Let Be Be Finale Of Seem

Another hot-weather dinner, and another round of homemade sushi for the clamoring tribe. Sockeyes are in season, and though very not local, they are sustainably caught and most delicious. This has become somewhat of a weekly ritual for us while our local-ish source is out of town; we get the best fish we can and I make a variety of sushi while the family sits and devours it all. I eat mine intermittently throughout, sometimes with a nice plate at the end after they’re sated.

I would have had a better picture but the camera battery died right after this shot. Other components included shiso, spicy sauce (that tomato-cream sauce from the day before plus sriracha and miso), tomato, chard, Thai basil, and avocado. I sautéed some mixed garden greens (chard, red and black kale, collards) with garlic and deglazed with local ponzu. Yup. Read the next article. It’s a wondrous way to eat, all gardeny fresh and fishy and cool; I had a powerful yearning to live closer to the ocean so that this sort of occasional indulgence would be more of a logical frugality.

The real star of this meal was dessert, though. Our big blueberry bushes, bought last year from Lee, fruited prolifically, and I netted them in time to keep the birds from stealing all of our berries (though one poor robin got caught and died in the brutal heat before I found and cut it loose). A blue jay also got caught, but we freed it. I’m getting to know our avian neighbors at an intimate proximity, but honestly neither of us are thrilled about it, as much as I enjoy watching them from a foot or two away. Next year I’ll be building a birdproof enclosure for all our blueberries, including those in the herb garden which I’ll be moving so they can be next to their bigger brethren. Nets are a big pain in the ass even without dead birds; they snag and pop off berries both ripe and unripe as one tries–however gingerly–to remove them come picking time.

So now that your appetites are thoroughly aroused, here’s the blueberry ice cream I made. It was a straight up vanilla custard to which I added some blueberry juice, then added a bunch of whole berries as the machine churned. The addition of the juice imparted a luscious blueberry flavor to the ice cream without adding too much color (the insides are white, after all) and the frozen berries had that wonderful tartness which plays so well with sweet cream. This was an ideal straddling of adult sophistication and youthful hedonism, and a most welcome treat on another muggy evening.