Contrasts

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm a little rusty on the blogging front. As I forgot to take a photo when I made this the other night, you are stuck with this photo of the leftover version that I had for lunch today:

Thankfully, a much prettier version accompanies the recipe in Plenty:

This recipe works because of the contrasts:  silky roasted eggplant; garlicky, sharp buttermilk sauce; bright sweet-tart pops of pomegranate seeds. It's not a terribly complicated recipe, but you don't want to skip any of the three facets and that means you better get in gear and make it while pomegranates are in season (they pretty much disappear from the markets here for about half the year.)

I've made a few tweaks to the recipe because while the combination is inspired, I think the dish benefits from added intensity: more garlic in the buttermilk sauce, more salt and a lot more za'atar. Also, while this edition of Plenty has fixed some errors that were in the first edition (the copy I borrowed from the library last year had erratic conversions of temperatures in Celsius to Fahrenheit so this recipe had 250 F listed rather than the approximate conversion of 450 F), I still had to adjust some temps. My edition of the cookbook says 400 F and I would definitely recommend 450 to get that golden burnished top (unless maybe you are dealing with really small eggplants).

And a warning, if you are thinking of serving this at a formal dinner party you should know that there really is no tidy way to eat it. Despite its pretty presentation once you start eating you're going to get a plate full of messy bliss, that quickly turns into something requiring fingers to pull away the eggplant skin and release the delicious innards. I recommend serving it with puffy, warm pita bread so you can sop up all the mashed bits of eggplant and sauce that will flood the plate.

Eggplant with Buttermilk Sauce and Pomegranate Seeds
adapted from Yotam Ottolenghi's Plenty

Ottolenghi recommends serving this as an appetizer but I found it made a terrific main course, especially when paired with a spiced lentil tahini dish (recipe to come!), warm pita and a salad.

Eggplants
2 medium eggplants (if you are using large, then increase cooking time)
1/3 C olive oil
4 t za'atar*
salt and pepper

Sauce
9 T buttermilk
1/2 C greek yogurt
1 1/2 T olive oil
2 cloves of garlic
1/2 t salt (or more to taste)

For serving
the seeds from one pomegranate
4 t za'atar
ground black pepper
olive oil

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Cut the eggplant in half lengthwise. Score the flesh in a diamond pattern (but make sure not to pierce the skin).

Place the eggplant halves, cut-side up on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Brush them with the olive oil--keep brushing until all the oil has been absorbed. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and 1 t of za'atar for each eggplant half. Roast for 35-40 minutes until the tops have become golden brown and the flesh is soft. Remove from the oven.

While the eggplants are cooking, seed the pomegranate (I do it in a bowl of water to keep me and my walls from being speckled with red juice) and set the seeds aside. Then make the sauce. In a medium bowl whisk together the sauce ingredients until smooth. Taste for salt--you want it pretty salty since it'll disperse over the eggplant and be diluted--and adjust as necessary.

You can serve these with the eggplants warm or at room temp. Put an eggplant on a plate, generously top with the sauce, sprinkle on an abundant quantity of pomegranate seeds and then sprinkle each eggplant with 1 t of za'atar (or more!) and a grind of black pepper, then drizzle with a little olive oil. Put the bowls of sauce and seeds on the table so people can add more as they work their way through their eggplant half.

_____
* za'atar is a Middle Eastern spice mix composed of roasted thyme, sumac, sesame seeds and salt. I'm sure there are chi-chi spice shops that sell it for $10 for a 1/2 cup (no doubt with thyme harvested by elves at starlight and salt from the shores of Atlantis) but if you have a Middle Eastern market nearby, it is sold in 1 lb bags for $3-4.

Time to wake up

I've been letting this blog have a good well-deserved rest for the past year or so, but it's January 2014 and for some reason, old pessimistic me is thinking this is going to be a good year. And I'd like to share some of that goodness here.

I'm going to try and post once every two weeks (on average). Maybe more often than that.

A quick preview of what is to come:

I received two of Yotam Ottolenghi's cookbooks for Christmas, to join the one I already had:

Jerusalem, meet Plenty and Ottolenghi

I've been cooking out of all three and there are some real winners and favorites already emerging. Last night I made some amazing recipes from all three, but I'm out of practice and didn't take pictures. While Brian and I were gobbling it down (and he even declared it "gourmet") I thought, "I really need to share this with other people." So share here I shall.

I've been diligently updating my books read blog (and just started a new one for 2014) and I'll try to feature some more-than-just-a-blurb responses here on the main blog. 2013 ended with a superb run of grown-up fiction so I'll probably start with that.

And in the books + food category, I'm going to try and remember to bring my camera to my book group meetings this year. We're going on 14 years together and the book-themed meals are still fantastic.

And now for a little update on two of my former obsessions that are presently on the sidelines:

I probably won't be blogging about writing much. I'm presently working on two novels (early November was great! Then a period of fallowness and craziness and extreme non-writing followed) but despite being a realistic person, something about writing about my writing spooks me. I wouldn't go so far as to say "curse" but it feels like that. So other than possibly sharing a few resources that have helped "unstick" me when I've been stuck, don't expect much reflection on my own creative writing.

And my craftiness has definitely fallen by the wayside. I am knitting a super basic sweater now, but it isn't interesting, either to look at or to write about. I may feature some of my daughter's weird and wonderful creations (she's still at the age--10--where her imagination is uninhibited), but most of my crafting energy is spent figuring out ways to help her express her creativity which is far more visual than mine ever will be (her Christmas presents included whittling supplies, needle felting supplies and that ever popular medium, polymer clay).

Not going to win prizes in the looks department....

The other day I made a soup that was oh so tasty but pretty damn ugly:

Let's face it, the inside of an eggplant is not exactly attractive and that's the main ingredient. If you take away the artfully scattered drops of lemon olive oil and the sprinkle of za'atar, then you are left with something that looks like sludge.  

But it's really tasty sludge. So this isn't a recipe that you are going to make for its looks. And looks aren't everything, right? The soup is makes up for it by being smokey, silky and piquant in every spoonful.  Did I also mention that it is ridiculously easy to make? I've made it three times in the last month and the recipe has been filed in my recipe binder--this one is a keeper, even if it isn't very pleasant to look at.


Smoky eggplant soup
adapted from this recipe in the New York Times

2 lbs eggplant(s)
3 tablespoons olive oil
2 cups sliced yellow onions
Salt and pepper
6 garlic cloves, minced
Pinch of cayenne
6 cups mild vegetable broth (I used this Better than Bouillon stuff and it works great here)
4 T lemon juice
1 tablespoon za’atar (Middle Eastern blend of thyme, sesame seeds, salt and sumac)

• Poke a couple of holes in the eggplants with a paring knife, then place on a baking sheet under a hot broiler, about 2 inches from the flame. Cook until the skin has blackened and charred. Turn and cook on other sides until eggplant is soft and the skin is charred all around. This took me probably 10-15 minutes, keeping an eye on the eggplant and rotating it with tongs.  Set aside to cool, then remove and discard skins, scraping away any flesh that sticks to the skins (that's where you get the nice smokey flavor) then roughly chop the eggplant flesh.
• Put the olive oil in a saucepan over medium-high heat. Add onion, season generously with salt and pepper, and cook until softened and beginning to color, about 5 minutes. Add garlic, cayenne and eggplant flesh and cook 1 minute more, then add broth and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer gently for 10 minutes. 

Either use your immersion blender and blend until smooth, or blend in batches in a regular blender. Add lemon juice to puréed soup and taste again, adding more as necessary. Soup should be well seasoned and rather lemony.
Top each serving with about a teaspoon of za'atar. 

(If you want the pretty lemon olive oil droplets to detract from the dinge, then mix a teaspoon of finely grated lemon zest with two tablespoons of olive oil and dribble a little over each serving. I thought it made a negligible impact on taste so I wouldn't make the effort, unless you are really worried about the sludge-look. And if you are really worried about the looks because you have some judgmental diners on your hands, then you probably also want to follow the original recipe and put some chopped parsley on top, too.)

Perfect book for the perfect place

While off on our canoe camping trip to Georgian Bay in July, I had the perfect book to read.  This has not always been the situation: I have problems in my hum drum daily life when I don't have a worthy book and, even worse, get very anxious about running out of reading material entirely while on a trip. In particular the memory of a camping trip to Isle Royale where I was an 8 hour boat ride away from the main land and any reading material replenishment opportunities haunts me. I read and re-read everything I had with me, including an insipid children's book that I brought for my kids.  When I don't have a story to occupy my mind, even when I'm not actively reading, it's like I can't track where I'm going, like I'm out of balance and even things that have nothing to do with reading are harder to do without the undercurrent of an in-progress story to keep some part of my mind going.

One move I made was to buy a Nook. I'm a big fan of paper and don't really enjoy the feel of reading on the screen, but I do like the security of having a whole lot of books at my fingertips when I am away from home (and all my New Yorker issues are uploaded to it automatically so even after I've recycled them or passed them on to my dad, I still have access!) I went for a basic black and white screen, not one of the color ereaders because battery longevity is a primary concern for me. When you are camping out on an island, hours away from the nearest electrical source, you want that battery to last as long as possible.

I am not the ideal ebook customer because I am a tightwad and what with how much I read, if I had to purchase each book I'd be broke. I am a BIG library supporter so the other clincher in the decision to buy an ereader was that the library now has a way for you to borrow ebooks. The website is tedious to navigate and their classification of lots of trashy romance under "literature" makes searching for titles an exercise in practicing calming breaths, but there are some decent titles buried in there that are available to borrow for 2 or 3 week periods of time, including some books that my kids want to read. My daughter has inherited my book-dependence and gets pretty crabby if she doesn't have something good to read so this ensures a basic level of happiness for her on camping trips, too. The only problem comes when we both want to use the Nook at the same time.

I did make an exception to my tightwad principles to buy the ebook version of Neil Gaiman's latest book The Ocean at the End of the Lane.

Barnes and Noble had a special which made it half off, which helped with the decision, but the book was so good that paying full price for it would be fine.  I'm not a rabid Gaiman fan--I didn't really like American Gods and I'm not a big fan of the Sandman graphic novels that brought him a lot of his early fame and while plenty of people love the tv show Dr Who and his contributions to it, it just hasn't clicked for me. I enjoyed his novel Neverwhere, but it didn't capture me as much as his last two books. It may have something to do with the age of the main character's in both Ocean  and The Graveyard Book. The perspective of a child is a natural fit for books where the prose is elegantly simple while the story is fantastical. I love this combination. Florid prose would detract from the story content and but the "clean" style that Gaiman uses in these stories makes wacky ideas (like a vampire guardian for Nob, or a hole in a boy's foot serving as a doorway to another world) seem completely plausible and even natural. There's a bare minimum of "explaining" any of these things--they just are. And that lends the stories a sense of wistfulness and it feels as though I am remembering something like this from my past, a time when reality was less solid and the world contained more possibilities.

This was the book that I had when we were out on Big McCoy island, a 6 hour paddle from the mainland, a quiet and beautiful place where this book was the perfect companion. I read it once and then, despite all the archived copies of the New Yorker available to me, I went back and read it again. It's magical when book and place line up so well and I'm pretty sure that when I think back on this camping trip, among the islands and water and swimming, I'll remember this story, too.

Summer Refreshment

I recently returned from one of the most beautiful places on earth:

Ah, Georgian Bay, how I love you. (That's Little McCoy Island pictured above. We canoed out and camped on nearby Big McCoy Island last week.)

Now that we're home I'm trying to prolong that vacation feeling and a nice cold drink seemed like the most efficient way to do so. I also may just be attempting to avoid the reality of the coming week in which my better half and I attempt to put up all the trim in the addition that we have learned (quite happily) to live without due to severe construction-fatigue. Luckily, alcohol is a multi-purpose sort of thing! While cracking a cold beer is always pleasant, I've rediscovered an old summer drink favorite:

The Pimm's Cup (variation #2)

It seems particularly appropriate to write about it today since, according to Wikipedia, it is one of the staple drinks at Wimbledon which just had the first British male singles winner in 77 years--so I raise a glass (well, a mason jar) to you Andy Murray!

There are lots of different recipes out there for a Pimm's Cup so I'm trying out a few of them (research, you know...). All include Pimm's No. 1 (duh), cucumber, ice and some sort of fizz. But after that you find plenty of other stuff thrown in: lemon, orange, strawberries, extra gin, and mint are some of the players. I'm game to try them all except for the mint. I'm saving my mint for mojitos and mint sounds like it would compete with the juniper in gin (even if you don't use extra gin, Pimm's No. 1 is gin-based. The other numbers have different bases like Pimm's No. 3 is brandy-based and No. 6 is vodka-based but most of the other numbers are hard to come by or have been phased out.) I think I might be too much of a lightweight to substitute champagne for the soda mixer but if anyone out there tries it (and can remember after trying it...) let me know what kind of a taste sensation it provides!

So far, I like my variation #1 best:

cucumber, orange slice, Pimm's and ginger ale.

#2 was pretty tasty too:
cucumber, lemon slice, sliced strawberry, Pimm's and 7-Up.

Next to be tried will be the #1 with extra gin and maybe extra cucumber.
UPDATE: extra gin is good, particularly if you don't have to go anywhere anytime soon! Adding double lemon and double cucumber makes it almost like a salad so you can pretend it is healthy, too.

The basic method is the same:
Take a mason jar (or a high-ball glass for those of you who have appropriate bar-ware) and drop a thick slice of cucumber in the bottom. Add a thick slice of orange or lemon. Then muddle the hell out of them (I use the handle end of a wooden spoon and find it quite therapeutic). Then add lots of ice, pour over 2 oz of Pimm's (you can add another 1/2 oz of gin now if you want to amp up the flavor and potency of the drink), and fill up the glass with your fizzy sweet soda of choice (or use sparkling water, agave nectar and extra lemon juice if you are adverse to purchasing commercial soda. Or the afore mentioned champagne if you are up for it). Use the end of the wooden spoon to stir it all up and then top with any accoutrements or garnishes you desire: a sliced strawberry gives you fun little boozy snacks to fish out while you are drinking, another slice of un-muddled cuke would look nice too since the muddled one is mush now.

Goodbye old friend

My old toaster finally died. This toaster has been something of a minor miracle in toaster-dom: I inherited it from the previous tenants when I sublet an apartment in the summer of (drum roll please) 1990. I have no idea how old it was then, but it survived some period of time in an apartment with 3 men in their 20s and then went on to have 23 years of toasting bliss with me.

Of course, it died the day I made 12 jars of strawberry jam. Which meant that I was thrust into a toasting emergency.

My first move was to see if I could find the same toaster. And apparently I'm not the only one who loved their Maxim one-slot toaster. It seems that they are now only available in Australia. The only American result for Maxim is the trashy men's magazine which is not what I want to look at when toast-deprived. Actually, even when toast-satiated, I could do without Maxim-the-magazine's images.

Then I spent way toooo much time researching toasters. I read reviews at Cook's Illustrated, Consumer Reports, BHG product reviews, Amazon reviews, etc. I complicated the matter by considering regular toasters and toaster ovens, particularly once I saw the price of new standard toasters that got good reviews. If I'm going to drop over $100 it would be nice if the thing did more than just toast. The kids are still kind of intimidated by the big oven and with a summer of lunches at home looming on the horizon, the idea of them making their own tuna melts was a big plus. 

Finally I couldn't stand thinking about it any more and, after shoving some stuff around in the kitchen to figure out counter space, I bit the bullet and bought this baby:

 Hello, I am the Breville Mini Smart Toaster Oven.

I bought it because it has the word "smart" in the title, because who wants a stupid toaster? No, seriously this is just about the only toaster OR toaster oven out there that gets pretty universal rave reviews. And it is Australian, too. (I must investigate this Australia/toast correlation further.)  

It cost $149 at Bed Bath and Beyond and unfortunately, they don't let you use their 20% off coupons on Breville products. There are bigger versions of the oven too, but since I have no need to toast 6 pieces of bread at once or any inclination to shove a whole chicken in the thing, I figured the mini one would do me fine, and gobble up a few inches less of counter space.

So far, I've toasted three kinds of bread: sliced wheat, Zingerman's paesano bread and a half a frozen sesame bagel and I have to say, this baby makes damn good toast. The dark setting really is dark! The light setting really is light! And it has a little snowflake button to press for when you are toasting stuff straight from the freezer that produced a beautifully golden bagel. And I'm looking forward to trying out the oven-ish stuff soon.

new(ish) toy

It'll be salad season soon and that means salad dressing. For someone whose favorite food is salad, I have a conflicted relationship with salad dressing. I had a basic formula that usually turned out pretty decently, but I still hated it when the last drops were used up and I had to make some more: chopping the shallots was fiddly, the garlic press would sometimes just smoosh the garlic so I'd have to pick that out and rechop it, and all of it had to be crammed down a funnel and usually poked with a chopstick to get it into the glass bottle in which I made my salad dressing. And sometimes (almost always) I was too lazy to measure the stuff and would end up with a dressing that was too acidy or too blah and the thought of getting out the damn funnel again and adding to it was so unappealing that I wouldn't do it and we'd just suffer through the inferior dressing until it was gone.

But no more. For Christmas, I got a new toy:

(except mine is silver instead of white.)

It's great for the expected stuff: blending soups in the pot instead of slopping stuff back and forth to the blender; the little chopper does a great job on onions which is particularly good when I either have a lot of onions to chop, or am cooking with a kid (eliminates the complaints about slipperiness and eye stinging).

The whisk thingy isn't so useful for me. I used it once to whip some cream when the mixer bowl was sitting in the sink waiting to be cleaned and it was ok, but I'd always choose the stand mixer if both were available.

But the real revelation has come in the making of salad dressing. This thing does an amazing job making emulsified dressing with almost no effort. And I can taste as I go so I don't make a jar-full-of-blah. And no chopping. And I can make it a slightly creamy vinaigrette with some yogurt with no clumps or lumps which never worked with the shaken kind. And it never separates (well, maybe if you left it for a month it might, but it never sticks around that long around here.)

There's a measuring beaker that I can make it in, with a rubber cap, but I usually prefer a wide-mouth mason canning jar because the lid stays on nice and tight and there are people here who sometimes shove stuff into the fridge without looking where they are shoving. Anyway, back to the dressing.

I toss in a whole garlic clove and about three wee peeled shallots (I grow these and they don't come out honkin' huge like some that you get at the market, and that's fine with me because I like them small) and some salt and pepper.

Then I add dijon mustard, plain yogurt and a little something sweet--honey or maple syrup--just enough to round out the flavors.

Then I glug in some sherry vinegar and maybe a little lemon juice and give it the first buzz with the hand blender.

Bubbles!

Add the oil (olive or canola and almost always some roasted walnut oil)

Then it's the second buzz buzz time and in seconds I have perfectly blended and emulsified salad dressing (that also doesn't separate so no shaking necessary).

I don't yet have real "recipe" proportions; I'll try and remember to measure the next time I make it. And I'm very excited to try some new variations--I have plenty of mason jars! I'm thinking a soy mustard vinaigrette is in order, maybe one with miso and rice vinegar and ginger and orange juice, maybe another with avocado subbing for the yogurt and some fresh basil.

Stand by for updates!

Soup to soothe the stir-crazy soul

It is April 20th and there is (albeit a light dusting of) snow.  This is not welcome when I'm at the "ugh" stage of the year in relation to preparing dinner.  Spring may have officially come, but I'm sick to death of root vegetables. I'm even sick of my favorite winter comfort dinner (homemade mac and cheese, lots of kale with garlic and lemon, and roasted beets).

I was digging through my recipe binder and came across this soup and there's something about the abundance of spinach and the saffron in the broth that keeps it from feeling like another damn winter soup. It's still pretty hearty, but it gives some hint that seasonal warmth may be coming.

The original recipe is from the New York Times and, in my view, it is unnecessarily complicated. There entire first step seems unnecessary to me: they have you blanch all the spinach, save the water that it is blanched in for the broth, and then add it back in at the end. Maybe their soup ended up a little brighter green in color than mine, but I chucked this advice and instead just added the (fresh) spinach to the soup at the very end. It cooks in the broth and you get rid of one finicky step. And as you can see below, it doesn't produce spinach the color of mud.

That's green enough for me.

The other thing I changed from the recipe was their instruction for the baguette and cheese. They say sprinkle the cheese on top of the egg and serve with baguette. I say, layer some baguette in each bowl, top with the gruyere and then ladle your soup over the top.

That way you get surprise gooey-cheesy bread under your top layer of soup which, along with the saffron in the broth, was probably my favorite thing about this recipe. This also means that if you only have slightly stale baguette around (or other farm/rustic-type bread) and don't want to go to the store, no one will ever know!  Next time I make it, I plan to rub these slightly stale bread pieces with a cut garlic clove before plopping them in the bowl because that just sounds like it would make it even better.

Spinach, Saffron Soup with Egg 
adapted from this recipe in the New York Times
(they said served 6, I thought 4 was more realistic)

1 pound baby spinach, rinsed
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 onion, finely chopped
2 leeks, white and light green parts only, cut in half lengthwise and rinsed of all grit, then sliced thin OR 1 C of Trader Joe's frozen leek slices, thawed
Salt to taste
6 garlic cloves, minced
1 pound Yukon gold potatoes, cut in thin slices
A bouquet garni made with a bay leaf and a couple of sprigs each thyme and parsley (and if you have it, a fennel sprig)
Generous pinch of saffron
Freshly ground pepper
4 eggs (unless you are going to serve small portions to more people, then one egg per person)
3 ounces Gruyère cheese, grated 
thin slices baguette or other rustic bread, rubbed with a cut piece of garlic

1. Heat the olive oil in a large, heavy soup pot or Dutch oven and add the onion and leek. Cook, stirring often, until tender, about 5 minutes. Add a pinch of salt and the garlic, stir over medium heat until the garlic smells fragrant, no more than a minute, and stir in 2 quarts of water, the potatoes, bouquet garni and salt to taste. Bring to a boil, add the saffron, and turn the heat to low. Cover and simmer 20 to 30 minutes, until the potatoes are tender but still intact and the broth is fragrant.

2. Stir in the spinach, cover and continue to simmer for another 10 minutes. Add pepper, remove the bouquet garni, taste and adjust seasonings.

3. Keep the soup at a bare simmer. Break each egg into the soup. Cover and continue to simmer until the eggs are set, about 5 minutes.

4. At the bottom of each bowl put a couple of pieces of baguette and a generous sprinkle of cheese. Serve the soup, with an egg in each bowl. Sprinkle the egg with a little more cheese if you are so inclined.

New Cookbooks

It has been a long time since I bought a new cookbook but today I splurged on two:

 The Sprouted Kitchen by Sarah Forte

and Jerusalem by Yotam Ottolenghi

My reasons for purchasing these two are completely different: the first book reminds me of what I already do well and the second pushes me to extend my thinking. I checked both books out of the library before buying them. That's what I always do with cookbooks to make sure that it isn't just one recipe that I've seen featured on a blog that I like.

I didn't learn anything radically new in The Sprouted Kitchen but leafing through the recipes, I kept getting jolts of "Oh yeah! I haven't made something like that in a while!" It looks like a perfect book for when I'm too tired to try anything particularly challenging and can't think of what to cook.  Recipes like walnut crusted salmon with edamame mash, honey mustard broccoli salad and toasted millet salad with arugula, quick pickled onions, and goat cheese all sound pretty easy and like they'd get me out of a rut when I'm burned out. And I like that while the recipes are healthy, they aren't excessively so--there's no scolding or preaching and plenty of recipes include cheese or a small amount of meat and suggestions like "grilled flank steak would go well with this salad."

Yotam Ottolenghi's book pushes me a little out of my comfort zone. The only recipe that I've actually cooked from the book was a delicious spice cookie at Christmas time, but I've made some of the recipes from his previous book, Plenty, and from his Guardian column like this parsley, lemon and bean salad and this herb soup, both of which produced intensely flavorful dishes. I don't know if I could eat Ottolenghi's food everyday but his recipes are a great shake up for when I'm really sick of what I usually cook. In Jerusalem, I'm looking forward to trying the hot yogurt and barley soup, pureed beets with yogurt and zaatar, lemony leek meatballs and saffron chicken and herb salad.

If you've cooked from either of these books, let me know your favorites (or duds!)

An inconvenient craving

Apparently, I am not the only person in my area who craves Zingerman's lemon scones. The last few times I attempted to obtain one, they were already sold out and that left me feeling a little grumpy. So rather than face disappointment at the store again today, I decided to try to make them at home.

I've had plenty of lemon zest in scones over the years, but other than the Zingerman's scone which I am craving, all have had shards of raw zest in the dough. This is fine when the zest is just there as an enhancer, say to make a cranberry scone taste a little brighter. But it has never been enough to make the citrus flavor the star of the scone. The Zingerman's lemon scones rely on copious quantities of candied lemon zest. The zest is in the same quantity that you'd add currants or dried cranberries and this lends them a powerful, floral intensity.

Texture-wise, these are more delicate than the scones I grew up on, which used milk and egg to bind together the flour-butter combination. These are cream scones (with no egg) and are more ethereal than my regular tasty-but-sturdy variety. They are amazing when freshly baked, though I think they dry out quickly and are less palatable when day old (if you have enough self control to have any left the next day). Next time I make them, I may try and freeze a couple to see whether they could be thawed and then refreshed in a warm oven and keep their tenderness.

Instead of an egg wash or brushing the scones with milk and sprinkling them with demerara sugar, these get a little dusting of powdered sugar once they've cooled. Normally, I'm not a big fan of powdered sugar. But the treatment here is minimal: they are still recognizable as a scone, and the touch of sweetness makes them kind of magical.

Making the zest is a bit of a pain--it's easy enough to do, but an extra step. I'm thinking that maybe I'll make a big batch of candied zest and then freeze it in 1/4 C portions, so I can churn these out quickly. Then again, they're pretty decadent so that might be a bit of a dangerous proposition...


Lemon Scones
recipe adapted from this one for Zingerman's Currant Scones

for the candied zest:
1-2 lemons (or double the recipe and have some left over to freeze for future batches)
1 C sugar

Use a vegetable peeler or a sharp knife to slice off the top layer of the lemon's peel--try to get as little pith as possible. Fill a small pot with cold water, chuck in the strips of zest and bring to a boil. Drain then repeat two more times (this gets any bitterness out and softens up the zest). After draining the third time, put 1 C sugar and 1 C water into the pot and heat until the sugar dissolves. Toss in the blanched zest and turn the heat down so it is just simmering. Cover and simmer for 30-40 minutes, until the zest is tender and looks a little translucent. Cool, then fish it out of the syrup and put on a chopping board and chop it into medium-fine pieces (about the size of a raisin, if a raisin was flat).

for the scones:
1.5 C all purpose flour
2.5 T sugar
1.5 t baking powder
.5 t salt
1/4 C cold butter, cut into 1/4" cubes
1/4 C chopped candied lemon zest
3/4 C heavy cream
2 T powdered sugar

Preheat oven to 400.
Put all the dry ingredients into the bowl of a food processor and pulse a few times to mix. Add the butter and pulse until it is partially incorporated. Dump into a mixing bowl and rub the bigger butter/flour lumps between your fingers to flatten (this makes the scones flakey). Add the candied zest. Then stir in the cream and turn out on a floured surface. Knead a few times and pat into a circle 1/2"thick. Divide into 6 large, pie-shaped wedges (or make 12 smaller scones, just bake them for a shorter time).

Put on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Bake for 15-18 minutes until delicately golden brown around the edges. Cool for a few minutes then dust the tops with powdered sugar.