Purple Plum Torte

Saturday morning breakfast. 

Purple plum torte from the New York Times food section.  This recipe has been on my radar for years, perhaps decades.  It is, apparently, the most popular recipe to ever be printed (and reprinted and reprinted and reprinted) in the New York Times.  And, like many other things that I should have started making YEARS ago, I finally see what all the hype is about.  

My enthusiastic helper.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought to make this cake, torte, whatever you want to call it.  It’s made an appearance on just about all of my favorite food blogs and websites over the years and of course, in the Times. Recently, I bought The Essential New York Times Cookbook by Amanda Hesser and there it was again. The recipe calls for Italian Prune Plums - which I rarely see - but since we are smack dab in the middle of plum season, I thought I might finally make the cake with whatever plums I could find.

Then, last Friday, I walked into the farmstand by my office, and the first thing I saw was a sign for Italian Prune Plums. On sale! It was destiny.

Ready to go into the oven.

I made the recipe in two 6-inch cake pans.  I love my 6-inch cake pans because, with the exception of this little number, we can never finish a full-sized cake.  Also because we probably shouldn’t. Most recipes that call for an 8 or 9 inch cake pan can be cut in half to make a 6 inch cake.  Or you can easily make two 6-inch cakes and save one for later (cakes freeze well), give one away, or let your husband dig into one while the other stays pristine for the dinner party you planned on serving it at. I cannot tell you the number of times Paul has tried to convince me that it’s ok to serve a dessert with a slice missing. NOOOOOO.

In this case, I didn’t end up needing my 6 inch cake pans because, somehow, we polished both of these plum cakes off in a weekend. What can I say? It’s a versatile little torte. Reminiscent of a coffee cake, and similarly good for breakfast or an afternoon snack, but also good with ice cream, creme fraiche, or whipped cream as a full blown dessert. It’s also really, really, easy to make. So I see its popularity, the payoff is really quite big for the effort involved.

I read somewhere that it is best to let it rest for several hours or overnight to let the plum juices release into the cake before digging in. This sounded reasonable to me, so I made it on Friday night and we enjoyed it for breakfast on Saturday.  It was jammy and delicious.  I finally understood what the big deal was. I know I’ll be making it again soon and I’m sure it will be delicious even if I can’t get Italian Prune Plums again until next year.

So it's not the most beautiful thing you've ever seen, but wait until you taste it. 

Purple Plum Torte

The Essential New York Times Cookbook by Amanda Hesser

Ingredients

• ¾ to 1 cup sugar
• ½ cup (8 tablespoons) unsalted butter, softened
• 1 cup unbleached flour, sifted
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• Pinch of salt
• 2 eggs
• 24 halves pitted purple plums
• 1-2 tablespoons sugar
• Juice from ½ a lemon
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• ½ teaspoon cardamom

1. Heat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Cream the sugar and butter in a bowl. Add the flour, baking powder, salt and eggs and beat well.

3. Spoon the batter into a springform pan of 8, 9 or 10 inches (or two 6 inch pans). Place the plum halves skin side up on top of the batter. Sprinkle lightly with sugar and lemon juice, depending on the sweetness of the fruit. Sprinkle with about 1 teaspoon of cinnamon, depending on how much you like cinnamon. I added cardamom as well because I’m a cardamom junkie, especially with stone fruits.

4. Bake 1 hour, approximately. Remove and cool; refrigerate or freeze if desired. Or cool to lukewarm and serve plain or with whipped cream. (To serve a torte that was frozen, defrost and reheat it briefly at 300 degrees.)

The aftermath. Worth it. 

End of Summer Salad: Heirloom Tomato Salad with Yellow Pepper, Basil, Feta and Dijon Vinaigrette

Thank you to everyone who came out for Long Grove Irish Days and made the festival a huge success! It amazes me that the stores have been part of the Long Grove community for almost 40 years.  It means so much to us to see so many people come out and support Long Grove and participate in the festival. I finally made it to Galena Canning Company and I am so excited to try the fancy mustard, apricot-peach and fig preserves I bought. I’m still looking forward to checking out the new spot in town,  Buffalo Creek Brewery.  I’ve heard it’s fantastic.

Isla taking in an Irish dance lesson on the stage at Irish Days. 

How can it be that summer has already come and gone? As much as I love fall, summer is always over too soon.  How I’m going to miss the warm, long days and all of the produce that makes dinner effortless.  All of the outdoor cooking. Taking walks to the park or out for ice cream.  All the things we only do during the summer in Chicago. There’s a part of me that enjoys sweater weather, apples and pumpkins, getting cozy when it’s dark out at 5:00 pm and perhaps most of all, the kids going to bed a little earlier (because I want to go to bed earlier too). Still, for the most part, I don’t get very excited in anticipation of fall, I’m too busy trying to soak up the last of the summer.

Last weekend was a good example of this. We had some friends over, hung out outside, went out for ice cream and mostly just tooled around the neighborhood. Sunday night my brother and father-in-law came over for dinner.  Because Paul and I had both fallen asleep on the couch and didn’t wake up in time to get to the store before dinner, we cooked up whatever was left in the fridge. Which ended up being corn, sweet potatoes and chicken.  Fortunately, my father-in-law arrived with some beautiful heirloom tomatoes from the Farmers Market.  He knows the way to my heart.

Heirloom tomatoes are easily in my top ten favorite foods on earth. They taste just like summer and are guaranteed to be delicious even if you don’t do a thing to them.  I will happily eat one over the sink with juice running down my chin just like a fresh peach. In this case, that might have been rude. I decided instead to make a salad.

I clipped some basil from the yard, found some feta cheese in the fridge and rooted around in my vegetable drawer until I came up with a single yellow bell pepper.  This would be enough. I decided on a mustardy-lemony vinaigrette and got to work. This dish came together in less than five minutes and was such a beauty. I think it would have been equally good with blue cheese and chives in place of the feta and basil.  It would have been good with anything because the heirlooms carried the day. I have one tomato left.  I saved it to eat over the sink all by myself.

Heirloom Tomato Salad with Yellow Pepper,  Basil, Feta and Dijon Vinaigrette

For salad:

3 large heirloom tomatoes

About a fistful of fresh basil

1 large yellow pepper

3 ounces of feta cheese

For dressing:

½ shallot, minced

Juice from ½ of a lemon

3 tablespoons olive oil

1-2 teaspoons honey

1 ½ tablespoons of dijon mustard

Salt and pepper to taste

 Mix shallot with lemon juice and allow to sit about 20 minutes to take some of the raw edge off the shallot. Whisk in dijon, honey, and olive oil until emulsified.  Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Cut the tomatoes into rounds and plate on a large platter. Cut yellow pepper into small squares and roughly chop basil.  Top tomato rounds with yellow pepper and basil and crumble feta over the top.  Spoon dressing over topped tomatoes. Serve.

Put 'Em Up: Oven Roasted Tomatoes

To say that I don’t have a green thumb is more than an understatement. My brother Mark, got the green thumb in the family, along with all of the musical ability, thick dark, curly hair and eyelashes, and well, a lot of things I still wish I had. When he lived in Brooklyn he basically had the secret garden growing in his apartment.  In contrast, I could kill a bamboo plant.  But I love the idea of growing my own food. So I have two raised planters in the backyard where I’ve been growing herbs, peppers and some vegetables for the last few years.

It’s great to have fresh herbs growing in the backyard because I cook with them so much and hate spending $2 here and $3 there to buy them at the store (in quantities that I don’t really need or use). I’ve also been growing peppers: Shishitos, Banana peppers, Jalapenos, Serranos and, this year, Poblanos - mostly because they are easy to grow and the bunnies don’t like them.  An added bonus is that when I have a zillion peppers ready at the same time in mid-August I am able to pickle and candy them.  The best part? We actually eat all of those jars of peppers throughout the year.

This year, we planted a cherry tomato plant that basically took over the garden. We obviously should have built some kind of structure so that it could grow upwards instead of out.  Lessons learned. Because the growing season in Chicago is so short and grocery store tomatoes are nothing like homegrown ones, I never, ever, EVER get sick of eating fresh tomatoes. However, when the tomatoes finally started ripening on our single plant, we had too many for the 5 of us to consume.  So, last weekend I decided to slow roast a couple of trays of them with garlic and herbs and throw them in the freezer. It really couldn’t be easier and the hands-on time is 5 minutes tops.

These little guys are great in pastas, soups, braised chicken or meat dishes, piled on top of a big scoop of hummus, or as a bruschetta topping.  Beware, these little guys really cook down and as they do, they shrivel up until they start to look like sun-dried tomatoes. But that’s the whole point. As they dry out in the oven their flavor is concentrated and they become chewy and even sweeter.  After they are roasted I like to drizzle them with a little bit of honey to accentuate that natural sweetness even more.

Oven Roasted Tomatoes

• 2-3 lb cherry tomatoes
• 12 cloves of garlic, whole (unpeeled, I used peeled because I had pre-peeled garlic on hand, unpeeled is better)
• A bunch of fresh herbs, I used Thyme for one pan and Tarragon for the other
• Olive oil, enough for a generous drizzle over the tomatoes
• Salt and Pepper to taste
• Honey or agave nectar, to taste (optional) 

Preheat oven to 300F.  

Cut tomatoes in half and put seed side up along with garlic cloves on a sheet pan covered with a baking mat or sheet of parchment paper.

Drizzle with olive oil.

Sprinkle with fresh herbs, salt and pepper.

Slip sheet pans in the oven and cook for a total of 2-3 hours, rotating from top to bottom (if you have two pans in there) about 1 hour in.

Tomatoes are ready when they have cooked down and dried out considerably and have become chewy but remain tender with concentrated tomato flavor. Taste them and take them out when you think they are done.

Allow to cool at room temperature before placing in labeled bags (I always think that I will recognize things months later in the freezer but I never do) or other containers in the freezer.