Pie Queen Planet

Thanksgiving is really the most pie-centric holiday on the American calendar, the only holiday that is truly incomplete without a pie or three. Even people whose familarity with their oven doesn't get closer than eating cookie dough straight from the tube find themselves strangely drawn to the idea of baking their very own pie.

Or maybe that's just my romantic notion; probably most people who Do Not Bake don't bake on the third Thursday of November, either. Or they hit the bakery, or the liquor store, or the Mrs. Smith section of the supermarket freezer. But woe to the Thanksgiving hoster who doesn't, somehow, provide pie of some provenance. Remember how Peppermint Patty freaks out at Snoopy's popcorn-and-toast dinner? "Where's the cranberry sauce, Chuck? Where's the PUMPKIN PIE???" Don't let that happen to you.

One of the tenents of Pie Queen Planet is that ANYONE can make a homemade pie without using canned filling or one of those crap-ass premade crusts. Even if you've never made your own crust, you can. How come no one ever freaks out about making the filling? Crust strikes fear in so many hearts when it doesn't have to.

First, yes, shortening is easier to deal with. But here on PQ Planet, we make butter crusts, unless we're at someone else's house and there's already an open can of shortening lying around. I can't deny having dipped into the Crisco on occasion. But butter should always predominate. Remember, hydrogenated vegetable shortening is a freaky industrial product (even if it's the new trans-fat-free kind) and tastes like greasy nothing. Why eat fat if it doesn't even taste good? Yes, a butter crust is a little fussier. But it tastes a million times better, and it's a natural product, not something cooked up in a lab.

What kind of butter? If you can get "European-style" butter, go for it. This is the butter you've been waiting for--butter with more fat. This butter has less water in it than regular butter, making crusts browner, crunchier, tender and more delicious all around. If you're lucky enough to live in the Bay Area, try Straus's organic European-style butter. Fantastic, and made by a really nice family dairy up in Marin. Milk from happy cows--I've seen 'em.

Your piecrust's biggest friends are cold and time. Keep your butter very cold and your water iced, and be sure to allow enough time for your dough to chill before and after rolling.

Do you have to do a lot of fancy things involving freezing and rolling the butter? Many hotshot cookbook authors, like Shirley "Cookwise" Corriher and Rose Levy "Bible" Bernbaum, go through these extremely elaborate hoo-has around piecrusts, wherein they tell you to freeze half the butter, roll your butter out into long shards and so forth. I've tried these methods, and honestly, they didn't make a piecrust any better than the standard method. All they do is convince once-a-year bakers that pie crusts can only be made by those with advanced baking degrees from Pie Crust U. I'm a big believer in tradition in this case. Simple works. As long as your butter is cold and you don't completely maul the dough, you're going to have a lovely crust.

Actually, more than fancy butter, what you really need is good music, a decent amount of clear space for rolling, 2 quart-size zip-loc plastic bags for chilling the dough, and a nice heavy rolling pin (although I have rolled out many a pie with a wine bottle--even better if you get to drink the wine afterwards). Listening to Arlo Guthrie singing Alice's Restaurant, Hank Williams and a particular Poi Dog Pondering album has become de rigueur for my Thanksgiving pie making, and I've got to burn a CD of said songs to take to the PQ Mother's house right now. A wide, long offset spatula (which looks a bit like a long, flexible palate knife, with a stepped handle) is also a great boon for getting the dough off the table without tearing. I've heard good things about Silpat mats, but they seem bizarrely expensive for something so ugly, so I've never used one.

So, the recipe. You can really make your own decision about how much butter you put in. It's up to you. In general, a crust with the larger amount will be very rich and delicious, and correspondingly trickier to work with. Less butter will be a little less insane and mellower. If you're already wound up with holiday anxiety, use less and don't stress. I am going to try out a butter-lard crust at some point this holiday, but probably not before Friday, because I don't think my quasi-vegetarian veterinarian sister wants pig fat in her pie. (I'm now also feeling really bad for buying that lard, once I'd taken a look at the incredibly cute piggies on the Flying Pigs website. K. has suggested starting a pig farm that uses only liposuction, but I don't think that was the fat-removal method in this case.)

Basic All-Butter Pie Crust

Now, I'm not going to reassure you and call this "fool-proof" or anything comforting like that. Sometimes this crust is a right pain in the arse, sticking to everything and hating to roll out smoothly. Other times it's just ducky. But luckily, no matter how much drama it puts you through beforehand, it does always taste really good once it's baked. So hang in there. This makes plenty for a 9 or 10 inch double crust, with some extras for cute little cut out leaves or whatever. Extra dough also freezes well.

2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp sugar
anywhere from 1 1/2 to 2 sticks (6 to 8 oz, 12 to 16 TB) butter
6 to 8 tablespoons of water, maybe a little more or less; you can also replace 1 tb water with cider vinegar
Glaze: 1 egg yolk mixed with 2 TB water

Whisk flour, salt, and sugar together. Chop your butter into cubes and toss into the flour. Using a pastry blender or your fingertips, cut or rub the butter into little flat chips coated with flour. Do this until the mix looks like dry oatmeal flakes with a few bigger pebbly bits. Sprinkle in water, a few TB at a time. Lift and scoop with a fork to moisten all the flour. Stop adding water when you can gently squeeze together a ball of dough in your hand without it falling apart when you open your hand. You definitely don't want it wet and gloppy, but it does need to stick together.

You can also use the food processor; use the pulse button to chop the butter in short bursts, and make sure not to overprocess. Leave the butter a bit chunkier than you think you should.

Divide the dough in half. Put each half into a zip-loc bag, and press down with the heel of your hand through the plastic to make a flat round. Squeeze any excess air out of the bag and seal. Toss into the fridge and let chill for a few hours, if possible. Otherwise, put into the freezer for 45 minutes or so and hope for the best.

Sprinkle a big clean surface lightly with flour. Rub your rolling pin with flour, too. Take 1 dough bag out of the fridge. Let it warm up for a few minutes, then take it out and flop into onto your work surface. Starting in the middle, roll out to the edges. Imagine little arrows pointing outward, and follow them. Don't roll back and forth like you're paving a road; radiate outward like you're making sun rays. Every few rolls, slide your spatula under the dough and give it a quarter-turn to keep it from sticking, adding a little more flour underneath if necessary. This is key, so don't skip this step. Also, try to expand your round evenly, so it will fill your pie pan properly.

When your dough is about 2 inches bigger around than the bottom of your pie plate, loosen it gently one more time. Working quickly, fold it in half, then in half again. Drape the quarter-folded dough into the lower quadrant of your pie pan, and unfold. Patch any tears and press gently into the pan, and trim off the excess dough. Wrap in plastic or foil, and stick back in the fridge or freezer while you get your filling together and roll out the top crust.

Once you're got your filling in the crust, drape your top crust over and trim off any excessively drapey bits. If possible, tuck the excess top crust under the edge of the bottom crust (between the bottom crust edge and the edge of the pie plate, if you get my drift.) Or just pinch them together. Now, you can make pretty scallops by gently pinching the crust edges together between your thumbs (along the outer edge) and forefingers (inner edge), or pinch harder to make little tight peaks. Cut some steam slits in the top crust. Brush with glaze and sprinkle with a little extra sugar for a professional-looking shine. Slip into a preheated oven with a cookie sheet underneath to catch the drips. Keep an eye on the pie as it bakes, and be sure to drape foil over the edges if they're browning too fast. Make sure to bake until the crust is a nice golden brown; no one likes a pallid crust, and everyone will think you just chickened out and used that cheap shortening that stays limp and pale no matter what.

Take out and let cool for at least a couple hours, to give the filling time to cool down and firm up. Don't refrigerate leftover pie, as the crust will get flabby.

Tomorrow: Filling!

(No) Knead to know

So, vast amounts of virtual ink have been spilled regarding Mark Bittman and Jim Lahey's 'no-knead' bread recipe. Being a sucker for fabulous bread, especially if it comes out of my own kitchen, I had to try it, and now, by loaf #3, I think I'm getting the hang of it.

In case you've been following other news (Iraq, the TomKat wedding, where to get lard for your Thanksgiving pie crusts*) the deal is very simple: a really wet dough made from 3 cups (15 oz) of flour, salt, yeast, and water, stirred up and left to rise without kneading for 12-18 hours. The dough is shaped on a floured towel, left to rise for another 2 hours. Meanwhile, a heavy pot with a lid (like cast iron or enameled cast iron) is heated up in a 450 F oven for at least 30 minutes. The dough is flung into the hot pot, the lid clapped on, and the bread baked for 30 minutes lid on, and another 15 minutes lid off. The combo of wet (or slack) dough, a very long, slow rise, and a very hot, enclosed baking environment results in a bread that's very close to a typical "artisanal" loaf, with a moist, open, holey crumb and a thin, crackly crust.

I still haven't tried making it with all white flour, since I prefer whole grains, but here's what I've learned:

More salt. The original recipe calls for 1 1/4 tsp, but that's not enough, and the bread tasted flat. I've gone up to a scant 2 tsps of fine-grain sea salt, which seems to be perfect.

A little less water. 1 1/2 cups is great, and makes a dough that's slack but can still be handled without tons of excess flour.

Active dry yeast, rather than instant yeast, is fine. I dissolve mine in the water and let it sit for a few minutes to wake up. After reading that instant yeast was more potent, I increased my yeast to 1/2 tsp; however, this made a dough that was so lively (relatively speaking) that I had to stir it down after about 9 hours, and let it rise again for the second 6 to 8 hour stretch. I did another loaf with 1/4 tsp, and it still rose very well.

Rubbing the rising towel with rice flour works very well, as the dough doesn't stick like it would to regular flour. If I had a peel, though, I'd let it rise on the peel, as getting the dough from the heavily floured towel onto the baking stone or pot meant flinging flour everywhere, and deflating the risen dough somewhat.

Baking: I had very good results dropping the dough into my bitsy (2 qt) Le Creuset pot (except that, at 500F, the bottom crust burned) and even better results by using my baking stone and an inverted cast-iron dutch oven at 450 F. I also slashed the crust with a razor blade before baking, which seemed to help with oven spring. Plus, slashing the cross gave it a nice professional look that made up for the somewhat irregular shape caused by my peel-less attempt to scoop the risen dough off the towel by hand.

So far, I've used a 2:1 mix of whole wheat and rye, which made a rather flat loaf; 2:1 white and whole wheat, which rose well and had a great holey open-crumb structure; and 2:1 whole wheat and white, which rose well but produced a slightly denser interior with fewer holes. All of these had a fairly thin crust that was more chewy than crackly; I'm still pondering how to get that true crackly crust.

*Why am I such a sucker for things journalists say? But pie queen as I am, I've always hankered to try making a lard crust, and the Times' recent paen to Flying Pigs Farm's fabulous rendered leaf lard (the best kind, taken from around the kidneys) got me longing for the stuff. And then, after yesterday's trip to the Botanic Garden, I found myself browsing through the Grand Army Plaza farmer's market...and there was the Flying Pigs stand, with lotsa lard on offer. Having just come from a conference on Food, Ethics and the Environment down at Princeton (more on that to come), I was a particularly soft touch for any products coming from a small family-owned farm where the pigs get to run around and act like pigs like to act. So now I've got a tub o' lard in my fridge, waiting to be turned into pies for Jane's day-after-thanksgiving. Reports to follow...

hello there

Thankful for autumn rose hips....


Golden leaves and gurgling brooks....

Sunshine through the trees...


And NetZero, the computer-phone system that means I can now actually call K. in Afghanistan, and talk to her while I'm walking through the autumnal delights of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where these pictures were taken yesterday, and which is lovely even at this time of year (and now free on weekdays as well as Saturday mornings through February).

And if you're thinking ahead, they still have lots of excellent tulip, hyacinth, crocus, and daffodil bulbs for sale in the very nice Garden Shop; since the weather's been so mild, it's not too late to plant a few more bulbs for spring. Lots of calendars, cards, books, and classy garden-related tchotckes (flowery teapots! lavender hand lotion!) too--I think I'll be back to do a little holiday gift-browsing here.

Giving Thanks

3 Good Things for Which to Give Thanks: Disco/Pizza/Artic Exploration Divisions
(an ongoing series for the week before Thanksgiving)

1. "Don't Feel like Dancing" by Scissor Sisters. A completely infectious, supremely danceable romp that refutes the very principle of its lyrics. I'm coming a little late to the soiree thrown by these party people, who shimmy like the Cockettes and sing like the Bee Gees, but this number still makes me really, really want to find a big gay dance party and shake it all night long. I defy anyone to listen to this without putting on glitter lipgloss and fan-dancing all around the room. "You'd think I could muster up a little soft-shoe gentle sway, But I don't feel like dancing, No sir no dancing today" And yes, that's Sir Elton on the piano.

2. Large pizza at Loucallie's, Henry and Carroll Sts, Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. They play opera in the background at this cozy new pizza spot, but don't expect to hear it over the din of happy diners. The big wood-fired brick oven in the back was built by the owner himself, a guy from the neighborhood who took over a longtime sweetshop/soda fountain and (supposed) numbers joint. No menu yet, just pizza, and sometimes calzones.

This being the case, it wouldn't kill them to write the toppings down on the chalkboard, since our slightly surly waitress seemed a little cranky at having to recite them, and expected us to make up our minds on the spot. But no matter, the pizza's fab, the thin crust miraculously not soupy in the center and the cheese very very good. The slightly watery sauce looked like plain ol' crushed canned tomatoes when I went up the pizza-making counter at the back; a more concentrated, flavorful sauce would make this very good pie sublime. So far, BYOB, which seems to add to the joint's joy factor considerably--lots of bottles on the tables on a recent rainy Sunday night. Large pizza (8 slices), $18.

3. The Last Gentleman Adventurer, by Edward Beauclerk Maurice. In 1930, when Maurice was a 16-year-old English schoolboy, he signed a five-year contract with the Hudson Bay Company as an apprentice fur trader in the Artic reaches of far northern Canada. His story, written some 50 years later, is thoughtful and shot through with a certain British dry humor, describing a snowbound world of desperate ingenuity recalled in tranquillity. Hunting for walrus, deer, polar bear, seal, whale, and ptarmigan features prominently (all are edible and heartily enjoyed). Because Maurice was so young at the time of his arrival, and because he quickly became fluent in the language of the native Inuits, his stories are refreshingly free of Kiplingesque paternalism. A perfect read on a cold, drizzly day.

Getting your goat

The Sandbox. Sharing a goat in an Afghan village....in honor of Veteran's Day.

Busy as a Bee

Do you ever get up in the morning and think, "I would be dripping in dates this week, if only I knew more about honey!"

Well, mister and miss, you've come to the right place. I used to be like you, thinking a little SueBee squeezy bear held all I needed to know. And was I going out dancing the twinkle on a Saturday night? No sirree Bob! But now I know the truth. And I want to share my knowledge with you.

If you want to get lucky and wow the ladies and gents, you've got options. You can buy my book, or you can come over and sit at my kitchen table and listen while I natter on about the bee dance, or you can go over to Chow and learn all about 10 very special varietal honeys, with recipes to match. Amaze your friends! Astound your relatives! Whip up a Bee's Knees or a batch of Buzzing Bran Muffins! And love will follow.

Thoughts on Gingerbread

What a beautiful week of autumn weather we've been having! Went to Prospect Park yesterday afternoon to kick through the crunching leaves and smell that wonderful scent of damp leaves, fallen acorns, and rich earth. Many kids, dogs, and soccer players were out on the main meadow, and Christina called as I strolled, to see if I could make up a cookie recipe involving apple-cider syrup, oats, non-wheat flours, and perhaps some flax seed. You know I like a challenge--we'll see what evolves. It's a season for gingerbread right now, especially for breakfast spread with apple butter. I'm in love with the homemade spicy apple butter in my fridge, and can rest easy knowing that I have about a dozen jars waiting in the closet for holiday gifts. Now, onto more pear butter, more grape jelly, and perhaps a try at crab apple jelly, or paradise jelly--I'm wondering if I couldn't make with crab apples, quince, and cranberry, rather than plain apples, which make too mild a jelly for my taste. Jellymaking always leaves me with a pang, though, when it comes to tossing out all that fruit pulp from the jelly bag.

Anyway, more gingerbread recipes to follow; I made Laurie Colwin's favorite gingerbread last week, using the Steen's Cane Syrup she recommends (part of the Southern-food haul brought back from the SFA conference last year). I'd made it before and remembered liking it, but this time, it was a disappointment--bland and buttery, and not nearly gingery-spicy enough for my taste, even though I'd added a couple of tsps. of fresh grated ginger in with the dried. However, the host at the dinner party to which I'd brought it adored it, and swore he ate the whole leftover half-cake for breakfast the next morning. I think I'm just used to the brawniness of regular molasses, and missed the darkness and richness of flavor it imparts. Perhaps I can save the rest of the cane syrup for a winter sticky toffee pudding for B., since it seems quite similar to the Lyle's Golden Syrup called for by most of the recipes for toffee pud. The next gingerbread will be my old favorite, an adaptation of a Martha Stewart Living recipe calling for dried, fresh, and candied ginger, and plenty of 'lasses. I don't have candied ginger on hand, but I do have knobs of ginger in syrup, which seems like an able substitute. And then there is John Thorne's Moosehead Lake Gingerbread, a Maine hunting camp recipe that uses black pepper, dry mustard, and bacon grease. Mmmmm. Now that's a breakfast to put hair on your chest and a deer on your hood.

FYI to Fresh Direct fans: If you're not going the fresh, farmers-market turkey route (and having had three different fresh, free-range turkeys last year during my three-day T-day redux, I can attest to the huge difference in flavor from a well-raised bird versus an unhappy factory-farmed supermarket one), grocery-delivery service Fresh Direct will GIVE you a frozen 10-12 lb bird, for free, when you buy stuff from them this month. I'm not sure how much you have to buy to get the giveaway, or what it says about livestock management in this country when companies can afford to use entire birds as loss leaders, but hey, enter in code "Frozturkey" during checkout and you'll git your bird.

Boo!

More apples

You'd be surprised at the little outposts of agriculture that can find their way into a big city. On Friday, I went down to the dirt-heaped pavements of Added Value Farm, in Red Hook, to demonstrate how the cider gets out of the apple. About 40 shrieking first graders from the Brooklyn New School elementary showed up, paper nametags roped around their necks, to run around the pumpkin patch (stocked, actually, with pumpkins and a few squash from the Park Slope Food Co-Op, since the farm's own pumpkin harvest was sold out at the previous weekend's harvest fair), play King of the Hay Bales, commune with the compost's wiggly worms, eat flowers (as part of a raw, made-on-the-spot "veggie burrito" that showcased every part of the plant--carrot roots, kale leaves, seed-filled tomatoes, and edible calendula flowers), and yes, grind, press, and drink apple cider.


The beautiful hand-powered wood and cast-iron press came from the fine folks over at Wyckoff House, and it was remarkably easy to use. With a Macintosh, Gala or Crispin from upstate's Red Jacket Orchards bulging in each hand, the kids lined up to feed their fruit into the iron hopper. As each kid took his or her turn spinning the big side wheel, a wooden spool marked off with rows of sharp metal teeth spun around inside, chewing the apples into pulp. Once the mesh-lined bucket below was filled, we topped it with a thick wooden lid, and the kids took turns winding the crank that pressed down onto the lid, squeezing the juice out of the apples, through the slats of the bucket, and down into a waiting tub.

It was russet-brown and frothy, and just about every kid loved it, asking for seconds and thirds and even fourths. I got hoarse and sticky, some yellow jackets met sweet and untimely ends by drowning in the cider bucket, and a great time was had by all.

How do you like them apples?

Ravishing East Coast autumn weather out there, with blue skies and nippy breezes. My kitchen smells like a Concord grape vineyard, all warm and winey, and little purple spatters are everywhere. 3 pounds of Concord grapes made less than a pint of jelly, alas, but I'm very excited to try a grape jelly that's not corn-syruped and kiddie-sweet. Also on the grape-season agenda--the schiacciata d'uva over at Sullivan St Bakery (no longer on Sullivan Street, but way over on 47th St near 11th Ave). This is a thin (the name means "squashed") foccacia covered in champagne grapes and anise seeds, sprinkled with sugar and glossed with olive oil. Heaven in a greasy brown paper bag, and only made this time of year.

What else? I did make apple butter chez PQM, which cut my apple haul considerably, so I only had to lug one heavy backpack full back on the bus and subway (this was, of course, the afternoon some nut job decided to tie up the entire Port Authority with suspicious-package threats, so I had to stagger down Eighth Avenue for 10 blocks with a bushel of apples on my back, in order to get to the next 2 train stop. Thanks, dude.) The apples, unpeeled, were quartered (I took out the cores, after having a sudden pang wondering about the cyanide in the apple seeds) and thrown in a big pot with a few splashes of apple cider. Once the apples had simmered into pulpy softness, I cranked them through my cheap little plastic food mill to make a gorgeous lipstick-pink puree. This was mixed with a cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, salt, a splash of apple cider vinegar and a bit of sugar, then spread into a heavy metal hotel pan. Baked in a slow oven (250-275F) for 3 or 4 hours, stirring occasionally, the mixture thickened and cooked down into a rich spread. Half of my huge bag of apples made 8 or 9 half-pints.

I'm going to do another batch this week, and will come up with a recipe with more specific measurements and times. And yes, close readers might know that the Pie Queen had a birthday on Monday. Chocolate cupcakes and beautiful pink roses from K., venison at La Goulue and Germain-Robin XO cognac (made in Ukiah, California, despite the Frenchy name, and as close to drinking sunshine and silk as you can imagine) at the Brandy Library with B. (and thanks to Bucky for being on the spot when I called California to ask the name of a bar in Manhattan), and best of all, family and friends singing happy birthday in person and on the phone from many places. Cake and candles are nice, but feeling the love is even better.

Apples!

Apples, apples, apples! Seeking fresh air and autumn leaves, I hopped the bus out to Orange County (no, not that OC--the one with the cows and the onion fields, near the Jersey border northwest of NYC) to see the Pie Queen Mother. More roast chicken and roasted vegetables (mmm, buttery parsnips and sweet potatoes with cinnamon and allspice), a fire in the fireplace, and Sergei Eisenstein's stirring black-and-white 1938 film Alexander Nevsky, scored by Prokofiev. Now that's my idea of a Good Time.

In the morning, after scones (by PQM) and apricot jam (by PQ--the PQM is a demanding customer), we went out to Nettie Ochs, a local orchard (the site of much raspberry picking earlier this summer), where we frolicked around searching for Empire apples, picking away and filling (on my part) an enormous bag in what felt like just a few minutes. I could have spent all afternoon up there with the crisp breezes, plucking massive apples off the heavily laden branches and crunching away. As it was, I did end up with a mixed bag of Stayman Winesaps, Cortlands, and Empires, while PQM stuck with Empires. Then, hiking in Wawayanda State Park, where the PQM finally got an upclose vision of a bunch of nice people camping, with their little tents and grilling hot dogs and cartons of spring water and Coleman stoves.

My mild prediliction for car camping--I like to wake up outside, but I'm hardly the super-adventure-driven, bear-defying backcountry type; I like a hot shower, even if I have to walk to it, and a minimum of Spooky Unidentifiable After-Midnight Noises--has caused much amusement in my family, none of whom are campers themselves. I actually don't think my mother has even walked through a campsite, so the site of real grownups--not Boy Scouts--doing this for fun has hopefully made this little occasional pastime of mine seem less strange.

Then, back home to peel apples and make applesauce. I have high hopes for finally making apple butter from my enormous bag of apples, if only because there's simply no way I can haul them all back to NYC on public transit. It takes a whole lot of apples to make not very much apple butter--in this case, a good thing.

Cupcakes!

It's raining here, there's a chicken & a bunch of root vegetables tossed with rosemary and garlic all roasting in the oven, and I'm laughing over the butch cupcake recipe posted by Esther, my Aussie blog-pal. She posted this back in June but I just discovered it, under the heading "Cupcakes for the Ladeez." Cause it's not just the femmes who bake to get into a girl's pants.

Um, yes, anyway, let's look at the calender and see what fun things are coming up. A launch party for the good folks at Chow.com on Wednesday at Public--I'm looking forward to this, but I'm a little nervous that those Aussies in the kitchen are going to slip me a kangaroo kebab.

Then this Saturday, come down to Red Hook for the Added Value harvest fair--(walking-around, not roasting) chickens, cider-pressing, cuddly animals, fresh vegetables, and lotsa pumpkins, all growing in Red Hook's only farm. Even wanted to know how to grow vegetables on pavement? Here's where to find out.

And Saturday night, Danielle from Habeas Brulee is hosting a get-together of local Brooklyn food bloggers. I always thought it was a sign of food-world braggadacio never to admit to any food issues--weren't you supposed to swagger through the barbecued alligator and spit-roasted guinea pig? Not here, apparently, where nearly everyone on the RSVP list has thoughtfully provided a list of their picky-eating provisos. Luckily, I'm making dessert, and even the olive-haters and bacotarians can usually get through a slice of apple pie without drama.

Oatmeal Cookies

What's going in the wider world of food: Michael Pollan's column in this week's NYT magazine is a must-read. It's a distillation of his recent book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and sums up many of the issues facing all of us as a result of the dominance of industrial farming. Yet another arguement for buying local--which I try to do as much as I can, except when Fresh Direct seduces me with a $50-off card. It's split into $25 on two orders, and each order has to total at least $40, with a $5 delivery charge. So really, I'm only getting $40 worth of free groceries, but it sure was nice to make oatmeal cookies still in pajamas this morning, thanks to the 10:30am delivery of butter and eggs.

According to K., the oatmeal cookies served in the dining hall are among the few tasty (or even halfway edible) things served there. These are what you bring your friends stuck on guard duty, or anyone you want to cheer up or owe you a favor. So we'll see how mine stack up, after a week in a tupperware box en route. The recipe came from the Silver Palate's Good Times cookbook, an old favorite, and makes a nice crunchy cookie.

Silver Palate Oatmeal Cookies

1/2 cup (1 stick/4 oz) butter, softened
3/4 cup brown sugar, packed
1 egg
1 1/2 TB honey
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
3/4 cup flour
2 cups rolled oats
3/4 cup raisins
3/4 cup chopped nuts (optional)

Preheat oven to 375F. Lightly grease a baking sheet.

Cream butter and sugar together. Beat in egg, honey, and vanilla. Sift salt, cinnamon, and flour together in a separate bowl. Using a wooden spoon, stir flour into butter mixture until smooth. Stir in oats, raisins, and nuts, if using. Drop in spoonfuls on baking sheet, flattening each spoonful. Bake until golden brown, 12-15 minutes. Cool on a rack.

Pie on the Farm

So the rain cleared up, the sun came out, and my pie won 3rd place at the UCSC harvest fair. Of course, with half a pound of fabulous Marin-raised Straus organic European-style butter (that is, butter with MORE fat and less water in it) in the crust, and lots of beautiful organic greening and jonagold apples in the filling, well, maybe the judging was rigged.



But there was bluegrass music and loads of kids running between the hay bales, and fresh hand-pressed apple juice, and a wild diversity of pumpkins and squashes everywhere. We did our best to add a little tattooed glamour to the proceedings, even though we didn't get a chance to eat a piece of my award-winning pastry-- after the judging, the pies were sold by the slice as a fund-raiser, and by the time we got up to the head of the line, one lone apple slice and bit of crust were all that was left of my pie.



Thus, pie #2, made the following morning for Shar's birthday. We ate all the eggs in the fridge for breakfast (along with Papa Steve's killer sausage gravy, biscuits, and home fries) so I couldn't glaze the crust, but it still came out pretty cute. No one could find the birthday candles, so a tea light had to suffice.

food for a rainy day

Indian pizza! Now, I know, I live in New York City, which means I don't have any right to complain about access to good, nay, mind-blowing pizza. But one thing a New Yorker can't get in the metropolitan area is Indian pizza--that is, mashed-up Indian food spread on a crust, globbed with cheese, and baked into mind-bending spicy goodness. That's why I have to keep JetBlue in business with cross-country flights whenever possible.

It was pouring rain way too early in a region where October means blissful Indian summer and the winter rains shouldn't kick in til after Thanksgiving. I was soaked and sniffling and trying to carry way too many bulky bags as I crawled up the street to Jen J's house. My bag of Williams-Sonoma swag (including four books from a series that I edited earlier this year) split right as I got to Jen's door while cold water sluiced my hair and fogged up my glasses. But all was forgotten when we got our pizza and chai from Zante's, the original Indian-pizza purveyor on Mission Street.

And now, just to taunt me when I get back to Brooklyn, I've got a little slice-shaped Zante's fridge magnet to take home.

Another pie!

...hates California, it's cold and it's damp....

Well, it has been rather drizzly up here in Marinwood, but Paige and I went out to Pt. Reyes Station anyway, driving under the redwoods and towering eucalyptus trees, past Nicasio (where they'll be holding their annual cute-as-a-bug harvest fair this Sunday from 10am-5pm) and all the cows grazing on the lion-colored hills.

And speaking of harvest fairs, the farm at UC Santa Cruz is having its annual harvest fair, with tours, hayrides, apple tastings, and yes, a pie-baking contest, from 11am to 5pm this Saturday, Oct. 7. So Christina, Sally and I will be heading back down south to bake up a storm and see if I can uphold my Gravenstein Apple Fair title. Steve, Shar's old buddy, a man with the words "homemade" tattooed on his knuckles, has promised to make a red-hot apple pie, based on his grandmother's recipe for apple butter sweetened with red hot candies. Me, I just want to make a big, beautiful pie that's as good as my mom's. Stay tuned for photos...

Mauna Loa Cake

Cesare is two! My old, old friends Shar (pictured here with me & Cesare on the beach) and Jackie celebrated their son's second birthday with a Hawaiian-themed party down in Santa Cruz.

The showpiece was the Mauna Loa cake, a true group effort made by everyone in the house. A sheet of yellow cake was the base, topped with rain-forest-green cream-cheese frosting, dusted with a lava field of crushed chocolate cookies sloping down from a mountain of chocolate ice cream mixed with homemade almond praline and topped with an eruption of pink whipped cream lava and scatterings of coconut. At first, Shar questioned the presence of flamingos around a volcano, but we decided they were party flamingos (they did, after all, come from the party store), there for the celebration.



A huge hit all around. Pictured here is Cesare's cousin Eva, ensconced amid the decorative pineapples. The most delicious part was the almond praline, which was surprisingly easy to make, and super-delish when ground and mixed in with the chocolate ice cream. Toast a cup of whole almonds for 10-15 minutes in the oven at 325, until they smell toasty and are pale golden-brown when broken open. While the almonds are toasting, melt 1/2 cup of sugar with 3 TB of water in a small, heavy pot over medium heat. Cook syrup, swirling (don't stir), until copper-penny color. Stir syrup into almonds and spread out onto an oiled pan. Let cool--almonds will turn hard and glossy. Break up and grind briefly until sandy, or chop with a knife for a more pebbly texture. Let ice cream soften, then mix in praline to taste. Eat as is, or line a cone-shaped vase or flowerpot with plastic wrap. Pack ice cream into mold, freeze, unmold and decorate with as many flamingos as you can find.

piepiepiepie

Not even fork-blowing winds and a sudden cloudburst could dampen the Pie Social spirit...pies were eaten and enjoyed by many. Commentary to follow, but first, a few pictures...



The pies, chocolate-coconut on the left, peach-pistachio tart on the right...

My tablemate Lisa, with her apple and mixed-berry pies (Lenny, not pictured, made the berry pie, and it rocked)


Skyler and Madeline, with one last piece of excellent peach-raspberry pie

Karen, who used to work at San Francisco's Firefly restaurant and Little Dipper Bakery, and her fabulous maple-pecan and Concord grape pies

Going Social

The coco-choco pie is ready to go! It turned out to be a bi-level pie, with chocolate-coconut custard on the bottom and coconut custard on top, drizzled in semi-sweet chcolate and topped with toasted coconut, in a graham-cracker-and-coconut crust made from the homemade graham crackers that I'd made for last year's Social and stashed in the freezer. It looks a little demented but should be very, very coconutty. The custard is a standard stovetop one, made with coconut milk, eggs, sugar, vanilla, and a little flour for thickening--after the birthday banana-cream-pie fiasco, I'm not making any more cornstarch fillings for the public until I can be sure it won't turn into soup. This version looks nice and sliceable.

Now, I'm debating--make a peach tart too? I'm out of butter, so I'm dawdling over going across the street to the market for a couple of sticks, then getting into the whole make-the-crust, peel the peaches deal. Do I want to be lazy Pie Queen? Hmmmm.

An hour later: No lazy PQ here! The peaches, foraged from the Carroll Gardens CSA's Saturday-morning leftovers, have been peeled, sliced, and tossed with sugar, flour, a pinch of salt and a few TB of B's magic pistachio fairy dust--ground pistachios, almonds, lemon rind, and nutmeg--and spread into a tart crust made from flour, sugar, butter, egg yolk, vanilla, and more fairy dust. And while thoroughly grubby and sticky with smeary bits of tart crust and sloshed peach juice, the kitchen smells dreamy.

On to the Social!

how to whack a coconut

The coconut has been vanquished! With a little help from Steve Raichlan's Miami Spice, a hammer, a screwdriver, a knife, and a food processor, my brown hairy-yak nut is now reduced to 3 1/2 cups of grated coconut meat, 2 cups of which are soaking in hot water to make coconut milk, and the rest sitting in the fridge, waiting to be added to the crust and filling of the upcoming choco-coconut pie.

Actually getting into a coconut is not that big a deal, as it turns out. First, poke out the "eyes" with a screwdriver. Drain the liquid inside, which tastes like salty coconut-flavored water, which is what it is. You can drink it straight, or mixed with rum and a dash of bitters, if you're feeling all Jake-Barnes-in-Cuba-ish.

Then you put your now-empty coconut on a good hard shock-absorbing surface, like a cutting board inside a baking sheet on the floor. Be sure to warn your downstairs neighbors before you start the next part, otherwise you'll be that mysteriously noisy Person Upstairs, the one seemingly running a bowling alley in her apartment.

Now whack, whack, whack with a hammer until the nut starts to crack in pieces. The heavy hairy shell should pry easily from the brown-skinned nut inside. Once you've got all the husk off, you grab a small, sturdy knife or heavy-duty vegetable peeler and scrape all the brown skin off--it's a lot like peeling a butternut squash, and just about as boring.

You're left with a pile of bright white flesh with a pleasant, apple-y crispness. (I wanted to like it, really, except for the part about it tasting like coconut. Damn.) Now, if you have a lot of time on your hands, you can rub each and every piece through the small holes on a box grater. Or you can shove them all into the tube of your food processor, tricked out with the grating attachment, and get a bowlful of grated coconut in less than a minute.

Measure out a 1 to 1 ratio of boiling water to grated coconut (that is, 1 cup water to 1 cup coconut) and let the coconut steep in the water for 15 minutes. LIne a sieve with cheesecloth, dump in the coconut mixture, and squeeze out all the liquid. Voila! Fresh coconut milk. Refrigerate like regular milk.

Ok, I'm very tired now. More later.

L'Shanah Tovah

L'Shanah Tovah, and happy new year! Rosh Hashanah marks the beginning of the year 5767 on the Jewish calendar, and a happy, healthy and sweet one to all of you. Being a baking Jew, I am, of course, making a round extra-honeyed challah this afternoon, using my own recipe from the Honey book. Rosh Hashanah challahs are sweeter and richer, being celebratory, and are usually filled with golden raisins or other dried fruits, all which makes for the best french toast ever a couple days later. This loaf is sweetened with some of the mountain Ozark honey brought back from Eureka Springs. Honey also makes a lovely glaze on the finished loaf, particularly nice if you're bringing some to a friend's house as a New Year's gift. Some fresh apples, a little jar of honey, and a fresh challah roll makes a perfect little housewarming gift at this time of year.

There aren't a lot of Jews on the base where K. is, but nonetheless the Army got a rabbi in from Atlanta to hold services this weekend, and K., thoughtful and interested in religion as she is, went to the shabbat/erev Rosh Hashanah service on Friday night. The rabbi wore a camoflage-print yarmulke and brought dried apples, honey, and Manischevitz wine with him. Ramadan, the month-long Muslim holiday that calls for daily sunrise-to-sundown fasting, is starting soon too. Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement which follows a week after Rosh Hashanah, is also marked by a day of fasting, from sundown to sundown.

Until then, though, sweet things are encouraged, to represent wishes for a sweet year. Nothing sour, nothing bitter, just ripe, golden, and sweet, warm and welcoming as a loaf of new bread.

pie socialists stage coup

It's a clear, nippy, really autumn-feeling day out there, which makes me think of....apple pie! I'd sure love to make a fabulous apple pie for the PIE SOCIAL this Sunday, but 2 years' of Social experience has taught me that the public is not big on beige. Shiny and fabulous goes, beige just kind of sits there like a sale rack at the Gap,even though my apple pie is, if I may say so, award-winning and really great. So I'm thinking the always-popular French plum tart, and then perhaps the as-yet-uncreated chocolate-coconut cream pie, which K. is gunning for. Shopping for coconut milk and shredded coconut, I was put off by the additives in the packages--propylene glycol and other creepy things, to "preserve freshness and whiteness." Why buy cans and bags when fresh coconuts were skulking, hard and hairy like yaks in the far corner of the produce section? So instead, I've got a real coconut, and will make my own milk and shreds.

I've heard rumours of crawfish pie (mmmm) and I'm certainly hoping last year's lobster pot pie lady comes back. But please, no repeat performance from the cricket-pie dude!

Bring your pies or just your appetites, but certainly bring your friends. See you there!

WHERE: MAIN STREET & PLYMOUTH STREET, DUMBO (across from Bubby's)
WHEN :SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2006 12PM-4PM

california here I come

One more week, and I'll be back in California! Wheee! I just can't wait. In fact, I wish I could move on back there, if only for the next few months until K. gets back to the States. This time, I'm going out there to check out this fine program at UC Santa Cruz, a six-month apprenticeship on their organic farm combined with education on sustainable agriculture and organic farming & marketing. It could make the goat farm a reality, or at least my longings to work organizing farmers' markets or CSAs, plus teaching cooking classes and such.

There's a great article in the Bay Guardian about local restauranteur Larry Bain's Nextcourse program, which teaches cooking and nutrition to women in the SF county jail. Says one woman, "When I was in jail, I was thinking this was all bullshit. I can't do that. It's going to be too expensive. It's just you white people blowing smoke up our ass. But I got out and now I'm going to the market every week and my kids love it."

Bain points out that his teachers shop at the Alemany and Heart of the City markets, and that the produce they buy is almost always cheaper, and better, than similar items bought from Safeway or FoodCo. There are other limitations, too--no knives in the jail--and the menu of a main, a salad, and an vegetable has to be produced in 25 minutes or less, for under $5 a person. It can be done, and by now over 750 women have gone through the program.

The current bagged-spinach scare is yet another example of the danger of big agribusiness, organic or not. A recent article in the Times pointed out how the sealed environment of the bag offers a excellent haven for bacteria growth if the bag gets too warm. I know I've eaten spinach from the bag--hey, it says it's triple-washed, right?-- but those dirty, sandy bunches of locally-grown greens are looking a lot cleaner now.

DId You Eat It at the Antic?

So, Brooklynites, whadja eat at the Antic? This is, to you out-of-towners, perhaps the only NYC street fest worth attending. Unlike the other interchangeable greasy affairs selling tube socks and fried stuff, the annual Atlantic Antic is an almost entirely local affair, with the many restaurants--and churches and other organizations--providing the chow. The menu and vibe changes block by block--from Hicks to clinton it's hipsterville, with beer gardens, rock and alt-country stages (here are The Dansettes, swinging their blue-eyed soul), and sangria Spanish paella, chorizo and grilled fresh sardines from La Mancha.

I was tempted by many, many things, but the standout this year was the lamb sharwerma sandwich from the table outside the Oriental Grocery, on the South side between Clinton and Court.

I think I'd heard tell of their legendary sharwerma here, and the beautiful old copper machine they grill the meat on, taken out and used only for the Antic. Juicy, very well-seasoned meat, chunks of tomato, dollops of tahini and yogurt sauces, cucumber and tomato salad, and a big sploosh of fabulous hot sauce. wildly messy but worth the stack of napkins.

Earlier in the day I'd seen a makeshift bbq pit on the street--a rectangle of concrete blocks topped with a sheet of corrugated metal, with hooves sticking out from either end. A return visit a few hours later revealed an entire butterflied pig laid on a metal grid and smoking away over a bed of coals laid down right on the asphalt.

It was the work of PJ Handley's, the bar and grill down on Court, who were serving up chopped pork sandwiches and plates of ribs. As I was admiring the pig's head, one of the pig choppers snagged a particularly tender morsel from somewhere down around the pig's neck and handed it over. Mmmm, tender porky goodness.

Eatin' it at the Antic

It's time for the Antic! The street fair was just getting going as I did a quick stroll from Hicks to Smith. A whole pig was roasting in an impromptu bbq pit made of a sheet of corrugated iron propped up on a low rectangle of concrete blocks, a pair of hooves sticking out at either end. La Mancha was handing out $3 links of blackened fat chorizo, $8 plates of paella and my fave, grilled sardinas! Waterfalls had a beautiful spread of Middle Eastern salads, and many shawerma grills will be spinning soon.

And what it is with Brooklyn and t-shirts? Seems like everyone's got a brooklyn-pride-t-shirt company going, and they're all selling their wares today. Good sales to be had at Cook's Companion--some nice Kitchenaid and cuisinart saute pans, dishtowels, and other accessories, for way cheap.

But really, it's all about the chow.

cookies

Train arrive,
16 coaches long
Well, that long black train,
Coming right round the bend,
Well, it took my baby, but it never will again


Sunny day, clean laundry, homemade chocolate-mint cookies, the brooklyn book festival or the next-to-last day of the Joseph Cornell show at the Katonah Art Museum?

Muffin blues

I woke up this morning,
looked out the door
I can tell my milk cow
I can tell by the way she lows
if you see my milk cow please drive her on home
I ain't had no milk and butter since my cow's been gone

You got to treat me right, day by day
Get out your little prayerbook,
get down on your knees and pray...

It's a rainy day, a day for the blues, a day to make carrot muffins from a recipe from Bainbridge Island's Streamliner Diner. Not exactly, of course, because I can never bring myself to use as much honey and butter as the book calls for. And because I had some extra canned pumpkin lying around, and some raisins, and some canned crushed pineapple, I decided to make pumpkin-carrot-raisin muffins, with more spices and some molasses, too. And weren't they just tasty this morning. I think they'd be especially good with cream cheese or apple butter. They're similar to a morning-glory muffin, minus the coconut, which you could, of course, throw in, if you didn't recoil from coconut as if from a snake, like I do.

Milk Cow Ate the Morning Glory Muffins

1 1/4 cups flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp powdered cloves
1/4 tsp nutmeg

2 eggs
1/2 cup (or so) pureed pumpkin
2 or 3 carrots, peeled and grated
1/2 cup raisins
1/2 cup chopped walnuts or pecans
1/2 cup crushed canned pineapple
1/4 cup melted butter and/or oil, or more if you like a richer muffin
1/2 cup honey
2 TB molasses
1/2 tsp vanilla

Grease a 12-cup muffin pan. Preheat oven to 350F. Whisk dry ingredients together. In a separate bowl, beat wet ingredients together. Dump wet into dry, stirring until just mixed and no more streaks of flour are visible. Don't beat! Scoop into muffin cups and bake until lightly browned and gently springy when pressed with a fingertip.

Best served warm or reheated before serving.

If you can bear to put on your wellies and leave the house, good things going on this weekend--on Saturday at Borough Hall the Brooklyn Book Festival will be in full swing, followed by Sunday's always-fab Atlantic Antic. See you there, and don't miss the Baptist church ladies' sweet-potato pies.

just like buttah

Have you seen the new online Chow magazine? It's snappy and fun, and yes, I'm writing for them. See what's keeping me in butter money, here, on the Grinder, and DO NOT miss the video link (or the outtakes). Everything you ever wanted to see on a stick at the Minnesota State Fair. Plus, butter sculpting! (As for Chow, I believe you have to register on Chowhound.com--just a sign-in name and password--in order to access Chow, for now.)

When I worked at Chronicle Books, we put out a lot of goofy single-subject books. But the all-time favorite was Butter Magic. Butter Magic, covering the fabulous trend-of-the-moment of butter sculpting (we had, after all, just put out Snowman and Sand Castle) was an in-house spoof that probably could have become a real book if anyone had really wanted to get behind it. I still remember the picture in Saveur of the life-sized cow carved in butter and kept in a refrigerated glass display room at the Wisconsin State Fair. Writes my now-Minnesota-dwelling sister, "Butter sculpting is HUGE out here!" It is so huge, in fact, that the busts of Princess Kay of the Milky Way, the beauty queen of all things dairy (not to be confused with Alice in Dairyland, who fufills the same role in Wisconsin, according to B.), and her court are carved lifesize out of butter and put on display throughout the 12 days of the fair. Don't believe me? It's on Flickr, honey. See the future of the medium.

Pie Social!

Pie Socialists, your time has come! Yes, Bubby's is putting on its 3rd Annual Pie Social on Sunday, September 24th, and the Pie Queen will be there, tiara, apron, and pies at the ready. And so can you, whether you're a pie baker or a pie eater. All the info's on the Bubby's website; click up top to get the baker's application. You'll pay less to enter if you get your application in before Sept. 10th, so click now...Make your check out to Bubby's, and mail it to the Tribeca location, with "Attn: Pie Social/Dani" on the envelope.

I'm thinking of plum tart (a hit at both previous socials) and then, perhaps the chocolate-coconut idea that sprang to mind during a conversation with K., as she was rhapsodizing about the coconut chocolate milk that's served (in UHT boxes, of course) at the dining hall run by the United Arab Emirates. A chocolate cream pie, made with a coconut-milk custard, over a crust of chocolate wafers and toasted coconut. Whipped cream, shaved chocolate, and more toasted coconut on top; maybe a little coconut rum in the filling...Of course, I hate coconut, so I won't be tasting this, but I'd bet that for people who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they will like.

A pie for a poem

Sometimes friends know exactly what you need to hear.

The Poet's Occasional Alternative - by Grace Paley

I was going to write a poem
I made a pie instead it took
about the same amount of time
of course the pie was a final
draft a poem would have had some
distance to go days and weeks and
much crumpled paper

the pie already had a talking
tumbling audience among small
trucks and a fire engine on
the kitchen floor

everybody will like this pie
it will have apples and cranberries
dried apricots in it many friends
will say why in the world did you
make only one

this does not happen with poems

because of unreportable
sadness I decided to
settle this morning for a re-
sponsive eatership I do not
want to wait a week a year a
generation for the right
consumer to come along

(from Begin Again: Collected Poems, 2000)

And many thanks to Jen from Manic D Press, for taking me to the ocean and the many farmstands of Springs, and for knowing all the best poetry at just the right moment.

apricadabra!

Woke up to the sound of rain splashing down through the fire escape--the morning glories are finally blooming their hot-magenta blooms and the basil, gnawed to near-death by pigeons, are slowly, cautiously, putting out tiny new green leaves. Went down to Added Value Farm yesterday to shovel wet compost into wheelbarrows for a few hours, coming home with eggplants, kale, and tomatoes, all grown there in long rows of lovely dirt mounded up over the asphalt in Coffey Park. And 2 pounds of apricots from Red Jacket Orchards, which means...apricot jam! But not just any apricot jam. Today is the day to wonder, "Can I successfully reproduce Sarabeth Kitchen's fabulous Apricadabra preserves in my very own kitchen?" I'm thinking some combo of fresh and dried apricots will be required, along with dried currants and crushed pineapple. Some experimentation will be in order. Stay tuned!

Can Can!

I didn't do much to celebrate the blogosphere's Sugar High Friday--unless you count that big chunk of watermelon and half of Bakerina's chocolate-Kahlua flan, but in honor of the fine lady hosting this month's SHF deal at pretty German site Delicious Days, I'll be givin' y'all a little sugar from my bowl this weekend. Something sweet in a jar, for sure, and you should too, since this month's theme is CANNING. Plum jam? Red currant jelly? More apricot jam? Blackberry? Peach chutney? Sticky spoons all around...

Elsewhere in the news, the revived, all-online CHOW magazine is up now, with the PQ's snappy commentary on what's up in food posted in the "Grinder" section (under my actual byline instead of this nom de pie). You'll have to do their quick n' easy free registration before you can access it, though, because it's still in soft-opening beta mode.

Brooklyn Girls!

All my pals on both coasts know they can count on getting some jam from the Pie Queen's kitchen when birthdays and holidays roll around. And that's still true...unless they'd rather have an I HEART BROOKLYN GIRLS calendar this year. Besides being true to my borough, these lovely b'klyn ladies are HOT. And having been a bit of a pin-up myself (all you Croatians who got here for the saucy ice-cream picture, you know who you are), I've got to give a shout-out to my glamour sisters--and these girls have it! 12 months, 12 real femmes, 12 re-creations of pinups from years past. You've got the cigar-smoking 30s moll, the cupcake-baking 50's gal, the Camarro-washing 80's babe, the naughty 20s flapper, even the tattooed 90s Billyburg grrl. Produced completely by women, and a percentage of the profits goes to the Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project. Get 'em while they're hot!

light in August

Ooofff! It's a scorcher out there.

Just back from watering the garden--my own, finally tomato-producing plot, the community veggie box, and all the ugly shrubs in the communal planters. As I hauled the huge snaky hose around and watered my flip-flops, I got upclose views of the bees slurping on the magenta coxcombs while a big orange butterfly swooped and flitted and circled all around the garden, as happy as a clam. For supper, definitely something involving basil and tomatoes. At the Grand Army Plaza farmers market yesterday, everything was ripe--okra, eggplant, corn, tomatoes in every color, peaches, plums, even the new crop Gingergold apples and red Clapp pears. I would have pictures of all this, if only the crucial camera-to-computer usb cord hadn't gone AWOL this evening.

Otherwise, coffee and the crossword at Hill Diner, unavoidable lemon ice from Court St Pastry (now also serving good, if very sweet, coffee Italian ice), a cool shower, sitting naked by the AC reading about twilight picnics and bat-watching in Prospect Park, and thinking of last summer, when K. and I were tripping around the farms and waterfalls of upstate NY, putting our money in roadside coffee cans for bags of tomatoes and eating blueberry pancakes in Watkins Glen.

Cheese, books, and apricot jam

Today's three good things:

--Daniel (aka Lemony Snickett) Handler's new novel Adverbs, definitely worth getting out of your fine local public library for a fast, fun read,

--Ten-year-old Wisconsin cheddar, sold at Smith Street's new Stinky Bklyn cheese store (and nowhere else in the metropolitan area), especially paired with Mazzola's killer garlic loaf and some of Chestnut's homemade pickles, all waiting to drop into your hot little hands chez Stinky,

--Homemade apricot jam! You can make this, yes you can.

Here's the short version: pit and quarter some apricots, mix them with sugar, let sit for a few hours. Pour fruit into a pot, add lemon juice, bring to a boil and simmer 5 minutes. Pour back in the bowl, let stand again. Boil up a second time, simmer a few minutes until thickened. Pour into clean jars. Let cool, then eat. Simple as that!

What you need: 1 quart box of little ripe fresh apricots (alas, I didn't have a scale to weigh them, and the farm stand was selling them by the quart, not by the pound. But enough to fill two strawberry pint boxes, if you can visualize that); 3/4 to 1 cup sugar, juice of 1 lemon.

If anyone at your local farmers' market is selling Royal Blenheim apricots, you MUST thank them profusely for growing these, buy a lot and make jam. Royal Blenheims (aka Royals or Blenheims) are small, freckly, greenish-orangey-red apricots that ripen from the inside out, so that the outside may not look quite ripe while the inside is pure jammy goodness. Hard to find, since they've mostly been shouldered out by the big, bland, standardized Pattersons (your typical solid-orange supermarket apricot), but they have a fantastically pure, deep apricot taste when cooked and make the best jam by far.

Wash, pit, and quarter the apricots. Put them in a ceramic or glass bowl and stir in the sugar. Put a plate on top and let sit at room temp for several hours, or overnight in the fridge. (Room temp is better, because the sugar dissolves faster.) When the sugar has dissolved and formed a bunch of syrup around the fruit, add the lemon juice and dump the whole thing into a saucepan and bring to a boil over medium heat. Turn down the heat when it starts to froth up and make a fuss. Let simmer, stirring frequently, for 5 minutes. Pour back into bowl, cover and let sit for another few hours. Wander off, go to the library, eat some cheese.

When you are ready to finish the jam, make sure you have 3 clean empty jars available (old jam, honey, or mayo jars work well). My batch made about 2 1/2 cups of jam, so pick your jars accordingly. To make sure the jars are super-clean, run them through the dishwasher or submerge them completely in a deep pot filled with water and boil them for 10 minutes.

Pour the jam mixture back into the saucepan and bring to a gentle boil again. Let simmer for a few minutes, stirring often. When the syrup is still liquid but thicker than it was and the fruit pieces look translucent, start picking up a spoonful of syrup and letting it run off the long side of the spoon. When the drops of syrup run together into one or two sticky-looking drops, it's done (it will thicken up further as it cools). This isn't a hard-gelling jam; it's more like a soft, chunky preserve. Turn off the heat and scoop the hot jam into the jars. Put on the lids and let cool at room temp. When the jars are cold, store in the fridge and eat within a month.

Actual work time on this jam is less than 30 minutes overall, with only one bowl and one pot to rinse out. And it's heaven on toast or stirred into yogurt.

You can, of course, "can" this jam for longer storage, using proper canning (aka Mason or ball) jars, the ones with the two-part lids-- a flat metal circle with a ring of rubbery sealing compound inside the rim and a wide screw-on band. Follow the same instructions for sterilizing the jars, rinsing the lids with boiling water as well just before use. Fill jars with hot jam to within 1/4" of the top. Wipe top rim of jar with a paper towel dipped in boiling water. Drop on lid and tighten band until it is just finger-tight. Return filled jars to pot of boiling water and boil for 10 minutes (this is to ensure a tight seal). Remove jars from water and let cool without disturbing the jars until they are stone cold. Press down in the middle of each lid to make sure it has sealed properly--if the lid pops up and down under your finger, it didn't seal and should be stored in the fridge. Otherwise, sealed jars can be stored in a cool, dry place for several months. Once open, store in the fridge and eat within a month.

Canning jars are sold in most hardware stores and many supermarkets. Half-pint (8 oz/1 cup) jars are the most useful for jam. Remember, you can re-use the jars and the metal screw-on bands, but you must use a brand-new flat lid for each batch. The flat lids can be purchased separately in small packs of a dozen each.

U-PiK

The Pie Queen has been a travellin' country girl this summer, and what a happy thing that's been. Alas, due to family issues, I had to fly home from Portland last Friday rather than continuing on to Vermont to see Joyce Carrol Goats and friends, but the up side was spending several days out in the lovely rural environs of Orange County, NY, a couple hours west of NYC, where the Pie Queen Mother resides. As anyone who's read the sides of the trucks at the Union Square Greenmarket knows, Warwick, Pine Island and the surrounding towns are home to many of the area's best farms, thanks to the region's unique "black dirt"--a loam so rich and productive that it really is chocolatey-black--perfect for onions, carrots and other root vegetables in particular, but good for lettuce and basil and flowers too. Orchards dot the area, as do dairies. Up the road from the PQM's house is Nettie Ochs, an apple orchard with acres of trees and swell cider and cider doughnuts, along with the most jigsaw-puzzle-perfect view of American farmland that's you'd ever want to see. In the summer, they offer pick your own peaches, blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, and tomatoes--a siren call to the fruit-hunter's heart that beats dark and fierce in the breast of PQ.

So on a recent hot afternoon, I greased up with SPF30 and went out to pick, hunting down each perfect raspberry and squatting down to separate the powdery dark-blue ripe berries from their purply sour cousins on the little blueberry shrubs. I came home with a bag of peaches, a bag of sweet orange tomatoes, a quart of raspberries, and a handful of blues. Everything will be riper in a week or two, but the pickings were still there for the taking, if you didn't mind a search. I'd hoped to come back with enough raspberries for a few jars of jam, but they were so sweet and delicious, we simply ate them out of hand.

I heart Jane

Two things you need to know about dining in Halifax: lunch at Jane's, and dinner at Jane's. That's Jane's on the Common, on Robie St bordering yes, the Commons, a big swathe of green used for multiple sports-playing. We stumbled upon Jane's in a morning coffee search, and then realized it had won numerous awards for brunch and customer loyalty in the 2006 Best Of Halifax put out by the weekly alternative newspaper, The Coast. We peered in at the chalkboard menu and saw pomegranate martinis, lemon-curd pavlova with blueberries, and more...and we liked it so much for lunch, we came back for dinner. More to follow, but if you're up here in the Maritimes, don't miss it--or Bud the Spud, one of the city's many roving chip wagons, or the amazing selection of British products--including mango-papaya Wensleydale cheese--at Pete's Frootique, which sounds like a smoothie joint but is actually a fabulous supermarket, the Canadian love child of Whole Foods and Berkeley Bowl.

Howdy from Halifax

Hello from Halifax, Nova Scotia, where it's cool and crisp and roving travelers can stay in dorm rooms at Dalhousie University for a mere $40 (Canadian) a night. Sure, you have to walk down the hall for the washroom, but the shower rooms come with actual bathtubs, a very civilized touch. Most Canadian universities rent out their dorms during the summer, and they are a great option for budget travelers--we stayed at the University of Prince Edward Island in Charlottetown a few days ago, and had a bang-up time--spotlessly clean rooms, laundry facilities down the hall, breakfast in the cafeteria, even a Tim Horton's down the street. Tim Horton's is the Canadian version of Dunkin' Donuts, essentially, although a little nicer, and is a Canadian obsession. They are everywhere, even at the air base in Kandahar, which is now run by the Canadians. Soldiers line up in front of the Tim Horton's trailer every morning, waiting for their coffee and doughnuts. In Charlottetown, though, we patronized Timothy's, the funky free-trade coffee shop with free wifi that calls their version of coffee with an espresso shot a "Canadiana." Much Canuck pride on display here, from maple-flag beach umbrellas to the cult of Anne of Green Gables.

More to follow, including Celtic folk dancing and Acadian meat pie in Cape Breton! Dining in Halifax, including the mystery of the donair! Gummy lobsters in PEI! And coming up, goats in Vermont!

Cool Enough to Bake

Don't hate me because I'm wearing a sweater right now. We've even got the woodstove cranked up this cool gray cloudy morning, up here on the coast of Maine.

Outside, it's the bloody,whining climax of When Mosquitos Attack, but behind the screen doors, all is peaceful, with the scent of spiced chai tea and salt air drifting through the knotty-pine lodge rooms. It is so beautiful up here, and NOT HOT, that I am grateful every minute for the convergence of luck and opportunity that brought me here. I've never been so happy not to have a day job as when my old pal Brian told me that one of the the writers at this little colony had flipped out and fled, and they now had a little 10x10 pine cabin just waiting for a chipper writer-baker like me. In gratitude, I have been baking like a piequeen, making coconut cupcakes, blueberry muffins (from wild berries picked just outside), chocolate chip cookies, and three kinds of pie--blueberry, raspberry custard, and last night, to go with the thanks-for-the-memories Thanksgiving dinner of turkey, stuffing, butternut squash, and gravy, good old all-American apple pie. Cool, peaceful, mossy and sprucey...we went out on the boat yesterday on a little excursion to the mile-long sandy beach on Roque Island, a beach lined with the best skipping stones ever made. On the way back, though Pig Gut (the narrow inlet running past Pig Island) and Ram Islands, we saw frolicking porpoises and curious dog-faced seals, leaping salmon (in salmon-fattening pens, out in the bay) and sleek black cormorants, maybe even eagles and herons in the distance.

Saturday or Sunday, we'll be leaving this little muddy paradise, on to the diversions of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, ending up at Brian's friends' goat farm in Vermont, where the most prolific milker has been dubbed Joyce Carol Goats.

Pie Baking Day

Last night's huge thunderstorm washed the whole island clean--woke up this morning to blue skies and blue water. A perfect day to hike through the spider-webbed, mossy pine woods and then over the granite boulders at the edge of the shore. Found wild gooseberries growing amid the blueberries, raspberries, and bearberries, along with wild roses, irises, beach peas, and Queen Anne's lace. Another storm blew in at 4pm--dramatic torrents and thunder as I rolled out the dough for my blueberry and raspberry-custard pies. By the time the pies were cooling, the puddles were reflecting a peaceful rose-and-cream sunset and a twilight blue sky.


The blueberry pie looks so sweet--nothing fancy, just straight-up pie. The filling is as simple as it gets: 5 cups berries, 1 cup sugar, 1/4 cup Minute tapioca, a tiny sprinkle of cinnamon. And the crust, 2 1/2 cups flour, 1/2 tsp salt, 2 tsp sugar, 2 sticks of butter (8 oz), 1/4 cup of ice water and I'm slightly ashamed to admit, a few tb of vegetable shortening, because it was there, and because I'm just sick of wrestling with those goddamn diva-bitch all-butter doughs. Working in a nice cool kitchen with an ocean breeze blowing through the screen door helped a lot, too.

One morning in Maine

It's a cool gray day on Norton Island, up here in the Gulf of Maine. L.L. Bean woolen-sweater weather, which was almost unimaginable back in the sweaty heat of Brooklyn. Almost, not quite, which means that I do have flannel pajamas, a turtleneck, a sweater, and a fleece pullover, all of which will be very good (and muddy) friends by the end of next week.

Tiny, aspirin-sized wild blueberries are just beginning to ripen all over the island; after picking with intent for two mornings, I had almost enough for a batch of muffins this morning. Although this is a congenial, food-focused group of artists and writers up here, it seems no one had ever thought to pick and bake for the morning before. I foresee making friends the PQ way--with the oven! It would take hours and hours to pick enough berries to make pie for 12, though, since the fruit's only just starting to ripen, so I put my weekend order in today for 5 pints of berries to be brought out by boat from the local Hannaford's supermarket so I can bake a few pies tomorrow.

The only connection to the mainland is by small boat (the same boat on which we went bucking around the bay yesterday on a fruitless but beautiful hunt for a dead whale, supposedly floating out there near Great Wass Island). It's hard to remember what day it is, especially on days like today, when the fog rolls in and all is silent and gray.

downeast ho!

I'm going to Maine! On the midnight train (well, bus) to Bangor tonight, and by tomorrow afternoon I'll be on a tiny island up the coast from Bar Harbor. And how this does fill me with joy. Lobster rolls! Cold nights! Colder water! Seagulls and pine trees, and seeing the Perseid meteor shower far from the bright lights of Brooklyn.

But first, a sour-cherry pie must be baked for the book club ladies, and finally, I can do this because the AC is on. Yes, I feel guilty about adding to my carbon- and electricity-guzzling debt, but surely I'm working at a deficit after all these no-AC/no TV/no hairdryer years. So the dough is chillin' and the cherries are ready to be pitted. Last night, Amy (the nicest neighbor in neighborland) invited me down for steak and CSA-box salad and succotash. I had half a bottle of rose to offer, but what about dessert? There was most of a box of tiny sweet tri-star strawberries from the Fantasy Fruit (does that sound kinky, or is it just me?) stand at the tompkins square farmers market, there was a tablespoon or so of sour cream (left over from last week's movie-night cupcakes) and yes, a little lump of tart dough in the freezer, left over from the apricot tart I made for that Bastille Day pate party (I bake; I don't puree liver). So, once the dough had unfrozen itself, I pressed it into some little fluted tart pans, weighed them down with foil and rice, and popped them in the oven to bake, taking out the foil halfway through so they'd get nice and golden. Mixed up the sour cream with a capful of vanilla, a couple tb of powdered sugar, and a drizzle of sweetened condensed milk, which has been lying around in the fridge as lazy as the day is long. It was soupy, but tasty, so I stuck it in the freezer to thicken up a little. Once the pastry shells were baked and cooled, I smeared in a little blueberry jam, added a spoonful of the now slightly slushy cream, and topped each one with cute little berries. And damn they were good, and even better since everything in them was, essentially, a leftover.

If you're not jam-inclined, you could melt some chocolate chips, add a little butter, brandy or coffee, and powdered sugar, and spread the chocolate over the crust. Let it cool and set, then top with berries.

when in doubt, swab

Crash! Boom! Splash! Yesterday afternoon's thunderstorm was really thrilling, or at least very, very loud, especially from my position squeezed up against the plexiglass of the b63 bus shelter, watching the lightning streak down the sky and the thunder sound like it was rending buildings apart right down the street. Thrilling and then scary enough to send me scuttling home to close the windows and watch the basil on the balcony get pounded with water.

So, with Brooklyn awash, instead of the silent Hitchcock movies in Prospect Park, Amy and Paul and I hit the Cobble Hill Cinema for a 2 1/2 hour date with Johnny Depp. Fun, but dopey, mostly because the whole movie pretty much grinds to a halt when the CGI sea monsters and undead half-human/half-crab creatures get in on the action, which they do at tedious length. And even a decent British character actor like Bill Nighy can't do much with a face overrun by a giant squid-tentacle weave, while Orlando Bloom, cut-glass handsome as he may be, is flummoxed by the demands of conveying any emotion more complex than square-jawed resolve. Which leaves Johnny Depp, whose flouncy pirate captain has more than enough surface interest--what with the eyeliner, the eyeshadow, the straggling facial hair, the headscarf, the multiple belts around his hips and little beady tchotchkes in his white-boy dreads--to make the rest of the nonsense (the three-way fight on a runaway millwheel that plays like the freakout of swashbuckling hamsters; the even more ridiculous fight in which Depp, roped to a long bamboo pole, ends up with both ends of the pole skewered with tropical fruit like a human mai tai) bearable, at least with popcorn and air conditioning.

And speaking of air conditioning, since I would not stop for the air conditioner, the air conditioner kindly stopped for me. When you've been whining about needing an air conditioner for weeks (well, years really) without figuring out a way to get one home from the hardware store, and then you come back to your apartment building on yet another sweltering day to find one of your neighbors holding a stoop sale on your very own steps, with a never-used, still-in-the-box air conditioner for sale, with her willing friend ready to carry the box up two flights and drop it in your living room, well, who am I to say no? So now I have a brand-new AC unit ready to be plugged in. Once, of course, I get some wood blocks or something to prop it on, since my window has these weird metal screen-and-storm-window ledges inside that make balancing an air conditioner in the window somewhat of a dicey prospect.

But at least now I, and all guests of the future, will no longer have drip in what was the sauna of PQ Castle. And while it's been much too hot to cook, the cocktails at the Brooklyn Social Club on Smith near Carroll are just the thing to chase the summer blues. Especially the pretty-in-pink Neopolitan, a cosmo-ish mix of citrus vodka, cointreau, lemon, and pomegranate juice. Mmmm.

Picnic Season

Oh, rain! Huge spattering drops came down last night, just minutes after the climax of the post-NY Philharmonic concert in the park, where I was sharing fresh mozzarella and hearts-of-palm salad and balsamic-grilled chicken with my old pal Adam. (Note to self: NEVER, ever, try to shop for a picnic at Whole Foods and Trader Joe's in prime post-work hours. I got plenty of tasty food, but the lines and crowds were murderous. It was, however, way too disgustingly hot to even think of cutting up anything in my sauna of a kitchen.) The crowds shrieked with glee and threw picnic blankets and newspapers over their heads, getting happily soaked after 2 days of close-to-100-degree heat. We stood under a marquee in Times Square and watched the rain teem down, neon reflecting in the puddles. And then, oh bliss, Adam actually drove me all the way home across the Brooklyn Bridge in his air-conditioned car, with Depression-era Argentinian tango playing, which he even translated. From what he could make out of the gangster slang, the main theme was "The world is broken/we're all in the shit."

Everyone, it seems, is going out to Brooklyn Bridge Park tomorrow at dusk to see Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, based on the Patricia Highsmith nail-biter of the same name, an attempt at constructing a pair of "perfect" crimes in which two strangers agree to dispatch each other's enemies. Highsmith excels at constructing an atmosphere of inescapable, almost claustrophobic anxiety, shown to particular perfection in The Talented Mr Ripley and others in that series. She was (mostly) gay, and conflicted about that, and it shows up transmuted into her fiction: lots of ambiguous relations between men, never made explicit and ending, more often than not, in a spasm of murderous intent, coupled with a streak of unexpectedly sharp misogyny. It's Jane's birthday eve, so cupcakes will be necessary--perhaps a repeat of last summer's Cook's Illustrated sour-cream-chocolate ones, plus perhaps a batch of a different flavor--lemon? Coconut? B. should be coming along too, which means, of course, lots of wine. I might even pull out the bottle of Bonny Doon Vin Gris de Cigare (or Flying Saucer Rose) that I hauled home from SF's Bi-Rite Market last summer. Smoked salmon, tasty crackers, mozzarella salad with basil from the garden...it's picnic season!

coolth

Oh, I give up. No more sleeping in the sauna. Hardware store, craigslist: an air conditioner WILL BE MINE by the end of the day today. Until then, it's watermelon, watermelon, watermelon all day long. And Beethoveen's Fifth in Central Park tonight, if, for a change, the NY Philharmonic doesn't incur the wrath of the rain gods.

Hot summer in the city

It's hot. It's sticky. PQ Castle still doesn't have AC--something I've been resisting because a) I have no money right now, b) I hate storing bulky appliances that aren't needed for three-quarters of the year, and c) somehow, if I buy an air conditioner, I am committing to staying in NYC, something I'm still not sure about, even after 3 years. Earlier this week, I couldn't help myself--I got onto to the instant-gratification crackhouse that is Craigslist, and starting skimming the Bay Area summer sublets. SF (or more specifically, the MIssion) being what it is, several of the places I found turned out to belong to friends of old roommates, and I wanted them all--the shared Edwardian on Dolores, the tiny no-stove acupuncturist's cottage up a million steps in Montclair, the wooden house in Bolinas, even the funky two-part house down in the Berkeley flats. What am I escaping from, or to? The heat, the humidity, the concrete, the sheer relentlessness of NYC. What is this life I'm living here? It feels like I'm just marking time, somehow, waiting for the life I really want to start. And this city's an almost unbearably pricey place to be marking time.

Well, enough whinging. (Although if you happen to be a person with a budget and a project looking for snappy freelance food writers or handy editors, please feel free to snap me up for some actual paid work. I'll perform with aplomb, I promise.) What's cooking? I'm on the list at the library for Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and Nina Planck's Real Food, two of the numerous books out this summer (including new tomes from Marion Nestle and Eric Schlosser) about the political, ecological, and health-related implications of how we eat. There's also Full Moon Feast, by Jessica Prentice, who taught the excellent soup-making class that I took a couple of years ago at Mariquita Farms. Much discussion by both Prentice and Planck about the importance of real--that is, non-processed, non-altered food, which means whole (preferably raw) milk instead of skim (the fat is key to absorbing the milk proteins and calcium, according to Planck); organic beef instead of soy burgers; canned sardines and chickpeas instead of premade anything, and plenty of butter and olive oil. While I don't know how true her vehement nutritional claims are, I certainly agree that brown rice and black beans, especially with homemade mango salsa and fresh corn, is one of the most satisfying (and inexpensive) things you can eat. And sardine sandwiches should be much more popular than they are, especially on crisp whole-wheat toast overlaid with razor-thin lemon slices and good lettuce.

Of course, much as I already live by Planck's frugal dried beans/canned fish/and vegetables, vegetables, vegetables dictum, sometimes I get frustrated in my own house by the fact that there's rarely much, if any, ready-to-eat food besides fruit and chocolate chips (half the bag goes into cookies; the other half lolls in the freezer to be slowly devoured by the palmful). Just about everything in my pantry and fridge has to be dealt with before it can be eaten--the oameal cooked, the pancakes made from scratch, the zucchini sauteed, the oil and vinegar whisked into vinaigrette. This is by choice; I actually hate most processed snacky food (OK, I will eat--and love--multiple handfuls of thick-cut salty potato chips, like Cape Cod or Terra chips. But only out of your bag of chips). Sometimes, though you just don't feel like peeling the carrot, or boiling the egg, and that's when peanut butter out of the jar (or almonds by the handful) comes in. But when I'm not already too hungry and cranky to take the 10 minutes it requires, there's rarely a better lunch in my house than a chunk of whole-wheat baguette, split, toasted, rubbed with garlic, spread with fresh goat cheese, fresh basil leaves, and slices of tomato, then popped in the oven until the bread crisps and the cheese and tomato get hot. Mmmm.

What else? Tomorrow, the Bastille Day pate-and-rillettes party at Amy and Zach's, where only people whose names begin with Z. will be allowed to head-butt the guests. Me? I'm bringing apricot tart. And then on Sat, my old pals M. and D. come out to visit. I've warned them that it will be 90+ degrees here, but I bet they don't believe me, after a decade of freezing SF summers.

And speaking of summer, it now seems that many of my SF pals will be coming east--or just leaving town--during August, so maybe it's not the best time to go jaunting off. Now, to pitch, pitch, pitch and keep this overpriced roof over my head.

my kingdom for a zuke

Off to East Flatbush, for more sidewalk cooking. On the menu: zucchini basil fritters, with herbed yogurt and fresh tomato salsa. Come on down! 2pm at the Wyckoff House farmers market. See you there!

Meet PQ in Brooklyn!

East Brooklynites, come down and see the Pie Queen in action this Sunday! I'll be doing a seasonal cooking demo at the Wyckoff House farmers' market at 2pm on July 9th, continuing this summer's cooking-on-the-sidewalk trend.

Stars and Stripes

Happy 4th of July!

One of the colonels on K's base decided to celebrate the holiday by hooking up a set of speakers outside his office and blasting the 1812 Overture--on repeat--all day. As K. said, you don't get to argue with the colonel.

But here in Brooklyn, it was a steamy day of thunder and dampness, with lemon ice from the Court St Pastry Shop and pink lemonade from the stand outside Cobble Hill Park, and now two rooftop fireworks parties in Brooklyn Heights, to which Amy & I will yet again be toting our collective Cherry Cobble(hill)r, made with sour cherries from Saturday's farmers' market. Happy Fourth, and don't blow your fingers off, y'all.

summer sweet

After endlessly, sweatily hauling my stuff--including jars and jars of Arkansas jam-- home from Newark Airport (which takes, if it's late on a Friday night and the downtown A train is running on the local track instead of the express, and you have to trudge through Penn Station like a pack mule trying to find the elevators because your numerous bags are too bulky to schlep up the stairs, something upwards of 3 hours), I'm finally back in Brooklyn, cocooning in my apt for the day, unpacking all the stuff I'd hidden in boxes to oblige the subletters.

The house was really minimalist, in a soothing way, when I walked in--nothing on the table, no photos on the bookcase, no underwear in the dresser, no stuff anywhere--but it's slowly returning to its more cluttered but liveable state. A girl's got to have easy access to her nail-polish remover and Afghanistan postcards, after all. My mother, bless her heart, showed up the afternoon before I arrived to hobnob with the subletters (who were vacuuming, bless their preppy little hearts) and fill my fridge with homemade meatloaf, roasted zucchini and rye bread. Not to mention yet more toothpaste, toilet paper, and laundry soap. It's a little embarrassing that my mother still treats me like a negligent college student, but then again, having 24 rolls of TP in the hall closet is reassuring. And she'll get plenty of jam--and pickles--from the jam closet in thanks.

Lots of fun things going on this week--the fireworks, of course, but also the start of the lovely Brooklyn Bridge Park outdoor movies, beginning with the Wizard of Oz this Thursday night. I'm already into the al fresco-movie swing, thanks to Princess Charlotte's outdoor cinema in Eureka Springs--in fact, I'm a little sad that I'm not in my best Pink Lady finery for the costume contest happening right now before tonight's showing of Grease (if only to enjoy seeing all the butches in town decked out in greaserwear)--but the BBP events are cheery, down-home ones, complete with take-out pizzas from Grimaldi's, kids in PJs, and hokey pre-show shorts shot by local filmmakers. Another way to beat the heat: the free, and HUGE (if hard to get to) Red Hook municipal pool, which is the size of a Wal-Mart parking lot. Just don't forget to bring a lock for your locker (you aren't allowed to bring anything out to pool except a towel, and they don't sell locks onsite), and remember that the pool, weirdly, closes down between 3pm and 4pm daily.

And I've got Bill Withers' song Lovely Day on constant rotation in my brain right now, thanks to the Body & Soul reunion in the courtyard at PS1, inaugurating the summer-long series of WarmUp parties out there in LIC. Instead of tweaker electro, the music was old-school funk and soul, with 20-minute mixes of Thelma Huston's Don't Leave Me This Way that put me in mind of Sunday mornings at the EndUp in SF, back in my Peachy Puff days selling twizzlers and Benson & Hedges Deluxe Ultra Light Menthols to the so-late-it's-early queer crowd, and the sweaty, swaying, hands-in-the-air street parties at the Folsom St Fair and Pink Saturday. Leaning over the railing at Julie P's second-floor rooftop patio (which handily overlooks the PS1 courtyard), I wanted to be dancing with K., to have my hands around her waist kissing her in the crowd surrounded by all that disco love.

My last day in Eureka Springs--for now--started with this good news from the courts in Little Rock. Now, if only the Court of Appeals in NY State would get on the stick and make it so K. can make an honest woman of me next year.

Until then, carrot muffins, bluberry pancakes, and jam for everyone.

Happy days at the market

Rosalina the Pie Queen Explains It All to You

With Heather, the market manager

All set up and ready to cook

Beautiful flowers with Diane. Turns out Diane and I lived in SF at the same time, drinking cappuccinos at Caffe Trieste but alas, never meeting. But now I know her and her lovely partner Marcie, who live out on a wonderful small farm way out in the country.

PQ at the Market, Take 2

It's time for another farmers' market demonstration, this one at the Eureka Springs market at 9AM on Thursday, June 29th, in the Pine Mountain Village parking lot (out, I believe, on highway 62E). Frittata with farm eggs, zucchini, and whatever herbs are on offer, along with a salad with berry vinaigrette. I have my doubts as to how the frittata's going to go, being made in a clunky electric skillet, but here's my chance for seat-of-the-pants cooking. I might have to do some fancy saves if the whole thing sticks to the pan, as it very well might when I try to do the fancy flipping. Wish me luck! Pictures to follow, and hope to see you there.

To make real berry vinegar, the berries should steep in the vinegar for at least 4 or 5 days. Ooops. Well, I'll have to do an instant version on site, but I'll post the real recipe here.

Warning: Armadillo Crossing

The supply vehicle for the Roadkill Cafe...

Double Blueberry Shortcake

Glad you've all been enjoying the rose-apron peanut galley pictures! The demo was extremely fun to do, even out there in the heat, baking biscuits on the sidewalk and having to yell across the plaza, where what audience I had was ensconced 15 feet away, under the sole cluster of shady trees. But I think I convinced the 7-year-olds that if I could make jam and biscuits in a tent, they could make them for their moms and dads in the kitchen. So here's the recipe, and you can do it too. It's a three-step process: biscuits, jam, whipped cream, and then lots of extra berries.

Make it a Fourth of July shortcake by adding raspberries or sliced strawberries to the fresh fruit on top. Serve in shallow bowls so you don't have to chase your berries all over the plate.

Blueberry Shortcake with Quick Blueberry Spread and Honey Cream

Light, fluffy biscuits get layered with a fresh blueberry filling, drenched with honey-sweetened whipped cream, and topped with more fresh berries.

Shortcake Biscuits
Cornmeal adds a pleasant crunch to these delicate, cake-like biscuits. The same recipe also makes tasty hot biscuits for breakfast, especially when slathered with butter and drizzled with honey or sorghum.

2 cups all-purpose white flour, preferably unbleached
1/2 cup yellow or white cornmeal
1/4 cup sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
8 TB (1 stick or 1/2 cup) butter or shortening, chilled
1 egg
1/2 cup milk plus 1 TB (you may need slightly more or less)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Lightly grease a round cake pan.

In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, cornmeal, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Cut butter or shortening into small chunks and scatter over the dry ingredients. Using your fingertips, a pastry blender, or two butter knives, cut butter or shortening into dry ingredients until mixture looks like coarse cornmeal with a few larger pea-sized bits. (This can also be done in a trice in a food processor. Once you get used to the fingertip method, though, it's really fast, and there's no bulky appliance to clean!)

Measure the milk in a glass measuring cup, then break in the egg and beat together. Drizzle over flour mixture and mix gently into a soft dough.

Turn out onto a floured countertop or cutting board. Pat into an even 1-inch-thick round. Using a floured biscuit cutter or the rim of a small drinking glass, cut out 6 biscuits (number may vary depending on the size of your cutter). Fit biscuits into cake pan, sides touching.

Bake 15-20 minutes until tops are pale gold. Remove from baking sheet and let cool on a rack.

Makes 6 biscuits.

Quick Blueberry Filling
This easy blueberry spread tastes just like a slice of blueberry pie fresh from the oven. If you have extra, scoop into a clean jar and store in the fridge to use like jam. (Because of the tapioca in the filling, this shouldn't be canned for storage; it's best if eaten with a week or so.)

2 TB water
1 TB tapioca (the tiny-pearl kind, such as Minute brand in the little red box)
juice of half a lemon
1/2 cup sugar
2 cups blueberries

In a small, heavy-bottomed pot, mix water, tapioca, lemon juice, sugar, and berries together. Over medium-low heat, bring to a simmer. Simmer, stirring frequently, until berries have collapsed and mixture is deep purple and jammy, about 10 minutes. Remove from heat. Let cool (it will thicken as it cools) and refrigerate until needed. If you want, stir in a little cassis or Chambord liqueur before using.

Makes 1 1/2 cups.

Honey Cream
Each type of flower produces a different flavor of honey; try an assortment of raw local honeys to find your favorite.

1/2 pint heavy (whipping) cream
1 TB honey, or to taste
1/2 tsp vanilla extract, a few drops of orange extract or a little bit of grated orange rind

Whip cream with a whisk or hand-held electric mixer until beater begins to leave traces on the surface of the cream. Add honey and vanilla. Continue beating until cream is thick enough to mound up on a spoon.

Assembly:

Biscuits
Blueberry preserves
Honey cream
2-3 cups fresh blueberries

Using a small sharp knife, split biscuit. Put bottom half on biscuit on a plate. Spread with a generous spoonful of blueberry preserves. Top with some fresh berries and a spoonful of cream. Top with top half of biscuit, more cream and fresh berries. Repeat with remaining biscuits.

Serves 6