You just gave me a new idea for how I want to die when my time comes- I want to be overwhelmed by blueberries! Yum- what a way to go.

i do not understand the concept of being overwhelmed by blueberries; I’ve been buying 2 pints a week for a while now, in addition to a lot of other fruit. but mostly, that’s because it’s too hot to cook, so I’ve been eating salads (both fruit and veggie varieties), dairy products with fruit (kefir, yogurt, cottage cheese etc), and just plain fruits and veggies for the last month or so

If you wanna be able to grill indoors, the Le Creuset Bistro round grill pan is outstanding!

http://www.williams-sonoma.com/products/3562782/?catalogId=42&bnrid=3180501&cm_ven=Shopping&cm_cat=Froogle&cm_pla=Cookware&cm_ite=3562782

I fucken love mine almost as much as my Le Creuset dutch oven!

If you want to put away a few of the blueberries for winter when you can’t get them, the best way is to spread them on a cookie sheet and stick it in the freezer. Then once all the berries are frozen pour them into a bag. It keeps your berries from making a horrible looking berry lump that you have to chisel pieces off of.

Blueberries - yum.
Any sort of cake does okay with blueberries tossed in.  I like fruit salsa, but usually go with mango.  blueberry with some extra lime to punch up the acid might work.
All jadehawk’s ideas seconded, as well.

Random note related to the Bill O’Really thread: the closest thing available to silphium today is asafoetida. If you were to use asafoetida to make Roman food, though, you’d definitely want to back off of the amount Apicius might ask for; the Romans said it was similar but didn’t like it much. Also, make sure to put it in a ziploc if you’re going to leave a jar on your spice shelf—the smell makes star anise look subtle.

JThompson beat me to it: my NW relatives do the separate freeze trick with raspberries and marionberries and enjoy them year-round.

Blueberries are ferociously expensive in Australia at any time of year—up to $8 for 250 grams (half a pound) so consider me jealous. Globalisation has done a lot of things but it really hasn’t made food all the same. Mind you, in summer in Sydney we can buy 24 mangoes for $10 so maybe you’d be envious of that.

Depends, I guess, on how much you like mangoes. I’d suggest importing blueberry bushes, but IIRC Australia has some rather strict regulations regarding keeping out invasive species.

I have several blueberry bushes in my yard, which made lots of blueberries, but I didn’t get a one.  The birds have an uncanny way of getting them just before they’re ripe.  I could use bird netting, but imagined them getting all tangled up in it.

gretchen, you can hang shiny things like junk CDs and the like on your bush, the mirrored flashes of light will keep them from coming near your bushes without hurting or disabling the birds at the same time.

Thanks for the tip, Dark Avenger.  I will try that next year.  How about repelling rabbits and groundhogs. And does anybody have more ideas for using basil besides pesto?  Like maybe a vegetable dip?

And does anybody have more ideas for using basil besides pesto?

I chop it finely and cook it into fresh tomato sauces, and also put it on just about any cheese or meat sandwich. Big leaves of basil with tomato slices and white bean hummus, on a baguette? Nom. Also, soups.

Basil Ideas:

There’s an awesome Gordon Ramsay recipe that involves tossing linguine with:

a little olive oil
grated parmesan
Some crushed pine nuts
crumbled feta
grated zest of a lemon
A bunch of chopped basil

Okay, so it’s in the Pesto universe, but the lemon and feta and basil together are heaven.

Also, if you have a lot of blueberries, try cooking them down with a little sugar, a squirt of lemon juice, a dash of vanilla extract, and a pinch of salt.  Great for mixing with Greek yogurt or over ice cream, also great as the base for a cobbler.

I love blueberry season. And basil season.  They are both the same season.

Last night I made grilled shrimp served with polenta. The polenta is vegetarian.

http://physioprof.wordpress.com/2011/07/24/grilled-marinated-shrimp-with-otto-file-polenta/

And does anybody have more ideas for using basil besides pesto?

My mother, who loves basil like some people love chocolate uses it as a vegetable. It’s quite a shock to be eating what you think is a nice, summery spinach salad and get a forkfull of all basil. But cut up so it doesn’t blend in quite as much, it is nice in salads. Or on a BLT. Or with just tomatoes and mayonnaise on toast.

Gretchen: Deer netting has worked pretty well for me to stop rabbits. You can get a 100’x7’ roll of it for around $22-$30+shipping on the internet. I just doubled it up to make a 3.5’ barrier. It works well for birds too, since I haven’t found a single bird tangled in it yet when I used it as bird netting. The downside is that snakes will tangle in it. I have to go untangle snakes pretty often, but it decreases the likelihood of a snake coming as a surprise inside the fence. It also tends to tear if struck, so if you’re in an area that has regular high winds that throw branches around, you’d probably be better off using chicken wire.

There are also capsaicin rabbit repellants and castor oil gopher repellants that I’ve heard work well, if you don’t want to use a physical barrier.

Basil is wonderful in pretty much any soup, but makes roasted vegetable soups the best in the world.

@Emma in Sydney
I grow blueberries in my garden in Australia (there are several varieties that don’t require snow or very cold winters to fruit). But I’m in Melbourne. I think Sydney might be too warm. I usually get several punnet fulls from my 2 bushes. They are much yummier when picked fresh I find.

@gretchen
You might like an Italian salad layering sliced tomato, sliced fresh mozzarella, basil leaves and a sprinkling of salt and good slug of quality olive oil. If you can get hold of the buffalo milk mozzarella all the better.

Use your basil in summer rolls! (the Vietnamese ones wrapped in rice-paper) You don’t even have to cut it—just pick and roll up with rice noodles, any other crunchy raw veggies or herbs you want, and some kind of highly seasoned protein. Nom. Minimal cooking too. Also delicious if you’ve got cilantro overrunning your garden, as my parents’ house has had for a few years now. Or Thai style chili and basil stir-fries.

And the best way to store asafoetida is, in my experience, to put the little plastic jar from the store into a bigger glass jar and put *that* in your pantry. At least, that’s what I’ve ended up doing, and it doesn’t smell like an Indian grocery store in there yet so I guess it works.

emma in Sydney, there are some warm weather varieties of blueberries that are available in CA, the local home improvement store(I don’t know what they are called in Australia) here sells a couple of varieties, and we have the typical “Mediterranean Climate” of the San Joaquin Valley complete with temps in the high 30s Celsius , a dry climate, and only rain, no snow or ice in the winter time, so if the varieties grown in Melbourne are those used in CA, they should grow where you are as well. :

Blueberries in Tulare County

“These are low-chill varieties, they’re adapted to this area,” he said. “For us, it’s been a very productive and very successful crop.”

Most of the blueberries produced from this field stay in California, though Blizzard said some do go to the East Coast. He said the company started growing blueberries with encouragement from Manuel Jimenez, a Tulare County farm adviser for the University of California Cooperative Extension.

“In terms of growing, if you have the right conditions, boy do blueberries grow in Tulare County,” Jimenez said. He arranged for several Central Valley growers who are interested in the crop to take a tour of the Lagomarsino blueberry farm in May.

Since the Southern Highbush varieties were introduced to Tulare County, Jimenez said the area now produces at least 35 percent of California’s blueberry crop.

Link

Greg says…
Hi Steve,

Blueberries will be fine in Sydney. You will do best with either southern highbush or rabbiteye types (southern highbush are self pollinating whereas rabbiteyes you will need more than one variety). Both require less chill hours than the northern highbush types (southern highbush types require less). I am growing misty, backyard blue, sharpblue, legacy, gulfcoast, biloxi (southern highbush types), powderblue, tifblue, delite, premier (rabbiteyes). So far of the ones that have fruited I found the misty gave the best flavour, followed by the tifblue and backyard blue. Biloxi was a touch sour/tart. The other varieties I have are flowering for the first time this year so not sure of these.

http://www.daleysfruit.com.au/forum/blueberries18/

I made some scones at mid-summer once, and threw some blueberries in that I didn’t want to throw out.  An Aussie expat friend of mine swooned. Then he went and bought a quart of them and wiped them out in a sitting.  Now I understand.

Mangos/blueberries - this last week I’ve bought 8 as they were on sale for $0.69 each.  Both the yellow flatish variety and the red and green ones. 
I froze some of them and blended with other frozen fruit (banana, watermelon, left over star fruit and dragonfruit slices from earlier in the week, a small handful of tiny low bush blueberries from the yard) and skim milk for smoothies.  Smoothies are great for odds and ends of fruit.
Have also blended the mangos, blueberries and watermelon (though not all together) with bottled margaritas and with rum.  Frozen dice of watermelon acted as a replacement for ice in a light blush wine I wanted to cool instantly without watering down (as ice cubes would have).  It had gon from room temps to warm on the way home.
Basil - octopod42 beat me to Vietnamese rolls and stir fry.  Also use as any green in salads or mixed in to cook with other greens.  It’s good sauteed with spinach, chard, bok choi, water spinach, etc.  I prefer to use Thai basil (aka Taiwan basil around New England) for that though.
In the winter, I go through a huge amount of dried basil adding it to soups and stews - as much as 1/2 cup in a 3 quart pot, depending on what else is going in.

Back many moons ago, my grandfather used to get a whole case! of mangoes from Chinatown in San Francisco, this was more than 30 years ago, and a case would be about 12$.

helen w. h., you should try baby bok choy with oyster sauce sometime, it’s ez Chinese restaurant food IMHO.

Stupid question here.  When you press tofu, do you cut it into slices in advance, or press the whole brick?  And if you do cut it, how big are the pieces?  Like 4 big slabs, or like 24 little planks?  I’ve tried a few different ways but have never been sure which was supposed to be _the_ way.

DAGCM - oyster sauce has too much salt for us.  I saute the baby bok choi with sweet onions; then add a little lemon, lime or vinegar, usually.
FlipYrWhig - I don’t know that there is a “the_way”.  I have both pressed as a whole block, slabs and as thinnish slices.  I use tofu in slices, sticks, cubes or crumbled into irregular chucks of marblish size.

@ helen w. h. : Thanks!  The other night I cut up a brick into so many little pieces that they covered an entire baking sheet, so I took that baking sheet’s sister and stuck it on top for pressing.  With all that surface area, it dawned on me that I may have been overdoing it.

helen w. h.:

My wife cooks using only 75% of the recommended amount of oyster sauce when she cooks, because she’s very sensitive to salt in her diet.

Lee Kum Kee Panda brand Oyster Sauce says to use 4 tbsp per pound of meat and veggies, so use 3 tbsp instead and I don’t think you’ll find it too salty.

What brand of soy sauce do you use?

three pints of blueberries. Swoon. I would have to mortgage my apartment to afford that (and my kids would probably eat a pint each).
Sorry for the unhelpful comment, I’m just so envious.

Blueberries are great with corn kernels on pizza. Seriously. Brush the partially cooked crust with olive oil (use pita or a tortilla if you don’t want to mess with pizza dough) and add a thin layer of cheese, top with blueberries, kernels of fresh or roasted corn sliced off the cob, black pepper, and thinly sliced onion.

You can also make corn and blueberry ice cream. There are a bunch of recipes online for corn ice cream; just add crushed blueberries. Or whole, but I liked the swirl effect of the blueberry juice.

You can also roast the blueberries with olive oil, salt and pepper, cook til they pop, and serve on top of grilled polenta.

Do you cats like them? I used to have cats who loved blueberries. My dogs adore them, especially frozen.

You cats = your cats, duh.

Also, for basil, look for a lemon-basil sorbet recipe, or crush a huge pile of it, steep in boiling water for half an hour, strain, and add to lemonade, about 1 oz per cup. Great over ice with vodka and seltzer!

Also, a lemon-basil tart: a shortbread crust, add lemon zest and chopped basil to the crust, then top it with a lemon custard or lemon curd with basil added. Garnish with the tops of the plants if they have flowered. Happy to find and post a recipe if google doesn’t help.

Also, google some Vietnamese or Thai recipes; many of them will call for whole bunches of basil, and are delicious summer fare.

This came into my e-mail today from Bread of the Week website:

Recipe of the Week: Lemon and Blueberry Loaf Recipe

This lemon and blueberry loaf recipe is a wonderful quick bread to make during blueberry season.

This recipes makes two loaves when baked in two 7” by 4” by 3” pans.

Ingredients

1 cup of sugar
1/2 cup of soft butter
2 eggs
rind of one lemon, grated
1/4 teaspoon of salt
1 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder
1 1/2 cups of flour
1/2 teaspoon of vanilla
1/2 cup of milk
1 1/2 cups of blueberries, fresh, washed and picked over to remove stems
additional 2 teaspoons of flour
juice from one lemon
additional 1/4 cup of sugar

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 °F.

Prepare your loaf pans by spraying lightly with a cooking spray.

In your first bowl, add the butter and sugar and cream these two together. Next, add the eggs and lemon rind and beat this in well.

In a separate small bowl, mix together the milk and vanilla.

In a third bowl, combine the flour, salt and baking powder.

In yet another bowl, dust the blueberries with the additional 2 teaspoons of flour.

Add the dry ingredients and the milk mixture to the creamed batter. Mix this in lightly, alternating. Do not over mix.

Fold in the floured blueberries.

Pour this into your loaf pans and bake for approximately 35 minutes. Test by inserting a toothpick or cake tester in the middle. The lemon and blueberry loaf is done when the tester comes out dry. Remove from oven.

Mix together the lemon juice and the additional 1/4 cup of sugar. Drizzle this mixture over top the warm loaf then enjoy!

http://www.best-bread-recipes.com/index.html

nora - mandrin oranges are also good on pizza.
DAGCM - We cook with literally no added salt.  It isn’t for taste, it’s completely removing any non-necessary source.  I’ve tried some low-salt soy and oyster sauces, but even they are usually too much.  With summer heat, the salt is a less critical concern though.  Thanks for the recommendation; I’ll see if the Uhn Hen has some.  I think I may have seen LKK items there.

helen w. h., I understand completely.  My wife’s former boss had to turn down some lovely Chinese beef jerky I made once because he’s on a low-salt diet, so I know that for some people soy sauce can be a real problem.