fruit

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

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

food : all things quince

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Quinces from our backyard.

One of the best surprises we’ve had as we’ve gotten to know our house and yard was the discovery of quince trees in the rear corner of our neighbor’s yard, along the border between our two properties. Because we are the neighbor to the south, and there are other trees to the north in our neighbor’s yard, the trees grow toward the sun, overhanging our rear sidewalk and garage. During the first year we were here, we saw one or two yellow things on the ground by the back fence, and commented to each other that an animal must have dragged an apple or something into the yard and left it there. That was the sum total of the interest we paid in the situation and the energy we expended in addressing it: very little. We were busy with other parts of the yard, and a bit overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work it would take to clean up the property; the last thing we wanted to do was investigate mysterious happenings out by the garage.

The second year we were here, we spent more time in the yard during the autumn clearing the ivy, pruning the trees, and covering the weed-laden garden beds with a thick leaf mulch. During all that time in close proximity to the rear yard, we noticed that the yellow fruits were actually growing on the trees, and were littering our rear sidewalk by early November. This piqued our curiosity, and we consulted one of my partner’s colleagues who grows quite a lot of his own fruits and vegetables on a lovely piece of land that used to be part of a dairy farm. He told us we had quinces, a fruit of which I had only heard vague and mysterious references to before that point. Nonetheless, I gathered them up and set them on the back steps to cure while I figured out what to do with them.


Quince jelly.


Quince paste.

There are, it appears, two things to do with quinces. You can make jelly or you can make membrillo, a thick paste that is a favorite dessert in Spain that’s served with manchego cheese. You can also bake and poach them, mixing them in with apple desserts for additional flavor, which we tried as well. With two dozen enormous yellow fruits having literally dropped from the sky into our yard and folks all over the internet raving about the glory of the flavor of the quince, I decided there was nothing for it but to make jelly…and membrillo, since it would be a shame to have all the pulp just go to waste. This was my first foray into canning, and I had to improvise somewhat. I used a stockpot for the boiling water bath (which, by the way, I don’t recommend) and set to work chopping and boiling and draining and boiling and skimming and stirring and pouring, ending up with about a dozen half-pints of jelly and about 20 pieces of membrillo. Happily, everybody I know seems to love membrillo, a delicacy I had never heard of before embarking on this new culinary path. We were able to give away the membrillo, in addition to serving it to guests at every opportunity, and enjoyed the jelly for much of the year. I also learned that canning is actually not that hard — although quince jelly is arguably the easiest product to start with, containing just the right amount of natural pectin to gel on its own and turning a lovely deep rose color to let you know when it’s done.

Following this roaring success, we made a concerted effort to help the trees this year. We cut back the ivy that surrounds them and pruned all the not-inconsiderable deadwood. Once we knew what to look for, the trees became incredibly easy to identify, and we were pleased to discover two small saplings at the sides of the main grove, no doubt sprung up from fruits left to lie under the thick ivy ground cover. Later in the spring we were rewarded first by flowers and then by little green fruits. Little green fruits which soon littered the ground when the gale-force winds of the early summer storms blew through. This autumn, there was not a single yellow fruit on any of the trees, much to our disappointment. We are hopeful that quinces are like some varieties of pears, with large and small production years, and that next year will be a banner year. In the meantime, I have been combing the internet for a mail-order source of quince fruits, to no avail, having learned the hard way that their floral flavor is truly as addictive as quince fans claimed!


Tarte tatin, with a layer of quince slices — magnifique!

food : all things quince

food : canning applesauce

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Applesauce!

In order to preserve for future use the 30 pounds of apples acquired on our first apple-picking expedition, I chose to make applesauce. As with the apple pie filling, I used a mix of Stayman, Braeburn, and Empire. I used a recipe that called for 1.5 pounds of apples, 1 tbsp. of lemon juice, and 2 tbsp. of sugar per pint. I used about 1/3 cup of sugar for the whole batch, and mashed the cooked apples with a potato masher until uniformly chunky. Then 25 minutes in the hot water bath and I was done. The result was a bit tart, but very tasty. We’ve eaten two of the seven pints already!

We’re planning another trip to the farm, and I’m thinking I’ll make some applesauce mixes the next time. Maybe rhubarb (I have a lot of that diced in the freezer) or cranberry. I can’t find a cranberry applesauce recipe I like, but I’m thinking of just adding a cup of fresh cranberries to the whole batch and seeing how that works out. I’m also considering making apple chutney or something along those lines. We’ll see how many apples I end up needing to make something with. Regardless, the pints and half-pints are much easier to process, and I think I’ll stick with that size until I get a more authentic canning setup (I’m currently using a stockpot and a steamer tray).

food : canning applesauce