Archive for fruit

02 Aug 2008
Cookery • fruit • Fruit recipe • Garden • locavore log • vegetable • Wild Food

Peachy-Wild Berries Jubilee

A few weeks ago, I blogged about picking up berries in the hedge rows – free wild food… well.. free as in “spend no cash”, but after several hours in the delightful mugginess and bugginess characteristic of a Virginia summer, the numerous scratches that you have collected – not matter how careful or layered you were – and the (relatively) meager harvest, you understand why berries seem so expensive when you buy them. And those are the cultivated ones that grow meekly and obediently in rows and trellises. Wild berries are … well… wild in how they grow – and you do have to keep an eye out for snakes and bears. It’s always amazing the things some people will do for wild berries!

So I froze berries by the bag full and jubilantly made wild blackberry sorbet & wineberry sorbet.

Then I read about Sugar High Friday on FoodBlogga where bloggers and non-bloggers alike are invited to make a dessert featuring berries and send it to the organizer. The round-up is the brain child of Jennifer at the Domestic Goddess. I am very new to the blogosphere – having had high speed internet only very recently and just discovering all those neat food blogs out there. I am still struggling with a lot of the technical blog stuff, but I can cook (or so I’d like to think). While dessert is not necessarily my forte, I’ve got berries: besides the aforementioned wild blackberries and wineberries, the garden is currently producing a few late blueberries, day-neutral strawberries, the odd raspberries and alpine strawberries (neither of which by the way is a berry, botanically speaking; but that will be a post for another time). Mmm… I hope Jennifer meant “Berries” as cooks and gardeners would mean it – not as botanists…

[Update August 4, 2008: Stop by FoodBlogga where Susan posted today pictures and links to 82 desserts all featuring berries, some very simple and some quite elaborate - but all looking simply delicious.]

Anyway, why not try to make a dessert, a COOL dessert – as it’s way too hot to do any real baking around here – that I could send in? A dessert good enough for a festive occasion but simple enough to assemble on any week night – as all the components – except for the fresh berries – can be made days (or even weeks) in advance. It’ll give me a topic for a post and will make my friend Margaret happy since she asked me to post a sorbet recipe using berries. Voila! I love it when I can accomplish several things at once! (Margaret: do note, you are getting TWO new sorbet recipes, two herbal syrup recipes that may be used in ice-teas and cocktails AND the dessert is fat free if you omit the toasted almonds and the whipped cream)

Peachy-Wild Berries Jubilee

And so Peachy-Wild Berries Jubilee was born.(It did not stay alive very long: hands kept trying to grab it as as was trying to take “one more picture”… and if you can pronounce the name 3 times very fast, you get to eat the jubilee). Read more

sylvie | 4 comments
25 Jul 2008
Cookery • Desserts • fruit • Fruit recipe • locavore log

Not Yet Peached Out

A bowl of peachesI promised more peach recipes. If “recipe” is the word to use. You got to do a lot of things – fast – when you got a bushel (close to 60 pounds!) of peaches.

Perfectly ripe fruit call for a very simple treatment. Why mess up with pure goodness? Some nice dough, a sprinkling of sugar, a dash of spices. Voila!

This “recipe”for rustic summer fruit tart works with peaches, nectarines, apricots and plums. Picture #1 shows 3 unbaked Rustic Tart, 2 plums & 1 peach; picture # 2 shows baked Rustic Peach Tarts.

Three assemled tart waiting to be baked

Ingredients

  • frozen puff pastry (Or fresh, if you make it. I have not quite been successful at puff pastry and will admit to buy it – unbaked and frozen). Frozen puff is what I’ve got on the freezer right now, so that’s what I use.
  • ripe peaches, pitted and sliced (I don’t bother to peel – although I do wash – but go ahead and peel if you must)
  • sugar
  • vanilla powder

Thaw puff pastry. Roll out thinly on a floured surface.

Cut each sheet in rectangle – any size, does not matter. In the picture, I cut up a 3-fold pastry sheet rectangle in 3, giving me 3 small-ish rectangular tarts.

Put dough on parchment paper on cookie sheet. The parchment paper – while optional – prevents sticking and makes it easier to remove the baked tart without tearing the bottom.

Arrange sliced fruit on top, leaving enough edge to fold the pastry on the fruit. See first picture. Crimp, pinch etc as necessary to ensure the pastry wraps well up the fruit to hold the filling in place during cooking. You can see on the 2nd picture, in the middle tart the dough was not wrapping the fruit well enough so some juice escaped during baking

Sprinkle one or two tablespoons of sugar and a dash of vanilla powder on fruit.

Bake in a preheated 400 F oven. 20 minutes or until done (i.e until the pastry is puffed up and golden, with slightly browned edges)

That’s it! Pretty, tasty, easy. Fast enough to make just about any week night…

Rustic Peach tart

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23 Jul 2008
fruit • Harvest • locavore log • Wild Food

Food from the Hedgerow

Wineberries ripening

It rained all through last night and today – something we haven’t had in a long time. The creek which had become so low I could not hear it from the house (but unlike last year, it has not dried out completely – at least not yet) is singing again. So of course, I did not weed the upper vegetable garden which already was a jungle (I know that when I am able to get to it, I will need a machete). Instead of weeding, I did paperwork and admin stuff and data entry and writing and all those other things that kept me indoor.

Still… I was keeping out an appreciative ear for the rain on the metal roof. Such a nice rain too, slow with an occasional shower and no wind. Oh how is the garden liking this! (me too, at least right then, no need to water). All of that to say that by mid-afternoon I was getting pretty restless. Yeah, I know all that other stuff needs to be done, especially when one is running a small business and trying to keep things under control. Nonetheless, I was getting restless. So when the weather let up for a while, I went wild berry picking. Since I was going to freeze them and cook them right away, it did not matter that they were wet from the rain.

Wild berry picking is a little expedition.

First, you get the berry baskets: they are not too big (about a quart) because you don’t want the bottom berries to get all squashed and 4 of them fit within a much bigger basket with a large comfortable handle.

Then you get the picking basket, which has no “proper” handle but two ear-like small handles that you use to loop the basket on your belt, leaving both your hands free. Even better, if you put your belt on loose enough, the basket nestles against your tummy giving you extra protection from thorny branches in front as you push – or attempt to push – your way through the brambles, and does not spill out even as you bend down. Trust me, it’s pretty bad to spill your basket of berries after you spent a sweaty and thorny hour picking it.

And you want to dress appropriately. Read more

sylvie | 2 comments | Tags: , , , ,
21 Jul 2008
Cookery • fruit • Fruit recipe • locavore log

Very Cool Peaches

The lovely peach originates from China, although as its botanical name (Prunus persica) indicates Europeans thought – in the 18th century – that it came from Persia. Peaches seemed to have been introduced to Southern Europe via the Silk Road in Antiquity. They were brought by the Spaniards to the Americas where adopted by a number of Indian tribes at least in North America. A Wikipedia map shows that peaches are also cultivated in the temperate areas of South America.

Freshly made white peach sorbetTheir adoption by many peoples is no wonder as a ripe peach is a gift from God. I certainly thought so this week-end as I was going through the bushel of peaches I bought Friday – almost dizzy with their heady scent. It was hot this week-end, so I wanted to minimize cooking indoor. One perfect way to use those fragrant sun-charged wonders is to make Peach Sorbet. Read more

sylvie | 5 comments | Tags: , ,
17 Jul 2008
beverage • Cookery • fruit • Fruit recipe • locavore log • Wild Food

Ruby Lemonade

A glass of blackberry lemonadeI don’t like to throw out (I mean compost) food – even things that other people may not see as still edible.

I went wild berry picking earlier in the week (that’ll make a post fo another day) and decided to make a sorbet with some of the wild blackberries I picked. (By the way, if you ever wonder why berries seem so expensive, go pick some, and you’ll get a much better understanding of that price…)

The wild blackberries have a lot of seeds, so I strain the puree before mixing it with my syrup. But although I tried to squeeze as much pulp as I could (getting purple hands and a new color pattern on my apron in the process) there was still too much pulp left for me to throw those seeds in the compost without a vague guilt feeling.

I had lemons left. We had Spirited Lemonade over the week-end as well as marinated lemon chicken. Sooo… How about blackberry lemonade?

I put water in a bowl, drop the whole seed mass in there, swish them around, strained again, and voila! blackberry wash! Then I squeezed a few lemons, use the blackberry wash instead of water, sugar to taste (not too much: maybe 2 tablespoon for the quart I was making, as I prefer my lemonade tart), and we had a beautifully ruby-colored lemonade, tasting of both lemon and wild blackberries.

Locavore log: blackberries from the hedgerow

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26 Jun 2008
Cookery • Desserts • fruit • Fruit recipe • herb • Kitchen Garden

Of Strawberries and Sorbet

Perfectly ripe Strawberries

Most people who grow strawberries - or who pick-them at pick-your-own operations or even frequent Farmers’ market – are familiar with the so-called June strawberries. They bear over a few weeks from mid/late May to mid/late June here in the Northern Piedmont depending on the cultivar. For the kitchen gardener, that’s good only if you have time to process lots of strawberries then. I don’t know about you, but in May and June, I am always so behind with planting and new garden projects that should have been done 3 months earlier (and really can’t wait any longer) that I really don’t want to deal with 40 quarts of strawberries.

So last year, I got ‘Tristar’, a day-neutral strawberry developed at the University of Maryland. While the June strawberry flowering (and therefore fruiting) is trigged by a certain amount of day light, day neutral strawberries don’t give a fig and flowers as long as there is no frost. I get fruit from early June until frost. Last year, I threw agricultural fabric over the bed, and I actually got a few strawberries for Thanksgiving. I can’t say they were very tasty but it was a victory of sorts… Best of all, you can harvest the year you plant. You have to pinch the flowers through June after which you let the plant flower. Unlike the June bearer, the crop is spread over many months. From 25 plants, last year I got over quart a week. This year, I got a quart or two every other day for about 3 weeks. Then there was a lull for a couple of weeks, and I can see I’ll be able to start picking again in few days.

I love freshly picked really ripe strawberries, eaten plain, tossed with a little sugar and lemon, frozen for smoothie, but one of my favorite recipe – not the least reason for it is that there is very little heat used (something to think about in the hot muggy summers of Virginia) – is Strawberry Sorbet. Here is the recipe I use: Read more

sylvie | 7 comments | Tags: , , ,
23 Jun 2008
Cookery • fruit • Fruit recipe • Kitchen Garden

The Easiest Jelly in the World

red currants

I have said my goodbye to fresh sour cherries for this year. I have frozen and made jam with a bucket of them – and of course enjoyed quite a few in cobblers and eaten them “au naturel”. But for the cook with a liking for vermilion sweet/tart fruits, red currants provide even more of a flavor burst. In my Northern Piedmont garden, red currants mature right after the sour cherries – sometimes overlapping them slightly. A red currant bush bears faster than a cherry tree– one can have a nice little harvest three years after rooting cuttings (very easy to do to!), although it’ll start to be respectable in year 4; they are more manageable in a kitchen garden than a cherry tree which takes a bit of room and is more appropriate for the orchard. Surprisingly, the birds seem to leave them alone, and at least for now, the bear also ignores them – unlike the cherries for which he makes special trips down the hill, devouring other things (like bluebird eggs) on his way to his feast.

Currants need a cold dormancy period and don’t enjoy too muggy a summer, so I give them shade in the afternoon. Besides watering well the first year to ensure good root establishment, and pruning the oldest branches (4+ years) occasionally, they are pretty care free. Also self-fertile, but that’s a moot point because one currant bush is simply not enough. Besides, delicious when eaten out of hands, or tossed with a little sugar and let to rest for 1 hour to draw out the juice, currants makes a famously delicious jelly – and a fabulously easy one. Read more for the “Fabulously Easy Red Currant Jelly” recipe. Read more

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