SKILLET CAKE FOR ANY TIME OF YEAR, & OTHER PLEASURES

It’s Saturday night, "date night", and here I am at the computer. It’s not as bleak as it might sound: I’ve had a great day of market, lovely bicycle ride, and then supper with friends here in my kitchen and garden. Time to sip a little rose d'Anjou and feel grateful.

But before I do, I need to talk abut the skillet cake. I have had a number of requests for the skillet cake recipe, and it’s time to put it out again.

This cake started when I was doing recipe development for HomeBaking, a book that came out in 2003 co-authored by my ex-partner Jeffrey Alford. I am very proud of the book: the artisan breads, etc especially, but also the effort in the book to demystify pastry and baking generally.

When I began work on it I tended to be intimidated by the idea of pastry and cakes. And so I felt I needed to analyse where those feelings of inadequacy came from and address them. One way I did that was to make up a cake recipe, just out of my head, using proportions that were easy to remember, so I could make it without reading a recipe, and without special equipment. 

That is the origin of the skillet cake. The recipe in HomeBaking calls for only 2 eggs and either all-purpose flour or a blend of all-purpose and pastry flour (for a more tender crumb). Since that time the recipe, or I should say, the cake I make, has evolved. Rather than using one large skillet, I make two cakes, each slightly smaller than the original. I have increased the eggs to four, from two.

And most importantly, I now prefer to use Red Fife flour for the cake, a whole wheat single varietal flour. It has wonderful taste and baking properties.

So here is the recepe set out anecdotally, my "Everyday Skillet Cake", to be interpreted as you wish:

You need one larger heavy ovenproof skillet (11 or 12 inch diameter) or two medium to small ones (I now use a 9-inch and a smaller 7 or 8 inch one too), cast-iron really is best; you could also make it in a rectangular cake tin I guess. I have done that in other people's kitchens.

Preheat the oven to 400 F; rack in the middle.

Find your skillet(s) or baking pan. Grease lightly with olive oil (or butter but I find oil works better).

Best if butter and eggs are at room temp. (See *** below for preparing the fruit topping now if you need to wait for the butter to soften a little.)

In one bowl cream together a generous 1/4 pound butter with 1 cup sugar (I tend to use a demerara, but whatever), then set aside.

In another bowl go 2 cups flour: use 1 cup each whole wheat pastry flour and all-purpose if you want, or – my preference - use all Red Fife (available at many farmers' markets). Don't worry.

And onto the flour go 1 teaspoon baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon baking soda, plus 1/2 teaspoon salt (or so) a generous amount of cinnamon if you like, some powdered cloves and powdered ginger if you like and just stir to mix. Set aside.

Back to the butter and sugar: Add a generous 1 cup (so in fact about 1 1/4 cups) plain full fat or 2 % yogurt and stir well. Add 4 large eggs and beat to make a kind of heavy foaming mixture. You can add a small splash of real vanilla extract if you want.

Pour the egg mixture into the flour etc and stir just enough to wet everything. It will be thick and wet. If you are including wild blueberries, as I like to do in summer (or you might have frozen ones, just fine), add them now and fold over a couple of times.

Pour it into the oiled skillets and put into the oven. 

Lower heat to 380 F after ten minutes.

Meantime (****or you could do this while you're waiting for the butter to soften, if you forgot to take it out of the frig early enough), heat a little butter in a skillet and add chopped apples or peaches or mango or pear (yum) , a little sugar or maple syrup (not with the pears; I'd add some lemon juice instead), some cinnamon and/or cloves, and cook briefly just to barely soften and bring out flavour. (You can skip the butter if you are using peaches or pears or apricots and just add sugar and a splash of white or red wine for extra flavour and liquid as they cook.)  You can use chopped rhubarb, but then you'll need to cook it with a tiny amount of water and add generous sugar and maple syrup. Taste to check that you like it. 

You can also make a mixture, say of peaches and blueberries or whatever, as it pleases you. You want about 2 cups cooked fruit plus some liquid, but really amounts don’t matter.

When the cake or cakes have been in the oven about 25 minutes the top will have set a little. Lift out the skillet(s). Distribute the fruit and juices on top and put back in. 

The whole thing takes about 45 minutes usually to cook through. Use a skewer into the centre or near it, to test for done. You can sprinkle on a little extra sugar about ten minutes before you take them out: a crystallised light brown sugar is attractive.

Once they come out of the oven, let stand for ten minutes, then turn out onto a plate and then onto another plate so it is fruit side up. Or serve from the skillet.

There you have it...

Leftovers are great for breakfast, because they’re real food, not just intense sweetness.

We had anther skillet cake this evening, sitting outside in the warm summer air, a group of friends and I. We’d begun with some fresh Berkshire pork, raised in Grey County out in a field, and slaughtered this week. I’d been up at the pig’s home farm last Sunday with Dawn the Baker (Marvellous Edibles), and so I hurried to Wychwood Market this morning because I knew there’d be fresh (not frozen) pork. It was so delicious, remarkable…a roast cut into steaks, grilled, then sliced. We had lemon wedges so people could squeeze on a little juice, but really nothing was needed.

I was so happy to have the skillet cake, made of wheat grown in Ontario, an old variety developed here, called Red Fife (with a lovely natural sweetness to it), and topped with Ontario peaches and blueberries, as a part of the meal, a wonderful complement to the pig.

So lucky to have local food, grown with care, to work with. As a friend of mine says, a huge part of the secret of good cooking is good shopping.

Happy summer everyone...

SEASON OF FRUITS...AND GRATITUDE

An online friend tells me I have been negligent in not giving any glimpses or news from the Oxford Symposium on Food of early July. There’s a reason I haven’t written about it I think. It’s a place where people come and meet and give talks and discuss food issues both large and small, famous and obscure. The being-there is the point. And I am not a reporter. So I end up stumped and stopped, unable to find the ease and juice to write interestingly about it.

But that online prompting in turn is making me think about the nature of the communicating that goes on on FB and Twitter. I post a link to an interesting story, thinking others might also find it interesting. That’s a kind of curating or giving access to others. And I also post notes about things I’m thinking about or situations I’ve just been in or even something interesting that I made myself for breakfast. Why do that? It’s hard to say. Is this taking the place of quick phone chats with friends? Is it an unloading of thoughts that would otherwise just run through my head? What purpose is served? 

On the other hand, this networking can be so useful for linking people and their needs. The other day I was at the Farmers’ Market that takes place every Tuesday (8 am to 2 pm) in front of Sick Children’s Hospital a few blocks from my house. The dazed parents and others who find themselves visting a sick child in the hospital can at least get refreshed by stopping by. It’s a reminder of a better happier world than the hospital. And a reminder that there is good food in the world; hospital food is still so disgracefully bad around here.

But the farmers who come in to the various farmers’ markets in Toronto pay a real price. They have the cost of gas and the time it all takes to drive in, or else the cost of paying someone else to drive in and to sell for them. I was talking to the woman who manages the market about whether farmers could share transport chores, take turns doing the drive in, whatever. But they come in from all directions, not from a single community or area. Still, if there were a good on-line bulletin board, so growers/producers could communicate their where and when and what kind of transport they needed, perhaps it could lighten their market burden. So, said the manager, find me someone to design the app who can give us a good price…

We clamour for local food, but many aren’t willing to pay the cost of it, and the farmers are caught in a squeeze. Perhaps modern methods can give this “old-fashioned” market idea new life and increased resilience.

With the peaches and blueberries I bought on Tuesday I made a couple of cakes: my skillet cake standard. I say "standard" but of course each time the cake is different, as I use a variety of flours (this time all Red Fife) and flavourings and toppings. I included a few wild blueberries in the cake batter, and I also cooked peaches briefly in white wine with more blueberries, then spooned them onto the cakes when they were half-cooked. Delicious. I like the unpredictability, the fresh discovery each time I make the skillet cakes, as I vary ingredients and proportions. It’s such a forgiving recipe, the best kind. I leave fine patisserie and over-precision to those who love it. Give me Home baking and a casual approach any day.

And on the subject of fruit, I had a large basket of blueberries to work with, not wild ones, this week. We’ve been eating handfuls of them as a snack at all times of day. But even so there were still a lot left yesterday and I was worried that they would start going off. So I tossed them into a pot with a very little bit of water and some sugar and cooked them a little. The intensification of flavour was fabulous. There definitely is a good argument for cooking some fruit – not raspberries or sweet cherries, but rhubarb, blueberries, sometimes peaches…

And more fruit talk: I have some sour cherries frozen, from a few weeks ago. I want to figure out a moraba (preserved fruit) recipe for them, to try to come close to the fabulous carnelian cherry moraba I tasted in Georgia.

Of course I am kind of rolling a rock uphill here. First, sour cherries and not the same as carnelian cherries, which, in fact, are not “cherries” at all, though they look like brighter red, slightly elongated cherries. (Their Latin name is Cornus mas and they are in the dogwood family; here’s a link http://www.wildmanstevebrill.com/Plants.Folder/CarnelianCherry.html)

I’ve seen them growing at the agricultural research station in Mount Vernon, in Washington State (where the Kneading Conference West is held each year – this year it’s September 12 to 14, and will be great), and wonder if any of you have worked with them.

Despite the rock-uphill aspect, I think it’s worth a try, this recipe testing/development with sour cherries, for morabas can be eaten as preserved fruits, but also, my favorite thing, their sweetened intensely fruit-tasting syrup can be used as a concentrate to make a delicious drink, essence of summer in the winter. Or you can drizzle the syrup over ice cream or use it to glaze a cake or…!

PUSHING THE LIMITS OF SUMMER, & MORE

The end of July this year feels like the end of summer. I’m trying to push the thought back, vigorously! Perhaps it’s just that after intense summer heat and monsoonal rains, the weather is cooler, a hint of autumn in mid-summer? Perhaps it’s that I have not been home for most of this month and was busy and under the gun with deadlines for much of June?

I’m back in Toronto, after a July full of travel and movement.  And I’m glad to be home, with no immediate plans to go anywhere farther than an hour out of town.

As I’ve reflected on the way this summer has spooled away and left me feeling I’ve missed out on it, I’ve come to realise that I think about summer much in the same way that I used to anticipate a weekend. That is, when I visualise the summer, I somehow have a feeling, a magical feeling, that it is of infinite length and contains infinite possibilities. When I worked as a lawyer, a time when weekends of one day or two were sharply etched beacons, on Thursday evening or Friday morning I would have a long loose list of all that I wanted to do on the weekend. And then come Sunday night I’d face once again the dismaying realisation that most of what I had imagined or visualised had not come to pass.

In the same way, summer in anticipation carries the promise of infinite possibility. This surely goes back to childhood, when summer was the liberation from the routines of the school year. And our school holidays were so long that summer did always feel wonderfully “infinitely” long and luxurious. Some part of me seems to expect that still.

Hence my feelings of dismay each year in late July or early August when I realise how much of the summer has passed by…and how little of it remains. It’s not the hot weather, it’s the feeling of long days and infinite possibility that is precious: time not measured out but available in generous dollops to spend with friends or reading books or just in blissful unawareness of its passing.

Yes, I guess I should grow up and stop this magical thinking…but I am rather attached to it. Better to have to face and swallow disappointment each year than to never have the exhilarating feeling that anything and everything is possible.

Speaking of possibility, it seems that some of us do not find it possible to engage with new technology. Those who can are a different species: they experiment with dials and instructions and figure out how to, for example make good use of their smart-phone. This was brought home to me the other day when I was in Maine. I was driving with my friend Nancy in her Prius and wanted to turn the fan off. “I can turn it down but I don’t know how to turn it off” she said. “It’s stupid because I’ve had the car for three years.” Some time later another friend, Ed, was with us in the car, and I suggested to Nancy that she ask him to figure out how to turn off the fan. He fiddled for a moment and bingo! there it was. Solved.

My theory about these things is that Nancy and I and many others like us, mostly not a young crowd, I admit, resist the kind of rat-in-a-maze learning, the trial and error button-pushing, that is required to explore and figure out our smart phones, computer programs, etc. I am happy to play around a little, to take a run at a tech problem. But the process of learning a series of steps that someone has designed? I balk. If someone tells me how to do it, I’m fine. But somehow I resist engaging with the trial-and-error- with-the-machine kind of learning that many people, especially the young, do effortlessly.

It’s lucky for me that I know a number of young people who are generous and tolerant and willing to bail me out of tech impasses. The most recent was a situation where I upgraded something on my Mac desktop and it resulted in my Word and related programs refusing to load. Argh! But there was a rescuer named Thomas, who kindly figured things out.

When I think about the why? of all this, I think it’s an impatience with a situation that requires trial and error but has little or no content or inherent interest to me, except the need to get it to work.

People like Nancy and me would like to be told or shown how to work our tech devices rather than being left to be beginners stumbling along. And because we refuse that process, we get further and further behind, we lose the skill to do trial and error figuring out, we become more dependent on others.

But in the kitchen both she and I are prepared to figure things out and work by trial and error. We both like that process. In the kitchen we are in search of understanding what’s going on, whereas with technology it’s all a blackbox. And so we lack both curiosity and patience for working out the how-to.  

Sorry to be so pedestrian in this post so far. But I've been mulling about these things and wanted to explore them on the page. 

I haven’t talked at all about the fun I had at the Kneading Conference in Skowhegan. I drove down with my dear friends Dawn Woodward and Ed Rek of Evelyn’s Crackers, and they and I and Nancy Jenkins of Camden, stayed with Barbara Sullivan, a wild and wonderful artist, and had loads of great conversations and engaged with each other and many more friends old and new.

We gave a tandoor workshop that was fun and oh-so-interesting for us as well as for those who came. So many people put their hand into the oven to slap a bread on the hot wall.  So many people gained confidence.

If you have an interest in sustainable agriculture, bread, milling, oven building, etc, then you should seriously consider coming to the Kneading confernece in Skowhegan next July, or else travelling to northern Washington State for the Kneading Conference West in the Skagit Valley this September. Being immersed in grain-related talk and learning is so satisfying. And grounding too.

Once you’re in Skowhegan, or in the Skagit Valley, you’re so close to sea coast and wonderfully beautiful natural environments (and great wild-gathered food), that it would be a pity not to take an extra day or two to explore. We ended up eating lobster at The Slipway in Thomaston Maine on Friday night – worth every minute of the long drive back the next day.

That’s the answer of course to the summer problem: just extend yourself, take risks, pack in as much fun and interesting activity as you can. Do not pace yourself. Don’t be sensible, if you have any choice in the matter. And suddenly summer becomes elastic, full of rich events and fruitful possibilities.

A SPEEDING FAREWELL TO LA BELLE FRANCE

In the TGV speeding north toward Paris. Fields of ripe pale-gold wheat punctuated by lines of bushy trees, the occasional village ith tints of grey and ochre,. Earlier, as we raced through Provence, there were fields of sunflowers, facing east and aglow, and the shining golden straw stubble of freshly harvested wheat, and then rain in Lyon at our brief station stop. The sun is back out now, the colours the slightly dull green of full summer, the grasses by the verge already yellow and drY.

I was sorry to say good-bye to the little stone gite this morning just before dawn, and to its owner, the graceful Elsabeth. I’d be happy to return. Things I’ve learned: Not to buy olives without tasting them, ever (I bought olives de Nyons at Tarascon market that looked fine, and I love Nyons olives, but were tired and tasteless); to get up before dawn to catch earliest light and coolness, a truth I know from elsewhere but needed to be reminded of; tht a simple sandwich of good baguette buttered with good ham is better than almost anything; that I would rather be in a town or a city, to people-watch and wander, then driving through countryside, however lovely; that cherries in Provence can be as delicious and amazing as Ontario cherries; that a good religieuse still tempts me where other sweets and pastries do not; that I really enjoy the polite phrases and “formules” in France that grease the wheels of everyday - “bonne journee Madame” on leaving a shop etc.; that citron presse is still my preferred drink at a café, by far.

And so, in the TGV, which somehow has no wi-fi, a curious omission in this ultra-modern efficient France, we’ve made our last stop; the next one is Charles de Gaulle airport, where there’ll be a bit of a dash to Air Canada.

I bought a book for the plane, this year’s winner of the Prix Femina, which so far is wonderful. It’s  a novel by Patrick Deville called Peste & Cholera, set across the first half of the twentieth century, in France and Vietnam, about a medical researcher who worked with Pasteur. I am already engrossed and enchanted.

Now posting this from the airport, before boarding the plane.

Adieu belle France…

MORE ON THE MILLIPEDES INVASION...

The following may well fall into the category of "things you never wnated to know". If so, just skip it and move along to something more appetizing.

Now that I have better computer access (power to the computer, plus some wi-fi at last) I've found out a little more about the black millipedes that seem to be swarming here, in the morning and again the evening 9described in my previous post). Here's a link: http://toutunmondedansmonjardin.perso.neuf.fr/EN/pages_EN/tachypodoiulus_niger_EN.htm
which explains that these common black European millipedes like damp places and calcareous soils. The photos give a good idea of what each one looks like, but not of how wild it is to see flocks of them moving across the terrace outside the house.

And here's an article about a black millipede invasion in Scotland:
http://www.scotsman.com/news/invasion-of-the-millipedes-1-1432060
Sounds ghastly.

The French name is Iule (pronounced ee-oule). The woman whose gite I'm staying in, Elisabeth, explained that they are around for about a month (it all just started) and that the problem with them began about ten years ago. That's when the authorities told everyone in Provence that they needed to cut their grasses and undergrowth, to reduce the risk of fire. Somehow this has led to a surge in the numbers of iules, and also to a displacement of them from the fields to the areas around people's houses.

Every place has its advantages and it downsides. Toronto has winter and snow and a few other issues. Provence, while beautiful and romantic, has scorpions and a few other goodies, including these non-biting, non-hurting but somewhat creepy millipedes.