For the last few months I have been continually impressed with Michelle Duggar. Giving birth to 19 children with one more on the way is no small feat.

The morning sickness alone is a challenge. In a study done a decade ago by researchers at Cornell University, 66 percent of women reported feeling some sort of illness between weeks 6 and 14. By my calculations, if Mrs. Duggar felt morning sickness or nausea for only two months during the first trimester of each of her pregnancies – and I don’t know that she did – that means she would have been sick for 3 and 1/3 years of her life.  

I don’t know if I could handle even that possibility. I’m only in my first pregnancy now. During the first trimester, I never got sick, but I felt plenty of nausea, most often in the evenings.  

Then, I didn’t want to look at a vegetable. The thought alone of cooking a real meal on the stove made me want to sit on the couch and take a rest. I ate a lot of yogurt and toast with butter and fruit.

Now that I’m in the second trimester, I have more energy and I only feel small waves of nausea every now and then. But my eating habits still get, well, weird. Sometimes I only want yogurt and cereal for dinner. I just can’t stomach anything else.

Apparently, other women have had it much worse. In an article in this week’s New Yorker about the fight between a bakery and a private equity firm, Ian Frazier mentions that his wife ate breadsticks for the entire nine months of her first pregnancy.

My symptoms have never been that bad, which I’m thankful for. But I still worry that the baby isn’t getting enough nutrition. So I’ve been relying on a green smoothie recipe made with spinach and avocados.

I know, this smoothie sounds like some sort of weird health food shake that requires you to hold your nose while gulping it down. But it’s good. Really. With grape juice and banana added to the recipe, the shake is actually pretty sweet. 

If you have a Magic Bullet-type appliance, it comes together in a flash too, a nice bonus on those days when you want something healthy but aren’t feeling well or just don’t feel up to getting into the kitchen. 

A Sweet Green Vegetable Shake
Adapted from Eating Well

1/2 cup white grape juice
1/4 avocado
1/2 medium banana
3/4 cup green tea
A large handful of spinach (about 1 cup)

Add the ingredients to a Magic Bullet or small blender in the above order. Whir together for a few minutes until the avocado and banana and thoroughly mixed in and the shake is bright green.

Do you have a favorite quick, healthy go-to recipe that doesn’t require much cooking or time in the kitchen?

I am so freakin’ sad about this year’s Super Bowl. More than a week has passed since the Ravens lost the AFC Championship, and I still cringe every time I hear someone talk about the big game.

In my mind I see Flacco, who played an awesome game despite weeks of enduring endless ridicule from the press, and Ed Reed, who so often looks cramped and hobbled and in pain after a play yet still managed to deflect that third down pass that gave the Ravens one more chance.

I see Evans dropping the game-winning pass (or was the ball stripped??), then the faces of Rice and Suggs and Smith, eyes and mouths wide after Cundiff missed that 32-yard field goal that would have let us hang in there a little longer.

Those last several seconds of the game were just crushing.

A good four days later, after running around a Baltimore that was still glowing with purple lights, I watched a segment about Super Bowl recipes on The Today Show. Feeling a bit ridiculous because, well, I’m not eight years old, I told Kenny that I wasn’t really feeling the Super Bowl this year. Actually, I was depressed about the whole thing.

I was sure Kenny would say that there are more important things going on in our lives. But even he, who reads football news about all teams every day during the season and whose secret super power is that he can insert himself into any NFL conversation within a 100-mile radius, agreed. “I’m pretty much done with football this season,” he said. I asked around later and found that most Ravens fans I know feel the same way.

It’s because they got soooo close.

But, on a more upbeat note, I do like Sara at the Saucy Dipper, and she is hosting her latest Dipstock in honor of the Super Bowl. I decided to play along and make chile con queso dip. Not for the big game because I’m still not sure I can watch it.

Instead, I made this chile cheese dip to celebrate the Ravens season. They had a great year. Thanks for taking us so close to the end, guys. And I mean that sincerely.

Eating Well’s Chile Con Queso Dip
This chile con queso dip didn’t have any connection to the Ravens that I could see. I just decided to make it because I’ve been craving cheese lately. But soon enough, a connection emerged.

The dip starts with onions and garlic sautéing in oil. I added low-fat milk and cornstarch to make a white sauce, then stirred in sharp Cheddar cheese.

Even though this is an Eating Well recipe, I used a full fat Cabot cheese. It had a rich texture and was supposed to melt smoothly into the warm, milky base. The dip should have been silky and creamy and perfect and, after I added the diced tomatoes, lime juice, and cayenne pepper, flavorful.

But the cheese didn’t melt. Instead, my strings of shredded cheese morphed together into small clumps that slowly floated through the dip like icebergs at sea.

Here’s the Ravens connection: much like the team, I’m still surprised the cheese dip met the fate it did. Even when I used a hand-held electric motor to break up some of the cheesy chunks, I couldn’t get the smooth texture I needed.

The flavor was nice though. So my “Celebrate the Ravens, Not the Super Bowl” dip became a cheesy pasta sauce.

There’s always an opportunity for reinvention. I know the Ravens will be good again. Maybe 2012 will be their year.

Have you ever been upset about a sporting event, even days later? Or, on a cooking-related note, do you know why my cheese didn’t melt into its milky base? I can’t figure out what went wrong and would love to hear any ideas you have.

Sometimes I absolutely love making dough. When I made this babka and the dough felt smooth and elastic as it should and it rose in the pan and then in the oven, I was beyond happy with myself. I felt like a baking goddess when I lifted the three hefty, chocolatey loaves from the oven. And I felt even more impressed with myself when my family ate the babka on Christmas Eve, even when faced with an entire table full of other delicious desserts that also wanted their attention.

Then other times I find myself sitting on my kitchen floor in agony, heart beating rapidly, because I have just tried to make dough – in this case pierogi dough – and it didn’t work. The dough was too dry to roll, so, after cutting out discs with a cookie cutter, I had pierogi shells that were much too thick. I also neglected to cover the dough with a towel, so a lovely flaky film was forming on top, one that felt a lot like dry skin.

It’s true that I tend to get upset in the kitchen, but in this case I had actually dropped to the floor for a reason. We had some plastic containers in our drying rack, and I wanted to put them away to distract myself.

The lower cabinet that holds our plastic containers happened to be overflowing at the time. Around the holidays, when there is plenty of leftover food after family dinners, the containers multiply in the cabinet like Mogwais. We had been throwing our holiday butter and Whipped Cream and yogurt containers on top of the old containers, making terribly skewed towers in the process. This had bothered me for weeks.

So I did what any reasonable person who is upset about their dry, unrollable dough would do. I reached forward from my spot on the floor, grabbed a few containers, and threw them.

Not far, and not at anything breakable. I just threw them at the other containers in the cabinet, which made the entire tower tumble down. 

It felt amazing. It was such a release.

It also prompted Kenny to come in the kitchen to check on me. I’m sure I had an irritated comment to make at first. But he just calmly helped me pack up the old food containers into big white trash bags. Inspired by his even-headedness, I neatly stacked our good containers, the plastic ones with blue tops that we actually bought at the store, in the cabinet to keep.

Then I went back to my cooking. I cleaned the many pieces of my food processor, measured out flour and eggs, and started my second batch of dough. I added more water this time so the dough would be moist enough to roll and covered my dough circles with a towel to prevent them from drying out. 

And because I rose up from my dejected position on the kitchen floor, all thanks to a few plastic containers, Kenny and I didn’t have to eat cereal for dinner that night. We had sweet farmer’s cheese pierogi instead.

How do you persevere through kitchen disaster? Do you try to salvage what you made? Do you have to regroup before attempting the recipe again, or do you calmly move on to your next batch? Please share your experiences with us.

I’m not a fan of farmer’s cheese. I love the idea of it because it is popular in Poland, and I am Polish and I have Polish pride.

But the taste? Not so much. I like my cheese to be bold. I want salt and I want intense flavor. I wouldn’t reach for a slice of, say, mozzarella because it’s too mild. But next to farmer’s cheese, mozzarella looks like aged Parmesan.

In the past I described farmer’s cheese as a less-salty version of feta, but that’s not accurate. It’s sour, like plain yogurt, and soft. It’s also a bit firmer than cottage cheese. In fact, farmer’s cheese was once cottage cheese – it’s curds were simply drained longer to remove more water from the final product.

Still, I would never want to eat farmer’s cheese (or cottage cheese, for that matter) on its own.

But in these blintzes? It’s lovely. With sugar and raisins folded into the batter, the blintzes are sweet patties that smell like French toast when they’re frying. When cooked, the texture is dense, as if flour was the main ingredient. But it’s not. The blintzes are primarly made with farmer’s cheese and eggs.

Ever the salt lover, I like to sprinkle some coarse salt on these blintzes before serving. It perks up their flavor and gives them a nice crunch.

Cheese Blintzes
Martha Stewart’s website has the recipe for cheese blintzes. Here’s a few tips on the process:

1. The quantities: The recipe calls for 15 ounces of farmer’s cheese, but my local shop sells the cheese by the pound. Without a scale, I had an extra ounce of cheese to work with. After mixing the cheese with eggs, sugar, flour, baking powder, and salt, I had a gloppy concoction that wouldn’t hold together when patted into shape. The fix? Add more flour. I can’t tell you how much. Just enough to hold the mixture together. It will still be soft. But the next step – rolling the blintzes in flour – helps with that. Which brings me to…
2. The flour: I shaped all of my blintzes, rolled them in flour, and stored them on cookie sheets ahead of time. This does not work. The flour sinks into the blintzes like snow melting on skin, and you’re left with a wet mess. Instead they must be fried immediately. After rolling them in flour, set them directly in a pan of hot oil so they can get cooking.

Are there any farmer’s cheese recipes that you just love (or cottage cheese recipes)? Please share them with us.

Seinfeld taught me this about chocolate babka: A chocolate version is better than cinnamon, so much so that one cannot possibly go to a party with a cinnamon babka when one knows that a chocolate babka, the better babka, will be present.

But even though I’ve seen this episode, one of my favorites, dozens of times, Jerry and Elaine left out one important fact: what is a babka, exactly? Is it a bread or a pie? A pastry with a flaky dough and a creamy filling? A layer cake with fluffy frosting?

I found out years later, when I wandered past a bakery in Grand Central Station that had a typewritten sign advertising its chocolate and cinnamon babkas. This was the first time I had ever come across a babka in real life. I snatched a chocolate loaf (yes, a loaf!), took it home, and immediately cut myself a slice.

What I remember about that slice is that several kinds of chocolate – and lots of it – poked and protruded from the folds of a buttery pastry , a hybrid between a rich bread and a cake. When I cut a slice, the crumbly streusel topping on top cracked and slid onto the cutting board like ice snapping and falling from a mountain.

That was years ago. Then last week, after three months of not cooking anything more interesting than toast followed by a week of constant baking to make up for lost time, I really wanted to make a babka for the holidays. So I did. 

Chocolate Babka

I found a Martha Stewart recipe for this Jewish dessert on The Smitten Kitchen. Making it was a five-hour project that turned out to be a lot of fun.

First, I made the yeasted dough and went through the rising and punching down stages that often come with making bread.

For the chocolate filling, I used chocolate bars, which I chopped into small pieces, then, at The Smitten Kitchen’s recommendation, pulsed in my Magic Bullet-like appliance until I had tiny chocolate bits. I stirred in cinnamon and cut in butter to make glossy crumbs as a shiny as fresh asphalt.

Then it was time to put everything together. I rolled out the dough, spooned on and spread out the filling, and rolled up the pastry like jelly roll. I twisted and folded the roll in all sorts of ways, which made the dough crack and the chocolate ooze out of the folds. Sometimes, I repaired the cracks; others, I let the chocolate run free.

For the final flourish, I patted on a powdered sugar, butter, and flour streusel topping, a white, fluffy coat to accessorize an already rich dessert.

This recipe makes three babkas, which I brought to my family’s Christmas party. Even though the babka slices had to compete with chocolate chip and sugar cookies, Rice Krispie treats on a stick, and the best red velvet cake I’ve ever had, they were still a hit.

If you make your own babka, here’s four tips that may help with the process: 

1. On chocolate: I used the best quality chocolate I could find in Whole Foods, which happened to be bars of El Rey dark milk chocolate and dark chocolate. In my Magic Bullet, I had to pulse the chocolate in nine batches, so it took a while. If you have a food processor, I’m sure the process will be much faster.
2. On the chocolate/cinnamon/butter filling: This recipe makes a lot of chocolate filling and streusel topping. I didn’t use all of it, and my babkas still had more chocolate in them then I would have liked. If you like a babka that has more pastry and less chocolate, I would leave out some of the filling.
3. On the streusel topping: The streusel topping will not stick very well to the top of your babka. I learned afterwards that this is ok. If the crumbs roll off of the dough and surround the babka in hills of topping, the streusel will still crisp up and be perfectly delicious.
4. On baking pans: The recipe says to bake the babkas in three bread loaf pans. I only had one bread loaf pan, so I used a circular pan and a square pan too. Two of my loaves had more of a circular shape, but they baked up just as nicely.

Did T.V. or other pop culture ever introduce you to a dish that you had to make? 

My condo smells like bacon. I don’t notice it unless I’m outside first. The other day, walking up the stairs that lead to my floor, I smelled salt and pork, heavy and smoky like the air wafting a short distance from a summer barbecue. I thought a neighbor was having a party.

But the lovely scent was left over from the six strips of bacon, cut so thin that they were almost translucent when raw, that I fried up that morning. This, finally, is my homemade bacon.

In its initial stages, making homemade bacon is like cooking a roast in a slow cooker: The process takes time, but requires very little effort. After I called a local butcher – Galvinell Meat Co., Inc. for Marylanders who may be interested – to reserve a thick slab of pork belly and, a few days later, picked it up, the hard part was done.

As this homemade bacon experiment was part of the Charcutepalooza project – it was actually the very first apprentice challenge back in January- I used Michael Ruhlman’s charcuterie book to get a recipe for a bacon cure. His savory cure is made with kosher salt, pink salt, sugar, garlic, bay leaves, and peppercorns, a coarse mixture that feels like sand.  (If you don’t have the book, here’s his recipe for a basic cure.)

I felt like Wilma Flintstone as I unpacked my eight pound pork belly from it’s plastic bag. Meat is so new to me that working with such an imposing piece feels almost prehistoric.

But from here all I needed to do was blot the pork belly to remove its extra moisture, then massage the cure into both sides of the flesh, like rubbing lotion on skin.

I then slid the pork belly back into its plastic bag. This isn’t as easy as it sounds because the plastic bag fit the pork belly perfectly, an important factor in bacon-making because the meat releases liquid as it cures.  A bag that just fits the pork belly ensures the cure is always rubbing up against the meat.

That’s it. The pork belly goes into the fridge, and gets turned every day to redistribute the cure. After seven days the meat should be firm and will spring back slightly when gently poked.

I let mine cure for two weeks, perhaps too long but I was working with a thicker slab of belly. When I finally poked the belly and it was firm, I felt like I had figured out the secret to a magic trick. I knew how to transform pork belly into bacon!

Clockwise from top left: The pork belly/bacon after it has been cured and roasted, peeling off the skin, slicing the bacon with an old electic slicer

The bacon is then cooked low and slow in the oven, the skin is peeled off, and the meat is sliced.  And this last part is when I bowed out of the process.

Pork belly can be sliced to any thickness with a knife, or even cut into lardons, those small cubes that are often cooked with Brussels sprouts. But because my dad has an old rickety meat slicer, we used that. Because I do not like electrical blades – I sliced off the tip of my thumb in eighth grade industrial arts class, the only person ever to do so, and I’ve stayed away from moving blades ever since – he handled the slicing.  It was quite exciting to watch the fresh bacon slide off of the slicer and onto a plate, where it laid in a curly pile like ribbons.

I fried up a few slices for my parents, Kenny, and me and wrapped the rest in six makeshift aluminum foil packages for later. This was a few weeks ago, so I’m embarrassed to say we haven’t done anything too creative with the results. Kenny does lay strips across his egg and cheese sandwiches.

For me though, this project was all about the science.  I got a big kick out of seeing how bacon is made.

Have you ever experimented with charcuterie at home?  Tell us about the process!

If I order dessert at a restaurant, it’s never chocolate.  If it’s winter or one of those rare occasions I’m just not in the mood for ice cream, my favorite after dinner sweet, I will always order fruit desserts.

And I don’t mean a bowl of fruit. No matter how fresh and bright and in-season a bowl of peaches or blueberries or strawberries is, and no matter how much whipped cream glistens on top of them, this is not dessert. When I say fruit dessert, I mean pie, crisp, cobbler, or cake packed with warm, syrupy fruit.

So last week, when Kenny and I made our first trip to Dangerously Delicious Pies in Baltimore, I turned away from the Baltimore Bomb, a pie made with our local Berger cookies, which are discs of cakey sweets slathered with a thick coating of dry chocolate icing. Instead, I turned to fruit pie: the cherry crumble pie, a one-crust pie topped with a buttery layer of crumble, most likely made with brown sugar, oats, flour, and butter.

We brought the pie back to our place and I ate a bite here, another one there, until my big piece of pie was gone by the next morning.

But I still craved more.

So I headed to Whole Foods to buy some cherries. At $6 or $8 a pound, I can’t remember which, they cost more than I wanted to spend. My craving for a pie that was both tart and sweet was strong though.

That’s when I saw the pluots.

Pluot Crumble Pie
Adapted from Local Flavors by Deborah Madison and Eating Well

Floyd Zaiger developed the pluot in the 80s by cross-breeding a plum and an apricot. An article in ABC News explains the process: Pollen from one fruit, say the plum, is crossed with the flower of another fruit, say the apricot. Cross-breeders like Zaiger then grow the fruit, and plant the resulting seeds. (To read more about Zaiger and cross-breeding, also check out this article in The Huffington Post.)

Even though the pluot has been around for more than twenty years, I had never heard of it until a couple of weeks ago. Unripe pluots are tart like cherries and only cost $2.99 a pound – perfect for my pie.

I made my pie with pluots that were still firm to the touch. With ¾ cup of sugar, the resulting pie was more tart than sweet with a puckery flavor that sometimes shriveled the skin on the inside of my mouth. Next time, I’ll try adding 1 cup of sugar instead.

Also, if you don’t feel like fooling with a pie crust, a pluot crumble is just as good. In a long pan, bake the pluots, sugar, and flour mixture, covered with aluminum foil that has three slits in the center, at 375 degrees for 30 minutes. Top with the crumble and follow the directions below.

1 pie crust, store-bought or homemade
7-8 pluots, about 2 ½ pounds, cut into small to medium chunks
¾ cup to 1 cup sugar
¼ cup all-purpose flour
½ cup whole-wheat pastry flour
½ cup old-fashioned rolled oats
¼ cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon cold unsalted butter, cut into small chunks
1 tablespoon canola oil
2 tablespoons apple butter, or your favorite fruit butter

Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

If you’re making your own crust, chill the pie dough for at least thirty minutes before rolling. When cold, roll the dough into a circle. Place your rolling pin on the edge of the circle and roll until the dough is wrapped around it. Gently unroll the dough across a 9 ½-inch pie pan. Trim the edges.

To make the filling, combine the pluots, sugar, and flour. Pour the fruit mixture on top of the pie crust, and cover with aluminum foil. Cut three slits in the foil, place the pie plate on a cookie tray, and bake for 30 minutes.

While the pie cooks, make the crumble. Stir together whole-wheat pastry flour, oats, brown sugar, and cinnamon. Cut in the chunks of butter with a fork or your hands. (I think it’s much easier to use your hands.) Add the oil and the apple butter and stir.

After the pie has baked for 30 minutes and the fruit is bubbly, reduce the heat to 375. Remove the aluminum foil from the pie, and spinkle on the crumble in a thick, even layer.  Bake for 15 to 20 minutes more, until the crumble begins to brown.

Cut into slices, if you can. But if you can’t, don’t worry. My pie didn’t hold together at all. On a plate, it had the runny texture of a regular fruit crumble with a pie crust hiding underneath the sauce.  Serve it with pride anyway.

What is your favorite restaurant dessert?  And, to switch topics completely, have you ever had a pluot or any other fruit or vegetables that were created through cross-breeding? 

Four years ago this month, Kenny and I took an overnight flight from New York to Reykjavik in Iceland for a 10-day vacation. Because it was August (and not because we checked a weather report), we expected some sunny weather. So we decided to save some money and camp out on a grassy lot behind the city’s youth hostel. We bought our $30 tent at Target and packed two L.L. Bean sleeping bags to stay warm.

And it rained the entire time.

Well, almost the entire time. There were pockets of sunshine, like in the picture above, or at least gray but dry air.

The air is one of the many things I remember about our trip.

I also remember the faint smell of rotten eggs that popped up around the country during our stay. (Pure hot water in Iceland is filtered through volcanic rock, which makes it smell of sulphur or rotten eggs.)

I remember that sheets of rain soaked through our thin tent and our backpacks, leaving all of our clothes wet on the first night.

I remember swimming in The Blue Lagoon, a warm, sea blue geothermal pool rich in minerals, and slathering the white mud placed in boxes around the Lagoon on my face as a mask.

And I remember walking through Reykjavik one evening when we decided we were tired of being wet and had spent enough money and it was time to cut our trip short. We stayed for only four days. (Though I’d love to visit Iceland again – I’ll just get a hotel room next time!)

But what I completely missed – and honestly I don’t know how this happened – is that Iceland is a chocolate-eating country, especially during the Easter holiday. The Nói Síríus chocolate factory alone produces 300,000 eggs every year – that’s one for every Icelander.

These aren’t just any old hollowed-out Easter eggs either, according to the Iceland Board of Tourism. First, you can buy the eggs in up to 10 – 10! – different sizes. Each egg is stuffed with candy and a slip of paper printed with a proverb or other bit of wisdom, kind of like a chocolate fortune cookie. People actually “mark” the holiday by giving and receiving these chocolate Easter eggs.

The tourism board also touts regular old Icelandic chocolate. The Nói Síríus factory is located right in Reykjavik, perhaps even steps from the campsite where I stayed.

But the only reason I know about this chocolate is because I saw stacks of the bars in Whole Foods last week. After I bought a 70% extra bitter bar, I realized there are actually two bars in every creamy white paper package.

The bars at my local Whole Foods are pure chocolate – no cherries, nuts, coffee, or mint here – and are classified by their cacao count – milk, semi-sweet, bitter, extra-bitter, etc.

The 70% bar is a smooth dark chocolate. The small squares are so rich that I’m satisfied with one or two of them at a time.

I’ve found my new go-to chocolate bar. Too bad I didn’t realize it when I was in Iceland.

What foods have you discovered – or not discovered – while on vacation?

Last year I wrote about what has become one of my favorite summer field trips: picking peaches at Bennett Orchards in Delaware.  The orchard is on our way home from Ocean City when we take the Delaware route, so we stopped in again this year after our early August vacation.

Field trip actually isn’t the right term to describe peach picking.  It’s more like a pleasant stopover or an errand.  That’s because peach picking is fast.  Five of us – and two people didn’t do much work – picked 27 pounds of peaches, an entire box, in five minutes.  Really.  My mom timed it.  And Kenny and I took home more of the haul than anyone else.

I love the idea of picking lots of fruit at once, but it also kind of stresses me out.  A few summers ago I bought a 25-pound box of tomatoes for canning, then waited an entire week to go to Bed Bath & Beyond and buy the stupid cans.  The tomatoes rotted.  Not one was useable.

I vowed then that I would never again let so much good food, lovingly cared for and picked by local farmers no less, end up in the trash. 

Luckily, the nice people at Bennett Orchards provide a full list of peach recipes, mostly breads, pies, cobblers, and these peach muffins, which I quickly whipped together one weekday morning last week.

Peach Muffins
Adapted from Bennett Orchards

I used whole wheat flours in this recipe, which definitely creates a more dense muffin.  If you like lighter muffins, substitute all-purpose flour. 

Because of the moist peaches – I used Glowingstar freestone yellow peaches – these muffins have pockets of fruit that are extremely soft and sticky.  Keep napkins close by!

And don’t worry if you add some ingredients out of order.  I did this myself with my first batch.  When I tasted the batter before scooping it into the muffin cups, it was terrible, like eating raw bread dough.   Then I realized it – I forgot the sugar.  So I stirred it in after I had already folded in the peaches.  This probably changed the texture of the muffin, but I’ve never been a very exact baker anyway.  They still tasted sweet and fruity to me. 

1 cup white whole wheat flour
1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
½ cup sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons ginger
½ teaspoon cinnamon
¾ cup soy milk
1 large egg
¼ cup butter, melted
2 large peaches, peeled and diced (save the juice)

In a large bowl, combine the flours, sugar, baking powder, salt, ginger, and cinnamon; set aside.  In a smaller bowl, stir together the soy milk and egg, then slowly whisk in the melted butter.  Move your whisk fast – you don’t want to cook the eggs.

Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients, and stir together until just combined.  Fold in the diced peaches and juice.

Line a muffin pan with 12 cupcake liners.  Scoop the batter into the cups.  (My muffins barely rose – possibly because I added the sugar so late – so I filled my muffin cups to the very top.)  Bake at 425 degrees for 20 minutes. 

Makes 17 small muffins.

Do you go fruit picking in the summer?  Other than canning, how do you use up your fruit?

Back in early July, the heat was sweltering here in Baltimore.  One Wednesday, around 5:30 p.m., I left my apartment in the central part of the city and walked to Bad Decisions, a bar near the water in Fell’s Point, to research a story about culinary cocktails.  More cars than usual packed the streets, thanks to the U2 concert at the M&T Bank Stadium that night. The air was thick and unmoving and engulfing, the kind that leaves sweat stains on your clothes. (It certainly left a lovely mark on the front of my dress.)

When I arrived at the bar, John Reusing, the owner, made me four cocktails to sample for my story. (Get recipes for his bacon habanero mojito, pickletini, and smoky margarita here.) They all had a lingering heat, which I love. But what my overheated body really wanted, I learned, was Reusing’s rhubarb shrub.

Made with fruit, vinegar, sugar, and Seltzer, shrub is like a soda. In his handwritten menu book, Reusing wrote that the shrub’s popularity dates back to the 1700s in the U.S.; today, it is popular in Japan. I ordered a non-alcoholic shrub made with rhubarb, and it was sweet, tart, fizzy, and incredibly refreshing. I couldn’t wait to make a version at home.  

Rhubarb Shrub
A shrub can be made with any kind of fruit. Since I made mine a few weeks ago and since I loved Reusing’s version so much, I used rhubarb. I diced two stalks of rhubarb and heated them with apple cider vinegar until the liquid simmered. 

Then I poured the heated rhubarb and vinegar in a long glass container, and let it sit in my refrigerator for three days.  If you want to be transformed back to childhood, take a good sniff of the rhubarb when it’s done soaking. (You may not even have to lean down – the smell is that strong.)  Doesn’t it remind you of dyeing Easter eggs, when your parents dropped those little colored pellets into cups full of vinegar?  

When I was done sniffing the vinegar (which sounds wrong when I write it down, like sniffing markers), I strained the mixture to remove the rhubarb. Here’s the coolest part: If you touch the soaked rhubarb, it will turn to mush beneath your fingers. The vinegar completely breaks it down. It also makes the rhubarb unusable, so I threw it away and focused on my rhubarb-infused vinegar.

I poured the vinegar into my Dutch oven, added three-fourths cup of sugar, and heated the mixture until the sugar dissolved and the liquid reduced slightly. That’s it – this thin syrup is shrub.

I stored my rhubarb shrub in a glass container. I like to pour two tablespoons of the shrub into a tall drinking glass, then fill the glass with Seltzer. You may want to use more or less shrub, depending your tastes.

Here’s a recipe for rhubarb shrub.  The vinegar flavor in my shrub was strong, so next time I’ll increase the amount of sugar to a full cup. I’m also curious to try replacing the rhubarb with peaches.

Have you ever had shrub or made homemade soda? Tell us about it!