rhubarb tart with strawberries and orange flower water

This is a rhubarb tart that I pulled together (also inspired by the new Deborah Madison book): I cooked a pound of chopped rhubarb with the zest and juice of an orange and a ½ cup of sugar. Once that softened, I added a handfull of halved strawberries (reserving most for garnishing since they were too gorgeous to cook) and ½ tsp. of tapioca starch and let it cook for about five minutes. To this I added a splash of orange flower water and let it cool, and I then placed it into a fully baked, and cooled, flaky tart shell (which had been coated with egg near the end of its baking). I added ⅓ of a vanilla bean to a ½-pint of heavy cream and let that sit while the tart set. To serve, I whipped the cream with another splash of orange flower water and some sugar. Finish with halved strawberries.

strawberry gin

Having heard about the delights of sloe gin I thought I'd give it a try with strawberries as I have no idea where one might find sloe berries.

I filled a quart container with hulled strawberries and added a third of a cup of sugar. I filled it with gin and swirled the berries a little to dissolve some of the sugar.

Agitating the jar every few days I let it go as the berries lost their color fading to a pink-white and then to a dull gray. Meanwhile, the sugar dissolved and the gin turned a bright red. It's been three weeks, and it is delicious. Not to sweet, full of berry flavor and maintaining the gin flavor (New Amsterdam gin, which makes a terrible martini or gin-and-tonic but is suited for this as vanilla is its predominant flavor).

Should be perfect for a strawberry gin fizz, or pink lemonade, right?

Also made anise hyssop gin. Wonderful. Green like chartreuse and delicious.

full-on summer, pt. 1

Asparagus (soufflé, and tips in salad).


Strawberries (ice cream, and macerated).

strawberry ale

The last week of June, with strawberries abound and more coming, I decided to try a go at making a strawberry wheatbeer. I started with a 2 gallon batch of wheat beer (in a 3 gallon carboy). It included: 1 pound Munton's light malted barley, 2 pounds Munton's wheat malt and a pound of unmalted wheat flakes. It is lightly hopped. I let it cool, overnight, protected by cheesecloth — hoping to excite and invite the various microflora of my neighborhood.

I've read that strawberry ales need to be enjoyed young, and that strawberries do poorly with fermentation — with all that activity and release of CO₂ the strawberryness escapes. So I brewed that for a week and then added maybe 4 pounds of strawberries — whole and crushed — for a second fermentation for two-and-a-half weeks.

It then spent a week in the bottle with some more light malt for a final fermentation/conditioning.

And it's wonderful. It has a nice berry tartness with a slight acetic tartness — nothing overwhelming, nowhere near a wild-fermented cider —, it's light and it has an aroma that really is of fresh strawberries. The carbonation is light and has the fine bubbles of a sparling wine. And the tartness with that is magnificent.

summer.

An entirely homegrown salad: Alissa's escarole, cucumber and baby summer squash with my nasturtiums. A perfectly bitter early summer salad: the sharp escarole was offset by the sweetness of raw squash and cucumbers while the nasturtiums' sweetness pairs with escarole's bite and its pepperyness goes well with a spicy mustard vinaigrette.

And then cauliflower (from the CSA), tossed with nutmeg and olive oil and grilled. Simple; very, very good:

And mackerel, one of my favorite fish, stuffed with thyme, preserved lemons and garlic, grilled:

And the last of my many strawberries, all tarted up.

small projects

Garlic scapes are on a "as you can use them" basis at the CSA, so I've grabed a few bunches each week. I made a pesto last week with one part garlic scapes to one part basil plus walnuts, cheese, olive oil, salt. That was quite good. I've also made a vegan version of that.

Even better:
• handful of garlic scapes
• quart of snap peas (whole)
• ½ cup walnuts
• ¼ - ½ cup olive oil
• salt, pepper to taste

Puréed and tossed with pasta (aim for as mush bean-scape mix as pasta and it's real good).

Also, small, but timely: I'm making a lambic-ish beer. I made a wheat beer (one part light barley malt, one part flaked wheat, two parts wheat malt) that sat out overnight, covered in cheesecloth to invite wild yeast, added ale yeast and then added strawberries after the first week. Could be terrible. Could be amazing. Yes, it's an amateur attempt at best (hoping to have more research done come raspberry time).

strawberries!

These may have been tedious to pick — they're all small, miniatures: the plants' last efforts at turning their berries red before the heat overwhelms — but these are the sweetest, brightest, most delicious strawberries that I have ever had.

crucifers

The CSA has brought many wonderful things this far into the season: komatsuna (a wholly new green to me), tatsoi (ditto), mizuna, turnips, bok choy... Thinking about it, I wonder if that actually counts as any diversity in my diet as all five of those plants are the same plant: Brassica rapa. (It's amazing that we've managed to get so much out of one species in a few thousand years). There has also been lettuce, radishes (pictured at left with baby turnips and salt as a crudité — the calendula and other flowers also from the CSA), arugula, kale, kolrahbi and broccoli. (Those last three are one plant—Brassica oleracea—, and close relatives of that first group).

This simple salad was actually quite good, I was extremely happy with it. It's mizuna and argula, chopped, with thinly sliced young turnips. These turnips are sweet and pair very well with the spice of the arugula and the bite of mizuna. A little sprinkle of salt, some mild olive oil and some (raw) red wine vinegar (not much!) made it perfection.

Here's to a summer of eating food grown less than two miles from home!

(Oh... and there were six quarts of strawberries for picking. Looks like I have to make jam!)

strawberries

This is another recipe from the people at Tartine, a strawberry bavarian. I used a génoise as the base (this is the second I've made and I prefer it to the chiffon as a base cake. No leavening, just flour, sugar, eggs, salt — and a little butter). It's really wonderful. So then the cake layers get split, soaked in strawberry purée, and covered with a thin of layer bavarian cream (pastry cream, whipped cream and a little bit of gelatin to stabilize it all).

You then cover that in fresh strawberries, turning halves out on the edge for the final cake's presentation. More pastry cream is added, then the second cake layer and more purée and then that sets for a while. I like to finish it with whipped cream at my final destination as that's the easy part and — I fear — the first part that'd get messed up or melts in a car. Strawberries and calendula (picked from the CSA) finish this one off.