Pondering the Pineapple Upside Down Cake

I'm reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, or should I say, I'm STILL reading it. It's taking me so long because I'm barely getting in a chapter every few days, in between Harry Potter and Artemis Fowl. But it's wonderful!

If you haven't heard of this book, here's a very brief summary: The author and her family move to an old farmstead in Appalachia and vow to eat only what they can produce themselves for a year. It's non-fiction in case you were wondering. And it's really got me thinking...

My family lives in "Unincorporated Miami-Dade County" in a semi-rural agricultural area Southwest of Miami, Florida, between Biscayne and Everglades National Parks. There is a lot of agriculture here, but most of it is not only conventionally grown (read: guys in haz-mat suits on tractors with sprayer attachments) but much of it is ornamental

 and landscape plants. We have participated in a local CSA (community supported agriculture) program and do know some of the organic farmers, but I have been wondering what the hell I would be serving if I tried to get ALL my food from within 25 miles or so. Draceana? Impatiens?

Even still, more and more farmers are selling their land to developers. One of the fastest growing "crops" in the area now seem to be yellow houses with clay tile roofs! Not very much taste at all, in my humble opinion!

Yesterday we spent the day at my mother in law's, about an hour or so North of our house. Most visits, she makes a pineapple upside down cake, special for me since she knows how I like it. It is good, too! Moist, super sweet with a layer of crunchy caramelized brown sugar on top (used to be bottom) of the pineapples. This is a classic space-age house wife recipe: a box of this, a can of that, set the timer and VOILA! I often say that if Duncan Heinz and Betty Crocker had a baby, that baby would grow up to be would be my mother in law!

As I was gobbling up my second piece, I was wondering where it all came from. The canned pineapples were probably last year's crop from Costa Rica. The sugar was probably from Malawi or Honduras. The eggs were likely from an artificially lit factory in the midwest. And who knows what's actually even in the cake mix to begin with!? 

My mother in law was born in 1930. When she was growing up, learning to cook, becoming a mama, the majority of her food probably did come from within the county in which she lived. Only rare and exotic delicacies and foods that kept well without much refrigeration would have come from far off lands. And there I was sitting in her dining room, sucking it all down, sneaking extra pieces of crumbly sugar bits off the rest of the cake that had been flown, shipped and trucked from all corners of the globe.

It was truly a surreal moment. Where do you think our food will come from in 2030? I've always admired Saturn...

::kristin::

It's springtime!

Just got finished gorging on strawberry shortcake.  Oh so good.  I am so glad it is warm weather time.  That means that fresh fruits and veggies are back!  Here in Wilmington we have a local farm, Lewis Farm, that does U-pick strawberries, blueberries, and blackberries.  Right around May the strawberries are ready for picking and we go as many times as we can.  They are so cheap this way and they taste better than any strawberry from the store.  I like supporting a local farm too.   The girls love going and picking their own berries.  Maggie has gotten the hang of it and does really well.  River just pretty much eats her way down the rows.  I would be in trouble if they did a before and after weigh in of the children.   The berries are so ripe that you can smell them when you are walking up to the plants.  On hot days it starts to smell like strawberry wine out there with the too far gone berries fermenting in the sun.  It is such a pleasure to be connected to the food you eat and I think good for the girls to know that food is grown and does not magically appear at the grocery store wrapped in plastic.  

 

So, the thing about fresh produce is...you have to eat it!  Right away.  It is picked when ripe and strawberries especially will not last.  So for two days we eat strawberries with everything, with chocolate, on salads, in cobblers...etc.  Today, I had a hankerin' (I do live in the south ya know) for strawberry shortcake.  I had some strawberries that were still good, but not really for eating whole.  Perfect!  I looked up the recipe in the bible of cooking (Joy of Cooking) and lo and behold, they recommend putting the strawberries on scones!  My other obsession of late.  I just went back to the Tea Room this week with Maggie to have a little mommy/big girl day. My ulterior motive was to get back to their scones.  Well, the recipe for scones was really, really easy.  Here it is in a slightly altered version:

Classic Scones

Preheat oven to 425 degrees.  Whisk together:

2 cups flour

1/3 cup sugar

1 T baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

Cut up and drop in:

6 Tablespoons unsalted butter

When making something like this or pie crust, I always break up the butter with my hands.  I know you are supposed to do it with 2 knives or a pastry cutter, but I find I can do it faster and easier with my hands.  You have to do it quick so the butter doesn't warm up too much.  Work the mixture till the largest pieces are the size of peas and the whole mixture looks like bread crumbs.

Form a little well and pour in:

1 large egg

1/2 cup heavy cream

Whisk that together quick and then mix the whole thing together with a rubber spatula.  After it is mixed use your hands to knead it a bit and work the dough together.  Transfer it to a lightly floured surface and pat it out to 3/4 inch thick round.  Cut into 8 to 12 triangles and place on your ungreased baking sheet.  Brush the tops with cream and sprinkle with sugar. Bake until the tops are golden 12-15 minutes.  

The strawberries I just cut up small and added about 2 tablespoons of sugar.  For the topping, I whipped about 1/2 cup of heavy cream with 1-2 tablespoons sugar in my fabulous stand mixer. Have I posted yet about my love affair with my mixer?  I must do that soon.  I love that damn thing.  

So delicious.  I was going to save this for dessert tonight, but it had to be eaten immediately.  I am so proud that I know how to make scones now.  

My next project:  How to make fruit preserves....

Can't wait for blueberries and blackberries to come!

Amy

What's for dinner? Curry!

If you ask my kids what their favorite dinner is, the answer is always: Curry!  I am so freaking proud of that.  Before I had kids, I was always worried that they would only eat macaroni and cheese or something, but then once they arrived I realized that for the most part, kids will eat what you eat.  I know that I felt like I needed to clean up my diet a bit when my kids got old enough to want what we had.  Soda especially has gone by the wayside.  If the kids see a can near my lips they surround me like flies demanding to know what I have and can they share it? I am not totally anti-soda or treats, but I realize that if I want my kids to eat well and make good choice, then I have to model that for them.  

We have never made separate food for the kids to eat.  Even when they were infants, they ate what was on our plate.  I never made any special baby food or fed them out of a jar, they just ate what we had either mashed up or as I called it, the baby bird style, where I would chew it up a bit with my front teeth and feed it to them.  That sounds gross when I write it down, but hey, they didn't mind!  So they have been eating all of these different flavors and spices from the beginning.

Well, that is the long wind bag explanation for why my kids love curry...the real reason is that it tastes freaking awesome.  This curry tastes kind of like Thai massman curry and it is super easy to make.  Here is the recipe:

Chicken Curry

3-4 chicken breasts

3-4 medium potatoes (or other root vegetables i.e. swt. potatoes, squash etc.)

1 medium onion minced

1 green or red pepper

2 14 oz cans Coconut milk

1 T Red curry paste

2 T Fish sauce

2 T Brown sugar

Handful unsalted Cashews (optional)

Start by simmering your curry paste and coconut milk over low heat until the milk and paste are combined.  While waiting for this, chop up your onion, potato, and peppers and add to the pot.  I chop the onion up quite small for the kids and make the potatoes and peppers around bit size.  Add the fish sauce and brown sugar then bring the pot to a slow boil and cover.  Cook until the potatoes are soft.  You can also wait to add the peppers till the end if you like them crunchier (we do).  While you are waiting for this to cook, chop up your chicken breasts into bite sized pieces and cook in a skillet.  When done, drain off excess liquid and add to the pot. Viola!  Serve over rice.  If you have unsalted cashews, throw them on top!  

You can really use any vegetables, but I suggest keeping with the root veggies.  You can out in anything else you like or have.  If you want to make this vegetarian, just omit the chicken and add more veg.  

Fish sauce is the absolute integral part of this recipe.  It is the stinkiest substance on earth, but without it, Thai curry is blah.  You probably have to go to an Asian market to get a jug of it, but it will last you a long time.  I just finished off a bottle my dad got me a year ago.  He got it in Florida and drove it up here to NC.  The lady in the Asian market asked him what he was going to do with it and he told her he was driving to see his daughter and give it to her.  Her response was "No break in car!"  Seriously, I think the stuff may be listed on the EPAs hazardous waste list.  I kept mine in a freezer bag in the cabinet, just in case.   On its own, toxic waste. Combined with coconut milk and brown sugar, heaven.  

PS:  This tastes even better the second day and it freezes beautifully.  I freeze this and take it when we go camping.  It serves to keep the cooler cold and heats up quick for a fantastic camp dinner. 

Blueberry + Lemon = LOVE

Lately I've discovered that late spring is blueberry season in Florida. I have lived here my entire life and never even knew blueberries grew in Florida! I've really been trying to buy as locally as is financially feasible for our family of 4, so when I saw giant boxes of Florida blues on sale at the store, I went nuts. There is reasonable debate on which is a more sound environmental priority: organic foods picked before their prime and shipped via tons of fossil fuels across the country, or conventionally grown in a neighboring county? Local won out over organic this time and I bought 2 huge containers.

They've been in my fridge for a few days while I decided how to most decadently serve them. Some had already been dipped into, and they were as good as they look! I originally wanted to make a light fluffy cake of some sort and top it with a goat cheese icing, with a few ripe strawberries to set off the blues. But alas, I'm am out of flour and our next co-op order was postponed 'til next week. What to do?

Well, I got out my cookbooks, digging to the bottom of the stack for a lovely Mediterranean pictoral book I picked up at a yard sale a few years ago, and the top of the stack: King Arthur Brand Whole Grain Baking. Both had lovely renditions including all american blueberry  cream pie, lemon blueberry calfoutis ( which I still don't think I'm pronouncing correctly) and all sorts of nice looking things, but they all required cooking the berries. These berries were too perfect to cook! I wanted something to pile them on top of FRESH, so I had to do a little mixing up...

Here are the pics. The recipe will be posted tonight. Now I'm off to work off the pie at jujitsu! 

Ok, Jujitsu was definitely a work out! Shihan at American JuJitsu Center decided to heat the room to about 92F! It felt like more than that, and delivered a workout to justify yet another slice of heaven, a.k.a. lemon pie with blueberries! The thought of that cool confection waiting at home helped me hang in 'til the last  kick, kata and "KIA"!

So here's how it happened...

The King Arthur cookbook had a great pie crust recipe made from oats and pecans. But of course, I had no pecans, and also no brown sugar, which it also called for. Technically speaking though, turbinado sugar is brown, and I had plenty of that. I also ended up combining the lemon curd/tart recipe from the mediterranean book with a lemon filling from King Arthur to make something easy that included ingredients I had in the pantry. So here is the recipe modification I came up with:

Lemon Pie with Whipped Cream and Blueberries

pat-in-the-pan nut crust:

-preheat oven to 350F

-on a cookie sheet spread out 1 1/3C whole rolled oats and 1/2C cashews

-bake them to toasted brown about 10 - 15 minutes, then cool before pulsing in a food processor to a uniform consistency ( I don't actually have a food processor, so I use my little chopper that came with my immersion blender and just do small batches)

-cut the oat/nut flour with about 6 TBS cold butter, a pinch of salt and about 1/4 - 1/3 turbinado sugar ( I do this with the whisk on my kitchen aid, mostly because its fun and I have one, but by hand is fairly easy to with either a big fork or a pastry cutter)

- turn out the crust mixture into a 9' pie plate and press with your fingers to evenly fill/line the pan and set aside.

The original crust recipe said to bake the crust without filling, but it was for a different type of pie with less time in the oven, so I elected not to, and I'm really glad. the nuts really brown up fast!

lemon filling:

-cream together 4 TBS butter with about a cup of turbinado sugar and a pinch of salt

-add 4 eggs one at a time

-add zest and juice of 2 lemons

Pour the filling into the crust and bake for about 50 minutes. Mine developed a dark sort of skin made of caramelized sugar, which was delicious, but not so pretty. I simply peeled it off (and ate it myself, fringe benefits of being the household chef) while the pie cooled on the counter for a few minutes. Then I stuck it in the fridge for about an hour. Once it was cooled through, I topped it with a generous layer of whipped cream ( 1C heavy cream, pinch of salt maybe a couple teaspoons of sugar whipped in the mixer 'til stiff) and then the glorious berries!A whole mountain of them!

 So, so pretty, don't you think? And the flavor was A-MAZ-ING! As approved by my kids, my man, and my sister. ( My mom said it was good, but too fruity for her, so I still accept that as a compliment!) YUM!

::kristin::