Deborah Madison Stops By!

You can hardly call yourself a foodie if you don't own at least one of Deborah Madison's many cookbooks, and if you happen to be vegetarian and don't own one, I don't know what to say to you. As you know, we eat just about anything in my house, but Madison's quintessential Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone remains my most called-upon, most splattered cooking bible. Given that Madison did a stint at Chez Panisse and founded Greens restaurant, her commitment to seasonal, local, good eating comes as no surprise, but I've been delighted by the accessibility of her writing and recipes to the home cook.

Recently Madison's eleventh cookbook hit the shelves, Seasonal Fruit Desserts: From Orchard, Farm and Market, and since she had included the Bellevue Farmers Market in her earlier book Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America's Farmers Markets, I impulsively hit her up for an interview:

First of all, congratulations on your new book. It's exactly in time for our Bellevue Farmers Market high season. The photographs are gorgeous, and I love your approach to fruit desserts, from simple to elaborate, from classics to putting together fruit-and-cheese trays. Besides the recipes, I love your writing. Your comments and insights make me feel like you're cooking alongside me in the kitchen!


Q. You have always urged your readers to eat seasonally and locally, when possible. Up in the Pacific Northwest, we are swimming in all kinds of berries at the moment, as well as stone fruits like cherries and pluots and peaches. Can you suggest some recipes for these from Seasonal Fruit Desserts?

DM: First of all, you're so lucky to be awash in berries! I can't quite imagine the luxury of that in New Mexico - they are truly precious (and costly, to match).  The simplest things to do —berries tossed with a little sugar and rose water; berries with creme fraiche, peaches sliced into a glass of wine; sauces made from an excess of berries or seedy little berries like blackcap raspberries.  One of my favorite desserts consists of sliced peaches and raspberries with a honey sabayon and a blackberry puree, or sauce. It's on the over-the-top side.  I'm wild for peach tarts or galettes with frangipane and there's one in the book, or a berry galette.  Plums and pluots are interesting sauteed with cardamom, or baked in wine with orange zest.

Q. In your book you talk about getting to know the names of fruits. As someone who only just learned there was more to cherries than Rainiers and Bings, can you explain what you mean by this?

DM: All things  have names, including fruits, and if we know what something is called, then we have the ability to ask for it again if we liked it, avoid it if we didn't, look for it if we long for it.  If we don't know their names, then we can't build a relationship to our favorites or more basically, to diversity.  Not only do we gradually lose the culture of food, in this case fruits, we lose a certain joy that comes with anticipating that Lambert cherry, or a Santa Rosa plum, or a favorite white nectarine, like  Arctic Rose.  Without names, it all becomes so random and over time, varieties get lost because no one knows what they're called and so they cease to ask for them.

Q. You recommend fresh berries be eaten right away, but if other Bellevue Farmers Market patrons are like me, we tend to go nuts and get a whole flat when the getting is good--are there any recipe suggestions in the cookbook that can be frozen or put by for later?

DM: Of course, freeze them if you have an excess!  I just meant you don't want to plan on keeping them around for a week before you use them.

Q. Oh, but I meant if you weren't going to freeze them. How long would a fruit compote or sauce keep?


DM: I think the texture of the compote would suffer in freezing, but I know you can freeze the sauces.  Compotes can keep in the fridge.  The dried fruit compote will keep for weeks, actually, but fresh fruit does diminish after a few days.
 
Q. I have a theory about the world: dessert eaters fall either into the Fruit or Chocolate categories. And Fruits always marry Chocolates--or at least this Fruit did. Any desserts in your new book that could satisfy both camps?

DM: Interesting theory.  I didn't include a lot of chocolate in the book.  There are two barks, that are great with dried fruits in winter, lavender, tangerine zest,  nuts. A included a good old fashioned chocolate pudding (and a butterscotch pudding) which is sort of a stand alone, but then t here's a steamed chocolate cake recipe that I included because of the fact chocolate does marry well with so many fruits, both fresh and dried ones.  The few cakes in the book, in  fact, are intended to accompany fruit throughout the seasons.

Q. And then there are those occasional weirdos who don't "do" dessert. I love how your book suggests pairings of cheese and fruit as dessert alternatives. Bellevue Farmers Market features locally-made Cheddars, Goudas, curds, fresh mozzarella, feta, and a very fresh variety called Ladysmith. There are also hazelnuts available. Can you put together a couple Washington cheese tray ideas for us?

DM: I'm familiar with your market as I visited it and wrote about it in my book, Local Flavors.  When there I was smitten with the hazelnuts, your gouda cheese, and a few apples we bought. They were spectacularly crisp and juicy (it was fall) and good.  I'd start with those three —toast the hazelnuts (in the shell is good, too!), have the cheese at room temperature, slices of your favorite apples. Of course Cheddar would be good with the apples and nuts as well.  I may be dead wrong on this, but I'd be curious to try the curds, or the Ladysmith, drizzled with honey and sprinkled with toasted, chopped hazelnuts. There is a really simple recipe in Seasonal Fruit Desserts that has you cook quartered apples in a little applejack on the stove (Plump Golden Apples) - a tad of butter, a pinch of sugar - not very sweet but very succulent.  One who doesn't "do" desserts might like it, especially with some Cheddar. There's also a peach or a pear stuffed with a hazelnut

frangipane which is quite modest as desserts go and makes use of your local fruits and nuts.

Thank you so very much for your time and your dedication to delicious, real food. We look forward to enjoying your book!

How Granola Can You Go?

***Don't forget! No Saturday Market on July 24 because of the Bellevue Arts Festival. See you Thursday!***

Last night, after we finished discussing Betty Smith's JOY IN THE MORNING, my book club got off into uncharted conversational territories, somehow ending up on the topic of fund-raising via bodily fluid donation. One member's husband even managed to pay rent on his college apartment by donating plasma twice a week! Another woman spoke up to say that, although she has gallons of breast milk stashed in the freezer, she can't sell it to a milk bank or even donate it because she was in Scotland during Chernobyl, and that puts you on the no-fly list.

"I bet if you made it into cheese you could sell it at farmers markets," spoke up a third, to a chorus of general groans. "No, really! Some people would be really into that! I have a friend who's trying to buy breast milk from this woman in Texas and have it shipped out."

Our beloved Bellevue Farmers Market offers just about everything a person would want to eat, but no Breast Milk Cheese vendors have yet approached director Lori Taylor. Nor Breast Milk Ice Cream vendors, which was the next suggestion. I suppose you could argue for the products being local, organic and sustainable--have pump, will travel--but surely only a handful of people in the entire Puget Sound could pass such a booth without tittering, so to speak.

You never know. No matter how interested and into real food and sustainability I get, there are always those much, much more into such things. Those who do CSAs and eat completely seasonally. Hundred-Mile-Dieters. Raw milk diehards.

Consider the cupcake I got at Cupcake Luv one Saturday. Here I was thinking I was eating a very bad thing, but, as it turned out, I was actually making the world a better place. For one thing, Cupcake Luv uses Shepherd's Grain, grain grown by families in the Pacific Northwest who don't plow the ground! Call me an idiot, but I had no idea this was a goal--hadn't I read in Jared Diamond's GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL that we humans had been happily plowing for thousands of years? Well, that's enough of that business because it turns out that not plowing--planting by direct-seed-- "means cleaner streams, healthier soils, and a reduced carbon footprint."

So not only was my cupcake conserving soil and water and protecting wildlife habitat, it tasted like a Creamsicle, had a luscious, moist crumb and was injected with Grand Marnier pastry cream. Yeesh. I think it was delicious, but I had to make sure, so I hid it toward the back of the kitchen counter and ate the entire thing.

Besides those amazing plow-free grains, Cupcake Luv uses all natural, local ingredients. Their pink frosting, for example, gets its color from prickly pear puree! Dark Chocolate-Peanut Butter is a BFM bestseller, as is the Whoopie Pie: two chocolate patties with vanilla-marshmallow cream and chocolate chips. For those of you gluten-allergics who want to save the planet and eat your cake, too, Cupcake Luv offers a weekly, rotating, gluten-free special made from a combination of rice, almond and millet meal. Except for the solid "minis," all cupcakes are filled with pastry cream or fruit filling or ganache. Uh huh. You read that right.

Of course, now that I have you all worked up, this is a sorry time to remind you that the next Saturday Market will be July 31 because of the Bellevue Arts Festival. But do come by this Thursday! As a treat in itself, Cafe Juanita's own Chef Holly Smith will be doing a chef demo at 4:00 p.m. Check my Bellevue.com mini-interview with her for the juicy details! See you there?

Blessed Are the Cheesemakers

...for they allowed me to invite myself to someone else's house for dinner last night. Really. There I was, sitting by our neighborhood pool at 5:15 p.m., chatting with a friend. Talk turned to our respective dinner menus, and she was planning chicken-pesto pizza made on the grill(!!!). "How about you?"

Uh...I thought of what was thawing on the counter at home, which was exactly nothing. I thought of how good that pizza sounded. I thought of how much more fun it would be to go to someone else's house and eat their planned meal than to come home and rummage through the freezer. "We'll probably grill some sausages," I said. Which was true, since that's probably what I would have whipped out of said freezer.

"Hmm...that sounds good."

"We could come grill them at your house!" I suggested, sensing weakness. "Have a potluck!"

"Oh..."

"They're from the farmers market! Skagit River Ranch Beef Summer Sausage and some Italian."

"Well, the house is a mess..."

"So's ours! I don't care about that. And I have some sugar snap peas--and pluots--" There was further softening, but I saw I would have to use the ace up my sleeve. "--And I have cheese."

Now this friend has a weakness for cheese. Her ears perked up. "What kind of cheese?"

"I picked up two kinds at the Market. This cheddar with salsa from Golden Glen Creamery and this fresh kind with chives from Samish Bay. They're so luscious! Four out of five Dudleys love them." (The fifth Dudley being my son, who only tolerates shredded cheddar that falls in a certain range of yellows on the color spectrum.) That clinched it. Have cheese, will travel.

And I think they weren't sorry to have us. They complimented the sausage, although it took a little extra grill time since I pulled them hard as rocks from my freezer, and the cheese was pronounced delicious with a "great texture." Even their nine-year-old boy had several thick slices of the Ladysmith with Chives, and my oldest daughter attempted to toast some of the Queso with Salsa over the fire, while others roasted marshmallows.

It's one thing to use our Bellevue Farmers Market as a source of hostess gifts. Another thing altogether to use it to get yourself hosted in the first place. If you haven't picked up farm-fresh cheese and you're still buying those generic blocks from the grocery store, let this be the week you branch out. Our cheesemakers carry everything from fresh curds to aged, grating cheeses. And Samish Bay's Ladysmith was named by Seattle Weekly as "the best, and by best we mean Most Addictively Snackable, New Cheese."

I know I'll be picking up some more varieties this week because we are cleaned out!

Slow Checks, if Not Food

(At last the Urban Farm Junkie has returned from her globetrotting and overcome jetlag to the point that she can sit at her computer again and then stumble off to the Saturday Bellevue Farmers Market--because heaven forbid she run out of cherries before the Thursday market.)

Greetings, foodies. I had hopes of sending a post written while I actually was in Paris, Florence, or Rome, but only the Paris hotel had any free computer access, and even my dedication level was not sufficient to compose a post typed in on my iPhone "keyboard." But good news--I've learned how to say organic in French and Italian! It's "biologique" or "biologico," respectively. Since European countries tend to have much stricter laws about what can and can't be done to food, I actually didn't think too much about it, but I did notice a few places bragging about "bio" eggs. Can't tell you whether or not the taste was superior because--ugh--it was soft-boiled. If there's anything American cooks have contributed to world cuisine, it's cooking everything within an inch of its life--a definite improvement where eggs are concerned.

Because we didn't swing south on this Italian journey, I missed the lavish displays of roasted vegetable antipasti, but there was still plenty of delicious food throughout the trip. Cafe LaDuree in Paris featured hot chocolate so thick and rich you could almost stand your spoon in it, as well as croissants so flaky that nearly exploded on contact. I had a croissant "fouree" the first day, the filling being a mixture of hazelnuts and almonds, and then one with chocolate and a pistachio mixture the next. Uh huh. Yum. Plenty of good cheese and bread, even in the restaurant at the Orsay Museum!

On to Florence, where our dinner at the Quattro Leoni won hands-down for best trip meal. Prosciutto and melon for starters, but not just your standard canteloupe. This was some smaller, darker, oranger melon at its very peak of ripeness. It wasn't a Charantais, either. I'm dying to ask our melon farmers when we hit the season. This was followed by my sublime entree of little pasta purses stuffed with a pear(!)-cheese mixture and bathed in a cream sauce. Oh. My. Goodness. This is when one yearns for gut-busting, American-size portions because I could have eaten about fifty of those little guys, but as it is I had to settle for gelato afterward. Just as with American ice cream, you can spot the better gelatos by the color. Banana should be gray-brown, not yellow. And pistachio should be gray-sage, not green. In Rome we risked our lives storming the completely disorganized counter at Giolitti's where they pile your gelato high and then ask, "Con panna?" Meaning, do you want whipped cream on your iced cream? Fat with your fat? Yes, please.

I was sad to come home from the mid-80s temperatures in Rome to the low-60s here, but at least summer marches on in theory! Here come all the berries and cherries and the first early-variety peaches. My youngest and I made quick work of the Tieton cherries from Johnson Orchards and look forward to Bings in a couple weeks. A friend reports that the grass-fed lamb chops she bought Thursday were to die for--she basted them with a little olive oil, salt and pepper, and then grilled them up in no time. And the snap peas are everywhere. This week I might pick up a little spinach and saute it as my husband enjoyed it in Rome: olive oil, raisins, and pine nuts.

Happy Market Day and buon appetito!