Category: Fruit
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Figgy jam
When they simmer for a little more than an hour with sugar, lemon juice and zest, something mysterious hangs in the background, behind the smell of sweetness. Something dark, serpents in the trees and jungle-y
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A dearth of dessert can lead to overdoing it on sugar; apple raspberry crisp
Believe me or don’t, I don’t make a lot of desserts. We “shouldn’t” eat them; we don’t “need” them. Eventually, though, I’ll stay up too late, meditating on something sweet. Then I’ll eat too much junk (although there’s not very much of that around here anymore) because no small serving of something sensational has appeared…
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Why I can (and freeze and pickle)
I enjoy preserving Stoic’s garden bounty (along with that of the Lynn St. Clair Orchard in Taylorsville) because it makes me feel like a good steward and because — of everything going on in my life — it’s the only process with a beginning, middle and end. I can actually see what I’ve accomplished, usually…
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And now, Father’s Day. Also, best fruit salad ever. With no added sugar!
OK, the good thing is: We get Mother’s and Father’s Day over within a few weeks of each other. Then I can revert to standard grump mode, as opposed to raging about the nonexistent parenting in my long-ago past. Even I realize this last hurts me as opposed to anyone else, especially those no longer…
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Fresh, fabulous figs
We waited longer for figs than for a baby. The latter took just under 3 years; the former, more than 25. And this year, booyah!, we have figs. Figs to eat out of hand, figs to freeze for making preserves and figs to cook. Assuming figs grew in Eden (fig leaves, remember?), why would anyone leave,…
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Drowning in a sea of chocolate
Please don’t take away my healthy food writer creds. It’s just so easy to pop a dessert into the oven (and so hard to divide it into the proper number of servings), and this one is so good. I promise this is the last in a series of 3, and then we’ll concentrate on vegetables.…
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Blueberry pie, just blueberries
All my cooking life I’ve tended toward recipes that jazz things up. Not this one. Marion Cunningham’s Fresh Berry Pie in her revised Fanny Farmer Baking Book adds scarcely any thickener, which means it’s runny if you eat it before it’s sat on the counter overnight. It also means you taste nothing but blueberries (when those…
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Syllabub, sillybubba
I sipped syllabub on Saturday in Salem, at the wonderful old tavern in Winston-Salem to be precise. Here on Redneck Ranch, we’ll probably call it Sillybubba whenwe make it. My ancient, tattered Charleston Receipts (The Junior League of Charleston, 1950) has 3 recipes, two of them even older than the book and one requiring a…
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Strawberry ice cream that’s a breeze to make
Family lore has my dear Stoic the Vast making two unforgettable ice cream gaffes: He put whole blueberries in the ice cream maker once upon a time (they freeze into navy-blue bullets), and he made ice cream with buttermilk. Even the cats wouldn’t eat it is the “happily ever after” on this particular fairy tale.…
youcanteaticecreamintheshower 