white beans with sage

If you have ever spent time in Santa Fe, you have no doubt found yourself in one of those little casitas, guest houses on the property of other larger estates. They are usually built by hand, constructed of salvaged wood and adobe, and there might perhaps be a loft bed to make the best use of the tiny space. Throughout the four years that I lived there in Santa Fe, I walked into a few of those magical little houses, invited to a party or finding myself in a friend's house, and always thinking on the perfection of the miniature space.

My sophomore year in college, I went to a party at one such house. I was in a new relationship, and the host was the ex-girlfriend of my new boyfriend. It seemed like it should be awkward, but it wasn't. She was lovely, and they were still friends, and there I was at her party.

As many years ago as this was, I can feel the warmth of her little house. It had a wall of windows, and although it must have been late winter, the New Mexico sun came through those windows and created the feel of a greenhouse. It was a morning brunch party, and everyone stripped off their sweaters and scarves, and we bathed in the sun like tired cats. I didn't really know anyone there all that well, and so I stared out the window, and I ran my hands over the knotty salvaged wood, and of course I focused on the food.

It may have been a potluck, but I don't think so. I think that our host, Lindsie, was the one who filled the table with food, and I imagine that it was all wonderful.  I base that imagining on the one dish that I do remember, the dish that I will forever link to Lindsie. Although we never got much closer than we were on that morning, she stays with me through this dish, and I always make it with her voice in my head.

This is how it went. She carried a bowl of cooked beans to the table--big fat cannellini beans in some beautiful serving dish. Then there was a handful of fresh sage leaves in one hand, and a bottle of olive oil in the other. We were all young, and most of us not so domestic, and so these actions were striking. I didn't cook much at that point, and I knew very little about putting flavors together in graceful ways. We all watched her as she tore up the sage leaves and scattered them over the beans. And there must have been several "ahhhs" because just then Lindsie said, "People always think this is so impressive, but it's just beans! Beans, sage, olive oil, salt and pepper, done."  And she poured several luxurious glugs of olive oil over the bowl as she talked, and it was the most beautiful action, without any thought or self consciousness. That action was mature, and delicious, and fancy. And so were the beans.

To this day, this one of my favorite party dishes. Ideally, the beans should be cooked at home instead of poured from a can to prohibit the possibility of tinniness or that peculiar canned bean texture. But if from a can is what you have time for, then that will work too. They can be warm or cold, or my favorite, met in the middle at room temperature. They are simple, and Italian, and as Lindsie pointed out, always impressive. If you can, prepare them in front of your guests. Tear the sage leaves. Let the olive oil pour with abandon. There will be sighs and ahhs, and as the perfume of the sage makes its way through the room, you can say "Just beans!" knowing full well that this is much more than that.


White Beans with Sage
(with thanks to Lindsie Bear after all these years)

1 pound dried cannellini beans
7 to 10 fresh sage leaves
olive oil
salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 250 degrees. Sort through the beans and remove any stones. Pour them into a large cast iron dutch oven and cover with water. There should be about four times as much water as beans. Bring the beans to a boil, cover, and transfer to the oven. Cook until just tender. This may take as little as 1 1/2 hours, and it may take as many as 3. Beans are just like that. Check after 1 1/2 hours, and remove when they are firm, but delicious to eat. You want to get them out of the oven before they start to split.

Drain the beans, and let them cool a bit. Transfer to a lovely serving bowl. Carry it out to your guests. Roughly tear the sage leaves and sprinkle them over the beans. Pour several glugs of olive oil over as well. Then the salt, and many grinds of pepper. Stir, taste, and adjust if necessary.

mint ice cream

There is a point in the summer where the brain stops being efficient. It happens all in one day, and it's the same day that wearing a bra is no longer an option given the discomfort it produces. It is the kind of day where one must either be near a body of water or in love or both--otherwise life is unbearable.  When the heat wave hits, there is not much to be done.


And when I say not much, I mean, really, that there's only one thing to do.


Today is the day to make ice cream.
I know you don't want to cook. I don't want to cook either. But mint is almost a green vegetable, and milk has lots of protein, and there you have it. Fresh mint ice cream could easily pass for dinner.  I'm guessing you won't get any argument from those around the table.

That is, if you're sitting at a table. We are just scattered about, looking for colder pockets of air.

When I set out to make fresh mint ice cream yesterday (because it was absolutely the only thing I wanted to eat), I had every intention of making an egg custard base and of whisking and thickening and all that. But then I got into it, and I came to the part where I would start breaking eggs. I wiped the sweat out of my eyes, and I gave up even on this, and I just went ahead and made ice cream with the simple base that I had, just the milk, cream, mint, and a little sugar. A Philadelphia style mint ice cream, if you will. 

And I have to tell you, that on a day like today (or yesterday), I just might prefer an eggless ice cream. It is lighter, and fluffier, and it just makes more sense. Best of all, it is outstanding easy to make--even today, you can handle it.

Some people don't grow mint because it takes over. This is exactly why I grow it, and I spend all summer shoving it into water and tea and jello and cocktails and anything else. This recipe requires a good heap of leaves, so if you don't have a rampant patch for your very own, find a friend who does.

 

Mint Ice Cream

2 cups heavy cream

1 cup whole milk

1/3 cup sugar

pinch of salt

1 1/2 cups loosely packed mint leaves

Combine one cup of the heavy cream, the milk, the sugar and the salt in a small saucepan. Heat and stir until the mixture is warm and the sugar is dissolved. Remove from heat. Add the mint leaves to the mixture, cover, and let steep for 30-45 minutes. 

Strain the mixture through a sieve to remove the mint leaves. Add the last cup of cream, and refrigerate for at least an hour. 

Pour into your ice cream maker (I love the Cuisinart), and churn.

the croissant

 We are away for a few days, fulfilling obligations of work, family, and pastry.

I hope your week has been a good one, and if it is as sultry where you are as where I am right now, I hope there is a cool drink by your hand.

Back in a few days, friends.

the best part about summer

Sometime last week or the week before that, we had a few people over. There were lots of kids fighting over our one swing, and they stayed fairly merry while the grownups ate meat on the back porch, but at one point in the early evening, Sadie lost it.

 She had made some cookies for the get together, some meringues that she and her auntie who was in for a visit had teamed up on. She was proud of those cookies, and rightly so. But Rosie was mad that she didn't participate in their making, and so when she had her turn on the swing and all the other kids were standing around her, watching and waiting for their coveted moments on the swing, she announced that she thought Sadie's cookies were not really all that special.

 Sadie couldn't take it. She was tired and sunned and full of sugar, but in the end it was the sister that put her over the edge.  She ran around the side of the house to where we were sitting, stomping and crying and unable to even get the story out.  I thought up an excuse for a car ride, and before she even let out an answer, she had sprinted to the car and buckled herself into her booster. Then, for ten glorious minutes, we drove.

The best part about summer is 6:00 pm, in the car, windows down, music loud.  I have thought so since I was very little, and in the depths of February it is this moment that I crave. It is the blue light, the endless green on the side of the road, the smell of cut grass and grill smoke and trees in their full foliage. It is the smell of marigolds and lilies and of bathing suits after a day at the lake.  I remember being in the back seat as a kid, rolling my window all the way down, and soaking it in. There was the first summer I knew how to drive, when I could turn up the music as loud as I could. The summer I had a boyfriend with a convertible, and we would drive in the summer nights with the music all the way up and the heat on to balance the cold night air all around us.  And with every different car, and every different summer, and every different album, it is always as wonderful to have the windows down, music loud.

That's what I told Sadie as we got into the car and pulled out of the driveway. And those ten minutes were so good. We came back, barely missed, and snuck back into the little party. She was a whole new girl. 

This is what we were listening to, a special mix that Joey made for July 4. It's longer than the kitchen mixes, because it is, after all a car mix, but it will probably do fine in the kitchen, too.  Be warned- it's a big file, but I hope you'll find it worth every bit of space... download here. Then tomorrow, 6:00, in the car, windows down, music loud.  I'll keep an eye out for you. 

gooseberry elderflower jam

 I have some memories that I know I never lived.  Some tastes that bring me back to places I've never been, and to people I've never met.

My great-grandmother on my father's side was a woman called Buckner Hollingsworth. I have heard that she was a woman of many talents, but the one by which she is remembered by the few people who find her books in a dusty and treasured corner of a used book store or who happen to be studying the history the areas where anthropology and flowers coincide is that she wrote about gardening and flowers.

To say "my father's side" still sticks a bit in my throat, and although the mention of sides at all seems to imply that there is half of me from one place and half of my from another, I am one of those people for whom that is just not true.

I was raised only by my mother, and she descended from Eastern European Jews on both sides. We were never religious, but there was a fair amount of Yiddish around, and every funeral to which we traveled was in some Jewish cemetery in New York. My last name growing up was Yost, changed at Ellis Island from Yoskowitz, and there was never any hesitation in my voice when I reported to anyone who asked that yes, I am Jewish. And besides my cousin Sharon the doctor who somehow surpassed the 5' 2" height limit of the women (and most men) in the family, I was always the tallest woman in the room at any family reunion. My blue eyes, my decidedly British nose, these features inspired family members to say (with just a bit of disdain), "you favor your father."

Those who met my father during the few years that he spent with my mother all seemed to speak of him with similar adjectives. He was charismatic (in a creepy way), self-centered, intelligent (though not always using his faculties to the best of his ability), and generally a bad match for my mother. As I grew up with this vision of him, my once every several years phone conversations confirmed it, and right around the time when my mother found me a new father (in my stepfather), I decided that I didn't have so much in common with the old one.  I was seventeen, and as I let go of my efforts to convince him that he (that is, my old father) really wanted to be a parent, I finally decided to seek out that side of my family through the two people who created my father, his parents.

My father's parents had divorced when he was a child, and in the same way that my mother came from Eastern European Jewish stock on both sides, he came from English blood on both sides. Both his mother and father were from good, highly educated, American families of British descent, and, true to the interpretation of my aunts and uncles and cousins, I looked exactly like them.



I only bring all this up because I've been thinking about those parts of our families that we will never know. In the last several years, I've learned a lot about those pieces of that that side of the family, the Hollingsworths and the Kirks and the Mortons, and I've sat down with my father's mother and father many times, and I am so happy to know them and count them as family. My grandfather in particular is kind enough to email a story to me here and there on a regular basis, and I think that it's through these stories that I do feel more one part my mother's family and one part my father's family (and one part my step father's family too, as luckily there's endless space for additional parts).



My grandfather's mother wrote these beautiful books on gardening and her experience in the garden, and through her writing, I've had the opportunity to find memories with her even though she died the year after I was born. Because you may never be able to find the book yourself, I feel like I have to give you at least a little taste from Gardening on Main Street.

 "Ghosts walk in gardens. Usually they are called up by sentiment. Every spring I carry a cluster         of pansies and lilies of the valley to the secretary of a friend of mine because, on her way to work, she often pauses by the fence to remark that her mother grew and loved pansies and lilies of the valley.
...My ghosts are less personal ones--a valued business acquaintance, three men I never saw, and a farmer-florist who, all unconsciously and because I provided him with an audience, stimulated my childhood interest in the flowering world. None of my family were gardeners, so I have no sentimental memories of my mother or grandmother bending over the plants they tended."



I love the way this woman writes. And I love knowing that in some small way, I come from her. And while I've never come across a mention of gooseberries or elderflowers in her books, I can't help but feel that my sighs over the tiny delicate and fragrant stars of the elderflower and my constant marveling over the striped and translucent rosiness of the tart and complex gooseberry come as a result of Buckie Hollingsworth's blood in my veins.  At least I like to think so. And I can't think of a lovelier and more welcome ghost in my garden.

I have written about both gooseberries and elderflowers before, but never in combination. In this case, the marriage comes about by gently cooking the gooseberries with the elderflowers lightly resting on top of the berries. The flowers are so delicate that they instantly blacken with the heat--then they are removed. The result is a jam that tastes like gooseberries (sweet and tart at once, with a green a grape-y overtone), but smells like elderflowers.


Gooseberries can be hard to come by, but they are coming back into fashion. Preparation of the berries takes forever-each berry has to be snipped at each end with a scissors to remove the stems, but the berries are so beautiful to work with that it is just okay. I recruited my sister to help with the job, and we stood there at the counter, quiet, snip, snip. Every so often, one of us would hold up a berry with a particularly striking hue and exclaim over its beauty.  These berries came from a friend's patch, as my little gooseberry bushes haven't yet started to bear fruit. They glowed in the colander, each and every one of them. I would wear those berries as jewelry if I could.

I took the last of the elderflowers from the top of my bushes, and they spread above my head like little starry umbrellas. Elderflowers grow wild in New England, and my bushes that I planted just a few years ago are the hardiest thing in our yard. If you have never seen an elderflower, seek out a bush when you can. I can't walk by without pausing over their geometric blossoms and sticking my nose in the center of one. They seem to belong to some other time an place altogether.

This jam is for my great grandmother, and the parts of me that come from her. And it's for you too, of course. There is plenty to share, and we'll spread it on toast and eat it in the garden.



Gooseberry Elderflower Jam
adapted from The River Cottage Preserves Handbook

Makes 8 to 9 cups

3 pounds gooseberries (can be ripe or slightly unripe)
8 elderflower heads
3 cups sugar

"Top and tail" the gooseberries (thanks to River Cottage for that apt description) with scissors, and put into a heavy pot with 2 1/2 cups water.  Bring to a low boil, then a gentle simmer. Make sure that the elderflowers are free from bugs and brown bits--then lay them on top of the berries as they cook. Cover the pot, and cook for 5 to 7 minutes, or until the berries are soft. Remove the elderflowers.

Add the sugar and stir gently to dissolve. Bring the mixture up to a rolling boil and let it cook for about 10 minutes, or until it registers 220 degrees on a candy thermometer or it gels a bit on the back of a wooden spoon. Transfer to sterilized jars and process in a water bath for 10 minutes.

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deep-dish strawberry rhubarb pie recipe

I've had my way with the last of the strawberries.
Joey went to pick at Thompson Finch Farm on Friday while I was at kids' cooking camp, and he stopped in on his way back to drop of strawberries for the last meal of camp.  We filled a colander and the kids descended on them, leaving just enough to slice into our crepes that we had so (un)carefully flipped all morning. Then I came home, washed the week's aprons, drank a Pimm's cup, and made 10 half-pints of jam. Joey's only request was that there was enough left over for a pie. 

Have I told you about Joey and his love for fruit pie? His obsession with fruit pie? His passion for fruit pie?  About how he'll go hours out of his way if there is even a whisper of a rumor of halfway decent pie?

Well I'm telling you now.

And I wouldn't be giving you the whole story unless I included the fact that I'm not such an enthusiastic partner. I'll come along for the scenery, but even the most revered fruit pie tends not to meet my tastes. I'll admit it's a failing of mine. I am many things, good and bad, and pie snob is one of them.

It's that thick, syrupy, sweet thing that happens when fruit and syrup and cornstarch come together just so. It's the sugar in the crust and the sugar on top of the crust. It's too sweet for me, and even diner coffee doesn't quite get it down.  Joey looks at me in disbelief.

So I make the pie that I want. Where the fruit is still recognizable, tart and citrus-y. The crust is flaky with a bit a bit of salt. And although a cup of coffee on the side is always pleasant, it isn't a necessity.  The juice overflows, and I always set off the fire alarm. Lucky for me, Joey is not a pie snob, and he loves my kind of pie too.

The other night, Joey set up the tent in the backyard.  Each of the girls had a friend over, and we ordered pizza. My sister Maia had a few friends over too, and so it was an impromptu party, and the light hung around the yard in that very specific way where it could only be those weeks right after the solstice, where the days are long and the summer stretches ahead. We ate pizza without plates, and the girls shrieked and ran through the yard.



At some point in the night, we heard a distant and blaring alarm, and I made some smug comment about second home owners and their car alarms. Joey nodded, and when it didn't stop, we looked at each other for a split second before sprinting inside to the kitchen.
That was no car alarm.  When the smoke alarm goes off, the pie is ready.


I have a pie dish that I love, a deep-dish 10-inch white one. Every pie recipe fills a 9-inch shallow dish, and then I fudge the recipe a little to fill my white pie plate. So today, just in case you have a favorite pie plate that's a little bigger than the norm, I'm going to give you a recipe to fill it. And if you're working with a smaller dish, just scale back a bit.

As you roll and fold this one into being, remember that every pie is beautiful.  Fill it with good fruit and weave your lattice however you like. It will be your greeting to summer, your kiss on the cheek to all that abundance. Something so good has no need to look perfect.

Deep-dish Strawberry Rhubarb Pie

For the crust:

6 ounces unsalted butter, cut into 1-inch pieces
6 ounces lard (or butter if you prefer), in small pieces
3 1/3 cups (1 pound, 2.75 ounces) all-purpose flour
3 teaspoons apple cider vinegar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup water

For the filling:

5 cups strawberries, hulled and sliced
2 cups rhubarb, in 1-inch pieces
1/4 cup cornstarch dissolved in 1/4 cup cool water
1/2 cup sugar
juice of 1 lime (or lemon, if that is what you have available)
2 tablespoons butter, cut into small pieces

Make the crust:

Combine the butter, lard, and flour in the bowl of a stand mixer. Toss the fat in the flour so that it is thoroughly coated. Put the bowl in the fridge.
Combine the vinegar, salt, and water in a cup. Put into the freezer for 10 minutes.
Remove the flour mixture from the fridge, and fit your mixer with the paddle attachment. Mix the flour mixture until the fat is in small crumbly pieces. Remove the vinegar mixture from the freezer and, while the mixer is running on medium speed, slowly add the wet to the dry until the dough clumps around the paddle.
Separate the dough into two discs, wrap in plastic or waxed paper, and refrigerate for at least two hours.

Make the filling:

Combine the strawberries, rhubarb, cornstarch mixture, and lime juice in a large mixing bowl. Gently stir until thoroughly combined--then let the mixture sit for 10 minutes.
Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Remove the crusts from the fridge. Grease your pie dish with butter.
Roll out the first crust on a floured counter with strong strokes until you have a 12 to 14-inch circle. Transfer the dough to the prepared pie dish.
Fill the pie crust with the strawberry mixture. Roll out the second pie crust to the same dimensions as the first, then cut it into 1-inch strips. Arrange the strips in a lattice. I know that there is some correct way to do this, but I like to improvise my way through it, weaving here, folding there. Tuck the butter in under the lattice so that it melts into the strawberries.
Put a baking sheet on a lower shelf of the oven to catch the drips. Bake the pie for fifteen minutes in the upper half of the oven, then reduce the temperature to 375 degrees. Bake for another 30 to 40 minutes, or until the crust is golden, the juice bubbles, and the smoke alarm goes off.

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