Sunday, September 2, 2012
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| Local Blueberry Tarts with Coconut-Vanilla Bean Pastry Cream |
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| Local Blueberries fully ripe and ready for picking! |
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| The buckets they provide hold about 5 lbs of berries. They provide buckets for picking, but you should bring your own shallow containers for bringing the berries home. Transfer the berries from their buckets after weighing and paying. Minimum was 5 lbs per person (i.e one bucket per adult). We picked 2 buckets and paid $1.75/lb. It took us a leisurely 1 hour to pick two buckets full. |
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| U-Pick Blueberry Field @ GS Farms, Richmond. Check out this link for other local UPick farms |
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| Some of the bushes were so full of berries, they sagged from the weight of the berries |
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| Coconut milk pastry cream...a good thing |
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| For the Coconut Vanilla Bean Pastry Cream, I used my ol' trusty recipe from a previous post. The toughest part...waiting for the pastry cream to cool before eating! |
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| No need to make tart pastry from scratch...though I know you can do it...the time is ripe to eat these blueberries now! There's 10 lbs of these blueberries! Life's too short! No time to lose! Buy frozen tart shells from the grocery store and bake per instructions before filling with pastry cream and berries. |
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| Press the cooked pastry cream through a sieve to ensure smoothness. |
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| Refrigerate the pastry cream until cold. To prevent a skin from forming, you should press plastic wrap on the surface. |
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| FYI: That's not dirt in my pastry cream. Those are quality Tahitian Vanilla Bean seeds freshly scraped from the juicy pods. |
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| Top the fresh berries on the pastry cream. No need to glaze. Savour the last remnants of summer. Wishing all my readers a relaxing Labour Day weekend and a fantastic start to the new school year! ;* cb |