the garden in october

lacinato kale, celeriac, lettuces, thyme, sage, and raab against a backdrop of hops and bitter melon.

cycle touring

For our honeymoon, we took our beloved blue Burley Duet tandem bicycle to Nova Scotia via the ferry from Bar Harbor. Upon docking in Yarmouth, we rode to bed and breakfasts and campgrounds, traveling 200 miles overall. We had a grand time and look forward to returning for an extended stay next year.


Here are some of our campsite meals at The Islands Provicial park, one of the wonderful highlights of our trip. We had packed one small pot and some packets of foil. Both supermarkets and farm stands were scarce overall, but near our campground we found both, including a little market that offered spices (as well as brewing and pickling supplies) in bulk.





More pictures of this trip, as well as scenes from our wedding, can be seen here.

rustic

Right on the hearth, a blackberry-blueberry tart with a buttery pastry crust. We had just made several pizzas, so the oven was likely still hotter than 500ºF. I placed this one just a bit close to the fire, so it did blacken slightly on one side, but this could be avoided in the future.

Almond mountain, our wedding cake

Each of the the three tiers (6", 9", and 12") was made of four layers of almond pound cake filled with rasberry curd-whipped cream and covered with rum buttercream. I decorated with borage and nasturtium flowers and leaves from the gardens of my friends and family. The raspberry curd was made from rasberries my mother picked from my aunt's yard, and the many dozens of eggs (ten or twelve?) that went into each component of the cake were all from hens and ducks (yes, huge duck egg yolks in the buttercream!) which roam in backyards from MA to ME.

I may need to make a separate post about the technical aspects of this cake, but I must mention that one clever idea I had that worked--and I am no fan of shortcuts in foodmaking, normally--I made almond paste using almond flour which I ordered (along with their Queen Guinivere cake flour) from King Arthur. I have become very particular about almond paste, and have found that good almond paste is not something you can buy (it is awful, the stuff I have found in stores, even in the most distinguished specialty shops), but few books I have read suggest making it at home. Fortunately I learned to make almond paste at my grandmother's knee, and tracked down her recipe in the 1975 edition of Joy of Cooking. My old method, when I've made it for marzipan, was to grind the almonds in the blender four times, but using pre-milled almonds saves a heck of a lot of trouble, does not cost more, and as far as I can tell, yields an acceptable result, certainly better than any commercial almond paste I've ever found! I had worried that the pre-ground almond meal would lack oils that freshly ground almonds would have, but the result seemed perfectly acceptable to me.

So worried was I that there would not be enough cake to go around, I made an extra 12" tier as backup! In truth, a cake this size should feed 150. There are still a few chunks of it in fridges around here..

photo courtesy of Drake King

watering the garden after a cycle ride

an oven in maine

built by my dad, with help from friends.
more to come...

Rosie's birthday cake

Almond hazelnut cake with mascarpone filling and a vanilla bean-flecked custard buttercream decorated with violets and white wild roses.. I also made --somewhat incongruous but delicious in its own right--mint ice cream flavored with a handful of spearmint poached from a then- uncultivated neighboring garden plot. (After eating the cake and ice cream we walked to the garden to find that at last, our garden neighbor had dug the entire plot, and the mint, thyme, oregano and all other perennials had been purged and were nowhere to be found!)