Adorable Dorie

Dorie Greenspan. I've never met the woman but she's my new best friend. She taught me, via Orangette, how to make shortcakes that are not only perfect with berries, they are the berries!

The part I can't figure out is how shortcakes made with so much rich butter and heavy cream end up being as light as a summer dress. They are so delicate that one must have care cutting them open to insert the berries and cream, or they crumble apart in the hand.

They are simple to make, easy to bake and utterly perfect with macerated strawberries or blackberries. I can only imagine that raspberries would be over the top in these and Molly's suggestion of peaches just about made me swoon. There's a bonus, too - they fill your house with a delicious light scent of baking that lasts all day.

So, Dorie, wherever you are, know that you are loved and admired and honored and shamelessly copied.

Elna's Pie

Making this pie reminds me of First Husband's mother, a cute little bantam hen of a lady who first introduced me to strawberry pie. My first thought was, "Jeez, won't it just taste like jam?" I was not enthusiastic.

I can still recall my delighted surprise when I found that the fruit is not cooked, just gently enrobed in a flavorful glaze that holds the fruit together in the crisp, buttery crust. Since there is simply no way to improve on fresh, ripe strawberries, she had me from the first bite.

I hadn't made one of these in years, so I was a little shaky on the method but I had lovely strawberries and fresh raspberries just begging to be made into dessert, so I dove in. Elna would not have approved of deviating from her all-strawberry theme and she'd have served it with whipped cream; I opted to delete the cream, to reduce the sugar substantially and to experiment with different berries. I think she also used food coloring to enhance her glaze - mine was lightly pink while my memory of hers is deeply red.

The result was a great pie for a warm day, one that highlighted the fresh flavors of berries at their peak. It's not a quick pie to make, requiring separate baking and cooling of the shell, lengthy maceration of the berries, separate cooking of the glaze, and chilling of the finished creation but none of the steps is really difficult and the taste is well worth the effort. I simplified the recipe by using Star dough for the crust, baking and cooling it according to the package directions. The rest I did pretty much by Elna's directions; no need to mess with a winner.

Strawberry-Raspberry Glaze Pie, adapted from Elna's recipe

6-8 cups stemmed strawberries and raspberries

3/4 cup sugar + 2 Tablespoons

1 Tablespoon corn starch

2 Tablespoons lemon juice

A baked, cooled pastry shell

Leave small strawberries whole or cut up larger ones. It's prettier if you leave all the berries whole and arrange them in the crust, pointy side up. In a bowl, sprinkle the strawberries with the 3/4 cup of sugar and let stand for one hour, stirring occasionally to dissolve the sugar as the juice forms. Drain and reserve the juice. Set the berries aside.

To the juice, add water to make 1-1/2 cups. In a small, heavy bottomed pot, mix corn starch with remaining sugar. Add juice mixture and boil, whisking, until the glaze turns clear and thickens. Off the heat, stir in the lemon juice and let it get cold.

Drain strawberries again so berries only go into the crust and add the raspberries now (they are so fragile that it's best not to macerate them), then pour the glaze over. You may not need all the glaze - just stop when you feel the pie will hold together. Chill well.

Serve with whipped cream, if you like.

The Morning After

I awoke, not in heaven nor in hell, on the morning after. As far as I can tell, no one I know is missing, not even my fourth boss, who was so incredibly hellish that I thought for sure she'd be one to disappear. *sigh* And not even my sister, who is the polar opposite of hellish.

Made me glad I had made strawberry scones for breakfast, just in case.

I used an old recipe from the Joy of Cooking, but modified it a bit by using half-and-half rather than heavy cream, adding chopped strawberries and a combination of salt and sugar on the crust rather than either one or the other, as the recipe recommends. I thought it would add a little je ne sais quoi to the scones.

They were wonderfully light and airy with a sunny yellow crumb thanks to the bright eggs from pastured chickens. The sweet, fruity pockets of strawberry goodness were really the best part; next time, even at the risk of weighing them down a bit, I'd add more strawberries. The salt-sugar experiment was fine but I'd probably use just sugar next time, a very sparing sprinkle of raw sugar for the sweet hit of the larger crystals.

I ate one of them warm from the oven, then wrapped the cooled ones and refrigerated them. When I awoke to find myself still here, I reheated one for breakfast (just as good reheated) and had a rapturous meal on the morning after.

Strawberry Scones, adapted from the Joy of Cooking (did you know the book now has its own website?)

1-3/4 cups sifted all-purpose flour

2-1/4 teaspoons double-acting baking powder

1 Tablespoon sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

6-8 ripe strawberries, chopped

1/4 cup butter

2 eggs

1/2 cup half-and-half or full cream

A mixture of salt and sugar for sprinkling over the top before baking, about 2 teaspoons

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F.

Into the first four ingredients in a large bowl, cut the butter using two knives or a pastry blender, until the butter is the size of small peas. In a separate bowl, beat two eggs. Remove 2 tablespoons of the egg to use as a wash later, then mix in the cream with the eggs.

Make a well in the dry ingredients and pour in the cream mixture. Combine the wet and dry ingredients with a few swift strokes. Handle the dough as little as possible. Place it on a lightly floured board and pat it out to about 3/4" thick. Cut wedges with a knife - it should make about 10-12 wedges.

Transfer the wedges to a baking sheet (I lined mine with parchment paper and I'd recommend that) and brush with the reserved egg wash, then sprinkle with the salt-sugar mixture (or take my advice and just go with sugar in a larger crystal).

Bake for about 15 minutes (my oven runs hot so I rescued these at 10 minutes and that was just right). Cool on a rack.

As Easy As Pie

My next door neighbor has cancer. If you've got to have cancer, his is the best kind to have, as it has a very high cure rate but, needless to say, all of us in the neighborhood are concerned.

He's a good guy - he gives back generously to his community and is always helpful. He is the president of our Neighborhood Council. He is the Energizer Bunny of neighbors, continually working on his house and, occasionally, on mine. When he saw that my outside stairs were worn and unsafe, he quietly repaired them; I only discovered the improvement last year when I went down to pick peaches. He keeps dog biscuits in his garage for all the neighborhood hounds and adopted an aging stray cat that he feeds with pills from the vet and pricey food out of tiny cans.

He has been pretty down on power for the past several months as he goes through chemotherapy. He lost his hair, of course, but he doesn't seem to realize that it is downright fashionable these days. He makes little jokes about his baldness and often wears a watch cap.

My way of thanking him for being such a good neighbor is usually to share baked goods when I make them; when he mentioned that he loves strawberry-rhubarb pie, I made a mental note. I had never made a strawberry-rhubarb pie before so this seemed like a great time to try. A quick scan of the interwebs showed that it's a very uncomplicated pie to make, requiring only seven ingredients for the filling. Mine actually only had six, since I didn't have corn starch in the house: strawberries, rhubarb, brown and white sugars, salt and cinnamon.

I used Star Dough for the crust rather than fuss with my own and it was perfectly delicious as well as divinely easy. I didn't bother to lattice it, just cut some slits in the top crust. I left out the cornstarch since I didn't have any and, as a result, the pie filling was very liquid but the flavor was wonderful. The cinnamon didn't dominate as I was a little afraid it would. Mostly you taste the tangy-sweet fruit with a hint of salt. And the color! Heavens, what a color! Deeply ruby under a golden crust, it was a visual as well as a gustatory treat.

Shortly after Cora and I took a couple of slices of pie over to his house, I received an email from his wife with a grinning photo of him, fork in hand over his half-eaten piece of pie, and several quotes that he had murmured between bites: "This is a county fair winner!" and "I don't know...this may be better than my Mom's" and "Definitely the crust..."

I hope he knows that we don't love him just for fixing stairs and for chairing the neighborhood council, for what he does for us; we love him because he's Peter.

Pie is a small way to say that.

Jarring Experience

The strawberries at the market last week were so sweet, so fragrant and so perfectly, gloriously red that I just had to buy 'way too many for two people to consume before they went bad. I'm always doing this with strawberries, seduced by their aroma and color to purchase more than we can possibly eat. Faced with so many perfect berries, I decided on the spur of the moment to try my hand at making jam.

All the recipes I found on the interwebs showcased the sugar much more than the fruit - some, in fact, advised a 5-1 ratio of sugar to fruit! Crazy! So, remembering June Taylor's class that I took last year, I took her advice and reduced the ratio to almost the opposite of that and added a little lemon zest for another layer of interest. I didn't use pectin, either; the resulting jam didn't jell well, it's a little loosey-goosey but, oh, the fresh, bright flavor and the rich, red color! When My Beloved's took his first bite, he exclaimed, "Oh, wow!" I'm very proud of that.

I used smallish jars because we don't eat a lot of jam and I wanted to be able to pop open a fresh one from time to time. I got seven 4-ounce jars from three baskets of ripe berries. I didn't process them in a water bath* either, just took the jars piping hot from the dishwasher, quickly filled them with searing hot jam to within 1/4" of the top, wiped the lips with a damp paper towel, and put on the sterilized lids, screwing the bands down firmly but not tightly. When all jars were filled, I blanketed the jars in towels to keep the heat in longer and to slow the cooling. All the jars sealed well - I'm confident that they will keep for a long, long time.

Here's the recipe I devised:

Zesty Strawberry Jam

8 cups (three baskets) of strawberries, hulled (= about 5 cups of mashed berries)
3/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup lemon juice (about two lemons worth)
2 lemons worth of microplaned zest (very finely grated zest - it looks almost like pollen)

Hull strawberries and mash them with a potato masher until they are lumpy and liquid. Add the sugar, lemon juice and lemon zest. Stir to dissolve the sugar and leave the fruit to macerate while you prepare your jars, bands and lids. You can leave it overnight if you want, but I'm always too impatient.

Prepare the jars and bands ahead by washing on hottest setting of the dishwasher. Leave the dishwasher closed after the cycle. Have a pair of heatproof gloves on hand (the jars will be piping hot once you fill them), plus several damp paper towels for wiping the rims of the jars, a small ladle and a large wooden cutting board (the jars will be too hot to put directly on the counter - they could shatter if your counter is too cold or hurt your counter if it's not heatproof). Place lids in a small pan of water and boil briefly. Leave the lids in the hot water.

Bring the fruit slowly to a boil, stirring to make sure the sugar is dissolved, in a heavy-bottomed pot. Once the sugar has completely dissolved, raise the heat to a full boil and let 'er rip, stirring more or less constantly, until the berries are making thick, shiny bubbles that pop but leave a small "hole" before filling up again. To test that they are ready, put dab of the juice on a plate and, when cooled, push it with your finger. If it "wrinkles" ahead of your finger and doesn't run to fill in where your finger was, it is ready. If it runs to cover your finger mark, boil it some more. Mine took about 20-30 minutes, give or take. Keep stirring while it boils to keep from burning on the bottom.

Once the jam is ready, pop open the dishwasher and quickly remove a couple of jars, setting them on the wooden board. Close and lock the dishwasher again. Working quickly with the heatproof gloves on, ladle the jam into the jars, filling to within 1/4" of the top. Carefully wipe any spills from the lip of the jar with the damp paper towel, replacing the towel as it gets soiled. Fish a lid out of the hot water with tongs, shake it off and fit it to the jar, then put on the band and screw it down firmly but not tightly (you want it to make the seal but you don't want it to dislodge your lid once it is cool and the band is removed). Repeat with the rest of the jars.

Once the jars are all filled, gather them together and cover them with a thick blanket of kitchen towels, inches thick if you have that many, or regular towels. The idea is to keep the heat in as long as possible and to slow the cooling so the jars have plenty of time to seal.

*Most home canning instructions will recommend that you do this processing to insure that no bacteria are alive in the jars. It is good practice and you should do it. Do as I say, not as I do.
If you skip this step, however, just make sure your jars have sealed by removing the band and, holding the jar by the lid, give it a pretty good shake, holding your other hand under it just in case. If the jar falls off, it didn't seal. If it didn't seal, refrigerate it and eat that jar first. If I give away my jam, I always warn the recipient to throw it away if they have any doubts when they open it.

The Intimidator

You'd have liked my first mother-in-law, although you might have been awed at first as I was by her homemaking skills. She could have given Dale Earnhardt lessons in intimidation. She kept an immaculate house, cooked like an angel, sewed most of her own and her children's clothes, made beautiful handcrafts, cooked up killer jam and played a mean game of bridge.

It took me a while as a young bride to stop feeling defensive whenever she was around - she was that good!

Once I relaxed a bit, we had a lot of fun together, cooking up a storm in the kitchen, picking berries out on the coast, visiting garage sales and sending each other craft ideas. She also taught me how to make her version of strawberry shortcake.

Elna's shortcake is dense, almost like a scone - no resemblance to sponge cake here! She always crushed the berries and served the shortcake crumbled in a bowl sprinkled with a little sugar and splashed with heavy cream. It was a gloriously sloppy mess of soft shortcake with crunchy top bits, sweet juicy berries and rich cream.

I did take liberties with her recipe after I gained confidence. She used vegetable shortening, a flavor I have always found to be flat, so I subbed in butter and, to my taste, it made all the difference. I macerate my strawberries lightly with sugar but don't crush them with a potato masher as she did. But I still do serve them in a bowl with a splash of cream on top and I still think of her fondly every time I dip my spoon into that delicious g'mish.

Elna's Strawberry Shortcake (with slight changes and apologies to her)

2 cups flour
4 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 Tablespoon sugar
2.2 oz (about 1/3 cup) cold butter, cut into pea-sized pieces
1 egg
2/3 cup milk
2-3 baskets of strawberries, macerated with sugar to taste

Preheat oven to 425 degrees F. Sift dry ingredients together in a bowl. Work in the butter with fingertips or a pastry blender until it resembles coarse meal. Beat the egg in a measuring cup and add milk to fill to 3/4 cup full. Mix in to dry ingredients with a spoon, gathering the shaggy mass together with your hands if there is extra flour in the bottom. Don't knead too much, just enough to gather it all together, and pat it into a roughly round cottage loaf shape. Place on a pie plate or baking sheet and bake for 20-25 minutes.

If you can resist picking the crunchy bits off the top while it cools, you are a stronger person than I. Once cooled (or still warm, for that matter), top with macerated strawberries and a splash of heavy cream or half and half.

Serves 6-8 depending on appetite.

How To Perk Up A Rainy Day

I have it on good authority, from a neighbor who is a Californian by birth and has lived here her entire life, that this crappy weather is not normal. The weather forecasters claim that we were just spoiled by the sunny, dry drought years but my friend Kate denies that heatedly.

Oh, thank heavens!

I moved to California about 13 years ago to escape the gloom of western New York. When I got divorced, I knew that wherever I lived, it would be sunnier than I had experienced for the past 20+ years. For the most part, California has fulfilled that wish. The frequent morning fogs don't bother me as long as the sun shines from about 10am on. When I awoke to another rainy day, long after the rains normally end, I was in a blue funk.

After rolling out of bed, letting Cora out and picking up the newspaper in a spitting drizzle, I headed for the kitchen and saw a basket of fresh strawberries, a sure day brightener. Then I remembered I had a new recipe to try - one for strawberry clafouti - and the day took on an even happier aspect. Once the clafouti came out of the oven and I was sharing it with the hot tub repairman who even braved the rain on our behalf, bless his heart, the sun might as well have been shining.

The recipe comes straight out of Sunset magazine - I made no changes. I'd suggest you do, however, if you make it. A little spice would have been nice - some cinnamon? a little allspice? perhaps a little lemon zest? It was fine, and particularly fine warm just out of the oven, but it would have been even better with some flavor layers in addition to the vanilla.

Still, it proved to be the day brightener I needed and the hot tub guy was pleased, too.

Strawberry Bavarian Cream

After using nearly every bowl and utensil in my kitchen, the resulting Bavarian cream was delicious and close in flavor but the texture was nothing like the absolutely smooth and creamy original dessert I enjoyed at the Ambassador's house.

Julia's version is not quite as sweet as that original one was. But, it unmolded beautifully and we enjoyed the light and almost bubbly texture of this one, even if it didn't match my memory.

Would I make it again? Not on a bet! It was good but the pleasure-to-work ratio was skewed too hard in the work direction. I'm glad I tried it but I'm happy now just to remember fondly that original dessert, formally served on a silver platter at the Ambassador's shining mahogany table.

How I Got Creamed by a Bavarian

Long ago, when I was a young student, faculty members used to actually invite students to their houses for dinner. Almost unimaginable today, but it taught us important social skills while humanizing the profs. One spring evening, I was invited with several others to dinner at the Dean's house; he was a former Ambassador to Vietnam and his two Vietnamese cooks made a heavenly dessert, one that I have never forgotten.

It was made with fresh strawberries and cream, a molded dessert that tasted of the simple essence of the ripe, sweet berries. It was spectacular, but I've never again had a dessert even remotely like it. So, when I read the recipe for a Bavarian Cream made with strawberries in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, I thought perhaps I had finally found a recipe that sounded like that marvelous, long-ago dessert.

It took four - yes, four - hours to make and I used:

4 spatulas
1 wooden spoon
2 sets of measuring spoons
1 blender
3 strainers
1 paring knife
4 bowls of various sizes
4 measuring cups
1 decorative mold
1 electric mixer, washed 3 times
2 whisks
and
1 pot

all to make one seemingly simple dessert. Not to mention the sieving, the whipping, the folding and the chilling. Whew! I felt like I'd been dragged through a hedge backwards by the time that puppy was safely in the fridge for the final (yes, there was more than one) cooling!

Sometimes, it's better to leave memories alone and just savor them over the years. This may have been one of those times.

They're The Berries!

My Dad had a favorite expression for things he really, really liked - he'd exclaim, "That's the berries!" I don't know where the expression came from but from him it was high praise, indeed.

Fast forward to when I was in the throes of a divorce and trying to decide where I would live after things settled down. I had been in western New York (WENY) for 20+ years and, although I loved it, I had to admit that the weather there is pretty much the pits. The winters are not so much fiercely cold - those huge Great Lakes absorb heat all summer and meter it back all winter - as they are very long, early November to late April or sometimes into May (one memorable year, it snowed in all 12 months) and they are gray, gray, gray. The summers are sticky, humid and hot - and yet much too brief.

I had lots of sensible reasons for choosing the Bay area - good year-round weather, lots of colleges to employ my career counseling skills, some already-resident and supportive friends, located halfway between my family in Hawaii and my family back East - but the real reasons I chose northern California (NOCA) were two - that My Beloved lived here and that the strawberry season is exquisitely long.

In WENY, the strawberries are amazing. In mid-June when strawberries are locally available, the whole air is perfumed as you drive by a berry patch. Everyone turns out to pick them, eat them and make jam from them. They are sweet and luscious and altogether wonderful - for those two measly weeks.

In NOCA, on the other hand, strawberry season begins in late March and continues unabated until late October when I can still get really sweet, ripe strawberries if I take a drive along the coast south of San Francisco where the cool, foggy summers retard the season for a few more precious weeks. I might have chosen NOCA for the strawberries alone; My Beloved, however, was a huge bonus.

Here's one of our favorite ways to serve strawberries, now that they are on the market and beautifully ripe again. So simple, all we do is dip the strawberries in some creme fraiche, then into a dish of coarse vanilla sugar, then pop the whole thing in our mouths, trying sometimes in vain to keep the pink juice from running down our chins.

They are the berries!

Plum Crazy

Now that I'm retired and walking for exercise around our funky 'hood each morning, I actually stop and chat with my neighbors, rather than the hasty wave they got when I was hurrying on my way to the BART station. You'd have to be crazy to dress for walking as I do, given my age and body type, but I do it anyway - I've reached the age where I figure "What the heck." Plus, not only has it improved community relations, it has been a windfall of fruit.

Several of the nearby yards have fruit trees and some of the kind people who live in those houses have given me their extras. Maybe, given my goofy appearance, they're afraid not to? In any case, an example - yellow plums, so sweet and ripe that they splat if they fall from the tree before you gently pick them. My neighbor up the hill gave me six of these little beauties and the idea for making a fruit picker from a bamboo pole and a soda pop bottle which I'm going to try out today.

I combined those six plums with some of the last strawberries of our local season into two small croustades so sweet and yet tangy that they did a little song and dance on the tongue. All I did was halve the plums and strawberries and arrange them on a crust*, sprinkle them with a little allspice and wrap the crust partway around the fruit before painting it with a egg white and sprinkling with just a touch of sugar. Popped them into a 400 degree oven for about 30-35 minutes and out came these crazy good little tarts, one for me and My Beloved and one for my neighbor to say "Thanks a bunch!"

We're nuts about our neighbors.

*If you want the crust recipe, look here: http://zoomiestation.blogspot.com/2007/08/cookiecrumb-jyah-pear-croustade.html

They're Back!

What's not to love? Sweet, juicy, versatile, with seeds that don't get stuck between my teeth, strawberries are high on my list of the Best Foods in Life, only slightly below coffee ice cream and lamb curry.

In Western New York where I lived for 20+ years, strawberry season is two fragrant weeks in the middle of June when the berries ripen. The whole air near the berry patches smells strongly of strawberries and everyone saves a piece of cardboard to sit on while scooting along the rows, filling box after box with sweet fruit. The little kids who are recruited to help with the picking emerge from the fields with pink juice smeared around their mouths and guilty grins. Mischievous teenagers sneak into the fields at night to steal berries and berry-flavored kisses. Housewives make jam, serve nothing but strawberry desserts for those happy weeks, and freeze some for later consumption. It's all about hurry-up-and-get-em-while-they're-ripe! Then they are gone for another year, leaving us with a few gemlike jars of jam and a sweet memory.

One of the most delightful discoveries for me when I moved to California was that strawberry season runs roughly from the end of April to the end of October with fragrant, ripe, luscious berries appearing in the markets and roadside stands all that time. When the berries are ripe, they announce themselves from 20 feet away with that wonderful smell; if the aroma doesn't transport me back to WNY, it's a fool's errand to buy them. They may look gorgeous but I'm not deceived - the scent's the important cue!

My favorite way to eat them, although they really need no embellishment at all, is to dip them in creme fraiche, then in turbinado sugar and pop the whole sweet, savory, fresh, smooth, fruity, crunchy bite into my mouth.

That first year in California, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Twelve years later, I still think so.