strawberries part two (pie)
June 4, 2010
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.
strawberries part one (jam)
June 4, 2010
When there are strawberries, there ARE strawberries. As with most fruits, if you choose to eat them when they are fresh, you have to eat a lot of them, all at once. This is of course how to make up for not eating them the rest of the year. (It is also a good way to get a stomach ache.) Pick them, eat them, can them, eat them, make pies, and eat some more.
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..
green tomato tart
May 30, 2010
What to do when you get paid in green tomatoes?
At the end of a morning of playing music at the farmer’s market, we received a collection of treats from many of the different vendors! Among the items was a bag of green tomatoes, and I took them home to try to make a green tomato tart. I had a recipe in mind that I wanted to try from Lee Bailey’s Country Desserts, one of my favorite cookbooks.
The crust was very simple, a mixture of flour, powdered sugar, and butter, pressed into the bottom of the tart pan. No rolling out, and it tasted delicious! I am going to remember this for other recipes…
Then I arranged apple and green tomato slices around, covered with lemon juice and dusted with a sugar and flour mixture. (You are supposed to use corn starch, but I didn’t have any.)
The recipe only called for three tablespoons of sugar in the tart. At the end you are supposed to add 1/2 a cup of blackberry jam. I didn’t have any blackberry jam, and wanting to use up something that I had in my cupboard I substituted a jar of spicy jalapeno pepper jelly. I wasn’t sure if it would go…green tomato, apple, vinegar, and the sharp bite of pepper, but it ended up tasting pretty good.
rose petals
May 22, 2010
Oh, I love making jam. And canning things. Especially when it involves picking rose petals. They smell lovely, and leave my hands smelling rose-like. And they are photogenic. I hadn’t really thought about that, until I found myself stopping to gaze at the roses, petals, and process of turning them into jam.
Rose petals are easy to pick. They fall off the bush, and in our case, there are plenty of them! The rose bush at the store is huge. Sprawling all over the place. When the front and back doors are open at the store, the roses waft through. Mmm.
Rose petals in the cauldron. They cooked over low heat for 30 minutes. The result was a mauve rose essence, and a clump of petals.
The inclusion of lemon juice brightened the color (and probably flavor too).
The lemon juice turned the mauve rose syrup a sharp, deep pink.
The petals re-added to the syrup, and simmered until the jam thickened. The lemon pips and pith help with thickening, and are contained in cheesecloth.
And, finished jam. I tried to cut corners and boil the jars in a smaller pot (as there were so few) but I ended up cracking one as I didn’t have a rack underneath. Not going to do that again…
crostata
May 11, 2010
Erika taught Heli and I how to make crostata in Italy. She showed us how to make it in pretty much the same way her mother (and probably grandmother, etc, etc.) made it. Erika made one exception, she melted the butter. Somehow she was able to pull it off, but when I tried to repeat this feat, I ended up with a very very hard tart…
So Heli and I cut in the butter. And then add an egg, and a little milk, and let the dough chill. If you have an extra jar of jam, this is the perfect desert. Sweet, but not too sweet, and fresh with the zest of a lemon in the crust.
We made ours with Heli’s apricot jam. With the left over dough we made a mini crostata with pear butter.
We latticed the tops, and drove the tarts into town to bake at the store (again..).
We had a little tart for my mom’s birthday, and snacked here and there for the rest of the afternoon…
sunday eating
April 18, 2010
Asparagus Crepes with Smokey Pink Sauce
Warm Quinoa Salad with Cilantro, Lime, and Olives
Spiced Banana Pear Crepes with Star Anise and Vanilla
Lemon Lime Water
I have been in a banana mode recently, so after the crepe batter was mixed and in the fridge to wait, I prepared a crepe filling of spiced bananas and pears.
I put some butter in a tagine on the stove top, and added star anise and vanilla. Then bananas, pears, and pear butter for sweetener. And a dash of cinnamon! For extra liquid, I added a little juice from the pears. Oh, and a little lime zest and juice. I stirred the mixture on the stove top for a few minutes, and then placed it in a low oven (325 degrees) for about an hour.
Meanwhile….asparagus time!
I picked what we had in the garden, and washed the ends and sliced them for crepe filling number two. I sauteed the asparagus in a little butter and a tiny bit of water, until they were a vivid green. Then I set them in a dish in the warm oven.
Skye made the crepes, which had a little cornmeal and whole wheat flour (one third of the total flour used). The mixture was a little different, but turned out well. We were having issues with the burner heating unevenly, but by the end of the project, after all the crepes were made, we seemed to figure things out.
To top the asparagus, we made a white sauce with tomato paste (a pink sauce I guess), to which I added a dash of smoked paprika and some cheese. We also added some fresh chopped parsley.
In addition to the crepes, I made a warm quinoa salad, with cilantro, lime, olive oil, olives, and cubed cheese. Simple, quick and slightly warm. I served the salad on lettuce leaves, which we used to scoop up the salad and make little bundles.
For dessert, we had sweet crepes. The bananas and pears cooked down, and were warm and mildly sweet, and the star anise was delicious! The flavors brightened with a little squirt of fresh lime.
Because it was such a beautiful day, we set up a table outside in a sunny section of the yard. The table was made out of one of my plant shelves (now empty as the plants have moved outdoors) and the chairs were logs.
After lunch we went for an adventure in the woods, looking for mushrooms (which we still didn’t see…), and other things. We did see a coyote, the bluebells, and other interesting things…
heli-claire’s kitchen
April 14, 2010
A quick blog-ish note.
If you like food, and beautiful photographs of food, and entertaining write-ups about food, I would definitely recommend giving Heli-Claire’s Kitchen a peep. I am biased, of course, what can I say. But who doesn’t want to drool over cornmeal biscotti and potato pie funnelled with cream, or get tips on how to make a tart’s edges stand up to the heat??
I love to cook, bake, garden, harvest, etc with my sister (except when she makes me grate cheese), and so it is particularly fun to be able to see what she is doing in the world of food on a regular basis!
P.S. Here is her tidy, tiny, kitchen, in which she manages to do just about everything!
tarts come in twos
April 14, 2010
I made a lemon tart yesterday, and the tart shell recipe made enough dough for two pies. I have been carrying the extra tart shell around with me today (it made its way into town and back…), trying to decide what to fill it with.
I settled on a mango cream pie (of sorts). When I dropped the meyer lemon pie off at my friend’s workshop, he gave me two limes from his tree, and so I incorporated them into the pie as well. The limes were yellow, and I had the hardest time wrapping my mind around the fact that they looked like lemons. I really associate the smell and taste of lime with the deep green that they usually are.
My mom suggested to make a pastry creme of sorts using whipped cream and greek style hung yogurt. To the yogurt I added lime zest and juice, mixed with sugar. (An idea from Duncan.) As I whipped the cream, I added some Haitian vanilla. Then I folded the yogurt mixture into the cream, and spread into the tart pan. For the filling, I used 1 tiny box of cream (a cup??) and half of a package of Fage full cream yogurt. I added vanilla and sugar to taste, and the zest and juice of one very delicious lime.
On top of the cream, which was already filling the tart shell nicely, I placed some ripe slices of mango. (I peeled and cut up 4 medium sized yellow mangoes.) I think that this would be good with many fresh fruits. Berries, peaches, plums, etc!
They fit nicely in a little mound on the top of the cream.
To garnish, I ran over to my mom’s house and picked a few sprigs of mint, which have popped up in the garden in the past few weeks.
meyer lemon (what to do when someone gives you a single)
April 13, 2010
I live in Iowa. Meyer lemons don’t really grow here. Or lemons for that matter. (Just stating the obvious here..) So when my friend Duncan picked one off of his tree and handed it to me today I was delighted. He has a beautiful tree situated next a big south-facing window in his cozy workshop. I stopped by to drop off a piece of pie, and left with a lemon. Big, bright, and juicy.
I wanted to make something special. This was one of 6 lemons on the tree, and I wanted to use the whole lemon, or as much of it as I could. My first thought was to call my sister. She is a little baker, and always has good ideas. And she did, of course. A lemon tart. Because I only had one lemon (not the three that the recipe called for), and I wanted to keep the lemon’s integrity, I adjusted her recipe and made a “one lemon tart.”
One lemon’s zest, one lemon’s juice, one egg, and 1/6th of a cup sugar. And one tiny tart pan, filled with a tiny crust. Prick, prick, prick, prick, prick, pricked with a fork. (My sister wrote a lot more pricks into the recipe.)
And weighted with lentils so that the crust didn’t have any chance at all to puff up. None.
Then came the custard. Zested the meyer lemon, juiced the meyer lemon,
found the unexpected but delightful surprise of sprouted pips inside the meyer lemon,
and stir, stir, stirred the custard…
I am not a custard maker. As you can see from the photograph, I don’t have the proper equipment (I used a shallow frying pan set over a pot of simmering water.), and I am just afraid that the eggs will scramble. After a lot of stirring, quite a few grumpy calls to my sister, and my face feeling like a ripe tomato, I took the custard off the stove, and set it aside to cool. I think that it turned out ok, and I was able to pour it into the crust, and put it into the oven. 
I did then call my mom, and had her come over to help me figure out when the custard was ‘set.’ I think that I will leave the custards to Heli, as she likes making them, and will probably do a much better job.
The finished result was a tart tart! Very un-sweet, lemony and delicious.
cake-from-a-mix
March 20, 2010
Maybe you could say that I am on a cake kick. Opportunities just keep popping up. It was my friend’s birthday last night. She had a roller skating birthday with a cake contest. I finished work around 5, and really wanted to bake a cake. I didn’t have a recipe with me in town, and my mom suggested that I just grab a mix…so I did.
I started with a Barefoot Contessa mix for coconut cupcakes, and added to it.
Instead of making cupcakes, I made two 8″ cakes, and then sliced them both in half to make 4 layers.
For some reason my kitchen becomes a disaster when I bake a cake. I was talking with my mom about it last night, and she was saying that it had to do with all the sugar all over the place. Maybe cakes are a collection of too much sugar.
I made a filling of Greek style yogurt, coconut passion fruit jam from France, and whipped cream (also my mom’s idea). I softly whipped the cream (1/2 cup) and gently folded in the yogurt (about 2/3 of a container), which is strained and quite firm. The mixture was quite tart, and so I added a lot of the jam to sweeten and flavor it. The cake itself was sweet, so I didn’t make the filling overly sweet.
Meanwhile, the cakes were on the porch cooling. The weather went from beautiful and sunny in the early afternoon, to cold, raining, and then snowing.
I put the coconut passion fruit filling in between the layers of the cake. I had a good amount of filling, which made the cake kind of tall. I was worried that it would drip over the sides, but it behaved itself. As the cake sat, a lot of the filling was absorbed by the layers.
I frosted the outside of the cake with cream cheese butter frosting (cream cheese, butter, and powdered sugar from the baking mix “packet number 3”). I dusted the sides with coconut flakes (from “packet number 2”). For the top I put a layer of passion fruit coconut jam for brightness and color (also my mom’s idea).
This is my conclusion about cakes and mixes. My kitchen is still a mess, and I spent a lot of time. BUT, I didn’t have to think too much about things. It was fun. I had a cake where I probably wouldn’t have otherwise.
living in the woods and making stuff 
