Archives for June 2015

Marnie’s Blueberry Ring

June 15, 2015

We’ve been berry-picking on an almost weekly basis for going on two months now.

Strawberries are my personal favorite, but E. is especially fond of blueberries (even though he tends to call them grapes). He has been on a real blueberry bender lately, working steadily through the big bucketful that we picked a few days ago.

I feel bad denying my baby fresh fruit, but I had to hoard a few of the berries so that I could make my great-aunt Marnie’s blueberry ring.

Marnie had a big, metal recipe box full of recipe cards and newspaper clippings that I was lucky enough to inherit several years ago. She loved to entertain and her recipes reflect that, with little notations about dinner party menus or cocktail pairings, like the words “good port” scrawled at the top of a recipe for chocolate walnut wafers.

Flipping through the recipe box is like stepping back in time. There are handwritten recipes for gingerbread and lemon meringue pie attributed to my great-grandmother who died 80 or 90-some-odd years ago, when Marnie was just a teenager; instructions for once-fashonable dishes like tomato aspic and Waldorf salad; a newspaper clipping about crab imperial from the now-defunct “Washington Star” newspaper….

Itty-bitty lentil crackers

June 10, 2015

When E. was born, nearly 2 years ago now, he received a really beautiful, illustrated copy of “The Wind and the Willows” from one of Paul’s friends.

At 229 pages, I figured this was a book we would largely ignore until E. became old enough to listen to chapter-length bedtime stories.

But lately E. has been really into his “big book.”

He hoists it off the shelf with both hands and drops it on my lap.

“Heavy,” he says, with satisfaction.

Then we flip through the pages and talk about the drawings of Mr. Toad, Mr. Mole, boats, cars and countryside. One of his favorite pictures shows a couple of animals having a picnic in the grass.

“What are they eating?” I ask.

“Watermelon,” E. says decisively, though there’s no watermelon in sight.

“Tea,” he adds. “Toast.”

“If you were going to have a picnic, what would you take to eat?” I ask next.

“Crackers!” he says….

Butter beans with melted leeks

June 3, 2015

On a summer evening some years ago, two of the South’s most celebrated writers, William Faulkner and Katherine Anne Porter, were dining together at a plush restaurant in Paris. Everything had been laid out to perfection; a splendid meal had been consumed, a bottle of fine Burgundy emptied, and thimble-sized glasses of an expensive liqueur drained. The maître d’ and an entourage of waiters hovered close by, ready to satisfy any final whim.

“Back home the butter beans are in,’ said Faulkner, peering into the distance, ‘the speckled ones.”

Miss Porter fiddled with her glass and stared into space. “Blackberries,” she said wistfully.

-Eugene Walter, American Cooking, Southern Style (1971)

If that doesn’t make you crave butter beans, nothing I can say will.

For those of you who don’t need any convincing, I have a confession to make: I have been holding out on you, eating the most delicious butter beans imaginable for a few months now without sharing the recipe.

In my defense, I did have my reasons….