Fruit for the future

By Caroline Cummins

July 16, 2007

Jars of raspberry-marionberry jam left outdoors to cool.

The pickup: Peaches at the downtown farmers’ market, plus several pounds of raspberries, blueberries, and marionberries at a local U-Pick farm.

The results: Rather than wait for the (quite firm) peaches to ripen fully, we blanched, peeled, sliced, and baked them in a lattice pie. The berries presented the opposite problem: on a hot day, all those fresh berries quickly started to turn into mush.

So, first, a cookie sheet of washed raspberries went into the freezer for a few hours; when frozen, the berries were flipped off and put into a freezer bag for future smoothies, baked treats, or to serve as fruity ice cubes in lemonade.

Next, some of the blueberries went into muffins; this provided breakfast and afternoon snack for a few days.

Fresh peach pie.

Third, the big project: simmering the bulk of the raspberries, plus all of the (very ripe) marionberries, down into jam. Last year’s raspberry jam, from the exact same U-Pick farm, cooked down nicely into a soft gel without the aid of pectin. Not this year; even with pectin, the best we got was, essentially, a thick dessert sauce. But who’s gonna complain when there’s still half a summer of sauce-loving ice cream to get through?