Sour Cherry Tart
(A culinary quest)

This is a sour cherry tart with a vanilla custard.
I will choose this as my last dessert.

Cooking, for me, isn't just about meeting the needs of the body. It's about artistry, science, and the pursuit of perfection. Not a toxic perfection that eats away at my self esteem, nor an impossible perfection such as sculpting the best ass is. I feel a great deal of pleasure in being able to do things well and cooking offers everyone the chance to make something well because of the enormous range of possibilities. If bread baking sounds like as much fun as walking across the Mohave desert barefoot and with no sunscreen, one doesn't need to bake bread. You can make soup instead.

About seven years ago I decided that I was going to master the art of baking tarts. When I say "master" I mean that I wanted to be able to make tarts consistently well, but not just well, I wanted people to eat my tarts and then not be able to stop thinking about it for long after the last crumb was pressed into a fork. There's more though, a tart should be a thing of beauty.

Tarts really aren't difficult to make. But making them well requires that you refine your skills at achieving each step. The first step is making a really good crust. Some people have trouble with this but I follow Martha Stewart's recipe, using my food processor to mix it, and the only trick I've found works well is to completely freeze the rolled out pastry dough before prebaking it. This usually prevents the crust from bubbling up. Two things, I've found, can really mess up a tart dough: adding too much water to the dough will make it hard where the dough is extra wet, and only using half the amount of butter is not recommended.

This is a vanilla custard tart with my canned peaches and my own Silvanberry sauce on top.

The vanilla custard* is the next part to master. I have found making a good vanilla custard challenging because the first time I made it it was perfect (and easy) but I could never remember which recipe I followed and I ended up trying a string of recipes that I had no difficulty messing up. A good recipe is really important. I don't like a rich custard with tons of egg yolks and heavy cream. I have finally found a recipe for a lighter custard that reliably turns out well from the book "Tartine". I used 2% milk (even though it calls for whole milk) and it turned out really well. The biggest challenge is preventing it from being lumpy and my only advice on this challenge is to stir frequently and use a whisk.

Once you have a great crust and a great pastry cream all you have to do is figure out what you want to put on top. My favorite desert of all time (OF ALL TIME) is a fresh fruit tart with vanilla custard, but this is winter, I can't buy kiwis from New Zealand, so I had to think about alternatives from the pantry. I'm misleading you there, I didn't have to think about it at all. All summer I was thinking about how my fruit preserves might be used in the winter to crown some lovely tarts. I was just waiting for the right opportunity.

Luckily I am usually the only one in my family who puts up a fight to preserve traditions like having yams every year with Thanksgiving dinner. It was not difficult to convince my mom, my sister, and Philip to let me bypass the whole pumpkin deal in favor of these tarts.

The result? My mom and my sister think that I have achieved my goal of mastery over the tart. We talked about those tarts for a full half hour after eating them. My family even indulged me in my favorite game of trying to figure out how they might be made even more perfect.

Now all I have to do is keep making them for the next thirty years (if I live that long) until I achieve fame among my friends and family for my tart making abilities. How will I know I've gotten there? I'll know when people start always asking me brightly if I am going to bring one of my tarts to the potluck? I'll know when I hear people talking about tarts past.

I think everyone should settle on one thing to master in the kitchen. Maybe you can master almost everything but you should aim to be known for making something in particular better than all else-it's great for your self esteem and it increases your pleasure in preparing food for others. It's fun to follow a food quest anyway. It's kind of like being a culinary knight only you're less likely to be impaled by a jousting stick.

Just as a side note, I can't make pie worth a damn.

Yesterday my mom, sister, and I went to the Portland farmer's market and I was impressed with the variety still available. This particular farmer's market continues through December 22. I've been meaning to buy some locally grown wild rice and was very pleased to find it there-so I bought a couple of packages of it. I also found (to my great excitement) that one stall had some gorgeous cilantro. I bought four bunches and plan to freeze it in ice cube size portions. I will report on how well it freezes as soon as I know. Cilantro isn't known to retain it's flavor well when dried. I'm sure those farmers are thinking I must be some kind of freak getting inordinately excited to have found fresh cilantro. Who cares? I thought I wouldn't find any more until mid-spring. I plan to make some black bean chili!

By the way, for those of you waiting on packages from Dustpan Alley, they are all ready to go and will be mailed early tomorrow morning. Thank you for your patience! The bath bombs are doing so well I've had to make new batches and am now in need of new supplies which I better get soon. I've gotten much better at making them and if people would like a tutorial I will put one together. Though, I did find some good ones out there already (my previous searches did not yield great directions. Sometimes a single word in a search makes ALL the difference.) I think the bombs would make excellent stocking stuffers and although they can be tricky (I ruined three batches last week), I think they are still easy enough for anyone to try. Each bath bomb costs about fifty cents each to make which makes it really an affordable homemade project.

I'm off to work at the Holiday Market downtown. I hope you all have a great Sunday!

*Technically this is a pastry cream.

The Story Of Four Two Cherry Pickers

We picked about thirty pounds of cherries from Egger's Acres yesterday. And when I say "we" I mean Lisa E. and I. Not our shiny blond boys.

Unpaid Review: unlike the useless specimen of an instrument I bought last year to cut corn kernels off the cob, this cherry stoner, made by VillaWare turned out to be a great buy. It was only $19.99 and although it doesn't feel particularly solidly made, it worked really well. I have always thought that making cherry pies sounds seriously tedious if you have to pit them with a paring knife; with this well designed tool I can pit a ton of cherries in just a few minutes.*

It kind of makes me wish I had planted more sour cherry trees. Oh, wait, there are other reasons for that too, as we shall see.

These boys have a fleeting interest in canning equipment. But only because it makes a satisfying thunking noise and spits the cherries out right into the bowl. All boys like flying fruit.

Philip was set to the task of de-stemming the Bings. He did this with amazing grace.

Untreated cherries for drying.

Cherry soup. I am attempting to make sweet cherry preserves but just as I suspected, sweet cherries don't make great preserves. I cooked one batch according to instructions from The Ball Blue Book of canning and preserving and what I got (which I won't bother canning) is a stewed fruit concoction that tastes like hot sugar. No cherry flavor. Gross. So for the three other batches I decided to let the fruit macerate overnight in the sugar. No added water. I will only heat it up long enough to get it hot enough to safely can. Hopefully this will help preserve the cherry flavor. I would like to use this cherry sauce to put on yogurt and maybe ice cream.


We went to Egger's Acres in Dundee to pick Bing cherries and sour cherries. I couldn't pick as many sour cherries as I would have liked because they are quite high up in the two trees that had them and the trees were on slopes making the possibility of a ladder seem like a pretty dangerous prospect. The trees were absolutely laden with dark Bings and I have to say that they taste a lot better than any I have so far eaten from the super market or the farmer's market.

I would have climbed the trees if it weren't for two factors: Mr. Egger (the proprietor) is the kind of guy you don't want to piss off, and the tree branches were populated by quite a lot of intimidating bugs.

You'd think it would be a boy's dream to run around on a farm in the summertime. Right? There's lots of dust and dirt and fruit to smash (or pick and eat) and acres of trees, lanes, bugs, and more dirt. The great outdoors! Boys love it, right? Well, maybe your boys do. Our boys prefer to play legos in the civilized interior of their own homes. Our boys prefer video games, movies, or sister torturing. The "great outdoors" holds no allure for them. Lisa and I find this incredible because we couldn't be happier getting dusty, picking fruit, taking in lung fulls of fresh air. This is the kind of thing we loved when we were kids, so what the hell is wrong with our kids?

They came on this whole cherry picking mission reluctantly in the first place. It started off with about a hundred truculent threats about what we better do to make it fun for them. But I should mention that in the beginning, it was mostly my own sweet bairn who was throwing his bad attitude around the car like ten pound weights at my head. I'm not proud of his behavior. In fact, I may have raised my voice a bit in the car about several hundred times before we even reached Lafayette. It just got better from there on out.

So what do you do when you have two boys bickering with each other non-stop and deciding to be absolutely miserable and bored. Bored. BORED! All this time I've been worried about raising a criminal and I didn't even see this danger coming- that I might be raising a bored person. I don't understand boredom. I've never experienced boredom the way other people do. Maybe I've had a couple of bored moments in my life, but fleeting experiences. What the hell do you do with people who don't know how to entertain themselves?

We kept trying to ignore them. Ever noticed how hard it is to ignore a child who is determined to have your undivided attention? You can't win. We grumbled to each other and had conversations about what the hell is wrong with our boys as though they weren't standing there telling us how bored they were. And getting more bored by the minute. These bored little being were like matches in the sun, getting hotter and hotter, ready to combust. I'm not proud to say it, but I kind of wanted to snap a branch or two at them. At least it would give them something real to complain about.

Right near the end, right when I had pulled back a tight branch ready to launch it at whichever boy came near me next, the complaints changed. Suddenly they had to pee. When boys who've been crying a river of boredom have to pee, it is sudden and urgent. So I took them off to knock at the farmer's door to find out if there was a near by outhouse they could use. We found Mr. Egger in his yard and I asked. He told us there wasn't a bathroom but why don't they just pee on a tree around the corner?

It's like the earth stopped spinning. Those boys looked at each other with the kind of delight usually reserved for a new set of legos.

So here's a practical tip for you should you find yourself with uncooperative boys in a beautiful rural landscape which you are unable to enjoy for their stubborn refusal to run off and play:

Send them off to pee on a tree together!

Men love to piss outside. Boys are no different than men in this regard. Pissing contests aren't just a macho test of manhood, pissing contests are something that the male species enjoys for the FUN of it.

Two boys pissing on a tree...suddenly they are the best of friends and playing dragons off in the distance forgetting all about us. Suddenly they are the rugged little boys we know they are at heart. Scrounging in the dirt for nature's interesting artifacts.

So the next time we take them with us on a farm excursion, I think the first thing we'll do is have them run off and pee somewhere together. Do you think other farmers will mind?

*Hey VillaWare people, feel free to pay me for this review. Don't worry, I don't have principles.

Cherry Season!

On the east coast and in the Midwest sour cherries are not very hard to find (from what I hear), but here on the west coast they are like rare birds who can't fly and are therefore dying off because it's evolutionarily less useful to have wings that don't work. I guess no one sees the point of growing sour cherries because you have to preserve them or cook them in pies to get the best out of them and who has time for that? You'd think, what with Washington state dripping with cherries it wouldn't be that hard to track some down.

You'd think.

When I lived in Sonoma I went on a mad sour cherry hunt. I actually tried to find mail order sources here on the west coast as I have heard there are on the east coast. No luck. I tried every local farm to find out if they had a Morello tree hidden on their back acre that I could pick from. No dice. Even though the west county in Somoma used to be full of cherry orchards. This was long before it was all vineyards and long before it was all apples which were mostly chopped down to make way for the grapes. Now there is almost no evidence that they once dominated the agricultural landscape. I heard about it from old farmers.

There are lots of cherries here in Yamhill county. Cherries everywhere! This is something you never see in California. Roadside cherries. Cherries in front yards. However, they are all sweet.

Lisa E. has begun a new hunt for cherries. It seems she's found a possible source here in Yamhill County. On Sunday we are going cherry picking. Of course we're going to pick sweet cherries. But besides eating them there isn't a lot you can do with the sweet ones. They lose their flavor when cooked and doused in sugar so pies, preserves, and other deserts don't shine with the sweet cherries.* Here's what we'll do with the sweet ones: we'll eat a ton of them fresh, we'll try oven drying some and dehydrator drying some others (to make a quality comparison), and we might make a little ice cream. We might even try making one of the recipes for preserves made with sweet cherries just to see how it turns out.

At this same orchard there is a sour cherry tree, but the owner has informed Lisa that the cherries on it are very small. We're bringing her cherry pitter to see how easily they pit. If they pit easily we will pick sour cherries and make sour cherry jam because it's one of the best jams on earth to those of us who like our jam with a little tartness. My all time favorite is made by the company Bon Maman. Philip bought it once a long time ago and since I don't like to try new things very freely, he had to convince me that it wouldn't kill me to take a taste. You see, I had only ever had cherry deserts and preserves made from sweet cherries which basically just taste like cooked sugar. Oh boy! I am so glad he made me try it. It tasted like cherry candy, the kind that is bright red and made with artificial flavorings...except that it was a gorgeous deep red and 100% natural.

I seem to have developed a habit of planting sour cherry trees wherever I live. I planted two at my last house and two at this house. I keep thinking that it isn't enough. Morello trees are quite small naturally. What if I never get enough from them? I'm not as sure about the Montmorency trees which is the other variety I planted. I kind of think I ought to plant at least one more. Another thing you can do with sour cherries (better than with sweet) is make liqueur. I haven't had tons of luck making good liqueurs but once you've tasted a really good one it's hard not to want to keep trying.

I've made an excellent plum liqueur and my friend Sharon has made an excellent cherry liqueur. I have to note that she used sweet cherries but didn't use as much sugar as cherry liqueur usually calls for and it turned out excellent-but she didn't write down what she did so it will remain a mystery forever.

The bowl of cherries above is this years Morello harvest from the front yard. Not a lot you can do with a tiny bowl of sour cherries except look at them and dream about what you'll do with them next year when you have enough of them.

So cherries are going to kick off our farm and preserving adventures for the season. I'm so excited! Now I have to start looking for an extra freezer. I needed one last year but didn't get one. I've needed one for a few years but have not wanted to make a rash choice. I don't know whether I should just get an extra fridge/freezer combo-but then I probably still wouldn't have enough freezer space, or get an upright freezer, or get one of those chest freezers? Which is best? The upright seems the easiest to find things in. The chest freezers are cheaper. There's all this talk of frost-which ones are frost free? Anyone have suggestions?

The one thing I know for sure is that I'm getting one with a low energy star rating which means I won't be buying locally unless my Sears can order a low energy Kenmore. Around here the only ones I've seen in person are the ones that eat up the most energy possible-are we trying to use up all the fossil fuel right now on purpose? Please! On line I've seen a lot of models that are very efficient compared to what I've seen around here.

For anyone else wondering what to do with a surplus of local cherries, here's a list:

dry them (sweet)
pit and then freeze them (sweet or sour)
preserves (best for sour)
ice cream (sweet)
syrup (sour)
liqueur (sweet or sour)
sauce to put over ice cream or other deserts (sour)

*This is my opinion possibly not shared by anyone else. That's alright, I'm used to it.