When I was a little girl living in Maryland, my best friend had a mulberry tree in the backyard. And, between drooling over watching David Bowie prance around in Labryinth as Jareth the Goblin King and reading the incredibly-informative Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, we’d pick mulberries. We’d pluck them until our hands and our mouths were stained purple with berry juice. Our bellies made good baskets.
This past weekend in Ojai, I spotted some mulberries at their farmer’s market. I didn’t buy them because I still need to come up with a suitable recipe (ice cream, perhaps?) for them, but I will next time I see them. But recently I did make a tart cobbler from a heaping amount of blackberries from this recipe on Confessions of a Foodie Bride:
Filling Ingredients:
- 6 cups blackberries
- 1/3 cup sugar
- 1 Tbsp flour
- 2 tsp lemon zest
- Pinch of salt
For the rest…please go to their site.
I was drawn to the recipe because it only added 1/3 cup of sugar to the entire filling, and that allowed the blackberries to retain their tartness. The topping added another 1/3 cup of sugar, but because it was paired with cinnamon, flour, baking powder, and other common dough ingredients, the topping didn’t sing with sweetness either.
Nor did it last very long.
…Unlike my favorite films from the 1980s. So, on a hike this weekend, I got into a discussion with a friend about how the ’80s were terrible for design but great for entertainment. Video games, music, cartoons, movies all rocked in the 80s. I’m tempted to throw an ’80s-themed-movie marathon complete with desserts inspired by those films, but until then, here are my top ten favorite movies from the ’80s:
1. Ghostbusters
3. Clue
4. Beetlejuice
6. Labryinth
10. Willow
Runners Up: Aliens, Scrooged, The Princess Bride, Little Shop of Horrors, Uncle Buck.
What were your favorites?