I was about to let this blog go. Not the name, you understand – just the process of writing a blog every month.
But then…cake.
You should know that cake is the world’s perfect food, or at least in a three-way (tie) with watermelon and pizza.
I love it the best and the most and will eat it every day if I can. I believe in the power of cake for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Perhaps most importantly for the purposes of this missive, I enjoy baking cakes for people. I like to see their faces when they open the box, and the whites of their eyes when they take their first bite.
That last little bit is creepy, but I mean it in the nicest way possible.
Additionally, if I made all of the cake I want to make/eat, the fit of my clothing would become problematic.
So, hello, you. Let me bake a cake for you.
I have updated my “Let Me Bake For You” page to list the offerings that are available.
Since I want baking to continue to be enjoyable, I won’t accept more orders than I can make with love (seriously. I know that sounds hokey or saccharine or whatever, but I mean it). If you want a cake, stake your claim early in the month and slap your money on the barrelhead (or the Venmo or PayPal – the 21st-century barrelhead).
If you want to give a cake to a person, I suppose I could whip you up a gift certificate for that person. Get in touch.
And if you want something other than a cake, get in touch. I could maybe work something out for you.
Oh, and hey. Share this post with a friend, using the buttons. I am off the Facebook but still use Instagram.
You can also take pix of your cakes and post on Instagram with my inventive hashtag: #charmcityedibles. That would not suck.
Khristian Weeks (l.), the birthday boy, pictured here with his collaborative partner, Peter.
So it’s October 1st, and it’s Khristian’s birthday.
This is a short blog with something delicious, easy, and celebratory. I like to make Bon Appetit’s seedy oat crackers to serve this with, but seriously. You could eat this any old way and be perfectly happy.
And in other news, this will be the last post here for a bit. I have some other things to focus on, and I may shift away from maintaining a food blog. I will keep cooking and posting recipes on Instagram (@charmcityedibles), so go on over there and follow along.
In the meantime, make this for someone you love.
Blistered Shishito Pimento Cheese Use this as a dip with crackers or vegetables, or make a grilled cheese with it. Or any other way you might use an insanely delicious cheese dip.
Ingredients 2 cups shredded cheddar cheese (see Recipe Notes) 8 ounces cream cheese, softened ¼ to ½ cup mayonnaise (NOT Miracle Whip, for chrissakes) ½ teaspoon dry mustard ¼ to ½ teaspoon cayenne pepper ½ teaspoon onion powder ½ cup chopped blistered (and cooled) shishito peppers (see Recipe Notes) 1 jalapeño pepper, diced fine ½ teaspoon celery seed
Method Couldn’t be easier. Mix all of the above together and taste. Add more of what you like, going slowly with the spice.
Chill for at least a couple of hours before serving. Keeps for at least a week in the ‘fridge if it lasts that long.
Recipe Notes • I like to shred my cheeses fine using a food processor, and I use a mix of white and orange cheddar, one extra sharp and one just sharp. This is largely a matter of preference, and I would actually prefer all white cheddar but most people think bright orange when they think of pimento cheese, and I like to give the people what they want.
• To blister shishito peppers, a cast-iron skillet is the tool of choice but not strictly necessary. Over medium-high heat, heat a tablespoon of oil in the frying pan of choice (I used non-stick), then toss the peppers (intact, with the stems on) in the oil. Season with salt and pepper and give a stir to coat with oil, then leave them alone for minutes at a time. You are looking for charring in spots, so let them sit. Toss after a couple of minutes, then let them sit. Peppers are done when they are tender-crisp with burnt looking parts. Remove from heat and squeeze a little lemon juice on them. Eat a bunch of them, but save six or seven for pimento cheese.
• You can also use a jar of pimentos, drained and chopped. I just happened to have shishitos.
August might just be the very best month of the summer.
I realize this is a blasphemous statement to place at the very top of September’s post, but bear with me.
There is a tart at the end of all of this.
For the second year in a row, Khristian and I have headed to Canada to spend a few weeks in the lovely province of New Brunswick, camping on a piece of raw land we purchased last year and gazing out at the creeping fog of the Bay of Fundy.
The Bay of Fundy is out there. Somewhere.
While this blog post was initially going to be titled, “How to build a camping platform without murdilating your partner,” I have mellowed somewhat, basted as I have been over the past two weeks in salt air and the chittering of squirrels.
No one was harmed in the making of this deck.
Coming home, and walking to the farmer’s market this morning, I realized that August is the best month of summer.
First, yes, it’s usually hotter than hell, but most people have their summer gear dialed in at this point and are capable of finding water or keeping cool. Many people head to the beach at this time (perfect time to avoid it, IMVHO), or just find some friends and a piece of shade to hang out in.
In short, by August, we are all used to the hellish weather and a little more relaxed about it. Sure, there’s still chatter on the topic but it’s less offended and more accepting, a sort of late summer resignation.
Next, by the time August rolls around, the frenetic new energy of the summer is chilled out. In June and July, everyone tries to do allofthethings, feels, in fact, COMPELLED to do them, but by August, much like that wild patch of overgrown, spindly, weighted down trio of tomato plants on your balcony and the overabundance of zucchini packed in ziploc baggies in your freezer, we have all given up. Sure, we still do someofthethings, but mostly it’s at a more leisurely pace. We are in our groove. Laid back.
It’s like we finally realize how long the days actually are in summer and just stop rushing around.
This more relaxed vibe is what all the commercials are actually talking about in April, looking towards summer. We just don’t get there until August. Add two eclipses and Mercury in retrograde during the entire month of July, and that’s some frantic shit right there. August is one big, fat exhale.
And then as August winds down? SCHOOL SUPPLIES.
Not back-to-school shopping, which sucks at any age, but school supplies. Fresh notebooks; new, full-to-the-brim ink pens; post-its; planners; and, if you’re lucky, a brand-new Trapper Keeper.
In college, the promise and possibility (and unfortunate expense) of new textbooks. I am probably the only person in history who didn’t mind the expense, but then again, I believe you can never spend too much on books.
August is the best. It leads into the productive energy of the fall in preparation for the hibernation of winter. This gentle seasonal slope makes me more motivated and often more creative – I do some of my best work in August and September. It’s like a reset.
I come back to the kitchen more energized, usually, and am baking with a ferocity that usually evaporates in mid-summer’s heat. Right now I am smelling the beginning notes of Frank’s Holy Bundt, unsurprisingly posted first on this blog on September 1st two years ago.
This time of the year the farmer’s markets are overflowing with abundance as well. Everything summer comes to a peak right now, perfect timing for canning, preserving, and otherwise storing away the easy bounty of summer against winter’s leaner feel.
Today I walked through Hampden in the sparkling sunshine, stopped at a neighborhood pear tree to see how things were going, and came away from the market with peaches, green beans, and a zucchini the size of my femur bone (put half in the current Holy Bundt and am freezing the other half for the next one).
The peaches. Man.
Everyone talks about South Carolina or Georgia peaches, but Maryland peaches kick their ass in a peach fistfight. They have more flavor and silkier flesh than their southern cousins, and the farm I bought from today is 30 miles from my back porch.
I ate one on the way home, and saved the others for this, my frangipane tart. Frangipane seems like a really complicated thing, mostly because its correct pronunciation eludes me, but that’s about it. It has a delicate almond flavor but still holds up like a more rustic dessert. The first time I made it with an apple butter caramel swirl on top I couldn’t cram it into my gaping maw fast enough. It wasn’t too sweet and had a tender, light crumb.
This time, some peaches and some bourbon and some lemon and some peach marmalade from Italy brighten the whole thing up.
You could also swap plums for the peaches and switch the bourbon to rum. Or use tart apples tossed in brown sugar, a squeeze of lemon, and some cinnamon. I’d like to try a banoffee version (bananas and toffee caramel), but that might be for the holidays.
6 tablespoons butter, at room temperature OR melted and
cooled
1 large egg
1 egg white
1 capful vanilla extract (see Recipe Notes)
1 teaspoon bourbon
2 teaspoons lemon zest
2 big peaches (between a tennis ball and a softball size)
Glaze
¼ cup peach preserves
3 tablespoons bourbon
2 tablespoons brown sugar
½ teaspoon lemon juice
Method
Preheat oven to 375°.
Start with your crust. Pulse almonds in food processor until
they are finely chopped. Add flour, sugar, and salt and process until almonds
are ground into meal.
Pulse butter in until mixture resembles sand. Mix in enough
water to form moist clumps. Once this happens, turn the dough directly into
your tart pan and press into shape (see Recipe Notes for what to do if you use
regular flour). Use a piece of plastic wrap to keep your hands clean and press
dough evenly into the sides and bottom of the tart pan. The goal is an equal
thickness all around, about 1/8”.
Cover tart pan and refrigerate at least two hours or
overnight.
When you are ready to bake, place tart pan on baking sheet
and poke several times with a fork. You can place a piece of parchment on top
of the crust and fill the crust with blind baking beads or rice, which will
prevent the edges of the tart from shrinking and which I usually forget to do.
Bake crust 10 minutes, popping any additional bubbles that
arise with a toothpick if you have not filled your crust with the baking beads
or rice. If you are using parchment, remove the parchment after 15 minutes to
allow the bottom to cook. Crust may take
up to 20 minutes to become a pale golden color – be patient.
Cool tart while you make the filling.
Blend almonds in food processor until they break into
smaller pieces. Add remaining sugar butter, eggs, extracts, bourbon, and lemon
zest and continue to pulse until almonds are finely ground and ingredients are
well mixed. Spread the filling in your crust.
Wash and slice the peaches into ½” slices (ish. No need to
be precious. This is a rustic tart). Place peaches in a spiral pattern (or any
pattern, really) into the top of the tart, pressing gently to make sure they
stick into the filling. The filling should come up the sides of the peaches a
little.
Bake tart on baking sheet until frangipane is puffed and
golden, between 30 and 45 minutes.
While the tart bakes, prepare the glaze. Stir brown sugar,
bourbon, and lemon juice in a small saucepan over medium heat until mixture
just boils and sugar is completely dissolved (this happens quickly). Strain
glaze into a bowl.
Transfer the tart to a cooling rack and brush the entire
surface with the glaze.
When completely cool, release the tart from the pan and
serve to much adoration. A little unsweetened whip cream (or with just a tiny
splash of almond extract) is delicious on this. If you’re especially fancy,
garnish with chopped fresh lemon balm.
Recipe Notes
I used McKenna bourbon in this recipe, a
seriously underrated, easy drinking and mixing bourbon. It is young and cheap
and thus smooth and sweeter, with notes of caramel and vanilla. It goes well
with the flavors of this tart and costs less than $15 a bottle. Go get some.
If you use regular flour, do not place the crust
directly in the pan; follow the typical crust recipe, which is to bring the
dough together by turning it out of the food processor after you incorporate
the water and kneading gently before forming it into a ball, wrapping it in
plastic and chilling it at least two hours. Then, roll the dough out on a
floured surface before placing into your tart pan and baking.
Prepare the crust a day ahead, chilling
overnight in the ‘fridge and then baking the next day.
Tart can sit at room temperature for eight hours
before serving, but you should plan to eat it on day one. The crust softens in
the ‘fridge overnight, so you don’t get that snap the next day. Still delicious
for breakfast.
Couldn’t let summer pass without an ice cream recipe.
I was going to write this big long post on home, but what I really want to share with you this month is an easy, delicious ice cream recipe and a video from Willie Nelson’s newest album that makes me cry when I see it.
First, the video.
You are a cold soul if this doesn’t smack you in the feels.
My darling child took me to see Willie Nelson at Merriweather Post Pavilion in June as a Mother’s Day present, and good lord did I ever love it. He is slowing down, and he didn’t play as much or sing quite as well, but his is the voice of my childhood, a soft and gravelly and sweet recollection of moments of peace. I like that he is such a lover of horses and actually has a rescued wild herd of his own in Texas.
He opened his set with this video, and it immediately filled me up and made me want to move out west to watch the wild horses run and then maybe buy a little cheap land of my own and rescue all of them myself. And later when I came home and finally calmed down I started to think about how the choices we make in our lives are as much about letting something go as they are about choosing something. So when we decide we are going to be a firefighter we don’t get to be an astronaut.
We have to decide between two things we might most want to do because we are only all of us just humans and not able to split in two.
So I don’t get to go out west and buy land to rescue horses because I have chosen to buy some raw land in Canada and build a camping platform, then a shed, then maybe a little house with a deck that looks out into the thunderous waters of the Bay of Fundy.
Still, and even though I am in love with our little patch of grass, with its baby forest and population of bark-munching porcupines, I feel a deep tug in my heart towards horses, a connection that I have felt since I have known breath. I think it’s their wildness that moves me – the way they are pure instinct and beauty.
Perhaps I will have another life to surrender to that tug of wildness.
But in this life, this current one where my particular friend and I are trapped inside due to heat that is in the 110-degree range, a stifling, suffocating sweat bath of weather that may become what is normal for this time of year, I have made perhaps the most delicious ice cream to date (giving Spicy Sweet Corn and the one with the tamarind caramel a run for their money). It is simple and can easily be dairy-free if you like.
Also, I used an ice cream machine to churn (reluctantly because I hate my ice cream maker, but that’s another story. Currently taking recommendations if you have any.), but you could also just freeze it without churning and thaw slightly before serving. Easy and delicious.
Coconut Cherry Ice Cream With Toasted Almonds
Ingredients
2 cans of full-fat coconut milk (NOT coconut cream)
1/2 can sweetened condensed milk (or 1/2 cup sugar for vegan version)
1/2 teaspoon almond extract
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups pitted fresh cherries (ish. Don’t get too precious about this amount)
1/2 cup almonds, chopped and toasted
1/2 cup unsweetened coconut
Method
Place all ingredients except for almonds and coconut in a blender and blend until combined.
If you are going to churn with an ice cream maker, follow your manufacturer’s directions, adding the coconut and almonds in the last five minutes of churning.
If you are going to simply freeze, stir in coconut and almonds, and freeze until set. If you prefer, you can leave the coconut and almonds out for a couple of hours, and then stir them in before freezing completely. This will keep them more evenly dispersed in the ice cream (they will sink to the bottom while the ice cream is still liquid).
Eating with a spoon is the best kind of eating. Fight me.
Well, here we are, July 1, time for me to begin to pull together the one blog a month I felt I could pull off.
Yes, this is past tense.
But I am not going to beat myself up about it. Because here I am, on the 1st, sitting in my studio, looking at a painting in progress and watching the neighborhood scary/tragic neighbor do slow and sweaty laps around the block on a loop. And writing this.
This July 1st, I find my two favorite people out of town, one for one week, the other for two, and I am feeling a mite blue about that. Mine is a generally solitary existence, but the people I like I really like and I want them around.
On top of the stupid solar system and my MIA people, my plan to get rejected is going well. The goal is 100 rejections by the end of 2020, and although I started off slowly, things are picking up. I found a place that will reject my work within 24 hours, and The Sun has rejected my photography, poetry, and prose. The point of all of this rejection is to get serious about submission and creating new works, and to some extent, it is working. I have written a couple of new poems this past month and have been note-taking and researching other forms of poetry and doing generally writerly things.
But the rejection can be a little challenging. Not knock-me-back-on-my-ass challenging, just not completely pleasant. I have gotten some lovely form rejection letters (in the vein of, “This is no commentary on the quality of the writing” which may, upon reflection, be a falsehood and not very nice at all and actually a loud commentary on the quality of the writing).
I do have a poem being published in Plainsongs this month. The acceptance letter referred to it as “your fine poem.” My self-esteem will be dining on those three words for at least the rest of the summer.
So I am just feeling meh and low-grade shitty. As this is a blog, I put that forth as an entirely legitimate way to describe what I am feeling. I am saving the words for the poetry.
And I have been cooking, even though it’s sad little meals for one. Today I made mango sticky rice in the rice cooker and some granola with the last bits of Costco dried mango (it’s mango-riffic), the only fruit I could scrounge up in my pantry.
I made gluten-free chocolate frosted chocolate fudge chocolate Pop-tarts that I had to throw out because they were making me ill, they were so rich (I saved an unfrosted batch in the ‘fridge).
I made epic pizza crust and ate the shit outta that (pro-tip: don’t make the crust too thin and it’s MONEY).
Many other lesser lights have made it to the groaning board in the past 30 days, but here’s the thing: when I feel low-grade shitty, I only want to cook sweet things, or else I want to lounge around in my bed and eat chips and watch crappy Netflix (I call this “Netflix and chonk”).
When this gets old, I need some food for real. Easy food that can be made with whatever is in the ‘fridge that’s not cold cereal, chips, gluten-free chicken tenders, or an entire cake.
So I make confetti salad.
Easy: boil two cups of water/veggie stock and add one cup rinsed quinoa and half a diced onion. Cover and cook until fluffy.
Add to a large bowl: three shredded carrots, one diced bell pepper, handful of chopped cilantro, handful of dried fruit, handful of pumpkin seeds, handful of sunflower seeds, can of chickpeas (rinsed and rained), juice of one lemon, olive oil, and black pepper. Add cooked quinoa, stir, adjust seasoning (maybe more lemon juice or olive oil), and you’re done.
Infinite variations. Add sliced snap peas. Dried fruit can be raisins, cranberries, barberries, mango, cherries. Add a thinly sliced spicy pepper. Use parsley instead of cilantro. Mix up the seeds. Add fresh, halved cherry tomatoes. Add warm grilled chicken (otherwise it’s vegan).
I eat this warm, cold, and room temperature. Throw it over greens. Whatever. Perfect for when your people are gone and you have been barefisting hunks of cake in front of the ‘fridge since they left.
