A minute ago, we flipped the calendar to April and now it’s almost time to turn the page to May! All this calendar flipping is amping up my foraging enthusiasm, which is already running at a steady hum. Fortunately, there is ample foraging material in my freezer as I patiently wait for Mother Nature to provide.

If you have been following along, you know that I am reluctant to add tools to my kitchen arsenal unless I have deemed them fantastically useful. No dust collectors allowed! After last summer’s kitchen experimentations (pie crusts, pestos, and other sauces), we decided it’s time to up our game and add a food processor to the mix.

Today’s assignment was testing out the new machine before burning the boxes they came in. After a quick forage in our freezer, frozen wild blueberries were the inspiration. Cutting in butter into a scone recipe sounded like a delicious trial for the new machine.

My previous strategy was using a grater to grate frozen butter to make those little pea-sized bits for a flaky pastry. It worked like a charm, but it did take some time. And mind your knuckles and fingertips! Using a food processor to make the scone dough was a revelation. I dropped the required chunks of butter into the dry ingredients. In 4 pulses, the butter was pea-sized and incorporated into the flour. I then added the remaining ingredients – 4 more pulses and my dough was done. Wow! I’m imagining all the recipes I can more quickly and easily prepare… pie crusts for wild berries and rhubarb, pestos with foraged greens, wild greens and mushroom fillings for ravioli…oh, and pasta dough… All right, Mother Nature, our calendars will align soon enough.

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