They weren’t just a couple of weeks ago, when I made my mixed berry tart. Those strawberries were trucked up from Florida — characteristically swollen and colorful, but also characteristically bland. The strawberries in this post are different. They are from right next door — from New Jersey, less than fifty miles away. And oh yes (dear readers!), they are sweet.

They’re the product of the McCann Farm‘s good work. You may recall, from a post that I made last year, that the McCanns set up shop not too far away from me, as the sole purveyor at the (optimistically named) Roxborough Farmer’s Market. They shut down for 2011 when winter came. But now they’re back. With a vengeance.

Last year, when I wrote about the Farmer’s Market, I told you about their vibrant vegetables and their genius hot-pepper bar. I told you about their sweet, sweet corn. And I wrote — and I quote — that they do the best peaches, strawberries, and sour cherries that I have encountered since I moved here.

Clearly, that part has not changed.

Immediately, upon seeing the strawberries last Friday at the McCanns’ inaugural 2012 appearance, I bought up a generous three quarts. I took them home thinking that I would make a pie, or maybe a crisp. But upon tasting them, I thought to myself: cooking these berries would be unbearable (un-berry-able?)! They are far too good to transform with heat. Everything delicate and wonderful about them would be destroyed.

So I took a different approach. Vinegar. If this recipe is about anything other than the strawberry itself, it’s about the balsamic. I almost decided to call it Balsamic Strawberry Cheesecake Mousse, in fact. But it seemed like a burdensome moniker.

That is what it is, though. And the McCanns’ goodies aside, it’s the balsamic vinegar — good balsamic vinegar — that makes this dessert so compelling.

At any rate, this — strawberry cheesecake mousse — is super easy to make. And it’s super tasty. And it will be sure to impress the guests at your next dinner party (assuming that your berries are as delicious as mine). There’s only one thing you should be aware of: to make the mousse itself, you need to have a whipped cream dispenser.

But that’s no problem, right? Should you not already have one, that oversight can be remedied here.

The Strawberries:
1 quart Strawberries
1 tbsp Balsamic Vinegar (the good stuff, if you can)
1 tbsp Granulated Sugar

The Mousse:
4 oz Fresh Chèvre Cheese
1 cups Heavy Whipping Cream
2 tbsp Confectioners Sugar
.5 tsp Orange Flower Water or Cointreau (optional)
Zest of one Lemon

The Sauce:
1 pint more Strawberries
2 tbsp Balsamic Vinegar
2 tbsp Granulated Sugar
1-2 tbsp Water

Mint Leaves, for garnish

To Prepare the Strawberries: Core and halve your strawberries. In a medium-sized mixing bowl, add the sugar and balsamic vinegar to the berries, and toss to coat. Then move the strawberries to a mesh sieve, suspend over the bowl, cover, and refrigerate for at least two hours to allow them to macerate and drain.

To Prepare the Mousse: To a bowl or beaker, add the cream, sugar, orange flower water, and lemon zest; and into that, crumble the chèvre. Whisk until the mixture is smooth, then pour into a whipped cream dispenser. Load the dispenser up with one NO2 charge, shake well, and expel the entire contents into a fresh bowl. Gently mix to make sure that the consistency is even. Then cover and refrigerate (you can do this up to eight hours ahead of time).

To Prepare the Sauce: Stem your pint of strawberries, and add them to a blender or food processor, along with the water, and the liquid that has dripped out of your macerated berries. Blend on high until the mixture has completely liquefied. Then pour through a fine-mesh sieve into a two-quart saucepan, stirring with a spoon to make sure that all the liquid comes through.

To your saucepan, add the vinegar and sugar to the liquid, and over a medium-high flame, boil until the mixture has reduced by about half and thickened to the point where it coats the back of a spoon. Then remove to a bowl (or better, a squeeze bottle), and chill thoroughly in the refrigerator.

Putting It All Together: To the bottom of four clear glasses (I like wine glasses, but you can use half-pint mason jars if you want to be hip), add just a couple of drops of the sauce. On top of that, layer a couple of spoonfuls of mousse, then enough macerated strawberries to cover it, then a second layer of mousse and a second layer of strawberries. Finish with a generous drizzle of the sauce, and a mint leaf or two for garnish.

Serve immediately, and enjoy!

Twice Cooked > Strawberry Cheesecake Mousse
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You see: brewing is sort of a wasteful process. You take eight or ten or twelve pounds of grain, soak it in water, and convert the runnings from that little bath into five gallons of sweet wort, and then eventually into five gallons of beer.

And all of that is great. And tasty. But when the process is done, it’s not as though the grain has disappeared. It’s given up its sugars to the noble cause of fermentation. But at the end of the day — once the wort is in the bucket — you still have a big, soggy pile of husks and what-have-you left over. And about that, something must be done.

It helps to have a compost pile. I don’t know a lot about the chemistry of compost. But I do know that the microbial life that converts yard waste into nutritious dirt loves — loves! — spent grains. Sarah and I toss them into the bin and in what seems like no time at all, they’re gone. Digested. Swept away by the pixies that keep our garden’s ecology going.

But even so — even though I know that by composting the grain, I’m turning it into something good — it always seems a shame to just make it disappear. One of the habits I’ve picked up brewing is to chew on spent grain while I’m doing my boil. And though it’s nothing you’d want to swallow in that state — it’s plenty tasty. Those maltsters, after all, know how coax flavor from their catch.

And so, with that in mind, one thing I’ve started doing is holding back some of the spent grains. I’ve been sticking them in the freezer in individual two-cup packages, with the idea that I’ll bake with them later. Most of the grain still gets composted. But between brewing days, I get four or five chances to make lovely, rich, moist-in-the-middle spent grain bread that’s high in fiber, and hardy enough that one or two slices is, by itself, enough to constitute a meal.

It’s lovely. And I’d highly recommend that you try it.

Before I show you how it’s done, though, a quick note: this, like the ciabatta I did a couple of weeks ago, is not a beginner’s bread. The dough is wet and hard to work with. It helps to have a stand mixer. And it’s imperative that you have a baking stone.

If you have some experience baking, I say go for it. Otherwise, you might want to lower the hydration to somewhere between 360 and 370 grams of water. Or you might want to look at this whole grain brown bread, which will be much easier to do.

400 grams Water
400 grams Whole Wheat Flour
150 grams Unbleached AP Flour
1 1/2 cups Spent Grains from brewing*
1/4 cup Flax Seeds (either ground or whole)
3 tbsp Molasses
1 1/2 tsp Salt
1/2 tsp Yeast

The Night Before: To the workbowl of your stand mixer, add 200 grams of the wheat flour, 400 grams of water, and the yeast. Mix thoroughly, and allow to stand covered on the counter overnight.

The Day Of: Add the rest of the ingredients to the bowl. With the dough hook attachment of your stand mixer, mix on low until everything comes together. Then turn the mixer to medium (I use setting 4 on the Kitchen Aid), and knead for about fifteen minutes. It will look more like batter than dough at first. But not to worry — it will firm up, at least a little.

When the dough is kneaded, form it into a ball as best you can and move it to an oiled bowl. After twenty minutes, and then again after forty, stretch and fold the dough, following the instructions here (this will firm it up considerably). Then allow it to rise, covered, for another two and a half hours, or until it has more than doubled in size.

When it is risen, move the dough to a well floured board (or counter). Gently form it into the shape of your choice (I chose a boule because I have a really convenient round brotform). Cover, and allow to proof for 50 minutes.

While it is proofing, set your oven up for hearth baking (yes — a stone, or at least an inverted cast iron pan, is essential for this bread), and preheat it as high as it will go (525F for me). Then flip the dough onto a parchment-lined pizza paddle, slide it into your oven, lower the oven temperature to 450F, and bake for 40 minutes, turning the bread halfway through.**

When the bread is cooked, remove it to a wire rack and allow to cool completely before slicing. It is especially well suited, I find, to breakfast. With jam. And maybe also Nutella.

(You can, of course, find many more fabulous bread recipes through Wild Yeast’s YeastSpotting Archive!)

* This recipe may also work with other cooked whole grains. But I haven’t tried it, so I couldn’t say for sure. Experiment! Then let me know!
** For improved crust, fill a spray bottle with water; and for the first two minutes that your bread is baking, spray the walls of the oven every 30 seconds. This will create steam, which will keep the surface of the bread moist, and allow a thicker crust to form. If you do this, don’t turn the oven down to 450F until you’ve finished. Opening the oven every 30 seconds loses a lot of heat.

Twice Cooked > Spent Grain Bread
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This is one of those. And its formula, I think, will look pretty familiar. For two reasons.

First: you should pretty clearly recognize the logic of this dish from the fried rice — and probably from a dozen other recipes I’ve posted here since Twice Cooked’s inception. There’s a carbohydrate, a protein, and a green; onion, spice, and fennel. It’s a handy combination, this. And one that, once you have it down, you can use in an indeterminately large number of permutations, all to good effect.

Were I to be presumptuous and offer you all a piece of advice, I’d tell you to take this formula and run. Who needs to read a recipe blog when you have the master key?

But anyway — second: this dish should look familiar because it’s a riff on an old weeknight classic. No, it isn’t real tuna noodle casserole — that favorite of pine-box American-style cooking, of June Cleaver and Carol Brady (or at least her maid, Alice), with its Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, its canned peas, and its topping of bread crumbs.

It’s not that. But it’s something like. It’s inspired by.

It has most of the same basic elements as its namesake dish. But here, they’re put together with a little more care, a little more thought, and a little less of that good old-fashioned, over-processed, out-of-a-can, well … yuck.

This is a recipe that has seen a lot of variation over the years: baked or not baked; egg or no egg; balsamic or plain. I would encourage you all to start from here and play. With proper experimentation, you can get a whole lot of mileage out of this one.

1 box Extruded Pasta
10 oz. Tuna (I use Skipjack when I can, as its population is generally considered sustainable)
1 bunch Kale or Collards, stripped and chopped
1 pint Mushrooms, sliced
1 Medium Onion, sliced
6 Garlic Cloves, minced
3 tbsp Parmesan Cheese
3 tbsp Romano Cheese
1 tsp Crushed Red Pepper
1 tsp Tarragon (I’m a regular tarragon of virtue!)
1/2 tsp Thyme
1/2 tsp Fennel Seed
Olive Oil
Thai Fish Sauce
Fresh Ground Pepper
Salt

Fill a pasta pot with salted water, and set it to boil. Add a generous quantity of olive oil to a sauté pan over medium heat, then add the mushrooms, along with the crushed red pepper, fennel seed, and a little salt, and cook until they look about halfway done (about ten minutes). Add the onion, thyme, and ground pepper, and continue cooking until the onion is soft and starting to brown (another 20 minutes or so).

When the onions are browning, add the pasta to your boiling water, stirring to make sure it doesn’t stick together. Add the tuna, garlic, and tarragon to the sauté pan. Mix well, and cook for about three more minutes.* Then add a couple of ladles worth of pasta water to the sauté pan, along with 1-2 tablespoons of fish sauce. Place your chopped kale on top of the mixture. Cover the pan, and cook until the pasta is done.

When the pasta has finished cooking, drain it (but not too well), and add it to the sauté pan. Add the Parmesan and Romano cheese, mix well, and allow the whole dish to cook together, stirring occasionally, for about five more minutes.**

Serve hot.

* If you wanted to add a little bit of balsamic vinegar, now would be the time.
** If you want to turn this into a baked dish, no problem! Remove the mixed pasta from the heat, and toss in one beaten egg. Sprinkle the top of the pasta with about 2 tablespoons each of Parmesan and Romano, and then stick it in the oven, uncovered, at 400F for about 20 minutes. But remember: if you’re going to do this, you’ll want to under-cook your noodles just a little bit. Otherwise, they’ll get mushy in the oven.

Twice Cooked > Tuna Noodle Casserole
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And I’ll tell you: it worked for me. I’m making loans now, specifically for agriculture and food-service ventures, to folks in six different countries. And to set that all up, it took me a total of about five minutes from my day.

For those who don’t know, Kiva.org is — according to Kiva:

A non-profit organization with a mission to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty. Leveraging the internet and a worldwide network of microfinance institutions, Kiva lets individuals lend as little as $25 to help create opportunity around the world.

You can find out more about how microlending with Kiva works here.

And if you decide that you like it, and you want to sign up, you can do so here.

Obviously — no pressure. But as long as I have my little soapbox of a web site, I figure that I might as well use it to do something good.

Twice Cooked > Microlending at Kiva.org
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Please don’t mistake those two things, because they are not the same.  And please don’t go around saying that Adam over at Twice Cooked is doing Chinese food.  Because I’m really, really not.

What this is, you might say, is mundane food.  It’s the kind of cooking that comes in handy when one has maybe a half hour to make dinner, and an odd assortment of ingredients in the fridge that need to get used before they go stale, or rank, or floppy.  It’s a kind of cooking that I’ve done for you here before, and that I try to do as often as I can manage.  Because this is what cooking is about — finding pleasing combinations of taste that might be useful for more than just a special occasion.

Not — of course — that fruit tarts or stuffed bread aren’t useful.  You might make them on a whim.  You might even make them on a weeknight.  But we all have nights — believe me, I know — when we get off work late, or we haven’t gotten to the grocery for one day too long, or we need to throw something together before we go to a nighttime meeting.  And for those times, something like this is perfect.

The recipe is just below.  But before we get there, one more note:  I use bok choy and bacon here.  But if that’s not what you have — substitute.  Gailan (Chinese broccoli) or tatsoi, or even kale are good here.  And sausage is as good as bacon, as is the vegetarian route.

Start from this recipe and go nuts!  You can’t go wrong.

2 Heads of Bok Choy, chopped
1 cup Long Grain White Rice, cooked
1/4 lb. Bacon, diced
1 Medium Onion, diced small
2 Eggs, beaten
2 tbsp Dark Soy Sauce
1 tbsp Sesame Oil
1 tsp Cumin Seeds
1/4 tsp Ground Cayenne Pepper
Sichuan Pepper (about 50 grinds)

In a pot with a steamer, set about an inch of water boiling.  To a sauté pan (or wok) over high-medium heat, add the bacon and cumin seeds.  When the bacon has given up its fat, and is just starting to brown, add the onion, cayenne pepper, and Sichuan pepper, and continue to cook until the onion has softened and the bacon is done.

Meanwhile, to your pot of boiling water, add the bok choy, and allow to steam for four minutes.  Then take it off the heat.

When the onion has softened, add the beaten eggs to the sauté pan and scramble.  Then add the rice, soy sauce, and sesame oil, mix thoroughly, and cook, stirring at regular intervals, until the rice dries out and crust starts to form on the bottom of the pan (5-10 minutes).

Add the bok choy to the fried rice.  Mix thoroughly.  Allow to cook for about two more minutes.  And serve hot, right off the stove.

Enjoy!

Twice Cooked > Weeknight Fried Rice
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Sound familiar? What if I added: because there were fewer regulations and lower taxes. Starting to sound familiar now?

The specifics of the complaints are certainly different, but the tone is just the same: like the minstrels of the post-Civil War period — those performers in burnt cork who borrowed blackness for the light entertainment of white audiences — the 2012 Republican platform trades on a kind of diffuse nostalgia for a more prosperous American epoch to garner attention and pander for votes, and to indict their opponents on grounds no more substantial than an inclination to look forward, not back — because back is not always such a forgiving place.

Via Wikimedia Commons

Molly Ball, writing recently in The Atlantic, has the right of it. Candidate Romney, she writes, is a dyed-in-the-wool nostalgic at heart. He bemoans Obama’s radical impulse to “transform America” and proposes, instead, that America be “restored.” On foreign policy, he longs for better days — for the doctrine of all modern presidencies — from Truman, to JFK, to Reagan, to Bush — of peace through strength (as though this current president is not cut from the same amoral cloth). Even his Super PAC, she writes, trades on a kind of nostalgic rhetoric of what a President Romney would do — he’ll Restore our Future. Whatever that means.

And she points us toward a speech by candidate Mitt– March 30th, in Wisconsin — that makes the case more convincingly than she ever could. In it, Romney piously intones: I don’t want to transform America; I want to restore the values of economic freedom, opportunity, and small government that have made this nation the leader it is. He tells us that the fundamental question that we should ask ourselves as we move toward the elections is: are we keeping faith with the great legacy – and trust – that has been handed to us by previous generations?

Romney, and his Republican cohort, look backwards for exactly the same reason that the blackface minstrels did. Our time, like theirs, is tumultuous. Like them, we have a weak economy (two major depressions in twenty years crippled growth through much of the last quarter of the nineteenth century). Like them, we worry about immigration (Eastern and Southern European newcomers seemed like a mortal threat to national unity). And like them, the spectre of generational conflict and moral decay threatens to catapult the nation into rank decadence (urbanization and waning religiosity scared the heck out of the Gilded Age’s old guard).

But the GOP has more in common with the minstrel stage than just their concerns. Like those burnt cork players, they’re giving scared Americans a good show, but one that’s ultimately empty. Robert Toll — from whom I lifted that opening quotation — writes that the thing about minstrels is that they don’t offer any solutions. The point of the act is to put butts in seats and money in their own coffers. Not to offer substantive critique.

And that’s what we’re getting here. Candidate Romney tells us that the President has most certainly failed to lead us from recession to recovery. He tells us that in Obama’s Government-Centered Society, the government must do more because the economy is doomed to do less. But does he offer a substantive alternative vision? Hardly. What he says is that he wants to restore the freedom and opportunity that have made America the most powerful economy in the world. Because freedom and opportunity are great! Like puppies and apple pie! His are the kind of happy generalizations of a musical review, or a motivational speaker, whose goal is to put butts in seats. When it comes to policy specifics — well, he’ll tell you after he’s elected.

The reason I’m making this comparison is not because I want to rag on Mitt Romney. It’s certainly not because I want to imply that he, or his GOP colleagues, hold to the same sort of frothing racism of their Gilded-Age stage counterparts. Nor is it to dismiss the GOP by pointing out that theirs is a kind of vaudevillian dog-and-pony show — as opposed to a serious political party.

My purpose here is to point out to you the other side of that coin. Nostalgia like this works because the people who engage in it most fervently imagine the world to be considerably smaller than it is. They imagine “us” to be an “in” group — whites, or native-born Americans, baby-boomer-aged men, or folks from “real America,” as Sarah Palin was so fond of saying in the last presidential election. Candidate Mitt does this again and again: his immigration policy, his attitudes toward women, even his tax policy are all about making the world small — about speaking to people who look and act a lot like Mitt Romney himself.

But the other side can’t afford to do that. As Molly Ball points out: for President Obama, the past — most definitely — was the bad old days. Sometimes, he’s talking specifically about the economic and foreign policies of the Bush administration. But sometimes it’s broader than that. While for Romney, the past is a place of comfort and security — the hallowed promise of America, now vanished — for President Obama, it’s the 1950s. A time of segregated schools and unequal pay. A time of sexism and racism, where couples like his parents opened themselves up to prosecution, and where people like himself, with his skin tone — most definitely — could never ever aspire to be President.

Mitt Romney, speaking in front of his (largely white, largely baby-boomer) base. Photo by Gage Skidmore, via Wikimedia Commons

Romney’s GOP, in other words, resorts to nostalgia because they can. Because the segment of the population to whom candidate Mitt is speaking remembers the past as brighter, more homogeneous, less filled with scolds telling them to be politically correct and cranks telling them to curb their mass consumption.

But walk out of that little tent, and the United States looks different. Ours is a nation made up of people on the butt end of minstrel humor, and on the short end of the nostalgic past. Sometime soon those people will open the newspapers and realize that what candidate Mitt is doing is singing “Mammy” at them. And we can only hope that that happens before November 6th.

*Robert Toll, “Social Commentary in White Minstrelsy.” In Inside the Minstrel Mask, edited by Annemarie Bean, et al. (Wesleyan U P: 1996): 104.

It is worth noting, in this quote, that the “Turkish harems” portion of the quotation is a direct attack on Mitt Romney’s religion. Mormonism remains a contentious issue on the Religious Right, even today. But I would contend that one of the effects of “blacking up” is that common whiteness transcends issues like religious difference.

Twice Cooked > Mitt Romney’s Minstrel Logic
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Sure, I thought. I had just been watching this sexy video chronicling the construction of a Sachertorte — a classic Viennese chocolate-on-chocolate-on-apricot number that l desperately wanted to reproduce. So I restarted the video and showed it to Sarah. And she did not even crack a smile.

You can’t make a cake, she told me, all matter of fact. The boss is making a cake and nobody else can make one if she is. So you can’t make that.

I was crestfallen. I was belligerent. It was the only dessert that I could think about, and if I couldn’t do it, then I was definitely taking my marbles and going home. What else could I possibly make for a workplace baby shower, I exclaimed, throwing my hands up in the air (I kid you not).

There was a pause. And then — calmly and reasonably — Sarah told me: Why don’t you make a custard tart?

Okay. That works. The images of that oh-so-hot cake were beginning to clear. And I like tarts. And I like custard tarts. And a tart would be adequately impressive, without stepping on the higher-ups’ toes.

But something about a custard tart says winter. And we’re now — despite my best efforts to deny it — well into spring. We’re still a couple of weeks away from ripe berries from the garden. But we are just in time for boxes and boxes of them, plump and brightly colored, to be on sale at the supermarket.

I’d had this idea, somewhere in the back of my head, maybe left over from last spring, that I wanted to make a mixed berry tart. So I did some digging around, some refresher reading about pastry cream, and decided that — yes — that’s what I would do.

And so, with one last wistful sigh, I gave up on my dream of a Sachertorte (for now). And this is what I came up with instead …

For the crust:
1 1/4 cups Unbleached AP Flour
1/2 cup (1 stick) Unsalted Butter, cubed and chilled
3-6 tbsp Heavy Cream
2 tbsp Granulated Sugar
Zest of one Lemon

For the pastry cream (cribbed with some modification from Michel Roux’s fabulous book, Pastry):
2 cups Whole Milk
6 Egg Yolks
1/2 cup + 2 tbsp Granulated Sugar
1/4 cup Unbleached AP Flour
1 Vanilla Bean, split and scraped
1/2 tsp Vanilla Extract

For the topping:
1 pint of Strawberries, cored and halved
1/2 pint of Blueberries
A neutral colored Jam or Jelly (I used peach)

For the crust: to the work bowl of a food processor, add your flour, salt, sugar, and lemon zest, and pulse once or twice to mix. Add the chilled butter, and pulse again, in five-second intervals, until it has integrated into the flour mixture, and the texture looks sandy. Then add the cream (three tablespoons at first, and more only if needed), and pulse again, in five-second intervals, until it just barely comes together as dough.

Remove the mixture — now shortcrust pastry — to a piece of plastic wrap. Shape it into a puck, wrap, and chill in the refrigerator for an hour.

At the end of the hour, unwrap the dough onto a lightly floured board, and roll it into a circle, about an inch wider than your tart pan. Lay the rolled dough into the pan, pressing it into the corners so that it fits snugly. Use a fork to perforate the bottom. Trim the extra dough (I like to just roll over it with my rolling pin when I’m making tarts). Then refrigerate the prepared crust for at least another twenty minutes — preferably for an hour — to allow the gluten to relax and prevent shrinkage in the oven.

Preheat your oven to 400F. When the crust has chilled, line it with parchment and use pie weights or dried beans to weigh down the bottom of the crust. Bake for 20 minutes. Then remove the parchment and weights and bake for 10 more (until the edges are browning and the bottom is starting to turn golden). Remove from the oven, and allow to cool completely.

For the pastry cream: In a three-quart saucepan over a low flame, heat the milk, the split vanilla bean (and its seeds), and about half of the sugar, stirring occasionally, until it starts to steam. While the milk is heating, in a separate bowl, whisk the egg yolks and the rest of the sugar together until the mixture lightens in color. Then add the flour, and whisk until it is thoroughly incorporated.

When the milk is steaming (should take about twenty minutes), strain out the vanilla bean, and return the mixture to the pan to bring it back up to heat. Pour about a third of the hot milk into the egg mixture, whisking vigorously to temper the yolks.* Then pour it back into the remainder of the milk, stirring until it is incorporated.

As soon as the yolks go into the saucepan, you will notice the mixture begin to thicken. Bring it gradually up to a simmer, stirring evenly and constantly. Then allow it to bubble for about two minutes to let the flour cook.

Remove the finished pastry cream to a bowl. Mix in the vanilla extract. Cover in plastic wrap such that it is touching the surface of the pastry cream (this keeps it from forming a skin), and refrigerate until thoroughly chilled.

To put it all together: When the crust is at room temperature, and the pastry cream is chilled, spoon the pastry cream into the crust and use a spatula to smooth it evenly across the surface. There should be just enough to fill the crust. Lay out the strawberries carefully, in a pattern of your choosing, being sure to leave room for the blueberries. Add the blueberries, then gently push all the fruit down into the pastry cream, just a little bit, to hold it in place.

Melt about four tablespoons of jam in the microwave (thirty seconds should more than do it), and — using a pastry brush — brush (or dab) the melted liquid across the surface of the tart. This will seal the fruit, and give it an appealing sheen.

Enjoy!

*It is vital in this step that your whisking be vigorous. Else you will end up with the most disgusting scrambled eggs ever.

Twice Cooked > Mixed Berry Tart
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Why has it been the standard, you ask?  Because it’s good.  Real good. It’s malty, complex, assertive, sprouted-barley goodness in a husk. Yum.

Anyway, as I was doing some electronic shopping for ingredients yesterday, I came across an interesting choice.  Northern Brewer (a supplier that I like very much) was offering ordinary Maris Otter.  Or, for just a couple of cents more, a floor malted variety.

Of course — I bought the floor malted.  To my basest consumerist instincts, it sounded “premium.”  And if I know I like the ordinary Maris Otter as X price, why would I not like super duper special Maris Otter for X price plus just a couple of cents?  It’s a product that hit my impulse-buy button for a lot of reasons, not the least of which being that “floor malted” sounds a lot like “heirloom,” and the folklorist in me certainly can’t resist that.

But the honest-to-goodness truth of it is that I didn’t know what floor malted means.  I knew that it was, in fact, an “heirloom” process, but what it entails, or how it differs from “modern” malting processes — well, beats me.  So once the internet-shopping brain numbness subsided, I went poking around on Google (actually DuckDuckGo) to find an answer.  And what I found was this, over at a blog called Beervana.  It’s a series of three videos, actually of a whiskey-producing operation in Scotland, in which the floor-malting process is revealed.

I ordinarily don’t do video, but so compelling did I find these that I decided that I’d give you a taste here.

And if you’re interested in the other two, you can find them at Beervana.

Meanwhile, here is the recipe that I plan to brew with next weekend.  If any of you out there have any suggestions you’d like to make, I’d be more than willing to listen.  So please do let me know.

8 lb Maris Otter Malt
.5 lb British Carastan Malt, Light
.5 lb CaraPils
1 tbsp British Chocolate Malt (to hopefully impart a bit of a red color to the wort)
2 oz UK Kent Golding Whole-Leaf Hops (1.5 oz for 50 minutes, .5 oz for 10 minutes)
Safale S-04 Yeast

Twice Cooked > Special Bitter, and Floor Malted Barley
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At any rate, yesterday was my birthday. And this is what I made for myself. So — I say — if I want cream on my pasta, I’ll have it.

1 lb. Extruded Pasta (I prefer ziti, but you’re allowed a different opinion on the matter.)
1 pint White Mushrooms, sliced
1 pint Shiitake Mushrooms, sliced
1 Medium Onion, sliced
1 cup Heavy Whipping Cream
1/2 lb Asparagus, cut into bite-sized pieces, with any woody ends discarded.
1/3 cup Grated Romano Cheese
4 cloves of Garlic, minced
1/2 tsp Dried Thyme
1/2 tsp Fennel Seed
1/4 tsp Whole Cumin Seed
1/8 tsp Ground Nutmeg (if you’re fancy and want to grind it yourself, be my guest!)
Olive Oil
Crushed Red Pepper
Black Pepper, coarsely ground
Salt

Set a pot of salted pasta water to boil, and heat a sauté pan over a medium flame. Add the olive oil, onion, fennel and cumin seed, crushed red pepper, and just a sprinkle of salt, and cook for about five minutes, until the onion is just starting to soften. Then add the mushrooms, thyme, and a bit more salt, and cook for about twenty-five minutes, stirring occasionally, until the mushrooms are just about done.

At this point, add the extruded pasta to your boiling water, and stir vigorously to keep it from sticking together.

To the sauté pan, add the asparagus and garlic, and cook for eight more minutes. Then add the cream, Romano cheese, nutmeg, and black pepper, and mix together thoroughly. At this point, you’ll want to season the sauce one more time, keeping in mind that cream dulls the flavors of other ingredients (in other words, you’ll need more salt than you think).

When the pasta is cooked, drain it and tip it into the sauté pan with the sauce. Mix thoroughly, and cook together for three to five more minutes, to give the flavors a chance to meld.

Serve hot, accompanied by a little bit more grated cheese.

Twice Cooked > Pasta with Mushrooms and Asparagus
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Either way, it’s true. I am late in making a post. But I am late for a very good reason. I’ve been off, in my academic capacity, at the meetings of the Popular Culture / American Culture Association. I’ve been off giving a paper about the reception of the Brothers Grimm’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen in the United States in the nineteenth century. And in a much more limited capacity, I’ve been off gallivanting around Massachusetts, peeping about a combination of historical sites and tourist … um … traps.

In my travels this past weekend, I made it to Salem, MA, where I got to sample the fare at Ye Olde Pepper Candy Companie, which is among the oldest (if not the absolute oldest) continually operating candy outfit in the United States (established in 1806). I’ve been eating lobster roll, and pasty-white seafood soup, and hanging out with (some really excellent) people who make a great show of dropping their R’s.

More interesting for blogging purposes, however, I’ve also been walking around with my camera. I got a chance, while I was in Salem, to visit the Salem Witch Trials Memorial, and the adjacent historical cemetery. And for various reasons, I ended up photographing it pretty extensively.

I’m not going to talk about the Memorial too much, except to say that was established fairly recently — 1992 — and that it’s an excellent, effective space. It reminds me of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C. a little bit, in that it’s neither too sappy nor too graphic, it lends itself to various different kinds of uses, and it promotes quiet and solemnity without feeling stifling.

It’s a great space to photograph. And so pleased was I with how some of the pictures came out that I thought I’d share a couple here.

You may consider this to be in lieu of food blogging, for now. Though a new food post is in the pipeline as we speak, and will be ready in a couple of short days.

For more images of Salem, you may visit the full set on Flickr.

Twice Cooked > Salem Witch Trials Memorial
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