Turkey Hill Farm
Last weekend, after the Race for the Cure, I visited two Manchester, VT gardens available as part of the Vermont Garden Conservancy Open Days program and was I glad I did! The first “garden,” Turkey Hill Farm, encompasses seven exquisitely maintained acres, two houses plus other buildings, and numerous pieces of sculpture dotting the landscape. The views go on for miles and a professional gardener makes sure that every flower does its job perfectly.
Next up was A Cook’s Garden, a very personal garden space, created and nurtured by delightful Ellen Ogden whose most current book, the Complete Kitchen Garden, is pictured here.
Ellen grows a lot of vegetables including these glorious artichokes
Artichokes in Ellen Ogden's Garden
and also designs gardens. I’ll bet she could make a stone blossom. If you’d like to investigate either her book or her design services, go to www.ellenogden.com
On Sunday, the first stop was the Dorset Farmer’s Market because I believe in supporting local farmers and love their fresh veggies and breads. Later that day, a group of family and friends went to Wildwood Farm in East Dorset to pick blueberries. When you arrive, you get a pail lined with a plastic bag; the pail is suspended on a piece of wide tape that goes around the neck, freeing you for two-handed picking. These are high bush berries and so plentiful this year they practically fell into the bucket. Lots of kids probably
eat as much as they pick but so it goes. When my daughters were little and we went berry picking, I tried to get across the idea of how hard this kind of work was but no dice–they thought picking (and eating) was a fabulous way to spend the day (and, in truth, it was.) This year I scored about six pounds of berries which I froze in roughly one pound-size plastic bags. The berries last brilliantly and work fine on cereal or in a pie or cobbler all winter (oh dear, just realized I sound like Ma in Little House on the Prairie–sorry about that.)
One of my favorite, easy things to do with blueberries is to make this buckle (and would love readers to check in with explanations of a buckle as compared with a cobbler, grunt, crisp, etc.) This recipe has one seemingly weird step (the boiling water bit) but turns out fine every time.
Blueberry Buckle courtesy Peggy T.
Batter:
3T butter
½ c. sugar
¼ t. salt
1 cup sifted flour
1 t baking powder
½ cup milk
1 egg
Mix sugar and butter. Sift dry ingredients. Add to butter mixture alternating with milk. Beat a minute or two and then beat in the egg.
Put 2 –3 cups berries in baking dish. Squeeze ½ lemon over them. Spread batter over berries. Mix ½- ¾ c. sugar, 1 tsp. cinnamon w. 1 T. corn starch (or not if you’re a purist and think cornstarch is awful) and ¼ t salt and sprinkle over batter. Pour 1 cup boiling water over all. (At first I thought yikes but it’s OK).
Bake in 375 oven for 1 hour. Good idea to line the oven rack with foil to catch drippings that can be a mess to deal with.
Blueberry Buckle
Call it what you will, served with vanilla ice cream it’s a great dessert.