baking

food : CSA bounty and the gardens of friends

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Our CSA is swinging into full summer gear, and we are overflowing with potatoes, basil, tomatoes, a variety of cucumbers, and two kinds of squash. To be fair to our farmer who works hard not to overwhelm us with what he perceives to be the less desirable of the summer vegetables (squash), this week’s surplus results at least in part from my choice to buy a second box at a discounted rate. Showing up exactly when the farmer is delivering has a few advantages, and being offered an orphan box is one of them. So I have twice as many tomatoes and squashes as usual, and am trying to decide what to do with them.

Although many people complain about squash, I like them and will probably just continue to eat them as a regular part of meals. So far this summer we’ve had yellow squash sautéed with olive oil and tarragon (my personal favorite way) and yellow squash fritters. The fritters were an experiment, the result of combing through Simply In Season and studying all the recipes marked with ‘summer squash.’ The fritters were quite tasty, but consistently soft. We’re going to have them again tomorrow—three cups of shredded squash is less than I thought it would be, so I have some squash pre-grated and ready to go—and I’m hopeful that smaller and thinner will lead to a crispier outcome. I’m also tempted by a pickle recipe that uses yellow squash, but not terribly motivated to hover over a pot of boiling water again so soon. Maybe later in the summer if we have another big yellow squash week. In the meantime, the green and white courge will go into muffins, and we’ll munch our way through the variety of cucumbers.

On the tomato front, I have a row of smallish red tomatoes lined up on the windowsill, two pints of cherry tomatoes in the fridge, and two large Cherokee Purples ready for eating. I’m thinking I’ll just stew and freeze the red ones, despite their suitability for sandwiches, which will save me the trouble of figuring out an actual dish to make with them once cooked. Freezer space is now at a premium, however, which means that recipes involving chicken stock need to start appearing on the menu forthwith. Not to mention that the actual chicken needs to be thawed and stewed, although that will do nothing to address the chicken stock surplus. It’s not exactly soup season, but I have some ideas involving rice and vegetables that could use some up.

We’re also getting a decent amount of lovely basil, but I’ve been too slow to use it and it’s quite wilted. It’s currently soaking in an ice water bath, which the internet assures me will revive it; I suspect that much of it has crossed the line from wilted to dried, so I’m unlikely to ‘revive’ enough for the pesto I was hoping to make. We did use the lovely lemon basil from the folks we know in Frederick for pesto last week, and I’m sure there will be more to come. I just hate to see it go to waste. Speaking of the folks we know in Frederick, they sent us home with some delicious selections from their garden. So far we’ve had dragon tongue beans and escarole, and are looking forward to the radicchio, which will be likely just sautéed as a side for salmon, and cabbage, which I’m going to make into Sweet and Sour Cabbage even though it’s white rather than red.

Not only is this making me hungry, it’s reminding me that there is a lot of chopping, dicing, stewing, sautéeing and baking to be done in the kitchen. Prepare for winter, indeed.

food : CSA bounty and the gardens of friends

food : cherries, cherries, cherries

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Cherries on the porch.

This is the time of year I’ve been waiting for: sour cherry season! I like sweet cherries fine, but you can’t bake with them, and it’s the sour cherry baked goods that I love. Pie, mainly, but also strudel and turnovers and muffins and croissants and danishes. When they’re well done, that is; there’s nothing I like less than a chemical-tasting dyed imitation of any of these fine products. Which is why I was so excited to discover a local source of sour cherries—besides the backyard of a woman I know, whose sour cherries are already spoken for—so that I can make all these things myself.

My first cherry pickup was ten quarts. That seems like a lot when you’re pitting and storing them, but really isn’t that much when you think about all the stuff you want to make with them. Including a recipe that I found online for something in between chocolate cake and brownies filled with cherries, which was absolutely mouthwateringly moist and delicious (I think all the naysayers must have just used sweet cherries, which we all know are for eating not baking). And jam. How could I forget jam? I didn’t forget jam, I just neglected plan for jam in the first round. Which meant that this week I picked up even more sour cherries at the market and continued the pitting through the week. Jam-making will be today (and possibly also tomorrow, depending on how many more cherries are available at today’s market). I plan to use David Lebovitz’s no-recipe recipe. While I’m making jam this week, I may as well also try the Cherry Walnut Conserve in the all-purpose Ball canning book, right? I mean, she gives me a discount if I buy in bulk, so it’s better to get more quarts than fewer. Having cherry jam in the dead of winter will make all the pitting worthwhile!

food : cherries, cherries, cherries

burned on the Fourth of July

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The good news about the Fourth of July is that, as I did last year, I made another delicious cherry pie and shared it with my friends. I’m stocking up on fresh sour cherries at the farmers’ market while they’re in season; most of them are going into the freezer, but a goodly number are going into things we can eat right away. Being, you know, from the north and all, I grew up on cherry pie and am more than happy to bake pies myself just so I can have my favorite dessert whenever I want. This year, I used Gourmet‘s recipe and didn’t bother to make a lattice top as I did last year with the Bon Appétit version. (Both can be found on Tastebook or Epicurious; I prefer Tastebook but not every likes to create a login in order to search.) So, cherry pie, that was good.

The bad news about the Fourth of July is that I went to the College Park fireworks on the University of Maryland’s campus and got hot ash in my eye. We had already moved our blankets farther away from the barrier because a flaming piece of debris caught our bag on fire after nearly landing on my partner’s upturned face. (Not that we were particularly close to start, as I don’t really enjoy fireworks that much; I’m with the eight year old who walked by and said, ‘Mommy, that sounds like guns!’) Anyway, when the ash blew into my eye I poured half my water bottle over my face to try to flush it, but it was still burning and stinging so we went to the paramedics (or EMTs, whichever are the firefighter ambulances rather than the hospital ambulances). A very nice firefighter named Lauren and an older guy whose name I didn’t catch flushed my eye with the official eye-flushing stuff and it went from burning to just feeling like I’d gotten a stick in my eye. Once home—at this point we left, as you might imagine I wasn’t in the most nationalistic of moods anymore—I called our medical advice nurse and she told me that I would be fine since I didn’t have either searing pain or loss of vision, but just to be safe I should stand in the shower and let the water run into my eye while blinking for five minutes. Five minutes is a crazy long time to have water running over your eyeball; I managed two. The first minute I was distracted by the burning in my previously non-flushed eye, which was parched from the smoke at the fireworks and the chlorine at the pool earlier. After that, it was just a matter of white-knuckling it through the creepy feeling for as long as possible, which wasn’t very long in my case.

Happily, my fear that I would wake up the next day not able to see did not come to pass. I can see, and my eye feels no worse than when a twig of a low-bridge town tree gets me in the eye in the dark. (You would think glasses would provide a tad more protection, but apparently not.) However, attending local fireworks displays will now join driving on the Garden State in the category of Never Doing That Again As Long As I Live So Help Me God.

burned on the Fourth of July

food : muffins

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I’ve been promising friends the muffin recipe(s) that we use, from Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home, and I realized that I did post the recipe a couple of years ago. It should be said that we never make the banana version, since bananas don’t grow in our region; we pretty much cycle through the muffins based on the seasonal availability of the fruit and vegetable ingredients.

Last year, we added a sour cherry variety to our repertoire, and it was fabulous. Much more like dessert than the other varieties, even with the same whole wheat flour and egg substitutions; cherries just make food fancier. For those muffins, substitute 1/2 tsp almond extract for the vanilla extract and use 1 1/2 cups sour cherries (we used frozen, but fresh would no doubt work). Delicious!

food : muffins

food : strawberry-rhubarb pie

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About five years ago, I realized that I could have homemade pie whenever I wanted if I baked it myself. Like most profound insights in life, this was completely obvious after the fact and I wondered at how I had spent so many pie-free years living in ignorance. No more! Since then, I’ve moved from the classics (apple pie in the fall, pumpkin or sweet potato pie at the holidays) through fancy tarts (lemon curd and Italian almond are the crowd favorites) to the boundless territory of fruit pies. Fruit pies are great because (1) they’re delicious and (2) there are gazillions of different ways to make them. So far, I’ve been working my way through the standards with seasonal fruit: blueberry, peach, apricot, and cherry have all had their turn in the past few years. Some, like blueberry and apple, we revisit every year; now that I have a source for sour cherries, cherry will become part of that rotation.

This week I managed, for the first time in years, to have both strawberries (from the farmers’ market) and rhubarb (from the local organic market) on hand in sufficient abundance to make a pie. Which is to say, usually I eat the strawberries fresh and end up with only rhubarb, which is how we come to have rhubarb muffins all through the year: the excess gets diced and frozen. This year, though, I was determined to try my hand at strawberry-rhubarb pie. I remember this pie from my summers in Ontario, where rhubarb grows like a weed and visits to a pick-your-own strawberry farm were a regular occurrence each June. The pie itself usually came from the store; while I was amply exposed to both plants, the rhubarb side of the family was not the strawberry side of the family and the fruits were rarely prepared in combination. It was my cousins on my father’s side who taught me never to eat rhubarb stalks without dipping them in sugar—never to eat anything unfamiliar that they handed me, as a more general rule—and my mother’s mother who loved the strawberries, dicing them and freezing them or serving them fresh with vanilla ice cream (for breakfast, if we were really lucky).

Now that I use the food processor to make the pie crust dough, making a pie is not as daunting as it was in the beginning. I was able to make the pie this morning (from my go-to pie cookbook) and have it cooling on the counter when our friends arrived to go to the May Fair at the elementary school. After a hot rain-free afternoon at the fair, we enjoyed the pie with ice cream, and my five year old friend gave it a thumbs up. It was great, if I do say so myself; it’s homemade pie, how bad could it be? Later in the weekend, I’ll pass along a couple of pieces to our neighbors who are our go-to friends when I have extra pie hanging around; by taking the pie off our hands, they perform the important function of allowing me to have fun making a pie without us each then having to eat half of it. It works out well for everyone, and we all look forward to the next one.

food : strawberry-rhubarb pie