Happy Birthday Marilyn

Here's all I want to say about it.

If you need an easy, fancy-looking cake.

Or a dessert to pair with mid-summer strawberries.

Or if you need TWO mixing bowls to wipe clean with a spoon, your fingers, or a fresh strawberry.

David Lebovitz has a damn good chocolate cake recipe for you.

Lard

Thanks to my dear friend Robyn, I finally made a pie with lard.

 Or, partially lard. Also butter. And peaches.

We had company.

 And the pie crust turned out pretty good.

 Flakier. Prettier. But not tastier. So I'm sticking with butter-crust pies for now.

But a lard crust would do well for a meat-filled pie. And in case we haven't got time to run to the butcher, I know just what kind to make...

Why do melons always have big weddings?

We've been buying quite a lot of melon for our small, three-person household because they're so perfectly in season, so wonderfully refreshing, and they just smell so damn good that it's worth the extra weight on the mile walk home from the farmers' market. And, to make room for the new melons, we have to eat up the old ones, resulting in this cantaloupe sorbet from David Lebovitz's The Perfect Scoop. Some advice:

1. If your melon happens to be less-than-perfectly ripe and flavorful, add another lime. Or, if you like lime, add another lime. For instance, when Lebovitz wrote "1 teaspoon freshly squeezed lime, plus more to taste." I read it as "one lime, plus another one." It might make the sorbet's texture a little coarser, but it will completely overwhelm the cantaloupe's inadequacies.

2. If you need to test the white wine in the back of the fridge to make sure it hasn't turned into vinegar, don't use the mini plastic teddybear cup you found in the back of the drawer because a) the four-year-old watching Toy Story with your dad will want some and b) it's probably covered in 20-year-old lead paint from China.

3. When your mum mentions that her second-hand mixer might run a little different because your uncle tinkered with the motor a bit before giving it to her, that means that he made it go twice as fast and it doesn't have a low setting and it may not be ideal for churning sorbet and you should just put it away on top of the fridge and replace it with the one you got from your grandma, which doesn't know about warp speed yet.

4. Don't leave your lens cap out on the counter.

5. Don't worry too much about the four-year-old angling for that plastic cup of white wine; she's much more interested in raspberries.

Cantaloupe Sorbet [with a lot of lime]

Adapted from David Lebovitz's "The Perfect Scoop"

Chop up the meat of 

One 2-pound ripe cantaloupe

Purée in a blender with

1/2 cup sugar

pinch of salt

the juice of one or two small limes, or if you have a really good melon, maybe just a teaspoon.

Add

2 tablespoons white wine or Champagne

Chill thoroughly, then freeze in an ice cream maker that your uncle hasn't tampered with.  

(Because they can't elope.)

Nonsense Cake

California is a pretty dry place, and though we've come out of our latest drought rather spectacularly, with heavy rainstorms and fog and wet well into the summer, the weather is still rather mild compared to, for instance, Philadelphia. Which is where I was this year as Californians complained about their dreary storm clouds, sopping rain puddles, and thick, lovely snowcaps. Happy as I was to miss the excitement and return to a much better watered state then when I left, I haven't completely avoided the unpleasant side-effects of our return to more sustainable waterways. Because, you see, our delicate agriculture that California so lovingly cultivates was affected by the unusual bounty of rain. Our more sensitive fruits – tomatoes, peaches, strawberries, cherries – have not only been late this year, but less intensely flavorful, less ripe, and far less plentiful. Except the plums.

The plums have been pretty fantastic.

And my mum, who 99% of the time would prefer a fresh piece of fruit over any confection that even the very best local, organic, unionized, free-range bakers might produce, has a deep, uncharacteristic love of zwetsche kuchen, a sort of German breakfast cake where a soft, sweet, spongy dough is generously covered in plums and baked until each plum piece is surrounded by a puffy golden pastry. And my mother is a damn good cook, so when plum season comes around, my mother stocks up on the little purple-green prune plums in the hopes that she'll end up with too many and be forced to bake them.

The recipe is from my great aunt Eva who, despite our family's legacy in the kitchen, was a fantastic cook in her day. My mother, as a child, tried to request Eva's zwetsche kuchen in her informal, phonetic German, and instead asked for schwatzen kuchen – nonsense cake – sending her aunt into hysterics, and providing one of the few family anecdotes about food that actually results in something delicious.

Eva calls for three to four pounds of fresh prune plums, which is about as many as you can possibly fit into your pie pan, plus a few more.

Unlike many German desserts, this cake is primarily about the fruit, not dark spices or rich pastry. It's a summer cake, and the plums should be nearly stacked on top of each other so that even when they shrink in the oven there will be hardly any room for the pastry to puff up around them.

But it is still a German cake, so the plums are lightly sprinkled with sugar and breadcrumbs – or, in our case, leftover ground hazelnuts – before they go in the oven.

In the oven the cake expands, turning golden and crispy around the edges, and the plums become soft and dark. Served hot, the crumbly warm cake sets off each bite of wet, thick plum. Left to itself for awhile, the flavors deepen and the plums imbue the cake with their juices.

My personal preference is to eat it hot right out of the oven it for dessert, and then, after it has sat overnight, again for breakfast the next morning.

Zwetsche Kuchen

adapted from a recipe by Eva Wertheimer

In a bowl, combine 

1 cup flour

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/3 cup sugar

1 egg

With hands, work in

4 tablespoons butter

Chill dough for 30 minutes. 

Roll or pat dough into a 9" pie plate (or any approximate alternative). 

Pit and halve

3-4 pounds fresh prune plums (or one 9" pie plate full, plus a few)

Place plum halves overlapping on top of the dough. Sprinkle with

3 tablespoons breadcrumbs or ground nuts

1-3 tablespoons white or brown sugar

Bake at 375° for 45 minutes. Cool slightly before serving. 

An unexpected love affair with Filbert.

The recipe sounded, felt, smelled, looked, tasted like poetry.

Warm, roasted hazelnuts rolling free of their skins in a clean kitchen towel, milk chocolate flakes melted by hot cream, sweet, nutty milk stirred into a custard, every step was a beautiful, satisfying aroma of things to come.

Engaging in some light reading with The Perfect Scoop, my dad bookmarked the recipe for gianduja gelato.

I might have passed over it, favoring fruit flavors in this late summer season, and preferring bitter dark chocolates to the creamy milks.

It may be the best ice cream I've ever eaten.

But please, disregard the instruction to "discard the hazelnuts" after infusing the milk with the roasted, ground nuts. They can be put back in the oven, covered with the milky, sugary residue, and roasted until they become the perfect crispy topping to sprinkle over the thick, rich, smooth gianduja gelato.

Because we don't have enough ice cream in the freezer already.

Last weekend I drove down to Santa Barbara to visit my grandmother, and to pick up a slightly used, underutilized kitchen unit for my own use.

When we returned, plus one standing mixer and one grandmother, waiting for me in my parents' freezer was an additional gift.

Then, in our meanderings, my grandmother found some apricots at the local corner grocery that were nearly exploding with over-ripeness.

Luckily, as of last week, I happened to have David Lebovitz's book The Perfect Scoop - which includes a very simple apricot sorbet recipe.

And so, all these lovely gifts from my family came together in the form of an intense scoop of sweet, cold apricot.

As the saying goes, the best gifts are the ones that keep on giving.

It was almost like it was my birthday or something.

What I Did During My Summer Vacation

Life and cooking have had their ups and downs lately, a little more of each than usual. But the good moments outweigh the bad, so that's alright then.

Oh, and I moved back to California. For good. And just in time for tomatoes.

(I still love Philly though! But I hella love Oakland.)