Hate
to say it, but summer is over.
No
more slip-n-slide. No more afternoon barbeques.
And certainly, no more lazy afternoons floating
down the lazy river at
Raging Waters.
The
kids are back in school. The air is crisp. And somewhere,
deep in rural Berkshire County (happy
birthday Kay!! happy birthday Vanessa!!),
the leaves are changing colors.
But
here at cmbsweets,
that doesn't mean we can't hold on to every last
drop of sunshine. The raspberries
do. They're the last berries to pop off the vine
before the official start of autumn.
All
summer long, the Central Valley's heat pulls in
the fog that blankets
the Santa Cruz coastline. By noon, it burns off,
the sun pokes through, getting hotter and hotter
until the next batch of fog
rolls in. But it's that balance of hot and cold,
wet and dry, that give raspberries
that characteristic balance of sweet and tart.
All
we do is add a little bit of sugar, a
drop of lemon juice, put it on the stove
and when it's done, there's that last
drop of sunshine in every jar of raspberry
jam .
"Fragile
raspberries lose their
shape when cooked, but Raspberry
Retainer is the thickest raspberry
preserve we have ever seen:
the raspberries
seem more hefty than they were pre-cooked. This
sweet spread is a most impressive
raspberry
preserve—
so far above most of its kind that it seems more
like a
raspberry
compote."
--The
Nibble,
July 2007
Get
a jar of cmbsweets'
raspberry
retainer for yourself. So you can hang
on to summer as long as you want. And taste what
the world's most delicious jam is all about.
