Pleasures of summer

Yogurt and granola with freshly picked raspberries

Here are just some of the delights I’ve been enjoying this first week or so of July.

Salmon with lemon slices

 Copper River salmon with blackened (caramelized) lemon slices. It’s nice to use a cast iron skillet for this. First, saute one (or two) thinly sliced lemon(s) in a bit of butter or olive oil until soft and starting to blacken; next, sear the salmon filet, then finish cooking in the oven at 300 or 325 degrees until the salmon is tender and flakes easily.

Beans and greens summer salad

The base is cooked or canned white beans. I used cannellini beans that I brined the night before and rinsed before cooking. (This is a great way to cook beans that I learned from Cook’s Illustrated.) Make a dressing of olive oil, plenty of fresh lemon juice (and some zest if you like), a little garlic and some salt. You can basically add any chopped vegetables and herbs you like: for this salad, I used chopped raw spinach, chopped broccoli rabe (cooked crisp-tender), chopped green onions, a little sweet yellow pepper and some minced parsley, mint and dill. A second variation omitted the spinach but had more broccoli rabe and some basil.

Pie cherries from the farmers market

Pitting pie cherries

Cherry pie

I only had enough cherries for a small pie — and I decided to make the top crust only. (We never missed the bottom crust or its calories. And I didn’t have to decide whether to pre-bake it or not.)

You’ll need some nice fresh pie cherries, which are not always easy to find — and some sugar and cornstarch or other thickener for the filling (How much? Epicurious has a good basic recipe and you can adjust it according to how big a pie you’re making, etc.) Also a little lemon juice and zest.

Some people like almond extract in a cherry pie, but I don’t care for almond extract anywhere, so of course it didn’t go in.

Later, that same day

I didn’t hear any complaints.

Saturday afternoon pie

It was a grey and dreary February day, and I was in the mood to make a little late afternoon sweet. I’d been thinking about cherry pie ever since George Washington’s birthday on Feb. 22.

When I was a child, I often heard the story about how young George, trying out his new hatchet, chopped down a cherry tree. When his father came along later and saw the damaged tree, he asked his son if he knew who the culprit was, the story goes, and George answered: “I cannot tell a lie, Pa. I did cut it with my hatchet.”

Growing up in Illinois, we always had Feb. 12 off from school for Lincoln’s birthday (sadly, not associated with any type of pie) and Feb. 22 off for Washington’s birthday, which was always celebrated with cherry pie.  One time when I was about 12 my father took me out to lunch at a fancy restaurant in Chicago’s Wrigley Building on Washington’s birthday.  I don’t remember what we ate for main course, only that it was a very special treat — and that, naturally, we had cherry pie for dessert.

Anyway, this Saturday, three days after George’s birthday, I was too lazy to make a real pie (and in any case I didn’t have enough quite enough pie cherries in my freezer for a big pie) so I decided to just wing it and create my own cookie-cutter topped cherry concoction. I made a pie dough (using about 3/4 cup flour, 3 tablespoons of butter, a little salt and some ice water), rolled it out and cut it with my cookie cutter.

I mixed the thawed pie cherries with a couple spoonfuls of flour, some sugar (I had to guess how much, but it turned out just right) and a little orange peel, and put the cherry mixture in a pie pan, then placed the flower-shaped pieces of dough atop and sprinkled them with a little demerara sugar.

After about 35 minutes, the cherries were bubbling and the pie dough was golden. I took this bottom-less pie out of the oven and let it cool down just a bit while I made a pot of Italian decaffeinated coffee and took out some rarely used fancy dessert plates.

In honor of George (albeit a little after his birthday) we enjoyed our cherry pie and coffee — and the dreary day became a cheery one.

Oh, by the way, it turns out the story about George Washington chopping down the cherry tree is false, a  fabrication of George Washington’s biographer. Nevertheless, as Maira Kalman writes in her fabulous blog about George (which I was happy to revisit today) he was likely a moral man — and also quite likely, partial to cherry pie.

Abundance of summer

It’s been a time of abundance lately, especially of the fruitful variety. Right after  my raspberry marathon, our neighbors invited us over for rhubarb crisp — and then gave me several pounds of rhubarb (I made rhubarb sauce, excellent with yogurt and granola).

Then we headed over the mountains to the Peshastin ice cream social. Peshastin is a tiny town along the Wenatchee River, in the fruit country between Leavenworth and Wenatchee, Washington.

It’s a delightful small-town community event where people buy cakes, pies, cookies, ice cream and coffee — and all the money goes to support the town library.

A lot of the sweets were better to look at than to eat, but the cherry pie was tasty.

Though we were only in orchard country for one day, our friends generously gave us many gifts of food:

Scott and Maggie let us sample the season’s early Red Hale peaches and then took us out to the cherry orchard to pick pie cherries to take home (and we picked some sweet cherries too — these were a late variety, Vans, in a year where everything is pretty late).

The cherry picking brought back memories of the many seasons that Rick and I picked cherries, traveling from Lodi, California, to Wenatchee, Washington, to Polson, Montana.  And the pie cherries reminded me of childhood summers spent with my family in Door County, Wisconsin, where we went to community fish boils and ate cherry pie for dessert.

Next: apricots! Rick let us pick as many apricots as we wanted from the prolific tree behind his house. It only took minutes to fill a couple of boxes.

And greens. Laurie made us pesto and vegetable salads and gave us bunches of kale and chard from her garden to take home.

When I returned to my kitchen, I had a lot of produce to deal with. Not to complain, though! I set to work pitting cherries, drying some in my food dehydrator and using some to make a cherry pie. (For the latter, I’m afraid I wasn’t as generous as I should have been with butter and sugar, so the pie didn’t make the cut for this post. It still tasted pretty good though:  a pinch of cardamom was very nice with pie cherries.)

I cut and dried most of the apricots and we ate the rest fresh (I meant to make apricot butter but never got to it.) I sauteed the chard with garlic and made kale salad (more about that soon) with fresh apricots and toasted walnuts.

Laurie made a delicious salad with lemon-treated kale and mangoes.

I also got some tips along the way that made things easier:

• Laurie told me about “massaging” kale with lemon to make it as tender as cooked greens, without the cooking.  This is the same process of “cooking” with acid that is used with ceviche — but I didn’t know it’d work with greens. You just use the juice of a lemon or two with a bunch of kale, mixing or massaging the juice and the torn or shredded leaves with your hands. It really transforms them. Another lemon miracle.
• Maggie suggested drying the pie cherries. They took a while in the food dehydrator, but  I really like the tart-sweet result. I’ll be using them in my granola or cookies in place of dried cranberries.
• Aviva told me that her friend Hannah uses a paperclip to pit pie cherries. It works! You just unbend one side of a large wire paperclip and use it to pry the pit from the cherry.

As I pitted the last of the pie cherries to put in the freezer–perhaps to make a more indulgent cherry pie this winter–I thought about how grateful I was for the abundance of food and friends.

A final thought:  A jarring contrast to all this plenty is the famine in the Horn of Africa. I don’t want to be preachy, but charities are having a really hard time getting adequate donations. If you can help, Unicef and many other charities are doing good work trying to prevent millions of children from starvation. Thank you.