My California Garden - Fuyu Persimmons (Eating and Recipe suggestions)

Fuyu Persimmon

Make prime smoothies and salads

California!

Persimmons started out in China, but now they call themselves California natives - having lived here since the mid 1800's. This year we've had a prime crop. I'm partial to non-astingent Fuyu type, since they taste good either crispy - we eat them out-of-hand like apples or add chunks of them to our main dish salads. Then again, if they soften we scoop them out, freeze them, and make them into delicious smoothies - I throw the frozen pulp together with some pieces of frozen bananas, a little non fat milk and some vanilla - better than ice cream!

Do delicious persimmons grow where you live? https://www.crfg.org/pubs/ff/persimmon.html

Peaches from California!/Melocotones de California!/Peches de la California!

 Melocotones de California!

Peches de la California!

Peaches! 

Recipe - My Favorite way to make Peach Cobbler http://postcardfromcalifornia.blogspot.com/2010/09/summers-end-peach-cobbler_19.html

Holiday Lights - Laurel's Pumpkin Gingerbread Recipe

Laurel’s Pumpkin Gingerbread I was inspired to create a gingerbread using pumpkin several years ago, by a PBS series called “Footsteps”. Though the young woman in the  show, tricked her die-hard, non-vegetable eating brother-in-law into saying he liked vegetables when he ate her pumpkin gingerbread, I could never find a recipe for it. So I created one myself by changing the ingredients around in somebody elses. I love it and make it regularly for festive, winter holidays. It is also delicious topped with some Bosc Pears that have been cooked up with cinnamon and no or sugar or just a tiny bit of sugar. Bosc Pears, which we eat regularly in our fall salads along with crisp persimmons, get over the hill so easily since they are really only good fresh when they are crisp

 This is a major variation on a recipe in Cooking Light 11-12/94 (substituted pumpkin/squash for oil, substituted whole wheat flour and buttermilk for liquid))

Note: this is very tasty and better for you if you make it with whole wheat flour (more fiber in our diets – yeah!), but you can make it with regular all-purpose if that is all you have.

Mix up wet stuff well in one bowl. Measure up dry stuff in another. Combine bowl contents and get them thoroughly mixed, but don’t beat the results. Bake at 350 degrees. Cut into eight pieces. Each piece is probably about 190 calories.

I commonly double this recipe so that it fits into two round cake pan. This recipe is the SINGLE cake pan recipe. Spray the cake pans with good old PAM.

Wet Stuff: 1/2 cup buttermilk, 1/4 cup molasses, 1/4 cup cooked squash/plain canned pumpkin, 2 T honey, 1 egg white or 1/4 cup egg substitute

Dry Suff: 1/4 cup sugar, 1 cup whole wheat (or white whole wheat) flour, 1 t powdered ginger, 1 t cinnamon, 3/4 t baking soda, 1/4 salt, 1 t cloves (If your baking soda is a little old, put it through one of those little hand strainers and grind the lumps through the mesh into the bowl)

Still Life With Sprouts

Brussels sprouts, who knew,

That I was partial to you?

With cranberries, yum!

Recipe: A delicious, and easy, way to make sprouts with fresh cranberries.

My beautiful daughter makes them this way.

http://lacasadesweets.com/blog/2013/11/14/maple-roasted-brussels-sprouts-with-cranberries/

90% of brussels sprouts come from nearby Watsonville! http://patch.com/california/watsonville/love-em-or-hate-em-but-brussels-sprout-season-is-here

Fall in California (Cornbread Recipe)

It takes until this time of the year to feel like fall here in our part of California. It was finally cool enough to wear a fleecy vest before dark and want to eat a hot supper - baked acorn squash, chicken sausage, tomato basil soup, cornbread (see recipe below) - you know a real fall meal. 

How long has it been feeling like fall where you live? In the Northern Hemisphere that is - OK, I know for you folks way down undAH we're talking springtime gamboling lambs...

* Cornbread from Scratch

Bake at 350 degrees

Dry Stuff
1 and 1/4 cup all purpose flour
3/4 cup yellow cornmeal
2 T baking powder (yes really - Tablespoons)
1/4 cup sugar (more if you like it sweeter)

Wet Stuff
2 eggs
2 T butter melted
1 cup milk

* Mix the dry stuff together.
* Mix the wet stuff together
* Make a hole in the hollow of the dry stuff and mix the wet stuff in gently. Don't beat it - just till combined.

Bake in a greased square pan till done. Usually 20 - 30 minutes. Also makes good muffins.

Apples Need a Home? California Apple Pancake To the Rescue! (Recipe)

Do you have some apples in your house that need a home?

The perfect California apples grow on a little tree overhanging our driveway. We planted it there because our yard is pretty shady and we have to tuck in the sun worshippers where we can. Kind of fun though, as we can share the produce with our neighbors.  If it's hanging down on their side, those are their apples!

It's a little golden delicious apple tree and that's perfect for us. Not being big time foodies, there's a limit to how many apples my husband will turn into sauce and can, how many apple crisps he'll make or how many California Apple Pancakes I will bake. Those pancakes are, however, a lovely, simple dish, something I can make quickly and easily. I've been making it since college days, and I never get tired of it. Here's how.

~ ~ ~

California Apple Pancake

Serves 2 -3

Leftovers OK, saved in refrigerator and reheated the next day

Tools 

 * two skillets- one must be oven proof. I use a good old cast iron skillet for that. The other will go on top of the stove, so whatever works there.
* An oven
* Blender or wisk and medium large bowl

Locate your ingredients

* 3 (or more apples) whatever kind you like when they're cooked or that you have handy. Of course I prefer the ones that fall down into my driveway
* 3/4 cup flour
* 3/4 cup milk
* 3 eggs
* Some cinnamon
* For the apples - Sugar or Not to taste (maybe 1/4 of a cup or more, or none at all, depends on what you like, and the sweetness of your apples)
* Something to grease a pan with (spray on stuff, margarine, whatever works in your house)

Now do the work

* Turn on your oven to 410 degrees, so it will be ready

* Core and Cut up the apples into slices or chunks. I leave the skin on of course - good for you, and we like the taste.

* Grease the skillet that goes on top of the stove. (Grease the oven-proof one at the same time so she's ready). Toss in the apples and as much cinnamon as you like (we don't add sugar anymore but you might like it at this stage). As it heats up pour in a little bit of water. Sauté the apples and when there brown enough for you, turn down the heat to simmer, pour in enough water so that they will cook up into cooked apples, not be too wet, and not burn - a judgment call. My husband likes a little apple syrup left on the apples that top off his pancake, I just like the apple pieces.

Work Continues , While your apples are cooking...

* In blender, or with your whisk, beat/froth up all those other ingredients - eggs, flour, and milk
* Turn the heat on the stove top on medium high, pop on your oven-proof skillet, and pour in the mixture. I just leave it on there for maybe 30 seconds, so it helps make a tiny bit of a bottom to the pancake, don't over do that. You just want it to kind of stick on when you swirl the pan. Better to under do this step.

* Pop the skillet into your hot oven.

* After 15 minutes, turn the oven temperature down to 350 degrees (with the pan still in the oven). Back another 10 minutes, but check it occasionally to make sure it's not overdone, since ovens vary a bit, don't they? (If you forgot to preheat the oven, you might just bake it a little more. This is not a picky item.)

* When it puffs up into a beautiful ever so slightly golden brown - but mostly still egg colored - it's done!

* Take it out, cut into 2 or 3 wedges and serve with the cooked apples.

~ ~ ~ Variations ~~~

Clearly you can use other seasonal fruit- Oregon Bosc Pears are nice in the winter. You can also experiment with baking the fruit and batter together in the oven. I have a personal-pancake version for one I do in the microwave, where I use 2 eggs, 1/3 cup milk, 1/3 cup flour, and I bake it over chunks of one piece of cut up fruit. I have to take that out and loosen it up several times during the microwaving process, and how it bakes depends on what fruit is in it.

CA Style Eatin' Enchiladas

We have been making enchiladas a lot. Doesn't that sound very California? They are easy and we feel virtuous making them. Yeh, I used sauce from a jar! - Trader Joes makes a good one. We mix in a bunch of vegetables - vary the veg, depending on what's handy. Tonight used 4 kinds of vegetables - 3 fresh (spinach, celery and yaller squash)  and one can of drained corn. Doesn't that sound like every nutrient you could imagine?  Oh, also leftover shredded chicken, and corn tortillas spread with a tad of whipped cream cheese. A tiny, tiny sprinkling of cheddar on the top - but nothing like Paula Deen style (I love that woman - but we dont' need the stick-o-butter style casseroles here). Also I made Chocolate-Covered-Katies frosting shots as a mousse style dessert. That's canned coconut milk with cocoa poweder and vanilla whipped up in the mixer and sweetened to taste with whatever you use. I used just a little bit of  Blue Agave, just enough to take the edge off the cocoa powder. There is a little bit of saturated fat in coconut milk but my Nutrition Major daughter said it is not excessive, and we don't eat much red meat, milk fat, etc. So I think that's about as much saturated fat as we have in our occasional bits of cheese.

Should have a productive evening of work after a nice supper. I hope you do too.

Persimmons on Parade

Thanks to my good neighbor Jen, we have persimmons this year. I know I could buy them at the downtown Farmer's Market, good ones too. But, around here, buying persimmons is like having to buy lemons. It feels wrong.

I scored both types that grow in the area, Fuyu and Hachiya. We actually have a Fuyu tree in our yard, and we used to get a lot of fruit from it. But no more. The squirrels scored all but one pathetic half of a fruit. Or maybe it was the raccoons. They were certainly busy with our small tomato patch this year.

But, luckily for me I scored with the homegrown persimmons. Of course, as y'all know, the Fuyu are the kind you eat hard. You can eat them out of hand, but we are pretty partial to them in our regular big supper salads. Tonight we had our first local crab salad of the year. Hooray for crab season! The pairing of persimmon and crab is right up there with apples and honey, mashed potatoes and gravy, or apples and cheddar cheese. Some flavors were just meant to go together.

I used some of the ripe Hachiya (you never want to eat those astringent guys until they are good and mushy) in a persimmon cake for Thanksgiving. I lost my original recipe, but there are variants on the web and I just played around with what I found. I'm not actually sure what I ended up putting in other than buttermilk, plenty of persimmon, dark raisins, local walnuts, and no oil or butter. It's basically a very minimal any-kind-of-oil-or-butter with 3 ripe persimmons (about a cup and a half of fruit). Delicious. That is what fruit cake should taste like, not heavy but dense and rich with fruit.

I'm partial to these little darlings in a smoothie with frozen bannana, milk and vanila as well. Heaven. I better freeze up those other two Hachiya's right now so I can have one tomorrow. BTW if the Fuyu get over ripe they work in any of the same way as their astringint cousins. That's why we planted a Fuyu tree. You get the value of both types of fruit.

Good simple California eating. Could food grow any better?

Time Traveling Forward to Fall

Just this morning I was listening to a BBC History Magazine podcast, time traveling back to World War II. But tonight I'm going forward, just a few weeks really. Fall officially starts on September 23, 5:05 a.m., according to  The Old Farmer's Almanac.

I'm thinking fall now because I just put a batch of applesauce spice muffins in the oven for the resident geologist to take out in the field. I made them with the apples I raked up and sauced from our runty little apple tree in the driveway. They are the ones the squirrels kick down, after chewing them and deciding they aren't reall….llly ripe. They also don't make the world's best apple sauce, because they are kind of green and they aren't cooking apples. But they make fine muffins PLUS the added benefit that if I don't leave them under the tree, Mr. Rat and his clan don't come a' callin' (at least not in the driveway).

Yup, it all just puts me in a very seasonal mood- the fall harvest, the squirrels and the jolly little rats. Here's my recipe, or receipt, as us time travelers like to say.

Applesauce Spice Muffins

A creation of The Simple Romantic

350 degrees, until baked/fork clean - depends on your muffin tin

Get out a Large Bowl 

Put in dry ingredients and mix 'em

Make a well in the dry stuff

 Beat one egg up in the well

Add in rest of wet ingredients. 

Put in muffin tins. 

Bake

Dry Ingredients

1 ¾ cup flour – type you like

½ cup regular oatmeal (NOT quick cooking type)

½ cup brown sugar

A whole bunch of black raisins (maybe ¾ of a cup?)

1 teaspoon baking soda (I run it through a sieve)

1 t ground cinnamon

¼ t nutmeg

(I also like the following spices in addition to the above – Resident geologist does not – though he eats them anyway – they are quite good either way)

½ t ground cloves

½ t ground allspice

Wet Ingredients

-   1 egg

-   ¼ cup corn oil (or butter if you like that)

-   ¼ cup buttermilk

-   1 cup applesauce –(preferably made from the culls that fall in my driveway)

Summer’s End Peach Cobbler

The weather’s been funny everywhere this summer. It poured rain several of the days I was in Madrid – a pattern the locals told me was normal ahora, pero antes, no! Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, we had a cooler than usual July and August. And my facebook-friend Judy, up in Oregon was most unhappy because it either rained incessantly or was boiling hot, nothing like the quintessential blackberry-pickin’ season I always imagined in the northwest.

I wonder if the funny weather is why every peach I tried, this summer have been crummy? I look forward to fresh peaches all year, but every one I’ve tried this year has been, what my mother would call, ‘mealy’.

Last week my husband hopefully brought home one last lovely looking box of peaches. Surely this batch would be different! They were so attractive, a beautiful shade of yellow with lovely red blushes. Today they were perfectly ripe, giving just, so, when you pressed one finger against their delicate complexions.

They tasted lousy.

What does good old Ann Landers say? Or was it Ben Franklin who suggested the connection between lemons and lemonade? But in the case of peaches, it’s cobbler. Tonight we made, and ate, the best peach cobbler I’ve ever eaten. Could it be, the mealier the peach, the better the cobbler?

Pretty easy.

1) I mixed up a batch of my 1960’s Style Buttermilk Biscuits (it’s the same recipe I wrote about earlier this month, in the art-journal entry “Kidhood Memories:1960’s Style Buttermilk Biscuits”) and filled the bottom of a deep dish, square type casserole dish.

2) I set the oven to 400 degrees (instead of the 450 degrees I’d use for biscuits)

3) Cut up 3 large, delicious looking, but mealy tasting yellow free-stone peaches and covered the biscuit dough. Then I topped the peaches with some sugar (maybe ½ a cup?) and a sprinkling of cinnamon.

4) I bakes the cobbler for 20 minutes (checking after 10 and finding it still very much un done). Then I turned off the oven, leaving the pan inside the still hot oven and took my dog for a walk around the park! (Probably for about 20 more minutes). When we returned from the dog walk, I turned the oven back on, but now at 450 degrees. It was done and fork clean, 10 minutes later.

Yummm. The mealier, the better!

Kidhood Memories

With my older sister, Trisha, at Pike's Peak Colorado 1962

Back then, it seemed like everybody in the U.S. ate biscuits

1960's Style Buttermilk Biscuits

We often eat these with our homemade Damson Plumm Private Eye Raspberry Jam

Bake 450 degrees Bake 8 – 10 minutes till tops brown

In a bowl Mix the dry stuff: 2 cups flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, ½ teaspoon baking soda,1/8 cup sugar, some cinnamon (½ teaspoon?)

Make a little well in the dry stuff pour in ¼ cup corn oil and 1 cup buttermilk (if using regular milk*, use 1 tablespoon bak. powder and no baking soda). Do not beat, just mix softly until combined.

Pam spray/oil muffin pan/ cookie sheet/pan

Additions: Raisins (Golden raisins are my favorite) or a few blueberries (mix these w/ dry stuff) or A spot of strawberry or raspberry jam in the top of each biscuits (jammy biscuits)

*or make buttermilk substitute: A tablespoon of white vinegar or lemon juice plus enough milk to make a cup, let stand 5 minutes

The London Loaf, For Anna

Laurel's London Loaf

Inspired by my ancestor, Anna Sherman

For more about making bread using a combination of a bread machine and traditional oven, see my previous entry, The Mystery of Trenta

Bread Machine Dough Cycle

2 loaves (if making half recipe use 2 and ¼ t yeast)

Wet Stuff

1.5 c buttermilk (low-fat if possible)

1 c water

pinch salt (put in w/ wet, isolate from yeast area)

Dry Stuff

Grated outer peel of one or two lemons

4 3/4 c BREAD flour

3/4 c oatmeal

Nestle on top of Dry Stuff

1/3 c brown sugar (first)

1T plus 1 t good fresh yeast (on the very top) (if making half recipe use 2 and ¼ t)

200 degrees 20 minutes (re-raising)

350 degrees, 30 minutes

The Mystery of Trenta (Madrid)

As always, PLEASE CLICK ON these pictures to see more lovely detail.

Window of Horno La Santiguesa

I looked all over the web for a recipe for a wonderful little braided sweet bread I found at this bakery on Calle Meyor, not too far from Palacio Real.* It's called 'trenta' (not treInta - the baker in the panaderia edited my hand-written note).

The only recipe I found was one for some Slovakian bread that is totally different. I know it was kind of like brioche but not as rich. It also had a little cinnamon twisted in.

the mysterious trenta

My search on recipes for "spanish bread" did turn up a wonderful recipe for camote, a sweet potato bread (recipe below). It was NOTHING LIKE THE TRENTA, but it is delicious. I found it in a great blog called Kusina ni Manang, which is a lot of fun to read. The author describes her entries as, A Filipina's unabashed chronicle of her adaptations in the American kitchen. The bread is extremely good. I made the dough - only, as I always do, in a two-pound loaf bread machine, then shaped it in pans, let it rise once more in a 200 degree oven, and baked it in a regular oven at 350 degrees. With the alterations I made to the recipe (removing the butter and increasing the sweet potato, changing milk and water to buttermilk) it baked very fast. Two loaves done around 25 - 30 minutes after the oven rise.

Another friendly-looking panaderia window

The author of Kusina ni Manang says about this recipe, "Camote is very cheap in the Philippines compared to flour, and the soft yellowish rolls they create will probably boost up sales and profit.

"

I don't know about sales and profit but the soft yellow bread is sure good.

The following is my re-interpretation of this recipe.

I run the machine on the dough cycle and bake it in the oven, so it bakes and looks like real bread.

* Spray or oil the bread machine pan first. It's a sticky dough.

Put in the wet stuff.

3/4 cup 2% buttermilk (original was 
1 / 2 cup milk and 1 / 4 cup water
)

1 / 2 cup boiled and mashed sweet potato
 (this was about one regular sized sweet-potato, skinned and mashed with a potato masher)

1 large egg


Put in the dry stuff.

1-1/2 teaspoons salt


5 shakes from the cinnamon shaker (my addition)

3 cups bread flour (I ran out of bread flour and so did the grocery store. Regular unbleached works fine in this.)

Make a dent (well) in the top of the flour.

Fill with following yeast and sugar mixture

(sugar helps the yeast work, this position keeps yeast dry until wet ingredients are heated up to the right yeast-working temperature)

1/4 cup white sugar


1/6 cup brown sugar (not in original recipe)

2 tsp Fleischmann's bread machine yeast


* Let the machine run on the dough cycle

* Once the dough cycle has run it's course (1:30 on my machine), then shape into 2 greased loaf pans (or one loaf pan for a really, really high loaf)

* Put into a 200 degree oven and let them rise once more for 20 minutes

* Switch oven over to 350 degrees and bake for 25 - 30 minutes. A really, really big loaf takes about 35 minutes. I stick a knife right down in the middle to make sure they are done. Yeah, it leaves a hole but you know your bread is done. If you like to tap instead, go for it.

Very good with some healthy-type margarine and honey

* Yes, I carefully wrote down the address and location in comparison to other well-known buildings in the travel notebook I lost on the airplane home.