For the Love of Blueberries

Last Saturday we joined up with some of our favorite and best pals for a very blue adventure. Meg, queen of the festivals (it's possible that her addiction outweighs my own), clued us in to the whereabouts of a new blueberry festival (different from the one we went to last year, and that we will attend again, this coming weekend), and we decided to check it out. I mean, why not spend an afternoon picking blueberries? Especially when they're the itty bitty wild blueberries (the favorite and best variety according to the five members of our family who are old enough to eat blueberries), which normally we've only come across fresh at roadside stands in Maine. We had never picked them ourselves before.

Finding the blueberry farm was a bit of an adventure in and of itself, though the directions were fine enough. But it was a ways away from our little farm in the valley, and so by the time we arrived at the festival, it was already nearly 4:00. We grabbed some boxes and rakes for picking, and headed out to the fields of blueberries.

It actually felt more like standing in a sea of blueberries, what with them being so blue, and so plentiful.


Luke and Jaz quickly figured out how to use the blueberry rakes, and made a significant contribution towards filling our box with berries.


The littler kids (Zeben, Aviva and Lisel) worked soley on filling their bellies with berries.


I had to take a break from picking myself in order to take about a million pictures of Liesl sitting picking berries and depositing them directly into her mouth. She's just about the cutest thing in the world, and bares a striking resistance to Sal in "Blueberries for Sal."

Leo was the only one of our crew who didn't get to partake in the blueberry deliciousness. But he did get to look cute wearing his blue hoody that perfectly matches his blue eyes.

We ended up with three boxes full among our three families, about 70 pounds of blueberries all together. We may have gone a little overboard. But we certainly won't have to worry about running out over the winter.

After the picking comes the equally-entertaining job of sorting. There is a conveyor belt sorter at the farm that we dumped the blueberries into and then examined them, picking out the leaves, stems, and tiny green berries as they came by.


For some of us, it was kind of like a conveyor belt of all-you-can-eat snacks coming by.

But, for the most part, everyone was very adept at purifying our harvest, and it was really nice to be able to come home with the berries already sorted, ready to go directly into the freezer. And blueberry cake. We will definitely be adding this oh-so-blue event to our list of "not to be missed" festivals.

My Favorite Blueberry Cake

• 2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup butter (plus extra for the pan)
  
• 2 and 1/4 cups sugar
• 4 eggs
• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
• 2 cups fresh (or frozen) blueberries (or a little more)
  
• 1/4 cup all-purpose flour

1. Preheat oven to 325°F. Grease a 10 inch tube pan generously with butter. Sprinkle pan with 1/4 cup sugar.
   
2. Mix together 2 3/4 cups flour, baking powder and salt. Set aside.
3. Cream together 1 cup butter and 2 cups sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs one at a time, then add the vanilla.
   
4. Gradually add the flour mixture to the butter/sugar/egg mixture.
   
5. Dredge blueberries with remaining 1/4 cup flour, then fold into batter.
   
6. Pour batter into prepared pan and bake for 70-90 minutes (in our oven it's 80 minutes), or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean. Let cool in pan for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack and cool completely (or eat immediately if you can't wait).

Enjoy!