August 4, 2025

Recipe: Mixed Berry Crisp

After last week’s newsletter, I was seriously craving a delicious rustic baked fruit thing. I love all of the fruit bakes, but crisps are probably my favorite. I like the higher ratio of fruit, I like the dramatic contrast in texture between jammy filling and crispy topping, and I also like that they’re comparatively pretty easy to put together.

I baked this up on Saturday afternoon with a delicious mix of blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries, and ate it sitting near our open windows with a pleasant breeze and the drone of cicadas outside, and it tasted like summer. (^_^)

If you make this: seriously, let it cool for as long as you can bear it before serving. I was impatient and cut into it after about 10 minutes, and the fruit mixture hadn’t quite set. It was still delicious! Just very sloppy. (>_<)

Shameless Self Promotion:

Ok! I finally got the Squid Ink print up on my site for sale. Sara Varon taught me how to use a risograph machine, and the first thing I did with it was make a print version of a custom watercolor painting I made for the writer Helen Rosner’s bathroom. I only have a handful of copies left, but they are finally available for you to order online. :)

How’s the book going, Sarah:

172/192 pages done!!! Only 20 pages left! I will almost certainly finish coloring this week, and then I’ll probably spend a week dropping the art into the final file, and making some last adjustments. I’m also waiting for the last round of proofreading edits to come in. But the end is very, very close!

What I’m into lately:

This week’s cocktail book coloring was fueled by the audiobook of You Should Have Left by Daniel Kehlmann. I really loved this one. It’s short, but it’s instantly gripping, deeply claustrophobic, delightfully creepy, and excellently paced. A tight little spooky puzzle of a book!

What Toki’s into lately:

Oh, just continuing to carry himself with a certain quiet dignity.