Braiden Rex-Johnson Kate Baldwin Christy Nordstrom

Related Articles

• Olympic Anticipation
• You Say Szechuan, I Say Sichuan
• From the Garden
• Uncorked in the Kitchen
• Try This At Home

One of the perks of growing up on the East Coast was the abundance of native produce and seafood-soft-shell crabs, beefsteak tomatoes, the sweetest sweet corn imaginable. One of my favorite foods of childhood remains one of my favorites today--strawberries.

I'll never forget the lavish summer garden parties thrown by a wealthy businessman and his wife, who had far more disposable income than we did. Servants would meet us (and the other 300 guests) at the front door of the mansion and lead my wide-eyed parents, little brother and me to the back of the estate, where the party began.

There, I was enraptured by the silver serving vessels overflowing with the biggest strawberries I'd ever seen. I could take as many as I wanted, then sprinkle them with powdered sugar or dip them in sour cream and brown sugar.

While garden parties with servants are long gone from my life, the simple delight of summer berries still sings its siren's song. Janie Hibler, a Portland resident and award-winning cookbook author, shares my passion in The Berry Bible: With 175 Recipes Using Cultivated and Wild, Fresh and Frozen Berries (HarperCollins Publishers, $29.95).

I'm also a fan of the Blueberry Strudel recipe, which comes from Jennifer Trainer Thompson's Very Blueberry (Celestial Arts, $5.95), a cute little book with 40 recipes. Here, butter-brushed phyllo dough creates a lacy base for a simple-to-make blueberry filling flavored with almond extract.

You can take the girl out of Texas (where I lived for 16 years), but you can't take Texas out of the girl, so I was also drawn to the recipe for Blackberry Pie Bars in Rebecca Rather's book, The Pastry Queen: Royally Good Recipes from the Texas Hill Country's Rather Sweet Bakery & Cafe (Ten Speed Press, $29.95). A self-taught pastry chef, Rather devised this recipe for people, like me, who are afraid of making pie crusts. They are even made with frozen berries, so you can prepare them year-round.

For good measure, I've included a couple of recipes from my personal collection. Merry Berry Medley is reprinted from Inside the Pike Place Market: Exploring America's Favorite Farmers' Market (Sasquatch Books, $19.95). It's my riff on a good, old-fashioned fruit crumble.

Blueberry-Peach Cobbler was, without a doubt, the most popular, requested and reprinted recipe from the first edition of the Pike Place Market Cookbook. It's a "magical" recipe in which the dough starts out on the bottom of the baking dish, then travels to the top during baking. As many times as I've made it, I've never quite figured out how it works.

But then, there's always something magical about summer berry desserts. I've been a believer since childhood.