Wow, week two of the summer holidays already! How are you enjoying yourselves? We had a busy (and frugal!) first week with visits to our local museum, our Tinkerbell button picture, picnics in the lounge (don’t they feel strangely special?) and of course, lots of lovely walks with the pup where we all made new friends.
It was on one of our walks that we discovered the blackberries had already ripened. It’s a treasured memory of time with my mum, picking blackberries, then making that British staple, crumble and one I was keen to replicate with the Lamb.
We were lucky that the blackberry bushes were dripping with fruit so it didn’t take us long to fill our bags. I didn’t weigh the fruit but I’d guess we had just over 500grams. The Lamb and I washed the berries when we got home and then I stewed them with a little sugar and water, just like my mum used to.
There are loads of crumble recipes on the internet so we chose this one from the BBC. After carefully measuring out the ingredients we began ‘rubbing in’, a fun technique, great for little fingers. It wasn’t long before all the butter and sugar had combined with the flour to make some lovely ‘crumbs’.
One thing I love about cooking with the Lamb is we get to experiment. After tasting the crumble, we decided it needed something else. The Lamb had a sniff of some cinnamon and some nutmeg, deciding that the nutmeg would be best. We sprinkled some over the top and mixed it in but after a small sample and the Lamb decided it needed more nutmeg. It was so lovely to see the Lamb engaged in cooking and making decisions about what should go in our food.
By the time we’d made the crumble, the fruit was fully stewed. If I’m honest, it was quite juicy and we probably should have cooked a bit more of the water off. Spreading the fruit in a shallow dish, we evenly distributed the crumble mixture over the fruit before putting it in the oven for 45mins at 180degrees C (Gas mark 4, 356degrees F).
And here is our cooked crumble! Sadly, there’s not enough to share and the Lamb and I ate a HUGE slice before daddy got home. It was delicious, made all the better by being homemade. I hope the Lamb has as fond memories of our adventure as I do with my mum.
Have you been blackberry picking yet? What do you make?