Fried Zucchini Blossoms: Good can get better

 

One of the special treats of the summer is zucchini blossoms, one of those delicacies that you can’t really enjoy unless you grow your own squash or you have ready access to a farmers market.  Several farmers offer them at our market, although you can never be sure you’ll find them.  We especially like the way Fiddler's Green offers the delicate blossoms standing up in a plastic basket.  This makes them easy to store with a damp paper towel underneath the basket and the whole thing swathed in a plastic bag and sealed.  

These blossoms usually need to be eaten promptly.  We shred them into side dishes or pastas featuring zucchini just before serving, to add color and to intensify the squash flavor.  They are also good raw in salads.  But the apotheosis of the zucchini blossom is fried.   When you are eating a fried flower, you know this is no ordinary day.

We have been making fried zucchini blossoms for years and the frequent fryer in the household was quite satisfied with her method.  She beat an egg with a slosh of white wine from her glass, dipped the blossoms in the egg wash, then rolled them in a mix of white flour and cornmeal, seasoned with salt, pepper, and maybe a little chile powder, and then fried them in a skillet in shallow oil over fairly high heat.  They looked and tasted great—you could see that they were blossoms and they had a nice crunch-- and it was hard to believe they could be improved upon.  We sometimes stuffed them with goat cheese but found we preferred them without filling.  So when the other Sherdo suggested trying a new recipe, from La Cucina Siciliana di Gangivecchio (his cookbook crush of that moment), the frequent fryer scoffed.  How could her method be improved upon?  This new recipe coated the blossoms in a batter, which threatened, in her not at all humble opinion, to be too heavy.

But try it we did and the result made a convert of the frequent fryer.  The blossoms seem to melt inside the batter and develop a creamy texture and an essence of squash taste.

We have adapted the instructions of this recipe slightly to fry the fritters in shallow oil rather than the recommended 3 inches of oil.  The results are great and there is less wasted oil.

The original recipe is for 24 large or 36 small zucchini flowers and is supposed to serve 8.  We have experimented with cutting it in half and that works just fine for one basket of blossoms from Fiddler's Green (where ours were from this time) or about 16.  You need to rinse the blossoms in cold water (to be sure to get rid of any bug passengers), and then carefully dry them on towels before proceeding.  We also reach into each blossom to remove the bright yellow stamen, which can be bitter.

For the original recipe you need:

Zucchini Blossoms!  This amount of batter would cover two baskets of blossoms at least.

2 teaspoons active dry yeast (it’s the yeast that makes this batter so light)

2 ¼ cups warm water (about 105 degrees)

2 cups plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

Salt and ground pepper

1 tablespoon olive oil

Oil for frying (high heat safflower oil is particularly good)

Sprinkle yeast over ½ cup warm water in a medium size bowl.  Stir it with a fork, then wait ten minutes until the yeast has dissolved.  Add the remaining 1 ¾ cups water and mix well.  Then, working ¼ cup at a time and stirring with a fork or whisk, stir in the flour.  Be sure to work out the lumps.  Season with the salt and pepper and stir in the olive oil.

Cover the bowl and let it rest in a warm place for about an hour.  You’ll know the batter is ready when there are bubbles on the surface.  Stir it again.

In a large skillet, heat about ½ inch of oil over fairly high heat (on our gas stove that’s between medium and high) until the oil is hot but not smoking.  Dip each blossom in batter to cover it, let the excess drip off over the bowl, and then place it in the oil.  As the batter cooks it will puff up and turn golden brown.  Turn the blossoms once so that they get brown on both sides.  You need to watch these carefully because they cook very quickly—a matter of minutes.  You’ll also need to work in batches—about 6 blossoms per batch.  

Drain the finished blossoms on paper towels or on a cooling rack over a baking sheet.  Lightly salt each batch after you set it out to drain.  You can hold the finished blossoms in a low oven while you fry subsequent batches, but we often find that whoever is lingering around the kitchen during this process happily consumes the blossoms as they are ready.  What’s wonderful about these is precisely how delicate they are.  They aren’t for keeping, before or after they are fried.

If we manage to get some on a plate, we serve them with a chopped salad of tomatoes and peaches.  But they don't need much embellishment.

One of the authors of the Gangivecchio cookbook, Wanda Tornabene, claims that her fritelle di fiori di Zucca, these very ones that seduced the frequent fryer away from her tried and true method, are “the best in the world.”  The Sherdos must now agree.  Something very good can get a lot better with the right recipe.

Grains and Beans a la mode

Throughout the year, but especially in the summer, we usually shop the market without a list.  We find that approach the most fun and relaxing because rather than hunting for something specific, we respond to what looks, smells, and tastes most inviting.  The result is often that we stagger home with the huge hauls we sometimes display here.  How do we manage to use all of this?  For many of our meals, we use grains and beans as a kind of produce platform, topping them with lots of fresh fruit and vegetables from our haul. These dishes are “a la mode” both in terms of the original meaning of that French phrase—according to the latest fashion or responding to what is in vogue or, in our case, in season and therefore time-sensitive—and in the distinctively American sense of “with something extra (usually ice-cream) on top.” No one knows precisely how or when this second meaning emerged, but it appears to have happened in the nineteenth century, when ice cream was gaining attention as a trendy sweet (although it was hardly new) and it was all the rage to pair it with pie.  

You can see the combination of fashion and food, timely and on top, in this image of a fashionable hairdo decorated with the wares from a greengrocer’s stall.  Matthew Darly, The Green Stall (a Hairdo fit for Market Day): London, 1777.  

(From the delightful blog http://b-womeninamericanhistory18.blogspot.com/2010/02/big-hair.html)

Three of our staple dishes allow us to eat lots of produce without being bound to recipes or getting stuck eating the same thing every day.  We make the “produce platforms” in advance and then, when hunger strikes, we throw together and personalize the dish as we like it, by chopping up fresh fruits, vegetables, and herbs.  Here are the three we eat the most.

Toasted Muesli

Muesli differs from granola in that it does not have sweetening or oil added to it. We mix a variety of rolled grains from the Co-op bulk bins, often rye, barley, and kamut.  We avoid oats just for variety but they work well here.   If you want a quick start, you can use the Wheatland multigrain flakes (which are rolled grains rather than processed flakes) at the Co-op rather than blending your own mix.  While the grains in muesli are often raw, we toast the grains on baking sheets in a 350 degree oven for about 15 minutes to enhance their flavor and texture.  You have to keep an eye on them because, like toasting nuts, grains go from palely raw to bitter black very fast.  While the oven is on, we sometimes toast pepitas, sunflower seeds, or large shred coconut  to throw in.  There’s no need to measure here.  Toss in what you have or please.  The most flavorful ingredient is the pre-toasted nuts from the Farmers Market, to which you don’t need to do a thing.  We use Sam Cabral & Family Orchard’s dry roasted almonds and Fiddyment Farms pistachios (not always at the same time).  

 
Once we’ve made a batch, we keep it in a tin to keep the grains and nuts crisp.  (If you’ve made a huge batch, you can freeze some of it to keep it fresh.  We’ve done this very successfully.)  Then, of a morning, we serve a scoop of the muesli a la mode, that is, topped with whatever fruit we’ve got. A typical bowl will be half muesli (grains, nuts, and seeds) and half fruit.  We top it with milk or almond milk.

Another breakfast alternative is Morning Muck

We started with this recipe for “chilled summer oatmeal” (whose origin we have forgotten):

16 oz. plain yogurt  (Greek doesn’t have enough liquid to soften the grains, so use regular)

2 cups rolled oats

1 cup oat bran

3-4 tablespoons flax seed

1 pint blueberries

2-3 cups apricot nectar

Mix together and chill. 

Over the years we have grown to like this less sweet and have abandoned both the nectar and the precision of measuring.  Now we stir together oats, yogurt, oat bran, and flax seed in a covered container until it is soupy. At first, the mixture needs to be fairly wet because it will set up overnight as the grains absorb the liquid.  We tend not to put fruit in the mixture, preferring to put it on top when we serve a muck sundae topped with fruit and perhaps a little homemade jam or honey.

 

Beans and/or grains a la mode

We have developed a similar strategy for lunches.  If you make a bean or grain salad for a week of lunches, you’ll get sick of it mid-week.  Whatever fresh ingredients you’ve included in it will also grow dank and dispiriting.  It works much better, we find,  to prepare the components that keep well and take a little time in advance but then assemble the salad each day, a la mode, rummaging about for what wants eating, suiting our fancy that day, and placing the fresh things on top of the cooked beans and grains.

Beans:  While there are many opinions and theories regarding cooking beans, we prefer to soak beans overnight in cold water because this seems to even out the textures of the beans.  Beans seem to absorb as much liquid as they need, helping to reduce the problem of uneven cooking.  They also take less time and fuel to cook if they’ve been soaked.  Grains can also be soaked and this will likewise reduce cooking time.  But if you soak them too long they can get mushy.  So we tend to soak the beans overnight but not the grains. 

After your beans have soaked, pour off that water—we pour it onto plants, so one can see a history of recent beans we have cooked at the base of our roses—and start with fresh water.  Bring it to a boil and let the pot simmer in a lively way while you are noodling about in the kitchen, perhaps 10 minutes.  Skim off the foam.  Add aromatics—a spring of rosemary, a bay leaf, a crushed clove of garlic, half an onion.  Add salt.  Turn off and cover.  Leave on the burner because residual heat is part of this method.  Walk away.  At lunchtime these should be ready to eat.  If they are a little toothsome for you, bring the pot back to a boil for a few minutes.  They should be close.  We have used this method very successfully--with no additional cooking--with garbanzo beans, white beans, and the black-eyed peas available both at the Farmers Market and at the Coop from Full Belly Farms. 

Grains:  Here again, we let time do a lot of the work for us.  We combine grains and water in a saucepan (usually about 1 cup of grains to 2 cups of water, but this method does not require that you be exact), bring it to a boil, then turn off the heat, cover the pot, and leave it on the burner.  The grains will usually be ready in an hour or so.  Pour off extra liquid, if there is any.  This method works well with hulled barley and semi-pearled faro.  If you are cooking a very tough grain—such as hard red winter wheatberries or rye berries—you might need to let the pot boil a few minutes, as you do with the beans, before turning it off.  Then the trick to grains you want to use for salads is to drain them, toss them with just a little oil, and let them cool spread out on a baking sheet.  This will mean they’ll stay discrete grains in your salads rather than turning into porridge vinaigrette.

We then store the beans and grains separately.  If you have more than you’ll use in the week, freeze them.  Grains freeze best dry, while beans freeze best in their cooking liquid.  Similarly, you might choose to dress the beans you'll be eating in a given week with some vinegar, oil, salt, and pepper, and perhaps a spoonful of tapenade or pesto if you have it, because they'll absorb the flavor.  Grains, on the other hand, will just get mushy if you dress them in advance.

When it’s time for lunch, put a scoop of beans and/or one of grains in a bowl, top it with chopped fruit and veg, and dress the whole thing with a little vinegar and oil.  This time of year, we usually use tomatoes, cucumbers, arugula, onions, and perhaps a little fresh basil or some crumbled feta from Orland Farms.  Radishes, shaved fennel, and grated carrots are also good.  You can also use leftover roasted vegetables, of course.  But what's good about these salads is their balance of soft, chewy, and crunchy, earthy and bright.  So uncooked toppings work the best.  The pleasure of this kind of cooking and eating is that you start thinking about how to combine colors, textures, and flavors to compose a salad that suits your stash and your taste that day.  The bowl ripening on our counter this week, for instance, suggests that yellow, orange, and red tomatoes, big chunks of heirlooms and tiny cherry tomatoes cut in half,  might like to rub skins with white nectarines.  No need to police the fruit/vegetable boundary.  Tomatoes are fruits and cucumbers are melon cousins, anyway.  So mix it up as color and flavor suggest.

 

All Mixed Up: Kasha Varnishkes

The two main ingredients for the dish we're writing about today aren’t, strictly-speaking, from the Farmers Market.  Yet even in this pantry dish, the onions and eggs come from the market, and we used homemade chicken stock using Cache Creek Meat Co. chickens. And anyway, we’re using the recipe to think about how cooking messes with every idea of purity or precision, every story of origins.  

 

Pete Seeger has a song called “All Mixed-up” that in one verse says:

I like Polish sausage, I like Spanish rice,

Pizza pie is also nice

Corn and beans from the Indians here

Washed down with German beer

Marco Polo travelled by camel and pony

He brought to Italy the first macaroni

And you and I as well as we’re able

Put it all on the table.

There’s a certain delicious irony in the evident fact that the song’s own references have dated (does anyone today say “pizza pie”?), and that, in celebrating the joy of cultural impurity, its lyrics take sides in what has been a long-standing debate about whether pasta originated in the far east or in Italy.   

Miniature from Marco Polo's Il Milione

For what it's worth, as the recent Encyclopedia of Pasta explains, there are unmistakable documentary references to pasta in the Italian peninsula long before the journey of Marco Polo to China in the 13^th century.   

Still, might not so basic a thing as a paste of flour and water (and sometimes egg) have been “discovered” or “invented” at a whole variety of different times and places?

Nevertheless, it is obvious that cooking often has strong associations with claimed ethnic and regional “identities.”  We were writing in the last post about S.’s Irish great-great-grandmother whose name he does not even know — the one who ate a baked potato (or what she reportedly called “a tatty”) for lunch every day in her old age.  Thinking of her made S. decide to do some “Jewish” cooking, which may seem surprising.  How did S. get an Irish grandmother and yet grow up thinking of himself as “Jewish”?  Thereby hangs a tale at once genealogical and culinary. 

S.’s mother Helen was only half-Jewish: she was the great granddaughter of the Irish tatty-eater, and the daughter of Anna, a devout Catholic until her death.  (And, by the way, since Judaism traces identity through the maternal line, this means that S. is not a Jew at all according to halacha  or Jewish law, even though all three of his other grandparents were of Jewish ancestry.)  S. has always wondered how his father Albert, who was born in Russia and raised in observant or “Orthodox” Judaism, managed to get himself married by a rabbi.  He suspects his father just plain lied about (or shall we say failed to mention) the fact that his bride was only half Jewish, and the wrong half to boot. He thinks this was because Albert had decided, to adapt the words of George Bernard Shaw, that he and nobody else was going to marry Helen.

Anyway, S. grew up in sublime ignorance of (as Jean-Luc Nancy puts it), his infinite lack of infinite identity, and in fact he suffered through a full education in what is called “reformed” Judaism.  And although his parents didn’t observe kosher rules, there were a few instances of what might be called Jewish cooking among his childhood memories.  Supposedly these were recipes from his paternal grandmother who, so the story goes, one day sat down with Helen, her daughter-in-law, and taught her a thing or two about Jewish comfort food.  Among the recipes coming from this ancestral direction were “cabbage rolls” — balls of seasoned rice and ground meat wrapped in cabbage leaves and then braised in a light tomato sauce.  They were his father’s favorite dish and made frequent appearances at the dinner table — though S. himself, unfortunately, loathed them. 

S. is pretty sure another one might have been kasha varnishkes: a somewhat unexpected combination of toasted buck-wheat groats and bow-tie pasta.   Is there any food more deeply associated with what we like to call "gustatory Judaism"  (and in this case very much for better and for worse) than kasha?  In one famous episode of Seinfeld, George’s father moves in with him; in the final scene they are sharing a single bed, and his father holds out a steaming bowl and asks “Kasha?”  The most harrowing, and profoundly comic, of domestic nightmares. (And anyway, isn't the "Castanza" family Italian?  Why is George's dad eating kasha in the first place?  But we digress.)

S. himself confesses to having, with regard to kasha, what might be called that degree of familiarity that, as the saying goes, breeds contempt.  Yet today, throwing it together out of curiosity more than culinary eagerness, we find the dish quite surprisingly good. Toasted buckwheat groats have to be coated with beaten egg and then cooked briefly in some kind of fat before being steamed in liquid.  If you try to just steam them the way you might with wheat berries they turn into a sort of mush which isn’t very nice.  To make it vegan, you can leave out the egg  and just cook the grains in oil to seal them.  We used superb vat-cultured butter from Sierra Nevada cheese company, bought at the Co-op, which we think is one of the reasons it tasted so good.  (Let's take a moment here to lament that Spring Hill Cheese Company no longer brings their Jersey milk butter and cheeses to the farmers market!). A traditional Jewish version would have called for chicken fat or margarine, since the dish contains meat stock which a kosher cook would not mix with dairy.  Of course you can also substitute vegetable stock or plain water for the chicken stock; you can also leave out the pasta for a simpler version. And finally, we must confess we added a little Sriracha hot sauce at the end to juice up a dish that is otherwise a little on the bland side.  That just makes it all a little more satisfyingly mixed up.

This recipe is based on one published online at the “Epicurious” website and said to be from a 1925 Yiddish cookbook published in New Jersey, which collected prize-winning recipes from the local Yiddish press. 

Apparently the 1925 recipe for “varnishkes” was a pasta dumpling filled with cooked kasha and served in broth, something like what is otherwise called kreplach.  As such, the dish is also not far from what is called in Northern Italy tortelloni or tortellini: little pasta packages stuffed with meat or cheese that are cooked and served in a savory stock.  Aliza Green’s Making Artisan Pasta has a recipe for what she calls “Ukrainian Vareniki,” which look a bit like the "pork buns" served in Chinese dim sum, and which in this case is a little pasta package stuffed with candied sour cherries and served as a desert.   

By contrast, the dish as we know it must have come about, it seems to us, when it occurred to some busy restaurant chef (or home cook) that one might as well just toss kasha with cooked dried noodles, instead of going to the trouble of making fresh pasta and stuffing the same kasha inside — a tricky job, as we’re going to talk about shortly in another post. 

Kasha Varnishkes

Slice two onions thinly and cook in butter, margarine, chicken fat, or vegetable oil until soft.  Remove from pan.

Beat one egg.  Pour it over one cup of toasted buckwheat groats and stir to coat.

In the same pan, over high heat, stir the coated grains until they are beginning to brown and separate. 

Add two cups chicken stock or water and salt and pepper.  Add the onions, cover, and turn down the heat.  Steam for about ten minutes or more.  Uncover, stir, and check for doneness.

Meanwhile, cook ½ lb of dried butterfly noodles (called farfalle in Italian) according to package directions, usually about 10-12 minutes.  Drain them when they still have a little bite, as they will continue to cook in the other pan.

Add the cooked butterflies to the kasha mixture in the pan, adding a few tablespoons of pasta-cooking water if it looks dry, and a little more salt and pepper (or a shot of Sriracha sauce!). 

Stir gently until it's all mixed up.

Corn Oysters: Grand Parents, disasters, and tea cups

Our purchases this week demonstrate how this season partakes of several times and places.  It's now too hot in the Davis area for peas and blueberries, but farmers  from cooler parts of the state — nearer the ocean or nearer the mountains — are still bringing them to the market.  Peaches, squash, tomatoes and sweet corn are plentiful, and we're starting to get the eggplants that (along with the peppers that have not yet arrived) are for us the very symbols or figures of high summer. And yet, among all this, the first grapes of the season (from Sheletewitz Family Farms) are already hinting that fall is not far behind.  

For D., who grew up in the Midwest, corn was one of the first vegetables that registered as “seasonal.”  Her father’s brother, an early foodie, grew corn in their tiny Chicago backyard.  A neighbor who grew corn and tomatoes next door touted them as superior to anything available in stores.  And corn was the one thing you’d find on Illinois roadside stands.  We chose the yellow corn from Busalacchi Farms as a nod to the corn of a midwestern youth.

While our shopping and cooking are grounded in this place and this season, we are also unstuck in time, collaborating with the ideas, wisdom, and practitioners we encounter in books and haunted, in the best sense, by all of those we’ve cooked with and for, as well as ancestors we know only through stories. This week we tried a recipe that was inspired both by this moment—and the fleeting treat of fresh corn—and by two of our great grandmothers.  

One of the rarest cookbooks in the Huntington Library’s collection is a slim pamphlet published after the San Francisco Earthquake in 1906.  It is called The Refugees' Cook Book:  Compiled by One of Them, Hattie P. Bowman, and it offers 50 recipes for 50 cents. As its Preface explains, "This little book of recipes has been compiled for the benefit of those who have lost their cook books in our great disaster."  

Displaced victims of the SF earthquake, in front of a temporary tent shelter (from Wikipedia Commons)

One of those may have been S.'s great great grandmother, whose very name is now unknown to us.  Born in Ireland, she had reportedly been brought to San Francisco from her second home in Virginia City, Nevada by her grand-daughter Ellen, S.'s grandmother.  By some accounts, she smoked a corncob pipe, to the shame of her family, and used to eat a baked potato for lunch every day.  According to another old family story that S. has never been able to verify, she perished in the quake and fire of 1906 and was buried in one of several mass graves for the estimated 3000 victims. 

One might not imagine that the first thing one would think of in the wake of such a monumental disaster would be lost cookbooks, but Miss Bowman rose to the occasion as she understood it, and her book provides a fascinating glimpse into what was available in the ruins of San Francisco.  We find recipes for vegetable salads, the ingredients kept cold "in an ice chest,” as well as lots of oysters, crab, and clams, as well as, surprisingly, a recipe for scallop of veal.  On the last page, instructions for a “refugee filter” (using cotton batting and pulverized charcoal) for purifying water and a trick for clearing your tent of flies (burning cayenne pepper) return the reader to the grim circumstances from which some of the more unlikely recipes might distract us.

The recipe we chose to make first is for “corn oysters,” a kind of hushpuppy or corn cake made with fresh corn instead of cornmeal. 

Here is the recipe in full:  "Grate the young corn into a dish--to one pint add one egg well beaten, one small teacup of flour, one cup of cream, teaspoon of salt, drop into a hot buttered pan a teaspoonful at a time and brown well."

We chose to use the teacup of another Irish great grandmother.  This one came to Chicago at eleven years old and, to her horror, at first resided in the “Home of the Friendless,” whose name she took as a lasting affront.  She eventually got a job as a stenographer at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, where she met her husband, a telegrapher.  In time, she acquired the set of Haviland china that represented, for her, that she had arrived at prosperous gentility.  Despite that china, however, she never quite achieved a Victorian ideal of domestic femininity.  No angel in the house, she.  For one thing, she was what D's mother Mary describes as "the world's worst cook," someone who, among other things, "brewed tea that would take the skin off your feet."  At her husband’s graveside, she is said to have pronounced, “Well Joe, you were a pal in your day, and now goodbye.”  Laura’s tea cups look fragile but they have proved as tough as she, surviving a century and travelling to California to be pressed into service in this recipe.

We weighed the amount of flour the teacup held—4.35 ounces, or a little over half a cup.  We used the same teacup to measure the cream.  

So we combined in a bowl:

2 cups corn kernels (we gave up on the grater, cut these off with a knife, and briefly pureed them in a food processor but didn’t try to get them too fine)

1 teacup (or generous half cup) white flour

1 teacup (or ¾ cup) cream

1 teaspoon salt

1 beaten egg

We then dropped generous teaspoonsful of the batter onto a buttered cast iron skillet over medium high heat (because they’d be easier to turn with a metal spatula and those refugees didn’t have teflon). They spread out and, as a result, resemble oysters not at all.  But they were light as a feather, despite having no leavening, and delicately sweet from the corn.

Although we made these as a lark, we were astonished by how delicious they were.  We served them with grilled skirt steak and a salad of tomatoes and corn — after a toast to the comic or tragic memory of all those who are no longer here, especially to what Milton wittily calls our "Grand Parents."

Olive Oil

It’s easy to take olive oil for granted. It is so often what goes into the pan first or is drizzled on the soup or the beans last. Like salt and pepper, it is a workhorse in the kitchen whose contribution to any dish is both a given and for that very reason sometimes seems like an afterthought.

Also, since it comes in a bottle and lasts at least a little while, olive oil perhaps seems not to be limited to the season in the way that tomatoes or cherries are. But since we live amidst olive groves, and steer our bicycles around the fallen fruits, we know that olive oil is indeed seasonal. 

This has not, unfortunately, been a particularly good season. The oil we have has been delicious and we are big consumers, as the size bottle we buy from Yolo Press should attest. But conditions conspired so that last year’s harvest wasn’t a big one. That liquid gold is going to be in short supply in late summer and early fall. Local producers will probably run out in a few weeks. And they won’t have a fresh pressing until October or November. So let’s take a moment to celebrate the privilege of local oil since we’re about to have to start rationing it.

Recent studies have demonstrated that much of the oil on supermarket shelves is spoiled. Many consumers may not even know the difference between fresh and stale oil, because they are so used to the taste of spoiled oil. You can download the UC Davis Olive Center’s study of freshness here: http://olivecenter.ucdavis.edu/what-we-do

On oil freshness, see also: http://www.oliveoiltimes.com/olive-oil-basics/good-olive-oils-gone-bad/8900

The recognition that olive oil should be fresh seems like a new discovery. But Pliny the Elder recognized it almost two millennia ago. Pliny was a Roman scholar and writer who lived in the first century A. D. Supposedly, his wide-ranging curiosity led to his demise when he decided to investigate the volcanic activity he observed on Mount Vesuvius and wound up a casualty in Pompeii. In his ambitious and influential History of the World or Natural History, which was first printed in 1469 and had gone into 55 editions by 1600, Pliny praises olive oil as parallel to wine as one of the two “liquors” which are “most pleasing and acceptable to mens bodies.” Of the two, though, he explains, “Oil is necessary, and Wine may be better spared." According to Pliny, this necessary and pleasing liquor must be fresh: "Oil-Olive commeth to have a rank and unpleasant taste if it be old kept and stale, contrary to the nature of wine, which is the better for age. And the longest time that oil will continue good, is but one year."

While we have various strategies for preserving oil unavailable to Pliny, the lifespan of a pressing is still considered to be about one year. To enhance freshness, Mike and Dianne Madison of Yolo Press keep their oil in stainless steel tanks, bottling it (in dark glass bottles to protect it from the light) just before they bring it to market.  According to Mike, if the tank is less than full, the air space is filled with argon gas, an inert gas that keeps oxygen away from the oil.  So the last of the 2011 pressing tastes as fresh as the first. But there just wasn't enough to make it to the coming pressing. So now is the time to snap up Yolo Press olive oil at the market just as you would the last cherry, blueberry, or apricot.

We are such boosters for local olive oil that we often offer guests a range of oils to taste and we send bottles of oil from the farmers market as presents. We always have a bottle (or jug) of Yolo Press oil in the kitchen, and we go through it at a brisk clip. But even if we are already converts, we can still be surprised by what a difference good, fresh oil makes. And that surprise comes most often in simple dishes. Olive oil is a crucial seasoning in two of the simple soups we've written posts about, fava bean and cauliflower. Recently we cooked some white beans with a little onion and garlic in the water, and served them first whole, warm, with a spoonful of cooking liquid, and plenty of olive oil, salt, and pepper. It might sound almost punishingly plain, but they simply blew us away: such sublime and exquisite simplicity!  We then pureed the leftovers, again with olive oil, a little more garlic, salt, and pepper, and served the puree room temperature as part of an antipasto plate with bread, salami, and a simple salad. Again, the beans acted as a carrier for the oil, whose flavor stole the show.

We used to wonder why so many recipes, especially from Mediterranean cuisines, instruct one to drizzle olive oil over finished dishes (such as homemade hummus).  We once thought it added nothing but calories. But that  was before we got used to cooking with truly fresh, truly extra virgin olive oil. A puree of cooked fava beans--which we were surprised to find at Saturday's market, since their moment has largely passed--was as simple as fava beans,garlic, lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper.  The olive oil added not only luscious mouth-feel but a peppery bite and a grassy note.  Similarly, pesto can seem to be all about the basil.  But olive oil is as important a part of that green wonder, adding not just lubrication but flavor.  We like our pesto in pieces, with the toasted pine nuts and parmesan on top of the pasta, which is dressed in a simple suspension of basil, garlic, olive oil, and salt.

The coming season promises to be a good one. That should mean an abundance of fresh-pressed “oil-olive” in October or November.

And here’s hoping that there will again be enough olives to cure. We loved Yolo Press’s salt-cured olives and the project of curing our own, which we did with their olives, purchased at the market, two years ago.

Loveliest of fruits, the cherry. Now.

In this season of superabundance, we sometimes feel time's winged chariot urging us on.  For the most part, we do not eat blueberries, for example, except when they are available at the farmers market.  So when they come into season, we feel compelled to do justice to those blueberries.  Their season will be short.  Seasonal eating means blueberries on everything, until you fear you will turn into Roald Dahl's purple, bloated Violet Beauregarde, followed by no blueberries at all.

This year the blueberry season has gone so quickly that we are already on the tail end of it.  This is a year in which, somehow, we did not quite give the blueberry its due.


But we have honored the sweet cherry.  Cherries have a special place in our commitment to savoring each season because of A. E. Housman's poem, "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now," with which we play in our title.  We recited that poem to one another years ago when we made trip after trip to the Tidal Basin in Washington DC to see the cherry trees "hung with bloom along the bough," knowing that their beauty would not last.  It was so beautiful because so delicate and fleeting.  And so are we.  The speaker of the poem is only twenty, but he is already wise enough to reckon how few springs he has left.  Those ornamental cherries don't bear fruit.  But Housman's reminder that our own time is both short and unpredictable, and that enjoyment of the moment is therefore an urgent need, applies to the particular pleasures of the season here in Davis.  The poem concludes:

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

We are older if no wiser and cannot count on even fifty precious turns of the seasons.  So we commit ourselves to feeling that urgency.  This is an urgency that farmers feel of necessity.  When the fruit is ripe it so quickly becomes overripe.  It has to be harvested.  And then what to do with all that opulence?  This week we turned 13 pounds of Royal Blenheim apricots from Good Humus farm into jam and regretted that we had not also bought more of the dead ripe dry farmed apricots from Diane Madison of Yolo Bulb.  Dry farming--that is, not irrigating--intensifies flavor.  We'll return to this in later posts on tomatoes and melons.  Apricots are so persnickety that some years they do not make much of a showing.  They also don't ship well.  And they go from unripe to mush very quickly.  Those dry farmed apricots will be gone by next week's market.  If you want to make apricot ice cream, or pie, or jam, you have to carpe fructum.


While we've raced to keep up with blueberries and apricots, the lovely cherry, with its more leisurely season, has allowed us to wallow in its ripeness.  Perhaps you have asked yourself:  how can I eat more cherries?  The answer is to pit them.  Greed can, in this case, be a spur to labor.  We use an Italian olive pitter.  You can also use your thumb.  Some varieties are easier to pit.  Marilyn Garibaldi of Garibaldi farms advised us to use the early Burlat cherries for canning purposes and she was right.  They were meaty, juicy, and easy to pit.  We'll remember that next year and buy even more of them.  We made cherry jam from Garibaldi Farm's Burlat cherries.

We also used the Burlat cherries for David Lebowitz's candied cherries and the wonderful ice cream he puts them in. 

You can get the recipes for both the candied cherries and the ice cream here:
http://theresalwayspie.com/2011/07/18/toasted-almond-candied-cherry-ice-creamsource-the-perfect-scoop-david-lebovitznotes-sinful-top-homemade-ice-cream-to-date/

The ice cream uses roasted almonds, also available at the market, to flavor the custard base as well as to add crunch.  The ice cream is so good that we started to go through our candied cherries, which were supposed to be put by for a rainy day,  and have already made a second batch.

We also used roasted cherries in place of dried fruit in a panzanella served with Cache Creek's new breed of L'Argent chicken.  We put cherries in a salad with leftover roast duck from Cache Creek, too.  The salad was even better than the duck was the first time, duck redux so to speak.

Finally, we put a few pounds of washed but not pitted Bing cherries in the freezer.  They'll be easier to pit when we thaw them and perfect for a cobbler when cherry season is otherwise just a fond memory.