Strawberry Preserve Cake
Gifts from the Oven
A friend showed up at the farm this weekend with some luscious desserts: Strawberry Preserve Cake and a Cheese Cake topped with Caramel and Pecans. Being a superb baker, she knows the key to any dessert is eye appeal. As they say: “We eat with our eyes first.” As you can tell by the photos, both desserts passed the eye test with flying colors.
Cheese Cake with Caramel and Pecans. This cheesecake can be made in about 20 minutes.
My baking friend found the recipe years ago on a box of Swans Down Cake flour. It was the perfect spring cake—pink inside and out. While I worked at getting just the right light and composition in the photos, hungry family and guests were drooling over my shoulder. I took dozens of pictures before agreeing to pass slices to admiring onlookers.
Gifts from Mother Nature
Robin had hoped to find some morels. She and my five-year-old granddaughter traipsed through the woods, stalking the wild fungi, but with no success. Unable to find mushrooms, the intrepid searchers decided to transplant a few small dogwoods. Dogwood saplings were definitely more abundant than the morels this weekend. We transplanted a few near the farm house and brought a couple back to St.Louis in the hopes of getting them to grow. (I use the editorial “we,” since I serve in an advisory capacity nowadays when it comes to earth moving.)
Later a neighbor came by with a sack of gorgeous morels from a stash of more than 200 found that day around Cuba, Missouri. To go with it, she had a few frozen packages of recently caught Alaskan salmon. Ahh, the best of land and sea.
A neighbor points out the earthy, woodsy fragrance of a good morel. My granddaughter holds the only mushroom she found this weekend. Since we were uncertain about what kind it was, we didn’t eat that one.
Life lesson: It’s good to get your hands dirty for a worthy purpose. Here my granddaughter plants basil. (It’s planting with turquoise nails, not a green thumb, that make the difference.)
Weeding and planting: the harbingers of spring.
The Gift of Friends
It “took a village” of friends, but we got a few tomatoes in the ground and dug up and re-planted a large, overgrown flower bed next to the house. It’s surprising what you can accomplish with a half-dozen willing and fun-loving friends, who don’t mind having a few aches and pains the next day. Luckily, we had to come home Sunday evening, or I might have gotten into cleaning closets.
Ethel, my friend of many years, brought me one of her handwoven dish towel with the suggestion that I could use it in my food photography. And I most certainly will. Another friend, who designs jewelry, returned a necklace she had repaired for me months earlier, that we had both forgotten. It was like getting a new piece of jewelry.
Julia Child called Chicken Fricassee a dish that is “half way between a saute and a stew.” The classic French concoction was said to have been Abraham Lincoln’s favorite.
As to food, my friend Jane in California participated in the weekend from afar, when she suggested Chicken Fricassee and sent the recipe she remembered fondly from her years in Belgium. I decided that our guest with the French-speaking grandmother was culturally best equipped to reproduce the dish, which he did superbly. Grand-mère would have been proud of him. Though it required more kitchen time than you like to expend on a pretty weekend, it was doggone good.
On to cookouts.
This vintage windmill was a gift from my kids years ago, one that arrived in many pieces and took some time to reconstruct. I love watching it whirl as I look from my kitchen widow. And it works, pumping water into a couple of nearby ponds when they get low.
One final “gift” of spring. I discovered on returning to St. Louis, that I had picked up my first seed ticks of the season. Now that’s a “gift” I could’ve done without.
