Aug
26
Photograph by Rosey Lakos
It’s the way of fruit trees to explode all at once, ready or not, and Late summer is always the time when I find myself with more fruit than I can imagine. Peaches and plums have been going full force for about a month, apples and pears are just poking their head into the scene, and the overlap has left me with bags of fruit all over my kitchen and more on the way. This is by no means a complaint; in fact, it’s my favorite time of year for preserving. But I admit it sometimes takes some creative thinking when you have 20-50lbs of a single fruit. I am just one person, so there is only so much of one kind of preserve I am willing to eat. Over the years I have come to rely on a few recipes that are interchangeable for nearly all kinds of fruit. Fruit butter, fruit pieces in syrup, pickled fruit, and the crumble. These versatile recipes are not just an amazing way to mix up the pounds and pounds of fruit you find yourself with, they are also an excellent way to deal with old, rubbery fruit you bought too much of, or a harvest of fruit that is dry and maybe a little flavorless. These recipes can literally transform fruit bound for the compost bin to something you save and savor on the most special occasions…. (get the recipes at Is Greater Than)
Tags: apple butter, apples, apricots, berries, blackberries, blueberries, fruit butter, fruit crumble, fruit pieces in syrup, peach butter, peaches, pear butter, pears, pickled fruit, plum butter, plums, pome fruit, preserved fruit, raspberries, stone fruit, strawberries
Jul
24
Photo Shoot in the Park with Rosey | Photograph by Rosey Lakos
Now is the time all over the country when herbs are in full bloom and gardening days are often spent pruning and picking with less time planting and watering. If you are an avid gardener, or even a forager or farmer’s market-goer, this is the perfect time to be harvesting herbs for a variety of reasons. It is the time for drying for teas or herbs in the winter, and it is definitely the time to be making infusions. Infusions are especially nice since you are not harvesting for tenderness, you can use parts of plants you would normally ignore: the flowering ends of basil or oregano, the woodier part of rosemary or sage, the parts you pinch off to make your plants bush out…everything is fair game in an infusion . . . read more at isgreaterthan.net
Jul
13
We are well into the season for herb drying and harvesting and aside from waiting for my tomatoes to ripen so I can get to canning there isn’t a lot else that is really exciting me right now. We are definitely in the middle of a beautiful stone fruit season, but I have to admit that now that I am gardening up a storm I’m a little less excited about things I’m not growing or picking myself, and alas, I have no orchard (but don’t worry, I’m mulling over a recipe right now: seared peaches with vanilla pudding sauce and candied sour cherries!).
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Jun
24
Photograph by Rosey Lakos
As I came up with ideas for the article this month I realized the first day of summer was quickly approaching, and I thought, what better way to celebrate summer than with wine spritzers! Every time I bring up wine spritzers I am met with a peculiar look of polite shock and mild disgust. So let me be clear. We are not talking about wine coolers, people. We are talking about the totally adaptable, refreshing, and amazing spritzer. You can class them up and serve them at your next summer soirée, dazzling people with lavender or St. Germain- or you can pick the ingredients up at your neighborhood convenience store in desperation on the hottest day of the year. You can make them bright, dry and crisp, or sweet and punch-like. You can make them for under 50¢ a glass, or spend $50 on a single mixer. These are not your childhood wine coolers …(read more at isgreaterthan.net)
Jun
02
Photograph by Rosey Lakos
Anyone who knows Cooper McBean outside the realm of “rockstar” knows that he is one bad-ass pie maker. What you might not know, is that he and his genius mother have a trick. A most amazing trick, a trick that has changed my life. Frozen butter. I know, right now you’re thinking “everyone knows about frozen butter and a food processor”. Nuh-uh, this trick is frozen butter and a cheese grater, and it’s fucking genius. I don’t want to say it’s the key to making good biscuits or good pie, but it IS the key to not wanting to stab yourself if you are the kind of person who (like me) isn’t really a baker, and gets enormously frustrated trying to make “cornmeal” out of butter and flour…….. (read more at isgreaterthan.net)
May
21
Photograph by Rosey Lakos
While writing an article on different types of manjar (meyer lemon and chocolate orange!) for isgreaterthan.net, I was struck by everyone’s suggestion in a blind test that Meyer Lemon Manjar tastes like lavender. It got me thinking. Why not make it lavender? I’ve been drinking a lot of lavender/rose tea, and happen to have plenty of it lying around, so I quickly came up with a syrup to add to the sweetened condensed milk, and ended up with a delicious, subtle, floral manjar. For those of you who don’t know, manjar is a Chilean spread very similar to dulce de leche, only much thicker. Dulce de leche is a traditional spread and syrup in many countries, but made popular by Argentina. It is made by caramelizing sweet milk, traditionally by heating very sugary milk over very low heat for a very long time. But no Chilean grandmother, or Argentine, Spanish, or Portuguese for that matter, is going tell you to make it that way. For most people, the best and easiest way is to boil a can of sweetened condensed milk for around 2-3 hours. Using canning jars you can do exactly the same thing, only flavored!
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May
15
Rhubarb is a delicious and very misunderstood plant. While many people are familiar with Strawberry-Rhubarb, it’s rare to find someone who can appreciate it solo. Alone, rhubarb is extremely sour and refreshing, not that dissimilar to sour-grass, or even sorrel. Contrary to popular belief, raw rhubarb is not toxic. The sour in rhubarb comes from oxalic acid which is found in many vegetables (it’s that thing that makes your teeth feel rough when you eat spinach or chard). The leaves of rhubarb contain the most oxalic acid, but in order to get a LD50 (Lethal Dose) you would need to eat 11lbs of them. In fact, one of my favorite pieces of rhubarb knowledge is that dipping the raw stalks in sugar used to be a favorite child’s treat in England. The first dip-sticks! It is even delicious raw in fruit salads.
Rhubarb tends to be the first fresh fruit in any North American spring, ready a little bit before strawberries, but right on time to match up with the first lavender blossoms. You can make a delicious rhubarb lavender jam with little more than rhubarb, water, sugar, and lavender. The simplicity and ease of this recipe is excellent, especially since by this point in the season I’ve run through my reserves and am dying for anything new.
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May
06
Photograph by Rosey Lakos
Well. It’s been a long time. What can I say except life took over for a little while. I don’t intend to turn this blog into a diary with intermittent recipes, but I feel like I owe my imagined readership an explanation of some sort. I mean here I was all geared up to create professional food blog, and I suddenly fell off the face of the earth!
Those of you who are close to me already know that Patrick and I split up in November. That was a huge blow the routine of my life, among other things. Since then I have moved to a lovely studio on Beach Hill surrounded by some of my favorite people (it’s a giant house split into apartments, and I adore everyone in each space). But I have found myself without reliable internet, and without the means to get it, and have been making my life increasingly busy, as busy as busy is possible. This has always been my way of dealing with my world when I don’t like it very much. The more I can do and busier I can be the better I start to feel about everything. But this means my focus is split and spastic and wild. I accomplish a lot, but in a bunch of different places.
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Oct
05
Several times this year I’ve expected to come across a fig tree loaded with fruit ready for picking and preserving, but each time I’ve been met with an almost bare tree or painfully under-ripe fruit, and come away with just a few handfuls. This is a serious problem for me, because I have a deep and unending love for fresh figs and the many things you can do with them. There is no other jam I love more than fig jam (quince paste is a paste not a jam, so I feel okay saying this…), and there is no fruit I would rather have fresh than figs. When you get the perfect, gooey, slightly firm fig… there is just nothing like it. So when I have only a handful, I end up hoarding them, foolishly and indecisively, until one day I open the refrigerator and they are dried out, lonely, and about to mold. This week I got a handful of green figs from my grandmother’s tree and determined not to let this happen. After reading Edward Schneider’s article about the Tarte Tartin, I couldn’t get the idea of caramelized figs out of my mind. Then I saw Nate’s post about the Boy Bait Cake, and suddenly it just all came together: Fig Upside Down (or Skillet) Cake. I have never made an upside down cake until today, and as I’ve mentioned before I’m really not a baker, but I love my iron skillet and I was determined to caramelize these figs, so I went for it. The result was unparalleled, delicious, and one more thing to add to my “things I love to do with figs” list.
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Sep
19
It is easy for me to recommend My Bread because I have been using Jim Lahey’s recipe for no knead bread ever since it was published in the New York Times almost 3 years ago. It is a flawlessly simple recipe as well as versatile. It is based on the idea that modern bread recipes are all about saving time, putting your own labor into the bread to get what would normally take a day in a matter of hours. Instead, Lahey’s method lets time and yeast do the work. I have recommended his basic recipe to countless friends and acquaintances, and rarely have been met with anything less than extreme enthusiasm. And let me just say. I am not a baker. I preserve, I cook, I make everything I can from scratch, from tomato sauce to pesto, to jams and pickles to yogurt and kombucha. But I very rarely bake. Cookies, cakes, pies, breads, unless it’s a casserole I usually leave it to my boyfriend, so it’s no surprise that he is the one who initially discovered this recipe; but over the years I have learned to love this one particular baking project, and to make it my own. It’s what I have always called a Fougasse (due to the shaping and haphazard baking method I use), and Jim Lahey has perfected into a Pizza Bianca. His book includes 40+ bread variations, recipes for sandwich ingredients from meats to spreads to vegetable preparation, recipes for his classic panini, and what to do with left over stale bread. In my eyes, this is the bread book to end all bread books.
As part of my recommendation for this book, I’d like to share my enthusiasm for it’s publication by posting my adaptation for the Fougasse.
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