eG Foodblog: MelissaH - Summer in Oswego, NY

[MelissaH]

I now have a plum tart in the oven, to be for tonight's dessert. I've even remembered to take pictures so far.

First, I did the dishes. I always like to start in a wide-open kitchen, and my kitchen has such limited working space that it's particularly important.

Then, I measured my crust ingredients. My guide was a galette recipe from Fine Cooking, available on line. I did half a recipe of crust, because as written it made two crusts and I didn't want to make another crust.

First, I put a couple of ice cubes in a cup with a spout, and then I filled the cup with water. I weighed out 5.7 ounces of King Arthur AP flour in a bowl. I added in a couple of spoonfuls of sugar and a bit of salt, and gave the whole thing a stir with a spoon. My last bit of prep: slicing a stick of butter, straight out of the fridge, lengthwise both ways into long skinny logs and then crosswise into bits.

When I have a dishwasher, my preferred tool to make crusts is my Cuisinart. However, it's been nearly two years since I had such a luxury in my home, and it's likely to be another year or so. In the absence of a dishwasher, I prefer to use my hands, because they're much easier to clean. Accordingly, I started to toss the bits of butter into the flour, getting each batch of butter bits completely coated before adding the next. Once all the butter was in and coated, I started smushing with my hands, getting the butter all flattened. During the process, it starts to break into smaller pieces, and eventually gets more or less uniform. When I use my hands, I'm not tempted to overdo this part of crust mixing.

Then, I weighed out the requisite 2.5 ounces of water from my iced supply in the measuring cup. Following the recipe instructions, I added it all at once. I folded it in with a rubber scraper, and got a wet gooey mass. I thought for sure I'd goofed again (really, I'm a pretty good baker!) and would have nothing but failures to show you this week. But I went ahead and shaped it into a disk, and wrapped the disk in plastic wrap in preparation for an hour in the fridge. The disk of dough was so soft that I put it on a little plate, because I was afraid it wouldn't stay put on its own.

But after an hour in the fridge, the dough had firmed up dramatically, and I was starting to believe that not all was lost. I cleared enough of my counter to pull out my wooden pastry board. This was an Ikea purchase a few years ago, when we found it for $20 instead of the $70 or so of the other brands my husband had found. It's been worth far more than that. I turned my oven on to a little more than 400 degrees F to preheat, because it takes a good long while and doesn't tell you when it gets where it's going. I also got out my flour bucket, because I knew I'd need some to roll out the dough. The rolling pin was from my in-laws a few Christmases back upon my request; you can imagine the laughs that provoked from the rest of the family!

The dough, much to my surprise, rolled out reasonably nicely. It stayed soft, which meant that I didn't need to beat it into submission. I didn't quite get it round, though. After I rolled it, I folded it into quarters with the help of my big metal scraper, and transferred it off the rolling board to a sheet of parchment. I put the sheet of parchment on a pizza pan with very low sides, draped the same piece of plastic wrap back over the rolled-out dough, and stashed it back in the fridge because it was starting to feel awfully soft. Then I scraped down my pastry board and put it away so I had working space again. It will be nice to eventually get a kitchen with enough working space that I don't necessarily need to put one thing away to do something else!

The recipe called for amaretti crumbs. I didn't have any of those, but I did have a bit of white bread. I turned a slice into crumbs in my spice grinder.

Next task: deal with the plums. I used the six sugar plums I'd gotten this morning at Ontario Orchards, which collectively weighed a smidge more than 1 pound. Following the instructions, I rinsed and dried the plums. But in the next step, the instructions lied. They said to cut each plum in half and remove the pit. I took the first plum, ran my knife around its prime meridian and International Date Line, and tried to twist it open into halves. All that happened was that the plum mushed around and spilled some juice onto my cutting board. I'm guessing these instructions were written more for supermarket plums that are less ripe and are more freestone than these. So I instead cut the plums into wedges and flicked them off a pit, doing all the cutting over a bowl to preserve my countertop.

Now that everything was ready to go, I pulled the crust out of the fridge and unfolded it all the way.

I sprinkled the breadcrumbs into the middle of the dough, leaving a couple of inches naked all the way around. My plum wedges weren't neat enough to make nice concentric circles, so I just concentrated on getting all the breadcrumbs covered with a layer of fruit.

Then I folded up the rim of dough, making the pleats as pretty as I could and showing off some of the fruit in the center.

Finally, I brushed the crust with a little milk, sprinkled it with some pearl sugar, and loaded it into the oven.

It took a little longer to bake than the recipe said, but that's not unusual for my oven. The thermostat is a little off on the low side, and it's also got a hot spot in a back corner so you need to rotate whatever you bake halfway through, which loses a tremendous amount of heat. But eventually it looked done enough to come out of the oven. It's now cooling on top of the stove.

Will let you know how it tastes after dinner!

MelissaH

[Smithy]

That looks lovely! I've been looking at that issue of Fine Cooking and wanting to try the tarts, but haven't tried it yet - lack of time mostly, and a bit failure of nerve to try something new. Good on you!

[ludja]

...

The recipe called for amaretti crumbs. I didn't have any of those, but I did have a bit of white bread. I turned a slice into crumbs in my spice grinder.

...

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The galette looks very nice and that was a good idea re: the breadcrumbs. Another option in this situation is ground almonds.

Edited July 27, 2005 by ludja (log)

[jgarner53]

Your galette looks great! I can't wait to hear how it turned out.

Another way to prep those plums (or other stone fruit), though slightly more wasteful, is to cut off the "cheeks" on either side of your Prime Meridian, getting as close to the pit as you can (just cut straight down). Then cut off the two remaining sides, and you have nice flat sides to lay down for slicing. Though looking at the wedges on your tart, that might not have worked in this case. But it's great for doing slices of the fresh fruit.

[Lori in PA]

Thanks for the blog, Melissa. I've thought summer would be the perfect time to blog because there is so much wonderful fresh produce available, but it occurs to me that the best thing to do with that gorgeous stuff is to prepare it in the simplest way possible, which might not make for detailed blogs. You've done well, though, and the great photos are an important enhancement.

[MelissaH]

wow melissa.  do you have mud/thunderstorm season like we used to over in fredonia?  love the price chopper - they haven't made them down to nw nj yet .  so cool you guys can work in the same university and it seems there isn't that town vs gown problems so many places have.

If we were going to have mud season, it would have happened today, with all the rain that's come down in the last 24 hours. Weatherwise, we're probably best known for the lake-effect snowstorms (January 2004: starts snowing Wednesday afternoon, finally quits late Friday night, 54 inches in our driveway, 80 inches in a town 20 miles southeast of here) but we firmly believe that the 4-letter word about weather is not snow so much as wind, as documented by the weather station on campus (look in particular in about the middle of the page, 15 October 2003).

Although nobody will talk about it much, there are certainly some town/gown issues. They mainly revolve around the fact that seemingly all the new people here are gown-related in one way or another (except the ones who came to work at the power plants). It's subtle: little things like people not connected with the university will choose to do business with other non-university people, given a choice. Most of the townsfolk seem to have families who have been here for many many generations---and this was the first freshwater port in the United States! It's such a small and close-knit town that it can be a little difficult for those of us who move in from elsewhere to break into society. What probably doesn't help is that campus is on the outskirts of the city limits, somewhat separate from downtown and most of the shopping. But the college community has been remarkably welcoming, and I'm still somewhat astounded that I can count as my friends not just people from the science departments, but also English, music, and history (among others). That's a new experience for me, since I've been at places where the chemists wouldn't even talk to the biologists!

do you fish for salmon in the spring?  when johnnybird went to ESF(SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry at Syracuse) he used to go up several times to around oswego/mexico to fish.  how about my favorite fish(even more than flounder) walleye?  or are there guys who sell off their boats?

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We are not fisherpeople. I've never felt the need to prove myself smarter than a fish. But the best fish market in town is the local supermarket, and I've never seen walleye sold here or in Syracuse. You don't even see a lot of fish sold in restaurants in town, and the last commercial fishing boat from Oswego now resides in the local marine museum. I think if you want fresh fish, you either need to know someone who fishes, or catch it yourself. We've looked into what it would take to get fishing licenses, but to get the really good stuff like walleye, we'd also need to get a boat. At this point, I'd rather remodel the kitchen.

It's a pretty amazing sight in the fall during the salmon run: both banks of the river are shoulder-to-shoulder people!

MelissaH

[MelissaH]

. We went to the Barnes and Noble store and purchased a CD/book set on how to speak Dutch. (There's a good reason for this, but I'll save it for another post, probably the one in which I answer rjwong's very good question.) We also looked for wheeled backpacks in the EMS store, but all the wheeled cases they had lacked backpack straps, and all their backpacks lacked wheels. (There's a good reason for this errand also, closely related to learning at least a little Dutch.)

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I guess that means you're heading my way somewhere in the near future!

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Yup, we'll be on our way to the Netherlands and Belgium in January, during the break between semesters! We very much enjoyed our bicycle trip last summer (Flanders and Zeeland), and can't wait to get back. We won't be bringing the bike in January, though; we'll be acting as tour guides for another faculty member, his daughter, and my in-laws! The January trip is to firm up details for another trip that will happen in May just after graduation: the study-abroad portion of a class my husband will be teaching. My husband and the other faculty member will be taking a class of 15 to 25 (probably) students to Belgium, to give them the experience of a different country with a different culture. I'll probably be along on that trip as well, as a chaperone. My husband's looking forward to all the beer, but I'm looking forward to the cheese more than anything.

MelissaH

[MelissaH]

Dinner's over, and all that's left to do is the dishes. I suspect they won't all fit in the dish drainer, so I'll do one batch tonight and let whatever's left wait till morning.

Anne and her mom Jeanne arrived just as we were setting out the munchies (chips and guac) on the table. We talked a little shop and a little about teaching, as Jeanne's a high school teacher. We munched and chatted until the beeper on the thermometer went off, letting us know that the chicken was cooked through.

Rewind to this morning: my husband put the chicken (leg quarters, on sale for $0.69/lb this week) in to marinate this morning. He made the marinade from a quarter cup of the commercial limeade, some freshly squeezed lime juice (one lime), a chopped up onion, four cloves of garlic, half a teaspoon each of dry thyme,marjoram, and Mexican oregano, S&P, all buzzed with the blender-on-a-stick until reasonably smooth. Marinade went into a plastic bag with four leg quarters this morning, and stayed there in the fridge till evening.

The chicken we get around here is standard mass-market chicken. We don't see kosher chicken, free-range chicken, or anything else special. Price Chopper does carry some Amish chicken, but lately they've only had parts of Amish birds, and on the occasions they've had whole birds, they've been big (over 4 pounds) and I really prefer something on the order of 3 to 3.5 pounds, especially if I'm just cooking for the two of us. Bigger than that, they don't cook as well when you rub them with spices and sit them on a beer can on the grill.

We had a green salad to go with our chicken (this was actually a cheat, since everything but the tomatoes from today's marketing came out of a bag of greens)

and also a corn and black bean salad.

The idea for this salad came from one of the Moosewood cookbooks. It also contains green onions, regular onion, and cilantro, and is dressed with olive oil, orange juice, and a bunch of spices I don't remember off the top of my head. The original was a hefty salad that could easily serve as the main dish of a meal because it had rice in it as well (probably brown rice if it came from a Moosewood cookbook, but we've always used white basmati). We decided to leave out the rice, both to be more Atkins-friendly and also because we didn't want to have that much food.

The chicken came off the grill looking absolutely scrumptious. During the last bit of cooking, my husband sauced them with a bit of Frontera brand tomatillo salsa, and we served a bowl of salsa to add. It gave the bird a nice smoky flavor, and just the right amount of kick. (I like that in Spanish, there are separate words for thermal-hot and spicy-hot; we no longer simply say that something is hot but specify whether it's caliente or picante.)

To drink with dinner, we opened a bottle of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc.

And for dessert, we ate plum tart. It probably could have used a little sugar in the filling, since the bread crumbs (unlike the amaretti in the original recipe) didn't contribute any sweetness. Despite my misgivings about the wetness of the dough, the crust turned out tasty, reasonably flaky, and baked all the way through. I do think that next time I'd try reducing the water a little so it doesn't look as scary. I was concerned about the amount of juice the fruit gave off, because it looked really runny in the oven. The breadcrumbs did their job of soaking up liquid, and the extra few minutes of baking time to help brown the crust also helped to keep the filling from oozing. A little sugar inside might have helped with that also, to turn the juice into a syrup. However, we all agreed that despite my original misgivings about the crust, it was a good container for these plums.

And to drink with dessert, we had a special treat, brought by Jeanne from New York City: Moët & Chandon!

We drank a toast to buying new houses (Anne's), and selling old ones (ours). Thus ended a pleasant evening, spent with friends.

Two random notes to tie things up:

*I haven't made sour cherry soup yet, but I won't forget about it either. Stay tuned on that one. I'll be making a cherry pie this weekend, to share with friends.

*Some of you may remember that I still have two eggplants from last week's farmer's market. I'm leaning toward making them into a salad for tomorrow: cutting them into chunks, cooking the chunks (bake, boil, or steam), and then marinating the chunks in some kind of flavorful dressing. I also have two yellow squash left, which may also find their way into this salad.

This brings my blog to an end. Thanks for letting me share a week of my summer with you, and thanks for reading my rambles. It's been a privilege for me. In retrospect, I suppose the subtitle could have been "Local markets, and imported goodies." I like to make the best of what I can find...and find places where I can get the rest. This is one of the nicest small towns I've lived in, and it's been a joy to show you some of it.

As my "parting shot" I leave you with one of Oswego's other famous products: a sunset.

MelissaH

In memory of Tom Sullivan, who enjoyed many meals around my family's table.

[Pan]

That's a very nice sunset, an appropriate ending for a nice blog. Sometimes, the storm is really worth it for the beauty and comfort it brings in its wake (we're not talking about Florida hurricanes here). It was terribly hot in New York today, then it rained, and now, my windows are open. Besides, what would all those little tomatoes do without rain?

[SobaAddict70]

Thanks to Melissa for blogging this week.

Tune in, in just a few short hours when our next blogger takes up the reins.

Soba