Strawberries for MonkeyBoy!

My younger son, known in bloglandia as MonkeyBoy, has always been a fiend for strawberries. He can down a few boxes of them in an hour's time. As a tot he used to toddle through tall grass out to our strawberry patch, often eating them slightly green in his enthusiasm. I don't want to publicly embarrass him, but I feel I can at least say that his exit from the diaper-wearing community was achieved primarily through the generous use of strawberries as a bribe. He's had strawberry shortcake for his June birthday more than once. His first ice cream was, of course, strawberry.

He was born a few days shy of 12 years ago during a brief stint when we lived far from Portland. Shortly thereafter my parents came to visit bringing the perfect gift for a Portlander-in-exile, sweltering in the California heat: an ice cream maker. We had to return to Portland before making truly good strawberry ice cream with local Oregon berries. There's no point in trying with the early berries they ship up from California. Those woody, pale monstrosities have no flavor whatsoever so we happily wait for the real thing: local berries picked the day of purchase, red all the way through, dead ripe, enchantingly fragrant and, well, heaven.

MonkeyBoy headed off with friends for a camping/rock climbing extravaganza this morning. He won't be returning until late on his birthday and, due to my work schedule, I may not even see him until quite late that day. But I wanted him to start his birthday with a special treat so I ran down to the Lents International Farmers Market early this morning to pick up some berries to send along. Nice little market, by the way, so those of you in SEPDX should drop by.

They couldn't take all the berries along so we kept two boxes behind. Having recently checked The Perfect Scoop out of the library, I thought some ice cream might be just the way to use some of the remaining berries. The author lists a number of possibilities for frozen delights using strawberries including a strawberry-rhubarb sorbet which sounds wonderful, but it was the strawberry-sour cream ice cream which won out today. I had all the ingredients on hand and I guess maybe I'm still pining for those blintzes because that's what the combo made me think of.

I hauled out the trusty old Donvier and whipped up a batch of heavenly pink ice cream in almost no time. Had I followed the recipe exactly, it would have taken a couple of hours with chilling time but the rushed version was just fine. The recipe is here. The Perfect Scoop contains page after page of splendid looking possibilities, so I'm sure I'll be writing about it again.

Fruity Bread Pudding

True to tradition, Parade Day dawned rainy and gloomy. We're not parade goers anyway, but while I lay in bed thinking of all the damp souls waiting for the fun to begin, I also started thinking about breakfast. A cool, early summer breakfast is a grand opportunity as far as I'm concerned. I can't think of how many recipes I've seen which look delicious but involve baking summer fruit. Baking. Summer. Fruit. You get the problem, right? Who wants to bake anything when it's hot?

One thing I love is a good bread pudding. We make them all the time, often using leftover challah. Mostly they are dense, eggy things, either a savory variety made with cheese or a rich chocolate variety. Today I wanted something lighter where the flavor of recently purchased blueberries and cherries would shine.

I started with this recipe, the first to pop up after I googled "blueberry bread pudding". It was a good starting point, but looked too sweet and too bland so I fiddled around a bit and made enough changes that I think I can fairly call this recipe my own. I cut back on the sugar, added cherries along with the blueberries, used more bread, replaced water with orange juice,and upped the lemon juice and butter accordingly.I even had the opportunity to put my grandmother's pastry tips to use for pitting the cherries after picking up the tip while browsing through a Martha Stewart magazine. Once I found the right size, it worked perfectly.

Served with a little half and half, this was delicious. If I were a bacon-eating person, I think that might be the perfect breakfast companion to this sweet bread pudding. I might try and remember to whip up some veggie sausage next time I serve this in the morning. But it would also be a delightful dessert along with freshly whipped cream. Do give it a try.

Lasagna With A Twist

Well I confess, I haven't been doing a whole lot of cooking. I've had some truly delicious meals in the last few weeks, especially here and here, but they weren't made by yours truly. I seem to be off my food again and not terribly interested in putting together delicious healthy meals in and around the growing chaos. But The Spouse has been making plaintive, mournful comments about my lack of output in the kitchen and nothing makes me feel guilty like the spousal whine. And when he complains that he has nothing to take for lunch, what he really means is that there's no delicious, cheesy, savory pasta to enjoy midday. Which, when you get right down to it, means there's no lasagna.

It's been uncommonly, horribly, global warmingly hot the last few weeks. Portland is beginning to feel like a city in a different latitude and I haven't adjusted. Ninety degrees before the end of May is just ridiculous as far as I'm concerned. Like the polar bears at out zoo, I just get lethargic when it's hot and could hardly care less about cooking or food in general. Firing up the oven for a pan of lasagna has had no appeal whatsoever lately.

So when today dawned gloomy and cool, I was in heaven. I ran around the house doing useful, productive things like scrubbing counters and tidying the laundry room. And thinking about cooking something solid and hearty and easily divided into lunchtime portions for my beloved.

I can only take so much of a big cheesy dish. While I love homemade macaroni and cheese, I really love a spicy kick-in-the-pants macaroni and cheese. Lasagna can work the same way. I found this recipe years ago in Vegetarian Planet, a great cookbook full of lively, fusion recipes influenced by nearly any cuisine you can think of. At first I rolled my eyes at the thought of "Mexican" lasagna. But reading the recipe I realized that the smoky chipotles in the sauce could make magic. And they do.

You can control the heat of the dish by leaving the chipotles in the sauce or fishing them out, as you prefer. The corn adds a surprising bit of texture and the flavors come together beautifully in this untraditional dish. Like most lasagnas, it reheats, travels, and freezes well, making it a versatile addition to your repertoire. Even if it does sound weird. The recipe is here. Let me know what you think!

Blintzless

One thing about being a member of one of the minor religions--there's no large scale buildup for our holidays, especially the lesser known ones. So Shavuot just kind of crept up on me this year, amid the staff meetings, volunteering stints, brake jobs, cell phone outages, and the rest of the many things that went on this week. I mean, I knew it was coming. I've been quietly counting the days since Passover and I knew the seven weeks of counting was coming to an end but I just didn't have it together to celebrate Shavuot in traditional Ashkenazic fashion. I know, I know, I'm a bad Jew.

The result of all this carelessness? No blintzes this year. Shavuot is traditionally associated with dairy foods and cheese blintzes are the height of dairy cooking. They take forever to make: you have to make a pile of tiny crepelike pancakes, wrap them around a filling made of eggs, cream cheese, and cottage cheese or ricotta, and then fry them again in lots of butter without having them fall apart. I serve them with fresh fruit and lots of sour cream.

I am one of many folks who don't handle large amounts of dairy well but I'll gladly take some pills and suffer a stomachache for blintzes once a year just for that perfect combination of buttery/tangy/fruity/creamy that is the ideal blintz. I recently read a great post over at The Jew and The Carrot talking about lactose intolerance and a dairy based holiday. Kind of a niche piece, but I found it interesting.

So...while a full on holiday blintz fest isn't in the cards this year, we do have a birthday brunch coming up this weekend providing a perfect opportunity to serve up blintz souffle, a dish that's never failed me. It uses all the same ingredients as regular blintzes, but it's all layered in a large baking dish and served with fruit on the side. The taste is very similar to real blintzes though without the buttery note that comes form frying up the filled blintzes. But it still had the tangy/creamy/fruity thing going on. My friend Elaine posted the recipe to one of the Jewish food lists ages ago and I'm sure it's fed hundreds if not thousands of happy eaters since then. If you're at a local farmers market and come across some perfect berries, there's no better way to honor them than by serving them up alongside blintz souffle.

Potato Cauliflower Curry

The boys had friends over today for the regular gaming session. Normally I try to feed the crowd something relatively nutritious and am always grateful for whatever snacks other parents bring. Today I was completely uninspired and had nothing better to offer than baked potatoes when I remembered a head of cauliflower in the fridge. Just like that I began dreaming about some kind of aloo gobi, potato and cauliflower curry. I went straight to the ever reliable Madhur Jaffrey and was not disappointed.

I filled the rice cooker with basmati rice along with cinnamon sticks and crushed cardamom pods to flavor the cooking water and then on to the curry. I cut some peeled potatoes into chunks and fried them until golden, likewise an entire head of cauliflower which had been broken into small florets. Once they were nice and brown, I removed them from the oil and then quickly fried a good pile of minced fresh ginger. Back in the pan with the potatoes and cauliflower along with a few basic curry spices: ground cumin, coriander and cayenne. After adding a bit of water and simmering until the potatoes were tender, we had a lovely meal to enjoy in the May sunshine. The picky kids eating baked potatoes had no idea what they were missing!

I fiddled with the recipe just slightly, adding extra water and upping the spices accordingly in order to make a slightly saucier dish than the original. It was a snap to make and quite delicious. Give it a try. The recipe is here.

Not Much Cooking

All those lofty goals about using this blog to focus attention on my need to cook more and eat better? Unfortunately, it hasn't been working. I've made a few things here and there but have mostly been subsisting on kefir and quesadillas and smoothies. And the $2.25 Asian vegetable sandwich at Best Baguette, my new all time favorite takeout place. Crispy baguettes, savory tofu, and pickled veggies--absolutely perfect and an unbeatable price!

I usually try to make an effort on Fridays for our Shabbat dinner. I recently got my hands on a library copy of The Simple Art of Perfect Baking after coming across a reference to it here. It's full of lovely looking things but my first experience was not at all positive. Some of the mistakes were mine and some of it was the confusing recipe, but I'd hoped the lemon tart with blueberries would be considerably more interesting than it turned out to be.

My plan was to double the recipe and make a full sized tart as well as a few dozen tartlettes (tartitos? tartini? tartichki?) to bring to a luncheon Saturday morning. I had trouble with the crust, trouble with the filling, I forgot ingredients, you name it, I found a way to mess up. In the end they were fairly tasty but hardly worth all the hoo-ha.

The cookbook is definitely on the fussy side for my level of baking but I'm going to hang on to it until summer. There's a peach cake made with a brown sugar genoise that sounds like heaven to me.

Curry Noodle Pot

I recently got my hands on a copy of Super Natural Cooking, the latest from Heidi Swanson over at 101 Cookbooks which has become one of my top 5 favorite food blogs. Her recipes are fresh and vibrant and her photos are simply breathtaking. Mere mortals like myself can only dream of using a camera with her skill. I thoroughly enjoyed her earlier Cook 1.0 and was looking forward to this latest effort.

The first thing to catch my eye was a recipe entitled Big Curry Noodle Pot. It's a simple and deeply satisfying Southeast Asian style curry soup, spicy from red curry paste, rich with coconut milk, and fragrant with lime. I made the soup following the book closely the first time. The recipe was quick and easy and lent itself to experimentation so my second batch went off in a slightly different direction. I used a yellow curry paste from our local Vietnamese market and upped the veggie factor with asparagus tips and coarsely grated carrot. I wanted the asparagus to shine so I skipped the cilantro but retained the all important crushed peanuts.

The asparagus and yellow curry was just as tasty as the original pot of soup. I'm sure one can go off in any number of directions with a recipe like this depending on what looks good and fresh on any given day. I find the silky rich coconut broth so very delicious.

I'm looking forward to trying out other recipes in the book. The Wheat Berry Salad looks delicious and the Crema de Guacamole looks perfect for a sultry summer's day. Go find a copy of Super Natural Cooking. Whether you cook from it or not (and of course you should), I think you'll find that the photos are feast all on their own.