Not every week, but most weeks I like to try out a few different quick and easy recipes.  Most often it’s dessert recipes for my incurable sweet tooth, but I like to play around.   I love fresh cherries; the season always passes much too quickly for my taste.  I think that Cherries just may be nature’s perfect fruit.  So small, so round, so pretty, so full of vitamin C and anti-oxidants.  Mostly I just eat them out of hand.  However, when I came across a recipe for candied Cherries in David Lebovitz’s ‘Ready for Dessert’ I had to make it.  It only has 3 ingredients—well 4 if you add a little almond extract (I did).  The other ingredients are pitted fresh cherries (duh), sugar and water.  Place 2 cups of pitted cherries in a pot with 1 cup water and 1 cup sugar and simmer until thick and syrupy. The most beautiful thing about this recipe is that it keeps 6 months, yes, 6 MONTHS, in the fridge. These candied cherries are great on their own, over ice cream, folded into Greek yogurt or spooned over lightly sweetened mascarpone.  Now I can have cherries for at least half the year.

The next recipe that I attacked was one for fudgesicles.  I have an excuse, really I do.   They were selling Popsicle molds at the local grocery store and Lily is teething. I thought that if my mouth hurt I would want a chocolaty fudgesicle. They are actually the pudding pops from the ‘Baked, New Frontiers in Baking’ by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito cookbook.  I have a distinct fondness for pudding pops.  Remember the Jell-O pudding pops that were popular in the ‘80’s?  I checked several different grocery stores for them, but couldn’t find any.  I guess they stopped making them, so I was very pleased to make my own.  These are delicious and just the perfect thing whether your mouth is sore or not.

Somewhere in between Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, Michael Ruhlman’s ‘Making of a Chef’ and Julie and Julia I lost my appetite for food memoirs.  I mean, there are so many of them out there!! I don’t have a lot of time for just pleasure reading these days, but when I read the Food Gal, Carolyn Jung’s blog, about Kim Severson, the New York Times food writer and her memoir, Spoon Fed, I knew that I would have to read it. It’s flat out wonderful.  It takes so much courage to tell your story and Kim does it so well, with grace, wit and compassion. I highly recommend that you seek out your own copy.

Cheers!

Phoebe

Tags: Anthony Bourdain, Cook, cookbooks, David Lebovitz, Home, Kim Severson, Kitchen Confidential, memoirs, Michael Ruhlman, New York Times, recipes

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 26th, 2010 at 6:00 am and is filed under Dessert, Family Meals and Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.