Berrypicking!

Last weekend, I was home visiting my family in Harrisburg for Labor Day, and my mother had picked up some delightful blackberries from her local farmer’s market.  This reminded me that I never posted about my own berrypicking trip – and the several recipes that resulted.  Since blackberry season is rapidly diminishing, but there are still some floating around out there, I thought I’d dedicate this week as Blackberry Week, and get all my berry-related posts resulting from the berry picking trip out all at once.  Kind of like one last tribute to summer (weather appropriate, seeing as how it snuck back up to 86 degrees today), before all the berries disappear off the shelves for another 10 months!

 
Every year, our lab piles up in a car or two and drives out to a pick-your-own farm in Maryland where we pick the fruit of the season.  In the past, I was never able to go, because I always had to babysit the old, crappy, protein-eating AKTAprime.  This year, however, courtesy of a far more cooperative AKTAexplorer, I am able to leave my purifications unattended, and was able to participate for the first time.  And I had a blast!  The general routine is eat one, pick two, eat one pick two, until you are so stuffed full of berries that you can barely move…. and then you roll yourself down the orchard to the peach trees and eat/pick peaches.  And the prices are unbelievable – I came home with 5.5 pounds of blackberries, 8 humongous peaches, 4 tomatoes the size of my head, and a dozen hand-cut zinnias for under $20.  Yes, please!

If you are interested in more pictures from the berrypicking adventure, you can check them out here <cue segue into new blog>.  I always have good intentions for posting pictures, and never get around to it.  I always feel like I need to explain things on here because personally, I don’t dig personal blogs that post without pictures or that whole ‘Wordless Wednesday’ thing.  There are photography blogs I love for the photography… and then blogs I enjoy because I like the person writing.  I will confess to being disappointed when I click over to one of my favorite blogs and just find a picture or two.  So now, some of my favorite photographs have a home – drop on by and visit some of my favorite events (my honeymoon, the Inauguration – all the things I meant to write about and never actually did).

Thinking about how I like order in my life and separate divisions in my Google Reader also made me wonder what everyone else prefers.  I know this started with a large group of fellow graduate students and scientists – would you prefer if I had the recipes on a separate blog so you didn’t have to sift through them?  Likewise, I know many food bloggers now drop in on a regular basis; are you entirely disinterested in my battles with imidazole and would rather have somewhere to go to see only the chemistry that goes on in my kitchen?  Would I be better off turning this into two separate blogs, or do you like dropping by for the general mishmash variety show?  Comments and (constructive) criticism welcome… and stay turned tomorrow for the berry extravaganza!