How was your weekend? I hope it was a lovely one. We had a decidedly autumnal couple of days, with misty mornings and cool evenings punctuating the bursts of heat and sunshine in between. We had an amazing evening on Friday at the Luna Cinema, watching a movie under the stars whilst swaddled in blankets and sipping wine; as Friday nights go, it was hard to beat. Picnics too take on a whole new dimension when you’re unable to see what you’re rummaging for in the basket; we did eat the strangest combination of things.
Our main activity this weekend though was harvesting and foraging, gathering pears and blackberries from the garden to see us through the next couple of seasons. We began with pears… very small, wrinkly and peculiarly shaped ones, but they taste delicious nonetheless..
Harry was in charge of quality control, checking for holes, bite-marks and signs that we’d been beaten to the chase by other inhabitants of the garden. He takes after his dad and is able to do this calmly and methodically, and not run screaming to the house in hysterics every time he finds a worm (guilty as charged…).
The quirky summer weather has produced masses of early blackberries, which unlike the pears are super-sized and super-juicy. I flash-froze tray after tray before packaging them up like marbles, and now have a freezer-full of strangely shaped bags of bobbly purple fruit.
Last year we experimented with blackberry jam-making, but this weekend we wanted a more immediate treat, so I tried this recipe from James Martin for pear and blackberry crumble… and can officially declare it to be delicious. I tweaked the quantities a little (my version below); if you’re working in US measurements, all you need to remember for the filling is a rough ratio of 3:1 for the pear vs the blackberries – though of course the beauty of crumbles is that you can customise it is much as you like…
Finally, we gathered up all of the pears we had left over and arranged them amongst tissue paper in a couple of spare shoeboxes; I pasted a picture of our morning’s efforts to the inside lid and we’ll take them to local friends. Harry has certified each to be worm-free, and his word is good 
And now we’re back into the hurly-burly of the working week; thankfully without the frantic checking of school kit and the shock of early mornings and routine which rushed at us last week; we’re in our groove again now. At least, today we were..
Thank you incidentally for the lovely comments about our puppet theatre, and the stories and memories shared – it’s so lovely when a conversation unfolds!
Have a great rest of the week.
