Dreaming about cherries until next spring

Andrew and I recently moved to a new house, and we were pleasantly surprised to find a cherry tree loaded with fruit in the back yard on moving-in weekend. The tree is pictured below.

The cherries are of the red tart variety. Sadly, this year, few of them were picked and processed because it took a while to find both the time for picking and the pots and sugar for preparing the cherries. Also, I needed to make time to buy a cherry pitter, since I had no intention of fussing around with paring knives or hairpins for extracting the pits from pounds of cherries.

We got a pound or so of cherries off the tree as the last of the fruits ripened. I pitted them and stewed them with a little demerara sugar, making a simple but special oatmeal topping for breakfast with our first houseguests. The flavor was described by one guest as "like mixing cherry cobbler and oatmeal."

Dreaming about what to do with the crop of cherries next year, when I'll be ready for them. Cherry pie. Cherry crisp/cobbler. Cherry jam. Dried cherries. More stewed cherries. Cherry bread pudding. I just hope there are enough cherries to supply all my ambitions.

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The impermanence of purple asparagus

Enjoy the purple color of purple asparagus in the store, in the fridge, in pieces in the prep bowl. Take a picture and admire the color while you can, because as soon as the purple asparagus is cooked, it turns into green asparagus.

Asparagus Salad with Southeast Asia Sauce and Sesame Oil

one pound green or purple asparagus

1 tsp Thai fish sauce

1 Tbsp toasted sesame oil

1/4 tsp fresh grated ginger

juice of 1/2 lime

1 tsp honey

Snap tough stem ends off washed asparagus. Break spears into bite-sized chunks. Steam until crisp-tender, about five to seven minutes. Whisk together the dressing ingredients and toss with steamed asparagus. Serve warm or cold.

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Soup for summer: fruit soup

I was inspired 1) by the flavor of mrissa's berry soup that she served for brunch when Andrew and I visited at Thanksgiving time and 2) by the overwhelming sweetness of many of the wines served at the local Mackinaw Valley Vineyard when I visited the winery for a friend's birthday party in May.

I can't recommend any of the Mackinaw wines I tried for drinking because they only came in two varieties: cloyingly sweet and nose-wrinkling sour.

Once I stopped sipping around the Mackinaw wine list for a wine to serve alone or with dinner and started looking for a wine to make fruit soup, I began to find the sweet red wines a lot more interesting. I halted the search with Eric's Red, which had just the right sweet fruitiness with a hint of spice to go with the cherries I'd been saving. Seemed appropriate to use a wine with a Viking ship on the label for a Scandinavian-inspired cold soup.

I recommend serving this dish for brunch or dessert and not serving it to the kids because of the noticeable amounts of alcohol in it. The garnish in the photo is dried strawberry slices I made a few days before.

Eric's Red Tart Cherry Soup
serves 6 to 8

1.5 pounds frozen red tart cherries
3/4 to 1 c sugar (I used vegan demerara sugar)
2 cups water
juice of 1/2 lemon
1 tsp ground ginger
1/2 to 1 tsp ground nutmeg
1 Tbsp quick-cooking tapioca (such as Minit)
2 cups Mackinaw Valley Vineyards Eric's Red or other very sweet red wine

Combine all ingredients except wine in a pot, let sit five minutes, then bring to a boil. Cook until sugar dissolves completely. Remove from heat, add wine and puree. If puree is very thick, add more wine. Serve chilled.

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My first fried chicken

I did not grow up with home-cooked Southern-style fried chicken, as frying things with a lot of oil happened very rarely in my parents' home. I've been attracted to the idea of making a batch of fried chicken as a picnic food, which I've read about in older cookbooks and novels set in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Enter the motivation of needing a dish for a Memorial Day weekend potluck, the availability of fryer chickens at the Bloomington Farmer's Market, and Mark Bittman's recipe in How to Cook Everything, and I'm in business.

Of course, I departed from the original recipe in order to use the ingredients I have at hand. I did soak the chicken in buttermilk overnight as recommended by the recipe for added tenderness and flavor, and I think it helped.
Mixed in with the flour was 1/2 cup matzo meal for a little coarser texture to the breading. The next time I make this dish, I'm definitely using more spices. I didn't have nearly enough pepper and salt at 1 tsp each, and I should have had much more of the Penzey's spice mix (I don't recall whether I used the Jerk Seasoning or the Adobo Seasoning) because its taste didn't come through at all.

Using my cast-iron covered Dutch oven and a mix of Crisco and canola oil (Nigella Lawson highly praises the results from solid vegetable shortening, and I had a cup of Crisco on hand), I fried at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for seven minutes with the cover on and seven minutes with the cover off, one batch for the dark meat and one batch for the light meat. The dark meat stayed in a couple more minutes with the cover off.

The final taste test at the potluck was successful. The chicken was, alas, fried earlier in the day and had been refrigerated, so it was not at the peak of its crispness, but the texture was better than acceptable, even when I ate leftovers another day later. Can't wait to try this again and improve upon the spice mix.

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