One more piece of summer

At the beginning of September, I was thinking about my blueberry stockpile...thinking that I didn't get quite enough berries in the freezer for the coming months. Thinking that I had missed the boat and would just have to settle with the berries I had collected, frozen and jammed back in July. But then last week a friend told me about a u-pick farm that still had berries. She said the picking wasn't great, but on a whim we headed out there to find plenty of berries still clinging to the bushes. Sweet, small, lovely berries. I couldn't get enough of the old-fashioned, self-serve scene: picking the berries in the overgrown hillside field full of bushes and the honor system payment plan of weighing the fruits myself on the farmer's porch and then dropping my money in the jar.

With purple stained fingers, we picked berries until sunset and brought home enough fruit to fill a gallon size freezer bag, eat too many fresh ones and make a blueberry pie (Mark Bitman's pie recipes are my favorite!).
And then just as I was beginning to accept the fact that summer was over, we headed south for the weekend to visit family. And my, it was one hot, full-fledged mini summer vacation. I'll have more on that tomorrow. Today I am unpacking (why did I think I needed so many long-sleeved shirts and pants?), organizing and sifting through nearly five hundred pictures from the weekend. We just got a new camera and  I can't restrain myself from clicking away.