Don't buy them, pick them
Photograph: Corbis
One of the sole survivors of this terrible summer seems to be the hardy blackberry. Last weekend we filled a huge black bin bag with perfectly ripe berries from a patch of brambles out near Heathrow, and the bushes on the common near our house are also about to burst into purple and squidgy life.
The blackberry season seems to get earlier and earlier every year. Not so long ago it heralded the first signs of a crisp autumn - and, for me at least, time to get back in the school uniform. While this summer has undeniably been autumnal enough, it seems plain wrong to set out, boxes in hand, to pick brambles in July. Blackberries seem almost designed by nature to go in crumbles, dissolving into a sweet pulp amid the apples, and surely even the British couldn't have invented the crumble in July?
There's such a profusion of them already that I actually found myself telling a bemused couple in the supermarket not to buy them (at £2.99 a punnet!) but to nip down the road and get them for free.
Having made bramble jelly from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's recipe (next time I make it, I may invest in a proper jelly bag rather than an old pillowcase, some string and an upside-down kitchen chair) I'm now looking for some more unusual recipes to use the next crop I get my juice-stained hands on. Has anyone ever tried making a blackberry cordial? This recipe is very appealing, with the mixture of spices and fruit. And I'd like to try a blackberry version of Creme de Cassis, if it wouldn't turn out too sweet? I eagerly await your blackberry concoctions ...
