Homesteading During the Quarantine

 My little granddaughter has gotten used to having blueberry sauce on pancakes and waffles when she comes to Nana's house with whipped cream on top.  It's a luscious breakfast and one of our favorites for sure.  When I took her home last week she told her daddy that she wouldn't eat the pancakes without blueberry sauce.  That remark got me in high gear.

I think I still have about 6 gallons of frozen blueberries in the freezer, so I decided to can some blueberry sauce for my gal.  The recipe usually makes just 1 pint so I decided to quadruple it.  When I first began to stir it over the heat I realized that something was wrong.  I had measured out 8 times the amount of orange juice, so I quickly had to add enough of the other ingredients to multiply the recipe by 8.  This is a very aggravating problem, as I'm a math teacher.  I was berating myself and wondering how I could make such a terrible error.  However, the berries cooked up well, the sauce was canned and now my sweet gal can have pancakes for supper with blueberry sauce - even if Nana isn't there!

Our favorite blueberry sauce takes 2 cups of blueberries (either frozen or fresh), 1/2 cup of orange juice, 2.5 Tablespoons of sugar, a Tablespoon of cornstarch and 1/8 teaspoon of cinnamon.  Bring to a boil and cook until the sauce is thickened.  It just takes a few minutes for the sauce to turn from cloudy to berry colored.  I've never canned it before, but I'm going to ask Maggie the next time I see her she liked it.


Since I had some blackberry juice that was canned, I decided to also make some blackberry syrup to pour over the waffles or pancakes and got that added into the mix that morning.  I've never tried blackberry syrup over pancakes before, but the recipe was pretty tasty.

Duke Blueberries 5.10.20

Here is a picture of today's view of blueberries.  The berries are growing and gaining a tint of lavender.  It's neat to see how they change as time goes on.  I think this variety is duke - the earliest variety that we grow.

Black Mac

We planted Black Mac, a variety of black raspberries, last year and should be picking these this year.  They have the largest thorns of any plant on our property.  It's a must to wear gloves when trying to prune or trellis them.  We shall see if we end up keeping them.  It's not so fun to press your fingers into thick thorns, but I do love the beautiful little flowers on the plant.

I'll save my pictures of sourdough bread until I have a loaf that looks good.  Sourdough is a nice little experiment but it may take a different cook to get the best results!

Until next time!