Tiny chocolate cups are for chumps.
All the best tourist guidebooks seem to agree that they’re entirely traditional and absolutely vital when it comes to imbibing ginjinha — that delicious Portuguese sour cherry liqueur — in Lisbon, or Porto, or anywhere else on its Iberian home terrain. But while I have nothing but respect for good old Rick Steves and his globetrotting colleagues who write these things, on this one small point, I must disagree.
A couple of summers ago, now, Sarah and I invited a vegetarian friend to come to dinner. I was really excited to cook for her, and planned an elaborate menu out ahead of time: soup, composed salads, pasta primavera from our garden, and crisp for dessert. It was going to be great.
And it was going great, too, until it came time to cook the pasta. By that point in the meal prep, the part of me that was committed to making a fancy dinner had taken over, leaving the part of me that was making a fancy dinner for a vegetarian far behind. The pasta water came to a boil. And without giving it much thought, I reached for the upscaliest noodles that I had on hand: squid-ink spaghetti from Claudio’s Specialty Foods in Philadelphia’s Italian market.
For the sake of full disclosure, you need to know that this recipe for sour cherry upside down cake is recycled with only a little modification from last year’s model: a peach cake in the same style. In the previous edition, I claimed that the point of the recipe was to rehabilitate the upside down cake genre, which has been saddled with all manner of unfortunate business like canned pineapple rings, cheapy maraschino cherries, and an aesthetic that screams at the top of its little pastry lungs: I’ve just come from the 1950s, and I’m here to help!
In that post, I said that this cake calls for two key modifications that make it a delight, rather than a chore, to eat: 1) I use real fruit and only real fruit in this recipe, eschewing the canned stuff in favor of whatever is local and in season; and 2) I’ve turned this into a yogurt-based cake, which leads to a texture that is moist but not soggy, and that adds just the tiny bit of creamy tang you need to complement the acidity of the fruit.
At this point, dear readers, you must surely already be aware of my deep and abiding love of Star Trek. But what you probably don’t know about me is that Star Trek is hardly the only shipborne drama that catches my imagination. I’m a sucker for all things nautical, too.
Wherever I travel, if my companions show even the slightest tinge of amenability, one of the first items on my touristy to-do list is to find the local maritime museum. In Reykjavik, it was a dockside exhibition showcasing the importance of fishing and whaling to the Icelandic economy. In Tallinn, it was a museum of nautical mines (the explody kind), followed by the Estonian Maritime Museum, nestled inside of a medieval stone turret named Fat Margaret. Blocks and lines, sextants, scrimshaw, or any other oceanic artifact instantly catches my interest. And especially if there’s a robust and well-sourced explanatory card attached, it’s difficult to drag me away.
I’m all alone this weekend. Sarah has gone a’visiting, and left me here to make my own fun.
I don’t actually much enjoy cooking for one, and usually, when this happens, my food situation quickly becomes more than a little bit dire. Either I revert to a state of stereotypical bachelorhood and subsist on boxed ramen, cereal, blocks of mediocre cheese, and the more nourishing varieties of beer. Or I decide to splurge and eat only the foods that I love, but that I know Sarah can’t abide: whole crabs, olives, and the occasional piece of steak.
Kraut, in the United States, isn’t a very nice word. Dating back to the nineteenth century, the stereotype of the sauerkraut-eating German immigrant was already a thing, and showed up in all the usual places — anecdotes in newspapers, on the minstrel stage, etc. — where one might expect humor at the expense of some racial or ethnic group or another.
During World War I, Kraut became a metonym for German, German became synonymous with wicked, and it became acceptable to use the term as a sneer or a snub, as a way of stirring up enmity and making school-children whose parents derived from Deutchland feel lousy about themselves and about their national heritage.
Grilling time is here again, and I’ve been thinking a lot about something. I don’t know about you all, but when I’m getting ready to cook burgers outside, especially for friends, I put a lot of thought and effort into finding the right kind of pastured, sustainable, local meat. I am careful to gather and slice only the snootiest organic tomatoes and cucumbers to use as a topping. I go shopping at the fancy cheese store for the most complementary dairy accompaniments. And I’m even pretty careful about which lump charcoal I use.
But when it comes to the buns, it’s kind of a different thing. Though in other circumstances I am a total bread snob, often as not I end up using those horrible, squishy packaged jobs from the cut-rate grocery down the street. And it’s not just a matter of convenience. When I think about those buns at all, it’s with a little shot of pleasure.
Here are some helpful rules for heading out to a local farm to pick your own produce:
Always wear sunscreen. And don’t forget dabs for your neck, ears, and the small of your back (plumbers out there, you know what I’m talking about).
Drink lots of water, and take lots of breaks. Fruit season is hot here in the mid-Atlantic, and you wouldn’t want to overdo it.
Don’t pick more than you need. Call this the ‘save some for the fishes’ rule, if you want. The point is that the next group might want some berries / peaches / asparagus, too.
And above all, be nice to the plants.
It wasn’t my plan to start a new mead this past week. On Monday, I thought to myself that this summer might be a good time to test the waters of melomel, fruit mead, a style that I had never attempted before. But later in the summer would be better, I thought, when blackberries were ready, or even once pears had come into their bloom. Definitely, there should be melomel sometime this season. But definitely, that sometime was not now.
And then there were strawberries — buckets and buckets of the best strawberries in the greater Philadelphia area, ripe almost to bursting, at a price that was far too good to be refused.
This may be the shortest, simplest recipe that I’ve ever posted in this space. So short is it that I’ll give you all the ingredients right here: coffee, water, and time. So simple is it that I’d feel a little silly writing about cold brew coffee at all, except that — surprisingly — not a lot of people know you can do it, and lots of folks who do know think that you need some complicated plastic contraption like a Toddy Cold Brew System to make it work.
You can use the Toddy if you want, dear readers, but it’s not necessary. All you need is a mason jar, a coffee grinder, and maybe one or two other items that aren’t vital, but that make filtering and clean-up a wee bit quicker.