Category: Pastry

The Pros and Cons of Nature

The Pastry clan was all up north this past weekend, partly for business, partly for pleasure. Little Jo spent all last week being spoiled by her grandparents and needed to be retrieved. The rest of us had business — ranging from meetings to shoe shopping — to get done. It was all pretty urban stuff.

Yet these days a visit to a big city like Chicago doesn’t preclude interactions with the natural world. It’s a big change from when I was a kid. Then, sparrows and goldfinches were considered exotic. Today Chicago — the “City in a Garden” — is something of a wildlife mecca. It’s the urban coyote capital of North America, home to hundreds if not thousand of the creatures (estimates vary). It’s got snakes, it’s got bats, it’s got birds of prey.

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Making Summer Berry Buckle

On what possible occasion would you prepare a thing like a buckle? When you suddenly find yourself with an awkward, medium quantity of berries, that’s when. Too few for a pie, but more than you can comfortably consume on top of your breakfast cereal. Two or three cups, say. About the quantity you’d have left over after making jam, or if you stopped to raid a bush driving a back country road. Think of a buckle not as an intention, but as a circumstance.

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Making Lemon Cider Sauce

What happens when you garnish a rustic, thrown-together dessert with a hastily prepared sauce? Sudden, unexpected elegance is what. Lemon cider sauce is supremely simple. You can pull it together in about five minutes. Drizzle it around a fat slice of gingerbread cake, over ice cream…whatever strikes your fancy. It’s terrific with poached fruit. Combine the sugar, spices, cornstarch and salt in a small saucepan.

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Lemon Cider Sauce Recipe

This easy and versatile sauce is great with all sorts of simple fall and winter cakes and fruit desserts. It’s much quicker and easier than a custard, since it’s thickened with cornstarch (corn flour) instead of egg yolks. It goes like this:

3.5 ounces (1/2 cup sugar)
1 tablespoon cornstarch
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 cup apple cider
1/4 cup fresh-squeezed lemon juice
grated zest of 1 lemon

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Summer Berry Buckle Recipe

A “buckle” is a member of a proud family of impromptu American country sweets that includes slumps, pandowdies and other fun-to-say treats you may have heard of but never tried. Like other desserts of its ilk, it’s not made with anything you wouldn’t be able to find in a typical rural pantry. Which means a home cook could whip one together whenever a few cups of berries happened to walk in the door.

6 ounces (12 tablespoons) soft butter
5.25 ounces (3/4 cup) light brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 eggs
5 ounces (1 cup) all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
2-3 cups fresh berries

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Just a Little Extra Protein

This past weekend we had an outbreak at chez Pastry. A neighbor family was leaving town for a year-long sabbatical, so a couple of weeks ago they brought over all their partly-used pantry foods. It was a bonanza of oils, vinegars, pastas and sauces. Woohoo! Unfortunately among the bounty was a sack of semolina that turned out to be full of flour beetles. By the time we noticed them they’d gotten into, well…just about everything. We needed to clean out the cabinets anyway.

Pantry pests happen to everyone at one time or another. You probably know the experience. You’re doing dishes one evening and you notice a couple of little moths with stripey wings flitting about. Who let these darn moths in here? “Honey,” you call to your spouse in the next room, “we’ve got to make sure we’re keeping the screen doors closed. Moths are getting in.” But of course no one is letting the moths in. You’re bringing them in — in live egg form, in your flour.

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Next Up: Buckle

This is going to be another very short week since I have yet another business trip Thursday-Friday. However I also have a couple of pints of blueberries in the fridge that I need to use up — and quick. A good ol’ buckle seems like just the thing for the time-pressed blogger who hates to […]

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Wrap-Up

I could spend an awful lot of time blogging on the subject of Chinese food. Since the heyday of chop suey in America, successive waves of immigrants have introduced myriad variations on the theme: Mandarin food, Szechwan food, and so on and so on. Nearly all of it has been adopted and assimilated to a greater or lesser extent, carrying on the grand tradition of the great American melting pot (in its edible form).

Today virtually everyone in America eats Chinese food at least occasionally. As of last year there were over 40,000 Chinese restaurants in the States. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of them serve what one might call a “classic” American-Chinese menu…egg rolls, wontons, General Tsao’s Chicken, you know the drill. You might have trouble turning up a chow mein or chop suey nowadays, but the go-to repertoire of dishes that Americans have put their stamp of approval on is everywhere. Indeed it’s estimated that a mere 20% of Chinese restaurants in America serve dishes that are considered in the least “authentic” (whatever that means).

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Making Spring Roll (Popiah) Skins

Now me, I grew up calling these sorts of devices “egg rolls.” It wasn’t until I got to be in high school that I began to know them as spring rolls. That was when one of my father’s oldest friends married a Chinese woman who happened to own one of the best Mandarin restaurants in Chinatown. We started eating there once a week, so I had to at least appear to know the lingo. These below are what I always thought were “spring rolls”:

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