Still warm

A few weeks ago, my friend Tracy gave me three dozen eggs and a tart pan. Today I repaid her the best way I know how: with a Breton Buckwheat Cake baked with six of her eggs in my brand new pan.

The cake is a stunner. I made my first one a few days ago in an effort to work my way through some of the buckwheat flour in our freezer from last year's grain CSA, and it certainly did the trick. We worked through our cake FAST. The fact that it was only vaguely sweet and very eggy and moist and made with whole grain flour meant that we justified a little sliver after breakfast and two more in the wake of dinner and lunch. 

The recipe comes from David Lebovitz, via 101cookbooks. I believe it is French. If it's not, it's everything French cakes tend to be—not overly sugary, simple to make, and deeply satisfying without being too rich. There's also no frosting—it feels very much like an every day peasant cake.

The excitement is in the sea salt that you sprinkle into the batter and then on the top just before you bake. It brings out all the nuances of the flavors that go into the cake—the undertones of dark rum, a hint of vanilla, the toothsome, earthy taste of buckwheat. I used light brown sugar in place of granulated, which I think gave it even more depth. 

After we devoured ours I made it again and delivered it to Tracy, still warm in a greasy paper sack. Thank you Tracy, again.

BRETON BUCKWHEAT CAKE WITH FLEUR DE SEL


adapted from David Lebovitz, The Sweet Life in Paris

We got buckwheat last year with our grain CSA, and I milled it all into flour. For reasons I don't fully understand it is much lighter than most buckwheat flours—in color at least—but otherwise, it seems the same. Either way, it's delicious in this cake, which is moist, eggy, and only a little bit sweet. Think of it as a snacking cake.

for the cake:
1 scant cup buckwheat flour
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon plus 1/3 teaspoon fleur de sel
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 pound (2 sticks) butter, at room temperature
1 cup light brown sugar
4 large egg yolks
1 large egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 tablespoons dark rum 


for the glaze:
1 large egg yolk
1 teaspoon milk

Grease a 9- or 10-inch tart pan. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. 

In a small bowl, whisk together the buckwheat flour, the all-purpose flour, 1/2 teaspoon of the salt, and the cinnamon.

Combine the butter and sugar in the bowl of a stand mixer and beat until smooth. Beat in the egg yolks one by one and then add the whole egg. Add the vanilla and rum in a slow dribble, beating the whole time. Beat on high speed until the mixture is very airy.

Finally, mix in the dry ingredients until the batter just comes together. Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top as flat as possible (it is a thick dough so this takes a few swipes).

Make the glaze by whisking together the egg yolk and milk in a small cup. Brush it generously across the top, then take a fork and rake it across the batter to create three parallel lines in one direction and three in another to make a criss-cross pattern. Sprinkle the remaining 1/3 teaspoon of salt over the cake. Bake for 35-40 minutes, or until the top is golden brown and the inside of the cake is still moist. 


Note: be careful not to overcook, as the cake seems like the type to dry out.

A do over

Did you carve a pumpkin? We meant to, but the Rouge Vif d'Etampes we bought at the farmers' market over a month ago is still sitting on the stoop. Amazingly, it's also still perfectly firm. So now that Halloween has come and gone and Sally has taken her costume off, I think we'll eat it instead.

I'm thinking I'll cut it into slices, roast it, puree it, and then make another batch of pumpkin oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. I made some the other day, but I gave most of them away, so I think we'll have a do over. I first discovered pumpkin chocolate-chip cookies at my friend Abbie's house sometime in junior high, and I've been a big fan ever since. They're much more moist than plain old chocolate chip cookies, with full cookie flavor but a texture that's almost like a cross between cookies and gingerbread. Last year I discovered that oats make an excellent addition, and I've been making the recipe below ever since.

Happy pumpkin season, everyone.

OATMEAL-PUMPKIN CHOCOLATE-CHIP COOKIES

This recipe is adapted slightly from Abbie's original. Any variety of winter squash or pumpkin puree will work fine; I often use butternut. Be sure to use dark chocolate chips—the cookies are sweet enough as is.

2 cups all-purpose flour

2 and 1/3 cups old-fashioned oats

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon ground nutmeg

1/2 teaspoon ground ginger

2 sticks butter, softened

3/4 cup dark brown sugar

3/4 cup granulated sugar

2 tablespoons honey

1 cup pureed pumpkin or squash

1 large egg

1 and 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

2 cups dark chocolate chips

In a mixing bowl, whisk together the flour, oats, baking soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger.

In another mixing bowl, cream the butter with the sugars and honey until light and fluffy. Add the pumpkin, egg, and vanilla, and mix well. Add the dry ingredients and the chocolate chips and stir until just combined; do not over mix. Chill the dough for at least 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Scoop the dough using two spoons into balls; drop the balls onto two un-greased cookie sheets. Bake the cookies for 10-12 minutes, or until just barely cooked through. Transfer to a wire rack to cool.

Yields 24 cookies.

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.

The Local Food Report: black walnuts

There are some tastes you never forget. The flavor of wild American black walnuts is one of them.

I first tried black walnuts this fall, when my forager friend, Richard Bailey, gave me a sack of them. I'd been hearing about them for years: from my grandmother, who grew up with them, and from my mother, describing the black walnut cake she used to make with them. They both got a sort of dreamy, far away look when they talked about the nuts---the kind of look people get when they talk about tastes and memories that belong to another time, another place. When I finally bit into a slice of my grandmother's black walnut cake for the first time a few weeks ago, I understood: black walnuts are all wild, all American, all history.

They don't grow on the Cape, not naturally. Their range extends from Western Massachusetts and Vermont out to southern Ontario, down to central Texas, and then east into Georgia and up the coast. But an Austrian couple in Wellfleet planted a tree half a century ago, and each fall, it produces.

The tree itself looks sort of like a locust---compound pinnate leaves and scratchy bark---but it's actually in the hickory family. The nuts are housed in a fleshy husk that's green straight off the tree, then slowly fades to black. They're famously hard to open: Richard Bailey uses a knife and a bench vice, but others have used hammers, rocks, the tires of their cars. Once you get through the husk, you find a hard shell, same as an English Walnut, so you still have to crack that. Finally, you get to the nutmeats, about a cup for every two pounds un-shelled.

It's a lot of work, but when you taste that flavor, you know it was worth it. The recipe my grandmother handed down to me is called Maryland Black Walnut Cake, and it comes from the Shields Chesapeake Bay Cookbook, circa 1990. She used to have an older recipe, the one my great-grandmother made, but that one's gone and this one is close, she says. It calls for all the usuals: flour, butter, sugar, eggs, a little bit of vanilla and baking powder and milk and salt. But then you add the black walnuts---1 and 1/2 cups of pure ground musk, and it changes the whole game. The flavor is something like really good banana bread soaked in port and black currant cordial with a little bit of smoke mixed in. It's good straight out of the oven but it gets better over the course of a few days---more moist, more pungent, somehow more rare.

I can't hand you a slice through the screen, but I can give you the next best thing: everything you need to bake your own cake, grow your own trees. You can buy black walnuts online, over here, and this company sells the trees online. And thanks to my grandmother, here's that cake recipe.

MARYLAND BLACK WALNUT CAKE

My grandmother talks about a recipe Gransie (her grandmother) used to make, but we can't find that anywhere. Instead, she sent me this recipe card from her files, with a note at the bottom that says "Shields Chesapeake Bay Cookbook, 1990."

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 cup butter

1 and 1/2 cups granulated sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

3 eggs, separated

3/4 cup milk

1 and 1/2 cup ground black walnuts

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease and flour a tube or Bundt cake pan.

Whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt in a medium bowl.

In a large bowl cream the butter and sugar until they're light and fluffy. Add the vanilla and egg yolks and beat well. Alternately add the dry ingredients and the milk to the creamed butter mixture, mixing well after each addition.

In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until they're stiff but not dry and gently fold them into the batter along with the ground black walnuts until just combined. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 30 minutes, or until a piece of straw comes out clean. Turn the cake onto a rack to cool, then dust with confectioners' sugar before serving.

Thank you

It is hard to thank you enough—

you who is up at 5 for work, every day. You who on your day off prunes the tomatoes, builds a compost bin, puts a door on the nursery. And then—when I think you must be tired, done—who mows the orchard, takes us for a swim. You who lets me do the napping while you make dinner—butter-poached lobster with pasta and sherry, roasted veggies—and washes the dishes. I don't have the words, not in this language.

But I do have this: whole wheat chocolate chip cookie dough in the fridge—made with flour from our CSA, pastured butter, Ghiradhelli's 60% Cacao big, dark chips. So let me pack them into a ramekin, fire on the oven, and give you thanks that are warm, oozy, and deep dish.

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.

In full swing

Strawberry season is here! The rain is here, too, I know, but we can't let that put a damper on things. Saturday morning the berries were everywhere at the markets: plump, blushing, peeking out from cartons of green. They're in our garden, too, big and dark, in full swing.

Yesterday morning Alex and I decided to celebrate. We slept through the storm and made French toast and topped it with a whole quart of fresh-picked berries: sweet red slivers over soft slices of anadama soaked in eggs and cream. And then, between cleaning and organizing and dinner and a walk, we managed to eat a whole other quart over the course of the day.

I don't do much cooking with strawberries—for the most part, I think they're best plain—but I do have a few favorite recipes. There's my mother's strawberry jam, for one, and the award winning strawberry-rhubarb pie I picked up last year from Elise. We always put up a bunch—just hulled and sliced and sprinkled with a spoonful of sugar, so that they'll juice before they freeze. And usually, I make strawberry shortcake.

But this year, I have my eye on a new recipe. It's the Fresh Strawberry Pie from last month's Cook's Illustrated, and what I like about it is that it doesn't fuss much with the berries. (If you want to see a how-to video, click on that link up there.) You just puree a few berries and cook them down with sugar, cornstarch, Sure-Jell, and salt—to make a thick glaze—and then pour it over a bunch of fresh strawberries into an already-baked bottom pie crust. The glaze firms up and holds the strawberries in place, and since you're not baking them, they don't ooze or juice and they still taste like good, sweet, fresh berries. There isn't much sugar, or much work, and after you've let the pie chill and set, you cover the top with homemade whipped cream. It sounds like sort of a shortcake-in-a-pie thing to me.

So if you're looking for me today, that's where I'll be. I'm heading out to pick more berries now, and by tonight, I plan to be digging in to a chilled slice of homegrown berries and sweet cream.

NO-BAKE STRAWBERRY PIE WITH WHIPPED CREAM

I've adapted the recipe from Cook's Illustrated slightly, but the idea is all theirs. I'm thinking I might also try making this with cooked down homemade strawberry jam instead of making the fresh berry puree. Our jam tends to be soupy, but who knows---with a little more time on the stove and a hit of Sure-Jell, it might be just the thing!

1 and 1/2 quarts fresh strawberries, gently rinsed and hulled
3/4 cup granulated sugar
2 tablespoons cornstarch
1 and 1/2 teaspoons Sure-Jell for low-sugar recipes (the pink box!)
a pinch of salt
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1 fully baked bottom pie crust
1 cup heavy cream
a dash of vanilla
1 tablespoon confectioners' sugar

Pick out a handful of the "worst" berries (think small, under-ripe, bruised, etc.). If you have a kitchen scale, they should weigh about 6 ounces; if not, aim for about a cup and a half. In a food processor, puree them until they're smooth.

Whisk together the sugar, cornstarch, Sure-Jell, and salt in a medium saucepan. Stir in the puree and cook over medium-high heat, stirring constantly. Bring to a boil and cook for 2 minutes (keep stirring!). Scrape the thickened puree into a bowl and stir in the lemon juice. Set this mixture aside and let it cool to room temperature.

When the glaze is cool, add the remaining strawberries. Stir gently until the berries are all coated, then scoop the mixture into the prepared pie crust and spread it around evenly. Put the pie in the fridge and let it chill until the glaze is set, about 2 hours.

Just before you're ready to serve the pie, whip the cream with the vanilla and confectioners' sugar until it is smooth and thick and forms soft peaks. Spoon the cream over the top of the pie, use a spatula to make it pretty, and serve immediately.

Keeps them homey

I know I already kind of mentioned this, but we aren't living at home these days. Home was ripped apart in anticipation of the baby's arrival, and is slowly coming back together. Slowly being the key word. So, in the meantime, we are living up in Truro, at Alex's parents' house, which just so happens to be right smack on the bay, in an absolute stunner of a spot.

It's only three miles away, but—laugh if you want—I get homesick. I would like to blame it on some sort of nesting instinct, but the truth is, I've always been this way. I am a homebody through and through, and when I'm not home, I ache for it. Home has changed over the years—it was Harpswell Neck forever, but it's gradually switched to Wellfleet—and when I'm not there, I miss it in some sort of deep, primeval place.

To try and counter this, I go by and visit our house when I can—check the progress, grab the mail, see who needs water or repotting or weeding. Yesterday, Alex and I spent the whole day there—planting trees and roses and literally watching the asparagus grow. Before we left, I picked another handful of Meyer lemons from our little tree and almost a pound of rhubarb! It made me very, very happy.

When it started to get late, we came back up to Truro, and I did something that made me even happier: I put dinner on the stove—pot roast—and baked a Meyer lemon and rhubarb cobbler with a cornmeal biscuit topping. It was absolutely, positively amazing.

I wasn't sure, when I came up with it, if it would be too Holy Zing! or tart or sour or something, but actually, I think it was a little sweet. I used this as a base recipe, but swapped out the blackberries and peaches for all rhubarb, added a little lemon zest, and swapped in a little extra sugar for the honey. Oh! and I used yogurt and whole wheat flour in the topping. Some people don't like whole wheat anything in desserts, I know, but with the exception of pie crusts, I don't really mind it. I think it makes things nice and moist, and keeps them homey.

Which, you know, is something I appreciate a little extra these days.

RHUBARB & MEYER LEMON COBBLER WITH A CORNMEAL BISCUIT TOPPING

I won't go into it again, but you can find the whole history of my original adaptation of this recipe over here. What you need to know for this version is that 1) Meyer lemon trees make excellent indoor house plants and if you have a birthday coming up I highly recommend requesting one and 2) in a Cape Cod window their fruit gets ripe right around this time of year and 3) you can use plain old lemons and this cobbler will be good, very good even, but definitely not quite the same. So there you go—find some Meyer lemons if you can, if not, cut your rhubarb anyhow and fire the oven up.

for the fruit:

4 heaping cups rhubarb, sliced into 1/2 inch pieces

1/2-2/3 cup granulated sugar (I used 3/4 cup and it was a bit too much)

juice and zest of 1 Meyer lemon or 1 smallish regular lemon

2 tablespoons flour (whole wheat or all-purpose is fine)

a pinch of cinnamon

a pinch of salt

for the cornmeal biscuit topping:

1/2 cup flour (again, whole wheat or all-purpose is fine)

1/2 cup stone ground cornmeal

3 tablespoons dark brown sugar

1 and 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

a pinch of salt

3 tablespoons cold butter, cut into pieces

1/2 cup buttermilk or heavy cream or yogurt

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F.

Combine the rhubarb, sugar, lemon juice, and lemon zest in a bowl and stir to mix. Add the flour, cinnamon, and salt and toss until fruit is coated. Spoon this mixture into the bottom of a 1 and 1/2 quart baking dish.

In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the flour, cornmeal, brown sugar, baking powder, and salt. Cut the butter into the dry mixture, add the buttermilk or cream, and mix until a wet dough comes together.

Spoon dollops of the biscuit dough over the filling—it won't cover the entire surface; that's fine. Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until the biscuit topping is golden brown and the fruit is syrupy and bubbling. Serve warm, with vanilla ice cream.

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.

I could lie

I could lie to you. I could tell you that we've been roasting Truro pork chops and using the bones to make big batches of broth for homemade Pho and lingering over fresh pumpkin muffins, or apple spice cake. But the truth is we have a leaky pipe and a flooded basement and no water, and since Saturday we've been relying on take-out and the generosity of friends.

Not that it's been bad, really. We had a nice lunch at Wellfleet Town Pizza on Saturday and our friend Gui grilled us prime rib from Northeast Family Farms that night, and we even contributed the box of just-picked Chinese cabbage you see up there, from the Mac's Shack garden. I could hardly believe the greens were still lingering, without any covering or attention.

Then yesterday we went over to Alex's brother's to sample cheeses from a new place called Robinson's Farm in Hardwick. The Robinsons started raising grass-fed cows in 2006, and this year, they just released a line of artisinal raw milk cheeses. Alex and Mac are thinking of selling them in the restaurants as part of a local cheese plate, and by the pound at the markets.

The Swiss was good with pickles and pepperoncinis, and a there was a buttery melting cheese that was top-notch over pan-fried potatoes. I'm hoping that Alex will pick up at least the melting one, so that I can make an all-local French onion soup.

In the meantime, of course, I'll take running water. When that happens, here's what's on my to-cook list:

1. this penne with garlic and kale
2. Stacey Glassman's squash with olive oil and garlic
3. cream of beet soup from James Peterson
4. buckwheat pancakes with the flour I ground down the other day from our grain CSA
5. deb's cranberry upside-down cake
6. more simple breakfasts like this
7. and maybe, just maybe, a batch of homemade pop tarts to use up our astounding supply of raspberry jam
   

Happy cooking, everyone.

The Local Food Report: Dill's Giant Atlantic

Peter Staaterman's pumpkin patch started out innocently enough. He was paging through the seed catalog with his wife Dilys—you know, the way you do in the spring, exclaiming over the new haricot verts and admiring a particularly plump new tomato—when Dill's Giant Atlantic Pumpkin caught their eye.

"It has your name!" Peter remarked to his wife. "We'll have to get it!" And so they did.

(Photo courtesy Howard Dill Enterprises; Howard Dill with his crop.)

Needless to say, it was a black and white seed catalog, no pictures like the one you've seen up there. They had no idea—no inkling of what they were getting into. They planted the seeds, staked out a plot, and several months later were astonished to see two huge hulks of orange peeking out from under the vines. They grew only two pumpkins in a 20- by 25-foot plot: a one-hundred-and-seventy-five pounder and a hundred pounder.

This seemed big—gigantic even—but astonishingly enough, it turns out, these were actually very small. Dill's Giant Atlantic Pumpkins are trademark registered as the World's Largest Pumpkin Variety, and last year, a woman named Christy Harp from Ohio grew the biggest one ever, weighing in at 1725 pounds. The seeds are sold in weight categories: 1000 lbs and up, 500 to 1000, 250 to 500. Next year, Staaterman says, he's going up.

His big one won first prize at the Truro Ag Fair—a beautiful yellowy-orangey color with long, thick ribs. A woman walked by who does pies and estimated she could make 500 pies out of the pumpkin—an exaggeration, but still. Staaterman says that according to the folks at Dill's, the pumpkins are edible, and you can count on a pound per pie—which brings his potential count down to a mere one hundred and seventy five. Just the thought of it makes me want to grab my rolling pin and hide.

A better use, I think—just in case any of you are thinking of going Dill's crazy next year—might be to bake the smaller ones, and make the bigger ones into the biggest-ever, scariest-ever jack-o-lanterns. Just imagine: a Dill's Giant Atlantic carved up, staring at you with spooky eyes and a hollowed out cavern of 1700 pounds.

You can find the seeds over here, and more growing information over here. Happy Halloween, everyone!

PUMPKIN PIE (THE BEST)

This is my grandmother's recipe. I've titled it exactly as she wrote it out on the card—and true to her word, this pie never fails. I usually use homemade pureed pumpkin or winter squash in place of the canned pumpkin—but that's the only tweak. Oh! and a note about amounts—this recipe makes two pies. Halve it, or give one to a friend!

4 eggs, beaten slightly
24 ounces pureed pumpkin or winter squash
1 and 1/2 cups granulated sugar
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
13 fluid ounces evaporated milk
two 9-inch pie crusts, preferably homemade

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. Whisk together the ingredients in the order given and pour the filling into the two bottom crusts. Bake for 15 minutes; turn the heat down to 350 and bake for another 45. Enjoy warm or cold, with a thick dollop of whipped cream.

P.S. Peter just sent me this link to a Science Friday video on the physics of giant pumpkins. Check it out!

The Local Food Report: Blue Ribbon Pie

Elise Kaufman bakes a mean strawberry rhubarb pie. You know the type—rich, custardy filling; tender, flaky pastry; crystals of sugar on the crust, thick wedges that slide out intact. It's the kind of pie you want to devour with your bare hands, straight from the plate cold for breakfast, or hot out of the oven with vanilla ice cream on top.

The judges at last year's first annual Truro Ag Fair agreed. Elise entered her pie in the pie-baking contest on a whim. She and her husband and daughters had been watching reruns of The Waltons all summer, and there was this one episode—the one where Olivia enters her best pickles and pie in the County Fair—that had them all going one night. A few days later Elise's daughter saw a flyer for the contest at the fair, and the whole family agreed: Elise had to enter her strawberry-rhubarb pie.

She won the blue ribbon.

She was shocked, she says, but after watching her make the pie, I'm not surprised in the least. Elise has all sorts of pie-perfection tricks up her sleeve—she stews the rhubarb in orange juice to give it some sweetness along with a bit of extra tang, and she makes sure the pulp is strained. She keep the butter and water ice cold while she works with her pastry, then refrigerates it, the lattice already woven, so that it's still cold when it goes onto the pie. She takes the rhubarb out of the orange juice with a slotted spoon, then thickens the leftover juice with cornstarch before mixing it back into the fruit. She halves her strawberries, then gently spoons the rhubarb and thick orange juice custard over them before pouring it all into the plate. She brushes the crust with an egg wash, sprinkles a bit of sugar over top , and then finally, puts it in the oven, on the bottom rack. This helps the bottom crust cook through and the filling thicken up, she says, and then after 15 minutes, she turns down the heat and moves it up to the top rack.

It takes a lot of concentration. And on top of all that, she grows the rhubarb herself.

It's quite a pie to beat. But the Fair is coming up again next week—Sunday, September 5th, the Sunday of Labor Day weekend—and I'm thinking I might have to enter, even though the competition is so stiff. Of course, the more the merrier (is there such a thing as too much pie?)—if you'd like to enter your pie, you can find out more over here.

Elise will be giving us a run for our money, but I hope to see you there.

BLUE RIBBON STRAWBERRY RHUBARB PIE

This is Elise Kaufman's exact recipe, though I've changed a few words here and there for clarification. It won first place—a blue ribbon—at the 2009 Truro Agricultural Fair Pie Baking Contest.

dough for a 9-inch bottom pie crust and a lattice top
4 cups strawberries, halved and hulled
1 pound rhubarb
3/4 cup granulated sugar, plus extra for sprinkling
1/2 cup orange juice, strained
3 tablespoons cornstarch
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 egg
1 tablespoon cold water
a pinch of salt

Make your crust and chill it while you start the filling.

Clean the rhubarb and string it. Trim the bottom and top edges and chop the stalks into 1- to 1 and 1/2-inch pieces. Combine the sugar and orange juice in a medium sauce pot and bring to a boil. Stir occasionally until the sugar is dissolved and the syrup is boiling. Add the rhubarb and cook, stirring occasionally, until the rhubarb gives up some of its juice and the syrup thins. Turn off the heat, cover the pot, and leave the rhubarb to steam for 15 minutes.

Roll out the dough for the crust, lining a Pyrex pie plate with a bottom crust (Elise says Pyrex distributes the heat more evenly than metal) and weaving a lattice top (Elise does this on a baking sheet). Return both the bottom and top crusts to the fridge to chill.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.

Use a slotted spoon to lift the rhubarb out of the sauce pot and set it aside in a bowl. Sift the cornstarch into the orange juice, sugar, and rhubarb juice mixture and cook over low heat, stirring occasionally, until the mixture gets thick and becomes clear. Pour the thickened syrup into the rhubarb in the bowl and gently mix in the halved strawberries and the butter.

Get out the bottom crust and pour the fruit filling in. Slide the lattice on top. Whisk the egg, water, and salt together to make an egg wash, and brush it gently over the pastry top. Take care to make sure the egg doesn't pool—it will fry. Sprinkle with granulated sugar.

Place the pie plate on a cookie sheet with rimmed edges (the pie may overflow) and bake on the bottom rack of the oven. After 15 minutes, turn the heat down to 350 degrees F and move the pie to the middle rack. Bake for another 30 minutes, or until the crust is a deep golden brown and the filling is cooked through.

Serve warm with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream.

The Local Food Report: peaches—for 85 years

Howard Crowell likes to say he's been farming peaches 85 years. It's a bit of a stretch—he's 86—but you get the idea. His first solid memory of the orchard is 1930, he says, the year his grandmother came to live with them. He can still picture her picking—and the peach trees were mature—so he imagines that stretches them back at least another ten years.

(Crow Farm pickers, 1940s. Photo courtesy Crowell Family)

Of course, there are new trees in the orchard these days. Compared to hundred-year producers like apples, peach trees are short-lived. They give you 25, maybe 30 years, and that's it. Howard says the varieties have changed over the years—he remembers names like Red Haven and Hale Haven and Elberta—rotating in and out of popularity.

These days, the oldest trees in the orchard are Reliance, Veterans, Golden Jubilees, and Belle of Georgia. The Jubilees come early and the Reliance are hardy down to negative twenty-five—about ten degrees lower than the Veterans, which are still considered fairly hardy for a peach. The Belles swoop in at the end—the last fruit, big white-fleshed globes, in a July to September run.

The new trees—the ones Howard's son Paul has been working to put in these last few summers to replace the plantings that went in around 1985—have a bit more formal names. They're mostly part of the P.S. Series—a group of cultivars developed at the Department of Fruit Science and Crop Protection of Pisa University. There are eight different strains, all engineered to ripen in succession, so that the farm will have peaches all summer long.

Given the way most of us feel about peaches, I'd say that's a pretty noble goal. The day I ran into Howard at the market, it was the Reliance fruits that were in. They were medium-sized, mid-season, blushed pink and just firm enough to make it home without bruising the skin.


I let them sit on the windowsill for a few days until they were soft, and then it was in a peach-blackberry cobbler with cornmeal biscuits where they met their end. I tossed them with flour, cinnamon, salt, blackberries from down the street. I drizzled in a little bit of honey, then topped them with big, soft globs of cornmeal and butter and cream. They baked into a syrup—hot, purple, bubbling—little orange half moons dotted about. We ate them hot, still steaming, biscuits golden and vanilla ice cream melting faster than we could keep up with in the heat.

The peaches came early this year—three weeks—and according to Howard, that means they'll be gone three weeks early, too. So quick—fire up the oven—and make a quick cobbler before they leave.

BLACKBERRY-PEACH COBBLER WITH CORNMEAL BISCUIT TOPPING

I adapted this recipe from my mother, who adapted it from a recipe my sister found on Smitten Kitchen, that was, in turn, adapted from The Lee Bros. Simple Fresh Southern. Whoever you want to credit, this cobbler is GOOD. Like best-I've-Had-In-A-Long-Time-And-I've-Eaten-My-Share-Of-Cobbler Good. There's something about the cornmeal that perfectly complements the fruit—something about the sweetness, and the almost grainy texture—that seems to fit just right. Feel free to play with the types and amounts of fruit—I imagine raspberries or blueberries would be equally good.

For the fruit:
3 medium peaches, pitted and sliced
3 cups blackberries
1/2 cup honey
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
2 tablespoons flour
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
a pinch of salt

For the cornmeal biscuit topping:
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup stone-ground cornmeal
3 tablespoons dark brown sugar
1 and 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons cold butter, cut into pieces
1/2 cup buttermilk or heavy cream or yogurt

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F.

Combine the peaches, blackberries, honey, and lemon juice in a bowl and stir to mix. Add flour, cinnamon, and salt and toss until the fruit is coated. Spoon this mixture into the bottom of a 1 and 1/2 quart baking dish.

In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the flour, cornmeal, brown sugar, baking powder, and salt. Cut the butter into the dry mixture, add the buttermilk or cream, and mix until a wet dough comes together.

Spoon dollops of the biscuit dough over the filling—it won't cover the entire surface; that's fine. Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until the biscuit topping is golden brown and the fruit is syrupy and bubbling. Serve warm, with vanilla ice cream.

The Local Food Report: the nectar progression

The other day, I walked into a conversation at the farmers' market that stopped me in my tracks. Gretel was standing behind her table, selling those skinny yellow carrots and sugar snap peas that she does so well, and Barbara Dean was next door, selling her Little Caesar's and Rediculous and chatting about the heat. Someone asked Barbara about her honey, and why it was so light in color, and suddenly, Gretel was on red ribbons and Barbara was talking about loosestrife and neither one could stop praising spring nectar. I knew a lot more about local honey when I left.

As it turns out, Barbara's honey was so light because it was spring honey. Bees around here go for the light colored flowers in the spring—the roses and the locusts and all those other first blooms—and the nectar they bring back to the hive is light colored, too. Most years, because of the wet and the cold we seem to bring in May and June, people around here don't get much of a spring harvest. But this year, in Barbara's hives at least, there was a boon.

She took two supers—a super is the wooden box beekeepers put on the hive to collect excess honey, and then grab when it's full—for a total of 45 pounds. She poured the honey, so clear it looks almost like lemon water, or maybe a weak ginger tea, into jars, and shoppers have been wondering after it ever since.

Gretel didn't have any at her stand, but apparently, years ago, she took second place for her spring honey at the Barnstable County Fair. She says she thinks she might have gotten first, a blue ribbon, if she'd properly filled the jars, but she didn't and they docked her and so she took home the red instead.

All of this is to say, of course, Did you ever realize honeys could be so different?

I did not. I had no idea that in the fall, honey gets dark and spicy and even a little cedary toward the end. I had no idea that commercial honey was mixed—from different hives and states and seasons into a monotone, amber blend. I'd never heard of buckwheat honey—dark black, with a taste almost like molasses—or thyme honey from Greece, or locust honey, the kind Barbara harvested this spring. I did not know that there are controversial blossoms for honey production—things like loosestrife, which some people love for honey and others can't stand—or that at certain times of summer, there's almost no nectar for the bees at all.

I talked with several beekeepers besides Gretel and Barbara, and from what I can gather, the nectar progression on the Cape goes like this: In May and June it's black locust and oak and roses and autumn olive, then cranberry blossoms if there's a bog around. Mid summer it's wildflowers and garden blooms like thyme and loosestrife, then in the fall, aster and goldenrod. The locust and roses and cranberry blossoms all give the honey a light, floral flavor, while the aster and goldenrod turn it spicy and dark.

When I got home, I searched through my cupboards to see what sort of honey we had kicking around. I'd gotten a spring bottle from Barbara, we had one mid-season blend from E & T Farms, and there was an old jar that we got from Mel Hammond down the street in Wellfleet last fall. We did a taste test, and the beekeepers were right: there was a huge difference. I couldn't pick a favorite, but I see now how different seasons of honey could be better for different uses and recipes.

Where ever you get your honey—there's a list of local producers over here—I highly recommend you stock up and get it into the kitchen as soon as you can. Because the peaches are ripe and honey—for a batch of summer peaches spiced and chilled in white wine—is all you need to make dessert, and dig in.


HONEY SPICED PEACHES CHILLED IN WHITE WINE

Cool, marinated peaches are one of my favorite things on a very hot day. They make an equally excellent dessert plain or over vanilla ice cream—we had them with vanilla ice cream that we made with a batch of Mel Hammond's fall honey left over from last year, and the more spicy fall honey flavor of the ice cream perfectly complemented the lighter, more floral flavor Barbara's spring honey lent the fruit. For the wine, I used a half bottle of Botani—a light, fruity moscatel.

1/2 bottle (about 2 cups) dry, fruity white wine
2 tablespoons honey
a pinch of nutmeg
a pinch of cinnamon
4 very ripe peaches

Heat up the wine, honey, nutmeg, and cinnamon in a saucepan over low heat, stirring until the honey dissolves. Turn off the heat and set aside.

Slice the peaches very thin, and add the slices to the hot wine. Cool to room temperature, then chill for several hours. When you're ready to eat the peaches, serve them either on their own, with a little bit of the wine, or strain them out and use them as a topping for vanilla ice cream.

The Local Food Report: have your cake

You know that saying—you can have your cake, and eat it too? Well, with Marissa Ferry, it's true.

You can have your cupcake, or your rhubarb ginger stout cake, or your panna cotta, and you can know that it was made by an up-and-coming Wellfleet pastry chef who uses as many local ingredients as possible. That way, you can feel good about dessert, and she can too.

Marissa grew up around here—she started baking at Nauset and then went on to the Baking & Pastry Arts program at Johnson and Wales—but she did plenty of traveling before coming home. She's worked under bakers and chefs all over the place—in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, even Orlando. But she's been back on the Cape for a few years now, turning out cupcakes and ice creams and all sorts of other goodies from a space in the basement of the Flying Fish in Wellfleet. She says it's good to be home—that it feels like closing a loop.


Since she arrived, she's been building her foodshed—networking with local farmers, asking for lists of when they'll have rhubarb and blueberries and exactly how long the peaches last. Recently, she even started working with the cheesemakers over at Shy Brothers Farm. They're making this new curd—cloumage—which is sort of like a ricotta/cream cheese/yogurt blend. It's a soft cheese, and it has the same unique tang and creaminess of crème frâiche. Marissa's putting it into panna cotta, and after trying out her recipe for you all last night, I can say without reservation that it's divine.

Of course, that's partially the cheese, but it's also partially Marissa. We serve her desserts where I work at Blackfish, in Truro, and her other creations—things like a ginger stout cake made with Ipswich Stout and served over a local rhubarb compote with a spiced honey ice cream—will also stop you in your tracks. She's always coming up with new combinations—things like this spring's hot honey cake, made with honey from E & T farms and served with lemon confit and chamomile tea ice cream—to fit the seasons. Pretty soon, she'll swap out the spring fruits—strawberries and rhubarb—for the raspberries and blueberries as they get ripe. After that it will be apples and stone fruits, and with any luck, she'll be able to get her hands on some local cherries to make clafouti for the first time this year.

If you're looking for her, look for the Wildflour Bakery sign that will be going up in a few days beside the Flying Fish. Right now, she does all the desserts for them and for Blackfish, and a few catering events and special orders, too. She's good at everything from tarts to ice creams to cupcakes, and of course, panna cotta, too.

CLOUMAGE PANNA COTTA

This dessert is about as easy and as elegant as they get. It takes maybe 10-15 minutes from start to finish, and there's no baking. Just stir, whisk, and pour. After trying it once, I can't wait to start playing with flavors—maybe almond-raspberry? Blueberry-lemon? Coffee? Peaches with thyme? Of course, the cheese is important; there's a list of local places where you can find Cloumage over here. If you can't get that, crème frâiche will work, but you will need to play around with the amount of gelatin to get the consistency just right.

1 pound Cloumage
1/2 ounce gelatin
1/2 cup cold water
2 cups heavy cream
1/4 teaspoon orange zest
1/4 teaspoon lemon zest
3/4 cup granulated sugar plus 1 tablespoon, divided
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla
sliced fresh strawberries and a few torn basil leaves, for topping

Arrange 8 small ramekins on a baking sheet and spoon the cloumage into a large mixing bowl.

Bloom the gelatin. (This is pastry-chef speak for pouring the packet of gelatin into the cold water, stirring, and waiting a bit.)

Pour the cream, orange and lemon zests, sugar, and salt into a medium-size, heavy-bottomed pot. Stir until the sugar dissolves and bring to a simmer. (Do not boil.) Turn the heat off, add the vanilla, and pour this mixture over the cloumage. Add the gelatin and whisk until smooth.

Divide the mixture evenly between the ramekins and put them on the baking sheet into the fridge to set for three hours. About an hour before you're ready to serve, mix the strawberries, remaining tablespoon of sugar, and basil, and leave at room temperature to juice. Serve the panna cotta chilled, with a spoonful of fresh strawberries and basil on top.

The Local Food Report: handy in combat

Ryeon Corsi deserves a round of applause. In September, she came to Provincetown as an AmeriCorp volunteer, and the first task the Conservation Commission dealt her was to tackle this:

If you're not familiar with that pink and green wonder, it's Japanese Knotweed. It is an invasive, brought over, as rumor has it, as an ornamental by Frederick Law Olmsted. The Global Invasive Species Database lists it as one of the world's 100 worst invasives, putting it at number 37. It spreads through an underground network of huge, bulbous rhizomes, making it nearly impossible to kill. It can grow through concrete, and if you pull it up, the spears just grow right back.

It also covers half of the land that the Provincetown Conservation Commission set aside for a community garden on Browne Street. That's where Corsi comes in. Her job is to make this:


Look—without using any herbicides—like this:


It's not an easy task. So far, she's hired a backhoe to break up the roots, worked with a huge group of volunteers to carefully, painstakingly dig the rhizomes out (one particularly nasty specimen was so big it took three people to pick it up out of the ground), and set all the roots on a big tarp. Once they are dry—thoroughly, completely dry—she will either burn them, or compost them, and hope for the best. She knows it will be a year-to-year commitment, and that after she finishes her program in July, the gardeners will have to work to keep it at bay.

But in the meantime, she's been waging war by eating the knotweed. As it turns out, those pink and green spears are edible, at least in the spring, while they're still under three feet high. Corsi describes them as sort of a cross between celery and rhubarb, and for opening day at the garden, she used them to make a strawberry rhubarb pie. It was tricky—the stalks are hollow, and most people recommend peeling them, which made for a lot of meticulous work—but the finished product was a hit.

I haven't found any growing in my neighborhood, but in case you have, this recipe could be very handy in combat.

STRAWBERRY-KNOTWEED PIE

Ryeon Corsi found this recipe on the NOFA website, but it comes originally from an old issue of Yankee magazine. The header says you can substitute rhubarb for knotweed, but it seems to me that would sort of defeat the point. The footer says to look for knotweed in disturbed habitats like roadsides, and to harvest thick stalks no more than 3 or 4 feet high that aren't fully leafed out by cutting a 1 and 1/2 to 2 foot section from the center of the stalk.

As for where to find strawberries, it's still a little bit early, but I ate my first three ( ! ) from the garden the other day. They should be turning up at the farmers' markets in the next two weeks.

4 cups strawberries, washed, stemmed, and halved
3 cups Japanese knotweed, peeled and chopped into 1/2-inch crescents
1 and 1/2 cups sugar, plus extra for sprinkling over crust
3 tablespoons cornstarch
dough for bottom and top crusts for a 9-inch pie
3 tablespoons butter
1 egg yolk, beaten with 1 tablespoon water

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. In a medium bowl, toss together the strawberries, knotweed, sugar, and cornstarch. Roll out your bottom pie crust, drape it over a 9-inch pie plate, and pour the filling in. Dot the fruit with the butter. Roll out the top pie crust and drape it over top. Roll the bottom and top edges together, moving around the edge of the pie, and press the log of dough against the rim of the pie plate as you go. Cut several slits in the top crust, brush it with the egg wash, and sprinkle the dough with sugar. Bake for 45 to 55 minutes, or until the filling is soft and bubbling and the crust is nicely browned. Serve hot, with vanilla ice cream.

I've fallen hard

I am well aware that we talked about rhubarb with gingerbread ten days ago, but today, we are going to have to talk about it again. The thing is, rhubarb season is short and sweet, and that was pudding, and this is shortcake, and well, what can I say. I've fallen hard.

Also, I have a feeling that once you take a bite—a bite of soft, puffy Raleigh Tavern Gingerbread with stewed rhubarb and a big pile of homemade whipped cream, you won't mind. You'll be thrilled, I think.

I found the recipe on a card a few weeks ago. It was a birthday card that my grandmother had sent to my mother, all the way back in 1994. It had a painting of the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg, Virginia on the front, and inside, two notes. I can hardly read my grandfather's writing—he passed away two years after the card was written, when I was only eleven—but I can make out the words "baby girl" and "moment of great joy," and given the way my grandfather felt about my mother, I think it's a fairly safe bet to guess he's talking about her birth. My grandmother gets a little mushy too, but she manages to keep it together enough to tell my mother that their favorite gingerbread recipe, the one from Raleigh Tavern, is printed on the back.

Which is a good thing, because my mother loves that gingerbread. We used to go to Colonial Williamsburg a lot when my sister and I were little—my mother's family is from Richmond—and we stopped at Raleigh Tavern for a bag of gingerbread every trip. The thing about the Raleigh Tavern gingerbread is that it's different from any other specimen I've ever had. It's dry, and crumbly, and almost biscuit-like, and when you buy it at the tavern, it comes all puffed up in the shape of a scone. It's almost like a gingerbread shortcake, I've always thought.


Which is why I was so delighted to dig up the recipe the other day when I had a jug of fresh whipping cream (our first from the farm!) and a bag of pink, fresh-cut rhubarb stalks from the farmers' market that were just begging to be stewed. I had a sudden flash forward to rhubarb gingerbread shortcakes, and there was no turning back. There was instead a rush of cranking up the oven, pulling out the molasses, and turning on a burner. And then there was rhubarb gingerbread shortcake, and first bites, and something that felt a lot like falling in love.

RHUBARB GINGERBREAD SHORTCAKE

This recipe is adapted from a gingerbread cookie recipe my grandmother picked up at Raleigh Tavern in Colonial Williamsburg. I've tweaked it only twice—I substituted butter for margarine and heavy cream for evaporated milk. The cookies didn't rise quite as much as they usually do, which probably had something to do with the heavy cream, but for making shortcake they were a little bit moister, and just right.

1 cup granulated sugar
2 teaspoons ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 and 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 cup butter, melted
1/2 cup heavy cream
1 cup molasses
3/4 teaspoon vanilla
4 cups all-purpose flour

1 pound rhubarb, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
1/4 cup water
1/4 cup brown sugar

whipped cream

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. In a medium bowl, whisk together the sugar, ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon, salt, and baking soda. In a large bowl, mix together the melted butter, cream, molasses, and vanilla and stir until smooth. Add the flour a cup at a time, stirring until just incorporated after each addition. The dough should be stiff enough to handle without sticking to your fingers; you may need to add up to an extra 3/4 cup of flour. When the dough is smooth, roll it out 1/2-inch thick on a lightly-floured surface. Use a biscuit cutter to punch it into rounds, and bake for 8-10 minutes on greased cookie sheets.

To make the stewed rhubarb, combine the rhubarb, water, and brown sugar in a medium-size saucepot. (Do not use an aluminum pot; the rhubarb is acidic and will react with the metal.) Stir to combine. Cover and cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, for 5 minutes, or until the mixture comes to a boil. Turn the heat down to a simmer and continue cooking 10 minutes, or until all the rhubarb pieces break down.

To make the shortcakes, cut each gingerbread cookie in half and spoon about 1/4 cup of stewed rhubarb over the bottom piece. Top this with a dollop of whipped cream and the top of the cookie, and serve at once.

P.S. About the photographs. Alex and I in a terrible joint blunder managed to drop and break my Minolta Instant Pro several weeks ago, an accident that almost cost us our marriage. And although our union survived and I just won a new one on eBay that should be arriving very shortly, I am currently without my Minolta and instead using an old sx-70. It works perfectly, but the only film currently available is old, wonky expired Polaroid film that does not seem to have its colors quite right. So, we're going with it, getting into the crazy, and holding our breath for a change in either film or cameras soon. Until then, bear with us. I do know that rhubarb should be pink and red, not orange and blue. I swear.