For Nancy

First, because I can't resist, a Sally photo. I promise we'll get back to fruits and vegetables soon.

And on the business side of things, a recipe! For Nancy, from the archives, here goes:

COCONUT CURRIED KOHLRABI AND SWISS CHARD

You can find kohlrabi at most farmers' markets. When selecting kohlrabi, keep in mind that the purple stems are sweeter and a bit more mild spice-wise than the green versions. Look for small, tender pieces, as the bigger they get the woodier they tend to be inside.

1 tablespoon butter

2 large cloves garlic, minced

6 scallions, chopped fine

1 tennis ball-size kohlrabi, peeled and diced

8-10 cups Swiss chard, chopped and packed

1/2 can coconut milk plus 1/4 cup water

1 tablespoon red curry paste

1 and 1/2 tablespoons peanut butter

salt

Get out a big, heavy-bottomed soup pot and put it over medium heat. Melt the butter, and throw in the scallions and the garlic. Stir briskly so that the garlic doesn't burn, cooking for only a minute.

Now add the kohlrabi and sauté a bit more before adding the Swiss chard. Once the greens are in the pot, put the lid tightly on top and let them steam down for about five minutes, stirring everything from time to time.

Remove the lid and add the coconut milk and the red curry paste. Turn up the heat to medium-high and keep stirring until the paste dissolves in the milk. When the liquid starts to boil throw in the peanut butter and stir until this dissolves too.

Turn the heat down to a simmer, season the pot with salt, and let the flavors cook together for a minute or two. Serve the vegetables and broth in a wide, shallow bowl over a scoop of brown rice. Sriracha hot sauce or another hot chili sauce makes a nice topping.

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.

The Local Food Report: plum nutty

Today, I'd like to let my grandmother do the storytelling. A while back, when she moved into an assisted living apartment, she stopped cooking. She's always been one hell of a cook---things like oven-fried chicken, stuffed potatoes, and tenderloin wrapped in bacon so rich it makes you melt---and recently, when she realized how interested I was, she gave me her old book of recipes. I wanted to know the stories behind the pages of measurements and ingredients, so one weekend, my mom and I flew down to her place in Richmond. I brought my recording gear, and we talked about food, and family, and recipes. One night, I asked her about something called plum nutty. Here's the story, in her words:

"Plum nutty? Oh, that's very special. That's a recipe that came from my gynecologist in Sandusky, Ohio. And he had been a flight surgeon during World War Two, stationed in the Pacific. And after he came back to the States he happened to be a member of our church, and every Christmas, he gave me plum nutty.

He would never tell me how to make it but he would give it to me. And plum nutty was made with plums---was a preserve---made with plums and nutmeats and it was very good as preserves but it was even better to put on top of vanilla ice cream.

So. I kiddingly knew he'd never give me the recipe but I just deviled him for it all the time and he also took care of me physically and I had several miscarriages after my son was born. And then came the day when I was pregnant again and it looked like this one was gonna stick with me.

And after Liz was born, he came to the house one day with two jars of plum nutty, and the recipe. So that's how I got the recipe for plum nutty."

Every time I listen to my grandmother tell the story, I tear up a little bit. When I think of her and the eight years she spent waiting for that recipe and waiting for my mom, I know that gift from her doctor must have felt like gold. My mom still has the original piece of paper, in Dean Sheldon's handwriting. She scanned it into the computer the other day, so that I could put it up here, for you. I hope you'll make it---plums, right now, are in season---and I hope that when you do, you'll know it's something special.

A girl!

Miss Sally Elizabeth Hay was born at 6:42pm on Sunday, October 2nd. She weighs 8 pounds and is 21 inches long, and she is the most beautiful thing her Momma has ever seen. She's also the spitting image of her Papa.

We'll be back soon to share more but while we get settled in at home, we just wanted to let you know that she's finally here.

xoxo Elspeth

The Local Food Report: keeping rosemary alive

Every spring, I buy a rosemary plant. And every winter, despite my best intentions, I manage to kill it. My friend Pete grows all kinds of varieties of rosemary, and he says it's not my fault. They're fussy. Still, he has some tips.

Here's the Pete Krumplebeck guide to keeping rosemary alive on Cape Cod:

1. Buy the right variety. Arp is apparently the only rosemary that has half a chance of surviving winter outside, in the ground, around here. It's hardy to zone 6, while most other varieties only make it to zone 8. We're in zone 7a, so Arp is a good pick.

He also grows Tuscan, BBQ, and a prostrate rosemary, but he keeps those in pots and brings them inside for the winter.

2. Keep them outside as long as possible. I usually bring my rosemary in around October, but Pete says this is too early. They like cold roots, prefer them even, and until there's a hard freeze, they're happier outside. He says he usually brings his in sometime between Christmas and New Year's Day.

3. Keep an eye on their water. Rosemary roots are very fussy, Pete says. They don't like to be dry but they also like to be well-drained, so you need to pot them correctly. He fills the bottom of third of his pots with perlite, then uses a regular potting soil mixture without too much organic matter on top to fill them. He says you should give the plants a good dunking every 7 to 10 days, and that when you do, the water should drain out in 2-4 seconds. And whatever you do, don't water with hot water—he says that's the easiest way to kill them.

4. Put them in a sunny spot with moving air and not too much heat. Inside, rosemary will get powdery mildew if it's left still for too long. Put it near a window or a fan, or dust it off every once in a while.

5. Outside, if you're having trouble with aphids or little white flies, give it a baking soda bath. Pete calls baking soda a multi-purpose "bugicide," and says it'll work wonders.

WATERMELON SALAD WITH ROSEMARY & FETA

I have long been a fan of the watermelon salad. We've been eating one version or another since the melons came into season a few weeks ago. But this riff is something new to me—I never would have thought of adding rosemary! Now I'm not sure I can imagine watermelon salad without it. It's sweet, juicy, and robust, and the feta adds salt and tang.

4 cups chilled watermelon cubes

2 ounces feta cheese, drained and crumbled

1 teaspoon finely chopped fresh rosemary

2 slices rustic bread

olive oil

sea salt and freshly cracked pepper to taste

Arrange the watermelon and feta in a shallow pie plate or bowl. Sprinkle the rosemary over top. Heat up a cast iron skillet or griddle, drizzle the bread with olive oil, and grill until golden on both sides. Cut into croutons.

Drizzle the salad with olive oil, arrange the croutons on top, and sprinkle with salt and pepper to taste. Serve at once.

Pizza & pups

Today is my due date. You are not going to get a cohesive sentence out of me, so let's try pictures instead.

Puppies! No Baby Hay yet, but we bred Fisher in July, and his little ones have arrived. My sister and her boyfriend and I went to see them this weekend, and they did a fairly good if temporary job of satisfying our need to snuggle with a small mammal. They're almost four weeks old, big enough to open their eyes and wobble around and chew on each other's chins and tails, but not big enough to do much else. There are five black ones, two yellows, and one tired nursing mama. Fisher came in and took a sniff, but he seemed pretty scared of the whole situation, and quickly backed out. We spent the rest of the weekend teasing him for being such a deadbeat dad.

Oh! and we made pizza.

I'd been wanting to make homemade pizza for a while, and I finally found a good recipe for whole wheat crust. Alex's nieces were over, and my sister was visiting, and it seemed like the perfect night. The only thing was, we didn't have any of the traditional pizza toppings on hand—the tomato sauce was all tucked into the freezer, the basil was dwindling, and there wasn't even a ball of plain mozzarella in the fridge.

And so we went unconventional, and I am so, so glad that we did. Alex caramelized an onion, then stirred in some finely chopped rosemary and a good dollop of homemade fig butter to make a spread. He smoothed this on the crust, then layered on arugula, bits of cooked bacon, pieces of sauteed eggplant, goat cheese, and slices of fig and almond burrata from Kathleen Kadlik. It was sweet and savory all at once, and very, very good.

FIGGY BURRATA PIZZA

This is a pretty loose recipe. We used one ball of the whole wheat crust from the New York Times link up there, and I made fig butter from fresh figs, not dried, following Kim Boyce's recipe in Good to the Grain. This preserve is full of butter. If you use fig jam, be sure to add a few tablespoons of butter when you melt it with the onions.

1 ball whole wheat pizza dough at room temperature

cornmeal, for the peel

1 medium size onion, sliced thin

1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh rosemary

1/3 cup fig butter

olive oil

1 small eggplant, cut into thin strips

salt

a handful of torn arugula

4 strips cooked bacon, torn into 1/2-inch pieces

1 ball fig & almond burrata mozzarella

2-3 ounces chevre

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Roll out the dough as thin as you can. We used a half sheet pan, so we rolled ours into a rectangle, but obviously you should roll yours into whatever shape your pan is. Sprinkle the pan with cornmeal and lay the dough on top.

Caramelize the onion in a heavy skillet over medium-low heat. When it's tender, add the rosemary and fig butter and sauté another minute or so, until they're warmed through. Spread this mixture evenly across the pizza dough.

In the same skillet, warm up a glug of olive oil. Salt the eggplant slices and sauté until tender, about five to eight minutes. Layer the cooked eggplant strips evenly over the pizza. Do the same with the arugula, bacon pieces, and the two cheeses.

Bake the pizza for 15-20 minutes, or until the dough is crispy around the edges and the cheeses are bubbling. Enjoy hot.

The Local Food Report: long pie pumpkin

Peter Burgess is into local history. He named his fields in Truro Six Pence Farm after he found an original 17th century six pence while he was out there digging one day. And when it comes to vegetable varieties, he prefers to grow those with some age and a story.

That's the Long Pie Pumpkin. When it's underripe, it looks sort of like an overgrown zucchini, but once it blushes orange, it's more of a pumpkin torpedo. Peter found out about it through the Fedco seed catalog, and he grew it for the first time this year.

It's said to have come over to Nantucket in 1832, aboard a whaling ship from the Isle of St. George in the Azores off of Portugal. It got popular with local farmers, and for a while it was simply called the Nantucket Pumpkin. Eventually the variety made its way north, and by the 1930s it was a favorite with growers in Androscoggin County, near where I grew up in Maine.

Farming started to peter out on Nantucket and the variety got less common in Maine, but a few growers kept it alive. According to researchers in Waldoboro, a man named John Navazio saved the seeds for years, and eventually went to work at a company called Garden City Seeds. They put the variety up for sale, and slowly but surely, it's making a comeback. RAFT listed it as an endangered heirloom last year, and in response, Chef's Collaborative sponsored a Long Pie Pumpkin "grow-out." Farmers all over New England grew the variety, told their neighbors about it, and with any luck, convinced a few more to grow it this season.

Peter Burgess, for one, is a fan. He says Long Pie Pumpkin is very resistant to squash borers and squash beetles, and that you can pick it early and let it ripen inside if you have a cold growing season. Also, most importantly, he says it makes the best pie ever, because it's sweet and meaty and cooks down like a squash.

My grandmother's recipe for pumpkin pie is up over here. I plan to get my hands on an orange torpedo asap.

Time & tomatoes

They say amniotic fluid has flavor---that babies can taste what their mothers eat, and develop food preferences in utero. If that's true, this baby is going to have quite a thing for tomatoes.

I've been eating tomatoes at least once a day since late July. Most of the time, I've been eating them simply---cut up and drizzled with olive oil, tucked into sandwiches and salads, cooked down into soups and sauce. A few weeks ago, Tom, one of the cooks at the restaurant, made a creamy tomato bisque, and I must have eaten a gallon of the stuff. I can't seem to get enough.

Out in the garden, the season's almost over, but we're still holding on. There are a few more meals left out there, and just in case this baby's not quite sure yet how it feels about tomatoes, I'm going to make these last few meals count. We're going to eat tomatoes my favorite way: sliced into big chunks, topped with torn basil and big hunks of creamy burrata mozzarella and grilled croutons, then drizzled with olive oil and sweet balsamic glaze and sprinkled with sea salt. We had this last night for dinner, and the day before for lunch.

Today when it gets to noon, I'm going to head out to the garden, pick a few last red globes, and make up another plate before time and tomatoes run out.

HEIRLOOM TOMATO SALAD

There are so many different versions of this it hardly counts as a recipe. The most important thing to focus on is the quality of your ingredients---you need sweet, super ripe tomatoes, and a rich creamy burrata. Recently I've been using a brand called Maplebrooks Farm from Vermont, but I also like the gorgonzola-stuffed mozarella that Kathleen Kadlik sells at the farmers' markets in Orleans, Falmouth, and Provincetown.

2 large heirloom tomatoes, cut into 1-inch chunks

a handful of basil leaves, torn in half if large

1 four ounce ball of burrata or mozzarella, cut into bite-size pieces

2 slices rustic bread

olive oil

balsamic glaze

sea salt

Warm up a cast iron skillet or griddle over medium heat. Meanwhile, arrange the tomatoes, basil leaves, and cheese in a wide, shallow bowl. When the griddle's hot, drizzle the bread slices with olive oil and grill until golden and just crispy on both sides. Cut the bread into croutons. Drizzle the salad with olive oil and balsamic glaze, arrange the croutons on top, and sprinkle with sea salt. Enjoy at once.

The Local Food Report: tomatillo salsa

Good morning, everyone. I'd like to introduce the tomatillo:

Isn't it a beautiful fruit? I met it last summer, talking with Ron Backer of Surrey Farms in Brewster. He grows all sorts of interesting heirlooms, including the tomatillo, which originated in Mexico. A lot of people think it's a tomato relative, and it is in the Solanaceae family, but it's more closely related to ground cherries and Giant Cape Gooseberries. It grows inside a paper husk, and depending on the variety and how ripe it is, the fruit can be any shade from yellow to lime green to a deep violet. Most importantly, it makes a killer salsa.

Ron feels so strongly about tomatillos and salsa that he calls salsa made with regular old tomatoes gazpacho in disguise. He admits that tomatillos are a little bit sour, but he says he likes this taste, and that Americans are too into sweet. He thinks it's a cultural thing that comes from eating too much high fructose corn syrup, and that we need to start thinking like the Latin Americans and Asians who count sour and bitter as good tastes.

And really, once you taste tomatillo salsa, I don't think you'll need much convincing. He makes his by roasting the fruits, then pureeing them with jalapenos, cilantro, onions, garlic, and a little bit of lime juice and salt. I tried it the other day, and I have to say, it's delicious.

If you're looking for tomatillos, they can be kind of tricky to find, but they are around. Silverbrook Farms grows them, and they sell at the Provincetown and Falmouth farmers' markets, and there are vendors selling them in Orleans and Wellfleet, too. Happy salsa season, everyone!

ROASTED TOMATILLO SALSA

This salsa is amazingly easy. There is almost no chopping involved, and it takes total about 10 minutes to make. Then all you have to do is chill it!

1 lb fresh tomatillos, husked and rinsed

2 fresh jalapeno or serrano chillies

2 garlic cloves, unpeeled

1 bunch fresh cilantro

1 medium onion, coarsely chopped

1 teaspoon salt

lime juice to taste

Preheat your oven broiler. Arrange the tomatillos, chillies, and garlic cloves on a baking sheet. Broil for about 7-8 minutes, or until the tomatillos are soft and a bit charred, turning occasionally. (I ended up taking some tomatillos out early and leaving the rest to roast a bit longer, as they cook at different rates depending on ripeness.)

Peel garlic and pull tops off of chillies. Puree in a blender or food processor along with tomatillos, cilantro, onion, salt, and lime juice. Chill before serving.