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Tangerine Curd and Angel Food Cake

January 11, 2012 //
53
painting of tangerine curd and ingredients

Tangerine Curd. 12″ x 12″ gouache and watercolor pencil. Sharyn DImmick

It’s tangerine season and that means tangerine curd. Riverdog Farm delivers pounds of mandarins and oranges each week. Because I have a contract baking/barter arrangement right now with my friend C., who brought me to music camp, I offered her some curd. She wanted eight jars. Eight jars! See Sharyn scurrying around the garage, looking for empty jars of an appropriate size. See Sharyn buying three dozen eggs at Trader Joe’s. See Sharyn topping a couple of those jars with plastic wrap and rubber bands because good lids were wanting. See Sharyn making angel food cake from scratch to use those first twelve egg whites.

Now, I had on hand eight organically grown tangerines from the farm and eight tangerines of unknown provenance from Safeway. Using the blood orange curd recipe from Chez Panisse Desserts for proportions, I made my first batch with the eight organic tangerines, 18 tablespoons of butter, a dozen egg yolks, plus three whole eggs, 3/4 cup sugar and the juice of three Meyer lemons. This yielded nearly two cups of juice and five jars of tangerine curd. Then I made a second batch with Safeway tangerines. They only yielded a little over a half cup of juice. I added Meyer lemon juice to get to a cup and followed the recipe as written, except for using tangerines instead of blood oranges. The lesson? Different tangerines will yield different amounts of juice — either buy organic ones or get a few extra in case your juice is too scant. The second recipe yielded three small jars of curd.

Tangerine Curd (adapted from Chez Panisse Desserts)

Zest, then juice 4 tangerines to yield 7 Tbsp juice (have a few back-up tangerines in case yours are dry)

Add 1 Tbsp of lemon juice (I juiced 1 Meyer lemon)

Separate 4 eggs and reserve whites for another use.

Whisk 4 egg yolks and one whole egg with 1/4 cup sugar in a non-reactive sauce pan.

Add juice and zest.

Cut 6 Tbsp unsalted butter into small pieces and add to saucepan.

Bring to low-medium heat, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon. Cook until curd coats the spoon. Hint, draw a clean finger through the curd on the spoon — if the track remains clear, the curd is done.

Pour curd into clean glass jars (I washed my jars and lids and boiled them in a water bath before filling them).

This recipe will yield three small jars. Cool and store in refrigerator. The curd will keep for one-to-two weeks. It is good on rye toast or as a cake filling. Or, you might do as my friend Bob suggested and make a tangerine meringue pie. If you want to use curd as a pie filling, Lindsey Shere suggests that you mix 1/4 tsp cornstarch with the sugar before you make the curd — apparently, it helps the curd hold together under oven heat.

Now, remember I made a triple batch the first time and had a dozen egg whites leftover: the simplest thing was to use them to make an angel food cake, delicious with curd. I had not made an angel food cake from scratch since I was a teenager, but I saw no reason not to attempt it. My trusty Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook offered not one but two options for homemade angel food. I chose option two, which contained confectioner’s sugar and seemed to skirt the possibility of being grainy. I got out my whisk, tube pan, metal utensils, beaters, scrubbed and dried them all, got down the cake flour and confectioner’s sugar and set to work. The recipe said to sift the flour and sugar together three times. Uh-huh. Right. Instead, I sifted them each once into a mixing bowl and used my whisk to blend them. Then I beat egg whites, added sugar, beat them again until they nearly overflowed the mixing bowl. I then followed the instruction to sift the sugar and flour over the top of the egg whites. I found this to be quite tedious, perhaps because our sifter is sixty years old and cranky, or perhaps because I really don’t like to sift, just as my mother does not like to stir. What the recipe should have said was to sift some of the mixture on top of the egg whites, fold it in, sift some more, because if you do it all at once you then have a difficult job of folding the mixture into the egg whites because you have no room left in your bowl. I got the job done, however. The other hard part is scraping the batter into the tube pan with a metal spatula. It is much easier to scrape things with a rubber scraper, but verboten for egg whites.

The reward for all of this excess and troublesome labor was a good-tasting cake with none of the odd flavors that show up in commercial angel food cakes or mixes. The cake tastes purely of vanilla and sugar and has a moister texture than you would expect. Mom says I didn’t beat the egg whites enough, but I thought the moist texture was gorgeous.

Here is the amended recipe from Betty Crocker

Angel Food De Luxe (sic)

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Whisk together 1 cup sifted Softasilk cake flour and 1 and 1/2 cups sifted confectioners’ sugar.

Beat 12 egg whites with 1 scant teaspoon of cream of tartar and 1/4 tsp salt until foamy.

Add 1 cup granulated sugar, 2 Tbsp at a time, while continuing to beat egg whites.

Beat to stiff peaks and fold in 1 and 1/2 tsp vanilla.

Sift 1/4 of the flour sugar mixture over the meringue and fold in. Repeat until all flour and sugar are incorporated.

Using only clean, dry metal utensils, transfer cake to waiting ungreased, unfloured 10 x 4 tube pan. Level cake gently with metal spatula.

Bake for 30 to 35 minutes until top springs back when gently pressed with finger.

Set tube pan on top of glass or plastic bottle (I used a ketchup bottle) and cool completely before unmolding. Use table knife to loosen edges. Eat with curd or plain. Yum.

P.S. When the comments started to come in, people suggested that angel food cake was a North American dessert. I didn’t know that. Now I do. I consulted Granny Wise and she’s written up a history of angel food cake for you.

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Categories cakes, desserts, Uncategorized

Three-Ingredient English Toffee from Susan

December 14, 2011 //
31
painting of English toffee and ingredients as seen by a horse.

Sebastian and the English Toffee. 12″ x 12″ watercolor pencil. Sharyn Dimmick

Last week Susan Darm showed up to show you how to make her delicious caramels. This week she is back with her English Toffee recipe. The basic recipe has only three ingredients — shouldn’t you be making some? Think of how nice it will be standing over a warm, fragrant pot of caramel on these cold days.

Susan says:

I did not get this recipe from a book. It may have been given to me by a neighbor, Mrs. Steel, who was from England. I never wrote it down because the recipe was simple, consisting of only three ingredients. These were cooked together carefully then poured out, cooled and broken into pieces which could be covered or dipped in chocolate and robed in chopped almonds. I made English Toffee at the holidays for years. So far I have not found any commercial toffee that tastes as good.

English Toffee

One pound granulated sugar

One pound butter (I have used salted and un-salted. Salted works better for me).

One cup raw almonds

Prepare a buttered cookie sheet. I use a buttered silicon cooking mat on a cookie sheet but it works just as well without the silicon. In a good quality saucepan about 10 inch diameter, place the sugar and butter. Melt these together stirring continuously until they are completely melted and start to bubble. Add the raw almonds. Continue to cook at a slow boil while stirring constantly never lifting the spoon from the mixture. If you are using a candy thermometer you will do this until it reads 290-300 degrees f (between soft crack and hard crack stage). If not using a thermometer, cook until the candy starts to turn a beautiful toffee color and pulls away from the sides of the pan as you stir. Remove the pan from the heat. Carefully remove the stirrer from the pan. Do not allow any candy on the stirrer to drip back in to the pan, it could taint your candy and ruin the texture. Pour the candy on to the baking sheet or silicon mat. I let it cool just a little then use a silicon spatula to smooth the surface and spread the nuts uniformly. I sometimes score the candy lightly with a knife just before it hardens so I get uniform sized pieces when I break the cooled candy. Once the candy has cooled you can do what you want, break it in to pieces to dip in chocolate, crumble it, or chocolate coat the whole big piece to give as a gift along with a little hammer. Have fun and be creative!

Food Notes (from Sharyn): We pour our candy into buttered Pyrex oblong pans. It works for us.

Painting note: Today’s painting features Susan’s horse, Sebastian, who says, “Western tack, please, but English toffee!”

Susan promises to come back next fall and teach us how to cure olives.

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Categories candy, Uncategorized

Candy-Making: Susan Darm’s Easy Caramels

December 7, 2011 //
19
painting shows miniature horse looking through window at caramels.

Scamp and the Christmas Caramels 12″ x 12″ watercolor pencil. Sharyn Dimmick.

Today The Kale Chronicles presents a holiday confection from Susan Darm: at our house candy and certain cookies are seasonal foods, made only in December.  In November 2011, Susan brought some of her caramels to a writing retreat in New Mexico and we all swooned. Susan lives in Brentwood in eastern Contra Costa County, an area formerly known as the Horn of Plenty. My favorite peach farm, Frog Hollow Farm, is still out there, although much of the fertile land has been paved over for housing. When Susan is not making candy she is an equine enthusiast, physical therapist and aspiring writer. Here’s Susan:.

I have always loved candy. As a child in grade school, I figured out that if I was going to eat as many sweets as I liked, I would have to learn to make them. I started out simply with a snack of bread, butter and white sugar. This was a respectable after school snack in my mother’s eyes, something she herself ate as a child. When I got bored with this snack I began experimenting with sugar, butter and/or syrup boiled in a sauce pan, cooled then either eaten plain or poured over nuts. I got the idea of cooking sugar from my father. He made pecan rolls at Christmas and I loved the gooey topping made of brown sugar, butter and pecans.

By the time I reached high school I had graduated to more complex concoctions. The first real winner, a candy that was good enough to share with others, was English Toffee. After 10 or 15 years of English Toffee, I got burned out on making the same candy over and over. I started searching for new recipes. I experimented heavily with both caramel and fudge. I was better suited to making caramel; it has similar properties to toffee. The recipe I ended up using as a base for my caramels is common and can be found with minor variations anywhere on the internet. Once you get the knack of making basic caramels, there are endless variations as far as using nuts, chocolate, salt for salted caramels, constructing layered candies (like Turtles) or shortening the cooking time and making caramel sauce instead of candy. I have even incorporated marshmallows, walnuts and chocolate in to the caramel with sweet results kind of like a caramel rocky road. It was good for me to make these candies. Over the years I began to eat less myself and enjoyed giving it away more than eating it.

The key to caramel making is attention to these details:

  1. Once you get to the actual cooking stage (after the ingredients have melted together), the spoon must not be removed from the pot and you must stir continuously without scraping the sides of the pot. I use a bamboo paddle and envision the paddle moving the candy in a pattern around the pot so no area is left unstirred.
  2. Manage the temperature of the stove to keep the pot at a slow boil.
  3. When you pour the candy out, do not scrape the pan. You may scrape the pan later and eat the scrapings.
  4. I no longer use a candy thermometer because I am able to eyeball the proper cooking stage. I suggest you start with a candy thermometer then estimate the time it takes to achieve the desired ball stage on your stove and quit the thermometer. I find the thermometer cumbersome and by the time I read the proper temperature my candy is overcooked.
  5. Every stove is different. On my old stove, the caramel took about 18 minutes to cook. On my new stove it is always ready in 12 to 15 minutes. This is why I use my eyes.

Easy Basic Caramels

Prepare a buttered 9 by 9 inch pan. Silicon works the best. You may fill the bottom of the pan with nuts. I use raw walnuts or toasted salted almonds or pecans. I have also used macadamias and Brazil nuts. Any nut tastes great with caramel! The caramels also taste good plain.

1 cup granulated sugar

1 cup dark corn syrup

1 cup butter

Put these ingredients in to a 10 inch heavy bottomed sauce pan, melt together and while stirring constantly bring to a slow boil. Turn the heat down and maintain a slow boil uncovered for 4 minutes without stirring. Keep the bamboo spatula in a cup of warm water while the concoction is boiling. After 4 minutes of slow boil, remove the pan from the heat and add:

One can of sweetened condensed milk

Put the pan back on the stove and over low/medium heat boil the concoction while stirring constantly without removing the spoon. If you use a thermometer you will cook it to 238 degrees f. If you use your eyes, the caramel will turn a warm brown caramel color and start to pull away from the sides of the pan. Once they have reached the desired temperature or color, remove the pan from the heat. At this point you may stir in any flavoring you would like. Most people like to add vanilla. I do not. Then pour the caramel in to the 9 by 9 buttered pan. Let the pan cool completely. I refrigerate them overnight. Once you have the basic caramel you can dress it any way you like. I remove the slab of caramel from the pan and cut it into small rectangles. I dip the bottoms of the rectangles in chocolate then wrap them individually in waxed paper (like my grandma used to do). You can also press salt in a decorative pattern on to the top of each piece or mold them in to balls, push nuts around the ball and dip it in chocolate. These caramels are very forgiving. Slightly undercooked they make a soft melt in your mouth caramel. Slightly overcooked they are firmer and must be served at room temperature.

These caramels keep well for several weeks in the refrigerator.

I try to put love in to everything I make. I believe we can taste when food is cooked with love. I also try to use local ingredients as much as possible. I am trying to find healthier candy to make and share. For next year I will work on making nougat with local honey, almonds from our orchard and egg whites from my mother in law’s chickens. This will be a lower fat candy made with ingredients from close to home. Wish me luck and I hope to share my results.

Food Notes: Sharyn here.I grew up making caramels at Christmas with cream, but have never made them with condensed milk (it won’t be long now!). My mother remembers boiling cans of condensed milk as a child to make caramel, so it is a tried and true method.  I also agree with Susan about candy thermometers: I learned to make candy the old-fashioned way by dropping samples into cool water or across plates and looking for textures: soft ball, hard ball, hard crack, etc. Next week, I’ll post Susan’s English toffee recipe for you.

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Categories candy, seasonal recipes, Uncategorized

My First Orange, Plus Candied Citrus Peel

November 15, 2011 //
11
Painting of orange on plate in Mabel's dining room, Taos, New Mexico.

First Orange. 8″ x 8″ watercolor pencil and gouache. Sharyn Dimmick

I ate my first orange of the season this morning, the first one I’ve had since March. The fruit plate at breakfast In New Mexico has been full of melons: I know they can’t be seasonal — not watermelon anyway. Today I turned first to the stewed prunes. I had two, but they were cold. Then I saw oranges in the fruit bowl and went up to investigate. The first orange was large. sporting a blue and white label: I squinted and read “Australia.” I put it back, but now I wanted an orange. I found a small one with no sticker. I took it, hoping it had been trucked no further than California where I live, two states away.

Taking it back to the table I peeled it with my fingernails and then used a knife to get under the thick white pith, losing a little juice as the knife pierced the flesh. Wiping my hands on my napkin, I removed the navel and separated the first segment from the broken halves.

It tasted like sunshine: winter sunshine — a little sweet, acid, radiant in my mouth. I understood for the first time how my mother felt in Canada and Illinois when she got an orange in her Christmas stocking: how wonderful it must have tasted in the dead of winter when they were rare.

Mom has never lost her taste for oranges. We argue about them. She wants them in August and September when it is not orange season. I remind her that in January, February and March we will be inundated with citrus: I spend March making tangerine curd to eat on angel food cake, devising citrus dressings for salads, drying and candying citrus peels. We make Swedish rye bread in the winter with orange zest and fresh juice.

When Mom moved to California in 1944 she said you could buy oranges everywhere: from roadside stands, from trucks on San Pablo Avenue. She bought an orange juicer — not an electric thing, but a press with a screen and long handles: you bring the handles together and squeeze halved oranges or lemons between metal plates. The screen catches the seeds and the juice falls into a reservoir below with a pouring spout. It does not work well if you have removed the peel for zest or candying — it was designed for halved citrus, squeezed whole.

I have never been partial to the standard American trio: apples, oranges and bananas, sitting on the counter year-round and incorporated into every fruit salad and lunch box. I eat apples in season, drying them for the winter and giving them up when they come from cold storage. I like oranges when I am hiking and fresh food is scarce, or when, like this morning, I take a walk in thawing snow: I walked to town to get a coffee, walked back in time for morning meditation, craved fruit at breakfast. The orange tasted like lost gold recovered, what explorers had been looking for as they sailed around the world.

Oh, you’ll want a recipe. Alright. This is how to candy citrus peel: orange, lime, tangerine, lemon, or grapefruit. I started doing this when I got interested in using the whole fruit: if I’m not zesting citrus fruit there is all of that peel left over — why not turn it into winter sweets? Home-candied peel bears no resemblance to that nasty glaceed mixed fruit you find in the store. I chop candied peel into breakfast muffins, use it in orange French toast, or eat it straight out of the jar when there are no sweets in the house and I want a little something. Sometimes I save mixed citrus peels in a bag in the freezer: when I have a lot, I take them out and candy them all at once. It’s best to use organically-grown fruit for edible peel, but if you only have commercially-grown citrus available, be sure to wash it with dishwashing liquid and water, rinse it and dry it before peeling so that you are not ingesting any unwanted chemicals.

Here’s what you do. Peel a lot of citrus fruit or take your bag of saved peels from the freezer. You can candy several types at once — you don’t need to separate them. If you are peeling fresh fruit, score the peel into quarters with a knife: this makes it easier to peel.

Place your peels in a large saucepan of cold water: you want 2 cups of water per eight limes or lemons, six tangerines or oranges, or three grapefruit. Bring peels to rolling boil. Drain them. Start again with cold water. Repeat. The thicker the peel, the more times you should blanch it — grapefruit peel takes at least four times,

Cool the peels and scrape the white pith from them with a knife or the side of a spoon, being careful not to break the peel — if it breaks, you can’t brag about it, but it is no tragedy — you’ll just have some smaller pieces. Cut the peels into strips.

Now return the peels to your saucepan with equal amounts of sugar and water — say 2 cups each. Bring to a simmer and cook without stirring until peel is translucent. This takes about an hour. If you are a thermometer-wielding type. Alice Medrich says to get the syrup to between 220 and 222 degrees.

Remove peel with slotted spoon and cool in a single layer on a rack over a baking sheet (the peel will drip for awhile).  We set ours in our oven overnight. When peel is dry, dredge it in sugar and store it in sugar in a glass jar in your refrigerator. If you make enough it will last you until citrus comes in again the following year. It makes great gifts, too. People have been known to dip it in chocolate or caramel.

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Categories candied citrus peel, Uncategorized

Sour Cherry Pie and Homemade Cherry Syrup

November 5, 2011 //
15
painting of sour cherry pie, cherry syrup and ingredients

Sour Cherry Pie (Detail) 12″ x 12″ gouache and watercolor paper. Sharyn Dimmick

How can cherries be a part of seasonal cooking in November when I don’t live in Australia? When the weather turns cold we turn to preserved foods. We still have apples on our backyard apple tree, but Mom asked me to roast a pork loin and some squash while she and my sister-in-law Barbara scrubbed and taped walls for painting (I know I got the better part of this division of labor). Because I am supposedly getting ready for a week away, I wanted an easy pie with no peeling and paring, no slicing, so I went for the canned cherries in the garage. These are pitted sour cherries canned in juice. Mom had made crust earlier in the week, so it was pie time again. And while I’m at it, I’ll just say that I have made fresh sour cherry pie from some sour cherries I scored at the Ferry Plaza market in San Francisco and — drum roll — we prefer pie made with canned sour cherries.

Here is how to make cherry pie — my cherry pie.

Make the crust first. If you make Madge’s recipe, you will have enough crust for two cherry pies, so you can pit my cherry pie against your favorite recipe, double the filling recipe and make two cherry pies from this recipe or save the extra crust for quiche or apple pie. Our recipe is handy at Thanksgiving and Christmas when you are baking lots of of pies, but. truth to tell, pie is never a problem here: we’ll eat it for breakfast, dinner, lunch and tea.

Once again, the no-rant version* of pie crust for your convenience:

Cut 1 cup of vegetable shortening plus 2 Tbsp of butter into 3 cups of unbleached flour and 1 tsp salt  until the mixture resembles small peas. Do not overwork the dough — you want to see streaks of fat in the raw dough: they will melt while baking and create flaky crust. If you use salted butter, you can reduce the salt to 1/4 tsp.

Into a 1-cup liquid measuring cup, break 1 large egg. Beat egg with fork until blended.

Add 1 Tbsp cider vinegar to egg and stir. Then add water until combined liquids measure 1/2 cup, plus a little more.

Add liquids to shortening and flour and work just until combined. Pat dough into a flattened circle. If you are a novice pie baker, you may want to wrap the dough in waxed paper and chill it for awhile. The intrepid and experienced can divide the dough in half and proceed by cutting one half-circle in half again — this recipe makes four crusts, so half of it will give you the crust for your two-crust cherry pie.

Roll crust out on a floured work surface with a floured rolling pin. Roll firmly but lightly, being sure to roll all the way to the edges — you want the crust thin, but you don’t want to press it down and make it stick. You’ll figure it out — it’s not that hard. Try your best to keep the crust circular. Measure the crust by setting your pie plate on top of it, allowing for enough crust to cover the sides. Fold rolled crust into quarters to pick it up and unfold it again in your pie tin.

Now you have an aesthetic choice to make. For that classic lattice cherry pie you can roll your next quarter of crust into another circle and cut the crust into long strips, which you will lay crosswise over the filling later. If you don’t have the inclination to build a lattice, just take your circle and fold it into quarters, leaving it for the top crust later.

Go and preheat your oven to 375 degrees if using a Pyrex pie plate. If you use metal, you can start the pie at 400, but be on hand to turn it down after ten or fifteen minutes.

Now the filling:

Mix 1/4 cup cornstarch and scant 3/4 cup sugar in a dry saucepan. Whisk until blended.

Open 2 cans of sour cherries packed in water (Do not use cherry pie filling, which belongs on The Horror Roll). Drain the juice from the cherries into a 2-cup measuring cup — you will have about 1 and 1/3 cups. Leave the drained cherries in the cans for now.

Whisk 1/3 cup cherry juice into the cornstarch and sugar and stir with whisk until thickened over medium heat. The first sign that the cornstarch is working is the appearance of little shapes that look like ragged skin. If you don’t care for the pale pink color add the secret ingredient, red food coloring, drop by drop until you get a hue you like — I particularly recommend this option if you are going the lattice crust route or planning to take photos of your pie. When the mixture is thick and glossy add the reserved cherries, remove from heat and stir in

1 Tbsp butter and

a grating of fresh nutmeg

Pour the filling into your prepared pie shell and weave your lattice strips over the top, or plonk your unfolded top crust over the filling and make an attractive pattern of knife slashes for vents. Do not wash your saucepan yet! Place pie in oven. Bake for about 50 minutes or until crust is nicely browned and filling is bubbling.

Now, remember that other cup of cherry juice sitting in your measuring cup? You can drink it if you want to, which Mom does sometimes, but this is what I do with it: put it in your saucepan. Add some sugar — more than a Tablespoon, less than a cup. Turn the burner back on and boil it down until thickened — you want it to coat the spoon and be bubbly and shiny. Decant carefully into a glass jar (pour along a spoon or a knife if you are nervous — the metal absorbs some of the heat). Let cool and then refrigerate. This will keep indefinitely in a cold refrigerator. It is delicious on cornmeal pancakes, stirred into your morning oatmeal, over ice cream, with lemon pound cake …. You can also add some cream and cook it into cherry caramel — you’ll never drain cherries over the sink or throw out cherry juice again!

Let your pie cool while you eat dinner or make tea (at least fifteen or twenty minutes — the hotter the pie when you cut it, the more likely the filling is to run. We don’t care a whole lot about this, but for a prettier pie give it some cooling time).

Serve plain or a la mode.

*For the full rant on pie crust, please visit Gravenstein Apple Pie.

Food notes: For the full flavor benefit you must make this with sour cherries packed in water and scant the sugar as I do. For those of you stateside, canned sour pie cherries show up infrequently at Canned Foods Grocery Outlet — aka “Half Foods.” Some cherry pie recipes call for lemon — that will not be necessary with this pie. Please do not make it with sweet cherries (Bings, Burlats, etc.) — sour cherries have a different flavor, the ideal flavor for cherry pie in my opinion. Try them and see. If you are out of cornstarch, you can substitute flour: if you use flour, your filling will be cloudy rather than clear, but it will taste equally good.

On Kale: When I wasn’t making cherry pie, baking acorn squash with hot mustard, honey, lime and black pepper, roasting the squash seeds or boiling down cherry syrup I finally tried my friend Cathy’s version of kale with fresh walnuts and homemade raisins. The verdict at the table? “It’s still kale.” Back to the tasting laboratory…

I’ll be away for eight days starting Sunday sans electronic devices with which to entertain you or read and respond to your comments. Please make comments anyway if you are so moved. I’ll be back to coach you through your cherry pie crises well before the run up to Thanksgiving. I’ll also instruct the robot to give you a post to read on Wednesday while I am gone. Au revoir, dear readers. I’ll be back in person November 14 with stories to tell and perhaps a new recipe or two.

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Categories fruit, fruit syrups, pie, syrups and sauces

Scary Food, Lemon Sponge Pie and “The Horror Roll”

October 30, 2011 //
18
painting of lemon pie and blue teapot

Lemon Sponge Pie, 8″ x 8″, gouache and watercolor pencil. Sharyn Dimmick

My late older brother ate pretty much the opposite of what I eat. He ate a lot of fast food, quick food and processed food. He drank mugs of coffee laced with up to a quarter cup of sugar, minus what he spilled on the counter. He liked raw carrots and celery and fresh strawberries, but he only ate those things if someone else washed them, cut them up and put them in a bowl for him, preferably on the counter where he could see it. The only other vegetable he consumed regularly was onions, although he once ate seven jars of marinated artichokes out of the case Mom gave him on Christmas Day. In the fruit category he liked raisins, strawberry milk and blueberry pie.

In the last year of his life, Kevin had an experience that improved his diet slightly. He liked to tell the story. His then girlfriend, Barbara, who would become his wife, had a cat named Jigs. Jigs looked forward to Kevin’s visits because he nearly always brought bags of fast food with him. One day Kevin arrived with a McDonald’s bag, containing a cheeseburger and an order of Chicken McNuggets. Kevin broke  open a McNugget and gave it to Jigs. Jigs sniffed it, immediately commenced to try to bury it and walked away, insulted. Kevin said, when he told the story, that if a cat wouldn’t eat something that was supposed to be chicken he wasn’t going to eat it anymore either.

Michael Pollan has famously given us the guideline not to eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. We hew pretty closely to that in our household these days, although we each have our indulgences: we buy Prego spaghetti sauce because Mom made her own for years and we can honestly say we like Prego better. I particularly like the Italian sausage flavor. We use it for quick suppers. Sometimes I add fresh summer squash or mushrooms or eggplant to the sauce, but sometimes I don’t. Beyond that, my personal weaknesses are for Cheez-It crackers and Golden Grahams cereal. I know I can make cheese straws, but I love Cheez-Its  right out of the box. I don’t buy them often. Golden Grahams are even less defensible — they are tooth-achingly sweet and taste like candy: to be able to eat them at all, I mix them half and half with some healthier cereal — anything not sweetened — and eat them with almonds. I allow myself about one box a year, on sale only.

To me, scary food does not mean food that appears to be dripping blood or cupcakes accented with spiders: scary food means food that has been so processed that it does not resemble the original food it came from.  An order of Chicken McNuggets is a good example, but so is anything labeled “cheese food” or  “pasteurized processed cheese,” as well as white bread from the grocery store. There are many more examples: please feel free to tell me about your personal food horrors in the Comments. Perhaps I’ll put up a link called “The Horror Roll” and list some of your candidates there.

Halloween was Kevin’s birthday. There is nothing he liked that I cook on a regular basis and if I shared one of his “recipes” you would stop reading this blog. Seriously. Instead, I’ll share with you a favorite family recipe that my mother made yesterday with ripe Meyer lemons from our neighbor’s tree and her famous Swedish pie crust. For your convenience, I’ll give you the pie crust recipe below, but I’ll spare you the editorial commentary: for the full rant on pie crust, please visit the Gravenstein Apple Pie post. Meanwhile, get ready to make a Lemon Sponge Pie, which is much like a lemon meringue pie, except that you fold the egg whites into a lemon custard, which includes milk. If you like lemon desserts, you will want to try this.

Make the crust first:

Sift 3 cups unbleached flour with

1 tsp salt

Cut in 1 cup Crisco (or other vegetable shortening) until it is the size of peas. Add a little butter (1-2 Tbsp for flavor).

Break into a one cup measuring cup:

1 large egg. Beat it until blended.

Add to egg:

1 Tbsp white or cider vinegar

Add water until combined liquids reach 1/2 cup, plus a little.

Add liquids to flour, salt, shortening and butter. Stir together crust and form it into a flattened round. Cut 1/4  from the round — this is your crust for this lemon pie. Wrap the other 3/4 crust in waxed paper and store it in the refrigerator for your next pie or quiche (Crust recipe makes 4 single crusts or 2 double-crust pies).

Pat pie crust into a circle on a floured work surface. Roll it out, making sure to roll in all directions and roll out any thick edges. When you think you are done set a 9″ or 10″ pie plate on top of crust. Adjust as needed: you need to roll this crust very thin for best results.

Transfer your crust to your pie tin. The classic method is folding the crust into quarters and unfolding it in the tin.

Now preheat your oven to 400 degrees or 350 if using a Pyrex  pie plate. Proceed with filling.

Pie filling:

Separate 2 large eggs, whites into a small mixing bowl, yolks into a larger one.

Beat the egg whites until fairly stiff. Leave beaters in place and change to larger bowl.

Beat egg yolks with:

1 cup milk

1 cup sugar

1/4 cup flour.

Zest 3 or 4 lemons over the bowl of egg mixture. Squeeze juice from lemons into bowl — you need at least 1/3 cup of juice.

Fold egg whites gently into the other ingredients and pour filling into your prepared crust. Transfer the pie to the oven. Keep an eye on it —  you are going to bake it for about 25 minutes, but this pie burns easily. If you are worried about it, put a strip of foil over the crust. Bake until filling is not sloshy. Allow to cool to lukewarm — if you cut it too warm, the filling will run and you will have pudding with crust rather than pie.

Like it? You can bake three more with the crust you now have on hand, or you can make quiche, apple pie, pumpkin pie, chocolate pie — whatever you like best.

Food Note: I use Meyer lemons in this recipe because we grow them. Eurekas or other tart lemons are fine, but don’t go above 1/3 cup of juice with them: Meyer lemons are sweeter than other varieties.

The Horror Roll: To nominate candidates for  “The Horror Roll,” please list foods or “foods” that scare you by their apparent deviation from real food in the Comments section. I’ll start a “Horror Roll” page soon with some of the most horrendous nominees. In fact, I’ll start it now. Check it out.

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Categories desserts, pie, Uncategorized

Trick or Treat — What Happened to the Cocoa Shortbread?

October 28, 2011 //
7
Halloween painting of cocoa shortbread cookies with bats.

Trick or Treat Cocoa Shortbread. 8″ x 8″ gouache and watercolor pencil. Sharyn Dimmick

Trick or Treat. I’m not here, am I? Because I’ve gone to post on ArtEpicurean for pre-Halloween fun. Please follow me over there for a delicious treat, my beloved cocoa shortbread cookies tricked out in Halloween costumes. Usually, I don’t break out this recipe until Christmas, but I wanted to do something special for Jane, a woman after my own heart who posts recipes inspired by or accompanied by paintings.

I’ll give you a thumbnail of the cookie painting, but please go visit Jane’s blog for the recipe. You won’t be sorry. Just click on the link that says ArtEpicurean in the first paragraph if you haven’t done so already, or scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page and click ArtEpicurean in my links section. We’ll save you some cookies.

P.S. I have to be away early this morning through late afternoon. If something goes wrong with the link, please  use your initiative and Google “Art Epicurean” to get your recipe. I’ll check in as soon as I can — before 6 PM PST. — Sharyn

P.P.S. The link in the first paragraph works now, thanks to Sally B. Sorry that it failed earlier.

Update: It is now approaching Christmas 2014 and the ArtEpicurean link no longer works so I have decided to re-post my cocoa shortbread recipe here as a service to all lovers of shortbread and chocolate. As always, using the best-quality ingredients you can find or afford will yield the most delicious shortbread.

Cocoa Shortbread

Break into small pieces, 2 sticks butter*. Soften for a few seconds in microwave. Measure 1/2 cup granulated sugar, plus 2 Tablespoons* Work sugar into butter — I like to use my hands, but you can use a spoon if you like. Whisk together 2 cups sifted unbleached flour and 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder, sifted. Add flour/cocoa mixture to sugar and butter and mix until blended. Add vanilla extract to taste.*

Chill dough for at least an hour. This step is important for both flavor and texture.

Preheat oven to 300 degrees.

Shape cookies by into small balls with hands and then smush your thumb into the center to make thumbprint cookies. Or mix equal parts unsweetened cocoa powder and powdered sugar in a shaker and use that to “flour” a work surface. Work with half to a quarter of the chilled dough at a time, depending on your skill and the coldness of the day. Flatten dough into a pat (like pie crust). “Flour” your rolling pin, cookie cutters and board or counter with the cocoa/powdered sugar mixture (I like to use a marble slab and rolling pin for rolled cookies). Roll out dough to 1/4 or 1/2 inch thickness and cut with decorative cutters. Place on ungreased baking sheets and decorate with colored sugar.*

Bake for twenty minutes at 300. For best results, rotate baking trays from back to front and from bottom to top rack at the ten-minute mark. Use caution in removing cookies from baking sheets — they are tender when hot and can break easily if you touch an adjoining cookie while working your spatula under another.

Note on ingredients: You can use unsalted butter if you prefer. If you do, add just a pinch of kosher salt to the dough to avoid a flat taste. I like to use one stick of unsalted butter and one stick of salted butter and omit the salt. Use vanilla extract, rather than artificial vanilla — it costs more, but you don’t have to use a lot, the flavor is superior and it does not have dodgy chemicals in it. You can also make your own vanilla if you have vanilla beans and spirits lying around. You could also try infusing the butter with ground vanilla beans instead of using extract (I haven’t tried this option yet). Coarse colored sugar works better than fine sugar, which can end up being absorbed into the dough as it baks. Nevertheless, I have had some success with making my own colored sugar out of either turbinado or white sugar by shaking it in a jar with food coloring. Shake well and save money. Turquoise, purple, hot pink and light lime green look beautiful on the dark dough, as would a light orange yellow. Mocha enthusiasts could add a pinch of instant espresso powder to the dough.

Enjoy!

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Categories cookies, desserts

Sonoma Pears Poached in White Wine with Blueberries (Guest Post by Suzanne Edminster)

October 24, 2011 //
16
Painting of a Pink Poached Pear

Dream Pears 7″ x 7″ Acrylic on Fabriano  Paper by Suzanne Edminster

Dear Readers and Cooks,

I am pleased to introduce my first guest post on “The Kale Chronicles.” My real-life best friend Suzanne Edminster is a painter who lives in Santa Rosa who teaches popular classes in acrylic painting techniques which you can find on her website, SaltworkStudio. What not everybody knows about Suzanne is that she is a talented hostess who can pull together delicious meals with skill and grace. Just for you, she painted the painting and wrote out the recipe. Enjoy.

Sonoma Pears Poached in White Wine and Blueberries

On an autumn night in Santa Rosa I was contemplating a bag of small Bartlett pears that had been carried too long in the car and were starting to bruise. I was longing for a sweet, elegant way to cook pears without messing with pie crust, cobbler or crumble. I developed this recipe as one that could, in the best of all possible worlds, be cooked with fruit from our garden, though I draw the line at keeping goats for cheese– four chickens are demanding enough.

We have two young pear trees in our urban backyard orchard, both Red D’Anjou. This was a mistake; we were given one of the two trees and was assured it was a Bartlett. Neither is bearing yet, as we’ve had to take young fruit off too-young branches to avoid breakage. Scott, my husband, planted 9 kinds of blueberry bushes in a raised bed, but between chickens, squirrels, raccoons and other poachers, we got a total of about five blueberries from the plants this year, although they are bearing well. Next year, bird netting goes over all and the humans of the house can eat the harvest. Eventually I’ll try this recipe with our own blueberries (self-frozen if need be) and our own pears.

At the end of the summer we had overbought on white wine and had not yet laid in the stock of red. My mother used to serve red warm cinnamon pears—yes, I think she used cinnamon drop candy on them and to make the sauce!– and I really wanted the pears to turn that glorious holiday crimson. What could I do to give the wine a color? We had small frozen organic blueberries that we keep on hand for cereal. I adapted Stacy Slinkard’s recipe for Red Wine Poached Pears that I found in About.com at http://wine.about.com/od/howwineismade/r/poachedpears.htm. The result was delicious, and the color of both sauce and pears, a deep red-purple, divine. Surprisingly, the blueberries held their shape through the longish poaching time. I used fresh lime juice from our lime trees rather than lemon, and I chose soft new Sonoma goat cheese to offset the brilliant sweetness of the pears in the sauce. Scott and I agreed that the white, tangy bite of goat cheese was perfection on the warm red pears. A bonus of this recipe is that the whole house smelled of pear-pourri!


Sonoma Pears Poached in White Wine and Blueberries

Ingredients:

4-6 halved, cored pears (peeling is optional and top stems can be left on)

1½ cups of white wine (your choice)

½ cup of granulated sugar

2 tablespoons of fresh lemon or lime juice, with optional zest

2 teaspoons vanilla

1 teaspoon cinnamon

½ to 1 cup fresh or frozen blueberries

Soft plain or new goat cheese

Combine all the ingredients, except pears and goat cheese, and bring to a boil. Let the sugar and wine combine, then add the pears face-down and simmer for about 15-20 minutes, turning once after about 10 minutes. Pears should be tender and easily poked through with a fork, but don’t overcook them. Remove pears and boil the wine/pear sauce until reduced by half. Serve pears warm in bowls with a small dollop of soft goat cheese in the middle of each half. Pour warm sauce over all. It’s excellent cold as well.

Painting Note: This slightly cosmic pear painting shows both the pinkish red of the sauce and the purple of the blueberries. It’s 7” x 7”, acrylic on paper. The pink-purple ranges from Alizarin Crimson to Fluorescent Magenta. You can see more of my paintings at www.saltworkstudio.net . Or visit my blog at http://saltworkstudio.wordpress.com/

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Categories desserts, fruit, Uncategorized

Apple Cake with Caramelized Fennel and Dark Rum

October 17, 2011 //
21
painting shows apple cake and ingredients

Apple Cake with Fennel 8″ x 8″ gouache and watercolor pencil. Sharyn DImmick

I am not a big cake person — I would rather eat pie or yeast-risen breads like cinnamon rolls — but when I saw “Grandmothers of Sils’ Apple-Yogurt Cake” on Smitten Kitchen I knew I had to try a variation on it. Deb’s picture enticed me and I like fennel/anise/licorice flavors. I have been cruising apple cake recipes for awhile (some of my friends like cake) and this one called to me.

I was patient: I waited a month. I kept hoping to get fennel in my vegetable box. No such luck. Yesterday I went out and bought some at the Farmers’ Market.

Smitten Kitchen’s recipe doesn’t have any fennel — what was I doing? I don’t have any anisette liqueur: I was plotting to use what I had with some gentle assistance from roasted fennel to bump  up the anise flavor.

First step, prepare the fennel. While it roasted I peeled and chopped the apples — I used some of my beloved Gravensteins and a couple of miscellaneous apples from a bulk buy I made at the market. It took me four apples to get the required three cups of diced apples.

Next I made “lemon yogurt” by mincing homemade candied lemon peel  into plain yogurt and adding half a capful of lemon extract (All of the lemons on the tree are greenish this week)

I turned the well-roasted fennel into a puree by adding the dregs of a bottle of dark rum — maybe an eighth of a cup — and a little olive oil and putting it in the blender. It took quite awhile to get a puree, even after I added a capful of anise flavoring to it, but I ended up with the quarter cup of liquid that I needed. I bumped up the flavor with a little star anise ground in a mortar.

These preparations done I almost followed the recipe as written, Almost. I swapped in unbleached flour and whisked the baking powder into it rather than sifting them together — I avoid sifting things together whenever possible because the flour sifter is not fun to clean and dry. Oh, yeah, and I made the cake in a bundt pan because I don’t have a spring form pan and it seemed like a bundt pan would work just fine. The batter smelled amazing, deeply perfumed with rum and citrus.

The cake came out a little less brown than I would have liked and I baked it for some extra minutes. It was showing good color near the bottom edges, but when I unmolded it, most of it was pale. After letting it cool for awhile I gunked up my sifter with powdered sugar. The cake looks nice with the sugar sifting: although this is the kind of step I often skip, I’m glad I bothered.

We ate our first slices slightly warm with tea, which we drink British style with milk. We brew our tea from tea leaves in a pre-warmed pot with water at a rolling boil, but don’t let me get started on that rant here. Mom said she could really taste the apples. I tasted predominately citrus. We are waiting to see if the flavor changes over the next few days.*

In short, it is a pretty cake. It is an autumn cake. It might even be a quick and easy cake to make if one wasn’t caramelizing fennel and grinding star anise. Some other person might have just gone out and bought a bottle of anisette liqueur, but that is not my style.

Apple Cake with Caramelized Fennel and Dark Rum

Prepare a bundt pan by rubbing it with butter.

For the fennel:

Preheat oven to 350. The cake bakes at 350, too, so this is convenient.

Wash and trim 1 fennel bulb

Remove core and slice thinly. Place in Pyrex pan with a little butter and olive oil to keep it from sticking. Roast until done, showing some brown color and soft. Let cool. While it is roasting and cooling, you can prepare your apples:

Peel 4 cooking apples, core and dice them. Set aside

Puree fennel in blender with 1/8 cup dark rum (or other liquor to taste. Add a little olive oil if fennel resists the blender. Taste and add 1-2 tsp anise extract if desired. If you want more anise flavor still, crush some star anise in a mortar and add to fennel puree.

For lemon yogurt:

Do it the easy way and just buy 8 oz of good quality lemon yogurt, or add lemon zest, candied lemon peel or lemon juice to plain yogurt.

Once you have your apples, fennel puree and lemon yogurt ready, make your cake batter:

Whisk together in a small bowl:

1 and 1/4 tsp baking powder

2 and 1/4 cups unbleached flour

Combine in large mixing bowl and beat until pale yellow:

4 large eggs

1 and 1/4 cups white sugar

Beat in 1 cup lemon yogurt and fennel-rum puree.

Add flour mixture and 1/2 cup+ olive oil,  alternating between flour and oil and beating briefly to incorporate each addition. When combined, fold in reserved apples.

Pour batter into prepared bundt pan. Bake on middle oven rack in your 350 0ven for 60 minutes, checking to see that a toothpick comes out clean.

Cool cake on a bottle — I use a vinegar bottle — until just warm. Upend bundt pan over dinner plate. Mine came out easily — no sticking. Dust with powered sugar.

Food notes: I had some blood orange olive oil, so that’s what I used, figuring it would boost the citrus notes in the recipe. It did. But you can use any mild-flavored olive oil — or if you have lemon olive oil that would be good, too. My first powdered sugar coating sunk in. Oh well. I’ll just add more because it looks pretty. * The second day the flavors are more complex and mellow: you can’t tell exactly what you are eating, but you know that it is good. The cake is still quite moist and might be good toasted. You could easily make this cake with pears as well.

Now, could it be that I made a cake because I am celebrating? It could be. Betsy over at bitsandbreadcrumbs kindly nominated me for a Liebster Blog Award.

The Liebster Award is given to blogs with fewer than 200 subscribers by a blogger who feels they deserve more recognition.

Rules are:

  1. Thank the giver and link back to the blogger who gave it to you.
  2. Reveal your top 5 bloggers and let them know by leaving a comment on their blog.
  3. Copy and paste the award on your blog.

I am honored to receive the nomination and would nominate Betsy right back if I could: Bits and Breadcrumbs is one of my favorites.

Now it is my priviIege to nominate five more deserving blogs. I have been searching for small blogs for four days, looking for those that haven’t yet received Liebster Awards. Finding them is harder than I thought: everyday my list of wonderful blogs grows, but usually only big blogs post their stats. So, I’ll post three now and I’ll take suggestions from my readers about other small, deserving blogs they love in the Comments section. Please, only list blogs with fewer than 200 subscribers — I want to play by the rules. Here, without further ado are three of my Liebster Award nominees:

1) Jane at ArtEpicurean. A woman after my own heart Jane combines recipes with paintings inspired by food and tips to keep your creativity flowing.

2) Kat at Sensible Lessons always has something intriguing going, whether it is her new take on huevos rancheros, ancho sweet potato fries with Sriracha ketchup  or brownies with both espresso and mint.

3 ) Stephanie at Recipe Renovator helps people on restricted diets reconfigure their recipes.  Not exciting at first description? Her photographs are beautiful and her range of recipes wide. And someone with dietary restrictions may thank you. I’m excited to introduce this site to my gluten-free friends.

Now, a list of some other blogs I would have nominated but they already got the prize. You should read them anyway — they can’t help it if they are popular.

Daisy’s World: Daisy is always cooking something good to eat. Beautiful photos, too.

Krista and Jess: These women always have something surprising (“Mushroom conk,” anyone?). They make me laugh and they were the conduit for my favorite new recipe, the David Lebovitz-inspired tomato tart.

Frugal Feeding: Good food, good photos, frugality. What’s not to like? He recently posted a Thai Carrot Soup with Lemongrass — I’ll be revamping my Thai Carrot Soup soon.

Cook Eat Live Vegetarian: Seasonal, mostly vegetarian food from Andalucia, Spain.

Around the World in Eighty Bakes: How can you not love a woman who is trying to bake her way around the world with refreshing honesty?

Chutney and Spice: I love the hand-drawn header. And I can’t wait to make the Green Tomato Chutney

The Cilantropist: The name is brilliant. The photos are enticing. The recipes are things you want to cook.

Savoring Every Bite She loves pumpkin. She probably loves other stuff, too, but it’s October.

Enjoy all of it. And thanks for reading, — Sharyn

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Categories cakes, cakes, desserts, Uncategorized
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