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A pleasant morning, a good book, a hot cup of joe and a favorite snack.

The rhubarb is on, growing like crazy all over town! It feels like a wild plant ready to be foraged. In fact, rhubarb grows exceptionally well in our sub-arctic rainforest biome. Like our lovely foraged ingredients, it comes back every year without much tending.

I did not grow up with rhubarb. Tasting a slice of strawberry rhubarb pie from a local pie shop, my young mind couldn’t get past the idea that the filling consisted of pink celery sticks – rendered rather gloppy in the pie. My original assessment – yuck! Good thing young taste buds grow up.

These days the bright pink and red stalks are an absolute favorite. The lemony flavor paired with the colorful hue make for a winning combination.

Rhubarb happens to freeze quite nicely. So, in the doldrum days before spring growth got started I dug into my freezer and turned out a batch of rhubarb crumb bars to bring along to a sunny day picnic gathering of friends. The bars were a hit. I was happy with the flavor, but I thought they looked boring. Covering an 8 x 8 baking pan, the rather nondescript bars could have been anything. I wanted these tasty treats to visually beckon.

The solution? Same recipe, but this time baked in parchment-lined muffin cups and topped with toasted pecan accents. My neighborhood taste-testers agreed!

Do you have a favorite take-along picnic treat?

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*A summer memory frozen in a bag. Today, I thawed it out and let that summer day return.*

A sun-drenched summer day, the two of us out hunting for wild strawberries. 2025 was quite a summer for those sugary little beauties and we came upon the biggest ones we’ve ever found. In searching favorite places, we also kept coming across wineberries (aka nagoonberries) – Merlot-colored tart gems that are hard to pass up even when we already have “enough” of them. They are prized for having a unique flavor that evokes a mixture of raspberry, strawberry and something else – something bright and wild not found in cultivated fruit. After a morning of foraging, we stopped for a picnic lunch at an empty campground next to a large pond. Our only dining company was a curious beaver who gave the water a quick tail whack as he swam by. After lunch, we decided to see what was growing along the forested shore. Lo and behold, a bush laden with huge, ripe blueberries!

We put aside a gallon of wild strawberries, wineberries, and blueberries from this day, frozen for later processing into a jam of memories. Today as I worked in the kitchen, steady snowfall blanketed the quiet landscape.