Each Little World

In a vase on Tuesday: A summer table setting

Mark and I were invited to a dinner party at the end of last week on an absolutely beautiful evening. The table was equally beautiful; so much so that I made him grab a few pictures on his phone. There was seating for 14 guests which meant Mark had to take more than one photo to get the entire table. There were lap blankets and throws in case it turned chilly and we needed to cover up but the temperature never fell so much that anyone needed a wrap.

I particularly liked the look of those French park chairs all in a row, looking so pristine with their white enamel paint.

Mark and I brought easy hors d'oeuvres: olives and breadsticks. Gardeners, note that I used a vase to hold the breadsticks. I needed a tall plain container and I realized nothing fit that description as well as a vase! 

In case you are curious, the entree was Cioppino with cornbread. Dessert was a fabulous lemon poppyseed layer cake served with coffee and glasses of iced Limoncello. A wonderful way to welcome September. Thank you Jane and David for including us.

Another summer meal

I subscribe to food and recipe emails from The New York Times and Food 52. Usually I quickly glance at them and hit delete. But I try enough of them — and am happy with the results — to keep 'em coming. A few weeks ago Food 52 posted a recipe for Sriracha Lime Corn Salad which was fabulous. I've already made it twice.

It's another of those corn dishes that uses kernels sliced off the cob which is the most labor-intensive part of the recipe. Saute the corn, add sweet red peppers, finish with lime juice, parsley, Sriracha and Cojita cheese. Since it's available on-line I won't bother to reprint the complete directions here. I'll just tell you that you should give it a try. Spicy, summery, and good hot or at room temp.

We paired the Food 52 corn dish and another Caprese salad with a recipe from Martha Stewart's magazine. I tore out the page and it's been sitting around for a couple of years waiting for me to rediscover it. Her Swordfish with Watermelon and Lime-Ginger Citronette is another very summery entree and a great way to eat up watermelon. Mark likes to buy the bigger ones and I get tired of it quickly so this was a great solution. 

Corn and tomatoes reign

Our local farmers' markets are bursting with fresh produce that is providing lots of great eating at our house. For as long as possible we will be feasting on sweet corn and tomatoes. I've been roasting and freezing tomatoes, making gazpacho and fresh uncooked tomato sauce for pasta. But my favorite for both flavor and ease is Caprese salad.

According to Epicurious.com Insalata caprese (literally, the salad from Capri) was created in the 1950s at the Trattoria da Vincenzo for folks looking for a light lunch. Its ingredients were tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, basil and olive oil. I add a splash of balsamic vinegar so mine's not authentic but it's the way we like it.

I don't have enough sun or space to grow my own tomatoes but my garden does offer three kinds of basil. So we vary the salad with the type of basil and tomatoes we use. It may have been created to satisfy lunch-goers, but I am happy eating it as an appetizer, side dish or the whole meal. Not many dishes are so pretty or so flavorful.

We had Caprese salad the other night after an entree of Beaufort Soused Corn and Shrimp. The link takes you to a recipe that is identical to the one I follow from Christopher Idone's coffee table cookbook, "Glorious American Food." We mostly enjoy corn on the cob but I love this recipe that uses it off the cob.

The waters around Beaufort were once plentiful with shrimp who made their way into many dishes, including pies, which is the origin of this dish. Idone ditched the crust and added a lemony vinaigrette instead. I usually only make this once a summer but it's yummy as well as easy. The recipe serves 8. I use a scant pound of shrimp for the two of us which leaves us with enough for dinner the next night. But I make the entire recipe of vinaigrette because I love the flavor and don't want to run short. 

A peach of a cake

I had a brief career as a pastry chef and still have two big bins filled with specialty baking tins and equipment. Going through some old photos I came across a couple of snapshots that brought back memories of those days when I thought nothing of spending an afternoon making a show-stopping dessert at home. I rarely use any of these items but the spring form or tart pans these days, but I haven't as yet been able to bring myself to jettison anything. I keep thinking I will make plum puddings or Yule logs or charlottes or madeleines one of these days and so there they all sit.

Among all these baking items is the mold I used to make "peach' cakes. It's a pan that is intended to be used to make cakes that can be decorated to look like baseballs for a kids' birthday party. You put two cakes together to make a round shape. But I bought this pan with another idea about how to use this curvaceous shape.

I'd clipped an article from Food and Wine magazine where Judith Olney, a creative cook and baker whose books and ideas I love, made a giant peach cake. She baked two big rounded cakes in metal bowls and united them with whipped cream as you can see in the magazine clipping on the left in the image below. But when I saw the baking tin above I thought, why not make cakes that looked like peaches since it was peach season? 

I used a mix for the cakes. After baking, I very lightly brushed the curved side of the cakes with a thinned down apricot jam and then rolled them in pink, yellow and orange sugars. The two halves are "glued" together with cream cheese flavored with honey and orange rind. Mint leaves stand in for the peach leaves.

I put each peach cake into one of the purple paper cupcake-type holders that peaches came in when I bought a hand basket of them the way I always used to do at my local grocery store. I filled my basket when it was empty of real peaches with the peach cakes and brought it to work as a birthday surprise for the grand dame of our office.

At the end of the day I discovered how real my peaches looked when a co-worked mentioned that she didn't like peaches so she didn't have one. She never realized they were cakes and not fruit! This is not the kind of dessert you make more than once or twice in a lifetime, but it's peach season now so it might be the moment to try my hand a some fancy baking again. 

Summer supper

We began June with too many days with temperatures that went up in the 80s, making it hot and humid and feeling like August. Too hot to cook, even too hot to grill. So I decided to make the Spring Antipasto Platter that was featured in the NYTImes not too long ago. Turned out to be quick, easy and tempting to a pair of hot and tired gardeners. Best of all, there were leftovers so we could do it again the next night.

To give us more options I added shrimp and a rustic country bread. My only recommendations are to cut the fennel paper thin and not to even bother to use green onions/scallions for grilling. They're too small and just give you a pile of charred sticks. If you can't find spring onions, skip this item in the recipe. As more veggies are coming to local markets, this meal will be appearing in endless variations at our house now that it's summer and hot days are the norm.

Wordless Wednesday

Chocolaterian, Atwood Ave., Madison.

Happy February 13th

We started celebrating Valentine's Day a little early. Actually my husband does not believe in made-up (aka Hallmark) holidays so he's not big on Valentine's Day — despite the fact that he's given me many lovely presents over the years.

We started the day Saturday with our usual group of friends for Saturday morning coffee. Then I went off to spend the morning with my textile group while he talked with his college-bound nephew about his potential options. We met up again to go to the gym for a brief workout.

And then we went off to our city's original shopping mall which is smaller than is common and was emphatically local until recently. Now it's being redesigned and relaunched with brand names like Kate Spade, Sur la Table and Madewell. What that means is there are a number of empty storefronts at one end of the older mall space. So they set up half a dozen pop up shops for the weekend, including Pleasant Living whose east side shop I still miss.

We bought a set of 1920-30s Sheffield nickel silver flatware for six.The knife handles are celluloid, I believe. It has four serving pieces and two kinds of soup spoons, demitasse and dessert spoons. I know. This is totally against the trend of downsizing and casual entertaining. Two things I think about but am not good at. Also picked up a beautiful Chinese ceramic garden stool, decorated in soft blues on gray. 

Hit the grocery store to pick up everything I wanted to make a couple of the recipes in this week's New York Times food section. We started with Mark Bittman's Champagne cocktails, Hook's Tilson blue cheese and my favorite cranberry and hazelnut Raincoast Crisps while sitting in front of fire, candles lit and the two of us getting slowly lit as we worked on the NYT Sunday crossword.

Dinner (above) was David Tanis' concoction of Seared Sea Scallops with Ginger-Lime butter, sweet potatoes and greens. He used baby bok choy but I subbed a quick saute of arugula. He baked his potatoes and I roasted mine. A superb meal and one to make again.

So we'll be spending Valentine's Day sleeping in and doing what ever we usually do on Sundays . . .

Thunder snow

The storm that has just started was downgraded. But I don't really know what that means. The original forecast said 1 to 6 inches of snow, rain, freezing rain and sleet. Also wind and thunder. Well it is mid-morning and so dark it looks like about 4:30 in the afternoon. It's snowing heavily, much more than these photos indicate.

The one below was snapped about 15 minutes after the one above. You can see how quickly the snow is sticking to the shrubs and branches. And it just thundered. We used to get snow with thunder quite often when I was growing up in the snowbelt, south of Lake Erie in Buffalo, NY. One of my favorite weather moments. Oh, joy! Just thundered again. And the plow went by.

Mark made a fabulous beef stew yesterday with lots of leftovers and I just took rice pudding with ginger out of the oven. We're set. Frankly, my garden is barely covered with snow and needs more insulation, so I am OK with a bit of winter returning again.

 

Winter desserts: Apple crostata

Martha Stewart's Apple Crostata is one of my go-to desserts for fall and winer. In a moment of sugary madness I made the crostada and these roasted pears for recent winter party. The crostata is nice because the dough makes enough for two, so I just keep it in the freezer and thus can quickly pull this particular dessert together as long as there are apples in the house. You can find the recipe here.

There is only one thing to remember when you are making this dessert, bake it on a pan with sides to catch any drips. And put a cylinder of rolled up tin foil around the edge to hold it in place till it hardens during baking. The first minutes in a warm oven make the sides want to collapse so you need to figure out a way to keep that from happening. It's too pretty and too delicious a dessert to let that little problem stop you from making it.

Winter desserts: Roasted pears

In my family an assortment of homemade cookies was the traditional dessert for Christmas. My sister Meg's birthday is December 25 so she rarely celebrated with a birthday cake. I remember one year my mom did make her a cake and it felt unnatural to be eating cake instead of cookies on Christmas.

Once I moved away from home after college, I started a new tradition when I began to make Linzer Torte for Christmas Eve, which was father's birthday. It was spicy and wintry and yet still not a cake. Then I made a dozen plum puddings for quite a few years. They were a labor of love but I don't have enough friends who like this dessert as much as I do so it fell out of my repertoire. 

But winter always seems like the time of year for fancy desserts. I make these roasted pears with candied hazelnuts and a nutty Frangelico sauce every few years because it's fairly easy, tastes good and is very dramatic visually. The recipe came from the November 1997 issue of Gourmet Magazine as the finishing touch on "A Pacific Northwest Thanksgiving." 

Though it would be a lovely ending to a holiday dinner, it would work with any winter meal or just invite a few neighbors over for dessert and coffee and wow 'em with this.

. . .

ROASTED PEARS

WITH HAZELNUT SYRUP & CANDIED HAZELNUTS 

 

1 cup water

1 1/4 cups sugar

3/4 cup hazelnuts

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

6 firm-ripe Bosc pears (about 2 1/4 pounds total, one pear per person), stems intact

3 tablespoons hazelnut-flavored liqueur like Frangelico

2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice, or to taste

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

 

In a small heavy saucepan simmer water with 1 cup sugar, stirring until sugar is dissolved. (Syrup may be made up to this point 2 days ahead and cooled completely before being chilled, covered.)

Preheat oven to 350° F and lightly butter a shallow baking pan.

Coarsely chop hazelnuts. Stir nuts into syrup and simmer 1 minute. With a slotted spoon transfer nuts to baking pan, arranging in one layer, and reserve syrup. Cut butter into pieces. Bake nuts in middle of oven until golden brown, about 15 minutes. Immediately add butter to nuts, tossing to coat and separate, and with a spatula transfer nuts to a plate to cool Nuts will crisp as they cool. (Nuts may be candied 2 days ahead and kept in an airtight container in a cool, dry place. Reserved syrup may be kept, covered and chilled, 2 days.)

Lightly butter a shallow ovenproof kettle or casserole dish (about 12 by 2 1/2 inches). With a sharp knife trim a very thin slice from bottom of each pear to enable pears to stand upright. Dip and roll each pear in reserved syrup to coat completely. Transfer pears as coated to kettle, standing them upright, and sprinkle with remaining 1/4 cup sugar. Add liqueur, lemon juice, and vanilla to remaining reserved syrup and pour down side of kettle or casserole.

Roast pears, uncovered, in middle of oven until undersides are tender when pierced with a knife, about 30 minutes.

Arrange pears on a serving platter. Spoon syrup around pears and sprinkle with candied nuts. Serve pears warm or at room temperature.

Note: I think the hardest part of this recipe is figuring out if the pears are ripe enough when they are still firm. The photo shows my version of the dessert so you can see what a pretty presentation it makes.