Black Raspberries

Today I had a fun day. It is one of those days, that you may think to yourself, "Joanne you are nuts! Fun? It is 97F outside and you are wearing jeans, knee high PVC boots and a long sleeve shirt. Why on earth would you do that to yourself?" Well, cause the wild black berries are in season. So are the thorns, chiggers, snakes etc.........

Near the end of my morning walk, Athena came by driving by in her John Deere Gater and asked if I wanted to go check the berries and see if they were ripe enough to pick. We found a bunch that were ripe, so decided it would be worth it to start our picking. Besides, it was a little cloudy and as you know, clouds will hide the TX sun.

So we drove home and changed into the outfit I described and off we went to the fields on the edge of our neighborhood. We were manned with bug spray, buckets, water, clippers and gloves. We fought the stickers and thorns to harvest the wonderful berries. Since we had both taken clippers, we clipped back any branches that got in the way of our harvest. It did get pretty hot, and quickly too, once the sun came up over the trees and the clouds blew off somewhere, so we called it a day and came home.

I had enough berries to make this wonderful pie. :)

I used a new(to me) pie crust recipe from the Joy of Cooking cookbook. It actually uses part butter in the crust. Then I used the berry pie recipe that I found in there.

For those that love knitting and felting. The pie is sitting on a knitted and felted potholder, that was an experiment years ago, that I thought flopped. It was too long, but actually has been the best hot pad ever!

I am just waiting for the vanilla ice cream to make it home and we will slice into that pie.