This recipe is for me, or rather, for my future self in April or May of every next year until I am planted. Mid-spring is when strawberries in Arkansas fulfill their finest destiny as luscious, flavorful fruit, ripe to the core. I see no reason to eat strawberries any other time of year, or to…
Category: Fruit
Meyer Lemon Curd
The petite woman knocking gently on the door of ER bay 17 last Wednesday opened it slightly and poked her head through. “May I come in?” she said softly. Everyone else had rapped loudly and bustled in and out. I nodded and moved to make room for her near the gurney where my father lay….
Classic Apple Pie
I made pie for me, just me, last Thursday. It was delicious. I ate almost the whole thing, and I am not sorry. Filling made with 1 1/2 pounds Granny Smith apples and 2 pounds Golden Delicious apples, prepared according to the recipe in The America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook, by the editors at America’s…
Two-fer: Fig Bruschetta & Fig Bites
Until he gave them up for good a few years ago, my husband loved Fig Newtons with an intensity people usually reserve for their favorite sports teams. I would buy five or six packages at a time and store them on a certain shelf in the pantry, so he’d always have a ready supply. He…
Snapshot: Watermelon Plugs
Did you catch the video making social media rounds recently showing another new way to cut and serve a watermelon? It’s simple and works great. Pictured above is a mini-melon, the perfect size for my small household. Slice it in half on a cutting board. Place one of the halves cut side down. Slice it…
Strawberry Jam
Silly me. I must have misread the label on the strawberry plants I bought last month. I thought I was buying a variety called Ozark Beauty. Instead, I must have bought some called Ant Food, by mistake. Good thing there’s a strawberry farm in nearby Cabot, Arkansas, that grows lusciously sweet fruit, scarlet to the…
Lemon Cake 2.0
I made two loaf-sized lemon cakes yesterday, requiring lemons galore. Juice and zest permeate every aspect of the recipe, from batter to hot syrup to sugar glaze, with tangy, tender, delicious results. A day later, the cake is nearly all gone. So now I have a lemon cake situation, because my craving for the stuff…
Peach Jam
I’m on my hands and knees on the concrete floor of my garage with 17 peach pits and a hammer. I have already accidentally bludgeoned the whorled imprint of a peach pit into my favorite maple cutting board, which hacks me off and makes relocating this project from the kitchen a necessity. As I smash…
Blueberry Pie
The blueberries I bought for this pie on Friday were luscious. We’re at the height of blueberry season in Arkansas now, and these beauties came with stems and leaves as evidence of their truck farm origins. Sourced by a local produce stand, they were bursting with so much flavor that I might as well have…
Half-a-Pound Cake with Fresh Strawberries
I bought two flats (total weight, about 10 pounds) of strawberries earlier this month so that I could make preserves. It’s not a cost-saving measure to make my own. Ounce for ounce, just about any jar of strawberry jam at a grocery store is much cheaper. But store-bought jam doesn’t taste remotely like what you…
Cookbook Wall 