This is the ‘adult’ cake of the season. He asked for something along the lines of devil’s food cake–chocolate and cherries. He was expecting an ordinary layer cake.
Hehehe…
So here it is–a chocolate genoise sheet cake rolled around whipped cream and cherries. I couldn’t resist the meringue mushrooms and chocolate leaf litter for my soil ecologist.
With his favourite cream cheese frosting (in chocolate, of course), this dead log looks good enough to eat.
I know nothing about pomegranates. Sometimes my husband gives me one for Christmas, and I like them, especially in fruit salad. Beyond that, I’m completely ignorant.
So last year, when I saw a pomegranate tree for sale in a local nursery, I naturally bought it.
To be fair, I did do a little research first, just to make sure we had any chance of actually getting it to grow on our property. By the time I brought it home, I knew it had no less of a chance of surviving here than any other fruit tree (all of which prefer more water and less wind than they get here).
So we planted a pomegranate, and a couple of months later it lost all its leaves.
Are pomegranates deciduous, or is it dead? We didn’t even know this much. Turns out, yes, they are. Ours dutifully leafed out again in spring.
Once we knew it was alive, we promptly ignored it again, until a few weeks ago when we noticed little red bulbs on it.
Hey! Fruit! Though we had seen no flowers, we could easily have missed them. For all we knew, pomegranates had small, plain flowers.
Then today, one of those little red bulbs burst, unfurling this stunning big red bloom.
Wow! We had no idea. I’d grow this tree for the flowers alone. They have all the tropical exuberance of a hibiscus (but on a more cold-hardy plant).
I still have no idea when or if those flowers might become fruit (it seems the wrong time of year for any tree to be flowering) but, hey, we know a lot more about pomegranates than we did a year ago. Reason enough to grow something new.
I knew what I wanted for dinner this evening. I remembered seeing the photo of it in one of our cookbooks. I remembered making it once, ages ago–a tomato zucchini tart. I couldn’t find the recipe, though, so I punted. The resulting tart was spectacularly good.
Here’s the completely untested recipe I made up on the fly.
Make your favourite pie crust. Line a large tart pan with it and chill it in the fridge while you prepare the rest of the tart.
Slice zucchinis and tomatoes into 3 mm (1/8 inch) slices. How many? I don’t know…enough. You can always slice more as you go.
Spread a generous layer of chevre (a soft goat cheese) on the bottom of the crust.
Layer slices of zucchini alternated with slices of tomato, starting at the outside edge of the pan and working toward the centre in rings. (Because I could, I used a different variety of zucchini for each ring, moving from dark green to light green to yellow…but I’m weird like that)
Sprinkle freshly grated parmesan cheese over the top, along with a generous grinding of black pepper and salt.
Bake at 210°C (400°F) for about 40 minutes.
I served this with corn on the cob and a cucumber and onion salad for a mid-week meal that felt more like a weekend feast.
We spent yesterday at the beach–sun, sand, and surf!
It was glorious.
Today I paid for it.
Not in sunburn or sand in my shorts, but in work. It was time to make our annual vat of summer soup, I was milking for the neighbour this weekend, and I had a weekend of cleaning and animal care to do–all in one day.
While I milked the neighbour’s goats, the rest of the family started picking and chopping vegetables. When I got home with a pot of milk, I made cheese around the vegetable prepping, then I joined in.
As the pot of soup came together, we started calculating how many jars we needed to hold it all. It was several more than we had empty.
So I made apple crisp, freeing up two jars (which still held last year’s apples). I baked that while the first load of jars was in the canner.
I had also planned on baking lunchbox desserts this weekend, so after putting the second load of jars in the canner, I made cookies.
I also took down and folded the laundry (and patched a hole in my daughter’s shirt), and washed a ton of dishes.
While the third load of jars was in the canner, I cleaned the house (mostly), and milked my own goat. Before that batch of jars was finished, it was dinnertime. I sat down for the first time since breakfast.
Whew!
The final tally for the day was 23 quarts of soup, 6 quarts of vegetable stock, 6 dozen cookies, one beautiful apple crisp, and a batch of chevre (and a clean house and laundry).
Unfortunately, the chicken house hasn’t gotten cleaned yet, nor has the bathroom. I could probably manage them yet today.
Or I could pour myself a glass of wine and worry about them tomorrow…
Most days I eat dinner leftovers for lunch. Sometimes they’re okay, sometimes they’re lame, occasionally they’re quite good.
But some leftovers are always nice.
During crazy cake season, I make a lot of icing, marzipan, and other special items for decorating cakes. Invariably I make too much–after all, I don’t want to run out in the middle of decorating a cake.
Some leftovers are eaten as-is–meringue mushrooms were a huge hit one year, as I recall, as were chocolate leaves.
Other leftovers need to be incorporated into something else to be enjoyable. This week I had a lot of marzipan leftover. Marzipan is okay on its own, but it’s much better with chocolate.
I rolled the leftover marzipan into 24 little balls, and placed each ball into the middle of a chocolate cupcake. The presence of the marzipan flattened the cupcakes (and made little belly buttons in some), but the chocolate-almond combination is excellent.
Best leftovers I’ve eaten in a long time. Now, if only I could justify eating them for lunch…
I asked my daughter if she had any requests for today’s baking, and she asked for ‘those ginger slices’. I have no idea what she was talking about, because I’ve never made ginger slice. Sounded like a good excuse to try something new. Besides, making a slice let me use the slice pans Santa brought me for Christmas this past year.
A quick on-line search took me to this recipe, posted by Chelsea Winter. The recipe was quick and easy, if rather high in butter and sugar.
The result was greeted with praise by my ginger-loving family. Even I (not really a fan of ginger) thought they were pretty good, especially with a cup of tea.
Let me start by saying I had nothing to do with this meal, aside from growing the raw ingredients and making the feta and parmesan cheese. I was off doing other things while my husband cooked this. I didn’t even do the dishes afterwards–the kids washed.
Do I have the best family, or what?
This incredible dish is actually quite simple. My husband started by making firm polenta (flavoured with parmesan cheese, rosemary, salt and pepper) and allowing it to cool in an oiled jelly roll pan. When the polenta was firm, he cut it into squares, and layered the squares at an angle in an oiled lasagne pan with slabs of raw zucchini, slices of tomato, salt and pepper, and a mix of feta and grated edam cheese. He sprinkled fresh basil, chopped garlic, and diced tomato on top, and baked it at 220°C (on fan bake) for about 20 minutes. The result was rich, juicy and flavourful.
My contribution to the dinner was a simple salad of thinly sliced cucumbers tossed with salt, red wine vinegar, olive oil, and chopped fresh fennel leaves–a perfect accompaniment.
Summer cooking just doesn’t get better than this.
He asked for a cube. Said I could decorate it however I wanted to. My first thought was to create a building (because he’s keen on architecture) but, truth is, a cubical building just looks wrong. Then I thought a Rubix cube or Lego block would be cute…but dreadfully boring to make. I wanted to create something unexpected, something not meant to be cubical. And I wanted an excuse to play with more Mexican paste.
So, inspired by Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, I created Cubeworld. Instead of elephants holding it up, there is a dragon holding it down…or something.
Along the way, I learned more about Mexican paste (or maybe I learned more about my sculpting skills…). Creating largish shapes with it is easy–it’s lovely to work with–but fashioning tiny animals was almost impossible (again, probably my skill here, not the Mexican paste at fault). I tried to make the dragon smaller, in keeping with the scale of the other parts of the scene, but I just couldn’t manage the tiny spikes and other sculptural details needed. And the longer I fussed with it, the drier it got, until the thin parts started crumbling. I just couldn’t work fast enough at a tiny scale.
In hindsight, it would have been good to practise with modelling clay or plasticine until I could form the dragon quickly.
Despite its limitations, the Mexican paste was, again, fun to play with, and was able to do things icing just can’t do.
The weather was finally cool enough today to think about baking. Knowing there’s another birthday cake to make Thursday evening, I decided to make something entirely different today–peanut butter cookies.
I’ve made a number of different peanut butter cookie recipes over the years, and there was a new one I wanted to try; it used wholegrain flours and whole peanuts in addition to peanut butter.
But as I glanced at the recipe, I realised it only made two dozen cookies. What kind of cookie recipe is that? I know I could have doubled the recipe, but it was the principle of the thing. Two dozen is hardly any cookies at all (especially with two teens in the house). It’s not worth the kitchen mess to make that few cookies, and they would look lost in the cookie jar.
So I pulled out Old Faithful–the 1975 edition of Joy of Cooking. Sixty-five peanut butter cookies later, I was pleased I had.
You wait for it all summer. You watch it grow taller and taller. You marvel when it overtops your head. You cheer when it starts to flower, and you impatiently poke the ears as they grow and fatten.
Then one day–finally–the first ears of sweet corn are ready to pick. Always eaten as corn-on-the-cob, the first ears are celebrated and savoured. They cry out Summer!
They are the beginning of the end, of course.
Once the sweet corn is coming on, the green beans will start to slow down. The peas, already on their last hurrah, will give up. February’s heat and dry will begin to take its toll on all the plants.
There is still plenty of time to enjoy summer’s bounty–the deluge of vegetables won’t be over until mid-April. There is still ketchup to make, and summer soup to bottle. And lots and lots of corn-on-the-cob to eat.
But once the corn is ripe, the clock is ticking. From here on out, the garden will look a little worse each day. I’ll start pulling plants out, clearing beds, harvesting storage crops.
And in a shady corner of the yard are two trays of seedlings, sheltering from the heat and harsh sun. Waiting for the end of the sweet corn. Winter crops.
Because every season’s end is another’s beginning.
Robinne Weiss 