Oy whey

| Green Card Gardener

Last week it was apricots, this week it’s yellow plums that are at their peak at the local orchard. Fruits and veggies don’t care about editorial diversity. Soon I shall be writing about homegrown tomatoes twice in a row.

I bought The Essential New York Times cookbook a couple of weeks ago and I know it will be my main reading for the rest of the summer. As for cooking from it, I wanted to begin with something really easy so I made ricotta – for the first time. It was easy, though I am not sure I will make it again, for two reasons.

When it was all over, I had almost a gallon of whey left over. Being the thrifty cook that I am, I could not possibly just dump it down the drain. So I froze it in 3-cup batches, enough to bake 10 loaves of bread. I only bake bread about every ten days, so I quickly realized I would soon have nothing in the freezer chest but whey. Also, I must have drained the ricotta for a bit too long, although I did not squeeze it as the recipe instructed.

To use up the ricotta, I remembered the Ricotta Cheese Pie from The Joy of Cooking as very good. I took my cues from that filling, but modified it to a crustless pie. Because the yellow plums were so juicy, it did not matter that the ricotta was a bit on the dry side.

Whether I make ricotta again or not, and whether you call this baked custard or crustless pie, I got myself a new recipe for a quick and light summer dessert.

Crustless Ricotta Pie with Yellow Plums

1 tablespoon butter + more for the pan

Breadcrumbs

1 pound well-drained ricotta

2 eggs

2 teaspoons finely grated lemon zest

2/3 cup sugar

Light brown sugar

8 ripe yellow plums

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.

2. Butter the bottom and sides a 9-inch pie pan and sprinkle with breadcrumbs. Turn it upside down over the sink and knock off any excess crumbs.

3. Beat the ricotta, eggs, lemon zest and sugar with an electric mixer until well combined.

4 Pour it into the prepared pan and spread evenly with a spatula.

5. Halve the plums and remove the pits (this usually works best when twisting them slightly but sometimes the pit clings. In that case remove the pit with a small paring knife.

6. Arrange the plum quarters in circles on the filling. Dot with butter and sprinkle with brown sugar.

7. Bake 30 to 40 minutes in the preheated oven, or until the pie is set but still a bit wobbly, and lightly browned on top. Serve lukewarm or cold.

Apricot tart, juicy and impromptu

| Green Card Gardener

My baking is often quite unorthodox. I start with a recipe, then change course mid-way, hoping it will work out. This time I had a basket full of beautiful, super-ripe apricots from a local orchard sitting on the counter. The apricots were so juicy that I feared the crust would turn soggy if I placed the apricots directly on the dough. So I turned the recipe upside down. I sprinkled the dough with the sugar-almond mix that was supposed to go on top, and made another batch of the almond-sugar mix for the topping. In fact the apricots were so juicy that as an additional precaution, I placed a jelly roll pan on the rack underneath to catch any drippings, and I am glad I did.

I took notes just in case the apricot tart would turn out fine. It did! Here is the recipe:

Apricot Tart:

Crust:

1 1/3 cups flour

1 stick chilled unsalted butter, cut into chunks

1/3 cup + 1 tablespoon sugar

Pinch of salt

1 egg yolk

Topping:

1/3 cup whole unpeeled almonds

1/3 cup sugar

4 tablespoons apricot preserves

1.5 pound ripe apricots

1. Place the flour and the butter in the food processor and process to a crumbly consistency. Add the sugar, salt and egg yolk and process until the dough forms a ball. Put the dough in a container with a lid or in plastic wrap and place in the freezer for 20 minutes.

2. Toast the almonds in an ungreased pan. Cool, then grind in the food processor with 1/3 cup sugar.

3. Butter a 9-inch tart pan (I used one with a removable bottom) and sprinkle with 1 tablespoon of the almond mix.

4. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.

5. Roll out the dough between two pieces of wax paper to a 11-inch circle. Fit the dough into the tart pan with the dough coming up the sides. Trim extra dough with a knife or gently even it out by pinching it together with your fingertips. Sprinkle with half of the remaining almond mix.

6. Wash the apricots and dry well. Cut in half and remove the pits. Place the apricots on the dough cut-side down; they should fit snugly.

7. Warm the apricot preserves and strain them through a fine sieve and brush the apricots with it. Sprinkle with the remaining almond mix and bake in the preheated oven for 40 minutes, or until the crust is golden. Let cool on a wire rack.

Beans in cheesecloth

| Green Card Gardener

Like beans in a brick, this is not an innovative recipe but a technique, the result of a 20-minute discussion last week between my husband and me about the most efficient way to blanch filet beans. If you have several pounds to process at once like we do, dumping the pot of water with the beans every time will turn the kitchen into a Turkish bath. Bringing one pot of water after another to the boil will take forever. If you leave the beans in the same water and remove them with tongs, half of them will be overcooked by the time you fish them all out.

Therefore, in previous years, I put the beans in a metal colander, which I placed in a pot with boiling water. But unless I did this in very small batches, the beans were too crowded and did not cook evenly.

After we took out half of our pots and colanders of various sizes and staged the different options, it occurred to me that cheesecloth might be the way to go. I placed a pound of green beans on a large piece of cheesecloth, twisted it several times at the top so it formed a loose bag around the beans, and lowered it into a large pot of the boiling water. I firmly held onto the top with a pair of tongs. When I immersed the bag into the bowl with ice water, it cooled off almost instantly so I could open up the cloth and release all the beans.

Tonight it’s blanching time again. For now I am happy with the cheesecloth trick. I am only curious what my assistant, in charge of the ice water cooling and spreading the beans on dish towels to dry, will cook up on his end. He usually runs the ceiling fan at top speed to dry the beans. But there is always room for improvement…

Beans in a brick

| Green Card Gardener

Unlike chicken under a brick, beans in a brick is not a recipe but the way I grow green beans. Every year I had entire rows of French filet beans, aka haricots verts, getting knocked over, a paining sight. Whether it’s the wind on our hilltop, or the weight of the beans that does it, I don’t know.

I tried different things, from securing every plant individually with a small stake (tedious and useless) to stretching wire along each side of the row (equally useless). I even called the company where I bought the seeds to find out what they recommend but they did not seem to understand what I was talking about, since the beans are described as self-supporting in the catalog.

Then, one day, I was standing outside the car wash waiting when my eyes fell on a pile of bricks nearby. What if I buried the seeds into the holes of bricks and let the plants grow into them? That way the crucial first 1.5 inches of the stem, where the plants always break, would be protected. Lucky coincidence – our local hardware store was just discontinuing selling bricks, so I got a few dozen bricks for free.

It worked! I seed the beans very densely, one in every hole, so they also support each other. The most important thing is not to move the bricks the slightest bit after seeding because the small hole is the seed’s lifeline to air and light. Without it, no germination!

A few plants still get knocked over, but this is minimal compared to the previous damage. Now it’s almost time to harvest, and I am looking forward to my favorite salad with green beans. The original recipe is from Bon Appetit but because I don’t like raw onions of any kind, I omit the shallots in the dressing. Since with my growing method, I get a good crop of haricot verts, I use three times more green beans than the recipe calls for. Therefore this is not a Potato Salad with Haricots Verts, but a Haricot Verts Salad with Potatoes.

Haricot Verts Salad with Potatoes, Blue Cheese and Walnuts

1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

1 tablespoon white wine vinegar

1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil

2 teaspoons chopped fresh rosemary

3/4 teaspoon chopped fresh sage

1 pound small reds-skinned potatoes

Salt

1.5 pounds French filet beans

1/3 cup walnuts

2/3 cup crumbled  blue cheese (Gorgonzola or Roquefort)

Freshly ground black pepper

1. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F.

2. Whisk the mustard with the vinegar and olive oil. Stir in the rosemary and sage.

3. Wash the potatoes and toss them whole with 3 tablespoons vinaigrette until they are evenly coated. Spread them in one layer in a baking dish. Bake in the preheated oven for 20 minutes. Reduce the heat to 375 degrees F and bake for another 40 to 50 minutes until they are soft, turning them once in a while. Cool.

4. Bring salted water to the boil in a large pot. Have a large bowl with ice water standing by. Cook the beans in the boiling water for 3 minutes. Drain and throw immerse the beans in the ice water immediately. Swirl them around so they cool evenly. Drain again.

5. Lightly toast the walnuts in an ungreased pan. Chop them coarsely.

6. In a large bowl, mix the potatoes, green beans, cheese, walnuts and the remaining vinaigrette.  Season with salt and pepper.

Makes 6 servings