Mother's Day

Last week a friend said to me that when someone who has lived a full, long life passes away a library dies with them. My sad news is that my Mom passed away on April 28. I have tried very hard to learn as much as I could from her library. She packed her 95 and half years full of life, cooking, gardening, and taking care of her family. Those are certainly passions that I have learned from her. Since December, it was a long five months of caring for her but she was as comfortable and content as I could make her right up to her last hour.

So here I am on my first Mother’s Day without her with a hole in my heart and wonderful memories. She gave me a lifetime of instruction and insight and shaped my interest in cooking and gardening as well as teaching me how to aspire to be a good person.

She taught me how to make Angel Food cake from scratch when I was 9 years old. I loved the cake and was always requesting it. She had a hen house full of chickens and a bountiful supply of eggs so she just taught me how to whip the egg whites and fold in the flour so I could make the cakes myself. Together we wore out that old Sunbeam Mixmaster mixer with the milky glass bowls!

Here's a photo of her in her element--at the kitchen table surrounded by our family celebrating what looks like my 16th birthday!

She taught me the fine points of making pie crust; use lard for the flakiest crust, don’t add too much water or the crust will be tough, bake your crust at 400 degrees for 15 minutes then turn down the oven. Of course, filling the crust with fresh or frozen fruit from the garden was an essential component.

Then there was jam making; hours of picking and pitting then mixing the fruit with sugar in Grandma’s soup pot and boiling and stirring. Ladle that hot, sweet fruit into jars so you can have the taste of summer on your toast in January.

She was my introduction to growing things. As a girl I helped her plant the kitchen garden. Onions, corn, beans, tomatoes, squash, and cucumbers for pickles were just the beginning. Then there were flowers. Heirloom perennials like honeysuckle, roses, iris, and peonies and annuals like zinnias, cornflowers, and petunias were all in her palate. One year when I was in college she arrived at my apartment in St. Louis with two five gallon buckets overflowing with peony blossoms! In the last twenty years we planted things together and in the last couple of years she gave the orders and I did the digging!

Many of her peonies and iris were blooming last weekend so I found a florist in town that would use them in her casket spray. She would have been so proud of how beautiful her own garden flowers were. I hope that wherever she is she was wearing a huge smile.

The hole in my heart will heal but I will always have the things she taught me and her love to guide me and give me strength.

Montmorency Cherries

My February and March have evaporated into a haze of sleep deprivation enveloping the routine of round the clock care for my Mom. My best intentions to accomplish projects—blog posts included-- disappear into the mist as the daily requirements of food, medicine, cleaning, and sleeping take precedence.

I have accomplished ordering seeds and plants. All of my seeds have now arrived. My bare root Montmorency cherry tree from Trees of Antiquity arrived last week. Fortunately our weather has cooperated with warm early spring days so Dave and I were able to plant it the day after the big brown truck brought it up the lane to the house. The tree gets its name from the Montmorency Valley in France where it is said to have been developed sometime before the seventeenth century.

Sadly, the cherry tree that was in the orchard for as long as I can recall died last spring. It was from old age as far as I can tell without calling in a botanical CSI forensics expert. It produced many a bucket full of small, bright red, tart, cherries packed full of intense flavor. There is no better variety of cherries for pies and jam. Forget canned cherry pie filling. Don’t even think about putting a purchased frozen cherry pie in the oven. Everything else cherry pales in comparison to these bright, profoundly flavored, little gems so much so that it makes the labor intensive process of picking and pitting worth the effort.

Hopefully the new tree will thrive where we planted it. We won’t have cherries this year. Maybe we will have a few next year and maybe the year after we will have enough for one pie. I still have enough cherries in the freezer for one more pie so I will wait for a special occasion to savor the last Montmorency cherry we will eat for a couple of years.


Montmorency Cherry Pie

Enough pie dough for a double crust pie (See Flaky Foundation post)

4 cups of Montmorency cherries –fresh or frozen

¼ cup minute tapioca

1 ½ cups granulated sugar

1 teaspoon pure almond extract

Mix the cherries, tapioca, sugar and almond extract in a bowl.

Let stand 15 minutes while you roll the crust. See Flaky Foundation II for detailed instructions.

Fill the crust with the fruit mixture, cover with the top crust.
Bake on the lower shelf of a preheated 400 degree oven for 20 minutes then reduce the oven temperature to 350 degrees and continue to bake the pie until the juice is bubbling through the vent hole about another 45 to 60 minutes. Cool completely before cutting. Serve with whipped cream.

Excalibur Cookies

That stack of seed catalogs is still on my desk. All I have had time to do is thumb through the tomatoes in the Territorial Seed Company catalog and casually ask Dave,

” Should I plant okra again this spring? What about watermelon? Cantaloupe?”

I silently wonder how much of my time this spring might be needed to care for my Mom instead of tending the garden, but with the ever present hope of a dyed in the wool gardener I will likely order the full array of plants and seeds anyway.

I have to admit that seed catalogs are just a small percent of the volumes that arrive in my mailbox. Most go straight to the paper recycling container at our neighborhood grade school but occasionally I find something interesting in one of them such as the cookie recipe in the holiday edition of the King Arthur Flour Baker’s Catalogue. The King Arthur folks describe them as a cross between a cookie and a bar. They call them Lemon Jam Slices. I decided to try them because they looked easy and I could use my homemade jam for the filling. I substituted lemon juice and zest for the lemon powder in the original recipe. I was pleasantly surprised about how quick and easy the recipe is to make. The cookies disappeared quickly too.

The Sands, Taylor, and Wood Co. is the parent company of King Arthur Flour. They have been producing flour and other products since 1790. Excalibur is a retired name for one of their flours. Come to think of it these cookies filled with raspberry jam would be great for Valentine’s Day.

Excalibur Cookies

1 cup (8 oz.) soft butter

1 cup (7 oz.) sugar

¾ teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Juice and zest of one lemon

1 large egg yolk

1 teaspoon baking powder

3 cups all purpose flour

1/3 cup raspberry or apricot jam

Glaze

1 cup powdered sugar

1 Tablespoon lemon juice

1 Tablespoon butter

1 tablespoon milk

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper or lightly grease them.

Beat together the softened butter, sugar, salt, vanilla extract, and lemon juice until fluffy.
Scrape the bottom and sides of the bowl and beat in the egg yolk. Mix in the baking powder and flour until well blended.

Divide the dough into four pieces. Roll each piece into a log about 12” long and 1” in diameter.

Put two logs on each prepared baking sheet, leaving several inches between them. Use the handle of a wooden spoon to make a trough down the center of each log. Fill the trough with jam. I used a spoon but you could go to the trouble of using a pastry bag.

Bake the cookie logs for 18 to 20 minutes, until they are set and lightly browned around the edges. Let them cool about 3 minutes, and then carefully slice them on the diagonal into 1” pieces. I found that I needed to wash my bread knife frequently to get a clean cut because my jam stuck to it as I was slicing.

As the cookies continue to cool, make the glaze:
Sift the sugar into a bowl. Add the lemon juice. Heat the butter and milk together until the butter melts; then add it to the sugar and juice. Beat until smooth. Drizzle the glaze over the cooled cookies.

This recipe makes about 4 dozen cookies depending upon how thick you slice them.

Leap of Faith

As the days grow longer the winter grows stronger.

My folks would quote that in German. It rhymes in German too and it is all to true in any language.

For most of the first two weeks of January our thermometer didn’t rise above freezing. The fields were frozen solid and covered with powdery snow. But the past few days have brought us a warm front with the temperature nudging 50 degrees on a few warm afternoons. The smell of wet earth and the muddy footprints on the kitchen floor have turned my thoughts to the tall stack of seed catalogs on my desk. The catalogs started arriving in the mailbox at the end of the lane in early December, each one holding its own promise of distinctive vegetables and fabulous flowers. I have my favorite places to order seeds and plants so I set aside their catalogs. Territorial Seed Company, The Cooks Garden, Select Seeds, Kitchen Garden Seeds, McClure and Zimmerman, White Flower Farm, and Trees of Antiquity are the major sources of the seeds and plants that make up my garden.

Territorial Seed Company is my favorite source for tomato plants, herbs, and supplies including some kitchen equipment. The Cooks Garden has a wide variety of lettuces and salad greens along with other vegetables and flowers. I always order their Spring Mix lettuce. Select Seeds specializes in heirloom flowers and foliage although they offer a few herbs and vegetables. If you are looking for flowers that grew in your grandmother’s garden, look there. Kitchen Garden Seeds has a nice variety of vegetable and flower seeds. McClure and Zimmerman are exactly what they claim on the front of their catalog, quality flowerbulb brokers. They have most every flowering bulb, corm, tuber, and rootstock you could want, heirloom and otherwise. White Flower Farm has a wide variety of annuals, perennials, shrubs, bulbs, and edible crops all of the highest quality. Trees of Antiquity is a new source for me. Last year when my Montmorency cherry tree died I went looking for a source of heirloom fruit trees so I could plant a replacement. I found a huge selection of heirloom fruit trees in Trees of Antiquity’s catalog. Their selection of Apple trees is especially impressive. I ordered my cherry tree and it will likely arrive in March.

Ordering seeds and plants is a leap of faith, a belief in the future, and the promise of honest hard work. I haven’t had time to plan my garden or put in any orders yet, except for the cherry at Trees of Antiquity. My Mom’s declining health has kept me busy just keeping the family comfortable, fed, and clean but somehow I will find the minutes and hours in the days and months to come to plan and plant my garden. The last time I spoke with my mother-in-law, Dorothy, before she passed away last October I promised her I would plant a yellow grape tomato this spring. Territorial Seed Company has just the plant to fill that request.

Somehow I will also find the minutes and hours in what I expect will be trying and emotional days ahead to continue to post to this blog. I may not post as regularly as I would like but I will continue.

Merry Christmas

A week ago tonight I was sitting in the emergency room of our local hospital with my 95 year old Mom who was having trouble breathing. Fortunately the capable staff had her breathing more comfortably pretty quickly and diagnosed a little less quickly. In addition to being 95 and having heart problems she had a bacterial infection. I brought her home from the hospital on Saturday afternoon. She is very slowly gaining strength but I am predicting that it will be weeks before she has bounced back enough to move around the house without needing help from me or someone else.

So my plans to spend December blogging about our German family tradition of baking dozens of different kinds of cookies for Christmas have dashed into the ether faster than Donner and Blitzen.

In the best of all December dreams I will have some spare time to post a recipe or two. There will be other Christmas seasons for me to bake, photograph, and write recipes but I may not get another Christmas to share with my Mom so I am going to dedicate my time to her and my family this December.

If I don’t get another post in before the 25th, Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.

Lemon Meringue

My Meyer lemon tree is blooming. The flowers fill the room with their sweet scent, as though a Gardena blossom was floating in vanilla extract. The tree spent the spring and summer on the deck soaking up the sun and rain and now that I have moved it indoors for the winter it is covered with white blossoms and buds. I can only hope that some of the blossoms will become plump, juicy, thin skinned lemons that I can juice and use in pie.

Lemon meringue pie has been a favorite in my family for as long as I can remember. It often shows up at Thanksgiving, Easter, and birthdays. My Dad and uncles, my maternal grandmother, my aunt, my cousin, and most recently, my husband all counted it as one of their favorite pies. The components of lemon meringue pie – pastry crust, lemon curd, and egg whites whipped with sugar—have all been around for centuries, but it was not until the 19th century that recipes for the pie as we know it today started appearing.

I found this note in my Grandmother Emma’s collection of recipes. I think those ingredients would make one very ‘lean’ lemon custard pie. One of my personal critiques of many lemon pies is that the filling tastes too much like cornstarch. My second problem is keeping the meringue from ‘weeping’ (little tears of syrup form on the surface after baking). After many years of research I have found a filling recipe with which I am happy but I still occasionally get a meringue that weeps. I blame it on our humidity and try to serve the pie as soon after baking as possible.


The Best Lemon Meringue Pie…so far

One 9 inch deep dish pie crust, baked


Filling:

4 large egg yolks

3 large eggs

¾ cup fresh lemon juice

1 cup granulated sugar

2 Tablespoons cornstarch

A pinch of salt

½ cup (1 stick) unsalted chilled butter, cut into small pieces

Combine the eggs and additional yolks in a small non-reactive sauce pan. Stir in the lemon juice. Combine the sugar, cornstarch, and salt in a small bowl. Stir into the yolk and juice mixtures. Cook over low heat, stirring constantly until thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. Do not allow to boil. Remove from heat. Stir in butter a piece at a time until it is all incorporated. Pour mixture into the crust.


Italian Meringue:

½ cup sugar

2 Tablespoons water

4 large egg whites

½ teaspoon cream of tartar

½ teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Put a one cup heatproof liquid measuring cup near the stove.
In a small heavy saucepan combine the sugar and water. Heat, stirring constantly, until the sugar dissolves and the syrup is bubbling. Stop stirring and turn the heat down to very low.

Using a stand mixer and the whisk attachment beat the egg whites until foamy. Add the cream of tartar and beat until stiff peaks form when the beater is raised.

Increase the heat under the syrup and boil until large bubbles start to break all over the surface. A thermometer will read 236 degrees (soft ball stage). Immediately pour the syrup into the glass measuring cup to stop the cooking.

Pour a small amount of the syrup over the egg whites while the mixer is off. Immediately beat at high speed 5 seconds. Stop the mixer and add more syrup. Beat 5 seconds. Continue with the remaining the syrup scraping out the last with a rubber scraper. Continue beating on high speed for about 2 to 3 minutes until the bowl is no longer hot.

Spread the meringue on top of the filling starting at the outside edge, pushing the meringue into the crust edge and making decorative swirls and peaks.

Bake the pie about 10 minutes until the meringue is golden. Cool to room temperature and serve as soon as possible. Refrigerate leftovers if there are any.

Happy 95th

Last Sunday was my Mom’s ninety-fifth birthday. That was the cake I made for her. The bottom layer was chocolate, the middle layer was vanilla cheesecake, and the top layer was raspberry-- all iced in raspberry buttercream. There is not a crumb left.

She held court at a party for 45 of her relatives and friends.

Her niece, Kay and her grand-niece Emma, surprised her with a carrot cake made to look like a chicken sitting on its nest of eggs. Mom has a fondness for chickens that began when she was a girl as you can see from this photo taken about 1920.

We all wish you much love and many happy returns of the day, Ellen.