Plum Crunch
- By Katie Roche
- •
- 03 Apr, 2020
- •
LAST DESSERT!!! I do, of course, love baking so I'm sad to be leaving the simplicity of recipes with mostly normal ingredients that just get mixed together in the KitchenAid but I'm really excited about the next (and last!) chapter: breakfast! So that'll be starting next week! But back to today: plum. crunch. I discussed this recipe with a couple of people and we all agreed that plums are something we know about but don't ever think about unless they're physically in front of us at that very moment. I've never been like, "you know what I really want right now? A PLUM." And I bet you haven't either. Furthermore, I have never in my LIFE considered slicing them and making a crisp out of them. That is just WILD. But here comes Ina to Broaden My Horizons (or as people have been calling her right now, QuarantIna, because she's giving us all ideas of what to cook while we're at home) and here we go, we're baking with plums.
This recipe was actually in the middle of the chapter and I'm just now making it because, up until last week, I was unable to find plums anywhere. They were, obviously, the focus of the ItemQuest, which lasted many weeks - I searched for them for at least a month, probably longer. The recipe actually calls for "Italian prune plums" (the heck is that???) but I kind of don't think Italy is really exporting any fruit right now as they have, unfortunately, got bigger fish to fry. Also, who goes to the trouble of buying three pounds of a fruit that has to come from another country only to SLICE IT UP AND PUT IT IN A CRISP??? Thankfully, Ina graciously permits you to use regular plums if you're "unable to find" (read: too poor and lame) Italian prune plums. I finally located them at Costco, where they conveniently came in a four-pound package. Perfect, only one extra pound of plums for me to consider eating before I choose a better fruit instead. Only other thing that needed to be Quested here was the crème de cassis, which is a liqueur made from currants. It was easily locatable at the liquor store right next to the Publix, but unfortunately only comes in a very large bottle. If you wish to be considered as a candidate to inherit our large collection of gently used liqueurs when we PCS, please do let me know.
This recipe was actually in the middle of the chapter and I'm just now making it because, up until last week, I was unable to find plums anywhere. They were, obviously, the focus of the ItemQuest, which lasted many weeks - I searched for them for at least a month, probably longer. The recipe actually calls for "Italian prune plums" (the heck is that???) but I kind of don't think Italy is really exporting any fruit right now as they have, unfortunately, got bigger fish to fry. Also, who goes to the trouble of buying three pounds of a fruit that has to come from another country only to SLICE IT UP AND PUT IT IN A CRISP??? Thankfully, Ina graciously permits you to use regular plums if you're "unable to find" (read: too poor and lame) Italian prune plums. I finally located them at Costco, where they conveniently came in a four-pound package. Perfect, only one extra pound of plums for me to consider eating before I choose a better fruit instead. Only other thing that needed to be Quested here was the crème de cassis, which is a liqueur made from currants. It was easily locatable at the liquor store right next to the Publix, but unfortunately only comes in a very large bottle. If you wish to be considered as a candidate to inherit our large collection of gently used liqueurs when we PCS, please do let me know.
I was faced with a choice here: to peel, or not to peel? Ina did not call for the Italian prune plums to be peeled, but said nothing about what to do if you're using regular plums. I was really torn because I've never made an apple crisp with unpeeled apples and assumed plum peels would be just as unwelcome in a crisp. But, due to the lack of specific instruction to peel, I chose not to peel. I'm glad, too, because it took me FOREVER to slice twelve plums. I'm not the world's most efficient knife user anyway (Dan came in and informed me I was "doing it wrong", when am I not, honestly?) so this ginormous bowl of plums took me like 20 minutes to slice. The entire time, too, I was like "this cannot be right, that is SO MANY PLUM" but I went with the equivalent weight of what Ina used so I figured it must be right and forged ahead. (It was.)
I took this picture pre-mix because I really liked how the brown sugar looked like lil patties. I don't know what my obsession is with that shape but it's been a thing for a number of years - when I worked at Starbucks I LOVED emptying the drawer on the espresso machine that collects all the discarded coffee ground patties from the portafilter. Fun fact! - If you garden, you can ask your local Starbucks for a bag of discarded grounds and they will give you a bag for free! I am not 100% sure what they're for as it relates to gardening because I have the brownest thumb ever, but I'm sure some of you know. It just occurred to me though - I used to call them "coffee pucks" which was maybe the universe preparing me to love actual hockey? Who knows. Anyhow, added to the plums here is brown sugar, flour, and the crème de cassis. I tasted the cassis before adding it (obvi) and it's the first liqueur I've used while making this blog that I could actually see myself using in something else. It was pretty good.
Wasn't sure they were going to fit, but look at that! Three pounds of plums!
So Ina has you make the streusel topping in the KitchenAid with the beater attachment, which I find a bit odd. She does this with mixing biscuits as well, so she seems to not be fond of cutting cold butter into flour with her hands. I did as she instructed, and used the KitchenAid, but I did find that the butter chunks were still pretty big so I did use my hands a bit at the end to try to get the butter "pea sized". Then I covered the top of the plums with it. I liken this to burying someone in sand on the beach - that's how tightly the crisp topping ends up over the fruit because there's so much of it. I'm not complaining. Crisp topping > the fruit in the crisp, almost always.
The plum juice rose from its sand grave.
There simply *is not* an attractive way to photograph crisps. They just look like this. I'm sorry. Alright so, the verdict is that this might make us rethink plums. This truly, to use an obnoxious food person word, *elevated* the plum. I can confidently say that Ina's claim that the crème de cassis would "make the plums taste more 'plum-y' without making its own statement" was absolutely true. It defies reason, and I wish it could explain it better, but I have always found plums to be pretty non-descript and the cassis somehow made this taste...well, like plums, but in a big way. Dan gave some to his coworker, who LOVED it and declared it to have made him think about plums in a whole new way. I wouldn't sing its praises that intensely - I'd still pick an apple crisp 100% of times - but if for some reason you've ever got three entire pounds of plums lying around, you could give it a try. It is not purely an apathy about plums that would have prevented me from making this in the past, but also the fact that if I had to buy three pounds of plums while I was living in Alaska it would have cost, like, $25. Just for the plums. And we've been over the fruit situation in Alaska - it's expensive AND it sucks. Ina's working from the opposite end of the spectrum here, so to revisit a resounding catchphrase I have not used in a while: if you can't import your plums straight from Italy, store-bought is fine.
For this post, I wanted to combine two summertime flavors into the crisp recipe one of my oldest Alaskan friends passed on to me years ago. Rhubarb, if you're unfamiliar, is a reddish stalk that kind of resembles really big celery. It's very tart and is most commonly paired with strawberry. I've rarely seen it star in its own show dessert-wise, but my friend Kylee has been making rhubarb crisp for years and it's the best crisp I know of. Blueberries are usually in season in late summer; I have not been home for a blueberry season since Dan's last deployment in 2018 so in order to make this recipe I actually used blueberries from a friend's parents' farm in upstate SC! They're a little sweeter than the blueberries I'd have picked at home, but they worked well. I'm going to pretend like I was actually picking blueberries at home in Alaska for the purpose of showing you what that would look like.
I was getting all ready to write this post, going through my process with photos starting in my kitchen when I realized that a lot of my friends probably don't know what fireweed is or where it comes from and this recipe actually starts far, far away from my kitchen. This will be the first of a few posts highlighting iconic Alaskan ingredients. I've wanted to do this for a while because my home inspires me in so many ways, writing and cooking particular among them. Fireweed is a wildflower that is rather ubiquitous in southcentral Alaska and is often considered a gauge for how long summer will last. It is said that when the blooms reach the top of the plant, winter is six weeks away. Whether or not that's accurate, fireweed is found all over in late summer in Alaska. Here is some I spotted in mid-July by Eklutna Lake:
If you know Dan and me very well, you probably know by now that if our life were a sitcom, he'd low-key be the funniest character. Because that is true, I thought I'd include his bottom ten with accompanying remarks before giving the actual bottom ten. His are hilarious, but aren't as legitimate as mine because he actually tried way fewer of these than one might think. I realized as he was flipping through the book that my old coworker Cam probably ate more of these foods than anyone else did. The overarching theme of Dan's song of Ina Garten hatred is not the actual taste of the finished product but more how asinine he finds that particular recipe to be. So here you are, Dan's bottom ten.
#1: Butternut Squash Soup
#1: Butternut Squash Soup
You guys asked for my top ten from the blog, so here we go! And I'm thinking that what you *really* want is actually the bottom ten, so I'll go ahead and give you those next week. That post will probably be A LOT funnier. While preparing to write this post, I had Dan flip through the cookbook to give me HIS top ten and he was all disgruntled as he did so and only came up with eight that he even liked at all. "I'm not a picky eater!" he insists. Yeah ok. Although to be fair, I've seen some cookbooks I would only make, like, one thing out of and plenty I'd make nothing out of, though sometimes that's because I find the chef so annoying. @ the Pioneer Woman. I just don't trust someone who puts sour cream in spaghetti and then bakes it. Plus all her recipe intros are about, like, Ladd or Tadd or whatever the heck her husband's name is "coming in from the fields starving for dinner". If I came in from working in a field and you tried to give me sour cream spaghetti, I'd be like, "How about a hot pocket instead? Thx." Anyway, this is not Dan's blog so these are not his top ten. You can ask him which ones he liked, but you'll end up in a long convo about how much he hates Ina Garten. Anyway, these are not ranked or anything, they're just in order from the cookbook.
So with that, #1: Juice of a Few Flowers
So with that, #1: Juice of a Few Flowers
It was Sunday afternoon and I thought to myself, "What a perfect time to make jam!" I mean, how positively quaint: just sitting in my home in suburbia, finished with weekend chores, relaxing with some knitting...why not? Why not make some jam? I mean, obviously my afternoon-kitchen-activity was directed toward jam-making because it was next up in the book BUT whatever, I was kind of excited! Also, this is the last recipe in this book!!! I'm still in the process of deciding what I'll do now, so if there's something you'd like me to make and tell you about in my own fashion - you know, with lots of tangents and jokes - please do let me know! I'll likely continue to tackle Ina content, but may start including some recipe faves and/or foods people text me about a lot! I get a lot of cake questions, a LOT of frosting questions (because meringue buttercream is bae and I've got everyone in my social circles who eats my food on board), and a lot of fish questions. So look for more food to come, even though this is the last recipe in Back to Basics.
We went to Publix to ItemQuest for this and Dan said, "Don't we already have strawberries???" And I had to confess that I had eaten them all because it's honestly amazing how good fruit can be when it's 1) in season, 2) somewhat local, and 3) not ludicrously expensive. I'm about to travel home to Alaska for about a month, and it's going to put a real damper on my current fruit-snacking habits when I go into Fred Meyer for some strawbs and they're like, $7/lb and already trying to be moldy. Also needed blueberries (partly for the jam, mostly for the snax), one Granny Smith apple, and more superfine sugar. Publix had all of these things, plus about a million old people 'cause Sunday + Publix = Old People City.
We went to Publix to ItemQuest for this and Dan said, "Don't we already have strawberries???" And I had to confess that I had eaten them all because it's honestly amazing how good fruit can be when it's 1) in season, 2) somewhat local, and 3) not ludicrously expensive. I'm about to travel home to Alaska for about a month, and it's going to put a real damper on my current fruit-snacking habits when I go into Fred Meyer for some strawbs and they're like, $7/lb and already trying to be moldy. Also needed blueberries (partly for the jam, mostly for the snax), one Granny Smith apple, and more superfine sugar. Publix had all of these things, plus about a million old people 'cause Sunday + Publix = Old People City.
I was glad Ina gave me something easy for this week, because I was packing for Alaska and just *did not have the time* to mess with hunting lobsters or weird cheeses from the internet or whatever. ItemQuest was fairly straightforward, just took Dan a trip to the liquor store next to the Publix for some limoncello. I grabbed this particular lemon curd in the British aisle of Publix; I think last time an Ina recipe called for lemon curd I bought it from Trader Joe's and it was DISGUSTING. I mean, truly awful. I would like to recommend making your own lemon curd if you have the time and the inclination. Ina's lemon curd recipe is phenomenal and it is one thing for which I can say she is truly correct: homemade is BETTER and store-bought is not at all as good. The most beloved cupcakes I have ever made were filled with Ina's lemon curd, and had the lemon curd mixed into the meringue buttercream frosting. HIGHLY RECOMMEND!!! Anyway, the rest of this was fruit that I had on hand, mint, and Greek yogurt which we did have to buy because I don't, as a rule, eat Greek yogurt of my own free will. It's chalky and disgusting.
Dates are something I honestly never even thought about until I did Whole 30. I have mentioned my Whole 30 experience several times over the course of this journey through Back to Basics, but if you're new to reading the blog, this is what happened: I did Whole 30 one time, just to prove that I could, because salvation-by-diet apologists were obsessed with it as the newest fad in righteous eating practices. It was a terrible experience; on top of hating every minute of it for myself and finding exactly zero wellness benefits, I also hated it for Dan who was not allowed to eat popcorn for 30 days. Dan is in love with popcorn; his addiction to it is almost at the level of my addiction to coffee. He gets rage-y without it. But anyway, Whole 30 recipes are big into dates as sweeteners and some of the things you can eat, like Lara Bars, are made with dates. Dates are impossibly chewy. I ate more of them in that 30 days than I ever wanted to, and now when I see them in recipes I can't help but think of that Whole 30. Fortunately for me, I got to begin this recipe by chopping TWO CUPS' worth of dates. Oh, they also kind of look like cockroach bodies, so there's that. The only thing I actually had to get at the store for this was oranges! I had everything else on hand, even Cointreau, thanks to many previous Ina recipes.
Alright so, I'm not the Muffin Man. I don't really make a whole lot of muffins, for a lot of reasons, one of the main ones being that on the rankings of breakfast foods they definitely do not crack the top five, maybe not even the top ten. If I have an option for a bagel or a waffle, I'll pick one of them over a muffin every single time. I also prefer cereal, cinnamon rolls, or *cue eye roll* avocado toast. I've just never risen from my slumber and been like, "You know what would really hit the spot right now? A MUFFIN." But!!! In recent months, since my friend Logan came into my life, I've been making muffins a lot more frequently because he really loves them. So the last blueberry muffins I made were from a 99cent Betty Crocker mix packet which he brought into my house and asked me sweetly to make, because they're what he grew up with and along with many preservatives, they are full of nostalgia for him. Here is Logan and me, preparing to mix the muffin batter. Out of respect (and to make up for the disrespect of rolling up with muffin mix), he wore one of my aprons. I will treasure this picture forever.
You guys...Ina has "a thing" about commercial granola bars. Her beef with them, apparently, is that they say they contain real fruit and nuts but that all she sees when she looks at the labels are like, ten different kinds of corn syrup. I'm going to go ahead and guess, just based on this, that none of the lunches her mom packed for her growing up contained any Fruit By the Foot. And surely if we introduced her to Gushers, she would die. This is a real shame. I also feel like this disdain for corn syrup is maybe just a tad self-righteous, coming from the woman whose frosting recipe calls for literally six entire sticks of butter. At that point, what's a little corn syrup to you really? People's nutritional hills-to-die-on really fascinate me (and also kind of annoy me sometimes) and the ones about sugar might get me the most. I feel like, at some point, sugar is sugar and whether you're baking with honey, white sugar, brown sugar, molasses, maple syrup, etc you're still probably making something that's not amazing for you so, in terms of sugar, why not just be in for a penny in for a pound, amirite? So while I'm on this topic, before I even get to the actual point (please, I know you're here for the tangents), I would like to just let anyone and everyone know that I'm absolutely not interested in your "healthy substitutes" for things that taste good in their original form. I do not WANT a chocolate chip pancake made out of bananas and grains you harvested in your field this morning. If I want a banana I will eat one, and if I want a chocolate chip pancake I will eat one, and that's that. And DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT come @ me with "cashew cheese". Just don't. I don't even think I should honor that concept with an explanation of why it's so wrong. If that's not self-evident, I can't help you.
So down to the granola bar ingredients. I rolled up to Kroger only to find that their already meager bulk bins had been EMPTIED because if you scoop dates into a bag and then someone else scoops dates into a bag, you might get the coronavirus. I'm glad they've taken the precaution of removing this shopping option, since I cannot resisting licking my hands after every grocery trip I make. Thankfully, they still had the lil tower of small containers of some of the weirder items right there in the organic section, which was where I was able to find dates. The rest of this stuff was on the baking aisle, with the exception of wheat germ which was, for some reason, with the cereal. I'm still kind of unclear on what wheat germ is actually used for by people, and the context of it being located on the cereal aisle makes me wonder even more. Do people eat it like grape nuts? Sprinkle it on stuff like how people like to do with nutritional yeast right now? ("It tastes just like cheese!" You know what else tastes like cheese? Actual cheese. You're welcome.) Anyway, I was very grateful that Kroger at least had everything I needed and I didn't have to go on a for real ItemQuest.
So down to the granola bar ingredients. I rolled up to Kroger only to find that their already meager bulk bins had been EMPTIED because if you scoop dates into a bag and then someone else scoops dates into a bag, you might get the coronavirus. I'm glad they've taken the precaution of removing this shopping option, since I cannot resisting licking my hands after every grocery trip I make. Thankfully, they still had the lil tower of small containers of some of the weirder items right there in the organic section, which was where I was able to find dates. The rest of this stuff was on the baking aisle, with the exception of wheat germ which was, for some reason, with the cereal. I'm still kind of unclear on what wheat germ is actually used for by people, and the context of it being located on the cereal aisle makes me wonder even more. Do people eat it like grape nuts? Sprinkle it on stuff like how people like to do with nutritional yeast right now? ("It tastes just like cheese!" You know what else tastes like cheese? Actual cheese. You're welcome.) Anyway, I was very grateful that Kroger at least had everything I needed and I didn't have to go on a for real ItemQuest.
At first I saw the pictures of this and thought, "YAY!!! Cinnamon rolls!" And then a couple of weeks ago, I actually tried making cinnamon rolls for the first time and realized that my inability to roll/shape/slice yeast doughs is still a thing. AND THEN I read this entire recipe and realized these get filled with raisins. So here we go!
ItemQuest was only dramatic because the stores just DID NOT have puff pastry sheets; I was only finding it in "shells". I tried Bi-Lo and Dan tried Food Lion before he finally located sheets at Publix. The rest of the ingredients, I already had on hand!
ItemQuest was only dramatic because the stores just DID NOT have puff pastry sheets; I was only finding it in "shells". I tried Bi-Lo and Dan tried Food Lion before he finally located sheets at Publix. The rest of the ingredients, I already had on hand!