Blueberry Cobbler

This recipe comes from my step-Mother's kitchen. She taught me how to cook during the three years I made her life miserable in the early 1970's. I was a pretty sulky 15-year old who most of the time would rather be cruising around with my latest boyfriend than paint the arbor or pull weeds from her 787,000 quadrillion foot vegetable garden.

But part of who I am today is due to living with that overall-wearing, 'Mother Earth News', taskmaster from South Carolina. I painted fences, canned tomatoes, pickled cucumbers, sprayed fruit trees, grew asparagus, learned to drive a manual transmission, and layed timbers for flowerbeds. I hated every minute of it. (Do you blame me?) That's her. And that's my little brother riding on that barrow full of produce that was produced from my toil and sweat.

Maybe I'm still a little sulky. Who me? Nah.

Today I love, love, love to work in the garden, paint fences and I am so proud of the things I learned from her. And I treasure some of the recipes she's passed along to me. Wait til you try her Hollandaise sauce. You'll never be the same! Her Blueberry Cobbler doesn't look fancy but it's so buttery and the cake turns slightly chewy and carmelized. Just perfect with a dollop of your favorite vanilla ice cream, or in my case, soy.

Nancy Smith's Blueberry Cobbler

Bake time: 40 to 45 minutes

Use a 2 or 2-1/2 qt casserole dish

Ingredients:

• 4 Cups frozen blueberries
• 3/4 cp sugar (I sometimes cut this to 1/3 cp and its turns out great, Fred likes it less sweet)
• 1 Stick butter
• 1 Cup all purpose flour
• 1 Cup sugar
• 1 and 1/2 tsp Baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/2 Cup half & half or evaporated milk

Preheat oven to 400. Heat blueberries and 3/4 cp sugar on medium heat in saucepan, stirring often. Boil for 7 to 10 min. Don't worry, this is supposed to turn the blueberries very liquid. Set aside.

Put one stick of butter in 2 qt cassserole dish and melt either in the oven for 5 minutes or in the microwave. Don't burn the butter!

Mix the 1 cp sugar, 1 cp flour, 1-1/2 tsp baking powder, 1/4 tsp salt with the half n half or evaporated milk. No special way to do this, just mix together. The dough is supposed to be very thick. It help hold up to the amount liquid in the blueberries.

Spoon dough over hot butter (right in the casserole dish you used to melt the butter) then spoon blueberries and juice over that. Its going to look like too much blueberry juice, but trust me, it's fine. Bake for 35 minutes, then test the cake with a toothpick. Everytime I've made this, its exactly 40 minutes. I'm telling you, it needs to be brown!

(See, this isn't quite done. This was at about 20 minutes. Back in for another 15.)

You will be tempted to pull it out at about 25 but don't! Use a toothpick to check that the cake is done at about 35 minutes. Although, it looks too brown when its done, the inside is perfect and that crust will be buttery and carmelized - oh so good!