Nectarine pie

Before I left town for the weekend I decided to leave my wife with a homemade pie.  I started working off of this SmittenKitchen recipe for peach creme fraiche pie, slowly acquiring the ingredients and secreting them in the kitchen so as not to spoil the surprise.  Oh, I used nectarines instead of peaches, because they looked marginally less despondent at the grocery store.  And our oven is on the cold side, so it took forever to bake.  And please remember that other than the cherry slab pie pictured in the banner right now, I'm pretty sure this is the first pie I've ever baked.  But it wasn't so bad, really.  I might conquer this fear of baking yet!

How to puree an entire watermelon

The first time I pureed an entire watermelon, it was in the course of making Smitten Kitchen's watermelon lemonade (which was almost as fantastic as Deb's pictures look).  For our housecooling party, we decided to make aguas frescas, so it seemed like another pureed watermelon was in order.

Now, that first pureed watermelon was definitely harder than I expected.  The chief difficulty is that we don't have a blender, only a cuisinart food processor.  Food processors can do almost anything blenders can, except deal neatly with large quantities of liquid.  Well let me tell you:  a pureed watermelon is a large quantity of liquid.

This time around, I had a flash of insight-- the immersion blender we had just gotten as a wedding present!  No problem.  The only hard thing I foresaw was cutting all that melon off the rind.  [That problem, it turned out was easily solved-- just cut the melon in thick, round slices with a big chef's knife, and then cut the rind away from the outside.]

However, I had accidentally bought a melon that was not seedless.  This required a colander and a lot of paper towels.  [See right.]  We left a bunch of the watermelon to strain and went off to see a movie, and it worked pretty well.  I squeezed a bunch of the pulp through the paper towels at the end to make sure we weren't missing too much of the good stuff.

So, learn from my many mistakes!

How to puree an entire watermelon:

1. Buy a seedless watermelon.
   
2. Cut it into slices with a big knife.
3. Cut the rind off of each slice and throw it away.
4. Roughly chop the watermelon flesh and put it in a big bowl.
5. Attack it mercilessly with an immersion blender.
6. Strain it only if you are the kind of killjoy who won't accept pulp in your orange juice.
7. Enjoy!

Best Two Sentences I Read Today

I hope to get back in the kitchen as soon as humanly possible after the baby is born, and the only way to get me back in the kitchen is to let me get hungry for something that nobody makes the way I want them to. It is the only reason I cook, it’s the only reason I’ve ever wanted to cook and it’s the only thing that’s going to get me to cook when feasting on pudgy baby cheeks no longer cuts it, as impossible as that is to imagine.

This is the source. This blog will soon be re-titled "Crescat reads Smitten Kitchen."

Are Cookbooks Dead?

One of CrescatK's other two readers says, in a comment below, "it would seem now, more than any time else, cookbooks are dead." I'm not so sure.

It's true that 5 nights out of 6, I cook dinner from memory, instinct, or necessity without cracking a cookbook. (As I have been dodging gainful employment for weeks, my mind is not currently on these weeknight-I'm-starving-and-lets-get-it-on-the-table dinners, but they'll surface on this blog sooner or later.) And it's also true that when I do turn to a recipe-- or (rarer still) feel inspired by a recipe to actually go out and acquire the ingredients to make it-- it is just as often one I found on the internet (almost always SmittenKitchen). But I still have a stock of cookbooks I use regularly.

To wit: How to Cook Everything, How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, Fish, and, more recently, The Perfect Scoop. (The clever reader will notice what those first three books have in common.) I hope that someday Julia Child's book goes on that list, and at some point I intend to finally conquer my twin fears of baking and of desserts, but I don't yet have a cookbook I fully trust on baking. [N.B.: I feel as if total trust is required to conquer this new and feared area of cooking-- I'm not yet in a position to glance at a cake recipe and know that I should cut the sugar in half, add an egg yolk, and expect the finished product to be better. Thus far, I trust Deb and my wife and no one else.]

Now, the commenter still makes a very good point-- that serious cooks are much more likely to use the internet rather than a cookbook much of the time. Even if cookbooks are not yet dead, the genre is sure dying. Just look at the cookbook section in your local Barnes & Noble. Nearly every one in the store is either pointlessly gimmicky ("95 vegan things you can make in a pressure cooker") or full of too many pictures and too little cookery (aka "food porn"). These items should be moved to "self-help" and "art" respectively.

But I'm not sure how much worse the world of cookbooks is than it ever was. I recently read Julia Child's retelling of her attempts to publish Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and even then she and her co-authors were being pressured by their publishers to make their books more like mainstream mass-market American cookbooks. Maybe we only notice because blogs are finally providing some competition.

Tomato-Corn Pie

I am never actually going to cook this. But I still think about it almost every day since it's been posted on Smitten Kitchen.