Author: Ari LeVaux

Calling prunes “dried plums” is misleading. When most people think “plum,” they think of the juicy round fruit sold in stores. But if you dehydrate one of those, it won’t resemble most people’s idea of a prune. Instead of a plump, dark, chewy orb, it will be a flat puddle with a seed bulging in the middle, vaguely reminiscent of the planet Saturn but more pink. And more than likely, that seed will be difficult to extract from the flesh of the dried plum.

There are plums, and there are prune plums. Only one of these is an exceptional laxative. The other, which is typically grown and marketed for eating fresh, is often referred to as the Asian plum. These are juicier than prune plums, with less fiber and sugar. Most varieties of prune plum, on the other hand, are of European descent. They are generally free-stone, meaning the flesh isn’t attached to the pit, which makes them easier to process and cook with. The Asian plums are usually of the cling-stone persuasion, meaning the pit is difficult to remove, which doesn’t matter as much when you’re eating them fresh. You just stop eating when you’re down to a tattered layer of fruit fiber stuck to the pit.

There are more differences between Asian-style plums and European-style prune plums. But rarely are these differences felt as dramatically as in a very special torte recipe, popularized by food columnist Marian Burros, that calls for purple Italian prune plums.

“[The prune plums] are engulfed by the batter during baking, and that gives the torte its special quality,” explained food writer Greg Patent, who first turned me on to this recipe.

Patent had agreed to walk me through it if I brought the ingredients to his house. The fruit on my Italian plum tree was not quite ripe, so I went to the store. Of course, it only stocked Asian-style plums. I brought those to Patent’s house, assuming it wouldn’t matter.

He frowned when I arrived with my Asian plums. It had to be purple prune plums, he said, definitively. But we decided to try anyway with the Asian plums, to see what would happen. For comparison, Patent removed a torte from his freezer that was a year old but with the correct fruit.

The torte’s magnificence is amplified by the fact that it can survive a full year in the freezer with negligible loss of quality, allowing you to eat purple Italian prune plum torte uninterrupted until the prune plums ripen again the following year. To store a torte, Patent lets it cool completely, wraps it in plastic, then foil, and freezes.

While Patent’s year-old torte thawed, we prepared a wrong-fruit torte from scratch. While this year’s torte cooled, we reheated last year’s at 300 degrees.

The fresh, wrong-fruit torte was delicious, and I wouldn’t have had a problem with it were it not for the presence of last year’s torte to compare it with. But side-by-side it was evident that the plums in the wrong-fruit torte, being plums and not prune plums, had too much water, which affected the torte’s consistency. And their flavor wasn’t sweet or assertive enough to balance the cake batter below. The wrong-fruit torte was good but not contagiously outstanding like last year’s torte, despite its year in the freezer.

I brought the leftovers to a friend with a sharp sense of taste. Without saying anything about the ingredients or relative ages of the two tortes, I let him try last year’s right-fruit model.

“I like it very much,” he said.

Then I let him try the new torte, fresh out of the oven.

“This one is less satisfactory,” he said. “Something’s wrong with the fruit.”

 

Marian Burros’ Purple Prune Plum Torte

1 cup sugar (plus a tablespoon or two for the topping)                                      

8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter

1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour, sifted

1 teaspoon baking powder

2 eggs

Pinch of salt

24 halves pitted Italian prune plums

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Arrange a rack in the lower third of the oven. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Allow the butter and eggs to come to room temperature. Cream the sugar and butter, either by hand or with a mixer. Add the flour, baking powder, eggs and salt, and mix well. Scoop into a 9- or 10-inch buttered springform pan. Smear the batter so it fills the pan evenly and arrange the plum halves on top with the cut sides facing against the batter, skin sides up. Mix the cinnamon with the 1 or 2 tablespoons of sugar and sprinkle over the top.

Bake for 40 to 50 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center pulls out clean. Remove and cool. Use a butter knife to separate the torte edge from the springform, then unclamp and remove the ring.

Pomegranates have long been one of the world’s most revered fruits. The Bible is littered with references to the red orb, the image of which decorates the temple of Solomon and the robes of priests. An Old World staple, the fruit is gaining popularity in the New World as well. Canada, Mexico, and emerging markets of South America are biting into California’s export market. Once you get the hang of eating and cooking with them, it’s easy to see why.

“Pomegranate” combines the Latin words for “apple” and “seeded.” Botanically, the seeded apple isn’t a close relative to the apple, but they have some things in common. Both are ripe in autumn — pomegranate season runs from late August until January — and both have long storage lives beyond their fresh seasons. Both fruits have been suggested as being the forbidden one that tempted Eve, though most biblical scholars lean toward the pomegranate. Both rosy-hued fruits have a reputation for keeping the doctor away, though pomegranates are more nutritious.

Another fruit historically linked to the pomegranate is the grape. They co-star in several biblical verses and can function similarly at the dining table. Pomegranate flavor has a wine-like quality. Chefs sprinkle the bright seeds atop their finished dishes, knowing that the mastication of a single ruby nugget with your mouthful of food is like a sip of wine as you chew. Pomegranate seeds create fireworks when eaten with rich foods, like stuffed pork loin or mushroom linguini.

Many of the pomegranate’s healthful elements reside in the seeds, skin, and the aril, the yellow membrane that crisscrosses the fruit. So while juice might be a sweeter, user-friendly way to ingest pomegranate, you might only be getting some of the benefits. But if you tear the skin off and dive mouth-first into the fruit like you would an apple, you’ll get a mix of pulp, seeds, and aril. It’s a bit more bitter and crunchy, but the sweet, penetrating flavor of the juice makes these bites pleasurable nonetheless, with more complexity than a sip of juice. If you’re really into the bitter components, it’s possible to purchase plain pomegranate arils — or even arils covered in milk chocolate.

An enriched juice out of fresh pomegranates can be made by peeling the fresh fruit, leaving as much of the inner peel and aril as possible, and putting the naked pomegranate innards in the blender with a little water. Blend it to a slurry, and leave it overnight, refrigerated. Filter it the next morning. The result is a little more bitter than juice, but more complex, and is a delicious, refreshing, and perhaps anti-carcinogenic way to start the day.

When selecting pomegranates, look for firm fruits with hard, rounded skins. Avoid super-sized fruits; like wine-grapes, pomegranates cultivated for size produce a more watery fruit, with less terroir. Those with dark red skin tend to contain seeds with darker red pulp.

Many recipes pair pomegranate with walnuts. Historically, they’re grown in the same regions. And culinarily, the flavors complement each other beautifully. The penetrating, acidic sweetness of pomegranates is a perfect contrast to the astringent, oily flavor of walnuts. Pomegranate seeds are used to accent sopa de nuez, a Spanish creamy walnut soup, and sprinkled atop chiles en nogada, a Mexican dish of stuffed chiles and walnut sauce. And they’re ground with walnuts and red pepper to make muhammara, a Persian dip.

Perhaps the most famous pairing of pomegranates and walnuts is fesenjan, a meat stew made with ground walnuts and pomegranate molasses. Typically made with chicken or lamb, fesenjan can be found throughout the Middle East and Central Asia, including Georgia, Iran, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Pomegranate molasses can be found wherever Middle Eastern ingredients are sold. Like pomegranate juice, molasses doesn’t contain all of the nutrient benefits of whole pomegranates, but it’s a very tasty tool to have in the chest and helps make this dish the winner it is.

Fesenjan

1 pound chicken or lamb, cut into chunks of roughly an inch,

with chicken skin removed

A cup of walnuts

Four tablespoons pomegranate molasses

One cup chicken stock

One large onion, chopped

Olive oil for the pan

Seven or so cardamom pods

A pinch each of nutmeg and cinnamon

Juice from one lemon

Salt and pepper

Optional: a tablespoon sugar

Pomegranate seeds for garnish

Brown the meat in a pan with oil. In a separate pan, without oil, lightly toast the walnuts. When they cool, grind the nuts into a paste.

After the meat has browned, add the onions and fry until translucent. Add walnut paste, pomegranate molasses, chicken stock, and enough water to submerge everything. Reduce heat to simmer and add the spices.

Simmer on low heat, adding water as necessary to keep the meat covered. After an hour, add the lemon juice, and season to taste with salt, pepper, and, if you wish, sugar.

As the meat approaches falling-apart tender, stop adding water and allow the sauce to thicken, stirring often to prevent burning. When the sauce is thick as melted ice cream, remove from heat and serve fesenjan with rice, garnished with fresh pomegranate seeds.

Pho, a brothy Vietnamese rice noodle and beef soup, is usually mispronounced “faux.” It’s more like “fuuh,” as if you were about to say a bad word and then realized you were in mixed company. However you pronounce it, this addictive bowl of steaming comfort food is grabbing the world by the bowls.

For lunch, when you can’t decide between soup, salad, and pasta, you can choose pho and get it all in the same bowl. A defining characteristic of the modern, global pho-nomenon is the fragrant and often whopping side salads served as a garnish. These salads usually consist of a pile of bean sprouts, topped with one or more varieties of basil, and typically cilantro, lime wedges, and sliced jalapenos. You might also find minced garlic, chopped scallions, and an obscure Southeast Asian herb called razor leaf.

Some purists from northern Vietnam, the birthplace of pho, consider the salad-in-your-soup thing something of a pho pas, since the practice was introduced when the dish migrated south. Another post-Hanoi improvement has been a growing body of condiments like hoisin sauce, spicy vinegar, chili sauce, chili powder, and fish sauce, all of which are served in a tabletop condiment caddy alongside soup and salad.

After pupating in Saigon for a spell, pho spread to nearby countries like Thailand. From there, it migrated with the Vietnamese diaspora, incorporating local ingredients wherever it landed — most notably, the jalapeno pepper in North America. Many American pho houses, aka Vietnamese restaurants, have also latched onto Western humor, with names like “Pho King” (proper pronunciation required for full comedic effect).

These restaurants generally have large menus featuring a bewildering array of dishes, some of which will be dead-ends. So unless you’re experienced, go straight for the pho — either classic beef, which can include tripe, tendon, meatballs, and slices of raw, tender steak that cook in your bowl at the table — or one of many similar soups that feature chicken, seafood, pork, duck, or vegetables.

Here’s a basic recipe for a traditional pho of beef flank (or some other tough cut). Those who want different meats or vegetarian options can modify accordingly. Daikon is often used to make vegetarian pho broth.

Parboil some beef bones for 10 minutes to release a shocking amount of scum and particles, then dump that water, rinse the bones in hot water, and put them back in the pot in 6 quarts of clean water. We’re going for a clear, subtle broth here. Venison bones make great broth, too. I like to oven-roast the bones before adding them to the pot, which adds a level of richness and reduces the need for scum removal.

Bring the water and bones to a simmer and turn the heat to the lowest setting. Add 8 star anise pods (either whole or in pieces), 1 tablespoon cardamom pods, a 3-inch cinnamon stick, 6 cloves, 4 tablespoons fish sauce, 1 tablespoon salt, a half-cup of sugar (optional, but typical), and 1 pound of tough red meat cut into 2-inch chunks. Ideally, isolate the cloves, anise, and cardamom in cheesecloth or a food-safe mesh bag so they can be easily removed — one inadvertently chewed anise pod can overpower an otherwise splendid, nuanced mouthful.

Next, slowly cook 2 medium yellow onions, sliced in half, and a 4-inch piece of ginger, sliced lengthwise, over a flame or in a dry pan, until charred, blistered, and fragrant. Add them to the stock.

When the meat is falling-apart tender — a matter of hours, depending on the cut of meat — remove the chunks with a slotted spoon, disturbing the broth as little as possible so it will remain clear (don’t ever stir it). Altogether, the stock should simmer for at least three hours, with fat being carefully skimmed as it simmers — or make the broth a day before serving and cool it in the fridge, which will cause the fat to solidify for easy removal.

Blanch some rice noodles for 20 seconds in boiling water. Rinse them in cold water to remove the starch, drain, and set aside. The noodles should be just a little soft, like an undercooked al dente. Assemble side salads on a plate and make sure your condiments are in place, including hoisin sauce, soy sauce, and a red chili sauce such as the ubiquitous Sriracha.

Place noodles in bowls, but not too many, as they will absorb broth; about a third of a bowl of noodles is good. Add a chopped scallion and some cubes of meat to each bowl, atop the noodles, along with a shake or grind of black pepper and a tablespoon of soy sauce. Ladle broth into the bowls and serve.

To eat, start by tearing off the herb leaves and adding them to your bowl, along with a handful of sprouts and as many jalapeno slices as you dare — piquant heat being an essential part of the soup’s warming effect, and you don’t need to actually eat the jalapeno for it to soak into the soup. Adjust the flavor to your liking with condiments.

Based on the variety of ice cream scoops on the market — 1,529 available from Amazon alone — one might conclude the world faces a crisis of improperly or inconveniently excavated ice cream. I think it’s more a symptom of our love affair with cooking gadgetry. Today’s kitchens are bigger than ever and can easily accommodate toys like turkey fryers, pizza stones, bread-making machines, and drawers of little hand tools. Every day we’re inundated with images of picture-perfect food, and some people actually believe that an adjustable tip on their bulb baster or a chef jacket with their name embroidered on it will help them reach the next level. But at some point, even in the most super-sized of kitchens, the returns from accumulating this stuff will eventually diminish. Keep that in mind as we prepare for another seasonal round of buying each other more crap to deal with.

Every piece of cooking gear you give someone effectively takes away space from their kitchen. If he or she doesn’t have a lot of space to work with, that can mess with their cooking flow. Just because, in the moment of present-opening, someone is pleased at the sight of a new set of egg-poaching baskets doesn’t mean it’s in their best interest to keep it. 

What I want for Christmas is an uncluttered kitchen with just the tools I need to do what I do. And when I’m at home, in private, what I do is pretty simple. I’m not after style points or photos to post on my Facebook time line. Food usually goes in a bowl ungarnished, spiced with some form of capsicum and greased with cheese or mayo if desired. I’ll take good ingredients over kitchen gear any day. I can improvise from there. What I can’t do is move a dough mixer out of the way every time I want to chop an onion. I can’t untangle the spatula from the avocado slicer in a clattery, cluttered drawer. I can’t waste my shelf space with gravy separators and pancake portion pourers.  

I’m not saying folks should go ill-prepared into meal prep. If you frequently enjoy soft-boiled eggs at home, you should probably own one of those medieval-torture-device-looking things that constricts a ring of blades around the tip of the egg with a easy squeeze of the handle, scalping off the shell and allowing your spoon easy access to the slimy innards. I do not need one of these devices, hence I do not have one.

But given how often I write about food, I am admittedly shocked at times by how primitive my kitchen is. Until recently, I was opening cans with a jackknife. I still don’t own measuring spoons. My whisk gets more action as a mallet for a certain little drummer boy than I ever give it. Not one piece of my silverware matches another. But nobody leaves my table unfulfilled. No one can taste that the meal was cooked on an electric stove or that my knives are dull.

Knives, in fact, can serve as a barometer for someone’s obsession with kitchen tools. You can spend a lot of money on them, or almost none. Any knife can be kept sharp or get the job done dull. If you are really into fancy knives, you probably have at least one ice cream scoop. If you’re a pro, you pretty much need to spend money on knives. Otherwise, you really don’t.

Japanese chefs say they need yanagi, usuba, and deba knives in order to properly float my boat of sushi, and I fully support them. But I also know full well that if I tried to use those knives at home I’d probably just hurt myself. I don’t need knives like that. 

My favorite knife ever is one I got in Thailand. It’s rectangular and very thin, with a wide, flat tip I can use as a spatula. I picked it up while on a motorcycle-taxi tour around some of Bangkok’s widely dispersed open-air kitchen-supply markets. My driver was helping me find a cro hiin, Thai for “big-ass stone mortar and pestle.” I said cro hiin so many times that day it remains one of the few bits of Thai I remember, along with hello and thanks.

We finally found my cro hiin at a stall in a market underneath an elevated highway. I bought both sets the guy had, because they were absolutely perfect: well-crafted from smooth, heavy stone. They were the size of tea kettles and about 20 pounds each — five for the pestle, 15 for the mortar. Flying home, I didn’t want to check them for fear they’d bounce around and destroy each other and the rest of my luggage. But the airline wouldn’t let me carry them on the plane, fearing I might use one to smash open the cockpit door. Luckily, airline personnel could see what was at stake and helped me package them appropriately.

When I finally got my mortars and pestles home, I put one set straight on my counter, where it proved well worth the trouble. It pulverizes everything, large and small, hard and soft. The heavy pestle does all the work, and the mortar doesn’t budge. The bowl is deep enough that stuff doesn’t fly out and all over the kitchen. It consumes a bit of space, but it’s worth it. That cro hiin remains one of the most important tools in my primitive kitchen.

I gave the other cro hiin to friends as a wedding present. What better way to symbolize a marriage than the grinding action of pestle in mortar? As for presents to celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, solstice, Kwanzaa, the retail economy, or whatever they’re calling it these days, remember: Your friends probably already have an ice cream scoop. It’s called a spoon.

Now seems like a good time to point out how easy it is to grind your own burger in the food processor. Grill season is in full swing, and, for once, wouldn’t it be nice to have a burger that isn’t basically mystery meat? And while most households don’t have meat grinders, your old La Machine or Cuisinart can get it done like a champ.

The process is about as simple as making a smoothie. Cut a burger’s worth of meat — beef, venison, lamb, turkey, emu, any other dark meat — into one-inch cubes. Put the cubes in the food processor, along with spices and fat, as necessary. Push the “on” button. Run the blades until the ground meat gathers into a ball and bounces around the chamber like a Mexican jumping bean on Red Bull. It will take between 10 seconds and a couple of minutes, depending on the meat, for this to happen.

 Food processors aren’t as good at cutting through sinew and connective tissue the way a real meat grinder can, so be wary of tougher cuts like stew chunks, shoulder, and flank, and forget about the likes of neck and shank.

Do yourself a favor and include chopped garlic, salt, and pepper in your home-burger. If you’re using lean meat, consider adding some kind of fat, like olive oil or bacon. Chopped onion is good, too. And there are many spice powders to be mixed and matched — but be careful. Not all combinations are going to taste good.

I’ve applied several sausage recipes to my home-burgers, with mixed results. My interpretation of bratwurst burger, alas, sounds more epic than I found it to be — though in fairness, I didn’t bathe my burger brats in Old Milwaukee.

My favorite burger seasonings are a clove of chopped garlic and a pinch each of salt, black pepper, fennel seed, celery seed, and nutmeg per patty. I like adding this modified Italian sausage mix to deer meat and chopped pieces of top-shelf bacon or side pork. Bacon integrates better with other meat if you chop and add it while still frozen.

Cheap cuts of steak, like flat iron or round, are good choices for home-burgers. Sirloin burgers are popular in many restaurants. T-bone burger is either a waste of a great steak or the greatest burger you ever ate, depending on who’s cooking.

I make my patties on the thick side. Cooking meat over wood coals is ideal. But it’s almost as good to simply broil the burgers at 500 in a cast-iron skillet, which holds heat and cooks the patty on both sides, so no flipping is necessary. After 5-10 minutes, a thick patty will begin contracting into a more rounded shape. Soon after, it’s ready.

One could use a meat thermometer to check if it’s done, but I just break the burger in half and look. If it’s raw in the middle, I put the two pieces back to cook more. It’s going to be further deconstructed anyway, because when I eat home-burger, I tear it apart as I go, adorning the bite-sized pieces with any number of condiments. These include homemade catsup, fake mayo (Vegenaise), chopped onions, chopped roasted green chile, avocado, tomato slices, bacon, sautéed mushrooms, roasted garlic, and pickled peppers and cucumbers, to name a few.

I like to lather my broken chunks of burger with catsup and mayo, sprinkle them with chopped onions, and attach or balance whatever else I can to them. I then follow these burger bites with nibbles of other condiments and sips of wine, beer, or coffee, depending on the time of day.

While I respect the hamburger sandwich, and have enjoyed my share, it’s important to remember that it’s not the only game in town. And personally, I have bun-related issues. 

For one, the hamburger sandwich gets progressively uglier and messier as you eat it. This isn’t a deal killer, but it’s not exactly a bonus, either.

And I don’t want to alarm anyone, but a big, bun-bound burger — or any other big thing you might attempt to put in your mouth — can literally break your face. A group of Taiwanese dentists is campaigning against supersized fast-food meals, citing an increase in jaw dislocations attributed to burger lovers fighting their own anatomy and opening too wide for their own good. More than eight centimeters — about three inches — in a food’s height, and you’re biting into the mandibular danger zone, says professor Hsu Ming-Iung of National Yang-Ming University in Taipei.

Another reason I skip the bun is I’m becoming more and more convinced that wheat is bad for you. Or at least, bad for me — and I’m not even gluten intolerant. But that’s a story for a different day. 

If you must use bread, and I know you probably will, consider open-faced burger bites. A toasted slice of bread can hold a lot of condiments, I’ll admit, and I have to respect that. But the piece on top is overkill. 

And even if we differ on the pros and cons of wheat, I think we can all agree that the less bread you eat, the more room you’ll have in your belly for the good stuff.

Freezers are good when they’re full of good food. But they’re expensive and wasteful when full of empty space. That’s because cold air escapes every time a freezer is opened, allowing warm air to sneak in. That warm air must be cooled. If the freezer is packed with food rather than air, there won’t be as much room for warm air to invade. Whatever warmth does slip in from outside will be cooled by the various frozen solids in the freezer, thus lightening the load on the freezer’s motor and lengthening its life.

I mention this now because many freezers are at their emptiest in summertime — especially the active freezers of home preservers, locavores, or any other species of hands-on foodie.

A well-managed freezer gets eaten through every year. There’s no point in letting food get old in there. A freezer slows the rate of decay, sometimes impressively, but won’t stop it. Stay aware of what’s in your freezer. Keep it clean. Keep it organized. Eat through it every year so it’s nearly empty by summer, which conveniently is when produce starts piling up in quantities worth freezing.

So it’s worth remembering, as we roll in the clover patches of summertime, that precious opportunities to chip away at freezer void are quickly passing us by, like summer itself.

While the autumn harvest can produce an overwhelming rush of food, the bounty of summer presents itself at a tempo that’s easier to stay on top of. You can put away spinach one week, followed by peas and strawberries the next, then perhaps cherries after that. These can be layered into the empty freezer at a leisurely pace.

It’s worth learning the basics of blanching and freezing food.The freezer is a gentle home-economics teacher that will never kill you, like canned goods might. The worst that can happen in the freezer is that something tastes bad or is discolored or mushy.

I recently made a big purchase of wild Alaskan sockeye salmon — whole fish — which my local supermarket was able to order for me at a scandalous price. I bought three fish and cut them into fat steaks, which I vacuum-sealed and froze.

I highly recommend a vacuum sealer. It’s an investment but can streamline your freezing operation and, most importantly, allow you to freeze food in durable, airtight packaging.

With the right skills and equipment you can become a well-rounded opportunivore, ready for action at a moment’s notice. Maybe there’s good basil at a good price at the farmers market and you want to stash some pesto into the freezer. Maybe there’s a head of broccoli in your fridge that you won’t be getting to soon. So before that broccoli gets soft, take it apart into florets and blanch and freeze them. Once you get the hang of it, freezing can be an easy side project you can bang out while cooking dinner.

My flaming-red chunks of vacuum-sealed salmon, meanwhile, are doing a great job helping the freezer run more efficiently this summer. And they’re so pretty to look at I almost hate to eat them. But I owe it to that salmon — some of the cleanest and sweetest fish I’ve tasted — to eat it while it’s awesome. It will be gone by the new year.

Some freezers are filled with produce personally wrested from the earth or from the bush, but even if you aren’t the hunting or homesteading type, there are other roads to a full freezer, from the roadside stand to green-thumb neighbors to the farmers market to the local grocery. Strike wherever you find good quality at a good price.

If your friends offer zucchini, grate and freeze it for winter zucchini bread. If there’s a sale on cherries, buy a box. If there’s an unpicked fruit tree in your neighborhood, ask the owners permission to pick it.

Making freezer jam is one option with fruit. Jam is typically found in the pantry, not the freezer, and there’s nothing wrong with canning jam for room-temperature storage. But since fruit and berries are ripe when the freezer is at its emptiest, I freeze them. It’s less hassle than canning and doesn’t heat up the kitchen.

Freezer jams are some of the tastiest there are, because you can get away with undercooking the fruit. But even freezer jam is kind of a pain, and I’ve got an easier way to get high-quality fruit into the freezer quickly by making a simple sauce. This sauce can be made with almost any fruit. Lately I’ve been using apricots, cherries, gooseberries, and strawberries for the sauce, because they’re available.

Fruit Sauce

Clean your fruit in a big tub of water. Put them in a heavy-bottomed pot with a few inches of water and cook the mixture on medium heat. When it’s a soft bubbling mess, turn it off and let it cool. Then run it through a food mill or baby-food maker, which removes the pits and purees the flesh and skin.

Pour the puree into whatever you want to freeze it in. I use clean glass jars and fill them about 80 percent full to leave room for expansion, as the sauce is mostly water, which expands when it freezes.

These jars of sauce don’t just keep the freezer cold all summer, they keep humans cool too. In the heat of summer, my family can go through a pint jar a day, mixing the thawed contents with water — sometimes bubbly water — and ice. Or we’ll eat it half-thawed, a kind of almost-sherbet.

If you anticipate that it will be awhile before your freezer is full, you could put some jugs of water (partially filled) in there to save energy. Or fill the freezer with Hungry-Man Salisbury steak dinners­ — you know you want to.

And those of you who are truly feeling the freezer love, to whom the freezer is an integral part of your annual culinary rhythm, don’t let summer get away without freezing your share of tasty souvenirs.

Braising means cooking in the oven, half submerged in fluid, and it’s one of the most powerful and underappreciated cooking techniques there is. The process requires only basic implements and can transform meat from tough enough to stop bullets to a soft puddle of flavor.

Acquiring braising skills could change your shopping habits. No longer will you feel compelled to pay big bucks for tender slices of fancy steak. Instead, you’ll find yourself leering at chuck steak and other cheap cuts, braising them with your eyes.

The very best cuts for braising are difficult to find over the counter, because most meat cutters grind those parts into hamburger: the great cop-out of American meat cookery. But the burger-bound scraps, crisscrossed with connective tissue, have more flavor than a soft steak from the same animal, provided you know how to coax it out. Any butcher, including the guy at your local market, can set aside some of the better braising cuts for you, like shoulder, neck, and cheeks.

Osso bucco, the famous bone-in braised roast, uses the shank muscles, analogous to your forearm or calf. Shanks are the toughest muscles in the body, layered with Kevlar-like sheets of intramuscular membrane. As osso bucco cooks, the membranes tighten and bunch the muscles into a lumpy ball at one end of the bone. When the membranes finally cook, they melt like fat.

Melted tendon, cartilage, and other connective tissues add texture as well as flavor to the meat, telling a story about the animal. A tender steak will never have this much character.

Cast-iron skillets and Dutch ovens are ideal for braising, because they have heavy lids that allow pressure to build in the pan.

Many braising recipes call for searing the meat prior to braising, to seal in the juices. But given that the meat will spend hours submerged in pressurized hot liquid, I’m not worried about moisture loss. As long as the braising liquid stays more than halfway up the meat, it will be plenty moist.

While searing is pointless, browning is non-negotiable. Braising meat without browning it would be like brewing coffee without roasting it first. Indeed, the essence of a good braise is a simultaneously browned exterior and creamy innards.

Browning meat owes its charms to the Maillard reaction, a chemical combination of amino acids and sugars at high temperatures that produces hundreds of aromatic compounds that deserve much of the credit for making meat taste good.

Following the lead of James Beard, who was hardly one to shy away from added fats, I shun the commonly used greasy pan for browning and go oil-free under the broiler instead.

The broiler method gives you superior control over the exact shade of brown you want, with less splatter and decreased fire danger. Broil the meat about four inches from the heat, turning often for even browning. I go for crispy and golden but not crunchy and burnt. If burning does happen, your best bet is to slice off the burned part and move on.

Add your braising liquid to a pan full of browned meat. I highly recommend equal parts wine and coffee, but the liquid could also be stock, plain wine, dark beer, or just water. I like to add a few bay leaves and some garlic powder, but hold off on salt and other seasonings until later — like the next day when I’m making stew or shepherd’s pie or refrying cut pieces of braised meat for tacos.

Cook at 300, turning the meat periodically. Whenever the fluid level drops to about half-full, replenish with water (or more wine and coffee) until the meat is nearly covered again.

Braise until the meat falls apart in total surrender to the slightest provocation, roughly two to five hours, depending on the cut of meat and how tight your lid fits.

Let the braise cool to room temperature and put it in the fridge overnight. In the morning the liquid will be solid gelatin, a poor man’s demi-glace, and will melt like butter in a hot pan.

You could have boiled the same piece of meat instead of braising it, but it would have turned out stringy and slimy — and only after hours of boiling. Browning and then boiling the meat would be acceptable but won’t be nearly the animal that browned and braised meat is.

With a pan of braised meat in the fridge, you have many options at your disposal. I like to make tacos, starting with a stack of corn tortillas in the oven while chopped bacon cooks in a pan. When the bacon starts to brown, add minced garlic and pieces of pulled-apart braised meat. Stir it all together and add some of the gelatinized braising liquid, which will melt into the mix. Season with chile, salt, and pepper, and eat it on tortillas with chopped onion, cilantro, and the creamy stuff of your choice.

And serve with red wine or coffee, depending on the time of day.

With the days getting longer, it’s officially time to start planning the garden. At the very least, make a cup of tea and open a seed catalog. Depending on what you have in mind, it might be time to place an order.

If your plans include tomatoes, especially heirlooms, it’s worth considering ways to fortify them. Anyone who’s lost tomatoes to blight knows the heartbreak of yanking whole plants still laden with fruit and removing them from the scene.

This is a big reason why many small farmers and serious gardeners have picked up the art of tomato grafting. Done much the same way that fruit trees are grafted, it’s a slick process that has helped growers achieve dramatic improvements in tomato yield and disease resistance, especially soil-borne diseases like blight.

Disease is more a problem now than ever. The efficiencies of global travel have enhanced the ways that plant disease can spread. And fickle weather conditions can create opportunities for disease to break out in unexpected places.

Ask a New England tomato grower about the 2009 season and expect a grimace for an answer. The late blight fungus hopped from field to field virtually overnight, taking hold thanks to unseasonably cool and wet conditions in June and July. Few tomatoes, heirloom or hybrid, organic or conventional, survived.

The pathogen that causes late blight, Phytophthora infestans, also caused the potato blight of the infamous Irish famine. Conditions favor late blight only sporadically in New England, and in 2009 many gardeners had never seen it. Home gardeners were apparently the primary incubators of the disease. The outbreak was blamed on infected tomato plants sold at garden stores.

The easiest way to avoid late blight (there’s also a related early blight) is to choose from an ever-widening selection of hybrid seeds for blight-resistant plants. I grew Mountain Magic and Defiant last year, both of which are resistant to both early and late blights. We had a cool, wet summer last year, and several gardeners and farmers I know lost their tomatoes to blight. My resistant tomatoes did great, and Mountain Magic is tastier than most heirlooms. Dark, rich, and meaty, they grow in beautiful red clusters of smallish fruit. I’d grow Mountain Magic even if blight were eradicated.

Beyond blight, there are many other maladies to which tomatoes are sensitive, especially those tasty, fragile heirlooms. There are wilts, nematodes, rot and viruses, salty soil, good old-fashioned cold, and, now that average summer temperatures are rising, heat. Grafting tasty tomatoes like heirlooms onto tough hybrid rootstock is an interesting way of dealing with these issues and for growing stronger, more productive tomato plants.

As with fruit tree grafts, the upper part of the graft, called a scion, is chosen based on favorable characteristics of the fruit they produce. The heirloom scion is spliced onto rootstock ­­—the stem and roots half — of especially hearty, disease-resistant, vigorously producing varieties.

In Montana, the typically dry summers don’t favor blight, but Missoula farmer Josh Slotnick is nonetheless excited to graft tomatoes this year for the first time.

“In the literature, it appears that grafted tomatoes are much more vigorous and productive,” he said. “Heating greenhouse space in the spring and fall is expensive. If we can get more tomatoes per square foot, it’s worth doing. Plus it’s cool,” he adds, “and I want to learn a new thing.”

It is pretty cool and actually quite simple. In a mesmerizing YouTube video produced by the University of Vermont Extension Service, Westminster farmer Mike Collins demonstrates several grafting techniques. He makes the moves look easy, using only a sharp blade and some plastic clips to execute the simple yet delicate steps.

In Vermont, the growing season is a sprint, and every second matters. Collins, who has been grafting tomatoes for 15 years, compares the various options in terms of growing days lost or gained.

Some companies sell seed bred specifically for rootstock: plants that, if grown out, would produce small, inedible fruit. These seeds tend to be expensive — the Johnny’s Selected Seeds catalog charges about $25 for a package of 50 seeds. Johnny’s stocks four varieties of rootstock, including the Maxifort seeds that Collins uses.

Lynn Montgomery has been farming in New Mexico for 40 years. He told me he never used to worry about late blight, but in recent years it’s become an issue he’s had to adapt to.

Montgomery grows tomato seedlings in Actinovate, a type of bacteria that can be applied as a fungicide to combat acute outbreaks of fungal disease. By drenching his potting soil with Actinovate, Montgomery is able to get the bacteria growing in the tomato plants, where they’ll live throughout the tomato’s life.

Meanwhile, Montgomery is preparing to graft himself to the grafting bandwagon. He ordered rootstock seeds and grafting clips — and seed for some of his scions — from Johnny’s and more scion seed from totallytomato.com.

Like Collins, Montgomery will use Maxifort for his rootstock seeds. Maxifort offers broad disease resistance and grows robust, deep roots, which enhances the uptake of nutrients and water, building strong, productive plants.

I was surprised to learn in the Sunrise tomato grafting forum (what, you didn’t know there are tomato grafting forums?), that you don’t need to order those expensive rootstock seeds. Many hybrid tomato plants are bred with all kinds of disease resistance, like those Mountain Magic tomatoes that so captured my heart. In fact, the Mountain lineage of tomatoes, including Mountain Magic, has some of the most disease-resistant plants there are. They make great rootstock.

It’s also possible to graft several different scions onto a single rootstock, so that a single plant can produce Brandywines, green zebra, yellow stripe, and purple Cherokee tomatoes. Such a strategy might be useful for limited-space situations, like container gardens, which are especially susceptible to disease.

If you’re growing tomatoes in containers, or just lazy, or cramped for space, more nurseries are stocking grafted tomatoes. It’s also possible to order them online. Now you have no excuse to get your graft on.

This is the one time of year when you can make an evolutionary argument for the consumption of massive amounts of fat. Perhaps for the same reasons, this is the time of year we crave fat most.

Under extreme conditions like winter, or pregnancy, the body craves specific nutrients. Arctic explorers report that a stick of butter rolled in sugar is the tastiest thing ever when you’re pushing a sled across ice. In the middle of the Arctic, your body is a delicate fire that needs to be fed and protected, and every calorie counts. In the desert, on the other hand, electrolytes will be your nutritional priority, since you’re constantly losing them through sweat.

Little has changed, metabolically speaking, since ancient times. During summer, we don’t need as much antifreeze in our pipes and we can survive on a leafier, leaner diet. As the days cool, we need more insulation than salad can provide. It’s time to bring on the fat.

It’s a culinary cliché that “fat is flavor,” and as with many clichés, there’s some truth to it. But too many restaurants interpret the relationship as a directive to “add butter and serve.” There is great skill involved in the proper application of fat.

Fat is often paired with some kind of acid. Steak and wine, catsup and French fries, and bacon and coffee are all examples of happy mouthfuls built on the acid-fat dance. Spice can be involved as well.

I cook steak simply, so as not to bury its flavor. That said, I often add sauce, which gives me control of how much extra flavor I want to add. If it’s a fat, juicy steak, like from a cow or certain cuts of pig, the sauce can focus on the acidic side of the flavor equation: applesauce on the pork chop, steak sauce on the T-bone. But with wild game like deer or elk, which tends to be lean, the sauce can stand a little fat.

Lately, I’ve been enjoying salmoriglio, an oily, lemony, oregano and garlic sauce. The lemon mixes with the olive oil to create a context in which the oregano can permeate each mouthful with herby volatility. The fat coats the taste buds, and the acid cuts the fat to stimulate them.

While the tension between acid and fat can facilitate great flavor, the two substances don’t mix easily. Forced to commingle, they move apart as quickly as possible, causing many a sauce or dressing to separate.

It is, however, possible to convince an acid and a fat to stay mixed. It’s a state called emulsion. Emulsions include many of the world’s best sauces, like mayonnaise, hollandaise, béarnaise, and even some sauces that don’t end in “aise.”

Today’s recipe, salmoriglio, is not an emulsion. Like an oil-and-vinegar dressing, it needs to be shaken or stirred before use.

While your steak is cooking, quickly whisk or beat half a cup of olive oil. Add half a cup of hot water, poured slowly into the oil while constantly beating the oil. Continue beating as you add the juice of a lemon. Finally, stir in a clove of minced garlic, a few sprigs of minced parsley and minced oregano, and a teaspoon of dried oregano. Adjust seasoning with salt, and serve the salmoriglio alongside your steak.

You can also sprinkle some pomegranate seeds on top. Pomegranates are in season during the holidays, and the occasional seed will explode in your mouth, a tart bite of sweet acid cutting through the richness of the salmoriglio-drenched meat like a sip of wine.

Don’t let the cold, dark days of winter swallow you whole. Swallow back. Thicken your sauce with warm camaraderie. Chew the fat while working in the kitchen. Continue chewing, with your mouth full of fat, until the sun comes back. It won’t be long.

The irony of corn smut is almost as delicious as the flavor. It’s a multi-billion-dollar agricultural pest that’s more valuable than the crop it destroys. But if you’re a factory farmer with an infected cornfield and no infrastructure, market, or stomach for moldy, grossly disfigured corn plants, you might as well plow the whole field under. And they do.

Corn smut has many names, one of which means “raven shit” in the language of the Aztecs. Some call it Mexican truffle or Aztec caviar, but it goes most often by huitlacoche (hweet-la-coach-ay). Fresh, it can taste like the blend of mushroom and corn that it is. When the specimen is old, or from a can, it blackens like squid ink and thickens like flour and has a dark fungal earthiness with a hint of the sea.

Corn smut grows where corn plants are damaged, such as by insects or hail. Spores of the fungus Ustilago maydis find their way in and to the developing corn kernels where they grow into a fungal mass called mycelium. When it’s time for the mycelium to flower and make smut babies, the kernels swell with millions of immature spores. Each kernel can grow as big as a golf ball, and together several neighboring kernels will form a tumor-like cluster that swells and bursts through the corn husks.

At first sight of the ole’ porn on the cob, most people probably don’t think, “Yum, a delicacy.” More likely it’s: “Ew, nasty!” It looks like something that needs to be thrown away.

Mycologist Larry Evans describes the taste as “olives and oysters.” Evans, who’s managed to put most every culinary mushroom on earth in his mouth, and many of the other ones, too, says corn smut is one of his favorites.

Much of the fresh corn smut consumed in the states comes from Mexico and goes primarily to restaurants. Finding it fresh retail is difficult. And eating it from a can is barely worth it. But if you live in a region where corn is grown, there’s probably smut closer than you think.

Some friends and I grew a big patch of blue corn on a plot of borrowed land this year, and sure enough, we found about 10 infected ears. Somehow, I was nominated to eat smut.

I’ve had it before, and I know that its nutty, deep flavors are pleasing to me. But facing the fungus in raw form I wasn’t sure how to proceed. I called Evans and left a message.

After carefully removing six infected silver-gray kernels from a cob and separating them, I put them in a skillet with olive oil on low heat. I placed thin slices of venison in the skillet among those scallop-like sacks of proto-mold spore. I stirred, making sure the meat and mushroom cooked on all sides, and then added chopped onions and garlic, followed a few minutes later with chopped tomatoes and, finally, chopped chili peppers. I used roasted green chilies, but chipotle or red chili would also work — anything with a soft, back-of-the-tongue fire. I ate it like stew, but it would be great in tortillas, too.

As I happily digested my meal, Evans returned my phone call. His was the first opinion I’d sought regarding smut safety. He told me that smut fungus has killed more people than any other mushroom.

In addition to corn, close relatives grow on wheat, oats, and other grains. In the early 1900s, a plague of exploding thrashing machinery took a huge number of farmers. The explosions were fueled by smut dust, which is highly combustible when dry. The dust is thought to have been ignited by static electricity in the cylinders of the thrashing machines, after being inhaled by the carburetors. During the summer of 1914 alone, 300 grain-thrashing machines exploded or burned in the Pacific Northwest.

“They’d hit a patch,” Evans says, “knock up a cloud of dust, come back around, and boom!”

And now there’s a corn smut boom of a different sort. Foodies are smitten with smut the way they once fell for heirloom tomatoes. Tracey Vowell used to be managing chef at Topolobampo in Chicago, where she smutted everything from tortes to enchiladas. She left to begin a decades-long quest to grow the stuff. Nowadays, she inoculates her corn via syringe and produces more than a 1,000 pounds of corn smut a year, supplying, among other places, her former restaurant.

While Vowell’s making good money selling smut at many times the value of the corn that’s hosting it, her Midwestern neighbors continue to destroy fields of that same delicious and bizarre cash crop. That’s a shame. Of all the uses for corn, including animal feed, corn syrup, and car fuel, I think I love corn smut the most.