While Bill and I flip through lists of tv shows, Will and Liam turn to YouTube videos for entertainment. With the prediction of six to eight inches of snow for us on Saturday, Liam woke up and bounded into the kitchen. “I’m going to make blueberry syrup for snow cones!” An idea from a YouTube video.
As it poured with rain outside, only the promise of a change-over to snow hung in the air. A pan and a pint of blueberries went on the stove along with enough water for the berries to float a bit off the bottom of the pan. “I’m going by memory; I don’t think I need to follow a recipe.” His unrestricted confidence in the kitchen mimics Bill’s more so than mine. For most dishes, I’d like a recipe to be my guiding light. A tablespoon of butter went into the warming blueberries and water.
Since Liam first saw the snow at a year old, his gut response has been the same year after year: to eat it. Off the ground or out of the air, his excitement for falling frozen water is like a puppy’s in freshly fallen snow. Upon Liam’s direction, I searched for the strainer, found a bowl it could sit on, and put both into the sink. We watched the blueberries shed their color in the water as the boiling bubbles grew more intense. I think they should be called purple berries, given the color of the water.
We wondered together how long it should boil; Liam decided when to pull it off of the stove and moved the pan to a trivet next to the sink where he ladled the blueberries and liquid into the strainer. When the ladle couldn’t pick up the last bits of blueberries, Liam lifted the pan, lightened by the ladling, and dumped the rest through the sieve. With the back of the ladle, he pushed the blueberries in the bowl-shaped sieve to get all of the juice out.
Gently and with a little trepidation, Liam poured the mixture back into the pan and returned it to the stove. Liam added sugar. One and a half cups of sugar. I bit my tongue knowing that was a bit too much, but this was his experiment, not mine.
Liam wants an ice scraper for Christmas. Not for the car but rather for freezing sheets of ice and scraping it as it freezes so he can have snow whenever he wants. We smelled the simmering concoction; it made me think that vanilla might be a good addition. Liam agreed, and a teaspoon of strong Mexican vanilla joined the dance. Liam’s nose suggested freshly squeezed lemon. In it went. After a few minutes, the combination thickened ever so slightly, and Liam took it off of the stove to cool. We took turns dipping spoons in for taste testing. It tasted more of sweetness than of blueberry.
Once we had discussed the rationale for letting the syrup cool before putting it into a glass jar, Liam disappeared for a half hour. Then we found a bulbous squatty jar that the whole batch fit into perfectly. Then—we waited. Hours later, around three, the snow cloud finally arrived over our house. The air was thick with heavy, clunky, wet snow. It was a good start to the winter storm. Three days before, the forecast for us was only one to three inches. Now, the forecast had increased to a real snow of six to eight inches. It was the weekend, and no one had to go anywhere: We were ready for that dump of snow to cover the dark, dreary, leaf-free ground.
When the table on the deck had collected about an inch of snow, Liam took a glass out with a spoon and scraped the cold, wet sheet. Back in the house, he spooned syrup over the white mound, but it didn’t have the desired effect of thoroughly dripping and drizzling through the snow. The heavy snow didn’t have enough air between the flakes to allow for snow cone absorption. Once again, the taste testing proved that the syrup was more sweet than blueberry. As the snow melted a bit, the purple syrup eventually colored the whole glob of slush.
As Liam looked at the remaining two cups of syrup, he was decidedly disappointed. Was it worth keeping? Could we just pour it away down the drain? All that effort and he was left with a subpar concoction. We tucked it into the fridge, behind the milk. Perhaps it will resurface for a retest with the next snowfall, for there wasn’t a second chance with this snow event: It only snowed about two inches.
All around, the anticipation and preparation gloriously outshone the main events.