Beautiful Berries!

This year for the first time EVER at Southside we are offering the fruitylicious Berry Share. For 13 weeks this summer from July to September Grieg Farm will be picking blackberries, blueberries and red and yellow raspberries first thing in the morning and delivering them to our CSA in the afternoon. That’s right folks – they will be oh but a few hours old.

Last year we got a few deliveries of berries, but whenever they reared their little berry heads, we were all super excited. SO excited in fact that we thought a whole share devote to berries would be just the ticket in 2010.

We will be running a workshop on jam making and canning which will easily swallow half your entire berry share. We will also receive a whole bunch of recipes for pies, sauces, ice creams, cocktails and other berry madness from you lot. Here are a few to get your salivary glands going…

Jellies and Jams

Ahh – the Guardian, lots of proper English recipes. Here’s one for no nonsense Jam making. And for those of you who just down right laugh at the thought of making Jam (aka, Jelly, but we’ll wean you off that term) the NY Times has kindly put together a stress free Raspberry Jam article – it apparently takes 30 mins. Totally worth a go and quite frankly if i can do it, you certainly can.

Cocktails – you can never go wrong with muddling cocktails with a variety of fresh herbs into hard-laced brown sugar and ice cubes. Cocktail Hacker have some Mojito variations with Blueberries – my kind of hackers!

Savory – Berries happily flounce-up many a savory dish. Tea-Smoked Duck Breast with Pears and Blueberry Jus – umm…anything tea-smoked gets my vote. But Roast Duck with Blueberry Sauce – that one will most certainly impress even my mother-in-law.  In fact, it seems you can make raspberry marinades & sauces for many meat dishes -how very sophisticated of you!

Sweet – But for those hazy days of summer there is many a sweet berry recipe guaranteed to tickle your fancy.

I thought blackberry lemonade would be good, but Blackberry-Lemon Tart with Champagne-Mint Granite..?! Oh, sweet berry bliss! Or Blackberry Sour Cream Panna Cotta with Lemon Sauce – its just so Italiano! And then there is Puzzle Pudding with Blueberries & Strawberries – a Nantucket favorite. I wonder if they’ve named an area of Brooklyn after Nantucket yet…

A little about the berry farm

Greig Farm is located on 100 acres of rolling farmland in Red Hook, NY. It is a second generation family farm growing quality fresh fruit and making it directly available to the public for the past 68 years. It has been open to the public for pick your own fruits and vegetables for more than 60 years and this is its second time working with a CSA. They do not use systemic chemicals and chose natural predators over the chemical solution whenever possible.