Sunburn and Blueberries = Gifts from Michigan - That's how the blueberries crumble

JULY 18 * DESSERT * KELLY

So, we spent a lovely weekend in Holland, MI. I got to see Liz's show -- Children of Eden -- at Hope Summer Rep. (That Stephen Schwartz really does seem to prefer religion more in Godspell than Children of Eden.) We had dinner with her dad, caught the new Harry Potter (yes please), and rented us a motorized catamaran. So, good time was had, despite Liz getting a freakish sunburn on her forearms and me having a shoulder burn that kids who can't apply sunscreen get. Anyway, why are we having this walk down Michigan memory lane? While we were there we bought some amazing raspberries, cherries, and a mess of blueberries at the farmers' market. We ate most of the fruit on the boat (perhaps why we didn't pay attention to the sunscreen), but we saved the blueberries for home.

Monday night we headed to our CSA partners' hood to pick up our veg. We pooled our resources and made an amazing cobb salad. Liz made a homemade ranch dressing. My contribution was this here blueberry crisp. The answer is that it was delicious. That seemed to be the general consensus, as we just kept eating it out of the pan. It was juicy with a little bit of crispy. Brian bought vanilla ice cream and lemon sorbet. It was perfect and delicious (and pretty much gone).

So, it was easier than pie. The recipe can be found here (thanks epicurious and Bon Apetite):


All you need

About 3 cups of fresh blueberries
2 tablespoons plus 1/4 cup (packed) golden brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon (I may have been heavy handed here, but it was tasty)

1/2 cup quick-cooking oats (I only had regular oats and it worked fine)
2 tablespoons all purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons (1/4 stick) chilled unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
1/4 cup sliced almonds (why these were in my freezer I don't know)

Preheat oven to 350°F. Rinse blueberries. Drain. Place berries in 9-inch glass pie dish. Sprinkle with 2 tablespoons brown sugar and cinnamon; stir to blend. Let stand until sugar dissolves and coats berries. Stir oats, flour, salt, and remaining 1/4 cup brown sugar to blend in medium bowl. Add butter and rub in with fingertips or fork until moist clumps form. Stir in almonds. Sprinkle oat mixture evenly over blueberries. Bake crisp until berries are bubbling and topping is golden, about 35 minutes.

Elizabeth * July 18 * DESSERT

The woman can bake. We did have a hard time leaving the one portion that Kelly had for breakfast. The spoons flew.

See this is what I mean. I would not have put cinnamon with blueberries to begin with. I would have read the recipe and thought, "that won't go" and left it out. Then I might have decided to add some other things. Lemon maybe, or butter, or black pepper, or garlic. (I can't lay off the garlic.) So I might have invented something new that no one ever had before, but I would never have known what a good idea cinnamon is. And I definitely wouldn't have had the discipline to do it twice. For consistency, vote Kessler every time. We had not one but two awesome blueberry cinnamon desserts in one week and now we know.

This crisp also had the added advantage of being actually good for us. Very little sugar and butter, lots of fresh fruit, good fiber topping, aand TONS of flavor. I love blueberries. I love Michigan. And despite this hellish heatwave, I love summer foods. I tell you what though, there will be no baking this week.

Arroz con paella or whatever tasty business this is sans clams

KELLY * DINNER * JULY 12

Okay, so I'm not totally sure how I feel about this, but I seem to be the one cooking these days. Given, Liz is slaving away at work and I seem to be stuck in neutral as I try to shift gears and start working on article revisions. Cooking = finite tasks. Writing = being smart. I currently can't seem to muster up the latter. Anyway, here I go. While perusing one of our issues of Cooking Light (see base recipe here), I came upon a clam paella recipe. As we did not get our act together in procuring the clams, this will be sans seafood and including some Trader Joe's chile-lime chicken. Liz is now making me call it arroz con pollo. Apparently I'm easily bullied.

What do you need:

3T olive oil
2 decent size yellow onions - diced
2 pablano peppers - diced
4 garlic cloves
1/2t black pepper
1 1/2t salt
1/2t saffron threads - crushed
1t dried pepper flakes (it asked for 1/8t, but live a little)
3/4c halved cherry tomatoes
2 ears of corn - de-kerneled
1/2c chunks of Trader Joe's chile-lime chicken strips

Per Cooking Light:

1. Preheat oven to 450°.
2. Heat oil in a 12-inch ovenproof skillet over medium-high heat. Add onion, garlic, poblanos, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and 1/4 teaspoon black pepper; sauté 3 minutes. Add rice and saffron. Cook 2 minutes; stir constantly. Add 2 cups water, 3/4 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon black pepper, and red pepper; bring to a boil.
3. Bake at 450° for 50 minutes or until rice is done. Stir in corn and tomatoes. Nestle clams into rice mixture. (NOTE: i only needed to bake this for about 30 minutes. By then the rice was finished. The liquid was gone. Another 20 minutes would have been a disaster, at least in my oven.) Bake at 450° for 12 minutes or until shells open, and discard unopened shells. (NOTE: you don't have to wait for the chicken to open.)'

Ok, so as it turns out, the fact that I made this dinner did not lead to it sucking. It was delicious. The timing was perfect. The garlic baguette was just crisped the moment that Liz walked into the house from work. I was officially a perfect 1950s wife. My heels and pearls had been replaced with an Austin t-shirt and camouflage shorts, but nonetheless.
I firmly look forward to making this again with the clams. Really, we inhaled it. Look at Lizzie and the clean plate club. My only regret is that I don't have more leftovers. For those who fear spice, this had a nice heat, but was not inedible if you like heat. It was perfect for us.

ELIZABETH * JULY 12 * DINNER

I know how I feel about this. Great. I don't mind at all walking in the house from slaving over a hot Internet all day to a cold glass of wine, a hot meal, and a doting K, pearls or no pearls. Just the kind of meal to set me right up for an evening of fierce eBay competition. Look out hat block buying millinery dorks.

This recipe is definitely a keeper. I think you could make it with anything: clams as suggested, a nice piece of fish, chicken was great, some pork loin pieces... And you could throw whatever veg you wanted in there. It has a great flavor, the corn was crunchy and fresh tasting, the poblanos flavorful, and those Trader Joe's people are clever bastards.

Again I say, no complaints when the little lady puts on her ruffly apron and gets out her home ec recipe file.

Why I fear wieners and a potato disaster

KELLY * DINNER * JULY 11

So, after weeks of being out of town, rushing around, eating anything but natural food, we're floundering to work our way through our produce, meat, and the like that is piling up in our fridge. As Liz is working at The Wolf and I'm only somewhat getting my butt in gear, the responsibility of making sure we don't starve (unlikely) and our food does not rot has been left up to me. As everyone knows, I'm not our ringer. Pretty much all I can do is follow directions. This is why I prefer baking. This dinner was a prime example of:

A. My propensity for screwing up easy foods
B. The impossibility of screwing up cabbage
C. My overall fear of cooking sausages (I don't know why)

Anyway, the goal was to crack into a package of German wieners Ms. Flauto brought back from the Holland, MI farmers' market. I had planned to make a potato salad (therefore saving some red potatoes from certain demise), sautéed cabbage (from our CSA box), and said wieners. What occurred was some facsimile of that menu and much sturm und drang.

Step 1 cook wieners.
I know this should have been easy, but I never know when they're done. I don't know when to add water. It just makes me anxious. Nonetheless, tasty.

Step 2 make potatoes.
Okay, I admit it, I was boiling potatoes while trying to finish watching an episode of Boston Legal. I'm addicted. Denny and Alan fascinate me, Julie Bowen is hilarious, and, well I needn't even qualify Candice Bergen. Anyway, I over-boiled the potatoes, thought I could just switch to mashed, and discovered that I had created wallpaper paste. Fail.

Step 3 stomp around kitchen and come up with alternative plan.
Easy schmeasy back-up plan = boil a couple servings off egg noodles until they're done, drain, add 2T butter and a random amount of your new random dried herb. (Liz told me to use it but never figured out what it was)

Step 4 make cabbage.
My recipe was based on the this recipe (see link).

I cut the recipe in half and used what I had.

Ingredients

1/4 head of cabbage
2T butter
1 diced yellow onion
Salt and pepper to taste
1.5T apple cider vinegar

So, just melt the butter in a skillet. Cut the onion into slivers and sautée in butter until translucent. Rough chop the cabbage and sautée with onion, salt, pepper, and vinegar. Cook on medium to medium high for, well, as long as it takes. The recipe said 60-90 minutes. I think I did more like 45. It was lovely.

Step 5 wait for Liz to come home and cross fingers that food is not awful. (it is a disadvantage that I don't like to taste while cooking. Luckily I broke this rule with the potatoes.

ELIZABETH * JULY 11 * DINNER

Here's the thing: she's not really a bad cook. Adventurous? No. Improvisational? Nyet. Edible? Totally. The cabbage was astonishingly tasty. It came out so sweet and succulent and delicious I thought it had sugar in it. The wiener was fine. They are very good sausages from 20th Century Meat Market - you would have to really try to screw them up. They are smoked wieners for Pete's sake. I don't know what herb it was on the noodles - it came in the CSA box. Maybe marjoram? Anyway again, noodles + butter + fresh herb = yum. When Kelly is the wife, it is home cookin, but really, what's wrong with that?

Welcome CSA partners - how about a breakfast pizza

KELLY * JULY 9 * BRUNCH

So, this was really meant to be the first blog post of the season. We were out of town for the first three veg deliveries of the season. Yes, sometimes life gets in the way of veg. We'd like to thank our CSA partners for valiantly claiming the veg and surprising us with what had not wilted when we got back from our unexpected (well, my unexpected) trip to Cleveland. When folks will double as cat sitters and veg deliverers, you have to hold on to those folks. Anyway, hats off to the Hotzmasters and Baby A for watching the cats and the veg.

That said, I went and picked up the veg this week. As always I stood in the pick up spot with a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other. I wasn't putting anything in the swap box, but could I take something out? I admit it, I took an extra chard (but that's for a later meal). Anyway, picked up the veg while my lovely gf prepared a tasty, delicious, and anything but mundane breakfast for the Hotzmasters and us. All I know is when I said, "Let's get us one of them there Boboli pizza crusts," this was not what I had in mind, but this woman can do things with an egg!

When our guests arrived, they were greeted with our bounty of veg, iced coffee (from a Zabar's blend I brought back from NYC), fresh blueberries with sugar and fresh mint (provided by Liz's Steppenwolf colleague), and a breakfast pizza of tomato sauce (win), sautéed red onion and zucchini (win), mozzarella (win), fresh basil, bacon (need I say it), and 4 eggs oven baked on top of said pizza (ding, ding, ding). Totally unique, light (despite the bacon-palooza), and summer-licious. I think all were in unmitigated agreement. Yes, summer had arrived. We were finally back home. And to paraphrase the immortal words of Bonnie Raitt, "it gave us somethin' to blog about."

So, it was something like this:

1 Boboli pizza crust
Half a giant zucchini (from CSA) sliced
Few slices of a red onion
6 pieces of bacon
A handful of rough chopped basil (CSA)
6oz of a shredded 3 cheese blend (asiago, mozzarella, and parm)
4 eggs
1/2 cup of Newman's Own Sockarooni sauce

Easy as pie. Top the crust with the sauce. Arrange chopped up pieces of bacon evenly on pie. Sautée onion and zucchini (okay, we totally did it in bacon grease) and arrange on pie. Add basil. Spread out cheese. Crack 4 eggs on top of pizza, being sure to neither break the yolk nor let the egg slide off. Bake at 450 for 15 minutes.

Slice, eat, tasty and delicious. The yolks get hardish but are intact and perfect.

(Hopefully Ms. Flauto will return to the keyboard soon. Right now she's narrating from inside her mystery novel across the room.)

The First Post of Summer: Gimme That Pie

Yes, we've been away for too long.  Work and life have both stepped in the way of blogging and cooking (but never eating).  The rush of winter, spring, and early summer brought us a dearth of exciting foods and an excess of work. Don't get me wrong, there was tasty goodness to be had. Sometimes we even remembered to take pictures of it, but in those cases, life seriously stepped on the toes of the blogging.  That said and in the words of creepy (and taken too soon) girl from Poltergeist, "We're Back."

Okay, now that we got that out of the way, despite the photo, I'm going to try to avoid any of the obvious pie jokes. (Okay, we all know, that pie is sitting in my lap.  Sometimes a girl has to snap a photo while driving to the party.  What's a girl to do??  Risk the pun.)  At the end of the day, this was just a lovely and simple blueberry pie. Sometimes you send your girlfriend out to get bourbon and a baguette and she comes home with rye and a GIANT box of blueberries instead.  So, you have mint juleps, contemplate the unexpected fruit, and determine, "Hey, I could make a heck of a pie."  After a lovely light breakfast side of blueberries and fresh mint (more to come on that later), I crammed another 3 cups of berries into said pie.

There's not so much to say about this here pie.  As I've said a million times in the past I swear by The Joy of Cooking and its pie crust.  It's easy. It's tasty. It's flaky.  It's just a no-brainer.  (Okay, I was almost lured by a cornmeal crust and a sweet corn ice-cream recipe, but as this pie was for someone's BBQ, I thought I'd go with old faithful. I hope to bring you the results of those other recipes later this summer.)  What this pie also proves (aside from the superiority of The Joy of Cooking) is that just because you're running out of ingredients does not mean that you can't pull off the pie.  There was a serious level of scrimping here: running out of sugar, no lemon, running out of non-sketchy Crisco. Fiddlesticks.  No worries. Cinnamon in place of lemon (lovely).  Using a disposable pie pan so you can leave it, you only need a single pie crust recipe to pull off a bottom crust and a lattice.  Go Pie!

What do you need?

Lovely Crust:

• 1 cup flour
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 2T water (and maybe 2T more)
• 1T butter
• 1/3 cup Crisco

So, hypothetically you sift the salt and flour together.  I skipped it this time. The wold did not end.  In another bowl, mix the Crisco and butter together.  Mix half of of the Crisco mixture (stop judging the Crisco. Loretta Lynn hawked it. It can't be that bad.) into the flour mixture.  (I swear by the use of a pastry blender. I'm not sure if it's the pastry blender or the magic of my late grandmother from whom said pastry blender came).  Mix in the second half.  It will start to look cornmeal-y or coarse.  Add the 2T of water, lifting with a fork. In the end, just use your hands to make it into a ball. If you need to add a couple more tablespoons of water, have at it.  For rolling out pie crust, I swear by putting it between 2 pieces of waxed paper.  Just peel from each side before you try to transfer.  As you can see, my pies are never works of art.  I lack precision and grace.  Nonetheless, they're tasty.

The blueberries (also from The Joy of Cooking, just reduced a bit because of the small pan):

• 3 cups fresh berries (4 if you're using a full-size 9inch pan)
• 2/3 to 1 cup or more sugar (I used a little under 2/3 and it needed  no more!)
• 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2T  lemon juice or 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon (I enjoyed the cinnamon and had no lemon)

Okay, so you're supposed to combine ingredients 2-4 before  you mix them in with the berries. Sometimes a girl doesn't actually read the directions and forgets to do so and just mixes them in one by one. No one died and the pie was delicious.  Let the berries sit for 15 minutes and juice up (I gave them 10).  


Bake at 450 for 10 minutes and then at 350 for another 35-40 minutes.  (I ended up turning it back up to 450 for the last 5 or 10 minutes to get my brown on.)


In short, tasty and delicious and thanks to Keri and Jeff Kersten for sending the pie back home with us. I shall now go wake Liz up and we shall head to the kitchen and enjoy leftovers.


Go Pie! And God Bless Loretta and her Crisco.

Cinco de Mayo-My!

Cinco de Mayo and we are back ya'll! I hit the Green City Farmers Market season premier on Wednesday morning and picked up some of the first fruits of the season. I got some kale (the brightest green I've ever seen), swiss chard, purple scallions, mixed wild mushroom, asparagus, fresh basil, mustard garlic (which is apparently a delicious weed), and an amazing honeycrisp apple I ate immediately. This morning Kelly suggested that she would feel deprived of Mexican food if I didn't do something about it, so I made:

Wild Mushroom and Poblano Tosdadas with Ancho Cream Sauce, Braised Asparagus with Smoked Serrano Salt, Black Beans, and Guacamole.

The tostadas were built on Los Pericos tostada shells (which I bought at Morse and assumed were local, but guess what, they are from California. Also please see this site as it is random and hilarious: http://chicagotostada.com/.) I topped them with sliced wild mushrooms from River Valley Ranch sauteed with sliced roasted poblanos and garlic dressed with lime. The sauce on top was sort of based on an Epicurious recipe for enchiladas, but mostly made up. I soaked three dried anchos we bought in a giant bag from Maxwell Street Market, cleaned and pureed them, then combined them with four cloves of garlic, a dollop of heavy cream, a tablespoon or two of honey, some of the liquor from the pepper-soaking, sea salt, and a pinch of ground cloves, ground ginger, and ground allspice. I blobbed some of that on top of the mushrooms, then sprinkled on some shredded cheese and popped it into the oven to melt.

Meanwhile Kelly made guacamole and I roasted the asparagus in some olive oil and water and we heated up a can of goya black beans (cheating but delicious and salty.) After plating we sprinkled on some Central Market Austin smoked serrano salt, which is spicy and smoky and salty and very delicious.

We have both been so looking forward to the coming of spring (where is it?!?) and some fresh veggies and the cooking. This was a fine start to the season. Looking forward to pasta with fresh mozzarella and basil with sausage, beans, and greens for dinner tomorrow!

Bless me bloggers for I have sinned. It has been six weeks since my last post.

Elizabeth * October 31 * Dinner(s)



It is appropriate that I should do this today, as we are marking the end of the CSA season - yesterday we got our last box for the year (and thank God, our last butternut squash). It has been a lovely and deeply satisfying experience to eat the changing seasons. However, in blogging we have slacked off. Kelly went back to school, I got busy with multiple projects, we got a little blogged out. Nonetheless, we have been collecting photos, some of which I will post here and now, with some attempt at recollection of the recipes. Kelly will do the same later on with the baking, which as you know is her department.

The first dish represented is from around the first week of September. It is a combination of a couple of recipes I love. One is my mom's pork chops, among my favorite dishes from my childhood. She slow-bakes them in a mixture of celery and onions in butter, and then tops them with sharp white cheddar. They melt in your mouth. For a faster and slimmer version, I quick pan-fried a pork chop and then topped it with sauteed onions and celery. This is combined with another favorite, from the Sopranos Cookbook: Pan-fried pork chops topped with pickled banana peppers. We have made these peppers several times - they are best when made with hot peppers from Fournie Farms in Collinsville, IL. See post of July 31, 2010 for peppers recipe and Sopranos link. I served this with fresh CSA zucchini and onion saute and some mashed potatoes. We liked it.

Second you see before you a dish we liked so much and ate so fast that I can hardly remember what was in it. We bought some fresh pork sausage from Crafthouse and fresh wild mushrooms from River Valley at Glenwood Sunday Market. I sauteed these items together with some onions, garlic, crushed chilis, and put them on some linguini. A little pecorino rounds it out and IT WAS AWESOME.

Third is the result of a craving I had for a burger. Kelly made me a turkey burger with blue cheese crumbles and bacon, fresh summer tomatoes, and baby field greens, on nutty wheat bread. She served it with some CSA kale chips and roasted yellow potatoes. Kale chips are like salty roasted fairy wings.

When Kelly came back from Austin in September, she brought back not only a bag of breakfast tacos for me from Maudie's (eaten in the car on the way home from O'Hare), but a selection of exciting spices from Central Market, one of my favorite places on earth. Among these was a jerk rub that I rubbed all over some chicken legs from Whole Foods, which will do in the absence of Central Market. Image four shows said chicken leg, pan-blackened and then finished in the oven, accompanied by some steamed CSA broccoli, fresh mini-yellow tomatoes courtesy of Jaime Hotz, and some rough-smashed CSA potatoes with sour cream and black pepper. K is currently moaning at the remembrance of this chicken. It was very spicy and VERY delicious.

Following that is one of many butternut squash dishes of the fall. We have gotten ALOT of squashes. We are both a little ambivalent about squash - I like it, but can get over it fast, and K is suspicious of it in most forms (she says it's too big). We have enjoyed it in many forms, and this was among the best. We discovered we both like it best when it is completely squashed squash. Here is a risotto made with butternut and fresh sage, both from the CSA, that was delish. Our favorite, a similar dish to this, was a fusilli pasta with a sort of squash sauce also made with garlic, sage, hot pepper, and pecorino.

Next to last please observe a delicata squash stuffed with sauteed kale, white beans, and hot turkey italian sausage with pecorino. Kelly very adventurously made this for me last week as I was going into tech for three simultaneous shows. It was great for a late dinner last weekend and great for lunch in between. Thanks, baby!

Last but certainly not least is tonight's dinner. Due to a back-log of veg and two weeks of overindulgence in the dining department, I wanted to make a homey but not too heavy soup with lots of good stuff in it. After about two hours of messing around in the kitchen, I eventually produced the above. It is beef, wild mushroom, and barley soup with carrots, turnip, celery, potato, onion, white beans, fresh thyme and parsley, in a chicken/beef/chardonnay broth. Billie Jo, make this soup. It is rich and very flavorful and filling and tastes like fall. We ate it with Russian pumpernickel toast with laughing cow cheese. Most of the veg and all the herbs are from Angelic, the mushrooms from River Valley again but via Green City Market this time, and the chardonnay from Markko Vineyard, Conneaut, OH, one of my many homes.

So, that's a brief catching up with some highlights of the last 6 weeks! We joined the CSA again for next year already, and in the off-season I am looking forward to exploring some more local vendors now that we won't be landing a load of veg automatically every week! I feel inspired by a great article in Cooking Light this week about artisan food products, and feel so lucky to be in such a great food city surrounded by plentiful lands. We scored some great stuff at Green City this weekend with Dad, Jackie, and Gwenda, so look forward to some lamb stew soon!

Kelly - Later That Night - October 31

Can I just say a few things?

(1) I have really missed the blog. Flauto has been insanely busy and a little blog burned and I have been itching to get back. Honestly, however, it's only half as fun with out my partner in blogging. In short, so glad that she did the turbo blog.

(2) THIS FOOD WAS SOOOOOO GOOD. I'd shank someone for that jerk chicken leg right now. The pork chops with the hot peppers were amazing (and we in fact have more peppers in the fridge just waiting to be pickled), kale chips rock the house (and are so, so, so, so easy), squash does not suck if you disguise it, and tonight's soup was amazing. We eat beef so seldom that it's kind of a treat to do so. This soup had a twinge of the hamburger noodle soup that we used to make in the mid 1990s.

(3) I AM SO SICK OF SQUASH!!! I find foods that are out of scale kind of creepy (e.g. baby carrots, baby corn, fava beans, hominy--although I've learned to give it a pass, and squash). For those of you who don't know, until my mid to late 20s I really only ate white and brown foods. My nickname in college was Kelly the carnivore. Some old habits die hard. In short, I'll miss the CSA boxes, but not the squash. We just visited our CSA boxmates today to pick up our last shipment and their counter was filled with a backlog of squash. It was like a big butternut nightmare.

(4) This summer has taught me not to fear some foods (even if squash are still eerie) and that farmers' markets are not necessarily a money suck and a hippie conspiracy.

(5) In case it doesn't come through in the blog, I want to say that I sure did marry well. Flauto can cook the dickens out of pretty much everything and I count myself a VERY lucky woman.

(6) Keep your eyes open for an upcoming blog post that will chronicle the last few baked goods that I made from the box. Talk soon (eat sooner).