Our Days in the UK

I have seen so many recipes, especially in historical books here, about blackberry and apple recipes. I wondered why they were always paired together, because it doesn't seem like the most obvious textural or taste combination to me. Well, now I know. We have blackberries and apples ripening simultaneously all around us! We don't have any apple trees in our yard, but there are lots of apple and crab apple trees growing on common land in our village. Even better, some neighbors who have carefully cultivated trees have been leaving out big buckets full of free apples for people to share. We have processed so many apples over the past few weeks. I really want an apple orchard! But for now I'll content myself with the pounds and pounds of apples we pick and gather. Blackberry-apple pie filling... Rows of apples waiting to be peeled and chopped, with a surprise head in the foreground:  More apples. These are not from the same batch as the one above. We've had S

But before I tell you about apples, let's take a quick look at this gem of a castle that we visited last weekend. See the big grey clouds in the sky? That's a sign for us that it's time to go exploring, because especially during the summer school holidays here, if you go anywhere when the sun is shining, you will be joined by throngs of people. I'm not sure what the population density of England is, but it has to be high.  We have learned to stay home in our own little yard when it's sunny holiday time and to go out and explore when it's cold and/or rainy and/or during school hours... Anyway, this castle is on the English side of the border with Wales. A friend from church recommended we check it out because it was one of her childhood favorites. We were glad we did. We ended up visiting during a Medieval Festival there, so we got to see a jester and some presentations about food. There was also a knight contest but we didn't stay for that.

Well, hello! We've been busy around here so I haven't gotten around to blogging much. One of the most exciting reasons for this busy-ness has been the abundance of free food available for foraging during this summer-turning-quickly-into-fall season. First on the free food list: blackberries! We noticed blackberries ripening all around us in hedgerows a month or so ago, but they were pretty bitter. We weren't sure whether wild blackberries here would just generally be bitter, but we went picking two weeks ago and were pleasantly surprised to find the berries were perfectly sweet. Since we are literally surrounded by bramble bushes, and since I might be slightly enthusiastic about both frugality and producing one's own food, I may or may not have gone slightly overboard in my blackberry picking enthusiasm. We went out as a family every evening for a week picking various brambles around the village. We've been eating a lot of blackberry food. Our first exper