Fruit crisp season continues here with this delightful dessert from Barefoot in Paris. It’s like the older, more sophisticated sister of the strawberry rhubarb crisp. We are not disappointed.
I’ve stopped measuring ingredients for the topping – I just throw together flour, sugar, brown sugar, oatmeal and butter until it looks right. It always tastes right. The raspberries for this came from our CSA, and the plums are ubiquitous in grocery stores this week.
It’s fruit crisp month here at the Contessa-Curessa Project, which coincides well with National Ice Cream Month. This recipe (from the Barefoot Contessa Cookbook) makes a huge batch. I see that as a theme in the early Contessa cookbooks, probably because the recipes were originally used for catering. As time has passed and she appeals to more home cooks, I see the recipe size shrinking for more of a small family size. I could have halved this recipe, but instead I just divided it between two baking dishes and will bring one to a friend who just had a baby. I have always loved peach crisp, but never would have thought to add the raspberries. Blueberries or blackberries would have been equally good. Stay tuned for more peach recipes later this week – I’m now into our third crate of peaches since last week.
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Some of you may be (rightfully) expecting the famous Barefoot Contessa Flag Cake (from Barefoot Contessa Family Style) to show up here, now that it’s Independence Day. I’m sorry that you’ll have to wait until next year for that treat, but I’ll share with you a story – and a different dessert – instead.
The Flag Cake is what brought me to Ina. The recipe was originally published in Martha Stewart Living magazine in July 2001, where Ina Garten published a guest piece. If you’re keeping track, I was 23 at the time. You may be asking yourself: what 23-year-old subscribes to Martha Stewart Living? I did, and unapologetically so. I even made the cake for my coworkers that summer, when I was interning at the Department of Health and Human Services between my second and third years of law school. This was the summer of 2001, and security was tight in federal buildings even before the events that happened on September 11 of that year. My coworkers were just as impressed with the fact that I brought a butter knife to work and through the metal detectors as they were with the cake. ”We haven’t seen a real metal knife ’round these parts in YEARS!” I didn’t even know that I was slipping anything nefarious past the guards. I have that doe-eyed (some would say vacuous) look about me, and I’m sure they just thought, “There goes that nice Midwestern girl with the cow-town accent and a big-ass flag cake.” Yes, that was me.
Anyway, we enjoyed the cake that summer, and in summers to follow. I’ve even been known to plan whole celebrations around that cake. For a while, people just thought I was really patriotic, wanting to celebrate Independence Day so fervently every year. Nope. I just wanted to make that flag cake.
I can’t tell you what, exactly, appealed to me so much about the flag cake. I remember leafing through the Sunday paper circulars when I was a little girl, wanting to make the (in retrospect, horrifying) patriotic cakes with Cool Whip and red, white, and blue Jell-O. I wasn’t particularly fond of any of the ingredients, but I wanted to make something pretty. We weren’t pretty dessert people when I was growing up. Do you see what happens, parents of the world, when you deny your child something? They grow up and obsess about it, and 25 years later they’re blogging about a cake. I can tell you, though, what appealed to me about Ina Garten’s guest piece in the Martha Stewart magazine that summer. Her ingredients were fresh and simple, and her instructions were easy to follow. Everything she made was beautiful, but not fussy or pretentious, and it tasted so, so good.
So, why didn’t I make it this year? We’re still adjusting to life as a family of four, so we’re not quite up to throwing a big party just yet. That cake requires a whole party, and it would not freeze well with all of the beautiful fresh berries on it. Maybe I’ll pretend to be Betsy Ross and make it for my birthday in a few weeks if the berries still look good.
Instead, I made the Strawberry Rhubarb Crisp from Barefoot Contessa: How Easy is That?
The blue baking dish that holds it was a wedding gift, and it’s one of my favorite things. It gave the whole dish a patriotic flair, which made me feel slightly less guilty for putting off the flag cake for another year.
I’m not ordinarily excited about rhubarb. It’s bitter, so it requires a lot of sugar, and I think most people don’t sweeten it enough to make it palatable. I could never understand why my grandmother gave it away as a gift like a bouquet of flowers. As it turns out, some folks get really excited about rhubarb: there’s an entire festival devoted to it in Lanesboro, Minnesota. Also, I think a lot of northern locavores like it because it’s a great source of Vitamin C that can actually be grown here. Still, I kind of scoffed at rhubarb until I had to make it for this project. I will scoff no more. I should have known that Ina could make even the lowly stalk-like plant that pops up like a weed in my parents’ back yard every spring delicious. I used some of the leftover strawberries from the fruit platter that I brought to the Contessa party.
Not only is this crisp delicious, it’s also beautiful. Baking the strawberries and the rhubarb together brings out a bright red hue. A few notes, though: the whole thing is incredibly soupy. The recipe instructs us to serve it with vanilla ice cream, which I think is a good move. Also, the recipe calls for 4 cups of rhubarb, or 4-5 stalks. I needed more like 6-7 large stalks to make 4 cups of diced rhubarb.
So, flag cake, you’ll have to wait a while to appear here. Your lowly rhubarb cousin will have to suffice for now.
Filed under Dessert
This is my usual weekday breakfast. I substitute steel-cut oatmeal and sometimes add walnuts.
Barefoot Contessa at Home
Filed under Breakfast
I’m usually kind of disappointed when I’m offered an oatmeal raisin cookie. I mean, I’m not going to turn down a cookie, but why eat dried fruit when you can eat chocolate, you know? It’s like a working vacation, or a boring field trip. You’re glad to be out of the office, but you’d rather be sitting on the beach than listening to a potential client dither on. This cookie, however, changed my tune. I don’t know if it was the nuts, or possibly the dark brown sugar, but these were perfect, and not disappointing in the least.
The original recipe (Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics) called for pecans, but I prefer walnuts (and had them on hand), so that’s what I used. So, not only do these provide a healthy dose of oatmeal and raisins, but the walnuts added a little antioxidant punch. They’re practically health food. Just be sure not to overbake them. I overbaked one pan, and they were sadly inedibly dry the next day.
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These were as good as they look, which is to say, amazing. Even though there’s whole wheat flour and oatmeal in them, I still wouldn’t exactly call them health food, but they were awfully good. I used the same biscuit-cutter trick as I did with the chive biscuits, but with a bigger drinking glass. An added perk is that I had all of the ingredients on hand for these scones, and I didn’t have to leave the house on our fifth straight day of cold rain to get extra ingredients. A half-batch is the perfect size to bring to the office or a play group, and the full batch would be great for a larger brunch party or tea. The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook, p. 223.
Filed under Breakfast
My great-grandmother, like most people who live long enough to become great-grandparents, has become somewhat of a family legend. Affectionately known as Little Gram, she and her family immigrated from Austria when she was just 12 years old. At just 4’11″ and probably 90 pounds soaking wet, she gave birth to three 10-pound babies at home, and outlived the doctors who told her she just had a year to live when she was in her forties. (She lived to be 93.) She wasn’t exactly known as a health nut, downing RC Cola every day and always keeping Butter Rum Lifesavers in her purse, but she did believe in moderation. She told my mom, “One time, I ate too much. It was terrible!” She also firmly believed in an afternoon nap. For years, I’ve relied on Gram’s apple crisp recipe, and it’s a quintessential Gram creation: nothing too fancy, nothing too crazy, and usually made with ingredients you have on hand. Of course, she never measured anything, and just taught her children and grandchildren how to cook by showing them: ”You mix it up until it looks like this, and then it should feel about like this.” So, the “recipe” came into being after her death: we finally took measurements and wrote them down. She simply refused to give out instructions for everything, though – she wanted to be needed, and so when my mom asked for her recipe for rye bread, for example, Gram told her, “You don’t want to bother making that. When you want that, you just send someone to come get me, and I’ll make it for you.” Her expertise, incidentally, was not limited to the kitchen: she evidently taught my mom (her granddaughter-in-law) how to re-pot plants, clean just about anything, and how to pluck what appeared to be porcupine quills from a dog’s snout. They turned out not to be porcupine quills and actually the dog’s whiskers, but my mom knew better than to question the almighty wisdom issuing forth from her husband’s grandmother’s mouth.
I barely knew Gram when she was alive; she died when I was just 6 years old. But obviously, she lives on through stories and traditions. Because of the apple crisp tradition, I’ve been reluctant to try another recipe until I started this project. Ina Garten’s recipe (on p. 226 of Barefoot Contessa Parties!) was just different enough that I didn’t feel like I was betraying family tradition, but it was familiar enough that it still tasted like apple crisp should taste. I can’t say that I’ll abandon Gram’s recipe (posted below), but this new variation (which includes citrus zest and juices) could be a nice addition to the rotation. The wonderful thing about apple crisp is that it’s not as complicated or involved as a pie, and it can be whipped up pretty quickly. Besides, with oatmeal and apples, who can resist it for breakfast?
Gram’s Apple Crisp
4-6 cups apples, peeled and sliced
½ c sugar
1 tblsp. cinnamon
2 tblsp. flour
Mix together and place in bottom of greased 8×8 or 9×9 pan.
1/3 c brown sugar
1/3 c oatmeal
1/3 c flour
3 tblsp. butter or margarine
“Cut” these ingredients together with a fork or pastry blender. Spread this mixture on top of apples. Bake for 40-50 minutes at 350 degrees.
We use the same recipe for peaches, with less (or no) cinnamon, and sometimes less sugar, depending on how sweet the peaches are. The peach crisp will probably take less time to bake, depending on how ripe the peaches are. Mom told me this recipe was from Little Gram, but she could have just told me that to make me want to learn how to make it. 
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