Blueberries

[vera_j]

There is a "blueberries season" in full swing here. This year is very generous and there are lots of people who spend their holidays picking blueberries for extra money.
The area where I live is well known for still vast pine forests full of blueberries. You are free to go and pick them. Some people are equipped with special "combs" - they are actually wooden boxes with iron "teeth" and a holder. You just go and " comb" the plants and the berries stay in the box, caught between the "teeth". If you are good, you are able to earn enough money worth a car (secon hand but good). Not our family - it is physically demanding (back suffers horribly), and you must be experienced.
However my daughter and I went yesterday to pick some because all around were demanding a blueberry cake. Yum, yum - the cake is big, it is a large rectangle of yeast dough covered with lots of berries, lots of sugar and a sweet mixture of sugar and butter, baked is an oven.
It is absolutely delicious, juicy - and leaves your teeth and mouth violet.
I picked only with my fingers and now my right hand was blue, the fingernails included - I had to use lemon juice to get rid of it! 

Comments

[linda-joyce.livejournal.com]

Your Blueberries are my winberries by the sound of it, the same low bushes the comb that the 'professionals' use( I don't think they could get enough for even a good second hand car but a couple of Hundred pounds( a short holiday) for a couple of days picking is normal and the back ache. Luckilly the best ones grow on the steep sides of the mountain so you can sit lower down and pick from the bushes above you. Of course you ruin everything you are wearing on your lower body as the bushes are so close to each other you sit on berries and that juice is impossible to get out. We keep a special set of disreputable trousers and underwear for picking days.
We cook them into a tart with short crust pastry top and bottom, and the taste of winberries fresh from the mountain is soooo good and totally indescribable

[vjezkova.livejournal.com]

LOL Yes, we also have got something old - such seasonal clothing, very distinctive thanks to those stains. Ah, and my daughter´s puppy Kendy fell asleep in the bushes and got a special bluish colouring everywhere...was sooo funny!

[quarryquest.livejournal.com]

Oh wow! You are making me jealous, and making me homesick for the moors of Northumberland full of heather. I have quite a bit of time off this summer (a week with nothing else to do) so I shall have to make a trip to some woods in Surrey where I know there are bilberry bushes (that is what my family call winberries or blaeberries) are. I'm waiting for the mulberry tree in Deptford to get fruit on so I can make John Evelyn Crumble again for Garienos.

[vjezkova.livejournal.com]

I hope you will find enough of them, enjoy!

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Oh, that sounds absolutely delicious!

[vjezkova.livejournal.com]

Mmmmmm...you can bet! And we also make special big dumplings with hot blueberry sauce - sweet and very blue!

[entropy-house.livejournal.com]

ooooooh. I want cake and fruit now. MMMmm...

[vjezkova.livejournal.com]

I have got a problem - tried to stuff it to the net...damned thing won´t cooperate, so no cake, no fruit for you...:-) :-)

[entropy-house.livejournal.com]

*sigh* Well, I appreciate the thought. :^)