Switching gears here for a minute from All the Proteins!! Week, I wanted to show you these “overthought” hand pies. You see, today is of course Juneteenth. I must admit that until I attended grad school some 25 years ago in someplace other than New England or Germany, I never really paid much attention to a whole lot of Black history — a fault that I will admit and have hopefully rectified. I’ll spare you the details of my grad school work except to say that it was eye-opening. In addition, I think that most of you know that I find cultural meaning and shared common beliefs through food — yes, for me, almost everything comes back to the food, whether it be Independence Day or Christmas. I did some more details research on the food traditions of Juneteenth, which is often celebrated with a menu of red foods to represent the perseverance of the enslaved. No, these Blackberry Peach Hand Pies aren’t red – there will be red on the menu soon as Strawberry week starts on Monday (and I have taken the day off to go Strawberry picking) — but they are a combination of ideas: Pies, and hand pies, a commonality between North and South, though these are inspired by a recipe from a little Georgia bakery. Peaches are common to both GA and TX. And I will always go back to Breaking Bread with family and friends as an important part of community building.
Browsing Tag
fruits-and-berries
My Aunt Ingrid had a plum tree in the backyard. And this one summer, there were a crazy amount of plums, so much so that when it was windy, it would rain plums all over the garden. They overwhelmed us that summer. So Ingrid suggested that she would give me one pfennig per plum that I collected into a bucket for the compost pile. I am guessing she though I would get bored soon enough, but I collected buckets and buckets full. In the end, I collected enough plums so that Ingrid bought me my first full album: Synchronicity by the Police. It was 1983 and I was eleven years old.
It’s always cool when you find a new ingredient. This time, I found Lemon Chips from King Arthur Flour. Sort of like Chocolate Chips, but lemon, of course. And they are very lemony. I only ordered one package as a test run, but I will definitely be ordering more! Very Lemony Lemon Chip Poppy Seed Blondies, pair nicely with a glass of iced tea. Trust me. 🙂
After the success of the Coconut Toffee Bit Florentines last week, I thought I would have a go at another kind: Cheery Berry Jammy Bits Oatmeal Cookies. What is a jammy bit? King Arthur makes these tiny (about 1/8 inch square) fruit flavored gummi-bits, that you can add to baked good, they melt and become these little pools of flavor. In this case, I chose cherry and raspberry. Turned out really nice with crispy bits of fruit flavors in an oatmeal florentine.