…into this….

…and this.

Emily and I picked these pears from a tree in my friend Mary’s back yard. They are seckel pears, a small, sweet, and delicate variety! Heli-Claire, my dad and I peeled them and preserved them in maple syrup with brown sugar and lemon juice last fall. Today I made tarts. I love the simplicity of opening a jar of preserved food, and having an almost instant dessert.

Tart crust: a basic pie dough. One recipe of dough makes two tarts.

Press the dough into tart pans and bake until dough is cooked through.

One quart jar of sickle pears preserved in maple syrup.

Reserve juice for boiling down into syrup.

Part of a vanilla bean, one cup cream, 1 T sugar, 1 T cornstarch, 1 T butter. Mixed, heated, and thickened to form a pastry cream.(Enough for one tart)

Layer the pastry cream in a baked tart shell. Place pears artistically on top. Don’t remove stems. (They were lovingly left in tact in the first place…) Drizzle tart with reduced maple syrup pear juice. Serve right away.

I started with the dough. It is a simple yeasted sweet dough, with a bit of sugar, sour cream, butter, and eggs. I mixed it with my mom’s Polish dough whisk, which is my new favorite kitchen tool. By far! The way that it incorporates the wet and dry ingredients is almost magical, and so much easier. I think it has to do with the way the wire is shaped. And the handle is lovely to hold, too. So well thought out!

I set the dough aside to rise, in a buttered bowl, covered with a tea towel. In a cold room, as I was going out for a little bit too long. I never seem to be able to match up my rising and baking times with when I can actually be home to let the dough rise, shape, bake, etc…

I made up the dough and filling, went out for a bit, and returned to a balloon of dough in my red bowl. It punched down nicely, and I shaped it into a large rectangle.

The filling is made up of finely chopped toasted almonds, chopped dried cherries, an egg, sugar, vanilla and almond extract. Oh, and butter!

I spread out the filling and sprinkled the cherries on top.

Then rolled the entire thing up into a log, and made a crescent.

And covered with a tea towel and set to rise again. This time more quickly, right above the fire.

And then into the oven. Bakety bake bake bake. I was tired, so I set the oven timer and went to bed, thinking that I would wake up when it dinged. I am not sure that I did… When I got up, it was still cooking, and ‘nicely browned’ on the top.

This years babka might be a little bit drier and crisper than last years, but still quite yummy. I need to have some coffee for it!

I was talking to my friend Emily a few days ago and we started discussing baking, and Christmas break, and I remembered that I needed to start another batch of grapefruit wine. I made (and blogged about) this recipe last year, and it turned out so well that I decided to make it again.

It is a recipe from Saving the Season, and originates in Southern France. It is a simple recipe. Place sugar in the bottom of several very large glass jars. Layer fruit on top, pressing down a bit as you go.

Add a little bit of chamomile and vanilla, and top with vodka and wine. Then let it sit for about 4o days before straining into bottles. The jars are mixed a bit and topped off during the first week.

This recipe makes me want to live near citrus trees so badly!!!

The weather has cooled off (relatively speaking), I have a box of ripe peaches in my kitchen, and a bag of this year’s pitted sour cherries in my freezer. Pie time!

I picked up a box of butter on my way home from work, and made up a double batch of pie dough. (I like to bake my pies in twos. When you go to all the trouble to bake a pie, might as well make another one…) For the filling, I used about 8 medium-sized peaches and one bag (about 6 cups of pitted cherries). I dropped the peaches in boiling water to skin, and sliced into wedges. I added about 1 1/4 cups sugar for both pies, and a bit of flour as the cherries were very juicy. And dotted the top of the fruit with a few tablespoons of butter.

I kept the tops covered, as opposed to lattice, as I have been doing a lot of crisscrossed tops lately and I wanted a change. I folded the tops and dough over, leaving a generous crust edge, which didn’t end up browning too much in the oven.

It is important to peel peaches, and to do so, I dropped them into boiling water for 30 seconds (as per mother’s instructions!). The peels come off very easily after the quick blanch. Then I sliced the peaches and added the blueberries, sugar, a lot of butter and a squeeze of lime to the pans. I put the pans into the oven and let the fruit cook for about 20 minutes. While the fruit was cooking, I made a biscuit topping with cream, butter, flour, sour milk, etc. I topped the baking fruits with spoonfuls of biscuit batter and popped everything back in the oven to finish cooking.

The finished cobblers were really runny right after I took the out of the oven. I was taking them into town with me, and every curve, pothole, and stop sign made the juices come close to dripping out of the pans. I used pie pans, and I think that it would probably be better to use casserole pans to contain the juices.

After the cobblers sat for a while, the top crust soaked up a lot of the juice, and the desserts were a lovely balance of fruit, crust and juice.

For the dutch oven cookoff we made a whiskey sour cherry spoon bread. A not too sweet cake, rich with butter, and filled with fruit. Cherries soaked for a few days in whiskey and sugar.

We preheated the dutch oven, melted the butter, and then added the cake batter. Then we carefully spooned in the sour cherries.

Then lidded the dish, making sure not to get any ashes in the cake, and set it aside to cook.

We whipped cream with vanilla and powdered sugar to serve with the spoon bread.

A simple and satisfying dessert.

I have a jar of cherries on my porch. They are solar cooking in a broth of sugar and whiskey. I got sick of pitting all the cherries, and this recipe called for unpitted (and unwashed) cherries, whiskey, and sugar. I had all the ingredients, as well as a quart jar, so I made use of them.

To pick the cherries, which were on a huge tree, my friend Duncan helped me out. We backed his pickup truck under the tree (over the sidewalk) and placed an 8 foot ladder in the bed of the truck. I used a pail with a handle attached to my overalls so that I had both hands free for picking the cherries and balancing.

The cherries “cook” for a month, and are supposed to last up to two years.

I found the recipe (originally made with brandy) in a cookbook on preserving fruits and vegetables according to French tradition, without canning. I am not one hundred percent sure that I trust this method, and might not end up leaving them in the sun the whole time…not sure.

I picked cherries in the rain, which was actually delightful. The rain washed the sticky ripe cherry juices off my arms as I picked, and the glistening cherries against the dark leaves were a treat to look at.

I brought the cherries home, set up camp on the porch (it had stopped raining) and pitted each and every cherry with my thumb. I have tried cherry pitters, but for small, ripe, sour pie cherries, the thumb works the best. After pitting the cherries, I put them in my jam cauldron layered with sugar. They sat for an hour (according to recipe) and then I heated the mixture to dissolve the sugar. Then the cherries rested again. Overnight this time. I woke up at 6 in the morning, with a clean kitchen, and heated the cherries and filled and processed the jars.

When I gave a nice little jar to my dad, I noticed, to my mild horror that there was a worm left in the jar…I guess organic means that worms get to enjoy the cherries as much as we do…and maybe I am not the best cherry worm remover.

I love the idea of strawberry pie. Fresh fruit, cream, and a buttery crust are all I need to be happy (for a few moments anyways). Oh, and maybe a sprig or two of mint, too.

Last night I got home with more strawberries than I knew what to do with. Well, not really, but there were a lot. Before bed, I mixed up a batch of pie dough. 1 1/2 cups flour, 1 stick butter, and a bit of ice water. I put the dough in the fridge over night, and this morning I rolled it out, pricked it, and popped it into the oven. I left the pie crusts on the counter to cool and ran off to work.

This afternoon, I came home and filled the pie shells with a whipped cream and yogurt mixture. It is one of my new favorites: very simple, fresh, and delicious. I used greek style hung yogurt mixed with sugar, lime zest and lime juice, and vanilla. To this mixture I added the whipped cream.

On top of the pies I added strawberries (whole around the edges, and sliced with sugar in the middle. I threw in a mango as well here. To garnish the pies I picked some mint from the garden.

All 6 assorted mini pies made it safely into town in my pie baskets.

My friend Bob has a huge garden, and the strawberries were ripe for picking last night. We went by, and picked tons! I came home with two turkey-roasting trays full (which is actually half full, as the fruits shouldn’t be layered too deep..). Last night I canned a batch of jam (and started crusts for pies).

Strawberry jam is a simple mixture of sugar, fruit, and lemon juice. I didn’t use much pectin, and the resulting jam was thin, which is perfect for things like pancakes and yogurt.

To thicken the jam a little bit, I boiled it for a while. You don’t want to boil the jam too much though, or you will over cook the fruit. hmmm..