It’s been a hot summer.  Maybe it seems hotter because it’s my first full summer in the city, where I’m pretty much a sticky mess topped with a fine layer of dust by noon, but according to the news, there’s more to it than the heat island effect – it’s been unusually hot all over the country.  There’s even a wikipedia page about it, so it must be true.  But having a scorcher of a summer isn’t all bad – it means happy tomatoes, extra-refreshing dips in the pond, and an excuse to eat even more ice cream than I normally might.

Making at least three kinds of ice cream was on my summer bucket list this year (stay tuned for an update soon!), and this plum sorbet makes three.  Not that that means there won’t be one or two more batches before the weather turns :-).  I was surprised by the simplicity and wholesomeness of this recipe – all you do is toss some plum halves with a bit of sugar and honey, blend, then freeze, and you have a gorgeously purple, refreshing, smooth sorbet.  Actually, the texture of this sorbet is easily the best of any homemade ice cream I’ve made – it doesn’t melt on contact with your spoon, and it has just enough airy-smoothness for my taste.  It’s another winning recipe from Suzanne Goin’s Sunday Suppers at Lucques, a book in which not a single recipe I’ve tried has been disappointing.  Suzanne suggests pairing this sorbet with these molasses cookies to make ice cream sandwiches, something I didn’t try this time around but definitely will in the future.

Counting sorbet as a “health” recipe for Greatist may seem a little suspect, but everyone needs a little something sweet sometimes – why not satisfy your cravings with a relatively light treat packed with fresh fruit?  You could even reduce the sugar somewhat, although your sorbet will freeze harder and be less creamy if you do so, as the sugar is one of the main things that keeps ice cream from freezing (read more here).  Head on over to Greatist for the recipe, and while you’re over there, check out their fun ice cream infographic.  (See, I’m not the only one who thinks ice cream has a place on health websites!)

Other tasty ice cream recipes from here…

• Lemon basil sorbet
• Cherry-chocolate ice cream
• Lemon buttermilk ice cream
• Roasted cinnamon ice cream
• Bailey’s fudge ripple ice cream

… and around the blogosphere

• Chocolate pretzel frozen custard from A Spicy Perspective
• Grapefruit and rosemary granita from In Sock Monkey Slippers
• Blackberry-cabernet sorbet from Gimme Some Oven
• Caramel brownie chunk nutella ice cream from Brave Tart
• Goat cheese ice cream with roasted strawberries from Heather Homemade
• Basil olive oil gelato from Cookie Talk

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Trev and I had a little BBQ at my place this weekend – just a few good friends who all happened to be in town at the same time.  One is starting up at Harvard Law, another passing through between summer camp in Maine and hut-keeping on the AMC.  My roommate joined in as a study break, and a good friend from work stopped by as well.  It was the sort of crowd that caused minimal stress, and the sort of messy, hand-held food you should only eat with people you’re not trying to impress – ribs slathered in tangy sauce, Mexican-style grilled corn rolled in mayo and chili-flecked parmesan cheese, chocolate-stout cupcakes with a mess of espresso frosting, and this galette, sliced and served like pizza.

The galette was a bit of a last minute decision.  Initially I had planned to make a much fancier puff-pastry based tart, but the frozen puff pastry at Wholefoods was $10 a package.  Ten dollars!  I might as well just buy a pie for that price.  Anyway, with a bag of plums and a carton of blackberries I picked in Andover last week both languishing in the fridge, I went simple and rustic and it was just right for a casual Saturday afternoon.  A drizzle of creme de cassis in the filling added some depth.  I managed to snag a few pictures before I got distracted by good company and cold Blue Moon beer, so I thought I’d share it with you.

Anyway, just a quick hello.  Hope everyone’s week got off to a good start, and I’ll be back on Wednesday with a delicious frozen treat that’s also healthy enough to be featured on Greatist.

Plum, Blackberry, and Cassis Galette

A Katie at the Kitchen Door original.  Serves 6.

• 1 1/4 c. flour
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 stick very cold butter
• 6-8 TBS ice cold water
• 1 1/2 lb ripe plums, pitted and thickly sliced
• 1 c. fresh blackberries
• 1/2 c. sugar
• 2 TBS cornstarch
• 1/2 tsp lemon juice
• 1/3 c. creme de cassis

1. Make the pie crust: whisk together the flour and the salt in a medium bowl.  Cut in the cold butter, and blend with a pastry cutter until the mixture is coarse with lumps no larger than a pea.  Add the water 1 TBS at a time, stirring with a fork between additions, until the dough comes loosely together.  Turn the dough out onto a piece of plastic wrap and wrap tightly.  Refrigerate for 1 hour.
2. Preheat the oven to 425°F.  In a large bowl, mix the plums, blackberries, sugar, cornstarch, lemon juice, and creme de cassis.  Let sit 5 minutes.  Roll out the dough into a large oval on a well-floured surface, then transfer to a baking sheet.  Pile the plum filling into the middle of the galette, leaving at least an inch around the edges on all sides.  Fold the edges of the dough over the filling and press down.  Bake at 425 for 20 minutes, then lower the heat to 350°F and continue baking for 25-30 minutes longer, until filling is bubbly and crust is golden brown.  Don’t worry if the filling bubbles out somewhat – it’s that kind of dessert!

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How great is July?  Coming back to a garden that has doubled in size in a week, walking through the Copley Square farmer’s market that’s just bursting with produce, eating meals composed entirely of vegetables because they’re just that good – it’s definitely a season of plenty.  In fact it’s so plentiful that I’m torn between the natural inclination to eat smaller, lighter meals in this hot weather and the desire to eat as many eggplants, tomatoes, beans, cherries, peaches, plums, and berries as I can during their short season.

In particular, I can’t get enough of stone fruit.  Sweet cherries eaten ice cold from the fridge, plums so perfect that the juice dribbles down your chin with every bite, peaches baked until hot and bubbly under a buttery crumble – these fruits of summer are so fleeting that in my opinion, it’s worth eating as many of them as you can while they’re around.  There are many great single fruit recipes for each type of fruit, but they also marry well with one another, whether in a luscious cobbler or a simple but addictive fruit salad like this one.

I don’t know about you, but for me, the words “fruit salad” conjure up an image of a sad, not quite cold enough bowl of mushy bananas and unwanted cantaloupe, with a straggling strawberry or two that the pickers left behind.  You know, the kind of fruit salad you used to find at every picnic, bbq, and pool party; the one that played second fiddle to the hamburgers and dirt cake.  This salad is an entirely different story.  Elegant, colorful, and slightly floral, with no filler fruits that get left behind, everyone in my family had at least 3 servings at dinner, even after eating these turkey cobb sandwiches, which were easily the most delicious sandwiches I’ve ever made.  Inspired by the just-blossoming lavender plants in my mom’s Maine garden, I decided to drizzle the fruit with a lemon lavender syrup, which truly tied the whole dish together.  You can use whatever stone fruits you have lying around – just make sure the salad is served cold, and give it an hour or two to soak in the lavender flavor.

Head on over to Greatist for the full recipe!

Other stone fruit recipes to celebrate July:

Spiced plum butter

Cafe Sperl plum squares

Boozy cherry brownies

Cherry cream cheese danishes

Cherry chocolate ice cream

Spiced apricot couscous

The post Greatist Collaboration: Stone Fruit Salad with Lemon-Lavender Syrup appeared first on Katie at the Kitchen Door.

I know.  It’s 100% not plum season.  At least, not in Boston or anywhere else north of the equator.  But in flipping through Roast Figs Sugar Snow (isn’t that just the best cookbook name?) I kept seeing all these tantalizing plum recipes.  Like roast plums and figs in vodka with cardamom cream.  And Russian cheese pancakes with plum compote.  And plum squares.  So the other day when I walked into Wholefoods and found it to be a veritable dream of produce, I couldn’t resist.  I mean, not only did they have beautiful stacks of winter citrus and root vegetables, they also had plums and gorgeous blackberries and mangoes and apricots.  Apricots.  And in a kind of dreary month like February, the temptation of all that succulent, summery, sweet fruit was too much for me – I caved.  Hey, it’s plum season in Chile.

And even though local plums are months and months away, I am getting excited for spring.  Peas, baby beets, tiny strawberries, scapes, fava beans.  In North Carolina, spring is more like New England’s summer – everything bursts into life and warmth and color in the middle of March and the days become long and hot and wonderful.  The moment that defined spring for me every year was getting off the plane in North Carolina after spring break and being overwhelmed by the green after a week in still-gray Boston.  And I loved that.  New England spring is a very different animal but I find that I’m looking forward to it with the same intensity that I look forward to the dramatic bursting forth in the South.  New England spring is a gray and gritty time, full of cold mud and rain and what feels like eternal waiting, but it holds so much promise, and each imperceptible change in the weather and the plants and the air brings a little more life to the world.  I may be jumping the gun a little bit with my enthusiasm (did anyone else start their herbs inside last weekend?  No?  Because I did.  And I’m really excited about it.) but can you blame me, really?

Personally, I thought these plum squares were amazing.  Like, way-better-than-I-was-expecting-them-to-be amazing.  They were super juicy and a little tangy and not overly sweet in a very refreshing way.  They are an ideal late afternoon or post-breakfast snack.  Or an ideal breakfast.  And I can definitely see remaking this recipe into a plum pie next summer.  Lastly, these squares are gorgeous.  All that purple richness really gets me.  So if you’re looking for a little escape from February and don’t mind cheating just this once on your Locavore commitments, try these.  You’ll be glad.  Alternatively, you can be a more earth-friendly person than I and bookmark this until next August.

“Cafe Sperl” Plum Squares

Recipe adapted from Roast Figs Sugar Snow by Diana Henry.  Makes 9 squares.

• 2 c. flour
• 1 stick cold butter, cut into small pieces
• 3/4 c. sugar
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 egg yolk
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 3-6 TBS ice cold water
• 3-4 medium, ripe plums
• 2 TBS turbinado sugar
• 2/3 c. apricot jelly

1. Combine flour and cold butter in a food processor and pulse until mixture is coarse with pea sized chunks.  Add sugar and salt and pulse a few more times.  Add egg yolk and vanilla and pulse until dough begins to come together.  If dough will not come together, add ice cold water 1 TBS at a time, pulsing in between additions, until dough stays loosely together when pinched.  Alternatively, this entire process can be done without a food processor, using a large bowl and a pastry cutter to mix the dry ingredients with the cold butter.  If no food processor is used, you will likely need more cold water to get the dough to come together.  Form the dough into a ball, wrap tightly in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for 30 minutes.
2. Preheat the oven to 350°F.  Press dough into a 8×12 inch baking pan.  Halve plums and remove pits, then slice into 1/2-inch thick slices.  Layer plum slices over dough, then sprinkle with the turbinado sugar.  Bake for 40-45 minutes, until plum juices are bubbly.  Allow to cool.
3. Heat apricot jelly in a small saucepan over low heat, until jelly is thin enough to pour.  If jelly is not thinning, add 1-2 TBS water.  Spoon warm jelly over plums, then allow to set.  Serve chilled.  Store in the refrigerator.

The post Plums in February appeared first on Katie at the Kitchen Door.

When I saw plums for $1 a pound last week, I immediately grabbed a bunch with this recipe for plum-apple butter in mind.  I made this on a whim last fall, and it was one of the most memorable recipes of the year.  With the warm, wintery spices – nutmeg, cloves, and cinnamon – it’s definitely a summer-into-fall type of recipe, but I’m enjoying it even though it’s the height of summer here.  Served cold on pretty much anything, from muffins to a spoon, or warm over vanilla ice cream, it’s incredible.  But my favorite way to eat it?  On a stack of chocolate pancakes, topped with fresh whipped cream.  Funny thing is, when I woke up this morning, I just couldn’t bring myself to make pancakes.  I didn’t want them.  It was weird, but something about them seemed … too much.  Too filling.  I knew I wanted something chocolatey, and preferably breakfast friendly, to go with the plum butter, but I couldn’t decide.  Chocolate muffins?  Chocolate cake with a plum filling?  Plum buttercream for chocolate cupcakes?  It all seemed delicious, but not quite right, when it hit me – why not pancakes’ skinny cousin, the crepe?  Perfect.

In theory, crepes are one of the simplest things you can make.  The classic recipe, as taught to me be my high school French teacher, calls for only three ingredients, combined in a simple ratio – 2 parts milk, 2 parts egg, and 1 part flour.  But then you start adding things like butter, sugar, oil, flavoring agents, liquers, and cocoa powder, and experimenting with pan temperature and refrigeration time, and the simplicity quickly gets lost.  I’ve tried lots of recipes in the past few years, never finding the perfect one, and never able to find an explanation for why one recipe might work better than another.  I was happy, then, to stumble across this explanation about crepe texture and flavor, complete with 8 different recipes categorized by egg content and fat content.  Enlightening.  I decided to go for the medium egg, medium butter formula, because the middle seemed like a good place to start.  The verdict?  The texture was perfect – tender, but not so delicate that they fell apart.  The flavor was good, but a bit milder than I’d hoped – I wanted them to be both more chocolatey and sweeter.  The addition of some espresso powder, to bring out the chocolate flavor, or the replacement of a few tablespoons of water with a chocolate liquer would probably fix that.  But when filled with the tart, aromatic, oh-so-delicious plum butter and mascarpone cheese?  Pretty good as they were.

Now that I’ve satisfied my plum and chocolate craving, other plum recipes keep popping out at me.  Plum and red wine sorbet.  Baked plums with blueberries and mascarpone.  Plum tarte tatin.  In fact, I’m feeling kind of pressured to keep up with all the summer fruits that are at their peak right now.  The fact that there’s only a month or two when currants, blackberries, raspberries, watermelon, blueberries, peaches, nectarines, cherries, and plums are in their prime is both glorious and daunting.  All those recipes bookmarked in the dead of winter when nothing sounded as appealing as a juicy plum on a hot day are begging to be made, shared, photographed.  Currently, I have plenty of time – I could bake and cook all day, every day for the next three weeks and not have anyone say a thing about it.  The problem is, I don’t have the eating power necessary to consume all of the food I want to make.  Alas.  I will just have to pace myself, round up some hungry friends, and learn to freeze summer fruits.  Either way, expect at least a few more glorious, fruity, summery recipes from me before I’m claimed by Corporate America in three weeks time.

Plum Butter

Adapted from Kitchen Simplicity. Makes about 1 1/2 cups.

• 4 medium, ripe plums
• 1 tart apple
• 1/3 c. water
• 3/4 c. sugar
• 3/4 tsp cinnamon
• scant 1/4 tsp nutmeg
• scant 1/8 tsp cloves

1. Pit and quarter the plums.  Core and dice the apple into 1 inch chunks.  Place fruit in a medium saucepan with water and bring to a boil.  Reduce heat, and simmer fruit, covered, for about 15 minutes, until apple is tender.  Puree completely in a blender or food processor.  Return fruit puree to pan, add sugar and spices, and simmer, stirring occasionally, for 30 minutes to an hour, until the butter is the desired consistency.  A thick, spreadable consistency may take some time.

Chocolate Crepes

Adapted from Luna Cafe. Makes 10, 6-inch crepes.

• 1 c. milk
• 3/4 c. water
• 2 eggs
• 3 TBS butter, melted
• 1 c. flour
• 1/4 c. cocoa powder
• 1/4 c. sugar
• 1/4 tsp salt

1. In a medium bowl, sift together flour, cocoa, sugar, and salt.  Whisk to combine.  In a large bowl, beat milk, water, eggs, and melted butter until fully incorporated.  Add dry ingredients to wet and stir to combine.  Batter should have consistency of heavy cream.  Refrigerate for at least 1 hour.
2. Heat a large frying pan over medium-high heat.  Add a pat of butter – you only need to add butter for the first crepe.  When butter is fully melted, spoon or ladle about 1/4 c. batter into pan, and quickly swirl pan or smooth batter gently with ladle to create a circle.  (Think the motion that crepe makers on the street do to quickly pull batter out into a circle.)  Cook for 20 seconds, until color begins to change on exposed side, then flip, and cook for another 20 seconds.  Remove to a plate (or serve!), then repeat with remaining batter.  Stuff crepes with plum butter and mascarpone cheese or whipped cream.  Extra crepes may be stored flat, wrapped on a plate or in a plastic bag, in the fridge.

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