The Local Food Report: a bumper crop

This is my whole crop of blueberries this season:

It's sad really. Last year, straight out of the nursery, they were loaded. This year, nothing. I'm pretty sure I've been doing something wrong.

So when I met Anita Stanley of South Dennis at the Orleans market—when I saw her pint upon pint of beautiful, deep blue, healthy looking berries—I decided to ask for advice. Here are her tips on growing blueberries, from purchasing to planting to long-term care. Happy berry growing!

1. Choose the right varieties. Blueberries are not self-pollinating, which means you need at least two, and preferably three or more, in order to get good pollination. (Although there are some plants advertised as self-pollinating, no one I've talked to recommends planting them without at least another variety around.)

Stanley grows Bluetta, Coville, and Berkeley. Bluetta's early and sweet, Coville is big and mid-season, and the Berkeley's come in late—which also means she gets a harvest all summer long.

2. Choose a good spot. Blueberries like acid soil with plenty of sun, and they like wet feet. Don't plant them in a dry spot. (I've seen them thriving in swampy areas around here, and on the banks of ponds.)

3. Use netting! Otherwise, the birds will make off with your crop. Cheesecloth works well for individual bushes, but if you have a large patch, like Stanley does, she recommends building a fence with high posts, and netting the whole enclosure overhead.

4. Cut the plants back. For the first three years, you shouldn't prune. After that, Stanley says, prune every year so that a bird could fly in between the branches. This will stop berries and branches from overlapping, which not only makes picking difficult but also leads to smaller berries. Prune, and you'll get big berries with more space. Pruning is best done in the winter, when the plants are dormant.

5. Keep an eye out for disease. Stanley says her plants were decimated last year by winter moths—a relatively new pest for the Cape. They were only introduced to North America in the 1950s, to Nova Scotia via Europe, and they made their way south about 10 years ago. They lay eggs on the bark of the plants, which overwinter and hatch come spring. Stanley fights them by spraying the plants in December, when they're dormant and have no flowers or leaves, with horticultural oil. Horticultural oil is a kind of mineral oil, so it's fine for organic growers, and it kills the moths by smothering their eggs.

Happy blueberry growing!

The Local Food Report: no bake cheesecake

The other night at work we did a big rehearsal dinner. It was unlike anything we'd ever done at the restaurant—a whole room blocked off for hours, passed apps and a cocktail hour—not to mention that all of the food was kosher, and some of it was even vegan. Considering the amount of pork and shellfish and butter and heavy cream we go through most nights, it was pretty amazing.

Sometime toward the end of the night, after we'd run the entrees and made sure everyone had enough wine and silverware and water and fresh cracked pepper, the line cooks called me into the kitchen. Go out back! they told me. There's something you need to try.

I walked down the line, through the heat, into the back room where the dessert chefs were plating. We'd brought in a special raw food, vegan chef for the occasion—a Wellfleet woman named Katie Reed—and she handed me a spoonful of something creamy and blue. Blueberry cheesecake, she told me. Made with local berries. I was ready to be skeptical—in high school, a vegan chocolate cake turned me off of vegan baked goods pretty much entirely—but one bite, and I was sold. There was no cream cheese, and the cake wasn't cooked, but somehow it was rich, decadent, and even creamy.

Later, I went back to talk with Katie. She said nuts made up the base—pureed cashews and almond cream—mixed with local blueberries, agave, coconut oil, vanilla, and Irish Moss—to act as a stabilizer. Then for the crust, she used sprouted, dehydrated walnuts, mixed with Medjool dates and organic raisins for sweetness. The end result was pretty amazing.

It was also raw, vegan, and gluten and dairy free—which is the way Katie cooks and eats, always. She got into vegan food as a kid because she had so many food allergies, and eventually, she went to culinary school to keep learning. She used to live out in Portland, Oregon, where she says raw food is more of a known quantity—but here on the Cape, she's still working to spread the idea through good recipes. She and her sister have started a raw food catering company, and they also offer raw food cooking classes and sell some of their dishes at the Orleans and Wellfleet farmers markets.

The cool thing is that they have farm land to back all these efforts up. The two of them are working a 2 acre parcel in Truro, growing produce for their catering events and to sell at the farmers' markets. Katie picked the blueberries for the cheesecake from a wild patch in Truro, and she says usually, if she hasn't grown it, she's either picked it in the wild or from a friend's farm somewhere local.

If you're interested in learning more, look for Farm Maid Foods at one of the farmers' markets, and say hi. There's a lot to learn, and all kinds of good food to try.

BLUEBERRY CHEESECAKE

This is Katie's recipe. She says cashews and almond cream are pretty typical in raw cheesecake bases—they're what give it the creamy taste.

for the crust:

2 cups walnuts

1/4 cup Medjool dates, pitted

1/4 cup Thompson seedless raisins

a pinch of salt

for the filling:

3 cups cashews, soaked for at least 2 hours

1 cup almond cream*

1 cup agave nectar

1 cup coconut oil, warmed to a liquid state

1/4 cup lemon juice

3 tablespoons lecithin

2 tablespoons Irish moss paste**

1 vanilla bean pod, soaked and scraped

a pinch of salt

2 cups fresh blueberries, divided

Make the crust. Pulse the walnuts in a food processor until you get a coarse meal. Be careful not to over process the nuts. Coarsely chop the dates and raisins and add them to the walnuts along with the salt. Process until the dates and raisins are incorporated and there are no more pieces. Empty this mixture onto the bottom of a spring form pan. Use your fingers to flatten the crust along the bottom of the pan and for a final smoothing use an offset spatula.

For the filling, combine the cashews, almond cream, agave nectar, coconut oil, lemon juice, lecithin, Irish moss paste, vanilla, and salt in a high powered blender. Blend until smooth. Reserve one cup of this mixture and place it in the fridge (this will be the glaze that goes on top of the finished cake). Add 1 and 1/2 cups of the blueberries to the remaining mixture and blend thoroughly. Pour this mixture into the spring form pan on top of the crust and place the pan in the fridge. Chill for several hours, or until the cake sets up completely.

Set the cup of frosting out an hour before serving to allow it to reliquify. Take the cheesecake out of the fridge and cut it into slices. Drizzle the icing over top of each slice, and garnish each slice with a handful of fresh blueberries. Serve at once.

*Note: To make almond cream at home, soak 3/4 cup almonds overnight. Drain them in the morning and place them in a high powered blender with 1 cup of water. Blend thoroughly and strain through a nut milk bag or cheesecloth. Reserve the cream. (You can use the almond pulp to make raw breads, cookies, or crackers.)

**Note: To make Irish Moss paste at home, soak the Irish Moss seaweed for 24 hours in water, draining and replenishing several times throughout the day. Blend in a high powered blender with 1 part seaweed to 3 parts water. Pour the paste into ice cube trays and reserve for later dessert making. This recipe calls for 2 ice cubes worth of Irish Moss paste.

Only to find

Life can be surprising sometimes—

On a weekday morning, the man you love—that same man who wakes up every day and runs 4.3 miles in 36 minutes at 6:37 and is gone by 8:15—that man can decide to stay in bed til noon with a headache.

And you can go to make him pancakes, only to find you're short all-purpose flour and throw in a bag of rye—rye you ground down from the whole berries grown in Belchertown, MA at White Oak Farm for your grain CSA—extra flour from another project, another morning, another sort of day.

And on this day, this morning, you can find that rye transforms: whole grain into airy pancakes, heavy with sweet syrup, delicate and lacy around the golden-brown edges, plump with berries that spill out, down, into an oily swill—butter, hot, thin maple. You can find that rye and buttermilk and blueberries are synonymous with delight.

Oh, and that headache. What? You can find it's pancakes and coffee and cider, and off to work another afternoon.

BUTTERMILK RYE PANCAKES
[with blueberries from Silverbrook Farms]

1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup whole grain rye flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
2 cups buttermilk
4 tablespoons melted butter
2 teaspoons honey, stirred into the melted butter to warm
1 cup blueberries, fresh or frozen

Whisk together the dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl. Separate the eggs, cracking the whites into a medium mixing bowl and the yolks into a small one. Whisk the buttermilk into the whites, and the melted butter and honey into the yolks. Then whisk these two egg mixtures together. Pour the wet ingredients into the large mixing bowl with the dry ingredients, and use the whisk to gently mix the two until just combined.

Have the blueberries at the ready, along with a spoon. Warm up a large, black iron skillet over medium heat. Coat the skillet with several tablespoons of oil or melted butter and ladle several third-cup scoops of pancake batter in. Use the spoon to plop a few blueberries into the top of each pancake. Cook for several minutes, or until the bottom side feels crispy and cohesive under a spatula and the top batter starts to form tiny bubbles. Flip the pancakes with the spatula. Cook for another few minutes (this side will want slightly less time than the first side, as the blueberries can burn).

Serve the pancakes hot, with plenty of butter and real, warm maple syrup.

Plan accordingly

This weekend, I learned two things. The first is that if you would like to stay happily married for a long, long time, you should never, ever attempt to shop for a house. Not even if you aren't altogether serious about it, and especially not if you are just sort of testing the waters to see how much you like the place you're already in. If you do, you will very quickly discover that actually, people who like three bedroom homes are not made for people who like four bedroom homes, and that basements are secretly much more important to certain people than anyone could have ever imagined, and that there is a lot more to discuss than you realized when it comes to a yard. You might also find out that one of you is very, very picky about southern light, and windows, and old, antique-y frames and floors. As a matter of fact, the only pleasant thing that you might discover is that when two people decide to become so completely unreasonable, you can patch things up by making a cake.

That, of course, is the second thing I learned this weekend: I now know how to bake Melt-in-Your-Mouth blueberry cake.

I never knew that a skill like that could come in quite so handy, as in, stop-your-husband-from-running-away handy, but let me tell you, it does. It is a very important thing to have in your repertoire. I wish I'd had it up my sleeve while we were a little bit earlier, because I have a feeling it's the sort of cake that could do things like knock thousands of dollars off of asking prices and expand basements and add built in storage under eaves and make your husband smile and grab your hand, but I can't be sure.

At any rate, Melt-In-Your-Mouth Blueberry Cake's real power comes from the ever mighty butter and sugar and flour trio, the one that has been saving friendships and marriages and whole businesses since just about the start of time. You make it by creaming some butter, adding in some sugar and a spoonful of vanilla and an egg yolk, and then beating up the white with a little bit more sugar until it's stiff. Then when that all is ready to go, you add the behind-the-scenes structure, the flour and the baking soda and a little pinch of salt, you mix the dry ingredients into the wet ones, fold the egg whites in, and finally, at the last possible second, add a whopping two cups of slightly thawed Eastham blueberries. You get the oven hot, and prep two little pans, one to keep for Sunday morning breakfast and one to bring over to your two very good friends who are [finally! at long last!] coming home from their honeymoon, and you bake.

It couldn't be more soothing, or more delightful when it's finally time to sit down and eat.


We polished ours off yesterday, over tea and coffee and sautéed onions and Chinese cabbage and two fried eggs. We talked about Alex's hockey game, and my walk, and the cilantro plant in the window, and even about a piece of land he'd seen for sale, and no one got the least bit cross.

The only disagreeable thing, actually, was how quickly it disappeared. We thought about breaking into our friends' pan, but that didn't seem right, especially given that they've been gone for a month, and that it was a very long month, and that we're really hoping that now that the hullabaloo is over they'll settle down and stay. Stealing cake from honeymooners seemed terribly unsportsmanlike. So all I'll say is that if you make this cake with the intent to share, don't divvy it up. Plan accordingly, and make a double batch, or if you need to, which you might, even bake three.

MELT-IN-YOUR-MOUTH BLUEBERRY CAKE

Adapted from Cooking Down East by Marjorie Standish

This recipe comes from my mother's repertoire. The annotation next to the header in her copy of the book reads, "YES! Made for the blizzard of March '93." I don't remember the storm, seeing as I was only eight at the time, but she says we ate it at night, with the shades up and the lights on in the yard, watching the snow fly wildly around outside. I think it would be equally lovely tonight, watching the trees bend in the wind and the rain.

2 eggs, separated
1 cup granulated sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup butter (1 stick)
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup whole-wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/3 cup whole milk, buttermilk, or even eggnog in a pinch
2 cups blueberries, fresh or frozen

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F and butter an 8" by 8" baking pan. Beat the egg whites until they're stiff. Once they have the right consistency, beat in 1/4 cup of the sugar to keep them stiff, and set them aside.

Cream the butter; add the salt and the vanilla. Beat in the remaining sugar, add the egg yolks, and beat until everything is light and creamy. Whisk the dry ingredients together in a small bowl, and add them to the butter mixture alternately with the milk. Gently fold in the beaten egg whites, and then fold in the blueberries. (Doing this last prevents the blueberries from mixing too much with the batter and giving the cake that eerie green color you sometimes notice in overmixed muffins and cakes.)

Spoon the batter into the prepared pan. Bake the cake for 50 to 60 minutes, or a little less if you like your cake slightly gooey and underdone. Serve at room temperature, with a cup of tea.

The Local Food Report: with a good dose of pudding

I wish today that I could turn your screen into a real, live scratch-n-sniff. I wish that all through the florescence I could send out silver spoons and white napkins and tiny porcelain bowls, and then, if I could, I would go out ladle in hand and fill them each up with a little dollop of blueberry lemon delight. I could be the world's first Benevolent Online Pudding Fairy. That would be lovely, don't you think?

Unfortunately, instead, you're going to have to content yourself with a recipe. It is a very easy, very high bang-for-your-buck sort of recipe, but still. You do have to go ahead and make it. So that you can get right down to business, here is a shopping list:

sugar
milk
1 lemon
all-purpose flour
2 eggs
salt
blueberries

But hold on. You can't rush out to the store just yet, because before you do, I have to tell you about the blueberry guy. He's where the idea for this recipe really came from, after all—before him and his radio interview it was just my mother's heavenly lemon pudding, no blueberries involved.

His name is Bob Wells, and he's from Eastham. I talked with him the other day at the Orleans Farmers' Market about his carbon negative farm, and how he's actually growing blueberries not just without a carbon footprint, but in a way that sequesters CO2 and puts it back into the ground, and I had to buy a pint. (Actually, I bought four, but there was a long line behind me, so please don't mention that to anyone else. I felt a little greedy.)

The way he does it—and this went waay over my head the first time I heard it, so don't be embarrassed if you need to slow down, or take a nap, or maybe eat a cup of pudding while you sort through it all—is through a process called pyrolisis. Basically, this involves burning biomass, like poison ivy or black locust or really anything else you might find in the woods around here, at very high temperatures with very little oxygen until it turns into a type of charcoal called biochar. The biochar traps the carbon that the plants have sucked up over their lifetimes—the carbon that would normally, in the natural cycle, be released back into the air as CO2 as the plants decompose—and instead puts that carbon in solid form into the ground.

That's where the blueberry plants come in. Bob adds the high-carbon, fine-grained residue to their soil, the carbon is officially sequestered, and the high bush berries thrive.

It sounds like a new idea, and I'd very much like to give Bob the credit, but it's not. Natives in the Amazon were doing it before Columbus arrived—smoldering agricultural waste beneath dirt until it turned into a fine, dark earth—terra preta, in their words. Rather than simply burning what they'd taken from the soil, they returned it in charcoal form—a kind of carbon composting I guess you could say.

Anyways, whether he can take credit or not, the whole carbon negative farming thing is a very good reason to like Bob. The way I figure, if you make lemon pudding with carbon negative blueberries, it kind of offsets the fact that the lemon came from far away. I'm not sure how this reasoning works on any official level, but I'm willing to go with it.

If you're interested in learning more about Bob and his blueberries and biochar, track him down at the market this weekend. He partnered recently with a local blacksmith, Peter Hirst to design and build simple metal burner units so that other small farms can start making biochar, too, and they're planning to teach some seminars in the fall. I'm sure he'd be glad to fill you in. In the meantime, if you want to learn more about the international biochar movement you can head on over here. I think you'll find it's a little overwhelming, but with a good dose of pudding, well worth the ride.

CARBON NEUTRAL PUDDING

Just so you know, I haven't crunched any numbers on this. But if you take carbon negative blueberries and cook them with a carbon positive lemon, you get carbon nuetral pudding, I think. Beyond that, there are no tricks to this pudding. It is simple as simple can be and pretty heart-stopping, too.

1 cup sugar
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 cup whole milk
2 eggs, separated
1 lemon
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup blueberries

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Pull out a good sized mixing bowl and whisk together the sugar and the flour. Pour in the milk, the well-beaten egg yolks, the juice of the lemon, its grated rind, and the salt, and stir well. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff. Then fold them gently into the lemon mixture along with the blueberries. Pour the pudding into a small, deep, well-buttered casserole or baking dish (roughly 6 or 8 inches square and 3 inches deep should do the trick). Bake it in a water bath for about 35 minutes, or until the top is golden brown and a knife comes out clean. Serve at once.

Roll out the welcome mat

Late Saturday night, my parents arrived for a visit. Early Sunday morning I opened the fridge to find this:

Actually, there were two of them, and they were a little more full. My parents certainly know how to get the old welcome mat rolled out, don't they?

My mom made the pies the day before they drove down, in her kitchen at home with the last of the 2008 frozen Maine blueberries. (This was in order to make room for the 2009 specimens, which should arrive within weeks.) She had three helpers borrowed from family friends: one eight years old, one five, and one three. The kitchen got a bit messy, and the sugar was shorted just a smidgen, but all in all, they were a very productive team. They turned out a full six homemade blueberry pies, even with a few crust casualties. (When my mother gave the three year old her own little ball to roll out, she took a few spins with the pin before promptly announcing that her mother had told her she should eat the dough, not roll it. Her mother not being present and this being a blatant fib, my mother had no choice to but chuckle, smile, and say goodbye to that particular chunk of dough.)

A few of the pies went home with the helpers and one stayed in Maine, but the other two—thank goodness!—came to us. And not only that, but one made the trip to Great Island Sunday afternoon for a picnic. Fisher tried to nab a slice from his perch on the bow of the boat, but he ended up with a towel instead. As you can see, that didn't slow him down when it came time to hunt around for crumbs.

I had a hard time refraining from crumb-hunting, myself. Between the afternoon sunshine and the swim off the boat and the walk through the woods and then along the beach to look for perfect oyster shells, I was about ready for another slice of pie, too. Happily, I remembered we had another one at home.

You might want to have one handy, too, seeing as it's August and all. There've been blueberries all over the farmers' markets recently, but if you're going to try and make a pie anything like the one my mother did, I'd go picking for wild ones instead. High bush blueberries are delicious, but they're nothing like the tiny, low-growing ones that carpet the barrens in Maine and the hillsides around here. I prefer the big ones for cereal and snacking, but the tiny ones hands down make a better pie.


At that, I think I'll leave you to it. It is the last day of my parents' visit, and I think you'll agree they deserve to be shown a very, very good time.

BLUEBERRY PIE

Adapted from the Joy of Cooking by Irma Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker, and Ethan Becker

Feel free to use whatever pie crust you like best for this recipe. My favorites are the "Tart and Pie Crust" recipe from Alice Waters' book, The Art of Simple Food or the one Annie B. Copps, editor of Yankee magazine developed for a pumpkin pie article last fall. I think my mother used the one from the Joy of Cooking, which as you saw above, came out perfectly as well.

Beyond the crust, it's all about the berries. Frozen berries are fine as long as they're wild; just be sure to use a bit more tapioca to soak up the extra juice or else the filling won't set. The 2/3 cup of sugar called for below is a bit on the low side, so if you like your pies sweeter I'd use a little more. And last but not least, it's a very, very good idea to bake the pie on top of a cookie sheet with a little lip, as they tend to overflow. Ultimately, my mother's pies did set, but they made a terrible mess of the oven in the process.

one 9-inch pie crust, bottom and top

5 cups blueberries
2/3 cup sugar
1/4 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon tapioca
1 tablespoon butter

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. In a large mixing bowl, combine the blueberries, sugar, flour, cinnamon, and tapioca. Stir everything together gently and let the mixture sit for about 15 minutes. Pour this filling into the prepared 9-inch pie crust bottom. Cut the butter into tiny pieces and scatter them across the top of the berries. Place the top crust over the berries, roll the sides into a thick rim, and prick the dough with a fork so that the steam can escape while the pie bakes. Bake the pie for 10 minutes at 450; then turn the oven down to 350 and bake it for another half hour, until golden brown.

Bearing witness

I would like to announce that Great Pond, in the summer time, is a magnificent place to be. Here are my toes, bearing witness.

It is especially lovely on a Saturday afternoon in July when you've spent the morning at the farmers' market (where there were carrots, no less!), passed mid-day at an ocean beach, and when your best friend is in town from 3,000 miles away. That, people, is the sort of magnificence I'm talking about here.

I would also like to announce that at the end of a day at Great Pond, it never hurts to have a large plate of shortcake on hand. Not strawberry shortcake, necessarily, at least not in a year like this one, but red-white-and-blue, with a box of blueberries and a pint or so of last year's frozen strawberries mixed in. (It does hurt to be a bit tipsy while you're whisking together the dry ingredients, especially if your baking soda goes into the bowl in big clumps, but I trust you already know that.)

Clumps aside, the shortbread making is really no trick at all. The cakes are just flour, butter, sugar, salt, and baking soda, with a bit of milk whisked in. Seriously, that's it. The berries aren't too tricky either—the blueberries freshen things up while the strawberries provide just the right amount of ooze—and then all that's left is the rather substantial dollop of whipped cream on top.


The trickiest thing about red-white-and-blue-shortcake, really, is rounding up the friends. What with the plane tickets and the getting-the-night-off requests and the drives down from Boston, it's much more of a bother to get everyone together than it is to whip up a few shortcakes here and there. But on Saturday night with the friends—the rounded up ones who are able to remember stories that start with the the Fourth of July you made out with a boy in an alley and progress to conversation about the cut of your wedding dress—on that sort of night, red-white-and-blue shortcake is a very good thing indeed.

Just be careful not to wear anything too close fitting, because between the laughter and the shortcake, it might not make it home in one piece.

RED-WHITE-AND-BLUE SHORTCAKE

This is a very versatile biscuit, adapted from Alice Waters' cream biscuits in The Art of Simple Food. They are equally good toasted for breakfast with a dab of butter and jam as they are drenched in berries and juice and topped with a whopping dollop of whipped cream, so it's a good idea to make more rather than less.

1 and 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
6 tablespoons butter, chilled
just under 3/4 cup whole milk

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. In a medium-sized mixing bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients. (Watch out, ahem, for those baking soda clumps!) Cut the butter into the flour and then, using your fingers, work it into pea-size chunks. Pour in the milk and stir everything together with a fork until just combined. Butter two baking sheets and, using two soup spoons, drop the batter on in lumps roughly 1 and 1/2 inches in diameter. (There should be eight in all.) Bake for about 15 minutes, or until golden brown.

Cut each biscuit in half and top it with fresh whipped cream and a mixture of half and half blueberries and sliced strawberries. (Frozen strawberries are fine, both since this year's crop hasn't been very good and because they offer up a nice amount of sweet juice, but if you can find fresh strawberries, slice them up, put them in a bowl, and sprinkle them with a few teaspoons of sugar. Within about 15 minutes, they should produce a nice puddle of juice.) Happy July!

The traveling little circle

I don't know quite how to introduce you to these jam rolls, except to say that they remind me of Pacman.

Do you remember that game? Pacman—the traveling little circle with a triangular mouth who runs around eating dots? I didn't spend much time in arcades as a kid, but every time we went skiing, there was a Pacman game in the lobby of the fitness center where we went to use the hot tub. From what I remember, the key is for Pacman to avoid the ghosts, because as he's trying to gobble up dots, they in turn are trying to gobble him up.

Sometimes, I still play online. (Did I really just admit that?) But when you have a batch of jam rolls that look like the ones above, you don't even have to resort to that. You can play Pacman right on the kitchen counter with two free hands. Just make sure no one else is home.

In addition to acting as real live Pacmans, these rolls are also very good for eating. They're nothing like their traditional fried counterpart, so you have to set that idea aside before you start tasting. But if you can do that, they're nice and plump and sweet with hints of vanilla and cardamom, sort of like a hot cross bun. And when you bite in, a bit of jam oozes out, which is delightful so long as you are able to locate a napkin nearby.

They are a lot less nice to make, however, particularly when you have none of the proper equipment. I learned quite quickly during the filling process that a plastic bag with a whole cut in the tip may work as a piping kit when you're frosting sugar cookies, but it doesn't do much for squeezing lumpy blueberry jam into fresh rolls. Just look at the carnage it caused!


The original recipe, which was from Cooking Light, recommends using a ketchup bottle or a pastry bag to push the jelly in, which is advice I would definitely stick to the second time around. I also think these rolls are best toasted, with a little bit of butter, and a dusting of confectioners' sugar on top. All in all, they're very nice to have around, particularly on weekday mornings, when you're in a hurry to get out the door with something moderately healthy in hand.

Just try not to get caught playing Pacman at your desk.


BLUEBERRY JAM ROLLS

adapted from Cooking Light, December 2008

1 and 1/2 teaspoons dry yeast
3/4 cup warm whole milk
6 tablespoons granulated sugar
1 tablespoon butter, softened
1 teaspoon cardamom
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 large egg
3 and 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cup blueberry jam
1 tablespoon powdered sugar

In a medium-size bowl, dissolve the yeast in 1/2 cup of the warm milk. Allow it to proof for five minutes or until the yeast starts to bubble. Add the remaining 1/4 cup of milk and the sugar, butter, cardamom, vanilla, salt, and egg. Beat until thoroughly blended. Add about 2 cups of flour, and mix until smooth. Work in the remaining flour with your hands, and turn the dough out onto the counter top. Knead for about ten minutes, or until the dough is smooth and elastic. Put the dough in a large mixing bowl coated with oil or butter, cover with plastic wrap, and leave it to rise for about 2 hours.

When the dough has doubled in size, punch it down and divide it into 16 pieces. Form each piece into a round, smooth ball, and place the balls on a greased or parchment-lined baking sheet. Cover the balls with plastic wrap and let them rise another hour, or until doubled in size.

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F and uncover the balls. Bake for about 15 minutes, or until the tops are golden brown. Remove them from the cookie sheet and allow them to cool on a wire rack.

Using the end of a wooden spoon, punch through one side of the rolls (without breaking through a second side) and form a pocket inside. Squeeze about 2 tablespoons of blueberry jam into each roll using a plastic ketchup bottle or a cake piping kit. Sprinkle the rolls with powdered sugar; serve warm with butter.

Taking stock

There comes a time in February when you have to deal with the contents of your freezer, or else. That time is now.


Paw through, and you will discover you have stashed away enough to feed a small army for many, many months. Yesterday, I took stock and discovered the following: chicken livers, turkey stock, chopped rhubarb, sliced strawberries, pesto, tomato sauce, pork sausage, green beans, corn, carrots, blueberries, venison, lobster mushrooms, steak, celery leaves, applesauce, homemade grape juice concentrate, tomato juice, and a ten pound box of blue cheese. I'm fairly sure I'm leaving something out, because you name it, we've got it. Oh! There was flounder. And bay scallops. I think we'll leave it at that.

When the inventory is this large, a mandatory shopping moratorium must be introduced. Ours went into effect last week, with the only exceptions allowed being butter, flour, sugar, and anything else necessary for making use of this monstrous heap of frozen goods. On the bright side, emptying the freezer is a sure sign that spring is on the way.

Not so incidentally, this is also a good time for a shopping moratorium based on the rather empty, sad state of many Cape Cod bank accounts (who knew winter could make you miss waiting tables so much?). On top of that, there is currently very little to buy locally when it comes to food, and I for one am not sure how many more bowls of winter squash and cabbage I can eat.

And so yesterday I did my weekly shop downstairs. Among other things, I picked up a pint of high bush blueberries, which ended up being just the thing for a batch of Saturday morning muffins. They don't pouf up like the big muffins you find at bakeries, which are coated in sugar and have such distinct regions as muffin and muffin top, but rather rise into small, peaked, more serving-sized-appropriate mounds. They are very much homemade and delicious warm with a little pat of butter.

BLUEBERRY MUFFINS

adapted from Dishing up Maine by Brooke Dojny

1 and 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cup whole-wheat flour
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup packed light brown sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup whole milk
2 eggs
5 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
2 cups fresh or frozen high bush blueberries (If frozen, do not thaw. This will prevent the berries from bleeding juice into the batter and falling apart.)

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Grease a 12-cup muffin tin (1/2 cup capacity per muffin) with butter or line with paper liners. In a medium-sized bowl, whisk together flours, sugars, baking powder, and salt. In another medium-sized bowl whisk eggs until combined, then whisk in milk and melted butter. (Be sure to let it cool down a bit, so that it doesn't cook the eggs.) Pour the dry ingredients into the wet, whisking until just combined. (Do not overmix, or the muffins will be tough.) Fold in the blueberries, and spoon the batter evenly into the muffin tins.

Bake until the muffins are golden brown and springy to the touch, roughly 20 minutes. Let them cool in the tin for about 5 minutes, then turn them out onto a cooling rack and enjoy warm.

Pie, again

I warned you, didn't I? The cascade of sugar and butter are still going strong.

Too strong, in fact. The other night we had a fire in the oven, thanks to the pie waxing innocent to your left. It was the frozen blueberries, I think—they're so much juicier than their summer selves.

The pie started out as an experiment. I had leftover dough left over from the pecan pie, and it seemed a shame to let it sit idle in the fridge, especially when there was a party involved.

So I rolled it out, ransacked the house for fruits, and decided on a thawed high bush blueberry and fresh cranberry lattice. I added sugar to taste, a bit more than usual because of the tart fruit, and a handful of flour to hold the berries together (the general rule is 1 tablespoon per cup of fruit, but as the fire proved, with frozen fruit, perhaps it's best to aim for more like 1 and 1/2).

I topped the filling off with lemon and cinnamon, and all seemed well as the pan slid into the oven. It was hardly full, a bit sunken even, so I didn't bother to add a cookie sheet for safety. A half hour later, the room filled suddenly with smoke, the fishmonger cursing and flinging open the doors. I stumbled downstairs, guilty as charged, but luckily, all was saved. He'd scraped the oven, returned the pie to its post, and I even managed to make it to the party on time.

So long as you have a sturdy cookie sheet and a heavy hand with the flour, I highly recommend giving the pie a try.

CRANBERRY-BLUEBERRY HOLIDAY PIE

Makes 1 pie

Roll out a bottom pie crust, drape over 9-inch pan, and let rest. In a large mixing bowl, stir together 2 and 1/2 cups thawed blueberries, 2 and 1/2 cups fresh cranberries, 1 to 1 and 1/2 cups sugar, or to taste, 5 to 7 tablespoons flour, depending on how juicy the berries are, 1 tablespoon lemon juice, and a pinch of cinnamon. Mix well and spoon filling into crust. Roll out and weave a lattice top. Bake (over a cookie sheet!) at 425 for 30 minutes, then turn the oven down to 350 and bake another 30 minutes, or until crust is golden and filling sets.