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

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::