Red, White and Blueberry

I don't think I can fully explain how excited I was to pick blueberries on my way home from the shore over the Fourth of July with LL and turn them into pancakes 24 hours later. Something about pick-your-own anything makes me happy. Giddy, silly, deeply little kid happy. It capped a perfectly July Fourth-y kind of weekend of beach, clams, food.

The house I grew up in until I was 18 was across the street from a huge pick-your-own operations in VT. Strawberries gave way to blueberries which in turn bowed to make room for raspberries. And there were orchards all over town that offered the same option for apples when the weather turned in September.

I remember long, hot summer days in the strawberry patch with my mother picking what seemed to me at the time like hundreds of pounds of berries to freeze for winter (or at least the ones that didn't get stuffed directly into our mouths). I remember cool wet falls days punctuated by fresh cider doughnuts spent pickng the apples for crisps and pies. For the record, apple picking was usually deemed the more "fun" of the two when we were kids because it offered an excuse to climb trees. Strawberries taste amazing when still warm from the sun, but picking berries off all those squat plants in long endlessly straight rows was much less fun than climbing gnarled old trees to toss apples down.

In both instances, and again last weekend as a grown up gathering blueberries in N.J. half the fun lies in eating oneself sick on the just picked fruit. If you've never tried it, I highly recommend a pick-your-own excursion.

The nostalgia was pushed even higher by coming home and making pancakes for dinner. It should be said here that LL and I spent a good portion of our picking time plotting out what to do with all the blueberries, I'm already wishing we'd doubled our haul.

But back to the pancakes. There's something so quintessentially comforting about breakfast foods, but I don't always have the craving early in the a.m. Breakfast for dinner isn't a tradition from my childhood, I think it's a habit I've acquired in adulthood. It must stem in some way from the discovery of brunch in college--we ate brunch like it's what we were studying to do. Although usually we ate out, cooking brunch in evolved later.

I've come further in my culinary wanderings as I've gotten older--I'm pretty sure that brunches and dinners I cooked in college never consisted of homemade blueberry buttermilk pancakes with a side of brown sugar and cayenne carmelized bacon. The college variety would have been more likely to include Bisquick and frozen veggie sausage patties (still a go to favorite prepared food if I'm being honest, but only Morningstar Farm's). Both meals would be smothered in real maple syrup, for Vermonters nothing else exists.

Regardless, I'm excited that pick-your-own berry patches have survived long enough for my culinary proclivities to catch up and give their fruit it's just dues.