Frugal Friday: Foraging for food
We recently discovered a nearby park has lots of mulberry trees. We've been having a blast going once a week and picking those beautiful dark berries as a family. What more frugal and fun family activity is there than picking fresh berries for free?
Anyone have any great mulberry recipes? My attempt substituting mulberries for blueberries in muffins was a bit of a flop. They burned badly, but I'm not sure if it was the mulberries or the fact that I substituted yogurt for sour cream.Have you foraged for any food this Summer? If so, tell us about it!
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Labels: Frugal Friday
posted by Crystal Paine at 4:54 PM
35 Comments:
That is so funny. We have trees right next to our house that have those berries. I never knew that they were mulberries.
Lulu
Mulberries! Yum! I use to love to eat them when I was little! My grandma made mulberry jam. It was very good. Sadly, I don't have her recipe. I am sure that you can find one online. We moved to a home two years ago that has cherry trees and grapevines! We love it! Free produce! Woohoo!
Amanda T. (www.xanga.com/TrentTribe)
Tammy at Tammysrecipes.com recently posted about yummy mulberry-cherry pie...
http://tammysrecipes.com/cherry_mulberry_pie
Hi! We live in a valley with lots of black raspberry & blackberry bushes, so we pick as many as we can and freeze them for pies. The only challenge is trying to beat our neighbors out each morning to pick them!
I have never even seen those berries before, but I love that black and white picture! Hehe, I thought it was cockroaches at first...can you tell I live in Florida??? ; )
I doubt it was the yogurt in place of sour cream. I use them in place of each other all the time in muffins and quick breads. I have never had a problem. So I would guess it was either the mulberries or the recipe.
I don't have a public blog, so I though I would share my foraging story here in the comments.
The house behind us has an abundant cherry tree. My husband said the house was vacant, so we talked to the real estate agent (it was in foreclosure, so no owner.) He gave the green light, so hubby hopped the fence and picked 17 pounds of sweet cherries!! Yummy!
:o) Rachel
Wonderful that you found mulberries. Over here in south Asia, we have several Mulberry trees in our garden that a previous Miss ionary planted. Every March, we are innundated. I make jelly and syrup. Sorry, I don't have a recipe for either. I use pectin from the US for the jelly, follow a berry jelly recipe on the package, and cook it until it starts to get a bit thick. Then into the jars and into the canner. The kids love it. Mulberries are too seedy (and also have tough center stems) for jam - at least the variety we have here.
Many of the berries get frozen for later and most of these end up in mulberry cobbler. I just use my mom's peach cobbler recipe as a starting point. I cook up the berries with sugar and corn starch first, then dump them in a pan and put the batter on top.
I have not had good success with mulberry muffins. The mulberries seem to have too much moisture and the muffins mold - usually in less than 36 hours. Of course, our humidity is a bit higher than most of the US :-) Other kinds of muffins are our daily snacks, though.
BTW, our national neighbors laughed at us for years because we covered our mulberry trees with large lengths of mosquito netting to keep the birds out. They thought we were crazy because only children and silk worms eat mulberries. But this year, everyone near us used mosquito nets to cover their lychees. Maybe we're not so crazy after all!
Blessings, Sherilyn
I use them to make mulberry syrup. Just boil in water and mash them some to get the juices out. Then use 1 cup of that liquid to 2 cups of sugar. I add a bit of vanilla flavoring and my kids love it on pancakes.
I have the fondest memories of snacking on mulberries in my grandmother's tiny back yard in the middle of the city. She was a farmgirl at heart, however, and let us indulge in that special treat. I've never heard of using them in baking. They don't seem to have a strong enough flavor. However, our frugal daughter, Lydia, has her eye on a tree near us and plans to find some way to use them.
Oh, I was just getting ready to post my mom's mulberry pie recipe! :)
That did look like bugs! I was getting kind of sick looking at it until I read on . . . :~)
About three years ago my husband and son took a walk in our neighborhood and came back saying they found some raspberries in an alley. It looked like no one was picking them and they were ripe. I went with them and we asked the neighbor who's property it looked like it was on. They told us to take all we wanted. They didn't want them. So pick we did! Boy, they were wonderfully good. They didn't last very long at our house! =)
Loretta
http://veganfootprints.blogspot.com/
I'm just waiting for our home grown black currant bushes to ripen and also looking for recipes on how to use them.
Blessings from Northern Ireland
Whoops...I accidentally linked to my main blog site, instead of the actual post. Does anyone know how I can change it?
we have seen more fruit this year than ever, we have mulberry trees, wild raspberries, blackberries, persimmons (those don't ripen till the fall) and wild asparagus! plus all of the orchard that is planted and the garden, but even in the orchard there are trees producing this year that have never produced as long as we have lived here! what a fruitful year! anyway, yes mulberries, my Hannah puts them in smoothies, and muffins and jam, and they are great mixed with strawberries, they are not good for you though if they are not ripe :( . I had several mulberry posts on my blog a few weeks ago,
blessings, Penny Raine
http://www.pennyraine.com/blog
I used to sing a song when I was a little girl with my Mom or Grandma or whoever would sing it: "Here we go round the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush. Here we go round the mulberry bush so early in the morning," or something like that.
I don't think the muffins burned because of the yogurt/sour cream substitution. I do that quite frequently and have had much success.
We have blueberries, pears, and figs in the summer, and persimmons in the winter! I especially love the figs because they are so sweet; we make fig preserves with them. We also go to a farm in Dexter, GA where they have acres of blueberry bushes growing 'wild'—no pesticides, no chemicals! It's fun to pick blueberries with friends there :-)
Georgia
I too thought they were cockroaches - eww! The in color picture made me feel much better. We used to pick mullberries on my grandpa's farm in south Dakota.
I pulled the black and white "cockroach-looking" picture so I didn't bother anyone else! I need to work on my photo-shopping and artsy photo skills a little bit more, I guess. :)
We had a mulberry tree in our backyard, and I made mulberry pie by substituting mulberries in a cherry pie recipe. It actually turned out quite well -- it's a bit tangy, but good! It takes a LOT of mulberries though.
Good luck!
Tammy @ Tammy's Recipes just posted a new recipe today for mulberry pie. Thought you might be interested!
Awww I liked the black and white picture! I thought it was really artsy, Crystal! I think you have an eye for photography. Oh well, I guess not everyone has my taste, hehe.
I didn't write a blog post about foraging, but I thought I would leave it in the comments. We live in the woods, and we get wild blackberries in the summer. We also get leafy greens called, "poke salad" in the summer. The older-timers call it that, because you pick it and put it in a poke (paper bag).
Tami
Free would be nice... but we found a cherry picking place that had them for $1.25 a pound... that's way better than the $4 or more a pound in the stores. :)
Our neighbors have a mulberry tree at the edge of their property, and they don't mind sharing. Just be careful. If you let the berries sit too long, tiny white bugs crawl out.
the best foraging is in your own garden :)
xoxoxo
Should have blogged about raiding my parents garden! :) I'll have to save that for another week.
Something to try....I've heard that if you get stains on your clothing while picking, that you can scrub it with a green one to help get it out! Don't know if it works...
We forage for persimmons in the autumn. We get as much as we can, make it into pulp, and then freeze it. I use it in any recipe that calls for pumpkin--muffins, bread, etc.
I've been on the lookout for roadside raspberries and blackberries. We used to forage for those when I was a child.
Blessings--
Dana
How do your decide on books related to your character quality for the week? Just curious!
Thanks~
Kelly
Mushroom hunting (morrels) is a very big deal where I grew up, although I know a lot of people have never heard of it. Mushroom hunting trips through woods were great fun.
Then, we used to live in the northern Chicago suburbs, and there was a foot/bike path in a fairly heavily populated area. There were tons of blackberries, raspberries, and mulberries growing alongside the path, and as far as we could tell, only about 2 people actually picked any. A practically unlimited supply of free fresh berries for the season!
Melissa
I made this for a potluck and it went over really well.
Country Cobbler
Any kind of fruit or berries works beautifully in this tasty, easy recipe.
2 cups mulberries
1/4 to 1/2 cup sugar, depending on the sweetness of the fruit
6 tablespoons butter
3/4 cup flour
1/3 cup sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup milk
1/2 teaspoon grated lemon zest
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Place the berries in a bowl and stir in 1/4 to 1/2 cup of sugar into the fruit and set aside.
Melt the butter in an 8-inch square glass baking dish. Sift the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt together, and stir in the brown sugar; add the milk and lemon zest and mix.
Pour the batter into the dish of melted butter. Do not mix. Sprinkle the mulberries over the batter.
Bake for 40 to 50 minutes.
Yield: 6 servings
Oh Crystal! Your mulberry picking brings back fond memories of my childhood. Taking our "mulberry" sheets out to the groves, armed w/ rakes and hoes, anything that can hook a high branch and give it a fierce shake... we'd lay the clean, but stained sheets on the ground and away we'd go!! Mulberries would come raining down, along w/ bugs and the like..ick! We would eat mulberries w/ cream and sugar (not part of today's low cal life)... and mulberry/cherry pie...yum! Thanks for that blast from the past! amy
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