Hours of Daylight – 13:04

Read the OpEd pages of The Times today [Sunday, September 4, 2005], i dare you. Never before have i seen so much unity in the OpEd pages. Read Frank Rich, and Bob Herbert and perhaps most importantly Paul Krugman and then wonder what the future of the country is going to be. While Frank Rich’s writing always inspires me, it’s Paul Krugman who really spells it out:

But the federal government’s lethal ineptitude wasn’t just a consequence of Mr. Bush’s personal inadequacy; it was a consequence of ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the public good. For 25 years the right has been denigrating the public sector, telling us that government is always the problem, not the solution. Why should we be surprised that when we needed a government solution, it wasn’t forthcoming?

That’s the real question. That quote illuminates the reality of what is occurring under the Bush administration, how the role of government is distorting. Sometimes we’re 50 states, sometimes we’re one country. Deciding what we are at any given moment might indeed be one of the most important roles of the President.

What i find actually amusing in all this is the little snippets of where all the senior officials were during or right after Katrina. Suffice to say none of them were at their offices actually doing something related to public service.

But the aftermath of Katrina, the feeble state of our government and the ongoing shame i feel for being a member of the club called "America" is not what i’m going to harp on today. Today is all about the Huckleberry.

Show of hands: who out there knows what a huckleberry looks like? I thought i knew. I was dead wrong. Huckleberries are essentially blueberries with an attitude. Oregon State says the following:

We use the name huckleberry for many different plants throughout North America. Some of the best known huckleberries are native to the eastern and southeastern United States and belong to four species found in the genus Gaylussacia. This genus is not found in the western United States. Western huckleberries belong to the genus Vaccinium. Their flowers and fruits resemble domestic highbush and lowbush blueberries, which are also Vaccinium species. Western huckleberries, however, are in a different taxonomic section (Myrtillus) than highbush and lowbush blueberries (Cyanococcus). The primary difference is that huckleberries produce single berries in the axils of leaves on new shoots. Highbush and lowbush blueberries develop clusters of berries on one-year-old wood, producing greater yields than huckleberries. Both diploids (2n=24) and tetraploids (2n=48) are found in section Myrtillus.

But that description fails to address the best aspect of the huckleberry: they taste really good.

Yesterday Annette purchased a pound of berries at the local farmers’ market. [sidenote: that quote from Oregon State does mention the lower yield of the huckleberry plant, thus explaining the price of a pound of berries $8 in Sandpoint, $10 here in Boise]. She then produced a tart crust in record time (using our brand new and quite potent Cuisenart food processor), mixed half the berries with some butter and flour and a teeny bit of sugar, and baked it. The flavor of the resulting simple tart is impossible to describe. She chose this recipe because it focuses on the fruit, and, being huckleberry neophytes, we figured we should see what the fruit can do largely on its own. Suffice to say that aside from freshly picked Maine blueberries i have never tasted anything close. The berries produce a sweet/tart wave of flavor that unlike the Maine blueberries doesn’t "pop" in the mouth, but swells like a wave of sweetness then tumbles into a break of tartness. My mother used to complain that blueberries always tasted like "blue ink." Ah, had she lived to try this unassuming tart!