Fresh Picked Berries

My cousin and I headed out to Sweet Berry Farm last Friday and loaded up on strawberries and blackberries.  We probably spent close to an hour looking high and low for blackberries only to come up with about a dozen total, and then on the way out saw a different patch that was loaded with ripe berries!  Figures.  Anyway, several hours, a sunburnt scalp and an empty tank of gas later, we finally made it home with our fresh berries.

Trying to figure out how to use all of the berries before they went bad was the hard part. Chandra made strawberry lemonade and a strawberry/blackberry ice cream topping.  

By the time I got home about half of my strawberries were looking pretty mushy so I hulled them and chopped them up really tiny, added about 1/2 a cup of sugar, a few splashes of balsamic vinegar and a good sprinkling of fresh ground pepper.  I put that on the stove, brought it to a boil and let it roll for a good 10 minutes.  

Once it cooled, I threw it in the fridge.  It's got a nice tanginess to it along with the sweet.  I plan on topping some pork chops with it later this week.

With the rest of the strawberries, I went boring but classic.  I had watched Alton Brown's Strawberry episode and used it as an inspiration for macerated strawberries.  I just hulled and chopped the strawberries, added about 1/2 cup of sugar, a good smattering of honey and a couple of splashes of red wine.  I mixed it all and put the strawberries in the refrigerator for a few hours to get nice and juicy.  They were even better the second day!  I threw the macerated strawberries on top of an angel food cake with some cool whip.  Fantastic!

(I was so excited I forgot to take a picture and dug in right away . . . so here it is partly eaten!)

I decided to try to make a cobbler with the blackberries.  I knew this was going to be interesting because I have never even tasted cobbler before much less baked it.  

I was at the store and limited by searching on Jeremy's iPhone, so google was my friend and I used this recipe from About.com.  I don't know what cobbler is supposed to taste like, but hopefully like this, because I must say it was pretty tasty.  

Here we topped our sugar-and-shortening-infused cobbler with "No Sugar Added Fat Free Ice Cream".  Ohhhh the irony!