Postcard: Berrypicking in New Paltz, New York

One of my best memories of growing up in New Jersey is stumbling across a patch of wild blueberries while on a class trip to the Delaware Water Gap. I remember devouring fistfuls of the small, sweet fruit, and how concentrated their flavor was. No blueberries have ever quite measured up to that taste-memory until this past weekend, when my family and I traveled with a friend to her childhood home in New Paltz, New York. A hiking trail atop a mountain led us to an enormous thicket of wild blueberry bushes, all heavy with ripe fruit. We stayed there, happily picking and eating berries, for hours. (If not for my daughter Aki's eventual protestations that it was dinner time, we'd probably be there still). By the time we headed down the mountain, we'd filled several plastic containers with the wild fruit. At home, we made quick work of our foraged bounty, serving up a blueberry pie for dinner, and blueberry muffins for breakfast the next morning. —Karen Shimizu