Last week I was reading Cheryl Sternman Rule’s blog, called 5secondrule, and having just written up a post a few days before about plums (everything you might possibly want to know about them) this cold soup recipe jumped out at me and said fix me. It took me a week to find good plums (at Costco) and another day or two to get around to making it.

The recipe (in its original form) is credited to Bruce Weinstein and  Mark Scarbrough, in their cookbook Cooking Know-How. And in their recipe it’s suggested as a first course. To me, it’s too sweet to be a first course, so I went at it thinking of it as a dessert. And is it yummy. Having just made the cherry compote with a bunch of spices in it, I decided to add a few more to this recipe. So, the allspice berries and coriander seeds are my additions. Otherwise the recipe is exactly as written.

It’s EASY to make. You simmer the plums in water and the spices, remove the spices and discard, remove the fruit, boil down the liquid, add it to the plums, then add in the sugar, yogurt and red wine. Puree – either in a blender, food processor, or with a stick blender. Chill. If you serve it as a first course, you might thin it out a little bit with a bit of milk (or cream or half-and-half). As a dessert I liked it a bit thicker. I also added the fillip of crème fraîche and the sprigs of mint. I had to sample it as soon as I made it, and also dished out a little glass for my DH. He proclaimed “wow, this is wonderful.” Just make sure you get out all the spices – so count them, okay? It’s not fun biting into an allspice berry. But make this, you should. Enough said.
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A year ago: Strawberry Coffeecake

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Without a doubt, this is the very best Tiramisù

I’ve ever eaten. Bar none.

It had been some years since I’d made Tiramisù, using an old recipe that I’d put together myself from about 3 different versions. Then I was watching America’s Test Kitchen last week and they made a rather simplified Tiramisù, and I was hooked. Had to try it. Caution: this recipe does have raw egg yolks in it, so if you’re interested in the version made without raw eggs, America’s Test Kitchen has that recipe too. A note: you do have to sign-in to a free ATK membership in order to view these recipes (so they can send you emails, most likely, which they do, but I like receiving most of them – except the two a week wanting me to subscribe to Cook’s Country – wish they would stop sending me that one – I’ve asked – no can do, I guess).

I suppose, from beginning to end, it took me about an hour to make it. Not too bad, I guess, although I thought it would take less than that. This recipe has a lot more mascarpone in it (1 1/2 pounds) than I’ve used before. But I sure learned exactly how to dip the savoiardi cookies – those are the Italian, dry ladyfingers used to make this dessert. Not the soft ones you can sometimes find at the grocery store.

That's how much coffee was left over

Even though I’m a fairly experienced home cook, and tackle almost anything, I’d never known HOW to get just the right amount of coffee into the cookies/the dessert. Too much and they fall apart into wet mush. Too little and the dessert is dry. You want a happy mixture of the cookies, coffee and mascarpone cream. That’s what I like about America’s Test Kitchen – they figure all this out for me so I don’t have to guess. They showed us exactly how to hold the cookie and how long to dip and turn it over in the coffee mixture. When I got done I had exactly one cookie left over and a little bit of coffee, so I dipped it in and bit into it. Exactly how it’s supposed to be – you only dip about 2 seconds, maybe 3 at the absolute most to get the coffee on the outside. When you cut (bite) into it, the center of the cookie is still dry. At least it was when I made the dessert. After it sits for 24 hours, the cookies had perfectly absorbed the flavors, but it wasn’t soggy with coffee, nor had it fallen apart. They still had enough “form” to use a spatula to cut and remove a nice serving portion.

The mascarpone batter was easy – eggs and sugar – some rum (rum was also added to the coffee dipping mixture too), the mascarpone and whipped cream. So, you dip the cookies in the coffee/rum mixture, put one layer in a 9×13 glass dish, slather on half of the mascarpone cream (picture at left shows spreading the first layer over the cookies), sprinkle with a bit of Dutch process cocoa, another layer of dipped cookies and the last half of the mascarpone and more cocoa. That’s it. Chill at least 6 hours, but 24 is preferable.  That was fine with me, so I got this dessert done a day ahead of our dinner party the other night. Just before serving I sprinkled the top with a bit of chopped semisweet chocolate shavings.

From this picture above (side view of the Pyrex dish) I can see that on the bottom layer I didn’t push and shove the tender soaked cookies tightly enough over on the right– they mentioned that on the ATK episode, about making sure the cookies are pressed snugly, to push a bit to fill in all the nooks and crannies. So I had a little dip there. Surely didn’t matter to the taste, though!

Results? By far the best tiramisu I’ve ever had. I would make not one change to this recipe. It will now be my go-to one for this coffee and chocolate dessert. The leftovers were sublime, even 48 hours later.
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A year ago: Zucchini Pancakes

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A friend of ours was celebrating a birthday. Bob is not up to his usual snuff right now and his wife Irene is caregiving. And she’s certainly not up to doing a celebration of some kind. SO, I offered to bring a birthday dessert, and we invited a group of their friends to join in on a little pomp and circumstance to honor the birthday guy. I asked Irene what Bob likes best? Chocolate. Most definitely chocolate. No problem in my book.

Since I needed to serve a larger crowd than usual, I had to hunt for a recipe that would work for this occasion. Finally found these cocoa cupcakes that I’d clipped out of the April ‘08 issue of Food and Wine. It can serve 16. Great, because that’s about how many we needed. The recipe came from a bakery in San Francisco, called Miette (at the Ferry Building Marketplace).

These are quite simple – sift the dry ingredients, whip up the butter and sugar, add the eggs slowly, then alternately add the dry stuff (I used Penzey’s high fat dark cocoa) with some crème fraîche. Pour into muffin cups (foil liners preferred) and bake 15 minutes or so. Cool slightly and top with a dollop of additional crème fraîche. Very easy. I made them about 30 minutes before we drove to our friends’ home, so the cupcakes were still warm when I served them. The recipe indicates serving with crème fraîche, which I did, but Bob is a big fan of ice cream, so that went alongside as well. I just used less crème fraîche, that’s all. I think the ice cream was a distraction. I’d prefer this just as is – with the crème fraîche or perhaps some lightly whipped cream on top.

And the results, you ask? Oh yes, delicious. Really good chocolate flavor. Very tender crumb. I would make these again just because they’re so EASY. They have a little tang to them (from the semi-sour crème fraîche) which I liked. Do serve them warm – I think that was part of the attraction. Give them about 10 minutes to cool down enough to handle, remove the paper wrapper and dig in while they’re still soft.
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To tell you the honest truth, I’ve never been much of a plum fan. I’m not saying I don’t eat them (none so far this summer, actually). I do eat them, but not often. I don’t seek them out is what I’m really saying, but I know that’s a mistake. After reading the chapter on plums in Russ Parsons’ book, How to Pick a Peach, I’ll be on the lookout for some specific varieties (Greengage primarily, or Wickson). My parents had a red plum tree in our backyard. A very prolific plum tree, actually. And I can recall, as a mid-age young girl reaching up to the low-hanging branches to taste the first fruit of the season and being sorely disappointed because of the sour skin. Mostly my mother just stewed the fruit with a little sugar and water. I have no recollections of a plum pie. Or cake. Or anything else with plums, for that matter. Just stewed plums. Maybe that’s another reason I didn’t develop a fondness for them.

Even I have noticed lots of plum varieties – yellow plums, green plums, red plums, scarlet plums, purple plums, and almost black plums. But by and large, most plum varieties taste the same, despite the variations on skin color. Mostly it’s just a sweet and tart flavor. The Elephant Heart is an herbaceous type, and the Wickson contains a golden honey tang. The greengage is the sweetest.

Did you know that plum trees are promiscuous? Yup. They cross-pollinate with wild abandon, so Parsons says. Yet the early varieties were mostly developed by the great Luther Burbank. Even though we have countless schools here in California named after Luther Burbank, I knew very little about him until I read his brief story at Wikipedia. With no more than a 5th grade education, he was fascinated with nature, plants and flowers, and eventually moved from Massachusetts to California. Then he began, in earnest, to hybridize a variety of vegetables and fruit, most notably the plum. [Just as an aside, Burbank developed the Russet potato – it was originally called the Russet Burbank potato, on which McDonald’s relies for its famous french fries. He also developed the Shasta daisy, the Fire poppy, the July Elberta peach, the Flaming Gold nectarine, the Freestone peach, the white blackberry AND both the Santa Rosa plum and the Wickson plum. Burbank was not highly regarded in his time because he didn’t use accepted scientific practices – note-taking particularly – in his research – he merely wanted the results and didn’t care a whit about how he got there.] Burbank actually developed 113 new varieties of plums and prunes. Amazing. He died in 1926.

Since then, another agricultural scientist named Floyd Zaiger took up Burbank’s banner. He’s the guy who crossed the plum and apricot, to create the pluot. He also developed the Aprium, which has a more apricot-ness than the pluot, which is more plummy. There are several varieties of these – the Dapple Dandy, the Dinaosaur Egg, Flavor King and Flavor Supreme.

Growing: Most plums are grown in California.

Choosing: Find the more deeply colored, shiny and firm, but not hard. Don’t worry about any of the white powder on the skin – that’s normal, called a “natural bloom.”

Storing: If unripe, leave out at room temp for a day or two, then refrigerate. If you chill them before they’re ripe the quality suffers.

In the book Parsons has detailed recipes for a Spiced Plum Ice Cream and a Cornmeal Buckle with Plums.

A year ago: Summer Shrimp Salad (very refreshing dinner type salad)
Two years ago: Grandgirl’s Fresh Apple Cake (oh my, yes, delicious, a Paula Deen recipe I believe)

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My friend Norma needed a new supply of puddings (I make them for her by choice because she’s a dear friend, and not because she asks me). I hadn’t made chocolate pudding for her. Her only caveat was that, although she usually is a dark chocolate fan, she can’t handle it right now, so would I prepare the pudding with milk chocolate instead? Sure, I said. An aside here, I had to BUY milk chocolate, because I didn’t have even an ounce of it. I never, never, ever buy milk chocolate! No matter. I used all of what I bought in this recipe (5 ounces).

Sometimes the internet is just an amazing resource, isn’t it? I don’t know how I ever lived without it, and yet we’ve only HAD the internet for about 16 or so years, right? Positively astounding, to me, how much stuff is available now. And I only research a tiny segment of it. Mostly about food, history, books, travel, animals, cultural activities.

I finally chose a cornstarch-based recipe found on the epicurious.com website (from a Gourmet issue in February of 2007) that was ever-so easy to make. You combine cornstarch, a small amount of sugar, powdered cocoa and salt, then whisk in milk and cream. Once it comes to a boil, it’s simmered for a full two minutes, and you’re basically done, except for dropping in a few ounces of milk chocolate and a splash of vanilla extract, and stirring it gently. How easy is that?

Dark chocolate is my choc-of-choice, but even I thought this tasted really good. I did use Penzey’s high fat cocoa (not regular store-bought) and it has really good flavor, but you can use whatever you have on hand.

Even Dutch process would work fine (it’s milder). If you need a dessert in a hurry, and you have the ingredients on hand, this is a no-brainer. Don’t expect this to taste like pots de crème, which is decadently rich. This is a much lighter version, but with decidedly good chocolate taste. I’d make this again.
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A year ago: Dinner at Charlie Palmer’s (local restaurant)
Two years ago: Pineapple Upside Down French Toast (a great holiday dish, make ahead, good for holiday mornings)

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These probably look just like the bowl of cherries I showed you a couple of days ago. But they’re NOT. Well, same cherries, but cooked. Same set-up (background, still left “up” in my mini kitchen studio area, but different bowl. I know, they don’t look cooked, do they? They’re not stewed for very long, but oh do they have flavor, big time.

In Russ Parsons’ book, How to Pick a Peach, he mentions a simple recipe of his. This one. It’s just pitted fresh cherries, mixed with some sugar (pictured left at the macerating stage), then with some red wine, some spices, briefly simmered on the stove, a splash of balsamic vinegar added and you’re done.

Good for spooning over vanilla ice cream. Because they still had some shape to them I decided to cut them in half. They also didn’t have much juice left to them, but that’s the way Parsons makes them. I’d prefer some juice to it, so you might add a bit more red wine and sugar to it. The flavor is elegant. Deep. Complex (especially with the balsamic added at the end). Really good – true cherry flavor. With backbone. I made these a couple of days ago, and once they’d rested in the refrigerator, they’d softened up a lot more than the photo at top indicates – you can see them better below with the ice cream. Soft cherries, the way they ought to be on top of ice cream.

I did end up adding just a bit more red wine to the compote during the cooking stage than the recipe indicates, but OH, is this ever piquant. I’ll be making this again. And again. But only when Bings are in season.
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A year ago: Irish Cream Brownies
Two years ago: Normandy Apricot Custard

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My friend Norma (for whom I’ve been making puddings and custards for a few months) thought maybe she was improved enough that she could tackle some peach cobbler. As long as the topping wasn’t too bready, too dry. Swallowing is still an issue for her. No problem for me to find something to fill that request. I don’t like cobblers with lots of topping either.

My America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook has a full-page chart for making fruit cobblers. It suggests 9 different fruit variations, with how much fruit to start with, always using a 9-inch deep dish pie plate, how much sugar to add, how much cornstarch and what flavorings to use. Very helpful. I’ll be referring to this chart again. One of the things I like the best about this cookbook (and Cook’s Illustrated, and America’s Test Kitchen recipes in general) is that they explain why they do some things in recipes. Things that might be contrary to established practice.

In this case it was about baking the peaches for half an hour before adding the biscuits. They found that if you put the biscuits on top of the peaches from the beginning, the bottom part of each biscuit didn’t get baked sufficiently (not enough heat from underneath). So, they completely heated the peaches first by baking them for 20-30 minutes, THEN placed the scoops of biscuit dough on top. Ideally, I suppose, you would eat this all at the first sitting. I don’t know what the biscuits will be like refrigerated for a day or two. Maybe a bit soggy. The recipe also said they’d tried adding oatmeal to the biscuit mixture, and definitely eliminated that option. The oatmeal was too distinctive (overpowering flavor).

This recipe recommended 4-5 peaches. I wanted more peach to cobbler ratio, so I upped it to about 7. I used a tad more cornstarch too, the lower amount of sugar (it mentioned 1/4 to 1/3 cup). Then it suggested ground cloves, vanilla and brandy. I knew my friend Norma wouldn’t want the brandy, so I made hers without. Since I doubled this recipe, I was able to add the brandy to the one I made for us. As it turned out, the one I made for Norma just happened to have a lot more fluid in it – hopefully just what Norma will like. You may need to flex the cornstarch ratio – if the peaches are really ripe and juicy, the cobbler likely needs a bit more cornstarch.

The cookbook recipe also suggested a variation with ground and crystallized ginger added to the biscuits. I threw caution to the wind and added the ginger AND the vanilla (and there were ground cloves in the peaches too). Why not, I thought? We liked this a LOT. The sweetness was at a moderate level (I don’t happen to like overly sweet desserts anyway). The buttermilk biscuits? Yum. I liked them a lot. Tender and tasty with the ginger inside. I like that variation a lot, actually. And the little sprinkling of sugar and cinnamon on top? Liked that part too. There wasn’t anything I didn’t like about this cobbler. It may become my new go-to recipe.
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A year ago: Barbecued Beans
Two years ago: Crisp Apple Pudding (my mother’s recipe, one of my very favorite recipes ever)

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On our recent driving trip through California, Oregon and Washington, we saw a multitude of roadside stands hawking cherries. Bings. A few Rainiers. The season is short, as we probably all know. It wasn’t always that way, apparently. Back in the day (probably the 1800’s) a plentiful variety ripened at different times. But somebody, in their infinite wisdom (?) decided it would be better to choose one variety and have them all harvest at the same time (more efficient . . . they decided). Hence the Bing. Our favorite national cherry.

Well, except in Michigan, where they grow about 240 MILLION pounds of sour cherries. But would you believe that 239 million of them end up in cans? Yup. Only about a million of them end up being eaten fresh, and only in Michigan.

Most cherries are grown on the West Coast (Washington, Oregon and California), and they make up about 65% of the marketable cherries in the U.S. I like how Russ Parsons (all this data comes from his book, How to Pick a Peach) describes the flavor:

• [A Bing] “is about as good as any cherry variety that has ever been grown – crisp on the outside, with a melting center that saves it from being crunchy; dark and sweet, with a nice tart backbone.”

It’s the “tart backbone” that I like. But anyway, so the legend goes, the Bing variety was found in 1875 on the farm of eastern Washington agricultural pioneer Seth Lewelling – by a Chinese workman named Ah Bing. Isn’t that just too cute? Now, there are 4 cherry categories (Bigarreaux (or Black, of which Bing is one), Dukes, Hearts and Sours. Hearts and Dukes are very soft cherries (can’t be shipped) and exist mostly in home gardens. Blacks (Bing, Royal Ann and Rainier) dominate the fresh cherry market. Royal Ann & Rainiers are the ones used to make maraschino cherries.

Interestingly, the Japanese are huge consumers of American cherries. And the “gold rush” of cherry farming is getting the first fruit of the season to the Asian market – jet-freighted to Japan and Hong Kong, where they charge 10x as much as they do here. And marketers, doing what they do, have begun growing Bings further south where the weather patterns aren’t always cherry partners. You see, cherries need at least 700 hours of winter temps at or below 45 degrees. Now THAT is a little factlet you can pop out at your next dinner party, right? But because of the more temperate climate in California, sometimes that doesn’t happen. Without the winter nap, Parsons calls it, the cherry trees simply don’t have enough energy to produce fruit. The other factlet is that cherries don’t like rain (they crack and split). And because winters in California can be rainy, more risk is involved each winter when California farmers attempt to get an early ripening.

In 1988, though, the University of California developed a new cherry – the Brooks (a cross between a Rainier and a Burlat, an heirloom variety). It is more resistant to warm weather flaws and can be picked about 10 days earlier than Bings. As a result of many California farmers shifting to the Brooks, California now grows more than a third of fresh cherries in the U.S.

One of Russ Parsons recommendations is that if you have a batch of cherries that are just barely past their prime, add a nip of balsamic vinegar to them when cooking. That will balance out the flavor. Don’t overdo it, though.

Choosing Cherries: sort through them if you can and choose the darkest – mahogany red – if possible. Make sure they’re shiny. A matte color means they’re over the hill. No shriveling or wilting, of course. Doubles and spurs mean they’ve had too much heat on the tree.

Storing: Plastic bag, coldest part of the refrigerator. Don’t wash until ready to eat. They’ll last 2-3 weeks.

In Parsons’ book he includes 3 recipes: Cold Spiced Cherry Soup, a Red Wine-Poached Cherry Dessert, and Cherry-Almond Cobbler.

A year ago: Supposedly a rendition of KFC’s Cole Slaw (not one of my better recipes)
Two years ago: Sicilian Tuna Salad (a real favorite of mine)

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You know why bloggers rarely write l-o-v-e, like it should be written? Because not-nice people out there do searches all over the internet for such words hoping they’ll find unsavory websites. And then they leave unsavory messages. Maybe I should go find my thesaurus and find some alternative words I could use here on my blog to describe a passion for something. Hmmm.

What’s more American summer than strawberry shortcake, I ask you? Our daughter-in-law Karen brought this fab dessert the other night to a family birthday celebration. It was SO good. You might think “what’s another shortcake recipe.” Well, I’m tellin’ ya, this tastes different. It’s all in the brown sugar. There’s brown sugar in the shortcakes, brown sugar in the berries, and best of all, there’s brown sugar (and a bit of sour cream) in the whipped cream. Makes for an altogether different taste sensation.

The recipe came from America’s Test Kitchen in 2007. Nothing about the recipe is difficult. You’re missing something if you don’t try it. Karen and I agreed that the shortcakes could be made a bit smaller (this makes a very large portion if you use a generous amount of berries and whipped cream). So you might feed 7 or maybe even 8.
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Two years ago: Butternut Squash Soup with Jalapeno & Ginger

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If you have all the ingredients on hand and all together, making bread pudding is really a snap. I’ve not made it for several years. Usually I make a recipe that’s loaded with a bourbon sauce on top, but this time most of it was going to my friend Norma who is really struggling to eat anything at all these days due to chemo and radiation. And a boozy sauce didn’t appeal to her at all. So I easily adapted a recipe to make a vanilla sauce. It, too, was very easy. The recipes I adapted came from the America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook. I seem to be reaching for that cookbook more often these days.

This particular recipe had an interesting technique you won’t see in other recipes. It had a bread cube topping that is really tasty. Some of the bread cubes are reserved, they’re tossed with some sugar and cinnamon, then drizzled with some melted butter. Then those cubes are gently pressed into the top of the pudding before baking. In the picture below you can see the darker colored cubes (this photo was taken before baking) kind of sitting on top. When you eat it, those little cubes on top are a bit crunchy and toothsome with the cinnamon and sugar. They never sink into the bread pudding, so give the pudding some different texture. I liked that about it. Usually you use white bread for a bread pudding, but my DH, who did the shopping for me, bought white whole wheat. Actually it made no difference, so I’d say it worked just fine. Most people wouldn’t even know it wasn’t white bread.

The vanilla sauce I used was an adaptation of a vanilla pudding recipe in the same book. It called for 3 egg yolks. I used 2. And because I didn’t have any half and half, I used a combination of fat-free half and half, a bit of whole milk (left over from the bread pudding custard mixture) and some 2% milk we usually have on hand in the refrigerator. I reduced the sugar amount just a little because the bread pudding is sweet enough. The recipe indicated bread pudding should be eaten the day it’s made (the crispy topping certainly won’t be crispy after it’s been refrigerated overnight). But the taste is still just fine a day later.

In case you’re interested, here’s the short/quick recipe for the whiskey sauce: 1/2 cup butter, 1 1/2 cups powdered sugar, 2 egg yolks, 1/2 cup bourbon. Cream butter and sugar over medium heat until all the butter is absorbed. Remove from heat and blend in egg yolk. Pour in bourbon gradually, stirring constantly. Sauce will thicken as it cools. Serve warm over warm bread pudding. [You might want to double that recipe to serve 12.]
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