Friday, June 10, 2011

When life gives you 20 lbs of blueberries, make EVERYTHING!

In my last post I talked about my 3 day blueberry picking extravaganza, where I picked a total of 20 pounds (let me be fair... Loukas picked 3 of the 20 pounds) of mouth watering blueberries... That's ALLOT of berries!  And even though I do enjoy eating fresh blueberries by the handfuls, I also enjoy playing with recipes, so here are a few blueberry inspired things I whipped up this past week. :)


Fluffy Lemon Blueberry Cookies!
I used my friends awesome recipe for Fluffy Lemon Cookies,
but added a handful of blueberries to the batter. :)
They were SUPER awesome. You definitely should try out her recipe!





Mini Blueberry Donuts!
For this recipe, I adapted Lauren Ulm's donut recipe from her awesome book,
Vegan Yum Yum, for which I am a proud owner of.
If you don't have the book, you can find her recipe here.

I basically followed her recipe with the exception of halving it (so I could make sure it would actually work with the blueberries), adding about 1/4 cup of purred fresh blueberries to the batter (i pureed them in my magic bullet real fast like), added a bit more sugar and baking powder, omitted the nutmeg and cinnamon, and added more flour until the consistency was right. I just kinda went with it.

For the icing I used a little bit of pureed blueberries mixed with powdered sugar and a dash of vanilla extract until it was smooth and not to runny. It dried and hardened up nicely.

I was a little bit more nervous with this recipe, not knowing what pureed blueberries would do to the batter. But SCORE! it was a win win for all involved.





Blueberry Pancakes!
When I asked the question, "What should I do with 20 pounds of blueberries?",
one person said i should make 40 pounds of pancakes!!!
I heard you, and I'm working on it! :)

For the pancakes, I used Colleen Patrick-Goudreau's recipe from her book, The Joy of Vegan Baking. It's my "go to" pancake recipe. I just added a handful of blueberries to the batter and some on the top after they were cooked. It's so freakin easy and they taste awesome, you will wonder why eggs were ever used in pancakes in the first place.
This is a great recipe to pass along to Omnivore friends. :)




That concludes one week of cooking with blueberries. But I'm not done yet!
I still have visions of blueberry ice cream and pie dancing in my head.
It's time for me to get off of this computer and make a big ol blueberry smoothie... YUM!

Thanks for stopping by!

~amber :)


Monday, June 6, 2011

Blueberry Picking

I LOVE the simple things in life. One of my favorite things on this simple list is that I live in a small country town, Plant City to be exact, where at any given time of the year I can go down the street and pick something fresh to eat. My favorite things to pick are strawberries and blueberries. And lucky for me, these seasons are back to back in Plant City.

This year I went blueberry crazy, visiting the fields 3 different times, and picking a total of 20 pounds of yummy fresh blueberries.












What would you make if you had 20 pounds of fresh blueberries?