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Cherry Almond Chocolate Chunk Ice Cream

Spoon - You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb (buy)

As seems to be the case with a lot of completely delicious foods, I came late to cherries. Maybe I had a bad maraschino experience somewhere in there (I maintain that those are not cherries), but for years I swore off the fruit entirely. My mother thought I was crazy, and now that I also know how wonderful the cherry is, I think I must have been crazy too.

Cherries dole out a lot of tough love, though. They're sweet and juicy and completely addictive, but of course if you eat too many of them... well. It ain't pretty. So when I walked by my Wednesday Greenmarket last week and saw that it was brimming with pints of cherries, I thought I was in some serious trouble.

Then it occurred to me. There is a way to eat all these cherries with some restraint: surround them with heavy cream and sugar and chocolate, and you'll feel a little guiltier about shoveling them all into your face in one afternoon. Maybe.

Garlic Scape Deviled Eggs

Daniel Johnston - Devil Town (buy)

I refused to eat hard boiled eggs when I was a kid. Every Easter egg hunt ended with me emptying my basket out on the living room coffee table, separating its eggs into piles of hard boiled and chocolate varieties, and leaving the non-foil-wrapped ones for dead. Needless to say, I wasn't a fan of the egg salad that inevitably surfaced in our fridge after the festivities were over, either.

This all changed when my mom made deviled eggs for my dad's 60th birthday party a few years back. The recipe was a pesto variation, loaded with fresh basil and pine nuts. Turns out, they were also highly addictive. Since then, my opinion of hard boiled eggs has completely reversed; last summer I probably made three or four big batches of egg salad over the course of a couple months. And I ate it ALL.

About two weeks ago, I started craving deviled eggs like nobody's business. Maybe because they're one of the world's perfect picnic foods, or because that hard-boiled egg white is so cooling on the tongue on a hot day, but they just seem to perfectly encapsulate summer to me. So I set out on a mission to make some this past weekend.

What's more, we got another bunch of beautiful garlic scape in this week's CSA share, so they became my not-so-secret ingredient.

Scapes are spicy and pungent when raw, packing a similar initial punch to raw mature garlic, but the flavor is subtler and subsides quickly enough that it doesn't overwhelm the senses. This is not to say you won't experience a little garlic breath, but I guarantee it's of a much gentler variety. And well worth it.

These eggs start with Ruth Reichl's recommended method of hard boiling eggs, found in the latest edition of The Gourmet Cookbook and -- aside from peeling the eggs, perhaps -- are incredibly easy to make.

Strawberry Ice Cream, Strawberry Sorbet, Food Coma

Guess what I did this weekend.

What can I say? I'm the type of lady who likes to deliver on her promises.

While I was home this weekend, my parents were hosting some folks who'd come down for a nearby wedding. Turns out, they were part of the family that runs Butterworks Farm in Westfield, Vermont, and they arrived with arm loads of fresh yogurt and heavy cream for the wedding brunch and as thank you gifts. Between that and the pint of deep red strawberries awaiting us when we woke up Saturday morning, I took it as a sign. A rich, delicious sign.

Summer Just Got Even More Awesome

It seems summer has already picked up in earnest, if you take my lack of updates as any indication. But there's so much good stuff happening food-wise right now that I just had to shun my responsibilities at work in favor of catching up on things here. You understand.

So I'd like to talk about how excited I am that local strawberries are in season. I'm SO EXCITED. This is something I await with just as much anticipation as tomatoes at the end of the summer, and the rewards are equally as sweet. Last year, my mom made some incredible strawberry ice cream with the tiny wild strawberries that grow near my parents' place in Massachusetts, and it was the fruitiest, freshest tasting strawberry ice cream I've ever had. Now that the season has come around again, I find myself daydreaming uncontrollably about the deliciousness.

(This pint of strawberries was waiting for me when I stopped by my folks' place on the way back to NYC from Martha's Vineyard last weekend. It survived for approximately 4 hours.)

Now, since wild strawberry season up in MA is barely three weeks long, I realized this spring that I could easily miss my window for mom's ice cream this year if I didn't plan my visits home right. That's when I decided I'd better develop a contingency plan:

That's right, gentlemen. I have the capability.

When it gets so hot in the city, it's impossible to motivate myself to make food that requires use of the stove or oven, but anything involving a frozen canister is something I can definitely get behind. Strawberry ice cream is first up, but if anyone out there has a favorite recipe or flavor combination, you know how to find me.

USDA Weighs In On Cloned Meat

I was momentarily hopeful to see the headline in Wednesday's Washington Post, "USDA Recommends That Food From Clones Stay Off the Market." Then I started reading, and it turns out that recommendation is only temporary:

Bruce I. Knight, the USDA's undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs, requested an ongoing "voluntary moratorium" to buy time for "an acceptance process" that Knight said consumers in the United States and abroad will need, "given the emotional nature of this issue."

Thanks, USDA. That's awful sweet.

More disturbing, though, is the fact that meat from the offspring of cloned animals has apparently been on the market for quite some time, despite a request from the FDA not to enter these animals into the food chain. No particular surprise that it wasn't made public, I suppose, since many proponents of cloned meat don't even want to label the stuff that will legitimately enter the marketplace.

I remain highly skeptical that meat and milk from cloned animals pose no more a health threat than those from non-cloned animals, but that issue aside, it disturbs me to no end when consumers are not given the choice to know what they are buying and eating. Sure, farms that don't raise cloned animals could theoretically go the route of producers of non-GMO foods and label their meat and dairy "non-cloned," but why on earth should that burden befall the people that are not doing it?

Well on that note, it's the end of the work day. I think I will not stay at my office any longer.

Déjà Moo

Good morning, world.

And what a wonderful day it is, because today! Today it's officially safe to eat meat from cloned animals in the United States.

The European Union's Food Safety Agency made its announcement to this effect this past Friday, with the Food and Drug Administration expected to follow suit shortly thereafter. Well, the Washington Post has obtained a copy of the FDA's report, which has not yet been officially released, and it indeed draws the conclusion that meat from cloned pigs, cows, and goats is no less safe to eat than meat from their non-cloned counterparts. That is all they are at liberty to conclude, however:

"Moral, religious and ethical concerns . . . have been raised," the agency notes in a document accompanying the report. But the risk assessment is "strictly a science-based evaluation," it reports, because the agency is not authorized by law to consider those issues.

Like Bonnie over at the Ethicurean, I'm kind of horrified that these conclusions were drawn after mere months of study. The FDA research is based on an inconsistent pool of animals, and because it is so difficult to determine what will actually predict the safety of food from cloned animals, the FDA is just going with what's (only kind of) worked so far:

...agency scientists decided to use the same simple but effective standard used by farmers since the dawn of agriculture: If a farm animal appears in all respects to be healthy, then presume that food from that animal is safe to eat.

Somehow, I'm not reassured... E. coli, anyone? Added bonus: as of now, when that cloned meat starts hitting the grocery shelves, it will not be required to be labeled as such, à la the current guidelines for genetically modified foods.

Though the few articles I've looked at this morning haven't really touched on this, the only point I can see in cloning animals for food is to give cloning companies business and boost meat production in the States, like we need it. Is that so crazy, or am I missing something? Well, count me among the folks who would rather eat meat from a known farm upstate once every couple of days than have cloned meat from who knows where for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

New York Times: Cloned Animals Safe to Eat, FDA Concludes
Washington Post: FDA Says Clones Are Safe For Food
Washington Post: Animal Cloning: A Risk Assessment (excerpts from the FDA report)
The Ethicurean: FDA approves food from cloned animals

Cheese, Please

Just after getting back from Christmas break, I made a visit to the Union Square Farmer's market -- one of my favorites for its size and variety.  It was about 4 o'clock on that Friday afternoon, though, and I was sad to see only about five stalls still selling at that late hour.  I was almost ready to admit defeat when I came across Bobolink Dairy (42 Meadow Burn Road, Vernon, NJ). 

There are a number of vendors who only go to Union Square one or two days a week (it's held every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday year-round), and aside from a small farm that makes its own goat cheese, I had yet to come across a dairy in my visits that truly specialized in cheese-making.

I should have known I was in for a treat when I stepped up to the Bobolink counter; it was swarming with people, and the two women working there were busy slicing off samples of some incredibly aromatic cheeses for customers to sample.  Sure enough, when I got up to the front, I was treated with tastes of the four cheeses (from grass-fed cows!) they were selling that day: Drumm, Baudolino, Frolic, and cave-ripened cheddar.  The cheddar was delicious and nutty.  The Frolic, another firm cheese, was sweeter and had a nice sort of tangy quality to it.  The Baudolino, a very soft and rich cheese, actually had two entirely separate flavors in my mouth, and the Drumm tasted exactly like the smell of a farm.  I know the latter may not sound too appealing, but I was so amazed at how perfectly the flavor encapsulated my little vision of rolling pastures and happy cows, I couldn't wipe the smile off my face.

In the end, I took home a quarter pound each of the Baudolino and the Frolic.  The cheeses sell for $20 a pound ($5 for a quarter pound) and are well worth it.  Bobolink also makes its own bread, which I did not sample this time around, and I'm excited to see on their website that they sell whey-fed pork at certain times of year. 

For those who may not live near one of the markets at which Bobolink sells, their cheeses, bread, pork, and other items are all available at their online store.

A Word to the Wise

If your roommate tells you that you that it's impossible crack an egg by squeezing it in your fist, you should probably verify that she knows this from experience before you or a loved one attempt it for yourselves.

Silver Spoon Strawberry Risotto

I decided on Saturday to finally purchase The Silver Spoon, the storied Italian cookbook that was translated into English for the first time last year.  If nothing else, it's very pretty.

When I got home from the bookstore, I opened it up to browse some of the recipes.  The very first recipe I laid eyes on was for strawberry risotto, something that struck me as both strange and serendipitous; strange simply because I'd never encountered a savory dish featuring strawberries before, and serendipitous because I'd just purchased some beautiful Tristar strawberries from Fantasy Fruit Farm at the farmer's market in Tompkins Square Park (corner of Avenue A and East 7th Street, New York), which takes place every Sunday.  It was a clear sign that the risotto should be my first attempted Silver Spoon recipe, so this afternoon I headed over to my neighborhood supermarket to purchase the remaining ingredients for the dish. 

First, a couple of liberties I took: 

• I substituted short-grain brown rice for a standard white risotto rice.  I may have sacrificed some of the creaminess as a result, but brown rice is a bit more nutritious (it has more fiber and nutrients than white rice, and it has a lower glycemic index). 

• I used 3/4 of a cup fewer strawberries than the recipe called for because the flavor of the Tristars was so robust.  I also did not completely hull them; they were so ripe that removing the caps was all that was necessary.

• Rather than using the full 7 tablespoons of butter the recipe called for, I used only two and substituted extra virgin olive oil for the rest.

I also debated about the cup of light cream that finishes off the recipe.  It seemed a bit like cheating for the right texture, but admittedly I couldn't resist the idea of an entrée that managed to have both strawberries and cream in it.

The risotto took just over an hour to make from prep to dinner time.  Aside from the constant stirring required of any risotto, it was very little work for a meal with a surprisingly complex flavor.

I was more than happy with my first bite.

The flavor of the strawberries had mellowed considerably, making room for the savory ingredients, and the cream added a delightful richness that I'm sure I would have missed if I'd decided against using it.  As a result, each bite had a nice trajectory from tart to buttery to nutty.

The garnish is more of my Anise Hyssop.  It worked very well here, too.