Snapshots from the market

Questions from the peanut gallery...

Whipped cream doesn't come from a can

The fine art of splitting a biscuit

PQ at the Market, Saturday June 24

Come down to the Fayetteville Farmers Market downtown on the main square, and get a taste of Double-Blueberry Shortcake. I'll be there doing a cooking demonstration, seeing if I can bake biscuits in a toaster oven and whip cream by hand while keeping the crowds entertained. Come by and say hello! I'll be shortcaking it up at 10AM and 11AM. See you there!

all green and gooseberry

And now starring at Jam Camp: gooseberries!

I have a thing for vaguely British, underappreciated fruits and vegetables--quinces, rhubarb, black currants, and yes, gooseberries. Well, now I know why they're no stars here: the stems. They're in the currant family, which means, sharp little stems that are implanted into the fruit. You can't pull them off in one go as you would on a bunch of red currants; no, these are just about welded on. I got through about a pint of topping and tailing (taking off the stem and the wrinkled little bit of dried blossom on the other end) before I decided: jelly. So, into a pot go the still-stemmy gooseberries, with about an inch of water below. Brought to a boil, let them boil for a few minutes to soften, then mashed them up. Into a colander lined with damp cheesecloth to let the juice drip out overnight. While the mess won't win any beauty contests (it's a lumpy, greenish-pink, seed-flecked slime) it has a wonderful fragrance of roses and summer hay. And the juice is a lovely wild-rose pink.

Fayetteville Farmers Market: Meet PQ!

Come on down and see the Pie Queen in action at the Fayetteville Farmers' Market this Saturday, June 24th. I'll be all decked out in my new flowered apron from K.'s mom (so sweet!), demonstrating how to make Summer Blueberry Shortcake with Honey Cream & Fresh Blueberry Preserves. And they've promised a toaster oven onsite, so those biscuits will be fresh baked! Mmmm, mmmm. Not quite sure where in the market I'll be, but probably near (or at) the stand for Drippings Springs blueberry farm.

I'll be making a more savory breakfast offering at the Eureka Springs farmers market in the Pine Mountain Village parking lot on Thursday, June 29th, at 8:30am--Zucchini and Herb Frittata with a Farmer's Salad with Fresh Raspberry Vinaigrette. Marty of Raspberry Ridge farm has promised to provide eggs from her hens and raspberries from the farm. Alas, I didn't get any raspberries today, since they were all gone by the time I showed up. Did get 4 pints of gooseberries, though--we'll see what I can do with them! I wish I had British food expert Jane Grigson's fruit book on hand, though, as these are a quintessential English fruit.

What else? Opera at the Ozarks--kind of a summer camp for young aspiring opera singers--opens on Friday with La Traviata; tomorrow I'm going for a tour of the War Eagle grist mill, source of fantastic stone-ground organic cornmeal and other grains. And then Friday, out to Dripping Springs to pick blueberries for the demo the following day. Just berry-filled fun around here...and yes, more writing!

Chasing the blues

A hot morning out in the blueberry patch, picking a gallon of berries with Barbara. Now, what to make? Preserves? Another pie? Muffins? all of the above? Or the supreme summer-morning breakfast: a big handful of blueberries over a bowl of Grape-Nuts. Mmmm.

Remy Charlip Needs You

OK, pictures and pie chat once today's cherry pie comes out of the oven...but more importantly, put this on your calender if you live in the Bay Area:

Every Little Movement: A Benefit for Remy Charlip: 7:30 p.m. Sat. Project Artaud Theater, 450 Florida St. between 17th and Mariposa), San Francisco. Minimum donation: $20. Tickets at the door only. Information: www.artaud.org/theater.

Remy Charlip is a living treasure--a dancer, choreographer, artist, and children's book author--who recently suffered a debilitating stroke. He's slowly recovering and beginning to work again, but as he's in his late 70s, it's no easy road. His amazingly witty and playful children's book Arm and Arm was one of my all-time favorites as a kid (happily, it was reissued in 1997, 30 years after its first publication); it wasn't until I moved to SF, where he has lived since 1989, that I learned he was also one of the founding members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Troupe, as well as an original member of the Living Theater and the Paper Bag Players. He is, by all accounts, an incredibly generous and warm-hearted artist and mentor. The benefit will feature new works by dozens of Bay Area dance groups, possibly including work by Charlip himself. Go, bask, help out.

And speaking of SF, oh, how I miss it! Especially this time of year, when everything's drenched in gay pride. Yes, it can get a little silly, all the beer ads and triangle-shaped, rainbow everything, but still...I miss all the movies, the crowds of men and women outside the Castro and Victoria theaters, all the dykes on bikes, the masses of art shows and performances and things going on every minute for the whole month. Last night, at the "Poet-Luck" (a potluck dinner/reading series held monthly at the Colony), I ended up reading this story "Getting Out of Dodge," a bitterly funny break-up revenge story, I guess you could call it, and you know, even with it cleaned up ("Fuck Donna Reed" turned into "Forget Donna Reed"--not half as satisfying to say), I don't ever want to say "red leather g-string" in front of nice white-haired ladies old enough to be my mother again. They all laughed in the right places, but I was embarassed, even if they weren't. I just read it really, really fast and hoped no one would notice.

More flora and fauna...

Wildflowers growing along highway 62, on my walk back from the Eureka Springs farmers' market in the Pine Village parking lot.

And more...

The trout-stocked lagoon at Blue Springs

How the trout get fat...25 cents buys you a handful of fish food to toss over the railings into the gaping maws below.

And what, alas, I didn't snap a picture of (at least not yet): the rebel-flag bikini on display outside a souvenir shop along this same highway, right past the store advertising "Christian Biker Gear."

You've Got a Friend in...Fayetteville

No, really, I do! One of the nice things about being in Arkansas this month was the opportunity to catch up with my old SF pal Josh, who's now a VP at the Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville. He and his lovely wife and their two blonde-ringleted children hopped in the kiddiemobile and drove up to Eureka this afternoon, for burgers and bbq on the balcony of the Basin Park Hotel. (Given their double stroller, and all the staircases in Eureka, finding a place with an elevator was a wise choice. It was a fine place to chat, and definitely the sort of vinyl-tablecloth place where it's perfectly OK to whip out a couple of baby-food jars. Don't go for the food, though; my prefab, run-over-by-the-Sysco-truck burger looked and tasted like well-kneaded grey Play-Doh.) After playing catch-up about our lives over the last few years--their trajectory from Mill Valley to Tiburon to Little Rock to Fayetteville, mine from SF to Bologna to NYC to Eureka Springs-- we headed back to the colony where I got to show off "my" kitchen and actually entertain in the living room.

Mismatched Tupperware and measuring spoons make great kiddie toys, as it turns out...and once toddler #1 was napping in my bed, and toddler #2 was busy with the spoons, I dished out bowlfuls of almond-cherry cobbler with vanilla whipped cream, made with 3 cans of pitted sour cherries instead of fresh sweet ones, drained and tossed with 3 TB tapioca, 3/4 cup sugar, and 1/4 tsp almond extract (the unsweetened juice will go into Monday's cherry lemonade).

Fruit, biscuits and cream have been the theme of the weekend...and since I didn't have time to take pictures of the peach-blueberry shortcakes, I snapped a few quick ones of the the cobbler. (Minus what we munched, and what went home with them for breakfast). And I was all set to post them, except that they came out looking bizarrely lurid, as if Weegee shot pastry in full color. So just imagine a really pretty pan of cobbler in your mind, and let's leave it at that. Josh's wife has promised to trade me her grandmother's secret biscuit recipe if I give her a pie tutorial, so I might be making a field trip to Fayetteville next weekend. The bright lights await!

Bagels and Biscuits

Today's the day I'm making peach-berry shortcake for 30. The Writers' Colony is having a big shindig for donors and other grand poo-bahs tonight, and so I've got lots and lots of butter, buttermilk and half-and-half in the fridge, waiting to be turned into many, many star-shaped biscuits. And a trayful of Arkansas peaches, ready to be dropped into boiling water and slipped out of their fuzz-kissed skins.

But before that, I promised--on a whim--to make something tasty for the task-crazed office staff this morning. Not wanting to get them all sugar-hyped on such a busy day, I wracked my little muffin-inclined brains for something savory-ish but good for morning, and came up with...homemade bagels! After all, Brooklyn gots to represent.

For maximum chewiness, the flour should really be bread (meaning hard wheat, which has higher protein and gluten) flour; given that this is the South, land of biscuit-ready soft-wheat flour, the random zip-loc bag of extra flour in the kitchen probably wasn't exactly right for the job, but luckily, there was also a box of vital wheat gluten lying around the kitchen, too. So I threw a little in there and hoped for the best. The dough is rising now, waiting to be shaped, boiled, and baked. Boiling, by the way, is what gives bagels that special chewy crust. Many so-called bagel bakeries now skip this step, or do some freaky steam-injection thing. No, no, no. A real bagel is a boiled bagel. Accept no imitations!


And here they are, ready to eat. Turns out the convection option on the super-duper oven does a bang-up job of browning, so use it if you've got it. The last few bagels I baked--which got more rising time-- turned out the puffiest and prettiest, so I've added a final post-shape rising to the instructions below. Variations I made: black and white sesame seeds; granulated onion; "everything"--kosher salt, onion, and sesame seeds; egg-washed plain.

These made everyone in the office very happy.

Brooklyn Bagels in the Ozarks

1 1/2 cups lukewarm water
1 packet dry yeast
1 TB brown sugar or 2 tsp malt syrup
4 cups bread flour, or 4 cups regular flour + 1 TB vital wheat gluten
1 TB coarse or kosher salt

Egg wash: 1 egg yolk mixed with 2 TB water
Cornmeal for sprinking on baking sheets, or baking parchment
Toppings: sesame seeds, poppy seeds, coarse salt, dehydrated onion or garlic, cinnamon sugar


Dissolve yeast and 1/2 TB brown sugar or malt in lukewarm water. Let stand for 5 minutes. Dump into a big bowl and add 1 cup flour. Stir together, then add salt and rest of sugar and flour. Tip out onto a lightly floured board and knead for at least 10 minutes, until smooth and stretchy. Drape a towel over the dough and let rest for 30 minutes.

Now, pull off an egg-sized lump of dough. Roll and stretch into a rope approximately 8-10 inches long. Wrap the rope around the widest part of your hand, forming a loop. Pinch the ends together. Looks like a bagel, doesn't it? Put the shaped bagel back onto the floured surface. Repeat with rest of dough, forming around a dozen bagels, depending on size. Drape with towel and let rise 20 minutes or so, until puffed up a bit.

Meanwhile, fill a big, wide pot with hot water. Add 1 TB of brown sugar or malt syrup and 1 tsp salt. Bring to a rolling boil.

Preheat oven to 425F, using convection option if possible. While water is boiling, set up your bagel-assembly line: Line a baking sheet or cover a cutting board with a clean towel. Sprinkle another baking sheet with cornmeal or line with parchment. Make egg wash, if using (it helps the toppings stick better and gives a shiny coating). Pour toppings into separate saucers.

When bagels are risen slightly, pick up 2 or 3 bagels with a spatula and drop into boiling water. Let cook about 45 seconds, then flip over if possible and boil on the other side for another 45 seconds or so. Boil only a few at a time, so they aren't crowded. Scoop out with a slotted spoon and deposit onto towel-lined sheet to drain. Repeat with remaining bagels.

While bagels are still moist, brush with egg wash, then dip rounded side into topping of choice. (The bagels can also be dipped directly into the toppings, without the egg wash.) Line up on cornmeal-sprinkled baking sheet. Let rise again for 10-15 minutes.

Bake for 20-25 minutes, until golden-brown. Cool on a rack. Best when eaten while still warm, or within 2-3 hours of baking.

The Flora and Fauna of Eureka Springs

The mouth of the Grotto spring, in full bloom


And guarding the spring, a great blue heron...

...not to outdone by the sunbathing stegosaurus of Spring Street

Sunny day bread

It dawned cloudy again today, but now, another sunny day up in the Ozarks. Off to the impressive Andrew Carnegie-built library for some jam-making tomes and continued shortcake research...eggs or no eggs? But before that, breakfast out on the deck, with the noisy birds and inquisitive squirrels.

And, as promised, the oatmeal bread recipe.

Rainy Day Oatmeal Bread

1 cup milk
1 cup rolled oats
1/4 cup sorghum or molasses
2 TB butter
2 tsp salt
1 envelope dry yeast
1/2 cup lukewarm water
3 to 4 cups all-purpose or bread flour, or a mix of whole wheat and white flour

In a small pot over medium heat, bring milk to a simmer--just until small bubbles form around the edges of the pot. (Why should I dirty up a pot with milk sludge, you ask? Well, bringing the milk to a boil destroys certain enzymes that could make your bread soggy, or so I've been told. The heat also helps soften up & hydrate the oatmeal flakes so they meld better with the dough. Do keep a close eye on that heating milk, though-it only takes a minute or two to get hot enough. A few more unattended minutes and you'll have a boiling burnt-milk volcano all over your stove, definitely not a good time.) In a large bowl, combine oats, sorghum, butter and salt. Pour milk over oat mixture and stir. Let sit, stirring occasionally, until butter is melted and mixture is barely lukewarm.

Meanwhile, sprinkle yeast in lukewarm water, stir to dissolve, and set aside. When oat mixture is ready, beat in 1 cup flour, then beat in yeast mixture. Add enough flour to make a soft but not sticky dough.

If you want, you can let dough rest for 10 minutes, or you can get right into the kneading. Lightly flour your countertop and knead thoroughly for at least 10 minutes. Dough should become manageable and smooth. If you use mostly white flour, you'll probably get a stretchy, elastic dough; mine was half whole wheat, so it stayed a bit more muscled. Drop dough into a large clean bowl,top with a clean towel and place in a draft-free place (like a turned-off oven) for an hour and a half, maybe more, until doubled in bulk.

Turn out, knead briefly, then stretch into a flattish oval. Tuck edges under and form into a loaf shape. Pat into a greased loaf pan and let rise again (it will go much quicker this time) until it is puffed over the top of the pan.

Bake at 375 for 25-30 minutes, until well browned. Let cool for a couple minutes in the pan, then turn out onto a rack (to keep the bottom from getting soggy from released steam). Let cool to room temp before slicing, if you can.

Rain, rain

It's teeming rain and crashing thunder and lightning this early morning; I'm lying in bed with coffee and yesterday's blueberry muffins, listening to the rain spattering on the skylights. This may cancel the planned trip to the farmer's market...but I love waking up to the sound of summer rain. Later on, oatmeal bread, sweetened with sorghum, and white-bean soup on the big stove...

Once the rain tapered off, I took a walk through the woods up to the grand (and 1880s-ish) Crescent Hotel. There's a sweet, crescent-shaped swimming pool there along with pretty gardens and a wide, wide back porch with rocking chairs and a newspaper coin box. I forsee a Sunday morning up there...Today, though, the chairs were deserted, but I took a picture of the top of St. Elizabeth's church.
The little bell tower on the left actually leads to the entrance to the church, since it's built into the hillside. The surrounding grounds are very pleasant, although there is a large headstone dedicated "To the Victims of Abortion", which is a little creepy, since I doubt they're commemorating the women who lost their lives to illegal operations or terrified do-it-yourself remedies.

When I got back, after a long walk, the bread was risen--really risen--and ready for the oven. Finished loaf pictures (and an easy recipe) to follow!

June Blues

Picked up 2 pints of Arkansas blueberries yesterday at the Sunday open-air market downtown (when I asked the guy if they were local berries, he said, straight-faced, "No, they're blueberries."), which meant, of course...blueberry muffins for breakfast! I have a small but maneagable obsession with blueberry muffins, and often feel I could write an entire cookbook of blueberry muffins alone. That seems just a TAD specific, however, so I'll content myself with a rotation of 3 or 4 recipes. Although right now, with this kitchen at my disposal, I could bake muffins for an army.

For a while, I was enamored of blueberry corn muffins, but they seemed a little dense for this summer morning, so instead, we're back to the regular old muffins, made with half-and-half whole wheat pastry flour and regular all-purpose. And buttermilk, every baker's best friend. As PQ readers know, I like a healthy muffin in the morning, so those typical fancy-bakery muffin recipes with a stick of butter and a cup of sugar per dozen are not what you'll find at PQ Castle. Instead, these are pleasanty grainy, fruit-studded warmers, just what you want to start a summer day. And they make the kitchen smell buttery-perfect.



June Blues

1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
1/3 cup sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt

2 eggs
1 cup buttermilk
1/2 tsp vanilla or 1/2 tsp orange or lemon zest (can add more, depending on your taste)

1 cup blueberries, rinsed, picked over (take out the squishy ones), and patted dry
3 or 4 tablespoons melted butter or vegetable oil

topping (optional): 2 TB sugar mixed with 1/2 tsp cinnamon

Preheat oven to 375F. Grease 12 muffin cups. Whisk dry ingredients together. In a separate bowl, beat eggs, buttermilk, and vanilla or zest together. Dump wet into dry, and stir gently until just mixed. Stir in blueberries and butter. Divide into muffin cups. Sprinkle with cinnamon sugar. Bake 20-25 minutes.

Dirty Sugar Cookies

Good morning! Today's the day for Dirty Sugar Cookies author Ayun Halliday to visit the Pie Queen, wearing a leopard-print bra and proffering really delicious Spanish fig jam from the just-opened Fairway in Red Hook. A pie-baking session had been planned, but when the day came we were both way too wiped out and overscheduled to do anything but drink cappuccino and talk, talk, talk. We're Brooklyn neighbors, as it turns out, a fact I didn't know til I read the recent Vows "State of the Union" column about Ayun and her Tony-winning playwright hubby, 11+ years after their initial hitch in a Soho loft. Reading about their bohemian Brooklyn home and slapped-together (and very productive) artists' world was a welcome change from plowing through the vapid life histories of the inane 26-year-old lawyers and hedge-funders that typically populate the wedding section. (Are K. and I going to submit an announcement to the Times next year? Oh, you bet. I haven't been reading everyone else's writeups all these years for nothing. After all, she'll be fresh from combat and I wrote a wedding guide. That trumps the typical schoolteacher-investment banker combo, surely.)

Although we live just a few blocks apart, I haven't yet seen the lemonade stand* Ayun and her kids India and Milo have been running out on the stoop, just a few doors down from the jillion-dollar renov supposed occupied by hotshots Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams (no one sees them around much, although my pal Jane swears Mr. Wish I Could Quit Yoo walked right behind me on his way out of Frankie's last Sunday. I was too preoccupied with stealing yet another forkful of Jane's French toast to notice any foxy cowboys in my near vicinity. A girl has her priorities). But if you pick up the latest copy of her excellent, hand-drawn little 'zine, the East Village Inky, you can read all about the history of Heath and Michelle's house, which involves an old Cuban lady, red-bobbed former nightlife queen Nell Campbell, and about 10 dumpsters of junk.

But back to Ayun. I first met Ayun when she came up to the Manic D Press booth at last year's Book Expo America. BEA was great for actually meeting writers in person. I already knew Ayun's extremely funny work, including No Touch Monkey and Job Hopper, and now here she was, with great springy curly hair, nice and chatty and proffering copies of the Inky. There was a long, hysterically illustrated piece in that month's issue, all about the hell of teaching kiddie art classes. I was hooked.

Now she's back with Dirty Sugar Cookies, a sassy memoir tracing her evolution from fearfully picky eater to world traveller and adventurous cook. The title sounds, well, dirty--one could be forgiven for thinking that this was going to be one of those food-and-sex things, like this chef-and-Elvis shagfest, or a guide to making, I don't know, cookies in the shape of naughty things. Thankfully, though, there are no Saveur-style (or Gael Greene-ish) rhapsodies here. After all, Hoosiers have no indigenous cuisine, no wood-grilled sardines or wood-fired loaves. Instead, there are paens to the best morning-after diners in Chicago (oh, Melrose Diner, where every plate came with a banana on the side, and its nearby cousin, the Belmont Diner), and hysterically accurate evocations of early-80s culture (Tickle deodorant! Love's Baby Soft! The Silver Palate Cookbook! Grapes in the chicken salad!) followed by forays into earth-mother, hippie-skirt cooking, Asian backpacker escapades, and now payback: her trials in raising a daughter who is at least as picky an eater as she herself was.

(And, although she's too cool to mention this in the book, I did get the dish that "Mr.Swain"--one of the many Chicago-theater-scene boyfriends who show up for a meal or two--is now a famous TV personality. Not Jon Stewart, let's just leave it at that.)

I look at Ayun's blog Dirty Sugar Cookies all the time, and I always wish I was eating dinner over at her house, because she's always making some swell-sounding Asian thing with lime juice and Thai fish sauce and a lot of cilantro. And avocado! You have to love a cook who notes that if you can roll a doob, you can roll maki. And whose husband isn't afraid to wrap a t-shirt around his head and morph into White Guy Sushi Master. She also takes pictures of her kitchen, which looks like an actual New York City kitchen crowded with honeydew melons and many, many repurposed glass jars doubling as canisters full of stuff, and nothing like the irritatingly professional food-porn that all those other food bloggers claim to be whipping up after work.

Really, her book's a scream, and you should hustle right on down to Book Court today and buy it. And if you're walking around Boerum Hill and see a woman and a couple of kids selling lemonade, get in line behind Heath and Michelle and get it autographed.

*And speaking of lemonade, I never got around to asking Ayun if they're selling real lemonade, the kind made with actual lemons and sugar and water, or whether they're just mixing up some Crystal Light and upping their profit margins. I have yet to hit a kiddie lemonade stand that has come within squeezing distance of an actual lemon, despite that New Yorker cartoon of the kid with the sign "Artisanal Lemonade, $5".

Eureka Springs!

I'm here! You never know what life is going to hand you, and in this case it was a big sign at the end of the jetway ramp reading "Welcome to Northwest Arkansas." So far, it's damp and warm out, the town is crazy cute, and my "culinary suite" is way bigger than my Brooklyn apt, and the kitchen--well, I could weep. Counter space for days, every kind of knife and pot and pan any Pie Queen could ever desire. Whooo-hooo! More later--there's exploring to do!

Send a salami to your gal in the Army

Given my position as cookie-baking USO girlfriend, I'm just a tad miffed that I didn't get to chip in to Kim Severson's NYT article about soldiers' care packages, just to disprove the image that only grandmas from the Midwest bake cookies for the troops. Foxy 38-year-olds in Brooklyn do, too!

The article does contain some howlers, though, like this quote from the admirable Crystal White, a Starbucks employee who, to her credit, sent 100 lbs of coffee beans and a grinder to Bagram, the main American air base in Afghanistan. "I wanted them to have something they're used to, something from back home," said Ms. White, whose siblings have served in the military. "I wanted them to know that there's something they are fighting for." Making the world safe for Frappuccinos, one slush at a time!

Severson goes on to note that future MREs will contain chocolate-covered espresso beans. Wheee! But she also mentions that "Other new field rations include an expanded line of vegetarian dishes, including lasagna and chicken pesto pasta." Bawk! I'm going out to weed the chickens now.

It's true, though, that Girl Scout cookies are as good as money for getting favors done. According to K., there's actually no shortage of junk food out there, from Cheetos to Kit Kats, all sent by well-meaning pals, church members, and relatives.

But homemade cookies--well, there's nothing like a double chocolate mint chip to get you through a dust-ridden 120-degree day.

Arkansas awaits!

Countdown to where I'm going to be, come this Thursday...that is, if I can get these editing projects finished, clean up the apt for the subletters, pack for a month and do all the jillion accompanying tasks. Regardless, though, I've got a ticket to Eureka Springs, and when that plane takes off for Fayetteville, well dang it, I'm going to be on it! Dishwasher, double oven, back porch, and strawberry shortcake for 30 (which I'll be making for a special dinner there just a few days after arriving, eeek), here I come!

In the meantime, though, I got to pick a whole lot of lettuce from the the garden,
where it became the base of a very swell salad inspired by the salmon-and-baby-beet salad in Suzanne Goin's lovely (if relentlessly hyped) book Sunday Suppers at Lucques.

I made the salad more of a late-spring fiesta, with blanched asparagus and fava beans, arugula, feathery bits of dill, parsley, and sliced garden radishes in all shades of pink, white, and purple, the whole thing tossed in a vinaigrette of wine vinegar, lemon juice, a big spoonful of Dijon mustard, and olive oil. Since the first-run Copper River salmon at Fish Tales was $30 a pound (yikes! no Jet Blue for this fish, obviously), I topped it instead with chunks of artic char cooked by Goin's salmon method.

The long single filet was plastered on both sides with a paste of minced shallots, dill, tarragon, parsley, the grated rind of 1 lemon, salt and pepper, and a few hearty glugs of olive oil. Then it was laid in a long glass baking pan and tucked into a 250-degree (F) oven with an additional pan half-filled with water placed on the lower shelf. It cooked very slowly in the damp heat for about 20-25 minutes, coming out gently cooked and very moist. Peeled off the skin and chunked the herby fish over the salad mound.

Had I had some edible flowers to throw in, it would have been even prettier. But it was a lovely lunch for the three ladies of PQ Castle (PQ, the PQ Mother, and Aunt PQ) on a summery Sunday, accompanied by fresh croissants from Almondine (actually, the croissants got devoured first, with the night-before's strawberry-rhubarb jam, while the PQ herself was frantically washing and re-washing the garden lettuce) and followed by the fabulous, chewy (not rock-hard) almond biscotti from Court St Pastry and little bowls of fresh cantaloupe with lime.

Memorial Day

Another beautiful day in the neighborhood, and I sure wish K. was here to spend it with me, grilling hot dogs and putting suntan lotion on my back. But I'm thinking of her, and all the men and women with her overseas, because this is Memorial Day, after all, not just opening day for grilling season.

It's very easy to think of the military as a monolithic other--something other people enlist, serve in, and run. Before I met K., I didn't know a single soul in uniform. My dad was in the Pacific with the Navy in WWII; the brother of an old girlfriend did some time in the Gulf War, and came back with a bunch of those persistent but nameless aliments now lumped under Gulf War Syndrome. What little familiarity I have now (mostly being able to recognize a handful of acronyms, which the service seems to love even more than microwaved boots* is due to the past year of hanging out with K. and meeting some of her fellow servicepeople, however briefly. They are very young, mostly, and beyond that it's impossible to generalize, because it's hard to imagine a group of people more diverse, in everything from race to their reason for being there.

I don't want anyone to be at war. But if we are, as a country, going to be in conflict around the world, it's worth taking the time to step back and just listen to what the people fighting have to say about their experiences.

* In units still wearing the standard shiny black boots--rather than the softer suede-y desert boots--the guys in particular get really obsessive about boot-shining. When you don't have a car on hand to detail, presumably you work on your boots. One trick is to zap them briefly in the microwave, which somehow helps set the polish so it can be rubbed to a mirrorlike shine. This is not something the women bother with, but the guys trade boot-shining techniques like NBA scores.

It's All Rhubarb to Moi

It's a balmy Saturday morning that finally feels like true early summer instead of endless chilly spring.

The roses are spilling over everywhere all of a sudden--lemony yellow, sunset peach, dusty maroon, lipgloss pink, mysterious greenish-white, smoky lavender, and ruffly ball-gown ivory.
The breezes are blowing the curtains around and the house is redolent with the fragrance of warm strawberries.

Big baskets of the first Jersey strawberries were on offer at the Borough Hall farmers' market on Thursday, along with the season's first garden peas and yes, more rhubarb! Since the Pie Queen Mother--a dedicated jam fancier--is coming to brunch tomorrow, it behooved PQ to pick up a couple boxes, plus a big pink bag of rhubarb, and set about making some strawberry-rhubarb jam. This seemed like a good opportunity to see what French jam star Christine Ferber had to say about the subject, in her fabulously outre book, Mes Confitures.

First, the expected: cut up all the rhubarb into little pieces, mix it with sugar and lemon juice, and let it sit overnight. Same with the strawberries.

In this fashion, you're letting the sugar do the work. Rather than having to boil the fruit for a long time to evaporate the extra water and get the mixture concentrated enough to thicken, you let the hydroscopic action of the sugar do it for you. The sugar itself draws out the excess water from the fruit, leaving you with a bunch of shrunk-down berries and a whole lot of sweetened juice. The juice gets boiled down alone, while the fruit chills out in a colander, listening to the Met opera broadcast and reading the New Republic. When the juice has reduced to a thickish syrup, you throw in the fruit and cook it for a few minutes, just until it's softened and translucent. That way, the fruit keeps its flavor, and the jam tastes like fresh-picked fruit, not cooked to death mush. You can also use less sugar this way, since you get thickness from evaporation, not sugar-concentration. The slow maceration also helps avoid that raw-sugar taste that some homemade jams can have.

So far, so good. Then the next part: dump the strawberries and their liquid into a pan, bring to a boil, then pour back into a bowl and let sit overnight again.

But now...Bring the mixture to a boil five times. Repeat this four times at 8 hour intervals. Oh, Mlle. Ferber, je suis desolee, but I am not hanging around for the next 32 hours boiling my strawberries twenty times. That's just wack. So we're going back to standard strawberry-preserve method, extended slightly for rhubarb: Let the once-boiled strawbs sit around for a while to contemplate their approaching destiny. Then, drain, set the fruit aside, and boil the syrup in one pan. Do the same to the rhubarb in a separate pan. Add the rhubarb, cook until soft, then dump in the strawberry syrup and reserved strawberries. Cook the whole thing for another few minutes until, tut, tut, it looks like jam.

That's the plan, anyway, and maybe I'll even do like Bakerina does and take step-by-step pictures. Stay tuned!

banana birthday pie

It's K.'s birthday today, and because she is truly the girl for me, she has requested a birthday pie instead of the usual cake. First choice was key lime, but alas, my previous source of key limes, the overpriced Garden of Eden grocery store on Montague St, has feijodas and papayas and six kinds of grapes but no key limes. Instead, I'll be whipping up her second choice, banana cream. My old pal the Red Meat Ranger was also a serious banana cream pie fancier, so I have a well-stained Joy of Cooking (1953 edition) to work with. It's so easy it barely needs a recipe--just a stovetop custard of egg yolks, sugar, cornstarch, milk, and vanilla. The only trick is judging when it's cooked enough not to be soup, but not so much that it's started to curdle. Longer than you think you can stand, but don't wander off, not for a minute, is the way I've found. Will post the recipe--and pictures!--once I've made it. And to all the other Taureans and almost Geminis out there, happy birthday!

OK, post-birthday post-mortem. The pie, well, the pie tasted great. But for some reason--i.e., it didn't occur to me to grease the pie pan--the graham cracker crust cemented itself to the pan. And then the custard, which seemed nice and thick when I first made it, transformed itself into runny soup during its stint in the fridge. So I dolloped the thing with fresh whipped cream, sprinkled it with chocolate powder, and then had to serve it with a ladle and a chisel. Oh, well. it did taste good, especially the next morning when we had the leftovers for breakfast. But I'm not posting the recipe til I get the kinks out.

because my mother loves scones

Ginger Scones for Mother's Day

3 cups flour (I used 2 cups all-purpose and 1 cup whole-wheat pastry flour)
2 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup sugar
3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks or 6 oz) butter, cold and cut into cubes
1 cup golden raisins, chopped dried apricots or currants
1 tsp grated lemon rind
2 TB chopped candied (crystallized) ginger
1/2 to 3/4 cup buttermilk
Glaze: 1 egg yolk beaten with 1 TB water

Preheat oven to 400. Sift dry ingredients together. Cut in butter as if making pastry, until mixture looks like pebbly cornmeal. Toss in raisins, rind, and ginger. Drip in buttermilk, stirring and tossing with a fork until mixture is moist and will hold together without being too wet. On a lightly floured board, pat into a round about 3/4 inch thick. Cut into wedges or cut out using a sharp-edged biscuit cutter (of course, a small glass will work fine, too). Glaze with a pastry brush or your fingertips. Place on a cookie sheet and bake until golden brown, 15-20 minutes.

Serve warm with a pot of tea. Drop a slice of candied ginger into your teacup before pouring in the tea.

tuesday afternoon surprises

Have you ever seen a sight as beautiful as the face in a crowd of people that lights up just for you...

Well, I've known all these things, and the joys that they can bring
Now every morning there's a cup of coffee and I wear your ring
And I wear your ring.

-Cowboy Junkies, "Anniversary Song"


July,
and the rich apples
once again falling.
You put them to your lips,
as you were meant to,
Enter a sweetness
the earth wants to give.

Everything loves this way,
in gold honey,
in gold mountain grass,
that carries lightly the shadow of hawks,
the shadow of clouds passing by.

And the dry grasses,
the live oaks and bays,
taste the apples' deep sweetness
because you taste it, as you were meant to,
tasting the life that is yours,

While below, the foghorns bend to
their work,
Bringing home what is coming home,
Blessing what goes.

-Jane Hirshfield, "For a Wedding on Mt. Tamalpais"
(with thanks to Shifra and Stephen)

B-town

Brooklyn's in the house, in the shape of: a box of Jacques Torres chocolates. A bunch of lilacs and a box of laid-yesterday eggs (ah, would that we could all claim the same!) from the Borough Hall farmer's market. A pound of fresh-roasted coffee from D'Amico's. Tomorrow, bread from Mazzola's.

Because I love to stay local, but best of all, because K. should be back here in Brooklyn in time for Sunday brunch!

As the man said,

Thus though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Coffee Cake, the replay

Well, the coffee cake was a hit, especially with the toddlers, and it was worth nearly burning my thighs as I rode the number 2 train with the hot-from-the-oven pan on my lap. I told the ladies I'd brought the cake to make friends, since it was a little early to walk in with a six-pack, to which they replied, in unison, "We're stay-at-home moms! It's NEVER too early!"

Well, then. Back from Real Housewives: Park Slope, I finally got a call from K., now in Kuwait, where (no surprise) it's very hot. ETA for Brooklyn: sometime Sunday, probably late afternoon or evening. Wheeeee!

Cake for Coffee

It's a warm, damp coffeecake morning out there. Going over to a friend's knitting circle this morning, to get expert advice on my toddler poncho, and since I don't know any of these nice knitting ladies, I'm going to bring some baked goods. Always the easiest way to make friends--arrive bearing something all buttery-sugary, hot from the oven. Apple streusel coffee cake, I think. In my dreams, this would be rhubarb, but until the pink stuff comes in, the spongy storage apples will have to do.

Streusel Coffee Cake

2 1/2 cups flour (I used whole-wheat pastry flour, with surprisingly delicious results)
1 TB baking powder
pinch salt
2/3 cup sugar
1 stick (4 oz or 1/2 cup) cold butter, cut in chunks
2 eggs
2/3 cup milk
1 tsp vanila

Fruit for topping (optional): 2 or 3 peeled and sliced apples, peaches or pears, plus juice of 1 lemon

Streusel:
1/2 cup flour
2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup chopped walnuts
2 TB melted butter

Grease an 8 or 9" square pan or something similar. Preheat oven to 375 F.

To make streusel: Mix flour, cinnamon, sugar, and walnuts together. Drizzle in butter and toss with a fork until clumpy and well mixed. Add more butter if it looks too sandy-dry or not clumpy enough. Set aside.

Peel and slice fruit. Toss with lemon juice.

Sift dry ingredients. Cut in butter as if you're making pastry. Beat eggs,milk, and vanilla together in a small bowl or pitcher, then pour into flour mix. Stir gently until just mixed--batter should be very thick and clumpy, like muffin batter. Add a little more milk if you still have any dry patches.

Spread half the dough in pan. Sprinkle lightly with some of the streusel crumbs. Add rest of dough. Top with sliced apples, peaches, or pears, pressing fruit down slightly into dough. Top with rest of streusel. Bake 45 minutes, until golden brown and well puffed. Make sure to poke the center with a toothpick or cake tester to check if it's completely baked. Serve warm.

Spring is Icumen In

Really, other people's love affairs are deeply uninteresting to read about, when they're happy. Misery and breakups, sure. But not the cheerful stuff. So I'll try to spare you the tap-dancing anticipation that I'm going through right now as K. heads down to the airfield to start her very, very long journey back to Brooklyn for her 2-week leave. Suffice it to say that I'm extremely chuffed at the thought of having an actual full-time girlfriend again, rather than just someone I write to alot, and talk to at midnight when I'm mostly asleep face down in the pillow. Someone to go eat at Chestnut with! Someone to make morning coffee for, and actually kiss! This is very exciting.

And speaking of Chestnut, well, I heart Chestnut, and their extremely yummy chicken-mole enchilada, and their peachy Riesling by the glass. I want to go back there with K. to try the halibut with pea vines and black trumpet mushrooms and fava-bean puree, not to mention the chocolate budino. (That's pudding in Italian, in case you were wondering).

Other happy days--the apt is(hopefully) sublet to a couple of nice high school teachers; the lettuce is slowly but surely growing in the garden plot, and I figured out a way to keep the goddamn pigeons from nesting in my fire-escape windowboxes. Bamboo skewers! Sure, it looks a little like some kind of Viet-Cong booby trap, but it works.

Cookie Queen

Well, it was such a beautiful blue spring day yesterday, all I wanted to do was bake a strawberry-rhubarb pie. But the thing about pie is, it's something you've got to share. And not just the pie itself, but the sweet buttery-fruity smell while it's baking, and then the piece cold out of the fridge the next morning with a cup of coffee. So I stood there in the kitchen, realizing that I was out of white flour, and thought that rather than trying to round up B. and other neighborhood pals to eat this pie, I'd just wait til K. got here and we'd make that pie together. In less than a week now, depending on how long it takes before she can get a seat on the next flight out of Central Asia. It will be a long, multi-stopped trip for her, but at the end of it, she'll be here in Brooklyn with me again, and already I'm doing happy little tap dances of anticipation.

Plus, the rhubarb at the store was limp and kind of shriveled--not what you want at something like $6 a pound. Patience, patience is all. So instead I made my favorite chocolate chip cookies, the ones we used to call everything cookies when we were kids, because we used to put just about everything in the cabinet in them--raisins, chocolate chips, nuts, oatmeal, and yes, Rice Krispies.

I particularly like these cookies when they come out well-browned, thin and very crunchy--you'll get little brown crumbs all over your sheets but that browned-butter flavor is worth it. The way to make this happen is to use less flour than the usual back-of-the-Nestle-bag recipe, so the dough is very soft and spreads thin in the oven. I often worry that the dough's too soft and add more flour at the last minute, and then I get these hard little rocks. Have faith. Also, I almost never measure the add-ins--I just dump in as much as I have lying around, or what looks right. Don't be stingy--the whole point of these is to have just enough interstitial cookie to hold together all the goodies.

Everything Cookies Instead of Pie

1 stick (4 oz or 1/2 cup) butter, softened
2/3 cup raw granulated (demerara) sugar (or plain old white sugar, or, even better, 1/3 cup brown sugar and 1/3 cup white sugar)
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 egg

3/4 cup whole-wheat pastry flour
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt

2/3 cup rolled oats (more or less)
1 cup chocolate chips or chunks
1/2 cup chopped nuts (or more, if you want)
1/2 cup raisins (ditto)
some Rice Krispies, if you want

Preheat oven to 350F. Cream butter and sugar(s) together. Beat in egg and vanilla. Mix dry ingredients together in a separate bowl. Stir dry into butter mix, stirring gently until just combined. Add oats, chips, nuts and raisins, stirring until mixed. Drop by spoonfuls onto lightly greased cookie sheet. Flatten each cookie and bake until golden brown, 10-15 minutes. Let cool on rack.

Cherries and Kitchens

So, the cherry trees were total rock stars this weekend at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens.
(This is the view from where I was sitting on the grass, sipping tea from the green-tea-and-blackout-cake stall and talking on my cell to K., who had just rung up for a chat from Afghanistan. Modern technology never ceases to amaze me.)

The number 2 train over there was jammed--I was crammed in next to a teenage girl wearing a kimono and obi over jeans and flip-flops. Inside the park, it was Woodstock for cherry blossoms.


There were lolling picknickers everywhere, with hotdogs and $8 bento boxes of teriyaki chicken and saifun noodles. And the trees were in full, exploding pink blossom, surrounded by every color of lilac. It was fun and then it was just too insanely crowded and I had to leave. But go soon; it's $5 to get into the garden, or free all day on Tuesday.

*****

Want to cook in the Pie Queen's kitchen? Lots of cookbooks and all the tart pans you could want! My perfect Australian subletters just bailed on me, and now I've got a real nice 1 BR in Brooklyn available for the month of June. Email me for more info and pix if you're interested.

on the road and back again

Oh, where has the Pie Queen been?

Out in Bucks County in knee-high wellies, busting sod and digging up bleeding hearts by the roadside. (The plants, that is, tiny wild plants that thrive in damp shady spots surrounded by moss and ferns and water trickling down the rocks).

Up in Warwick, NY with the Pie Queen Mother, making mint sauce for the lamb chops and having Almondine's croissants for Easter breakfast. (Yes, I know it was Passover. I'm a BAD Jew. But my religious family history is a little, well, complicated, and more truthfully, I just hate to pass up any holiday, especially one that involves brunch and marshmallow chicks).

In the downstairs cave at Vintage New York, eating chunklets of cheese, drinking Long Island Syrah (and very good it was too, much to my admittedly California-shaped surprise), and swapping cheesemaker stories with Sasha & Michael, two lovely people who are about to go on a cross-country odessey (Alaska included) to talk to small-scale American cheesemakers. They're calling their project Cheese By Hand and they have just about the cutest website and t-shirts around, so check 'em out, and tune in while they're on the road to hear what's going on in the pastures of this country, and how small artisans--and their fine cud-chewing friends--are surviving in the face of mega-agribusiness. Restaurants Mas and Blue Hill provided some tiny, tasty little spring snacks, including what looked like spinach dip but turned out to be fresh ricotta blended with chopped dandelion greens and ramps with a splash of buttermilk, and my goodness it was tasty.

And speaking of ramps, just why did the NYT give Kim Severson a whole spread to bitch and moan about her distaste for spring greens? OK, lady, you think fiddleheads and ramps are overrated. Fine; don't eat 'em. But don't whine and rant and try to convince everyone else that they blow, just because you'd rather go eat another storage potato or Israeli tomato. (Although I was amused by the snark of describing fiddleheads, etc. as "promising dates that end up making your ex look terrific.") Anyone that thinks nettles can only be boiled "to a soggy mess" has not had the sublime, astroturf-green nettle pasta and nettle soup at San Francisco's Delfina, and since Kim S. did a number of years writing for the SF Chronicle, she's got no excuse. I'm starting to think that she's just a sucky cook. But this does mean more fiddleheads and ramps for the rest of us, yippee, although I do yearn, gently, for the un-weedy California harbingers of spring: asparagus, favas, and baby artichokes. Sigh.

And, of course, I've been in the garden,

aka the square foot of planter space that I have in the new Transit Garden, at 2nd Place and Smith St. I go here daily to pray over the lemon balm and the still stubbornly micro-mini lettuce spriglets. (The radishes, however, are looking quite robust). Back in March, I promised K. a homegrown salad when she came back for leave in May, and now, with the start of her leave just 2 weeks away (yippee!), I'm wondering just how baby a baby-greens salad I can serve.

Matzoh Meal

Not having a Seder to go to this year, I'm throwing my own again, for the first time since I left San Francisco. So today I'm frantically trying to unearth my Seder plate and handwritten Hagaddah (both mysteriously AWOL) as well as hitting the Streit's factory on the Lower East Side for matzoh fresh off the conveyor belt. Recipes to follow, but for now, a reprint of an old Bay Guardian column about Passover. Enjoy!

Ride a bike instead of going to Hebrew school, eat bacon, have a Christmas tree: when I was younger, being Jewish was all about restriction, rule after rule about what you couldn't do. Most difficult of all was Passover: first, the two Seders, during which my sisters and I covertly thumbed ahead in our Hagaddahs to see how many more pages of Hebrew had to elapse before the "festive meal" could be served; then, the week-long prohibition on bread, cookies, pasta -- anything made with grain or even corn syrup—which meant a week of messy sandwiches, chunks of tuna salad falling out from between two crumbling, uneven slabs of matzoh, along with weird candy like Bartons' Almond Kisses (wads of chocolate taffy studded with nuts) and chocolate-covered matzoh (good) and chocolate-covered jelly rings and coconut-covered marshmallows (revolting). By the third day of Passover, all the Jewish kids were veering away from the matzoh boxes stacked up in a corner of the cafeteria, while the non-Jewish kids piled up their trays with them as if they were some kind of exotic saltine.

And just to complicate things, the family on my mother's side wasn't Jewish, so we always got to celebrate a secular Easter up at my grandmother's, dyeing eggs and hunting for chocolate bunnies all around her house. But while there may be kosher-for-passover Pepsi, there will never be kosher-for-Passover Easter candy. If Easter fell during Passover, as it usually did, our jelly beans and Cadbury's creme eggs were off limits. So we'd take them home, watching the yellow marshmallow Peeps slowly hardening until the eight days were up. Oddly enough, after all that anticipation, I don't remember now what it was like to finally peel back those shimmering bits of foil. Instead, when the sun went down on the last day and Passover was over, I remember how the plainest slice of crusty white Italian bread tasted just like heaven.

Now, some twenty years later, much to my own surprise, certain rituals have seeped back into my life. "Why do you call it rigidity?" writes poet Louise Gluck in one of the last poems in her book The Meadowlands. "Can't you call it a taste for ceremony?" The flip side of restriction is tradition, a sense of continuity that pushes the future up from the deep roots of the past. These days, for me, the holidays on the Jewish calendar inspire both a reaching out and a gathering in, collecting scattered friends into a chosen family grouped around a table, sharing a heritage, a history, and a meal.

Although most traditional Seders have some kind of meat at the center--braised lamb, stuffed breast of veal, brisket, roast chicken--it seems particularly appropriate to celebrate this spring festival with a vegetarian meal. Plus, vegetarian food is every anxious host's best friend, because it's a rare guest who'll take a strong moral stance against asparagus. And anyone with a tiny speck of cooking ability can steam some asparagus and bring it along to save you the trouble. Always, there's a tumbled salad full of herbs and small leaves, the karpas or spring greens that fulfill the promise of the earth's rebirth, the weird but inevitable hard-boiled eggs in salt water (basically horrible, but extremely evocative, since they're never eaten at any other time), followed by matzoh balls bobbing in a dill-and-garlic perfumed vegetable broth. Add enough salt, onion, and garlic to the broth as it cooks, and any deprivation felt by the chicken-soup-inclined will be outweighed by the gratitude of the vegetarians finally allowed to enjoy a matzoh ball in a reasonable facsimile of its true habitat.

Last year's sleeper was a wine-dark, blood-red beet salad. Inspired by a pile of vigorous, beautiful beets at that morning's farmers' market, I bought two bunches, boiled them until they were tender and ready to slip shining out of their dull magenta skins. Then, they were hurriedly pushed them aside until I spied a long-ignored bottle of Lebanese pomegranate molasses in the fridge. Made into a quick dressing with olive oil, salt, pepper, and a fast grating of orange rind and a squeeze of orange juice, the intensely tart syryp (made from boiled-down fresh pomegranate juice) turned out to be the perfect foil for the beets' earthy sweetness. (Mediterranean food expert Joyce Goldstein prefers the Cortas brand, which is imported from Lebanon; I found mine at Haig's, on Clement Street in SF; you can find it in Brooklyn at Sahadi's or any of the other Middle Eastern grocery stores along Atlantic Avenue).

Beside the beets goes a huge bowl of charoseth, the sweet, chunky mix of apples, walnuts, cinnamon, and sweet kosher wine. This is the first dish that every kid learns to make in her grandmother's kitchen. By the way, you must use that digusting Concord-grape kosher wine. Nothing else will do, not grape juice, not Baron Herzog cabaret. Two years ago, I went to a Seder where the charoseth--two kinds, both the familar apple-and-walnut mix and a sticky Sephardic one made with dates-- was made by the family's Swedish au pair, and it was still great. (Actually, all the food was made by the au pair, proving that kugel-makers are made, not born).

Last year, a friend called mid-afternoon, just as my pre-dinner jitters--and the stack of dirty bowls in the sink--were rising. I'm having doubts about my kugel, she admitted. I'm sitting shiva for my spongecake, I replied, eyeing the gummy hunks that had hit the table the minute I'd flipped the pan over to cool. It wasn't a conversation I'd ever imagined having, so far from the worn pink Formica of my grandmother's brisket-scented kitchen. But just for a moment, I was back home.

April Snow

It's SNOWING. Right here, right now, puffy fat cottontail-sized flakes, coming down on the daffodils and the Easter bunny displays, floating down past the magnolia blossoms and the frothy, bridal-veil archways of the blooming Bradford pear trees.

Freaky.

But, of course, this means one more snowtime hot chocolate at Cafe Nova. Mmmm. And an excuse to hole up inside with yesterday's leftover chocolate chip-walnut cookies instead of going down to the garden to plant more radish seeds.

BrookLime Pie

From Friday's Escapes section, in the NYTimes:

"TRAVELERS come to the Florida Keys for the sun, the sand and the scenery of America gone Caribbean. They come for bone-fishing in the morning, margaritas at midday and sunset celebrations at dusk. And before it's time to depart, everybody wants a piece of Key lime pie.

Never mind that most Key limes — golf-ball-size and yellowish, in contrast to the larger, greener Persian lime — are grown these days in Mexico. Or that first-rate Key lime pie can now be had in places like Brooklyn."

Clearly, journalist Charles Passy must have been one of the many lining up at the Pie Queen's table during last year's 2nd Annual Brooklyn PIe Social.



Dumbo's no Key West, but the pies are sure tasty:


Notice the little green fruit next to the pie, smaller than golf balls but bigger than marbles--those are real key (aka Mexican) limes. No bottled juice here!

(Not that I'm trying to make K., a true Florida girl, homesick; I'm just counting down the days til she comes back to Brooklyn for her 2-week leave, in less than 6 weeks now. I miss my girl.)

****
And for you locals this evening, it's a 3 dog night at the Brooklyn Museum's free First Saturday program, in honor of the museum's new William Wegman exhibit Funney/Strange.

****
Don't forget, American readers: daylight savings time starts tonight. Set your clocks forward 1 hour before you go to bed. It's your ready-made excuse to skip whatever early-morning activity you'd rather avoid!

I am curious yellow

Finally, finally, the daffodils and crocuses are opening their bright blossoms to the suddenly springlike air, their purple and yellow so clear and crayon-bright they look almost like plastic flowers stuck in the dirt. Jacques Torres's chocolate shop in Dumbo is filled with row after row of chicks and bunnies, along with a few other barnyard animals (my favorite? "Funny Pig Dancin' a Jig!") along with many little bags of the inexplicably popular chocolate-covered cheerios. (I once tried to make rice krispie treats using cheerios instead of the usual RKs. What a disaster that was. Nothing makes oat-flavored compressed sawdust taste better, not even butter and marshmallows.) And it's suddenly time to think about the marzipan treats at Elk Candy on the Upper East Side and the baby Peeps (yes, little tiny baby Peeps! Or so my mother tells me) and Cadbury creme eggs in every Duane Reed.

Meanwhile, I've been holding out with the recipe for that lemon-ginger cake, as lauded by the so-kind Bakerina, and nibbled by me for days and days with countless cups of tea. Popped in a sealed plastic bag, it lasts extremely well, staying moist and lemony-gingery whenever you want it. As mentioned before, this is nothing like gingerbread; rather, it's a moist, rather dense and buttery lemon cake with a hint of ginger.

Drenched Ginger and Lemon Cake
Adapted from Good-Tempered Food, by Tamasin Day-Lewis

3/4 cup (6 oz or 1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter
3/4 cup light brown (muscovado) sugar, packed
2 eggs
grated zest of 2 lemons
2 tsp baking powder
1 1/2 cups flour (I used a mix of all-purpose and whole wheat pastry flour)
1/4 tsp salt
4-5 TB milk
5 knobs of preserved ginger in syrup, drained and finely chopped

Syrup
juice of 2 lemons
2 TB sugar (raw or demerara, if you have it)
1 TB honey
2 TB ginger syrup

Grease a 7 or 8 inch cake pan (I used a deep 7 inch springform pan). Preheat oven to 350F. Cream butter and sugar. Beat in eggs one at a time, followed by zest.Whisk baking powder, flour, and salt together, then stir into butter mix. Add enough milk to make a thick mixture that will drop off a spoon in large gloppy clumps. Stir in ginger. Plop into pan and bake 40-50 minutes.

Let cool for 15 minutes, then turn out onto a rack (right side up) to cool. While cake is still warm, boil up syrup ingredients, letting it boil together for a minute or two. Using a toothpick or skewer, poke holes all over cake. Slowly pour hot syrup all over cake, let it soak in.

I think this is nicest while still warm, or reheated briefly.

Everything that rises must converge

Oh, I heart Fran Gage and her foolproof souffle recipe. After the chermoula disaster, I needed something to restore my kitchen faith, and a lovely little dinner of cheddar-cheese souffle, green beans with lemon, and tiny roasted potatoes with rosemary did just that. For once, I didn't undercook the souffle, so I didn't have to scoop apologetically around a still-wet middle. It was puffy and brown and just savory enough from the cheddar and some minced scallions, very nice with the blanched beans turned around in a hot pan with butter and lemon zest and a spritz of juice. Alongside went some marble-sized potatoes lightly parboiled and then roasted with olive oil, fleur de sel and a crumble of rosemary. Afterwards, a salad of red-leaf lettuce with jelly-tender roasted beets, toasted walnuts, and slivered crunchy raw fennel, dressed with a thick drizzle of pomegranate molasses, balsamic vinegar, and olive oil.

And for dessert, the Drenched Ginger and Lemon Cake, warmed up and served with tea and chips of June Taylor's candied Meyer Lemons, leftover from making Shifra and Stephen's wedding cake in January. The cake was buttery-moist ("wodgy" as Bakerina called it) in the center and crunchy-brown around the edges. Despite the four knobs of preserved ginger in the batter and the ginger syrup used in the drenching, it tasted mostly like lemon cake, which is still a pretty excellent thing. You could up the ginger ante with some grated fresh ginger or a spoonful of dried, but it's quite lovely as it is.

And Bakerina told me all about the joys of Eureka Springs, and how to manage gloopy bread doughs, and much more. Tea was sipped, prosecco was drunk, and now, even sending her home to Queens with enough cake for her husband to have both a late-night snack and breakfast the next morning, I've still got a coffee-sized chunk left for my own morning repast.

Foolproof Cheese Souffle

2 TB butter
2 1/2 TB flour
1 cup milk
4 extra-large eggs, separated
4 oz cheese --soft goat cheese or grated hard cheese, like cheddar or Gruyere
1 TB or so of minced chives or scallions
salt and pepper

Butter an 8-inch souffle dish (aka a straight-sided, deep ceramic baking dish). Preheat oven to 375F. In a smallish, heavy pot, melt the butter. Add the flour and whisk like crazy, letting it cook until it looks smooth and thick and smells slightly biscuity but doesn't color, about 2 minutes. Dump in the milk and whisk madly as it bubbles up and thickens, 2-3 minutes. Take off the heat and let it cool for a few minutes. Whisk in the egg yolks one at a time. Stir in the grated cheese and chives. Add salt and pepper to taste. Set aside.

Now, either wash and dry your whisk very well and then whisk (or use an electric hand-held or standup mixer) until your egg whites form soft, droopy peaks when the beater is lifted. Fold a scoop of whites into the cheese mixture, then fold the rest in quickly and lightly. It doesn't have to be uniform; you should be able to mix it in just a few strokes. The egg whites are what will give you the fluff, so don't deflate them by over-mixing. Pour into dish and pop into the oven.

NO PEEKING! Let it cook for at least 30 minutes. Then check; it should be well-golden-browned and beautifully puffy. Shake it a bit; center should be a bit jiggly without being soupy. Serve immediately, as it begin to collapse shortly after being removed from the oven.

This souffle won't form a huge brown mushroom-head, but it does puff up nicely and has a lovely spongy-fluffy texture.

Chermoula, part two

Well, it turns out, not surprisingly, that Middle-Eastern food expert Claudia Roden knows more about green olives, preserved lemons, and chermoula than I. Chermoula, it seems, is usually used for fish, and preserved lemons for chicken, which is probably why Tamasin Day-Lewis put the two together in her chicken chermoula recipe. Roden's fish chermoula formula is similar to Day-Lewis's--with a couple of crucial differences. It's great to bake the fish with olives, she says--use the green ones, but boil them first, for 10 or 15 minutes in a lot of water, to take the bitterness out. Oh.

And the good folks at Chowhound swear that preserved lemons, made properly, have an intensely lemony, floral fragrance and flavor, not the nasty bleach-compound that I tasted. They were quite smug in their insistance that the lemons be made at home--which I'm all for, since given space, time, and enough kitty litter, I'd not only bake my own bread and make my own jam but pick the fruit and build my own bread oven, just because why not make life slower and harder?-- except that it takes a good month in a jar for a lemon to get itself preserved, and I only had a day.

Last night, I was tempted to get another bunch of cilantro and parsley and start over, olive- and lemon-less, but this morning, well, the cheese souffle idea is looking pretty good, if only because I know my souffle recipe (from Fran Gage's Bread and Chocolate) is foolproof. I have made it everywhere and it always works, even in an Italian oven the size of a radio.

And out in California, it's snowing! And L.E. (formerly Dan) Leone is busy making chicken soup for his chickens.

Revolting Food

Well, I've finally enticed the fine Bakerina to cross boroughs and join me for dinner in Brooklyn tomorrow. Knowing we share an oft-ridiculed fondness for British cookbooks, I got out my well-loved but never-used copy of Tamasin Day-Lewis's (yes, she's Daniel's sister, and yes, she's equally foxy, plus she cooks. I knew I liked her when she not only gave a fabulous-sounding recipe for homemade Bloody Mary mix but swore that it was her Sunday-morning elixir, downed religiously post 8-mile run and bath. Damn. But I digress) book Good -Tempered Food (as opposed to, say, Bad-Tempered Food?), finally choosing Chicken Chermoula with Preserved Lemons, accompanied by my own crunchy citrus salad with blood oranges, fennel, and Meyer lemon vinaigrette, followed by Drenched Lemon-Ginger Cake. So far, so good. Went out to the produce store, hit Sahadi's for preserved lemon, ginger in syrup, coriander seeds and paprika, plus thick Greek yogurt and green olives.

Into the kitchen with the food processor, buzzing the toasted cumin and coriander seeds, the paprika, the carefully de-stemmed cilantro and parsley, the chopped onion and garlic into a pungently Moroccan-smelling paste. Then, the green olives and the preserved lemon go into the mix. A couple tablespoons of olive oil, then the taste test.

Oh my god. It's disgusting. Bitter, bitter, salty, and then somewhere in the background, cumin and parsley, struggling vainly to be heard. I taste an olive on its own, one of the big green Greek jobs from Sahadi's well-regarded olive bar. Blechhh! It's incredibly bitter, as if it hadn't finished curing yet. The lemon is worse--it smells like bleach and Lemon Pledge, and tastes like them too, if Lemon Pledge was also really, really salty and bitter. They have destroyed my chermoula rub. Bitterness cannot be assuaged; if I put this on anything, that thing will be ruined.

Into the trash it goes. Grrrr. But tell me, are preserved lemons supposed to taste like that? If so, why does everyone rave about them so?

We're having cheese souffle now. And although I'm a little burned on the lovely Tamasin, I'm going to go ahead with the cake today, so that if it blows, it can be replaced.

Happy Spring!

Woke up this morning to coffee, homemade hamantaschen (after all that hoo-ha, I think my original recipe is still the best--and it rolls out! wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles!), and a call from K., wishing me a happy spring. With the weather back to pom-pom hat temperatures, I'd completely forgotten that the vernal equinox was arriving today. But icy winds (and, if you're in the midwest, snow) notwithstanding, it's spring! Three tulips started pushing up through the cold dirt in a pot out on the balcony a few days ago. Now, if they could retract, they would, but instead they're just hunkering down, looking like they'd like to find someone to blame for last week's deceptively balmy invitation.

In celebration, I went down the 2nd Place Garden, clutching 16 pounds of fresh potting soil and a couple of packets of seeds: a mesclun mix bought in Paris 3 years ago and some Easter-egg radishes from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden--so-called because the round little roots come in a bouquet of spring pastels, including rose, lilac, pale pink, and white. WIth my crumpled garden gloves on, still stiff with last year's dirt, I sprinkled tiny lettuce seeds and poked down pebbly, Advil-colored radish seeds. A week or so and they should start sprouting. I've promised K. a homegrown salad for her birthday dinner when she comes back on leave in May, dressed with last summer's hot pink chive-blossom vinegar.

Something else for the future backyard (because surely there will be one, one of these days): a wood-burning outdoor oven, made in a weekend, from cinderblock, firebrick, sand, and...kitty litter? Yep, you want to make a clay oven--sturdy, cheap, and perfect for baking anything from pizza and bread to pie and pork shoulder, you just get yourself to the supermarket and buy a few bags of the cheapest house-brand kitty litter. Mix it with water, and the little granules will melt into smooth greenish clay. Learning this, and many other useful details, made the hour+ ride on the local train up to the Bronx on Saturday worth it. It was Greenbridge's annual Grow Together, a day of gardening and community-building workshops, on every possible topic from the upcoming Farm Bill to making your own twig lampshades and kestrel houses. And now I know how to make an bread oven out of kitty litter! That's true urban homesteading.

Elsewhere in the news: Prairie Home Companion, the Movie. Another Robert Altman ensemble piece, and I'm just hoping it's playing in Eureka Springs this June. One question, though: Lindsay Lohan?

And as promised, Trader Joe's has opened on Union Square. It looks swell, but I can't tell you what the merch is like, because there was an endless line down the block on Sunday afternoon just to get in. I like attractively priced trail mix and frozen pot stickers just as much as the next girl, but I am not standing in line just to go to the grocery store. Come on, people! Amy's dedicated-foodie pal Heather, however, checked it out on Saturday, and said the prices seemed San-Francisco-style--they're not doing the Dean and Deluca gouge, shockingly enough.

Eating chocolate cake from a bag...

...with Roxxie, of Girl Jock fame, sitting outside Cafe Doma on Perry Street, huddled over cups of tea like the Little Match Girl as the wintery winds whipped around us. The crocuses were regretting their eagerness for spring right about now, but inside Magnolia Bakery it was sugary-warm as always. Being a savvy former West Villager, I quickly steered Roxxie to the best thing in the house: the little squashed-looking flourless chocolate cakes, which are fresh and moist and very chocolatey, and umpteen times better than the suck-ass cupcakes. Roxxie got my West Village trifecta: tea and champagne at Turks and Frogs (where i had to go to pick up the bag full of seeds and garden info that I'd left there on my last visit), dinner at August (which was suiting the weather with Eastern-European Jewish grandma food: kasha with wild mushrooms, beef borscht with barley, and chicken in a pot), and more tea and those chocolate cakes snuck from the bag at a table at Doma. We talked about all the things people we knew from San Francisco used to do at parties. Naughty things. Things that New Yorkers don't do because they are too busy discussing real estate. Not that all the crazy people aren't moms and/or dads now, but still. We are rich in stories, and friendship.

Blooming Brooklyn

Walking down to the river today through the wind-scudded sunlight, with frothing waves in the wake of the ferries skipping over the broad beam of the shining water, I spied the first crocuses pushing up and opening their crayon-colored blooms, Easter-chick yellow and jellybean purple. Green whips of daffodil and tulip leaves are unfurling too, no flowers yet but just the sight of spring green is enough to give my hibernating winter heart a lift. The bulbs I planted last November around the community garden on 2nd Place, just before the ground froze, are coming up too, in orderly rows, interspersed with what look to be hyacinths. The dusty miller in my own little plot weathered the winter surprisingly well. Everything else--the rosemary, the lavender--looks stalky and brown and dead, but I have hopes that, stroked by the sun, they will rejeuvenate. The camomile is already sending out runners topped with feathery whorls of green.

Coming back from last Saturday's "Making Brooklyn Bloom" day at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, I had a bag filled with seeds (mixed lettuces, bitty sweet peas--the flower, not the vegetable--cucumbers, Easter-egg radishes, more lettuce) and stacks of pamphlets and brochures on everything from canning to composting. A handy thing to know, if you're gardening in Brooklyn: If you can get out to far eastern Brooklyn on April 8-9th or 22-23rd, you can haul off all the free compost you can carry from the Spring Creek Composting Facility. More info here; bring your own shovel and bags.

But back to the conference, which was free, and jammed, and full of tons of excellent information. My only complaint was the brevity of the thing--you could only sign up for 2 workshops (1 in the morning, 1 in the afternoon), which meant I had to skip the history of agriculture in NYC and the secrets of container gardening in order to get an audience with the sassy Miss Classie, canner divine. It was worth it, though, if only for the taste of her slow-cooked pear-and-brandy preserves. Canning is the road to love, Miss Classie insists; can and the gentleman (or the ladies) will be turning up on your doorstep, following you down the street, and stealing jars out of your kitchen when your back is turned.

I was sitting on a stone wall, watching the tail-flicking, tangerine-colored koi in the reflecting pool and writing to K. (who just returned from a helicopter-and-convoy trip down a few hours south, where herds of camels browsed along the road and large sections of the map were marked merely "numerous scattered villages") when B. rang up, having celebrated the balmy day with a stroll across the Brooklyn Bridge, over through Battery Park and up to the Hudson piers. Having no plans, I hopped a train and met him for white wine and smoky eggplant dip at the alluring little Turks and Frogs on 11th St off Greenwich. Located far down what looks like a mostly residential West Village street, this secret-feeling hideaway makes a good first (or last) stop for any West Village date, although the flickering candlelight and small tables tucked in corners will leave no doubt as to your intentions for the rest of the evening.

Having no such intentions, B. and I kept wandering, past the wonderful August, along Bleeker to West Houston and through Soho, trying (and failing) to get a table at the attitude-stacked Arturo's, finally ending up at the always-reliable Fanelli's for a burger and a croque-monsieur. Then across the bridge to home, to bake a puffy gold loaf of dill bread using the fragrant wad of dill dried from B.'s garden last summer, to spread with cream cheese and eat with scrambled eggs on a cool gray rainy Sunday morning.

Turks & Frogs. 323 W 11th St, between Greenwich and Washington Sts. (212) 691-8875.
Fanelli's, 94 Prince St. at Mercer St. (212) 226-9412.

blueberry mountain

I wanted to go over to KGB tonight and listen to Mark Kurlansky read about oysters over a glass of red wine in a red-painted room. But that would have meant getting Manhattan-presentable: the pointy boots, the non-saggy jeans, something besides the big charcoal sweater of K.'s that I've been living (and sleeping) in for the past week or so. Comb my hair, brush my teeth, put on lipstick, walk to the subway, buy yet another Metrocard, tromp along the buzzing East Village streets: I had planned to do all these things. But then it was 7 o'clock and I was still reading the story about Jehovah's Witnesses in the latest issue of the Oxford American, eating grits with smoked paprika, garlic and broccoli and again, not being able to leave the house. It's winter hibernation.

So then I was trying to salvage the evening by working on a new book idea, going through some old work to see if anything's worth filching (since it's not plagarism if you steal from yourself). Ranging through an old column about gay-pride week (or month, if you live in San Francisco), I found paens to the Go-gos, a description of girls wading through the amber afternoon as if they'd been dipped in butterscotch, and then, right after the part about letting the blueberry muffins cool in the pan for a few minutes before slathering them with the butter, the words

Cannibal

Obsession

appeared stacked one on top of another, apropos of absolutely nothing.

This is why I don't take drugs.

Now, this column--about lady-lovin' and the joys of morning-after blueberry muffins--actually ran in the Bay Guardian some seven years ago or so, and I'm sure there was nothing about cannibals in there. I don't have an obsession with cannibals, and I would think, given their tastes, that blueberry muffins would be low on the list of obsessions for actual cannibals themselves. I'm a little thrown, to say the least.

****

And speaking of obsessions, I feel kind of bad now for slagging so hard on that oil-based hamentaschen recipe. While they did taste pretty blah fresh out of the oven, those cookies got magically better after sitting around a while. I added a few drips of lemon extract to the batter before I baked a second batch, and they taste surprisingly good with a cup of tea, three days later. So maybe these would be the hament. of choice for mailing long distances, as long as you upped the lemon/orange rind quotient and added a little lemon extract too. I still think the texture of the dough is way too slick, so an oil-reduction experiment is in order before I post the recipe.

Ours is not to question why...

...platinum-topped, hottie butch pastry chef Elizabeth Faulkner of Citizen Cake is going hand-in-meringue with the Tourism Australia to fill San Francisco's Union Square with the world's largest pavlova--largest, presumably, only because it has never crossed anyone else's mind to make a pavlova bigger than their head. Still, if anyone's working downtown and has a camera, please snap a picture for the Pie Queen.

World's Biggest Pavlova
Tuesday 3/7/06
1:30-3pm
Union Square, SF

...to be followed by a chocolate tasting at Citizen Cupcake (on the 3rd floor of the Virgin Megastore at Stockton and Market) from 3-5pm.

Any thoughts from Esther and the other Aussies out there on this example of west coast/down under mind-meld?

And on the comparatively sober East Coast, a food-themed reading at the sexy KGB Bar on Tuesday, March 7. Readers are Mark Kurlansky, a man who likes to think long and hard about one thing. His unlikely best seller Cod: A History of the Fish that Changed the World set off a swarm of copycat single-subject tomes on everything from dirt to air. He's back with The Big Oyster: History of the Half Shell, a New York-centric history of Diamond Jim Brady's favorite bivalve, from which he'll be reading tonight. He'll be joined by Gabriella Gershenson from the New York Press.

KGB Bar
85 E. 4th St, second floor
7-9pm
3/7/06
Free, but bring cash for cocktails, and buy the Pie Queen a drink while you're there.

The Quest for Hamentaschen, Part 2

The Hamentaschen-A-Rama, chez Pie Queen, has hit a snag! Marcy Goldman, usually so reliable, really screwed the pooch with her recipe for Bubbe's Oil-and-Orange cookies, made with vegetable oil instead of butter. The dough was slick and mushy, way too wet to roll out even after several hours in the fridge. When patted out and baked, it turned out bready and bland. Worst of all, it made vast quantities of dough. I hate wasting my great fillings on such a dull wrapper, which means, APO mailing be damned, I'm going to make another buttery batch of Susan's HamenT. to send to K.

Until then, I'll be staying warm in bed with my hot-water bottle, snug in its little knitted cozy. If you (or your sleeping partner) has perpetual icicle feet, this is the answer. No more ice cube feet! The water bottle alone is not enough; it may be warm, but it feels medicinal and rubbery, not what you want in your bed. (Not like that, anyway.) What you want to do is rummage through your yarn stash and pull out any abandoned half-balls of orphaned yarn. All you need to do is knit up two rectangles (keeping in mind that the bottle will plump out when it's filled), with some way of tightening the top around the neck. I knitted in a few holes a couple inches below the top, then wove in a braided strand of yarn. Mine is mostly blue, with a pink square on one side where the blue yarn ran out. On a chilly night, it's like having a kitty sleeping on your feet--a kitty that doesn't mind being shoved down under the covers at the foot of your bed, and who'll never crawl up and start meowing fish breath in your face at 6am. Dorky? Yes. But in a sweetly demented English way--and keep in mind I got this idea from the posh shops in Notting Hill, where the pink cashmere bottle covers with cute red hearts knitted into the front had 50-pound price tags. When your feet are toasty, all's right with the world.

The Quest for Hamentaschen, Part 1

Clouds so swift and rain falling in...

The first entry in this year's Hamentaschen Sweeps comes from Raymond Sokolov's The Jewish American Kitchen. (Actually, according to the credits on the cover, Susan Friedland did the recipes for this book, so we'll say thanks to Susan first. Thanks, Susan!) The ingredient list may look like every other cookie dough on the planet, but check out the method. Instead of creaming the butter and sugar, adding the eggs, then stirring in the flour, this dough is made like a rich tart pastry. The butter is cut into the flour, then the eggs and lemon rind are stirred in to make a soft, rich dough.

Now, the caveats. Even though I chilled the dough very well, it was really, really sticky when I went to roll it out. If this happens to you too, be sure to flour your counter really well. I tossed some flour over a sheet of wax paper, sprinkled a little more flour over the dough, then topped with another piece of paper. This solved the rolling problem, but the dough was still so soft it was hard to cut out. I pretty much had to imprint circles on the dough, scrape them off the paper with a spatula, sprinkle each one with flour, then hand-pat the crumpled dough wads into more-or-less even circles. But once baked, they looked cute and were so buttery-lemony and delicious that any amount of fuss was worth it.

And a question: has anyone ever had yeast-raised hamentaschen? Presumably, these pre-date the chemically-leavened ones we're familiar with today. I've never had them, but recipes (usually for a brioche-style dough enriched with milk, butter, and eggs) turn up in many books; they sound like a wonderful breakfast treat.

Susan's Hamentaschen

2 cups flour
1/2 cup sugar (can increase if you like a sweeter cookie, to 2/3 cup)
1 tsp baking powder
pinch salt
1/2 cup (4 oz/1 stick) cold butter, cut into cubes
2 eggs, beaten
2 tsp finely grated lemon rind

Apricot and/or prune filling (see below)
Egg wash (1 egg beaten with 1 TB water)

Sift or whisk flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt together. Cut in cold butter as if making pastry, using a food processor or a pastry blender. Dough should look pebbly. Pour beaten egg into a measuring cup or small pitcher and add to flour mixture a little at a time. Mix and add egg until a soft dough is formed. You may not need all the egg; you want your dough to hold together well but not be so moist you can't roll it out. Mix in lemon rind. Form into a ball, wrap tightly and chill well--at least several hours or overnight.

Preheat oven to 350 F. Roll out dough on a well-floured board or between two pieces of wax paper--it should be a little thicker than you'd use for pie pastry. Using a glass or a biscuit cutter, cut dough into 2- to 3-inch circles. Lift circles onto an ungreased baking sheet. Scoop a dab of apricot or prune filling onto each circle, then fold sides in and bottom up to form a triangle with a small peek of filling showing in the center. Using a pastry brush, brush dough lightly with egg wash. Bake 15-20 minutes, until pale golden brown. Let cool on a rack, keeping in mind that filling is VERY hot when first removed from the oven. They are delicious warm, but give that filling a little time to cool off first. Makes around 20-30 cookies, depending on size.

Apricot Filling

Why this, and not jam? Because jam is way too wet, and will make your cookies soggy.

7 oz. apricot paste (available in Middle Eastern grocery stores)
1/8 cup lemon juice
1/8 cup orange juice
scant 1/4 cup sugar
1 cup golden raisins

Pull apricot paste into pieces. Put pieces into a small, heavy-bottomed pot with juices, sugar, and raisins. Simmer over very low heat for 10-12 minutes, until apricot paste is softened and raisins are plump. Stir frequently to keep from scorching. Remove from heat, let cool for 10 minutes, then puree. This makes enough for several batches of cookies, with some left over for toast. Kept in a covered jar in the fridge, it lasts a very long time.

Prune Filling

2 cups pitted prunes
1 cup raisins
1/3 cup lemon juice
1/4 cup orange juice
1/2 cup water
1/4 tsp cinnamon

Mix ingredients in small, heavy-bottomed pot. Follow instructions, above, cooking until prunes are softened and raisins are plumped. Cool and puree as above.

Upsy Daisy

Returning from three days of snow and lake-whipped winds up in Rochester, it actually came as a complete surprise that today is, in fact, March first. As in coming in like a lion, going out like a lamb. As in, next door to April. As in, nearly spring!

Of course, reading the posts I was writing last year at this time, there should be plenty of chilly, wet, and generally filthy weather ahead before we get to the sticky little leaves of spring and the hordes of nodding daffodils and all that. But still--not February, March! And there are lots of things to look forward to, to wit:

First Saturday at the Brooklyn Museum, Sat. March 4, 5-11pm. The museum gets shaking to a Cajun/Brazilian beat this Saturday, with live music, samba lessons, Cajun storytelling and performance, art projects for kids, tours of the museum, and more. I seem to remember plastic cups of red wine in here, too. Really fun, FREE, and filled with a roaming cross-section of happy Brooklynites.

The Brooklyn Botanic Garden's 25th Annual Making Brooklyn Bloom, a day of lectures, panels, and workshops, is happening on Sat. March 11, from 10am to 4pm. This year, the theme is Keeping It Fresh! City Gardeners Grow Food--a subject always close to my country-yearning heart. The workshops will cover all kinds of cool stuff, from container gardening for fruits and vegetables to an agricultural history of New York City. Plus canning! Show up at the Palm House at 10am for coffee and registration.

Trader Joe's, opening March 17th (according to the Post, and what, you'd doubt them?) next to PC Richards at 14th St and 3rd Ave in Manhattan. Oh joy. Will they be as good and as cheap as they are in San Francisco? I don't need to take the enamel off my teeth with 2 Buck Chuck, but their house-brand dried fruits and nuts, their juices, their wine and cheese and crackers and pantry staples--they're all good.

And on March 13 and 14, Purim! Which means--hamentaschen!! (My religious affiliation? Baking Jew.) There's a recipe here from last year (look in the archives under "Queen Esther", 3/23/05) that's always worth making, especially if you go to Sahadi's on Atlantic Avenue, get a little cellophane-wrapped packet of apricot paste (they're to the right of the main door, on the lower shelf) plus some prunes and raisins from the bulk jars, and make your own tasty lekvars.

Happy as I've been with my usual recipe (from Marcy Goldman's excellent book, A Treasury of Jewish Holiday Baking) still I yearn for that one true best-ever hamentaschen. Right now I've got a very simple, pastry-style dough chilling in the fridge, with prune and apricot fillings cooling on the counter. Will report back and post the recipe, if it's tasty. Next up: Goldman's orange-and-oil (no butter) version, which I'm hoping might survive the 10-day trip to K. better than a typical butter cookie. Are there many Jews out there on the base? Probably not, I'm guessing, but you never know. Might just have to throw in a couple of noisemakers, just in case.