Lambstock 2011

How sweet it was, to spend a wee bit of time in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, feasting and visiting on Border Springs Farm. This magnificent, adorable, and extravagantly delicious toasted coconut cake came from pastry chef Lora Mahaffey of Stuart, Virginia. 

Late in August, my lucky stars converged in such a way that I was able to participate in a marvelous gathering in Patrick County, Virginia, hosted by Craig Rogers of Border Springs Farm. http://www.borderspringsfarm.com/  I met Craig at the annual Symposium of the Southern Foodways Alliance in Oxford, Mississippi, where he was roasting and serving his fine pasture-raised lamb to our grateful and happy crowd of SFA folks. Border Springs Farm is only about two hours from where I live in Chapel Hill, NC, and when Lambstock 2011 weekend rolled around, I eagerly loaded up the minivan with pillow and blankets for car-camping, while loading in an array of pies with which to supplement the lamb-centric savory feast I had heard was in store for one and all. Lambstock 2011 brought a happy crew of chefs, restaurateurs, farmers, food producers, brewers, winemakers, coffee roasters, and other food-loving people together to cook, eat, and enjoy hand-crafted artisan-made music from a host of fine bands. Here is a small souvenir of Lambstock, a delicious gambol in the fields of Border Springs Farm, and the finale to my memorable summer of 2011. Craig’s generosity is wider than the astounding panoramas backlighting every gentle hillside of the farm. Border collies zoom around, sheep graze in the distance, breezes meander even in the August sunshine, and culinary delights appear along with friends and new people you want to get to know. I am thankful to have attended, and I invite you to visit my Facebook page for a few dozen photos, an album of my good times at Lambstock. You’ll find them on my Nancie McDermott  Author Page .

http://www.facebook.com/NancieMcDermott

There I’ve posted a Lambstock photo album with several dozen photos of Lambstock fun. Check them out and share your comments on the photos if something comes to mind. You can also comment at the end of this post. Love to be in touch, and to hear what you think!

Minivan was stocked with Lambstock pies: Apple (top), coconut custard, chess, buttermilk, and brown sugar. No lambpie this year.

Lambstock World Headquarters: Border Springs Farm

Banh mi sandwiches with lamb sausage and lamb pate, freshly made by Chef Jason Alley of Comfort in Richmond, Virginia

For more good times at Lambstock 2011, visit my Nancie McDermott Author Page on Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/NancieMcDermott

For more, do visit “Okra” Magazine, published by the Southern Food and Beverage Museum, for Lambstock reflections by Brent Rosen, here:

http://southernfood.org/okra/?p=1120

You can check out Brent Rosen’s blog here:

http://southxmidwest.com/

Nancie’s Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie

Strawberry season makes North Carolina people happy, and with good reason. At this point in the heart of May, farmer’s markets tend to have a bountiful supply such that even the tardy-arriving market-goers have a good chance of finding sweet ripe strawberries, enough to eat, sprinkle on cereal, cook into jam, and bake into pies. You can find pick-your-own strawberry patches as well, here in Piedmont North Carolina, though I confess to having offered grateful prayers to the people who’ve gone in there and done the picking by the time I go looking for a berry supply.

Rhubarb grows happily in this area, but since I needed to bake my pies last night, I sought out rhubarb at my local Whole Foods, and they had lovely red stalks galore. Ripe rhubarb varies in its redness, ranging from an avocado-green to lipstick-red, and while the flavor isn’t affected, the red color does add eye-candy. When paired with strawberries as in this pie, you’ll get red-gorgeousness aplenty, regardless of what your rhubarb brings to the pastry. This is a tic-tac-toe-board pie, not a proper lattice-top pie, since carefully criscrossing and interweaving the pastry strips is something I admire greatly in others but cannot actually do with great skill. Nobody complained, and this pie disappeared at this morning’s Triangle Food Bloggers First Annual Bake Sale to benefit Share Our Strength. Great cause, great company from my fellow food-folk, and great goodies. More on that to come…

Nancie’s Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie

 Pastry for a 9-inch double-crust pie

1 1/4 cups sugar

1/3 cup all-purpose flour

1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon salt

3 cups chopped fresh rhubarb, cut into 1/2-inch chunks (about 1 pound)

2 cups hulled and chopped fresh strawberries, cut into 1-inch chunks

(1 pint, about 8 ounces)

1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice

2 tablespoons cold butter, cut into 1/4-inch chunks

Heat the oven to 425 degrees F. Line a 9-inch pie pan with crust, leaving a 1-inch overhang.

In a large bowl, combine the sugar, flour, cinnamon, and salt, and use a fork or a whisk to stir them together well. Add the rhubarb, strawberries, and lemon juice and mix very gently using a large spoon. Scrape the mixture into the piecrust, and distribute the butter bits evenly over the strawberry-rhubarb filling. Top the filling with a lattice crust; or simply lay out a tic-tac-toe crust, placing strips in one direction, and then laying the other-directional strips on top of the first batch.

Place the pie on a baking sheet to catch spills, and place it on the bottom rack of the oven. Bake at 425 degrees F for 15 minutes, and then lower the temperature to 350 degrees. Bake until the pink filling bubbles up and the pastry is golden brown, 45 to 50 minutes more. Place the pie on a cooling rack or a folded kitchen towel and let it cool for at least 15minutes. Serve it warm or at room temperature.

Makes one 9-inch pie

Notes:

I’ve made this using frozen fruit, both the strawberries and the rhubarb, with great results. If using frozen, don’t defrost — chop any gigantic chunks of fruit while they are still frozen, or just leave them whole. Don’t worry if your rhubarb isn’t fire-engine red— the flavor will be there and it’s a fantastic pie, no matter what.

Butternut Squash Pie for October 5th

Butternut Squash Pie, a worthy variation on pumpkin pie, which shouldn't be limited to Thanksgiving menus. Nor trapped on dessert menus --- we made short work of it as a latenight snack and a tasty breakfast.

Pumpkin pie has been on my A-list forever, and I’ve never understood why we relegate it to the holiday menus between November and January 1st. Delicious? Check — Simply and swiftly made? Check — Made from accessible inexpensive ingredients? Check — Popular? Check! Perhaps its automatic inclusion on menus that require turkey, dressing, and cranberry sauce gets in the way of our ability to think outside the holiday box. Grocery stores, farms stands and farmers’ markets around here have been stacking up  gourds all week, and placing this year’s pumpkin supply out in full view of the Halloween crowd. The jack-o-lantern pumpkins decorating the marketplace telegraph the arrival of autumn nicely, and they serve carvers well as a canvas for scary faces. But if you’ve tried using the standard pumpkins for cooking, you know that their texture and flavor leave much to be desired, piewise. Farmers’ markets often carry old-time pumpkins, varying in color and shape from the bright orange standard, and tending to have thick, sweet flesh which is ideal from a pie-making point of view. Butternut squash makes a grand alternative to pumpkin in most any recipe calling for cooked mashed pumpkin or pumpkin puree. I love it peeled and cut into large chunks as an ingredient in Thai-style curries, and for roasting along with parsnips, carrots garlic, and onions. These days I’m finding it peeled and chunked up in the produce section, making it a quick fix for curries, for roasting, and for simmering just until tender enough to mash to a puree. From there I season it with salt and either butter or Asian sesame oil as a fall sidedish, or stir it into this fine, spiced fall pie.

Nancie’s Butternut Squash Pie

1 unbaked 9-inch piecrust

3/4 cup sugar

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon ground ginger

1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 cups cooked, mashed butternut squash

3/4 cup evaporated milk or half-and-half

2 beaten eggs

1/3 cup honey, dark corn syrup, maple syrup, or molasses

Heat the oven to 450 degrees F. Combine the sugar, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and salt in a small bowl, and stir with a fork to combine them well. Combine the butternut squash, milk or half-and-half, eggs and honey or syrup in a medium bowl. Stir all this up with a whisk, an eggbeater, or a large spoon, until everything is evenly combined. Stir in the sugar-and-spices mixture and mix it all together evenly and well. Pour this mixture into the unbaked piecrust and place it in the oven 450 degree oven on a lower rack. Bake 10 minutes, and then lower the heat to 325 degrees F. Continue baking until the filling is firm and the outer edges of the pie puff up nicely, 35 to 45 minutes. (The very center can still be a bit jiggly but overall the pie should be firm and set.) Set the pie on a cooling rack or on a folded kitchen towel to cool to room temperature.

Farewell to Summertime Pies

“I miss summer!” my husband Will said as we sat out on the deck yesterday evening, with a little merlot and smoked salmon and pate from Harriss Teeter, and candles flickering to simulate the campfire we could have used had it been a wee bit cooler and had we been located a safe distance from our house. Yes, it was a school night, but this week brought many new to-do’s at work, and Friday seemed way far away from where we we sitting at 7:00 p.m. Fall being my very favorite time of year and summer heat and mosquitoes being things I gladly put away in exchange for sweaters and fireplace action, I started out cold-hearted, a “get-over-it!” attitude bubbling up in my response. But it was quite cool this morning, and still full-on dark at 7:00 a.m. when the sanitation guys zoomed by our house on their weekly run, and I’m now feeling a spoonful of nostalgia myself, for daylight coming and going, and the sense that there’s more time in the day and in the evenings, more possibilities, more produce and vendors at the farmers’ market, more blanks on the calendar for an escapade, whether we fill them in or not. On this sun-splashed early autumn day here in North Carolina, I’m thinking about summer journeys to our friends’ farm up in Northeastern Pennsylvania, where we get to collapse into the pleasures of summer with grins and sighs, taking turns in the hammock and the porch swing, reading books all morning and putting effort only into such tasks as shucking corn, harvesting basil and peas from the garden, and making more coffee. For me, it’s a baking wonderland, with time to read their cookbooks and opportunity to help clean out the freezer which included damson plums, a Southern treasure transplanted to that northern clime by my green-thumbed friend Dean. He turned some of those plums into a spectacular pie, combining them with blueberries, sugar and flour, a dab of butter, letting everything bubble up in open-faced splendor. That pie is long gone, just like summertime, but I’ve got apples and sweet potatoes and scuppernong grapes to work with for now, and the way time tends to zoom past me unnoticed, we’ll be back in the farm kitchen, rooting around in the freezer before we know it.

Brown Sugar Pie for October 2nd

This pie looks like it could be chocolate or molasses, but the flavor is pure caramel-heaven

Simplicity itself, this pie is an old-timer. I suspect it’s the great-aunt of the modern darling, pecan pie, though I thus far I have no documentation to support this guess of mine. You start this particular pie off in a 450 degree oven for a five-minute heat-blas; then ease it down to 350 and let it bake slowly to plush perfection. Located in Southern Pies‘ old-school chapter, “A Chess Pie Compendium”, Brown Sugar Pie follows the chess-pie theme of basic but luscious desserts, made from everyday home-kitchen ingredients. While the recipes in Southern Pies range in difficulty levels from simple to elaborate, this particular pie is just about as straightforward and speedy as any in the book. Brown sugar, eggs, softened butter, and vanilla, are stirred into a thick, silky brown mixture, and baked off in the time it takes to clean up the dishes, put away the brown sugar and vanilla, and read today’s poem from The Writer’s Almanac — this may be the very dessert that called forth the term, “Easy as pie!”

Nancie’s Daily Pie for October 2, 2010

Brown Sugar Pie

Unbaked piecrust for one 9-inch pie

1/2 cup butter, softened (one stick/4 ounces)

2 cups packed brown sugar, light or dark or a combination

3 large eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Heat the oven to 450 degrees F. In a medium bowl, beat the butter with a whisk or a big wooden spoon, until it is soft and creamy. (I used my hand-held mixer, since the butter was very recently sprung from the fridge, and I wanted maximum help in combining all ingredients into a smooth filling).

Add the brown sugar and beat well, scraping the bowl often, until soft and creamy. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating very well after each addition. Add the vanilla, beat to mix everything well, and then pour all the filling into the ubaked piecrust, and smooth out the top.

Place the pie on the bottom shelf of the 450 degree oven and bake for 5 minutes. Reduce heat to 350 and continue baking until the edges puff up, and the center is fairly firm when you gently shake the pan, 20 to 25 minutes. (The puffing-up is a phase — enjoy it, but don’t expect it to endure through eating time — chess pie’s job is to expand and then settle back down into a satisfying un-puffed up pie.) If the crust and pie are nicely browned and the pie needs a little more time for the filling to set, cover it loosely with a generous piece of aluminum foil to prevent further browning.

Set the pie on a cooling rack, or on a folded kitchen towel and let it cool to room temperature.

From Southern Pies: A Gracious Plenty of Pie Recipes, from Lemon Chess to Chocolate Pecan by Nancie McDermott (Chronicle Books, October 2010)