A year ago, Gourmet Magazine lit up quite a few food blogs with their Raspberry Buttermilk Cake recipe.  Munchkin and I made it and everyone loved it.  This year I found myself at a crossroads of two nice happenstances.  The first was a surplus of delicious strawberries from a farm in the Catskills.  The second was leftover buttermilk after making Alice Waters’ delectable chocolate cake (from the Art of Simple Food).

So we brushed off the recipe, and made it again — this time with strawberries.  It’s extremely easy to toss together, and a delicious summer lunch dessert. Here are the ingredients, and you can get the full recipe over at Epicurious:

1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 stick unsalted butter, softened
2/3 cup plus 1 1/2 tablespoons sugar, divided
1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 large egg
1/2 cup well-shaken buttermilk
1 cup fresh strawberries, washed and quartered

It is a shame Gourmet was shut down, especially since I vastly preferred it to Bon Appetit, but such are the woes of the publishing industry right now. Aside: this was my first time using the iPad in the kitchen to follow a recipe, and it is great for that purpose.  Epicurious’ iPad app is nicely done, and it’s a marvelous device for browsing food blogs.

When it comes to baking, one of my favorite test kitchens belongs to a New Jersey blog called Stacey Snacks.  I’m not a huge baker, even though I might aspire to Zoe heights, however I’ve mentioned before that baking has become a fun activity where I can involve our 4 yr old munchkin. When Lisl caught sight of a peach and blueberry pie recipe with two thumbs up on Stacey’s site, I knew we had to try it.

The recipe comes from Mango & Tomato, and I followed it pretty much exactly save for replacing one of the peaches with 3 apricots (and I skipped powdered sugar at the end).  It is very straightforward — check out her site to see the instructions.  Moist and absolutely delicious!

Ingredients (just so I have a record should other blogs disappear)
3 eggs
1 cup sugar
1 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon white vinegar
1 tablespoon yogurt
zest of half a lemon
1 peach, pitted and sliced
3 apricots, pitted and sliced
1 cup blueberries

And while my savory dish of the evening didn’t quite pass the “bloggable” bar (experimental vegetarian dish), I did take this photo of spinach which I liked enough to share:

This is a simple yet surprisingly sophisticated dish from Richard Olney’s Simple French Food. I’ve long been a fan of making scalloped potatoes with milk and/or cream. The use of beer makes the dish a little less rich, which can be a good thing, yet still flavorful, and the onions add a sophistication that I really enjoyed.

Potatoes in Beer
from Richard Olney’s Simple French Food
Serves 4

1 1/2 lb potatoes, thinly sliced*
1 large onion, halved then finely sliced
1 cup beer (see below)
1/2 cup heavy cream
2 tbsp of unsalted butter
salt

Preheat oven at 400F.

Butter the bottom and sides of a deep baking dish**, and then place alternate layers of onion and potatoes. Have your first layer be onions and the last be potatoes, and try to make your layers as densely packed as possible. Salt each layer lightly.

Pour the beer over the potatoes, and scatter thin shavings of butter all over the top. I used a pale lager for this dish, and think a pale ale would work well too. I’m curious to try it with a dark beer and will update this post when I do.

Place the dish into the oven and turn the heat down to 370F. Bake for 50 minutes. Remove and pour the cream over the surface, and then return to the oven for another 10 to 15 minutes.

*I think this dish will be excellent with either large red potatoes or baking/Idaho potatoes.  The texture will be slightly different at the end.  I sliced them about 1/16″ thick (or two mm).

*Note: Olney recommends a deep baking dish, and I understand why. You can see from the above photo that I used a pie dish, not having a deep, medium-sized baking vessel available at the time. The dish came out great but I was not able to pack in all the potatoes, which left the results a little too soupy. Not a problem flavor-wise, but it required more care when serving to not flood the plate.