Wicked Tasty Harvest

Fruit

by Cynthia Graber

 

Earlier this week, I heard a friend give a book talk. Afterwards, I stopped by JP Licks for a treat. Usually, I ask for a taste of a flavor before I choose, but this time, the flavor of the week - fresh strawberry and rhubarb - leapt out at me. I chose it without hesitation.

And then, after a few bites, I threw it away. Yes, you read that right. I threw away ice cream.

Where was the bit of the rhubarb? The snap of the strawberries? How could fresh strawberry and rhubarb ice cream be bland? MY strawberry ice cream is far from bland. It has sparkle, verve. In fact, I knew right then that I had to pick up more strawberries and make strawberry/sour cream ice cream, one of my favorites. This weekend.

But I'd recently cooked up a strawberry-rhubarb compote, and I'd already decided that it would taste divine swirled into goat cheese ice cream. Okay, that's two ice creams to create this week.

And then, when I biked to Copley today to up more strawberries, miracle of miracles! A stand was selling sour cherries! Ever since I churned out sour cherry frozen yoghurt two years ago, from fruit purchased at Copley, I've dreamt of the magic those flavors produced. Tart, sweet heaven.

That makes three frozen treats for this weekend. Time to head to the store for the rest of the ingredients. Anyone want to come over for dessert? I have a feeling I'm about to go overboard...

Yes! It's the best...

Get ready. The holidays are already swinging and you still need to tackle the best part of your list. Of course you do—you always save the best for last. Wicked Tasty Harvest has drawn up a list of must-have and very-cool things to please anyone who loves food and local goodies. How do we know they'll love all of these things? Because we would. (Side-note to our stumped loved ones: Read on and stop fretting over which sweater we'd look hottest in. This season, we're all about the local treats.)

These amazing local treats make stunning gifts, and fill gift baskets and stockings deliciously well. If you arrive in style at the next holiday party with one of these in hand, the hosts will gush. These local favorites are all tasty, well-made, and sought after. 

Homemade jams and preserves from Bonnie's Jams in Cambridge. Flavors like apricot-orange, raspberry and strawberry-ginger elevate breakfast toast into something special. $10.95, Formaggio Kitchen, Savenor's Market, Russo's and more.

Effie's Oatcakes and Corncakes from Hyde Park, MA, are the perfect biscuits for tea and cheese lovers. These crisp, crunchy and rather addictive biscuits are slightly sweet and salty—and they're just right for tea time or snack. They're also fantastic as a cracker with cheese. Try them with cheese and apples, a dollop of jam, or just plain. The oatcakes are a favorite for straight-up snacking and the corn is perfect for cheesy accompaniments. $6, at your local specialty store or at Whole Foods. Or buy them direct.

Taza Chocolate, made in their Somerville factory, offers a wide variety of tasty treats, from bars to nibs to hot chocolate scented with almond. They say they're the only American chocolate-makers offering stone-ground organic chocolate, employing a traditional grinding method from Oaxaca, Mexico. They work closely with growers to ensure top quality and fair pay. You can find the chocolate at many area stores, including holiday packages at Greenward, but if you need to buy in bulk (and who doesn't?), they're now offering free shipping on purchases of more than $50. 

Lake Champlain Chocolates, made in Vermont, have some particularly appropriate holiday offerings, including a bag of silver- and gold-wrapped disks of dark chocolate and peppermint dark chocolate. They also have a lovely box of Chanukah gelt (and they're kosher), much tastier than what you ate in Hebrew school. Buy them at Whole Foods and Sherman Market in Somerville, starting at $8.

Perfect for someone who prefers sour to sweet: Root Cellar Preserves, local pickles that sell in stores around town such as Formaggio Kitchen, Harvest Coop, and Russo's. We particularly love their sweet and spicy pickle mix, $8.

 Ask your neighborhood cheese purveyor for some lovely local cheeses. Some of our favorites include Cabot cloth-bound cheddar, Twig Farm Tomme, Vermont Butter and Cheese Company's Bijou aged goat cheese, Great Hill blue cheese, and Shy Brother's Farm's Hannahbells (pictured). Check out our holiday cheese plate primer or let your local cheese shop select a great combination of cheeses. Formaggio Kitchen and Farmstead (Providence, RI) both do amazing cheese baskets—and they ship. Don't forget about the Concord Cheese Shop and the delicious and deftly edited selection at Central Bottle. Cheese-lovers on your list are well-cared for in this area.

Traditional Goat's Milk Caramel from Fat Toad Farm is crazy delicious. It's like dulce de leche, but it's made from goat's milk, like cajeta. You can taste the flavor profile of goat's milk instead of the slick sweetness of cow's milk (also good, but different). Fat Toad Farm is a small family-run dairy in Brookfield, VT, and they make several flavors of their caramel: original, vanilla, cinnamon, and coffee. The original is awesome on ice cream, tea cakes, or a spoon. $9 at Formaggio Kitchen, Cambridge Naturals, and Farmstead (Providence).

One of the Wicked Tasty team lives very close to L.A. Burdick. Deliciously close. Too close. Burdick's chocolates rival those of the well-known European chocolate houses (and we're well-studied on those). A clear favorite is the truffle filled with caramelized lavender honey. The mouse and penguin chocolates may be too adorable to eat, but you'd never let that deter you from picking up a quarter-pound box. Heck, make it a full pound. Then, warm up holiday visitors with hot chocolate made with their shaved dark, milk and white chocolate. They're made in Walpole, NH, and they have a lovely café in Harvard Square. Boxes start at $15.

Made by Maureen Gallagher at the Western Massachusetts Food Processing Center, the Sassy Sauces line includes an addictive rum caramel sauce, spicy dark chocolate sauce (Valrhona chocolate, chipotle, Vietnamese cinnamon and cayenne), milk chocolate caramel, bittersweet chocolate, peanut butter fudge and vegan butterscotch. All are sublime over ice cream, with fresh fruit or breakfast treats, or straight out of the jar. Recently, Wicked Tasty got to try the Vera Cruz sauce (the first savory Sassy Sauce product and so new that the labels were handwritten). We seared salmon on both sides then simmered it in the sauce to finish. Easy and delicious! Sassy Sauces are available online and at Bacon Street Farm in Natick, Savenor’s Market, and select Whole Food Markets in the Boston area.

What great meal is complete without well-lubricated conversation or a tasty aperitif? Here's where to go for a gift that says, "Capital, darling!" instead of merely Kappy's. 

Drink is one of our favorite bars, and with good reason. There's no cocktail list...but there are gift certificates for your friends. And for a mere $10, the bartenders will whip them up a custom libation based on their tastes (whiskey or gin? citrus or bitters?) and, better yet, indulge their inner cocktail nerds by happily dishing on the drinks' origins (often pre-Prohibition) and variations.  We find it's best to stick to our favorite base liquor and ask the exceptional staff to steer us seasonal. Recently, we've enjoyed a twist on the traditional Frisco (made with homemade pumpkin simple syrup) and the Leather Coat, which employed Scotch, apple butter and sage to a heavenly, fragrant end. For Christmas in a glass, ask for the Lion's Tail: bourbon, allspice dram, lime juice, simple syrup and angostura bitters.

Once the lovely staff at Drink have sent you home with a few handwritten recipes, you'll find the corner packie not up to your new liquor-buying needs. Hit Brix—with shops on Broad Street and Washington Street in the South End—to source Luxardo maraschino liquor for homemade aviations, small-batch bourbons, and St. Elizabeth Allspice Dram for that Lion's Tail. The shop also has a well-curated wine selection and handsome gift baskets capitalizing on that to boot. Next hit up The Boston Shaker—online and opening any day now in Davis Square, after starting as a mini-store within Grand in Somerville's Union Square—for the dash that makes the difference. The store has the most extensive selection of bitters we've ever seen (celery, cardamon, Xocolati mole, whiskey barrel, Peychaud's and many others), along with a strong supporting cast of simple and shrub syrups, heirloom-quality muddlers and perfectly sized 5-ounce cocktail glasses.

Gift card to Craigie on Main. Though perhaps better known for the delectable food out of the kitchen, the bar has gained acclaim for creative, delicious libations using small-batch spirits and local produce that change with the seasons.

 

Sometimes a cook needs some new and gorgeous things.

A slate cheese board from Brooklyn Slate Company is ideal both for a festive party or a regular Tuesday night dinner. Brooklyn Slate Company gets the grey, black or red slate from the family quarry in Upstate New York and offers the non-porous, food-safe pieces with a rough-hewn or clean edge. They also add in a soap pencil to write cheese names right on the board. They're very lovely and at a very reasonable price. Find these gorgeous cheese slabs at Formaggio Kitchen and Wasik's Cheese Shop in Wellesley. 7" x 12" boards, $20; 10" x 14" boards, $24.

When it comes to recipes, we often find that weight is more reliable than volume or size. After all, what does "three large potatoes" mean? Are the ones I've selected large enough? Some recipes today offer both size/volume and weight (for instance: "one medium-sized squash, or 2 lbs of squash"). A food scale is an incredibly handy tool, especially if you love cookbooks printed outside the US, where weights are the standard format. Make sure you get a scale that can do both pounds and grams, so recipes in metric are no problem. Electronic scales make taring a breeze. Try your local hardware store or cooking goods shop for one, like this Salter Baker's Dream scale that has an 11-lb limit and switches units with the click of a button. $39.95, Tags Hardware in Cambridge, and other kitchenware stores.

It's good to eschew plastic water bottles in lieu of tap and filtered. But what if you prefer bubbles? Then it's either plastic bottles or glass ones shipped at a high carbon cost, right? Not so. In looking for a local soda water delivery service, we found this iSi soda siphon. Like their whipped cream canisters, you charge the filled water canister with CO₂ cartridges, making the tap bubbly and wonderful. The soda from the siphon is not short on bubbles, either. It makes a fierce soda water, which is lovely. Since Boston-are tap water is very good quality, the end result is very tasty, indeed. No more bottles, no more shipping our beverages from Italy, and yet no compromising on the brisk drinking experience. If you're so inclined, you could add flavors or juices right into the siphon. $69.99 at Tags Hardware and local cooking goods stores.

The Ratio iPhone app is not really a gadget at all, but still a completely cool tool. This program transforms your iphone into a cooking assistant based on Michael Ruhlman's book Ratio, which offers up the ratios of ingredients needed to make nearly anything without a recipe. You can store the recipes you devise and share them on Twitter and Facebook. $4.99 on iTunes.

We love a bit of class. Cooking class, that is. An evening of cooking (and learning, and eating, and drinking) is a great gift for someone you love—or or yourself. Two of our absolute favorites would be the highlight of anyone's holiday.

Get a gift certificate or sign someone up for a specific class at Stir Boston, Chef Barbara Lynch's fantastic demonstration kitchen and cookbook library in the South End. We've gushed about the classes there before and with good reason. The small-sized classes not only show you foods and techniques up close, but also provide an evening of stellar food and amazing drink as you taste it all and chat with chefs and students. The food you eat is on par with No. 9 Park, Barbara Lynch's flagship restaurant, but you leave knowing that you can do it in your kitchen, too. The cost may seem high but think of it as dining at the chef's table while asking your chef friend to ply you with wine and share his or her secrets. Totally worth it.

Learn to cook with local produce and meat from Ana Sortun, award-winning chef at Oleana and Sofra Bakery. Sit in Sofra's cozy dining room and watch and learn as Sortun and pastry chef Maura Kilpatrick guide you through a handful of flavorful recipes—and you then enjoy the tastes of their labors. The recipes are fantastic when made in a home kitchen, too; we've know, because we've tried. Ana even offers an entire class in the spring focused on making the most of your CSA.

A good cookbook is part story and part culinary sherpa. They help you get where you're going, whether it's how to boil water or the lofty heights of specialized cuisine.  

Craft of Cooking, by Tom Colicchio. Sure, Top Chef-viewers love him. You know why he's really loved? Because his food is so damn good. A trip to NYC is lacking if not for a stop at one of his many Craft incarnations. This cookbook gives you the simple tools to transform lovely ingredients into stunning food with some simple techniques and ideas. Your home cooking will get easier and tastier after reading this book. It works so well with the CSA/local ideas because the recipes make the most of quality ingredients.

Stir: Mixing It Up in the Italian Tradition, by Barbara Lynch. This local chef (and head of her own growing No. 9 Park empire) has a cookbook that just came out this fall. It's named after her South End demonstration kitchen and it has some of her signature dishes. Check out how to make your own ricotta and some of her amazing pasta dishes that have made tables at her restaurants a hot commodity.

At Wicked Tasty Harvest, we love eating local and getting to know neighborhoods through their food. That's why Savoring East Somerville: A Taste-Based Guide to the Neighborhood is on our wish list. The new cookbook from East Somerville Main Streets promises recipes and full-color portraits from 26 East Somerville restaurants and business owners and family-cooking traditions from 25 neighborhood residents. Recipes from large Italian families, Salvadorian cooks and Brazilian bakers? Um, yes, please!  Order your copy (gift wrapping and shipping available).

I Know How to Cook, by Ginette Mathiot. Not only does it have a fantastic pink cover and a title that offers a fun variety of dramatic readings (I know how to cook, I know how to cook, I know how to cook), this book is a wealth of awesome French cooking techniques. This tome has been a standard for French women for decades and was on every French woman's grandmother's shelf. It's recently been translated into English and is a sort of French version of The Silver Spoon. It's full of wonderful recipes updated by Clotilde Dusoulier. French food, we find, does very well with the excellent produce, fantastic meats, and gorgeous dairy we have in New England. Might as well know how to do it the way it's been done in French homes for decades.

Gifts are more than lovely little things that make our lives delightful. They're also about those gifts that make the world a better and safer place. What gift guide could be complete without including organizations that are doing their part to improve the reality of the world. If you're giving gifts this season, consider a gift to an organization that is out there changing the world. And if you're getting this season, think about passing along some of that great feeling to others in the world. 

Gardens for Health is a Cambridge-based organization that provides tools, seeds, equipment and assistance to people living with HIV/AIDS in Rwanda. It helps them create food co-ops where they can grow food, improve their nutrition (which in many regions of the world is lacking in people suffering from HIV/AIDS), and earn income when they might otherwise have no jobs due to illness. This organization helps stop the cycle of poverty, malnourishment, and illness. Like Heifer International, your gifts are paired up with actual tools and supplies: $4 for a hoe, $180 for 100 plum tree seedlings, $500 for 8 wheelbarrows. 

Share Our Strength is trying to end childhood hunger by supporting school breakfast and year-round meal programs, improving access to fresh produce to families, encouraging farmers' markets to accept food stamps, and creating programs that teach families how to make nutritious healthy food on a limited budget. You can make a donation, order gift cards to share with other people, or buy tickets to their benefit, Taste of the Nation. The benefit is set for April 2010 and will feature Andy Husbands of Tremont 647, Jody Adams of Rialto, Gordon Hamersley of Hamersley's Bistro, Jason Santos of Gargoyles and about 70 restaurants and wineries. Tickets to the event and silent auction are 20 percent off by January 1 when you enter the code JINGLE10.

There are plenty of other organizations that bring food and giving, together. Take a closer look at the Greater Boston Food Bank, Heifer International, and City Sprouts, just to name a few.

Here's to a Tasty New Year!

 

In a Jam. A Delicious, Delicious Jam.

by April Paffrath

A favorite breakfast. Homemade raspberry-blackberry preserves on bread.

I've been working all summer on ways to enjoy the food when we have it, as well as ways to prolong that gorgeous rush of flavor well after the ground is frosty and dusted with snow. The gorgeous bolero carrots that Siena Farms includes in the CSA boxes will last for quite awhile, but other veggies won't. Like Cynthia, I froze things that are waiting for mid-winter debut. I also baked things to outlast their normal shelf life and I've flirted heavily with canning and preserving. I'm a small-batch gal when I'm trying to puzzle out the proper how-to, so most of what I pickled was eaten right away. The jam I made, though, should see us through part of the harsh of winter with a welcome jolt of flavor. We do all get tempted to eat it straight out of the jar with a spoon, though, so I hope it lasts a while.

Good jam on good bread is one of my constant cravings. When it's good, it's like a sunburst in the middle of February. When I finally snapped out of denial that summer had turned to fall, I knew that I had to make some of the fruit flavors last.

I've been fascinated with jam for a long time. Surprisingly, I hardly had any truly good jam until I was 10 or 11. Until then, I preferred jelly and I thought of it strictly as a component of the PB&J…until one fateful jam- and marmalade-filled trip. I went on a ski trip to a small Swiss village with my classmates and each morning at breakfast we were served continental breakfast. Every table had big bowls of jam and marmalade to spoon on top of toast.

Quite possibly, it may have been the first time I didn't put butter on my toast—just jam. It tasted like…fruit. I couldn't believe it. And this was even vaguely institutional jam—you just knew the chalet had outsize jars of the stuff in the kitchen next to the 3-gallon mayonnaise and a container of more capers than most people use in a lifetime.

Still, that non-fancy jam began a culinary quest that I'm just now fulfilling. On that trip, I filled up on bread (and marmalade) and left the ski trip with a deep love—not for the swift downhill and our instructor Antoine—but for blood oranges, vol-au-vent, and jam that tasted like sweet fruit instead of just plain sweet.

For years, I've harbored dreams of making marmalade (a task I will finally tackle this winter—stay tuned) and jam. Jam is a little scary if you've never done it before. But who ever let being scared stop them?

A couple of things finally got me stove-side and actively experimenting.

First of all, I spend a lot of time thinking about food traceability. I like to support local farmers, so I like it when good food comes from local sources. Still, I want to know about the sources and quality that goes into food, no matter where it comes from. I might buy a jar of jam from France, but I want to know where the ingredients come from and like them as much as the finished product. When local sources hold their own against anything else available, I feel excited and proud—and in my corner of the world, I luckily get to feel that way pretty often.

Secondly, that jar of jam from France that we've loved is now a dizzying $19 a jar. It used to be an affordable $7 indulgence. It's kind of hard to enjoy the fruit and flavor in the morning when your brain—without your permission—is tallying what that second piece of toast does to your monthly food budget. I firmly believe that one should never be meagre when offering guests (and yourself!) something delicious, so I dislike what that financial turn does to the taste pleasures.  (Boo, exchange rate and recession. Boo.)

Thirdly, if my efforts can rival that lovely jam, I would slash our breakfast and elevenses carbon footprint if I use mostly local produce. The carbon footprint might not have a flavor of its own, but it can surely affect the enjoyment of a meal. I'm totally OK getting imported food (and I do), but if I can best the quality in my kitchen, hurrah! I knew it was finally time to try.

Finally, I have a 3-year-old who does not eat fruit. Except bananas. (Have you ever heard of such a thing?) However, she does eat jam. I want to share all kinds of pleasurable jam flavors with her so she can taste the real fruit in a way that she likes. It's kind of like a gateway food. (A gateway to 7 servings a day, kiddo!)

 

To move on my jammy goal, I took a class at Stir and Chef Molly Loveday walked us through several jams from Christine Ferber's book "Mes Confitures." I can read about jam all I want, but sometimes you need to see it happen right in front of you. Stir is my favorite place for that, because the food is awesome, the space is small enough that you see every little detail, and you can ask endless questions (which I often do). I never had a grandmother who made jam, so I had no context in which to place the instructions I read. I needed a place like Stir to see all of the color changes, textures, reflections, and processes. (By the way, you should totally go there.) The basic take-away: Just get in there and do it. Use great ingredients, decide for yourself how sweet it should be and do it. Quit being so scared.

I also went to an afternoon tea hosted by Edible Boston and D2E at Upstairs on the Square where their guest Eugenia Bone, author of Well-Preserved, discussed canning, jams, jellies, and preserving in general. She made several great points about why it makes sense to do it and what affect it has. The basic take-away: If you take a moment to make your own tomato sauce or jam, you can use local ingredients. You take that part of your pantry and make it local (or organic or whatever aspect is important to you). You have greater control over the source of your food and who you support with your spending. Small batch preserving is easy to do, takes very little time, and you don't have to set aside an entire day—the process of filling your pantry is calm and goes on all season long.

I dream of that kind of low-key approach. So far I've made several jams, but nothing in a quantity that requires "putting up." It turns out we want to eat it all right away, but luckily jam lasts a long time, thanks to sugar and heat. (Just think of how long that jam in your fridge has been there.) I've been working in small batches to refine the process and take advantage of a small amount of gorgeous produce. I'm still working out some kinks, but I've had some stellar successes.

I've followed Eugenia's advice a few times and just made jam with what was around and good-looking, but using Stir's technique. I had strawberries that were in danger of going bad but oh so fragrant, so I chopped them and cooked them up one night. We ate the jam for breakfast the next morning to cheers and applause, and second helpings.

The superstar jam, so far, is based on a recipe from Christine Ferber's book that we made at Stir. It's raspberry-blackberry preserves and it's so good. No, even better than that. I bought all the raspberries and blackberries that Formaggio had one day and went to town making a jar of lovely preserves.

Pluot, raspberry-blackberry, and strawberry jams lined up by the kitchen counter at breakfast.

Raspberry-Blackberry Preserves

I put the raspberries through a food mill to make them a liquid. I cooked the raspberry liquid with the whole blackberries and the sugar (50 percent of the fruit by weight). The bright red liquid coats the blackberries, making the deep berries glow a sort of luscious red when the light catches it. It gels up to the perfect thick jam consistency—exactly what you'd like if you were buying a favorite in a store. Everything about it is perfect…except that I only made one and a half jars. The half jar is already gone!

I've used this basic method for peach-nectarine-vanilla jam, pluot jam, strawberry preserves and a few others that have been greedily and happily devoured.

Basic Jam

• Buy yummy fruit that is almost luminous. The kind that you need to eat and distracts you from tasks at hand.
• Wash it very gently and cut it up or purée it.
• Give in this once and taste it to see how sweet it is. Stop yourself so you don't eat it all.
• Weigh it so you know how much sugar to add.
• Add sugar that equals somewhere between 40–60 percent of the weight of the fruit. The sweeter the fruit, the less sugar. 
• Boil it while stirring. Use a candy thermometer to tell when the temperature reaches 220 degrees F. The books all talk about the jam flaking off the spoon in sheets, but I've found that happens before 220 degrees F. I don't know what that means for long-term storage, since I'm still figuring this all out.
• Pour it into sterilized jars and lids and process in a way that you agree with. Do some research because NO one likes mold, sliminess, foul odors or Botulism. Seriously, there are 5 million books and websites each with slightly different techniques. I'm still learning, so I don't have a good feel for the exact one I want to recommend. 

The kinks I'm still working out are how to know how much jam a certain amount of fruit will become. Also, it's very difficult to reach 220 degrees F if you don't add a lot of sugar. A couple of batches have tasted like the sugar caramelized—which ended up tasting wonderful, but it wasn't what I was trying for. I noticed that for the batches where I added slightly more sugar, it reached 220 degrees with no problem or prolonged (caramelizing) cooking.

Anyone have tips for the sugar ratio that lets you reach 220 easily but doesn't overpower the fruit with sweet?

80-mile Strawberry Pie

by April Paffrath

Want a slice?

This pie is a legend. A stunning pie that is the making of summer. It's the pie of my youth.

My husband and I took our daughter strawberry picking at Land's Sake farm in Weston, MA. (They don't use pesticides, which is especially important when you're all over the plants with your preschooler.) I've been waiting to take her strawberry picking because it's something I loved to do as a girl. There's no picking in the rain, so we had a long wait. It was totally worth it. I wish there were a fruit CSA, but I will happily go pick my own again at Land's Sake.

Fresh in the field: sun warmed, and bright red.

We brought home our multi-quart haul and I spent the evening hulling and chopping. It's mindless work in the best way possible. Meditative but vibrant. And so tasty.

This pie is easiest thing in the world to make, but every time I would consider making it in years past, my husband would just shrug his shoulders, not sure that it sounded altogether good. So, we would opt for shortcake instead, which we both adore. In his defense, the pie has jello in it, and that kind of creeps him out. If he thinks too hard about gelatin, it doesn't sound appetizing to him. That's fair...I guess. At the store last week, I bought a non-gelatin "gel dessert" and I knew that would make the amazing pie sound good to my gelatin-squeamish sweetie.

Back in college, a small group of us reconvened mid-summer for a long weekend in our apartment in Ithaca, NY. It was the Fourth of July weekend and we went strawberry picking on the first day. We picked 25 pounds. (What? It was too fun to stop!) The rest of the weekend was a festival of strawberries—smoothies, shortcakes, sundaes, and straight from the colander as we sat on the back porch overlooking Six Mile Creek, talking away the hours. I also made the pie. (With all of the other tempting choices, my husband, Matt, didn't have any.) That weekend stands out as one of the best weekends of my life—I was never so relaxed, and so full of amazing, gorgeous strawberries.

This pie has humble origins. Humble being the Elias Brothers' Big Boy restaurant in Bridgeport, Michigan. When I was a kid, we would go there mid-summer for a cold piece of strawberry pie in strawberry jello in a graham cracker crust, topped with some "creme" topping. But my mom knew she could make it better. And she certainly did. Oh, mater familias. She really knows her cooking.

The pie is all strawberries, just clinging together with the thinnest coating of "gelatin."

As a child, I had a strawberry patch in the backyard. The rest of the yard was covered in smaller, crazy-delicious wild strawberries. In season, my mother would send me to the back yard with a measuring bowl and tell me to fill it up to the line. I would pick the reddest berries from the patch and then wander the property looking for the tiny, wild, bright-red berries to fill the rest of the bowl. Back in the kitchen, she would prep the berries and fill a crust made from Nilla Wafers (which dwarf any graham cracker crust, honestly). And she would use raspberry Jello to offset the strawberry with a bit of depth. As she told me once when I was a small girl helping her: you don't want to mess up wonderful strawberries with sub-par strawberry flavoring. Then the whole pie would taste mediocre and fake—what a waste of berries that would be. Lesson learned and devoured.

When I made it this week and gave Matt a slice, his eyes lit up. I think he said something about my amazing skills and shining beauty. He said he couldn't believe how amazing it tasted and he was so happy that I made it anyway, despite his shrugging. Actually, what he really said was (and this is fact-checked with the source), "This is so good! You would drive 80 miles for a slice of this pie! This is better than you can get anywhere."

80-Mile Strawberry Pie

Crust

• a little less than 1 package of "nilla wafers" (whichever brand you prefer)
• 2-3 Tbs of melted butter

Filling

• Strawberries, enough for a pie. That's 1 1/2 quarts for us, because there's some eating that goes on while cooking.
• 1 1/2 boxes of raspberry gel dessert (jello or gelatin-free)
• 2 c. water for making the gel or jello.

Whipped cream

• 1 c. heavy cream
• 1/2 tsp vanilla bean paste or extract
• 1-2 Tbs sugar

1. Crush the cookies in a food processor, or by hand. You want a fine crumb texture.
2. Drizzle in the melted butter and mix together. Add more or less to your tastes, but the crumbs should hold together when you squeeze them.
3. Press the crust into a pie pan and up the sides. Press gently but firmly, so the crust holds together. Take care with the bottom edges—it's easy to have crust buildup if you let the bottom and sides smoothly run into each other.
4. Wash and chop strawberries. Put them in the pie crust, right up to the top. Get as many in there as you can, because it just tastes better that way.
5. Boil 2 cups of water. Dissolve the gel dessert, whisking the whole time.
6. Slowly pour it over the berries. It will fill in all the cracks and crevices and creep up toward the top of the berries.
7. Put it in the fridge to set.
8. Cut the pie with a serrated knife so it slices through the jumble of berries and leaves a clean-ish edge to the piece.
9. Whip the cream, vanilla, and sugar and dollop on top with thoughts of summer and tasty treats in your head.
10. Eat up one piece and go back for a second. Stop yourself at three—for awhile—and remember that fruit is an important part of a healthy diet and strawberries are very high in Vitamin C.

Kohlrabi Two Ways & Strawberry Salad Dressing

by April Paffrath
At a dinner party the other night we got out a kohlrabi to admire (which our hosts got from the same CSA as ours). We all decided that a kohlrabi looks like a bizarre edible space satellite. The stalks of the plant shoot out like vertical-facing spokes from a small 2-inch globe. All it needs is a reflector dish and it looks like a solar system explorer.

Kohlrabi is one of those wonderful food treasures for me—the complete unknown. I didn't grow up eating kohlrabi. We didn't have it in the family garden or the local IGA, so I never really saw it. I never tried it until this week. I occasionally find these food treasures—like beets. I never had beets growing up and my boyfriend (now husband) made them for me one night for dinner. I was star struck—with the man and the food.

Kohlrabi sounded to me like a secret club—you must have grown-up tastes and taste buds in order to like it. Would I know the secret handshake when the time came? I wanted to know! I was desperate to try. But what to do?

Someone had said it was like the inside of a broccoli stalk, in which case I would think steaming would be the best. Someone else said it was like radish and turnip, in which case raw with salt might make the most of it. Not knowing, I decided to try it both ways in a single meal.

I peeled the gorgeous purple skin off, but I feel like it might have been small enough to leave it on. Such a beautiful color. Next time, it may stay on if I eat it raw. (Since it's in the cabbage family, the purple would cook to a funny blue color, like red cabbage does.)

The raw version was crisp and very radish-like. But it was more sweet than fiery. The steamed was sweeter still and gentler. The comparison to broccoli isn't lost, but it isn't wholly accurate. In truth, we liked them both ways.

We ate the steamed with garlic rice, and next time I will add a bit of olive oil or sesame oil and nigella seeds. It was very tasty. It might taste very good curried. The raw slices we ate on a salad of Siena Farms' stunning mesclun. Sweet greens in heaven! This mesclun is not some silly lettuce mix. It tastes like a honed blend of wonderful leaves at the peak of freshness and flavor. Our salad at our simple dinner put many restaurant salads to serious and deep-burning shame. This week's mix had plenty of parsley in it and a great blend of different flavors.

We had just gone strawberry picking earlier in the day, so I decided to make a strawberry vinaigrette, using the berries for the vinegar component. I was hesitant and unsure, but something was telling me the strawberries would show off the lettuce, kohlrabi and chick peas we added to the salad. I based my idea on my favorite salad dressing from the 1990s—raspberry vinaigrette. Inspiration is good. It totally worked and made the salad flavors sing and zing. I made enough to save for more salads all week!

What a zing. Kohlrabi 2 ways at the same meal. And strawberry vinaigrette.

I put about 6 berries in the minbowl of the food processor and added stoneground mustard, olive oil, garlic, salt and dill. You know what happened? Magic. It was a magic salad. The dill was a big risk, but we got a deep green bunch of it in the CSA box and it smells SO HEAVENLY that I wanted to use it in everything. Produce propinquity is what made the dressing work so well. Simple as that.

Surprise your friends, go crazy with the salad dressing. Pink looks so stylish on the occasional salad. And kohlrabi? I love it. I'm heading to the farmers' market today to get more because I can't wait to see if the CSA box has more this week. It was a great crunch to the salad and a delicious crisp steamed veggie with rice.

Strawberry Vinaigrette

• 6 strawberries
• 1 tsp stoneground mustard
• 2-4 Tbs olive oil
• 1/3 clove of garlic
• pinch of dill—1/2 tsp, perhaps
• pinch of salt
• (tsp of sugar if the berries aren't at their peak sweetness)

1. Put ingredients in the food processor and blend.
2. Taste and adjust the ingredients to taste. 
3. Add more oil if the berries are very tart, since they are the vinegar component.

Stalking Spring

by April Paffrath
New leaf green is one of the most-loved harbingers of spring, lauded in poems, paintings, and everyday conversations come March and April. To me, though, spring is heralded best by the pale garnet of the season's first rhubarb. I wait for it every year when the air is still cold and spring is hovering in the doorway. The minute the rhubarb arrives, I know spring is finally on the way in, even if slowly. The year's first stalks are practically luminous, and the deep pink runs the entire length without any streaks of green.


Every year, I buy an armful of that first harvest from Formaggio Kitchen. The sweet, tender stalks are pampered and unscathed. I love cutting into it and seeing that the flesh ranges from ruby to snow white, without any greenish hint of bitterness. That's how I know I got it early enough.

This weekend, I made off with all the rhubarb in the case at Formaggio. It was like a secret treasure. I couldn't believe no one else battled me for it or carded me. Seems like they should have. I chopped it all up and made a rhubarb upside down cake and a vanilla rhubarb compote. The joy of early rhubarb is that the tartness is pleasant and mild. Its natural sweetness is untempered with the harsh bitterness found in more mature stalks. Later in the season, rhubarb will need plenty of sugar, but right now it doesn't need a lot, just some. The tang works so well with vanilla and cream and that's what I dream of year-round when I think of spring. In the first few days, the compote gets devoured over scoops of vanilla ice cream. This year, the cake didn't even last long enough for a photo. I usually try to squirrel away some of the haul in the freezer to pull out mid-summer, deep winter, or any day that has been unusually rough. This year, however, it seems as if spring has been a long time coming, so we may eat it all immediately.

I like green, too. But the pink really makes me think of burgeoning spring.

Vanilla-Rhubarb Compote

• several stalks of early spring rhubarb, chopped
• sugar, several spoonfuls
• vanilla bean paste, a tsp or so.

1. Put the chopped rhubarb in a thick-bottomed pan on the stove.
2. Add a few tablespoons of sugar—not too much because you can add more later if it's too tart.
3. Add a vanilla bean paste. 
4. Set it on medium-low heat and let it slowly cook. Taste it when it's cooked together. Add a touch more sugar if it's needed. Cook until it has softened into a vibrant pink compote.

It's especially good served warm over vanilla ice cream.