freezer

food : muffins

girl, , , Leave a comment

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 : butternut sage orzo

girl, , , Leave a comment

After searching high and low, I was able to find orzo at Whole Foods. Good to know for the future. For folks like me for whom cream is just a big no-no, orzo is the gift that allows us to have something resembling risotto. Which is what the Butternut Sage Orzo dish is. (Note: this version of the recipe omits the instructions to add the sage to simmer with the squash if you are using dried rather than fresh herb.)

It’s likely that this dish was meant to be more of a pasta dish, in the sense that the squash chunks would remain whole and be tossed with the orzo. I wanted a risotto impersonation, however, so I used my handy potato masher to mash the squash toward the end of the cooking time and create a nice thick soupy sauce to be mixed in with the orzo. It was delicious! After our experience with the Winter Squash Galette, I was pretty confident that the dish would be great, as it had the same winning combination of sage and parmesan cheese (pecorino again, in my case). I didn’t take any pictures, but I’m sure you can imagine: it looked like a warm bowl of yummy squash and orzo with sage!

There is really not much else to say about this dish or squash. Except that I still have three pumpkins, one butternut squash, and one spaghetti squash hanging about, as well as something like two quarts each of pureed pumpkin and courge longue de nice in the freezer. I will bring another batch of pumpkin bars to a dinner next week, but beyond that I got nothin. Except a recipe for pumpkin apple muffins that looks delicious if I ever get around to making it. I fear that we’re a little muffined out on pumpkin, though, after last year’s seemingly endless stream of pumpkin bread. We’ll see.

food : butternut sage orzo

persimmon cookies

girl, , , Leave a comment


Wild persimmons.

Last year we foraged wild (American) persimmons from an undisclosed location in our county. All the hippies we know seemed to be wild about the fruit, and having stumbled across a few trees we decided to give them a try. Persimmons being extremely astringent when not quite ripe, it was hard to gain a sense of what the fruit actually tasted like. But I collected them, made sure they were soft, and mushed them through a strainer (a process that took several hours to glean a total of two cups of pulp, making me suspect that the thrill of the chase has more to do with their underground popularity than any aspect of the fruits themselves).

Having collected the fruit in that way, I stuck the pulp in the freezer and tried to find out what to do with them. There seem to be two ways to use persimmon pulp: (1) in an English-style Christmas pudding and (2) in cookies. Because the pudding recipes I could find were heavy on the milk and best served with whipped cream, I was hesitant to go there. I didn’t want to waste my hard-scavenged persimmon pulp on a modified recipe that risked being terrible, but neither did I want to commit to something that I wouldn’t be able to eat. Also, cookies seemed kind of boring.

I stayed in this persimmon limbo for a year, and finally decided that I needed to make something with the pulp, if only to decide whether to forage again this year. After scouring the internet — by which I mean ‘using Tastebook‘ — I came up with two recipes for my first attempt. One is an English-style pudding, liberal on the brandy, which I’ll test when it gets cold and possibly make for my birthday (just as soon as I figure out how to rig up the steaming container). The other is a spice cookie recipe, advertised as ‘an old family recipe’ which I am hopeful means it was designed for use with native persimmons. The cookie recipe I made last night, with much effort — I locked up my touchy shoulder mixing up the dough; I recommend a mixer — and not a small amount of trepidation. The cookies turned out well, though, much to my relief. Substituting in canola oil and egg beaters worked fine; the persimmon flavor is not strong, but the texture is nice so even just as a spice cookie they’re enjoyable.


Persimmon cookies.

persimmon cookies

winter squash bars

girl, , , Leave a comment


The freezer.

The major challenge I face with regard to processing and storing all the produce we receive with our farm share is the limited space in the freezer. We agreed to get a chest freezer this summer, but haven’t wanted to go ahead with that purchase until we get the basement repairs taken care of. Which leaves us with the fridge freezer, which is about half full of fruit from the summer (tart cherries, blueberries, and rhubarb) and 1/4 full of other prepared food (pesto, hummus, baba ghanouj, chicken stock, and tomato sauce). Which leaves about 1/4 of the freezer for regular things (butter, bread, coffee beans, salmon, and turkey burgers) and any additional prepared food I might try to fit in. You begin to see my problem, and this is after removing the bottle of gin with an inch at the bottom that my partner pointed out was occupying prime real estate in the door (‘Gin? What gin? I don’t have a bottle of gin in the freezer, what kind of alcoholic do you think I am, sheesh. Oh, that bottle of gin…’). I really should just drink that and be done with it.

One of the other containers taking up space in the freezer was a quart of cooked squash from last winter, most likely butternut. At any rate, 4 cups of squash. In order to make room in the freezer for the cooked pumpkin from this year that is destined to be pie in a few weeks, I thawed out the already-frozen squash and used it to make Winter Squash Bars:

Winter Squash Bars, from Simply in Season
(yields 24-32 bars)

Beat together in a mixing bowl:
2 cups winter squash (cooked, pureed)
1 1/2 cups sugar
3/4 cup oil
4 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla
1/2 tsp. salt

Combine separately and then mix into the wet ingredients:
1 cup white flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. ground cinnamon

Pour into lightly greased 11 x 17” jelly roll pan. Bake in preheated oven at 350F for 25-30 minutes.

As with just about every recipe I’ve made from Simply In Season, the bars were really good. In addition to using up squash, they use up eggs, 4 per batch (so if you also have more eggs than you know what to do with from, for example, your CSA, this recipe will help get rid of them). More like gingerbread than cookie bars, they were a hit with everyone: me, my partner, my friend from high school, her mother, my partner’s gaming guys. Four cups made two batches, about 5 dozen bars in all. While they still tasted good after being stored in tupperware overnight, the tops went from a nice bright orange to a bit brown; don’t be put off by that if it happens to you.

The next squash plan is soup, if I can (1) get some apples at the farmers’ market and (2) make some room in the freezer.

winter squash bars

summer of pie

girl, , Leave a comment


My first cherry pie.

This summer has been full of pies, and I expect I’m not quite done yet as I’ve promised a friend a peach pie for her September birthday. The peach pie will be the sixth pie of the summer, and I think that’s a nice round number. I’m sure there will be apple pies and sweet potato pies and the like in autumn, but we’ll take those when they come.

To kick off the pie making, we celebrated the 4th of July by having dinner with the family of my good friend from college, to which my contribution was a cherry pie. I had planned to make a peach pie, knowing that was a favorite of our host, but the folks at the fruit stand assured me that the only local peaches good for pie-making didn’t ripen until later in the summer. Despite my best efforts to seek assurances that the peaches they sold for eating fresh would be fine in pies, they held steady and advised me to go with their fresh tart cherries. I wasn’t a hard sell; cherry pie is my favorite. Knowing that tart fresh cherries are hard to find and wouldn’t be available long, I took the plunge and snapped up ten quarts, enough for five pies. Two of those quarts I made into a delicious pie, and eight of those quarts I pitted and froze for use later in the year.

Despite what we might assume about pie, it wasn’t a given that the cherry pie would be delicious. Mostly because I have been experimenting with whole wheat crusts and wasn’t entirely sure how that was going to turn out. Using the newly widely available Organic White Whole Wheat flour from King Arthur, I can say that their ‘just like white flour but brown!’ advertising is truthful. Unlike with traditional whole wheat flour, the white whole wheat flour performs pretty much the same in recipes; it has a subtly different taste, but it’s not as grainy or flat as replacement with traditional whole wheat flour tends to be. It’s more brown, which bothers some people but I personally like. I’ve also discovered that the crust recipe I use is perfectly suited for assembly in a food processor, which boosts the performance of the wheat flour as the dough is only minimally handled. The other factor in the cherry pie, which wasn’t likely to impact the taste, was the lattice top, another first for me. I went, shall we say, rustic with it: I made the strips of dough wider and included fewer of them, making the whole lattice assembly go more quickly and easily. In the end, of course, it was a delicious homemade cherry pie and nobody noticed any of the things I’d worried about (the above plus my concern that there was more juice than there should have been in the filling and my overcompensating by adding in some tapioca).

Following the cherry pie success, I made an apricot-ginger pie just because the fruit folks had fresh apricots that reminded me of the tree my grandparents used to have at the side of their house. That pie was ok — it was a homemade pie — but I wouldn’t go out of my way to buy apricots again in the future. If I had a tree in my yard, the pie would be a perfectly reasonable way of using them if I weren’t planning to spend hours making jam. Since I don’t, it was a good experiment that I fed mostly to my partner’s weekly gaming crew.

After a lull in pie-making during which we traveled around and recovered from being ill, I made three blueberry pies in the course of a couple of weeks. In the past I’ve been loathe to use the fresh blueberries for pies, but by the time they make it back to our fridge the oldest ones are invariably starting to wilt a bit, making them ideal for baking. Blueberry pies are always an appreciated contribution to a dinner with friends, which was the destiny of two of the pies, and a handy way to welcome new neighbors, which was the destiny of a portion of the third pie. Not all pies get more tasty after a day in the fridge, but I find that my favorites typically do: cherry, apple and blueberry (now you know).

In the course of all this pie-making and transporting, I had the opportunity to use my handy pie carrier — for which I was heartily mocked last year when I purchased it, I must say, the phrase of choice being something like ‘how often are you taking a pie somewhere really?’ I still think it’s one of the best investments of $8 I’ve made for the house, and have found that almost every time I make a pie it’s headed to someone else’s house. I was, though, disappointed to discover that the crust guard I received as a gift a couple of years ago doesn’t fit on my large pie plates, but I’m hopeful that it will still fit on the smaller metal one. And, I can continue to heartily recommend the Williams-Sonoma Pie and Tart cookbook, as the blueberry and apricot-ginger recipes came from them (the cherry pie recipe did not, but instead from Bon Appétit via the internet, as the Williams-Sonoma recipe called for canned cherries).


Pie never lasts long at our house.

summer of pie