Garden Huckleberry Pie

Today has simply *flown* by. 

10 Minutes a Day hasn’t happened yet, and I am not sure that it will today.  And honestly, I won’t be upset with myself – it’s been a wonderful day.

Spent a few hours this morning working in the garden.  It’s been a rough year for it, and now I’m trying to get it cleaned up and prepared for winter.  One of the chores today was to figure out what to do with all these Garden Huckleberries.

Amazingly, one plant gave me 9 cups, or 3.5 pounds of beautiful purple-black berries.  They were very easy to harvest, though pulling off all the little stems took some time.  I found two recipes, one pretty complicated, involving cooking them in baking soda and rinsing, and another that simply simmered them for a while and added sugar. 

Goodness, I had more than enough berries, just from the one plant (there are four more out there) so I figured I’d try them both.

Unfortunately, neither recipe yielded satisfactory results.  The first recipe had a residual baking soda taste and the second was still too bitter.  Of course, that could be because I simply couldn’t bring myself to use all the sugar that was in the recipe.

I’m looking forward to experimenting with these things more.  There is a blueberry pie recipe out there that I’ll try next to see if the garden huckleberries will work for.  We’ll see – maybe I’ll do that tomorrow. 

Fortunately, the berries are supposed to get better after a light frost, so the rest will wait until then. 

The other good news is that I pulled a wonderful potato harvest today.  All the sweet potatoes came from a grocery store potato – not bad for free!  And I can tell you for a fact that they are super yummy!  The red potatoes gave an excellent harvest, though the whites were a bit disappointing.  Honestly, I can’t complain for never having grown potatoes of any type before.  And they all taste so good…

 

Music: Siouxsie & the Banshees