Adventures with Dad: Cranberries

I’m pretty sure Dad knows more people in town now than I do. While he’s been waiting for the rain to lift before he ventures on into Alaska, he’s done a lot of wandering around town while I work. Somewhere in his ventures he learned we have natural cranberries growing everywhere here in the woods.

I took a few hours off the other afternoon to go out in the rain to pick cranberries with him.

Guess who is the better cranberry picker?

That’s right. Not me. I’m mostly too bearanoid. Especially while in a berry patch. Dad easily picked two cranberries for every one of mine. Half the time I was busy looking for bears, thanking my lucky stars there are no snakes in the Yukon, looking at long forgotten treasures in the woods from old gold mining expeditions, trees, or even just looking for where Dad went, and wondering if he’d make one final gasp before the grizzly ate him. Or would a bear just want the berries?

Our motherlode of cranberries

We froze some, so we’d have them over the winter, and then Dad made some cranberry sauce to go with our caribou sausage for dinner.

Then he figured he might as well make some cranberry sauce to take home, in case the cranberries didn’t like 10 days in a bag on the way home. So while I worked, he made cranberry sauce, and then canned a couple jar worth.

Then he made cranberry muffins!

Cranberry muffins

Yesterday he decided to go out for another batch of cranberries while I worked so he could can some more to take with him, just in case the border guards had any problem with raw cranberries crossing into Alaska or back again.

Cranberry sauce boiling

The cranberries were fairly easy to pick, and are best after the first frost. Really you just rake the stem with your hand and all the cranberries come off. These were the low-bush cranberries. They grow like this:

So unfortunately, if you were thinking about coming over for cranberries muffins, they were endangered species, and are now all extinct. The good news is we have more cranberries to make more 🙂