Roasted pears

I like fruit as dessert, and winter is the best time to roast apples and pears. They fill the house with positive smells. Even better ones, when you add fir sugar and citrus to their cavities.

 The whys and hows are in my story for Gardenista:

Winter Comfort: Roasted Pears with Fir Sugar

Food

Our local greenmarket is just a five minute walk away from where we live. On Sundays and Wednesdays trucks arrive early in the day from farms in New Jersey and New York, filled with vegetables and fruit and flowers ripe right now. The farmers or their vendors unpack and set everything up. These harvests were sown months earlier, tended, gathered, cleaned, packed, made beautiful for New York shoppers who've seen it all. At the end of the market day, back it goes, back they go. Long day, New York traffic. 

I don't know what the profit margin is or how real farmers survive. The produce is not cheap - it can't be. It's much more expensive than what you'd pay in a nearby store for similar (looking) and seasonless produce shipped hundreds or thousands of miles, and it's about double to triple what the equivalent quality would cost in markets in Europe. 

I think a lot about food. How it is grown. How to grow it. Who grows it. Who harvests it. Who eats it. How little so many people know about the food they eat. How it is eaten. Who gets to eat it. How much of it there is, in the world. How obscene it is that it is kept from people by other people, who have the power to prevent death by famine. 

This okra and these aubergines were very pretty.

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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. 

Quince

These things are bone-familiar, yet rare. The quinces ripe on the trees. The shadowed light of a kitchen where a thin cloth in the window softens the sun. An old wooden table. 

I grated one small quince and squeezed lemon juice across it. Salt, some chile/chili/chilli, and it was a quick sambal, ready for the lamb chops we cooked over coals under a shimmering southern sky. The sheep eat the bushes that grow in the veld we can see.

In this old house  where we are staying, with thick walls, low doors, and and high gables and layers of thatch, I wondered how many hands had prepared quinces, before me.

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Durian Ice Cream: First, Catch Your Hedgehog

I found my hedgehog frozen, shivering in the vast produce section of Fei Long Market, on 8th Avenue in Brooklyn's Sunset Park neighborhood. Tiny crystals of frost nestled between the prickles. It joined my bag of bitter melons and mustard hearts and stem lettuce. 

At home, I banished the durian to the cold terrace overnight, in case its infamous smell evicted us in the wee hours. And the next day I let it thaw at room temperature. 

By this time I could smell it. To me, it's not offensive at all. It's more scent than smell - strong, but in a tropically assertive and suggestively layered way. Like truffles. But not. The Frenchman disagrees completely: It smells like trash, he offered, when I held it under his long French nose. Well, I said, I'm about about to make some trash ice cream. 

He backed away.

In Manhattan's Chinatown I've bought durian by the wedge from a sidewalk fruit vendor, who also provided a spoon to attack its custardy innards. The whole, heavy fruit, sealed in serious prickles, looks intimidating. But as mine thawed it split helpfully at the tip. Steadying the durian with an oven-mitt-clad left hand I wiggled a sharp paring knife into that crack and followed it, slicing towards the stem. The leathery skin gave way surprisingly easily. 

The knife repeated that pattern, tip to stem, until the durian fell into five parts, each with double rows of segmented, custard-soft pulp, each segment hiding an enormous seed. 

I ate a couple of segments, the flavor very strong and very rich. Also very more-ish. But my mission was ice cream, to see if I could recreate the best ice cream I can remember eating, from the tiniest Thai restaurant, now very much a memory, on 4th Street (or was it 8th...) in the East Village. That place taught me a lot about food.

The seeds are very easy to remove - each is about two inches long. Once pulped, I puréed this natural custard in the food processor. At the last minute, tasting it - so rich - I decided to add some slices of yuzu from my huge jar of yuzu syrup. This super-aromatic citrus's uplifting and uncomplicated high notes were exactly what the heavier, sexier durian needed. 

Instant pudding, prior to freezing: durian and yuzu.

I had frozen the bowl of the ice cream maker overnight. Instead of cream, I added half-and-half, one cupful to the two cups of pulp. No sugar. In 20 minutes, it was close to frozen. 

And there you have it. Durian ice cream (with yuzu zest atop). It was very, very good. 

A pint went to Burmese and Hungarian friends in Prospect Heights, on the other side of the park. A pint went into me. The Frenchman wanted nothing to do with it.

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Then, and now

Seeing red. Well, deep orange? Amber? A rufous hue? This is the perfect stage, not in a renewed presidency, not in the world, but in the short, truncated life of a tulip. Full blown. 

Supper began with snacks of olives that I salt-cured, given to me by the friend who came over last night to eat them. She grew them, just a few blocks west of us. Then, a couple of salads, drenched in a bright dressing of Thai lime juice (from the happier of our two trees) with fish sauce and some sugar: crisp endive, thin rounds of watermelon radish, a shaved heart of mustard, and tiny, vinegar-soused cucumbers. And another of peeled and naked pomelo sections, topped with fried shallots. After that, the duck legs, simmered forever in shoyu with many bay leaves (our tree, yay), on a starchy foundation of lacy lotus roots. With a side plate of chilled spinach stems, with shoyu and ginger and crisp sesame seeds. Followed by durian ice cream, just-churned, and cherimoya granita. 

Life in the big, evil city, where dozens of cultures collide daily and (mostly) get along.

Cherimoyas (custard apples) are in season for another couple of months, in California. I highly recommend treating yourself to a box, if you live within shipping reach of Rincon Tropics (a small business with a real, live human owner) whose fruit is wonderful and whose shredded paper packaging makes unpacking it a treasure hunt.

My granita recipe is at Gardenista.

That's all I've got. But we're all going to have to do better than gape, as each new violence unfolds. It is beyond anyone's experience, but catch up we must. If you don't already belong to the American Civil Liberties Union, there has never been a more insistent need to join. 

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ACLU

Guavas

Buy some little guavas (from Mexico. Before those tariffs change their price). 

It's OK if they are still rather green and hard. Release them into a bowl and leave them on a counter. In a few days, as they turn pale yellow, you will come home from the grey outdoors and you will be greeted by that very specific, very not-winter guava aroma. Like a Sauvignon blanc from New Zealand (or South Africa's Overberg), or very fruity and somehow appealing cat pee. But it's actually just guava, and wonderful. (Our cat is smell-free, he begs me to explain. I would explain right back at him that it is because we scoop his litter immediately, like the cat-servants we are...)

How you eat them is up to you. But I do have some ideas...

Here in Brooklyn these small guavas can be found at most corner grocers, fruit stands, and supermarkets. Right now they are clam-shelling at about $3.99 to $4.99 for around eight fruit per clamshell. Yes, I would like the plastic to be converted, toot sweet, into biodegradable packaging. It is possible.

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Citrus Candy, But Real

A sweet flood of tiny-tiny Kishu mandarins arrived at our door some weeks ago, a gift from a citrus grower. I had been making all things citrus - candied pomelo peel, fermented yuzu syrup - but this windfall led to an interesting discovery: they can be dried, whole! I made a first, tentative batch, and then, when I had eaten that entire dried batch in one sitting, I made some more, taking notes.

After peeling, I placed them in the lowest of ovens, on a parchment covered baking sheet. I wasn't sure at what point they would seem "done," but learned that there is a cusp of perfection, achieved just before their sugars begin to darken and turn them a little bitter.

It is not easy to convey their flavor: Mandarin, yes, but deeply intensified. Later, I played with other seedless, easy-peel citrus fruit, and now find it hard to choose which I like better. the whole fruit, or the segments, which become chip-like and crisp.

You decide. My method is now up on Gardenista: Dried, Naked Citrus. I believe it will make you very happy.

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The sill

Austere, like the flavor of autumn olives. Clear, tart, enough sweetness to keep your attention. But definitely autumn.

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@marie_viljoen

Let it bloom

Friday office. I could not resist (decided not to resist?) the anemones that were being sold at the Union Square Greenmarket on Wednesday. They were wrapped in tissue paper, in petite bouquets, still in tight bud. They remind me of childhood, where they bloomed in the cold spring of the Free State in my mother's garden.  

I was at market for the quinces, grown by Locust Grove Fruit Farm (NY), and kept in cold storage since fall, but they as fragrant as quinces should be. Today I am delivering them to two friends, will be poaching some to make a picnic snack for my class at the New York Botanical Garden tomorrow, and will bottle the rest.

The artichokes? Sold very fresh, with stems, at a Brooklyn institution - 5 Guys from Brooklyn. 

It's March!

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Candied crabapples

Crabapple season.

Birds prefer them after a real cold snap, when they are less tannic.

And I like them fat and tart, to be candied.

 

Get my easy candied crabapple recipe - plus an excellent cocktail -  on Gardenista. They're deliiiiiicious.

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Book a Wild Walk

What's easy to grow, unusual, and edible? Myoga!

One forgets how good pears can be. This farmers market Bosc sat on the counter for over a week, ripening. Then I sliced it, tossed with lemon juice and slivered myoga buds from the potted plant on the terrace, and added some chopped, roasted apricot kernels (they taste a little like almonds, and are from Ziba Foods, who source heirloom foods from Afghanistan). The fruit was creamily juicy and fragrant, the myoga buds spicy and floral.

Myoga is one of my favorite plants. It is completely undemanding. When its leafy stalks are long and lush in October, I begin to hunt daily for these rosy, crunchy buds.

I wrote about this hardy ginger for Gardenista, and you can read the article and get my two salad recipes, there. 

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New November Walks

The time of the pawpaws

This is a magnificent sight. Clusters of big pawpaws (the fruit of Asimina triloba), ripening in Brooklyn, just a few blocks from where we live. If I had an in-ground garden, I would plant two trees. Even if I wasn't quite sure how long I'd be there. But better if I could look forward to picking them every early fall. They take around seven years to bear fruit. And these trees are only around 12 years old. When their grower, Lola, texted me to ask if I would like some (for the third year in a row), my answer was an all-caps YES, PLEASE. 

September. Month of pawpaws. At least, in this zip code (October, for upstate, NY). The apartment smells like tropical fruit salad. I spoon up mouthfuls and cherish every bite. 

Tomorrow I will de-seed them and freeze some portions of pulp, for future picnics and foodsploration. There will have to be just one batch of ice cream (which is indescribably good), even though the whole freezer will have to be unpacked to accommodate the bowl of the ice ream maker. 

I think I'll make the pawpaw spicecake from Forage, Harvest, Feast for this Saturday's adventure in the wilds of Staten Island.

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@66squarefeet

Ripe in late summer...

March.

April.

August.

Action!

My story about the beautiful fruit we call cornelian cherry is up at Gardenista. And you know there's a recipe!

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Walk on the Wild Side

Beach plum gin

August in Brooklyn feels like January in Keetmanshoop, right now. Oven-hot. But New York also slings a bucket of soapy mugginess at you to make sure you will really, really look forward to September. And I do. Look forward to September.

There are compensations. For me, they are fruit. Beach plums are beginning to ripen. Elderberries (the ones that have not shriveled on the parched shrubs) are turning purple. And Aronia is ready, too.

I opened a 2020 bottle of beach plum gin the other evening. A maceration made in that first summer of pandemic. It is very good, but improved by a bitter strip of ruby grapefruit peel, with lots of dry tonic (Fever Tree Lite) and ice to make the glass bead. Perfect for this weather. This is the gin I refer to as Pits-and-Pulp, using the leftovers from a beach plum purée. I create another gin, too, that is redder and richer...

I explain that, with a recipe, in the recent story about beach plums I wrote for Gardenista, which you will find in that link. They are a wonderful East Coast fruit, and a very resilient shrub. I hope more people will grow them. 

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Time to drink the elderberry gin

Now that the new crop is ripening on shrubs around the city it seems safe to drink last year's elderberry gin! Why on earth did I wait so long? I usually make the gin with the elderberry pomace leftover from creating a fermented syrup. There is still plenty of flavor left to infuse the liquor. After that the elderberries can be used one last time: Pushed through a foodmill to extract the dark pulp, which I freeze to stir into soups, stews, and all the other outlandishly warm things that seem impossible on a 95'F day. 

Tonight's cold supper is a cold lentil salad vibrating with the flavors of onion, garlic, carrot, salted anchovies and vinegar. I'll top it with nine-minute eggs, halved. 

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All About Elderberries

Aronia - good for what ails ye

As late summer arrives in waves of humidity, with a side of cicadas, Aronia begins to ripen. The dried fruits above were added to a batch of roasted beets, for a savory spread (I call it a pâté) that I make for forage picnics.

I also preserve the antioxidant-laden fruit in a chutney that is flavored with juniper and spicebush, and which is very good with soft cheese.

The chutney recipe, and much more about superfood Aronia, is over at Gardenista.

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Edible Plant Walk, Queens Country Farm Museum

10 August 6pm

Follow that passionfruit!

Slurp.

Where are all the US passionfruit? Find out in my story for Gardenista. 

(I ate my way through pounds of passionfruit to answer the question. It was rough.)

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My Books

Passionfruit Mousse Recipe

I make this tartly sweet, tropically creamy mousse any time I have a flock of passionfruit within reach. So, usually Cape Town in summer (and then it is a grenadilla mousse!). But January is passionfruit season in Brooklyn, thanks to Chinatown and the Little Caribbean, and magical boxes that arrive at the door, from California.

Passionfruit Mousse

Serves 8 

You do not have to strain the passionfruit seeds out (in which case skip the food processing part). I strain from force of habit: My father used to crunch every single seed, instead of just slurping each mouthful down. It drove me nuts. But I digress. 

Use a single jelly mould for a large mousse, or individual moulds if you're being fancy and giving everyone their own. An overnight chilling is helpful.

1 ¾ cups passionfruit pulp (from about 20 passionfruit), chilled

3 ½ teaspoons powdered gelatine

3 tablespoons water

3 cups whipping cream, chilled

5 oz sugar

Halve the passionfruit and scoop the pulp into the bowl of a food processor. Pulse for about 15 seconds to separate the pulp from the seeds. Place a medium-mesh sieve over a bowl and strain the pulp through the sieve, extracting as much juice as possible. Reserve a quarter cup and chill the rest for two hours.

Heat the reserved quarter cup of passionfruit juice with 3 tablespoons of water in a small pot. When it is hot (but not boiling) turn off the heat and sprinkle the gelatine onto it, swooshing the juice around to cover and soak the granules. Stir to make sure there are no lumps. When the mixture is perfectly smooth, whisk this gelatine-juice into the chilled juice.

In a large bowl whisk the cream until it thickens slightly. Add the sugar to the cream and continue whisking until the cream holds soft peaks.

Pour the passionfruit juice into the whipped cream, then fold rapidly using a spatula to blend the mixture well. When no bright yellow juice remains at the bottom of the bowl, pour it into your jelly mold/s. Cover, and transfer to the fridge. Chill until it is set (three hours, minimum).

To unmold, slide a butter knife carefully around the edge of the mousse. Dip for about 4 seconds in a bowl of extremely hot water (too long and the outer layers will melt). Invert onto a flat serving dish and shake hard. You should hear a satisfying plop as releases. If you don't, turn it right way up again, run a hot knife around the edges of the mousse, and repeat. Chill until needed.

How to Make Hoshigaki

It is time to make hoshigaki. Again!

These delicious East Asian delicacies, made by air-drying persimmons slowly, are now a late autumn ritual, for me. The dry fruit is intensely flavored and luxuriously rich, reminiscent of the best dates, but less cloying.

I made my first batch of hoshigaki in 2016, while researching and developing ways to use foraged native American persimmons (Diospyros virginiana) for Forage, Harvest, Feast - A Wild-Inspired Cuisine.

The diminutive American fruit were fiddly to peel, but looked luminously festive, like Christmas decorations hanging in our southern windows at 1st Place. They were enchanting. They also dried really quickly, in about three weeks (that really is quick in hoshigaki terms). Their flavor was like sweetened rosewater. 

I use the small native hoshigaki (after soaking), in my persimmon focaccia from the persimmon chapter of the now complete cookbook. It's delicious.

But I wanted to compare those with the traditional dried fruit, made with big, Asian persimmons. So when gorgeous, pointy-bottomed ‘Hachiya’s arrived at our local deli (owned by a Korean-Japanese couple) on Court Street I pounced, peeled, and strung up correct, hefty fruit. I used white kitchen twine attached to a screw in the ceiling to suspended them, and another, long stainless steel screw inserted into each heavy fruit to anchor the twine. In the US persimmon are not sold with a neat twig attached for the twine to loop around. When their naked skins were dry to the touch I massaged them, smoothing out the rough exterior ridges and feeling the pulp turn soft inside their drying shells. At night I cracked open the windows, because our radiator heat was too much for us. During the day the fruit basked in sunlight. These conditions, as it turned out, were ideal.

Two months later the persimmons were dark brown, their roundness now oblong, dusted in white sugar. Their texture was sumptuous, firm but yielding, their flavor sweet but more complex than the best ‘Medjool’ date. 

Those sunny windows were the key to perfection, apparently. When we moved to our current apartment my hoshigaki operations transferred from airy windows to a high-ceilinged alcove near a skylight. The biggest difference is that they are draftless. The humidity is higher, here, too. First, because our overwintering indoor citrus jungle has grown (it actually raises the humidity!) and because we keep our central heat lower than those hot radiators. For the first few weeks the fruit tends to drip, stickily. Once, there was some mold on the Fuyus. A dip in vodka and a small fan installed below them soon fixed that. They are slower to dry by several weeks and the sugar bloom does not always form. But their flavor and texture remain delicious. 

I eat the first couple extravagantly, like candy. And then I serve them with excellent cheese, cut up into salads with toasted nuts, macerated in booze (dark rum, brandy, and Calvados) before stirring into fruitcakes, or folded into that killer focaccia. 

I still make the little native 'simmon hoshigaki, because they are so pretty and last so long.

How to Make Hoshigaki: 

You Need: Firm persimmons. And they can be any kind. The ones above are Fuyu. But even astringent Hachiyas must be firm or you can't peel them. They will turn sweet, I promise.

A potato peeler and a very sharp, small knife.

Stainless steel screws, one for each fruit. If they are not stainless, they can actually rust inside the fruit. They are more expensive but you can re-use them. They should be about half as long as half your chosen persimmons. 

Twine. 

To Make: Sterilize the screws by boiling them, or cover them in high-proof liquor. This helps prevent mold.

Wash your hands (mold-prevention, again). Peel the persimmons. Twist the screws into the top of each fruit, drilling through the papery calyx and as deep as you can go, leaving the head and some shaft exposed for twine-tying. 

Tie twine to the screw heads. You can tie several fruit in strands (like edible fairy lights) on a single piece of twine, just make sure they will not touch each other. 

Before Hanging: Briefly dunk the whole stringful (or individual strings) of fruit into a pot of boiling water and remove at once. Or, use alcohol: Place the persimmons in a shallow bowl and pour a little vodka or other high proof alcohol over them. I reuse the same vodka for my whole batch. (Then I strain it and shake it up in a cocktail.) 

Hanging the fruit: Ideally, hang the hoshigaki in a sunny spot with decent airflow. If the space is neither sunny nor breezy a fan is close to essential. 

Massaging: When the exterior of the peeled fruits has dried to the touch - usually a few days after peeling (unless your environment is very dry), give them a gentle squeeze all around. With clean hands. As time passes you will notice the interior yielding more and more, until you can manipulate the whole fruit without damaging the exterior.

Drying times vary a lot, depending heat, humidity and airflow. Six to 12 weeks is average. The degree of dryness is also a personal preference. You may prefer them more sticky on the inside. Experiment. 

Hoshigaki Tips: 

Choose hard persimmons (I know, an exception to the super-ripe Hachiya rule). Soft, ripe ones will turn syrupy very soon. They may also slip right off their attachments and plop stickily onto whatever you have below. 

Use stainless steel screws. They will not rust inside the moist interior and they are food safe (sheet metal screws are not).

Use a fan: If the indoor humidity is high or the airflow doesn't...flow...mold can form. If you see a very syrupy exterior, you need more moving air. 

If you spot mold: Remove the mold with a pastry brush, then brush some high proof alcohol over the fruit. Hang them again. (Do not mistake the perfect sugar bloom for mold!)

Windows. If you can hang the hoshigaki in a sunny window, do it.

Hachiyas are more expensive. Go for Fuyus if you are on a budget. They taste very similar, dried.

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Forage, Harvest, Feast