My favorite new snack food is an old nemesis of mine. I never thought I'd find anything nice to say about mulberries; in my book, they're literally for the birds. Every summer we get bombarded by bland, seedy berries from the five mulberry trees in our yard; the birds love them, but they leave a layer of rotting, fermented mulberries spread across the driveway like good jam gone bad.

I've tried to put the berries to good culinary use. After all, Alice Waters calls mulberries "sublime," and I know people who've had her mulberry ice cream and swear it was delicious. My mulberry ice cream was a seedy disaster. I made a pie, too; it wasn't so bad, but anything tastes good if you add enough sugar. It's true that some varieties of mulberries taste better than others, but we've got three different kinds, and they all seem to lack flavor.

So I was skeptical when a friend raved about dried mulberries. While dried mulberries are common in Middle Eastern markets, they've only recently become more widely available here. Curious, I bought a bag, and discovered that they have a pleasing taste and texture-crunchy and soft at the same time, and sweet but not too sweet. Matt dubbed them "fruit croutons."

Dried mulberries are amazingly healthy, too. A 1/3 cup serving contains 5 grams of fiber, 4 grams of protein, plus 190% of the recommended daily value (RDV) of vitamin C, 30% of the RDV for iron, and 10% for calcium. That's an incredible amount of nutrients for a handful of dried fruit.

Maybe the birds are on to something after all. This year I'm going to harvest the berries and dry them myself. Sure beats tracking them into the house on the bottom of my shoes.