Watermelon Mint Sorbet

"It's been a gloomy, rainy June," said Tim the other night. His first really gloomy, rainy June in Washington—the last four Junes since he moved here have been so sunny and warm that he's never believed me that gloomy and rainy are usually synonymous with June, and summer doesn't start until July 5.

I'm ready for the sun to come back now. So I'm trying to lure it back with summery things like this watermelon mint sorbet. I don't have an ice cream maker, but I recently discovered that's so not necessary when you start with frozen bananas. Has anyone else tried one-ingredient banana ice cream? Its worth a try if only to watch the transformation of chunky bananas into smooth and creamy stuff that looks exactly like ice cream, and then to eat it and try to convince your mouth that yes, this is only banana. I found it so rich and sweet that I could hardly finish a one-banana serving. Weird. But it's a perfect base for less creamy fruits like watermelon, and jazzed up with some fresh mint and lime juice, this sorbet tastes just as good on a dreary summer evening as a hot one. 

Watermelon Mint Sorbet

Makes 4-6 servings 

2 pounds de-rinded watermelon (this was a quarter of a giant watermelon for me)

2 bananas, sliced thin

1/2 cup chopped mint

3 tablespoons lime juice 

Slice the watermelon 1/4/-inch thick and cut the slices into small pieces. Line two sheet pans with plastic wrap and lay watermelon and bananas out in a single layer. Cover them with plastic wrap and freeze them for 3 hours, or overnight (the watermelon freezes solid in an hour or less, but I found the bananas needed longer than that). 

In an 8-cup food processor, blend half the frozen watermelon and half the frozen bananas with the lime juice and mint until smooth and sorbet-like, about 4-5 minutes. Add the remaining watermelon and bananas in small amounts and keep blending until super smooth, another 4-5 minutes. 

Mine was the consistency of soft serve at this point. You can return the sorbet to the freezer to harden up again, or eat it right away. 

Mint flecks: I don't really mind the mint flecks, but I think starting by blending just the lime juice and chopped mint in the bottom of the food processor, then adding half the fruit, would get the mint smaller or even make it disappear. 

A Hack Photo Studio, and Attempts at Food Photography

I don't post photos from the kitchen here often, if ever. Food photography has always felt way out of my reach. I can wield my iPhone camera outside when I want to, but I have always been intimidated by the flashy props and chic styling that every food blogger seems to use, and baffled by how to harness the powers of natural lighting. My house is under giant trees. On most days, except perhaps in the summer, there is very little good natural light for taking pictures of food.

But. Recently, I vowed to dip my toes into the ocean. Now I can't even remember how it started, but the other day I found myself deep in the Google hole of food photography tips, mainly just trying to find out how to rig a hack studio for cheap.

My new "studio" is a hack of the hack and cost $23. A 500-watt halogen work light sits behind an eviscerated cardboard box plastered with a cut-up Value Village t-shirt stuck to the box with some double-sided stickies (from a box of stick-to-the-wall hangers that happen to pull paint off my walls and have been sitting on my desk since, um, we moved). Two big white pieces of cardboard act as reflectors.

I was kind of nervous as I set it up, remembering Pinterest art project disasters of years past. But amazingly, it worked--in that it provides a neutral, clean light source. A blank slate. Really, a whole new world: now that I have good light, I can fiddle with shooting photos of the recipes I make at home all the time, and then share them on the blog, which I've avoided doing purely because of the photo barrier.

I'm going to keep it low budget. Maybe I'll take a trip to Value Village for ten dollar's worth of props--some colorful dishes, some simple white plates, some metal measuring cups (mine are plastic and I don't like looking at them in real life, let alone a photo). But that's all. This is an iPhone camera type of studio.

So I like the light, but the whole food styling thing feels really foreign to me. Like, the photo above is so unnatural. That is not how I make eggs. I did not actually even make these eggs. I threw this together as a studio trial run at 8:30 last night and then put everything away in the fridge and went to bed. And because I know that this photo wasn't taken on a sunny morning, with coffee brewing and a pan heating up in the background and someone to enjoy the omelette with sitting at the table, hungry--but rather a cloudy darkening evening and a quiet house and the cat trying to climb into the light box, then scratching on the guest room door when I put him away--it doesn't have much magic to me. Part of the magic of a food photograph is that you're transported into a story--the food entices you into a scene, into someone else's kitchen or patio, which you probably don't even see, but the scene fools you into thinking it's there. The food becomes more than just food.

Happily, this morning, I made these very omelettes and Tim and I ate them while looking out at the misty pasture and drinking coffee. Is that the story this photo tells? I can't decide.

Veggies of June

Just as of last week, I've been starting to really feel like the garden is in--like we have enough vegetables to stop buying them from the store, to stop planning too much for dinner ahead of time. Dinner is anything with greens, turnips, radishes, shallots, sometimes beets, now steadily peas, both snap and shell. Add a can of salmon and an olive oil/balsamic dressing; or cook up some egg noddles and stir in soy sauce and sesame oil. Voila. It is good. 

And yet I've been hung up on vegetables of the future. Our sad, tiny onions.  The beans and the leaf spot on some of their leaves. Our tomatoes suffering in the upside down weather—cool and rainy now that they're getting heavy with green fruit. 

I actually cried about it—in fury at the rain and clouds that stayed away all spring, when I wanted them for peas and lettuce and radishes, and at the sun that beat down on everything endlessly until now, when it would actually be more helpful. 

And then I got a grip. Or, I'm trying to get a grip. Trying to rearrange my focus on the present. On sautés with snap peas, on panfuls of just-hot shell peas tossed with butter. On pillowy mashed turnips. On radish pickles and lots and lots of salad. I can do my best to help the rest of the garden along, but I can't let worries about August keep me from enjoying June. 

Rye Brownies

This winter my dad sent me a link to Melissa Clark's rye brownies. We get rye flour sometimes from our Bluebird Grains CSA, so I tried these brownies for a party in January. It was love at first bite. These are not kid brownies, and these are not Costco brownies (that Ghiradelli mix—which I do like). These are fudgy, dense, and dark, with a rye snap in the flavor that makes me never want to consume brownies made from all-purpose flour again. I don't think they're for everyone, or even every brownie lover, but they are for me. My soul brownie. 

But they do call for a lot of baking chocolate, and I didn't want to have to buy fair trade organic baking chocolate as often as I wanted to be able to make these brownies (it is just too expensive to be a basic pantry item for me). Fair trade organic cocoa powder is less expensive and goes farther. So I set out to recreate the rye brownie recipe using cocoa powder only. 

I've started keeping a cooking journal where I scribble down recipes—successes and failures and musings and dinner idea lists. I added my first cocoa powder rye brownie recipe to the journal; it was a conglomeration of Melissa Clark's recipe modified by ratios I saw in cocoa powder brownie recipes online. Besides the ratios, I chose to whip the egg whites separately from everything else and fold them into the batter at the last minute, to try to balance out the lack of rise in rye flour. 

Somewhat disappointingly, for I was in a test-kitchen mood, this recipe was completely and totally satisfying. It was Valentines Day, and Tim was sick with a bad cold, and we were watching What's Eating Gilbert Grape, which he had promised me would fulfill my desire for a light and romantic movie to watch that night—and it totally didn't, but it was such an amazing movie that I didn't care, and the brownies were rich and dark and chewy and we ate the whole pan (it was a mini pan). 

But I couldn't just declare my brownie recipe perfect after one iteration. So for the next few months I tweaked and fiddled, tried extra eggs (too cakey), all coconut oil instead of butter (awful! Oddly crispy on the outside!), and a few other things. I kept coming back to that first recipe, with one change: no whipped egg whites. That way, the recipe takes only one bowl, about ten minutes to put together, and zero fuss. It's the kind of recipe that I can now make on whim, with no notice and no trips to the store for several $10 bars of chocolate. Like tonight, when we decided to go on a picnic at the river and I felt that we must have rye brownies to eat. Thirty minutes later, the brownies were done along with the picnic dinner and we were off. At the river's edge, after a nettle-y bushwack and wander through a mostly maple forest with ginormous old-growth stumps here and there, we consumed the brownies and I declared the recipe done. It's a monumental recipe for me—the first baking one I've patched together myself, taken all sorts of notes about and thought about many times, and tried and tested enough to feel confident in it. 

So, without further ado:

Rye Brownies

10 tablespoons butter, plus more for greasing pan

3/4 cup white sugar

3/4 cup + 2 tablespoons cocoa powder

2 eggs

1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract 

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup Bluebird Grains rye flour

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon baking powder

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F.

Combine the butter, white sugar, and cocoa powder in the bowl of a double boiler (or a heat-proof bowl set over a saucepan of boiling water). Stir until the butter is melted and the sugar and cocoa powder are smoothly incorporated. Set it aside to cool for a minute or two while you grease an 8x10-inch baking pan.

Then add the eggs, vanilla, and brown sugar, and stir to combine. Finally, add the rye flour, salt, and baking powder. I mound them on top of the butter-cocoa mixture, whisk just the dry stuff with a fork (my lazy way of avoiding getting out another bowl), and then stir it all together. 

Pour into the prepared pan, use a spatula to spread it all evenly, and bake for 23-25 minutes (23 will be fudgy, and your husband might say "these aren't cooked all the way," but you will be happy) until a fork inserted in the middle comes out clean(ish). 

Update, January 22, 2023:

In search of a brownie recipe for Tim’s birthday, I remembered this old recipe and dusted off the blog to check it out. It seemed just right to try again: a one-bowl recipe is even more appealing these days, and we have a plethora of rye flour for our weekly sourdough loaf. I followed the recipe exactly, with one exception—adding a generous handful of chocolate chips. 

Goodness, it turned out delicious! Rich, fudgy, and just the right amount of sweet to counter the rye flavor.

I was wrong on only one point. I said “these are not kid brownies.” Did I have any kids then? Who was I to declare that? My four year old gobbled them up just as happily as me and Tim. 

Maybe in the next iteration I’ll experiment with making them dairy- and egg-free, so my littlest one can partake. 

For now, these are a decadent treat that I will reinstate as my go-to brownie. 

Tarragon Radish Quick Pickles

These days, peas are just around the corner. I ate one yesterday, on the last day of May. While the plants have struggled in the hot spring weather and are still short, some just a foot and a half tall, and even though the snap peas didn't germinate fantastically and look scraggly along the fence, with big gaps between them, it was a delicious and satisfying moment. So we might not have as many peas as we hoped--I am happy for what we have! Last year, we didn't plant any.

We planted thirty-two tomato plants outside last night, and the greenhouse--now home to eight tomato plants--feels so spacious sans seeding tables and the mini forest of potted tomatoes that lived on top of them for two months. Don't tell me forty tomato plants is overboard. I still don't trust that they all will make it, not after last year's rotting-tomato-disease fiasco, and this way I am pretty sure, barring wholesale disaster, we will at least have some. And if they all end up producing, I will achieve tomato nirvana.

Meanwhile, we're eating lots of cherry belle radishes, hailstone radishes, and purple-top turnips. When you catch the turnips young, maybe golf-ball size, they are shockingly sweet and sugary, with just a hint of a snap in the aftertaste.

But I wanted to write about cherry belle radishes. These beauties mature after just twenty-five days, which goes by so fast that it's easy to miss them in their prime--as I almost did with the full-grown cache I discovered yesterday. Besides being quick to grow, they are low maintenance and so satisfyingly red and round and juicy. It seems almost a shame to do anything to them besides slice them into a salad--as much as we like sautéing them quickly in butter and eating them just barely translucent and still a little crunchy, any cooking turns that firehouse red color a sort of lame pink. Pickling does the same; the pigments stain their pure-white insides pinkish, too, after about twenty-four hours.

But I can't resist quick pickles--a first milestone in the garden season, when you have some extra to "put up" rather than just enough for a lunch salad or dinner side. I have to put "put up" in quotation marks because, let's face it, the jar will be empty in less than a week!

Tarragon Radish Quick Pickles 
The fresh tarragon adds a hint of licorice, and the longer you let the pickles sit in the fridge, the more licorice-y they will taste. 

I like these pickles as a condiment for stir-fried noodles, especially if you add a little hoisin sauce--the sweetness of the hoisin plus the tangy tartness of the radishes is addictive. Or fold them into a salad with avocado, Gorgonzola cheese, and almonds—the pickles brighten all that richness to make a perfect dinner on a hot June evening. 

About 20 cherry belle radishes, cleaned and sliced thin
A few sprigs fresh tarragon
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup red wine vinegar
1/4 cup honey
A pinch of red pepper flakes

Wash and dry a pint jar, then fill it with radishes. Stuff the tarragon down the sides. In a small saucepan, combine the water, red wine vinegar, honey, and red pepper flakes, and bring just to a boil. Pour the vinegar mixture over the radishes, fit a lid on the jar, and let cool to room temperature. Refrigerate for twenty-four hours before eating.

The quick pickles will keep for a week or two in the fridge.