With June, strawberry season comes into full swing in Ohio. I love this… As with most produce, locally grown is so much better than shipped in, as the produce can ripen before being picked. Plus, I like that I can talk to the farmer that actually grew the food.

I got strawberries on the way home from work this year, at a farm north of Xenia, Ohio, from Doug Anderson of Anderson Farms. I took a photo of him for a Flickr project called ‘100 Strangers’, where participants agree to take photos of 100 people they don’t know, but they have to ask the people for permission first. For some, it’s an exercise in talking to unknown people; for me, it’s just trying to take better photos of people quickly.

Back to the strawberries… The strawberries I picked up with small and uniform in size and color. Obviously not big, commercially grown berries… a good thing! They were ripe when I got them, unlike grocery store berries typically are.

The shortcake recipe is simple and easy. I prefer biscuit-style shortbread, though my wife prefers something lighter. I think the thicker texture soaks up the strawberry juice really well. The basic recipe is:

• 2 cups all purpose flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 4 tbsp cold butter, cut into small chunks
• 4 tbsp cold water

Put the dry ingredients in a mixing bowl and add the chunks of butter a little at a time, either cutting in with a pastry blender or mixing by hand until the texture is kind of like cornmeal. Add in just enough water to form a stiff dough.

I baked this on my Big Green Egg, so I had it fired up already and running at 425 degrees F. I formed it into individual shortbreads, but it can be baked as a rectangle, and I put it on parchment to make it easier to take on and off the stone on the egg. To sweeten the shortbread, if desired, it can be topped with a bit of sugar after it comes off the cooker, after being brushed with melted butter (optional). The shortbread takes 12-15 minutes to bake.

While the shortbread was baking outside, my wife came up with a great way to prep the strawberries. Instead of slicing each berry by hand, I used an egg slicer to evenly slice the berries. They were so sweet and juicy, I didn’t macerate them with sugar; I just left them as they were… sweet and juicy from the farm market!

To top the strawberry shortcake, I put heavy whipping cream in my stand mixer with some vanilla syrup, like what’s used for cappuccinos… about 2 tablespoons for a cup of cream. With the whisk attachment, I whipped the cream until it was nice and thick and formed soft peaks on the whisk when removed. Then I piled it on top of the strawberries.

This is one of the great things about summer in Ohio… The seasonal foods are great!  I can find decent strawberries other times, but they’re nothing compared to locally grown berries that are handpicked when ripe.

We’re just past Memorial Day weekend. I have to say that I’m a bit saddened that Memorial Day isn’t really observed for what it’s meant to honor, which is fallen U.S. soldiers. I don’t go out of my way to do a lot for the day, but I do think about the sacrifices made by others. Unfortunately, I saw a lot of other celebrations going on, too, that had nothing to do with that; people are just confused, I guess.

On Saturday, Pat of Patrick’s BBQ held his annual customer appreciation event by cooking anything that he could fit in his smoker (which is a whole lot). While there, I noticed a field of wildflowers, and I had to wander down to get a better look.

It is a long weekend, and it unofficially denotes the start of summer. We had incredible weather for Saturday and Sunday, with Monday not too awful. On Sunday, my dad and stepmother were in Ohio, and they spent the afternoon and evening with us, which was all the excuse I needed to put the XL Big Green Egg through it’s paces, just to see how it did with a variety of tasks.

Read the rest of this entry »

First of all, Happy New Year! I’ve been a bit preoccupied, but I’m finally posting again. My preoccupation has been Bucky McKatt (registered name is Congocoon Where Are My Buccaneers)

This is another in my ‘best ever’ line. My wife makes really good oatmeal cookies, but these are my favorite. That’s partly due to history, probably. I remember helping my mom make these when I was a kid. Keep in mind, when I say ‘best ever’, ‘best’ is subjective, and it mean the best ever whatever-it-is to me only. Your opinion may differ, and I’m okay with you being wrong (that’s a joke, people).

My Great Aunt Irva (pronounced Irvy) gave this recipe to my mom. Mom thinks the recipe may be over 100 years old, and may be from her grandmother. Aunt Irva was 99 when she passed away, so it’s not hard to imagine the recipe is that old or older. This is one of those oatmeal cookie recipes that uses powdered sugar and a glass to flatten the cookies before baking… When I was a kid, I got to help with that part.

When I eat one of these cookies, it makes me think of being a kid, no responsibilities, things were simple. These are just what God meant oatmeal cookies to be!

This is the unadulterated version; adding some butterscotch and chocolate chips is good, too. I’m not a fan of anyone trying to sneak raisins in my food, so I don’t opt for them, but if you like raisins, they can be added, too, or even some pecans or walnuts. But, just as with chocolate chip cookies being just chocolate chip cookies, there’s something pure about the base version that’s hard to beat.
Read the rest of this entry »

or My Favorite Thing My Wife Makes For Me That I Eat Too Much Of Too Quickly. But that title was too long, I thought.

I do most of the cooking around hte house, but my wife does make a couple of things, and I let her. I’m not about to start making pumpkin bars and have her decide not to do them anymore… I’m a lot of things, but stupid isn’t one of them.

The pumpkin bars themselves are from my wife’s grandmother, and they’re good, but my wife made them considerably better… by using butter! One truism I’ve discovered in life is that just about anything can be improved by adding one of two things: bacon and/or butter. Bacon in pumpkin bars wouldn’t quite fly, but these bars are right in the butter-improving zone.

The original recipe called for vegetable oil, but we were out, so she substituted, wisely, melted butter instead. Yum! The old recipe was fine, this and a few other slight changes really made a difference. Before this go around, the pumpkin bar part of the dessert was little more than a transport mechanism to get cream cheese icing to my taste buds. This time, the pumpkin bar is great on its own (but best with the cream cheese icing!). Read the rest of this entry »

Now that Food Photo 101 is started, I still don’t want to stop cooking and talking about cooking. With that, I realized I still haven’t posted about the bread I made for the wine party we had a couple of weeks ago.

The foie gras I made gave me the opportunity to try a new kind of bread, brioche. What is brioche? For those that don’t know that it’s a little slice of buttery heaven, here’s a formal definition:

bri·oche /ˈbrioʊʃ, -ɒʃ; Fr. briˈɔʃ/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[bree-ohsh, -osh; Fr. bree-awsh

n. A soft, light-textured bread made from eggs, butter, flour, and yeast and formed into a roll or a bun.

Really, that lists things in the wrong order; butter should be the first thing, because this bread is loaded with it! There’s almost as much butter as there is flour in this recipe.

I made the Rich Man’s Brioche, though there were 2 other versions, each with different levels of butter, adding other dairy to compensate (and be less costly when butter was harder to procure).

Read the rest of this entry »

Jaay Dunlap posted a chocolate chip cookie recipe in November 2006 on JustBaking.net that sounded good enough I wanted to try it, and, man alive, am I glad I did!

I’ve made these before, but never when I had the chance to get some shots of the process. The recipe is simple, and includes the same stuff that most any other recipe has. There’s sugar, egg, vanilla, baking soda, flour, salt and chocolate chips (or chunks in this case). Oh, I can’t orget the butter… There’s definitely butter in these puppies.

What is different is the proportions of the ingredients. This recipe calls for a 2:1 ratio of brown to white sugar. I want to try making this with all Turbinado sugar to see how that works, too.

Another major difference is that I’d always read to cream the butter, usually at room temperature, with the sugars. This recipe instead calls for using melted butter. (The formal recipe is listed at the bottom of this entry).

Read the rest of this entry »