Blueberry Bars

It’s late August, and Mom packs us all up in the minivan and we set off for the beautiful, scenic drive to Alexanders Wild Blueberry Farm. For me, this is one of my favorite days of summer. The sweaty sticky weather doesn’t bother me now all I can think about is what blueberry pick-up means. A freezer full of tiny sweet berries ready to be baked into many delicious bars. The second we get home my siblings and I dart to the trunk, eager to help my mom unload the bags of fresh berries. To us, the quicker we bring the berries in the house the quicker we can grab handfuls of the blueberries, shoving them into our mouths, covering our tiny lips and fingertips in a purple stain. 

The first step in the long-awaited baking process is gathering all our ingredients. We run from cabinet to cabinet spreading the ingredients along the freshly cleared counter: flour, rolled oats, brown sugar, baking soda, butter, and most importantly the blueberries. After making sure we have all the ingredients we start measuring. 1 cup flour, 1 cup oats, ⅔ cup brown sugar, ¼ teaspoon baking soda, 1 stick butter, and 1 ½ cups blueberries. Now it’s time for the real baking to begin. We dump everything but the butter and berries into a medium-sized bowl, mixing them together. Next, we add the butter to the bowl taking turns mashing the whole mixture with a pastry blender until it resembles coarse crumbs. Once we finish our crumble it’s time to put it in the pan. We measure out ½ cup of the crumble and set it aside. We press the rest of the mixture into the bottom of a glass 9 by 9 pan. After the crumble bottom is nice and packed down we add in our blueberries, covering the pan with an ocean of teeny, tiny pockets of sweetness. Mom pours the rest of the crumble on top of the berries, evening it out, before popping the bars into a 350ºF oven and starting the 30-minute timer for the bars. 

The thirty or so minutes where the bars are in the oven are my favorite because it means reading the Robert McCloskey classic, Blueberries for Sal. The flipping through pretty paper pages covered in beautiful drawings, saying, “Mom, read it again, again!”. As soon as we hear the oven timer go off, we jump up and run through the door to the kitchen. The room is filled with an aroma of toasted oats and sizzling berries, making us all eager to devour the bars. Mom walks to the oven turning off the repeatedly beeping timer before proceeding to open the glass oven door, pulling out the toasty bars. “Can we eat them?” we beg Mom. “Not yet,” she replies, placing the pan on the stovetop. 

When the bars have cooled we each grab a small blue and white Corelle plate, waiting for Mom to cut up the bars, slicing them into perfect squares she hands one to each of us, before placing one on a plate for herself. We head outside to the plaid picnic blanket eating our delicious bars under the August sun.