May | 2010 | knitting a life

Archive for May, 2010

Rustic fruit desserts — apricot upside-down cornmeal cake

Posted in baking, ingredients on May 31, 2010| 2 Comments »

It was the middle of the winter when I got a copy of Rustic Fruit Desserts, the new(ish) baking book by local chef/bakers Cory Schreiber and Julie Richardson. I pass Julie’s wonderful bakery (Baker and Spice) on my way to and from work every day and Wildwood, the Portland restaurant Cory Schreiber founded, is one of the first places we tried when we moved here. I knew that whatever these two collaborated on would have to be good.

The recipes in the book are arranged by season, so there’s no good reason I haven’t used the book before now, but lately, with summer fruits starting to appear, I am discovering that this book will be one of the ones I use often.

Where did I start? Well, oddly, it was the apricots that got me going.

For some reason I haven’t ever been a big fan of fresh apricots. After this spring, though, that is changing. The produce manager at New Seasons encouraged us to buy some the other week, and I have been keeping a bowlful in the kitchen ever since. I’ve been eating them right from the bowl, but also experimenting with them in baked desserts. And that’s when I found myself turning to Rustic Fruit Desserts.

The recipe I chose is called stone fruit upside-down cornmeal cake. And it’s a good one. The cake is just sweet enough, and even a little crunchy with bits of cornmeal. The topping — well it’s really just apricots, butter and brown sugar — and that’s just about perfect.

The recipe is very simple — melt butter and brown sugar in a cast-iron skillet, arrange the fruit (cut sides down) in the skillet and top it with the cornmeal batter. Bake, and then turn the finished cake out onto a plate. It’s easy, delicious, and beautiful. What more could you ask?

Here’s the recipe.

Stone fruit upside-down cornmeal cake

(adapted from Rustic Fruit Desserts by Cory Schreiber and Julie Richardson)

Fruit Topping
5 apricots
¼ cup unsalted butter
½ cup packed brown sugar

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Score the skin of the apricots with a few strokes of a knife, then slice them in half and remove the pits.

Melt the butter in a 10-inch cast iron skillet over medium heat. Add the brown sugar and stir until the sugar dissolves and blends with the butter to form a caramel. Remove from the heat and arrange to fruit cut side down on top of the caramel.

Cake
1 ¼ cups all purpose flour
¾ cups fine cornmeal
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
¼ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon fine sea salt
½ cup unsalted butter at room temperature
2/3 cups granulated sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
¾ cup buttermilk

Whisk the flour, cornmeal, baking powder, baking soda and salt together in a bowl.

Using stand mixer with the paddle attachment, cream the butter and sugar together on medium high speed for 3-5 minutes until light and fluffy.

Add the eggs one at a time, scraping down the sides of the bowl after each addition, then stir in the vanilla.

Stir in the flour mixture in three additions, alternating with the buttermilk in two additions, beginning and ending with the dry ingredients and scraping down the bowl as needed.

Pour the batter over the fruit in the skillet and gently spread it evenly. Bake in the middle of the oven for about 45 minutes, or until the center of the cake springs back lightly when touched.

Allow the cake to cool for 20 minutes before flipping it over onto a plate.

This cake is best the day it is made but will keep for a few days covered with plastic wrap.

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Asparagus Pesto, ala Bittman

Posted in cooking, food, ingredients on May 25, 2010| 5 Comments »

Despite the chilly weather and continuous drizzle (interrupted by occasional bursts of hail) it must be spring. How do I know? There is locally grown asparagus at the farmer’s market.

I am a big fan of this vegetable, especially when I know it’s been grown locally and when the spears are crisp and sweet almost all the way to the base of the stalk. I have prepared asparagus lots of ways; grilled, roasted and poached and sauced with everything from a simple drizzle of olive oil and a splash of lemon juice to a more complex mustardy, balsamic vinaigrette.

My affection for asparagus is probably why Mark Bittman’s column about Asparagus Pesto caught my eye. I clearly had to make this.

I followed MB’s recipe, substituting hazelnuts (I live in Oregon, after all) for the pine nuts and quadrupling the amount of garlic in the original recipe. The resulting puree was lovely — bright springy green in color

and bursting with flavor.

I quickly boiled up some fresh rigatoni (also from the Portland Farmer’s Market) tossed the noodles with the pesto, topped it all with some lightly steamed fresh peas in the pod, and sat down to a plate of spring perfection.

Why not give it a try at your house?

Asparagus Pesto

Kosher salt
1 pound asparagus, trimmed and cut into 2-inch segments
4 cloves garlic
1/2 cup toasted hazelnuts
1/4 cup olive oil, or more as desired
3/4 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
Freshly ground black pepper
Juice of 1/2 lemon, or to taste.

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Add the asparagus and cook until tender but not mushy, 8 to 10 minutes. Drain well and shock with ice water to stop the cooking. Reserve some of the cooking liquid.

Transfer the cooled asparagus pieces to a food processor and add the garlic, hazelnuts, 2 tablespoons of the oil, Parmesan, a pinch of salt and a couple of tablespoons of the cooking liquid.

Process the mixture, stopping to scrape down the sides of the container if necessary, and gradually add the remaining oil and a bit more of the reserved cooking liquid to moisten if necessary. Add the lemon juice and season with salt and pepper to taste, pulse one last time to finish mixing.

Serve over pasta, fish or chicken. Top with chopped hazelnuts and additional Parmesan cheese, if desired.

Makes about 1 1/2 cups of pesto. Keeps, covered and refrigerated for a day or two.

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Baking David Lebovitz’s Chocolate Bread

Posted in baking, Breakfast on May 14, 2010| 9 Comments »

The minute I saw this post on David Lebovitz’s wonderful blog, I knew I had to make Chocolate Bread. I mean, how could I resist? Chocolate bread? What a great idea. Not a new one, even to me, but this recipe was both relatively straight-forward and annotated with lots of notes about each ingredient choice. I was hooked.

Of course, I had some questions to answer first. DL recommends using a Dutch process cocoa powder and I wanted to use my current favorite, Green and Black’s Organic Cocoa. Was it “Dutched” (aka alkalized)?” Yes.

DL also calls for bread flour (though he says all-purpose will do in a pinch) so I replenished my supply of King Arthur bread flour (it turned out I had some sitting around, but since I wasn’t sure how old it was, getting fresh flour was a good idea).

DL’s recipe cites toasted nuts as an optional ingredient. Being a resident of Portland, where I can get freshly roasted hazelnuts at the Farmer’s Market most of the year, I chose to add those incredibly tasty nuts to this batch.

Finally I bought and chopped some Scharffen Berger 70% Cacao Bittersweet Chocolate.

Ingredients assembled, I waded in. The dough came together easily in my mixer, looking (as DL mentions) almost like brownie batter when fully mixed — very soft and not at all like most bread dough.

After a couple of rises (2 hours in the bowl, just over an hour in a loaf pan) I slid the bread into the oven.

And, oh! the smell. Better than bread alone, better even than brownies baking, my whole kitchen was filled with the warm scent of chocolate and the yeasty smell of bread — a combination almost impossible to describe. The scent alone makes baking this bread worth it.

Of course it tastes pretty darn good, too!