my secret identity

I sort of, kind of have a secret identity. At least, that's how I like to see it. But instead of donning a cape and mask and whisking around Chicago to save the meek and innocent, I don a suit, put on mascara and disappear into Chicago's nightlife. Part-way through culinary school I picked up a job being a night manager at a small, upscale hotel bar and restaurant in Chicago's ritzy Gold Coast neighborhood. Most of the time, I'm all alone, greeting the customers, waiting the tables, making the drinks, and dealing with the most recent trouble-maker. And, goodness, do I bring home my fair share of stories.

What surprised me most about the job, and what has become my favorite part about it, is the way I melt into the background, becoming almost indistinguishable from the rows of high end scotch behind me. My ex-boyfriends, my political views, my favorite color...my whole person vanishes, and I get to be nothing more than the woman who pours the wine.

Some of you may think that sounds terrible, but I find it exhilarating. When I no longer have to be me, I get welcomed in to the secret lives of strangers from all around the world. The financial trader, gripping a Honker's Ale, tells me about his clandestine stash of Ethiopian magic scrolls. The young woman, sipping a dirty martini, tells me about how her grandfather used to give her the olives out of his when she was small. A fiery, middle-aged woman from the west coast, nursing a Chardonnay, explains how she had never imagined she'd marry the brother of her late-fiance. You only think I'm kidding. It really does feel an awful lot like like a secret identity.

And after a long night of mixing martinis and listening, I take off my suit, fold up my secret identity and tuck it into my closet for another day.

Then, once the real Adriana is back in full swing, I go make fresh berry tarts. Two kinds, in fact.

-Adriana

Blueberry tarts with meyer lemon mascarpone cream

and

Strawberry tarts with vanilla mascarpone cream

Pate sucre
8 oz butter
4 oz sugar
1 egg
12 oz pastry flour (or 6oz cake flour + 6oz all purpose flour)

Mascarpone Cream
14 oz mascarpone (sub cream cheese for up to half, if desired)
1/4 cup sour cream
1/4 cup sugar
*for meyer lemon cream add 2 teaspoons finely grated meyer lemon zest
*for vanilla cream add 1 teaspoon grated lemon zest and scant 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

To finish
blueberries
strawberries, cored and sliced about 1/4 in thick
apricot jam and/or honey

Make the tart shells (about 6 4-inch shells)

1. Cream butter in a stand mixer or by hand for 3-4 minutes, until fluffy. Add sugar and continue to cream. Add egg and cream until completely fluffy, another couple of minutes.

2. Sift flour. Add flour in two shifts and mix until fully incorporated. Flatten into a disk and refrigerate until firm.

3. Roll out dough to 1/8 in thick. Cut circles a bit larger than the size of your tart pan(s). Lay dough inside, making sure it's lightly pressed flush with the edges and then crimp off the excess dough from the top.

4. Poke bottom and sides of dough shells well with a fork

5. Bake at 350 until the shells are light golden brown. The timing will totally depend on your oven, but it took about 12-15 minutes in mine.

6. Let shells cool completely.

Make the cream

1. Whisk together the first three ingredients until fluffy and well-incorporated.

2. Divide cream in half. Whisk lemon zest into one, whisk lemon zest and vanilla into the other.

Assemble tarts

1. Fill shells with cream and smooth into an even layer

2. Lay berries on top in whatever pattern you think it prettiest!

3. Gently heat the apricot jam and or honey, thinning with a tiny bit of water to get the right consistency for your glaze.

4. Gently brush the tops of the tarts with the glaze.

5. Refrigerate tarts until cream has chilled, at least 2 hours.

slug-mud pies (and why kids don't need currency)

Alright, everyone.  Let's sit and think back for a moment.  Can you remember a time when money was nothing more to you than silly slips of paper that grown ups played with?  Sure, the coins were fun.  At least they were shiny, and you could flick them at little brothers.  But in the end, the stuff wasn't really worth troubling with.

Think back to long ago, before you had a house, apartment or car, before you even had braces or text books.  Was there a time when you didn't need dollars to get what you wanted?

Sometimes when it's drizzling outside and I'm sitting with a mug of tea, I can recall a time when it hadn't yet dawned on me that that money makes the world go round.  Oh, I must have been quite young, 7 or 8 at most, and the whole world was at my chubby fingertips.

Once, when I was hankerin' for a new dress, my friend Nichole and I sewed awkward, smock-like garments and wore them proudly on our stroll around the block.  Then we sewed matching ones for our little brothers, who unfortunately didn't share our excitement.

Then, when I wanted some perfume one day, I dissolved a number of my mom's fancy-smelling face products in a cup of water and added a few drops of food coloring for effect.  "C'est magnifique," I'm sure I told myself of my Paris-worthy potion.  Or at least I would have if I had known a lick of French.  What I actually said probably sounded closer to "tubular."

And one time when I wanted a fresh-baked treat (and my mom had successfully hidden the cookies), I ground up cheerios to make a flour-like substance, added water and mixed it into a dough.  After giving it a quick zap in my EZ-Bake oven, I smeared on some jam and ate my lumpy, cheerio-crumb 'cake' with glee.

Then there was the time that I traded my "slug-mud cake" to my little brother for his big hole in the ground.  Who got the short end of that deal?  Goodness, it's hard to tell.

It wasn't that I didn't have access to the regular conveniences of any polite suburban home.  And I certainly spent my fare share of afternoons whining for ice-cream or drooling over the newest "My Little Pony." It's just that the scraggly pack of neighborhood kids I grew up with got some measure of satisfaction from doing things for our gosh-darn-selves.  I have to believe that these experiences were not unique to my childhood.  Well, okay, maybe these experiences were, but I'm sure you have your own stories to tell about how you bartered, sewed, cooked, and created your way through your formative years.  Do you?  I do hope you share...

Now that I'm (gasp) grown, working two jobs, and living in a bustling metropolis, it's so easy to forget the joys of occasionally disconnecting myself from the 'currency grid.'  After all, it's not often these days that I bust out my home-steading skills to prove I'm not wholly dependent on modern conveniences.

That's why I spent my afternoon making jam.

Yep, jam.  If you had visited my kitchen earlier this afternoon, you would have found me standing in a splattered apron, shaking a wooden spoon in the air, and shouting, "take that, Smuckers.  See who needs your jelly-like products now!"  Then I sat down and ate some fresh baked biscuits slathered with my exquisite lavender-scented strawberry jam.  No EZ-Bake oven required.

P.S.  The jam whispered in my ear that spring is just around the corner.

lavender-scented strawberry jam
method adapted from "Good to the Grain" by Kim Boyce

Ingredients:
3 lbs fresh strawberries
1 cup sugar
1.5 tsp dried lavender flowers

1.  Put a plate in the freezer (you'll need it later).  Fill a large bowl with ice and a bit of water.  Set a slightly smaller bowl to the side.

2.  Hull strawberries and cut the larger ones in half so that all the pieces are roughly the same size.

3.  Put 1/2 cup water in a heavy-bottomed, large pot.  Add sugar and wait a moment for it to dissolve.

4.  Bring mixture to a boil over medium-high heat.  Boil until there are large bubbles moving slowly across the surface, about 5-7 mintues.

5.  Add the strawberries.  Cook, stirring constantly for 20-30 minutes until the jam reduces down into a jammy-texture.  Near the end of the cooking time, add your lavender.  If you have a candy thermometer, cook the liquid until it reaches 210 degrees.

6.  When you think it's done, place a spoonful onto the frozen plate.  It should thicken up to the proper texture immediately.

7.  Pour all the jam into the smaller bowl, and place in the ice bath to cool.  You can give it a few stirs to speed up this process.  When the jam has cooled, store it in an airtight container (I like little jars).

Keeps for 2 weeks.

-Adriana

A Piece on Pie

It’s fun to look at people on city buses. There’s the teenage wannabe punk, with spiked hair and iPod headphones blasting a jangly mess of chords into the surrounding rows. There’s the harried mom of three, fretfully herding her brood into a row a seats near the back. There’s the elderly gentleman teetering his way onto to bus and staunchly refusing the seats offered to him as he clings precariously to the hand bar. There’s the young woman balancing a large, wobbly, steaming pie between two oven mits as the bus hurtles over the pot-holed streets. Oh wait, that one’s me.

Not many people try and take a pie fresh from the oven across the city of Chicago via public transportation. And if you ever hear of someone reaching their destination with their pie untarnished, they deserve a medal. A pie, I have learned, is meant to be eaten close to home. They aren’t built for travel via air, bus, or rail. They don't pack conveniently into boxes or tins. You can't simply throw one in a tupperware and expect it to arrive unscathed.

Why, I asked myself while heading north on Bus 50, is a pie the symbol for classic American home-life? It’s because pies don’t leave home without a fight. And that, in a pie-shell, is what I learned last Sunday afternoon.

That being said, the pie still tasted just fine. In fact, it tasted darn right dandy. I just wish I had been able to present it to my dinner hosts in a somewhat more presentable state. C'est la vie. If you bake a succulent little pie such as this strawberry number below, I advise you to not export the pie, but rather import the pie-eater. And believe me, one whiff and those pie-eaters will be barging down your door.

Home-bound Strawberry Pie
Recipe for crust adapted from Bittman's How to Cook Everything


Ingredients for Pie Crust
2 1/4 cup all-purpose flour, plus more for rolling
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons sugar
2 sticks cold unsalted butter, cut into about 8 pieces
6 tablespoons ice water, plus more if necessary

Ingredients for Filling
6 cups strawberries, fresh or thawed
1/2 - 1 cup sugar depending on the sweetness of the berries
3 tablespoons cornstarch
pinch each of salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg
a dash of milk for brushing crust

Step one: Combine the flour, salt, and sugar in a food processor and pulse once or twice to mix. Add the butter and process for about 10 seconds, or until the mixture resembles cornmeal. Put the mixture in a bowl and add the ice water. Mix the dough with your hands (the fun part!) until you can form a ball. Divide the dough into two balls, wrap the balls in plastic and either freeze for 10 minutes, or refrigerate for 30. Flour a flat surface and place one chilled ball of dough in the middle. Using a rolling pin and working from the center outwards, roll the dough out flat until it's diameter is at least 2 inches wider than the pie dish on all sides. Using the rolling pin for support, drape the flattened crust over the pie dish and gently press into place. Repeat process with the second ball of dough, but this time cut into strips about 3/4 in. thick. Set aside.

Step two: Heat oven to 450 degrees. Gently toss the strawberries with the sugar, cornstarch, salt, and spices. Pile the mixture into the prepared pie crust, heaping it a bit higher towards the center. Using the strips of dough, prepare a lattice top (click here for an excellent visual demonstration of how this is done). Seal the edges by folding crust under and gently pressing down. Brush the top crust with the milk, and then sprinkle with a bit more sugar.

Step three: Put the pie on a baking sheet and bake for 10 minutes, reduce the heat to 350 and bake for another 50 minutes, or until the pie is golden brown. Be sure not to underbake your pie, because this is very easy to do. Cool on a rack or windowsill before serving warm or at room temperature. It's delicious with whipped cream, ice cream or all on its own!


P.S. I had a bit of extra pie crust left over so I rolled it out and filled it with fresh mango tossed with dried shredded coconut and a bit of sugar. Then I folded the sides in to make a tropical fruit galette. Strangely, it wasn't actually too bad. Noah and I wolfed it down while watching the Blackhawks play on TV. I mean, if I freshly baked tropical fruit galette isn't sports watching food, I don't know what is.

-Adriana