Now that I have vented, I would like to announce that I have found berry nirvana in the northern panhandle of WV: The Wood Doctor Garden organic farm where you get to pick the berries.
Strawberries are 2 bucks a pound, and dad and I are going to go later on this week and then make a metric ton of strawberry preserves. He also has all sorts of raspberries and blackberries and blueberries coming in…
lamh32
I know most of ya’ll dudes could care less, but for my fellow ladies out there, saw Sex and The City 2 last night.
It was 2 and 1/2 hours long!!!!! I think the first one was much better. The 2nd one was okay, and it did have some laughs, but the storyline was a bit too “sitcom-my” for me. The whole movie kinda felt like three 30-45 min episodes of the show, there was no real cohesiveness to the movie.
It wasn’t “as bad” as some of the reviews said it was. The fashion as usual was good, Mr Big was still pretty sexy, and for us Aiden fans out there, Aiden looked as good as ever. The new dude for Samantha was the hottest of course.
If there is one big problem for me as an Aiden fan, I don’t like the way they used Aiden to progress the story forward. it just seemed too out of character for “Aiden” and how he was on the show. It was so obviously a contrived way to progress the story, and it seemed out of the blue for me, and unnecessary. I won’t give it away, if ya’ll see it, you’ll know what I meant.
Either way, I still love Aiden. I’ll give the movie a C+ for non-fans of the show, but a B- overall, for fans of the show like me and most of the people there.
flukebucket
How many pounds of strawberries = 1 gallon?
NickM
Since this looks to be a berry thread, are mulberrys useful for anything other than feeding wildlife? And what kinds of birds eat them?
Fwiffo
U-pick is the way to go. Actually buying raspberries at the store is crazy.
jeffreyw
@NickM:
Yes! That neighbor that pisses you off? Plant a mulberry tree near his property line and in twenty years the birds will leave purple shit all over his car! Win!
Mike E
Alton Brown has the best tip for freezing blueberries: Lay them out in a single layer on a cookie sheet (w/sides) first until pretty much frozen, then transfer them to ziplock bags for long-term storage. This prevents them getting mushy.
SiubhanDuinne
John, I’ve been meaning to ask, how did your dad’s eye surgery go the other week? Well, I assume, or he wouldn’t be a-berryin’ and a-jammin’ otherwise. Anyhow, it’s very belated but I was thinking of him all that time you were taking care of Ginny and Guesley.
Litlebritdifrnt
I am married so I can’t marry you. However, after that post John I am going to get in my car drive to WV and adopt you, or something.
Okay who broke the board this time, it looks like John.
Incertus (Brian)
My friend Neal photoshopped another BP image. We went to college together in Hammond, LA, slung beers and margaritas together at a shitty Mexican restaurant in a mall there, became very close friends there. He never left, and this is killing him right now. The wider I can push his art the better.
sheba
@Nickm,
I’ve never done it but teh Google says one can make jam with mulberries. This doesn’t surprise me since, being from the NW, I’ve made jam out of all kinds of berries. Around here berry plants literally grow like weeds. In fact wild blackberries are quite the nuisance plant in the garden and are referred to as “stickers” rather than as blackberries, tho they do also make for some very tasty jam in spite of how amazingly ANNOYING they are and HARD TO KILL NATURALLY.
Oh, sorry, where was I? Oh yeah. Mulberries.
Anyhoo, according to Google it looks like one can make mulberry jam pretty much the same as any other kind of berry jam, adding sugar, pectin and/or lemon juice, cooking, and then “canning” using Ye Olde Boiling Water Bath method. This recipe looks as good as any IMO.
sherifffruitfly
Should make a metric fuck-ton of preserves. That’s a bit more than a metric ton. :P
burnspbesq
Lax championship game tomorrow at 3:30 p.m. Eastern time.
My head says Duke should win, but my gut reminds my head that there is nothing scarier than a red-hot goaltender.
SiubhanDuinne
@Incertus (Brian). That’s awesome. Is there a gallery of his BP art?
Corner Stone
@Incertus (Brian): Did either of y’all “do it” with Britney?
Incertus (Brian)
@SiubhanDuinne: So far as I know, he’s only got two pieces right now, but I’ll ask him.
He’s also said that anyone who wants the images is welcome to them. He’s very open-source that way.
Corner Stone
@Fwiffo:
$2 for a carton? How many do you eat before they go bad?
I almost never finish a container in time.
dan
This place is only just more than an hour away from home for me! I’ll have to head out there one of these days. Nice find, John.
RedKitten
Alton Brown has the best tips for EVERYTHING. That man is a walking gastronomical encyclopedia.
asiangrrlMN
Mmmmmm….berries. Love them.
Litlebritdifrnt
You know what I miss, I miss my daddies raspberry patch on his allotment. I would go down there when I was on leave from the Navy and stuff my face with fresh raspberries, all weekend. Britty + 4
John Cole
@burnspbesq: My mom and uncle are at the game.
Incertus (Brian)
@Corner Stone: Since this is an open thread, I’ll give you my awesome Britney story.
My last name is Spears, and nearly 20 years ago, my now ex-wife had a daughter. We named her Brittany. Fast forward about 7 years: we’re divorced, and I’m about two years into my college career. “Baby Hit Me One More Time” is playing on my clock radio while I read the news before heading to class. The DJ says “that’s local Britney Spears,” at which point I wonder just what the hell my ex-wife hasn’t been telling me. That doesn’t last.
Couple of months later, a friend asks me why I’m not in math class. I say, “because I’m an English major now, thanks to that fucking 5-hour calculus class I failed last year.” Turns out there’s another Bryan Spears (notice the spelling difference) on campus-Britney’s brother. Never got to meet him or her, but it was an interesting story.
Oh yeah. Both of our mothers are named Lynn(e). I can’t prove it, but I suspect we’re distant cousins, though distant is a relative term in the deep south.
Alan
This post makes me want to eat some of the blueberries I have in the fridge. They may be good with a little coconut milk poured over ’em.
RedKitten
@Corner Stone: Just put them on your cereal every morning, and you’ll get them all eaten up long before they go bad. That’s what I do. Throw some blueberries in there too — yummy!
Poopyman
@jeffreyw:
Fixed
Svensker
Can never get enough berries. My strawberry patch is under attack from the chipmunks — the little tuskers come and take one bite from each dang ripe strawberry, then leave it and move on to the next. Any solutions, other than catching and skinning the little suckers? (I actually have seen a coat made from literally hundreds of teeny tiny chipmunk skins…)
John, the recipe for frozen berry jam which I think is still on the pectin boxes is REALLY good. Tastes like fresh summer in a jar.
pdf23ds
Is anyone else here annoyed the hell out of when people say “X causes Y deaths a year”? Especially when it’s about lack of healthcare. In that context, what does it mean to “save” a life? If Mimi would have lived for 2 more years with some different healthcare, can that healthcare really be said to have saved her life? A sane measure seems to be how many years of life are saved. Please tell me the underlying studies do something sane.
With things like car crashes, where their fatality has much less to do with the age of the victims, I don’t mind the terminology so much.
Svensker
@NickM:
Re mulberries — you can make jams and pies from them and eat them fresh. Also yummy in muffins. The Whole Foods market had dried mulberries today, to sample, and they were good in a raisiny-berry kind of way. But I’d stick with a nice pie…
Poopyman
I should add that red mulberry wood is nearly as rot-resistant as black locust and ages to a really nice warm brown. It’s not terribly strong, which is why they keep splitting and falling once they hit 16″-18″ diameter. I’ve made a bunch of chisel and file handles so far, but haven’t got any dry enough for case pieces yet.
Never did anything with the berries, though, except clean off the purple birdshit.
Comrade Mary
My killer raspberry bush and slutty strawberries are coming along nicely. (The strawberries sent runners all over the place last year, hibernated over the winter, and are now flowering and growing teeny berries.) These upcoming berries are gettin’ ET, no problem.
Corner Stone
@Incertus (Brian): I jokingly asked because one of my 20+ year friends has family from there and still has a family farm.
When she blew up big we went to a couchon du lait (some people spell it cochon but not where we were) right after and I was giving him a hard time about it.
His cousins were all like, “Yeah, no big deal. The whole town knows all about that family.”
Incertus (Brian)
@Corner Stone: Another funny little coincidence–before Britney Spears blew up, the most famous person to ever come out of Kentwood was Michael Jackson. The NFL wide receiver, that is. That guy couldn’t get a break.
Corner Stone
@RedKitten: If I ever actually eat breakfast it’s usually instant oatmeal with a little brown sugar, raisins and dried golden cherries added.
Or it’s 80 proof, but I don’t think that counts as “eating”.
I love fresh berries of all varieties but usually as snacks. And don’t mind picking them up on sale a couple times a week.
LanceThruster
Berry picking? Where’s the adventure in that? Now mushroom picking is a manly man’s pursuit. There’s nothing like the satisfaction of chowing down on some wild mushroom variety even if it winds up costing you part of your liver, stomach, or a length of large or small intestine.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained I always say.
If god hadn’t wanted us to roll the dice, she wouldn’t have made so many of the poisonous ones look just like the edible kind. She’s such a kidder, PBUH!
Calming Influence
In re: John’s venting in previous post – for the science/engineer types here, as well as anyone else who just wants a clearer picture of the problems faced by the people working to fix this, you should check out The Oil Drum.
These are engineers, geologists, and oilfield experts who are doing a good job of cutting through the fog of ignorance and misunderstanding. Note: hyperbole, wild speculation on solutions, politics, rants against BP, the government response, etc., are generally ignored or shunned. They do not suffer fools gladly. Go and learn.
(Are they really experts? A commenter was citing from an industry text to try and bolster his argument; the author of the post answered “Yeah, I know. I wrote that book.”)
Corner Stone
@LanceThruster: Would you happen to have a newsletter by any chance?
Corner Stone
@Incertus (Brian): I always enjoy going there because the part where my friend’s farm is, all the street names are named after family surnames.
And all the damn families still own property on those streets.
So you drive a little bit out of town and you can find pretty much anybody you’re looking for because you see a dang street named after their great-great-grandpappy.
Gian
in my kid days, went to a pickem yourself place in glastonbury connecticut, owned by a Pole who fought with Patton in WWII, as I recall he said to 12 year old me (maybe 11 or 13) “with Patton you go like hell” in a very thick accent.
Larkspur
Oh, blueberries, blueberries, blueberries! And organic, too! Blueberries are my totem fruit.
I have heard that mulberry bushes are good for running around, especially on cold and frosty mornings.
I would like to be excused from the eating of any mushrooms not purchased in a grocery store, the reputation of which is excellent and known to me. I am very boring, and favor not the seeking of thrills, shroomwise. But you go ahead.
suzanne
@jeffreyw:
So the spousal unit and I just bought our first house, and it has a mulberry tree in the backyard. Bank that owned the house didn’t care for the landscape while it was for sale/during escrow, so now the entire fucking yard is covered in that shit. There’s so much purple shit on the dead grass that it looks like they replaced the grass with gravel. And I’m allergic to it, so raking it up should be a BLAST.
Grrrrr.
Anne Laurie
@Svensker:
When the little monsters did this to my tomatoes during our first summer here, a more experienced gardener suggested I give them a water source. A big plastic pot saucer on the ground, where I can refill it when I water the tomato planters, has protected my plants for the ensuing 15+ years. It’s a cheap enough fix, if you want to try it.
Fwiffo
I eat fresh raspberries by the quart when I can get them in quantity. Those stingy half-pint trays from the store are OK if you want to use them as decoration or something. If you want to make pie, or jam, or jelly, or syrup, you’re out of luck (although frozen raspberries are fine for any of those uses).
kdaug
OK, bully – I don’t give a crap about berries, but I hope I get the last word on this:
Why the fuck does every state have a “panhandle”????
I know it comes from Oklahoma, where the whole goddamned state is shaped like a pan. I get it. But then we started calling the north Texas region the “panhandle”, I guess just ’cause it’s close to that part of Oklahoma? And I suppose that Kansas and Colorado call their little corners of shared borders “panhandles” too?
And Florida, no. You don’t have a “panhandle”. You have the pencil-dick on a really long scrotum.
But West Virginia??? Seriously??? Do you mean the little pokey thing sticking out of the top of your state? I mean, what region is your “panhandle”? Or has that just become a catch-all for all the dangly-bits? (In that case – sorry Colorado and Wyoming – square states can’t play).
I’m actually kind of serious. Where is the WV “panhandle”?
slapperina
Actually, we have two. They’re referred to as the Northern and Eastern panhandles. Presumably because Northern and eastern “little pokey things” would be too long of a title. :)
Also, too, we like to pick berries here as well.
Yutsano
@Svensker: Brunswick stew. Or a terrier that is trained to ignore the berries. You could always borrow Lily for a couple weeks, just long enough to give your yard a reputation among the chattering class.
kdaug
@slapperina: Shit, thought I’d had the last word on something around here.
So WV has two “panhandles”, eh? Never seen a pan with two handles – Maybe you should call them your “wok-handles” or “soup-pot handles”. Of course, those nominally would be on opposite sides of the state, not at right angles…
I am curious as to the etymology of this, though. Why did states all want to have a “panhandle”? When did this start?
slapperina
@kdaug: You raise an interesting question. Let’s blame hobos.
kdaug
@slapperina: Actually I think you’re right. Think dustbowl and Depression, Okie’s and “Grapes of Wrath”. It didn’t affect every state the same way, but even the (comparatively) prosperous ones wanted to glom onto the meme of the time.
Just interesting that the lexicon has lasted this long.
LanceThruster
@Corner Stone:
No I don’t. But I could have from Jim Palmer The Newsletter Guru for as low as $97/mo. I’d be crazy not to get it!
Oh, and this guy’s got one.
Triassic Sands
@Mike E:
I have my own raspberry bushes and they produce a surplus every year. I’ve been freezing them this way for years, it’s easy to do, and it works very well. I remember thinking the first year I froze them, as the last frozen berry was about to be consumed — Why hadn’t I always done this and why hadn’t I frozen even more?
The only thing I would add to the above instructions is that I put parchment paper on the cookie sheets. Last year I filled my entire freezer with frozen raspberries. I ate the last fresh berry in the third week of August. The last frozen berry disappeared many months later (and I gave a bunch away).
@Corner Stone:
Buy whatever quantity you want of raspberries and freeze as many as you think will go to waste because you can’t eat them fast enough. The resulting frozen berries will last a long time and are excellent on cereal, in smoothies, etc. I like to toss a frozen raspberry in my mouth and let it melt. Since you don’t need any specialized equipment (just a cookie sheet, a freezer, and bags) this method should save every berry you might otherwise have lost — with virtually no expenditure of precious resources (time, money, etc.) Just don’t wait until the berries are getting mushy before you freeze them. Better to freeze too many than to freeze too late.
Store-bought berries tend to be quite expensive, but berries are one of the great foods on Earth. There’s no point in wasting even one.
Corner Stone
@slapperina:
I can’t believe this discussion branched out into hobo lore and I missed it.
This has really bummed me out today.
brettvk
Mulberries flourish as weed trees in my part of SW MO because of a failed attempt to create a silkworm industry in the late 19th century, IIRC. I think the mulberries turned out to be the wrong species for the silkworms, among other barriers to success. The fruit quality varies tremendously from tree to tree. While they might make a plausible survival food, I find them too insipid to harvest — even though a tree on my property is raining literally gallons of fruit as I type. The squirrels and starlings are happy, anyway. I have to grub mulberry seedlings out of every garden yearly.
Lex
@jeffreyw: Yes. This.
Lex
John, three words: fresh. strawberry. daiquiris.