Guest Post Day: Barb Freda of Babette Feasts

Greetings! Today is the annual guest post day of the blogathon where we are encouraged to swap posts with another blogger. I'm delighted to be swapping today with Barb Freda of Babette Feasts. Barb's blog was one of my discoveries during last year's blogathon, so I'm very pleased to have her here. She cooks, she tangos, she participates in triathlons, and she writes about all of these on Babette Feasts. You'll find my post over there today on a delicious South Indian shrimp dish from a sadly out-of-print cookbook.

And below, several worthy and welcome additions to my recipe collections here. Mmm, strawberries!

Strawberry Season

Welcome to my guest post for Sue! I blog over at BabetteFeasts.com, where I write about any and everything foodie, even when I have to make a stretch to make it fit—and lately I’ve been veering off-course now and then, but it’s all good . . . please come on over and visit now and then.

You probably all know that Sue is part of Blogathon2011, which is how we’ve come to guest post for each other (if you visit BabetteFeasts.com today, you will see Sue there). May 16 is guest poster day…so here I am.

I wanted to write about Strawberry Rhubarb pie (well, I really wanted to EAT strawberry rhubarb pie, and writing about it would have given me a reason to eat it), but when I shopped, there was no rhubarb to be found.

(An aside. Years ago, a piece of trivia entered my family’s folklore history. We were told in crowd scenes in movies, when the crowd is supposed to be murmuring as one, that all the extras say: Rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb…etc. I have no idea if it’s true, but to this day when we make reference to noise (for example), someone often can be found muttering rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb. True.)

So. Instead, I want to highlight a bunch of strawberry dishes I’ve made.

Most recently, it was my daughter’s gift to me on Mother’s Day: Stuffed French Toast.

Recipe Procedure:

1. Make your fave French toast egg-coating recipe.*

2. Whip softened cream cheese with a bit of powdered sugar and vanilla. Spread some of the cream cheese on the upturned side of two pieces of bread. Add sliced strawberries to one piece, then sandwich the berries closed by placing the second piece of bread, cream-cheese-side-down, on top of the berries. Press the bread slices together, just enough so they adhere to each other.

3. Dip the entire sandwich in the egg batter to coat the bread on both sides.

4. Melt butter in heavy skillet over medium heat. Place French toast in skillet and brown until golden on each side.

5.To serve, add strawberries to the top of the sandwich and dust all with powdered sugar.

6. Indulge.

*I have always loved Cook’s Illustrated’s “perfect” French toast batter, which combines 3 tablespoons melted butter with 1/2 cup milk, 1 egg, a bit of sugar (I use turbinado for extra flavor), a splash of vanilla, a dash cinnamon and 1/4 cup flour. The flour seems to give the bread something to adhere to…or visa versa, the flour seems to give the batter a WAY to adhere to the bread . . . either way, it gets fabulously crispy and this is the way I go all the time, even if my dear daughter did NOT go that way on Mother’s Day.

The second strawberry recipe I want you to try comes from Dorie Greenspan and I made this the first time when I was blogging (sporadically) with the Tuesdays with Dorie group. (my name is Barb and I am a failed Tuesdays with Dorie Blogger). Dorie’s La Palette Strawberry Tart is one of the best ways to showcase the berries: a shortbread crust (I’ve been known to ask how could there be anything better: butter and sugar held together by a bit of flour. I love me some shortbread.) topped with lightly sugared strawberries. Head to A Year from Oak Cottage to see the write-up the original “picker” did…and here is MY tart. This is one of my all-time faves, really.

Strawberries showed up last year on Babette Feasts in the form of a strawberry milkshake…ooh, what a treat…Doesn’t it sound so GOOD??

All in all? Enjoy Strawberry Season. It is fleeting. Make some jam, some ice cream, a milkshake, the tart above, some French toast and when you cannot use them all up, lay the strawberries out in a single layer on a cookie sheet. Freeze them, then, once frozen, bag them up in a zip-close bag. Come January, you’ll have a burst of summer to brighten a winter’s meal.

Rhubarb Curd

The above is my standard photo to show the enormity of my rhubarb plant. It's partly that I haven't gotten around to taking a new photo this year, but it's also that this one still quite nicely represents how much the rhubarb likes its spot in the garden. I am delighted that it's so happy; it means that every year, there are ample quantities of rhubarb so I can make my beloved rhubarb-ginger jam while still having enough rhubarb to try some new recipes. Last year, I made rhubarb-oatmeal bars, which were quite tasty. This year, for the first new rhubarb recipe of the season, I made rhubarb curd.

Food 52 is once again responsible. When you're looking at a recipe, on the right side of the page is a list of how many people are looking at other recipes. Four people are viewing rhubarb curd shortbread at this very moment, and very smart people they are because this is another great recipe.

I can't speak for the whole recipe, admittedly. I decided to make the curd but not the shortbread, at least not now. Instead, I paired the curd with a ginger-lemon buttermilk cake. (Because there are still 16 days of May to go, I will write about that later.) I have nothing against shortbread, of course, but I was more intrigued with the rhubarb curd, and so, on this rainy, lazy Sunday, I decided to give it a try.

First, you chop up about 3/4 pound of rhubarb:


Then you cook it down with sugar and a bit of water and then puree it.

Then you whisk together some egg yolks and more sugar along with some butter, lemon zest and lemon juice. Slowly, you add the rhubarb to the egg mixture. Meanwhile, you have some water simmering in the bottom of a double boiler, if you have one, and if a regular pot, if you don't. (I don't, so experimented with my pots and bowls to see which ones would work best. I ended up with a medium-large saucepan and a small stainless steel bowl which worked quite nicely.)
And then the whisking begins. Making curd is nerve wracking in the same way that making custard is. You definitely don't want to end up with some version of rhubarb-lemon scrambled eggs, but you also don't want to be whisking into infinity. It had been awhile since I'd made curd (the lemon extravaganza a few years ago may have been the last time), but I remembered that you always have to whisk longer than you think you do and the flame has to be a little bit higher than you feel comfortable with. The recipe said it would thicken in 5 minutes; mine didn't. It was probably on the stove for 15 minutes, thickening slightly but not overwhelmingly. After 15 minutes, I got worried that the eggs were cooking too much, and I took it off. I also neglected the final step of pushing it through a sieve. The curd was plenty silky and smooth without it.

One thing: my rhubarb curd, as you might have noticed above, is not pink. (The curd in the Food 52 recipe was decidedly pink.) Perhaps it was because the rhubarb I used was not particularly pink or perhaps it was those dark orange yolks from the eggs that Beth's hens laid. My rhubarb curd was more apricot-colored, or perhaps a pale butternut squash.

No matter. It was, in a word, delicious. Sweet and tart and smooth and luscious all at once. It would have made a fine dessert on its own. And maybe, another day, it will.

Rhubarb Curd
Adapted from Rivka's Rhubarb Curd Shortbread on Food 52

• 3/4 pounds rhubarb (about 6 stalks)
• 4 tablespoons water
• 1/4 cups sugar
• 4 egg yolks
• 1/3 cup plus 1/8 cup sugar
• 1 teaspoon lemon zest
• 2 teaspoons lemon juice
• 3 tablespoons butter, cut into chunks

Wash rhubarb and trim as little off the ends as possible. Cut rhubarb into 1-inch chunks. In a small saucepan, heat rhubarb, 1/4 sugar, and water on medium. Cook until rhubarb falls apart and there are no whole pieces left, adding water by the tablespoon if rhubarb sticks to the bottom of the pan. At this point, puree mixture with an immersion blender or push the mixture through a strainer. The first method is definitely easier.

Add a couple inches of water to the pot of a double boiler and set over medium heat. Put egg yolks, butter, remaining sugar, lemon zest, and lemon juice in the bowl of the double boiler and whisk to combine. When sugar has dissolved completely, add the rhubarb puree by the spoonful, to temper the eggs. When all rhubarb has been added, set bowl over pot; the water should be simmering. Continue stirring the rhubarb mixture; after about 5 (or 15) minutes, the mixture will be warm and slightly thickened. At this point, remove from heat. Press through a strainer -- this will give your curd that smooth, pudding-like texture.

A Poem for Saturday

This is another poem from Morning Song, the new poetry anthology for either new parents, all parents, or anyone who's ever been born (depending on who you ask).

Richard Wilbur is a bit of a local hero around here. He graduated from Amherst College in 1942 and lives up in Cummington, in the hilltowns. He recently turned 90 and still teaches at Amherst and gives readings.

I hadn't known this poem before I found it in the anthology, but I think it's lovely. If you go to Poets.org, the website of The Academy of American Poets, you can hear him read it here.

The Writer

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten.  I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.

Richard Wilbur

Friday Link Love

Well, that was nerve-wracking! Blogger was down for almost 24 hours, and yesterday's post plus any comments after early Weds. afternoon vanished into the ether! I am relieved that I was able to cut and paste yesterday's chicken post from an old screen shot. In any case, the delay threw me off. Please, Blogger, keep working!

Anyway, crisis averted for the moment, and on to today's links:

DFW Links:

Since his posthumous unfinished novel, The Pale King, came out last month, there's been a lot of new press about David Foster Wallace recently. (For those new to this blog, my own connection to Dave is explained here.) I haven't read the novel yet, but there were two pieces I found especially interesting.

One was this thoughtful essay in The Awl by Maria Bustillos who went through Dave's personal library, now in the archives at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and wrote about all the self-help books she found there: "Inside David Foster Wallace's Private Self-Help Library."

The other is a rare interview with Dave's widow, Karen Green. She stays out of the press, mostly, but she spoke to The Guardian around the time of the release of the novel.

A more cheerful literary link:

Although I've only read a few of the essays in Elif Batuman's book The Possessed, I've decided that she's such an entertaining writer that I'd read what she wrote no matter what it was about. I loved this essay in the Guardian. It got attention when it first came out because of the part where she asks Jonathan Franzen whether he has any weed, but that's only a small part of why I liked it: "Life after a bestseller"

From Possessed to Possession:

Since I'm (sort of) on the subject, I found myself at lunch the other day with a bunch of young scholars talking about how much they loved what they discovered in the archives. So, it was to my astonishment that I brought up A.S. Byatt's book Possession only to discover that none of them had read it! It's been more than 20 years since Possession was first published, and my first read of it still remains one of my most satisfying reading experiences ever. Byatt can be hit or miss, but Possession is worth all the praise heaped upon it back when it was published and won the Booker Prize. I've heard mixed things about Byatt's newest, The Children's Book (which I bought in nice compact form in India in January), but I'm still going to give it a try.

The Delicious:

I haven't made too many things from Martha Rose Shulman's "Recipes for Health" in the NY Times, but this week's spring vegetable recipes looked great.

I'm particularly intrigued by the recipe for Asparagus with Green Garlic and the one for Green Garlic, Potato and Leek Soup.

(Other green garlic recipes can be found on this very blog:
Spinach and Green Garlic Soup and Green Garlic and Chive Souffle, both delicious!)

Today's photo is courtesy of a shop in the Greater Kailash N-Block Market in Delhi. I don't think the cat was for sale.

A Chicken Story

Chickens are in the news these days. Not long ago, my town passed a zoning ordinance that allows people living in certain neighborhoods (including mine!) with properties of at least a certain size to keep chickens. This is a change from a few years ago when there was a front page story in the local paper about two children who had to make a special case before the zoning board so that they could keep their four chickens—Guinevere, Gurley, Mabel and Carmelo--who had been deemed illegal. Meanwhile, another person in my office just got chickens, bringing the number up to three in one small office.

All of this talk about chickens brings to mind a particularly memorable chicken, one I encountered a number of years ago in India. Here is my chicken story.

It was summer, monsoon season, and I was in Bangalore. My hotel had once been handsome but now was dumpy. My room was forgettable, the food lousy. But there was a lovely garden and a veranda beside it. In the garden lived a flock of chickens along with one scary rooster who charged at me whenever I walked by.

One rainy afternoon, I had no plans and decided to sit on the veranda and write some letters. I sat down at one of the tables with paper and a pen. The other tables were empty, but a hen from the garden hopped up on one of the chairs and promptly went to sleep. This amused me, but I didn’t think much of it.

A little while later, a man came out and sat at the table where the chicken was sleeping. I guessed he was the hotel accountant because he carried with him an armload of bulky ledgers which he spread out across the table. He wore thick spectacles and settled down with the books, adding up numbers, making notes. Hard at work, he didn’t notice the chicken, and they coexisted peacefully for a long while.

The chicken’s peace was disturbed, though, when one of the hotel servants alerted the man that he was sharing his table with a chicken. The accountant had the servant shoo the sleepy chicken back into the garden. The chicken was not pleased. And so the battle began.

From the moment she was banished into the garden, the chicken attempted to regain her seat. At first, her forays were furtive. If a chicken could tiptoe, that’s what this chicken was doing. Every few minutes, she would hop up onto the veranda, and the accountant would shoo her away, sometimes with a stick, sometimes with his hand. She tried to go around the other way, not obviously up the steps right in front of him. A few times she nearly made it, but he caught her every time. It goes without saying that I was rooting for the chicken. It also seemed to me that the accountant was just distracting himself unnecessarily because clearly she wasn’t going to give up. This was one tenacious chicken.

The stalemate lasted for more than an hour. I recorded it as a play by play in the letter I was writing. The chicken did not accept defeat and join her sister chickens in the garden. She wanted her seat back, and she would not be refused.

Finally, the accountant got up and left—not for long, but long enough for the chicken to get back to her chair. I swear she looked around to make sure the coast was clear. I like to think he left as a means of conceding defeat. When he came back, he resumed his seat, the chicken had resumed hers, and we all sat there quietly for the rest of the afternoon. The accountant, I will add, left before the chicken, who stayed until it got dark, secure in her victory.

I don’t know if this means more about tenacity of chickens or the vagaries of memory, but I no longer remember the name of the hotel or even, really, what else I did in those few days in Bangalore. But ask me about the chicken, and I can tell you a story.

*Enormous thanks to my colleague, Nancy Eckert, chicken owner and chicken artist extraordinaire, for today's illustration!

**The Blogger Outage of 5/12-13 wiped out this post and the comments. I've re-posted it in case blogger isn't able to restore it. Very frustrating.

Morning Song: Poems for New Parents

The timing could not have been better. One day, I received a slew of photos from my cousin Tim of his brand new baby, Adam. The next day came an email from Emily, announcing that the poetry anthology her mom had co-edited, Morning Song: Poems for New Parents, was about to be published.

Morning Song began as a handmade book for Emily on Tommy's birth, now nearly 9 years ago! It is now a gorgeous hardcover filled with wonderful poems. I sent my friend Beth to the book's website, and after reading the selection of poems included there, she said, "They should market this as a book for all parents, not just new parents." Later that same day, I saw Susan Todd at a reception and told her this. She smiled and said, "I think of it as a book for anyone who's ever been born."

The book is really lovely and has a wide array of poems from poets ancient to contemporary. There's also an audio version, with a number of the poems read by Richard Wilbur (who recently turned 90!) and other poets as well. If you're in the Pioneer Valley and have no plans for tonight, there's a reading at Forbes Library at 7:00 p.m. with many of the local poets included in the book.

Here's one brief poem from the book, one that made Alex and me laugh when I read it to him:

The Video

When Laura was born, Ceri watched.
They all gathered around Mum’s bed —
Dad and the midwife and Mum’s sister
and Ceri. "Move over a bit," Dad said —
he was trying to focus the camcorder
on Mum's legs and the baby's head.

After she had a little sister,
and Mum had gone back to being thin,
and was twice as busy, Ceri played
the video again and again.
She watched Laura come out, and then,
in reverse, she made her go back in.

Fleur Adcock

Haikus of the Day

Today is the second blogathon theme day--Haiku Day! Unfortunately, I missed last week's theme day, but it's always fun to do haikus. (And it's nice to have a shorter than usual post to do on a busy day.)

As I did last year, I've written two garden-related haikus. My first is, in fact, a sequel to one of last year's haikus. It seems fitting to put them together under one title:

The Neighbor's Cat Visits my Garden

i.

The cat from next door
has napped on my baby greens.
Leaves crushed into soil.

ii.
I have moved the greens
to a new bed in the shade.
Please, cat, stay away!

And the second, perhaps a common sentiment this month:

The lawn is awash
with violets and clover;
I don't want to mow.

More poetry tomorrow, though not of the haiku persuasion.