Strawberry-Nectarine Galette with Raine

The tree of us visited the Pacific Coast Air Museum near the Shultz Airport in Santa Rosa. We took Fulton towards home, but did a few errands. We stopped at the farm stand on Hwy 12, just west of Llano Rd. outside of Sebastopol for some freshly picked strawberries. There is often a line because lots of locals know that these are some of the best strawberries anywhere. They are grown just up the drive and over the hill in the land that gets richness from seasonal flooding some years. They must throw in some magic, too, because they are juicy and ripe and so fragrant, plus sweet enough that you don't need to add any sugar...which is what we did with this freeform pie.

Raine took off the greenery at the stem end and then quartered the berries while I cut the nectarines into slices and then pieces to roughly match the size of the berries. After that it's really easy.

We put a baking stone in the oven and started the oven pre-heating to 425 degrees F. If you don't have a baking stone, you could try and upside down cast iron skillet or just put in an upside down sheet pan. The reason for the upside down instructions is that we are going to slide the galette sitting on parchment paper into the oven, so we can't have any sides of pans sticking up getting in the way.

Next we cut some parchment to roughly a square, about  12" wide and long. Some pre-rolled pie dough from the refrigerator case in the market (I use Pillsbury ReadyCrust) had been sitting out of the fridge long enough to soften. It was a simple matter to roll it out onto the parchment, use a rolling pin to flatten it about another inch all around to about 10.5-11 inches in diameter.

Next we took the prepared fruit and added a teaspoon lemon zest and a tablespoon all-purpose flour, then used clean hands to mix it gently into the fruit. When you want to do gentle but thorough mixing, clean hands are your best tool!

Raine poured the floured and flavored fruit into the center of the dough round. He left about 2.5-3 inches bare around the outer edges and mounded the fruit in that center area. Then he pleated the edge dough up and over the mounded fruit filling all around.

Time for getting this beauty into the oven! I have a long-handled bread baking peel so I used that to transfer the pie laden parchment from the counter onto the hot baking stone. We set the timer for 10 minutes. After that 10 minutes when the hot oven was crisping the bottom and starting to cook the dough, we turned it down to 350 degrees F and baked it another 20-25 minutes...I confess I didn't time it, but took it out when the top was browned and the filling was bubbly...plus the crust and sprung a leak and I needed to get it out before any more juice headed to the oven bottom! With fresh fruit it's hard to know how much flour to add to thicken up the juices...should have used 2 tablespoons!

It made a beautiful rustic pie and it was so delicious. No sugar was needed...it was plenty sweet from the ripe fruit.

Strawberry-Nectarine Galette

Serves 4-6

1/2 box ReadyCrust pie dough (1 round), at room temperature
1 pint fresh strawberries, hulled and cut in quarters
2 nectarines, washed, sliced, pit removed, and cut into smaller pieces (to match the strawberry sizes)
1 teaspoon lemon zest (from about 1/2 a lemon)
1-2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
sugar if needed...if your fruit isn't ripe add a tablespoon or so
parchment paper

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. If possible add a baking stone, pizza stone, upside down cast iron skillet (12" diameter), or upside down baking sheet.

Place a parchment paper square, about 12 inches wide and long, on a baking peel or on the counter.

Roll the pie dough out onto the center of the parchment paper. Use a rolling pin to increase the size all around so that it becomes about 10.5-11 inches in diameter.

In a large bowl combine the prepared strawberries, prepared nectarines, lemon zest, flour, and sugar if using. Use clean hands to gently but thoroughly mix the ingredients together for the filling.

Pour the filling into the center of the prepared dough circle. Mound in the center, leaving about 2.5-3 inches along the outside edge with no filling. Fold that outer edge of dough up and over the mounded filling, pleating as needed, until all around had had the dough folded over the filling.

Use the peel, or an upside-down baking sheet, to transfer the parchment and galette to the oven, sliding the parchment onto the baking stone/skillet/baking pan already in the oven. Bake for 10 minutes.

After 10 minutes, turn the oven down to 350 degrees F. Bake for another 20-25 minutes, until filling is bubbly and crust is browned.

Remove to a cooling rack and let cool at least 10 minutes before serving. The filling will be firmer and less drippy as it cools. In our photo we hadn't even waited the 10 minutes, so it was messy...but delicious!

Feeling My Oats

Today's bake is for Sweetie. He has been such a staunch supporter as I have worked on the puzzle of what to eat and drink and what to avoid putting in my gut. Things are improving in that area and I'm feeling my oats, walking more, gardening again, and even putting a coat of paint on an outdoor structure. Oats are also the star ingredient in the cookies I made for Sweetie today.

He has always loved oatmeal cookies, especially chewy ones, so that's what I made. I used a recipe from the old standby cookbook Joy of Cooking, with (of course) a few tweaks. I added some chocolate chips and some dried cranberries and some chopped walnuts. Beyond that, it was just the recipe in the book. Classics become classics because they are good enough to stand the test of time.

So for this fairly flat, chewy cookie the dominant flavors are butter, brown sugar, oats, chocolate, vanilla, cranberry and walnuts. The edges are crisp, but otherwise it is a fairly soft cookie. Sweetie really doesn't enjoy crisp, crunchy cookies.

I made the cookies pretty large, so I ended up with 26 of them and he ate five as soon as he got home!They are that good (and almost gluten free, with only 1/2 cup regular all-purpose flour...since I've decided that I can have a little gluten now and then with no harm...and it does help with the cookie structure.)

Quick Oatmeal Cookies
Makes 36 2-inch cookies
A variation of a recipe in Joy of Cooking cookbook

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
Measure:
   1/2 cup brown sugar, firmly packed
   1/2 cup granulated sugar
Cream with:
   1/2 cup butter at room temperature
Combine and beat in until smooth:
   1 egg
   1 teaspoon vanilla
   1 tablespoon milk
Sift together and add to the above ingredients:
   1 cup all-purpose flour (I used 1/2 cup gluten free flour mix and 1/2 cup all-purpose flour)
   1/2 teaspoon baking soda
   1/2 teaspoon baking powder
   1/2 teaspoon salt
When beaten smooth, add:
   1 cup uncooked quick rolled oats
   1/2 cup chocolate chips
   1/2 cup dried cranberries
   1/2 cup chopped walnuts
Beat the mixture well. Drop cookies 2 inches apart on well-greased cookie sheet and bake until light brown. Remove to a cooling rack soon after taking cookies from oven.

At Last

Yesterday was exactly three month since my cataract surgery on the second eye and a day past 16 weeks since the first cataract surgery. During those 16 weeks I couldn't really drive due to double vision, which is usually corrected with glasses. At first it was because I was healing from the surgeries, so no glasses could be ordered. It takes a little while for the eyes to get to the point where the eye doctor will write a prescription. I had figured on about three weeks for the glasses to be produced but instead they had to be sent back a number of times, so it ended up being 9 weeks on top of all those weeks of healing! Poor Sweetie had a lot of extra driving to do, even though I curtailed my social schedule a lot on optional visits and events.

At last the glasses I tried on this Monday were correct. Not perfect, but correct enough for driving and general wear. Not as good on the close work, but I have readers and, frankly, couldn't imaging sending them back again. The optometrist was probably even more upset than I was and did a terrific job of nagging the lab, but apparently the lab had new people who messed up, trouble with machines breaking and terrible quality control. The optometrist has switched now to a new lab for their current and future orders, thank heavens.

So here they are. They look exactly like my old ones. The new frames I picked out were part of the production problem, so the gave me, no charge, frames like my old ones, plus my old frame to keep (which is unusable because we messed up the screw area when we removed one of the lenses after the first surgery so I could use them for the other eye. Sorry if that doesn't make sense, but trust me, it's all good.

To celebrate I went to lunch and a movie with my good friend Barbara. Saw a sweet flick called 'I'll See You In My Dreams' about friendship, love, loss and karaoke. On the way home I though about all the lovely berries and apricots in the kitchen and decided to see if I could adapt the 5 Minute Chocolate Mug Cake to a vanilla cake with fruit. A surprise for Sweetie for dessert, right?

First I helped him with fitting and securing the second new post of the front porch, then watered a couple of plants in the garden which were wilting in the heat despite the overnight and early morning light rain (rain in June...so unusual for us), and checked out the color of the stain I'll use on the whole porch once the new section is installed. The new stuff will replace the 30 year old deck that has led to the old front porch since before we moved in. The joists underneath are dry rotted here and there, too, so it will probably be some time in July before all that stain goes on.

Finally I was able to get in the bake center and make the cake. Amazing how quickly it all went together. I diced an apricot and some strawberries into a small dice and added a handful of blueberries to the mix, then measured and stirred the dry ingredients and sprinkled some of that over the fruit and tossed it a bit. In another bowl I whisked together egg, oil and milk then added a splash of vanilla. The fruit was tossed into the dry ingredients, the wet mixture went on top of that and it was all stirred together with a fork. That batter went into a Pyrex bowl which I had buttered lightly. The bowl went into the microwave (on high) for five minutes.

That's it! Turned it out to cool, added sliced strawberries when it was time to serve and added scoops of vanilla soy ice cream to the bowl at the last minute. Delicious! You couldn't really taste the apricot because the blueberries and strawberries were more dominant flavors. The cake was a moist sponge and went perfectly with the fresh berries and ice cream. I'm going to try this again with other flavors. Sweetie had two servings, so I know 'he who doesn't like cake' will eat it anyway...and enjoy it.

5 Minute Apricot Berry Mug Cake

A variation of a recipe from Don Fulton
Serves 1-2

(I doubled the recipe and cooked it in a Pyrex bowl big enough that the mixture didn't go over the sides, although it did reach the top edge during baking...then settled down to about an inch below the edge)

4 tablespoons self-rising flour

4 tablespoons sugar

1/8 teaspoon orange zest

dash ground nutmeg

dash salt

1/2 apricot, diced small

1/4 cup strawberries, washed and diced small

1/4 cup blueberries, washed and picked over for debris

1 egg

3 tablespoons milk

3 tablespoons oil

a small splash of vanilla extract

1 large coffee mug

Add dry ingredients to mug, and mix well. Sprinkle some of the dry ingredients over the fruit and toss lightly. Add to the dry ingredients. Mix together in another bowl the egg, the milk and oil and mix well. Add the vanilla extract, and mix again. Pour the wet mixture into the dry mixture and mix well. Pour the batter into a lightly buttered large mug.

Put your mug in the microwave and cook for 3 minutes at 1000 watts (high). (If doubling the recipe as I did, use a larger container and cook for 5 minutes on high.) The cake will rise over the top of the mug, but don't be alarmed! Allow to cool a little, and tip out onto a plate if desired.

EAT! (this can serve 2 if you want to feel slightly more virtuous). And why is this the most dangerous cake recipe in the world? Because now we are all only 5 minutes away from apricot berry cake at any time of the day or night!

I served the cake in bowls with lots of sliced fresh strawberries and a small scoop of ice cream, but the cake all by itself is delicious! 
The photo suffers from being taken at night, but I wanted you to see the inside to see how moist and spongy it is.

Short and Sweet Orange Cranberry Shortbread

There are cookbooks that are on my shelf which go unused for a long time and then I suddenly notice them and decide to make a recipe from them. That happened this week with a great little book Short and Sweet, by Melanie Barnard. I was looking for something else and spotted it, then fell in love with the shortbread cookie recipe.

The recipes are all pretty quick and many also have limited ingredients. The one I chose, Cranberry Orange Shortbread, met both of those criteria. Because you met the butter you can decide to make this at a moments notice...no softened, room temperature butter needed.  I melted the butter in a large microwave safe bowl and finished making the batter in that bowl, but the recipe actually calls for melting the butter in a saucepan and finishing the batter in that. Either way you have quick clean up as well as the quick recipe.

Freshly grated orange zest is aromatic so these cookies smelled nice even before they baked. I was worried that it would be difficult to remove them from the pan because it's un-greased and the cookies are fairly thin, but they came out in one piece and I used a long bread knife to cut them into squares.

These cookies are not too sweet, perfect by themselves, with coffee or tea, or even on the side of a dish of ice cream. The texture is crisp and a bit sandy as a shortbread should be. The total time from start to finish is less than an hour. Hard to do better than that for a nice fruity cookie, right?

Cranberry Orange Shortbread Bars
Makes 16 cookies

8 tablespoons (1 stick, 4 oz.) unsalted butter, cut into 10 pieces
1 tablespoon grated orange peel
1/2 cup dried cranberries
1/2 cup powdered sugar
1 cup all-purpose flour

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. In a large microwave safe bowl (or in a medium sauce pan over medium heat if you prefer) melt the butter. Remove pan from microwave (or heat) and stir in the orange peel, cranberries, and powdered sugar. Then stir in the flour to make a stiff dough.

Spread and pat the dough into an uncreased 8-inch square baking pan. Bake unti the bars are golden and firm at the edges, about 20 minutes. Cool the pan on a rack for 2 minutes, then use a sharp knife to cut into 16 squares. (After cookie had cooled 10 minutes with pan on a cooling rack, I used a small sharp knife run around the outer edge to loosen the whole mass of cookie, then turned it out, turned it right side up on a cutting board and then cut the bars with a long knife.) Let the bars cool in the pan for at least 10 minutes before removing them with a small spatula.

The bars can be stored, tightly covered, for up to 5 days or frozen for up to 1 month.