I love cobbler

Several summers ago, I went blackberry picking with my then-boyfriend at a farm located around Elgin, Texas (I'd give you the name but I can't remember it, and a Google search isn't being very helpful, either).

As we wandered through row after row of bushes offering big, fat blackberries for the picking, we got so caught up in filling our cute (but gigantic) baskets that we didn't stop to consider what we were going to do with all of those blackberries once we got them home. It took my getting stung by a bee (they like blackberries, too) to finally snap us out of our blackberry reverie and wake us up to the fact that we had picked a lot more than we could ever eat.

Five-ish pounds of blackberries and am embarrassing amount of money paid to the farmers later, we were back at the house, trying to look up blackberry recipes. Both of us liked the idea of cobbler, but immediately dismissed it as being way too complicated to make, and neither of us particularly wanted to gain 50 lbs from eating it every single day.

If only Tess had already published her book back then, with its recipe for "Ultra Light Blackberry Cobbler." Super easy, super delicious, and a green recipe to boot (for more info about color coding, see this post).

I avoided making this recipe for a long time, mainly because I really love cobbler and was convinced that a "healthy" cobbler could not taste good. But my curiosity finally got the best of me, so I tried it out. And yum!

I think what makes this recipe successful is the fact that blackberries really are the centerpiece here. The doughiness is still there for those of us who love it (I am one of those folks), but there are so many damn blackberries (I'm not complaining) that it balances things out.

The ingredients are really quite simple: Whole wheat pastry flour combined with some baking powder, non-dairy milk, vanilla, and a touch of maple syrup. Once it's all mixed together, pour it into a pie pan, dump 2 cups of blackberries on top, and bake for 45 minutes. I'm not sure how it's possible to make a delicious cobbler without using butter, but somehow Tess managed to find a way. Yum.

I served mine with a little bit of almond-milk vanilla ice cream. It's no Ben & Jerry's, but was actually pretty good, and, more importantly, it didn't make me feel like I needed to go run 3 miles after eating it.

**Note: You really need to use good quality, organic blackberries. This will probably cost you around $4 for a 16-oz bag, but there's no comparison in quality between the frozen HEB version and the really nice organic farm version, in taste, appearance, and pesticide levels. Worth it.