Did the Maccabees Keep Their Oil at 350?

With an abiding love for tall, dark and intellectual men, I spent much of my 20s in relationships with Nice Jewish Boys, and, being the kind of girl you could take home to Mom (by day, at least), was invited to a couple of Chanukah celebrations along the way.

Chanukah at Chad’s house was fairly forgettable—although I still cringe at the memory of his dingbat-non-Jewish new stepmother interrupting a sung prayer, declaring that it reminded her of “Angels We Have Heard on High,” and gracing us with an a cappella rendition.

But Chanukah at Aaron’s house was actually one of the highlights of my short experiment in West Coast living. We drove up to his relative’s house in Malibu, a relative who regaled us with tales of his latest production, a little film called “Titanic.” I felt like a church mouse in my WASPy skirt and twinset amongst a flock of designer-casual cousins. The food was forgettable, catered in, but the latkes! I can’t remember Aaron’s last name, but I have never forgotten his grandmother’s latkes.

This was a woman who had, within 30 minutes of meeting me, patted my leg conspiratorially and said “Don’t worry about your thighs. Men like big thighs on a girl.” I hadn’t, until that moment, been particularly worried about my thighs, being at the twentysomething height of my nubile-young-thingness. But this was L.A., after all, where even Jewish grandmothers have distorted views of healthy women’s’ bodies. I’m willing to overlook her pointed comment because of the latkes…..crispy-edged, tender-moist in the center, not greasy….with flecks of green something.

Over the years, I’ve tried to reproduce those latkes, combing the internet for new ideas. I shredded my potatoes by hand and by processor, I added flour, potato starch, matzo meal….fewer eggs, more eggs. But they just weren’t what I remembered. This year, I stumbled on a Chowhound discussion of grating versus shredding, terms that I had previously considered interchangeable. It turns out that grating is actually using the nail-punch side of a box graters, producing potato mush rather than potato shreds. Apparently, this is the central European method of latkery, distinct from the German/western European shreds.

Armed with 5 pounds of russet potatoes and an embarrassingly large jug of peanut oil, I immediately got grating. It is slower going, for sure, than shredding, even than hand shredding. Ultimately I ended up with a goo that, with some flour and an egg, fried up into Aaron’s Grandmother’s latkes! Slightly cakey, crisp at the edges, almost chewy in the center….yum.

But here’s the thing: they were pretty greasy. I checked my oil temperature, which stayed right in the 350 range for minimal grease absorption the whole time I was frying. Maybe there is something about the grating? I decided that I must immediately make some shredded-potato latkes to test.

So I shredded (by hand!) and wrung dry and floured and egged and fried, and sure enough, the shredded latkes were much less greasy. It seems counter-intuitive to me; greasy food happens when the moisture in food doesn’t turn to steam fast enough to form a bubbly barrier, exerting enough force on the oil to keep it from seeping in. Usually the culprit is oil that isn’t hot enough, but the oil temperature had stayed pretty consistent through both of my latke batches. Hrm.

If I were Alton Brown, or on the Cook’s Illustrated team I would have delved further in the science of it all. But since I’m not, and I had laundry to do and Christmas presents to wrap, I decided to just try something else, and see how that went. I wanted the creamy-chewy center of a grated latke, but the less greasy, super-crisp exterior of a shredded latke.

I opted for a ground-potato mixture, inspired by the latke musings of my favorite internet food chatters. Grinding potatoes in my food processor, with the chopping blade, not the shredding blade, resulted in a potato goo with more edges, slightly drier than the hand-grated potato goo, and profoundly easier, faster, and less bloody. I mixed the potato goo with the ingredients of my previously favored latke recipe, and got frying.

Nirvana.

Latke nirvana. Shatteringly crisp edges, toothsome interior, rich potato flavor, no gumminess…..I’m there.

Having no tradition to fall back on, I served the latkes with everything: homemade applesauce, sour cream, smoked salmon, some briney capers…..we gorged to the point of regret. Once a year.

So I leave you with what, for me, is the best-of-class latke, and raise a glass to Aaron’s Grandmother, where ever she may be. Chanukah Sameach!

Shiksa* Latkes

Serves 4 for Latke Night, or more like 6 or 8 as a side dish

2 pounds russet potatoes, skins on, well scrubbed
4 scallions, thinly sliced
2 eggs
1/3 cup flour
½ teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon kosher salt
about a cup of peanut, grapeseed or vegetable oil, for frying

Chunk up the potatoes into roughly 1-inch cubes, and toss into a food processor fitted with the chopping blade. Process until finely ground, scraping down once, about 2 minutes. Transfer potato goo to a mixing bowl, and mix in the scallions, eggs, flour, baking powder and salt.

Heat about ¼ inch of oil in a large heavy skillet over medium-high heat, until oil is around 350 degrees. Spoon tablespoons of now-pinkish potato batter into hot oil and fry, turning once, until deep golden brown. Drain on a rack set over a sheet pan. Repeat with remaining batter, refreshing the oil every few batches to maintain the ¼ inch level.

Serve hot to the appreciative assembled masses, with whatever your family thinks is the only appropriate thing to serve with latkes.

*To my understanding, based on a quick survey of my Jewish friends, this term is a simply slang for a non-Jewish woman. I had one person, however, state that it is really pejorative, and if that is your understanding, my apologies. I use it to describe myself in a deprecating manner, because a girl with my all-WASP, Founding Families lineage has no business makin’ latkes.

Soup Weather.

Some people crave the warmth of spring so intensely that they play chicken with the air conditioning, soaking in the heat until they wake up with sweaty twisted sheets and finally break down. I play a similar game as the nights grow colder. My neighbor described sleeping huddled with her kids last night because their furnace was broken; I nodded sympathetically, while keeping to myself that I had slept with the window open last night, never having considered turning on the heat.

Which is all a long way of saying that I love fall. I love cold-nose sleeping and throwing on a fleece jacket to walk my daughter to the bus stop in the morning. I love the crunch of leaves under my feet and I love soup weather.

Tonight I made the Tennessee Onion Soup that won the cornbread cook-off last spring, but without the cornbread topping. Sweet with caramelized onions and hearty with beans and greens, this soup will warm your nose and fuel your body for the leaf-raking days to come.

(This picture isn’t great, but can you see that salad in the background? Roasted carrots, golden raisins, toasted walnuts, and spinach. Balsamic vinaigrette. You know you want to make that tonight.)

Tennessee Onion Soup
Serves 6

4 slices bacon, cut crosswise into 1/2-inch pieces
3 large onions, halved and thinly sliced
1 tablespoon sugar
1 lb Swiss chard, stems removed, sliced into 1/2-inch strips
1 15.5 oz can white beans, rinsed and drained
2 tablespoons cider vinegar
¼ teaspoon crushed red pepper
4 cups low-sodium beef stock
4 cups water
½ tsp salt
¼ tsp pepper

Directions:
Heat a 5-quart Dutch oven over medium heat. Cook bacon until crisp. Remove with slotted spoon to paper towels to drain. Add onions and sugar to bacon drippings. Cook, stirring frequently, until onions are caramelized, about 40 minutes. Add chard, white beans, bacon, vinegar and red pepper. Add beef stock and water. Bring to a low simmer over high heat. Reduce heat and simmer, uncovered, 20 minutes. Season with salt and pepper, and serve piping hot, with cornbread.

Note to the vegetarians in the mix: to make this veg, skip the bacon, sauteing the onions in 1 tablespoon olive oil and 2 tablespoons butter. Sub a good vegetable stock for the beef stock; I like the oniony flavor of College Inn.

Comfort Food

I really should have served this in an earthenware bowl. Rice pudding is not “presentation” food, even rice pudding this good.

This month has been rainy and blah and trees are mildewy and the basement has flooded and now we need to spend our new shed budget on getting the basement waterproofed and re-drywalled and re-carpeted. Good times.

And it is still rainy today. And rain is in the forecast until Thursday. And I don’t live in Seattle.

So, I made some rice pudding today. Caramel Apple Rice Pudding, to be precise, adapted from a Dorie Greenspan recipe I found in Bon Appetit.

I’ve been playing with rice pudding a bit lately. It’s not a food from my own childhood; my mom has an aversion to “mushy foods,” so things in the rice pudding-polenta-tapioca-oatmeal world were right out. But after discovering it’s diner-y goodness in my 20s, I’ve been working on perfecting my own version. I like a super creamy rice pudding, so I’ve always gravitated towards recipes that contain eggs, imagining sort of a custardy effect. But this version, made with arborio rice, was a revelation. No eggs, no cream, just arborio rice (the kind often used for risotto), whole milk, a little sugar and vanilla. And yet, here it is: a truly aspirational thick and rich rice pudding. The glorious caramel apple topping, which is jacked with cream, made it seasonal and company-worthy. Another time, though, I’ll use Dorie’s rice pudding and just stir in a handful of golden raisins. Comfort food perfection.

Caramel Apple Rice Pudding
Serves 4-6

For the Pudding:
3 cups water
1/2 cup arborio rice
4 cups whole milk
1/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

For the Caramel Apple Topping:
1/4 cup sugar
2 tablespoons orange juice
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
1 tablespoon butter
1/2 cup cider
2 cups peeled, chopped apples
1/3 cup heavy cream

To make the pudding, bring the water to a boil, with a pinch of salt. Add the rice, return to a boil, and cook, uncovered, for 10 minutes. Drain rice into a mesh strainer and set aside. Pour milk, sugar and another pinch of salt into the same pot, and bring to a simmer over medium-high heat, stirring occasionally. Add the par-boiled rice, return the mixture to a simmer, and reduce heat to medium-low. Simmer, stirring occasionally, until thick and creamy, about 45 minutes. Stir in the vanilla, and serve warm or at room temperature.

To make the caramel apple topping, combine the sugar and orange juice in a nonstick saute pan over medium-high heat. Cook, swirling the mixture carefully in the pan, until sugar melts and takes a deep amber hue, about 5 minutes. Take the pan off the heat, add the butter and salt, continuing to swirl, then pour in the cider. The caramel with seize up, but that’s ok. Return to the heat, and cook, stirring, until the caramel melts smoothly again. Add the apples, bring to a simmer, and cook until tender, about 5 more minutes. Pour in the cream (whee!) and continue to cook until thickened, 4-5 more minutes.

Serve pudding topped with caramel apples, in earthenware bowls, on a rainy night.

Holy Crepe!

An autumnal cold front blew through the mid-Atlantic yesterday afternoon, driving out the last lingering late-summer heat. After running around, opening windows and shutting down the AC, my thoughts turned to dinner. Of course. I think about dinner a lot.

It would have been just the moment to make a butternut squash soup, or a cozy cider-braised chicken, or maybe my favorite pork tenderloin recipe, with onions and a maple pan sauce, just asking to be served over spicy mashed sweet potatoes. But my cupboard was fairly bare, devoid of butternut squash, chicken and pork tenderloin. I did, however, have a pound of super-creamy fresh ricotta from Blue Ridge Dairy Company, and that was inspiration enough.

Cheese manicotti, or crespelle, if you prefer, are a favorite here. The basic recipe comes from Peter’s old girlfriend, a stylish and sassy Italian-American woman who trained him well for me. Thank, Jen-sub-one. Simple crepes, rolled around a rich herb and ricotta filling, lightly sauced-and-cheesed, and baked until bubbly: yum.

Crepes are very manageable. You don’t need a crepe pan; in fact, I think that an 8-inch non-stick saute pan (the one you probably make eggs in) is preferable to the authentically-French steel crepe pan. Unless you’ve totally jacked up the non-stick coating, you don’t even need to butter the pan for crepes, which lets you cook them hot and fast without worrying about the butter solids burning and smoking up the kitchen. Heat the pan, then lift it off the heat, pour in a quarter-cup of batter, and swirl the batter around to coat the pan in a thin layer. If you are getting lots of holes in your crepes, and this bothers you, add a little more batter at the start of the process. Return the pan to the heat, and cook about 30 seconds, until the edges are dry and pull away slightly from the pan. Flip the crepe–using your fingers or a flipper, unless you need a new party trick and want to master airborne crepe flippery–and cook another 15 seconds on the second side, then slide it onto a plate. Repeat. You’ll find a rhythm; it actually goes pretty quickly. I managed to crank out a dozen crepes in the time it took my kids to agree on 3 books from the crinkly 4-page Scholastic Books catalog…about 10 minutes.

The first one will be funky looking, and the next three should be lightly sprinkled with sugar and a few drops from a lemon wedge, rolled up and noshed on by hungry cooks and kids. It would be a travesty to skip this important step.

Next, use the crepe pan to saute some onions and garlic in olive oil, then add in some good crushed tomatoes. Season with salt and pepper and simmer while you assemble the manicotti, just 10 or 15 minutes.

Stir together the filling. Ricotta is the diva of this dish, so try to find some good stuff. Italian markets will have fresh ricotta, as will many dairies and farmer’s markets. And it is easy to make yourself if you have the time and inclination. I’d avoid supermarket ricotta for this recipe.

Next, an assembly line of crepery:

And once everyone’s nestled into a pan, lightly sauced and cheese, and baked until bubbly, it’s dinner time.

(Some of our manicotti were left nekkid for small individuals who like everything better “plain”)

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Family Dinner, Part One

“If you make me eat my zucchini, I’m gonna barf.”

“Eat your goddamn zucchini or go straight to bed!”

RETCH.

My sister was nothing if not forthcoming. She set everyone’s expectations, informed my parents of the consequences of their insistence, and followed through most impressively.

Family dinner. The stuff of Norman Rockwell paintings in some families, the scene of the crime in others. At my house, growing up, “family dinner” was just plain “dinner.” Unless we were otherwise informed, dinner was at about 6:30, we needed to help set the table sometime before then, and if you didn’t show up to dinner, there wouldn’t be anything else to eat. TVs were off, phones were answered with a terse “we’re sitting down to dinner now; can I call you back?” and we all told each other about our days.

It wasn’t always pleasant. Even when no one was barfing at the table, there were sporadic episodes of squabbling, bad news, mediocre food, and manners admonishment. But we did it. Almost every night, and it was part of family life. Sure, we went out periodically, and there were pizza nights in front of the TV every now and then, but 6 nights a week, all 5 members of showed up. And by showing up, we learned a little about each other, talking about school and work and sports and, as we got older, politics and the economy and the Gulf War and where we wanted to go on vacation. It was time in our busy, committee meetings-soccer-swim team-debate meet-community theater lives that we sat down and just spent time together.

It turns out that in addition to those glimpses of functional family life, family dinner provided my sibs and me with a healthful foundation. A study published this spring in the medical journal Pediatrics reviewed 17 separate studies of childhood nutritional health and family dinner, and found that children in families that ate dinner together 3 or more times a week ate more nutritious food overall, and were less likely to be obese or suffer from eating disorders than those kids in families that ate together less frequently. The study does not distinguish between home-cooked meals, take-out meals, or meals eaten in restaurants; it simply concludes that over time, families that sit down together to eat several times a week will have children with better nutritional health than those that do not.

Still, 6 pm is a tough time for all of us. It takes effort to get dinner on the table, and to engage with our families, rather than the TV or our iphone news feeds. But I am going to keep trying to make most dinners “family dinners.” As an opportunity to engage as a family, to improve communication, to create memories, and to impact my children’s nutritional health, it is a bargain for my energy buck.

This post is the first in of a series of musings on the idea of family dinner. Future posts will have more ideas on how to make it happen, but today I wanted to just start thinking about why it is so important to me.

Bruschetta*, optimized.

Bruschetta is summer on a plate. Tomatoes, basil, fruity olive oil on a crisp and flavorful slice of bread….simple, perfect food. It’s all you need for dinner when the heat index is approaching triple digits and there is a pitcher of sun tea on the counter. Or a bottle of sauvignon blanc in the fridge.

But bruschetta can also be lackluster, even when you use those garden-ripe tomatoes and your best olive oil. Tomatoes have a very high water content, that varies with the time of year and type of tomato. While I don’t generally embrace fussy procedures designed to fix barely-perceivable flaws in recipes (I’m talking to you, Christopher Kimball), in this case, I think a little fussing really elevates the whole tomatoes-on-toast thing. And really, I’m not asking that much of you.

Start by coring, then chopping some summer tomatoes. Try to use ones that have never been refrigerated…chilling tomatoes speeds the conversion of natural sugars into starches. So if you can get your tomatoes from the farmer’s market, the “locally grown” table at the supermarket, or from your neighbor’s garden on a moonless night, those are the ones to use here. Some people squish the goo out first. I like the goo; I like the texture of the seeds.

Once you have chopped up a bunch of tomatoes (one per person if this is dinner….maybe one per 2 or 3 people if this is a cocktail snackie), combine them in a bowl with a big (BIG!) pinch of coarse salt. And if you like garlic in your bruschetta, which I do, add 1 minced clove for every two tomatoes. Don’t overdo the raw garlic; we are seeking balance here. Balance, peace, enlightenment, through tomatoes.

Set the tomato-salt-garlic mixture on the counter for at least 20 minutes, or maybe an hour or 2. If you leave it too long, the salt will actually start to change the texture of the tomatoes for the worse, but there’s a wide sweet spot in there in which the water is being drawn out of the tomatoes, concentrating their tomatoeness as they are subtly seasoned with salt and garlic.

While that magic is happening, make toast. You can make it in the toaster or the oven or on the grill, but please, start with good bread. Grocery store baugette is not good bread, at least at my grocery store. But there are lots of places these days where you can get a nice, rustic, slow-risen, flavorful and sturdy loaf of bread. Ciabatta works well here, as do most loaves labelled “artisan” (human hands add a lot to the bread-making process). I really like Panera’s sourdough baugette for bruschetta. Take your good bread and slice it about as thick as your pinkie finger. Drizzle with some olive oil, and toast until you get some color on it…brown color. If you are grilling, go for a touch of char.

When you are ready to serve, drain off the liquid that has accumulated from the tomatoes. You can use a strainer or just pour it off carefully to minimize your dish pile. There’s flavor in the liquid, yes, and if you are into tomato water cocktails, this is a pretty good approximation, but me, I just dump the stuff down the drain.

Return your now-optimized tomatoes to a bowl, and bathe with a few glugs of good olive oil. Add copious fresh basil, either torn or thinly slivered, and gently toss. Arrange your toast on a platter, slightly overlapping, and then top with the tomatoes, not worrying at all about keeping everything on the toasts. This is food that should require fingers…or crusts of toast…greedily nabbing unclaimed tomatoes.

Serve immediately, but slowly, on the patio, with cool drinks. Ahhh.

Enjoy the rest of your summer! I’m going to do the same, and will be back with more random food thoughts in early September. Promise.

* My dear friends, the name of this dish is pronounced “brew-sket-ta.” With a melodic “r”. But not, despite the best corrective efforts of servers at Italian chain restaurants around this great nation, “brew-shet-ta,” no matter how melodic you make the r. Just as we don’t insist on calling pizza “piz-za” nor tortillas “tor-til-las,” we can embrace the proper pronunciation here, too.

Whoopie!

When I was a pre-teen and my mom would drive me and my similarly awkward, be-hormoned friends to the Burlington Mall for an afternoon of shopping and boy-watching, the highlight for me was not the awesome new acid-washed Guess jeans I could get at Jordan Marsh, or the new colors of striped rugby shirts available at Bennetton, but the gigantic whoopie pies available from an Italian bakery in the food court. Five years ago, I would have taken some time to explain to you all what, precisely, a whoopie pie consists of, but whoopie pies have come into their own in recent years, taking off from their Northern New England roots and popping up across the nation. Spreading the whoop.

Back in the day, the only whoopie pie was the chocolate whoopie pie, two cakey hemispheres sandwiching at least an inch of super-sweet marshmallowy, Crisco-y filling. Like a frosting burger. But the recent diaspora has brought about mutations, some pretty successful: pumpkin whoopie pies with cream cheese filling? Yum. Thanks, Martha.

Which brings me to this weekend. A few weeks ago, I vastly overshot when making cream cheese frosting for some cupcakes. I tossed the leftovers into the fridge in a plastic container (BPA free! But I’m still trying to make the transition to glass storage….any recommendations?) and promptly forgot about them, unearthing them only in one of my pre-vacation fridge cleanouts*. Not wanting to waste a good fat and sugar emulsion, I wracked my brain the internet for a way to use it up. And I found my answer at Rah Cha Chow, the cooking blog of a longtime webfriend Tracy (Hi Tracy! Remember the good ol’ days on the CLBB?) who is also literally a rockstar. Anyhow, Banana Whoopie Pies with Cream Cheese Filling. Perfect. So perfect, in fact that they were almost immediately wrapped and frozen** for Peter to take to his bi-weekly game night, where grown men sit around eating sugary snacks, drinking scotch and playing video games in a pimped out Man Cave. Awesome.

Banana Whoopie Pies
derivative credit to RahChaChow.com, Tasteofhome.com and Slashfood.com

1/2 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup mashed ripe banana
1/2 cup buttermilk
2 cups (280 grams) all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda

Filling
5 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
8 ounces cream cheese, softened
2 cups confectioners’ sugar
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
Pinch of salt

In a large bowl, cream butter and sugars until light and fluffy. Beat in egg and vanilla. In a small bowl, combine banana and buttermilk. Combine the flour, salt, baking powder and baking soda; gradually add to creamed mixture alternately with banana mixture.

Drop by tablespoonfuls 2 in. apart onto parchment paper-lined baking sheets. Bake at 350° for 12-15 minutes or until set. Cool for 2 minutes before removing from pans to wire racks to cool completely.

For filling, in a large bowl, beat the cream cheese, and butter until fluffy. Beat in confectioners’ sugar, vanilla and salt until smooth. Use a pastry bag with a large star top to pipe a generous dollop of filling on the bottoms of half of the cookies. Top with remaining cookies and press together gently. Refrigerate for at least an hour before serving.

*I have a bizarre fixation on leaving an almost-empty fridge when we go out of town, even just for a long weekend. As if I don’t regularly have things in there for more that a day or two. Add it to the pathology list.
**In case you were wondering: yes they are great straight from the freezer. Consumed on the couch in the flickering glow of a mind-rotting summer reality TV show.

…but a bowl of cherries!

Ain’t that the truth? Like June’s strawberries, August’s peaches, and September’s Honeycrisp apples, cherries in July are treasures of the harvest, sugar sweet and complex in flavor. Whole Foods is celebrating these jewels with a Cherry Fest Kid-Friendly Recipe Contest, and my Turkey Sliders with Creamy Cherry-Feta Spread had my kids (and Peter! and me!) celebrating, all right.

The sliders themselves avoid the dry turkey burger DMZ with my (no longer) double-secret turkey burger technique of adding grated zucchini. In addition to bringing fiber and nutrients to the show, the zucchini gives off liquid and shrinks slightly as the burgers cook, keeping the burgers juicy and not so dense. I like to to cook turkey burgers on a flat griddle, as I am a crust seeker, but if you are a devoted griller or broiler of burgers, no worries.

But the umph in these sliders comes from a creamy cherry-packed spread. The cherries and feta strike a perfect sweet-salty balance, smoothed out with a little cream cheese, and peppered with an assertive scallion bite.

Yum. We layered it thickly on our sliders and swooned, just a bit, as we noshed.

Turkey Sliders with Creamy Cherry Feta Spread
Makes 8 Sliders, Serving 4

1 pound ground turkey, 93% lean (not all white meat)
1 cup grated zucchini, from 2 small or 1 medium zucchini
1 teaspoon kosher salt
3/4 teaspoon black pepper, divided
2 teaspoons olive oil
4 ounces cream cheese, room temperature
6 ounces crumbled feta cheese, room temperature
4 scallions, thinly sliced
1 1/2 cups pitted cherries, coarsely chopped
8 100% whole wheat slider buns or dinner rolls, split

Preheat a large griddle or skillet over high heat. Combine turkey, grated zucchini, salt and 1/4 teaspoon pepper in a large bowl, mixing gently but thoroughly. Divide into 8 even portions, and form into balls. Oil the preheated griddle with the olive oil then place the burgers on the griddle, pressing slightly as you do so to form patties. Cook about 3 minutes per side, until just cooked through.

While the patties cook, stir together cream cheese, feta, scallions, and remaining 1/2 teaspoon pepper in a medium bowl. Gently fold in the cherries, and set aside at room temperature.

Toast slider buns on the hot griddle, then top each with a cooked turkey patty. Divide the cherry spread between the sliders, close the buns, and serve hot.

Spiced Blueberry Souffles

Souffles. My friends, they AREN’T SO HARD. I know, Lucille Ball had lots of trouble with hers, but seriously, dance in the kitchen while they bake! It is all good.

And since you are ready to give this creamy wow of a dessert a try, please try this delicious version, full of summery blueberries and unforgettably, almost hauntingly complex, with notes of wine, orange, star anise and ginger. Slip a scoop of vanilla ice cream into the hot souffles, and enjoy as the melting custard contrasts with the hot blueberry fluff.

A few technique notes: classical French souffles integrate the base evenly with the sweetened egg whites, but here, I like to leave some streaks. Blue food can be a little off-putting, but blueberry swirls, I can get behind. Also, to get a tall, straight-sided souffle, run your thumb around the edge of the filled ramekins before baking. You can see my grubby thumb here, cleaning up the edge. The souffles in the background have already been cleaned:

This is your moment….make a souffle. Make this souffle.

Spiced Blueberry Souffles
Serves 8

2 cups fresh or frozen blueberries, picked-over if fresh
½ cup Sauvignon Blanc or other dry white wine
2 ¼-inch slices of fresh ginger
2 1-inch by 3-inch strips of pith-free orange zest
½ star anise (3 or 4 of the points)
2 tablespoons honey
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt, divided
4 teaspoons room-temperature butter
1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons granulated sugar, divided
8 egg whites
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
8 small scoops premium vanilla ice cream

Combine blueberries, wine, ginger, orange zest, star anise, honey, and 1/8 teaspoon kosher salt in a saucepan. Simmer over medium-low heat until reduced by half, then cool to room temperature. Fish out the ginger, orange zest and star anise and discard.

Prepare 8 1-cup straight-sided ramekins by buttering generously with the room-temperature butter, then coating with sugar, using about 2 tablespoons between the ramekins. Arrange prepared ramekins on a sheet pan.

Beat egg whites and remaining 1/8 teaspoon salt with a mixer until soft peaks form. Slowly add 1/4 cup granulated sugar and the vanilla extract, and continue beating until mixture is shiny and forms stiff peaks. Fold in blueberry mixture until only a few streaks remain. Divide soufflé mixture evenly among the prepared ramekins. Run your thumb around the interior lip of the ramekin, creating a roughly 1/2-inch ridge in the soufflé mixture to help the soufflé rise straight up. (Soufflés can be prepared up to this point and refrigerated, uncovered, for up to 4 hours. Add a minute or two to baking time if they are baked straight out of the fridge.)

Bake the soufflés for 14-16 minutes, until they are well risen, golden brown on top, and appear dry on the risen sides. While the soufflés bake, place a spoon on each of 8 plates, and fill each spoon with a small scoop of ice cream. Place hot souffles on plates and serve immediately, encouraging your guests to plunge their ice cream-filled spoons into the center of the hot soufflé.

Seasonal Superfood Supper

There comes a time each year, usually in mid-to-late June, when the blueberries become perfect: plump, sweet, packed with nutrition, and suddenly and magnificently affordable. I start stocking up with abandon at the grocery store’s buy-one-get-one sales, and the gorging begins. My kids easily split a pint between the two of them at breakfast time. Blueberries grace lunch boxes at midday, and are inhaled by the grubby fistful all afternoon. After dinner, there is sometimes a pie. Or a souffle, but I’ll tell you about that another day. Tonight, though, it is blueberries for dinner, paired with another nutrition-packed food that is just coming into season, Copper River salmon.

Now, you don’t need wild-caught Copper River salmon to make this dish, but you’ll be glad if you do. Nor do you need peak-of-the season highbush (the fat kind) blueberries to make the sauce—it is great with frozen berries in the winter, maybe on a pork chop—but man, if you can get them, your sauce will sing. And you might, too, because on top of being delicious and nutritious, it is a one-pan wonder that comes together in about 15 minutes.

Pan Seared Salmon with Fresh Blueberry-Mustard Sauce

Serves 4

1 tablespoon olive oil
4 6-ounce salmon filets, preferably wild-caught
kosher salt and pepper
½ cup minced onion
1 ½ cups blueberries
2 tablespoons cider vinegar
2 tablespoons brown sugar
2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
2 tablespoons coarse grain mustard
1 tablespoon unsalted butter

Heat olive oil in a large non-stick saute pan over high heat. Check salmon for pinbones, season with salt and pepper, and pat dry with paper towels. Add salmon to the pan pink side down, and sear, undisturbed, 3-4 minutes. Gently turn the fillets, and cook the skin side an additional 3-4 minutes, until just opaque. Remove the fillets to a serving platter.

Reduce heat to medium. Add minced onion to the same pan, and sauté until translucent, about 1 minute. Add blueberries, cider vinegar, brown sugar, Worcestershire sauce, mustard, and ½ teaspoon salt. Bring sauce to a low boil, stirring occasionally, then reduce heat to low and simmer 4-5 minutes, until purple and slightly thickened. Spoon blueberry sauce over each fillet and serve immediately.