Rhubarb Ricotta Cake

Posted by Sara — May 14, 2013

As I’ve told you, one of my very favorite recipes of all time is Rhubarb Crisp (though Karen likes it with strawberries thrown in). The tartness of the rhubarb set off against a crunchy, buttery brown sugar topping? It’s a dessert I can eat way past the point when I know I’ve definitively overindulged. Then I’ll call Karen or Marie and tell them how I ate enough to make myself ‘sick’ and they’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. (What are sisters for if not to share the mundane as well as the lofty with?)

Because it’s in essence just rhubarb, sugar, and butter, it’s delicious, but it’s not exactly something I can get away with eating for breakfast. Well, not legitimately anyway (i.e. I’m not saying I haven’t done it). But–sprinkled on top of a cake? Why, it’s just as appropriate as a muffin or a pancake. (I mean, we can question how wholesome an idea it is to be eating muffins and pancakes for breakfast with any regularity, but at least if you must overindulge, doing so at breakfast appears to be the least damaging to your waistline).

Many recipes call for sour cream or buttermilk, but since I had ricotta on hand I figured that I’d give that a shot–and I’ve loved the result of ricotta in baked goods before–remember this old post? (And if you’re still wondering, it’s Smitten Kitchen approved; need i say more?). I wanted to use up some semolina flour so I threw that in as well. Semolina is high in gluten (which is why it’s so great for making pasta) so it’s not always the ideal choice for more tender baked goods, but I thought it might add a nice rustic texture and that the acidity of the ricotta would tenderize it and work out any rough edges. I was pleased with the result, but feel free to use regular all-purpose flour.

Now despite my paean to rhubarb here, I think this cake is a perfect base for any fruit you’d like–rhubarb for spring, peaches or nectarines for fall? The cake itself is mild in flavor and well-structured and thus will happily pair with whatever seasonal bounty you have on hand. In the meantime, I’m going to enjoy the rhubarb while it lasts.

If you’re looking for more ideas for rhubarb, check out one of my favorite blogs, Relishing It. Laurie has got tons of great ideas (and taught me that you can freeze rhubarb to enjoy it year round). There’s also our rhubarb-rose ice cream here and our pinterest page with rhubarb ideas here.

Rhubarb Ricotta Cake

Ingredients

Cake

1 pound rhubarb, trimmed and cut into ½-inch pieces along the diagonal
1⅓ cup sugar, divided
1 tablespoon lemon juice and zest of one lemon
½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
½ teaspoon finely grated lemon zest
2 large eggs
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup semolina flour (substitute an additional cup of flour)
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
¾ teaspoon table salt
1 cup ricotta

Crumb

1 cup all-purpose flour (I used whole wheat pastry flour)
¼ cup brown sugar (I used muscovado with a bit of white)
⅛ teaspoon table salt
¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon
4 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted

Instructions

Make the cake: Preheat your oven to 350°F. Coat the bottom and sides of a 9×13-inch baking pan with butter or a nonstick cooking spray, then line the bottom with parchment paper, extending the lengths up two sides. (It will look like a sling). Stir together rhubarb, lemon juice and ⅔ cup sugar and set aside. Beat butter, remaining sugar and lemon zest with an electric mixer until light and fluffy. Add eggs, one at at time, scraping down the sides after each addition. Whisk together flour, baking powder, ¾ teaspoon table salt and ground ginger together in a small bowl. Add one-third of this mixture to the batter, mixing until just combined. Continue, adding half the ricotta, the second third of the flour mixture, the remaining ricotta, and then the remaining flour mixture, mixing between each addition until just combined.
Dollop batter over prepared pan, then use a spatula — offset, if you have one, makes this easiest — to spread the cake into an even, thin layer. Pour the rhubarb mixture over the cake, spreading it into an even layer (most pieces should fit in a tight, single layer).
Stir together the crumb mixture, first whisking the flour, brown sugar, table salt and cinnamon together, then stirring in the melted butter with a spoon or fork. Scatter evenly over rhubarb layer. Bake cake in preheated oven for 50 to 60 minutes. The cake is done when a tester comes out free of the wet cake batter below. It will be golden on top. Cool completely in the pan on a rack.
Cut the two exposed sides of the cake free of the pan, if needed, then use the parchment “sling” to remove the cake from the pan. Cut into 2-inch squares and go ahead and eat the first one standing up. (If it’s written into the recipe, it’s not “sneaking” a piece but, in fact, following orders, right?) Share the rest with friends. Cake keeps at room temperature for a few days, but I didn’t mind it at all from the fridge, where I kept it covered tightly.

Chopped Winter Salad with butternut squash, apple and feta (even though it’s spring!)

Posted by mclevering — May 9, 2013

Well the title says it all. I wanted to post this salad because even though it’s spring (with some days feeling closer to early summer), I love this salad. It calls for really easy ingredients that are some of my all time favorite. I get pretty bored with my salads because I tend to stick to the same ingredients so this was a pleasant surprise to find. I also like that it calls for radicchio which I rarely use, but really like when it’s cooked or used the right way.

I got this recipe from a friend who is a fabulous cook. I figured that it was a more time intensive salad than I wanted to deal with because my friend is always creating such great dishes that take some time. But I was wrong! Total time is 40 minute and half of this is time allotted to cook the squash. This recipe was taken straight from Real Simple.com

The recipe calls for great ingredients such as butternut squash, apples, feta and chickpeas. However, I think you can mix in different ingredients or replace many items for similar ones. I think gorgonzola would work great with the apples or maybe switch out the apples for pears if have them. I think adding some avocado to this could be a nice treat and maybe adding some corn if you don’t have any chickpeas. Either way, it’s a great salad. Try it!

(Oh and the good thing about this evening for me was that my little newborn Mattie let me get all the ingredients at the grocery store and prepare this meal with minimal interruptions! She’s the best. We are quite smitten.)

Book Review: Consider the Fork

Posted by Sara — May 7, 2013

We haven’t done book reviews on Three Clever Sisters before (at least, not books that don’t have recipes in them as well) but Bee Wilson‘s Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat seems like an appropriate departure. This book, which I first read about in the New Yorker, is the latest by the British food writer and academic (and prior author of The Hive: The Story of the Honeybee and Us and Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud, from Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee). Lest you think that the word ‘academic’ is code word for this being dry and boring, fear not: While the book is certainly well-researched and packed with information, Bee Wilson’s engaging style and voice shines through, and you are not reading history so much as listening to an enthusiastic friend.

For me, one of the clearest takeaways is how new and novel the idea of cooking-as-recreation is, and just how much of a luxury this concept is: for those of us who like to cook, part of what makes it so is the fact that it’s not required–either because of the abundance of processed food. In fact, despite this little world of food blogs where people are making their own kimchi or mars bars, it’s no secret that home cooking is on the decline. But enjoyment in cooking is a luxury for other reasons too: as much as people thin it takes too much work to cook nowadays, the fact is that what many see as overly-onerous “from scratch” cooking is vastly less taxing (and significantly less dangerous) than historically. And the author’s perspective is more far-reaching than our collective great-grandmothers. Further back, the labors of the kitchen were as far removed as possible from the delights of the table, and with good reason–cooking was a smoky, ashy, overly hot and dangerous business: cramped, sweaty, oppressive. Today the ultimate status symbol is a spacious, modern kitchen (that may or may not have a veneer of the rustic, authentic), for however much it is actually used in fact. For the medieval European nobility, status meant kitchens that were built separated from the main house, despite the inconvenience of the daily ferrying of food to table. Kitchen fires being so common, the inconvenience of a soup that may be lukewarm by the time it completed its journey to table was preferable to having the whole castle burn down.

Being wealthy enough to construct a separate kitchen annex on your property was the most visible way of indicating wealth, but what you served was perhaps just as important. For example, serving purees was a subtle indication of just how many invisible hands you had in your kitchen: just imagine all the work that it took to press something into a smooth, silky paste with no food processors or blenders. Imagine how tired one’s arm would get beating egg whites into a stiff meringue–it takes 5-6 minutes in my powerful stand mixer alone! In contrast, in today’s world where much manual labor has been replaced by electronic gadgetry, Wilson posits that the chunky textures of “rustic peasant” style food (Alice Waters et al) is making a new kind of statement, by advertising the fact that the meal was prepared by hand (mortar and pestle!) not by machine (no inauthentic magic bullets!). Of course, I’d have to add one addendum to Bee Wilson’s observation about modern trends: the ability to make perfectly smooth purees may still subtly be communicating a status message: Vitamix blenders (and thus the green smoothie lifestyle) do not come cheap.

The book is not just an “upstairs/downstairs” exploration, however. Wilson takes on a variety of topics–how much longer it took for refrigerators to catch on in Europe versus the United States, how shipments of ice from New England could make their way to Calcutta on 19th century shipping vessels, and how the Chinese shun knife is perhaps one of the most versatile pieces of kitchen equipment.

And some of the facts are truly bizarre: like the theory explained in the New Yorker‘s review of this same book (which is what piqued my interest in the first place): how the mild, orthodontically correct overbite is a result of tableware (be it chopsticks or cutlery): cutting food into small pieces (rather than, presumably, gnawing at drumsticks the way we’d imagine Henry the VIII going about it) may very well be altering our anatomy. As the daughter of a dentist, perhaps this is a fitting place for me to wrap it up.

In short, I enjoyed this book–I love trivia like this, particularly when it’s delivered through Bee Wilson’s witty voice. But more than just a collection of fun facts, Wilson draws on her sweeping historical journey to make thoughtful observations and to raise interesting questions about what cooking, and how we eat, means today.

Sardine and Avocado Bruschetta

Posted by Sara — May 2, 2013

I’ve talked about sardines on this blog before (and again), even though I imagine you all are giving me funny looks. So much talking, in fact, that I recently got some free samples from BELA, a local company that sources Portuguese sardines for the U.S. market. Besides your standard olive-oil-packed sardines, they also have lemon, tomato, and hot pepper packed fish. (All of which I love, of course). The canned filets are plump, meaty, and flavorful–both lightly smoked and briny.

Sardines are my favorite “fast food,” and I’ve admitted before that I’ll open up a can and eat them with toasted crusty bread as a meal when I’m too busy to do more. But with not much more effort, and thanks to inspiration from the lovely Argentinian food blog Momentos Gastronomicos, I’ve recently bumped it up a notch. I made a few modifications to Rocio’s recipe, making it a bit more pantry friendly: using BELA’s tomato-packed sardines in lieu of fresh tomatoes.

I admit, this is not a low-fat recipe, but it’s one that is chock-full of all those good fats we’re supposed to be eating–omega-3′s in the sardines, healthy monounsaturated fat from the avocado, and of course the elixir of the gods, olive oil. But I just like it because of how it tastes.

Sardine and Avocado Bruschetta

Author: adapted from Rocio at Momentos Gastronomicos

Serves: 2

Ingredients

Two slices of artisan bread
several garlic cloves (depending on size)
olive oil
one avocado
one small red onion (you will not need the whole onion)
one can BELA sardines packed in tomato sauce
olives (kalamata-style or oil packed)

Instructions

Rub each slice of bread with a cut garlic clove. Toast under the broiler until lightly browned, remove from the oven, and drizzle lightly with olive oil.
Meanwhile, cut your avocado in half, remove it from its skin, and slice cross-wise into semi-circles. Do the same with your onion (slicing into thin half-circles).
Arrange the canned sardines evenly over both slices of bread, then alternately layer on the avocado and onion. Top with a few olives, serve immediately, and enjoy.

Butternut Squash Soup with Coconut Milk, Miso and Lime

Posted by Sara — April 21, 2013

This soup is special. If I were having this at a restaurant, I’m sure it would go like this: a fancy presentation in which a wide shallow bowl is slid in front of me, with only a mound of rice artfully constructed in the center. The server would then take a miniature pitcher and pour the brightly colored soup all around, leaving me with an island of rice surrounded by a terra cotta sea.

When I make it at home, it’s not quite so fancy but it’s still elegant and special. In part because I’m using ingredients that are new, and therefore “special” to me. I usually ignore “Asian” recipes (I put ‘Asian’ in quotes because if we’re being honest it’s far too large an area to lump together, culinarily or otherwise) as I am not familiar enough with the ingredients. My history of coconut milk is not impressive (for goodness sakes, I couldn’t even be counted on to buy the right product the first time I used it). I didn’t have a clue where miso was to be found in the grocery store, (by the way, it’s refrigerated?!) much less be expected to decide between red, yellow, and white. This whole time I thought miso was a soup, maybe a powder, but certainly not a concentrated paste of fermented soy beans. And while red rice isn’t so new to me, it certainly is prettier (and coordinates nicely with the butternut squash, since we’re talking aesthetics).

The tastes all meld so nicely too: partly pureed and partly chunky means the soup is smooth but feels substantial enough to stand on its own. All the key ingredients work together because they are all hint at sweet but each have their own additional complexity, from the savoriness of miso to the luxurious texture of coconut milk. The heat of the pepper and the brightness of the citrus are key players to balancing out the soup.

It’s really a standout–both to look at and to eat. And a nice reward for doing what I always tell my kids to do–trying something new.

Butternut Squash Soup with Coconut Milk, Miso and Lime

Author: Adapted from Deborah Madison’s Vegetable Literacy

Recipe type: soup

Ingredients

1 butternut squash (about 2 pounds)
2 T light sesame oil
1 large onion, finely diced
1 heaping tablespoon chopped fresh ginger
2 t crushed Aleppo Pepper
1 t turmeric
½c cilantro stems or leaves, chopped fine
salt
1 can (15 ounces) light coconut milk
juice of one lime
½c red rice
1-2 t coconut butter
2 T white miso

Instructions

Cut the squash in half crosswise, just where the neck of the squash joins with the round (seeded) end. Bring a half inch or so of water to a boil, lower to a simmer and place the seeded end in (unpeeled and uncored). Put a lid on and steam until soft, about 15 minutes, while you continue with the recipe.
Peel the neck and cut into ½” pieces.
Heat the oil in a deep soup pot, and then saute the squash cubes together with the onion and ginger. After a few minutes, add the aleppo pepper, turmeric, and cilantro stems and cook for a few more minutes. Stir in the coconut milk and three cups of water and bring to a boil. Lower to a simmer and cook, covered, for about 20 minutes.
Meanwhile, check on your round end of the squash (it’s a good idea to look from time to time anyway to make sure the water doesn’t evaporate fully). When soft, remove the squash and when it’s cool enough to handle, cut it in half lengthwise and scoop out the seeds and discard. Then scrape the soft flesh from the skin. Puree the flesh together with a cup of the soup liquid until smooth. (You can use a blender, a food processor, or an immersion blender to do this). Pour this back into the soup, and add the lime juice.
While the soup cooks, also cook your rice. It will depend on the rice you use, but generally speaking you can count on about a cup of water for the half cup of rice. Boil the water, then add the rice, stir, and turn to the lowest heat and cook covered for about 20 minutes. When finished, stir in the coconut oil.
When the soup is done, take a cup of liquid out and mash the miso paste into that. (It’s easier than adding the miso directly to the soup–mixing the miso into just a small portion of soup allows you to be certain you have fully dissolved it). Return this cup to the soup and heat through if necessary.
To serve, pour the soup into bowls and then add a scoop of rice to the center. Enjoy!

Boston

Posted by Sara — April 17, 2013

Early Monday afternoon during my lunch break, I stood at mile 26 of the Boston marathon, cheering on runners. As someone who recently started running more seriously, I was more excited about the marathon than I’ve ever been. Even more exciting was knowing several people who were running–though they’re so fast I’m sure I missed most of them come by me. Nevermind, I was so happy to be cheering for everyone. I imagined how excited the runners must all feel and how it felt, this culmination of so much hard work–whether qualifying with an impossibly fast time or as a runner for charity. Some were breezing by at mile 26 with huge smiles, others were in goofy costumes, others were struggling but persevering. There were a few in military fatigues who were apparently running with heavy backpacks (because a marathon is not tough enough as it is?) The day was beautiful, everyone was so happy, I was feeling so proud of my adopted city.

I was well out of the way of harm when I heard one and then another explosion. I was many stories up in one of the area’s tall towers, and I wanted to believe some transformer had blown, maybe something like what happened last year. It was almost impossible to believe anything else had happened, and I resisted even though the location of the blast and the noise of sirens made it more agonizingly clear that it was no accident. As I went down 30+ flights of stairs with some co-workers, we started to hope we had overreacted, but when we got to the first floor and sirens were on and lights were flashing. To go outside or stay inside? We weren’t sure what to do so we stayed put, reasoning at least we were at ground level but deciding since whatever had happened happened outside, inside might be better.

Of course soon enough the terrible news start to sink in. By the end of the day every part of me felt so heavy, even though I’d physically done not much of anything at all. Strange how the mental stress of a day can leave you feeling so physically depleted, and how I felt alert yet catatonic at the same time while watching the news that evening. Such a weariness at the seemingly continuous assault of tragedies.

Like so many others I remember 9/11 well, even though I was living in the Boston area at the time. July 2005, I was living in London, and in fact commuting at the very time of the transit system bombings there. Rather than my skin being thicker, somehow this feels just as raw as ever to me, perhaps even more so–the utter perversion of an event that is a celebration of some of the best of humanity. I was lucky enough to not be personally affected or know anyone who was. But my heart aches for all the victims all the same. And I salute everyone who pulled together in the aftermath, and thank them–the helpers.