CreativeSpace

The giddiness of fresh produce

The last two days have been full of adventures. Produce adventures, that is. Our CSA, Farm to Family, has a new location; an actual market! It's only ten minutes from downtown Richmond, so any of you local creative readers can hustle yourselves over for local, farm-fresh dairy, meats, and produce. They're across from the (now closed) Showplace on Mechanicsville Turnpike, 2817 Mechanicsville Turnpike to be exact. You can't miss the brightly colored bus parked outside or the cheery flowers.

Little Bear petted the feet of their bunny (she was beside herself with glee) and avidly watched her babies hopping around, and then she climbed on the bus and sat in the driver's seat. Yes, she knew exactly where to sit and what the steering wheel would do. (Before you call Child Services, the bus is especially outfitted so that children can play on it.) 

After we went inside, it was my turn to play. Being able to support local farmers just rings my chimes. I realize that for other parts of the country, a farmers market is no big deal. With some things, like the slow food movement, I feel like it takes Richmond forever to catch up with what's going on in the rest of the world. Mark Lilly, the owner, told me that he's received all kinds of good publicity (including a write-up in People Magazine and an interview with the BBC) about his program (he brings fresh produce to inner city families) but has received no support from local government. I don't hold any sway with politicians, but I'm willing to make the drive up for fresh, local food to support Virginia farmers.

Little Bear went crazy over the cherry display and wouldn't calm down until I let her hold her own sweet potato. That kid can eat some cherries, let me tell you. Thank goodness she was harnessed into the backpack or else I would have been writing a handsome check for the destruction and mauling of several pounds of local cherries. I also gave Mark a heads-up about my upcoming tomato order for the 4th of July weekend and managed to do it without squealing in excitement. Some people look forward to an elaborate fireworks display. I look forward to sweating over a pressure cooker.

When we got home, I decided to make my first attempt at roasting beets. Unlike others in my generation, I have a fondness for canned beets. It was the only kind I knew, and my Grammy would serve them at Sunday dinners. She'd spoon them into a bowl along with a red beet egg. You Pennsylvanians know what I'm talking about. The Husband thinks that red beet eggs are creepy, like some Frankenstein experiment kept in a jar. But if they're done right...sweet and eggy all at the same time.

Hmmmm. After writing that I have to reconsider that maybe it's a nostalgia thing.

Anyway, on with the beets.

After washing and trimming the leaves, I wilted them in boiling water for 30 seconds. I drained them on paper towels, shredded them in a bowl, and dressed them with a dash of balsamic vinegar and a drop of olive oil. They tasted fantastic.

The roasted beets didn't turn out as well. There were small beets and several giant ones, and the extra-large beets are just done. And not sweet. I'm considering throwing them back into the roaster for another fifteen minutes. But my question is this: how do you season your roasted beets?

My roasting cookbook says toss them with olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Is this the way to go? Is that all they need?

I need advice. Please comment! (And you will have my thanks eternal, because I have a very large bowl of beets that need eating.)

You say tomato

My exciting canning project (I hesitate to use the adjective “epic” for fear of giving my mother second thoughts about helping me) with tomatoes now looms on the horizon. I’ve become preoccupied with the red, robust beauties, and my research into canning has begun in earnest. Thank heavens for the internets, because I found a plethora of help in the form of canning blogs through a link from Thrift at Home blogger, Margo. (If you’re not already reading her blog, you really should because her excellent homemaking skills are a joy to read.)

I have tomatoes on the brain, and even though it means rushing the season, I’ve been thinking endlessly about tomato sandwiches in particular. It’s a funny thing really, because before I was pregnant, I didn’t care at all for tomatoes in the raw. (My mother, on the other hand, used to eat tomatoes fresh from the garden, stooped over the kitchen sink with red juice running down her chin. As a too-cool teenager, I was thoroughly disgusted.) Something in those pregnancy hormones, however, switched my tomato gears. I’ve written here about my unholy love of Cheetos during my pregnancy days. Thankfully I also had some healthy cravings for tomatoes and bananas. (The amount of bananas I ate would have made a monkey proud.)

It was still too early for the local tomato crop to hit the market, so I made due with a grocery find; an heirloom Uglyripe. (I think “ugly” is too harsh a word. I prefer to use the name Unusualripe.) Anyway, its oddness beckoned to me along with its slogan: “a tomato that tastes like a tomato.” Unfortunately, it tasted more like it had sat on a truck for a long journey across these great United States of ours. Undaunted, I continued on my tomato sandwich quest.

The next item I needed was the right kind of bread. A quick perusal of Simply in Season gave me the idea of zucchini yeast rolls. They were so spectacular that the Husband didn’t notice a.) They featured summer squash and zucchini and b.) They were whole wheat. He declared them ‘restaurant quality,’ which is the highest praise the Husband can give for food.

With a smear of homemade mayo and a sprinkling of sea salt, I piled those ruby slices between the halves of warm-from-the-oven zucchini roll. Every mouthful tasted like a little piece of summer.

It's what's for breakfast

This week’s mission, besides dealing with a not-so-hot feeling Little Bear, was to find a strawberry shortcake recipe as good as what I remembered from my childhood. This was more difficult than I had anticipated, mainly because nostalgia was a large component of that taste. And really, can a simple recipe of such mundane things as flour and butter compete with years upon years of built-up, layered nostalgia? It’s a tall order, my creative friends. I ended up trying four different recipes that ranged from hockey pucks to sawdust, until I lighted upon the perfect one in The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, circa 1965, of Fannie Merritt Farmer’s Boston Cooking School Cookbook fame.

They write, “Old-fashioned shortcake is made with biscuit dough, not cake, and is served with unsweetened heavy cream, not whipped cream. Perfect for a leisurely Sunday breakfast as well as for desserts.” 

I leaped up and cried, “Ah-ha!” (And scared the dog out of a deep sleep and his few wits.) I wanted an uneven texture that was more biscuit than cake. Something that would soak up cream like a sponge. Although the individual strawberry shortcake portions with their beautifully scalloped edges and petite bearing can be delicious pieces of art, I wanted to bake something that my grandfather would be pleased to eat under some cream.

My mother’s departure was softened by an excellent breakfast of this:

Strawberry Shortcake
Serves 6
From: The Fannie Farmer Cookbook

Butter a 9-inch round cake pan. Set the oven at 425°.

Sift together:
2 cups flour
4 tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
1 tbs sugar
Few grains nutmeg

With a blending fork or fingers, work in ¼ cup butter

Stir in, little by little, up to ¾ cup milk until the dough holds together but is still soft. Turn out on a floured board and divide in two parts. Pat or roll out into 9-inch rounds. Put one round in the pan. Spread lightly with 2 tbs melted butter and place the other half on top.

Bake 12 minutes. Split the two layers apart carefully with a fork. Spread with 2 tbs butter. Place berries between layers and on top. Serve warm with heavy cream.

Donuts at midnight

My mother and I are famous (Or should I say infamous?) for tackling involved culinary projects under extreme time constrains and in high-pressure conditions. Give us the eve of a major religious or national holiday and the imminent arrival of a horde of hungry revelers/worshipers, and we will begin some twenty-step dish a mere two hours beforehand, typically accompanied by too much caffeine and too little sleep.

Take, for example, the Christmas Eve when we baked a complex gingerbread cheesecake with a ten-step cookie crust that kept us in the kitchen until 3:00 a.m. (It’s risky business tangling with a waterbath when your eyes are all squinty and your muscles jiggly from fatigue. Nothing like a holiday on the edge.) This wasn’t the first Christmas Eve where the Husband had to attend Midnight Mass alone, because I was in the throes of some terribly complicated kitchen maneuver.

Then there was the night before Thanksgiving when we made four different kinds of rolls and three pies because we were worried about having enough food the next day, and in the throes of paranoia, we worked until the wee hours. Again. Or the Easter when no matter what we tried we could not get the coconut tart to set properly, and we wasted hours of excellent sleeping time trying to fix the darn thing. (Note to my creative dears: there is a significant difference between cream de coco and coconut milk, and if you discover this too late, save yourself the exhaustion and just THROW IT AWAY.)

You would think that we’d have learned our lesson by now, but on the eve of Memorial Day we found ourselves, once again, in the grips of a new five-hour project. It began with an after-dinner perusal of my Fannie Farmer Cookbook, the 1965 edition, when my eyes alighted on two pages devoted to the making of donuts. My heart soared.

I have always had a passion for homemade donuts, ever since I discovered Faschnaut Day in elementary school. A translation for the non-Pennsylvanians: Faschnaut Day is the Pennsylvania-Dutch version of Fat Tuesday, feasting on the last day before the beginning of Lent. Others may celebrate it with alcohol, but our sensible German ancestors got jiggy with fried dough.

It was a Wednesday afternoon, and I had walked to my grandparents’ house after a long day at school. Grandma was in the kitchen, not a surprise, but she was doing something on the stove that smelled uncommonly delicious. She was frying dough, an activity that blew my mind and that opened up an entire new world of dessert foods. She explained that it was Faschnaut Day, and my first question was if every Wednesday was Faschnaut Day and a reason to celebrate with donuts. Alas, it was not.

That homemade taste has stuck with me through the years. I’ve always wanted to make them but hadn’t found an inspiring recipe. Until this past Saturday. Give me a vintage recipe with particularly vague instructions, and I must make it. I MUST! (Regardless of the time of day.)

So midnight rolled around, and there my mother and I were, squinting over the hot oil and arguing, er, gently debating, about whether five donuts in the pot at one time was too much or merely expeditious. We were riding the high that only precarious cooking can give you, both of us certain that we were right. (A family trait, that.) The final product was delicious, slightly chewy and not too sweet. A perfect midnight snack.

Strawberry fields forever

When I was a little girl, my grandma and grandpa would pick a pint of strawberries for me as a birthday present every year. The end of May in central Pennsylvania was only the beginning of strawberry season, so some years, a lot of searching happened to fill that pint. Not that I knew any of this. No, I only knew the thrill of having an entire pint of strawberries, my favorite fruit, to myself.

It would have been a gracious thing if I had taken them home to share with my family, but I typically ate those strawberries right then and there. And I’m loathe to say that only rarely did they make it to the sink for a good wash. One year there were enough strawberries to fill an entire quart, and to this day I can remember the smile on my grandpa’s face when he handed me the extra-large container. Such abundance! It was one of my favorite birthdays.

This time of year fills me with nostalgia for my grandparents and their large garden. Strawberry time meant that my grandma would make strawberry preserves (spread over homemade bread with a little bit of butter was surely a slice of heaven on earth), strawberry jam, strawberry shortcake and strawberry-rhubarb pie (a complete waste of strawberries as far as I was concerned). My grandfather would do the picking in his broad-brimmed, straw hat and would come in through the back door from the garden carrying bushels of berries. Even with all the windows open and the doors propped ajar, it would be boiling hot in the house because of the canning process and the beginnings of summer. In those days, air conditioning was only a dream, or a city slicker invention intended for the wealthy. (Well, that’s how I justified our lack of it.)

Grandma would be standing in the kitchen as she washed and hulled the strawberries and got them ready to cook. I would sit in the rocking chair as close to the squat, circular fan (a relic from the ‘70s) as possible without being scolded for blocking the air and would talk to Grandma as she worked. Sometimes I helped hull the berries, but most of the time I sat there and chatted.

I don’t specifically remember the topics of our scintillating conversations. I just remember the sticky heat and the drone of the fan, the baskets of strawberries occupying every space on the counter and spilling on to the floor. All of it overlaid by the thick, sweet smell of cooking strawberries. And the love I felt for my grandma. I will never forget that.