Welcome to Making Time. Helping you find more joy in simple, everyday pleasures. I write about seasonal eating, building a garden, and a slow life in rural Oregon. If you’d like to follow along, you can subscribe for free.
There’s blood on my leg. This happens more and more at this time of year. I feel a scratch, look down, and a blackberry vine has reached out and grabbed on, snaring my clothes and embedding thorns in my skin.
Our land is full of blackberries. Before we moved here, the back half of our property had been clear cut, all the timber removed and sold, leaving an open field for the blackberries to move into.
In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer explains that when land is traumatized, either by fire or storm or a clear cut like this, nature has a method to repair itself. The first to move in are what she calls the pioneer plants. These are vigorous growers that need little and spread easily, much like human pioneers.
Often these plants have berries, so that they can be picked up by birds and spread even beyond the immediate area, to the next clear cut where they can do their work.
Kenn has been battling these tough plants for five years, trying to contain them to a few stands that we can harvest from without letting them own the entire property. It’s hard work. They are wild and dense and often dangerous.
But in late summer, they also produce the most glorious abundance of deep purple fruit. Even Gordy has learned to pick them, braving the sharp thorns that scratch his nose in order to find ripe berries close to the ground. He hunts berries and munches happily with me.
It’s hard to stop, once you begin picking. You start to recognize the dull sheen of perfectly sweet berries, just on the cusp of rotting. The ones that fall apart in your hand taste best, but the tart and shiny ones hold their shape and are nice for baking. For every handful that go in my container, at least a couple go in my mouth.
I spend a lot of energy trying to keep chaos at bay. It’s the human way, to fear the unpredictable and to make every effort to control the world, and therefore control the future.
And because we humans can see so far into the future (or at least believe we can), we take even greater effort to control it. I fight back blackberry bushes, but I also fight back my to-do list, my projects, the entropy of life. Everything grabbing my attention, snagging me here and there.
This is helpful, and maybe even necessary. But it’s easy to take it too far, to destroy the good in an effort to keep everything in order. Sometimes that wildness is absolutely delicious, and exactly what you need.
Wild Blackberry Curd
This recipe comes from Chez Panisse Desserts, perhaps my all-time favorite cookbook when it comes to sweets. It’s simple to make, and is the perfect thing to swirl into greek yogurt (with peaches, apples, or more berries), to top some oatmeal, or to spoon onto vanilla ice cream.
Ingredients
3 cups wild blackberries
6 T unsalted butter
3 T sugar (or to taste)
2 T lemon juice
3 eggs
2 egg yolks
Instructions
Purée the blackberries in a blender, then strain the seeds out with a fine strainer.
Measure out 1 1/2 cups of the strained purée into a saucepan and add the butter. Heat until the butter has melted, stirring constantly.
Add the sugar and lemon juice and taste to adjust (my blackberries were very sweet, yours might be more tart).
Place eggs and egg yolks in a bowl and mix. Stream in a little of the hot purée to temper the eggs (this prevents them from getting scrambled).
Pur the eggs into the saucepan and cook, stirring constantly, until it reaches 170 degrees F and can hold its shape when dropped from a spoon.
Poor into jars, let cool, then chill.
You can keep this in the fridge for a week or two. I’ve also recently learned that fruit curds freeze beautifully, so you can make a few jars and pop some in the freezer for your fall baking. It would be perfect with any sort of apple goodie, and you can even bake it in a pie crust to make a pie.
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