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August 18, 2009
Raspberries and bread.....mmmm
Back home as a child, we had an enormous garden. My parents (and other family members) devoted a lot of time to it, keeping it maintained and a result we always had lots of homegrown vegetables to eat throughout the summer and root vegetables to last some of the winter. I guess a lot of that came down to experience passed down from older relatives (mostly farmers) who were of the generation that you ate what you grew, shared or traded any surplus and bought only other limited food supplies throughout the year. But enough background, let's jump to how this is relevant to today.
Raspberries. We've got wild raspberries growing in our back yard here in Jasper and they're in full effect right now. I hated having to pick raspberries as a kid. We had three rows of canes, each about 50m long, with berries needing to be picked on both sides of each row. That was a lot of raspberries. Luckily, we've only got about 4 to 5 canes/bushes here but I now find that I don't mind picking them. Yesterday I picked about a pound of berries and in another couple of days, there'll be just as many ripe for the picking. Not sure as of yet what I'm going to do with them - maybe a coulee for dessert, maybe a liqueur for those cold winter nights. Either way, they will be put to good use.
Bread. I picked up a working breadmaker at a yard sale for $2. It works great. I'm currently baking (better call that making - not a lot of actual skill needed with these machines) what is probably my 8th or 9th loaf of bread as I type....which maybe means that I should turn the raspberries into a jam....Hmmmm? While placing the ingredients into the machine, I realized that for my grandmother to produce the same result, she may have even had a hand in preparing the ingredients themselves. I bought the butter I needed, but originally it would have been churned using milk from the cattle on the farm. Maybe I'm confusing a generation with one previous but I do appreciate the fact that I've grown up eating food that my family has produced and that I've inherited a certain desire to be involved in even the smallest portion of producing food myself now. I'll never be able to manage a 100 mile diet - I enjoy beer and whiskey too much, but I will take pride knowing that the heritage of the 10 mile diet lies only a generation or two away in my own family.
Posted by Dr.Unk at August 18, 2009 4:23 PM
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