Food, Photography and Bons Mots
Stop me if you have heard this one. A neighbor walks into his backyard. Innocently, he plants a generous row of zucchini seeds in his garden. Almost overnight, he has pretty green plants. Then, one morning, to his delight and amazement, there is…
My friend Sarah said to put this recipe on Blue Cayenne. Believe me, when Sarah gets that insistent tone in her voice, Blue Cayenne listens. I’ve been making this gorgeous (and delicious!) soup for a very long time. This recipe was adapted from one…
Apricots evoke strong emotions.
For poet John Ruskin, they conjured up a visual and tactile beauty. He described them as “shining in a sweet brightness of golden velvet.”
For Chilean novelist Isabel Allende, theirs was a melancholy comfort. She wrote: “At the most difficult moments of my life, when it seemed that every door was closed to me, the taste of those apricots comes back to comfort me with the notion that abundance is always within reach, if only one knows how to find it.”
For me, apricots have always occupied a special place in my food world. For a number of years, my mother’s “paradise cake” was a family tradition for my birthday. It was a yellow cake frosted with a cooked puree of apricots and decorated with coconut. It was tart, sweet, and decadent and it was made just for me. So, for me, I guess the tart-sweet flavor of apricots is like a reassuring hug. I’ve looked online for the recipe, thinking that there must be a recipe for paradise cake out there somewhere, but so far I’m coming up empty.
Absent a recipe for my mother’s paradise cake, this apricot crumble cake is a sweet-tart delight.
The recipe made its way into my towering stack of “must try” recipes because of the technique used in adding the fruit. Basically, you make the cake batter, spoon it into your cake pan, arrange apricot halves on top of the batter and then sprinkle a sugary crumble topping over the whole thing. As a result, you get a real jolt of the apricots’ tart goodness before you bite into the sweet cake. For an apricot enthusiast like me, that is a big big plus. The recipe is versatile, too. You could use nectarines, peaches, or plums in place of the apricots. How good is that?“
Every year the apricot season seems like it lasts about fifteen minutes to me. In actuality, ninety per cent of the U.S. commercial crop of apricots is grown in California and the season lasts from early May to late July.
Eek! It’s July 1.
Time to gather some of the last of this year’s crop!
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This recipe is adapted from one that appears here: http://eatlittlebird.com .
Banana cake. Cream cheese frosting. Chopped pecans. This is a great banana cake. You may even want to eat the frosting by the spoonful. I did. OK. That’s a fair criticism. I have posted a number of banana cake and bread recipes on…
You know the feeling. There is casual remark among your group of friends and some knowing laughter. Gradually, it dawns on you. There was a party. You weren’t invited. That’s the way I felt with this recipe. Apparently a whole lot of people know…
JOIN ME FOR THE WAVE!
IT’S STONE FRUIT SEASON, PEOPLE!
In my mind, it doesn’t get better than stone fruit season–ripe as it is with the promise of baking and aromas and pleasurable eating, but, alas, not everyone is feeling the love this year. There is a wonderful apricot tart recipe as the end of this post, but, first I want to tell you a cautionary tale about a small breakdown in grocery store etiquette. The story begins in the fruit aisle.
I was gathering fuzzy orange-gold apricots into my biodegradable produce bags at my local Jon’s Supermarket the other day when, out of nowhere, I was approached by a lady wearing a wide flower-patterned headband that partially covered her medusa-like reddish hair.
“What are you going to make with all those apricots?” she asked as I was filling my second bag and as she was picking up a bag of her own. (There were a gazillion apricots filling the store’s bins, by the way. There was no shortage.)
Startled, I mumbled that I was going to bake an apricot tart because Jon’s apricots looked beautiful. “It’s always hard to find good apricots,” was my distracted but not unfriendly reply and I kept bagging.
For some reason, my answer seemed to irritate my new friend at the apricot bin. Before I could even begin to tune into the drama unfolding around me, she had pivoted to face the apple aisle and yelled to “Bob,” a casually-dressed man who apparently was her husband, “She’s going to make an apricot tart!” The edge to her voice made her point clear. She might as well have added, “Can you believe that?”
Soon it seemed that people in the vicinity of the apricot bin were staring at us curiously. Bob, however, just proffered a half-disinterested “what?” and kept studying the sale produce. Not to be ignored—especially, apparently, by Bob—the apricot lady yelled to Bob again, this time even more loudly. “She’s making a tart,” trailing out the word tart as if it were a foul four-letter word.
I just stood there. What in the world? Had I wandered into some kind of Sterlingesque cultural minefield by admitting that I was making a tart? Was I being pranked? Candid Camera, maybe?
Or, wait! Was it me? I checked the strap of my purse to see if I was still wearing my Bernie button. Nope. I was clean. No triggers there.
Or, wait–again! Maybe it was just her. Maybe road rage has found its nasty way into the produce aisles, reducing one of our last areas of semi-civility to dust. Or, maybe she just needed a hug…or an apricot.
Whatever. I tied the little twisty tops onto my bags of apricots and ducked into the anonymity of the check-out line. (What? You thought I was going to leave the apricots behind just because I was being harrangued by a stranger? Blue Cayenne had a post deadline! I can be one tough cookie when I need to.)
As I drove home, I made it a point to refocus upon my plan to bake the beautiful apricot tart recipe I had bookmarked in David Lebovitz’s book, Ready for Dessert, and to write a bit about the glories of beautiful apricots. I’d gotten my groove back.
Here is that part of my post.
After I had enjoyed every moment of baking the tart–It is superb, by the way– I started doing a little more research on apricots. Did you know that, fragile as they are, apricots have been around for thousands of years, probably first being cultivated in China and Central Asia? Or that thereafter, they were carried across the Eurasian steppe by what one writer colorfully described as bands of “nomadic, horseback-riding tribesman?” I didn’t know that but reading the history of apricots set me to musing; can’t you just picture rough-and-tumble warriors, pockets packed with apricots, bare-chested except for tight little leather vests… Nevermind.
Apricots are called a lot of names around the world—golden apples, Armenian plums, The Precocious One, yellow plums and on and on. They’ve also insinuated themselves into colloquial expressions. There is an absolutely wonderful Turkish expression that goes like this: “It doesn’t get better than an apricot in Damascus.” (Translation: You can’t show me anything better than that!)
The Persians have an apricot saying, too. When someone makes an improbable boast, the sarcastic response is sometimes, ” when the apricots bloom…” or, “Tomorrow there will be apricots.” The apricot expression is the Persian equivalent of “when pigs fly.”
Lest you dismiss my promise of a great apricot tart recipe with references to apricots blooming tomorrow, here it is– and it’s a delicious gem of a recipe, too. Worth the wait.
Me? I’m going back to buy more apricots tomorrow. I’ve found an Ottolenghi recipe for Poached Apricots with Pistachios and Amaretto Cream that I just can’t wait to try. Tell you the truth, though, I’m really hoping not to run into that downer of an apricot lady again. If I do, maybe I’ll try telling her the one about the nomadic, horseback-riding tribesmen.
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You can buy Lebovitz’ book at Amazon. Here is the link: Amazon.
It takes a neighborhood and sometimes a bicycle! This salad recipe is adapted from Hetty McKinnon’s salad cookbook Neighborhood. McKinnon is an Australian cook who currently lives in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn but has hung her hat in the Mediterranean, Asia and France.…
Brilliant red strawberries picked at the peak of their ripeness floating on a bed of creamy mascarpone and suspended over a crisp rye flour crust… You need this tart. We are on the cusp of strawberry season here in California and this easy-peasy (and indulgent)…
Dear Meghan.
You are one lucky girl. Movie star good looks. Handsome prince. Loaded grandmother-in-law.
But why didn’t you put that elegant little foot down and insist on a real cake for your wedding? What was it with that frou-frou elderflower cake anyhow?
I know., I know. You rejected the traditional British wedding cake–the dreaded fruit cake–for a cake with organic lemons, castle-grown elderflowers and cascades of elegant flowers. Good move on that one. But, still…
I know that whole tradition “thing” must have been a powerful pressure on you and Harry in picking your cake. Someone probably started out by showing you a photo of the Queen’s cake in 1947. Whoa!
And, then, of course, there was Princess Diana’s cake for her marriage to (ugh!) Charles. Sadly, that marriage had so many things going against it from the very beginning, not the least of which was that sterile-looking wedding cake baked by the head baker for the British Naval Armed Services. If I was into conspiracy theories, I would wonder if Camilla had a hand in the cake design. Just sayin…
So, I ask you, what better way would there have been to assert your American independence than by insisting upon the quintessential American cake, the banana cake, for your wedding? Surely, the queen must have had some overripe bananas sitting around the kitchens of Windsor Castle and I’m sure that people all across America would have sent you their overripe bananas for the cake. I know I would have. It would have been a slam dunk.
But that is all, as they say, water under the (London) bridge. Your wedding was beautiful.
In any event, here is a great banana cake recipe. New brides always enjoy experimenting with recipes in their modest first homes. You’ll probably be the only one baking banana cake at Kensington Palace and it’s always nice to have something sweet on hand when the Queen stops by unexpectedly with the corgis.
Give Harry a hug.
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This recipe is adapted from one that appears on the King Arthur Flour website. Here is the link: KAF Banana Cake.
I love adore soup! All soup. Well…maybe not all soup. I was once on a school district committee where one of the elementary school reps reported on her school’s “soup day.” Seems they had an activity where each student was asked to bring a can of Campbell’s…
