Sunday, June 19, 2011

New jams

We just got back from a short trip to the Oregon Coast. On the second day we were in Astoria, a little town up in the corner of the state where the Columbia River empties into the Pacific. Very cute, and it's also where Goonies was filmed - we saw the house where the Goonies lived.

It also turns out that, back when Astoria was a salmon-fishing boomtown, it was largely settled by Scandinavian immigrants, mostly Finns. And, looking around for souvenirs to bring home, we settled, as we so often do, on an exotic jam. In this case we brought home a jar of cloudberry preserves and a jar of lingonberry preserves - both from a Swedish maker called Hafi. Here's a link.

We'd had lingonberry sauce on pancakes before, but never had cloudberry anything. Of these jars, the cloudberry turned out to be sweeter than the lingonberry. I guess lingonberries are naturally sour, and although the syrups we've had in the past were quite sweet these preserves are pretty sour. Almost as sour as cranberries, but not quite; they taste like a cross between a blueberry and a cranberry, maybe? The cloudberry preserves tasted more like a kind of mellow raspberry. But mainly I think I like the name: cloudberry.

We made pancakes for dinner last night, so we could ladle the preserves over them. Awesome.