50 Before 11.75: Picking Blackberries and Eating Apples

As part of our ongoing mission to do 50 things before 11 3/4, we completed some of the food related things on the list. 

#21 is picking blackberries growing in the wild. L did this on a walk. Rather than eat them right then and there (though I'm sure she sampled some to check their quality), she brought them home to make some blackberry jam.

L with her spoils of walking

Thankfully, we have a bread-maker with a jam setting. Whipping out the cookbook, we followed the instructions on what ingredients to add in what order.

Blackberries in the bread pan

Helping the bread machine stir

L made another "quality check" on the blackberries at this point.

Tastes right to her

After much heating and stirring, we had a lot of jam. We divided the batch into two pots. One batch was strained, resulting in a straight jelly with no bits of blackberry in it. The other was the "chunky" jam. L preferred the jelly, and was her own satisfied customer!

The final quality check

The first of many satisfied customers

#9 of the 50 things to do is eating an apple straight from a tree. This was easy for us to accomplish because we have an apple tree in our back yard and it had a great yield this year.

Backyard Bonanza!

Also in our backyard, we had a snail race (#17), but that will be for another blog post!