Blog Post
Leslie in France
Welcome to my blog about my adventure here in France: restoring a manor house, gardening, cooking, and writing.
Garden Harvests: Abundance, Scarcity, and Indulgences
Leslie Denis • August 24, 2021
I am blessed to be married to someone who loves to garden. Laurent has agriculture in his blood, and he’s happiest outside in his potager.
Lucky me: my inner chef delights in cooking dirt-to-table food. What joy when he brings me produce from the garden – a handful of strawberries for snacking, a salad for dinner, a big bunch of rhubarb for a pie. The harvest is a joy, that is, until the abundance brings burdensome work. Last year there were way too many courgettes
(zucchini), potirons (pumpkins), and tomates
(tomatoes, obviously). I was in the kitchen non-stop, making cream of zucchini soup, zucchini bread, zucchini lasagna, curried pumpkin soup, pumpkin bread, pumpkin pie, and jars upon jars of preserved tomato sauce which lasted us well into the winter.
This year too many tomatoes aren’t a problem due to the relentless rains in Western Europe this spring: everyone is complaining of the mildiou
(mildew) attacking their tomato crops. Laurent cut off most of the leaves of the tomato plants and treated the plants and growing fruit with a solution of water and sodium bicarbonate. His efforts have been somewhat successful because we’re now eating ripe tomatoes, although they don’t have last year’s flavor and are slightly mealy. They make good sauce, however, and I’ll not have the burden of having to preserve countless jars.
Our early spring spinach was perfect – either lightly sauteed in butter or simply as a colorful addition to salads. However, the crop was wiped out by the mildew, another victim of the weeks of cold rain. I didn’t get a chance to make a fresh spinach quiche but gave thanks that we didn’t experience the deadly flooding that devastated Belgium and Germany.
This year the big winners so far are the potatoes. Laurent planted too many for just the two of us; they helped to clear the soil but expanded our waistlines. I have made potatoes sauteed in duck fat, potato soup, and fries, and I consider myself the queen of potato salad. We needed a break from potatoes, so the harvested crop is now stored in our cave, a proper wine cellar with a floor of gravel-over-dirt and lined on one side with shelves for storing fruit and veggies and on the other side lined with racks for wine. The spuds should keep well into the winter. Next year far less potatoes: gardening is a learning process.
The carrots have begun to come in – kind of gnarly, not at all industrial-pretty, but sweet and delicious. We celebrated the simple goodness of the first few: sliced lengthwise, parboiled to soften, then sauteed in butter and dusted with salt, pepper and chopped parsley. Yesterday I made carrot slaw, tossing grated carrots with lemon vinaigrette, parsley, and shallots; they’re better after macerating in the fridge, so we’ll enjoy them tomorrow. Since I was already grating carrots for the slaw using the Cuisinart, I grated twice what I needed and made one of my favorite indulgences – carrot cake cookies.
I adapted my recipe for carrot cake cookies from a recipe that Barbara Swell, in her entertaining The First American Cookie Lady: Recipes from a 1917 Cookie Diary, adapted from one of Anna “Cookie” Covington’s recipes. I’ve cut back on the sugar, added raisins and spices, increased the leavening, and substituted almond flour for some of the AP flour. These are not crisp, crunchy cookies, but portable rounds of light and fluffy carrot cake. There’s no icing, but you could make them smaller than called for and sandwich two together with cream cheese frosting or marshmallow fluff -- like a whoopy pie -- or make ice cream sandwiches with vanilla or rum raisin ice cream. But eating them plain with a cup of tea works for me. In case you want to try them, here’s my recipe. Just tell yourself that they’re made with carrots so they’re healthy. In any event, I find them good for the soul.
Carrot Cake Cookies
Step 1. Make Carrot Marmalade
Finely grate 2 generous cups of carrots. Add a scant cup of sugar, the finely grated rind (yellow only, no bitter white pith) and juice of 1 lemon. Let sit in fridge for at least 6 hours or overnight.
Stirring constantly, simmer gently over low heat until most of the liquid has evaporated and the carrots are candied.
Add a generous ½ cup of raisins and let cool.
Step 2. Make Cookie Batter
Cream 10 tablespoons (155 grams) of softened butter with ¾ cup (185 grams) of sugar. Stir in two eggs, one at a time, then 1 teaspoon vanilla.
Whisk together 1 ½ cups (185 grams) all purpose flour, ½ cup (50 grams) almond flour, 1 ½ teaspoons of baking powder, a scant ¼ teaspoon salt, and a generous dash each of cinnamon, ginger, and cardamon.
To the butter/sugar/egg mixture add the flour mixture about a third at a time. Stir in carrot and raisin marmalade until uniformly blended.
Step 3. Bake
Using a cereal spoon, drop slightly rounded mounds onto parchment-covered cookie sheets, keeping them rounded and separating them well because they spread when baking. I usually do 8 mounds per cookie sheet.
Bake at 350 degrees (175 centigrade) until edges are lightly browned, about 15 minutes or so. Let cook on a rack.
Makes about 2 dozen generous cookies. (You could use smaller spoonfuls and for smaller cookies, especially if you’re going to make a sandwich of some kind.)
Step 4. Enjoy
These freeze well. They’re so good that Laurent and I usually can’t wait for them to thaw.
Bon appetit!