... a spirited celebration of regional food and culinary craft, season by season, with original recipes by Susan S. Bradley
Every summer, I work up a few new blueberry dishes and share the best of them with you. To prime your creative juices, here are some of my favorite ways to eat this super juicy, distinctively flavored berry. Check out the Fresh Blueberry Primer first to see the wide range of other ingredients that partner beautifully with blueberries. Maybe try a combination you’ve never tried before.
After I created Fresh Blueberry Lime Sauce earlier this summer, I devoted myself to spooning it over Burnt Sugar Ice Cream and Fireweed Honey Panna Cotta, drizzling it over Blueberry Cornmeal Upside-Down Cake and MauiJim’s Cottage Cheese Pancakes, and using it way too frequently to make my favorite summer afternoon delight, Blueberry Lemon Verbena Spritzer with Candied Ginger Ice Cream.
I would have to wait until college to taste my first Indian chutney, a sweet-tart-spicy-hot-chunky-fruity, completely addictive condiment. After that first mind altering bite, there was no turning back. Today, our frig always contains at least one homemade and several store-bought chutneys.
Here we have a new fangled play on an old fashioned ice cream soda. It’s the bees knees. And guaranteed to conclude any school shopping expedition with a celebratory high.
Long, long ago, in a far, far away land (okay, it was Phinney Ridge near the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle), I was the co-owner of a cheesecake business called the Uncommon Cheesecake. My partner and I baked the most extraordinary cheesecakes I have ever tasted, before or since: Grand Marnier with Bitter Orange, Candied Ginger, and Café Mocha to name a few I can recall.
Blueberry season is in full swing in the Northwest. Yesterday, the Pike Place Market was overflowing with these silvery purple jewels. I nibbled my way around until I found a local grower whose berries seemed just right: full and multidimensional in flavor with good acidity to balance their sweetness.
Although blueberries are indigenous to American soil and were one of the first fruits encountered by early settlers, the blueberry industry was still a relative newcomer to Washington and Oregon agribusiness in the 1990’s when I first wrote about it in Pacific Northwest Palate: Four Seasons of Great Cooking. At that time, the industry was 25-30 years young by most accounts.
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