As promised

It's dark already?! The day escaped us. And now it's time to finish dinner, give the baby a bath, and settle in for the night. But first, as promised, here's that recipe for Swedish Apple Pie. I've added cranberries, and I think it would be equally nice with pears.

SWEDISH APPLE PIE

I found this recipe in The Apple Lover's Cookbook, a new book from W.W. Norton. They very nicely sent me a copy in the mail and I've been working my way through. I like this recipe because it's an easy alternative to pie—no crust, no fuss—tasty and quick.

3 large apples, peeled, cored, and cut into 1/4-inch slices

1/2 cup cranberries

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 tablespoon plus 1 cup all-purpose flour

2 tablespoons plus 1 cup granulated sugar

10 tablespoons butter, at room temperature, plus more for greasing the pan

1 large egg

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Grease a pie plate and set it aside.

In a mixing bowl, toss the apple slices with the cinnamon, 1 tablespoon of the flour, and 2 tablespoons of the sugar. Pour the mixture into the bottom of the pie plate and smooth it into an even layer.

Combine the remaining ingredients in a standing mixer and beat until just combined. Use the back of a wooden spoon to spread the batter evenly over the apples and cranberries. Bake for 40-45 minutes, or until the top is golden brown and crackly. Serve warm from the pan.

Sally & I

Hi, friends.

Sorry to have been gone so long, but Sally and I have had a lot of catching up to do. It's very different for both of us with her here, on the outside, but it's also pretty great. My parents left Tuesday, which was both nice and scary, and the three of us are slowly settling into a routine. Mostly this involves nursing and reading and trying to sleep and doing laundry and walking, and while that might not sound like a lot, it keeps us very busy.

We've also managed to start cooking again—nothing very complicated—a salad for lunch, a pot of ham and beans for supper. But mostly, we've been relying on the kitchens of family and friends. Luckily we have good friends, friends who bring things like Torta di Mele, a moist, crackly apple cake that reminds me of my host mother in Spain. Lourdes made the best apple cake—it was moist and custardy and sweet, and I've tried but never been able to recreate it. Until Teresa brought one over, complete with a print out of the recipe. It's nearly gone now, so I don't have a proper picture for you, but believe me this is a cake you want to make. It is simple and elegant and in a very homey way quite pretty, and perfect this time of year.

We'll see you soon, friends, and until then, I hope we all find time to bake.

TORTA DI MELE

In English, this apparently is called "Apple Cake with a Crackly Meringue." Whatever you want to call it, it comes from both Italy and Spain, and this version in particular comes from Lynn Rosetto Kasper's The Italian Country Table. Teresa's baked up beautifully—crackly and wispy on top and moist in the center.

2 cups plus 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour

1 and 1/2 cups plus 2 tablespoons granulated sugar

a pinch of salt

1 and 1/2 sticks cold butter, cut into small pieces

3/4 cup milk

2 large eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

shredded zest of 1 large lemon

1 tablespoon baking powder

2 large (about 1 pound) apples, peeled, cored, and cut into 1/2-inch pieces

1 large egg white

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Grease and flour a 9-inch spring form pan.

In a large bowl, work together the 2 cups of flour, 1 and 1/2 cups sugar, the salt, and the butter with your fingers until crumbly. Take 1 cup of this mixture and press it over the bottom of the pan and about 1/2 inch up the sides to make a crust.

Make a well in the remaining crumb mixture. Add the milk, eggs, vanilla, lemon zest, remaining flour, and baking powder. Blend these liquid ingredients in the well as best you can without mixing in the crumbs. Then stir in the crumbs until well blended but still a little lumpy. Fold in the apples and scrape the batter into the pan over the crust.

Beat the egg white until foamy in a small bowl. Beat in the remaining sugar until the mixture forms peaks. Spread this over the batter.

Bake for an hour to 75 minutes or until the top is golden brown and a straw comes out clean. Cool and serve at room temperature. Whipped cream or vanilla ice cream make a nice accompaniment, but the cake is so moist that they aren't essential.

Dig through & dig in

Our annual food-shopping moratorium is officially on. Does this happen at your house? You preserve and preserve and preserve, then worry so much about making it last that you face a freezer/pantry overflow crisis come March? Oy. It happens every year here, although I have a hunch it arrives at just the right time.

That is, in the sense that there isn't much local food shopping to be done these days. The carrots are all gone from the greenhouse, and the spinach is dwindling, fast. I am embarrassed to admit that because of a very late Fedco order, our spring seeds haven't even arrived yet! So perhaps the crisis is really a blessing in disguise.

At any rate, it yielded a blackberry-apple crisp, so it can't be all bad.

It was probably one of the easiest crisps I've ever made: a frozen homemade pie shell leftover from the day this winter that Alex and I tested clam pie recipes (21, to be exact!); wrinkled, shriveling apples that my mom brought down back in late January, soft but still good once we cut in; and blackberries from the freezer, picked in August at my brother and sister-in-law's, down the road.

I tossed the fruit with sugar, flour, lemon juice, and a pinch of cinnamon and nutmeg—then loaded it into the shell. The topping is one from my mother's recipe box—from a Pepperidge Farm piecrust sticker way back when. It has oats and brown sugar and walnuts, and of course plenty of butter to melt and ooze and hold it all in.

Blackberry-apple has always been a favorite of mine—ever since my mother started making this jam—but what do you have in your freezer? I have a feeling all sorts of combos would be good—apple-rhubarb? blueberry-cranberry? strawberry-pear? Dig through, and dig in!

APPLE-BLACKBERRY CRISP

Whenever I make blackberry jam, I always add bits of apple for pectin—a trick I learned as a kid from my mom (the extra pectin in the apples helps the jam set). I've always loved the flavor combination of tart apples and sweet berries, so when I found a bag of August-picked berries in the freezer the other day and a sad, too-soft-for-eating pound of apples in the fridge, I knew I had a crisp on my hands. This recipe is adapted from one my mom makes with apples and raisins. With vanilla ice cream, it's perfect.

for the filling:
4 cups sliced baking apples
1 cup blackberries, frozen or fresh
1/4 cup sugar
2-3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1/8 teaspoon cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon nutmeg
a pinch of salt

one 9-inch pie crust, bottom only

for the topping:
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup rolled oats
1/4 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1/4 cup cold butter, cut into cranberry-size pieces
1/4 cup chopped walnuts or pecans

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. In a large mixing bowl, toss the apples and blackberries with the remaining filling ingredients. Spoon the filling into the pie crust.

In the same bowl, toss together all of the ingredients for the topping. Use your hands to sprinkle the topping over the filling, taking care to distribute the butter evenly (otherwise, certain areas of the topping will be dry while others are super wet).

Bake for roughly 35-45 minutes, or until the fruit is soft and juicy and the topping is golden brown. Pay special attention to the nuts, as if you overcook the crisp they will be the first thing to burn.

The Local Food Report: Carafoli's Sagamore

On September 15th, 1880, 500 Italians arrived in Sagamore to start digging the Cape Cod Canal. The work was short-lived—funding ran out four months later—but the community was not. More Italian immigrants came over in the early 1900s when work started again and slowly, in Sagamore Village, an Italian community was formed.

That's John Carafoli. His grandparents were amongst those who came to Sagamore looking for work, and he's one of the few who still remembers Italian Sagamore. His mother passed away when he was eleven, and as a way of trying to hold onto her, he started hanging out in the kitchens of the neighborhood women, watching them cook and bring in squash and grapes and tomatoes from the garden and getting their techniques down. Then he'd go home and try to recreate the dishes for his father and aunt and brother—lasagnas and jams and breads and sweet pastas.

By the time he left Sagamore and went out into the world, he had a whole childhood of recipes to draw from. He started working with food—these days, he's a world-reknowned food stylist and recipe developer—and the recipes acted like a sort of bridge. They took him back to Italy to trace particular pastas and breads and back to his grandparents' city of Bologna to learn about their language and culture. The recipes kept him connected him not just with his mother, but also with his Italian heritage and the Sagamore Village of his past.


There's one Sagamore woman in particular who John talks about a lot. Her name was Mafalada Maiolini, but in the kitchen, he called her Muffy. She taught him to make brassadella, a sweet, dry coffee cake from Verona that involves a top roll and a bottom roll and lots of hole poking in between, and savor, a sweet, dark jam made with leftover fruit at the end of the harvest season. When I talked with John a few weeks ago Muffy was still alive, but she passed away last Sunday, at the age of 96. In her obituary, it says that her kitchen was a gathering place for many friends—a nice way to be remembered, I think.

In Muffy's honor, John gave me this savor recipe to share. It's his—adapted from hers—honed by observation and friendship and the practice of years.

SAVOR

This is a time-consuming jam at first glance, but most of the work is in the simmering. If you can set aside two 6-hour chunks over two days to be around, you've done the hard part. This jam is traditionally made in the fall, with any leftover fruit from the harvest. Carafoli has planted his own orchard of pears, apples, figs, apricots, and peaches, and he's hoping to make savor from his own fruit next year.

6 large ripe pears
6 large ripe apples
6 large ripe peaches
1 pound Italian prune-plums or other plums
1 pound seedless red grapes
12 ounces fresh cranberries
12 pitted prunes
12 ounces pitted dried apricots
12 ounces dark raisins
zest of 2 oranges, removed in strips and minced
1 bottle red wine or saba
1 quart red grape juice
1 quart cranberry juice
1 cup cooked peeled chestnuts

Peel and core pears and apples; peel and pit peaches and plums. Cut into coarse 1-inch dice, and place in a nonreactive (like stainless steel) heavy-bottomed 8-quart pot. Add grapes, cranberries, prunes, apricots, raisins, and orange zest. Add wine or saba, grape juice, and cranberry juice and mix well.

Place pot over high heat and bring to a boil. Immediately reduce heat to its lowest possible setting, and simmer, uncovered, for 6 hours. Remove from heat and allow to sit, loosely covered, at room temperature overnight. (Sugar and acid in mixture will keep it from spoiling.)

The next day, uncover the pot and again bring to a boil. Reduce heat to lowest possible setting, and simmer for 6 more hours. Toward the end of cooking, stir frequently to prevent scorching.

Remove pot from heat; mixture will be very dark and thick. Place chestnuts in a food processor and process to make a mealy puree. Stir into cooked mixture. While mixture is still hot, pour into sterile jars and seal according to manufacturers' directions. Savor may also be covered and refrigerated for up to 4 months, or frozen in a tightly sealed container for up to 6 months.

Yield: 11 pints

A party

It is Alex's birthday today.

We celebrated yesterday, with our friends Tracy and Swede and our two nieces and a whole lot of apples and pears. Tracy had just bought a new cider press, and a friend had an orchard full of fruit. We picked up the drops and filled a few baskets from the trees, and then brought the fruit back to crank and crush and press and strain.

I had made cider once before, at our friend Rebecca's when I was maybe about ten, and then again last year, and it's no small under-taking. It's the type of thing you almost have to make into a party, because otherwise, it would simply be too much work. Even yesterday, with Tracy picking out apples and me and Bella on the crank and Lili weighing down the pressing table and Swede handing out chocolate and wine and Alex manning the press, it took us two hours to put out about three gallons.

At least, for the apple cider it did.

Later in the afternoon, when the girls got tired and the requests for another turn at cranking turned to requests for bathroom breaks and more chocolate, we tried the pears. They were ripe, and soft, and unlike the apples, they cranked through the cutting blades in about five minutes flat. They were juicier than the apples, too, and sweeter, and the juice that came out when we pressed them was slightly thicker, but also more delicate. I liked both the ciders, but I think if in the future I get to choose—based both on pressing and on taste—from now on I'll pick pear. Alex liked a mix, and that was good too, although I think you lose the flavor of both a little bit.

Either way, for now, we have plenty of both flavors to spare. We're taking it easy today—in honor of Alex, and September, and the fact that it's a beautiful, blustery day—but pretty soon, I think we'll get energized enough at least to eat some cake. And then to wash it down with some cider—a swig of apple, then a swig of pear.

WHITE & BLACK RUM MARBLE CAKE

I can't very well give you a recipe for cider—all you need is fruit, and a press, and a good arm to turn the crank—but here's the recipe for Alex's birthday cake. It comes from one of my favorite books—The Modern Baker, by Nick Malgieri—which I like for its simplicity and creativity.

Malgieri calls this cake "both homey and festive," and I agree; it's as pretty as it is good. Just be sure to read through the whole recipe before you begin as there are a few steps—like melting the chocolate and softening the butter—that need to be taken care of first.

for the base batter:
2 and 2/3 cup all-purpose flour
1 and 2/3 cup granulated sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 sticks butter, softened
7 eggs
3 tablespoons dark rum (I used Gosling's Bermuda Black Rum)

for the chocolate batter:
2 tablespoons dark rum
2 tablespoons milk
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
6 ounces bittersweet chocolate, melted and cooled
2 cups base batter (see above)

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. Grease a Bundt pan and coat it with flour or very fine, dry bread crumbs. Whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt in a large bowl. Add the butter and beat for a minute or two, until the batter forms a thick, heavy paste.

Whisk the eggs and rum together in a small bowl. Add this mixture to the butter and flour mixture in thirds, beating well and scraping down the sides of the bowl with a spatula after each addition. Use the spatula to give the batter a final mix.

In another bowl, combine the rum, milk and baking soda and whisk well. Add the chocolate and whisk well again. Add 2 cups of the base batter to the chocolate mixture and mix with the spatula until smooth and well-combined.

Spoon half of the remaining base batter into the prepared pan. Use a small spatula to smooth out the top of the batter, taking care to make sure it is very even on top. Spoon the chocolate batter in over top; and again use the spatula to smooth the top of the batter. Finally, spoon the remaining base batter over the chocolate batter. Don't worry about smoothing this top layer out; it will even as it bakes and you risk mottling the marbling underneath.

Bake for 45-55 minutes, or until a cake tester comes out clean. As the cake rises, you may be able to see some chocolate through the lighter base batter—this is fine. Serve at room temperature, plain—or with vanilla ice cream and a little pour of rum.

The Local Food Report: Gray's Grist

Thornton Simmons sometimes loses his r's. They roll into words like flavor and over the way the water on his mill pond skims down the turbine wheels, round and down. Simmons is a New Englander through and through: he claims ancestors working as millers in the Little Compton area as far back as 1621. He says the work comes naturally to him—that he has cornmeal in his blood.

Simmons is the miller at Gray's Grist Mill—a small, stone-grinding operation with a property boundary so old it was cut in half when Massachusetts ceded the area to Rhode Island in 1747. The mill pond lies mainly in Adamsville, Rhode Island, while across the street, the mill house stands firmly on Westport ground. It's been turning out cornmeal for over three hundred years.

As for the corn, it's Narragansett white flint corn Simmons grinds. The handful of farmers who still grow it say it's a testy strain—two ears to a stalk, eight rows on a cob, hard and dense and slow to dry. But something about the climate, the soil, and the ancient granite stone Simmons uses to grind it down makes it worth it. You used to be able to mortgage your house on this cornmeal, Simmons likes to say.


Over the years, the mill has been powered by all sorts of things: water, a dodge truck motor, a tractor with a power belt, electricity. Maybe, if Simmons gets his way, the mill will be able to go back to water again. The trouble with property straddling two states is that it can make digging out an old mill pond awfully hard: there are two Conservation Commissions, two sets of regulations, two bodies of law to contend with. Simmons has to get it done, though—even with a deep pond, the water build-up will only ever be enough to run the mill for four hours before it needs to rest, fill up again.

The mill is one of the oldest continuous grist mills in the country. The water runs under the mill house, from a man made pond dammed from the west branch of the Westport River, running down from Tiverton. Simmons says there used to be a lot of dam wars—someone upriver hoarding water, the miller downstream with a dry, slack pond. When the water did come, it ran the turbines that turned the stone. Dried, shucked corn went down through the hopper into a feed shoot called the shoe. A stick straddling the stone called a damsel hit the shoe and knocked the corn into the eye of the stone—you need speed in the feed, as Simmons says. Once a year or so the 56-inch diameter granite stone needs to be dressed—roughed up to keep it sharp. Granite is best for cornmeal, french burr for wheat and rye.

However it's ground, Simmons has no doubt about how to eat cornmeal: jonnycakes. These thin, lacy cornmeal pancakes are the ones Rhode Islanders and people from southeastern Massachusetts have been padding with butter and a little drizzle of maple syrup for years. They're simple food, but hearty—honest in a way that makes you taste the corn, the water, the land.

They're easy—just cornmeal, water, and milk—and you fry them in a hot, black iron skillet. The batter sort of dances when it hits the pan, quivering out, flattening into a thin disk with tiny eyelets all around the edge. To get any satisfaction you need a stack—five, six, seven thin cakes with crispy edges and a swath of butter and hot maple syrup running down. Simmons says he likes to serve his with cranberries, so the other morning, I made up a batch with a side of thinly sliced pears and cranberries, sauteed until soft with butter and a little bit of cinnamon. The combination was just right—sweet maple cutting tart berries, soft pears atop crisp corn. I guess that's no surprise; it's simply what you get with four hundred years of cornmeal passed on down the line.

NARRAGANSETT JONNYCAKES

This recipe is for thin jonnycakes—if you like the thick kind, head on over here. An important note about stone-ground cornmeal: keep it in the freezer or refrigerator. Because the stone-grinding process doesn't grind out the corn kernel's germ, or nutrient packed embryo, left out the cornmeal will spoil quickly.

2 cups stone ground cornmeal
a generous pinch of salt
3/4 cup cold water
1 and 1/2 cups milk
oil for frying

Whisk together the cornmeal and salt in a medium size mixing bowl. Pour in the water and stir until the mixture is smooth. Stir in the milk, adding a bit more if needed to make a thin, pourable batter.

Warm up a griddle or cast iron skillet over medium-high heat. Spoon a tablespoon or so of oil into the pan, and let it get hot. Then, taking care to stir the batter (the cornmeal quickly settles), spoon out about two tablespoons of batter onto the pan for each cake. They should thin out and dance as they hit the pan, forming a thin disk.

Cook for several minutes, or until golden brown and lacy on the bottom side, then flip. They won't need so long on the second side—only a minute or so. Serve hot, with butter, maple syrup, and if you like, sauteed apples or pears with cranberries.

The Local Food Report: cranberry apple cider donuts

Scott Morse grew up in Vermont. I don't know him very well, but I do know that he recently moved to Marstons Mills, and that the transition must have been hard. Having spent four years in Vermont myself, I know that when you leave, it isn't just real fall foliage and Mobil station stops for Ben & Jerry's seconds and warm, early springs you give up. You also leave apple cider donut territory behind.

Maine, where I grew up, is also an apple cider donut place. Every respectable pick-your-own orchard has a recipe, and you eat the donuts hot, after you pick. You get a paper cup of steaming cider for dunking, and you sit with your family on a bench or hay bales or in the back of your pick-up truck. While the cashier weighs and tallies up your haul, you watch your cider fill with cinnamon flecks and floating crumbs, and you wash one, one-and-a-half, then two donuts down.

It isn't the sort of tradition you want to give up, but until a few weeks ago, I had never seen an apple cider donut on the Cape.


That's where Scott Morse comes in. A few years back he left home and went out into the world and came to the same conclusion I did: that a life without apple cider donuts wasn't the sort he wanted to live. But instead of driving home to the Common Ground Fair each September for a visit, he set out to learn how to make apple cider donuts on the Cape. He and his friend, Patience Thomas, already ran a bakery operation, Great Cape Baking, in Marstons Mills. They moved into a new space with a fry-o-lator and a master donut maker came in to teach Scott how to do things just right. He learned how to make the dough: flour, cinnamon, nutmeg, baking soda, with tiny minced dried apple flecks mixed in. He learned to use the cider hot, not cold, and to keep every step of the dough at room temperature along the way. He made batch after batch of dough in the bakery's big, Hobart mixer, and he developed a system for frying and drying and sugaring the donuts that he thought made them less greasy, lighter on clothes and hips. He learned to work the dough from start to finished product in under 30 minutes, just fast enough that the baking soda would set, but not so long that it would cease to act.

Finally, he started experimenting on his own. He had a bag of local dried cranberries lying around, and folded a handful into the dough. He made sure that none stuck out the sides (they'd burn), and tossed a few into hot oil. What emerged was the very first batch of Cape Cod Cranberry Apple Cider Donuts—an immediate smash hit.


These days, Scott sells both his classic apple cider donuts and the cranberry twist at the bakery's little front at Cash Market in Marstons Mills, and also at the new winter farmers' market at Liberty Hall. He gets in every morning at 3am to roll out the dough, and you can tell, from watching him, that he loves the process. But he says the best part is watching his customers' faces change as they dig in—women with kids, contractors holding hot coffee, men brushing cinnamon sugar off their business suits. They savor it at first, he says, a little bit in awe, and then finally, they break into a grin.

Clearly, he and I aren't the only ones missing home.

Note—updated 10.30.10: Great Cape Baking is no longer at the Cash Market in Marstons Mills. I have tried to no avail to get some hard facts, but in lieu of those can offer this: I heard that they moved to a location in Hyannis, but that it fell through, and they were still selling at the farmers' market in Sandwich until that closed for the season. I haven't heard whether or not the Marstons' Mills Winter Farmers' Market is going to happen again, but if it does, I'm hoping to find the donuts there.

CRANBERRY APPLE CIDER DONUTS

Adapted from this recipe over at Smitten Kitchen

My sister was the first one to try this recipe. She made it this fall when she was home for a visit, and my parents promptly helped her devour almost every single one. (She did, to her credit, bring me a few leftovers in a plastic bag.) We all agreed that they tasted just as good as the ones we've had at pick-your-own stands in Maine and Vermont. I changed things a bit on Scott's advice—he recommended doubling the amount of apple cider, whisking in a tad more nutmeg, and adding in chewy cranberries to give things a Cape twist. This man is serious about his apple cider donuts, and when it came to the tweaks, he was dead right. Just be sure to fold the cranberries in so that they aren't sticking out anywhere from the dough—otherwise, when they hit the oil, they'll burn. Oh! and if you're looking for a source of local dried cranberries, try here or here.

2 cups apple cider
3 and 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons sea-salted butter
1 cup granulated sugar
2 large eggs
1/2 cup buttermilk
1/2 cup dried cranberries
canola oil, for frying
cinnamon sugar (1 cup granulated sugar mixed with 1 and 1/2 tablespoons ground cinnamon)

Bring the cider to a boil in a small pot over medium-high heat. Turn the heat down to low and leave the cider to simmer, uncovered, until it reduces down to 1/4 cup. This will take about 35-40 minutes.

Meanwhile, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt in a medium mixing bowl.

In a large mixing bowl, beat together the butter and sugar. Add the eggs, one at a time, and continue beating until the mixture is light, pale, and creamy—about a minute. Beat in the reduced cider and the buttermilk, and then fold the dry ingredients in gently until everything is just combined.

Roll the dough out to 1/2-inch thick on a well-floured surface. Fold it in half and roll it out again. Repeat this process several times until the dough feels smooth and moist but not sticky—it shouldn't cling to your hands. Let the dough rest for 5-1o minutes, then use your hands to shape it into a rectangle, keeping the top smooth and the sides 1/2-inch thick. Press the cranberries evenly into the top of the dough, fold it over once more (so that the cranberries are sandwiched in the middle) and roll it out and shape it into a rectangle again.

Use a 3-inch donut cutter (or a round cookie-cutter and a bottle top, if you need to improvise) to cut the dough into roughly 15 donuts. As when you make shaped cookies, you will need to ball up the scraps (but not the holes) and re-roll the dough several times. Arrange the cut donuts and holes on a cookie sheet and set aside.

Fill a medium-size pot with canola oil so that the oil reaches 3 inches up the side. (After you use this oil for frying the donuts, you can set it aside for general cooking use, so it doesn't need to go to waste.) Attach a candy thermometer to the side of the pot, and over medium-high heat bring the oil to 350 degrees. Drop the donuts in batches into the hot oil using a slotted spoon. They should fry for roughly one minute and ten seconds per side, or until they are a deep golden brown. Use the wrong end of a wooden spoon to flip them through their holes, and pull them out with the slotted spoon. Transfer them to another cookie sheet lined with a clean dish towel or a layer of paper towels. Flip them once so that both sides are patted dry, and let them cool for one minute before rolling them in the cinnamon sugar.

Repeat this process until all of the donuts are fried and sugared, and then enjoy them hot, with a glass of steaming cider or coffee.

Cooking by place

I write about food, local food, because I care about place. Mostly, I care about the connections that spring up between people and their places, the way that a caramelized onion and goat cheese and apple tart can make you remember the shape of a kitchen, the silhouette of a tree.

This tart reminds me of all my places at once. It reminds me of eating fried apples at my parents' kitchen counter, my mother leaning over their big black skillet on a winter morning sprinkling a pinch of cinnamon, tasting, sprinkling again. It reminds me of the Massachusetts goat cheese at our wedding, of the pickle and cheese buffet I never saw in the swirl of hugs and smiles and the feeling I just might burst. It reminds me of Vermont, of my time at Middlebury, of the crisp Octobers and the ruddy green apples in the dining hall and the first homecoming weekend my best friend and I spent picking McIntoshes in the rain.

The recipe for the tart is from one of my favorite books—Dishing up Vermont. It sits on my cookbook shelf right next to Dishing up Maine and Charleston Receipts, the cooking by place section, I suppose. The original recipe calls for cheddar cheese, but because I'm not just Vermont, because I've always been Maine and Cape Cod, now, too, I used Massachusetts goat cheese instead. It also calls for thyme, but I went with rosemary—the only herb alive and spirited still in our yard. It calls for green pepper jelly, but after digging through our cupboards, I used local cranberry, bright cherry red.


In the end, it felt like me—like a Maine girl gone to Vermont and now settled in to a little red salt box by the sea.

APPLE, CARAMELIZED ONION, AND GOAT CHEESE TART

In the tart you see above, I used a mix of McIntosh and Northern Spy apples, and I didn't peel them. The original recipe called for a more tart, crisp variety—Granny Smiths—with their skins off, and I regretted my choice of varieties. The apples don't have to be Granny Smiths necessarily, but they should be tart, firm, and peeled. Otherwise, you'll end up with apples that are a little too mushy and all tough around the edges. So long as you have the apples right, feel free to substitute cheeses and herbs and jellies as you see fit. I don't think you can go wrong.

dough for 1 bottom 9-inch pie crust
2 tablespoons butter, divided
1 medium onion, chopped
1 lemon slice, seeds removed
1 and 1/2 tart, firm apples, peeled and sliced into thin half moons
2 teaspoons fresh rosemary, chopped
1/3 cup cranberry jelly, warmed up, and divided
4 ounces goat cheese

On a lightly floured surface, roll out the dough for the pie crust. Press it into a 9-inch tart pan, and pinch off any extra dough. Set the pan aside and preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.

Melt one tablespoon of the butter in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Sauté the onions, stirring frequently, until soft and translucent, about eight minutes. Transfer the onions to a bowl and set aside.

In the same skillet, melt the remaining butter over medium-high heat and add the lemon, apples, and rosemary. Sauté until the apples feel tender when pierced with a fork, then turn off the heat and set aside.

Brush half of the warm jelly over the bottom of the pie crust. Sprinkle the goat cheese evenly over the jelly, and layer the onions on top. Carefully arrange the apples in two concentric circles over the onions. Gently brush the tops of the apples with the remaining cranberry jelly; if it has cooled, be sure to warm it back up. Bake the tart for about 15 to 20 minutes, or until the crust is golden and the apples are lightly browned. Serve warm.

We do need pie

Last week, I made a real, honest-to-goodness mincemeat pie.

It had venison in it, and a bunch of spices and fruits, and a thick, flakey crust, and it was staggeringly good. I was just a little bit surprised, I have to admit.

For some people, maybe, the idea that ground meat and sugar and fruit are going to meld together in the oven into something delicious makes total sense. Unfortunately, I have never been one of them. Mincemeat pie, ever since I started watching Friends at the age of about fourteen, has always reminded me of the episode when the cookbook pages get stuck together and Rachel makes half an English trifle and half a shepherd pie. She is a little bit puzzled but puts it all together anyway—a big, layered dessert with ladyfingers, custard, jam, and—horror of horrors—beef sautéed with peas. Then she tries to convince everyone to eat it by telling them it's the same idea as mincemeat pie.

Needless to say, this was not an overly winning introduction.

But the other day, I pulled something out of the freezer labeled "burger '09." Once it had thawed out, Alex informed me that it was actually venison from a deer shot locally, by a friend. It seemed wrong to waste it, and so I called my mother, who called her friend Sally, who said she knew just the thing: mincemeat.

Sally, as it turns out, is a big mincemeat fan. She makes jars and jars of it each December and gives them out as Christmas gifts. She has to bargain for the meat, usually, by giving a jar in exchange, but since most traditional mincemeat recipes make 20 pints of preserves, this is a fairly good trade. She gave my parents a jar a while back, and she told them that the trick is to cut the mincemeat with apples when you make the pie, so that the filling gets the flavor and the heft of the sweet meat preserve but has a solid apple base.

Mostly, this is because an all-mincemeat pie is a little too heavy for most people these days. The recipe Sally uses came from a man named Azel Adams, who used to live in Western Maine, in a place called West Forks. She recorded him on cassette a while back for a book, talking about recipes that kept him going when he worked in the 1920s and 1930s in the winter woods. Mincemeat, apparently, used to be a sort of power food—meat and sugar and fruit slapped between two biscuits for a hearty January lunch. Most of us, as Sally pointed out, don't really need that sort of midday meal to keep us going any more.

But we do need pie. And toned down with apples and served with a hunk of cheddar cheese, mincemeat pie, as it turns out, can sometimes be just the thing.

MINCEMEAT PIE

[for modern-day lightweights]

I adapted this from The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book by Fannie Merritt Farmer. In the header of the very old, very dilapidated copy of this book my mother picked up for me a few years back, Fannie calls this recipe "Quick Mincemeat." Based on what Sally told me, I'm guessing this is because traditionally, making mincemeat was a huge, once-a-year production. Whereas most recipes make enough for twenty pies, this one makes filling for only one. For mincemeat beginners, I think that's just enough.


for the mincemeat:
1 cup apples, chopped
1/2 cup raisins
1/2 cup cranberries
3 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon molasses
1 tablespoon cider vinegar
1 cup dark brown sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup venison or beef stock
1 cup ground venison, cooked
2 tablespoons fruit jam or jelly (I used cranberry apple, but I'm not sure it matters much)

for the pie:
2 cups mincemeat
5 cups apples, chopped
1 nine-inch pie crust, top and bottom

Combine all of the mincemeat ingredients except the cooked venison and the fruit jam in a large, heavy-bottomed pot. Bring everything to a boil over medium heat, and then turn the burner down as low as it goes and simmer the mixture for 45 minutes to an hour. Keep a close eye on it during this time, stirring frequently, as you would a jam. As the mixture loses moisture, it will become increasingly thick and sticky and can burn if you aren't paying attention. When it gets to be the consistency of a runny jam, add the venison and the jam and simmer it for another 15 minutes or so, until it cooks into a nice, thick preserve. Turn off the heat, and allow the mincemeat to cool to room temperature.

To make the pie, first preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Then combine the mincemeat—the recipe above should make about 2 cups—with the 5 cups of sliced apples. Mix the two up well so that the mincemeat coats the apples. Any crust will work, but the best choice would be one that is thick and flaky, and more salty than sweet. Roll out the bottom crust, drape it over the pie plate, and spoon the filling in. Then roll out the top crust and drape it over the filling, making sure to pinch the edges and cut a few slits in the top to let steam out. Bake the pie for 25-30 minutes at 400, then turn the temperature down to 325 and bake another 25-30 minutes, or until the crust is golden and the filling is thick.

Eat the pie warm or at room temperature, served with a thick, sharp slice of cheddar cheese.

The Local Food Report: on inheriting a dream

What if, instead of having a dream, a dream had you? What if it grabbed you one day, picked you up on the street, took you by the horns, and told you what you were going to do every day for the rest of your life? Would you hop on board, or would you run?

I recognize that I sound like I'm writing song lyrics for Selena (Dreaming of You, anyone?), but that's the sort of story I want to tell you today. I met this woman, Myrna Cook, at the Falmouth Farmer's Market a month or so ago, a few weeks before we left. I didn't have time to tell you about her then, but she's the kind of woman you can't forget. She's quiet and sweet and a little bit private, too, and eight years ago, she and her husband bought a house. Or, they thought they bought just a house. Turns out, it came with a dream.

It was an abandoned house—somewhere in Barnstable—and just a little bit ramshackle after two years of empty rooms and an overgrown lawn. People told them they were crazy to buy it, that it needed more love than two people could possibly give, but they went in anyway. There were fruit trees here and there and it was in a nice, quiet neighborhood, and at any rate, it would be a fun project to have a fixer-upper, to do some renovations as time went on. They learned that a Ukranian woman and her husband had owned it before them, and that she had passed away young and unexpectedly before he sold. Then one day, when they were ripping through the attic in the midst of a project, they found a plan.

It was an orchard plan—a plan to have a business selling and putting up fruit. They realized that there were 48 trees and not just a few, and that the storage shed out back was for keeping pears and apples to overwinter in. They uncovered other traces—a stainless steel work table, more and more varieties of apples, peaches, plums, and pears. Myrna decided that if the woman who'd planted the trees hadn't had time to live out her dream, then she would have to live it out for her.

She started by collecting fruit samples from every tree. She sent them to the UMass Extension program, and they sent her back a 30-page color report on what kind of trees she had inherited, and how to keep them alive. She bought books on horticulture and fruit growing and combed the internet for workshop dates. She even enlisted the help of Spooner Ornamental Care, a plant health care provider in Hatchville, and hired a landscaper to help with pruning and year round maintenance. Of the 48 original trees, 30 survived, and this year, for the first time, Myrna had fruit healthy enough to sell.

When I asked Myrna if the dream had somehow, along the way, become her own, she hesitated. It wasn't really her dream, she said, but she had learned to love it over time. It was a labor of love in the most immediate sense—in the sense that fruit farming means sore knees and heavy lifting and probably a flare up of carpal tunnel syndrome here and there. Fruit wants to be picked when it wants to be picked—and to inherit this sort of dream, there isn't any way around the nitty-gritty of that.

This time of year, Myrna's wrapping things up—selling the last of her hardy apples and pears, and getting the orchard ready for a cold, hard winter—making sure not too many branches and buds tumble to the ground. She's ready for a break, ready for pie-baking and apple butter and the hubbub of the holidays, ready, for a few months at least, to lay the dream down. But underneath that readiness, she's incredibly proud. She's proud that she's been able to rehab the trees, proud and amazed to have fruit shiny and sweet enough that people actually want to buy it. She can hardly believe that this dream has taken off so well in her hands.

The phrase that's stuck with me the most, though, is something she told me after we first talked, something she murmured over the wires of the phone. I asked her why she did it—why she was so open to living this woman's dream out, this woman who she'd never even met. She thought for a second.

It was like picking a message up off the street, she said. Suddenly, my whole direction changed.

One day, I hope to be as open to life as that. In the meantime, I think I'll settle to being open to cake—to cake even the second time it's baked, even after the first try went so terribly wrong.

Like Myrna's fruit, some things just need a chance—the chance to be given a second time around.

MELTING BUTTERMILK-PEAR CAKE

This cake is adapted from a recipe I found in September in Bon Appétit. I didn't mean for it to be an adaptation, really, but the first time I baked the cake I didn't read the directions all the way through before I made it. Also, I didn't have any parchment paper.

This, unsurprisingly, lead to the discoveries that a) there was a reason the ingredients for the pear compote came first, namely, that the compote was supposed to be ready when the cake was only half baked, and that b) because I had not lined the pan with parchment paper, even if the pear compote had been ready, the cake still never would have ended up intact upside-down on top of it as it was supposed to.

Luckily, as you know, Fisher ate the first cake, but the second time around, I decided to go without parchment paper again and keep the pears on top. The end result was not exactly what I'd imagined on the beach the day I was paging through the magazine—but somehow, for today, it seemed right.

Pear Compote:
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup water
3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves
1 pound firm but ripe Bosc pears, peeled, halved, cored, and sliced thin

Combine the sugar, water, lemon juice, and thyme in a small, heavy bottomed saucepan. Bring the mixture to a boil, stirring until the sugar is dissolved. Turn the heat down to medium, add the pears, and simmer until the fruit is tender but still intact, roughly 10 minutes. Transfer the pears from the saucepan to a cookie sheet using a slotted spoon. Continue cooking the remaining liquid for about five minutes, until it thickens into a syrup.

Buttermilk Cake:
1 heaping cup all-purpose flour
1 and 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 stick butter
1 large egg
1 large egg yolk
1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons buttermilk
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. In a medium size mixing bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt. In a large mixing bowl, cream the sugar and butter and beat in the egg and then the egg yolk. Add the vanilla to the buttermilk, and then add the wet ingredients and the dry ingredients alternately to the egg mixture until everything is just mixed.

Spoon the batter into a buttered and floured 8-inch round cake pan with at least 2-inch high sides. Bake the cake for about 35 minutes, or until the top is just set. Leaving the oven on, take the cake out. Arrange the pear slices over the top of the cake in a circular pattern (or really, whatever pattern you like), and pour the syrup evenly over the top of the whole cake. Return the cake to the oven and bake it for another 10 minutes or so, or until the edges are just golden brown. Let it cool for several hours before serving it, maybe with some buttermilk ice cream, at room temperature.

butter:
Kate's, from Maine
buttermilk:
Garelick Farms, purchased before we got our milk, which has finally—hooray!—returned
eggs, pears:
the December 6th Provincetown farmers' market
thyme:
our garden

P.S. The UMass Amherst website has a ton of information on growing fruit, in case you're interested. There's so much there, in fact, that if you're just trying to get a feel for whether or not you're up for planting an orchard, it's hard to even know where to start. This page, put together by Fedco Seeds in Maine, has a little bit more broad information. (Scroll down to where it says "Choosing a Site For Fruit Trees and Berries.")

The Local Food Report: to bookend the day

When Eben Franks was a kid, his grandparents had this cider press. It was an antique, from the early 1900s, built someplace in Indiana, and they never, ever hauled it out. He was fascinated by it—the way the gears interlocked, the strength of the wooden barrel, even the carefully engineered oak spout.

Unfortunately, there was only one rule about the cider press, and that was that he should never touch it. Ever. Needless to say, when his grandmother and grandfather passed away twenty-five years ago and Eben and his siblings went to Plymouth to go through the barn, he called dibs. He's been making cider, lots of it, every fall since.


It helps that he has a son, because as it turns out, making cider by hand is very hard work, and it's good to have a lot of boy-power lurking about. When I went over to Eben's house in Bourne to learn how to make a batch, I brought six pounds of apples—roughly three of those orchard bags—and it took the two of us a solid fifteen minutes of cranking and sweating and cursing to get the whole lot crushed. I can only imagine what it must have been like to look at an entire tree's or orchard's worth of apples and think, Oh goodie! Cider pressing time again.

I might be making this fact up, but I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that the early settlers of Truro thought the water tasted bad, so they drank almost entirely cider instead. Either they were terrible exaggerators, or they spent part of every day churning out the day's liquid. It must have been awfully hard to stay hydrated either way.


Anyway, Eben's childhood observations were right: this machine is a work of art. What you see right up there is a side view. Sticking down is the hand crank, which turns those two gears. They, in turn, push around a wheel on the other side, which spins the cutting blades inside that metal box. Above that, just out of view, is the hopper, the wooden shoot one picture up that you drop the apples through. Finally, in the bottom right of the picture you can see a wooden barrel, and just to the left of it, a little pile of apples shavings. When we were actively cranking the apples through, the barrel (lined with a burlap sack) was where the little pile of apple bits is, directly below the hopper. It catches the crushed apples while you crank, and then when you're done, you move it closer to the spout, so that you can crank down this enormous jacking screw and press the cider out.


The best cider, Eben thinks, comes from a blend of apples. He likes to get some tart, some sweet, some in between, and mix them all up for a perfect juice. When the cider first comes out, it's almost unrecognizable, because it hasn't been oxidized yet. Instead of the deep, rich brown we're used to, it's a light, golden color more like apple juice, and it tastes a little bit like it, too. Once I let mine sit around in the fridge for a day or so, it developed both the color and the taste, but it didn't last long.

Eben says his favorite way to drink cider is as a hot, mulled drink—the kind boiled with cinnamon sticks and nutmeg and allspice and poured steaming into a mug. Sometimes, he spikes it with rum, but only if the kids aren't around. Recently, I've been thinking that these two methods are a pretty good way to bookend the day. Hot mulled cider for breakfast, hot spiked cider as an after-dinner drink, and I'm pretty much content. I hope you will be as well.

Oh! and a quick P.S. Eben will be doing a cider making demonstration at the second annual Farm Day this Sunday, at Long Pasture (the Audubon Sanctuary in Cummaquid) from 1 to 4. He has over 500 apples to crank through, so he will most definitely be happy if you show up to help. There will also be a farmers' market in the morning, and all sorts of other agricultural fun.

HOT MULLED CIDER

Most hot mulled cider recipes are pretty much the same—cider, spices, sometimes rum—but I like this one because it uses ginger, which I think gives it an extra kick. Whatever combination you choose, it's pretty hard to go wrong.

1 gallon cider
1 (2-inch) knob fresh ginger
1 lemon, cut into quarters
2 (2-inch) cinnamon stick
a pinch of nutmeg
a pinch of allspice

Combine everything in a large pot and bring it to a boil. Turn the heat down and simmer it for ten minutes. Strain the cider through a large colander into a large bowl to remove the spices and fruit, and pour it back into the pot. If you're planning to serve the cider intermittently (if, say, you're hosting a party), keep it on the back burner, covered, over the lowest possible heat. And don't spike it until it's either going into individual cups or is not going to be heated up again—otherwise, eventually, you'll cook off the alcohol, and that would be sort of a waste.

The best part

When you write about food for a living and the man you're marrying owns a restaurant, there is quite a bit of pressure to serve everyone at your wedding a Very Good Meal. This feeling is mostly imagined, but a little bit real, and it can make planning the menu a task that takes many, many months.

We certainly haven't gotten very far, though we have managed to amass an absolutely enormous amount of recipe clippings.


It doesn't help that I am very stubborn, and that even though I have relinquished the idea that we will cook our entire rehearsal dinner together (doesn't anyone but me think that would be fun?), I will not give up the right to make my own cake. This adds a lot of To-Dos to the list, like check out wedding cake books from the library, and try every recipe in them, and purchase a cake piping kit, and look for cake stands at the flea market each Sunday, and throw lots of dinner parties so that you're not eating every triple decker by yourself.

Luckily, I don't really mind the list. In fact, it's kind of the best part.

Technically, I'm not going to make the cake alone, either; my bridesmaids are going to help. And there are going to be a few cakes, not just one, in different sizes and flavors. And my best friend's mother owns a bakery, so we'll have the equipment going for us, and plenty of space, and hopefully a few bottles of champagne.

Doing it that way will make things a whole lot easier when it comes to baking the real cakes, but it means lots more work testing recipes now. The other day, I tried an applesauce cake, and though the fishmonger wasn't sure it was wedding material, it was certainly good. At least, it was gone within twenty-four hours, for whatever that's worth—so quickly, I didn't even get to snap its portrait.


I might be kind of biased, if you recall, because I have a pretty serious thing for just about any applesauce cake. But we are getting married in the fall, in the height of applesauce season, and so having at least one apple-themed cake kind of goes without saying, I think.

I found the recipe for this one online after lots and lots of searching, but originally it came from the May 1980 issue of something called "Mailbox News" by a Mrs. Henry Blasi of Michigan. I have no idea what sort of a publication that is, but I'm very thankful for the cake. I made just a single batch, which filled two cake pans. This left room for a layer of icing in between the cakes, and then a good spread on top, but I didn't put any on the sides. That seemed like a bit much. In fact, if you wanted, you could even make this in a loaf tin and eat it for breakfast or snacks—it's kind of like banana bread that way. Either way, I think you'll be glad you gave it a go. Who knows, it just might sneak onto one of those cake platters for the Big Day. We'll have to wait and see.

APPLESAUCE WEDDING CAKE

adapted from Mailbox News, by Mrs. Henry Blasi, May 1980

This cake can be easily frozen once cooled. Just wrap each cake in plastic wrap, then tinfoil, then stick it in the freezer. This makes frosting easier later—not to mention baking ahead of time.

1 and 1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup butter
2 eggs
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup whole-wheat flour
1 and 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon all-spice
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1 and 1/2 cups applesauce

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. In a medium-size mixing bowl, cream sugar and butter. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well. In another medium-size bowl, whisk together dry ingredients. Add applesauce and dry ingredients alternatively to creamed butter, mixing well after each addition. Spoon batter into 2 greased cake pans, and bake until a cake tester comes out clean (about 30 minutes).

I topped the cake with this icing, but a lemony glaze would work well, too, I think.

New York Grown

I found these for you
at Shaw's
in Orleans

a place
I don't normally go.

I was looking for a slab of tuna
to photograph for the radio.

Wandering through the produce aisle on my way out
(all the bluefin was packed in plastic
and frozen),
I spotted this bag.

There they were:
crisp, red,
New York grown,
lovely pieces of
fall.

I guess March
isn't so bad;

after all,
you know what they say
about an apple a day.

Worth saving

I have been fooled by a whole lot of low-fat recipes in my time. As a kid, I drank only skim milk. I often ate 98% lean hamburgers with whole-wheat buns and 50% skim cheddar cheese slices on top, and I liked them quite a bit.

But once I tasted the real things—sharp cheddar, creamy milk, hamburgers with just a smidgen of grease—the jig was up. My parents tried their hardest, but innocence can't last forever, and it was terribly hard to rewind.


Which is why the low-fat waffles I made this weekend didn't fool me one bit. They were clipped from a magazine whose name reads something like Booking Bight and whose March 2007 issue contained a recipe for Gingerbread Waffles as part of the menu for a champagne brunch.

After two whole years of anticipation, you can imagine the let down when they came out sort of floppy and with a distinct lack of oomph. They were good, but I'd been hoping for some va-va-voom, if you know what I mean.

I may have played some part.

First of all, there was the two-year build up, which never helps expectations, and secondly, I did some ingredient swapping here and there. I added in whole-wheat flour where I maybe shouldn't have, substituted candied ginger for the real, fresh thing, and used sour milk instead of buttermilk. Maybe, maybe, if I had kept everything just so, the recipe might have turned out perfectly. But I kind of doubt it.

I think the real problem was that the waffles were low-fat.

I don't make this claim lightly. I've spent an awful lot of Sundays doing research, eating waffles at friends' houses and from my own press, and I've learned that the basic recipe can take almost any sort of milk or fruit or flour variation. Whole-wheat flour, powdered buttermilk, sparkling water, even, can all turn out a mean batch of Belgians. But when you start fudging fat content, well, that's where things start to go downhill.

For starters, the waffles lose their crispness. They get kind of spongy and floppy, better for toasting from the freezer than eating on the spot with a puddle of syrup. They also require a lot more butter spread on top, which sort of defeats the original purpose, if you see what I mean.


I should have seen it coming, what with the applesauce and the canola oil and the fat-free buttermilk.

The good news is, I think the recipe can be salvaged, and handily at that. Anything with a title like Gingerbread Waffles is worth saving, after all. The waffles also have on their side the fact that they used up a good deal of applesauce from the freezer, had a delightful Christmas-morning sort of ring, and popped up bites of candied ginger at all the right times.

I think, in fact, that with their fat back, they're going to be not just average March Sunday keepers, but maybe even New Year's Day or Easter material. So here's a modified recipe. Tweak it further as you'd like, just don't leave out the fat. Once you've lost your innocence, they just won't taste the same.

GINGERBREAD WAFFLES

adapted, ahem, from this recipe, published in this magazine in March 2007

1 and 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cup whole-wheat flour
1 and 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 and 1/2 cups sour milk or buttermilk (I'd stick with 2% or whole for best results)
6 tablespoons butter, melted
3 tablespoons molasses
2 teaspoons finely grated peeled ginger
2 eggs, separated
a pinch of cream of tartar
1 cup applesauce
1/3 cup minced candied ginger (optional)

Plug in your waffle press to preheat it, so that as soon as the batter is mixed it'll be ready to go. Whisk together the dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl. In a medium-size bowl, stir together milk, butter, molasses, grated ginger, and both egg yolks. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and stir until just combined. Sprinkle in the candied ginger, and mix that in too.

In another medium-size mixing bowl, whip the egg whites with the cream of tartar until they form soft peaks. Using a spatula, gently fold the beaten whites into the batter. Ladle about a cup of batter onto the preheated iron, and cook according to manufacturers instructions. (A good rule of thumb is that when the steaming stops, the waffles are ready to come out.) Serve hot with butter and maple syrup, or as the original recipe recommends, champagne and a dollop of lemon curd. Hear, hear!

Hostess for a day

Have you ever wished you could be a professional, full-time, home-dinner-party-hostess, just for a month or two? That each morning involved waking up, taking stock of your refrigerator and pantry, and planning a menu, a guest list, and decor?

There would be chores involved, certainly. Silver gets tarnished, flowers need refreshing, and dusting when you live in a home with a woodstove seems like the never-ending song of tasks. And of course if being a hostess was the only thing to think about, ever, I suppose you might eventually get bored. But I think it would take me a very, very long time. Because home dinner parties are really my absolute favorite thing.

For starters, there's the fact that you get to spend the morning pouring over cookbooks. You get to pull out a butternut squash, or a container of frozen rhubarb, or a pork shoulder and wonder, what on earth will I do with this? That, in my opinion, is the best part, because no matter what you have, there is always an excellent menu to be made. It simply takes a bit of imagination, and lots of time with those books. Which are some of my favorite inanimate objects to spend a day with. They're more fun than some people and can be awfully talkative, I find.


Then there's the cooking, and the whirlwind of friends and hugs and babies and drinks, and the sitting down to a meal you are offering up to feed the people you love. I really like that part, the food. But the part where I'm afraid I start to sound a bit crazy is right now, when I announce that I like dinner parties so much that I don't even really mind cleaning up. In fact, truth be told, I kind of like the routine. There are always a few women in the kitchen, and between the washing and the drying and the gossiping and the sense of tidiness that ensues, there's something awfully satisfying about that time, too.

I have no idea whether or not this weekend will offer that chance. But if it does, I know exactly what I'll make. Here's an early March menu, in case you find yourself in the lucky seat of host or hostess for a day. You might have to make a trip to the library, of course, but that's the whole fun.

— cocktail hour —

The Old Fashioned, to show off bourbon's charms
from The Essential Cocktail by Dale DeGroff and featured in Gourmet, March 2009

Cracker stacks with Brad's Bread and Butter Pickles and Great Hill Blue Cheese

— dinner —

Butternut Squash in Cream and Cinnamon
from The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food, by Judith Jones

Cod baked in foil with leeks and carrots
from Cook's Illustrated, March & April 2009

— dessert —

Tinky's Cozy Apple-Maple Pudding
from Yankee, March/April 2009

A very, very good attempt

When your parents come to dinner at the house where your fiancé grew up, it is a very good idea to volunteer to cook. The thing to do is to buy a new cookbook that day, and get very excited about a recipe or two, and then disappear to the store and finally into the kitchen for the afternoon. That way, the fathers and mothers can all pour themselves a glass of wine and head into the living room, leaving you and your fiancé to work happily on a marinade while they do the work of getting to know each other for a bit.

At least this is what I decided yesterday. The book I found was The Food of France, part of a Williams Sonoma collection. I found it in the city, and we decided on a menu of salt and pepper crusted rib-eye, braised endive, gratin dauphinos (a fancy term for scalloped potatoes), and an apple tart for dessert. The apple tart was especially important, as it required quite a bit of concentration and everyone shooed out of the kitchen for a bit.

It also, incidentally, is one of my absolute favorite things to eat for both for dessert, and for breakfast in the car the next day. I first had it in Spain, and spent many evenings sneaking into the kitchen (which very handily had glass doors, closing out the creak of the refrigerator and the noisy scraping of forks on china) with my host sister late at night, after everyone else was asleep. Of course we were chastised in the morning when our mother noticed the edges of the tart slowly creeping in, but we did it every time she made it all the same.

Now this tart is not quite like that one (I am still trying to get the recipe, and translate it, as the measurements are in grams and that sort of thing) but for now it is a very, very good attempt. Maybe it's because it is French, but the pastry cream seems a bit softer, and the crust a little bit less dense, but the apples and the apricot glaze are just the same.


It is also just as delicious the next day, if not better, especially if you have a drive to make. I recommend setting it up on your lap on a bit of tupperware, and without even bothering with forks, eating up every last bit. Just watch out for the pastry cream, as it tends to sneak out and mess things up a bit.

Other than that, I don't have too many tips. I do recommend making it for family gatherings, as it goes very well with wine, and seems to make everyone sort of drowsy and content, always handy for squashing familial discontent. If there are politics or other dire subjects to discuss, I think it would be an especially good bet. I know the election is over and all, but you might want to start practicing for next time, so as to have it in your bag of tricks.

APPLE TART

from The Food of France, Williams Sonoma collection

for the crust:

2 and 3/4 cup flour
small pinch of salt
1 stick plus 2 and 1/2 tablespoons butter
3/4 cup confectioners' sugar
2 eggs, beaten

Mix flour and salt in a large bowl. In a separate bowl, mix butter with your fingers, until soft. Then add sugar, followed by eggs. Gradually incorporate dry ingredients into wet. Knead to make a smooth dough, warp in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for at least an hour.

for the pastry cream:

6 egg yolks
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup cornstarch
2 tablespoons flour
2 and 1/4 cups whole milk
1 tablespoon vanilla or rum
1 tablespoon butter

Whisk together the egg yolks, 1/4 cup sugar, cornstarch, and flour in a medium sized mixing bowl. In a medium sized heavy bottomed saucepan, mix milk and remaining sugar. Bring just to a boil, and pour a small amount of the hot milk into the egg mixture, whisking constantly, to temper the eggs. Pour the egg and milk mixture back into the pot of milk, and whisking constantly, bring back to a boil. Once it begins to thicken, cook for two minutes longer. Stir in butter and vanilla and scrape the cream into a mixing bowl. So that it doesn't form a skin, press a piece of plastic wrap against the surface of the cream, and put the bowl into the refrigerator until you're ready to use it.

for the tart:

4 sweet apples
1/4 cup apricot jam

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Roll out pastry dough. Press into a greased 10 inch tart pan, trimming excess dough from top. Line dough with tinfoil or parchment paper, and fill tart center with rice, coffee, or other dry beans. Prebake for 10 minutes, remove weights and foil or paper, and bake several minutes more, or until just cooked through.


Remove from oven and fill with pastry cream. Peel and core apples, and cut into very thin slices. Layer around the top of the tart into two circles. Cook tart 25 to 30 minutes, or until apples are golden and pastry is dry and cooked. Let cool completely, then melt apricot jam in a pot with a bit of water, and spread with a pastry brush over top. Chill or serve immediately. This tart is just as good, if not better, eaten the next day.