After taking off exactly three days so far this year, I decided to treat myself to another luxurious vacation day and thus enjoy a wonderfully long holiday weekend. Gil’s been working from home since last week, so we slept in (by our standards), walked Rufus, and puttered around for a bit before I even considered being productive. Not inclined to waste the day cleaning, I got in cooking mode and treated myself to a nicer breakfast than my usual weekday cereal or egg sandwich — multigrain waffles with blueberries and maple syrup.

Yeah.

I modified an old favorite recipe for the waffles, leaving out the cinnamon, cardamom and vanilla, then tossed in two handfuls of fresh blueberries. To keep it simple, I just topped the waffles with a little butter, more blueberries and a drizzle of maple syrup before quickly taking the obligatory pictures and devouring my breakfast.

And then there was cleaning, followed by some work, but the day was redeemed by the “grilled everything” lunch.

Being a congenitally lazy person who relishes her cool house in summertime, I refused to stand around cooking in a hot kitchen on my day off (woohoo!), so I did a little experiment to see just how much of our meal I could cook on the grill. Turns out that would be every single thing. A grass-fed ribeye was a no-brainer slathered with avocado oil and a little salt. Two minutes of grilling per side produced a nice, rosy medium steak. (I’m usually a medium-rare girl, but had no trouble overlooking the lack of blood in such an otherwise-delicious hunka beef.)

We had several grilled sides which really were the focus of the meal, so maybe “sides” isn’t the term to use, but hey. It’s already there and I don’t feel like editing. First up, we had kale tossed with olive oil and salt that was grilled in a basket then tossed with a little sherry vinegar. I dug out some new potatoes and grilled them in a foil packet with spring onions and garlic, avocado oil, salt and pepper. Once they were done, I added a handful of chopped herbs (thyme, rosemary, and chives) from my balcony garden. And to finish off the meal, some baby carrots tossed in olive oil and salt and grilled until slightly charred on the outside and just short of soft inside.

And then we locked Rufus in his cage and feasted.

Have a safe and happy 4th, everyone! I hope your day is filled with grilled meats and delicious beverages.

For the record, my husband’s the one who enjoys dressing the dog in human clothing.

Usually when I buy beets, both root and green are destined for a salad inspired by an episode of Lidia’s Family Table — roasted beets, boiled greens, and sliced green apple are tossed with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, topped with hard goat cheese, and seasoned only with salt & pepper. It’s simple and delicious, especially when the produce is at its freshest and most vibrant.

But wanting something different last weekend and thinking (incorrectly) I was prepared to deal with a certain amount of frustration, I decided on a beet tart adapted from this one. The process involved me buying my first tart pan from a store that fascinates and repels me in equal measure — New York Cake & Baking Distribution, conveniently located across the street from my office. I’m attracted to its bare bones design and singularity of purpose; this isn’t a place you go for a comfortable shopping experience with easily navigable aisles or readily located merchandise. No, you go here for baking supplies (pretty much anything at all) at a good price. Period. I’m repelled only because I’m woefully ignorant about baking and expect to be given the bum’s rush when I walk in. Insecure much?

And, you know, there’s a reason for my insecurity — I’ve never once made a pie crust that hasn’t frustrated me to the point of tears. Part of the problem is a lack of counter space, but mostly it’s simple inexperience. Is the dough too dry? Is it too wet? I DON’T KNOW! I think the problem you see above was a too-dry crust, but couldn’t say. My quick fix was to jam bits of dough into the areas where it broke apart, figuring the filling would hide my mistakes from sight, if not taste.

But what a filling it was! While the beets were roasting, I threw in a whole head of garlic, too, which I later sautéed with a chopped onion and copious amounts of thyme. Just meditate on that for a minute.

And then I topped that layer with an egg, crème fraiche, and goat cheese cheese mixture before the roasted beets and even more cheese found their way to the tippy top of the tart.

It was a lot of work, I won’t lie, and I don’t really know if I’ll be preparing the crust again since I’m such a numskull with the pastry-making, but that filling definitely will be featured again in future meals, the layers alone or in some combination. For you see, it was DELICIOUS.

OK, it looks a little pizza-like, but warm from the oven with the sweet caramelized onions, garlic and beets sandwiching that creamy filling, mmmm…

We polished off about half of the tart on the spot, calling it dinner, and put the other half away for quick lunches later in the week.

The other (and probably the more surprising) ingredient I planned a meal around was … coconut juice. I picked it up on a whim at the grocery one day and couldn’t quite figure out what to do with it, so it languished in the pantry for a few weeks. Then I thought — hey, Thai! So I broke out my new rice cooker and set about making coconut rice with brown basmati and a mixture of coconut milk and strained coconut juice. I was on a roll!

To top the rice, I defrosted about a cup of sofrito from my stash, thinking the cilantro and culantro would be right at home with the coconut, and made a thick stew with the addition of lime-marinated shrimp, shrimp stock, hot pepper paste, and the rest of the coconut milk/juice. I topped it all with thinly sliced green onions and toasted sweetened coconut to balance the tartness from the lime and have to say I was pretty pleased with the outcome:

But I think it could’ve used more heat and possibly a little funky fish sauce to bring the whole thing together. I’ll try that variation next time and report back to you.

And it doesn’t have anything to do with this post, really, but because ’tis the season, I have to show you what I did with my garlic scapes last weekend instead of grilling them.

I made a chickpea dip inspired by Mark Bittman’s white bean dip with lemon zest. I could eat this everyday. I just whirled together some canned chickpeas (drained of squack), the zest of one lemon, the juice of the same, quite a few chopped garlic scapes and harissa. While the machine was running, I drizzled in some good-quality olive oil until the mixture turned creamy; I topped it with more lemon juice, olive oil, and another sprinkling of harissa before we dove in. Yum.

recipe after the jump

Roasted Beet and Garlic Tart adapted from Mediterranean Cooking in Alaska

Crust:
1 1/2 cups flour
1/4 tsp. salt
1/4 cup olive oil
2 Tbsp. cold butter, cut into small chunks
3 – 5 Tbsp. ice water

Filling:
2 cups finely chopped onions
2 Tbsp. olive oil
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
1 Tbsp. dried thyme, crushed, plus 1/4 tsp. for sprinkling on tart
1 head roasted garlic
2 eggs
1/2 cup crème fraiche, or 1/4 cup each heavy cream and sour cream
1/2 cup firm goat’s milk cheese, shredded, plus 1 Tbsp. for sprinkling on top
2 Tbsp. minced basil
3 – 4 roasted and sliced beets (see NOTE below)

Make the crust: In a food processor, mix the flour, salt, and olive oil until the olive oil is thoroughly incorporated into the flour. Add the butter and pulse three or four times to break up and distribute the butter; when you are done, the butter pieces should be the size of small lentils. Add 3 Tbsp. ice water and pulse to mix. Pinch together some of the dough to see if it holds together. If it does not, add small amounts of water, pulsing to mix, until the dough holds together when pinched. Dump the dough onto a piece of plastic wrap and knead lightly until the dough holds together. Shape the dough into a flat disk, wrap in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 425°F.

Roll out the dough on a piece of well-floured parchment paper until it forms a 10-1/2 inch circle. Use the rolling pin to lift the dough and place it over a 9” tart pan with removable bottom. Press the dough firmly into the sides and bottom of the tart pan. Trim the dough’s edges so there is just enough to fold under and cover the sides of the pan with a double layer of dough. Prick tiny holes all over the bottom crust with a fork.

Press a double layer of aluminum foil into the dough (this will prevent it from bubbling up when it bakes) and top with pie weights or dried beans. Bake the crust for 15 minutes. Remove the foil and pie weights/beans and bake for 5 minutes longer or until the crust is set and lightly golden. Remove from oven and place on a cooling rack. Reduce the oven heat to 350°F.

Make the filling: Sauté the onion, lightly seasoned with salt and freshly ground black pepper, in olive oil until the onion softens and turns golden. Stir in the garlic and thyme and cook for 1 minute, mashing the garlic into the onion as it cooks. Spread the onion, garlic, and thyme mixture over the bottom of the baked tart crust.

Stir together the eggs, crème fraiche, cheese, basil, and freshly ground black pepper until they are thoroughly mixed. Pour the egg mixture evenly over the cooked onions. Arrange the sliced, roasted beets on top of the egg mixture. Sprinkle tart with 1 Tbsp. shredded cheese and 1/4 tsp. of crushed dried thyme.

Bake the tart at 350°F for 30 – 35 minutes, or until the eggs are set.

Remove the tart from the pan and serve hot or at room temperature.

When I saw these babies at the farmers’ market yesterday, I scooped up a bunch for the clafoutis I’ve been craving since Spring first came to town. Clafoutis is just about the simplest dessert you can make, which is a real godsend for someone with my limited baking skills; it’s just a pancake-like batter poured over some type of fruit and baked until the top is brown and puffed and the inside is moist and firmly custardy. The traditional Limousin way of making a cherry clafoutis (it’s such a fun word to say, I’m going to repeat it over and over in this post for the sheer pleasure of saying it in my head — clafoutis, clafoutis) is to leave in the pits; now, I may not be the most traditional cook, but I am a pretty lazy one, so let’s just say my arm didn’t take too much twisting to leave them in. And honestly, spitting the pits is good summertime fun, like doing the same with watermelon seeds.

So I washed and stemmed the cherries and put them in a round baking dish roughly the size of a pie plate…

Do you know how difficult it was not to eat these straight? Gah.

And then I mostly followed Julia Child’s recipe for Clafoutis à la Bourdalone (cherry clafoutis with almonds) because hey, who doesn’t like almonds? Not me, that’s who. But if you don’t like them, I promise not to invite you over when I make this again, ok?

But I have a feeling you’d love this anyway.

See? CLAFOUTIS!

recipe after the jump

Cherry Clafoutis with Almonds from Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Child, Bertholle, and Beck

I took a few liberties with the recipe, but minor ones. I used vanilla sugar for the clafoutis instead of vanilla extract and granulated sugar. Also, the recipe calls for cooking a thin layer of batter in the baking dish before adding the cherries and proceeding with the recipe, but I was too afraid of cracking the dish over the flame, so I skipped that step.

3 cups cherries, pitted or not
1 1/4 cups milk
1/2 cup blanched almonds
1/3 cup granulated sugar
3 eggs
1 teaspoon almond extract
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1/8 teaspoon salt
2/3 cup all-purpose flour
1/3 cup granulated sugar for topping
powdered sugar for serving

Preheat oven to 350 degrees and lightly butter a 7- to 8-cup baking dish or 1 1/2-inch deep pie dish.

Place cherries in buttered dish. In a blender, combine milk and almonds and blend until almonds are finely chopped. Add 1/3 cup sugar, eggs, almond and vanilla extracts, salt and flour, and blend at high speed for about a minute.

Pour batter over cherries, then top with remaining 1/3 cup of sugar. (I used less than the full amount because the batter tasted sweet enough to me. But I don’t like overly sweet desserts, so take that for what it’s worth.)

Bake at 350 degrees for about an hour, or until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean.

Sprinkle clafoutis with powdered sugar just before serving. Best served hot or still warm.

Poor, highstrung Rufus. When a storm strikes, you can find him here in the guest bedroom, curled up with his latest favorite toy for comfort.

This weekend, Gil and I made a quick and early excursion to the farmers’ market (Rufus overheats easily), but still managed to return home with bags bursting from the beautiful fruits and vegetables and pickles and pies and herbs on display. I was unable to resist much, so I’ll be doing a lot of cooking (for one) this week before the greens wilt and strawberries turn to mush.

The very first things I put to use from our haul were sugar snap peas and asparagus. I sautéed them lightly in butter and olive oil with garlic and reconstituted morels, then steamed them till tender with a little of the morel liquid. I topped the vegetables with chives and thyme from my herb garden and was very happy, indeed, until I had the bright idea to serve it with red snapper fresh from the freezer. And quelle surprise! the fish wasn’t so great, but it’s finally convinced me of the need to find a good fish market in the area. If anyone out there knows of a good one in Passaic or Bergen county, let me know.

Because I have real trouble letting anything go to waste, it was a happy day when I saw a recipe for chilled pea pod soup at Chocolate & Zucchini. I plan to make this until the market runs out of snap peas; it was light, delicious, and refreshing, especially topped with a spoonful of crème fraiche and more chives from my herb garden. Yum.

Yum. My chive plant resurrected itself this year and before I knew it, there were loads of gorgeous blossoms on my balcony.

Found some colorful rainbow chard and spring garlic at the first farmers’ market of the season, so I threw together a quick chard agro dolce with balsamic vinegar and dried cherries. The salmon was coated with grainy dijon and topped with panko bread crumbs before I seared it on the stove.

Saw this gorgeous orchid (I think) on one of Rufus’s early morning walks.

Another neighborhood sight.

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed the late afternoon sun streaming through a drinking glass, making beautiful designs on the kitchen counter.

Salt-roasted pink potatoes. Salt roasting is much easier than I thought, so I’ll definitely try this out with a whole fish sometime.

Red quinoa…

Wonderful over baked eggs.

You see the funniest sights heading into the city.

Dad called to ask if there was anything special I wanted to eat during my weekend visit. Hmmm… early June in a bayou town… what could I say but boiled crabs?

Friday turned out to be a perfect day for a crab boil; the temperature hovered around 90, but there was a nice breeze blowing beneath the old oak tree in the back yard, so we pulled out some chairs to watch my dad as he got to work.

Clockwise, from upper left: My godchild Cody stopped by to chat, enormous oak tree with my grandma’s house in the background, Mom, Mason hiding from the camera, crab paraphernalia, Mason thinks better of hiding and tries to ignore the camera instead.

Dad ignored the camera pretty well too, and got things going despite my constant intrusion. Crab boils are pretty simple affairs; you need a big pot filled to the halfway point with water, crab boil, salt, crabs, lemons, bay leaves, onions, garlic, potatoes, corn, and smoked sausage and mushrooms if you enjoy that sort of thing. And boy, do we ever.

Clockwise from upper left: Ginormous pot, table o’seasonings, pouring in some liquid crab boil, adding a bag of Zatarain’s Crab Boil — keep your Old Bay, Zatarain’s is where it’s at, the whoosh of propane, liquid Zatarain’s — see? I told you.

Dad put in an early-week order for blue crabs with a fisherman who lives down the street. The crabs he delivered were incidental to his catfish haul (something like 4,500 lbs for the day, about 3 times his usual) and weren’t very fat yet; in fact, I don’t think we had even one female in the bunch, but that didn’t matter so much. They were sweet, delicious and just a little bit spicy. I’ve always avoided the whole heads of garlic at these boils, but decided to try my first few cloves over the weekend. Oh mah gah. What have I denied myself all these years?!

Clockwise from upper left: Blue crabs — all males, escapees, aaaaaaaaaggggghhh!, yeeeeaaahh, my family isn’t much on drinking, the crab whisperer, my bro-in-law Tommy put a hurting on those crabs, sorting live from dead.

Gil and I are huge fans of Deadliest Catch, but I don’t think he’ll be doing a tour on a crab boat anytime soon. Even Moi would kick his ass.

The crab boil was perfect and just what I needed, but the real reason for our visit was to attend my nephew’s birthday party Saturday. He turned six years old last week and his parties are something I look forward to every year. The kids tend to have a lot of fun on a big waterslide in the front yard while the adults make with more grown-up pleasures like eating, drinking, listening to 80’s hair bands, playing yard games, and schooling each other in pedro (I like to think of it as “Cajun bridge”). I went to LSU for college, not Nicholls, so my pedro skills are lacking, but everyone was pretty patient with me while I got almost up to speed.

Scenes from a party: Bikes, waterslide, Wii, cake and cards. Just about a perfect day.

OK, I give! Consider my arm twisted.

With all of the great blog posts on strawberry-rhubarb cobbler lately, there was no way I was going to be able to hold off making my own much longer; I gave in over the weekend and assembled one with some purchases from our very first local farmers’ market of the season. (For Gil’s pictures of Rufus’s day at the market, click here.)

Cobblers haven’t been featured here at all, due to a tragic tale of love and loss. When I was a teenager and thought in my teenagerly way that things last forever, I made a peach-strawberry cobbler of such great beauty that my grandmother raved about it. So what did I do? Continue to make cobblers with the rest of the summer’s bounty, thereby committing the recipe to memory? Share the recipe with someone who would’ve written it down for safe-keeping? No, I planned to make it again someday, but promptly lost the recipe (in my teenagerly way). While mourning that loss over the years, I fell hard for apple crisp and gave my heart to any number of bread puddings, which (mostly) pushed all thoughts of other fruit desserts out of my mind. Oh sure, the faint whiff of a peach could send me back, wishing I’d been more careful, pining ever so slightly for that magical soft-yet-crunchy biscuity topping. But mostly, I was happy to have the other options.

But as luck would have it, cobbler recipes are all pretty simple and similar, so I decided to take the plunge this weekend. The base is a mixture of fruit, sugar, and some kind of thickener, depending on the juiciness of the fruit.

Crispy, tart rhubarb

Juicy, sweet strawberries

Instead of using citrus zest in the fruit, I added balsamic vinegar to bring out the flavor of the strawberries and add a little complexity to the dessert.

Macerate, macerate, macerate

I made a couple of individual desserts, too. Cute, and the small portions kept us from devouring the whole dessert in one sitting.

The real difference between cobbler recipes seems to be in the topping. Both of the ones I referenced this weekend praised their cobbler toppings as crispy and just sweet enough, so I knew I was on the right path to finding my lost love.

At least this time, I’ve saved the recipe. And you’re welcome to it.

recipe after the jump

Strawberry-Rhubarb Cobbler adapted from The Houndstooth Gourmet and Simply Recipes

Depending on the juiciness of the fruit you use, 2 tablespoons of cornstarch may be too much or not enough. The strawberries I used were quite plump, so the liquid was a little thin after baking. It was delicious, just not terribly thick.

fruit base
4 1/2 cups rhubarb stalks, cut into 1-inch pieces (Discard any leaves from stalks and trim any stringy layers from thick stalks)
2 cups strawberries, stemmed and sliced
1/2 cup sugar
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
2 tablespoons cornstarch

cobbler crust
2 Tbsp white sugar
1 cup all purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup butter
1/4 cup milk
1 egg, lightly beaten

In a large bowl, mix rhubarb and strawberries with sugar. Macerate 10 minutes, then mix well with balsamic vinegar and cornstarch, and let sit for an additional 20 minutes.

In a medium bowl, combine 2 tablespoons of sugar, the flour, baking powder and salt. Cut the butter in with a fork or pastry blender until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Stir in the egg and add enough milk until mixture is just moistened. This might be less than the 1/4 cup called for, so don’t add it all at once.

Pour fruit into a 2-quart casserole dish. Drop the batter on the fruit. Bake in a 350°F oven for 35 minutes until cobbler crust is golden brown.

Note for next time: Try slivered almonds in the topping and sprinkle with demerara sugar just before baking.