Mom’s Birthday Dinner

The wines!

I picked some really fun dishes for Mom’s birthday over the weekend - my sister made a cool appetizer of apricot with brie en croute and for the main course we had lamb chops with a dressing I made of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, lemon, and fresh rosemary with garlic, kosher salt, and black pepper.

My dishes?  I made side dishes - stuffed tomatoes, risotto, and the cake - a New York style (or sort of German style) cheesecake.  Delicious!  I picked the wines, too - a Provence rose’, a 2007 Right Bank Bordeaux (that means it’s mostly Merlot with some Cabernet), and a Chateauneuf-du-Pape (mostly Grenache based wine with other grapes like Syrah and Mourvedre, from Southern Rhone).  The wines showed perfectly, and the dishes turned out really well.

Very easy stuffed tomatoes

The stuffed tomatoes are incredibly easy - I cut a few large vine ripened tomatoes in half, and, using a grapefruit knife, I hollow them out.  In a bowl, I mix together Italian seasoned bread crumbs, parmigiano reggiano, fresh finely chopped garlic, fresh chopped parsley, and olive oil.  I blend the olive oil into the mixture with a fork and make sure the crumbs are moist with olive oil, and then I spoon and lightly tamp down the mixture into the hollow tomato halves.  I then drizzle them with a bit more olive oil just to let them brown a bit, and bake them in the oven at 400 degrees F.  When they’r golden brown and just starting to crack a bit on top while the tomatoes are softened, take them out and enjoy them!

A cheesy, lemony risotto

The risotto I taught myself.  It’s not the easiest thing to make but if you get a feel for it, it can be quite simple.  I use 2 cups of arborio rice and my ratio is just over 3:1 liquid to rice.  I begin with a large pot and a drop of olive oil and cook an onion, chopped.  I add about 4 tbsp unsalted butter and let it melt, and using a wooden spoon, I add the 2 cups of arborio rice and stir to coat with the melted butter.  I then add, about 1 cup at a time, chicken stock, and keep the pot on fairly low heat.  I use about 6 cups of chicken stock, and then I also add the juice of 1 lemon and about 1 cup of dry white wine (this time I used a Cotes de Gascogne so not quite as dry as usual - Sauvignon Blanc or Pinot Grigio).  I add 1 cup at a time and stir so that the rice will gradually absorb the liquid.  I use about a pinch of ground black pepper, garlic powder, and about a tsp of fresh thyme leaves.  Once the rice has absorbed all liquid and is at a cooked rice consistency, I add about a cup (or slightly less) of grated parmigiano reggiano, and stir it in and remove the pot from the heat.  Once it’s integrated, I put it in a large heated bowl and top with chopped fresh parsley, and it’s done!

Cheesecake!

Let that cheesecake settle!

So about the cheesecake - there’s a story behind this one.  I was a girl scout when I was a kid until I was almost a teenager.  Somewhere around the middle of my girl scout years, I guess I was around 10 or 11, we had our first real bake-off.  I had never baked anything before - so my mom suggested her cheesecake recipe - it’s not that hard and it’s 100% from scratch, and she’d be happy to watch me, since she had made the cake so many times (I think she was given the recipe by someone named Connie that Mom worked with a long time ago, before I was born).  So the cheesecake it would be.  We’ve always called it the German cheesecake, but it’s definitely New York style (for those of you who have had a real New York cheesecake - and it’s far more fresh than most cakes that you’ll find in a New York deli or diner.  Anyway, it gets made in a spring form pan, and so there’s no graham cracker crust - in fact, there’s no crust at all.  I grease the pan with butter and coat it with plain bread crumbs.  The cake itself consists of cream cheese and butter blended together, and then add to it: sour cream, heavy cream, sugar, flour, corn starch, eggs, and vanilla, and there it is - use an electric mixer (I begin on low but bring it all the way up to the highest setting as I like loads of air in it - it can be pretty heavy for a cake so air helps!) - and 4 minutes later, pour it into the prepared pan, and bake it for almost an hour.  It’ll crack just a bit on top, but let it settle for a little while, and it;ll return to form, and carefully release the spring form sides, and it’s done!  Let it cool and place it in the refrigerator and that’s all there is to it.  Easy, right?  Well, maybe.  But I won that girl scout bake-off, and so the cheesecake was my first ever kitchen project, and a success it was.

Blueberry Pie for Labor Day

I love cooking and baking according to the seasons, and what’s fresh - it’s the best way to ensure a delicious and healthy dish, because preservatives don’t play quite so big a role when the ingredients are so fresh.  Plus, when ingredients are in season, they’re at their peak, so flavor is at maximum levels - at least that’s the way I see it.

Blueberry Pie - up close

I’m a huge fan of Ina Garten.  I learned an interesting lesson in one of her books (I believe it’s in Back to Basics but I’m not positive on that.)  Anyway, the lesson came from one of her trips to France.  She and her husband Jeffrey have homes here in New York (one in East Hampton right here in Suffolk County on Long Island, maybe an hour’s drive from where I live), one in the city, and one in Paris.  She was spending Thanksgiving in Paris and she and Jeffrey invited some friends over to their Parisian apartment, and she encountered a problem.  Some foods that are available to us here in New York are not available in Paris, at least not at Thanksgiving, when we use those ingredients to cook our Thanksgiving dinner.  I believe cranberries were among her examples.  The lesson I took from her experience which she shared with her readers is that cooking should be based on what’s in season, in order to keep it fresh and delicious.  So while Ina was able to put on an American Thanksgiving dinner in Paris, it took some major effort to find the ingredients, and some were frozen and she wasn’t happy about that (if I remember the story correctly).  And after the story, she reminds her readers to opt for the freshest ingredients, preferably those that are currently in season.

Blueberries are generally in season toward the latter part of the summer, at least that’s the case in northeastern United States.  And the true blueberries are the ones also labeled “bluet” - they have a pale colored inside flesh and dark skin (and the not-so-real blueberries have dark flesh as well - I think that’s important to remember!).

They say every good cook should have signature items, including signature cookies, cakes, and pies.  (When the holidays come around, I can’t wait to tell you all about my signature cookies - they reflect my Italian/Sicilian heritage and while they’re challenging, I love them so much and I look forward to sharing them with you.)

Since this blog post covers pie, I’ll tell you what my signature pies are.  My real signature pie is key lime pie - it’s the first pie I learned to make and now I do with without a recipe in front of me - I make it during the warmer months as I like to think of it almost like margarita in the form of dessert.  And the graham cracker crust is really quite simple to make.  If you look back a month or two ago, you’ll see the key lime pie in my 4th of July post.  My other signature pie, which I believe I covered in a post in June, is pecan pie, which I learned to make because it’s my dad’s favorite, and it seems quite difficult to find a good quality pecan pie here in New York, even in the best of American restaurants.  So I learned it, and thanks to a friend in the midwest who shared his recipe with me, the whole thing is quite easy.

“Raw"

As a child, my favorite pie was banana creme, and I’ve yet to attempt it, but I think it’ll be fairly simple - hopefully I’ll try soon and let you know about it!  My dad’s friend used to make it all the time when he came to our house when I was a kid, when the men in the family made wine in our cellar and planned fireworks shows for 4th of July parties at our house.  Eddie always brought cool desserts, including gingerbread cookies for my sister and me, Christmas cookies, apple pie, and of course my favorite, banana creme pie, and he even whipped the creme by hand.  How about that!  So yes, I’ll be learning to make banana creme pie.

But while blueberries are in season late in the summer, I decided it was time to try making blueberry pie.  I got the recipe from a dear family friend, who was also my piano teacher when I was growing up.  But the recipe didn’t include a specific pie crust recipe, so I turned to my sister, who makes an outrageously great apple pie.  That crust is fantastic, so that’s the one I wanted.  But instead of doing a complete cover crust, I opted for lattice, which I think looks nice on a richly colored berry pie filling.

Fresh out of the oven!

The filling includes about 5 cups of fresh blueberries (the real ones, bluet!), sugar, flour, and cinnamon, and once it’s in the pie crust, some lemon juice and tiny pieces of butter sprinkled over the berries.  The crust includes flour, shortening, salt, and cold water.  The crust is completely done by hand, and I doubled the recipe, because I wanted to ensure that the entire bottom crust would cover the Emile Henri pie dish, and also to make strips (cut with a pastry cutting wheel from Williams-Sonoma) long enough to make a proper lattice top for the pie.  Without giving away Lauren’s pie crust recipe, I’ll say that the shortening gets “cut” into the flour with butter knives, which takes a bit of time but it’s worth it, and when adding the water one tablespoon at a time, it gets blended in gently with a fork.  Do it by hand, she said, and not with the food processor.  You want to know how your dough feels throughout the process.  TRUE.

I used the butcher block as my surface and covered it with a bit of flour so as not to let it stick, and then rolled it out with a wooden rolling pin, and carefully, I got it quite thin, which is essential, and placed it very carefully in the pie dish.  I repeated the rolling for the second crust, except this one I cut into strips with the pastry cutting wheel (which works really well!).  I filled the crust with the blueberry mixture which was already starting to sort of macerate.  I carefully placed the strips of dough into a lattice which my mom helped me weave like a basket (since it was my first time doing lattice, 4 hands were better than two).

I then added a bit to it - I made an egg wash and brushed it on only the lattice and crust around the edges and not on the berries - and then sprinkled the whole pie with cinnamon sugar.  Perfect, I thought.

Into the oven for 45 minutes at 425 degrees F.

And voila!  A perfect blueberry pie emerged from the oven, bubbling around the edges and looking “golden brown” - I took so many pictures, I was so pleased with the way it looked.

Blueberry Pie with Vanilla Bean Gelato

And it was delicious, too.  It was served with a scoop of Talenti Tahitian vanilla bean gelato, and the sweet/tartness of the pie, the slight saltiness of the crust, and the sweetness of the gelato were a perfect match.

I was asked what would I pair with that - well, I’d say one of my favorite dessert wines - Alcyone late harvest Tannat from Uruguay, with its dark fruit and chocolate characteristics.

In all, I don’t think the whole prep time took longer than an hour, making this one of the less complicated and time consuming desserts in my repertoire.  And I’m pretty sure this will become my signature berry pie.  It’s too beautiful and delicious not to!