Oatmeal isn't health food in this house.

One of my favorite, simple, everyday cookie recipes is an adaptation from The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters, one of my regular kitchen references that I highly recommend. The recipe is her Oatmeal Currant Cookies, a grainy, crispy cookie with, I imagine, chewy, wet currants to set off the texture. Probably. But I've never actually made the recipe as it's set down on paper - partly because I've never had dried currants around, and partly because the minute I made it with semisweet/bittersweet chocolate chips (just no milk chocolate please) in place of the currants I realized that I'd found the ideal oatmeal chocolate chip cookie.

 

The trick to getting that oatmeal flavor without the chewy, dense chunks of oatmeal that so many people (although not me!) eschew is simple: Waters puts the oats in a blender to make a grainy oat flour.

But that isn't the only think that makes these cookies the perfect vehicle for chocolate chips. Blending the oats allows Waters to make a crispy oatmeal cookie by mixing baking soda with boiling water in equal proportions to act as a leavening agent. I'm rather deficient in my knowledge of food chemistry, but somehow it's this step that results in the extreme crispiness of the cookie.

There's probably a lot of debate in kitchens, internet forums, and playgrounds everywhere over whether chocolate chip cookies should be crispy or chewy, but I'll always side with the crisp in nearly any dessert, and especially a chocolate chip cookie. The balance of crunchy cookie and melted chocolate is pure baking zen.

And the dough is such a lovely, textured, grainy brown.

I made these cookies for the first monthly soup club (spearheaded by Dan) as a basic, easy, no-supermarket-trip-necessary contribution. Digging around the shelves of my kitchen to figure out what I had on hand turned up a jar of sour cherries, bought in a moment of grief and desperation last year after Purim, when I'd so much wanted to make hamantaschen with sour cherry filling and hadn't been able to find any form of the fruits, and then a month later come across a jar in a Polish market I happened to be eating kielbasa in. The jar had sat through the summer months when fresh sour cherries had made a big show at the farmers' markets, and, with Purim coming around again soon, its presence in my cupboard was tickling at the back of my mind. Plus it's huge and takes up a lot of room.

So, since I'd never made the original currant cookie, I decided I might as well add some cherries to the recipe.

And they were fine. Not dried, as the currants are, so the flavor didn't come through the cookie very strongly (note to self: find dried sour cherries before Purim) and the wetness of the fruit made the cookies behave a little strangely: they spread more and the texture was a little off. So I think in the future I'll stick with using just chocolate chips.

But they did all get eaten.

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.