Category Archives: Fruit

Blueberry Jam

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I’m afraid I can’t write a post for you tonight because I am too absorbed with Pinterest, which I never really explored before today.  Ooh, pretty!  Very distracting.  I see the attraction now.  Come visit me at pinterest.com/emmycooks/, wouldja?But here’s the nice thing about jam, I guess: it can happen in the background in fits and starts while you’re doing other things.  (Cooking an elaborate Senegalese feast, for example, or fooling around on the internet.)  Continue reading →

Tomato and Nectarine Salad with Basil

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Welcome to Emmy Cooks!  You can see some of my favorite recent recipes by clicking the “My Favorite Recipes” category on the sidebar (here are May, June, and July).  If you like what you see here, you can sign up on the sidebar to receive a daily recipe by email, or follow Emmy Cooks on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest.

It took us 11 hours to get out of the house today.  Does that happen to families that don’t have little children running around everywhere?  I can’t remember.  I don’t think so.There was playing to do in the back yard, the baby wanted to be rocked while she slept, and the bigger kids took long naps in the late afternoon.  Meanwhile, we picked through our blueberries (tiny snails were hiding in their blossom ends) and got a pot of blueberry jam simmering.  The children tasted it many, many times.  It doesn’t sound busy, does it?  Today, it was all-consuming.  We got to the park with all our bikes and scooters in the evening, just in time to ride the lakefront loop and have a picnic dinner on our girls’ favorite hidden beach at sunset.

We had a very good salad.  Continue reading →

Frozen Yogurt Jam Pops

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I made jam to use up fruit recently and now I’m making popsicles to use up jam.  It’s one big happy circle, really.

So my version of these popsicles are made with my recent batch of chunky cherry jam.  All you do, really, is mix jam with yogurt and freeze it.  The artistry is in choosing the jam flavor, I guess?  No, not even that, because I can’t think of a single flavor that wouldn’t be perfect here.  Plum?  Strawberry?  Peach?  Divine.

If you don’t feel like making your own jam (not even one single jar?) and you can’t be bothered to run to the store (and that I can understand, truly), I have another suggestion for you.  Visit A Raisin and A Porpoise, where Janet is giving away a jar of her homemade blackberry jam to a lucky reader.  You’ll be doubly enriched if you win the drawing, both by the blackberry jam and by making the acquaintance of a well-written blog full of little insights about life and great ideas about what to cook.

And blackberry jam would be just the thing in these popsicles. Continue reading Frozen Yogurt Jam Pops (click for recipe)

One Jar of Cherry Jam

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Am I right in suspecting that people who aren’t canners don’t make their own jam?  More’s the pity if that’s true.  Everyone should make jam occasionally, I think.  It’s a grandmother’s trick, preserving fruit with sugar and a few minutes of boiling on the stove, but it’s a trick worth keeping around.

I know canning sounds intimidating, all magic and mumbo jumbo, but that’s only until you see it in action just one time.  And then it’s no big deal.  This week a friend told me that she was inspired to can her first batch of jam after a recent visit where J and I were canning raspberry jam in the background when she arrived.  That was a proud moment for me.  But I’m not really here to talk about canning today.  (If you’re interested, Marisa‘s your girl.)

You can freeze jam too, you know.  Or better yet, mix it with yogurt and freeze it into Frozen Yogurt Jam Pops.

And here’s another thing you can do with jam: make just one jar, and eat it all up.  Or two, and give one away.  It’s an elegant little indulgence, and a smart way to give new life to days-old fruit.

Since you’re not canning this jam, you can take any liberties you like with the recipe.  (Canned foods require a certain minimum level of acidity for safe storage, so always use a modern canning recipe if you’re going that route.)  I started with three kinds of cherries, sugar, and half a lemon, then added a splash of almond extract at the end.  Cinnamon or vanilla would also be excellent additions to this jam. Continue reading One Jar of Cherry Jam (click for recipe)

Raw Rhubarb Compote

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I don’t think I knew about rhubarb when I was a kid.  But I have read about and romanticized the childhood pleasure of being sent outside with a bowl of sugar to dunk the tart whole stalks as an afternoon treat.  Did you get to do that?

This compote is like a grown-up version of what I imagine that sweet-crunchy experience to be.  I especially like to make it with green rhubarb, which turns a dingy beige color when cooked; leaving it raw instead preserves the gem-green color and lets the occasional pink highlight shine.  The flavor is very bright, tart and sweet at once, and if you are feeling adventurous the recipe (from Rustic Fruit Desserts, again) smartly suggests infusing the compote with fresh rosemary or lavender.  I always mean to try that, but it’s so good as is that I never have.

Likewise, I’m not too creative about serving this dish.  We usually scoop spoonfuls over yogurt, maybe with a little granola (like this one with orange zest and currants) sprinkled on top.  What other ideas do you have?  I have a big bowl in my fridge.

Continue reading Raw Rhubarb Compote (click for recipe)

Peach and Tayberry Upside-Down Pie

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What?  It’s been four days since I posted the recipe for the Easiest Pie Crust Ever and you still haven’t made a pie?  What are you waiting for?

Ok, ok, here’s a recipe that’s even easier than pie.  I’m calling it an upside-down pie, because it’s a single-crust pie with the crust, get this, on top.  Isn’t that smart?  So you get a scoop of juicy fruit and a crisp, buttery top crust.  That’s it.  The Rustic Fruit Desserts people (I told you you’d be hearing hearing more about them) refer to this dessert by the funny name “pandowdy,” and indeed it was their Gingered Peach and Blackberry Pandowdy that inspired mine.

This dessert was especially sweet because I made it with the last of the peaches we brought home from California and tayberries from our Tonnemaker’s fruit CSA.   (You can substitute raspberries or blackberries or both; tayberries are a cross of the two.)  I personally wouldn’t usually put peaches into a pie–I know, other people do it successfully!–because I think they give up too much juice, resulting in a too-liquid filling and a soggy bottom pie crust.  Both problems are solved by this recipe: the bottom crust has vanished and the filling is thickened to a luscious consistency by macerating the peaches and then simmering the juice to thicken it.

Continue reading Peach and Tayberry Upside-Down Pie (click for recipe)

Raspberry Jam

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Today was a cooking whirlwind.  It was the first day of our Nash’s CSA, and when my sister and I looped through the market to pick up our box I couldn’t resist bringing home a flat of raspberries as well.  So that meant jam-making (and everyone eating countless raspberries off their fingers, of course) in addition to our first CSA salad of the season, followed immediately by a five-hour cooking spree with new and old friends to produce a Senegalese feast.  The dishwasher is now running for the fourth time.

My sister was making gorgeous salads on one counter (greens, strawberries, goat cheese, pistachios, balsamic, thank you!) while I got a habenero chile sauce going on the stove, so J had the bright idea to set up the canner on the barbeque burner outside.  We will certainly be doing that again this summer to keep the kitchen cool.

Here are a few things you should know about making jam.  First, you don’t have to can it.  You can always make just a bowl or a couple of jars; keep them in the fridge and use them within a week or two (depending on the sugar content).  Alternatively, you can make a larger batch and freeze your jam instead of canning it.  Finally, if you use pectin, I recommend Pomona’s Universal Pectin, which doesn’t require a high percentage of sugar to work.  So you can sweeten your jam to taste and it will still set nicely. Continue reading Raspberry Jam (click for recipe)

Whole Wheat Pancakes with Sweet Cherries and Pecans

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We picked up our first box from Tonnemaker’s fruit CSA this week and–I’m almost sorry to say, for those of you where cherries are already over or not happening at all this summer–I have remembered how good a cherry can be.  We got three varieties this week, each better than the last, each cherry firm and impossibly sweet and dripping juice.  The kids’ hands have been purple since Tuesday.

It was J’s stroke of genius to slice some of the cherries into pancakes, which he did with the girls on the 4th of July.  It’s a weekend and holiday tradition of theirs, making pancakes or waffles for breakfast.  J seems to have inherited this sweet habit from his own pancake-making dad, which makes it doubly sweet.  The cherry on top, so to speak, is that I usually wake up just in time for breakfast (or just leftovers, if I’m really lucky). 

This recipe is J’s standard buttermilk pancake recipe (from Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone), which he made on this occasion with 2/3 whole wheat flour, those outstanding cherries, and some rosemary candied pecans we had lying around.  The result was so good that we ate them plain; the cherries were like built-in jam.  You could also serve them with butter and maple syrup, of course.  You won’t be sorry either way. Continue reading Whole Wheat Pancakes with Sweet Cherries and Pecans (click for recipe)

Apricot and Blackberry Cobbler

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Here’s what we brought back from California: a huge jug of olive oil, grown and pressed a few miles from where I grew up.  Bags and bags of almonds and walnuts from the nut orchards we drove through to get to my parents’ house.  And a 20 lb. box of peaches, nectarines, and plums, so that we can go on pretending that it’s summer even though it appears to have skipped straight from spring to fall in Seattle.

Mostly we eat ripe fruit alone, which is really its highest and best use, but last week this cobbler recipe appeared on Dinner: A Love Story and it sounded so simple and good that it was in the oven almost before I knew it.  Luckily we had lots of people hanging around that day, and it was gone within hours.

Continue reading Apricot and Blackberry Cobbler (click for recipe)

Summer Berry Sauce

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Why yes, those are chocolate pancakes you see pictured below.  A certain three-year-old daughter of mine is about to turn four, and she requested them for the birthday pre-party we had today.  (Last year it was chocolate waffles.)  We like to draw birthdays out as long as possible in our family.

While chocolate pancakes might be unconventional, they were topped with the most natural pancake topping I know for this time of year: a berry sauce.  My parents grow blueberries, raspberries, and multiple varieties of blackberries that bear fruit throughout the summer.  My kids’ hands and shirts have been stained with berry juice since the day we arrived, and every day there are fresh baskets of berries waiting after my dad makes his morning rounds.  This berry sauce, one of my mom’s specialties, was inevitable.

And yes, of course you can also make summer berry sauce all winter using frozen berries.  I usually make it with blackberries, but today’s version was raspberry.  The only real requirement here is that you whisk the cornstarch into cold water until smooth; if you add the cornstarch after the sauce is warm, it will clump.  Weird, huh?  Other than that, feel free to play around, you really can’t go wrong. Continue reading Summer Berry Sauce (click for recipe)