Summer Fruit Happy

Summer is here and I am in sticky, juicy, fruity heaven. Last weekend I bought some of the first peaches and apricots, 3 pounds of cherries and a whole flat of late strawberries. It's hard to declare a winner. The peaches and apricots weren't up to their full flavor yet but having to choose between the berries and the cherries would be tough.

I've seen lots of tasty looking recipes using fresh cherries but honestly all that pitting doesn't hold any appeal when I could just gobble them down as is and gleefully spit the pits out. And that's just what I've been doing, for days on end. I don't know how many more times I can hit the farmers market and stock up so I will gobble while I can.

In my cherry stupor I almost missed the strawberries altogether. I'd gotten a box here and there but when I went looking for full flats to freeze at my local farmers market there were none to be had. I headed north to another market and I was in luck. I found someone selling flats of deep crimson colored Tillamook strawberries which are highly fragrant and extremely tasty. Half of them immediately went into the freezer for midwinter smoothies. We ate many of the remaining berries as is, some went into a cobbler along with rhubarb from our garden, and I made the last two boxes into a truly special frozen treat.I've written before about David Lebovitz' fantastic book The Perfect Scoop. This man knows his frozen desserts like nobody's business. I had all the ingredients for his strawberry frozen yogurt on hand and I made up a double batch yesterday. It is so tasty. I think these were just about the most flavorful berries ever, and mixed with creamy whole milk yogurt and a dash of Cointreau--there's nothing better on a warm night. This does require the use of an ice cream maker but surely you have one by now, right? If not, the Donvier machine is simple and effective. I've been using mine for 13 years without a hitch.
You'll find the recipe here. Let me know how it goes. Also--is anyone having trouble accessing the recipes? Is the hosting site bombarding you with annoying ads? Things seem to be changing there and I'm not so sure that's where I want to keep my recipes. Any suggestions?

Berry Stained Fingers

Yesterday we bought four flats of fresh strawberries which works out to 48 little green pint boxes. Half were Laura's and half were ours. We went out to Thompson Farms where the berries are grown without chemical pesticides, herbicides, or fertilizers. East Multnomah County was once covered in strawberry farms but the farms are shrinking or disappearing these days, so I was delighted to support a local family owned business with my berry dollars. The smell of the fruit in the back of the van as we drove home was positively intoxicating!

I wanted lots for the freezer as nothing tickles me more than to pull a bag of perfectly ripe local berries out of freezer for those mid-winter smoothies. Quite a few berries were quickly rinsed and spread in a single layer on a large baking tray covered in waxed paper (which keeps the berries from sticking to the bare metal). Each tray sat in the freezer for about an hour and a half, just long enough for the berries to firm up. Then I popped the frozen berries into 1 quart freezer bags and stored them away for winter.

Meanwhile, the jam berries were sitting, bathed in sugar, as we waited for them to soften and get juicy. Laura's favorite recipe looked astoundingly sweet to me, but I've had the jam many times and it's quite delicious so I wasn't worried. She brought along her steam canner, a marvelous contraption which was entirely new to me. It requires heating only a few pints of water rather than than the gallons and gallons needed to fill my old canning kettle so the water heats much faster, you can process numerous batches quickly and the kitchen doesn't get nearly as hot as with the big canner. I think I'll have to find one of my own.
We ended up with 18 half-pint jars of strawberry jam. At this point Laura left and I still had a full flat of berries. Continuing with the freezer routine, I also started poking around in Stocking Up looking for more ways to use my remaining berries. Since I still had some of my Mt Vernon rhubarb remaining, I decided to try the strawberry -rhubarb preserves. This is not always a flavor combination I love, mostly because the rhubarb is often overwhelmed by the berries, and that appealing tang is lost in overwhelming sweetness. One of the things I really appreciate about Stocking Up is that many of the recipes are written with a goal of reducing sugar so I figured their recipe wouldn't be overly sweet. Also, the recipe uses low-methoxyl pectin (I use the Pomona brand) which is great stuff. Regular pectin won't thicken your jams unless your mixture is at least 50% sugar. This stuff, made entirely from citrus peel, will thicken jams, jellies, and preserves regardless of sugar content. I made the entire batch--8 cups of fruit cooked down into 6 half-pints--using less than a cup of honey and no sugar at all.

The resulting preserve is tangy and tart and, as far as I'm concerned, perfectly delicious. I'm sure that some folks would find it way too astringent. Others might not like the way the preserves look in the jar. The finished product gets rather foamy and I need to do some research to find out why that is. So it's not exactly picture perfect but it is absolutely delicious. I had one jar that didn't seal in the water bath canner last night which meant I could dig right into it this morning. I toasted some thick slices of Pugliese bread, spread them with a thin layer of cream cheese and then topped them with a thick dollop of freshly made strawberry-rhubarb preserves....heaven!
If you feel like making a batch of your own strawberry rhubarb preserves, the recipe is here.

Strawberries for MonkeyBoy!

My younger son, known in bloglandia as MonkeyBoy, has always been a fiend for strawberries. He can down a few boxes of them in an hour's time. As a tot he used to toddle through tall grass out to our strawberry patch, often eating them slightly green in his enthusiasm. I don't want to publicly embarrass him, but I feel I can at least say that his exit from the diaper-wearing community was achieved primarily through the generous use of strawberries as a bribe. He's had strawberry shortcake for his June birthday more than once. His first ice cream was, of course, strawberry.

He was born a few days shy of 12 years ago during a brief stint when we lived far from Portland. Shortly thereafter my parents came to visit bringing the perfect gift for a Portlander-in-exile, sweltering in the California heat: an ice cream maker. We had to return to Portland before making truly good strawberry ice cream with local Oregon berries. There's no point in trying with the early berries they ship up from California. Those woody, pale monstrosities have no flavor whatsoever so we happily wait for the real thing: local berries picked the day of purchase, red all the way through, dead ripe, enchantingly fragrant and, well, heaven.

MonkeyBoy headed off with friends for a camping/rock climbing extravaganza this morning. He won't be returning until late on his birthday and, due to my work schedule, I may not even see him until quite late that day. But I wanted him to start his birthday with a special treat so I ran down to the Lents International Farmers Market early this morning to pick up some berries to send along. Nice little market, by the way, so those of you in SEPDX should drop by.

They couldn't take all the berries along so we kept two boxes behind. Having recently checked The Perfect Scoop out of the library, I thought some ice cream might be just the way to use some of the remaining berries. The author lists a number of possibilities for frozen delights using strawberries including a strawberry-rhubarb sorbet which sounds wonderful, but it was the strawberry-sour cream ice cream which won out today. I had all the ingredients on hand and I guess maybe I'm still pining for those blintzes because that's what the combo made me think of.

I hauled out the trusty old Donvier and whipped up a batch of heavenly pink ice cream in almost no time. Had I followed the recipe exactly, it would have taken a couple of hours with chilling time but the rushed version was just fine. The recipe is here. The Perfect Scoop contains page after page of splendid looking possibilities, so I'm sure I'll be writing about it again.