back berries

ben's LOVES blackberries. i'm not sure if it's the berries themselves or if it's more the fact that you can pick them from bushes in so many places. this past weekend while we were on the sunshine coast, the short road to the beach was lined with blackberry bushes. we couldn't walk to the beach without ben scarfing berries as fast as he could pick them. his little mantra was "geen? no. wed? no." (aka. don't pick the green or red ones).

personally, i like blackberries well enough but when i pass a blackberry bush, it's rare that i stop to pick some to eat. blackberries seem so dirty. they have those little brown bits on them and the white core that you see in the middle once you've picked one kind of looks like a bug. and chances that you're going to have bugs ON them are high. i cringed at ben's picking/eating, thinking of all the weird bugs he could possibly be eating because he doesn't analyse each berry for a couple minutes like i do. ha.

the other night, tim and i went for a walk with ben on his little glider bike. we walked to a path that goes along a ravine and we discovered tons of blackberry bushes. ben started chowing down and tim was like, "we should get a pail and pick a bunch of these." last night we went for the same walk and this time took a bowl with us to put our berries in. there aren't too many low berries on these bushes so ben had to mostly rely on us to hand him berries. we sstarted by letting him hold the bowl. then we realized that he could eat much faster than we could pick - we took the bowl back. i didn't eat too many (due to the unwashed nature of the berries...) and despite the berry monster being with us, we managed to bring home at least a couple cups of blackberries.

after ben went to bed, i filled the bowl up with water to wash them and then pulled them out a handful at a time, rinsed, and put on a cookie sheet so that i could freeze them. as i was imagining the recipes i could make and thinking that we should go back and pick more, i pulled out a handful that had a huge worm on it! AUGH! i screamed, threw the handful back in, and had multiple shivering fits. i said to tim, "how did this worm get in here? were you looking carefully at the berries you were picking?" he responds, "yeah. it was probably inside a berry." INSIDE? like my kid probably ATE a bunch of worms and now he has worms? (is that how that works? ;) i finished washing the berries and stuck them in the freezer.

i think my blackberry picking day(s) are over.