my love affair with blueberries

I mean real blueberries. Fresh blueberries. Really fresh blueberries. So blue they're black, so juicy they burst when you touch them, hanging off the vine fresh.

If you've never had the pleasure of going blueberry picking, you've never tasted deliciousness, my friend.

When I was young, my mom would take us blueberry picking each summer. We would get up at around 5 am, to get to the patch at around 6, before it gets too hot or before the old people come out and steal all the good berries (It's always old people at blueberry patches; most teenagers aren't keen on spending 4 hours hunched over a row of bushes at the crack of dawn on a saturday, why I don't know. We always were). We would lather on the sunscreen, as we are pasty folk, and head out to the patch!

Sometimes we would bring our own buckets, sometimes we would use the ones the patch provided. We would then each pick a row of bushes, and go to town. You go down the row and pick as many blueberries as you can, and eat them out of your bucket while you go. It's hot, and there are some pretty weird bugs, and Carrie and I would usually end up arguing about who was invading whose bush or who had more berries in their bucket or something, but it was heaven.

You go home with enough berries to fill the freezer (literally), and to eat for the rest of the summer. My mom would make pies, we'd put them in vanilla ice cream and cereal, or just eat them by the handful.

One of my favorite ways to eat them is just to reach into the freezer and fill a bowl, frozen blueberry popsicle bites. YUM!!

Here's the other thing, not only are fresh blueberries the tastiest thing ever, there are a ton of health benefits too. For example, just a handful of these guys is packed full of Vitamin C and antioxidants, and they are very low in fat and calories.