About those black raspberries: They grow like weeds in my neighborhood (and some of my more idiotic neighbors actually consider them to be weeds). They serve as my bait to get me out jogging regularly at least one month out of the year.

This year, they’re ripe about a month early, and they’re plumper, juicier, and sweeter than ever before.

Today I happened upon a particularly thick thicket of them, so I decided to sacrifice my shirt, doing the hold-up-your-t-shirt-like-a-bucket trick to bring home a load of them. My shirt will probably never be quite the same; I’m hoping that purple berry stains aren’t wildly noticeable on a dark maroon t-shirt. At my friend Katrina’s suggestion, I’m infusing them in a big old bottle of vodka (the kind you get in a plastic bottle at the grocery store for $9). Come visit in about a month (I guess I am an optimist!) and help me toast the kitchen’s completion with blackberry cosmos!