With spring-y weather we are looking forward to enjoying the weekend. There is nothing like taking a leisurely stroll through a green market to remind us of the bounty of good and healthy foods our farmers grow here on our beautiful blue jewel of a planet. Remember to bring your own bags!
So you can go to the markets, support your local farmers and young environmentalists (who are our future), buy some delish strawberries and go home and whip up some strawberry fool à la Mark Bittman.
Strawberry Fool
Yield 4 servings
Time 30 minutes
Ingredients
• 1 pint strawberries
• 1/2 cup sugar, or to taste
• 1 cup heavy cream
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract, optional
1. Hull strawberries, then wash them and chop into 1/4-inch-thick pieces. Toss with half the sugar, and wait 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until they give up their juices.
2. Place half the strawberries and all the juice in a blender, and purée. Pour purée back in bowl with chopped strawberries.
3. Whip the cream with remaining sugar and vanilla until cream is stiff and holds peaks easily. Fold berries and cream together, and serve immediately, or refrigerate for up to two hours.
https://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/10/the-minimalist-strawberry-fool/?ref=theminimalist
Whipped cream can enhance almost everything. (Clotted cream is pretty good stuff, too.) It masks lumpy bumpy chocolate cakes, while adding sweet deliciousness to the tart bite of fresh strawberries. On top of lemon pie, with a sprinkling of sea salt, you will be transported to the seaside. And remember how it made Jell-o all the better? That was a real life math lesson – learning how to divide the Jell-o and the whipped cream evenly, so you could make the whipped cream last to the very final scraping of the bowl.
The recipe below was one of the most e-mailed stories on NPR last year. We made a lot of whipped cream last weekend in the Food Friday Test Kitchen. Besides testing strawberry fools we also baked this lemon pie. We used to live in North Carolina and had a sudden hankering to go to the beach, but we realized we had the heady responsibility of seeing how whipped cream tasted with this combination of sweet and salt and lemon. (In my distant Jell-o past my mother made Jell-O box mix lemon meringue pies, with buttery, flaky homemade piecrusts and cloud-light and thunderhead-high meringue tops.) This recipe called for an unlikely piecrust – smashed Saltines mixed with butter and sugar. It was fun to use the rolling pin to crush the Saltines – Martha would have counted out the crackers individually and then carefully pulverized them in a Cuisinart. (Wearing Hermès.) I believe you need to wring all the fun you can out of every situation, so I smashed away. (In Old Navy.)
Bill Smith’s Atlantic Beach Pie
This is a newer version of a pie that is commonly served at seafood restaurants on the North Carolina coast. Chef Bill Smith has been serving it at and at special events for about a year. He calls it the easiest recipe in the world.
Makes one pie
For the crust:
1 1/2 sleeves of saltine crackers (I guesstimated this – I figured if I could devide a ration of Jell-o to whipped cream I could eyeball the correct number of Saltine’s – though I bet it would give Martha a fit of apoplexy!)
1/3 to 1/2 cup softened unsalted butter
3 tablespoons sugar
For the filling:
1 can (14 ounces) sweetened condensed milk
4 egg yolks
1/2 cup lemon or lime juice or a mix of the two
Fresh whipped cream and coarse sea salt for garnish
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Crush the crackers finely, but not to dust. You can use a food processor or your hands. Add the sugar, then knead in the butter until the crumbs hold together like dough. Press into an 8 inch pie pan. Chill for 15 minutes, then bake for 18 minutes or until the crust colors a little.
While the crust is cooling (it doesn’t need to be cold), beat the egg yolks into the milk, then beat in the citrus juice. It is important to completely combine these ingredients. Pour into the shell and bake for 16 minutes until the filling has set. The pie needs to be completely cold to be sliced. Serve with fresh whipped cream and a sprinkling of sea salt.
Get out and enjoy the sunshine this weekend. Be nice to the environment. Kiss a farmer. Go for a walk so you can justify eating whipped cream. Enjoy yourself!
“The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.”
-John Cheever
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