Not Derby Pie

This past week, we had the first day of what actually felt like fall in DC. Went for a run through Rock Creek Park with a friend, and barely broke a sweat, the air was so crisp. Walked out of the house in a sweater, and boots, and a scarf. All three! At once! We’ll pretend this week wasn’t 80 degrees and humid: Fall has fallen.

Apples have exploded at the farmers’ markets, and everyone’s talking about pie. But I still haven’t finished the last of my peach and nectarine store, and admittedly, I’m savoring them. I’m not quite ready to say goodbye. But I’ll split the difference: I’m ready, very very ready, for concord grapes.

In years past, puzzlingly enough, I’ve watched the two fleeting weeks of grape season pass me by. The fruit seemed prohibitively expensive, and I’ve worried that if I forked over the cash and bought them, I wouldn’t be able to figure out a way to use them that’d rationalize the expense in my mind. It’s all very psychological (and kind of ridiculous), but this year, I’ve come to my senses. Grapes were $5/quart at my local market, so I bought them, ate a bunch on the way home from the market, and baked the rest into this fantastic focaccia.

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If you ask D about my eating habits, she’ll not hesitate a moment before telling you that they’re strange. Among what she deems my more odd tendencies is my affinity for salad in the morning. She – and most everyone else – like starting the day with oatmeal, yogurt, pancakes. (I do, too. Not sure how else to explain this, this, this, and, you know, this whole category.) But I’m also quite content to make breakfast from chopped vegetables, some avocado, a squeeze of lemon, and a hunk of feta cheese.

That’s what I did while living in Israel. If I wasn’t running out the door with a bottle of drinkable goat’s milk yogurt in hand, I was frequently making this salad in the mornings. Frankly, I was making a version of this salad nearly three times a day.

Classic Israeli salad doesn’t have feta or avocado. It’s just tomatoes, cucumber, parsley, lemon, and salt. That’s good, too – but this is better. It’s more luxurious, and more filling. Serve it with pita and some hummus or labneh, and you’ve got a complete meal. For years, this has been my Israeli salad. I’ll happily stuff it into a falafel sandwich, just like real Israeli salad, but I’ll also pile it on wheat toast, taking things in a slightly different (but still delicious) direction.

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Friends, the zucchini glut is nearly over. Those plants have practically exhausted themselves these past few months. Before you know it, we’ll be talking apple pie. But we’ve still got a week or two more of zucchini overflow, and I thought I’d share a couple delicious ways to put zucchini excess to good use.

These are recipes I’ve been making all summer, and you should certainly take the opportunity to make them while zucchini plants are still producing. Lest you think we’re only talking about stir fry or gratin, I’ve got you covered for brunch and snacktime, too.

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With the plentiful tomato salads and the peach cobblers of a good East Coast summer, lentils are often forgotten, relegated to the soups, stews, and curries of colder months. Such has been the case in our home. We’ve plowed through pint after pint of beautiful blackberries (making just a couple of these). We’ve eaten our weight in red, orange, yellow, even purple cherry tomatoes (and fried our fair share of green ones; if you’re clicking over, check out those vintage NDP photos! My, how far we’ve come…). But the lentils, they linger in the pantry, waiting for the air to grow colder.

The lentils were hiding, for sure. But last week, I peered deep into my pantry, looking for items begging to be used – the neglected cans or bags of whatever legume I felt inspired to buy, however many months ago. Blame it on the new home purchase: I’m already twitching at the thought of migrating my whole kitchen worth of stuff, so the leaner, the better. Also: last week, I was reading about Slow Food USA’s $5 Challenge, a call to food lovers to “take back the value meal” by gathering friends and family and eating a meal that costs $5 a head. Lentils give some of the best bang-for-buck of any food item out there. They’re inexpensive, full of protein, and easy to make. Also, easy to make taste delicious.

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The humble green bean doesn’t get enough love, I’ve decided. We’re all so focused on bursting tomatoes and perfect peaches, sweet sweet corn and favas that take five times as long to peel as to eat (and are still totally worth it) and we totally ignore green beans. Unlike peaches, they don’t get super juicy. Unlike tomatoes, they don’t look any prettier at the farmers’ market than they do at Safeway. And I don’t know about you, but I’m so used to seeing grocery-store green beans all year round that somehow, the site of them at the market doesn’t trigger that must-have-now feeling that, say, perfect baby okras inspire. (Incidentally, I got those okras. Thrice. I started this thread on Foodpickle, the only place on the web where you can ask a question and get a bunch of really smart answers, really quickly. Then I went and made this recipe. And this one. I also floured and fried a handful as an appetizer one evening. And then, with my last batch, I tried to follow my colleague’s instructions for Bindi Masala but, let’s face it, ended up with some strange not-quite-Indian okra curry. Still pretty good. I love okra.)

Back to the green beans, which may not have had me up at 8am as I do for tomatoes — freaked out they’ll disappear before I get some — but did spark my attention enough that last week, I bagged a couple pounds from one of the farmers at the Dupont market. I wasn’t quite sure how I’d use them, but I can tell you this: once those beans were tucked under my arm, I had no trouble at all getting excited brainstorming ways to use them.

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I’m at the point with my summer bounty where peaches go in my salads about as often as tomatoes do. Peaches have a different kind of lusciousness than tomatoes, the juice dribbling out of every bite rather than bursting out all at once as soon as you bite in. I like how the slices of ripe peach coat my lettuces, taking some of the burden off vinaigrette. Truth be told, I don’t use much dressing in the summer.

As much as I’m a sucker for juicy bowls of salad, I swooned when I saw this unconventional, more subdued number in last month’s Food and Wine. It’s from Stephanie Izard, of Top Chef fame, who’s got what I hear is a top-notch restaurant in Chicago called Girl and the Goat. I’ve been jonesing to eat there on my last few trips, but haven’t yet had the chance. For now, there’s this salad to tide me over.

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I do my best to keep up with the kids, to stay in the know about what’s new. I caught wind of the microbrew trend a couple years back, and I even went so far as to buy a beer-of-the-month club subscription for D. (She loved it so much, she told me to never think again about birthday presents: it’s beer club from here on out.) But every so often, a new tidbit of knowledge seems to sweep the food world by storm while skipping me completely, Passover-style. This time, it was tapioca flour, which has quickly supplanted corn starch as the best thickener, ever. Unlike corn starch, tapioca is undetectable in every way. It thickens up pies without any of that milky, gloopy, corn starch texture. It also doesn’t threaten to leave a raw-flour taste if it doesn’t cook completely. In short, it’s basically foolproof. Cook a pie with tapioca, and you’ll think there’s no thickener in it at all – until you cut the first slice and see that there is no puddle of murky fruit liquid swamping your pie. It’s an amazing feat. Your guests will ooh and ahh.

So how did I miss the trend? I don’t know. But I blame being late to the tapioca party for not sharing this amazing pie recipe until now. This, my friends, is the best blackberry pie. Ever.

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