Love Among the Blackberries by Milou Koenings

In my new release, I Love You Three, the characters spend a day harvesting blackberries from an old lady’s backyard — and then half the town spends the weekend using them before they spoil. There among the blackberry bushes, my heroine, Julie, falls ever more in love with the hero, and as they unload their harvest, she tells him the first lie...

Lorna Mitchell, cc-by-nd-2.0.

For me, blackberries immediately conjure up the memory of my grandmother’s marathon jelly-making days. She grew a variety of berries in her backyard and we always knew she kept a sharp eye on us kids from the kitchen window whenever we were out there playing. The minute she couldn’t see us anymore, she’d come looking, certain we were crouching behind a berry bush of some kind, eating her harvest. (She was usually right!)

But the payoff came when all those berries were harvested — one kind at a time — and she’d make jam. She had a stainless-steel pot taller than a coffee urn, with a tap at the bottom. I’ve never seen another one like it. The closest I’ve found are pots used to brew homemade beer. (And since my grandmother also produced many bottles of cassis liquor, it’s quite possible this was a hootch-making contraption and not a jam pot at all!)

We used to love lining up the jars of different colored jelly on the shelves. The jewel tones — ruby red currants, dark amethyst blackberries, deep blue cassis and blueberries, and fresh green of gooseberries ­— gleamed in the half-light of the basement.

Still, there’s only so much jelly or jam, or even pies and muffins, you can make when you’re faced with as many blackberries as my characters in I Love You Three.  So, I took a little journey on Pinterest, just to see what else people are doing with their fresh blackberries.  And wow!

Here’s a sampling of the mouthwatering recipes I found, and which of the characters in I Love You Three would be most likely to make it:

Blackberry Crostada, from halfbakedharvest.com

This seems like something Annie's mom would make. We first meet her in I Love You Three, but she saves the day in a later Green Pines romance.

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/560838959831417544/

Blackberry Cheesecake, from Bromabakery.com

This is totally something Marcia would make. She teaches the hero, Mac, to dance, and brings him dinner, sometimes, too.

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/560838959831394435/

Blackberry Popsicles and Blackberry Lemonade

Of course, the heroine, Julie, is going to be serving these at her mother's birthday party, during which she also surreptitiously tries to steer Mac toward some help for the problem he's grappling with...

Blackberry Popsicles from Tutti-dolci.com

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/560838959827557141/

Blackberry Lemonade from Like Mother Like Daughter

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/560838959827557038/

Blackberry Party Cake

This cake has got to be the piece the resistance at Julie and Mac’s engagement party, since it’s summer. (It won’t work as their wedding cake only because they get married right after Thanksgiving, at the beginning of my holiday novella, The Kampala Peppermint Twist.)

Blackberry Cake from Natascha's Kitchen

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/560838959831280457/

Now tell me you don’t want to fill your yard with blackberries? Well, maybe not. But when you find a basket or two of them at the store, at least you'll know the problem won’t be what to do with them, but which recipe to pick!

One last one that I have to include only because no recipe list would be complete without chocolate:

Blackberry Mille-Feuille from Gourmande in the Kitchen

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/560838959831394402/

I hope you enjoyed this tour of some of awesome culinary blogs.  You can find more recipes that my Green Pines characters might be whipping up on my Green Pines Recipes Pinterest board.

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Milou Koenings is a USA Today bestselling author. She writes romance because, like chocolate, stories with a happy ending bring more joy into the world and so make it a better place.

Her Green Pines sweet romances, Reclaiming Home and Sweet Blizzard are available on Amazon,  Amazon.uk, iBooks, Nook, Kobo and all your favorite e-book retailers.  








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Blackberry Jam and Other Memories by Milou Koenings

My grandmother had apple trees.  And lots and lots of berries.  Gooseberries, blackberries, currants - red and black.   

Steph, cc-by-nc-nd-2.0.

 She would peer at us kids from the kitchen window whenever we sounded a bit too far away.  Because the farther from the kitchen we went, the more fruit there was to pluck off the bushes, to savor, crouching down behind the thickest cluster of leaves, keeping an eye for the twitch of the kitchen curtains while tell-tale juice ran down our chins and stained our dresses.

No matter how many berries our little hands picked though, it didn't seem to reduce the enormous amounts of buckets of fruit that filled the kitchen when it was time to make jam.  Grandma had this strange metal contraption that sat on the stove.  It hissed and it sputtered and it growled while we cowered at the far end of the room.  

When it was time to open the little tap near the bottom of the monstrous pot, we'd get kicked out of the kitchen altogether.  But my cousins and I would peer through the open doorway to watch the ruby and amethyst potions fill one glass jar after another.

Eventually, the jars would be added to those on the wall of shelves in the basement and one by one, show up at breakfast.

I got Grandma's cookbook recently.  A five-volume set published in France in 1959 that my mother inherited from her.  My father found it and mailed it to me.  

It's mine now.  

The volumes have been taped together multiple times.  They've been rebound in contact paper.  A coffee table set, this isn't.   

It shows every sign of having been well-used.  

But I love turning the pages and coming upon little notes in Grandma's handwriting, and a few pages later, comments by my mother.   

Every once in a while, I come upon a bookmark; I've found permission slips meant for kids' teachers and store receipts from the 1970s.  And even flight information from January 29, 1964, when my mom and dad were working together running an airline in the Congo.   

Not surprisingly, one of the five volumes is dedicated to jams and preserves.

So is it any wonder that I've got my characters hard at work making blackberry jam? 

Here's the recipe.  But remember, it starts with harvesting the berries yourself from the backyard!

Phil Long, cc-by-2.0

Blackberry Jam

3.5 kg (7.7 pounds) of blackberries

1 kg (2.2 pounds) of green apples

4 kg (8.8 pounds!) of sugar

1/2 liter (1 pint) of water

1. Clean the blackberries and peel the apples.
2. Cover the fruit with sugar and let them sit for several hours.
3. Pour the mixture in a pot, add the water and cook, stirring.

Elsewhere, the cookbook recommends adding lemon juice to blackberry jam.  But you'll notice the recipe gives no indication as to how long this should cook. The book says it all depends on your stove and how high the flame is ... that's specific, isn't it? 

Have you ever made jam? I confess I never have!

Milou Koenings is a USA Today best-selling author. She writes romance because, like chocolate, stories with a happy ending bring more joy into the world and so make it a better place.  

Her Green Pines sweet romances, Reclaiming Home and Sweet Blizzard are available on Amazon and Amazon.uk. 

You can find her on her website,www.miloukoenings.com, on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, or Instagram.

 

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