Strawberries Are In—and They Are Fine!

I had heard all about the brutal winter and soggy spring this year, and I thought, oh no, not another growing season (or lack thereof) like 2009. So I was really surprised when, driving right past the fruit lady on my way into Little Compton because I wasn’t expecting anything¸ I glimpsed little boxes of red in my rear-view mirror. I was too tired from traveling to turn around, but when I got to Walker’s I pulled in, hoping for lettuce. There was beautiful lettuce—more about that later—but also strawberries. Walker’s own: he used to buy them from others and they were always priced too high, but apparently has decided to add some fruit to his largely vegetable-focused farm. $3.50 a pint, and gorgeous.
The modern commercial strawberry has a lot in common with the modern commercial tomato: it’s huge and red. And also tasteless, pulpy, all-core-and-no-flesh inside, fragrance-free, and generally inedible. It has a half-life of about a zillion years. It is just a red, strawberry-shaped mutant, best relegated to a centerpiece or the decorating of hats. I never buy them. And certainly don’t eat them. Just like commercial tomatoes.
So is it too much to say that this year’s strawberries are iconic? Red right through, natch. Virtually core-less. Perfectly shiny-ripe. Naturally sweet. Strawberry-scented. Juicy. Juicy enough for—strawberry shortcake.
I know I’ve made it for the blog before. But this has a few little twists, so I hope you’ll forgive the repeat. The strawberries are worth an encore.

Strawberry Shortcake with Cheese Biscuits
I had some store cheese, so decided to make cheese biscuits to pair with the berries for a kind of sweet-salty match. Serves 4.

1 ½ c flour
½ tea salt
1 T sugar
1 T b.p.
5 T cold, unsalted butter
½ c whole milk
½ c grated store cheese

1 pt local strawberries
sugar
1 cup light cream or heavy cream, preferably unhomogenized
½ tea vanilla
2 tea superfine sugar
Mint for garnish (optional)
Preheat the oven to 350F. Sift the flour, salt, sugar, and b.p. Cut in the butter with a knife or your fingers until crumbly; do not overwork. Add the milk, blending with a fork or your hands until the dough just is almost together; add the cheese and blend until it is together but still rough; again, do not overwork. Dust the counter with flour and turn out the dough, patting and lightly folding it until it holds together, then pat it into a uniform rectangle about 1 ½” thick. Cut out biscuits with a 3” cookie cutter or glass. Gather the scraps, pat them together, and cut them out as well.
Place the biscuits on a baking sheet and let rest for about ½ hr. Brush lightly with cream or milk. Sprinkle with a little additional grated cheese. Bake 15 minutes, or until golden and crisp on the outside. Cool on a rack. I usually get about 5 high biscuits from this amount of dough, and eat one soon after they are done.
Hull and slice the strawberries into a bowl; add sugar to taste to draw out the juices and let sit for about 10 minutes.
In part because of the richness of the biscuit, these shortcakes are served a little differently—instead of with whipped cream, I pour lightly sweetened cream over it, as you know I often do with fruit desserts. You of course can whip your cream if you want, but don’t make it too sweet. Use light or heavy cream, mix it with a small amount of superfine sugar (2 teaspoons) and a little vanilla; just warm it a bit to help the sugar dissolve.
Split the biscuits, spoon some berries with their juices over the bottom halves; cover with the tops and more berries, then pour the cream generously over all. Garnish with the mint and serve.  By the way, these biscuits freeze very well. A light toasting brings them back to nearly as good as fresh out of the oven.

                                                                

Leaving (Left) Nashvegas: Pushing further South(west)

 

I meant to send this a month ago. It’s news, capital N. It’s an explanation for all those endless drawing-down-inventory posts about cleaning out my freezer. And it is, quite possibly, motivation to get back to my blog.

I’ve left Vanderbilt, which means I’ve left Nashville (a little ‘Hurrah!’ is not out of place). Before I left I was going to blog a list of the top 10 things I won’t miss, but I couldn’t narrow it down. Besides, this is a food blog. So I decided to make a list of the top food things I would miss. This too proved really, really hard—in part related to what I won’t miss. I came up with one, maybe two things. Not exactly a list. So I’ll just tell you about the leaving part.

Leaving was fun. I had a great last semester of teaching, thanks to my uniformly wonderful students and my few sane and supportive friends. Lots of feting, drinks, dinners from both. As typical, there was food for my last classes. And as typical, I forgot to take photos, because I wasn’t specifically cooking for the blog. Fortunately, in my graduate ethics class, a few students snapped these photos with their phones. We had quite a spread, with many contributions from students. I  made cold sesame noodles, summer rolls, Asian-style pickles, and orange-scented date bars with the gorgeous medjool dates I use for date-nut bread. Students brought everything from beer cheese and pretzels to sweet rice rolls, sushi, pasta, veggies and dip, and desserts—brownies, cookies, peanut butter bars, pineapple “casserole,” a kind of crumble. We fixed ourselves plates before sitting down to watch an ethics movie, The Insider, about a whistleblower (Russell Crowe) and the journalist who works with him to reveal his story (Al Pacino). For another class, I made a lemon meringue pie and a yellow 3-layer cake with buttercream fillng and a ganache frosting. Forgot to take a picture of the cake. But really good. 

Leaving implies arriving somewhere; that was fun, too. I’ve moved to Tucson to join the University of Arizona faculty. Can I tell you how happy I was to see a chile roaster at the farmer’s market selling entire bags of fresh, warm-from-the-roaster bags of roasted and peeled poblanos and red peppers, maybe 8 to a bag, for $5.00? So many locally made tortillas, including these mesquite flour tortillas? The amazing El Super, where everything “cuesta menos”?

More about all that later, because now for the really good news…for me, but also, hopefully, for you:

I’m in Little Compton!

                                                 

LCM 4th Anniversary Today: Reflections on my blog-child

Like everything with children growing up, this 4^th blog birthday snuck up on me. Four years old! It seems like yesterday when I wrote the first post about morning in Little Compton—time to wake up and start thinking about what’s for dinner while drinking coffee, ideally while strolling outside, followed by a piece of pie for breakfast (and then for lunch…).

Naturally, I devoted motherly attention to my blog during its first year, learning as I went about how to make it work (getting the photos right, for instance). The doting continued well into the second year, but then the blog entered the metaphorical terrible twos (and threes). But I can’t really blame the blog for this; it’s more like I became a neglectful mother. A guilt-ridden one, of course, but neglectful nevertheless. Busy working (Moving! So many papers to write! Courses to teach! Grading!). I really wonder if people realize that the vast majority of consistently updated blogs are written by people who don’t work—or for whom the blog is their work. Maybe I’ll get to that point some day.

Of course, there are also those bloggers, including many fine ones, who do work, but are still so young (let’s say, under 40 or so) that they have the energy to do their cooking and blogging at night. I was like that once, but alas, no more—I do fade at the end of the day. So until I retire (ha), or am able to work from home to allow cooking-in-between (ha), a neglected, on-again, off-again blog it will be. I do try to compensate for all the silences and weak-sister posts during the summers when I have more time (and when there is more fruit and veggies and other bounty for inspiration), and for the most part, I think I’ve done all right on that score. Thank you for your patience.

Which I hope will be rewarded. For better or worse, I am one of those people for whom hope springs eternal, in a Pollyanna kind of way, so I expect the blog, as it enters its 5^th year, to smooth out a little, and to return to a more regular rhythm. I may not match the nearly 5 posts a month of the first couple years, but I am not ready to give up my child yet. I don’t at all mind not having lots of comments on my posts; while I’d like more because I think it would mean I’d be reaching a more diverse reader group, I get lots of emails instead; that’s the kind of reader I have, and I like the friendliness of it and the fact that people feel a personal enough connection to actually write. In fact, I’ve made friends through my blog, and good ones: who knew? I want to return not just to cooking for you, but to writing for you, well. I still have lots of New England specialties to cover. And pies to make before I sleep, and pies to make before I sleep.

Speaking of which:

New England-y Shoofly Pie

This is for you, racheld, as promised. Shoofly pie is one of the pies my Pennsylvania German grandmother used to make; I have made it a little more New England with maple syrup, completely consistent with its general genre of “syrup pie.” There’s lots of room for variation here, in both the sweeteners used and the spices. Shoofly pie is a classic pie-for-breakfast kind of pie, right up there with fruit pies, possibly because of its strong flavor that goes well with coffee. Serves 8—because it is rich.

Pastry for a 9” pie prepared according to your favorite recipe, or this one. Use a glass pie plate if you have one.

1 c flour
½ c firmly packed light brown sugar
4 T unsalted butter, softened
½ tea cinnamon
¼ tea cardamom
1/8 t freshly ground nutmeg
big pinch ground cloves
Pinch salt

½ c unsulphured molasses (mild or strong, to your taste)
¼ c pure maple syrup
¾ c boiling water, cooled slightly
1 large egg
1 tea vanilla extract
½ tea chocolate extract (optional, but nice)
1 tea baking soda

Preheat the oven to 400 F. Roll out the pastry and fit it into a standard 9” pie pan; crimp the edges, and chill the crust while you make the crumbs and filling.

Lightly mix the flour, sugar, and spices and work the butter in with your hands to form crumbs. Set aside.

In a small bowl or large glass measure, mix the molasses, the maple syrup, extract(s), baking soda, and hot water. Beat the egg and stir it into the syrup mixture. You can either pour this into the pie shell and top with the crumbs; layer it, beginning and ending with the crumbs; or about half the crumbs into the filling as I remember my grandmother doing. Doing this or layering makes for a slightly “dryer” versus “wetter” pie, as shoo fly pies are often described.

Bake the pie for 10 minutes; it will puff up (and some of the filling may rise above the crumbs as in the picture; that’s OK). Reduce the heat to 325 F and bake for another 20-25 (likely) minutes, until evenly brown and lightly firm but still springy in the center. Remove and cool on a rack to warm room temperature. You can serve it with whipped cream, ice cream, yogurt (which is good), or on its own.

        

 

And here, made with the re-rolled pastry scraps, is a jelly tart, just like my grandmother used to do, made with last summer’s seedless raspberry jam. Eaten hot out of the oven as the cook’s treat—delicious.

Almonds

 

Yes, this is still about leftovers, but I’m tired of reminding myself, and everyone else, that I am still clearing out the freezer. It’s kind of fun, though, to discover things you’d forgotten about. Today it was 8 oz of the Mürbteig pastry from the Cuisinart/New York Cheesecake post, and a bag of almonds from the holdiays, both still in excellent condition (thanks to their fat, of course, and a very cold freezer). I didn’t really have a lot of time, so decided to use the pastry to make a few simple cookies. The dough is so rich and flavorful on its own that it needs little else but a simple garnish, something that almonds are perfect for. You could use these to make little sandwich cookies with buttercream or ganache, but you’d have to have the lightest possible touch, as they break under pressure. Besides, these are very good just as they are.

Tender Pastry Cookies

The fragility of these simple cookies makes them seem rather fancy. They are good on their own or with ice cream. Makes about 10 cookies.

8 oz Mürbteig pastry, very cold
2 oz whole almonds
1 oz (2 T) turbinado sugar
1 egg white
1 tea simple syrup (optional)

Preheat the oven to 325 F.

Put the sugar and the almonds in a small food processor; pulse to chop medium-fine. Set aside.

Roll the pastry out between two sheets of wax paper to a thickness of between ¼” and 1/3.” Slide onto a baking sheet and chill again. Remove the top sheet of the paper. Using a 1 ¾” fluted biscuit cutter, quickly cut the dough into rounds and lift them gently, using a narrow spatula, onto an ungreased baking sheet. Form and re-roll the scraps, chilling again if needed, and cut the remainder. Brush the tops lightly with egg white, beaten with a teaspoon or so of simple syrup if you have it. Sprinkle generously with the almond-sugar mixture. Chill 10 minutes. Bake 18-20 minutes, turning once. Don’t try to edit a paper while they are baking, or you may let them go a minute too long, as I did. Carefully remove to a rack to cool.

                                                                          

Drawing Down Inventory V: Egg Whites

In the continuing saga—or slog—of spring cleaning of the freezer, this week I used up all the egg whites. I had about 2 cups. I thawed them all, then used about a half-cup over the course of a few days for various uses (including a facial mask), and the rest for an angel food cake. Angel food cake is the perfect use for leftover egg whites. It meets the two crucial criteria previously discussed for freezer inventory: it’s quick, and it uses lots. In fact, an angel cake uses anywhere from 12-14 egg whites, or 1 ½-1 2/3 cups of egg white, depending on egg size. And it has the added benefit of being, of course, delicious. Because it requires so many whites, most people don’t make this old-fashioned cake anymore, and I only make it about once a year (freezer cleaning time). So it is sort of special.
Before getting into the cake itself, it might be worth talking about the storing of egg whites in the first place. Obviously, every time you make something that calls for an egg yolk, either for extra richness or to glaze something, you should put the unused white away in the freezer. I like to use a glass canning jar because you can more easily track how many you have as you go; I usually also mark the number on a piece of tape on the lid, sort of like keeping score in hangman, but this isn’t really necessary because in the end you are going to measure them anyway. But it’s kind of helpful for gauging what you have or need when they’re still frozen—e.g., if you have 7 notches on the lid, you know you probably need another half-dozen for a cake. Remember that 1 egg white is about 1 oz, depending on its size. I needn’t lecture you on the importance of separating your eggs cleanly so that there is not one bit of yolk in your whites. The secrets to this, of course, are: very fresh eggs; separating them when they are cold; and using your hands over a bowl as your separating tool. Now, about angel food cake. It should be very light, high, and tender. It is sweet, but not cloyingly so. You can, as I do here, reduce the sugar a bit with minimal trade-off in height, and partner the cake with something to offset or balance the sweetness. Angel food needs to be cut gently with a serrated knife and a gradual, light sawing motion; it is usually served in rather sizeable wedges, although it can be cut thinly, particularly after it is a day old (and still good).
Angel cake is, as I said, a very airy old-fashioned treat. Many newer recipes contain confectioner’s sugar (10x), which gives the cake a more velvety texture, and allows it to be sliced more like a conventional cake. Those cakes are excellent in their own way, but are not as traditional. Here is how my grandmother made angel food cake—a classic cake made with granulated sugar only, and then glazed with a quite bitter icing made with Baker’s unsweetened chocolate—all that was available for home bakers when I was growing up. We all loved it. Actually, everybody does. I serve it here with the coulis from last week’s freezer clean-out.
Grandma’s Angel Food Cake with Chocolate Glaze
Angel cake should be tender and moist, not dry. Serves 10-12.
Angel Food
1 ¼ sugar (to be divided as instructed)
1 ½ c egg whites, at room temperature
1 T warm water
2 tea vanilla
Few drops pure almond extract (optional)
¼ tea salt
1 ½ tea cream of tartar
1 cup cake flour
Preheat the oven to 350F. Use a 10” aluminum tube pan with straight sides (the specialty pan for this cake); do not use a nonstick pan. 
Put the sugar in the food processor and whiz for 10 seconds or so (alternatively, you can use superfine sugar, but it is expensive). Remove ¼ cup and set the rest aside.
Take out 2 sheets of wax paper. Sift together the flour and ¼ cup sugar onto one sheet of wax paper. Place the sifter onto the other sheet, lift the flour-sugar mixture on its paper and pour it back into the sifter and sift again. Repeat this two more times.
Put the egg whites and water into a standing mixer fitted with the balloon whisk. Beat at medium speed until foamy. Add the vanilla, almond extract if using, salt, and cream  of tartar. Turn the mixer on to medium-high and beat, gradually adding the remaining 1 cup sugar, until the egg whites are voluminous and voluptuous, forming soft, rounded mounds and medium-sharp peaks. The meringue should remain very shiny and homogeneous and moist; be very careful not to overbeat so as not to break the meringue into clumps.
Pour the flour/sugar mixture back into the sifter and sift it over the egg whites, gently folding it in with a rubber spatula, in 5 or 6 batches. Lift and turn the whites carefully, ensuring complete incorporation of the flour. Using the spatula, scoop the batter into the pan, mounding it evenly around the center. Cut through the batter once with a butter knife. Smooth the top.
Bake for about 35 minutes, until golden brown. The top will be cracked, but the cake will not pull from the sides. Remove as soon as it is done—if overbaked, it can collapse--and immediately turn it upside down on a rack or, as my grandmother did, a bottle. Let the cake cool completely. To remove from the pan, run a long, thin, flexible non-serrated knife (I use my French thin slicing knife, which can be pressed along the shape of the pan) around the outside edge of the pan and the center hole. Grasp the center tube and remove the cake from the pan. Then with one smooth motion, turning the cake as you go, slide the knife between the cake bottom and the pan base.
Lift the cake and place it on a cake plate lined with two pieces of wax paper that meet in the center. Glaze as follows.

Bitter Chocolate Glaze
3 oz unsweetened chocolate
2 T unsalted butter
2 tea corn syrup (optional—Grandma did not use)
½ tea pure vanilla extract
½-3/4 cup water
Pinch salt
Over low heat, melt the chocolate and the butter, stirring occasionally. Add the corn syrup if using, and the vanilla. Gradually add water, stirring, until smooth and pourable, but with enough body to spread—approximately like pastry cream. Pour and spread over the cake with an offset icing spatula or knife (my grandmother did not have an offset spatula), smoothing the sides and making sure to cover the cake in the center hole. Put it into the refrigerator for about 10 minutes to set; remove the wax paper strips.

To serve and store
Cut the cake with a serrated knife into large slices, using a gently sawing motion—no pressing down. They say those angel food cutters work well, but neither I nor my grandmother have/had one; I like the smooth-faced slices I get from a knife. Serve as is or with berry coulis or vanilla ice cream. Or both. Other nice accompaniments in place of the chocolate glaze are caramel icing (this makes for a rather sweet dessert) or lemon curd. Store on the counter under a glass dome, or freeze. If there is any left over and it begins to get too dry, try toasting it briefly under a hot broiler; the icing will melt, and form a sauce. But a well-made angel food cake actually keeps quite well for a few days.

              

Drawing Down Inventory IV: Frozen Strawberries and Raspberries

 

For several reasons, I am under pressure to get the freezer fully cleaned out a little earlier than usual. More about that later. Spring is the time of anticipation, so that can wait.

Taking stock, so to speak, of the freezer, reveals an awful lot of frozen berries (it should be spelled aweful, not awful, because what could be bad about a lot of berries?). I often make muffins with frozen berries, an item to which they are well suited; muffins are quick, and when you are cleaning out the freezer, that is perhaps the most desirable feature in a suitable application. Another is recipes that use a large quantity—with muffins, that is usually not the case.

So I made some muffins—lemon-strawberry (lemons are cheap again right now). But also some coulis, which has the virtue of letting you easily use as much as you have and will keep nicely in the refrigerator for a few weeks to garnish other items made from other freezer inventory. Hmm. There’s something wrong with this picture, but I don’t have time to puzzle it through. I’m sure, however, that it has to do with some sort of major philosophical question about the weird cycle of hoarding and disgorging, or about pareto optimality—are we making things we would not otherwise make? Thankfully, I am not an economist, so don’t feel compelled to answer that one. And can take comfort in the knowledge that any answer the economists come up with will be wrong.

Frozen Fruit Coulis

I like to use a coulis for its fruity berry flavor, not for sweetness. This does not contain much sugar. The touch of pepper gives it a subtle edge. Makes about 2 ½ cups.

4 cups whole frozen berries (I used about half raspberries and half strawberries; the raspberries dominate) 
1 ½ cups cane sugar
Juice of half a lemon (about 2 T)
Pinch salt and white pepper

Combine all ingredients in a nonreactive, preferably slope-sided, pan. Bring to a boil and cook, skimming and stirring, for about 5 minutes, breaking up the larger berries with the edge of a wooden spoon. Strain over a bowl, pressing the solids against the side of the strainer. Strain again to catch any escaped seeds (if you have a small strainer, you can do this directly into jars). Pour into jars or other containers; store in the refrigerator and use to garnish cakes, desserts,  and cold meats/composed salads.

 

                   

Pineapple: Sinful Pancakes

Every March 1 the International House of Pancakes hosts National Pancake Day when they give away free pancakes. I’ve never been, but it’s a nice idea. National Pancake Day coincides, roughly, with Shrove Tuesday, a day of indulgence prior to atoning for one’s sins, by fasting, during Lent. Or so I’ve heard, being pretty much of a heathen myself. Fasting is not part of my moral outlook.

Nevertheless, I do like the idea of indulging in pancakes, so on March 1 I joined the party by making pancakes at home. Yes, it’s taken me that long to get around to writing this. It’s not that I’m not thinking about it, or not cooking and taking photos; it’s the sitting down to put it together that takes so much time. Thankfully, photos will wait.

I love pancakes, as other pancake posts on this site attest. I just counted them, and there are four: here, here, here, and here. (And that doesn’t even include the posts on thick and thin johnnycakes.) Since I try not to repeat myself too much (this gets harder as we get older, as we all know), that tally of posts is an indication of just how much I do love the fried little disks. I’d eat them every day, occasionally interspersed with French Toast (I really should do an entry on that) if I could. Or rather, if I didn’t think it would be better for me if I didn’t. Because of course, one could, and has. When I make pancakes, I eat them for days in a row, in part because the batter improves as it ages in the refrigerator. I confess I have gone through some periods where I ate pancakes every day for months. But yes, I did gain weight. Time to stop.

The run-up to National Pancake Day/Shrove Tuesday also happened to coincide with a discussion I was following on the wonderful food forum, e-gullet, in which was described something I had never heard of before: a casserole made of pineapple and cheddar cheese. This sounded disgusting to me at first, and chemically suspect, from a food science standpoint. But I became persuaded from various comments that this was a combination worth trying. I also happen to be in the South at the moment, and since this casserole seemed clearly to be one of those Southern aberrations and I am very much a when-in-Rome sort of person, the deal was sealed. I bought the ingredients.

But then National Pancake Day came along to distract me, and the casserole idea went out the window, at least until the next time I make a ham (the dish to which the pineapple-cheddar casserole is purported to be a traditional accompaniment). Why not pineapple-cheddar pancakes instead? Indeed.

Pineapple-Cheddar Pancakes

These are a bit like my favorites made with farmer’s cheese. Like them, they contain very little flour, need to be cooked slowly and thoroughly, and are very moist inside. This  particular batter will not keep; it would ferment. Serves 3-4.

1 cup fresh cored pineapple, cubed
½ cup 2% cottage cheese
1 large egg
1 T firmly packed light brown sugar
½ cup packed shredded very sharp cheddar, such as store cheese
½ c a-p flour, approx.
1 tea baking powder
¼ tea baking soda
¼ tea salt

Pulse the pineapple in the food processor with the cottage cheese until smooth (there will be some pineapple shreds remaining). Stir in the remaining ingredients in the order given, adding enough flour to make a soupy, thickish, but not stiff, batter.

Heat a griddle to medium (about 350F if you are using electric); you may need to lower it a little as you cook. Butter the griddle and drop or pour the batter into small rounds,  about 3-4” in diameter. Cook for 1-2 minutes, checking by sliding your spatula underneath; if too dark, lower the heat. Do not try to turn until the spatula slides easily across the bottom. Turn, and cook until the second side is brown and completely cooked. Serve with maple syrup.