For a delicious ending to your summer cookout, try an easy blackberry crisp.

Blackberry Crisp

By Sue Lau

One of the greatest pleasures for me when I was a kid was to go out picking blackberries with my  Mom. In the early part of summer before it got too terribly hot (as it did in late July and  August), we could be found gathering these  up  in  our favorite places. In my later years before I married and moved to Mississippi, one of my favorites was along an old train track with the rails long since removed. Along the sides of its elevation, berries would be plentiful. We would pick until we grew tired of it.

Berries are coming in already in some parts, but  of course, you can always buy them at the store as well. One of my favorite recipes for berries is a crust topped cobbler with ice cream.  But I don’t know what it is about summertime that makes me get rushed and in a hurry, feeling  like I just don’t have time to make a crust and roll it out. Maybe it’s all  that blue sky with its siren song.

But a crisp is the perfect response to it, since you can get it made in a hurry. It’s not really much more casual  that a cobbler or pie. In fact, it’s quite like a crumb topped pie minus the bottom crust. And a cobbler (lost times) won’t have a bottom crust anyway. Even though  the double crusted cobblers I recall seem to have more in  common with a slab pie.

But I’ll  take the berries any way I can get them, topped with a  little ice cream.

And this makes the perfect ending for any kind of barbecue or picnic, except,  of course, having the ice cream on a picnic is  a bit of a challenge. But nothing would suit me  better than to sit out under the trees in the fading light of a summer day, dessert in hand, lightning bugs beginning to sparkle and the occasional  cicada screaming its delight over the summer weather. June bugs will fly drunken flight  paths  in the heat, and mosquitos will peek from hidden places wondering if it  is safe to torment the living. But they should beware. I have my citronella plant hanging nearby.

This weekend is the unofficial-official start of summertime fun. Have fun with it,  cross your t’s  and dot your I’s, bake a crisp and whatever you do, don’t forget the ice cream.

 

Join me tomorrow as I wind down #BBQWeek  with my recipe for Jamaican Jerk  Chicken. There is a giveaway and there is still time to enter. Just pop in to any of my recipes with #BBQWeek in the title from earlier this week, and scroll down the page to get to the link  to enter. I’ll be taking the weekend off from posting, but will be back on Monday with some new summertime fun: I’ll be joining with the #MuffinMonday  blogging group and  sharing my recipe for Strawberry Cantaloupe Muffins. I bet you never dreamed you could make muffins out of that. But you can. Sometimes the wackiest recipes are the tastiest. I think I ate my weight in those. At least the weight I would actually admit to being. Ha!  Yeah. I weigh about a pound. Gosh, that makes me feel like maybe I should go eat another before they  are gone. C’ya tomorrow-

~Sue