Over our eleven years of full time RV’ing we have run across and picked pretty much every edible wild berry in the continental USA.  We found a grove of mulberry trees in a campground somewhere in Utah and literally picked the low hanging fruit.  Then the Google told us to spread an old sheet on the ground and shake the branches.  That works so much better.  Mulberries look something like blueberries and taste  like them too.  Like blueberries, mulberries make delicious pies and cobblers.  

In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan we camped at an Ojibway casino with RV sites.  Kat found several pints of wild blueberries there.  Our plentitude excited us and she made pies, muffins, a cake, and I found a recipe for blueberry chicken.  The chicken tasted like chicken with side blueberries; maybe worth two stars out of five.  But when people are rich in something, rich in anything, we tend to squander it.  Tennessee Williams (I am old; you, much younger – he wrote Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and A Streetcar Named Desire, plus many other plays and a few short stories.)  Tennessee was really good with words and among them these: “None of man’s gifts is more incontinently spent than youthful beauty.”  As were those blueberries.

Somewhere in the northwest we found a treat that to my knowledge, man has not yet managed to domesticate and farm. Val Kilmer played the part of Doc Holliday in Tombstone and his character said again and again “I’m your huckleberry”.  Doc was accepting gunfights, but the ones that grow on bushes are simply fantastic.  Kat made a cobbler or two out of the few we picked.  By now we had realized wild berries are a wonderful ingredient in assorted pastries and desserts. 

In Wisconsin, and here and there in Michigan, we found wild raspberries.  These were smaller than those you buy in supermarkets but equally tasty.  We put them in waffles where they became a delightful counterpoint to the sweetness of maple syrup. 

And just a few days ago in Braithwaite, LA, Kat found a trove of perfect wild blackberries.  We were at St. Bernard State Park on the east side of New Orleans.  The big river was only a few hundred yards away, and from the blackness of the soil uprooted by illegal immigrants from Mexico (banded armadillos) you just know that dirt is nourishing to plants.  Most wild blackberries are stunted, usually from poor soil or unreliable rainfall.  These had neither problem.  And here they grew wild in almost full sun.  These berries were the size you find in the best groceries, and maybe tastier.  We picked three quarts.  Kat baked a blackberry cake, a cobbler, then another cake, and now just quart remains in the freezer.  We found a wonderfully marbled flat iron steak at the grocery and bought the fixin’s for a steak salad.  We used bleu cheese, butter lettuce, radishes, marinated artichokes, cherry tomatoes, and our dressing was a fresh blackberry vinaigrette with garlic butter croutons.  Talk about good!