Blackberry Apple Chutney Recipe

Invasive so-called Himalayan blackberries clamber over much of western Washington's terrain. Dubbed "Himalayan" by Luther Burbank as a marketing move even though they probably originated in Armenia, these blackberries aren't the thornless variety he had hoped to breed by a long shot. Not even close; when I pick them along the roads near my house I wear long sleeves, some hiking pants with a smooth finish, and a glove on one hand to push the vines back.

Like my gleaned apples, they're free for the taking so I end up thinking up things to do with them. 

• Fruit leather: I have a batch waiting in the freezer for me to decide whether I'm turning them into fruit leather along with plums I got from a Buy Nothing offer.
• Flavored vinegar: I soaked a big batch in white wine vinegar to make this for gift-giving. I used a sugar-free blackberry vinegar recipe, although other recipes involving sugar would be fine if you'd like to start with a sweeter base. I didn't take the longer-term route of extracting and then fermenting blackberry juice to turn it into vinegar. I hung onto the soaked blackberries and used a bunch of them in the chutney, which provided vinegary quality. Now pink, with much of their color along with flavor transferred into the vinegar, a few of them wait in the freezer for a future something or other.
• Blackberry chutney: If you've read my other recipe roundups about tomatoes, apples, pears, zucchini, and green tomatoes, you know I love me some chutney! So of course I had to riff on a few recipes I found. This turned out not to be as tangy as most of my other chutneys, more along the lines of a complex jam than anything. Well worth putting on a cracker with some cheese though

Blackberry Chutney Recipes

Where I started for inspiration, considering proportions of ingredients, whether or not it included apples (most did and that seemed like a good medium to carry the blackberry flavor), and the spices used:

• BBC Apple, Blackberry and Cinnamon Chutney
• Larder Love's Easy Blackberry (Bramble) Chutney
• Wellington Bakehouse Blackberry Relish: No apples
• Feast Glorious Feast Blackberry Chutney
• Foraged Farmacy Spiced Blackberry Chutney

I had a lot of blackberries even accounting for the ones waiting for fruit leather so this recipe uses large quantities. All the reference recipes use about a third of the quantities here. I scaled up and checked the spicing levels along the way.

Blackberry Apple Chutney

• Blackberries: 1,300 grams (mine were soaked in vinegar; refer to note with the vinegar amount)
• Apples: ~415 grams, approximately 3-4 apples depending on size, diced small
• Onion (red or yellow): 400 grams, diced small
• Brown sugar (white okay; brown sugar gives a caramel element): 450 grams
• Apple cider or any other vinegar with 5% acidity: At a guesstimate, 350 grams; taste and adjust after it's all cooked together. I used blackberries soaked in vinegar so the vinegar amount is based on proportions from the source recipes
• Garlic: 3 cloves, diced or crushed
• Ground cumin: 1/2 t.
• Crushed red pepper: 1/2 t.
• Fine salt: 1 t.
• Cinnamon: 1 t.
• Cloves: 1/4 t.
• Optional: Zest of 1-2 oranges

Yield: 4 half-pints and 8 quarter-pints

Prepare jars for canning following best practices such as those on the National Center for Home Food Preservation or Food in Jars.

Dice the onions and start them cooking at a gentle heat. After five minutes add the apples, blackberries, and spices and cook until the fruit is soft. Depending on the apples this will run around 15-20 minutes. Add the vinegar and sugar. Stir the sugar in and allow it to dissolve. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat and cook for about 20 minutes, stirring often. At about 10 minutes taste and adjust sweet/sour balance by adding a bit more vinegar or sugar to your taste. Cook until you can drag a wooden spoon through the base of the chutney and leave a clear trail in the pan before the thickening liquid fills the line back in. 

Ladle into sterilized jars and process in a hot water bath for 15 minutes. For best flavors, wait at least two weeks for the chutney to mature before using.

A Dusty Collection: Poems about Dust

I'm not the world's most meticulous housekeeper. If I look at a dusty surface and feel guilt for not dusting more often, I'm missing the chance to think of it, or of myself, as a collection of protozoa, ocean salt, stardust. Made up of so many tiniest fragments of ourselves and our lives, dust is unavoidable, metaphorical, even astronomical in these poems. Put down that duster and read a while.

"The Dust Speaks" by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

I am the memory
of everywhere you’ve been
and I am the memory
of what you do
and I come from places
you’ll never go.

"Dusting" by Marilyn Nelson

Thank you for these tiny
particles of ocean salt,
pearl-necklace viruses,
winged protozoans:
for the infinite,
intricate shapes
of submicroscopic
living things

“The Joy of Sweeping” by Maya Stein

the settling of dust
or its disturbance,
the silence
or the song.

“View with a Grain of Sand” by Wislawa Szymborska

We call it a grain of sand,
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect, or apt.

"Belonging" by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

we are the dust, the dust that hopes,
a rising of dust, a pitch of dust
the dust that dances in the light   

"Porcelain Musician in a Child's Bedroom" by Brenda Hillman

dust, the noun & verb that is
   a thing & isn’t, drifted, its dreamy
abstract qualities sent
         off with a cloth till nothing
    said you had to or you didn’t,—

"Memo to Self Re: Meditation" by Ron Stone

Slowly learn the lesson about who you are:
dust of the earth, dust of a star.
The stuff that is you has always been here
fulfilling its purpose in losing its Self.

Until you.

"In Any Event" by Dorianne Laux

Nothing is gone forever.
If we came from dust
and will return to dust
then we can find our way
into anything.

"Stardust" by Kay Ryan

something like
sugar grains on
something like
metal, but with
none of the chill.
It’s hard to explain.

"Saltwater" by Finn Butler

Everyone who terrifies you is 65% water.
And everyone you love is made of stardust,

A Year of Poems: November

I have a particular reason for appreciating November: It's my birthday month. According to my mother I was supposed to be an October baby but I hung in there an extra month. In a fun twist of fate that meant I ended up being born on Election Day, and then when I was elected for the first time to the Idaho state legislature it was on my birthday. Quite a big present from the voters of Kootenai County, Idaho!

November has come to mean more to me beyond my birthday and Election Day, in particular becoming the birthday month for my first baby, Eldest Daughter. 

As the poems below describe, for all of us in the Northern Hemisphere it's the month when days really feel shorter, sun really rises later, autumn really does turn around and hand us into the cold arms of the waiting winter.

"Monday" by Cindy Gregg

On this first day of November
it is cold as a cave,
the sky the color
of neutral third parties.

"Why You Should Go Outside at 4:40 am in November" by Rosemary Royston

Because it is more silent than you can imagine
and above you the moon is a nickel
glinting from the unseen sun,
surrounded by broken crystals.

"Enough" by Jeffrey Harrison

It’s a gift, this cloudless November morning

warm enough for you to walk without a jacket

along your favorite path.

"Praise Song" by Barbara Crooker

Praise the light of late November,

the thin sunlight that goes deep in the bones.

Praise the crows chattering in the oak trees;

though they are clothed in night, they do not

despair. Praise what little there's left:

"November for Beginners" by Rita Dove
(Bonus for me: The site where I found this posted it on my birthday)

Snow would be the easy

way out—that softening
sky like a sigh of relief
at finally being allowed
to yield. No dice.

"The Crazy Woman" by Gwendolyn Brooks

I shall not sing a May song.
A May song should be gay.
I'll wait until November
And sing a song of gray.

"Like Coins, November" by Elizabeth Klise Von Zerneck

We drove past late fall fields as flat and cold
as sheets of tin and, in the distance, trees

were tossed like coins against the sky. Stunned gold
and bronze, oaks, maples stood in twos and threes:

some copper bright, a few dull brown and, now
and then, the shock of one so steeled with frost

it glittered like a dime. 

"November" by Maggie Dietz

Field mice hit the barns, big squirrels gorge

On busted chestnuts. A sky like hardened plaster
Hovers. The pasty river, its next of kin,
Coughs up reed grass fat as feather dusters.

"November" by Ben Howard

These last warm days are telling a funny story
whose punchline never comes. You could put your hand
on the iron railing of your neighbor's steps
and feel, in its frigid core, the steadiness
of winter.

"November" by Lucien Stark

 First frost, the blue spruce
against my window's shagged, 
and the sky is sombering. I

draw close to the fire, inward
with all that breathes.

"November" by Jay du Von

And the earth was heavy, the roads
soft with yellow mud and lined with coming
and going. Always the days were shorter
and now the evening came far on the road
to meet us.

A Year of Poems

• A Year of Poems: January
• A Year of Poems: February
• A Year of Poems: March 
• A Year of Poems: April
• A Year of Poems: May
• A Year of Poems: June
• A Year of Poems: July
• A Year of Poems: August
• A Year of Poems: September
• A Year of Poems: October