A Finger in Every Pie

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute

On occasion, I find myself with more to do and less time in which to do it than I had planned.  Actually, I find that to be true on most occasions -- just about every day, in fact.  I know I'm not alone here -- at least I hope I'm not. 

Even when I have one of my favorite summer shopping binges at a Greenmarket, I plan to eat more fresh produce than G and I can actually tuck away during the course of a week.  That's how I recently opened the door of the fridge and found myself in possession of raspberries, blueberries, day-neutral strawberries (which are smaller, sweeter, intensely perfumed, and red all the way through), apricots, peaches and cherries. 

I knew that all this bounty would not get eaten in its natural state before it began to spoil, so muffins were the first order of business.  I found a delicious blueberry muffin recipe (originally introduced to me by none other than Zarah), modified it slightly, added all three kinds of berries and voila!  Several days worth of breakfast and the berries were saved in the meantime.

My favorite recent culinary accomplishment was yesterday's project.    No, that's not cheese sauce in that bowl.  I was browsing my way through several searches on apricots, lazily looking for preserves, when I happened on several different sites that mentioned apricot curd.  Being a long-time lover of both lemon curd and apricots, this struck me as a delightful possibility for the apricots in the fridge, just sitting there in all their blushing glory waiting for something to happen.  The recipes I saw were not promising, since they all used what seemed to me extremely high ratios of sugar to fruit.  Eggs and butter are one thing, but apricots are too delicate to oversweeten.  To me they lose all their luscious perfume if they're combined with too much sugar. 

Long story short, I more or less morphed what I 'd read and devised my own recipe, with a puree made of lightly cooked and sieved apricots, the juice of a lemon, eggs, butter, and about one-fourth the sugar called for in other recipes.   This is glorious stuff.  I ate it on the berry muffins for breakfast, but my favorite use for apricot curd thus far is to open the fridge every time I pass by, pick up a spoon and start eating. 

Due to imminent departure and the need to go start packing, I won't post recipes for either of these treats right now, but will be happy to do so later.   G's and my other enormous change at the last minute has been a complete rearrangement of our vacation plans.   We had originally planned to drive cross-country and be gone for more than three weeks.  Because of (positive) developments in a burgeoning entrepreneurial endeavor of G's, he can't be out of town for that long.  So tomorrow (or today, actually) I fly to New Orleans, G joins me later in the week and we come home together.  (I've already got the ingredients for tomorrow's "plane sandwich", and have several lists of New Orleans restaurants -- far more than I can possibly try in four days). 

We're home for a few days, and then in early August we fly out to San Francisco for nine days in the Bay Area with friends.  All this re-configuring has actually turned out to be less stressful than our original plans, although we both feel a bit wistful about missing some of our envisioned stops.  In the meantime, any plaintive yearnings can always be staved off with another spoonful of apricot curd.

To Market, To Market

Summer in the city, for all its lyricism as a phrase, is not an easy time.  Recently, on a day hotter and muggier than any day has any right to be, I found myself walking a particularly unappealing strip of urban turf.  This walk was not voluntary; it was due to the re-routing of a bus and my need to catch a train.  Not to put too fine a point on it, I walked a half-mile stretch which felt like I was entering a portal to Hell and smelled as if someone had neglected to clean up a recent Gangland mass murder in a local basement. 

So what makes an urban summer bearable, besides parks, air-conditioned movies and ice-cream trucks?    One aspect is the bounty to be found in summer's farm markets, which in NYC are known as  Greenmarkets.  Farmers from upstate NY and NJ truck in their beautiful produce and charge us top dollar -- a price I gladly pay, hoping that the folks who produce the food might actually benefit from their hard labor.   It feels cooler at the Greenmarket, even on a hot day; perhaps it's just the effect of all those white-swathed tents, with tables and boxes and mounds of jewel-like produce beneath.

Urban Oasis:  The Greenmarket in bloom.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

Before we go off on a hard-earned vacation, I've tried to hit a few different markets, and am planning on one or maybe even two more as well.   There's the gold standard, of course, which is Union Square on a Saturday (the Union Square Greenmarket happens on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays).  I recently visited on a Monday, which was bustling but lacked both the size and the variety of Saturday's market.    I also paid a visit to Dag Hammerskold Plaza in midtown on a Wednesday not long ago.  That's a lovely mid-size farmers' market, with plenty of goodies to choose from.  Although our vacation departure is finally imminent, I'm hoping to hit one or two more before we go.  My big excitement is that there's a new (the only) one in East Harlem, although it's still about twenty blocks from where we live.  I'm going to have to bring my little shopping cart and check it out.  Another one is directly across town from me as the crow flies, and would necessitate only a walk through the park, as it were.  So that too warrants exploring, to figure out if it's worth the trek. 

Actually, it's always worth the trek.  Even when I schlepped backbreaking bags from Union Square early one Saturday a few weeks back, I was able to gloat as I unpacked all that glory.  A huge and gorgeous capon, fresh Ronnybrook milk and cream, day-neutral strawberries, other berries and the already immortalized sour cherries, the first apricots, the last English peas, tiny squashes, multi-hued carrots, baby leeks (thinner and smaller than scallions), wild arugula, piccolo small-leaf basil...

                                                                   

        All the pretty little squashes.

The question then becomes what to do with all this bounty?  Well, with that haul I made a simple herb and lemon roasted capon, which ran with intensely flavorful juices but also super-heated our apartment for about 12 hours.  We barricaded ourselves in the air-conditioned bedroom with iced drinks and trays of food which also included a market salad, invented for the occasion. 

Amazing technicolor baby carrots.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           
I came to refer to that salad as "not-pasta salad with not-pesto dressing", which recalls some of the more unfortunate summer salads prevalent in the later decades of the last millenium.  This, although it had both pasta and a basil/garlic/cheese dressing, was composed mainly of little rounds and ovoids of squash, multicolored carrots in julienne and miniscule sweet peas, each one barely cooked, cooled, and tossed with a few handfuls of cooked tri-colored orzo, minced baby leeks, grape tomatoes and the aforementioned dressing, which was actually more like a creamy vinaigrette with pesto flavors rather than a heavy, oily pesto itself.   I won't include a recipe,  since you could a) throw it together from the above description and b) I'd rather urge you to invent your own salad with whatever is freshest that day from your local farmers' market.  Today, for example, I'm going to use more Greenmarket treasure:  slim and velvety just-cooked green beans and steamed new red potatoes that were left from last night's dinner.  I plan to turn these into a cool Niçoise-style salad with roasted red peppers, onions and tomatoes and olives added in, all in a lemon-garlic vinaigrette. 

My absolute favorite market supper this season was one we had a week or so ago.  Spiky wild arugula and a few other field greens made a bed for thin rare slices of marinated grilled organic steak, similar to the dish that I enjoyed on a trip to Italy several years ago called tagliata di manzo.  Our only accompaniment to this was slices of toasted country bread, and much later, fresh berries for dessert.  Such a simple thing, and so good it defies description.   

I'm about to head out for one of the newer Greenmarkets today, mainly to explore, since we're leaving soon and we don't exactly need to stock up.  But perhaps I'll discover some fresh gem that must be eaten within the next couple of days, before we head south to the land of the deep-fried, the heavy sauce and "meat and three".  A week or so later we'll have some respite in the Bay Area, where I hope to spend some time at a farmers' market as well.  My favorite travel pictures always seem to include an inordinate number of markets.  Oh for the market in Cuzco, in Florence, in Oaxaca, in Aix.  Even on vacation, off to the market I go...

Recipes: Sour Cherry Serenade

A number of you requested recipes for the last post, both in the comments section and by email.   Finally, finally, here is both my mother's Cherry Borscht and the Sour Cherry Streusel Cake, a recipe originally introduced to me by that culinary wonder of a gal-pal Ernie, whom you'll recognize from the comments section of this blog.   Sorry for the delay in posting recipes -- we've been in vacation/crisis mode, which has included many serious last-minute changes, so blogging among other things has definitely suffered.

Sour Cherry Borscht

6 cups sour cherries (Montmorency preferred), washed and stemmed, but left whole with pits intact
6 cups water (or enough to cover by about an inch in a shallow pot)
1/2 cup sugar (or more to taste)
pinch of good cinnamon (Penzey's Vietnamese, for example)
2 eggs

Sour cream, crème fraîche, or Greek yogurt for serving

Place cherries, water, sugar and cinnamon in a pot.  Bring to a boil, turn down the heat and let simmer for 10-15 minutes, until cherries are tender but not falling apart or losing their skins.   Beat the two eggs well in a medium-sized bowl.  Whisk in hot cherry juice from the pot, a tablespoon at a time, so that eggs become hot but don't curdle.  When a cup or so of juice has been amalgamated, pour the egg mixture back into the hot pot of cherries and liquid and stir well.  Taste for sweetness, and add more sugar if you like.  We actually like this quite tart.  It should taste richly of sour cherries, but the flavor deepens exponentially once the soup is chilled.  Let the mixture cool to room temp, and then chill for  several hours. 

Serve cold with sour cream or one of the other options dolloped on top.  Warn others about the pits, and bring a little dish to the table for spitting out pits.  You could, I suppose, pit the cherries before you make the soup.  We never did, so I never will.  The pits supposedly add to the flavor.  While spitting out pits may seem inelegant to some, I think of it as one of those messily fun and companionable summer eating activities, like cracking lobster or crabs, or eating watermelon. 

Sour Cherry Streusel Cake

I'll give you this with the modifications I made to it, which were to add almond paste, almond extract, and to make half again as much of the streusel topping, since almond is lovely with cherries, and the first time I made this cake the topping was a little skimpy for me.   This is also sumptuous made with other fruits -- peaches, apricots, plums, berries.  I made it not long ago with a combination of strawberries (which I generally never use for baking) and black raspberries, and it was quite wonderful

2 cups (500 mL) all-purpose flour
1/2 cup (125 mL) granulated sugar
1 tbsp (15 mL) baking powder
1/4 tsp (1 mL) salt
1/3 cup (75 mL) butter, at room temperature
3 1/2  oz.  almond paste
1 egg
1 cup (250 mL) half-and-half or light cream
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp almond extract
2 tsp grated lemon zest
4 - 5 cups (1 L) pitted, drained sour cherries or other seasonal sliced fruits

Streusel Topping

1 1/2 cups (375 mL) all-purpose flour
1 generous cup (260 mL) brown sugar
3/4 cup (190 mL) butter, at room temperature

Preheat oven to 350°F (180°C).
Combine flour, sugar, baking powder and salt in the work bowl of a food processor. Using the work blade, cut in butter and almond paste to make coarse crumbs. Beat egg in a bowl; stir in cream, zest and  extracts. Pour this slowly through the feed tube of the food processor, and pulse the mixture until just mixed -- it should make a quite thick batter. Drop by spoonfuls into a parchment-lined, generously buttered 13 x 9-inch (3-L) cake pan and spread evenly. Top with cherries in a single layer.
Combine flour and brown sugar in a bowl. Cut in butter using a pastry blender or fork to make coarse crumbs (or you can do this first, in the food processor, before you make the batter and reserve it). Sprinkle evenly over fruit. Bake on middle rack of oven for 45 to 50 minutes or until top is golden. Place pan on a rack and let cool. Cut into squares and serve.

Sour Cherry Serenade

I've been a bit on tenterhooks lately, not wanting to miss the extraordinarily brief season for sour cherries.  Thankfully, I found my puckery little treasures at the Greenmarket yesterday morning.  This post might otherwise have been called "Tart Cherry Tantrum".

When I was nine years old, we moved from a suburban apartment building to a suburban house on what seemed to us a princely quarter-acre of land. One of the first things my dad did once we were actually in this house was to go to a local tree nursery, where he purchased a small Montmorency cherry tree and brought it home.  It was then planted by all of us with no small ceremony in our front yard. 

Sour cherries have special standing in my family.  They're not just a foodstuff -- they're a part of our history.  When my (somewhat ancient) father was a boy, he lived on a farm (actually an anarchist school colony.  No, really) where there was a Montmorency cherry tree.  He said that it was his favorite hideaway, and that when the sour, sour cherries were ripe, he would climb the tree with a favorite book, perch on a comfortable limb and read, eat sour cherries and spit out the pits. 

We waited several years, but eventually began to harvest a small cherry crop which grew larger with each successive year.  Eventually we needed a ladder, and baskets for what we thought of as "cherry day", pickers passing their full baskets to those who would wash them, pit them and begin to cook.  Sour cherries, especially these fragile, bright red Montmorencys, go bad quickly.  Even by the evening of the same day they're picked, they can begin to develop brown patches.  Speed is of the essence here, so we turned our ripe provender into stores for both the near and the farther future as quickly as we could. 

We made pies.  One year I made five of them.  I wish I were still blessed with the culinary courage I had then, when I was in high school and college.  People loved those pies, so I must have been doing something right.  It's just that over the past several years, I've developed a pernicious fear-of-pie-crust syndrome.  If you have the perfect crust recipe, let me know. 

We made jam.  It wouldn't jell because we only used half the amount of sugar called for, so we cooked it way down until it was a thick, luscious preserve of cherries.  We liked it so much, we made it just that way every year. 

We made "cold-pack" canned cherries in syrup.  This was my father's baby, he who barely cooked at all, and he was extremely proud of them -- rightly so, for they were amazing on ice-cream and French toast.

And my mother made cold cherry soup, which she called Cherry Borscht.  It's a cold, sweet-tart summer fruit soup in a luscious shade of pink, with whole, unpitted cherries bobbing up and down around the dollop of sour cream or crème fraîche which tops it off. 

Oh to have that kind of wealth once more.  I didn't really understand that it was wealth at the time, you see.   We had such an abundance of cherries, and the problem was what to do with them all.   Glorious indeed are gallons of cherries, free for the picking.  This became even clearer yesterday at the Greenmarket, where a not-exactly-heaping, in fact not-particularly-full quart basket was going for about six bucks a pop.  I thought about how many quarts I'd need just to make a few jars of jam.  Unfortunately, I had to remind myself  that paying the rent is important too, not just sour cherries and the site of memory. 

I bought about 3 quarts, which was enough for a small pot of cherry soup, and a large sour-cherry streusel cake.   They don't go very far, especially after stemming, washing, trimming and pitting.   But last night I was happy in that way that happens to city dwellers when they buy and prepare food that came directly from a small, reasonably local farm.   It was like the companionable feeling I had recently while shelling peas.  I enjoyed pitting cherries yesterday.  It put me, even if only for a moment, into an alternate life taking place on some other time strand.  A choice not taken, a life not lived, at least here and now:   my farmwife self, getting ready to make preserves and pies, even if what I was actually making was cold cherry soup and cake.   Through the action of working with this beautiful fruit, I could actually forget about the noisy street baking right outside our doors and windows, the ofttimes unmentionable scents and noises of inner city neighborhoods in summer, and allow my cherries to take me on a journey:  first back to childhood, then to this fantasy of the alternate self.  Nothing like a mini-vacation, provided courtesy of the farmer's market and the fresh produce to be had there. 

Tonight G and I will share the cherry borscht and streusel cake at dinner with my father and brother and sister-in-law.  Our first course will be the soup of cherries and our last course the dessert of cherries.  What we have in between -- well, that's going to be up to the others.  But our meal will be bookended by sour cherries so much like those we once grew and harvested and pitted and preserved together as a family.   And somehow my mother, who in our long-ago kitchen pitted the cherries with a hairpin, just as she'd been taught, will be present too.  Thus do we mend the strands of family and memory that during hectic days seem in danger of unravelling.  For us, the tartness of Montmorency cherries is imbued with that power. 

Give Peas a Chance

When I was a child, I really didn't like peas, not at all.  I'm not sure I ever had fresh peas; I know that we had tiny little Le Sueur peas from a can, and probably frozen peas on occasion too.  I liked almost all other vegetables, but something about peas just got to me.  I think perhaps it has to do with the way in which processing for canning or even freezing changes flavor and texture, because I finally discovered fresh peas in my adult life, and they are very different from that childhood memory of the hated vegetable. 

The other day I went to a Greenmarket in search of sour cherries, which were not in yet.  Despite the fact that we were about to go out of town yet again, I came home with strawberries and wild black raspberries, beautiful varieties of little summer squash,  a bunch of fresh mint, milk and cream from Ronnybrook dairy, and a couple of pounds of English peas in their shells.  G and I spent a companionable half hour shelling them while listening to Low, and while I pondered how to prepare them.  Should I make them in the French fashion with lettuce?  Lace them with some of that pungent mint? 

It was then that I thought of Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher. 

I think that even the most inveterate pea-hater could not fail to be moved by MFK Fisher's description of an afternoon spent with peas and loved ones in Switzerland, at her home Le Pâquis:   

We put a clean cloth, red and white, over one of the carpenters' tables, and we kicked wood curls aside to make room for our feet under the chairs brought up from the apartment in Vevey.  I set out tumblers, plates, silver, smooth, unironed napkins sweet from the meadow grass where they had dried.   
      While some of us bent over the dwarf-pea bushes and tossed the crisp pods into baskets, others built a hearth from stones and a couple of roof tiles lying about and made a lively little fire.  I had a big kettle with spring water in the bottom of it, just off simmering, and salt and pepper and a pat of fine butter to hand.   Then I put the bottles of Dezelay in the fountain, under the timeless spurt of icy mountain water, and ran down to be the liaison between the harvesters and my mother, who sat shelling peas from the basket on her lap into the pot between her feet, her fingers as intent and nimble as a lacemaker's.   
    I dashed up and down the steep terraces with the baskets, and my mother would groan and then hum happily when another one appeared, and below, I could hear my father and our friends cursing just as happily at their wry backs and their aching thighs, while the peas came off their stems and into the baskets with a small sound audible in that still high air, so many hundred feet above the distant and completely silent Léman.  It was suddenly almost twilight.  The last sunlight on the Dents du Midi was fire-rosy, with immeasurable coldness in it. 
    "Time, gentlemen, time," my mother called in an unrehearsed and astonishing imitation of a Cornish barmaid.
    They came in grateful hurry up the steep paths, almost nothing now in their baskets, and looks of smug success upon their faces.  We raced through the rest of the shelling, and then while we ate rolled prosciutto and drank Swiss bitters or brandy and soda or sherry, according to our various habits, I dashed like an eighteenth-century courier on a secret mission of utmost military importance, the pot cautiously braced in front of me, to the little hearth. 
    I stirred up the fire.  When the scant half-inch of water boiled, I tossed in the peas, a good six quarts or more, and slapped on the heavy lid as if a devil might get out.  The minute steam showed I shook the whole like mad.  Someone brought me a curl of thin pink ham and a glass of wine cold from the fountain.  Revivified, if that were any more possible, I shook the pot again. 
    I looked up at the terrace, a shambles of sawed beams, cement mixers, and empty sardine tins left from the workmen's lunches.  There sat most of the people in the world I loved, in a thin light that was pink with Alpen glow, blue with a veil of pine smoke from the hearth. Their voices sang with a certain
remoteness into the clear air, and suddenly from across the curve of the Lower Corniche a cow in Monsieur Rogivue's orchard moved her head among the meadow flowers and shook her bell in a slow melodious rhythm, a kind of hymn.  My father lifeted up his face at the sweet sound and, his fists all stained with green-pea juice, said passionately, "God, but I feel good!" I felt near to tears. 
    The peas were now done.  After one more shake I whipped off the lid and threw in the big pat of butter, which had a bas-relief of William Tell upon it.  I shook in salt, ground in pepper, and then swirled the pot over the low flames until Tell had disappeared. Then I ran like hell, up the path lined with candytuft and pinks, past the fountain where bottles shown promisingly though the crystal water, to the table. 
    Small brown roasted chickens lay on every plate, the best ones I have ever eaten, done for me that afternoon by Madame Doellenbach of the Vieux Vevey and not chilled since but cooled in their own intangibly delicate juices.  There was a salad of mountain lettuces.  There was honest bread.  There was plenty of limpid wine, the kind Brillat-Savarin said was like rock-water, tempting enough to make a hydrophobic drink.   Later there was cheese, an Emmenthaler and a smuggled Roblichon...
    ...And later still we walked dreamily away, along the Upper Corniche to a cafe terrace, where we sat watching fireworks far across the lake at Evian, and drinking cafe noir and a very fine fine. 
    But what really mattered, what piped the high unforgettable tune of perfection, were the peas, which came from their hot pot onto our thick china plates in a cloud, a kind of miasma, of everything that anyone could ever want from them, even in a dream.
        -- From "P is for Peas", An Alphabet for Gourmets

So I cooked our fresh peas simply, in their own steam, with salt and pepper and plenty of fresh butter.  Perhaps one day we will pick our own peas, and eat them on our own piece of land.  But for now, no peas have ever tasted so good to us, though we didn't pick them ourselves and cook them over a wood fire and eat them on a terrace in Switzerland, but did at the very least shell, cook and eat them here in our East Harlem apartment.