Pick your own berry syrup

Last week, my family and I went berry picking at McBride's Briar Patch. We'd never been there before, and we were really impressed: they had buckets for you to use, ropes to tie them around your waist, little metal buckets for the kids, and bags and boxes to carry your berries home. The owner was so nice: he showed us how and where to pick and knew everything about the berries.

My 4-year-old was our best picker! She filled her entire bucket all by herself. All together, we picked 3 pounds of raspberries and 1/2 a pound of blackberries. The owner told us that since it was so hot, we should be sure to put our berries to use that day.

So that night, Ryan and I got to work turning our berries into berry syrup with this recipe from PickYourOwn.org (you can also find local PYO farms here!).

First, rinse and mash the berries. Then boil the mash.

Now strain the boiled mash (discard the pulp). You can strain it again through cheesecloth, but we found this actually pretty difficult because the cheesecloth clogged. If you have a good way to do this in volume, you might be able to let it sit overnight to get very clear juice. We settled for not-so-clear juice.

Next, add the sugar. You'll want to use right around one and a half times the amount of juice. So if you end up with 3 cups of juice, you'll use a little more or less than 4.5 cups of sugar.

The raspberry juice is still waiting, but I went ahead and made the blackberry syrup.

Bring the sugar and juice to a boil, and boil for one minute.

You can pour the juice into jars for canning, or directly into containers to keep in the fridge if you want to use it right away.

My blackberry syrup was really good, especially considering how tart the berries were. However, after a couple days in the fridge, it was almost as thick as jam! I microwaved it a little to help it flow better.

What's your favorite kind of berry?

A Guide to Strawberry Picking

We went to a wonderful farm last week to pick strawberries! If you have never done this you absolutely must! To find a location near you try here. The farm we went to also had amazing fresh homemade ice cream. We got sweet potatoes as well for some baby food. That night it felt so good to be eating fresh locally grown food for dinner!

We picked about 10.5 pounds and PB left with a red stained face :) I have gone strawberry picking every year for quite a while so I thought I would put together some tips!

Start by doing your research!

1. Try not to go on a weekend.
2. Look for berries that are: completely red, not too soft, deeper in color.
3. With the strawberry between two the pointer and middle fingers gently pull. Try not to squish the berry.
4. We were picking by the container and not the pound so we gently shook the bucket to get more in.
5. Use them quickly so they do not rot!
6. To hull strawberries you can just cut the tops off, use a strawberry or tomato huller (a quick search on Amazon comes up with quite a few options), or you can use a straw. I tried to the straw method and I found the bigger straws you get from restaurants work better than the typical ones you get at the store. 

 A few things I did this year with my berries:

1. Eat them fresh! I cut them up and sprinkle a little sugar on them to bring out the juices.
2. Simple Preserves
3. Frozen slices for shakes. I mixed with blueberries and frozen yogurt to make them extra yummy! I slice them thick and put them on wax paper on a cookie sheet. I flash froze them until they were half way frozen and put them in a bag. 
4. In a Simple Syrup

After enjoying and sharing more than half of what we picked I sorted them into four categories. No bad spots (frozen slices), one bad spot (simple syrup), multiple bad spots (preserves), and inedible (yuck!). Here are pictures of what I was left with.

From L to R Ugly, Bad, Good

Inedible

Frozen whole

Simple syrup is in the closed containers, the pureed preserves are still cooling in the small containers which fit about 1/4 of a cup., and the frozen strawberries ready for the freezer

With some of the preserves I made muffins and I plan on making some pancakes.

Strawberry Preserves Bisquick Muffins

2 cups Bisquick
1/3 cup Sugar
1 Egg
2/3 cup Milk
1/3-1/2 cup preserves (I only used 1/4 and there wasn't enough to taste the strawberry)

Mix together all ingredients but preserves. I had to add a little extra milk to make it the right consistency then add in preserves.. Fill greased muffin tin cups 2/3 full. Bake for 13-18 minutes. Mine were done on the lower end. Since mine didn't have quite enough strawberry flavor we added preserves on top and they were really tasty! Enjoy!