Garlic Scape Pesto

I first ran into these beautiful, curly stems in a friend's CSA that I was picking up while she was on vacation. Another friend and I tried them raw, having no idea what they were, and came away smelling strongly of garlic. Garlic scapes, the stalk and seed of the garlic bulb, can be used just like garlic, although they have a fresher, greener taste, and as the temperature heats up they have made a big showing in my local farmers' markets. In fact, one farmer gave me a giant double handful for free, grabbed from a huge box of the curvy green stalks. And faced with a giant heap of the buggers, I decided that I needed to do something a little more drastic than throwing them in my eggs.
So I went to the internet, and found that others had had a similar dilemma, and most seemed to solve it by linking to this intense pesto recipe from Dorie Greenspan. A simple idea: instead of basil, use garlic scapes!

As I sat down with my heap of scapes, I realized that while the recipe called for about ten stems, the pile I was confronting had about fifty. So I upped the amounts a bit, and hoped the garlic wouldn't overwhelm the other flavors completely.

Half a pound of walnuts, toasted.

Half a pound of parmesan cheese and a whole lot of olive oil (I stopped pouring when the texture seemed right).

We went to Claudio's, the local Italian cheese wonderland, to get the parmesan (and a few other things, since I have no self restraint when it comes to cheeses), and when the cheese monger heard what we were making, we were treated to a story about the garlic-y Italian sisters he and his friend once dated.

I put a little too much in my mouth the first time I tried the pesto - it's pretty intense right out of the food processor. But not in a bad way.

And the color is lovely.

It was delicious. But, as the fellow at Claudio's said, not a first-date kind of meal. 

Sour Cherry Sorbet

 So after completely overwhelming myself and my household with sour cherry pie, when my housemate's CSA left us with another quart of sour cherries, I decided to try something different. Something that, preferably, didn't involve an oven.

Like this sour cherry sorbet recipe from Cafe Fernando.











It's very simple (after you've pitted the cherries): a simple syrup, a little lemon, and sour cherry juice.

Skim off the solids, make sure everything's cold, and dump it in the ice cream maker. And then freeze it. The only problem was that we ate it all so fast. And it was evening, so you can't see the marvelous color of the final product. Maybe I'll make another batch and try to eat it during the daylight.

Sour Cherry Pie

Having witnessed a friend go on an exhaustive search last summer for sour cherries, it completely blew my mind to see them innocently sitting around in quart-sized boxes on two different vendor tables in my regular farmer's market. And an unforeseen benefit of buying from both vendors was getting to try two different kinds of sour cherries! (One being marginally more sour, wetter, and redder than the other.) So, blessed with two quarts of sour cherries, I made pie. I looked at this recipe for guidance on amounts of sugar and corn starch, but took out a lot of the ingredients (for instance, I love butter, but I don't see the sense in covering fresh, juicy fruit with it when it's already going to be encased in a buttery crust). 

Fruit pies are all pretty basic - if it's good, fresh fruit, there's very little that should be added to it. Lemon brings out some of the flavors and keeps fruit from oxidizing while it sits. Corn starch (or flour) is good for fruits that release a lot of juices. (So is letting those pies cool ALL THE WAY. Otherwise you get pie soup.) I use sugar very sparingly, depending on the sourness of the fruit. For sour cherries it's a bit of a requirement, but I still only used about half a cup.

One of the very best things about cooking with sour cherries? They are so very photogenic.





+lemon juice
+sugar
+corn starch

The cherries released a lot of liquid after sitting for a bit. I threw most of it out.

Lattice pie crusts are easier than they appear - just cut out strips of pie dough and weave them over the pie! It's a simple way to showcase the fruit inside, and ensures that the top crust will get a lovely crisp, flaky texture.

The sour cherries held their shape extremely well! I was very sparing with the sugar, so this pie really emphasized the sourness of the cherries, which was refreshing and delicious, but also a little overwhelming. Serving sizes should be about half a regular sweet berry pie - my first piece gave me an overload on sour cherries for a few days. But oh, so delicious! And truly amazing paired with some vanilla ice cream.

Candied Bacon Whiskey Ice Cream

For my first-ever batch of ice cream, taking advantage of my housemate's recent acquisition of an ice cream maker attachment for her standing mixer, I wanted to stick to the basics. So I went to David Lebovitz, where I found a very simple recipe that would be perfect for an upcoming birthday party I was attending. The birthday boy's favorite drink? Whiskey. Favorite food? Bacon. The ice cream recipe? Candied Bacon Ice Cream.

The background for the candied bacon was an egg-y cream, flavored with whiskey and a bit of cinnamon. I made the same ice cream with chocolate chips too - it's a good base, but also interesting enough to stand on its own.




The bacon was local - from Cafe Estelle's chef, by way of the Green Aisle Grocery - and after over-cooking the first batch a little, I managed to get a clear, smooth, glistening sugar coat on the second. Just bacon and brown sugar and a few minutes in the toaster oven, and sweet, salty, greasy goodness appeared. 

After that, everything just went into the ice cream maker, and then on into the freezer. And while I don't have any pretty pictures of the final product, I will assure you that while people tasted it for the novelty, they stuck around for the delicious. Because it actually was.

Pie Crust

The trick is butter. Regardless of the recipe, the ingredients, the methods, the trick to making something delicious is probably butter. Real butter. Nothing else melts, hardens, fattens, cuts, greases, fries, or burns quite like butter does. And so, for a delicious pie crust, use butter. And because pie is a comfort food, a simple food, and such an excellent showcase, I thought a good place to start this public, online dump of my food experiments and trials would be pie crust.

Start with cold butter. You want little chunks of butter to melt during baking, and cause flaky pockets of goodness in the crust. To make two crusts, I cut 16 tablespoons of unsalted butter into 2.5 cups flour and a little bit of salt and sugar until the mixture gets grainy and chunky.

Add some cold water, mash it all together, and refrigerate for a bit.

Don't handle it too much, but enough so that it makes a solid crust. And don't worry about making it too pretty; it won't be.The edges will sink, and burn, and will be puffy and misshapen. But it will taste delicious.

This recipe is adapted from the Joy of Cooking, from my mother's disdain of shortening, and from my own love of butter and lazy cooking style.