Berried Alive

None shall go unstained!

All shall be sticky!

For a long time I have wanted to check out a U-Pick establishment. We spend a small fortune on jam, and we have a thing for baking and pancakes. Getting a big haul of fruit seemed right up our alley, and a good way to save some money. Plus, kids with buckets, picking berries... I can't even finish that thought. The sheer summeriness of it makes me want to log off and go outside. It just had to happen. Let's leave it at that.

So, we checked out this site, and found a big cluster of farms in the Tigard area. We went on a Friday, which meant the place we ended up was pretty quiet. There were only a few other people there.

We have 50 lbs of berries. Now what?

Okay, besides that.

mm hmm

Right, right.

Say, now THAT looks pretty good.

What's going on here?

I'm drying them (without the aid of a food dehydrator, I might add). First, they were boiled for 60 sec. and plopped in ice water, to rupture their skins. Afterward, I arranged them on sheets of cheesecloth that had been clothespinned to my oven racks, turned the heat as low as I could get it, propped the oven door open, and let them go all day.

This is what they looked like when they were done. Sort of like raisins, moist but not juicy.

Steady yourself. What you're about to see next has been dipped in chocolate. There's even a dash of almond extract, for added fanciness, an often overlooked requirement of a well-balanced diet.

Thankfully, my local university extension office checks dehydrators out to the local public.

Geza checked it out while I worked on this post. It's been humming away for the last day and a half, and I'm in love.

It's much better, if you want to get serious about drying stuff out. The oven will work in a pinch, but you can't dry much food, it's a bigger waste of heat, air circulation is inferior; plus your oven is in use for a whole day, at least. That can be inconvenient.

Let's see, it feels like I'm forgetting something.

Oh yeah! This!

I spread the berries out on wax paper-lined trays and stuck them in the freezer for a day. After they're frozen, the berries go into freezer bags, where they'll stay until I put them in a batch of ice cream, or oatmeal, or something else that can tolerate soggy berries of a degraded texture.

Now, what else?

This is just going to bug me. Sorry. It's just that I'm pretty tiredberry in the brainberry, what with being in the throes of Berrymageddon. Think. Think. Thinkberry.

Berry!

I mean,

Oh yeah!

Just this.

Just two dozen jars of jam. That's all. Just my first foray into water-bath canning, and I probably saved myself a few hundred dollars this year.

Just that.

Hmmm, that last photo....pan out?

Ah, see? I have no recollection of this moment, but I have some idea of what's going on here. Either I fell asleep while taking pictures, and my head space* is bubbling with sweetened dreams, or my face is stuck to the counter.

*Canning joke. You'd have to be over 60 to get it.