Very Berry Good

With summer theoretically behind us (the rain is back with a vengeance), it's time to catch up on all the blog posts we meant to do but instead ended up avoiding the computer screen for one reason or another.

We'd been meaning to go berry picking for years and somehow never got a around to actually going. At long last on a magically fine weathered Sunday afternoon last month we finally decided to pack it up, head to the country and pick us some berry goodness. Cue the dreamy sound bite: doodelet, doodelet, doodelet (yes, I'm waiving my hands a la Wayne's World).

Let me start by noting that as alluded to above that our berry picking prowess has diminished over the years.

First "mistake" was that we somehow talked ourselves into thinking that it was BYO bucket, so Jean being the crafty genius she is fashioned these stylish berry picking baskets using some old locker baskets and cotton rope. The result was easy to tote, high capacity (more on this later) baskets that put any gallon plastic bucket to shame.

We arrived at Bybee Nims Blueberry farm, an exclusively blueberry farm at the foot of Mt Si in North Bend, WA about 60 mins East of Seattle. The scenery at the farm was amazing with the mountain jutting into the sky behind the shimmering blueberry fields.

We got right to picking and taste testing. The berries had this incredible honey flavor that you never get from store bought. We picked and picked and picked...

All the while not realizing (second "mistake") the capacity of our homemade baskets. We set our goal to fill them and aggressively, successfully met it. 3 hours later, we were riding off into the sunset back to Ballard with the trunk filled with 30 lbs of delicious blueberries.....and $50 less in our wallet. Ouch! What the hell were we going to do with them all??

Well...if you REALLY want to know. We were literally eating them fist full at a time. I gave couple of pounds to all our friends. I'd drop a few on the floor and would just throw since we had such abundance of them! That's like what rich people do, right?

I also decided to try this Blueberry muffin recipe from Tricia! Super yummy! I especially enjoyed the taste of the hidden sugar lemon topping!

Then from the muffins, I decided to bake a blueberry pie. It's been at least 9 years since I made a pie from scratch!! I used to make them all the time in high school when I took a catering class. Oh....wait, I take that back...I guess I did make pie this year....does Frito Pie count? oh yeah...duh, of course!! Why did I even ask!! I used this recipe from Martha. It's just a simple blueberry pie recipe. I forgot how much fun it was to make.....I like rolling out the crust part. I was totally excited to use my marble "Gourmet Rolling Pin!" seriously though...a pie is not good unless the word "gourmet" is part of it. So...I guess that means my pie is officially a "Gourmet Blueberry Pie!" It totally does sound 10 times better than just a blueberry pie! .....Blueberry pie....Pheh! That just sounds like a pie offered at some truck stop that's been sitting in spinning pie case for days....probably baked in factory that uses a processed mixture with at least 2 pounds of sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, swine flu infested hormones, and 0.1% real blueberries...Who can eat that!? No thank you!
I'll take a Gourmet Blueberry Pie baked by me, please.....Mmmmm, much better.....

Happy weekend!