Fruit Crisp: or, Turning those expiring fruits into desserts

Today, we at A Book of Cookrye present another entry in our ongoing intermittent series of avoiding waste! There's a plague on, and groceries are more scarce than ever. Even if your grocery store looks normal and plentiful again, you've doubtless noticed faint dizzy spells when paying for what used to be affordable. We posted the following line to our friends online:

If you often don't eat berries fast enough to keep them from expiring, keep them out on the refrigerator shelf instead of in the fruit drawer. They will dry out rather than go moldy. So instead of discarding them, you can stir them into pancakes, muffins, and cakes. Once they're baked, you can't tell they ever got a bit pruny.

In a previous lifetime, people might have commented with things like "Ewww" or "You're still eating those?" or "Why don't you just throw them away?" But in these times, we got comments like "Making note for future reference." No one was grossed out at the thought of eating blueberries that have hardened nearly to rocks in the refrigerator. (By the way, this really works. Keeping your berries out on the counter or in the fruit drawer of your refrigerator will make the uneaten ones go moldy. But the air in the main part of your refrigerator will dry them out instead. Also, your berries won't start looking dried until at least the time when they would have expired anyway.)
I'm not going to say that it's more important than ever not to waste food. It's just more obvious now that it's either more expensive or out of stock. We all know how I feel about wasting food:

Even in times of plenty, wasting food is taking all the farm labor, all the fuel used for farming equipment, all the fertilizer (whether it was used for your produce or for the animal feed that went into your meat), all the energy used for refrigerated shipping, all the expense and resources of packaging... and literally throwing it away.
Anyway, today we found some moldy raspberries that got mistakenly put in the fruit drawer. Half of them had gone moldy, and the others had only hours before they too were expired. And so, we are going to make fruit crisp! This is a wonderful way to use up absolutely any fruit that is getting too old to eat. A lot of us forget that fruit pies and cobblers and crisps used to be very popular ways to make something delicious out of fruit that looked ready for the trash. Do you have apples that are wrinkled on the outside and are brown when you cut them open? Do you have mushy berries? Wrinkled, shrinking grapes? Plums turning into prunes? By the time you bake them, you'll never know that they were looking sad and drippy.
Fruit crisp also is easy to make in any size you like. You can easily make a small fruit crisp if you want nice treat just for yourself, or (if you have a lot of old fruit on hand or the store had a lot of wrinkly, pruny fruits on clearance) make a big one just as easily.

Using those sugar packets that come with your to-go orders (because of course you would never just pinch it from restaurants as you leave) is a wonderful way to reduce how much sugar you must use from your baking pantry now that sacks of it are getting scarce.

And now we sweeten the fruit! Add sugar to taste. As this is not cake-making, we needn't worry about one mis-measurement leading to disaster. If you have no idea how much sugar "to taste" is for you, start with one tablespoon per cup of fruit.
The next step is to take the fruit, cut it open so the sugar can permeate it, and let it soak in the sugar and any spices you'd like to add. This step is totally optional, though I find it helps the flavor of very expired fruit. If you will be baking this in a pan instead of folding one yourself out of foil, you can just do this in the pan and forget about getting out a container which will later need washing. (We do not recommend letting the fruit soak in a homemade pan of folded foil- there will be tiny pinholes that the juice will leak through. This drip-through isn't a problem in baking because the juice quickly cooks until too thick to go through.)

These particular raspberries may look fresh and delightful in the photo, but that's because I already picked out the ones with gray fur. Many of them were moldy only on one side, so in the name of avoiding waste we discarded the bad side and figured that we're baking them which will deal with anything we missed. They were also so mushy that the container looked like this after just a quick shake.

If you look in the above photo, you will also see some dark wrinkly things. Those are dried blueberries. We didn't purchase them dried, we just remembered to avoid putting them in the drawer. They sat out in the refrigerator, and so the uneaten ones turned into those raisin-looking things instead of becoming too moldy to eat.

As you can see, the blueberries are already re-plumping in the juice that has exuded from the raspberries. Even if you don't let the berries marinate, the more dried-out fruit will quite indistinguishable from the fresh after things get boiling hot in the oven. Also, if you have a large stash of those raw sugar packets from coffee shops you've never used in anything, this is a great time to get them out and use them up. It will help stretch out your pantry now that flour and sugar have to be rationed in many stores. Raw sugar may be too gravelly to use in cakes and cookies (unless you want to sand your teeth off), but it will dissolve into the fruit juices and also add a nice extra flavor.
Anyway, let's move on to making the topping. You start with a knob of butter (or margarine) and about 1-and-a-half times as much sugar. It can be brown or white, depending on what's at hand.

This wasn't quite enough brown sugar, so pretend that we have about one and a half times as much in the bowl. Also, yes we are reusing the container the berries were in. Every dish you get out is a dish you must wash.

Now just mix the two together. It should be nice and creamy.

Now add enough flour to make it crumbly and little bit dry. We're using whole-wheat flour to make ourselves feel a little bit better about whether dessert is good for you. It also adds a nice extra flavor that always goes well with the fruit underneath. You can also add whatever spices you like. We added a lot of cinnamon to this, which is why it suddenly turns dark brown in future pictures.

As you can see, it's a bit dry. This is on purpose; the boiling fruit juice will soak into it. If it starts out a bit dry, it'll stay nice and crusty instead of going too soft.

At this point, you can add whatever chopped nuts or other things you like on top of the fruit. We dumped in a handful of oatmeal. Keep in mind that whatever you use will probably still be crunchy afterward unless you're using fruit that has a lot of juices in it.

And now, with a quick bit of mixing, the topping is ready! The really nice thing about making a topping like this is you don't even need to get out a spoon. You can just use your fingertips.
And now, just look at how perfectly crumbly it is, which makes it so easy to sprinkle onto the fruit.

Obviously we want a lot more tasty topping than that, but this is just to show you about how crumbly it should be when you make it. But be sure you don't put too thick a layer of topping, or else the very upper surface will go dry as sand. If you keep the topping thin, the steam from the bubbling fruit will keep things nice and moist. If you like to have a lot of topping with your fruit, use a big enough pan that the fruit is spread out a bit thin. That way there's a lot of tasty crust with every bite of fruit.

And here we see the happy result!

I'm not going to lie, I'd have made this regardless of whether I'm skimping on groceries or not. It's easy and delicious.

Banana bread-- except with plantains!

Today on A Book of Cookrye, we are trying an idea we've been pondering since we first put plantains on a waffle iron: since plantains taste a lot more like artificial banana flavoring than actual bananas do, what happens if we use plantains instead of bananas in banana bread?

Plantain Bread 2 eggs 1 tsp vanilla ½ c milk 2 plantains 2 c flour 2 tsp baking powder 1 tsp baking soda ½ tsp salt ½ c shortening, margarine, or butter 1 c sugar Heat oven to 350°. Grease 2 round pans (or one very deep one). Put eggs, vanilla, milk, and plantains into a blender. Blenderize until thoroughly mixed and nicely whipped. Cream the butter, sugar, baking powder, and baking soda, beating until light and fluffy. Pour in about an egg-sized amount of the plantain mixture (about a quarter cup) and beat in thoroughly. Pour and thoroughly beat in a second egg's worth of plantain mix. Mix in one third of the flour. When mixed, add about a quarter cup of the plantain mix. Repeat this, and when all is mixed add the last third of the flour. Wait until the last addition of flour to thoroughly beat out all the persistent lumps. That way, you don't overbeat and toughen the batter from mixing it very hard multiple times. Pour into the pan and bake until a toothpick or skewer comes out with no batter or paste-like deposits on it, which will be longer than you think (40-60 minutes). Adapted from a recipe by Mrs. Tony Benkus (Whiting, Indiana), 1892-1952 Anniversary Slovak-American Cook Book, The First Catholic Slovak Ladies Union, 1952

This comes to us from the 1892-1952 Anniversary Slovak-American Cook Book. It turned up on a friend's bookshelf. We were drawn to it because it looked so worn and old next to all the other books it lived with. The photo below is making the cover a lot more legible than it is in person; in reality the cover is so dark and the printing ink so worn off that it's a little hard to read. 
I'm surprised that the first thing we're making out of this book is so ordinary. We're not doing the poppyseed bread-braid, the prune pie, the cabbage strudel, the kolačky, the rožky, the panchuski, the pirohy, or anything else that is at all from eastern Europe. We're making banana bread.

And this book has a whole page of banana breads for us to choose from! I love this about community cookbooks. No one wants to give someone's recipe the ax. So if five different people sent in a recipe for Chicken Spaghetti, then there will be five different recipes for Chicken Spaghetti. And some of the recipes will have two names underneath.

It amuses me that the only difference between banana bread and banana cake is what pan you pour the batter into.

We're choosing the recipe at the top of the page because we don't have buttermilk, and also because someone has handwritten notes on it. At first we thought it was someone tweaking the amounts to their taste, but it's actually someone doubling the whole recipe. Sometimes you see check marks or notes like "Good!" next to a recipe, but there's no better endorsement than "This recipe's so good we wanted more!" Also, I respect the previous cook's honesty with their own bad math. Those notes mean "I'll forget how much I'm supposed to use now that I'm doubling the recipe, so I'm going to forestall my own failure and just write it out so I can't mess it up!" It's just like how we at A Book of Cookrye put our car keys on things we absolutely cannot forget to take with us when we're going somewhere. You know your own airheadedness and plan for it.
Note that the recipe calls for "spry or margarine." I note with interest that Spry was apparently so common in Indiana that Mrs. Tony Benkus didn't even capitalize it. Spry was a brand of shortening from Lever Brothers (now called Unilever) that tried and failed to knock down Crisco. They had a matronly mascot named Aunt Jenny with a perpetual oversized smile, a fanatical obsession with Spry shortening that caused her to turn every neighborly visit into a sales pitch, and a folksy accent that rivaled Josiah Allen's wife.

For those who don't read novels that turn up in people's sheds, this is Josiah Allen's wife. source

Aunt Jenny was Lever's attempt to copy Betty Crocker, who had become one of the most profitable fictitious faces in the history of flour. But at least the Betty Crocker writers had her step off of product-schilling long enough to talk about other things and seem like a real person. Advertisements showed Aunt Jenny giving "thrifty three-pound cans" of Spry and Spry recipe pamphlets to brides as wedding presents, and proclaiming that foods fried in Spry were "so digestible even children can eat'em." If you'd like to see what happens when an ad firm of men try to sound like a grandmother-aged woman with a passion for trans fats, here is a tribute to Aunt Jenny and her thrifty three-pound cans of Spry!

Back to the recipe. Today we're using plantains, but we didn't know how big a plantain is compared to a banana. We decided to do the volume-displacement test: You put exactly one cup of water in a measuring cup, shove in the plantain (in pieces if necessary), and the waterline will tell you precisely how many cups of plantain you have.
We decided not to cook the plantains before baking them. Yes, we know you are supposed to cook plantains before you eat them, but we were afraid that after pre-cooking the plantains and then baking for nearly an hour, all the taste would be cooked completely out. However, plantains are a lot more fibrous than bananas. We didn't think just mashing them with a fork like you do bananas would be enough- the plantain bread might be too stringy. So we got out the power tools. Fortunately, there's enough liquids in this recipe to make blenderizing possible.

And so, we just sort of smashed the plantains in there. This particular stage of the recipe looks like something a fitness enthusiast who's gone round the twist might do to themselves with a few scoops of protein powder added. I've previously expressed my confusion at the odd practice of gym nuts taking what could have been a perfectly lovely salad or snack and putting it in a blender. I would swear I've seen someone doing a banana-egg-milk blender-paste instead of eating the banana, drinking the milk, and either scrambling or boiling the eggs.

Anyway, the plantain blenderized almost immediately. But then everything in the blender started whipping up very nicely. We could actually see the waterline rising. So we let it get nice and aerated until it reached the top of the blender, which would hopefully add extra lightness to the bread.

And so, after that quasi-health-food interval, we return to where we at A Book of Cookrye end up so very often: making close friends with butter and sugar! I almost always use brown sugar in banana bread because I like the extra flavor it adds. But for this experiment, I used white. I wanted to see precisely what flavor we get from plantains with minimal things to hide it.

Now, at this point we would have added the eggs one at a time. For obvious reasons, this was now impossible. So we dumped in an egg-sized splot of the blender contents.

The batter looked about right, so we added the second egg-sized splatter and also a surprisingly-high dose of vanilla. Recipes like this make me glad I started using the cheaper fake vanilla. That and it turns out that you can't taste the difference after baking it anyway. Real vanilla smells so much better in the oven because the many different flavors in real vanilla beans (the ones that fake vanilla lacks) are evaporating away.

This recipe was looking promisingly normal now. You'd almost never suspect that we turned half the ingredients into a blender-goop and tried to pass it off as delightful baking.

And now, to baking! We were going to use a round cake pan, but we had a lot more batter than anticipated. We rummaged through the cabinets and found this thing.

I'm not sure what this pan is for, but it appears to have spent much of its life boiling water. My first guess is that it's the insert to one of those built-in soup wells that some high-end stoves used to have. If you've never seen one, imagine someone removed a burner from your stovetop and replaced it with a pot lid. When you take the lid off, you find what basically looks like a built-in slow cooker. Here's a photo!

There's a whole slab of cow and a basket of potatoes stewing down in there. source

Since you can't lift the soup-well assembly out (it's literally bolted into the stove), they come with various pans like this to drop in there. I think this is why soup-wells went out of style. For one thing, it's hard to show your stove off to the hopefully-envious neighbors when its snazziest feature looks like you are too lazy to take a pot lid off the stove before company arrives. For another, soup wells really weren't all that much better than just putting a big pot over a burner. And obviously, they took away a stove burner that could be used for a lot of things and replaced it with a single-purpose built-in pot.

Regardless of this pan's original purpose, it is about the width of a cake pan but extra deep. So it seemed perfect for a recipe that had just a smidge too much batter to fit in a round cake pan but not quite enough to use a bigger one. Though I wondered: if the recipe for banana bread/banana cake is so amorphous that the only difference between banana bread and banana cake is the pan you cook it in, does using this stewpot make it soup?

I'll be honest, the batter here tasted really good. I had high hopes that I could serve this as banana bread and not have people squint and say it tasted fishy. It was good enough that I deliberately did a bad job of scraping out the bowl so I could eat what remained.

The funny thing about banana bread (or plantain bread) is that it always gets a lot darker on top than you probably think it should. You may see the crust's dark golden color and think it's done. You may also give it a light press and see that it springs back. But if you stick it with a toothpick or a fork, you may find that it is still doughy in the middle anyway. Always stab your banana bread to be sure.

This bread was marvelous. It has a much more intense banana flavor than banana bread made with with actual bananas. Like, banana bread tastes like banana bread, but plantain bread tastes like bananas. Also, it sliced really easily. It seems like banana bread is always a bit crumbly, but this showed a lot of integrity even when sliced really thin. Which is nice if you wanted just a little bit.

Broccoli-Cheese Casserole: or, I voluntarily ate broccoli

We at A Book of Cookrye never liked broccoli. From its bitter taste to the inevitable backwind, broccoli is something we deeply regret every time we eat it. We are not alone in this distaste- President George Bush the Elder made a national statement declaring that now that he was president, no one could make him eat broccoli (We're not making this up: see the video here). However, you know what we hate more than broccoli? Wasting food. And so.... this turned up in the refrigerator.

However, we at A Book of Cookrye live in America. And you know what we do in America when we hate the taste of a food and are too lazy to batter and fry it? We cover it in cheese!

Broccoli-Cheese Casserole 2 tbsp butter 2 tbsp flour 1 c water 1½ tsp beef bouillon Paprika, cayenne, and chili powder to taste About 1½ c shredded cheese 2 eggs 2 or 3 large bunches broccoli 2 tbsp water Heat oven to 350°. Grease a 9"x13" pan (you may want to line it with foil even if you usually don't). Chop the broccoli. Put it in a microwave-safe bowl with the water. Cover the bowl and cook in the microwave until done. Stop the microwave during cooking and stir as needed. Make the cheese sauce: Cook the butter and flour over medium heat until a medium-light brown. Add the water a spoonful at a time, stirring very hard to prevent lumps. It will seize and thicken when you first add water to it. When all the water is added, add the bouillon and the seasonings. You can add salt if you like, but the bouillon may have enough salt in it already. Cook, stirring constantly, until thickened. Then reduce heat to low and stir in the cheese, reserving a handful to sprinkle on top. Turn off the burner as soon as the cheese is all melted or else it will curdle again. Stir in the eggs. Mix the broccoli and sauce and spread into the pan. Sprinkle the extra cheese on top and bake until bubbly and set, about 20 or 30 minutes. Serve hot.

I have to admit, I've cooked broccoli a few times (for other people), but it has always been frozen. Usually it was already chopped. We had no idea how to even start cutting these things, so we cleft one in twain.

Some of the pieces that fell off looked like the ones that show up on those raw vegetable trays with ranch dressing tubs. As we were nearly done with cooking school before the plague hit, we should have been able to competently chop it. Instead we had hacked at it with the knife until they looked small enough.
With the second--- bunch? bouquet? clump?---  of broccoli, we decided to try shaving off the bushy end and see if it was a faster route to finely-chopped broccoli. The exposed botanical cross-section was interesting to look at.

This way yields tiny bits of broccoli much faster than the other way. It falls off the already decently atomized. In pleasantly short order, we had reduced the broccoli to a lot of little bits, and a stumpy-looking core.

In case the whole broccoli is edible and not just the skinny bits, we chopped up the core and added it to the bowl.

As we all know, casseroles do not bake long enough to actually cook most of your ingredients. It is customary to boil vegetables, but we decided to microwave them instead. We've discovered that most vegetables that you would have otherwise boiled taste much better if you microwave them, adding perhaps a little water to make steam as they cook. While the microwave dealt with the broccoli, we could make the cheese sauce. We did not measure the cheese, but instead grated it off of the cheese brick until the remainder was small enough to fit in a bag.

For some reason we felt like putting more effort into this than just dumping shredded cheese on the broccoli and baking until melted. If you're going to make your own gravy and are using a cheap saucepan has nothing more than a thin layer of sheet metal on the bottom, prepare to tell everyone that you thought browned butter would enhance the flavor because your butter do its damnedest to burn. It won't matter how good your pot-scraping technique is.

We decided to make brown gravy to hide the brown specks. Because groceries are getting sporadic and expensive, we used water instead of milk. To make up for the plague-induced parsimony, we dug out a canister of powdered beef bouillon (a word that defies all my attempts to spell it) that had hardened into a brick.

As groceries become sporadic and more expensive, we now understand why so many recipe books from earlier decades used massive quantities of white sauce and brown gravy in nearly everything- it's so cheap! The main ingredients are merely a handful of flour, a knob of whatever fat is on hand, and either milk (on a good week) or water from the tap (when the budget's looking tiny). It also makes it look like you have a lot more food in the pan than you do- today it's making two broccoli bunches look like a whole casserole. And when there's a bit of extra grocery money left, you can add a massive mound of cheesy goodness to the pot.

We intended that the cheese should melt on contact with hot gravy, but instead it spent a long time in looking like this.

But eventually, having spent a lot of time mercilessly beating it over a low burner, we had... this! It's the consistency of cake batter and full of cheese. I don't usually like gravy, in fact I think it basically tastes like barely-seasoned paste. But this pot of cheesy goodness was amazing. Since we'd cooked the flour and butter to a medium-to-dark brown before adding the water, it tasted like cheese on toast.

Now, the trouble with a lot of casseroles is that they never really set when you bake them. Instead, they stay exactly as goopy as when you put them in the oven. In an attempt to forestall making a pan of formless broccoli-cheese ooze, we used something we learned when making British moussaka.

In theory, the eggs would help the whole thing set like a sort of baked custard that has broccoli in it, making it the gravy-quiche of your childhood's worst nightmares.  They made the sauce a little bit gelatinous once we had them mixed in.

All right, we didn't come here for fun with cheese. We're here because of vegetables. And don't they look steamed to... uh... perfection?

Luckily, we only had to actually look at them for a brief yet wince-inducing moment before dumping the magic cheese on it.

If we look at this sideways, we can see the cheesy ooze penetrating deep into the broccoli before we even start stirring. I haven't used a transparent mixing bowl in a long time, so I've never thought about what a recipe in progress looks like in cross section.

Things looked dire in the mixing bowl once we started stirring. The broccoli shrank to near-nothing (you can see the original waterline well above its current level) and made our creamy-dreamy cheese sauce so runny it was practically water again.

I practically never make gravy and I never make cheese sauce. Furthermore, there are two eggs (that I can never get back) in this bowl of vegetable-based disappointment. We decided to dump them in the pan and just see what we would have to choke down while telling ourselves we were better people for not throwing away the broccoli.

We had set aside some of the cheese to put on top (because every good casserole has cheese on top), but it appeared that we didn't set aside enough. Those poor lonely cheese shreds looked overwhelmed by the task of making the broccoli underneath them edible.

As it baked, the combination of cheese and bitter vegetables made the kitchen smell like my aunt's house on Thanksgiving when multiple casseroles are rewarming in the overcrowded oven. The pan of baked things looked like it would have been right at home on the Thanksgiving table. Fortunately, the cheese on top spread a lot more than anticipated, giving us surprisingly-adequate coverage of the vegetable matter below.

You will be pleased to know that whatever else happened here, this was at least sliceable.  In fact, it lifted rather neatly out of the pan.

You know there may be slight problems with your food choices when the first positive thing you can think of is "You can slice it!"
As for the flavor of what we have wrought, imagine if you took a pan of baked macaroni and cheese and replaced the noodles with broccoli. The cheese didn't completely hide the taste, or even come close to it. But it did make it bearable if one ate it fast enough. If you like broccoli, you will very likely think it's a really good . If you don't, this is a decent way to make it bearable. And besides, you can slice it.