100-Mile Desserts: Four Fruit Crisp

It's mulberry season! We've been out wild-harvesting the mulberries, and in this region they are not hard to find as these trees grow fairly abundantly, though often unnoticed and unpicked. They do take quite a bit of work to harvest as the berries are small and need nimble fingers to be plucked off the tree. Once ripened, they drop quickly and so it's often easiest to gather them from an undisturbed area on the ground. It's a juicy mess, including purple stained knees, shoes and fingers! But well worth the effort to have the berries for baking or smoothies later in the winter months. I also baked a few 100-mile desserts using the fresh mulberries...here's the recipe for a four fruit crisp, and in the next post the recipe for mulberry-cherry scones. The crisp can be made vegan if you leave out the butter and add extra oil. We just heard about a source for locally produced sunflower oil (from a farm near London) so now we have another source beyond always using local canola.

Four Fruit Crisp - adapted from Simply in Season

1 1/2 cups each of four kinds of fruit (we used apples, rhubarb, cherries and mulberries)
1 1/2 cups local organic flour
1 1/2 cups local organic oats
6 Tbsp butter
4 Tbsp canola or sunflower oil
1/2 cup maple syrup or honey

1) Mix fruit together in a 10-inch deep baking or pie pan.
2) Mix the flour, oats, butter, oil and sweetener together in a large bowl. Blend until crumbly.
3) Evenly sprinkle topping over the fruit.
4) Bake in prepared oven at 375F until fruit bubbles and top is golden brown, about 30 min.

Serves 8.

Would be lovely served warm with locally made organic icecream, like Mapletons (does that count as 100-Mile??)