dessert

Rhubarb-raspberry stew with dumplings.

~ wellfedemily ~ 9 Comments

I have a lot of opinions lately, though Nick is quick to point out that they are not opinions as much as they are hormonal outbursts. I have evaluated the pros and cons of keeping him and at this point it seems like his potential future usefulness trumps his “helpful” suggestions so for now, he lives.

Though many of my opinions have been unsavoury and not appropriate to share under “if you don’t have anything nice to say” guidelines, at least one has been food-related and that opinion has been that rhubarb is fantastic and it ought to be mixed with vanilla bean at my earliest opportunity.

Today, just such an opportunity presented itself.

What follows is a recipe for rhubarb stew with dumplings; I used the last of my frozen raspberries to stretch the rhubarb (I thought I had more than I did), and it turned out to be the correct move. I’ve suggested one half cup of honey because I like my rhubarb tart, but taste as you go; you might like yours sweeter.

It’s not a beautiful dish – it’s the kind of thing you might serve after a weeknight family dinner, or for breakfast when you have more time in the morning. But it’s tasty. Dumplings are always tasty.

Rhubarb-raspberry stew with dumplings

(Serves four to six.)

Fruit:

  • 1 1/2 lbs. rhubarb
  • 1 lb. frozen raspberries
  • 1/2 cup honey
  • 1 vanilla bean, scraped
  • 1/4 tsp. salt

Dumplings:

  • 1 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1 tbsp. sugar
  • 2 tsp. baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp. salt
  • 1/2 cup milk
  • 1/4 cup butter, melted

In a heavy-bottomed pan over medium heat, combine rhubarb, raspberries, honey, vanilla bean seeds, and salt. Allow raspberries to melt, then bump heat up a notch or two and bring the mixture to a simmer, stirring frequently for about ten minutes. Rhubarb should soften and begin to break down. Return heat to medium.

Meanwhile, combine flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Stir to combine. Add milk and butter to form a soft dough.

Drop spoonfuls of dough into the hot fruit mixture; you should end up with about eight dumplings. Place a lid firmly over the pot, and cook for 15 minutes.

Serve hot, with ice cream.

Orange upside-down cake.

~ wellfedemily ~ 15 Comments

It was plum season when I wrote about upside-down cakes, and I mentioned then that you would want to try making upside-down cakes with oranges in the wintertime. I love being right – and with oranges baked in caramel, how could you go wrong?

On an unrelated note, the lighting in my apartment continues to be terrible, despite my best efforts, so even with my shiny new camera the photos are turning out yellow. If this is something you can solve for me with a simple explanation (Fuji FinePix JX250, in the hands of an unskilled clicker), I will love you forever AND be your best friend.

Anyway.

When I got home from work I was too tired to do anything about feeding myself, so I slumped onto the couch with a can of room-temperature PBR and watched RapCity while Nick made merely adequate grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner. For an hour or two I was resigned to an evening of staring blankly at the TV with my mouth hanging open.

Then Nick went out to play boardgames with his boyfriends, and I felt repentant for my earlier uselessness but also disinterested in washing dishes or bending over to collect his socks from the floor, so I made a cake.

This is a variation on October’s upside-down cake, as I’ve decided that cornmeal is what I am in the mood for. You could make it with the other cake if you want, but the yellow of this version is nice, and the citrus in the batter brightens it up enough that you’ll almost forget you haven’t seen sunlight in a month. It’s just about healthy, with its corny base and orangey top, and something about it tells me it will be as satisfying reheated for breakfast tomorrow morning as it was fresh from the oven tonight.

Orange upside-down cake

Top:

  • 3 to 4 small navel oranges or blood oranges (or a combination)
  • 1/4 cup unsalted butter
  • 3/4 brown sugar
  • Pinch salt

Cake:

  • Zest of one orange
  • Zest and juice of one lemon
  • 2/3 cup yellow cornmeal
  • 2/3 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1/2 tsp. baking soda
  • 1/2 tsp. salt
  • 2 tbsp. unsalted butter, melted
  • 2 tbsp. honey
  • 1 cup milk
  • 1 egg

Preheat oven to 375°F.

Using a knife, peel your oranges. Cut slightly on the diagonal, running the blade along the flesh of the orange, being careful not to leave any of the bitter white pith behind. Slice oranges horizontally to about 1/4″ thick. Test to be sure they fit into the bottom of a 9″ cast iron pan; they should fit comfortably with only nominal overlapping. Set aside.

In a bowl, combine orange and lemon zests, cornmeal, flour, baking soda, and salt. In a separate bowl, whisk together lemon juice, melted butter, honey, milk, and the egg.

Place the 9″ cast iron pan over medium high heat, melt butter and sugar together until bubbling. Turn the heat off, and carefully add orange slices, placing them evenly across the bottom of the pan.

Whisk wet ingredients into dry ingredients, and pour into pan on top of the butter-sugar-orange mixture.

Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, until top is golden, edges appear crisp, and caramel has bubbled through in places.

Let stand five minutes, then carefully turn out onto a serving plate. Let cool for 15 minutes before serving.

PS – Lisa over at Sweet as Sugar Cookies asked me to share this at her linky party. Since I like parties and adjectives that end in “y,” I said yes. Go check out her line-up of awesome desserts!

Grandpa’s Radio Pudding.

~ wellfedemily ~ 5 Comments

Every so often I find myself going too easily from reflective to sentimental, especially at this time of year when it seems like every beverage is seasonally … uh, “enhanced.” It goes against my nature, which is perhaps why I find sentimentality embarrassing, and even more perhaps why I’ve avoided lengthy ramblings on the holidays and significance and touching heartfelt somethingorothers in general. But I have been thinking a lot about tradition, because it’s December and because I have reached a strange point in my existence, one where “tradition” is less the thing you do each year and more the thing you try to replicate now that key pieces are missing.

One of the lessons of my first married Christmas is that I do not cope well with change. It would be marvellous if every holiday went exactly as I’d like it to, but the annoying thing about traditions is that they tend to involve other people. Now that Nick is one of my people, I have to care about him too, even though he doesn’t do Christmas the way I want him to. One year real soon I am going to have to get over the fact that he never believed in Santa Claus. What do I care if he’s on the naughty list? I’m on the nice list, so I’ll be getting a gift this year. And maybe it’s still possible to stab some magic into his heart.

This year we lost my Grandpa. Grandpa was funny, a veteran of the Korean war, a proud Canadian, and probably the only good dancer in the gene pool. When he was young he looked like James Garner and was just as cool as Jim Rockford, at least to me. Every time I visited, he was just about to head off on some grand adventure, often driving. And making him proud was something I very much wanted to do; I won a scholarship from the Korean Veteran’s Association when I was 18, and he was literally pink with delight. I remember the rum drinks, and thinking about how I would have to walk to collect my award deliberately, without stumbling, because there were a lot of old men there, and cameras. When Grandpa poured the drinks the Coke was just for colour.

I adapted reluctantly to changes over the course of nearly a decade of Christmases, where one grandparent or the other was sick or had passed away; I remember cooking holiday feasts while my parents visited my mom’s dad in the hospital, or cramming shortbread in my mouth as Cuddles and Auntie Lynn and I snorted with laughter at the kitchen table over three decades of holiday gossip, remembering Grampa with humour. When my grandma Cuddles died, we adapted again. But as long as there was Grandpa, my dad’s dad, a piece of my smaller self’s Christmas remained intact.

This is the year when all the things are officially different – no grandparents will be at our dinner table. That doesn’t mean that Christmas will be any less magical (except it won’t be for Nick because he doesn’t believe in flying reindeer either), but it does mean that I am at a temporary loss for describing the traditions I’ve held for my whole life so far. I’ve celebrated a few this year and they have been as joyous as always, and I’ve made quite a few new ones.

Many of these new traditions are due in large part to the fact that there are small children around now, and because none of them are mine I don’t have to be an adult. Some are because of Nick and Nick’s family, where there are many more small children and where I am also not required (or expected?) to act my age.

And there is still Sandi, who I think of as Grandma and who is very much family, who was good to my Grandpa until the last, and who I will still make a trip out Pitt Meadows in the coming week to visit. I believe she’s spending Christmas with her kids this year.

So even though there is lots to look forward to this year, I’d like to also think about Grandpa and the past. And because I do most of my thinking in the kitchen, I’d like to share with you a recipe of his, the origins of which are “the radio.” He heard the recipe on the radio at some point a very long time ago, but as far as anyone’s concerned it’s his. It’s his like Continental Chicken and garlic sausage and cheese on crackers. It’s called, quite simply, “Grandpa’s Radio Pudding.” Make it for yourself if you could use a warm hug or a bit of holiday cheer.

Grandpa’s Radio Pudding

Cake:

  • 1 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1/2 tsp. salt
  • 1 tbsp. cocoa
  • 2 tsp. baking powder
  • 1/2 cup granulated sugar
  • 1/2 cup chopped nuts (or chocolate chips)
  • 1/2 cup milk
  • 2 tsp. melted butter or shortening
  • 1 tsp. vanilla

Sauce:

  • 4 tbsp. cocoa
  • 1/2 cup brown sugar
  • 1 3/4 cups hot water

Preheat your oven to 350°F.

In a 1 1/2 quart casserole or baking dish, whisk together flour, salt, cocoa, baking powder, sugar, and nuts or chocolate chips. Stir in milk, butter or shortening, and vanilla.

In a separate bowl, mix cocoa, brown sugar, and water. Pour over cake mixture. Do not stir.

Bake for one hour.

Serve hot, with ice cream or whipped cream.

Plum upside-down cake.

~ wellfedemily ~ 5 Comments

You see that pretty red pan? In the hierarchy of Things That I Love, it’s between The Cat and Butter. Nick bought it for me for my birthday in July, even though my birthday is in April, and since then every time I open its cupboard and it beams up at me, so Crayola-coloured and perfectly suited to meals for two, I feel a rush of joy and an urge to cook something at once.

It’s a pan that insists on upside-down cake. You could make it with pineapple, I guess, but pineapple upside-down cake (you know, with the maraschino cherries?) reminds me of elementary school bake sales and this cookbook my mom had from the 80s where all the pictures were really orange and all the food looked just terrible, and there that cake was, illuminating the page like a fussy yellow and red-nippled monster. My mom says that in the 80s, no one cared as much as we do now about food, and that dinner parties were about party games. Which sort of explains food photography; maybe all the photographers were so exhausted from too many rounds of beer pong that by the time they got to taking pictures of the food, they all decided, “Enh, good enough. Whatever.”

That’s not to say I have anything against pineapple upside-down cake; it has it’s place, to be sure, and whenever I’m visiting octogenarians, there it is.

As nippletastic as the typical upside-down cake is, sometimes it’s fun to deviate from tradition just a touch. And some ingredients lend themselves to caramelization and baked goods. Plums, for example, which are glorious right now, and the farm market is bursting with them in every shade. I have red and purple ones right now. You could use any fruit you like, at any time of year – how lovely this would be with cherries, or peaches. Or oranges – oranges in caramel are almost as seductive as a shiny new cast iron pan, and we’ve almost reached mandarin season. Improvise. Have fun. Giggle inappropriately at every opportunity to do so.

Plum upside-down cake

Caramel

  • 1/4 cup butter
  • 3/4 cup brown sugar

Cake

  • 5 or 6 plums, enough to fill the bottom of your pan
  • 1/2 cup brown sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 cup full-fat buttermilk
  • 1 tsp. vanilla
  • 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 2 tsp. baking powder
  • 1/4 tsp. salt

Halve and pit your plums.

In your nine-inch cast-iron pan, heat butter and sugar until bubbling. If you don’t have a nine-inch cast-iron pan, you can use a nine-inch pie plate or cake pan, but your steps will be different; if you’re using a pie plate, heat butter and sugar until bubbling and then pour them into the pie plate.

Meanwhile, beat together sugar, eggs, buttermilk, and vanilla. In a separate bowl, mix flour, baking powder, and salt. Stir together wet ingredients and dry ingredients.

Place plum halves cut-side down in caramel. Pour the cake batter over top, and then place in the oven.

Bake for 35 to 40 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the centre comes out clean. Cool five minutes in the pan before turning out onto a plate. Serve warm, or reheat later on as needed. There should most certainly be whipped cream or ice cream.

Blueberry crisp and a lot of procrastination.

~ wellfedemily ~ 3 Comments

This post is a little overdue – I bought many pounds of blueberries a few weeks ago at the UBC Blueberry Festival, but I put them all in the freezer  in order to procrastinate … because I don’t like blueberries. Or so I often think.

Blueberries, picked at their seasonal peak under the warm July sun are really very nice. They’re sweet-tart, not mealy little perfume balls, which is how they taste to me whenever I have them at any point during the rest of the year. I get cranky when I find them in muffins where they usually turn out to be flavourless little wet spots in what would otherwise be a perfectly edible baked good. And their unusually floral musk turns up in smoothies and juice – there was awhile there, before manufacturers started whoring out pomegranate or açai, when blueberries were deemed the healthiest thing ever and they were in everything. I had a tantrum one morning when I went to put my lunch together and found that Nick had eaten all the other flavours of yogurt, leaving only blueberry behind.

But they’re not all bad, and I forget that, and then July comes and I eat one and it’s a surprise every time. Oh! These aren’t yucky at all! I think, and then I enjoy blueberries for two weeks until there are none left and then disregard them again until the following year. That’s what happened here – I was afraid of them, then I ate some, and then blueberry crisp.

The recipe that follows has lived in my head for as many years as I can remember – for a long time, “crisps” were the only dessert I knew how to make. It’s a crisp like my parents would make, and there are no oats in it. No nuts, because my Dad is allergic, though if you’re not feeding him you can go right ahead and toss a handful into the crumble and he won’t mind. Just butter and sugar, and some flour to keep it all together, and that’s really all you need. You can make this with apples, peaches – any fruit you like. When I was a kid it often contained rhubarb from the plant out back, and that was very good. You can make anything tasty, even a blueberry, by simply topping it with butter and brown sugar.

Blueberry crisp

  • 4 to 5 cups blueberries
  • 1 tbsp. cornstarch
  • 1/2 tsp. salt, divided
  • 2 tbsp. maple syrup (if your blueberries are very sweet, you might like a squish of lemon and a sprinkle of white sugar instead)
  • 1 cup whole-wheat flour (all-purpose is totally fine if that’s all you’ve got, but I like the deeper flavour that whole wheat gives)
  • 1 cup dark brown sugar
  • 1/2 cup room temperature butter
  • 1/2 tsp. cinnamon

Lightly grease a 1.5-quart baking dish. Preheat oven to 375°F.

Create a slurry out of the cornstarch, 1/4 teaspoon of salt, and the maple syrup, then pour over blueberries and toss to coat. Put blueberries in baking dish.

Combine flour, sugar, 1/4 teaspoon of salt, butter, and cinnamon, and crumble with your fingers to create a lumpy, streusel-looking mixture. Dump on top of blueberries, pressing down gently do ensure your crumble stays put.

Put the whole lovely mess into the oven and bake for 35 to 40 minutes, or until the top is crisp and golden and blueberry goo is bubbling up on the sides. Serve warm, with ice cream. Though if, like me, you are bad at planning ahead and don’t have ice cream, it’s just as delicious without.

Meringue held up my fruit and yogurt this morning, and thus Tuesday was vastly improved.

~ wellfedemily ~ 2 Comments

After a rather indulgent weekend I felt more than a little hard done by, repentantly enduring my hot whole grain cereal with almond milk on Monday morning. Usually that’s a breakfast I enjoy, but after the delights and feasting of Saturday and Sunday, it felt a little bit like punishment, or like the shakiest part of withdrawal. Sure, it was good for me. But there was no zing, no glorious gluttony high.

So last night, with the dry air suggesting the perfect time to whip egg whites into a glossy frenzy (not a drop of precipitation in all of July so far!), I made six brown sugar meringue shells, and this morning filled them with pink, local yogurt and juicy Okanagan cherries, and felt enough zing to last the week, and all of the high with none of the actual gluttony. One meringue shell is significantly fewer calories than a slice of toast, with none of the kneading and hardly any real effort to prepare.

If you care about that sort of thing.

Calories, I mean.

Which I do not.

The recipe is adapted from a recipe I posted in the fall, from Saveur (such a messily dressed pavlova), with the only difference being that I halved the recipe and used brown sugar instead of white. The recipe assumes you have a stand mixer; if you don’t, the time it takes to whip the whites will be a bit longer. I’ll let you know how you’ll know when the mixture’s done.

Brown sugar meringues

(Makes six)

  • 4 egg whites
  • 1 cup dark brown sugar, packed
  • 4 1/2 tsp. cornstarch
  • 1 1/2 tsp. distilled white vinegar
  • 1 1/2 tsp. vanilla

Preheat your oven to 350°F.

Whip egg whites and sugar until stiff peaks form, about 14 minutes using a stand mixer.

Meanwhile, make a slurry of the cornstarch, vinegar, and vanilla. When egg whites stand up on their own and do not fall when shaken, whisk in the slurry and beat for another five minutes, until peaks are smooth and shiny.

Using the top of a one-cup-size ramekin, trace six circles onto a sheet of parchment paper that is just a bit smaller than a baking sheet, leaving an inch between each circle. Turn the parchment over, and divide the meringue evenly between the six circles. It’s okay if there’s overlap. Gently press a dip into the centre of each one, building up the sides a bit so as to form a shallow bowl.

Place in the oven, and immediately reduce the temperature to 215ºF, and set the timer for 1 hour and 15 minutes. Do not open the door at any time. When the timer goes off, leave the meringues in the oven to cool overnight, or at least three hours. Remove the meringues to a sealed container and store in a warm, dry place. Do not refrigerate.Serve meringues with yogurt and fresh seasonal berries. If you’re using cherries, pit them the night before and stick them in the fridge, covered with plastic wrap. Feel good about breakfast.

I should mention that if you’re used to something heartier, this is not terribly filling – if you’re a bacon/eggs/toast enthusiast, use this one at brunch with lots of other things. But if you’re a fruit and yogurt fan, like I am, this will be plenty sufficient to get you through the morning.

Also, I told you I’d tell you about blueberry crisp. I haven’t forgotten. I just get distracted so easily.

Some talk about cherries.

~ wellfedemily ~ 6 Comments

On Friday evening I went with Grace to her mother’s house to pick cherries, which we did quite successfully last year, and which we were determined to do quite successfully once again.

This year, the cherries returned in abundance! I think we must have gotten to them a little later this year, because by the time we arrived the cherries on the main tree had darkened until they were almost black. They had a caramel taste to them, and they begged me to eat so many of them, and I did.

What squishy feelings come from eating too many cherries all at once.

They became jam, sort of, and a lovely dark sauce for steak, and a tart that sparkled like something much more valuable than the sum of graham crackers, cherries, sugar, and rum.

I even tried to paint one of them. Tried being the operative word, and maybe my evil beast of a high school art teacher was right – I don’t apply myself or seem to care, and all I’ll ever have is wasted potential, especially with this attitude.

But what did she know, anyway? I really, really care about cherries.

There aren’t really recipes for any of the dishes that wound up – there is for the jam, and it comes from David Liebovitz, and even he claims there’s no real recipe. Mine didn’t set, which is just as well, because now I have six jars of cherries in a rich rummy caramel, and that’s just fine. They will be lovely in ramekin-sized cobblers come Christmas.

And the steak. You ought to know all about this.

When you pan-fry a steak, right after you move it to a foil-covered plate to rest, while the pan’s still hot, dump a cup of cherries per person into it, let them melt into the meat juices, and when the pan looks dry, deglaze with a splash of balsamic vinegar. Add chili flakes if you feel like it. You’ll know when it’s done – the sauce will be sticky, not runny, and will smell fantastic.

And the tart. There’s nothing to the tart.

Macerate two pounds or so of cherries in about a half a cup of sugar  and a quarter cup of your favourite rum or bourbon, and give it 30 minutes, or 60 if you’ve got ’em. Bourbon’s better, but sometimes you’re out because it’s hot and you like bourbon and lemonade almost better than anything in the world, and my goodness your liver must be tough. Is it hard around the edges? Fine work. Really well done. What?

Right.

Tart. Take a tart pan. Pack it full of one cup graham cracker crumbs mixed with a quarter cup of melted butter and two tablespoons of brown sugar. Bake at 400°F for ten minutes. Remove from oven, and cool.

Fill with cherries. If you have a lot of liquid, thicken it on the stove with a bit of cornstarch. If you don’t, that’s fine too. I just poured it back over the cherries.

Serve immediately to salivating guests. Pile so much whipped cream on top.

Tomorrow I’m going to a blueberry festival at work and should have a flat or two to do something with, and then Grace and I are going on a pink wine picnic followed by berry picking on Sunday. So much excitement! I can’t wait to tell you all about it. But for now, think about cherries. I still am. If for no other reason than they’ve permanently grubbied my fingernails and I’m painfully self-conscious about it.

Orange granita that tastes like Creamsicles.

~ wellfedemily ~ 6 Comments

I have had three cold showers today.

Outside is lovely, bright and beautiful and exactly what I was hoping for, but inside – my goodness. Everyone is flat. And covered in a sticky, glossy film of the kind of sweat that never dries. There is no air conditioning here, or at work. And yet, I have not adapted. The cat seems to be suffering the most, and looks like a puppet without a hand, just tossed on the floor. And I think she might be losing it. Do cats get the heat crazies and hallucinate? Am I projecting my own neuroses? Should I stop talking about my cat? Okay. I will. After this photo.

So, yeah. We’re a little warm. We haven’t been eating any of the kinds of things that demand high heat or long cooking times. We have been drinking homemade iced tea by the gallon, and eating a lot of fruit. And today, granita. Because I don’t own an ice cream maker (I really have to do something about that) and there is no place to buy Slurpees within walking-without-sweating-distance.

Granita is actually the perfect hot-weather dessert, because it’s completely no-stress. You just haul your sweaty ass off the couch every so often to scrape the ice crystals – no churning required. It takes about three hours, but most of that time can be spent procrastinating over other things. And this granita? It tastes like Creamsicles.

Orange granita

(Serves four to six.)

  • Zest of 1 large navel orange
  • Zest and juice of 1 lemon
  • 1 cup freshly squeezed orange juice
  • 1 cup granulated sugar
  • Pinch salt
  • 1 tsp. vanilla
  • 1/2 cup heavy cream

In a pot over medium-high heat, combine citrus zest, juices, sugar, and salt. Whisk until sugar has completely dissolved – two to three minutes.

Remove from heat. Whisk in vanilla and cream, and pour the whole thing into a glass pan or pie plate. And then put it in the freezer.

Every hour for the first three hours after that, pull the juice out of the freezer and scrape with a fork to move the ice crystals around, which keeps them from becoming a solid mass. After that, just pop in every once in awhile to be sure that all is well, scraping as needed.

Serve as is, or with whipped cream.

Every hour for the first three hours after that, pull the juice out of the freezer and scrape with a fork to move the ice crystals around, which keeps them from becoming a solid mass. After that, just pop in every once in awhile to be sure that all is well, scraping as needed.

... then you're cold.

Remove from the freezer about ten minutes before serving, and scrape with a spoon into serving dishes. Serve as is, or with whipped cream. Swoon.

Delicious.

Did I just tell you about dessert first? I guess I did. Come back soon – I have lots to tell you, all about baked beans and ribs and cornbread with blackberries and wonderful things like that.

Preview.

*Note: I originally called the grapes “concord” because until this morning when I read the package, I thought that’s what they were called. No. They’re coronation grapes, and they’re marvellous. But you can make this with concord grapes if that’s what you’ve got. Cheers.

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Separation anxiety, Paul’s farewell, and avocado pudding.

~ wellfedemily ~ 2 Comments

Paul’s leaving town. I am sad.

He’s headed to Montreal for the summer, to boil bagels, maybe, and to return in September, probably. He departs for sunnier skies than ours on Saturday, so Tuesday night Grace had us all over for snacks from below the equator and a lot of sparkling wine. I have been dreaming about the ceviche ever since, and not only to distract myself from the fact that Paul will not be here to bug for three whole months.

She asked me to bring dessert, and I was thinking pudding, because, let’s be honest, if I am not thinking of wine, meatballs, or pancakes, I’m probably thinking of pudding, even when I should be thinking of other things, like the answers to the questions people ask me at cash registers, bus stops, dinner parties, and work. If my face betrays me and you can tell my mind is wandering, you can bring my attention back simply by mentioning some sweet thing with a creamy mouthfeel. Good to know, right?

So to match Grace’s treats, I thought avocado pudding would be the way to go. And it turns out, I was right, though I had to go back and tweak the recipe because though I was certain it would turn out the first time, it was rather runny, and we ended up turning it into a loose ice cream in order to eat it before 11:00 pm. Still good, but not quite right. I’ve since adjusted the recipe, made it again, and re-tasted, and now I think it’s pretty damn near perfect. Paul agreed, and he doesn’t even like avocado. I knew this, but am (charmingly) passive-aggressive.

So, here you go. Another green pudding. Please don’t you go leaving me too.

Avocado pudding

  • 1 small ripe Hass avocado
  • 3 egg yolks
  • 1 tbsp. lemon juice
  • 1/2 tsp. salt
  • 4 tbsp. cornstarch
  • 1/3 cup granulated sugar
  • 1 tbsp. honey
  • 1 cup heavy cream
  • 1 cup almond milk
  • 1 tsp. vanilla

Mash up avocado with egg yolks, lemon juice, and salt. Set aside.

In a heavy-bottomed pot, whisk together cornstarch and sugar, then pour in honey, cream, and almond milk, turning heat to medium, and whisking to thoroughly combine. Stir frequently.

Heat slowly until bubbling. Pour 1/4 cup of the bubbling mixture into the avocado mix, and stir quickly to temper. You want to be quick so the eggs don’t scramble.

Pour avocado mixture into pot, and whisk until mixture has thickened. Remove from heat and stir in vanilla.

Strain through a mesh sieve into a bowl.

Top with plastic wrap (touching the top of the pudding in order to prevent a skin from forming), and refrigerate for three to four hours, until set.

Serve with whipped cream.

Rhubarb cobbler.

~ wellfedemily ~ 1 Comment

My long-lost friend Vanessa came over the other night, long-lost because she has just re-emerged from a self-imposed thesis-writing hermitage, and we had dinner and rhubarb cobbler and talked about books and our mutual love for Lady Gaga. I have been missing women lately, because the ones I know are absurd and hilarious and we’ve all reached that boring age at which “work” and “Costco” all too often rank higher on our lists of priorities than does “witty banter” and “drinking too much on a Monday.” Well, that’s not true. Work and Costco are rarely priorities of mine, but I have so many bills and we always seem to be low on toilet paper. But you know. You know?

It’s hard to justify complaining, though, and there are far worse things happening in the world than my bad mood. And while I am crabby this week, I did find that baking and witty female company made things a little better. Here’s a recipe that you can use if you need to feel better, or to serve the smart, funny someone you’ve been missing, or to the one that’s still around because she has the good sense to not to leave you alone too long. It’s a plain old cobbler recipe made spiffy with a few unexpected flavours – rhubarb and rosemary and lemon zest. All good things, and don’t forget the ice cream.

Rhubarb cobbler

Cobbler:

  • 2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 2 tbsp. granulated sugar
  • 1 tbsp. lemon zest
  • 2 tsp. baking powder
  • 1/4 tsp. salt
  • 1/4 cup butter, at room temperature
  • 1/4 cup milk
  • 1 egg, lightly beaten

Filling:

  • 3 cups chopped rhubarb (slices should be no more than 1/4-inch thick)
  • 2/3 cup granulated sugar
  • 1 tsp. lemon juice
  • 1/2 tsp. finely chopped fresh rosemary
  • 1/4 tsp. salt

Preheat your oven to 350°F.

Grease a 1 1/2-quart casserole dish with butter, and into it toss rhubarb, sugar, lemon juice, rosemary, and salt. Stir to coat rhubarb.

In a bowl, combine flour, sugar, baking powder, lemon zest, and salt. Add butter, mixing until dry ingredients begin to form crumbs, then stir in milk and the egg. Stir until dry ingredients are just moistened.

Using a spoon or your fingers, pluck golf-ball-size rounds from the bowl and place on top of rhubarb, one ball at a time, until there is no dough left in the bowl and the rhubarb is mostly covered. You can smooth it down if you want, but I never bother. “Rustic” means that it looks homey and didn’t require fussing.

Bake for about 30 minutes, or until the top is golden and the rhubarb mixture bubbles around the sides. Let cool 10 minutes, then serve warm, with ice cream. I forgot the ice cream, and really noticed the lack of it.

The rosemary in this is what makes the whole thing magic. It might seem bizarre, but it totally works – I learned about it from Grace, and it rates as highly on the list of things I learned as the time I figured out how to multiply nines. Please do try it – there’s still rhubarb growing, as the season got off to a rocky start and it’s just beginning to really thrive. And be sure to demand company – you can ask her to pick up ice cream on the way. French vanilla is preferable.