This summer I have a new obsession thanks to the cookbook Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way, by Francis Mallmann: charred tomatoes. Several of Mallmann’s listed appetizers call for burning the featured vegetable (cherry tomatoes or carrots) or cheese and then platting the singed goodness on bread or a salad. With a slightly skeptical mind I tested it out on a hot cast iron skillet with halved cherry tomatoes, and now I can’t stop eating my tomatoes this way.

Charred or burnt tomatoes with cheese on bread has become my breakfast and after work snack in this glorious time of bountiful tomatoes. And since this is a weekend, you can guess what I’m eating three times a day…

Charred tomatoes and cheese on bread

Preheat a cast iron skillet on med-high heat. You’ll want the surface to be hot: judge by being able to hold your hand above the surface of the skillet for no more than 2 seconds.

Slice a small handful of cherry tomatoes in half, or cut 1/4 inch slices off of a large tomato. Sprinkle a pinch of salt over the cut sides.

Assemble 1 oz of cheese (any type will work) in small thumb sized chunks and 2 small slices of bread to be close to your hot skillet.

Place the cut tomatoes, cut side down on the hot skillet. Make sure to obey Francis Mallmann’s 1st commandment of food making contact with a heated surface “Don’t Touch”.

After 1 minute, place the cheese chunks down on the skillet in the space remaining around the tomato slices. Place the pieces of bread along side to toast lightly.

Leave the cheese and tomatoes on the hot skillet for approximately 4 minutes at which time they will be burnt on the cooking surface.

Place the toasted bread slices on a plate, and with a nice sharp edged metal spatula, scrape/lift the charred tomato slices and cheese on to the bread, burnt side up (so it won’t get all steamy soggy).

Allow to cool slightly and dust with another slight sprinkle of salt and enjoy.

When its too darn hot outside, do I want to fire up the stove top to turn these fruity gems into jam? No.

To deal with over-ripening fruit super quick, my answer is to make popsicles. It’s a great answer for when your fruit is a ticking time bomb, developing a pool of juice love at the bottom of its storage container.

And when made with a judicious hand, these treats are perfectly allowable as guilt-free breakfast treats, (I say typing one handed with a cantaloupe black pepper pop). I like to think of them as summer’s answer to homemade poptarts, but even better.

Summer fruit popsicles

You don’t really need to be told how to make popsicles, but here’s a break down to help stir up your creative juices.

• First step: is to clear a bit of space in the freezer.
  A two-birds-with-one-stone approach to this process is to find some frozen fruit from last season you need to clear out and make this the target of your popsicle fixation.
• Second step: is to build the body of your pop up with your target fruit.
  Either stick your fruit in a blender (melons) or mash them up with a fork or potato masher (strawberries) to get a good sludge going.
• Third step: consider your options for popsicle body additions. Do you want these to be no-nonsense popsicles, or adventurous, creamy, chunky, caffeinated popsicles?
  
  • salt: I always add a touch of salt when making my popsicles. It helps get the juices flowing and always makes them taste even better.
  • extra sweetness: honey, agave nectar, rice syrup, jam, maple syrup, molasses, dissolved sugar (white granulated, brown, or palm).
  • chocolate: if I want chocolatey popsicles I like to mix up 2 Tbs of cocoa powder with ~2 Tbs boiling water. Add enough additional water to make this into a pudding like consistency.
  • liquid: water, juice, dairy, coconut milk, coffee, tea, vinegar.
  • dairy: keifer, yogurt, sour cream, milk, half and half, cottage cheese, custard or pudding.
  • toothsome bits: more fruit left whole or chunky, cocoa nibs, coffee grounds, bits of nuts, cookie crumbs, soaked cake cubes, vanilla bean specks.
  • spices and flavors: cinnamon, peppers (black pepper or chili), saffron, curry, cilantro, nutmeg, vanilla, mint, lemon, fresh garden herbs.
• Fourth step: pour your popsicle concoction into the mold of your choice.
  My favorite is my 1/2 cup Food Cuber.
• Fifth step: stick consideration.
  Add your popsicle sticks immediately if your mold is designed for such, or just pop them into your popsicles about 1 hour after freezing.
  
  The popsicle sticks can be many things: spoons, cinnamon sticks, flat skewers (I use wide flat bamboo skewers cut down to an appropriate size- as seen on amazon or your local cooking supply stores), chopsticks, or good ole clean recycled popsicle sticks.
• Sixth step: finishing touches to fancy-up your popsicles.
  Homemade magic shell is divine on strawberry popsicles. White chocolate magic shell on lemon pudding popsicles? You could even sprinkle ground nuts or sprinkles onto the magic shell right before it hardens, (but then you’d have clown popsicles).
• Storage: most popsicles can just be left in their popsicle molds, in the freezer. However, if mold space is at a premium because you have more popsicles screaming to be made, just pop your finished popsicles out into an air tight container. I use either large ziplock bags or large mason jars. As flavors can sometimes migrate, its best to keep different flavors separate, unless you want that chipotle banana mocha popsicle to mingle with your mango yogurt pop.

Enjoy!

Not only that, it’s nestled in between slices of the grainiest bread I know and melted to oblivion. Half-n-half grilled cheese style: horseradish chive havarti and pepperdew havarti.

How do you like to make your grilled cheese grown up?

Weekend Update

New favorite grilled cheese- grainy bread, horseradish chive havarti, and thin sliced pear.

Well, now you’re going to know my secret source for intriguing new recipes.

Delving into the world of raw recipes can seem daunting at first (it really is a whole new world of summer suited dehydrating and freezing techniques) but one is quickly rewarded in the development of a new arsenal of food preparation techniques.

And Yes, reading a raw recipe book can be a nice kick in the butt to eat more fruits and vegetables to supplement my cooked diet. However, Ani Phyo’s raw recipe books serve primarily to remind myself of how successful simple, bright wholesome flavors are.

Her latest book Ani’s Raw Food Desserts: 85 Easy, Delectable Sweets and Treats contains a wide range of raw recipes. From classic coconut oil based chocolates, nut based scones, dairy and tofu free “cream” concoctions, to simple unrecipes of Fleur de Sel Kissed Watermelon and apples dusted with fresh rosemary; Ani Phyo presents ample opportunities to enjoy your summer fruits in a new way.

New tricks I learned: using cacao powder, pairing mesquite flour with chocolate, and playing up agave syrups. Reading through Ani’s Raw Food Desserts shook up my conservative approach to using this sweetner. Now I can’t wait to toss fresh lavender blossoms in agave syrup, or to create a whole bottle of cinnamon nutmeg seasoned syrup for yogurt drizzles.

Featured below is one of the new recipes from Ani’s Raw Food Desserts: Sesame Snap Cookies. These speckled fruit patties are bombs of flavor: tart apricot with crunchy pistachios and sesame seeds that pop in the teeth, and they’re super easy to make with the use of a food processor. I think these will be my new super quick breakfast to grab out the door, when I’m not imagining them covered with chocolate, that is.

Sesame Snap Cookies

From the book Ani’s Raw Food Desserts by Ani Phyo. Excerpted by arrangement with Da Capo Lifelong, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright (c) 2009. Find out more at www.dacapopresscookbooks.com.

Makes 10 cookies

• 1 cup dried apricots
• 1/2 cup shelled pistachios
• 1/2 cup sesame seeds
• 1 teaspoon lemon extract or lemon juice
• 1 teaspoon agave syrup

Place the apricots in the food processor and process into a paste. Add the pistachios, sesame seeds, lemon extract, and agave syrup and process to mix well.

Scoop the dough by 1 1/2 teaspoons onto a sheet tray lines with parchment and flatten into cookies.

Will keep for a week in the fridge or for several weeks in the freezer (thaw before eating).

Variations:
If you love herbs, try adding 1/2 teaspoon fresh thyme or tarragon to the dough. Or add 1/2 teaspoon minced fresh ginger for zing.

We found ourselves habitually lingering over breakfast at Le Pichet, enjoying the simplicity of a petite breakfast muddled with the wrappings of a French title. Yaourt fabrication maison au miel et noix? How about thick whole milk yogurt with a sunken treasure of honeyed walnuts? I heard your heart just speed up in anticipation didn’t I?

House-made yogurt with honey and walnuts is a breakfast easily assembled to enjoy through out the week and on special lazy weekends with a baguette, butter and marmalade.

Honeyed Walnuts with Yogurt

Honeyed walnuts: toasted walnuts preserved in honey
Preheat oven to 350F.

Distribute in a pan 1-2 cups of walnut halves and pieces. The amount I use is as many walnut pieces will fit into a mason jar. Toast until fragrant and slightly golden. Tip the warm toasted walnut halves and pieces into a glass storage jar (like a mason jar). Cover with honey. This jar will keep indefinitely at room temperature on the shelves of your pantry or cupboard.

Assembly
This breakfast is best enjoyed with a high quality yogurt, and in a small cup.
Using your best whole milk plain yogurt, spoon about 1/2 cup into a serving dish. Spoon 1-2 tablespoons of your honeyed walnuts into the middle, pushing down slightly to create a nearly hidden sunken treasure.

Enjoy!

Ah, caught in the act of walking the semi-homemade line. “I figure I can always make them myself next time,” I offered apologetically.

“It’s cool, cause then you know what’s in them..” she continued while looking over the package of gyoza wrappers.

But I don’t know what’s in the store bought wrappers, I thought to myself, puzzled.

Oooooh, you mean… yeah, nevermind. Just a neurotic foodie here feeling silly about buying gyoza wrappers instead of making them.

I made a breakthrough this weekend with the help of this YumSugar video on how to fold potstickers. This is my first time getting the technique down, little gyoza pleats and everything.

The filling I made resulted from the simple recipe on the wrapper package. Except, I used raw bacon in place of ground pork, and whirled everything up in the food processor.

I made two types of potstickers: shrimp with pork flavored with toasted sesame oil, and garlic lamb sausage with pork ginger ones. To distinguish the two types, I used a toothpick touched with red food coloring to dot all the shrimp ones.

The results were juicy, salty, and so cute. I was very pleased and couldn’t help but tweet my joy (twitter = the lazy way to blog).

Next time, I’ll try homemade wrappers too for the double whammy. I can hardly wait.

No need to struggle over what flavors go together or which textures accentuate your lettuces the best- seasonality often takes care of those questions for you. Paying attention to the selections of your farmer’s markets will usually reveal flavor pairings right alongside each other.

Learning to recognize these opportunities takes some practice. I’ve been using the Zuni Cafe Cookbook to remind myself how well composed Oregon’s seasons are. This salad is one such wake up call.

The warm juicy cherries, soft salty cheese and crunchy toasted nuts are a perfect addition to your fresh salad greens.

Oregon Summer Salad of Warmed Cherries with Oregonzola & Hazelnuts

adapted from the Zuni Cafe Cookbook’s Mixed Greens with Roasted Cherries, Hazelnuts, & Warm Saint-Marcellin. Here I pit the cherries, which are warmed on the stove as opposed to roasting whole in the oven. I also choose the prized Oregonzola from Rogue Creamery to round out our dish.

makes 4 servings

1/4 cup of whole hazelnuts
4 ounces of Oregonzola
16 cherries
olive oil
8 cups of young salad greens
salt and pepper

In a 325F oven, roast a 1/4 cup of whole hazelnuts till the skins are cracked and the nuts are slightly tan and fragrant. Rub the toasted nuts in a clean dish towel to loosen most of the skin off the nuts. Transfer the hazelnuts to a bowl, clean off the skins from the dish towel, and return the nuts to the cloth. Fold the cloth over the nuts and crack each nut with the heal of your hand. Set aside.

Bring 4 ounces of Oregonzola to room temperature. For speed- place the cheese on parchment paper and slip into the oven still warm from the hazelnuts. Warming the cheese to an almost melted state will be fine.

Wearing an apron, de-stem 16 cherries. With the blade of a kitchen knife, press down on each cherry splitting the fruit and popping out the pit. Tear each cherry into halves and scoop into a bowl along with the juices.

Warm a skillet over medium high heat and lightly drizzle with olive oil. Add the cherry halves to the skillet and sprinkle with a pinch of salt. Heat through ~3 minutes getting the cherries nice and hot. Add a small splash of your favorite vinegar to the hot pan of cherries and quickly transfer to a bowl.

Lightly dress 8 cups of young salad greens with a simple vinaigrette (for example: 1 Tbs vinegar whisked with 1/4 cup olive oil, salt & pepper). Arrange on individual dishes, or a large platter. Slide the Oregonzola off of the parchment paper next to the lettuce greens. Spoon over the salad the warmed cherries and sprinkle with toasted hazelnuts.

So in this day and age, why would you make your own butter?

Honestly- this butter tastes unlike anything you’ll buy in a grocery store. It has a fuller flavor of creamy butter that is much more aromatic than store bought butters. This heady fragrance means that you too need to be conscious of your own butter’s timeline- make your batches smaller and frequent and it will be fresher.

As good as all that sounds, this butter-maker will let you in on a secret… I do it for the buttermilk. This eponymous treat finally delivers the full understanding to its name with one small sip. I should warn you though. Once you’ve tasted this elixir, you’ll be hard pressed to leave enough leftover from your sip for making buttermilk pancakes!

Homemade Butter Process

I once made butter in elementary school, shaking a jar of cream that we passed around the classroom. Once it started to sound thumpy in the jar instead of splashy, our teacher took over and gave us all slices of bread with a smear of our butter.

Lucky to be a grown up now, you can use your stand mixer to whip this up instead of shaking a jar for 10 minutes. This method lets you witness an interesting set of transformations in your cream:

• it quickly moves to whipped cream, then breaks (always a good process to do on purpose instead of accident!) down slightly,
• a couple minutes later it breaks again looking like white curds in liquid… but you’re not there yet.
• The final breakdown of the cream will sound splashy in your mixer bowl, and look distinctly different from the previous breakdowns. This final time, the curds will be slightly golden in color, and will be clumping readily on your beater in a sea of the most luscious buttermilk you’ve ever tasted.

Remove the butter chunks to cheesecloth, and squeeze out the remaining buttermilk. Hey- look what you’ve got in your hands… it’s butter!

The remove every last bit of buttermilk, add the butter back to your mixing bowl with a cup of cold water. Beat together and again strain the butter from the liquid. Repeat until the liquid rinsed from the butter is clear.

How to store your fresh butter: topped with water

To keep your butter the freshest tasting, its going to be best served in an oxygen free environment.

I accomplish this by pressing walnut sized pieces of the fresh butter into a 1 cup sized wide mouthed glass mason jar. Press in the butter pieces so that there is no air trapped in the bottom of the jar, or around the butter.

If you choose to salt your butter, this would be a good time to massage your chosen salt into each butter piece, or butter layer.

When all the butter is smoothed into your jar, top it off with cold water and screw on the lid. This water layer will aid in keeping your butter air free- thus preserving its fresh taste longer (this is kind of like a French Butter Bell). Pour off the water each time you use your butter and top it off with a new cool layer when done.

How much butter will you get?

The yield of butter from cream is rather straightforward. One pint of cream yields 1 cup of butter and one cup of buttermilk. One cup of butter is 2 sticks, which is half a pound.

This homemade butter will be the perfect match to warm cornbread, steaming buckwheat pancakes, homemade bran muffins, cinnamon laced french toast…
I think you get my drift. I don’t need to convince you that butter is good!

More hot links for homemade butter

• Splendid Table: my inspiration, Lynne’s homemade butter procedure.
• The Traveler’s Lunchbox: once you’ve gotten comfortable with your homemade butter, come join us over on the cultured butter side. You won’t regret it.
• Mahanandi: repeat after Indira- clarified butter is not ghee. Having homemade ghee in use by your stove will yield a new round of tastiness to your cooking.
• Accidental Hedonist: now that you’re a connoisseur of all things butter, consider Kate’s post of types of butter a checklist to work through.
• Chocolate and Zucchini: don’t forget this special treat! So its not made with cream, its still a butter. Get carried away with Clotilde’s recipe for making Beurre de Cajou (that’s cashew butter, but it sounds better Clotilde’s way).

I have tubs of golden raspberries, a mob of marionberries, bags of blueberries, and morsels of strawberries. Living in the northwest is a blessing in that it seems to have a berry named for every country.

My problem? I sometimes get stuck in viewing these gems as precious. I’ll tend to not use them, because I don’t want to hasten their vanishing point. What good is a treasure if you don’t experience it?

Let’s thumb our noses at our wintry weather and make glorious fruit filled muffins out of our freezer gems. Muffins need not be of the death muffin variety (you know- those mini cake ones). They can even fit into a diet that’s sworn to be healthier.

I tossed my frozen huckleberries into the muffin making frey and was rewarded with a great breakfast morsel to go with my usual coffee.

Simply Recipes hosts my favorite muffin recipe. I’ve modified it nutritionally over time to great success: using a direct substitution of canola oil for the butter amount, using less sugar, and using whole wheat flour in place of some of the AP flour (~1 cup). Pop these baked goods in the freezer and they’ll keep fresh all week long.

What do you have lurking in your freezer that needs a coming out party?

A bag of this will be a most welcome gift for any occasion, plus it really is a snap to make. All it requires is a moment of constant stirring and the patience to let it cool for 10 minutes.

Here’s the link to basic Pretzel Praline Recipe at Ideas in Food. It’s one of those processes that don’t need a recipe after you’ve tried it once or twice. You add pretzels to a pan with sugar, stir till the sugar browns, stir in butter, and then spread to cool. The candy finish will be snappy and crunchy when cool, so make sure to spread your hot pretzel pieces out when they are cooling so that they will be in smaller chunks.

Pretzel Praline Recipe Variations

For these variations, I added the Flavors in the butter step, after the sugar has browned.

• Zesty: Sweets gave me the driving inspiration for this variety. “Make it taste good like Chex Mix,” he said.
  Use the short stubby type of pretzels, broken into pieces.
  Flavors: add 2 shots of Worcestershire sauce, a sprinkle of cayenne or chipotle pepper and a generous grinding of black pepper. Trust me, Worcestershire is perfect in this crunchy candy caramel.
• Fruit and Nut: do you know the love that are the Sahale Snack blends? If so, you will understand this flavor inspiration, if you are new to Sahale’s flavors: please join us!
  Flavors: add chopped candied orange peel, toasted walnuts, one shot of Worcestershire sauce, and plenty of salt and pepper. Check out Sahale’s flavor combinations for more creative inspirations.
• Snowed in Pretzels: Mom and I made these Christmas Eve to show how darn quick and easy the pretzel pralines are to make, and to appease the white chocolate nibbling mice (that’s us!) in her house.
  Use the small typical knot shape pretzels.
  Flavors: add a dash of vanilla and drizzle with melted white chocolate when cool.
• Chocolate Laced Salty Peanut Butter Pillows: This flavor combination is in a tie with chocolate-mint. One of these days we’ll have to have them arm wrestle to find the winner. I’ll help judge!
  Use peanut butter filled pretzels.
  Flavors: add a dash of vanilla and drizzle with tempered chocolate when cool.

I have a feeling this recipe will extend itself to itself to include the candying of many more ingredients. I’m just waiting for an excuse to add bacon. Quick, before New Year Resolutions strike!

Cheers