Entries in cooking (5)

Wednesday
Mar032010

Sunset, Wednesday, 3 March 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

I was making ice cream, as sunset approached, from peaches I had canned about 11 years ago. (I plan to have a small amount of the ice cream after I freeze it, just to test and make sure I don’t poison anyone but myself; but the peaches, canned with honey, seemed surprisingly good.) A blog being what it is (voracious), my mind wandered to whether there was any connection between the old peaches and tonight’s cold sunset.

So, in the name of sanity: No way is there any connection. Yes, I often think of how the horizon at sunset seems like a flowing stream of time, and yes, somewhere back there are the peaches of 1999, seamlessly connected with this moment. But if anyone refers to this painting as the peach sunset, it’s on them.

Wednesday
Nov252009

Sunset, Wednesday, 25 November 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

This view is turned a little bit south from the usual perspective ... for those who know the area, looking more or less toward Charlottesville Airport from a mile east of 29.

Now ... in my sincerely misguided effort to be all things to all people, and in the belief that almost everyone who’s on the web at this moment is desperately seeking Thanksgiving dinner advice, I offer a little something culinary to go with the sunset.

After years, many years, of following the family habit of simply serving whole roasted yams, I switched last year to Roasted Yam Puree With Brown Butter, a recipe from the November 2004 issue of Bon Appétit. It was a hit, but probably only because I remembered that Patrick O’Connell, of The Inn at Little Washington (Washington, Virginia), had a Brown Butter recipe (the brown butter directions for the Bon Appétit yams seemed dangerously general and vague). I got O’Connell’s brown butter from The Inn at Little Washington Cookbook, but you can find it here. I think it’s critical to the success of the yams.

For what it’s worth, I’ve been roasting something like 7 or 8 pounds of yams and using more than a cup of butter. This year (I finished them just now, before sunset) I roasted garnet yams a good 90 minutes instead of an hour – a long, emphatic roasting for a sweeter, almost caramelized flavor, which then makes the puree more complex when combined with brown butter.

Happy Thanksgiving and good night!

Monday
Sep282009

Sunset, Monday, 28 September 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

Clear tonight, or nearly so.

On this >1,000-acre place we inhabit as renters there are, to our knowledge, four persimmon trees, and every year we watch as the fruit ripens and taunts us with our inability to make proper use of it.

If you were to look up persimmons online, and find them, say, on a cooking website, you’d think, hey, what’s the problem, there are plenty of ways to use persimmons!

But, ironically – even though our English word ‘persimmon’ originates with the Powhatan tribe of Virginia – what most people now mean when they discuss persimmons are two Asian varieties, and these are the kind you can find in supermarkets.

In fact, ‘fresh grocer’ Tony Tantillo cautions you to be aware that there is not one, there are TWO (as if there were just two) varieties of persimmon: 

... the Fuyu, the kind you can eat right away, and the Hachiya, the kind you can’t. If you bite into an unripe Hachiya persimmon, it is as if you just drank six cups of extra strength tea. This astringent flavor is due to the high level of tannin in the fruit, and there is a good chance that you would never try a persimmon again because it tastes so bitter.

That’s fine as far as it goes, but even the Hachiya is a sweetie pie compared with the persimmons that gave persimmons their name – persimmons with virginiana in their Latin title. And these guys, these eastern, country, American persimmons, are tough to deal with.

Let’s put it this way. I’ve long been aware that you were supposed to let our persimmons go past the frost. They start out green and hard, then ripen to orange, softening, and then, after a hard frost, they turn a bit darker, even somewhat blue in places, and very soft – and then you’re supposed to be able to eat them.

I don’t think so!

‘Astringent’ doesn’t do them justice. Ever seen those joke photos of some old guy, seemingly with no teeth, his lips and mouth and cheeks so puckered up it looks like he’s swallowed them? That’s what it feels like.

I’ve tried various ways of using them, including a really interesting recipe in one of my favorite ‘old’ (1970s-era) books, still available, Putting It Up With Honey: A Natural Foods Canning and Preserving Cookbook, by Susan Geiskopf ... Geiskopf was in California when she wrote the book and I think that recipe needs one of the Asian varieties.

As for virginiana, I figured the thing to do might be to add sugar or honey and strong spices and try to make a sort of chutney. I gave up on my last attempt, before Thanksgiving, partly because of flavor failures and partly because of the two huge flat seeds that take up so much of each persimmon.

Precisely because of those unmistakable seeds, I can report one discovery I made out in the fields today. Even though persimmons are coming along rather late, and aren’t yet even entirely orange, much less soft, bears – who must possess mouths of steel (and iron constitutions) – seem to have no problem with them whatsoever.

Tuesday
Sep082009

Sunset, Tuesday, 8 September 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

The clouds call to the moon, just a couple of hours behind.

Yesterday’s post about making peach ice cream led to an exchange about peach cobbler, which, in turn, reminded me of another great cookbook – Sweety Pies: An Uncommon Collection of Womanish Observations, With Pie, by Patty Pinner. It’s almost as much fun for the browsing and reading as for the pies (the baking of which, in our house, is Laura’s province). Considering how much I like pie, that’s saying something.

Monday
Sep072009

Sunset, Monday, 7 September 2009 (Labor Day)

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Behind sunset, vast blue night and bright stars.

Part of the day was devoted to making peach ice cream, adapting a recipe from The Inn at Little Washington Cookbook: A Consuming Passion, by IALW chef-owner Patrick O’Connell. Despite the Inn’s reputation for complex, almost theatrical dishes, the recipes in this book are really accessible. To make what may be the best peach ice cream you’ve ever had (I think the secret is the vanilla), just do the ice cream part of the three-part “Peach Intensifier” dessert, cutting it in half for a small home ice cream maker. Just don’t mix white and yellow peaches – I’m not sure white peaches will work at all, but I know from sad experience that they don’t work with yellow.

If you have peaches coming out of your ears and are in dire need of this recipe, just contact me and I’ll write it out for you. In our case, the ice cream–making was occasioned not by Aunt Millie’s Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, peaches, but by our very own Crozet, Virginia, peaches, which have been fantastic this year.

And if you’re thinking it’s trivial for me to go off on a tangent about cooking – what, in this blog, are you kidding? – this morning I happened to catch NPR’s On Point, and a segment with an author who says humans are the apes who ultimately mastered fire and learned to cook. (Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham.)

Now, let’s see about those unbelievably human Mark Bittman Brussels sprouts ...