Cook Club 2

[Guest post from M.]

L. has graciously allowed me to post a story to her blog about our most recent cook club.  As regular readers of this blog know, a few months ago, L. gathered a group of us with the idea of having regular supper parties.  There are four of us, and we take turns hosting.  Whoever hosts is in charge of all the food.  The other three bring guests and drinks.  L. hosted our first dinner party, which you can read about here.

Sunday night, it was my turn.  Those of you in the New York area know that this past weekend was sweltering.  Disgustingly hot.  All I wanted to do was lay in my air-conditioned bedroom and dream of winter snows.  It felt like we were in Alabama, and as luck would have it, I had planned a menu of southern food from The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook.  Even more lucky, I had done some of the baking the day before, and two of the main dishes were salads.  Regardless, by the end of the evening, my kitchen felt like a sauna.

So, on to the important things.  We started off with cheese straws (recipe from Mark Bittman; I don’t have a large food processor, and the Lee Bros’ recipe was a bit too reliant upon the food processor for me to feel as though I could adapt it reliably to my food-processor-less kitchen) and deviled eggs (recipe from the Lee Bros.).  I also had a big pitcher of sweet tea, and L. brought a pitcher of unsweetened white jasmine iced tea.  Delish!  I even dug out my grandmother’s hand-crocheted table-cloth for an added Southern touch (am I the only one who associates tablecloths with the South?  We never used them growing up — they seem most at home on a table tied to traditional ways).

After everyone had arrived and had had time to cool off with iced tea or wine, I started the grits.  I had planned originally to make grits with blue cheese, but with the weather, I thought the cheese might make them unnecessarily heavy.  I had already made the collards — vegetarian, but cooked in a smoky tomato onion sauce that gave them a nice traditional flavor — so I just heated those up as the grits cooked.  I had also prepared the two salads before my guests arrived — a succotash made of corn, cranberry beans, tomatoes, yellow squash, and basil;

and a “new ambrosia” made with grapefruit, oranges, avocados, celery, and cucumber — so C. tossed them with their dressings while I cooked. 

The recipe for the ambrosia is available online here.

I was most fond of the collards and grits, but I thought all the dishes turned out well.  It was nice, in this heat, to have cool dishes and to avoid the heaviness that comes with meals featuring too much dairy or meat.  Next time, I think I’d use less dressing on each of the salads, and I think I would de-seed the tomatoes before adding them to the succotash. 

But, of course, the most important part of any meal is dessert.

I had cooked a buttermilk pound cake the day before.  It was my first attempt at making a pound cake, and it turned out beautifully.  I’m still slightly traumatized by the amount of butter that went into it, but the results were divine.  I topped the cake with some plain whipped cream, a sauce made from blueberries that I had picked in New Jersey the weekend before, and fresh blueberries (sadly, not fresh picked). 

So, all in all, a lovely dinner with old friends and new.  We survived the heat and proved that a vegetarian southern feast is not an oxymoron.

There Will Be Pie, part 2

The crust was ready to go, and the time had arrived to decide just what kind of pie to make for the dojo party. For me, certain pies are intrinsically linked to specific experiences. Apricot pie, for example, is best eaten at breakfast. (Or maybe I mean that the best breakfast is apricot pie… Remember, it’s a whole wheat crust–it’s just like having a bowl of oatmeal.) I made one once in collaboration with my sister (hi, Lindsay!), who had mailed me a jar of filling, made from apricots from her own fruit trees.

Blueberry pie, on the other hand, is an oddity for me. My strongest memory of eating it is as a child, at a neighbor’s birthday/July 4th celebration, and getting hit on the back of the neck with a stray spark from a firework. I have never had blueberry pie since then without thinking of that sharp stinging sensation. Now, I consider myself to be something of a blueberry expert, in spite of never having baked a pie with them. I know that most blueberries in this country come from Hammonton, New Jersey, right near where I spent every summer of my childhood. I have opinions about which brands are the best.

You didn’t know blueberries had brands, did you? Seriously, though, a handful of these tastes like sunshine and salt air and the Pine Barrens. So I decided that I needed to create a new association for myself. And since I was already using Rose Levy Beranbaum’s cream cheese crust, so it made sense to use her recipe for Open-Faced Fresh Blueberry Pie, too. It is an unusual preparation to say the least.

First, you bake the empty crust, fully cooked through. Brush it with an egg white wash.

For the filling, only about a quarter of the blueberries get cooked, right on the stovetop, in a bit of water.

Once the pot is boiling, add corn starch, sugar, and lemon juice.

Then turn off the heat, and fold in the rest of the berries.

That’s the extent of how much the berries get cooked.  Pour the filling into the baked crust, and let it sit for a couple of hours to set up.

And that’s it! I was a little bit nervous about how it would turn out. A pie that doesn’t entirely go in the oven? A crust with cream cheese and vinegar? A pie without a lattice top?? But I needn’t have worried. It disappeared very quickly.

There Will Be Pie, part 1

Fruit pies are one of my favorite things to make. Of course, I like other pies, too, and I like to bake many things, but fruit pies have long been a summer staple.

I’m the first to admit, though, that I tend to be very conservative with my pies. I might find myself singing the song from Waitress on occasion while baking one, but I do not get terribly creative with ingredients and names, like Keri Russell’s character does. Historically, the craziest I get is combining peaches and sour cherries (though take note that pitting a pint or two of sour cherries will make your fingers incredibly dry–those things are awfully acidic). I only do lattice tops. And I always use Martha Stewart’s pâte brisée recipe, my slight alteration being that I use 1 cup of whole wheat flour and 1 1/2 cups of all-purpose. (Because if it has whole wheat flour in the crust, then it’s health food, right?)

But every once in a while I like to branch out. And I had a package of cream cheese leftover from when I bought waaaaay too much for the frosting for the red velvet beet cupcakes. And when I was searching around for a good way to use it, I found this recipe for flaky cream cheese pie crust. And a party at the dojo this weekend was the perfect excuse for the first pie of the summer, as if I actually need a reason to bake a pie.

It’s not a complicated recipe, but the author is very specific about some of the steps, and rather than louse it up the very first time I try it, I figured I’d go by the book. The butter, flour, salt, and baking powder get chilled in the freezer ahead of time. Then you dump the flour et al. in the Cuisinart (using the metal blade, which surprised me–I usually pull out the pastry blade for pie crust).

 

Add in the cream cheese and process.

 Then you take the frozen butter

 and dump that in, too.

 

Pulse until the bits of butter are about pea-sized.

 The liquid ingredients are a mix of the usual ice water plus apple cider vinegar.

 

They go in, too, and pulse a bit more.

 

Pour out the dough (still very crumbly) onto a sheet of plastic wrap and knead it just enough to make it come together. If you’re doing a lattice or a top crust, you want to split the dough in two.

Stick in the fridge for a while, until you’re ready to roll it out. The rolling process is no different than a normal crust, but I will say that it was quite a bit easier to work with. I suppose the vinegar and the leavening make it a bit springy, or something.

And there you have a lovely bottom crust, ready to be filled with whatever you like. (More on that in the next post.)

Mid-Week Dessert

E. came over for dinner last night, which was a terribly exciting leftover lasagne that I’d made and stuck in the freezer before I flew to Colorado for New Year’s. It’s actually a really wonderful recipe, from Deborah Madison, made with eggplant and Swiss chard. But since sticking a baking dish in the oven for an hour is not my idea of cooking, I decided that we also needed something sweet to indulge in while watching Battlestar Galactica.

Enter David Lebovitz.

I am proving to be a little prophetic about what we’ll be getting each month, but not in a useful way. For example, two days before the December list was sent out, I bought two bags of frozen berries. And then found myself blessed with a pouch of blueberries and a little container of raspberries. So when life gives you berries, you make berry cobbler.

First you toss together some berries with a little sugar, flour, and lemon juice, just like pie filling. Dump it in a baking dish and bake for a half hour.

Meanwhile you make the dough for the drop biscuits, in which I used plain yogurt instead of buttermilk, like I always do.

Bake another 20 minutes and you’re done.

Next time it’s either going in a wider, flatter baking dish or else it needs to be baked longer, because the biscuit topping wasn’t quite cooked through. E. and I didn’t have any trouble eating it, though…