I always appreciate it when someone gives me something. I especially like it when the gift is actually useful. A few weeks ago one of my daughter-in-law’s gave me a gift that fits this description perfectly.
As I wrote in an earlier post, I have made and still make a lot of pies. The last of this summer’s blackberries went into 2 pies yesterday. I shared one with my granddaughter and her folks since she has become my biggest pie fan. So the gift I received has made making pies even more fun.
It’s a Pastry Cloth and Rolling Pin Cover and I highly recommend it. The concept is so simple and yet has eluded me all the years I’ve made pies. The cloth is made of canvas and the rolling pin cover is like a cheese cloth. You sprinkle the cloth and the rolling pin (in it’s cover) with flour. It creates a non stick surface to roll out the dough. The idea is you won’t need to use more flour to roll the dough. We all know tough crusts are are the result of overworking the dough. This cloth allowed me to roll the dough with no more flour than I covered the cloth with. And it only took a few minutes to get the dough rolled to the correct size and thickness. It makes for a very flaky crust without the work. I bet Betty Crocker had one of these years ago!
I love it when I learn something new. This little gift has given me new joy to something I have always loved doing. I’m not planning on making a pie a day but maybe once a week. I need to consider that my sweet husband’s metabolism has changed a bit since 1972.
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Early this morning my husband and daughter went out behind our house to go blackberry picking. One of the blackberries favorite places to grow is along the perimeter of a field. You can pretty much always find some nice picking if you look in a place like this. They were gone about 2 hours and came home with 4 gallons. Considering that’s enough for 12 blackberry pies it’s not a bad return for the time and effort spent.
I grew up picking berries in the summer. First there were the wild strawberries. We picked them in the field beside the small airport that was up the road from our house. There were always enough for 3 or 4 strawberry shortcakes. When they would quit bearing we would move to the huckleberries.
Huckleb
erries are the wild cousin of the domesticated blueberry. Most of the time they are smaller and black. The taste is pretty much the same but they grow on bushes that are low to the ground. (perfectly suited for children to pick) We would pick our huckleberries at a place we called “The Cuts” it was an old strip mining area not too far from our house. It had hundreds of bushes and my brother and I and other neighborhood kids would pick gallons of these berries. My mom would make up pies in aluminum pie pans and freeze them. Then all through the fall and winter we would have huckleberry pies. It was a great feeling knowing there were pies waiting to be baked. When these berries played out we moved on to blackberry picking.
Blackberries were picked at a place called “The Pits.” It was a very large area with a huge, deep hole in the middle of it. A factory used the place to dump garbage in when I was a kid. I don’t know what the original purpose was. It had tons of blackberry bushes. The berries were usually big and juicy. We would pick gallon after gallon of blackberries. My mom would repeat the pie process with these berries but she would also make jam. I still love blackberry jam but with less seeds than my mom made. The last berry to ripen was the elderberry.
Elderberries grow on small trees or large bushes. You can find elderberry bushes just about anywhere. They have a very sour taste on their own. (No problem getting all you picked home with these berries.) My mother used the elderberry exclusively for jelly. They are easy to make juice from and the jelly has a wonderful taste.
All of these berries have a limited time to be picked before they dried up or critters would eat them. That meant when the berry picking season began you could not procrastinate. I guess as kids we felt like it was our responsibility to get the berries while we could. And it felt good to know we had contributed to the food supply. Especially the one that answered the sweet tooth cravings.
Berry picking continued to be a big part of our children’s lives as well. While my husband was at work, I and our children would often go blackberry picking. Because my husband loves to use jelly on hotdogs, hamburgers, and other sandwiches, this meant using every available berry around for making jelly. One year we managed to pick enough berries of various kinds to make 100 jars of jelly. Now that’s some serious berry picking!
No matter where we have lived we have managed to find berries to pick, and with those berries make wonderful desserts, jellies, or pies.
Berry picking is not only how it used to be but how it still is.
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