Strawberry upside-down cake

I like making upside-down cakes. They can be a bit of a gamble: Will the whole thing come out of the pan beautifully, or will it crumble into a delicious, but hideous mess? When they come out well, they can be so beautiful: Glorious jewel-like fruit glistening in deep-brown caramel both gooey and with a lacy edge of crispness. Then there is the contrast of the slight hit of acid from the fruit against soft sweet cake. Oh yeah...

The other thing I like about them is that they are endlessly variable. Once you get a basic batter and caramel down, you can switch up the fruit and the flavor of the batter in nearly endless ways (which just sparked an idea about inventing a savory upside-down cake at some point--maybe later this summer with tomatoes and some of the beautiful goat cheese from Cherry Glen--but I digress). For example, during summer you could use peaches, plums, cherries, blackberries--whatever is fresh and good and loading down the tables at the farmer's market. In fall, you could use apples, pears, and cranberries. To complement different fruits, you could flavor the batter with lemon zest, cinnamon, cardamom, vanilla--whatever strikes your fancy and suits your tastes.

In this case, my fancy was struck when I went looking for strawberry-intensive recipes for a treat to bring to a brunch. I came across several tasty ones at Joy the Baker's blog, including a brown butter banana strawberry bread (looks so delicious) and a strawberry balsamic flatbread (most intriguing), but what really sparked my thinking was the strawberry upside-down cake with cardamom. Oh yeah! I could make an upside-down cake with strawberries. Only, instead of using cardamom, I would caramelize the strawberries, and instead of cinnamon in my batter, I would use lemon zest because lemon and strawberries just play so nicely together. Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy.

So I got to work. I had a quart of strawberries from the farmer's market to hull (I bought two actually, but the other one is for eating fresh), caramel to make, and a batter to whip up. Here's how to proceed.*

Topping

• 6 Tbsp unsalted butter
• 1 packed cup brown sugar
• 1 Tbsp local honey
• 1 quart strawberries, hulled and sliced 

(If you aren't using a cast-iron skillet to make this cake, make the caramel separately on the stove and then pour it into the cake pan you plan to use; use an 8- to 9-inch pan. Springform would probably help you out a bunch.)

1. Pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. 
2. Melt the butter, let it get foamy and slightly brown. (Keep an eye on it, you do not want burnt butter in your cake. Or in any dish you make, ever.)
3. Add brown sugar and honey and stir until the brown sugar is mostly melted. 
4. Take the pan off the heat and add the strawberries. (The heat of the sugar-butter mixture will slightly cook the strawberries, and a scent will rise that is indescribably beautiful. Just breathe it in and count yourself lucky to experience such a thing of ephemeral beauty.) If you are using a cake pan, pour the whole mixture into the pan. Set it aside while you make the batter.   

Cake Batter

• 6 Tbsp butter, room temperature
• 1 cup white sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• zest from one lemon, finely chopped or grated
• 1/2 cup whole milk

1. Using a stand mixer, whip the butter silly. No. Sorry. Whip the butter until it's fluffy. The paddle attachment is good for this.  
2. Add the sugar to the butter and whip that until it's creamy. If you are starting with cold butter, this could take a while.
3. While the butter and sugar are working, add flour, baking powder, salt, and lemon zest to a bowl. Mix everything together with a whisk and set it aside. 
4. OK, now that your butter and sugar is fluffy and pale gold, add one egg at a time. Beat them into the butter-sugar mixture until fluffy. Even more fluffy! Lots of fluffy. 
5. Next, mix in the vanilla extract. 
6. Finally add the flour mixture and the milk, alternating between about a third of the flour and a third of the milk until you've added it all. Mix until the flour and the milk are just incorporated and then stop the machine. (If you keep beating the batter, you will get a tough cake. And you don't want a tough cake unless you are planning to throw it at someone you are mad at. And why would you be mad at someone? You have these gorgeous strawberries and this fluffy cake batter.)
7. Scrape the batter over the strawberries and caramel and smooth the batter as best you can (this is a thick batter that doesn't spread very easily, but don't worry about it being uneven; it will spread nicely in the oven). 
8. Slide the pan into the hot oven and let it bake for 1 hour and 5 minutes. Take it out and let it cool for 30 minutes before flipping it over onto a serving plate. Enjoy it warm or cold. Serve it with ice cream or some fresh whipped cream or all by itself.

* This recipe was adapted from this oh-so-good plum upside-down cake from Epicurious.

Chocolate-chip lace cookies

I have been trying to corral my thoughts about Josh Vertiel's article in The Atlantic about the need to be fair to both farmer and eater and haven't really gotten them broken in yet. Until I do, I am going to have a  chocolate chip lace cookie and try to tire out my racing thoughts.

I based these cookies on a recipe for what's called havre flarn in Bonniers Stora Kokbok; I think flarn is equivalent to lace cookie, but I could be wrong. Anyway, they look lacy. I added some chocolate chips and sprinkled a little fleur de sel on top to balance the sweetness. They are incredibly easy to put together--just blend the ingredients in a bowl, drop teaspoonsful on your baking sheet, and slide them into a 385-degree oven (Fahrenheit) for nine minutes. Make sure to leave lots of space between them because they spread out a lot during baking. 

Ingredients

• 3 deciliters rolled oats
• 2 deciliters sugar (if you have any vanilla sugar, this is a nice place for it)
• 1/2 deciliter sugar cane or corn syrup
• 150 grams melted butter (don't use margarine--just don't)
• 1/2 deciliter half-and-half
• 1 and 1/2 deciliter all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 to 1 cup chocolate chips (bittersweet is good, but any flavor will do)
• fleur de sel (to sprinkle on afterward)

Tips for Success

• Use parchment paper to line your baking sheets because the cookies will be very soft when they first come out of the oven; they harden up as they cool.
• Use two teaspoons to measure out each lump of dough onto the parchment and space them well (better to make more batches than get one gigantic glob). Try to keep the cookies as consistently sized as possible. Consistency means even cooking. 
• Watch the first batch carefully. The edges and tops of the cookies should start turning golden-brown, but they can burn quickly. Adjust the timing and temperature slightly up or down as needed. 
• Let the cookies sit in the pan for a few minutes before you slide them onto your cooling grates. They are so soft when they first come out that it's really easy to tear them. 
• Sprinkle salt while they are still hot so that the salt adheres to the cookie. 
• Try not to eat them all right away. :)

Now, I will try to get back eventually with some sort of cogent discussion of Josh Vertiel's stance on Slow Food USA, but in the meantime, mmmmm.  

Local food is elitist? Part I

I am fan of Mark Bittman. I don't always agree with him, but I do more often than not. His recent post, "Local Food: No Elitist Plot," really pissed me off. Not because I disagree with Bittman, but because of this notion that eating local food in season is in some way elitist and snobby. Really? The method of sourcing food that we've used to get our food for about 250,000 years is elitist? Wow. The fundamental reason for the planet's many and distinctive food cultures is snobby? What a thoroughly ridiculous, absurd idea.

So what's perceived as elitist about it? For one thing, local food is nearly always placed in direct opposition to fast food, junk food, convenience foods of any kind--sort of the local, liberal, environmentally friendly yin to the industrial yang of cheap food. (Don't get me wrong: I know several local farmers, and their political leanings run the gamut.) Fast food is cheap and noncomplex and requires no work to prepare and eat; thus it appeals to many fundamental American values. By providing a lot of food for what seems like little money (here's another Bittman piece about the supposed cheapness of fast food), it wraps itself in a robe of thriftiness, of good old American hard-workingness. By dimming our senses with blasts of salt and sugar, it ensures we are incapable of experiencing the subtler pleasures of real food. And finally, by being so easy to get, it suggests respect for the value of our time. It seems to say, "I understand you don't have time for this fancy food nonsense; here's something that'll get the eating job done so that you can get on with the hard work of your day."

In contrast, local food does not seem cheap, especially if you are used to getting groceries from discount chains. If you typically buy a dozen eggs for 99 cents, $5 for a dozen will sting. However, you pay for that cheap-looking 99 cents in a lot of other ways both financial and, well, moral: taxes that pay for industrial farm subsidies, farmworker abuse, environmental costs, mass food poisoning events, other health costs, and so forth. (I would love to see a study that calculates the real cost of a dozen eggs. If anyone has ever seen one, please let me know.) When you  realize that the farmer at the farmer's market is demanding prices that cover his or her real costs and that you already paid extra for the cheap food at the grocery store, those high prices seem a lot less unreasonable and elitist(1). (Also, you start to ask yourself, who asked my permission to spend my money on appeasing on giant, industrial corn producers?)

Another problem with the seeming cheapness of industrial food is that when you make something seem cheap, people will start to treat it that way. In other words, it loses its value. This may not seem like that big a deal; why would it matter that people think food is cheap? Well, for one thing, cheapening food devalues the very hard labor that people put into growing it (and if you are a meat eater like me, minimizes the life of the animal). And that just kind of sticks in my craw a bit.

But devaluing food also has implications for human culture and health. Sharing food, eating together, teaching one another to cook--all these food-related activities and more comprise some of the most important ways that people create and transmit culture as well as form bonds with one another. When the food you eat loses value, you are less likely to engage in those kinds of behaviors. When you pick up that  super-extra-duper-value meal at the drive-through window and eat it in the car on the way home, you lose opportunities to communicate with other people, to learn something, to teach something, or even to just relax and enjoy your food--to enrich your life. So the food and the eating experience don't satisfy. You end up wanting more (whether food or human interaction is another question). Food loses it specialness; it becomes something to engage in any time, any place. So you eat more. And more. And then the portion sizes seem off if they aren't huge. And the taste seems bland if the food isn't drenched in salt or sugar. And suddenly you find yourself weighing more, struggling with hypertension and/or diabetes, wondering how the heck it happened.

Speaking of wondering what happened, I seem to have gotten off track of my original topic, which was the absurdity of the elitism charge on local food, so I will get back to that in a future blog post. (I've also got some nice recipes for cream of tomato soup and finally made some great red beans and rice.)

(1) Of course, not everyone can afford food from the local farmer's market, but that has a lot to do with the way the current system is set up. If more farm subsidies were shifted from producing mass quantities of cheap commodity grain to local fruit and vegetable farms, it seems fairly certain that local farmers could and would lower their prices. That's more of a political issue, not just a change your personal habits and the market will come kind of issue.

[This was also published (with a prettier picture) at Pick-a-Pepper, a great website devoted to connecting local farmers, food artisans, and producers with local consumers, restaurants, and institutions. Check it out!]

My grandmother's pancakes

That's my Icelandic grandmother, or Amma, on the far left in the tweed suit, holding a fur hat in her hand. This picture was probably taken when I was about six or seven, at least 33 years ago. That's me on the far right, in the rust-red pants, brown turtleneck, leg cocked back slightly. Between me and my grandmother are my uncle, his two first children, my grandfather (Afi), and my aunt. I am not sure who stands behind my aunt. This was taken somewhere in Iceland. We are on a picnic. Perhaps we are here to pick blueberries or krækiberjum (crowberries); I imagine we are.


My grandmother's clothes in this photo interest me. She is dressed so well for a trip to a wild meadow surrounded by distant mountains. Did she always dress this nicely when going out, regardless of where she was going? I honestly can't remember. My memories of her only come in bits and pieces now: a glimpse of her through the glass upon landing at the old Reykjavik airport, her bundling me up in a thick woolen Icelandic sweater to keep me warm, the teddy bears she knitted for me, her calling me by my cousin's name when illness had devastated her memory. She had a soft round face with a little peach fuzz on her skin and usually wore her hair in a net. But these memories are so deeply inadequate to suggest a person's life or what she meant to me. Here's my only other photo of her, with me and Afi on a boat in Sweden:

Food memories stand in for much that I've never really known about my grandparents. For example, Afi and Amma always bought a particular brand of chocolate-flavored cereal when I came to visit. I think they bought it just for me, and I loved it. Even though I no longer eat processed cereal, when I smell that particular brand of cereal, and it has a very particular smell, I find myself back at their small kitchen table, eating out of the bowl with the picture at the bottom. I see my grandfather winding up a toy with a key and kneeling down stiffly to set it loose on the kitchen floor. I see all kinds of details about their apartment: the glass doors to the dining room with the etched fish and bubbles, the cuckoo clocks, the couch stuffed with so many decorative cushions no one could sit on it, the blue cot I slept on, the textured concrete of the balcony. Outside was a gray and green world that smelled of fish and harbor. 


Inside fresh, cold air wafted through the lace curtain at an open window, the sounds of traffic rose from the road below, and a huge stack of thin pancakes grew in the kitchen. Now my family calls these pancakes Swedish pancakes. I don't know how or why that happened. I always liked them, the pancakes, but I had no idea they would leave me with such powerful sense memories. In essence, they are thin, sweet crepes with a slightly lemony flavor, but to me they represent memories of Iceland, of the vast banquets of cakes, kleinur, cookies, sweets, and pea and carrot salad on crackers served as just a little afternoon "coffee." We seemed to have these little coffees every day at every relative's house. The pancakes were also served as a special occasion dessert with whipped cream and jam. We had them as picnic food, sprinkling on sugar and rolling them into tubes like cigars. The crunch of the raw sugar at the center of a soft pancake roll makes the memories for me. 

The ingredients are simple enough, but these pancakes take a little practice to get right. It also takes a little experimentation with your equipment. It took me several tries with various spatulas and pans and measures until I found just the right way to make them. They should be very thin with a fine lace edge. They should be browned just right on both sides.

The ingredients:

• 2 medium eggs
• 3 deciliters milk
• 1/8 tsp salt
• 1 Tbsp sugar
• 1.5 deciliters all-purpose flour
• zest of one lemon
• 4 Tbsp butter (divided)

The equipment:

• medium bowl
• balloon whisk
• fine zester
• 1/4 cup measuring cup
• frying pan about 8-9 inches in diameter
• a pastry brush
• a small sauce pan
• a hard spatula that covers at least half the pan.

Now, for some explanations for the equipment choices. Bowl, whisk, zester? Well, what do you think? The size of the measuring cup and the pan, however, do matter. If you just barely fill the measuring cup, you will get the perfect amount of batter to spread across your pan. Pan size also matters. If it is too big, the batter will set before you have time to coat it with batter. Too small, and the pancake will be too thick. With the right size pan and a bare quarter cup of batter, you'll get just the right thickness every time. Spatula size also really matters here, because you want it to support as much as possible of your pancake so that you can easily flip it.  Pastry brush and small sauce pan are for buttering the pan every time you start a new pancake. Don't assume there's going to be enough butter left in the pan; there won't be.

Now, how do you make the pancakes? First off, make the batter: Melt 4 tablespoons butter in a small sauce pan. Mix milk and eggs in your bowl and whisk in 2 tablespoons melted butter (the butter will look curdled because it will get cold in the milk; don't worry about it as long as it's somewhat evenly dispersed). (Leave the remaining butter in the sauce pan on low temperature.) Mix salt, sugar, and flour together and add the flour mixture in batches to the liquid, whisking continuously to avoid lumps (small lumps are not a problem; if you get big ones, you'll probably need to strain the batter). Whisk in the lemon zest. Voila, batter! 

  

Next, make the pancakes. Heat your 8-9 inch frying pan on medium heat. Give it at least five minutes to let it get hot enough and to even out the temperature. Brush the pan with melted butter (just the barest amount to cover the pan, but not pool). It will sizzle a bit. 

Add just slightly less than 1/4 cup of the batter to the pan. Quickly swirl the batter around to coat the pan. If you get a hole or two, don't fret, it will still taste wonderful, just try to cover the pan as evenly as possible. 

Let it cook for about a minute or two. Feel around the edges with the spatula, once you are able to get the spatula under the pancake without tearing it, take a peek at the underside.

When you like the color, get the spatula as far under the pancake as you can and turn it over. You can help a little with your other hand as needed. Also, if it sort of lands in the pan a little folded, all is not lost, you can shake the pan around and straighten out the pancake. Then cook until you like the color on the underside (another minute or two). Transfer the pancake to a plate. Then start from the beginning again: brush the pan with a little bit of melted butter...

It does take a little practice to make them pretty, but even if you rip and tear the first ones, don't worry about it. They will still be good. Serve rolled up with sugar. Serve with maple syrup. Serve with jam and whipped cream. Eat them straight. Or eliminate the sugar in the batter and serve with a savory filling. Just enjoy them. 

Lime-peach upside-down cake: The experiment

So. I did it. You know, the experiment? With the limes and the peaches and the cake and whatnot that I mentioned I wanted to try yesterday? Yeah, I made a lime-peach upside-down cake, and as you will see, the experience had its ups and downs.

So I started with my go-to recipe for all the upside-down cakes I make and then made some modifications.

I zested two limes.

I melted six tablespoons of butter in my cast-iron skillet slowly over low heat.

I added a cup of brown sugar to the butter in the pan.

I juiced the two limes and added the juice to the sugar and butter in the pan.

I added a tablespoon of honey to the sugar, butter, and lime juice in the pan.

Then I let the mixture simmer on low heat until the sauce thickened.

While the lime caramel simmered in the pan, I started on the batter. First I beat six tablespoons of softened butter in my stand mixer until it was creamy.

Then I added a cup of white sugar to the butter and beat that until it was creamy.

I added the lime zest (about one tablespoon) and two eggs to sugar and butter and once again beat it until it was creamy. (It's funny how hard we have to work over our food sometimes. I imagine the molecules with little black eyes. Oh boy. Don't mind me.) Then I added a half teaspoon of vanilla extract. (Usually I scrape the seeds out of half a vanilla bean, but I couldn't find any in the cupboard, which is always overflowing with spices, some of which I don't use because I bought them in the heat of excitement over something or other).

Then I mixed one and a half cups of all-purpose flour, two teaspoons of baking powder, and a quarter teaspoon of salt in a bowl and measured out a half cup of milk. I proceeded to alternate adding milk and flour mixture to eggs, butter, sugar, etc. in the bowl. (About three measures of each and at low speed, otherwise the flour will fly up into a cloud and make you look like an old man, which is of course not a problem if you are an old man, but I am not yet, so I avoid it.)

The next step was to add the peaches to the caramel mixture in the pan. (I used frozen peach slices left from last year--there were about two peaches worth in the bag. The texture of the peaches was pretty mushy, so I would recommend fresh peaches or other fruit.)

I poured the batter on top of the peaches. Poured is generous, more like scraped and smeared. This batter is not runny, and it's not supposed to be. Try to spread it evenly over the fruit and caramel in the pan. (By the way, if you don't have a cast-iron pan, you can do this in an eight-inch cake pan. Just start your caramel in a thick-bottomed pan on the stove and then pour it into your cake pan. However, I think that you should run out and get a cast-iron pan; they are cheap, last forever, and incredibly wonderful to work with if you get a good season on them. Like now. Go. Run. I will wait for you.)

Put the pan into a 350-degree oven and set the timer for one hour and five minutes. Now, if you use eggs that you can trust, gorge yourself on every last morsel of batter that you can scrape out of the bowl. I literally made some kind of grunting Neanderthal noise while trying to shove my face into the bowl (with little success) to get every last molecule of this batter. It's that good. No. Really. Trust me on this.

OK, when the timer went off an hour and a half later I pulled the cake out of the oven (it turned out a little darker than usual, I probably should have pulled it out a little earlier). I placed the whole pan on a rack to rest for 30 minutes. Dum de dum de dum de dum. Twiddling fingers. Pacing.

Finally, it was time for the great reveal. I scraped around the edges of the cake with a butter knife to loosen it, and holding a plate on top of the pan, I flipped it over. I pulled up the pan. Nothing on the plate but a couple of crumbs. Hm. OK. Scrape around the edges again. Do the flip thing again, and, don't laugh, the thing comes out in big broken chunks.

Damn! Typical! I have made this cake so many times, and it has come out beautifully every time. The one time I want to show it off to the world, it turns out a big mess. Oh well. It tastes great. I am pretty sure it turned out such a disaster because the fruit was so mushy. If I had used fresh peaches (and perhaps more of them), it would have been beautiful.

Notes on the source recipe: For this recipe I eliminated the cinnamon that is usually added to the flour mixture. I didn't think that lime and cinnamon would be a happy combination. I also added lime juice to the caramel mixture. When I make this recipe with other fruits, I generally follow the recipe as is, minus the almond extract. I like almonds, but I've got a thing about almond extract and other almond-scented stuff. It just gives me the willies. I know, weird, right. Well, everyone has their hangups. I also detest celery and do all I can to avoid it.