Have a Very Berry Summer

Picking, harvesting and foraging your own food has been in rapid decline over the last decades, but if one is to believe programmes like Countryfile or River Cottage and similar (and one is, of course), more people are now seeing the value of going straight to nature for fresh, free and fabulous ingredients and foodstuffs.

My mother has always been an avid berry-picker, and every year she loads up freezers at home and with family and friends, with lots of berry goodness, in the form of jams, squashes, pickles, liqueurs and single-frozen berries. We who get to eat these goodies throughout the year, are luckier than we realise, especially as most of us haven't exactly been eager to join her on her missions. But nothing can beat the feeling of taking up home-picked berries in the middle of wet and windy November, making pancakes with jam, blueberry muffins, hot buns with raspberry jam, whipping cream and cloudberries for a delicious dessert, or just enjoying blueberries, banana and milk as an energy-boosting (and low-carb!) breakfast. 

So this year, I've done some small efforts of joining in, attempting to fill buckets, tubs and bags with cloudberries, cowberries, blueberries (I know they might be known as bilberries in some places, but I can't agree that the big, industrial berries without any blue colouring apart from on the outside, should be allowed to carry the proud name of blue berries!), a raspberry or two, and the odd wild strawberry for pleasure. And I can't wait for the winter, when we can properly start enjoying the fruits of our labours, and taste that sweet taste of summer even as the wind howls around the corners and the rain beats on the windows.

Of course, one is still allowed to enjoy the berries right here, right now. (And to eat while one picks, too!) One of my favourite ways to use freshly picked blueberries, which is also incredibly successful with frozen berries, is a speciality of my berry-picking super mum. She whips up these delicious American muffins in about 3 minutes, and they are absolutely stunning. I have re-named them in her honour:

Mamerican Blueberry Muffins

425 ml plain white flour

160 ml granulated sugar

1 tbsp baking powder

3/4 tsp salt

6 tbsp butter

1 egg

125 ml milk

1/2 tsp vanilla extract or 1 tbsp vanilla sugar

250 ml blueberries

Mix flour, sugar, baking powder and salt together. Melt the butter and stir into the flour mix. Mix egg, milk and vanilla extract (if using vanilla sugar, mix with the dry) in a cup, and stir into the rest of the mixture until it is even and glossy. Finally, add the blueberries, and mix only a little and carefully so they don't bleed colour into the batter.

Fill into big muffin cups, and bake for 20-25 minutes in the middle of a preheated oven at 200 C.

Serve as they are, or even better, with a dollop of home made vanilla ice cream (recipe to follow).

As it were, when we made these last, we didn't have any muffin cups. As necessity is the mother of invention (or, as the Norwegian saying goes: Emergency teaches naked woman to spin wool), my innovative mother used a round eared gratin dish from Pillivuyt instead, which made these look that more impressive, and taste even better, I think. We served with shop bought vanilla ice cream, which was delicious!

A P.S. at the end: I promise that the photos will soon improve; as I am currently missing a cable for my real camera, these are all bad phone shots...