Defrosting last summer’s tart gifts

Psychiatrist Bruce Greyson has spent the past 40 years studying near death experiences — reportedly vivid, realer-than-real-life experiences people have when their brains and bodies are shutting down to a point that would seem to make those experiences impossible. Some of the people who have had these experiences and survived have described traveling outside their bodies and witnessing verifiable events that the eyes in their heads could not have observed. Many of them describe being granted a glimpse into the nature of existence.

One person in Greyson’s book, “After”, Anita Moorjani, had advanced stage cancer and went into a coma as she approached death. She survived and in describing her near death experience in her own book, “Dying To Be Me”, asks us to imagine that our everyday reality is like living in a huge, dark warehouse. “Everything you know about what’s contained within this enormous space is what you’ve seen by the beam of one small flashlight … You can only see what your light is focused on, and only identify that which you already know. That is what physical life is like … Next, imagine that one day, someone flicks on a switch … In a sudden burst of brilliance and sound and color, you can see the entire warehouse and it’s nothing like anything you’ve ever imagined … the vastness, complexity, depth, and breadth of everything going on around you is almost overwhelming … you get a strong feeling that you’re actually part of … a large and unfolding tapestry that goes beyond sight and sound. You understand that what you used to think was your reality was, in fact, hardly a speck within the vast wonder that surrounds you.”

If we are fumbling around with flashlights here in the physical plane, learning about a new plant and tasting its fruits for the first time is like shining our little lights into an unseen corner of the warehouse, revealing another small piece of that tapestry. If you travel to the following coordinates, 40.601510, -73.886273, right here in New York City, you can taste autumn olive berries from bushes alongside the vast, wide-open wonder that is the old airfield tarmac at Floyd Bennett Field. You can create a calendar reminder on your phone to go in late September or early October, when autumn olive berries are at peak ripeness. Watch for sporty vehicles painting donut shapes on the endless concrete surfaces there, mingled with the halting movements of cars with new drivers learning more basic maneuvers.

The autumn olive was introduced to North America as an ornamental plant in the 1800s and is now considered invasive in many parts of the U.S., including New York. When you get to Floyd Bennett, look for four to eight foot tall shrubs, with relatively straight, thin branches pointing upwards and outwards, and two tell-tale characteristics: small oval leaves — pale green on top with silvery-white undersides — and pea-sized, ruby-red berries that look like they have been speckled with tiny flecks of silver-gray glitter. If you don’t see the glitter, it’s not an autumn olive berry. The berries have a single, edible, large-ish seed inside and depending on the individual bush and how ripe they are, fall on a spectrum from delicious sweet-tart to eyebrow-raising tart to tongue-numbing astringent. They grow close to the branch, often in large clusters — allowing you to hold a wide container directly underneath the branch and strip many berries at a time, letting them fall into your container.

We picked for about thirty minutes, filling our bellies plus two large containers and could have picked for a few more hours without fully depleting the fruit we saw hanging close by. We were busy at the time with other projects, so even though they taste best fresh or refrigerated, we decided to freeze the berries for later use — a perfect winter diversion.

After defrosting our berries in January, we heated them gently in a pot with a small amount of water (this helps them pass through the strainer more easily) and put them through our food mill/strainer to remove the seeds. We ran them through the food mill two times to preserve as much of the pulp as possible. We spread the pulp in a thin, one eighth-ish inch layer on parchment paper-covered dehydrator trays and dried everything at 135 degrees for about ten hours. The resulting tacky fruit goop has the potential to illuminate corners of your consciousness not yet glimpsed.

As always, please feel free to reach out with thoughts or recipes to slightlysooty@gmail.com.