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.