Blueberries

Yesterday, we all went blueberry picking. Wonderful, blue-purple, ripe fresh berries that taste superb just warm off the bush. We ended up with 2 gallons of berries. So, of course, once we got back home, I had about 40 minutes of work to rinse, pick out leaves and stems and sort out the unripe ones. I ended up with a cupful of unripe ones (I am sure there were more, but I decided to let them stay with the sweet ones). The question was, what was to be done with these reddish, whitish berries that are too tart to pop into your mouth? I decided to Indianize them and made blueberry pickle (the first time I have ever tried to make this!).

Here’s how I made it.

Indian pickle from blueberries

I heated about 30 mls of cooking oil in an iron wok, popped a 1/4 tsp of black mustard seeds, added the scant cup of berries with a pinch of turmeric and 1 tsp of sea salt. Stirred them on medium-low for about 9-10 minutes and once they started to stick to the bottom of the wok, I added a teaspoonful of red chilli powder (the super hot variety from the Indian grocers). Voila!

Notes: Tastes quite nice though you can’t really tell it what the fruit is (that’s what comes of spicing them up!). Great for a sandwich. And, yes, there was too much oil, so the next time I will try it with 20 mls.

How I used my fresh vegetables

Yesterday afternoon, I stopped by Dig-It Farms in Jasper, GA and got some red potatoes, green beans, cucumbers, bicolor corn and blueberries all of which we had for dinner the same evening. We also had red cabbage, sweet potato and white corn that was part of a home produce delivery co-op.

Blueberries and Cucumbers were uncooked.

Corn was steamed and eaten with a dab of butter.

Green beans were sautéed with olive oil till bright green (some browned as well), freshly snipped thyme, salt, pepper and lemon juice just as they were ready to take off from the pan.

The red potatoes were roasted at 400 degrees F for about an hour with olive oil, a whole bulb of garlic separated into cloves, a few sprigs of rosemary and salt and pepper. I prefer them roasted till most are browned, but we were hungry and they were taken out before most of the potato slices browned!

The sweet potato was roasted at the same temperature with just olive oil; peeled and cut into bite sized pieces and it takes about 40 minutes to be ready.

The cabbage was cut into wedges with some olive oil, salt and pepper on it and roasted at the same temperature, but it took about 30 minutes to crisp at the edges. This was the first time I have roasted cabbage and the next time I will separate the leaves instead of leaving the wedges intact as I prefer them slightly crunchier.