My family and I have picked blueberries and strawberries together but not raspberries, until last week. We came home with 5 plus pounds of beautiful, fresh red raspberries and my kids actually had fun, especially my eight year old. I wouldn’t recommend taking kids much younger because if you don’t know, raspberry bushes are a lot like rose bushes… lots of thorns! My daughter’s legs got scraped a couple of times which caused some momentary drama-queen sobbing… any of you with girls can probably relate. But really, it was a great two hours spent in the sun, having my last hurrah with my kiddos before the school routine started.
So what could be better except actually eating all those raspberries?
For about 1/4 of my raspberries (3 cups), I used the recipe I posted about previously for fresh blueberry sauce to make fresh raspberry syrup, pictured above topping some plain Greek yogurt. I also used it to top some of our leftover french toast muffins for breakfasts this week. I’ve used about half the syrup so far and will freeze the rest to save for future pancake mornings.
With another 1/4 (4 cups), I made this fantastic fresh raspberry crisp pictured above plated with vanilla ice cream. I’m a huge fan of crisps, check out my recipes for honeycrisp apple and strawberry rhubarb too! Crisps are the perfect fruit dessert in my opinion because they are a breeze to throw together and it saves me from making pie crust! This particular recipe was a combination of a recipe from The Pioneer Woman and one from Taste of Home.
The remaining half of the raspberries we picked (8 cups), I spread in a single layer over three sheet pans and stuck them in my freezer. After they were frozen, I packed them in freezer-safe Ziploc bags for future use. Certainly the best looking frozen raspberries I’ve ever seen {or tasted}. Actually they’ve been great this week to pack in my children’s lunches as a topping for yogurt just by themselves. The raspberries are nice and thawed for them by lunchtime.
These are my suggestions for how to use fresh-picked red raspberries. What are some of your favorite raspberry recipes?
Red Raspberry Crisp
Ingredients
- 4 c. red raspberries fresh or frozen
- 1/3 c. sugar
- 2 T. cornstarch
- 3/4 c. quick oats
- 1/4 c. finely chopped pecans
- 1/3 c. light brown sugar
- 6 T. unsalted butter cold and cut into 6 pieces
- pinch of salt
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
- Spray a baking dish (about 9x9) with cooking spray.
- Fold together the raspberries, sugar and cornstarch until evenly combined and spread into bottom of prepared baking dish.
- In a separate bowl, combine the oats, pecans, brown sugar, butter and pinch of salt. Using a pastry cutter, cut and mix together the topping ingredients until very well combined and resembling the texture of wet sand.
- Evenly spread the topping over the raspberries in the dish.
- Bake on center rack of oven for 30-40 minutes until the topping is beginning to brown.
- Allow to cool for about 30 minutes before serving topped with plenty of vanilla ice cream.
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