In Pursuit of the Perfect Cheese Pastry

First, a brief note as to our absence of late: We're still alive! Still biking, boating, gardening, cooking, camping and generally having fun, mostly. We have, though, in the last 8 months, been sort of derailed a bit from our regular routine of fun, fun, fun and more fun: Zeek had a quarter of his lower jaw bone removed last November because of cancer, and two more tumors of the same type popped up very recently. And Sprocket came down with Valley Fever in March, after our last Arizona trip. Naturally, we've been very focused on taking care of them and getting them through what we hope was the worst of their illnesses. Things are as under control as they can be at this point, so we'll likely have the mental energy to resume more of a presence here, including more on the dog dramas at a later date. For now, the boys are doing a lot of recuperating and just enough playing, and I'm taking comfort in baking while they rest:



In Pursuit of the Perfect Cheese Pastry
by Trina

Greg isn’t really one for planning. He enjoys the spontaneity of winging it and going with the flow. He’ll show up in an unknown country with his bike and some camping gear, pick a direction at random, and start riding. He loves seeing what surprises are in store for him when he just lets things unfold as they will. Plus, planning is hard. I’m 99% happy to wing it as well, and I, too, find that if you leave things unplanned, you are likely to stumble upon much more magical experiences than anything you could’ve conceived of in advance and from afar.

Proceeding in this manner, we frequently find ourselves stumbling upon secret hidden treasures that we would never have known to seek out: unlikely little creeks bursting out of the side of a mountain; bike-able trails that aren’t on any map; vugs in the sparse, arid desert that are full of water and teeming with odd and unfamiliar lifeforms; incredible handmade cheese in the Baja farm country; the world’s best cheese pastry in a homely Mexican café in a mostly abandoned Southern Arizona border town:




…which brings me to the 1% where I’m not willing to risk missing something because I didn’t know where to look for it: cheese pastries.

It doesn’t take much research to find, in advance, the “best bakeries” or “ethnic bakeries” or “gourmet bakeries” or “best cheese danish” in a town, state or country you’re going to visit. Doing this tiny bit of advance planning allows your route to be dictated by the locations of bakeries, and you can still leave all the rest of the (less important) details of your journey delightfully unscripted.

Before we went to Baja a few years ago, I had seen a picture of a pastry that looked like it must be the Mexican version of sfogliatella, which is stuffed with a sweet ricotta mixture, and is divine. The picture was, however, without caption or any other descriptive text – it was just a picture of beautiful handmade pastries at a farmers market – so all throughout our travels in Baja I described the pastry, in my best Spanish, and asked people if they knew it, and where I might find it. My inquiries were fruitless until, at last, eating at a taco-stand-style breakfast shack, seated on sawhorses at the bar, I asked our dining companions about it. They talked amongst themselves in Spanish that was much too brisk for me to follow, and then, with the wide-eyed excitement of having solved a puzzle, one of the men shouted, “O, si, si, si! Se llama La Philadelphia!” Ugh. My must-have authentic Mexican pastry had an English name based on the American brand name product it featured. Bubble popped, I longed a little less for the previously romanticized pastry, and was therefore not heartbroken when we never managed to find La Philadelphia in Baja.

The other place where a great cheese pastry cannot, with any amount of planning or mapping, be found is the culturally-lacking mountain biking Mecca where we currently live. Yeah, the local bagel shop has a cheese danish. It’s lame. It has not enough cheese, an overly greasy pastry and a dollop of highly-sugared fruit-flavored glop on it. For a very brief time there existed in town a little coffee shop owned by a woman who studied pastry-making in France – Good sign! I was excited! – but while her cheese mixture was perfect, she put it on a giant mound of weird, flavorless, leavened dough that really didn’t work.

Recently, I’ve taken advantage of some (unusual) rainy Sunday mornings to stay indoors and see if I could come up with a cheese pastry that might satisfy. Also, we have a burgeoning crop of raspberries that need to be used.



In tackling these two "problems," I ended up with two different pastries, both of which are scrumptious and pretty easy to throw together.



This one is a tart -- actually 12 individual tartlets -- with a pecan shortbread crust. The tart crusts are baked, and then filled with room temperature cheese filling (recipe below) and fruit right before you plan to eat them. If you fill them and let them sit, the crusts will get soggy and fall apart.

The second is a danish, which is surprisingly quick and easy if you use frozen puff pastry instead of making your own, which is a ridiculous undertaking, really, considering that when you need a cheese danish, you need it pretty much ten minutes ago.



Filling (for both the tartlets and the danish):
8 oz cream cheese (Philadelphia brand, naturally)
¼ cup sugar
Zest from 1 lemon, chopped

A couple of handfuls of fresh fruit

To make the danish:
Thaw the pastry according to the instructions on the package. Cut one sheet into four squares and roll them out a bit. (Save the second sheet in the freezer for another time.) Pile on the cheese and fruit. Form the pastry into whatever shape you want. Brush the dough with melted butter. Bake at 400 for 15 minutes.



I also made one with no berries, enough cheese filling and a generous grating of fresh nutmeg. I’m not sure whether my eyes rolled back in my head before or after my socks were knocked off my feet. And really, does it matter?

Goldilocks’ Almond Torte

by Trina

Once upon a time there was the most amazing almond torte in the history of the known universe. It wasn’t too light. It wasn’t too dense. It wasn't too dry. It wasn't too sweet. It was juuuuuuust right. This torte was one of the desserts at The Ragtop Grill. My first ever restaurant job in a long line of them that ultimately supported me through high school and a couple of college "careers," The Ragtop was a cute little bistro with an octagonal footprint, and eight panels of canvas roof that rolled up and away so that the entire dining room was open-air, with a fireplace in the center and surrounding redwood trees for a canopy. Locals would drive their ragtops down from the hills and in from the coast for the grill’s lovely, classic Sunday brunch, which was my first exposure, at the impressionable age of 15, to foods other than my mom’s southern down-home cooking.

There was an oyster bar with raw oysters on the half shell, Oysters Rockefeller, oysters all kinds of ways, all of which were brand new to me. There was gravlax, brioche, and half a dozen variations on Eggs Benedict. The Ragtop blew the roof off my concept of food. It is where I first realized that there was a whole world of food out there, a world waiting to be explored, where none of the dishes were flavored with canned of cream-of-chicken soup or Cool Whip.

At some point in my history of waitressing jobs, I figured out that just about any chef was happy to stay after a shift to teach an eager student how to make something from the menu that she particularly loved. The almond torte, however, was before that time and it simply didn't occur to me to ask for -- or abscond with -- the recipe. I didn't know, as a young teenager, that this torte would haunt me into adulthood, and that decades later I'd still be trying recipes in the hopes of finding one that matched the perfect density and not-too-sweet-ness of the first almond torte to ever pass my lips. I didn't know that the distance of years and the fallibility of memory would be putting this torte more and more out of reach as time went by.

The search has taken me around the world. The Majorcan Flourless Lemon Almond Cake, at the light end of the spectrum, is wheat- and gluten-free and lightened with whipped egg whites; it’s practically health food. The very dense, very buttery Italian Almond Cake, which is most definitely a dessert, represents the heavy, indulgent end of the spectrum. The otherworldly Cranberry Pecan Frangipane Tart is amazing and lovely (and a new favorite), but different than what I've been aiming for. The hazelnut torte from Chez Panisse in Berkeley, which I tried with both almonds and pecans, is wonderful with any nut, but again, different than what I was after. All these years later, I still hadn’t found the magic recipe, so finally, left with no other choice, I made one up.

Experimenting like this is rarely as successful as it was with this effort. At least in my experience, something is always not-quite-right, there's too much of one ingredient, and not enough of another, with results that remind me that I don't entirely know what I'm doing. But, surprisingly, somehow, borrowing elements from both the lightest and densest tortes, aiming for middle density and as much almondiness as possible, this one worked -- I mean really worked -- the first time around. It will, of course, be ever impossible to achieve a perfect match for a 30 year old memory of what is now an unreachable pinnacle in almond torte-dom, but this recipe might just be as close as I’ll ever get. It’s juuuuuuust right enough. (And it's easy.)



The recipe:

Torte ingredients:
1 1/3 cups almonds
1/2 cup wheat flour*
½ tsp nutmeg
½ tsp salt
½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, chopped
*Make it wheat-free by substituting an additional 1/2 cup of almonds, processed, for the wheat flour.

2 eggs
1 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 ½ tsp almond extract

Topping:
¾ cup slivered almonds
½ TBSP sugar
1/8 tsp salt

How to:
Process almonds in food processor to a flour-like consistency.
Add wheat flour, nutmeg and salt. Pulse to combine.
Add butter; pulse to combine.

In a separate bowl, whisk eggs and sugar until sugar starts to dissolve, then stir in extracts.
Gradually add the flour mixture to the egg mixture and combine.
Scrape batter (it will be thick) into a buttered and floured 9” springform pan and spread it evenly.

Sprinkle slivered almonds over batter; sprinkle sugar and salt over almonds.
Bake at 350 for 40 minutes. Let it cool for as long as you can stand before cutting it.

Find and Seek

by Greg

Late late late summer. Slipping into autumn. Or slipped. Up the mountain. Into the grey. Into the rain. Muddy truck track. Soggy foot trail. Then no trail at all. The rain falls cold. The rain falls hard. Cold. Hard. Not rain at all. But the frozen white bite of hail that hits and bounces and gathers. Dogs run faster to dodge the cold.

We slog and clamber. Scuff and bend. Scanning. Looking. Find fall colors. Find fallen leaves. Find secret views between the trees. But also we find. Nothing.

Then we do. Tucked into the forest. Between lichen and ice. The rumpled head. The fluted stalk. The peachy glow. With cold wet fingers. With bright-edged knife. We pull it free. Then seek others. Then find others. Nearly hidden. Their glow gathered.

We have come to the mountain seeking. We have come to the mountain to find. Not only the means to a dinner. But more. To find fall colors. Find fallen leaves. Find secret views between the trees.

Summer Garden

by Trina and Greg



As we're uprooting the last of the carrots, beets and potatoes, snapping off the few remaining frost-kissed leaves from the kale, and tucking the garden in with blankets of compost and mulch, we look back to what was a bountiful and beautiful season in the garden.









Four cups of berries is just enough...



to make the yearly Tarte Alsacienne:







Apricot espalier in spring bloom













We didn't even bother trying to grow squash of any variety this year, but there were melons, both intentionally planted and compost volunteers, happily clinging and climbing wherever they could gain purchase.