My mother gave her mother, my Nana, daffodils three times each spring, in February on her birthday, in March for Nana’s birthday and in May for Mothers’ day. When I was ten, we were buying daffodils for Nana’s birthday when I saw bundles of strawberry plants for sale.

I convinced my mother that since Nana loved to garden, strawberry plants would be a perfect present. There were June bearing plants and everbearing varieties. Everbearing was the obvious choice. Naively I assumed that everbearing plants meant strawberries all the time, strawberries every day, long after the small, dark red strawberries in square, wooden baskets with red stains disappeared from the market at the end of June. In fact it everbearing means that there would be a berry harvest in June and a second in August. It wasn’t until years later that strawberries were flown from California to markets around the country and available year round.

Nana was delighted with both the daffodils and the strawberry plants. After lunch we went out to her garden to make a strawberry bed. When she unwrapped the bundle of plants, she said that there were enough plants for two strawberry beds, that I was old enough to have my own garden and that she would help me. I picked a sunny spot near the climbing, pink rose bush and it didn’t take long to make my garden. I watched the plants carefully and learned that each flower held the promise of one sweet red berry.
I watered the plants with gentle streams from my watering can and Nana taught me how to recognize weeds. My first crop was less than the bounty I had hoped for – only one harvest and three and a half cups rather than two pails but there were enough berries to make my first ever, strawberry shortcake for Sunday dinner with Nana and my grandfather.

I wasn’t sure what traditional strawberry shortcake was. I had seen curious sponge cake cups and aerosol cans of whipped cream displayed next to the strawberries at the market, but they were not what I wanted for the strawberries I had tended for nearly two months.

I would make proper shortcake and top each dessert with real whipped real cream. When I found a recipe for shortcake at the library, I was surprised to learn that shortcake was really a biscuit and nothing like the shortbread cookies we had at Christmas time. Here’s how I made it: … read more

I wanted to use the rhubarb that came in my CSA bag to make something incredible. I like rhubarb in pie, as sauce, in quick bread but my goal was to make something exotic with this reliable, New England, early spring offering. The most exotic ingredient I found in a recipe was nutmeg. Nutmeg – sure I like nutmeg and use it when I make a rhubarb pie but it wasn’t the zing I was looking for. When I  wondered what Julia (Child) would do, I thought of butter. And when I wondered what James (Beard) would do I thought of butter and cream.  An idea was coming into focus.

I would poach rhubarb in butter and sugar and then nestle it into meringue shell and top it with whipped cream to make a rhubarb pavlova. Here’s how I made it: … read more

Do you still have snow? Is the sap running? Have you seen mergansers on the river?

These familiar questions are heard at the post office, the Creamery, the market, and at community dinners in the early spring.

It was a bright morning last April, when I saw pink sprouts pushing up through the cold earth. Within a week, there were pink stems topped with dark green leaves. Rhubarb! It would be the first harvest from my garden. Along with the phoebes that nest in the rafters of the barn, it’s rhubarb that announces the arrival of spring in Vermont.

A lilac bush, a clump of rhubarb and a stonewall may be all that remains of a homestead abandoned a hundred years earlier. The dark green leaves, full of oxalic acid, are poisonous but the bright pink or drab green stems are loaded with flavor. It doesn’t need much attention, an occasion scoop of well-rotted manure and cutting back the flowering stalks when they appear will keep the harvest coming until early summer.

Technically rhubarb is a vegetable, but I think of it as a fruit that can be roasted and topped with a dollop of yogurt, baked in a pie or simmered with dried fruit to make chutney.

A week after the sprouts had appeared, it was impossible for me to wait any longer. There wasn’t enough rhubarb to make a pie, but there were enough stems for a ‘dessert for one’. That bowl of sweet-tart, roasted rhubarb satisfied my rhubarb cravings. Here’s how I did it:

Roasted Rhubarb

I put four stalks of rhubarb, cut in one-inch pieces in a bowl along with two tablespoons of sugar. While it rested in the sugar for half an hour, I weeded the rhubarb patch. When I’d finished weeding, I poured the rhubarb and the juice that had formed into a buttered ceramic baking dish. After roasting at 175-degrees C /350-F degrees for half an hour it was tender and surrounded with sweet pink syrup. I poured in a generous splash of heavy cream, added a sprinkle of freshly grated nutmeg and returned it to the oven for ten more minutes. It was edible proof that spring had come.

I like to eat it still hot from the oven, with an antique silver spoon that was my grandmother’s, but no one has complained when I have served it chilled as dessert or topped with granola for breakfast. Rhubarb from the garden with cream from a Vermont dairy and local maple syrup is eating local at its best.

Click here to get label.

A piece of pie is often breakfast in New England. A slice of custardy rhubarb pie served with a steamy cup of coffee does the trick. It was my friend Kathy who generously served me my first piece of this pie. Here’s how I made it when I was able to harvest enough rhubarb: … read more

A couple of weeks ago my friend Edie told me about friends who had moved to San Francisco from Vermont.  ( I’m sure that they didn’t move for the natural beauty, this Vermont sunrise was worthy of Maxfield Parish.) They created Recchiuti Confections with the idea “… once you introduce people to truly exquisite chocolates they will be won over instantly and forever.”  The next day Edie sent me a link to the Hot Chocolate Recipe Contest. I called to find out where I could buy some of the Hot Chocolate wafers and was surprised when I was told that they would send me a sample. The chocolate came a few days later – they were yummy. The wafers are meant to be used to make a perfect cup of hot chocolate but I decided to create a new cake that would feature this wonderful semisweet chocolate.

I was inspired by a package of dried mission figs in the pantry and decided that figs and chocolate would be an interesting combination. I emailed my recipe for a Chocolate Figgy Cake with coffee mousse to Recchiuti and I am waiting to see it they agree with my friends who declared it a winner. Their site says that the winning recipe will be announced before Valentine’s day.

Here’s the recipe, written in cookbook recipe style, that I sent: … read more

Saturday was a beautiful, cold, gray, windy, winter day.

I’m not complaining, the air above the frozen pond was white. (Can it be so cold that fog freezes?) The trees on the hill were  black and created a startling contrast to the white field. The alpacas were cozy inside their upscale fleece. Rosie, working on her version of a canine snow angel, was frequently distracted by the scent of creatures tunneling beneath the icy crust of snow. On the other hand, I wanted pie. Not a frozen pie from the market, not a pumpkin pie made from a tin of pumpkin, not an apple pie, I wanted a pie  that would leave pink streaks on the plate. I was missing summer pies.

What to do — I opened the freezer and found a bag of cranberries and remembered that I had once made a cranberry pie but I couldn’t remember how. I had to be adventurous, think creatively and get started. I had an unbaked pie crust in the freezer and I began by rinsing the cranberries and thinking of pies past. I knew that the birds would be pleased with the pie if I wasn’t. Luckily –

It look good enough to slice.

One bite

After the next

Sorry birdies — maybe next time.

Here’s how I made it.

… read more

Mathea Tanner is the cook, writer, artist and brains that make Peas Love Carrots one of the food blogs I love to visit. Her recipes for penguins, snowmen and lambs will make you want to rush to the kitchen even if you are a vegetarian.  I’m pleased to be able to introduce you and her blog, peaslovecarrots, to you.

I often have these moments of excitement when I think I’ve had an original recipe idea only to rush to my computer and have Google tell me that I am last in a line of hundreds to have it.  I’m left wondering if in the past I’ve seen these recipes somewhere or another and forgotten about them, only to resurface again as subliminal faux-epiphanies.  While it’s not a bad thing to do something that’s been done before, it does take away the feeling of being some sort of culinary explorer, charting unknown waters.  Every now and then one likes to feel like a discoverer, right?

The other day I day I decided to make rainbow cupcakes. [/dontprint] … read more