The 4th of July is always a significant day – and a good day to re-read the Declaration of Independence.
This year also marked our first day of “real” berry picking, meaning we picked all of the fruit bearing rows on both sides. We ended up with 40 lbs today and combined it with the 5 lbs that Sam had picked two days before. Our sole purpose was to make jam. Did I mention that we had become desperate for blackberry jam? Our stockpile had actually run out – this has never happened before. So we filled our 22 quart stock pot with berries and heated them, then ran them through the food mill, using the berry screen to remove all seeds and made 7 batches of low sugar, seedless, deliciously tart blackberry jam. Yay!!! We ended up with 27 pints and a bowl for use right now. (there were 12 lbs of berries that we could not fit into the pot – we froze those for later)
Our 4th of July feast included fresh buttermilk biscuits (used the Alton Brown recipe, which is great) with blackberry jam, grilled sweet potatoes, zucchini and mushrooms, as well as grilled chicken – and red beets and baked potatoes.
And the other important news of the day was that CERN announced the observation of a particle “consistent with long sought Higgs boson”
