Rookie Cookery

Fuyu Persimmon Yogurt Crunch Recipe

I'm forever trying to come up with new ways to enjoy the crisp, sweet Fuyu persimmons from our tree.   Usually I bake with them or simply slice and eat them raw.  Because they are naturally so sweet,  I often want to pair them with something else to cut the sweetness while playing up the spicy notes in this unusual fruit.

Then it came to me in a brilliant flash of insight:  Yogurt!  The tart and creamy tang  of plain yogurt is the perfect foil for the sweetness of the persimmon, while the persimmon mellows out the sourness of the yogurt.  A sprinkle of  crunchy granola or walnuts adds the perfect textural garnish. 

Fruit, yogurt and granola is hardly a new combination,  but using persimmons this way was a revelation for me.  It works as breakfast or a dessert.   

I know what you're thinking. "If persimmons play well with yogurt, wouldn't they work nicely with sour cream too?"

Yes. Yes, they do.  As a variation, mix the sour cream with a bit of brown sugar,  and use that as a sauce for the persimmons. (Just as strawberries are sometimes served, which is where I got the idea.)

I deserve a medal. :)

Wine Too Sweet? Get Gorgonzola

Last Thanksgiving I followed the advice of the wine manager at Whole Foods and bought a Loosen Brothers Riesling to drink with our roast turkey.  It was a good wine, consistently interesting, which is perhaps why it was recommended to accompany a meal that could become too traditional and boring.  However I found it to be too sweet  for my taste, almost distracting to the meal.  I found myself reluctant to pull the bottle out of the fridge.

Because I was also reading Janet Fletcher's Cheese and Wine, I saw that she recommends a sweet wine to be paired with gorgonzola.  I decided to put her advice to the test, and returned to Whole Foods and bought two styles of that strongly flavored blue cheese: A gorgonzola "dulce", a "sweeter" and very soft, mild gorgonzola that spreads like a brie, and a hardy "picante" gorgonzola, riddled with blue veins and cut into the traditional wedge shape.

When we went to taste the cheeses, I realized that these represented two extremes of flavor, from the relatively mild to the very robust, almost over-ripe and intensely flavored, sharp gorgonzola.    Then I sipped the Riesling, and sure enough, the wine had an amazing ability to knock the hard edges off the cheese and enhance the rich undertones of flavor. The bonus was that the flavor of the wine was improved too, such that it's sweetness and acidity were even more nicely balanced. 

Just to round out our gorgonzola and wine taste test, I pulled out a red wine--a nice malbec from Argentina that I enjoy--and poured a taste to try with the cheeses.

Blech!!!!  It was revolting.  Really. I had to taste a few different things to get that flavor out of my mouth. That effectively ended the tastings for the day!

Lesson learned: pairing wine and cheese is more than an art, in some cases it is self defense for your taste buds!

What else to do with such an intense gorgonzola, I wondered? I bought a steak and planned to make a blue cheese sauce to accompany it, but that meal came and went without the sauce. (Life got busy). My son Ethan won't mind another opportunity to eat steak. I also bought some beets to roast and serve with crumbled gorgonzola, which is one of my favorite ways to eat it.

This is what I find to be so much fun:  A food or wine can instigate a whole series of explorations in food that go well beyond the original serving idea. I like that a lot. It also makes me want to invite friends over and try new things with me. (Things I have tested and know will be good!)

I've been thinking of getting rid of the covered cake plate I bought at a thrift store lately, because it's awkward to store and I don't serve cake or cookies all that often.   However, now that I am exploring food and wine pairings,  I realize it makes a great cheese server, and it has earned  its way back into my limited cupboard space.  So even my dishware is getting more life.  Sweet!

The Christmas Cookie Book

I am a book lover, including an old charmer like this vintage tome I picked up for a few dollars at a used book store a couple of years ago.   It is in remarkably good shape, given its publication year of 1949,  with very few of the smudges and stains that usually decorate a cook book that has been well loved. 

The Christmas Cookie Book was written by Virginia Pasley and illustrated with line drawings by Barbara Corrigan. The text describes in glowing detail the author's family tradition of baking a huge variety of Christmas cookies, often starting right after Thanksgiving and continuing through to Christmas day. The contents feature Cookies that keep, cookies that keep a little while, cookies in fancy shapes, cookies that won't keep, and more.

Our family has a Christmas cookie tradition too, although not nearly as elaborate as the one described in this book.  We've done the cookie routine since our sons were little boys, skipping some years when we let life get too busy. The recipe was always the same: a basic sugar cookie from my Good Housekeeping Cook book,  which we cut into shapes using the cookie cutters my Mom had used, as well as a few new cutters I had purchased here and there. 

The real fun was in the decorating, though.  A big bowl of white frosting was divided into four smaller bowls, and colored with red, green and yellow food coloring.

Then the four of us-- my husband and our two sons Evan and Ethan, would spend a couple of hours "painting" the cookies with colored frosting, nibbling and talking until every flat surface in the kitchen was covered with a tray or plate of cookies.  Here's a glimpse from a batch we made in recent years:

This just never gets old, even when the boys are now grown.  Did you ever see the Simpson's episode where Marge chastises Bart for making the Christmas tree cookies look like "bloody arrow heads"...?

That's our son Evan (now age 22) demonstrating this concept with my husband Jim.  I was tempted to leave the "red eye" artifact in the photograph in Evan's eyes, but thought better of it and edited it out. But you get the idea.

Christmas cookies are fun! At any age.

Last weekend I went to my first ever Cookie Swap, hosted by my pal Garrett of Vanilla Garlic.  We had a blast, and my own cookie baking will never be the same.  Traditions are wonderful,  but I am learning that just because something is a tradition, doesn't mean that it has to be exactly the same year after year.  Twenty years of sugar cookies and colored frosting is enough!  I aim to hunt down several of the recipes I enjoyed from the cookie swap (I'm looking at you, Kate!)  and make them part of our tradition here at home. They were SO GOOD!

I made persimmon cookies for the swap, and I was quite relieved that they came out just fine, having narrowly avoided disaster when my recipe failed me the night before. Cooking with fruit pulp can be tricky, and I had to add flour and increase the oven temperature significantly before the cookies came out right. That was a little scary. 

The moral of the story is: Bake cookies! And don't be afraid to update your traditions, or start new ones this very day.  It's never too late to start.

(Above: Ethan, me, and cookie, 2 years ago)