Blackberry Cobbler - My Style

I finally got to go blackberry picking with my sister out at her new house.  She is a super-awesome biologist doing all sorts of wildlife studies for the State of California.  One perk is that she gets to live out in the middle of nowhere, by rice fields and sloughs and all sorts of general wildlife.  Since there are a bajillion blackberry bushes in her area, and I love a giant bucket of free blackberries, I invited myself out to see her new house and go blackberry picking.  The blackberries near her house are non-native and invasive, so it's a good thing that we're picking them with wild abandon.  Her house is a 20-minute drive away, which was actually quite lovely.  I got to drive through orchards and rice fields while listening to all sorts of folk music on the radio.  I was also all by myself, which was amazingly nice.  I never knew why my mom wanted quiet all the time.  Now I know.  Quiet is hard to come by, and therefore quite precious.

Orb Spiders!  See them?

So, blackberries!  Blackberry picking is not for the fainthearted when foraging for wild, untended blackberries.  For one thing, out by the slough = Monster Mosquito City.  We doused ourselves with high quantities of mosquito repellant.  Typically, I'm not a huge fan of deet.  However, if you saw these suckers, you'd want to douse yourself in deet, too.  My sister warned me to load up on deet-heavy repellant.  She wasn't kidding.  Another drawback are the giant Orb Spiders.  They are huge.  HUGE.  They are not typically aggressive, and their venom can't kill you, but they are large and creepy, and I don't want to find out how much it hurts if they do bite.  There are also the blackberries themselves.  They are loaded with thorns.  And interspersed among the blackberry vines are poison oak plants.  Easy enough to spot if you know what to look for.  Also easy to overlook, even when you know what to look for!  Are you dissuaded from going berrying yet?  Good!  More for me!

Being outside was nice.  All sorts of wildlife I don't normally get to see here in town - jackrabbits and otters and bullfrogs and herons of all sorts are all over that area.  I didn't actually see the otters or jackrabbits, but I did see some of their ... leavings.  I could hear the bullfrogs, and I did see a great blue heron, which was breathtaking.  I need to get outside more often.  Today was restorative.  Even with the insects and threat of poison oak and sunburn (yes, I wore sunblock - lots of it.).

On to the blackberry cobbler.  After bringing home my giant bucket of blackberries, I rinsed them all - they were covered in cottonwood fluff and occasional spiderweb.  I prepped some for blackberry jam - they are pre-measured, fork-crushed and in my freezer, all ready to be made into jam after we move.  A small container is also in my refrigerator, to be enjoyed throughout the week with cereal or just general snacking.  After all that, I still had plenty.  So I made cobbler.  As my good cobbler recipes are already packed, awaiting the move, I had to go hunting for a new recipe.  I remembered my mom sharing with me recently a recipe that called for a stick of butter, and a cup each of flour, sugar, and milk, but somehow that recipe didn't sound quite right.  A lot of the recipes online that I found called for making a biscuit-like dough and dropping it on top of the berries.  What I wanted was a batter dough with the fruit sprinkled on top.  So after reading several different recipes, here's what I came up with:

My Blackberry Cobbler

6 T butter
2 C all-purpose flour
2 C sugar
1 T baking powder
1 t salt
1 t cinnamon
2 C milk
1.5 T vanilla
4-5 C prepared fruit (blackberries, in this case)
1 T lime juice
2 T washed raw sugar

Place butter in a 9x13 pan, put in the oven while it's pre-heating at 350 farenheit.  Remove from the oven when the butter is completely melted and just starting to brown.

Mix together the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon.  Make a well in the dry ingredients, pour in milk and vanilla, stir until well-combined and there are no more lumps.  Pour batter into melted butter.  DO NOT STIR.

Toss the fruit with lime juice.  Sprinkle fruit over the batter/butter layer.  Sprinkle the raw sugar or turbinado over the fruit.  Again, DO NOT STIR.  Stirring is tempting, but will ruin the whole shebang.  As the cobbler bakes, the fruit will sink through the batter to the bottom, infusing the batter with the flavor from the fruit.  Trust me on this one. 

Bake at 350 until the fruit bubbles and the batter is browned.  For my oven, that took about 40 minutes.  Remove from oven and allow to cool, if you can.  Long before this point, my daughters kept running into the kitchen, just dying to eat cobbler.  I was able to give it about ten minutes.  And that was sheer torture.  So I gave myself permission to have a small serving with a scoop of coconut ice cream from a new ice cream shop around the corner from my house.  The crust was crisp and chewy, and the flavoring was just right, in my opinion.  This is my new go-to cobbler recipe. 

Amazing.  Simple, and amazing.

Portion control is a MUST.

Caprese Sandwiches

Today is a lovely day.  A bit warm, but it's summertime.  And summertime means awesome produce!
We made our way down to the local Farmer's Market early this morning, while it was still cool and not yet too crowded.  We always start our marketing with fresh chai from Chico Chai.  It is also my personal policy to walk through the market, to get an idea of what's out there this week.  The second time around is purchasing time.  Today we bought Zephyr and pattypan squash, lettuce, strawberries, a few heirloom tomatoes, a poem, and two plants: opal basil and lemon verbena.  We took it easy today, since we already still have a few bags of produce lingering in the fridge from last week: green beans, corn, plums, and regular zucchini.  I would have liked to get more fruit - peaches, nectarines, plums, and apricots were out in full force today.  However, I can get apricots from my mother-in-law's tree, and blackberries from my sister's house.  There will be a multitude of roadside fruit stands this week to pick up peaches from, and nearly all the fruit will be at market again next week.

At lunchtime today, I decided to make tomato sandwiches.  But not just any tomato sandwich would do.  Only the best tomato sandwich could pay proper respect to the summertime produce.  Hence, Caprese Sandwiches!  These are like summer in edible form.  And I love them.  Here's how I did it, but feel free to change it up as you like:

Spread mayonnaise to taste on sourdough bread.  Layer fresh sliced tomato, sliced mozzarella cheese, and fresh basil.  Set open sandwich in toaster oven (or pre-heated oven), toast until cheese is just melted.  Drizzle with olive oil, finish assembling your sandwich, and serve.  Easy!

Note: I like to make open-face half sandwiches, toast them in the toaster oven, then separate the two halves to finish assembly.  This is why only half of my sandwich has anything on it.  It's easier to see all the delicious when it's not covered up with the other half of the bread.