Rhubarb, strawberries and cherries, oh my!

How I love this time of year, when my favorite fruits are in season.  (Let’s not quibble about rhubarb. It may be a vegetable, botanically speaking, but it cooks up like a fruit.)

I have no desire to spend hours in the kitchen fussing with this bounty, however.  A simple, old-fashioned crisp is just what’s called for when the days are long and the weather balmy.

Rhubarb is the star of this dessert.  Bright and sassy, its refreshingly sour flavor balances out all the sugar in the topping.  I like it paired with the soft, sweet flavors of ripe strawberries and cherries, but it works beautifully all by itself, too. A lively burst of fresh ginger adds character. (more…)

New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman always seems to have his finger on the pulse of how America cooks.  His encyclopedic book of pared-down recipes, “How to Cook Everything,” Wiley, 1998, long ago displaced the venerable “Joy of Cooking” as the everyday kitchen reference in our house.  My husband would be lost without it.

Now Bittman has joined the smart phone age with his nifty new iPhone app, “How to Cook Everything On the Go” ($4.99). I’m not going to give up my hardback version of his cooking bible anytime soon but I’m smitten with this clever bit of technical wizardry.  It has everything in the book and more in a to-go format that is much easier to search.

The shortcake pictured here is based on the simple scone recipe I found while browsing among the strawberry entries.   The ingredient list is short, the instructions are simple, and the results are delectable.  This may be the easiest, most tender and flaky scone I’ve ever made even though I switched out half of the white flour for whole wheat pastry flour.  Use a food processor and the scones are ready to bake before the oven has warmed up. (more…)

Summer is winding down and the stone fruit season is almost at an end.

Apricots are long gone. Peaches have passed their peak.  Still, plum lovers can rejoice. Some of the most complex and appealing varieties of this multi-faceted fruit are still flourishing.

Gorgeous elephant hearts, their lush burgundy flesh ready to burst out of pale purple skin, were irresistible at the Aptos farmers market last week.  Then Sunday I was seduced by cute little French prune plums, the original sugar plum, at the Live Oak farmers market.  Long before the dried version of the fruit became the butt of so many jokes that marketers changed the name to dried plums, they were a major cash crop in the orchards of Santa Clara Valley.  The French still treasure them, both fresh and dried, but they’re hard to find outside of farmers markets.

These extraordinary varieties taste nothing like supermarket plums, which usually are picked so early that their flavors never really develop.  They’re sweet but complex, much like a dessert wine.  The tart zing of the thin skin is fleeting and only adds to their interest.

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Juicy, sweet, dribble-down-your-chin peaches are one of the real treats of summer.

Because there are dozens of varieties out there, each ripening at a different time, the season seems to stretch on forever.  By mid-July I’m usually ready to do something more with this delightful fruit than merely stand over the sink, eating it out of hand.  Still, I want to keep it simple to preserve the bright, sun-kissed taste.

Peaches and ice cream are a classic combo and this year I’m serving grilled peaches with a spicy, ginger ice cream.  Grilling caramelizes the surface of the fruit and concentrates the flavor.  Ginger serves as a dramatic counterpoint.  Pair the hot fruit with the chilly ice cream and you have an ideal dessert for these midsummer evenings when it’s really too hot to turn on an oven.

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Say what you will about English cooking, the Brits know pudding.

They so love their custards, fools, trifles, and duffs that they’ve come to  refer to all desserts as pudding.  None is so magical to my mind as summer pudding.  Only alchemy could turn something as prosaic as white bread, berries and sugar into something so gorgeous, elegant and delicious.

The Oxford Companion of Food traces the first published recipe for summer pudding to a missionary in India.  But I first tasted it in a hip East Berlin restaurant not long after the wall came down.  I still remember the vivid fuchia color and the bright berry flavor that seemed to distill the essence of summer.  It was like no other dessert I knew, neither as rich as pastry or as creamy as a typical pudding.  I was smitten.

So when I was casting about last week for something different to make with a portion of the 15 pounds of olallieberries my husband and I had just picked at Coastways Ranch north of Santa Cruz, summer pudding leaped straight to mind. (more…)