Cantaloupe with Blueberries and Blackberry Peach Puree

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eyes level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. 
-Thoreau-

Cantaloupe with Blueberries and Blackberry Peach Puree

Cook's notes: This puree makes a terrific sauce for pancakes, French toast, waffles, scones or muffins. It can be made a day in advance and refrigerated to thicken. The recipe make one cup and comes from book "Morning Glories" by Donna Leahy.

Serves 4

Puree Ingredients:

• 1 pint blackberries
• 1 pint blueberries
• 1 cantaloupe
• 2 medium ripe peaches. peeled, pitted and quartered
• 2 TB. lemon juice
• 1 TB. sugar
• 2 TB. blueberry or blackberry jam

Puree Directions:

• In a blender combine blackberries, peaches, lemon juice, sugar, and jam.
• Process until smooth.
• Serve in a pitcher or on a plate with cut up cantaloupe and blueberries. 

Blackberry-Picking 

by Seamus Heaney

Irish poet, playwright, translator and lecturer, and the recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.