Raspberries - Sunday of the Month

Raspberries, that mid summer fruit that epitomizes vacation time - soft, sweet and fleeting - are a pleasure at which you really have to work. Raspberries are so ethereal that they were seldom sold in grocery stores until modern modifications created a tougher berry. Although they are much larger and do survive packaging, shipping and reselling, store bought raspberries are pale reproductions of the original.

Traditional raspberries ripen in a thicket; every inch of bush covered in thorns to catch at your clothing and scratch your skin. Yet each berry is so fragile that they stain your fingers as you pick and your lips and tongue as you eat. Your fingers must work gently to pick the berries from their stems, and you have to spread them in wide containers, berries less than an inch deep, to keep them from crushing each other.


Picking berries forces you to slow down, just a little - a small taste of vacation in your berry patch. There is nothing small about the fragrance or flavor of home grown raspberries. The scent of berries hanging thick on their branches in the warm sun entices and the bright, intense flavor as you slip one into your mouth grabs at your taste buds and shouts “Yes! This is summer!”


Wild Raspberry Sunday


The absolutely best way to eat raspberries is sprinkled liberally on a dish of vanilla ice cream. But if all my Sunday of the Month blog entries are plain fruit on ice cream, they will get boring fairly rapidly. The following “Sunday” came from a friend who ate something similar in a restaurant and figured out her own version of the raspberry treat. I altered her recipe for our family’s taste buds.

1 cup fresh raspberries divided into 3 small bowls
2 Tablespoons powdered sugar
1 Tablespoon sour cream or yogurt


Mix the sour cream (or yogurt) and powdered sugar until well blended. Spoon mixture over the raspberries. Serve with small spoons to make the treat last longer.