Simplicity

We went out for Italian pizza lunches at the two best places near here with Mary Ellen, and had a variety of 12-inch pizzas ranging from Margherita to prosciutto with arugula. Quite a worthwhile project, although fattening. I don't always succeed in getting my photos in order here, but a prosciutto, arugula, and truffle oil pizza is pictured.

And here's the cobbler recipe from your childhood.

Fruit Cobbler

Place in a baking dish or 10-inch pyrex pie plate:

4 to 6 cups prepared fruit (berries, or cut-up peaches, or a mixture)
1/2 cup sugar
2 tablespoons flour

Make biscuit topping:

1 cup flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons sugar

Mix with fork.

1/3 cup milk or water
1/6 (2 and 2/3 tablespoons) cup oil

Mix liquids and stir into flour mixture, stirring only until lightly blended. Drop by teaspoon blobs onto fruit. Sprinkle with cinnamon sugar if desired. Bake at 350 degrees for about 45 minutes. Serve warm, maybe with ice cream.

Vegetarian Southern Food Again

Mark returned for a short visit, this time with his awesome new wife, and I made a vegetarian Southern meal the last night they were here. It was semi-successful.

The grits were fine, nothing fancy -- you can see them soaking on the right side of the picture. Just soaked, simmered for a few hours, and finished with half and half.

I made black eyed peas -- I browned onions and garlic and flour carefully but quite a bit, then added some sherry and a lot of vegetable stock and some fresh thyme and cooked it all down for an hour and a half. It was a nutty brown, very rich and good.

I quickly sauteed garden collards with some red pepper flakes, finishing them with vinegar.

Florida okra and tomatoes have started appearing in stores, so I made stewed tomatoes and okra. Very simple: just sweated half a Vidalia onion in some butter, then added the okra (stems cut off) and a few chopped tomatoes (seeds and some skin removed) and cooked it all down for 15 minutes, covered.

And I made strawberry rhubarb cobbler.

Strawberry-Rhubarb Cobbler

I saw rhubarb at the grocery store last week (nobody I know seems to grow it) and got to thinking about the rhubarb sauce you used to make when Russell and I were kids. I remember eating it plain, slightly warmed, with a spoon. That was just rhubarb and sugar, right? It was magical.

Then, in one of the many strange food coincidences of the late spring, my pal Kerry sent me a link to this rhubarb pie post.

I also saw that strawberries were on sale, and not knowing whether Lawson was ready to handle plain rhubarb sauce, I then got to thinking about strawberry-rhubarb pies.

But you know what? Pies are too fancy, with their fussy rolling pins and optional lattices and pie weights. So I decided to make a cobbler.

My favorite chapter in the 2000 Joy of Cooking is "American Fruit Desserts." It covers cobblers, grunts, slumps, crisps, pandowdies, and apple brown betty. The linguist in me is ecstatic over this.

I used the Joy strawberry-rhubarb cobbler recipe. It has just a tiny bit of cornmeal mixed into a basic biscuit dough. I used white whole wheat flour instead of white flour. And I made rough blobby chunks of dough the way you used to instead of rolling out the biscuit dough or something else all fancy.

It was delicious. Lawson, who found his one previous run-in with rhubarb pie kind of weird, loved it. So now I have to find out if I can grow rhubarb down here in South Carolina.