chocolate beet cake
When I discovered beets in my CSA basket this week I figured I had two choices: toss them directly onto the compost heap or bake them into a cake.
I don’t like cake and I don’t like beets, so I’m not sure what made me think I would like a cake made out of beets. Possibly it was the assurance that “even confirmed beet-bashers will love this cake” in the introduction to the recipe or the fact that my foodie friend Katie mentioned that she’d tried it and liked it, but I suspect it was the chocolate. Of all the ingredients on this earth, chocolate seems the most likely candidate for transforming beets from a mouthful of musty dirt into something that people might actually want to eat.
rhubarb stir cake
On an unusually warm afternoon in the summer of 1980, my sister and I wandered into a little thicket of shade created by enormous ruffly leaves curving out from bright red stalks just tall enough for little girls to play beneath. Elated at such a discovery, we raced home to collect our buckets and shovels and then, for reasons intelligible only to little girls, spent the rest of the afternoon happily digging in the cool dirt amid those leafy stalks. I’m not sure if this memory has stuck with me for nearly thirty years because that patch of shade was such a lovely place in which to play or because of the boatload of trouble we got into when our favorite digging spot turned out to be the rhubarb patch of a neighbor lady whose Navy husband significantly outranked our father.
lemon lavender cookies
Spring, that elusive little leafy green sprite, is taking her sweet time this year. Oh sure, I suppose you’re already floating through your days in a pollen-induced euphoria, adrift in a sea of daffodils and cherry blossoms and baby bunnies going hop hop hop, but here in northern Michigan it’s still colder (as my Geometry teacher liked to say) than a witch’s tit in a brass bra. I always imagined that must be pretty damn cold — cold enough, at least, to warrant such an expression — and it seems an appropriate way to describe the sort of stubborn, lingering cold that delivers snow in April. When the baby bunnies are supposed to be hop-hop-hopping.
I haven’t noticed any bunnies, but each time I’ve gone to the window to cuss at the snow I’ve been silenced both by its unwillingness to stick and by the cheerful sight of robins flitting from branch to branch and pecking optimistically at the newly thawed ground. On a walk yesterday I discovered tender little shoots of green poking their way up insistently through that same ground, and communion with the trees revealed limbs teeming with softly swelling buds. Spring is quietly transforming brown to green, sneaking up on us like a delightful surprise.
brown butter cornbread
Although there are still a few days left before the Autumnal Equinox officially ushers in fall — with its crisp days and crunchy leaves, summer has been quietly fading for weeks now. The days have grown increasingly shorter, the sunlight itself seems softer, and the smell of wood smoke from neighbors’ fireplaces has replaced the quintessentially summertime scent of sunscreen. All of which leaves me feeling restless and wistful.
I begin to realize that afternoons squandered in tidying up the house or running errands might have been better spent lounging on the beach, and to regret those nights I succumbed to the siren song of takeout pizza rather than avail myself of summer’s abundant and delicious fresh produce. I’m disappointed to discover that I did not pack enough summer into my summer.
So when my favorite corn farmer warned me last weekend that we could expect only three more weeks of corn, I might have been just a teensy bit overzealous in my purchasing. (sensing a theme here?) Not to worry. Corn freezes beautifully and easily, plus I’d recently run across a piece by a corn-obsessed columnist in The New York Times and was itching to try her cornbread.
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When Harry Met Salad 