Noberry Home

It was early September, time for Mary Ann and me to go on our annual huckleberry hunt. This year I hadn't had a chance to check out the crop in advance, so we didn't know what to expect. The last two years, boy howdy, the bushes were nuts. Huckleberries pushed at the margins of the forest like they were behind the velvet rope at the nightclub, saying Pick me! Pick me! And, like roadies with all the power, we were able to select just the prettiest ones most likely to put out.

"But you never know," we said this time, perfunctorily modest. The fates frown on audacity.

You never do know. Still, we approached our berry grounds with all the anticipatory glee of a postal worker taking his paycheck to Reno. And we pulled up to our accustomed turnout and charged into the woods with empty buckets and full hearts.

A half hour later, the hearts were running a pint low but nothing else had changed.

"Huh," we articulated.

"Do you suppose it's been picked over?" Mary Ann wanted to know.

With a Huckleberry Hound.

No, I didn't. They don't all ripen at once, and ordinarily you can see little berries all green with ambition right next to their voluptuous sisters. What we had here was that rare non-existent variety. We'd brought along our friend Margaret and a huckleberry hound for good luck, without vetting either one properly for auspiciousness. But berrying is a bright and hopeful pursuit and we gave it all we had. An hour in, I had thirteen berries to my credit. They huddled along the bottom of my bucket like the skinny, morose kids about to be picked last for dodgeball. There were few enough that I got to know them by name, and have favorites.

Two hours in, I had begun to scan the smaller alders in case our berries had switched teams since last season. Whereas the alders failed to turn up any huckleberries, it must be noted that they didn't produce much fewer than the huckleberry bushes did.

Well, you can keep this sort of thing up for hours at a time, especially if you are content to sift quietly through the dappled light of a fir forest to no particular end. There is a restorative quality to the early-autumn slant of sun in the woods, and although this year it has a pinkish cast from not-so-distant fires, it still feels like a benediction. And one of the beauties of our local berries is that you don't have to bend over for them. In fact, I'd say just about all the berries that weren't there this year were at waist-height, probably.

After 7.5 berrypickerhours and a consolidation, we had finally covered the bottom of one bucket, assuming it was kept level. We could achieve two pies if we used jar lids for tins. And added apples.

But that's two more huckleberry pucks than we've made all year. We're chalking it up as a win.

The Bonanza

So this is how it works. At the end of summer, you go up to the mountain to get your huckleberries. You pray for one pieful and hope your humility will be rewarded with enough for two or three. The berries are tiny and sparse, sapphire-rare, and you drift languidly through the bushes like a T'ai Chi dude, as attentive to a blue speck as any miner looking for a flash in the pan. An hour later you can still see the bottom of the bucket. If you drop a berry, you get down on your hands and knees to track it down, trying to keep your tears out of the bucket.

Some years they seem plentiful and you scavenge a gallon over the course of six or eighteen hours. Some years your huckleberries are (botanically speaking) in the Theoretical family. No one has a clue why fortunes change from year to year, but people speculate. There was a late snowstorm. El Nino was in a snit. The Berry Goddess was having her nails done or seducing a televangelist when the fruit was supposed to set. No one knows.

And then there was this year. Mary Ann (purveyor of the World's Finest Salamander Hardware) and I pilgrimated to our usual spot and found ourselves hip deep in a sea of blue. I thumbed berries into my bucket; it sounded like a drum solo. After a while I quit picking the ones I'd have to bend over for. Later I narrowed it down to the ones in the strike zone. Then I passed up the bushes on uneven terrain and sought out the ones with a nice flat spot in front of them. Then I quit picking the large berries and concentrated on the huge ones.

By noon I was patronizing only the bushes that waved their little limbs in the air and said yowza, yowza, yowza. A short time later I was ignoring those in favor of the shrubs that offered free checking and a toaster. Towards mid-afternoon I limited myself to the berries that did a swan dive into my bucket when I passed by. An hour later I began ejecting them if they didn't execute either a tuck or a half-twist on the way in. I held up an explanatory card as I punted them out: 3.2, too much splash.

I began to hold out the largest ones so they would not make my pies lumpy. They'll be cut up for steaks and chops and put in the freezer. I ran out of containers for the rest and decanted them into the side pockets of my car.

I have room in my freezer for four pies, or one more pie than I have the serenity to make. I have enough berries for about twelve. There is no reason to keep picking, but I do. Somewhere in this glade I will find a bush with pie crusts on it.

Already rolled out.

Thanks Again!

Hey Cousin!

Great time over at your house the other night! Sorry about Little Earl. Kids! They're so curious at that age. And clumsy? I don't need to tell you! LOL!!!

Anyway I'm just writing to thank you for the Marionberry-Blueberry pie recipe. Best. Pie. Ever! I couldn't find any marionberries, but I did get plenty of blackberries from over there behind the sewage treatment plant--SO juicy. And I thought I'd go ahead and substitute huckleberries for the blueberries, because I picked a bunch a few weeks ago. Not the sweet blue ones, the red ones. Nobody ever picks those for some reason, that's why I was able to get so many. They'll put a pucker on you, that's for sure. I like them in my pancakes, they're like little tartness bombs going off. You put a mess of red huckleberries in your pancakes, and man, it makes you appreciate the pancake that much more! The parts in between the huckleberries. Anyhoo.

So I really don't know what you mean by "two dry pints berries." What's a dry pint, anyway? I mashed up the blackberries real good and sopped them up between a bunch of paper towels, so I hope that was good enough. Didn't bother with the huckleberries, they're already like little BBs.  Did you really mean to say "juice of two lemons?" That's a lot of lemons. I guess it makes sense if you've got sweet berries, but I got to thinking, I thought, Marly June? Maybe your berries aren't really sweet so much as they're a little ornery. So I put in Kraft caramels instead. And that yummy crust? So I didn't actually have as much butter on hand as you called for. I thought we had some Crisco, but we must have gone through that the night Earl came home from his convention. Uh oh! Did I type that out loud? Ha ha!

Anyhoo. So the crust called for two eggs, and mine were only large, which as you know is the smallest size they come in, so I thought, Marly June? You might just as well put in three, and since I didn't have as much butter as I needed I put in a fourth just for bulk. I must say the dough came out kind of soupy, not that I'm blaming you or anything, LOL! So I had to put in a little more flour until it stiffened up. Unfortunately I ran out of flour before I'd gotten it where I thought it should be, so I threw in some garden lime, and then that puppy just stood right up and barked.

I'm such a silly goose, though, you know me, I didn't even notice that the recipe was enough to make "two thick ten-inch pies," and my pans are all nine inches. And just between you and me, not that your pie wasn't the Best. Pie. Ever!, but I'm not all that big on thick pies since the volcanic cobbler incident. The kitchen never really was right after that one. We just left the oven door open for a few nights and let the mice take care of the worst of it. So then I had this terrific idea: why not make one really big thin pie? Since I had all the filling and crust made up. So I "did the math." I love that expression! What I mean is I kind of guesstimated with my hands what two thick ten-inch pies put together would look like, except thinner, and then I hunted around for a pan. That's when I got my big inspiration. Garbage can lid! I know, right?

I had to roll the dough on the floor, because it wouldn't fit on my cutting board, but it transferred like a dream. First time I've ever regretted getting that shag carpet, but we could all use more fiber, Earl especially. LOL! Slid in the berry filling, and the tapioca for thickener--oh, I didn't have quite enough tapioca, and I was a little worried about that, the last thing I want is for the juice to gang up and lurch out like before, so I just laid in a couple dryer sheets in the middle to give it some structure, and we were good to go. Well! I'll bet you can see what comes next. Sure enough, the garbage can lid was just a little bigger than my oven, but only by a couple inches, it was so close. I don't mind telling you I was miffed, but I'm not going to be outsmarted by a giant thin pie. I closed the oven door as much as it would go and then tented it around the edges with tinfoil. Wallah!

Well, the tinfoil didn't work all that well and the oven never really did get up to temperature. I checked it every hour for a while but it was taking its own sweet time baking up, and man but the kitchen got hot! Ha ha! We decided to just mix up a bucket of margaritas and wait it out on the patio. You know, we could argue the rest of our lives whose turn it was to check the pie, but the important thing is we did wake up because of how chilly it got, and also the sirens.

Anyhoo. Little Earl is thrilled that we're camping in the back yard now. The things he finds and drags into that tent! LOL! And I just want to thank you so much for the recipe. I'm sure that pie is going to wear real well and last us a good number of years, even more if we can get it re-soled. Dinner at our place next time? Just say the word!

((Hugs))

Marly June

Thanks to John D. for the recipe. Really. Best. Pie. Ever.