Kat of All Trades

After not making time to post for two weeks – it’s my busy season at work! – I’ve got so many photographs, recipes, and stories to share. Since pie seems to be everyone’s favorite topic, I figured I’d start with a post about that!

For those of you who don’t know, I’ve been involved with Gotham Girls Roller Derby since 2007, first as a skater for the Bronx Gridlock, and now as their manager. When you’ve been working together for a while – practice  three or four nights a week, plus other events – you start to develop team traditions, superstitions, and inside jokes. The more you bond off the track, the better your connection will be when you’re skating together as a team. You trust each other.

Throughout those three and a half seasons, one of the traditions we’ve developed is sharing a victory pie for each bout that we win. That’s 13 pies so far: we play four bouts per season including the championship, and have only lost one in that time frame. One of my other teammates usually bakes; however, after our last bout, she was hosting our team barbecue, so we decided that I would take a turn. I have, after all, made a few pies in my time.

I still had plenty of rhubarb left from rhubarb fest, and at that point, strawberries were still plentiful at the greenmarket, so I’d picked up quite a few. The perfect early summer victory pie? Strawberry-rhubarb. One of my teammates doesn’t eat sugar, so I looked up some information about baking with agave nectar and went for it. If nothing else, I knew it smelled amazing when it came out of the oven, and it looked stunning in the yellow pie dish my teammates gave me as a manager’s gift at the end of last season.

I’d be exaggerating if I said that people dove at me when I arrived at the barbecue; however, I mean it when I say that the 12-inch, deep-dish pie plate was empty in under ten minutes! I’m pretty sure there isn’t a better way to spend a summer evening than celebrating victory, conversing, and sharing pie with friends.

Part of why I’m telling you this particular story is that I believe that pie is an amazing food that carries on a long tradition of friendship, community, and sharing food. My friend Lauren is in the last days of her Pie in the Park Kickstarter project, and she needs your help to make it a success. She’s planning to publish a Pie in the Park cookbook, which will include stories of baking, recipes, and pie tips. Proceeds from book sales will go to Clinton Hill CSA to help fund their low-income shares. The money raised from her Kickstarter project will help cover printing costs, as well as paying the book’s designer and illustrator a fair rate.

If you love pie as much as I do – and I’m pretty sure you do – consider donating!

Either way, you can still enjoy this recipe.

Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie, sans Sugar
Makes one 12-inch pie.

1 unbaked double crust
5 c rhubarb (1 lb)
4 c hulled and halved strawberries
1/3 c cornstarch
3/4 c raw agave nectar
1/4 c spring wildflower honey
1/2 tsp cinnamon
3/8 tsp salt

Preheat oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit, and coat the bottom and sides of  12-inch pie plate with butter.

Roll out half of the dough for the bottom crust. Put in pie dish and crimp the edges of the crust.

Combine the rest of the ingredients in a large bowl, making sure that the fruit is thoroughly coated with the cornstarch, sweeteners, and seasonings.

Roll out the other half of the dough for the top crust. If you prefer to do a lattice crust, cut the dough into long strips.

Pour the fruit mixture into the bottom crust. Top with the rolled out dough or the lattice.

Bake for 15 minutes, then add a foil ring around the edge of the pie plate to prevent the crust from burning. Bake for 25 more minutes, and allow to cool before slicing and serving.

I grew up baking bread with my mom, aunt, and cousin every Easter (and my grandparents when they were still alive). When I say baking bread, I mean a full day adventure of mixing, kneading, shaping, and baking, culminating in many loaves.

When I was young, my participation consisted of punching down the dough after it rose. As I grew older, I was able to help out with almost all of the aspects, and my cousin and I became masters of twisting and shaping the dough. It’s the perfect bread, made from a family recipe handed down through generations. Part of the treat, of course, is that you only have it once a year. It’s hard to set aside an entire day for bread baking on a regular basis.

With all my recent jamming, though, I wanted good bread. Needed it, even. The crustiness. The doughy insides. The smell of it baking. Also, there are few combinations so perfectly matched as homemade jam and freshly baked bread.

I’d been reading about no-knead breads for a while, and then my mom sent me a copy of Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day sometime last year. While living with roommates, I never had enough refrigerator space to store the dough. That’s no longer a problem, though!

I like their recipe because it really is minimal commitment for prep – important when I’m busy spending time canning, gardening, and figuring out what to do with my CSA produce (more on that soon!) – and the bread is pretty freaking tasty. I mix up the dough, let it rise for two hours, and then put it in fridge until I’m ready to bake it.

I’d been getting used to the basic boule recipe provided in the book, and then all that white flour had me feeling a little doughy, which was not the goal I had in mind. I decided to give the light whole wheat recipe a try, though I double the amount of wheat flour because, well, why not? I think next time I’ll up the balance to half white, half wheat. I feel healthier that way, which is all that really matters.

The mixture didn’t seem to rise quite as enthusiastically as the pure white flour boule dough; however, it baked up to be a good loaf of bread, which I may have considered eating in a single sitting. My coworkers and knitting group seemed to be pleased as well, so I think I can call it a bread-baking success!

It’ll never take the place of Easter Bread, but it can fill the rest of the year. I’m also curious to try their gluten-free baking book!

(If you’re looking for bake-off details, scroll to the bottom! I think you should read about pie first, though.)

I’ve been experimenting with some pie recipes recently, taking seasonal favorites rhubarb and strawberry and playing around with flavors to see what I like best. They’re not quite ready for recipe sharing, but they are pretty enough for a peek!

I brought this pie to the Eagle Street Rooftop Farm pie potluck a few weeks ago (where I had the pleasure of seeing Brooklyn Homesteader and meeting Pie in the Park!). I’d been pondering what type of pie to bring, and then I remembered that I’d purchased 25 pounds of rhubarb the day before. I recalled baking a rhubarb custard pie last year, so I went back through my pie notes and decided to change up that recipe a bit.

In addition to the eggs for the light custard, I added some vanilla, cardamom, and orange zest. I think it needs a bit more work to balance things, but overall, people seemed to enjoy it, and I was pretty happy with the flavors. I think I’d like to try it without the custard, or with more time for the custard to chill; the day of the potluck, the pie came out of the oven and went directly to Greenpoint.

This beauty is a strawberry pie that I baked when I went to visit my cousins in Pennsylvania. Black pepper and balsamic vinegar both amp up the flavor of strawberries, so I tried them in tandem. It was good, but a little too much, or perhaps not quite the right amounts of each. More experimenting will be necessary!

In other pie-related news, I’ll be competing in a pie bake-off this Saturday, June 12! The bake-off, which Jimmy’s No. 43 is hosting, is a fundraiser for the awesome bk farmyards, a Brooklyn-based decentralized farming network. Tickets are $20 at the door, and doors open at 1:00 p.m. There will be so many amazing people bringing pies, and I’m super excited to be part of the competition. I’ll be bringing my balsamic pie – this time with strawberries – and I promise you won’t want to miss it. You can get all of the details here. Come early and bring friends! (And after the bake-off, come to Hunter College, where I’ll be managing the Bronx Gridlock to victory over the Manhattan Mayhem! Tickets are available here; that will sell out before Saturday.)

That’s a previous iteration of the balsamic pie. It’s as delicious as it looks.

Did I tell you I purchased a 25-lb box of rhubarb a few weeks ago? I’d been buying a few pounds at a time at $4/lb, and the girl at my favorite farm stand mentioned that they sold 25-lb boxes of rhubarb for $50. Half-price rhubarb? Yes, please!

Two of my amazing and wonderful friends were kind enough to come participate in Rhubarb Fest: chopping, bagging, freezing, and canning with me! We finished everything in two hours, including canning nine half-pints of rhubarb-blood orange jam.

I’m so in love with that jam. The color, the flavor, everything! You know it’s a good day when it starts with the giant box of rhubarb pictured first and ends with this:

Yes, that would be fresh rhubarb-blood orange jam over vanilla bean ice cream.

Since then, I’ve made rhubarb jam with lemon and lavender, as well as a rhubarb pie. The rest of the rhubarb is hanging out in my freezer, waiting to be paired with other fruits, including my preferred partner berry: blueberry!

Remember those gorgeous strawberries I showed you last week? Well, I ate some, and then decided that I wanted the rest to be jam. I know the strawberry bounty is coming soon, and I wanted more small-batch jam-making practice.

At the recommendation of Kate from The Hip Girl’s Guide to Homemaking, I picked up Eugenia Bone‘s fantastic book, Well-Preserved, which contains “recipes and techniques for putting up small batches of seasonal foods.” I love the layout of the book: Bone provides you will a recipe to preserve a seasonal food, and then shows you two or three ways you can use your canned goods later. Plus, the photos are stunning. Yum!

I was flipping through all my canning books trying to decide which jam to make with the strawberries, and Bone’s strawberry balsamic jam looked stunning. Now, it did not look like jam – more fruit in syrup – but I decided to see what would happen.

I may have cooked it too long because I didn’t start my boiling-water bath early enough, or maybe my making a small batch even smaller meant that it cooked down more, leaving me without whole strawberries. Either way, it’s still delicious and I’ll be eating it very soon. Possibly between layers of cake, as Ian suggested.

Strawberry-Balsamic Jam (adapted from Eugenia Bones’ Well-Preserved)

2 c washed and hulled strawberries
1-1/4 c unrefined sugar
1/8 tsp unsalted butter
1-1/4 tbsp balsamic vinegar

Start your boiling-water bath! Sterilize your jars when your jam has been boiling for about 30 minutes.

Place the strawberries in a pot and bring to a boil over medium heat. Once the strawberries are boiling, add the sugar and stir until it is thoroughly dissolved.

Bring to a boil and then add the butter, which will help keep the foam volume down. Turn the heat down to medium-low and gently boil the jam for 40 minutes, until thickened to a loose, soft jam.

Stir in the balsamic vinegar.

Carefully ladle the jam into a sterilized jar. Process in a boiling-water bath for ten minutes, then remove the lid and leave the jars in the water for five more minutes.

This made 1/2 pint of jam.

I made my first batch of jam on Saturday! I figured that since I’ll be getting 25 POUNDS of rhubarb from the farmer’s market, it would be a good idea to get familiar with jam making when I only needed to process a small batch.

Lessons learned:

1. Jam is sticky. And it splatters everywhere. Be prepared to clean your kitchen and yourself afterwards.
2. Make sure your jars and boiling-water bath are ready to go as soon as the jam is done, so that the jam can go immediately into the jars and then be processed in the bath.
3. The jam will go from not-quite-jam to ready and rather thick very quickly.
4. If you want to have jam to share, put it in half-pint jars and make more than two pints. Two pints is not enough!
5. Seriously, have the boiling-water bath rolling while the jam is cooking.
6. Listening to jar lids pop is exciting!

Rhubarb-Blood Orange Jam (adapted from The Joy of Jams, Jellies, and Other Sweet Preserves)

2-1/2 lb of rhubarb stalks, cut into pieces about 3/8-inch square
1/2 c water
Grated zest of 1 blood orange
1/2 c blood orange juice (storebought is okay!)
3 c unrefined sugar

Start your boiling-water bath! You can use it to sterilize your jars while the jam is cooking, and then it will be ready to go as soon as the jam is ready.

Combine rhubarb, water, and zest in a large pot. Heat the pot over medium heat, cover, and simmer the contents for about 20 minutes, until the rhubarb is tender and breaking down. Stir periodically throughout the 20 minutes to ensure that nothing is sticking.

Remove the pot from the heat and add the juice and sugar. Put the pot back on the stove, and over medium heat, stir until the sugar is dissolved. Raise the heat to medium-high and boil the jam until it mounds in a chilled dish. (Read: When the jam starts to look, well, more like jam, put a small bowl in the freezer. After it’s in the freezer for a few minutes, take out the bowl and drop a small amount of jam into it. If it forms a little hill – and if, once you let it cool for a few minutes, it doesn’t run when you tip the bowl on its side – the jam is ready for the jars.)

Ladle the jam into pint or half-pint mason jars. Wipe the jar edges clean. Add lids and rings, tighten to finger-tight, and process the jars for ten minutes in a boiling-water bath.

I used my last small bunch of ramps to make ramp compound butter. I found the recipe a few weeks ago while looking for ways to preserve ramps since they have such a short season. My remaining bunch was quite tiny, so I substantially pared down the recipe, using only a little over 4-oz (one stick) of butter, and less than half a lemon’s worth of zest and juice.

The butter is currently hanging out in my freezer, waiting for the time when I will roast a chicken and use its deliciousness under the skin. That’s going to be an incredible day.

I cleaned the ramps, chopped off the ends, blanched them, and shocked them in ice water. They’re waiting to be chopped.

I combined the ramps with a little over 4-oz of butter, salt, pepper, and the zest and juice from about 1/3 of a lemon. I love the bits of reddish-purple.

After thoroughly mixing all of the ingredients, I shaped them and wrapped them in parchment paper.

And of course, I wanted to get a photo of the cross-section before I put the butter away in the freezer. I can’t wait to eat it!

Today is a most exciting day: the first of the strawberries are showing up at the farmer’s market! I couldn’t resist picking some up; the smell is one of my favorites of summer.

Strawberries remind me of being a kid and going with my mom, grandfather, and brother to pick strawberries at a nearby farm. They’d weigh your containers when you arrived, you’d go pick until you couldn’t fit anymore strawberries in your buckets or bowls, and then they’d charge you per pound after a final weigh-in. My mom used to joke that my brother ate so many strawberries – one for the bowl, one for him – that the farm needed to check his weight before we left!

When we got home, the strawberries became jam, or went into a bowl with a little sugar for strawberry shortcake, or we’d pop them straight into our mouths.

I can’t stop smiling when I catch a whiff of the basket.

A partial loaf of bread decided to hide in the back of our fridge for a few weeks. While perfectly edible, it left something to be desired in terms of using it for sandwiches. No better way to make it new again than to drench it in milk, eggs, and spices, right?

I also wanted to try out baking with my canned rhubarb, as I’d like to use this method to preserve more while I can still get it. This seemed like a good first attempt, as I could then use the sugar syrup to sweeten the pudding.

I’ll call this sweet success, though next time, I’ll add a full cup of tangy, wonderful rhubarb.

Rhubarb Bread Pudding (adapted from Diana Shaw’s The Essential Vegetarian Cookbook)

4-1/2 c loosely packed stale bread cubes (about 6 slices)
1/2 c canned rhubarb
2 large eggs
2 large egg whites
1 c milk (I used 2%)
1/4 c rhubarb sugar syrup
3 tbsp brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp cardamom

Grease a 1-1/2 quart baking dish, and place the bread cubes in it. Add the rhubarb

Whisk together the eggs, egg whites, milk, syrup, brown sugar, vanilla, cinnamon, and cardamom until well combined. Pour the mixture evenly over the bread and rhubarb. Mix together to make sure all bread is coated. Cover with plastic wrap, and refrigerate for 30-40 minutes.

Twenty minutes before you are ready to bake, preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Bake until golden brown and firm to the touch, about 50 minutes.

In case you weren’t sure what was topping my yogurt in my last entry, those are the entire wheat kernel – sans hull – which are also known as wheatberries.

I got the idea recently that rather than just eating granola, I could change up my yogurt additions by throwing on a variety of whole grains. I spotted these grains from Cayuga Pure Organics at the farmer’s market, and decided to try them first.

Here’s the thing about wheatberries: they apparently take forever and a day to cook. I soaked 1 cup of these for over an hour in 3 cups of water, then put them on to cook with 1 tsp of salt. I brought them to a boil over medium-high heat, and then simmered until the water was gone. At that point, I tried a few, and they were still crazy hard. So I added more water – about another 1/2 cup – and continued to simmer until the water was gone and some of the kernels popped open. They were still rather al dente, but it was time for me to head out, so I went with it. Next time, I’ll start them soaking in the morning before work and cook them in the evening.

I added some of my rhubarb in sugar syrup to add some fruit and sweetness to the mix, which was pretty tasty. I can’t get enough rhubarb these days. Fresh fruit or preserves would also be good.

Variety is the spice of life, though, so I made some granola, too. Last week, Ian and I took a wild edibles cooking class with the charming Louisa Shafia, author of Lucid Food, and I picked up her cookbook at the end of class. The boastful name of her granola recipe caught my eye, and it used ingredients I had in my pantry. Why not try it?

The Best Granola Ever (adapted from Louisa Shafia’s Lucid Food: Cooking for an Eco-Conscious Life)

2 c raw nuts, coarsely chopped (My mix was about 3/4 c walnuts, 1/4 c slivered almonds, and 1 c cashews)
2 c rolled oats
1 tbsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp allspice
1/4 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
Dash or two of salt
6 tbsp maple syrup
5 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp vanilla extract
1-1/2 c dried apricots, coarsely chopped
1/2 c raw, unsweetened coconut flakes

Preheat the oven to 250 degrees Fahrenheit.

Combine nuts, oats, spices, and salt in a large bowl and stir. Add the maple syrup, 4 tbsp of the oil, and the vanilla extract, and mix thoroughly.

Spread the granola evenly on a baking sheet and bake for 15 minutes. Stir the granola well, rotate the pan, and bake for 15 minutes more. At this point, the granola should be almost completely dry. (Mine didn’t get especially dry; next time, I would bake for longer.) Add the apricots and the remaining 1 tbsp of the oil to the mixture, stir well, and return the pan to the oven for 5 minutes. Add the coconut flakes and bake for 2 minutes more.