It's Sunday night, dark and with the moon almost set. I've somehow lost a few hours. No I'm not hallucinating. We had supper, I did some rereading of my Burma travel journals, just checking this and that as I head into my final week of editing the Burma manuscript. And then sleep overcame me. Yes yes, perhaps it was the tedium of deciphering my own handwriting! Whatever!
Over two hours later I resurfaced, in that state of post-deep sleep paralysis that meant it took me another half hour to get off the sofa. Whew! I think I have to treat this as a second morning. I won't head out for a run (had a wonderful one this morning, long and easy) but I will try to knock some chores off my to-do list with my sort-of morning energy.
This weekend has already been productive. The big thing? yesterday I printed out a final draft of the Burma manuscript so a friend could read it through. This will be my last pass through and tidy up, and then off it goes... I now have a working title, by the way: RIVERS OF FLAVOR: RECIPES AND TRAVELLER'S TALES FROM BURMA
How does that look to you?
Getting that far ahead meant that I could at last do a little more in the garden. I have talked here about my plan to plant tomatoes in bags of soil, because of the blight problem in the garden soil. Now that's done, and we'll see how they do. It's not an attractive arrangement, for sure. The bags are all along the wall of the house in the side yard, so they won't get as much sun as plants do in the back, but the wall will hold in warmth and hopefully lengthen their season.; it should also give them some support. The other plants that I bought last week in Grey County are all planted: many kinds of chiles and basil and some cumin too, and after the heavy rains mid-week, they are looking better than perky and starting to grow.
Meantime on the flower side of the garden the irises are in full glorious bloom and the columbines too, lots of shade of blue and purple and all the in-betweens. Then late this afternoon the first peonies came out, creamy white edged with pink. A fab week for flowers...
Just started reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. It's quite amazing. Part of my mind's eye is living in Japan, with the motley Dutch trading community on an island off Nagasaki in 1799. Maybe that's what left me feeling dazed and needing sleep after supper. Hmm It could also be late payment for sleep deficit caused by the adrenalin of getting near the finish with the book. I have been pumped, for sure, unable to sleep more than five hours solidly each night. Not good!
I want to send a map in with the Burma manuscript. It's always good to be able to find where you are on a map, when reading about a new place. At least that's how I am. Do you feel the same way? A map makes it real somehow. Yes photos help, but the map is essential. That's next on my to-do list. It will have major rivers and cities and towns that are mentioned in the book. I'm using mostly the older names: Burma (not Myanmar) and Rangoon, not Yangon, for example.
Speaking of photos, I'm soon going to be able to (and I need to) start working on organising my digital photos, over two years' worth. I'm ashamed that I haven't done it until now, you're right. It's a big project and I knew it could side-track me, so I've left it for after I submit the manuscript. I've already got a list of some of the photos I like best, but they all need organising, using Lightbox. First I need to buy the program, then learn to use it. These transitions into new tech or new programs can be scary, of course, but since the pressure of the photos has grown so huge, I am not worried, just desperate to get started.
Meantime summer will be blooming and beautiful outside while I am insidel looking at this computer screen for hours. But at least the windows will be open, the fresh air pouring in, and the streets lively with summer ease.
Bring it on!
Showing posts with label tomato blight. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tomato blight. Show all posts
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Sunday, April 10, 2011
APRIL SUN & SHOWERS & THE PROMISE OF NEW LIFE
In the warm optimism of yesterday's sunshine, springtime finally announcing itself, I drove out of Toronto and through the swooping hills north to Grey County. I had a great visit with my lively and wonderful aunt in Markdale and then headed over in the sunny late afternoon to Durham.
There was a contra-dance last night in the town hall in Durham, a lovely chance to catch up with friends. We danced and danced, to lilting music by Scatter the Cats of Owen Sound and area: fiddle, mandolin, double bass, irish flute... instructed and called to so that we found ourselves moving pretty confidently through the complications of the dances, getting hot and sweaty and happy as we did so. "We" were about 75 people, maybe more, of all ages, from small children to grandparents, of all descriptions, all there to have fun and also to help raise money for a local Waldorf-ish school called Edge Hill.
I spent the night at friends' whose house is in a forest. This morning, instead of yesterday's sun we found ourselves in dripping rain, with occasional flashes of lightning and rolling thunder. There are still no leaves on the trees, so the forest was all vertical lines and soft autumnal tones. Well, not entirely autumnal. There's a quickening in the trees, heavy buds on branches, a warmth to the bark on the willows, the occasional strand of green peeping up already from under the damp brown-tan-purplish layers of last year's leaves.
We had a sauna this morning, seven adults sitting on benches in a hot wooden room, the stove hissing when we tossed a little water on it. Every so often one or more of us would go out to stand in the cool dripping rain radiating clouds of steam. Fun! And such a cleansing feeling, all that sweat and open-pored skin in the cool moist air.
After a huge drink of water I headed down the misty road in the little red Honda Fit, feeling light as air. The last patches of snow were brilliant white against the soft tones of the damp fields. And rising from each snowy patch was a fine mist, the moisture in the air condensing in the colder temperatures above the snow. It's an eerie effect, that trailing mist. In the low-lying patches, at dips in the road, and over pools of water still ice-patched in places, there was swirling thick fog. Fields of corn stubble were rows of pale yellow on dark, like some ancient hand-writing on the curving landscape, with gleaming black crows as punctuation. And there were newly ploughed fields, the soil not brown, not black, but again that purplish brown-black of spring, promising life and fruitfulness.
I know that when I drive those roads again in two or three weeks there will be brilliant colour, not the muted tones of today, and no mist, no snow, no skims of ice still floating on shaded small ponds.
It all got me thinking about impermanence. Of course as I drove through it, my view of the landscape was constantly changing. But even if I'd been standing still, my view would have been melting and moving and transforming before my eyes. In these northern climes all of nature is change, especially at these "shoulder" times of year, when we lurch out of the grip of winter and into the promise of new life. It's miraculous.
Back in the city now I know that I must start digging up the back garden, feeding it some manure, and thinking about where to plant the early lettuce seed. I had problems with tomato blight last year, so I need to move things around. The tomatoes have to go somewhere new. But how to do that? there's a very small space, and not all of it with good sunshine. hmmm
My cousin Jennifer sent me a link about blight and suggested that I could grow tomatoes in bags of soil, so they don't come in contact with the infected soil in my garden. That takes more planning and discipline than I'm used to putting into my gardening. My approach tends to be more haphazard. But I should be treating the garden with more respect.
I had a conversation last night at the dance with a friend named Diane who is part of the seed-saving movement. Her task this year is to grow more than twenty plants, tomato plants of a particular heirloom variety, in a place at least 100 feet from any other tomato plants (to ensure the seeds from the new crop are not-contaminated by cross-pollination). She's on a farm, so she has the space, but she still has to cultivate and develop a whole new area of garden, a huge amount of work. If she can do that, and the other seed-savers can put their efforts into protecting heirloom varieties for the good of us all, then the least I can do is take good care of my small tomato crop. Right?
And finally, on the Burma book front: This evening i retested the balachaung recipe (a great side-condiment, with tamarind, fried shallots and garlic, lots of dried shrimp ground to a powder, all cooked together into an umami-laden must-have condiment. My mouth is watering as I write this!). And I made a deceptively simple staple I learned about in Kengtung, in the Eastern Shan States (just near where the earthquake was a few weeks ago). It's made of rice and peanuts cooked together and then ground into a smooth texture, rather like a polenta. Tashi loved it.
A couple of days ago I printed out a draft of all the recipes, organised by chapters and looking pretty complete. It's thrilling to have the recipes in a three-ring binder, easy to annotate as I retest. I feel I've turned a corner, and am on the home stretch.
As I write this Dom and Tashi are also on a home stretch, a different one, which is made up of exams and term papers, as the university year comes to an end. I'm on cooking duty for these weeks, my small contribution to their efforts. And they thank me and say they'll take good care of me as I get really close to my June deadline. I'll keep you posted!
There was a contra-dance last night in the town hall in Durham, a lovely chance to catch up with friends. We danced and danced, to lilting music by Scatter the Cats of Owen Sound and area: fiddle, mandolin, double bass, irish flute... instructed and called to so that we found ourselves moving pretty confidently through the complications of the dances, getting hot and sweaty and happy as we did so. "We" were about 75 people, maybe more, of all ages, from small children to grandparents, of all descriptions, all there to have fun and also to help raise money for a local Waldorf-ish school called Edge Hill.
I spent the night at friends' whose house is in a forest. This morning, instead of yesterday's sun we found ourselves in dripping rain, with occasional flashes of lightning and rolling thunder. There are still no leaves on the trees, so the forest was all vertical lines and soft autumnal tones. Well, not entirely autumnal. There's a quickening in the trees, heavy buds on branches, a warmth to the bark on the willows, the occasional strand of green peeping up already from under the damp brown-tan-purplish layers of last year's leaves.
We had a sauna this morning, seven adults sitting on benches in a hot wooden room, the stove hissing when we tossed a little water on it. Every so often one or more of us would go out to stand in the cool dripping rain radiating clouds of steam. Fun! And such a cleansing feeling, all that sweat and open-pored skin in the cool moist air.
After a huge drink of water I headed down the misty road in the little red Honda Fit, feeling light as air. The last patches of snow were brilliant white against the soft tones of the damp fields. And rising from each snowy patch was a fine mist, the moisture in the air condensing in the colder temperatures above the snow. It's an eerie effect, that trailing mist. In the low-lying patches, at dips in the road, and over pools of water still ice-patched in places, there was swirling thick fog. Fields of corn stubble were rows of pale yellow on dark, like some ancient hand-writing on the curving landscape, with gleaming black crows as punctuation. And there were newly ploughed fields, the soil not brown, not black, but again that purplish brown-black of spring, promising life and fruitfulness.
I know that when I drive those roads again in two or three weeks there will be brilliant colour, not the muted tones of today, and no mist, no snow, no skims of ice still floating on shaded small ponds.
It all got me thinking about impermanence. Of course as I drove through it, my view of the landscape was constantly changing. But even if I'd been standing still, my view would have been melting and moving and transforming before my eyes. In these northern climes all of nature is change, especially at these "shoulder" times of year, when we lurch out of the grip of winter and into the promise of new life. It's miraculous.
Back in the city now I know that I must start digging up the back garden, feeding it some manure, and thinking about where to plant the early lettuce seed. I had problems with tomato blight last year, so I need to move things around. The tomatoes have to go somewhere new. But how to do that? there's a very small space, and not all of it with good sunshine. hmmm
My cousin Jennifer sent me a link about blight and suggested that I could grow tomatoes in bags of soil, so they don't come in contact with the infected soil in my garden. That takes more planning and discipline than I'm used to putting into my gardening. My approach tends to be more haphazard. But I should be treating the garden with more respect.
I had a conversation last night at the dance with a friend named Diane who is part of the seed-saving movement. Her task this year is to grow more than twenty plants, tomato plants of a particular heirloom variety, in a place at least 100 feet from any other tomato plants (to ensure the seeds from the new crop are not-contaminated by cross-pollination). She's on a farm, so she has the space, but she still has to cultivate and develop a whole new area of garden, a huge amount of work. If she can do that, and the other seed-savers can put their efforts into protecting heirloom varieties for the good of us all, then the least I can do is take good care of my small tomato crop. Right?
And finally, on the Burma book front: This evening i retested the balachaung recipe (a great side-condiment, with tamarind, fried shallots and garlic, lots of dried shrimp ground to a powder, all cooked together into an umami-laden must-have condiment. My mouth is watering as I write this!). And I made a deceptively simple staple I learned about in Kengtung, in the Eastern Shan States (just near where the earthquake was a few weeks ago). It's made of rice and peanuts cooked together and then ground into a smooth texture, rather like a polenta. Tashi loved it.
A couple of days ago I printed out a draft of all the recipes, organised by chapters and looking pretty complete. It's thrilling to have the recipes in a three-ring binder, easy to annotate as I retest. I feel I've turned a corner, and am on the home stretch.
As I write this Dom and Tashi are also on a home stretch, a different one, which is made up of exams and term papers, as the university year comes to an end. I'm on cooking duty for these weeks, my small contribution to their efforts. And they thank me and say they'll take good care of me as I get really close to my June deadline. I'll keep you posted!
Sunday, August 15, 2010
OF DELUGES AND PLEASURES
I feel as if this is a peasceful oasis, a haven, this bedroom of mine on the third floor, with open door to a quirky deck and night air blowing in, soft and summery still. But the weekend was very un-peaceful, as nature's power, and the possibility of plagues and floods etc at any hour, was very real.
I went north to Grey County for a film and to see friends. I left humid bright skies in Toronto and by the time I was north and swimming in magical Wilder Lake (I swam across and back and felt so weightless and timeless, it was wonderful) the sky was grey and formless. Later it turned into intense dark clouds and then the heavens opened: lightning, yes, but right overhead making the electric wires crackle, and great claps of thunder with it, and then drenching rain, and more and more. I headed out in it, in the car, with Lillian and some friends. We travelled through green fields and fog, but had little rain while we were gone. Returned to their house on a hill some hours later we learned it had continued to pour there, for three hours straight. Buckets left outside had nearly a foot of water in them. The tender greens in the garden were battered and bruised, and the smoothly gravelled laneway was like some flood plain, all scored with furrows where the water had poured along, rushing downhill.
Spent a good amount of time later on, around midnight, helping bail out a neighbour's basement, bucket after bucket scooped and poured into a big laundry sink. It felt a little sisyphean: were we making any progress? But finally we could see that the water was going down. We quite when it had gone from nearly two feet deep to about four inches.
And today? Well is that small twinge in my upper arms from swimming across the lake and back? Or is it from all that bucket scooping? Hard to tell. Lucky to be physically able to engage with the world, with its pleasures and catastrophes both.
I cannot imagine the floods in Pakistan, where deluges of at least biblical proportions have ripped people from their homes and killed hundreds. It's easy to get preoccupied with our immediate worries and comforts, but out there in the wider world, there are life and death situations, real-life, and real-death. How can we cope? How can we acknowledge them? How can we help, and not get paralysed or overwhelmed by hopelessness?
That's the task, and each of us invents the answer in our own way. For international relief, the advice is, send money
to an internationally reputable organisation such as OXFAM, rather than sending supplies that need to be shipped. People seem to be hesitating about helping Pakistan, because of all the fear-mongering there's been about the Taliban, and also because of a history of poor government over decades. But international organisations are in there, and are not the same as the discredited Pkistani government. Arguably people there need even more help because their governmetn has been so incompetent, so there's even more incentive to send aid. Here's hoping everyone hears the pleas.
On a local and mundane note, a food story: Last year I had a black fennel plant or two in my garden. This year I have masses of volunteers. But when I dug one or two up, they had no bulb, just a root. They ARE aromatic, and they are flowering now, level flowers, like all unbelliferae, yellow and cheerful. Fennel pollen is a fab ingredient, wild fennel pollen, and I know it from Italy. So dawnthebaker suggested we try gathering it.
We snipped off the fennel flowers and then tapped them on a white bowl, and there we were with golden strongly aromatic yellow fennel pollen. It's loaded with flavour. We added some salt, so the pollen would keep. Sprinkle fennel pollen on freshly roasted potatoes, or on roast chicken (that's what we did) or on eggs or as you please....
But what about the flowers, once cleaned of pollen? We dragged them through a simple batter, a pakora batter (chickpea flour and water, a little more than 1 water to 1 flour by volume to get a loose batter, and some salt), then deep-fried them. Yum again! You'd think that perhaps all the flavour is in the pollen, but no, fennel flowers are tasty. Some garlic chive flowers also got the pakora treatment, and were delish.
The huge rains will bring on a flush of shiitake's at Lillian's place, even as they drown and batter the tender greens and bring blight to potatoes and tomatoes. There's a bright and a dark side to most weather, right? Lillian, up north in Grey County, has okra in this warm summer, and also a version of winged bean, a tender lovely legume that I've seen only in Thailand and India. Amazing to see it ripen here. And we've had amazing fruit this year, from peaches to crabapples (already! on the tree out front) to elderberries... A friend, who grew up on Wolf Island, where Lake Ontario flows into the St Lawrence River, says her favorite pie is apple-elderberry.
I have other plans for the elderberries I bought last week at the farmers' market. They're precious, for on many years the birds get them all. I'll turn them into vinegar I hope, with dawnthebaker's help, using a "mother" from the organic apple cider vinegar I use (Filsingers from Grey County). We have to wait for cooler weather to start it (so meantime I've frozen the elderberries). And I was told by a friend this evening that a few simple pieces of dried pasta help vinegar along. It's the traditional Italian way, he said. He makes a very delicious red wine vinegar; I trust him on this.
Any idea why it might help or speed things along?
This is a rambling post, perhaps more than usual (and the first posting of it, late at night, was filled with typos, now all, hopefully, corrected). Sorry! Perhaps it's the ongoing heat and humidity that have scrambled my brains a little? Or maybe it's all the fresh tomatoes I'm eating, straight from the garden? No complaints. In fact it feels like a fair trade!
I went north to Grey County for a film and to see friends. I left humid bright skies in Toronto and by the time I was north and swimming in magical Wilder Lake (I swam across and back and felt so weightless and timeless, it was wonderful) the sky was grey and formless. Later it turned into intense dark clouds and then the heavens opened: lightning, yes, but right overhead making the electric wires crackle, and great claps of thunder with it, and then drenching rain, and more and more. I headed out in it, in the car, with Lillian and some friends. We travelled through green fields and fog, but had little rain while we were gone. Returned to their house on a hill some hours later we learned it had continued to pour there, for three hours straight. Buckets left outside had nearly a foot of water in them. The tender greens in the garden were battered and bruised, and the smoothly gravelled laneway was like some flood plain, all scored with furrows where the water had poured along, rushing downhill.
Spent a good amount of time later on, around midnight, helping bail out a neighbour's basement, bucket after bucket scooped and poured into a big laundry sink. It felt a little sisyphean: were we making any progress? But finally we could see that the water was going down. We quite when it had gone from nearly two feet deep to about four inches.
And today? Well is that small twinge in my upper arms from swimming across the lake and back? Or is it from all that bucket scooping? Hard to tell. Lucky to be physically able to engage with the world, with its pleasures and catastrophes both.
I cannot imagine the floods in Pakistan, where deluges of at least biblical proportions have ripped people from their homes and killed hundreds. It's easy to get preoccupied with our immediate worries and comforts, but out there in the wider world, there are life and death situations, real-life, and real-death. How can we cope? How can we acknowledge them? How can we help, and not get paralysed or overwhelmed by hopelessness?
That's the task, and each of us invents the answer in our own way. For international relief, the advice is, send money
to an internationally reputable organisation such as OXFAM, rather than sending supplies that need to be shipped. People seem to be hesitating about helping Pakistan, because of all the fear-mongering there's been about the Taliban, and also because of a history of poor government over decades. But international organisations are in there, and are not the same as the discredited Pkistani government. Arguably people there need even more help because their governmetn has been so incompetent, so there's even more incentive to send aid. Here's hoping everyone hears the pleas.
On a local and mundane note, a food story: Last year I had a black fennel plant or two in my garden. This year I have masses of volunteers. But when I dug one or two up, they had no bulb, just a root. They ARE aromatic, and they are flowering now, level flowers, like all unbelliferae, yellow and cheerful. Fennel pollen is a fab ingredient, wild fennel pollen, and I know it from Italy. So dawnthebaker suggested we try gathering it.
We snipped off the fennel flowers and then tapped them on a white bowl, and there we were with golden strongly aromatic yellow fennel pollen. It's loaded with flavour. We added some salt, so the pollen would keep. Sprinkle fennel pollen on freshly roasted potatoes, or on roast chicken (that's what we did) or on eggs or as you please....
But what about the flowers, once cleaned of pollen? We dragged them through a simple batter, a pakora batter (chickpea flour and water, a little more than 1 water to 1 flour by volume to get a loose batter, and some salt), then deep-fried them. Yum again! You'd think that perhaps all the flavour is in the pollen, but no, fennel flowers are tasty. Some garlic chive flowers also got the pakora treatment, and were delish.
The huge rains will bring on a flush of shiitake's at Lillian's place, even as they drown and batter the tender greens and bring blight to potatoes and tomatoes. There's a bright and a dark side to most weather, right? Lillian, up north in Grey County, has okra in this warm summer, and also a version of winged bean, a tender lovely legume that I've seen only in Thailand and India. Amazing to see it ripen here. And we've had amazing fruit this year, from peaches to crabapples (already! on the tree out front) to elderberries... A friend, who grew up on Wolf Island, where Lake Ontario flows into the St Lawrence River, says her favorite pie is apple-elderberry.
I have other plans for the elderberries I bought last week at the farmers' market. They're precious, for on many years the birds get them all. I'll turn them into vinegar I hope, with dawnthebaker's help, using a "mother" from the organic apple cider vinegar I use (Filsingers from Grey County). We have to wait for cooler weather to start it (so meantime I've frozen the elderberries). And I was told by a friend this evening that a few simple pieces of dried pasta help vinegar along. It's the traditional Italian way, he said. He makes a very delicious red wine vinegar; I trust him on this.
Any idea why it might help or speed things along?
This is a rambling post, perhaps more than usual (and the first posting of it, late at night, was filled with typos, now all, hopefully, corrected). Sorry! Perhaps it's the ongoing heat and humidity that have scrambled my brains a little? Or maybe it's all the fresh tomatoes I'm eating, straight from the garden? No complaints. In fact it feels like a fair trade!
Saturday, August 15, 2009
SUMMER RISKS AND SUMMER PLEASURES
Here we are suddenly in mid-August, with the first corn at the farmers' markets and the crabapples on the big tree in the front yard now pink-red and glowing like decorations on a Christmas tree. I'm not ready for summer to be over, but already the re-entry to university classes is less than a month away. And there's a little sad news: The tomato plants in the back yard are suffering from a blight that I'm told is related to potato blight. It's carried by spores, they say, that float up from the ground. The result is that although there's fruit, the leaves and branches are gradually turning brown and dead, so the plants are weaker and also very pathetic looking. There's none of the lush green curtain of growing plants that is the usual mid-August view out the back door. And by September I expect there will be no more tomatoes, for the plants have stopped growing and flowering. Such a shame, for those late season tomatoes are always such a treat.
How do farmers cope with this kind of unpredictability, with disease and drought and loss? How not to be anxious all the time if your livelihood depends on fickle weather and the interplay of bugs and disease? Those of us who are not completely dependent on our gardens for our food and our survival, and who have a more urban-style expectation that we can control outcomes, are so remote from the realities of nature's cruel edge. Maybe that's why we flinch at paying full price for the fruits of farmers' labours: because we're deluded and ignorant. And let's face it, we don't really want to know how hard life is for other people. Their health is our health, but we don't usually think of things that way. We want to think of ourselves only, and to assume everyone else is fine...
Today I went to the weekly Saturday market at the Brickworks, here in Toronto. It's an attractive place, with lots of farmer vendors and beautiful produce, especially at this time of year. As always there were people there with their dogs, many of them large, and an overwhelming number of them not well behaved. There's something a little sick about dogs sticking their noses into food that's on display, drooling over it or sniffing it or whatever they do, and exploring the samples of elk, for example, set out on a table for customers. Maybe I'm being too picky? It's not the dogs that are the problem, it's the owners who don't take responsibility. Now I'm sounding really grouchy!
My friend Dina tells me that at the large organic market in the Laurentians there's a big sign "interdit aux chiens". What a good idea!
On another topic, a more inviting one, I was at Potz's store yesterday, "4-Life" in Kensington Market. He carries local produce, labelled with the name of the farmer who grows it, as well as eggs and butter etc, and some frozen organic meat too, and is a great guy, always open to new ideas and people. He had some long flat beans for sale that looked like sword beans, but weren't. They were locally grown by a guy named Trevor, I think, who is also a chef. Potz gave me a few and told me to grill them or cook them in a hot skillet.
Later in the day some friends dropped by for a drink, so I heated a little olive oil in the cast-iron skillet and put the beans in, whole, pressing on them to scorch them a little on each side, a matter of several minutes. A little fresh garlic from the garden, coarsely chopped, then went into the oil briefly. I cut the beans crosswise into 1/2-inch slices, added the garlic, then sprinkled Malden salt on top. They were great little tender green mouthfuls, ideal with the cold Kronenberg or white wine people were sipping. If I find out the name of the beans, I'll add it into this post. Meantime, keep an eye out for them. Oiled and grilled they'd be great too.
While I was in Umbria I picked a large hatful (having brought no bag with me) of wild blackberries. The last time I picked blackberries was ages ago, on Vancouver Island and on SaltSpring, when the kids were very small and I'd taken them to visit my then 103-year-old grandmother. Blackberries are always a treat that you have to fight for a little, for the brambles scratch and leave you marked for a week or so. (My ankles are still scarred from last week.)
It's all worth it when you eat them fresh, popping them into your mouth one by one, or bake with them, for example as I did in Umbria: I rolled out a rather butter-rich pastry (made with 00 Italian flour and one egg), put it on a baking sheet and sprinkled on chopped walnuts, then piled on a mound of blackberries. The pastry was very soft. I folded it up over the mounded berries leaving only a smallish opening at the top of the pile. It baked for about half an hour at 400 and then needed another half hour to cool and settle into firmness.
The stars were bright and the moon up as we cut into the crostata, another summer pleasure to savour in the moment, and to look back on with gratitude.
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