saving room for rhubarb crisp

The rhubarb in the garden is coming along beautifully, and we’ve been hankering for a pie or crisp. I finally had time to make our first crisp of the season - just enough for the two of us.

I kept dinner really simple: some steamed asparagus with olive oil and salt, and a halibut fillet sauteed in a little butter, with a glass of verdejo. I was mostly looking to eat something light so as to save room for dessert, but this actually turned out fantastic - the halibut was incredibly tender and flavorful, like crab claw meat, and the verdejo matched perfectly. It was so good.

But then we got to eat rhubarb crisp!

lamb pizza

My favorite pizza dough recipe of all time (so far) is from the book Home Baking by Alford and Duguid. It’s just the perfect blend of white and whole wheat, with just the right amount of chew and crispiness and not at all doughy. The recipe I got it from, however, isn’t a traditional pizza - it’s a middle-eastern lamb flatbread often made as a street food.

In the original recipe, the pizzas are cooked one at a time as small, personal-size breads in a skillet, then finished under the broiler, rolled up like burritos and eaten immediately with mint and yogurt. This time, though, I wanted to have it all done at once so we could sit and enjoy our pizza together. So I followed my usual pizza-making format and baked two pizzas at very high heat, adding the toppings at appropriate points. It worked! The other way is good, but this was very, very tasty. And I was so excited to find a little bit of fresh mint in my garden to sprinkle on top!

While we were eating, I was reminded of a pizza that my friends and I often got in college - the “gyros pizza” from the two local Greek-owned pizzerias (run by competing brothers). I don’t remember the exact toppings, but it was a spiced beef or lamb pizza that always came with a container of tsatsiki sauce. It was delicious. You could definitely do the same sort of thing here, just by crushing some garlic into a bowl of yogurt, maybe adding a bit more mint. Yum.

khachapuri again

A while back I mentioned a batch of khachapuri that I had made, but I didn’t go into detail about them because I was seriously distracted by the gougères I was making at the same time. Last week I made them again, though, so I thought I’d do some fuller coverage.

Khachapuri are cheese-and-egg filled flatbreads from the Republic of Georgia. The bread itself is a yogurt and white flour dough which is very simple to make and very tasty as well. The variety I always make are the “emeruli khachapuri” out of Flatbreads and Flavors; the book has some variations stuffed with red beans or potatoes, but I haven’t really branched out yet - these are too good.

emeruli khachapuri

from Flatbreads and Flavors by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid

The full recipe makes 8 flatbreads. The breads are very filling, so I usually just make a half batch, which works fine. Leftovers are tasty for breakfast, too.

for the dough:

• 3 to 4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 2 cups plain yogurt

for the filling:

• 4 oz cheddar or mozzarella cheese, finely grated
• 2 oz feta cheese, crumbled
• 2 Tbsp plain yogurt
• 1 egg

Preheat the oven to 450°.

German apple pancake

The box of Jonagold apples in our basement finally gave up the ghost (i.e. was dumped unceremoniously into the compost bin) but I did manage to pull out two survivors to make a German apple pancake. This is one of those recipes my family’s been making forever, out of the original Vegetarian Epicure - the one with all the butter and cream and marijuana references. It’s the same thing as “Dutch babies” - basically a big  popover, cooked in butter and served with hot cinnamony apple slices.

The batter is very quick to prepare: just 3/4 cup of milk, 3/4 cup white flour, 3 eggs and a bit of salt all whisked together, then poured into a hot cast iron skillet in which you’ve melted a tablespoon of butter. Pop the pan into a 450° oven for 15 minutes, then turn the heat down to 350° and leave it for another 10 minutes or so. It always comes out a little different, but it usually poofs up high along the edges while the center stays thin and custardy with a crisp edge. This one poofed very nicely:

a slight pie mishap

There’s a box of lovely bosc pears from the Wenatchee Valley that are just ripening in our basement. Pears are a real use-it-or-lose-it sort of fruit, so I thought I’d make one of my pear custard pies to take on a visit to a relative. A good idea, but a few problems in the execution.

The pie baked up beautifully, with a golden crust and pretty browned-sugar spots on the top, but of course it hadn’t set up completely (I could probably have left it in the oven a little longer). Generally custard pies will finish setting up on their own, so I didn’t worry about it. But instead of letting the pie cool on its rack in the kitchen, we impatiently packed it up in a cake carrier and took it off in the car.

Lesson learned: do not transport a hot, unset custard pie in an enclosed container. Between the jiggling of the moving car and the heat trap of the carrier lid, the pie completely liquified on the trip down, becoming instead a pie crust filled with sweet pear soup. I put it in the fridge when we arrived, but it only congealed slightly. Aargh.

However! Once we had polished off our lovely takeout dinner from Szechuan Bistro (if you’re anywhere near that neighborhood, and you haven’t had their dry-fried string beans with tofu, go get some now), we felt able to face the wreck of the pie. There was vanilla ice cream in the house, so I simply scooped the pie filling out of the shell and dumped it all over ice cream. It tasted wonderful.

But next time? I’ll make sure it stays pie.

Corpus Christi pecan cookies

I’m not necessarily a big one for making Christmas cookies, but I do like to do some baking over the holidays. In past years I’ve made a lot of biscotti, since it ships well, and occasionally chocolate crinkles. But last winter I went back to making a recipe that was a favorite of my grandmother’s - she picked it up while she and my grandfather were living in Corpus Christi, Texas, during World War II. They’re very simple cookies, but they remind me of her - plus they’re fabulously delicious. If I make no other cookies for the holidays, I will make these.

Breakfast clafoutis

This recipe has an interesting (to me) backstory. Years back, I had come into possession of some random issues of Home & Garden magazine, which I mostly looked at for the photos of unattainably beautiful and enormous gardens. One of them, though - I believe the November 1992 issue - had a story about going out to pick fresh cranberries in Maine and bringing them home to make clafoutis for breakfast. The recipe seemed simple (minus the fresh-picked cranberries - not so common out here), so I tried it, and it became a solid staple in our breakfast repertoire. I barely noticed the author of the article.

Much later, my father was reading Jim Harrison’s remarkable book The Raw and the Cooked, and noticed that he was constantly singing the praises of someone named John Thorne, calling him the finest food writer in America. That’s interesting, we thought, we’ve never heard of him. So when I happened across one of his books (Pot on the Fire) I snapped it up, and I found his website and went through it. He is indeed an amazing food writer - I have since subscribed to his newsletter and bought my father every single one of his books. And I discovered that in one of his earlier books, there’s a recipe for a cranberry clafoutis. The very same one that we’ve been making all these years! So I am very happy to attribute this recipe, correctly, to John Thorne and his wife, Matt Lewis Thorne. I don’t remember if the Grand Marnier is my own idea or not. Probably not.

Hallowe’en dinner

Don’t ask me how this got started, but every year on Hallowe’en we have to eat the same thing for dinner. Pumpkin soup, hot Italian sausages, and Yorkshire pudding. It’s a requirement. It’s warming, autumnal and not a little bit indulgent, so I guess it’s perfect for an autumn holiday. In any case, we’ve been doing it for years. Usually I get a small sugar pie pumpkin for the soup, which I actually did this year, but it will have to get used for something else this time, because we got hold of one of these:

It’s a padana squash, as far as I know, a sort of heirloom Italian pumpkin with awesome ribbing down the sides. J saw it at the Dunbar farmstand and immediately wanted to carve it, and Steve pointed out that it makes good eating, too. So on Saturday J carved it, and we saved the flesh for our soup.

Cheese puffs and khachapuri

Friends came over for dinner on Saturday. The weather was actually decent enough that we fired up the grill one last time, producing some truly excellent lemony lamb kebabs and spiced eggplant (I have no pictures, sorry - we ate everything). To go with the lamb and eggplant I whipped up a batch of khachapuri, Georgian cheese-filled yogurt flatbreads (again, forgot to take any pictures before they were gone, but here’s a borrowed image that looks similar). The recipe for these is out of Flatbreads & Flavors by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, and they were described by our friend as tasting like “Mac and cheese in a bun!” I assume that’s a good thing - anyway, I like them. Come to think of it, they’d be really good stuffed with eggplant. Or lamb.

Pear custard pie

I gave J a bottle of Vin Santo dessert wine last Christmas. I believe we had tried some at a wine tasting not long before, and been rather excited by it. But then the bottle lurked in our cellar all year, waiting for the appropriate occasion. Of late, though, I’ve decided that wine-opening occasions have to be created, not just awaited, so I went searching for possible accompaniments.

We recently bought ourselves a copy of What to Drink with What You Eat, so I looked up Vin Santo. Along with the usual recommendations of biscotti and nut-based desserts, I saw pears. Aha! We are definitely in the heart of fresh pear season around here, so I went digging for a recipe I remembered liking back in the mists of time - a pear custard pie that my mother used to make. She got the recipe at a farmer’s market meeting and then printed it in the Cashmere Valley Record newspaper’s recipe collection. Usually when we eat pears around here we poach them in sugar water and top them with pecans, brandy and sour cream. Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with that, but pie sounded fun.