"summer fruit" news and stories

I am not a pie person. I enjoy eating them, but I find the process of making crust, rolling it out and getting it into the pan more bother than I can really deal with. However, I happily embrace all varieties of crisps and cobblers because they are hugely easy and are a wonderful way to use all that great summer fruit.

Yesterday, I made the easiest cobbler ever. It requires just one bowl, one measuring cup and a baking pan. Butter your favorite baking pan and set it aside. Pour five or six cups of blueberries into a medium-sized mixing bowl and add a few cubed nectarines (not required, but very tasty). Sprinkle cornstarch, sugar, cinnamon and grated nutmeg over fruit and squeeze half a lemon in. Stir to combine and pour into the baking pan. Use the same bowl to mix up the biscuit-style topping (recipe after the jump) and spoon it over the top.

I took it to a cookout last night and it was the perfect finish to a meal of hamburgers, potato salad, grilled corn and fresh, garden squash.

This is more of a conceptual Feast Your Eyes post, as opposed to ones that just offer up the gorgeous food. You have to do a little more work here, imaging how amazing those raspberries looked, plump and rosy on their mildly thorny vines. I went blueberry picking yesterday, and was seeing the bushes laden with button-sized blue fruit for miles before I actually arrived at the farm. Happily, the reality of the berries in the field were even better than the image conjured in my mind's eye.

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In a post that I wrote earlier this week, I mentioned that raspberries are currently in season. Raspberries are just one out of the many berries in season. I encourage you to taste the diversity of berries out there.

Last weekend, I tried fresh gooseberries for the first time. They're not like any berry I have ever tried. Their flavor ranges from bitter and sour to sweet. In just one gooseberry, I experienced a succession of brilliant aromas starting with sour green apples and ending with sugary grapes.

When eaten raw, make sure that the gooseberries are really ripe; otherwise, they will be too tart. In addition to eating them on their own, gooseberries can be the featured ingredient in plenty of dishes. Try these below:

1. Gooseberry tart
2. Gooseberry pie
3. Gooseberry Cobbler
4. Gooseberry Relish
5. Gooseberry Wine Fondue
6. Gooseberry Curd

Have you had a dish with gooseberries recently?

Last week, my local produce market devoted an entire shelf of their display space to these pint boxes of fresh, local strawberries. They were selling for $3 a basket and I bought one (I wish I had gotten two or three more). When I got them home, I took them straight into the kitchen, washed a few and stood by the sink to eat the deep red fruit. The seeds were more assertive than those you find in those sturdy, pale California berries and while it was a surprise at first, I found myself enjoying the crunch, as it added a satisfying textural counterpoint to the fruit.

It seems like everyone is enjoying the abundance of berries right now. Over in the Talk section of Serious Eats, people are trading Strawberry Cake recipes. At Coconut & Lime, Rachel made Strawberry Thyme Cupcakes. Strawberry Kutchen is the dish du jour at Sunday Nite Dinner (the recipe is posted along with lots of tantalizing pictures). Or you could be like me and just chop up your fruit and eat it with yogurt and a drizzle of honey (only if the berries are tart).

What are your favorite ways to use fresh strawberries?

I was scanning my shelf of cookbooks tonight, when this one, the Complete Pie Cookbook leaped out at me. Being that we are approaching the end of the summer, the bounty of summer fruit is slightly overwhelming. Peaches, plums, nectarines and blackberries are cheap and gorgeous right now. Baking a pie is one good way of utilizing some of the summer abundance and make your friends and family happy at the same time.

The recipe after the jump is from a section called Peach Pies for Summer Suppers. The introduction to that section says, "Peach pie is a reward tired and hungry men who have worked late in the field trying to finish a job really appreciate. A cool evening and a peach pie are country joys to sample together."

photo by Marisa McClellan