A series to help you cook with the bounty of the season.
It's blueberry season, a time for filling pails and pie shells.
From now until the first week in August, home cooks can visit farms in just about every county of Maryland and load their buckets with blueberries for about $2 a pound. Or, if you are Carol Kressen of Ellicott City, you can step into your yard, where a half-dozen blueberry bushes planted by the home's previous owner produce more blueberries than your three children can eat - or sell.
"The first year, we picked about 48 quarts before I stopped counting," said Kressen, whose favorite way to make use of the blueberries is in a pie recipe she adapted from The Fanny Farmer Cookbook.
"I served it once at a dinner party to a guest who loved it and then admitted that he didn't even like blueberries."
Her youngest, Melissa, 5, eats the blueberries as fast as she picks them from the branches that hang just above her head. The bushes are covered with netting that keeps greedy birds away.
Kressen's twins, Kathleen and Joey, 7, often open up a stand at the end of the driveway and sell cups full of the blue-gray berries for 25 cents each.
"People get halfway down the street and come back for more," said the mother of the entrepreneurs.
Terry Freed of Garden of Eden Orchards in Salisbury sells blueberries, too. But he has more than six bushes in his backyard. He has 6,000.
"It is a fun crop to grow in your backyard," he said. "They take little or no spraying. The only thing with blueberries is that the birds love them."
Birds can make a serious dent in the production of a single mature bush, which might yield 10 quarts a year.
"My mother came down from Massachusetts," said Kressen, who thinks her bushes might be about 25 years old. "And we'd picked about six quarts in an hour. There were so many and it was so hot, I finally said, 'Mom. Enough.' Sometimes you just have to walk away," said Kressen.
Blueberries aren't just for muffins or pies anymore. They are for soups, salads, salsas and sauces. Cooks are finding savory recipes for this bountiful crop. Kressen sprinkles blueberries on salads and even created a blueberry vinaigrette in addition to jams and pies.
"And I freeze a lot of them," she said.
