Strawberries: Tasting summer in winter

An update: In writing this post, I started to talk about food and carbon footprints, then decided to just celebrate strawberries in winter. Reader T.W. Barritt gave me a gentle nudge to reconsider the issue. So I’ve added an update at the end of the post. Probably opening a real can of worms here, but what can you do?

One morning recently I stopped at the grocery store on the way to work to pick up a couple of things for lunch. On my way through the produce section, I was stopped dead in my tracks by the scent of strawberries. It was the smell of summer. And with the winter we’ve been having in Chicago this year—it has snowed 35 days so far, some kind of record—summer is what I dearly needed to smell. And to taste.

Granted, you can often find at least a few strawberries in the store, even in winter. Often, though, they’re blond and bland. Or else they cost the Earth—this time of year, five bucks a pound is not out of the question. But this was a big, generous display of one-pound, clear plastic boxes, stacked high and smelling like a hot August day. And every bit as beautiful as the red, ripe berries themselves was a sign saying $1.99.

I took my time at the display, carefully picking a box that had the reddest, most beautiful berries without the telltale smooshed ones in the bottom that said this batch was past just ripe. At the checkout, the cashier suddenly picked up the box of strawberries and held it near her face, eyes closed, inhaling deeply, a startlingly intimate act with someone else’s purchase. But such was the power of the smell of those luscious berries on a winter morning.

The scent continued to exert its power, filling my office as I tried to concentrate on my work. By lunch, I had scarfed down half a dozen of these fat, juicy beauties, and over lunch, I hunted online for recipes to make the most of the rest of the strawberries, assuming they made it home.

What I found made the most of them indeed—a light, sophisticated dessert with exactly four ingredients. If you’re not ready for dessert yet, scroll on down to a versatile spicy fruit salsa that goes with salmon, chicken, chops and more.

Mascarpone: Italian for easy, elegant desserts

The holiday season is upon us, which means parties galore. Which means it’s also the season of the little black dress. Women know little black dresses as the simple little tricks in their closets that—with a few accessories—make them look elegant, festive and very, very lovely. Men know them as the things that make us lose our train of thought at parties, because they’re just that good. Marion has one that works like a charm, every time.

Well, when it comes to dinner parties, this is the little black dress of desserts. Simple, sophisticated, infinitely accessorizable. At its heart is mascarpone, a buttery rich double-cream or triple-cream dessert cheese from Italy. Made from cow’s milk and typically containing 60% to 75% milk fat, it is most often known as that intoxicatingly silky cream found in tiramisù.

A quick search on epicurious.com turns up more than 120 recipes for this versatile cheese. Still, they’re the first to admit that “this delicately flavored cheese needs little embellishment other than being topped with fruit.”

The recipe below is almost that simple. A half dozen ingredients thrown into a bowl and beaten with an electric mixer into mascarpone cream. And then a little fruit, nuts, chocolate or what have you to accessorize it. That’s it—no double boilers, no baking, no fuss. So easy for something that tastes so over-the-top decadent and dresses up so beautifully in the right setting. We used smallish vintage martini glasses. Teacups, mismatched or otherwise, could work just as well—especially with a couple of small, plainish, lemony cookies on each saucer. Obviously, the key here is scale. These desserts are served in small portions—serving dishes should be scaled appropriately.

An unexpected bonus for something so delicate tasting is how surprisingly sturdy mascarpone cream is. I mixed up a batch and then started experimenting with the fruit I was adding for one version. Then I fussed over one photo set-up until I decided it wouldn’t work and created a completely different one at the opposite end of the apartment. After the first shot, I decided it would be good to show two variations, and Marion helped me put together the second dessert. The whole time, the mascarpone cream was sitting out on the kitchen counter, no wilting, no running, no collapsing. And the first prepared dessert looked just as good in the last shot as it did in the first. In fact, we even had the remaining cream the next night with more fresh berries, and spending the night in the fridge [covered, of course] hadn’t affected it in the slightest. To me, this says you can whip up the mascarpone cream before company shows up and dress it up when you’re ready to serve dessert. If the kitchen’s particularly hot, you may want to keep it in the fridge.

This recipe is based on one found in Tastes of Italia, the same issue of the magazine that led to last week’s Rosemary Sage Chops. If I get a couple/few recipes out of an entire cookbook, I feel that I’ve gotten my money’s worth. Well, so far I’ve gotten two from one issue of a magazine—and I don’t think I’m done yet.

The taste of summer memories

First, a quick bit of news: At the end of today’s post, you’ll find out about some minor but cool changes to this blog. Okay, back to the post.

Prune plums are in season right now, but they won’t be around for long. That means it’s time for me to get out of the kitchen and let Marion share her luscious plum cake with you, along with a side of summer memories.

 

I remember the warm months of my childhood as a procession of seasonal fruits—first the small soft fruits, strawberries, and raspberries, both also indelibly linked in my mind to various Detroit backyards where my father always kept an assortment of fruit trees and berry bushes, lovingly tended in even the most urban settings. Every fruit was ripe for such a fleeting time, and we were all keenly aware of that little vanishing moment. When the fruits we loved fell ripe, we all went to work, picking, cleaning, canning, and the children of course holding up their end by happily eating. In mid-summer every year we would spend a Sunday scrambling around in trees at an orchard north of Detroit, picking as many sour cherries as we could stand; then for days my mother would imprison herself in the kitchen, where she would heroically can and can and can. Blueberries were later in the summer, when we were up north, and the best ones were the ones we picked in the wild. I particularly remember one warm, remote clearing full of low little twisted bushes that was my parents’ favorite—we would graze around in this warm, still bowl among the birch and pine trees, while my father told tales about a jealous, nervous bear seen in that same clearing just the week before.

These days most produce no longer seems tied to the calendar. Now we can have strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, grapes and even cherries and watermelons and citrus any time of the year.

But prune plums remain obdurately seasonal. Small, dark, slim and even meager in shape, these plums aren’t much to look at, and eating them out of hand is just plain disappointing. But, with their low moisture content and their tiny stones, they are ideal for baking. My mother used to make an upside down cake with them unlike any other I’ve ever had—a luscious, homey recipe now lost to the ages. And they are in season now.

This dessert is in the spirit of my mother’s plum cake—lush, but very simple and direct. It is based on an apple cake recipe by Patricia Wells, who originally got it from “the apple lady,” a Frenchwoman selling the fruits of her family’s orchard in a Paris street market.

Borrowed ingredients: Garam Masala Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

In her recent post The Flavor Of Yellow over at A Chicken In Every Granny Cart, Ann made a lovely golden Grated Cauliflower Curry. She said she had to improvise on the original recipe because she doesn’t “keep garam masala lying around.”

That got me thinking about the fact that we usually have at least a couple of different kinds of garam masala lying around at any given time—even though the couple of Indian-inspired dishes we cook don’t call for it. And that led to this post.

According to The Spice House website, garam masala is a Punjabi, or Northern Indian, style curry powder. Unlike other curry powders based on turmeric, it is built on a mixture of cardamom, coriander and black pepper. There are probably as many variations on garam masala as there are cooks who use it, but it may also contain cinnamon, cloves, fennel seeds, caraway, mace, nutmeg… well, you get the idea.

While it’s primarily thought of as a Northern Indian spice mix, garam masala is actually used throughout South Asia, according to food-nepal.com, and varies by region. This would explain its use in an amazing Vietnamese beef stew that Marion makes once or twice a year. This hearty dish dates to Vietnam’s colonial past, when it was known as French Indochina, so it is eaten with a fork instead of chopsticks and served with a baguette rather than rice. Unfortunately, with spring upon us as of today [those of us in the northern hemisphere, that is], you’ll have to wait ’til this fall for this dish.

We also use garam masala in chicken dishes, stews and various dishes with sauces to give them a nice depth and mystery. It doesn’t scream Indian food and it doesn’t pack much in the way of heat, but it adds a delicious spiciness to whatever you’re cooking. Most recipes for slow cooked foods advise you to add it near the end of cooking for maximum flavor.

But cookies? Or as Ann said when I mentioned them in a comment on her Flavor Of Yellow post, “Whoa. Oatmeal cookies with CURRY?!? WOW! This I MUST taste!” Okay. Here you go.

Rosemary Apricots: Toute de sweet

I just found out about Weekend Herb Blogging, a weekly event created by Kalyn over at the popular Kalyn’s Kitchen. So when I came across some particularly nice looking rosemary at the produce market, I thought I’d toss my toque in the ring.

Rosemary is probably my favorite herb. Every year we grow some in the yard and some in a pot on the back porch, and I always watch it impatiently, waiting for it to get big and hardy enough for me to start harvesting occasional sprigs. Even when I’m not clipping bits to use in some dish or another, I like brushing against the plants as I pass, catching a whiff of the big, distinctive fragrance they release. Rosemary does wonderful things to lamb, chicken, pork, roasted potatoes—and to apricots, in this wonderfully simple French dessert.

I think there is a perception among many cooks and non-cooks alike that French cooking is complicated and daunting. And while much of classic Gallic cuisine can be, the essence of a great deal of French cooking [to me, anyway] is taking a handful of carefully chosen ingredients and preparing them simply in a way that brings out the best flavors in each of them and blends them into something that isn’t just delicious, but somehow exactly “right.” This recipe [adapted from one found in Laura Calder's excellent French Food at Home] uses just three ingredients—four, if you count water. It is quick and brainlessly easy to make, and its elegant simplicity never fails to impress. Ever.

Rosemary Apricots
Serves six

6 firm ripe apricots, halved and pitted
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup water
leaves from 1 large sprig, rosemary

Gently heat sugar in a sauté pan with water and rosemary. When sugar is dissolved, bring to a simmer. Place apricot halves in pan fanny side down, as Ms. Calder so charmingly puts it [the rounded side down, for the less poetic among us] and poach until tender, about 3 minutes—maybe 4 minutes if your apricots are on the firm side of ripe. Don’t let them get too soft.

Remove fruit with slotted spoon and place two halves on each serving plate. Increase heat to medium high and boil the cooking liquid down to a syrup, about five minutes. Spoon around apricots and serve. It may seem runny as you spoon it around the fruit, but it quickly thickens as it cools—essentially as it contacts the plate.

CAUTION: Be careful about the plates you choose for serving this dessert. The syrup gets very hot and can crack delicate or antique plates, particularly glass. Seriously. I speak from firsthand experience here.

Kitchen Notes

Cooking with Rosemary. You can cook many dishes that call for fresh rosemary with dried rosemary leaves [or needles, as they're often called], using about one third the amount called for. Not this dessert, however—it demands the softness of fresh leaves.

When preparing a dish that calls for a whole sprig rather than the leaves, I often bruise it with a rolling pin or the side of a glass. This releases more of the rosemary’s oils and flavor. But the act of plucking the leaves from the stem, as you do for this dish, sufficiently roughs them up.

SPECIAL NOTE: Be sure to check out the rest of the Weekend Herb Blogging at Kalyn’s Kitchen this coming Sunday.

Chocolate cake: Easy on the flour, easy to make

As much as I love to cook, when it comes to dessert I’m often all too ready to follow the advice given with so many main course recipes in cooking magazines: Cap off the meal with a nice store-bought dessert. With all the premium ice creams out there and lots of little bakeries churning out a dazzling [sometimes almost daunting] assortment of goodies, it’s an easy default. But there’s just something so nice about finishing a great meal with something homemade.

Fortunately for me, Marion is far more ready than I am to ignore the easy charms of store-bought and whip up something sinfully sweet and delicious at home. This decadent, rich, nearly flourless chocolate cake is a perfect example. So I’ll get out of the kitchen and let Marion tell you how to make it.