by Caroline
The other day I saw a bus ad quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson’s line, “There are only ten minutes in the life of a pear when it is perfect to eat.” I was so surprised to see Emerson’s words on the side of a bus that it took a while before I stopped to think how rarely, now, I hit on those ten minutes for myself. Eli is the pear guy in our house, and I watch our pears carefully to spot when they are just the right balance of crisp-ripe for him (a perfect Eli pear is ripe half a day or more before it is perfect for me). Inevitably, he can’t keep up with the ripe pears, I miss my moment, and the overripe pears go into bread that everybody can enjoy for days. This easy Joy of Cooking recipe is the best way I’ve found to extend the brief life of pears.
preheat the oven to 350
butter & flour an 8-cup loaf pan (9×5″)
Whisk together in a large bowl:
1 1/2 c flour
1 c sugar
1 t baking soda
1/2 t salt
1/2 t cinnamon
1/4 t nutmeg
3-6 T ground flax (optional; reduce the oil by 1 T for every 3 T of flax you use)
In another bowl, whisk together
1 egg
1/2 c vegetable oil (remember to reduce this if you’re using ground flax),
1 t vanilla
the zest and juice of one lemon
1 1/2 c peeled, grated ripe (or overripe) pears, with juice
1 c toasted chopped pecans or walnuts, optional
Add the flour mixture to the pear mixture and fold until dry ingredients are moistened. Add nuts, if using. Scrape into prepared pan and spread evenly. Bake until a toothpick comes out clean, about 1 hour and 15 minutes. Let cool on a rack before removing from pan.
It seems amazing to me that three and a half years ago, I began a blog post, “Ben’s not a picky eater…” What happened?! One day he was eating toasts spread with goat cheese and eggplant caviar and then, one by one, foods started to leave his diet. I wonder sometimes about the impact of Tony’s and my vegetarian diet on him — after all, we were the ones who, by eliminating an entire category of foods from our diets, introduced the notion of pickiness in the first place. But I don’t care enough for meat, nor know well enough how to cook it, to make that change now, and I doubt he’d eat it anyway (his brother is another story, for another day).
Ben still eats a greater variety of foods than some children I know, for which I am very grateful (and for which I extend their very patient parents my understanding and sympathy); he loves just about any vegetable, including the typically unpopular cooked greens, he likes funny things like pickled ginger and burdock root, he eats all kinds of fruits. But I get sad that his strong feelings about beans and cheese keep him from joining the rest of us for Mexican food, that he doesn’t like soups or stews or any meal, really, involving several foods cooked together.
So I was kind of stunned the other night at dinner when Ben said, “Remember that lasagna you used to make? With chard? I think I would eat that again.” And so I promised to make it for him the very next day. This afternoon after school, Eli and I harvested the chard from our backyard, and then it was quick work to turn it into this fabulous dish from Deborah Madison’s wonderful cookbook, Local Flavors:
1 cup walnuts
2-3 bunches chard, leaves only (save the stems and toss them into a potato gratin or something)
2 tbsp olive oil, plus extra for the dish
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/3 cup white wine
1 cup ricotta
1 cup grated parmesan
8 oz (about 2 cups) fresh mozzarella, coarsely grated (divided)
1 1/4 cup milk
8 oz lasagna noodles
Preheat oven to 400. While it’s warming, put the walnuts in to toast. Give them 7-10 minutes, until they are nice and fragrant, then chop finely and set aside.
Cook chard leaves in a large pot with a couple cups of water till tender, about 5 minutes. Scoop chard into colander, press out most of the water, reserving 1/3 cup of the cooking water. Chop chard finely.
Heat oil in a wide skillet and add 2 cloves of garlic, then chard. Cook over medium-high heat, turning frequently, for several minutes, then add wine and allow to cook down. Turn off heat.
Combine ricotta, parmesan, 6 ounces of the grated mozzarella, and remaining garlic in a bowl. Stir in 1/3 cup of the chard water, then add chard. Mix, and season with salt & pepper.
Lightly oil a 9×13″ baking dish. Drizzle 1/4 cup of milk into the dish (it won’t spread evenly because of the oil but that’s ok). Fit 3 pieces of uncooked (really, it’ll work just fine) lasagna noodles into baking dish. Sprinkle with 1/4 cup of milk, 1/3 of the cheese mixture, and 1/4 cup of walnuts. Repeat twice more with pasta, milk, cheese mix and nuts. When you get to the last layer, add the remaining milk, mozzarella, and walnuts.
Cover with foil and bake for 25 minutes.
Remove foil and bake 10 minutes longer, or till lightly browned.
My dad and sons added a new cookie to their repertoire this year, one I grew up with thanks to the nut-gathering efforts of my dad: hickory puffs. Now, most Californians don’t know about hickory nuts; the trees grow in New England and Wisconsin, and the nut shells are so hard and the nutmeat so small that they aren’t cultivated. Further, as my dad writes,
“Hickory trees are individualists. Some produce nuts every year, some only when they feel like it. Some produce nuts the size of a small baseball, some produce nuts more the size of a large marble, some are round in shape, some are oblong, some come down from the tree with a thick green husk, some come down after shedding the husk. If you don’t happen to have a hickory tree on your property, keep an eye out as you drive. Often the edge of the road will be littered with husks and nuts and you can stop and scoop them up, keeping a careful eye out for traffic. This is best done on a dirt road or one with a low volume of traffic. You will not find hickory nuts in your local market so you will need strong hunter-gatherer instincts for this step in the process.”
Sometime I’ll get the boys back east in the fall to involve them in the nut gathering, but for now, they are very good at the nut cookie-baking, and I can’t complain about that. If you aren’t lucky enough to have someone gather and shell hundreds of hickory nuts for you, you can use pecans.
Hickory Puffs
Preheat oven to 300º
Beat until soft:
½ cup butter
Add & blend until creamy
2 Tbs sugar
Add
1 tsp vanilla
Measure, then grind in a nut grinder (or pulse in a food processor)
1 cup hickory meats (be sure to sort for stray shells!)
Sift before measuring
1 cup cake flour
Stir the hickory nuts and the flour into the butter mixture. Roll the dough into small balls. Place balls on parchment paper-lined baking sheet and bake for about 30 minutes.
Roll while hot in
Confectioners’ sugar
To glaze, put the sheet back into the oven for a minute. Cool and serve, or store in a tightly covered tin.
We don’t have quite as many holiday food traditions as Lisa’s family — the meals always vary depending on whether we stay in California or travel east to my parents’ home — but one tradition that reaches back generations is, as in many families, cookie baking. My grandmother and mother kept tallies of the cookie count in the back pages of increasingly-tattered copies of Joy of Cooking, and now I do, too. I don’t produce as many cookies as my mom did in her heyday (when she hosted Christmas open houses for the entire church congregation and choir), but I like the history in the lists: 1998 (childless, newly partnered with Tony, and — most tellingly — in the thick of dissertation writing), I produced 11 different types of cookies; Christmas 2001 (the first year in our house) I made 10. The list for Christmas 2003 reads, “pneumonia, strep throat, bronchitis, and truffles.” Thank goodness for truffles!
A new tradition, and one I very happily encourage, is for my dad to make a couple batches of cookies with the kids. I don’t know quite how this started — probably just my dad wanted bourbon balls one year and realized that, despite the main ingredient, they are a terrifically kid-friendly, craft-project kind of cookie: smash vanilla wafers, mix with flavorings, scoop out balls, done — but the kids love it, of course. It’s fun to smash and mush. It’s fun to cook with Granddad. And it’s exciting to use such a grown-up ingredient as bourbon, and one which is adored by one of their favorite characters — Captain Haddock — in their beloved Tintin books.
The recipe is straight out of Joy of Cooking, with my comments:
Bourbon Balls Sift (or not, depending on how much mess you can tolerate):
1 c confectioner’s sugar
2 T cocoa
In another bowl, whisk together
1/4 c bourbon
2 T light corn syrup
Smash, using either the food processor or in a resealable bag, with a rolling pin
2 1/2 cups vanilla wafers
Stir in
1 c coarsely chopped nuts (we use hickory nuts; more on those in another post)
Combine all the ingredients and roll into small balls. Roll in confectioner’s sugar and store at room temperature. They improve as they age.
We are all about Fantastic Mr. Fox these days. Ben just finished reading the book in school, we loved the movie, we are singing the song and now — eating the cookies! It was Tony who recognized the familiar voice of Rabbit (Mario Batali) in the movie, Ben who kept talking about Mrs. Bean’s Famous Nutmeg Ginger Apple Snaps (and is the only one of us who can get all the modifiers in the proper order) and I was the one who thought to see if the recipe was available on-line. Of course it is. I have never made a cookie — or anything else for that matter — that I first saw in a movie (though I did once make a recipe off a bottle of shower gel) and while our cookies may not look as gorgeous as they do in the movie (because I’m no food stylist) they are deliciously chewy, gingery, appley — they’re fantastic!