Fruit | Gourmandistan

Pre-Pearl Harbor peach preserves are historically delicious

July 13, 2016 by Steve

Michelle recently made two wise decisions: teach Steve how to make jam and get a monthly subscription to the newly-available online archives of our local newspaper, the Courier-Journal. Steve has pitted, chopped, sugared and boiled plums, cherries, peaches and (currently) wild blackberries, filling our freezer with an overflow of jam. With her newly-found spare time this fruit season, Michelle has perused old restaurant reviews, advertising and such, bemoaning the fact that this treasure trove wasn’t there when we were writing our book. (Yes, the […]

Categories: Cooking, Food, Jams & Preserves, Old cookbooks, Peaches/Nectarines, Vegetarian

Cocoa brownies with coconut icing sweetly kick chocolate to the curb

April 1, 2016 by Michelle

Gourmandistan has a long history of bringing our virtual world recipes from Alice Medrich’s Chewy Gooey Crunchy Melt-In-Your-Mouth Cookies. (We are not sorry, dear readers, because the recipes are so damn good.) Today’s homage is to a batch of brownies that bypass chocolate for cocoa powder. As Medrich says, “the best brownies are not always made with a bar of chocolate,” asserting that cocoa gives brownies “divinely soft centers and slightly chewy, almost candylike tops.” We must admit the idea of coconut icing came […]

Categories: Baking, Brownies, Chocolate, Coconut, Desserts & Sweets, Food, Recipes

Bacon salad dressing brings back memories, blesses pea shoots and more

March 27, 2016 by Michelle

Michelle had never heard of Hillstone Restaurant Group before reading this month’s feature article in Bon Appétit Magazine. This “non-chain chain” is reportedly adored by such culinary luminaries as Danny Meyer and David Chang. As she read, Michelle felt a jolt of familiarity when she saw that HRG “started in 1977 with the opening of Houston’s in Nashville.” 1977, it seems, was the year Michelle and her college girlfriends also landed on Nashville’s West End Avenue, becoming a part of the beginning of what Andrew Knowlton, the article’s author, calls the “best-run, […]

Categories: Apples, Chicken, Cured meats, Food, Friends, Nuts, Pork, Recipes, Restaurants, Salad, Watercress

Boozy cherry almond biscotti demonstrate thinking inside and outside the box

February 14, 2016 by Michelle

Many years ago, Steve had his first day at a new advertising agency, receiving a t-shirt with the company logo and the slogan, “think outside the box.” Steve received it politely but did not wear the shirt in public, as the clichéd slogan struck him as kind of silly. (They weren’t alone in their platitudes, as Steve’s previous agency liked to boast it “put the client at the center of everything we do.”) However, a recent batch of biscotti Michelle whipped up […]

Categories: Baking, Cherries, Cookies, Cooking, Desserts & Sweets, Food, Nuts, Recipes

King-size apple cake keeps us intrigued, well-buttered

December 8, 2015 by Steve

We have been enjoying this simple, old-fashioned apple cake from Susan Herrmann Loomis’ 1991 Farmhouse Cookbook for several days. Long before she began making everyone jealous with her tales of Rue Tatin in a small Norman town and rural French cooking, Loomis traveled across the U.S., interviewing farm wives and collecting their homey recipes. This “King-Size Apple Cake,” from one Alice Berner of Big Sandy, Montana, is a winner. It may be the seasonally-appropriate mix of cinnamon and allspice bumped up with some nice quality cocoa, but it’s most likely […]

Categories: Apples, Baking, Cake, Desserts & Sweets, Food, Fruit Desserts, Old cookbooks, Recipes

walnut-apple-calvados-caramel cake says “autumn,” avoids awful pumpkin spice

October 11, 2015 by Steve

Gourmandistan enjoys autumn, and does not generally stand in opposition to cinnamon, cloves or nutmeg. (OK, Steve admits to being somewhat more averse to cinnamon than most people.) But we do not understand the current appeal of pairing the season with something called “pumpkin spice.” We are in awe of the marketing and social forces that have combined to make whatever constitutes “pumpkin pie” flavoring almost ubiquitous, but we wish more people would seek alternative “fall” flavors that are all around them. Apple, for one. It is […]

Categories: Apples, Cake, Cooking, Desserts & Sweets, Food, Fruit Desserts, Recipes

Plum buttercream further plumbs depths of fruit-based deliciousness

August 21, 2015 by Steve

Michelle’s discovery that most any fresh fruit juice can be used to flavor buttercream has created a bit of an unusual cake boom here in Gourmandistan. While handing over a hoarded, frozen slice of our white cake with wild blackberry buttercream to her mother, Michelle casually created another cake, this time with chocolate and red plum buttercream. The juice came from a batch of plums we luckily spotted on a recent market trip. We snatched them up to make jam (and several cold and […]

Categories: Cake, Chocolate, Cooking, Desserts & Sweets, Food, Fruit, Jams & Preserves, Plums, Recipes

Peach Ginger Rosemary Brown Betty makes brioche flop much better

August 2, 2015 by Steve

An anticipated bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich ended up as a Peach Brown Betty, and it really wasn’t a bad ending. It did begin somewhat sadly for Steve, who had fussed over his buttery brioche dough for two days before it all went wrong in the oven. What seemed to be a golden brown loaf revealed its still-raw core when the top fell off as Steve attempted to turn it onto a cooling rack. Putting the patched-together brioche back in the oven […]

Categories: Cooking, Food, Fruit Desserts, Peaches/Nectarines, Recipes, Vegetarian, Yeast breads

Wild blackberry curd and buttercream make a lovely wedding (cake)

July 23, 2015 by Michelle

The wedding that eventually led to Gourmandistan happened many years ago, and it has been quite a while since we’ve attended anyone else’s. However, a combination of Michelle’s imagination and Steve’s perspiration recently led to one of the best wedding cakes either of us has ever eaten—and we didn’t have to get dressed up to do it. This year’s wild blackberry harvest was not that wonderful. February’s ice and snow smashed many canes flat; the oddly cool temperatures and torrential rains that followed didn’t […]

Categories: Blackberries, Cake, Chocolate, Cooking, Desserts & Sweets, Food, Fruit Desserts, Recipes, Vegetarian