midlife huckleberry
October 2nd, 2021Housekeeping Update: Subscribers may have received an email burp of use real butter post summaries recently. We’re not sure what Feedburner is doing, so I apologize. We are in the process of migrating your use real butter subscription to a new service while minimizing any further weirdness you may encounter. Until the new service is in place, we haven’t cut off Feedburner, but you can self-subscribe in the little subscription box on the upper right of the blog. Thank you so much for your patience and thanks to Lesley for recommending follow.it. -jen xo
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September sways between summer and autumn and occasionally dips a toe in faux-winter here in the mountains. The month began thick with greenery and hot sun, and ended draped in the golden leaves of autumn as the high country backdrops were accented in white from recent snowfall. I find it a refreshing reprieve from relentless awesome summer doings. Like much of the wildlife around us, we are tending to those responsibilities we shirked all summer in favor of foraging mushrooms and huckleberries.
Labor Day is an unofficial bookend of summer, which means we spent our birthdays in relative peace and quiet. Relative because… pups. Per Jeremy’s request, I prepared a multi-course seafood dinner for his birthday dinner and baked a hazelnut almond dacquoise with fresh berries and chocolate mousse for dessert. For my own birthday, my 50th, I made chicken porcini pot pie, had a scoop of non-dairy store bought ice cream, and defeated several armies of hostile alien forces. No midlife crisis, just midlife casual no-drama low-stress appreciation for the ordinary. We were in Crested Butte last weekend to winterize our place and do a little leaf peeping.
birthday boy and yuki side-eye
neva enjoying outside time (yuki did not want to climb onto the boulder)
everybody happy
aspen and spruce
this will never get old
walking through golden aspen stands
lovely views in every direction
It’s late in the season to be posting a huckleberry recipe, but I know people are still foraging them to the north and west of Colorado. We had a pretty good huck season locally. If you were diligent about picking and freezing these tiny flavor bombs this summer, you might have enough to make a pie. If (like me) you use your precious huckleberries sparingly, then a full-sized 9-inch pie might be too great a demand of your stash. A 4-inch pie requires a mere 1 1/2 cups. Thankfully, frozen huckleberries work just as well as fresh in this pie, so one could conceivably create a blast of late summer any time of year. And as always, if you don’t have huckleberries, you can substitute with wild blueberries or regular blueberries.
a tremendous season full of big little huckleberries
Truth be told, I’ve never made a life-size huckleberry pie. 6-8 cups is a full day of picking in the BEST of seasons in Colorado. So the recipe below is for a 9-inch pie, because apparently there are locales where the huckleberries are large and plentiful and you don’t have to crouch on the ground for hours on end to get them. The process I photographed here is the making of a 4-inch pie. I also ditched the pie dough in the Saveur recipe because Kenji’s pie dough is now my trusted go-to recipe.
flour, salt, sugar, butter, ice water
pulse sugar, salt, 2/3 of the flour, and cold butter together
cut in the remaining flour
drizzle with cold water
press and fold the dough together
holding shape and ready to chill
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