Homework

I think everyone should, at least once in a while, harvest their own food.  Even if you don’t grow it yourself, it’s worth getting out there in a field or an orchard somewhere and harvesting what you’ll eat.  Ideally, you should do enough of it to get a little tired, and a little bit wishing you were done already, so that it doesn’t feel entirely like A Pleasant Rustic Playacting Adventure but instead you get inside the work of harvesting enough to get it that this is a job, an absolutely necessary job, and like all jobs, something that you sometimes just have to get done whether the spirit moves you or not.

I also highly recommend going out to pick when it is raining, or when the sun and/or the bugs are ferocious.  A little sunburn and eyes that have been stinging with sweat, a proper selection of insect bites, or a good goose-bumped chilled ride home with your goodies, will help you remember later on that the food does not arrive magically at the store or on your plate.  It’s about gratitude, and remembering that you have a bunch of people to thank for everything you eat that you weren’t personally responsible for growing and harvesting and transporting.

This morning, we went out in the rain to pick blackberries.  It was my Belovedary’s birthday yesterday, and he wanted to go berrying, and since we are neither of us sweet enough to melt and we planned to use the fruit immediately after we got it home, we figured picking in the wet would be okay.  Which it was.  It was quiet and lush and very, very wet, and we picked ten pounds of berries and got soaked to the skin.

We brought our berries home, along with some red raspberries and some peaches from the same you-pick, and set about making blackberry pie and blackberry sorbet.  The day being as warm and wet as it was, the pie crust completely refused to behave, but I’m of the school that says it can be ugly as long as it tastes good, so I persevered.  I even took a photo, because I recall some of you folks were curious about what a pie bird looks like in use.  This is what a pie bird looks like when it’s in an ugly, patchworky, lumpy blackberry pie.

We also ate several bowls of berries plain, between the two of us.  There’ll be no scurvy in this household anytime soon, that much is for sure.

With the rest, we made blackberry sorbet.  Blackberry puree, creme de gingembre, a little lime juice, a little agave syrup, a little slug of vanilla extract, and it’s the most lovely fruity mellow thing, with a great texture and a gorgeous color.

Tomorrow it’s back to work with both of us, but we’ll have sorbet and pie to look forward to when we get home, and that’s no small thing.

What has it got in its bucketses?  Let’s take a look!

Why, it’s a big bucket of scratch-and-dent stone fruits!  Nectarines, white peaches, yellow peaches, and Shiro yellow plums.

I didn’t think to start taking pictures until we were more than halfway done processing the fruit, but the bucket was originally almost full.  The fruit came from a friend who is a local business owner… it’s all locally grown fruit, but due to bruises, mold, and spots of rot, not stuff that our friend can sell.  She offered me a bucket of the stuff that would otherwise go on the compost heap if I thought I had a use for it.  I leapt at the chance.

Why?  Why would I want a huge bucket full of fruit that no one else would buy?  Fruit that lots of people I know would consider rather revolting, honestly, and discard as inedible?

Because even fruit that looks like it’s way over the hill is often well worth your time.  That’s why.  Not only is it frugal to just cut away the bad bits and use what’s still good, not only does it respect the fruit and the people whose effort went into growing it, but if I’m honest, it’s some of the best-tasting, most fully ripe fruit you’ll ever put in your mouth.  The Belovedary and I snuck an awful lot of tastes while we were converting that bucket of fruit into nearly 18 cups of peeled, pared chunks, and oh man was it delicious.

Besides, for a great many cooking applications, there is no need whatsoever that the fruit be cosmetically perfect or even close.  It’s probably my inner Midwesterner showing, but every time I encounter a recipe for jelly, jam, or chutney that begins with the instruction to “choose ripe, firm, unblemished fruit” I want to scream a little.  If you’re chunking the fruit up into small pieces anyway, cooking it into a puree–or even more pertinently, turning it into clarified juice for a jelly–there is not going to be anything left that will tell you whether the fruit was unblemished or not when you began.  It simply does not matter. Same goes if you’re making cobbler, crisp, fool, clafoutis, slump, brown betty, turnovers, strudel, pudding, fruit soup, or pie, for crying out loud.  So give your poor fruit growers a break.  Give yourself a break.  Use up what’s good, regardless of what it looks like or whether you have to cut away some mushy bits or cope with a bit of rot or mold.  It won’t hurt you.

I mean, just look at that gorgeous fruit.  I won’t lie, we were a little tempted to just grab spoons and dive in, but we thought nearly 18 cups of fruit might be a little much even for us, so instead…

It was time for the Old Black Rum.  I added a cup of spiced black rum, and a little bit of water, and put the fruit into my ginormous off-brand slow-cooker (slow cookers are your friend when it’s hot, as it can do low/slow cooking without heating up the house).

In due time, this will all collapse into a puree… and eventually, by dint of cooking it forever with the lid off at a low temperature, into a rich, delicious, lightly spiced, nicely thick fruit butter.  Which at some point later in the week, when the weather (I hope and pray) breaks a little, I will pack into jars and seal in a hot-water bath.

Then, this winter, when memories are all we have of fresh stone fruit, we can bust out the Scratch And Dent Stone Fruit Butter, and eat and be happy.  Not bad, for a bucket of throwaway fruit.

The weather report says that the heat index reached 125F or so today here in Baltimore, which is simply unspeakable.

So I won’t speak of it.  Instead I will show you pictures.

Lilies and hydrangea from the garden.  I’ve been cutting the lilies as they hit their peak, and bringing them into the house so they can stink up the joint with that heady, sweet scent of theirs.

This morning’s farmer’s market was a wonderful orgy of high-summer fruit.  We bought white peaches and yellow, white nectarines (one of my favorites), and the most glorious tiny sweet yellow-orange cherry tomatoes.    It’s a little MStew of me, but I always think fruit looks prettier on Depression-era glass, somehow.  (And to make up for the MStew quotient, you can enjoy my very old, very faded, very seriously worn and stained tablecloth, heh.)

So pretty.  Now if my own tomatoes would just hurry up and ripen…

My Belovedary and I went out and did the circuit of our favorite Asian markets for lunch today.  I needed some downtime before I went stark raving book-bonkers, and I’ve been missing the Belovedary due to spending so much time lately going stark raving book-bonkers.  He had the day off, so away we went.

The dragonfruit were splendid.  I’ve never seen such beautiful ones for sale in this country.  That’s why I bought three.  What a treat!  The cherimoya is very nearly ripe.  It’s one of the Belovedary’s favorites.

I also got myself these, one of my all-time favorite Sichuanese treats: fried peanuts with chiles, Sichuan pepper, and salt.  I make them at home sometimes, but I have to confess that there’s something to be said for not having to go to the trouble of frying up peanuts when you want a snack.

We bought some other things… red yeast rice, spicy tofu snacks, a big sack of dry Salvadoran red beans, a big bag of dried guajillo chiles, ginger, that sort of thing.  We had a good time.

And so we go back to work.

‘Cause dayyum, it’s hot out there.

1. Flavored Waters — I see them for sale in the shops and I think “I may really be incapable of understanding how far people will go to avoid doing something that is nearly effortless to begin with.”  Because $1.49 for 20 ounces of water with a little mint in it?  It’s not highway robbery if you voluntarily part with your money, my friends.  Get yourself some sort of reasonably wide-mouthed jug (a recycled glass juice bottle is tops) and fill it 7/8 of the way with water.  Plunk in something that tastes nice: cucumber slices, citrus zest, borage flowers, mint leaves, sliced fruit of any kind, a couple chunks of watermelon plus a few chunks of rind (white part only), a quartered tomato, basil leaves, a clove or two, orange flower water, rosewater, kewra water, knotted strips of lemongrass, a pinch of fennel seed. Play with the combinations and mix it up.  Try mint plus orange flower water, cucumber plus rosewater, watermelon plus basil, borage flowers plus halved green grapes, tomato plus fennel seed, citrus zest and a dill blossom.  Refrigerate your water and its add-ins and let infuse for an hour or two before drinking.

2. Cucumber-Almond Granita — Puree two large peeled seeded cucumbers in a blender.  Add a couple of handfuls of almonds and a couple handfuls of green seedless grapes or honeydew melon.  Add a tiny splash of orange flower water and just a touch of honey or agave nectar.  Pour into an ice cube tray and freeze.  To serve, pop out as many cubes as you want and turn them into slush in your blender or food processor.

3.  DIY Creamsicles — 2 parts freshly squeezed orange juice to 1 part buttermilk (or soymilk plus a little extra lime juice), about a half a lime’s worth of lime juice, and a little agave syrup.  Pour into popsicle molds or paper cups, freeze, and eat.

4. Beans Love Greens, Hot Weather Version — Drain and rinse a can of good quality cooked white beans like cannellini.  Get a bunch of the nicest, tenderest, most voluptuous greens you can find.  For me, it’s almost always chard straight from the garden but you can have what you like.  Just don’t buy the “prewashed” crap in the cellophane bags please, it’s all ‘prewashed’ in the same gigantic sink, effectively, and people get sick from it.  Also it is neither nice nor tender nor voluptuous and really, what is the point of eating any green vegetable that does not look up at you from the plate, flutter its undulating curves at you, and whisper “I’m lovely, I’m delicious, eat me”?   Anyway, wash and dry your greens and tear them into pieces of a comfortable size.  Make a nest of leaves on your plate.  Top with beans, cherry tomatoes or wedges of larger ones, seeded chunked cucumber, torn basil leaves, some good pitted olives, and, if you like, some kind of salty cheese like feta.  Dress with the best olive oil you can lay hands on, and either good wine or sherry vinegar or lemon juice.

5. The Essence of Fruit Crisp — Prepare and layer on a plate or in a shallow bowl bite-sized pieces of whatever sort of fruit appeals to you.  Stone fruits and berries work best, but you could do this with summer apples and with pears, too.  In a small frying pan, melt a tablespoon or three of salted butter (depending on how many people you plan to feed) and then cook, in the butter, three tablespoons of Grape Nuts to each tablespoon of butter.  As they start to get fragrant, sprinkle with brown sugar and maybe a little cinnamon.  Stir and keep cooking until the sugar is all melted, just a moment or so.  Drizzle the butter/sugar/Grape Nuts over the fruit.  Perfect for when just plain sliced fruit doesn’t seem desserty enough.  If you want to bump it up another notch, sprinkle a pinch of really good sea salt over the whole shebang.

6. Water Chestnuts with Coconut Milk and Shrimp — Use FRESH water chestnuts only for this, or in a pinch, jicama.  Peel and julienne the water chestnuts, keeping them submerged in cold water before and after cutting so they don’t discolor.  Roughly chop some shelled, deveined shrimp — cooked or raw, it’s up to you.  If you can get good raw ones, it’s nice that way.  Make a mixture of 4 parts lime juice, 3 parts coconut milk, and as much fresh minced chili and onion as you want.   Mix the lime/coconut mixture with the shrimp.  Drain the water chestnuts well and add.  Refrigerate for an hour.  Salt to taste.  Vegheads, just sub nice fresh firm tofu.

7.  Vietnamese rice-paper “salad” rolls, aka gai cuon — Oishii Eats will show you how, and her mom is hilarious.

8.  The Best Peanut Butter Sandwich Ever — You want some good, crusty French-style bread.  Baguette is great.  Slice a hank of it the long way like a sub sandwich roll, and remove some but not all of the crumb.  You can also do this on a really dense seedy wholegrain but try it with the French loaf first.  OK.  Get you some peanut butter, whatever kind you like.  A little sweet is OK.  Spread a thin — and I am not funning with you, I mean thin! — layer on both halves of the bread.  Next, you want a little chili paste.  Sambal oelek, the Indonesian spice paste, is fantastic and is what they use at Chicago’s Cafe Lula where they call this the tineka sandwich, but you know, it will work with many different kinds.  Sriracha, sweet chili-garlic paste, toban jian, what you got.  Schmear that right on up into  your peanut butter.  Then you wanna make a nice friendly haystack of shredded carrot, cucumber slices, sprouts, lettuce, definitely some tomato and a little bit of paper-thin sliced onion.  Drizzle just a snoodge of soy sauce on your veggies.  Sweet black soy if you have it.  The Indonesian kind is particularly choice in this, but the Chinese will do fine.  Slap the whole thing together and eat.

9.  Tuna Salad in a Tomato — So maybe the savory peanut butter-chili-veg bomb is too adventuresome for your palate.  That’s okay.  Get a fantastic tomato and slice off the top so you can scoop out the gooey bit in the middle (put the gooey bit in some water and let it infuse, you can pour it through a sieve later, and the water will taste wonderful).  Fill your tomato up with tuna salad instead.  Or egg salad.  Or chicken salad.  Or tofu salad.  Or… you get the idea.

10.  Banana Cream — Peel, then toss in a plastic bag and freeze, a few very ripe bananas.  Cut them into chunks, put them in the blender, and puree to a soft-serve ice cream  sort of texture. Add a little bit of vanilla extract.  Stir in chocolate chips if you like, or shredded sweetened coconut, or toasted nuts.

Here is a list of 20 things to make and eat when it is too hot to cook.

1. Balela — drain and rinse some canned cooked chickpeas and some black beans, mince half an onion or so and a couple cloves of garlic, roughly chop a big bunch of parsley, dice a few ripe tomatoes if you have them, combine all this in a large bowl with plenty of lemon juice/olive oil vinaigrette, salt and pepper to taste, and if you like it and have it, some za’atar.  Let stand in the fridge for an hour or two before serving.

2. Hummus — cooked chickpeas (skinned please) whirred in the food processor with tahini, olive oil, lemon juice, salt, and a small sufficiency of fresh raw garlic.  Should not be as thick as mashed potatoes… thin with some water or bean liquid so it just barely holds peaks.

3. Gazpacho — do it the Spanish way.  David Rosengarten tells you how.

4. Ceviche — impeccably fresh fish or crustaceans in a largish dice with a liberal amount of lemon/lime juice, some salt, some onion, and some hot chili.  Cilantro if you like it, or not.  Marinate an hour or so.  The fish will firm up and become opaque, the result of acid at work.  Be sure to drink a cup of the liquor, called leche de tigre — tiger’s milk — reportedly a great hangover cure, and powerful stuff regardless, good for what ails you.

5. Tabbouleh — cooking the bulgur is the only cooking you have to do and it’s nothing more than pouring boiling water into uncooked bulgur (2 parts boiling water to 1 part bulgur, by volume), stirring, and waiting until the water is absorbed.  Parsley parsley parsley forever.  Chopped tomato, perhaps diced cucumber, some minced garlic, maybe some minced onion.  Lemon juice and olive oil, salt and pepper.  C’est tout.

6. Cucumber-Cilantro Salad

7. Fruit and Herb Salad — You can improvise this depending on what you’ve got.  Blueberries, chiffonade of sage, apple, and pecans.  Watermelon, basil, tomato, and ricotta salata.  Peaches, diced prosciutto, lemon balm.  Canteloupe, thyme, fresh ginger juice, and soft fresh goat cheese.  You don’t need to dress these, but a little salt and black pepper go a long way.

8. Carrot-Jicama Slaw — Shred, combine with a dressing of plain yogurt loosened with a little olive oil and lemon juice.  Add some cumin, cardamom, ground coriander, black pepper, tart dried cherries or cranberries, pecans or walnuts, salt.  Stir it all up, let it stand an hour or so, eat.

9. Cold Spicy Celery and Smoked Tofu — slice celery on the bias as thinly as possible, toss with julienned smoked tofu, dress with lime juice, soy sauce, sesame oil, and a little bit of hot chili paste.  Marinate for a half hour or so before eating.

10. Fattoush — This is what you do with stale pita, or any storebought pita since it’s already stale.  Pita torn into bite-sized pieces, tossed with whatever summer veg you have, including leafy ones: purslane is excellent, so is romaine, but chard is nice too.  Tomatoes are de rigeur, and so are cukes and sweet peppers.  Some raw onion, a vinaigrette (red wine vinegar or lemon juice), a healthy sprinkle of za’atar.  Toss, salt/pepper, eat.

11. Caprese salad — dead ripe tomatoes, beautiful leaves of basil, fresh mozzarella, olive oil, salt, pepper, done.

12. Panzanella — Italian for “fattoush.”  Add some mozzarella or ricotta salata to your day-old-bread/veg/vinaigrette, or perhaps some drained oil-packed tuna.

13. Cold Stone Fruit Soup — peel and chunk up whatever kind of stone fruits are best.  Peaches, plums, cherries, apricots.  Puree in the blender with plain unsweetened yogurt.  Add some cream or buttermilk if you like.  Or prosecco, Champagne, Sauternes, or some other lightly sweet white wine.  A little cinnamon, cardamom, or nutmeg can be nice.  Or a little ginger juice.  Or freshly ground black pepper.  There are a billion variations.  Fold in whipped cream, if you’re nasty.

14. Cold Ginger-Carrot-Orange Soup — quick and dirty.  Carrot juice + orange juice, both fresh squeezed, in approximately equal parts.  A little salt, a little black pepper, and plenty of fresh ginger and its juice grated into the soup.  Let it stand a wee while for the flavors to marry.

15. Quick-pickled Daikon (with or without carrot)

16. Guacamole — Restrain your impulse to overthink this.  Avocado, lots of lime juice, a small amount of crushed garlic, salt.  Puree, eat, repeat.

17. Prosciutto and Fruit — Melon’s nice but it’s just the tip of the iceberg.  Plums, tart cherries, apricots, peaches?  Oh yeah.

18. Salsa — You have tomatoes, tomatilloes, peppers, cilantro, onion, garlic.  You know what to do.

19. Sweet Corn Salads — Cut the corn off the cob.  Combine with whatever sounds good.  Salsa, for instance.  Or chopped tomato, a little onion, some basil or parsley or both, and some feta.

20. Tofu — Perfect fresh soft tofu, in a dish, with a liberal splosh of the best soy sauce you can lay hands on.  Sprinkle on finely chopped green onion, fried shallot, dried shaved bonito, toasted sesame seeds, or whatever else piques your fancy.  Scoff if you like but I know what I know.

I’m giving y’all the heads up now so you won’t miss it:  I’ll be cooking my last brunch for a while on Sunday, May 23, at Mill Valley General Store (2800 Sisson St., Baltimore), from 9-1.

The theme is STRAWBERRIES.  The first fruit of the new season, and I don’t know about you, but I am beyond ready.

I’ll be picking the berries myself the day before the brunch, so you know they’ll be fresh and local as possible, and you just don’t get much more field-to-fork than when the chef actually goes out into the field and picks the fruit for you.  So c’mon out for

The Ohio Bowl
A mound of lightly sugared strawberries over split buttermilk biscuits, doused in fresh Trickling Springs creamline milk.  A breakfast treat I looked forward to all year as a child. Add a little whipped cream, if you like.

The Parfait
Lightly sugared strawberries layered with creamy Jersey milk yogurt from Pequea Valley Farms and the whole-grain crunch of small-batch granola, sprinkled with toasted pecans.

A la carte
Buttermilk biscuits with honey butter
Bowl of berries

Again, that’s Sunday, May 23, from 9-1, at Mill Valley General Store, 2800 Sisson St., Baltimore.  See you there!

The theme for this evening’s cookery turned out to be Dishes That Require Four Ingredients. I didn’t plan it this way, it just turned out like that. Still, it’s nice to have simple good things up your sleeve, isn’t it?

For my actual supper, I was jonesing for greens so I ate a huge bowl of one of the most addictive kale dishes I’ve ever come across. I learned it from a good friend of mine who is, in addition to being a brilliant anthropologist, a phenomenal cook. She in turn cribbed it from a Thai restaurant, because she’s smart like that. Since learning this dish I have become kind of obnoxious about it and push it on everyone I know. They don’t mind, though, because it’s really that good.

Lemon-Sesame Kale

1 pound kale, cleaned, stripped from the stems, and torn into bite-size pieces
julienned or grated zest and juice of 2 lemons
2 Tablespoons Asian sesame oil
2 Tablespoons soy sauce

Steam the kale until it is just tender. Remove from the steamer, giving it a good shake as you do to remove any excess water. Toss with the lemon zest and juice, sesame oil, and soy sauce. Taste and correct the seasonings if needed. Eat.

For most people, this is probably not a complete dinner in and of itself, but then again, most people are unlikely to eat the entire thing in one go. I, on the other hand, am a kaleoholic, and am more than happy, upon occasion, to eat a pound of kale and call it supper.

I also did a little recipe testing tonight that sufficed for a very fine dessert. For the Mother’s Day brunch I’m cooking, I’ll be serving lemon and lime bars, so I wanted to remind myself of the go-to recipes I’ve used in the past for both citrus curd and shortbread, in case I want to change anything between now and the brunch. I may not — these taste pretty good.

Basic Citrus Curd

1 cup strained fresh lemon, lime, or other citrus juice
1 cup granulated sugar
8 egg yolks + 4 whole eggs
8 Tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into chunks

In a double boiler over simmering, but not boiling, water, whisk together the juice, sugar, egg yolks, and eggs until smooth, then stir gently until the mixture thickens to about the consistency of mayonnaise. This will take about 10 minutes.

If the mixture starts to form lumps, whisk ferociously and reduce the heat, and you should be able to save it. These are eggs you’re working with here. Too high a heat and you will have sweet lemon-flavored scrambled eggs. So just relax and take your time and do it over a simmer and you’ll be fine.

When the mixture has thickened, remove the inner part of the double boiler from the outer and place it on a bed of ice cubes. Add several chunks of butter and stir in until melted, at which point add more butter and repeat until all butter is incorporated and the mixture is smooth. Pour out into a scrupulously clean container, cover with plastic wrap (press the plastic wrap down onto the surface of the curd to prevent a skin forming), and refrigerate until thoroughly chilled.

Extra Credit: Strain the curd through a fine sieve before refrigerating. This will remove any of the small bits of chalazae — the membranes that serve as tethers for the yolk, holding it in place inside the shell — that might present as little chewy lumps in your citrus curd. Alternately, pour the uncooked eggs through a sieve before you start, which will do the same thing preemptively.

Simple Shortbread

The ratio for a simple shortbread is this: for each 8 Tablespoons of salted slightly softened butter, use one cup all-purpose flour and one half cup powdered sugar, plus one teaspoon vanilla extract.

The method, and let me tell you up front that you want an electric mixer for this, is to beat the butter until it is reasonably pliable, then add the flour, sugar, and vanilla and beat hell out of it until it comes together as a stiff dough. Trust me, it will happen, even though it doesn’t seem like it will at first. Do not yield to the temptation to add water, we are not making pie crust here.

Turn the dough out onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper (or if you have Silpat liners, this is the time to use them) and roll 1/4 inch thick. Prick all over with a fork, which will release steam as the shortbread bakes.

Bake in a preheated 300F oven until the shortbread is golden brown and lovely. How long this takes will depend on how large a batch of shortbread you have made. Half an hour is probably the minimum, though, and it may take longer if you have made a large batch.

Remove from the oven, let stand 5 minutes, and cut while still warm into pieces of the desired size. Shortbread does not cut gracefully once it has cooled completely so strike while the iron is hot.

To make lemon bars, lime bars, blood orange bars, kumquat bars, grapefruit bars, or whatever other kind of citrus bars you fancy, simply cut the shortbread into bars, let it cool completely, then top each one with a layer of curd made with the relevant sort of juice. Sprinkle with powdered sugar if you like, though it isn’t really necessary.

If you want to get fancy-schmancy, convert your citrus curd into citrus mousse by folding a cup of it into a cup of heavy cream that has been whipped to stiff peaks, and make a lovely plated dessert with a slab of shortbread topped with a heavenly billow of mousse. A sprinkling of berries and perhaps a curl or two of citrus zest would be lovely, no?