Forest Treats

Well well well! I'm back again from my deep slumber.

I've been living in a forest again for another month, and that explains why I don't really post anything on this blog. I do have internet access but sometimes I'm just too tired to post pictures.

And lately, sad to say, I haven't been making bentos. Sigh. I do have my rice cooker, but since I'm sharing fridge with 3 other people in the house, I don't think I could get as many ingredients to put in a bento. Plus, I don't feel like hogging the kitchen to myself.

I've been working on blueberries. I picked quite a lot of them for my project, and I also helped my company with U-pick sessions where people from all over the place (one lady told me she drove for an hour to get here) went to our company and pick blueberries. These blueberries are sold for $1.50 per lb (which is VERY CHEAP, if you compare them to those in groceries stores).

When I went back to Urbana one time I decided to make beignets (some kind of french doughnut) with blueberries. And so I did! Unfortunately, since I'm not so friendly to baking, I didn't have confectionery sugar in stock, so I had to use granulated sugar instead. But that still does the trick :)

I bought the beignet mix from New Orleans Cafe Du Monde. You can actually buy the mix online and now they sell those mixes at Far East, an Asian store in Champaign, IL. So there's actually no need to go all the way to New Orleans to buy these >.<

And of course, the blueberries were fresh from the tree. The cultivar that I like the most is called Bluetta, which is actually the one I used in the picture above. Another one is called Earliblue, but at that time I hadn't realized that they're sweet, so I hadn't been picking on those. These two are far sweeter than those commecially sold blueberries. One time I brought back a quart of these blueberries and gave them to my friends, and gosh, they liked them so much! They can tell that the blueberries that I picked are far more flavorful and sweeter than the ones they normally buy from the groceries.

Now that it reached the end of July, we no longer have the U-pick sessions. No more blueberries hanging on the bushes - they're all green :(

I miss them T__T