Pawpaw Cake with Spicebush Streusel

Recently, I served this Pawpaw Spicebush Cake - coffee-cake style, with spicebush-pecan streusel - after a plant walk at the Queens Country Farm Museum, a small but remarkably rural-looking farm in the heart of Queens. Because I needed to feed about 16 people I double my recipe and baked it in a big rectangular pan. It worked!

The pawpaw purée for the recipe was from my frozen stash, circa September 2024. The pulp freezes beautifully, and I keep it in half-cup portions for later baking or ice

cream.

And in case you are in doubt, we're talking the native American fruit, Asimina triloba, a custard apple relative, not papaya, which is also called pawpaw in countries with Commonwealth ties, past or present.

And pawpaw season is coming. And the hunt will be on. 

This recipe is in the pawapw chapter of Forage, Harvest, Feast (of course). The streusel in the original is for hazelnuts, but I think pecans work very well indeed. 

A nightly netting

 

Our evening suppers are now netted, which is normal for summer. Usually, it's for tiny flying insects (smaller than fruit flies, but what are they?) that are attracted to anything acidic, like salad dressing, or wine, into which they hurl themselves to perish. But these last few evenings we have been joined by a persistent, chunky hornet, who buzzes our dinner relentlessly. I don't really mind it, but the Frenchman feels about hornets the way I feel about spiders. Heebie jeebies. We both know that both are beneficial, yet neither of us can stand being near them. So, net. 

Supper was a tangle of tiny wax beans soused while warm in shoyu with finely ribboned shiso leaves from the terrace, and dropped onto crisp-skinned, curry-powder-dusted roasted chicken thighs. Before adding the steamed beans I deglazed the hot pan with elderflower vinegar and honeysuckle cordial (the methods for these delightful concoctions are in Forage, Harvest, Feast).

It's 99°F as I write, and the African basil continues to persecute me (see previous post). It's been watered twice, today. But the bees are happy. Very, very happy.

Too much basil

I made a gardening mistake, this year. Enthused by the success of the African basil last summer, and the endlessly interesting pollinator show that unfolded in its airspace from dawn to dusk, I doubled up this late spring, and placed two plants in each of the windowboxes lining our terrace.  

After a slow spring start - the plants really don't like cold nights (did you know that basils are native to Africa and to Asia?) - this long-stemmed hybrid is now bustling with bees. That's not the problem. The problem is that it has to be watered at least twice, and sometimes three times, a day. This morning I watered it at 10am. By 2pm the plants were drooping. Granted, it is extremely hot (96°F), but at the very least this basil asks for two waterings a day. Two minutes to fill the watering can; in out, in, out. It feels like a persecution. 

The other basils, growing mostly in cooler spots or in full shade, are much less thirsty.

In other hot-weather news, the lablab beans have taken off and the bronze fennel is six feet tall. If we are lucky the fennel flowers will attract some cicada killers. They did, last year. The lablab beans we eat, and the hummingbirds visit their flowers on their way south, in September. 

Dirty rice: Just add daylilies

Have you ever made dirty rice? It's a delicious mess of rice made exciting with all sorts of bits and pieces. The Southern Creole dish looks a bit different in our house, but I hope I capture its spirit. One of the staple ingredients  in my various versions is dried daylilies. Hemerocallis fulva is still in bloom here in Brooklyn, and the spent flowers are a delicacy (I think), once dried, with an unexpected flavor of carob. Daylilies are dead easy to dry, and last pretty much indefinitely.

My recipe for dirty daylily rice is now up on Gardenista, along with the how-to of drying. Bon appétit!

(Oh: the salad above? Just watermelon pieces with various basils from our terrace, a little salt, and little olive oil, and a drizzle of good balsamic vinegar.)

Summer's flowers

Summer flowers, wild and weedy, aromatic and opportunistic. Knapweed, Queen Anne's lace, white sweet clover and mugwort are feral fillers for this tangle of two bee balms and rudbeckia. 

Monarda punctata to the right, an underrated cut flower and edible herb. Plant more. 

And on the windowsill, some extras from the terrace: liatris and hyssop, and more obliging mugwort. Aside from being a very useful herb, this super-invader lasts exceptionally well in water. Just strip off the lower leaves and immerse it for 30 minutes to revive it after picking. Florists? Mugwort is everywhere, and it is free.

A vegetable love

When local greenmarkets spill over with produce it's hard not to be vegetarian. Corn is ritually peeled of its outer husks, the tender silk removed (it's very good to eat in a coconut milk soup), and then the inner husks folded back carefully over the kernels so that they are not burned by the fire that cooks them. 

We ate this corn with basil butter (heaps of basil whizzed in a food processor with as much or as little butter as you like), and an anchovy butter. So...not quite vegetarian. A quick cabbage slaw, and broccolini dressed with ramp leaf salt and a Palestinian olive oil made by Al'Ard. 

Late bees still buzzed the hyssop and African basil while we ate. 

Outside

 

Hot days, hot nights, heat advisories. Turning on the oven seems insane, so if we're not eating cool and cold food, we're cooking outside on the tiny terrace. 

The charcoal is always Red Oak's lump charcoal, never briquettes; the firelighters I use (I am the braai mistress!) are the little chunks made by If You Care. The lightweight charcoal lights fast and burns hot, so one doesn't need too much. 

Lillet, seltzer, rosemary, ice. A drink to sip while watching the chimneys swifts on insect patrol above us. Every night there are more and more fireflies, and every night they fly higher, coming right up to the terrace to blink as we eat.