Kitchen3N

Recipes and food fun from Apt 3N

Meyer Lemon Strawberry Lemonade

IMG_4823I’ve come a long way from the days of squeezing limes into a tall pitcher of water, and stirring in sugar until it dissolves. And stirring and stirring and stirring…

Lemon/limeades were usually reserved for Ramadan in my household. That meant we whipped up batches of the stuff without being able to taste it (since we were fasting) and without sticking to any sort of recipe (my mother never owned a recipe book). The results ran the gamut from mouth puckeringly tart to gaggingly sweet.

That won’t happen with this recipe. I won’t forget the looks on my guests’ faces when they broke their fast with this drink earlier this summer. Their eyes widened as they could not believe the incredible reward their taste buds received after a long day without food or drink.  IMG_4726This is an adaptation of a pretty straightforward Pioneer Woman recipe. I stuck to her proportions, but jazzed it up with some floral scented Meyer lemons, a simple syrup for easy dissolving, and ice for a quick cool down. I had never thought to puree strawberries in a food processor with sugar to get the strawberry part of a strawberry lemonade but it was so easy and so perfect. I think when you cook it down in a saucepan it has the tendency to thicken. This way it was perfectly smooth and pourable. IMG_4816 If you don’t have Meyer lemons in your grocery store, please proceed with regular lemons! If you do have Meyer lemons handy, you won’t regret it. They have such an amazing bouquet – floral, sweet. I’m not sure if you’ve ever noticed, but when you squeeze citrus, the essential oils mist up and out from the rind like a natural air freshener. When the oils of the Meyer lemons gets into the air, it perfumes the whole kitchen. Almost makes you want to take a bite out of it!

Summer’s not over as long as you’re making this drink! It HAS the power to keep summer going. Also, summer is not over until it’s my birthday. Seriously – last day of summer this year and I turn…twenty…I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.

Adapted from Pioneer Woman.

Ingredients

  • 1 pound strawberries, hulled
  • 3 cups sugar
  • 8 to 10 Meyer lemons
  • 9 cups water
  • 2 heaping cups ice

Directions

  1. In a medium saucepan, dissolve 2 cups sugar with 2 cups of water and the peel of 1 Meyer lemon* over medium heat. Stir occasionally. When dissolved, remove from heat and let cool.
  2. Meanwhile, blend the strawberries in a food processor with 1 cup of sugar until well blended. Set aside.
  3. Using a citrus juicer, or by hand (over a sieve to catch seeds and pulp), juice 8 to 10 Meyer lemons until you have 2 cups of lemon juice. Set aside.
  4. Remove lemon peel from simple syrup. In a large pitcher or drink dispenser combine lemon scented simple syrup, strawberry puree, lemon juice, remaining 7 cups of water and 2 cups of ice. Stir to combine. Add more water/sugar to taste.

*When peeling, take care not to get too much of the white part (pith) as that will make the simple syrup bitter.

Strawberry Rhubarb Hand Pies

IMG_4519I gave into peer pressure, guys. When the first ramps popped up in my instagram feed, I rushed to the Union Square Green Market to pick some up. Not too long after, I picked up some rhubarb without much idea about what I was going to do with it. I am all about eating seasonal foods, local, humane, natural, sustainable, etc. But sometimes the thing that’s in season isn’t exactly worth all the hype. Ramps are great and all. If you are less familiar with them, they are a green leafy vegetable available for a few short weeks in spring. They are sold leaves, stalk, bulb and all and have a lovely mild onion flavor. I loved them first time I used them, as a topping on my homemade pizza. More recently, I chopped them up and stewed them with some tomatoes. I even bought a ramp pesto that works wonders on a tomato mozzarella panino.

IMG_4486But I thought part of the point of seasonal foods was that they would be a bit more affordable? Because of their limited availability these items can be incredibly marked up. I vow for next year (and for later on this year), to wait until the end of a crop’s season to buy them. After the hype dies down, so does the price. And that, my friends, is how I internalize Supply and Demand (take that AP Microeconomics). IMG_4488I’m not posting an original recipe here today. I worked off a Smitten Kitchen recipe and am sharing my experience as a novice in hand pie assembly. This is after all a Web-Log. I am logging my forays into new foods and techniques.  IMG_4489Observation 1: Mamma mia that’s a lot of butter. 3 sticks. That’s an amount usually reserved for Ina’s Pecan Bars or the frosting for a 2 layer cake.

Observation 2: It was a pleasant salty, tangy, sweet and savory flavor experience. I thought the tartness of the rhubarb would be off-putting, but it worked well with the buttery-ness of the crust. I am so used to inundating my tart fruits with sugar (see Lemon Yogurt Cake) that my aging palette appreciated the change of pace. I actually misread the recipe and used 1/4 cup sugar for the filling as opposed to 1/3 cup. Oops. I did, however, intentionally add 1/4 tsp of salt. I ALWAYS need plenty of salt on my tangy fruits.

Observation 3: Make sure you have a good stainless steel saucepan to make this compote in. You have to leave it in the pot for 15 minutes, covered, so it is essential that it doesn’t stick to the sides or bottom. Do not try this on your Mother’s or Mother In Law’s 100 year old Imusa pot. Next time I might try it with black pepper or balsamic vinegar added to the fruit compote. Mmmm….IMG_4490IMG_4511I got to use my pastry blender for the first time. Or as my kids like to call it, The Monster. I had to resort to my salad bowl for mixing. You need a nice, big, wide bowl to work the dough in.  IMG_4514Although I regretted not making this with store bought pie dough (because of the million other things I had to do that in preparation for our weekend beach getaway), I can comfort myself by saying that a store bought pie dough would not have been made special with buttermilk and grapefruit zest. Small comforts when you’ve got fried chicken grease splattered all over your kitchen, a cold dough to work until flat, and a suitcase that just won’t pack itself!IMG_4516Pardon my cutting board’s appearance. It’s close to retirement.IMG_4517I think I should have gotten them thinner than I did. The directions were to roll to 1/8 of an inch but this was the best I could do. Is it ghetto to roll out your dough on a cutting board rather than the counter? I don’t trust myself to clean the counter well enough to roll out dough onto it. Maybe it’s a desi thing. And given my limited counter space, I wouldn’t gain a whole lot by nixing the board. IMG_4524Directions also stated a cooking time of 15 to 20 minutes. I needed to go a bit beyond the the 20 to ensure a nice golden color on my hand pies. IMG_4529Enjoy the season, folks, and all that it has to offer (but maybe wait a week or two ;)).

Recipe adapted from Smitten Kitchen.

Ingredients

  • 3 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1/2 tsp grated orange or grapefruit zest
  • 1 1/2 tbsps granulated sugar
  • 1 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1 1/2 cups (3 sticks) cold, unsalted butter
  • 1 cup cold buttermilk
  • 3 cups chopped rhubarb and strawberries (I used two cups rhubarb, one cup strawberries. Cut off the leaves and any tough parts of the rhubarb)
  • 1/4 to 1/3 cup sugar (depending on how sweet your strawberries are, but if you’re using all rhubarb, go with 1/3 cup)
  • 1/4 tsp salt
  • 1 egg

Directions

  1. Make the dough: mix the flour, citrus zest, sugar and salt in a large bowl with a whisk. Add the butter and work with a pastry blender, fork or your fingers until you have pea sized bits of flour encrusted butter running throughout. Then, slowly add the buttermilk and mix with a spatula or wooden spoon to incorporate. When all the buttermilk has been added, knead a few times with your hand to get it in the shape of the ball. Divide the ball in four and flatten each into a disk. Wrap with plastic wrap and stick them in the fridge for at least 30 minutes.
  2. Make the filling: combine the fruit, sugar, and salt in a medium to large stainless steel saucepan. Turn on the heat to medium low, cover and cook for 15 minutes. You don’t need to stir during this time. Enough liquid emerges from the fruit to self baste. After the 15 minutes are up, uncover and cook for an additional 15 minutes at medium low. Stir occasionally to ensure nothing sticks to the bottom, particularly towards the end. After these 15 minutes are up, pour onto a plate to let cool.
  3. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F and line two baking sheets with parchment paper. Generously flour your surface and rolling pin. Roll out one of the disks until 1/8 of an inch thick. Do this with a swift back and forth motion, rotate the dough 45 degrees, then repeat until it is sufficiently thin. Take your time with this, young Jedi. Trim off the edges with a pizza cutter or sharp knife and cut to make 4 squares or rectangles. In a small bowl, beat the egg with a dash of water. Brush two of the squares with the egg wash. These will be the bottoms (hehe). Spoon a teaspoon of the cooled fruit compote onto the two squares. Place the adjacent squares a top the squares with filling, pulling a bit to ensure the edges line up. Crimp the edges with a fork. Brush the top with egg wash and cut a slit to let the steam out while they are in the oven. Place the two completed hand pies on a baking sheet and sprinkle the tops generously with sugar. Bake in the preheated oven for about 20 minutes. While those bake, work on rolling out the next quarter of dough and assemble the next two hand pies in the same fashion. I alternated by sticking the second batch in the oven as soon as it was ready and calculating the extra time required when the first timer went off, but it really browns best when there’s only one baking sheet in the oven at a time. Continue with the rest of the dough. Let cool a few minutes before moving onto a wire rack for complete cooling.