Tethering Grace & Togetherness
And now, for the thing I ABHOR:
When I was five years old, my family was invited to pick blueberries at a private farm belonging to a friend of my dad. Apparently, it was a banner year for their blueberries and so we were told to pick as many as we could eat or freeze. They provided us with 10 and 15 gallon buckets and we went to picking. As you can imagine, this was a huge treat as we were a family of 7 and fresh blueberries just were not in the weekly budget. We picked, and picked and picked until we were blue in the face, and fingers I might add. Then the entire family entourage schlepped home to properly deal with this great unexpected blessing. Many of the berries went into the freezer— so many in fact that we had blueberry cobbler, blueberry pie, blueberry pancakes and blueberry muffins for several years. I am not exaggerating. We lived on blueberries. Oh, and deer meat. So in truth, we lived on blueberries and bambi burgers. But that’s a blog post for another day.
I never got around to posting about our little vacation before I went back to work… Lance calls it “The Magical Mystery Tour” and was it ever! We had a great time with family and friends before our “new normal” began!
There is a small jar of strawberry jam in my refrigerator. This glistening red goodness is perfect and homemade, only it was not made in my home, but in the cozy kitchen of a kindred spirit. We refer to it lovingly as “Sexton- Jam.” Sexton is their last name, you see. We only use it when we have a worthy baked good to top it with. We would not dare put it on something as trivial as PB & J. Bearing in mind that the summer is coming to a close and the strawberry crop has come and gone, this is the last bit of this special jam we will savor this year. And so, we have carefully and conservatively chosen when and on what we would enjoy this lovely jam. Yesterday, I found the jam’s true complement: warm, fresh from the oven Brioche. Brioche is one of those concoctions which I had always wondered about, but never tried to make or even tasted. Brioche. It’s just fun to say, no? Once, I even purchased a pink silicone brioche mold from the Williams-Sonoma semi-annual sale. Not because I love brioche, but because I love pink. The fact that it was a brioche mold was secondary. To date, I have absolutely no idea where this pink pan is. Good thing it was $3.99.
