All the Ingredients

Garden Salsa

The first tomatoes are finally ready in the garden. I also have onions and herbs, so I decided to make salsa.

Now, I spent most of my precollege years in Phoenix. This was back in the days before salsa became trendy and was made out of mangoes or pineapple or peaches. I am stodgy when it comes to salsa. I want a tomatoes base. To me, the other concoctions are fruit relishes.

I also am not a big fan of chunks of onion or large fronds of cilantro. I could be wrong, but I don't think cilantro was a common salsa ingredient in Phoenix in the 1960s. It certainly wasn't an herb my mother ever used, and she was a pretty adventurous cook. So yesterday, with fresh ingredients from my garden, and within my picky parameters, I came up with a frisky salsa.

First I sliced up a sweet yellow onion. I hadn't planned to harvest most of the onions this early, but more than a dozen of them had pushed themselves halfway out of the soil. Obviously, I need to plant them deeper next summer. So now I have a nice braid of drying, lemon-sized onions.

I added a diced clove of garlic to the onion and sauteed them in olive oil until just soft. In the food processor, I combined chunks of yellow and red tomatoes from the garden, along with some parsley and cilantro. After several pulses, I added the onions, garlic, and some sea salt. Then I diced up and threw in the first jalapeno from the garden. I am new to enjoying spicy heat in my food. I know that many people don't consider jalapenoss to be very hot, but the salsa had quite a lot of zip for me. And the onion and garlic flavors were there but muted. A new family favorite recipe!

Sweet Corn

There are pluses and minuses to living in Iowa. In the last six months, we've had too many minuses. We had a long and awful winter with too much snow and ice. At one point, most of the folks in our area were without electricity for three days, the result of a nasty ice storm. We bought a house with a fireplace so we would have someplace to hang the Christmas stockings and have been grateful for it every winter. A wet spring led into what will now be recorded in our memories and the history books as "The Flood of 2008." We bought a house on a hill because it came with an acre and a half of land. It also happens to be far enough from the lake that surrounds our rural subdivision on three sides, to never be in danger of flooding. Recovery in our part of Iowa will be very slow. Favorite restaurants are gone and won't return. Other businesses have relocated. And many people were washed completely out of their homes, neighborhoods, and towns, and have to start over again.

A lot of people lost their gardens. I was lucky. I only lost my beans which came up and rotted in the wet soil. I replanted, just to have it happen again. A lot of farmers in this area lost all or part of their corn fields. Even now, there's been enough rain that some of these fields remain shallow lakes. I drove by one adjacent to the interstate recently that had a fallen tree along one edge that was covered in snowy egrets. Perhaps they thought they had gotten to Minnesota, the land of a thousand lakes, a little sooner this summer. It was consoling to think that such beautiful birds have stopped to rest in a spot that's beauty this time of year should have come from tall green corn sporting a crown of tassels.

I have my own small strip of corn in my garden this year. I haven't planted corn in over a decade because we live on the top of a hill, and the tall corn plants are vulnerable to the strong rains and hail storms of the average Iowa summer. My small crops were always broken down before they could produce anything. Since I have my garden in our protected side yard this summer, I thought I would give corn another try. Due to the wet spring, the plants emerged at different times and are at different heights, like two blended families with lots of children. So far we have four ears of corn developing. If that's all we get, everyone in the family will get to eat one, and it will have been a successful experiment.

But one of the pluses of living in Iowa arrived on time this week, in this long, hard summer. Sweet corn. I was driving past the parking lot next to the vacuum cleaner repair shop, and there was a rusted red pickup truck with a striped awning over the back, filled almost to overflowing with ears of sweet corn, just picked that morning. A farmer cheerfully filled a plastic grocery sack with twelve large ears for five dollars. I took them home, and served them boiled, with butter and salt, for dinner that night along with hamburgers off the grill. Easily my favorite summer meal. The corn was sweet and crunchy, and we ate seconds, butter running down our fingers.

There are a lot of things I would never buy out of pick up in a parking lot, but in Iowa, in late July and August, I will always stop for sweet corn. This year, it's a sight just as beautiful as the snowy egrets.

At the Farmers' Market

Our small town has tried several times to establish a farmer's market. The first year it consisted ofthree men who showed up on Thursday nights to sell fruit and vegetables out of their pickup trucks in the parking lot next to the ballpark. The offerings were basic: corn, tomatoes, beans, onions, and melons. After about six weeks, no one showed up anymore. The second year, the location was the same, and the vendors different. Again it didn't last the summer.

This year the farmer's market was moved to Sunday afternoon behind the town's rec center. This was a smart move. Not only is this location within biking and walking distance of more of the town, but it also attracts the rec center traffic--patrons who have come to work out, or to use the pool, the library, or the playground.

The first week there were four vendors. The gentleman with fresh pork and vegetables from his farm, the lady who had just opened her own herb shop in town and who gardens and bakes, the family selling elk meat and elk leather goods, and the lady selling home-made baked goods. That first week I bought tomatoes, cucumbers, and lettuces. Glorious tomatoes! It had been such a wet, nasty spring that the tomatoes had been grown in a hot house. But I ate one everyday for week--often in a salad with the lettuce and cucumbers.

Four weeks later there were twice as many vendors with kohlrabi, potatoes, early onions, tiny strawberries, the end of the rhubarb and the radishes, and the beginning of pea pods and sugar snaps. There were two more ladies selling pastries and fresh fruit pies, and two other ladies selling their handmade jewelry. Then followed the two wonderful weeks of the sour cherry harvest. I couldn't get enough fruit either week to make a cherry pie, so I started hunting for crisp recipes. I turned to a cookbook I had just bought, Deborah's Madison's Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America's Farmers' Markets, just out this spring in paperback. In this book, she describes farmers' markets all over the U.S. and gives recipes grouped by what you will find in these markets seasonally. There's a great recipe in the book for a "Apricot-Cherry Crisp."

I didn't have any apricots or the sweet cherries the recipe called for, but the sour cherries worked great. The recipe calls for only two tablespoons of sugar to be added to roughly one pound of cherries. I increased this to a quarter cup for my two pints of sour cherries. I combined that with two tablespoons of minute tapioca and a dash of almond extract and poured into a buttered 8-inch square glass baking dish. Then I followed the crisp topping recipe exactly as Madison has it, and worked together six tablespoons unsalted butter, three-fourths of a cup of brown sugar, two-thirds of a cup of flour, and a dash each of salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg. I baked it at 375 degrees until the juices from the cherries almost bubbled over the edge of the pan--about 30 minutes. We ate it warm out of the oven with a good french vanilla ice cream scooped on top. In the last two weeks, I have found nice sweet cherries and apricots (not indigenous to my local farmers' market) and made the recipe exactly as it appears in Madison's book. It's excellent. The apricots and cherries play off each other nicely, and barely need any sugar, as sweet as they are.

Last Sunday, the farmers' market had swelled to over twenty vendors, each with a colored tent to protect them from the harsh midday sun. As I pulled up, families were getting out of their vans to shop, kids and dogs in tow. It finally looked like a "market," busy with shoppers.There were melons, green beans, beets, sweet corn, peppers, potatoes, and squash of all shapes, sizes, and colors. The herb lady who has been there every week is now selling her hand-crafted breads and pastas as well as her herbs. The pork farmer still has his freezer of various cuts of meat (they are right next to the folks who sell the frozen cuts of elk), and his vegetables have expanded as well. My refrigerator is full and it's time to hunt for more recipes.

Tamales--Part 2

Wednesday's assembly plan was compromised by flash floods, tornado warnings, and the fact that I had to drive to two different cities to get masa flour for the tamales. I live in a ethnically diverse part of the Midwest and can get authentic Thai, Chinese, and Mexican food nearby, but it can be frustrating at times to find specific ingredients for recipes. The conversation at Big-Box-Mart went like this:

"Do you have Masa flour for making tamales?"

"Masa Flowers? That would be in the Lawn and Garden section."

So my daughter Emily and I made the tamales yesterday. We prepared three fillings. The first was black bean and corn based on my standby black bean and corn soup (see http://alltheingredients.typepad.com/weblog/2007/04/black_bean_corn.html ). I made half a recipe and simmered it longer so there was less juice. The second filling was the chicken breast I had roasted pulled off the bone and mixed with a small jar of black bean and corn salsa and extra jalapenos. The third filling was the pulled pork mixed with jalapenos, enough canned tomato sauce to make it hold together, and some of my friend Jim's "X-Scorn" hot sauce. The filling had a slight kick, but since these are going to be served to a diverse group, I didn't want to make them too hot. We will add some more sauce as we eat them.

Then I made the "Masa Harina Masa" recipe out of Tamales 101. I made it in half batches since my Kitchen Aid mixer could only handle that much at once--about ten cups resulted from each batch. Then Emily and I started out assembly line. I would spread the masa on the damp corn husk, add a tablespoon or so of the filling, and then roll them. Emily tied them with smaller strips of corn husk. Tamales 101 has diagrams of a number of different tamales wrapping styles. We used three different ones for each type of filling so we could tell them apart after they are steamed. Pickles, the kitten Emily rescued from a downpour at the stables last September, came along to attack the corn husks sticking up out of the bowl holding the finished tamales.The masa recipe says that it will create enough for two to three dozen tamales. We ended up with over six dozen with some masa leftover. I will steam some of the tamales for about an hour and them pack them in the preheated Crock Pot for the trip to the park today. The rest have gone into bags in the freezer for later. The whole assembly process took about five hours, but is worth it considering how long the tamales will last. However you celebrate today, have a Happy Fourth of July!

Tamales--Part 1

Every year for the Fourth of July, we go to a local park with friends and family to watch fireworks. My friend Janice and I get there in the afternoon and spread out blankets and lawn chairs to claim our space for the family members that will accumulate before the celebration begins. We wander through the adjacent fair, watching people braver than us ride the Tilt-a-Whirl, and always end up in front of the food booths. These are run by local businesses, selling barbecue, burgers and dogs, fruit platters, ice cream, and fried delights. We work our way back to our spot through the crazy quilt of blankets on the grass, and split a funnel cake. This is just the appetizer before our Fourth Feast.

Every year we bring a shrimp ring, raw veggies, and chips and salsa. There's a cooler of soft drinks and waters, fast food fried poultry pieces for the kids, and a wonderful something for the adults. One year I made Italian sausages with peppers and onions. I have a Crockpot with an insulated cover and handle. The sausages stayed plenty warm until they were all gone. Two years ago my daughter Emily and I made tamales form scratch, also served from the warm Crockpot. She liked them so much, she wants to make them again this year.

My mother and father, in their final years, had a wonderfully kind Japanese couple that worked for them at their home in Phoenix. George mowed the lawn every week and his wife, Cheese, cleaned house one day a week, cooking lunch for or with my mother. Cheese would plug in her rice cooker after she got to the house for the day, and she and my mom would open cans of eel and other delicacies to eat with it. Or the two ladies would sneak out to a Japanese restaurant and eat tempura. I asked my mother once if "Cheese" was really the name of George's wife. She replied that no, it wasn't, but it was as close as she could get to the Japanese pronunciation, and Cheese didn't mind.

Cheese was an excellent cook, and she made the best tamales I have ever eaten. She made two kinds, pork and chicken, and my mother would pay her to make extra for our freezer. Once Cheese learned how much I liked her tamales, I would come home from college to find large Ziploc bags of them in the freezer that she had left to welcome me back. My mother just popped them in the microwave for her and my father, but I preferred to steam them, using my mother's little silver collapsible steamer that fit in the bottom of her sauce pots. Then I would mix a slurry of sour cream and salsa to top them. The masa coating was soft and smooth, and the meats in each tamale were seasoned with peppers and were almost too hot for me. I stopped ordering tamales in restaurant decades ago, because no matter where in the southwest I was, the tamales were never as good as those made by my mother's Japanese housekeeper.

After college, I went to Iowa to go to graduate school, got married, and settled in for good. My father passed away, and a little over a year later, my mother did too. I got got a lovely sympathy card from George and his wife, who had continued to work weekly for my parents as long as they were alive. It was signed "George and Shizuko." And so it was with Shizuko's wonderful tamales in mind that I bought a copy of Tamales 101: A Beginner's Guide to Making Traditional Tamales, by Alice Guadalupe Tapp. Emily and I worked our way through the pulled pork tamales, and black bean & corn tamales in the book two years ago.

So I spent Sunday simmering pork tenderloin in the Crockpot with a sliced onion, salt, and pepper to make the base for the pork tamales. I oven roasted two large chicken breasts with salt and pepper, pulling the meat off the bones to make the base for the chicken tamales. I will also make the black bean and corn filling, so for our Fourth Feast we will have three types of tamales. This year I have so many more choices of spices and seasonings at hand, including my friend Jim's spectrum of hot sauces, that I would like to make a batch of firecracker tamales that will be hotter than usual.

Stay tuned. Wednesday is assembly day.

From the Garden #1

I haven't written much about my garden yet this season, although it's been a very busy place. The garden is a strip, about two feet wide that runs around the edges of the small side-yard of our house. It's flanked on its sides by the house, our shed, a fence, and a hedge. ug another strip of garden out of the lawn in the side yard this spring, turning my C-shaped side into and E. This provided another two-foot wide bed that I could plant and reach from both sides.

I have discovered that there are a number of advantages to having a walled-in garden. One, animals such as deer and rabbits are much less likely to come so close to the house into an enclosed space for their midnight snacks. Two, it doesn't matter how messy and dirty I get, the neighbors can't see me in the garden. And three, it's so close to the house, it's easy to keep an eye on things and pick ingredients for dinner. I am often kept company in the garden by our three cats who go outside, and who use the picnic table in the side yard to sun themselves, or snooze under the hedge where it's cooler.

This year I've planted tomatoes, two peppers (one yellow, one jalapeno), an eggplant (Ichiban this time), lettuces of a number of varieties, sweet potatoes, spinach, carrots, a watermelon, ONE pumpkin, a zucchini, a bush cucumber, strawberries, onions, rhubarb, leeks, beets, corn (two short rows), and a number of herbs: cilantro, lavender, parsley, basil, oregano, sage, and rosemary. It's been a difficult spring for getting seeds to germinate. It's been very cool and wet, with long hard rains. I had to replant some of the beans yesterday because a number of them came up and rotted in the wet soil before they could stand all the way up. This week we've had some days in the 80s and that's help the basil, carrots, and corn poke through the soil.

I've planted the garden on a smaller budget this year, and have started more plants from seeds. The first-seeding of lettuces were planted in mid-April and are ready to start picking this week. The tomatoes which were planted from purchased seedlings are two-to-three times their original size. And, of course, all this rain has helped the seeds that spread from last years to sprout. I have tomatoes, cilantro, some lettuce, and one pumpkin plant coming up pre-seeded. I am going to clean up a neglected flower bed along the back of the house this week and transplant the renegade tomato plants there. I have no idea what kind they are, and if they do well, there's no such thing as too many tomatoes.

Retro Food--Banana Cream Pie

We eat a lot of pie in our house. Mostly we bake fresh or frozen-fruit pies with half the usual amount of sugar, some tapioca for thickener, and a nice double-crust. Recently I had cause to make a banana cream pie for a friend, and I realized how long it had been since I had thrown caloric considerations to the wind, and made a custard-based pie.

The first cookbook I ever bought of my own was the 1980 edition of The Fannie Farmer Cookbook.  Fannie was a great teacher of cooking techniques I needed to learn. The second cookbook I bought was the first paperback version of The Culinary Arts Institute Encyclopedic Cookbook, the "newly revised" version of 1971, edited by Ruth Berolzheimer. This book was originally printed in the 1940s, and includes basic recipes for many foods that are now retro such as "Bologna Cups with Peas" (broiled bologna slices filled with cooked peas and served with rice and tomato wedges) and meats that no one in my neighborhood cooks such as moose, reindeer, and opossum. But as fascinating as the roasted squirrel recipe is, I love looking through the old dessert recipes. This is the cookbook that taught me how to make a killer banana cream pie when I had my first apartment in the early 1980s, and had yet to acquire a middle-aged waist.

I found the page in the encyclopedia's section on pies with my pencil notations that showed what recipes I had used, and started in. First, I followed the recipe for a basic graham cracker crust. While that was cooling, I prepared the "Cream Pie" filling. First I scalded 1 1/2 cups cold milk, and added it to 1/2 cup of cold milk, 1/3 cup of sugar, a dash of salt, and 3 tablespoons of cornstarch. Once I had simmered this mixture, stirring until it thickened, I added 3 egg yolks (tempered with some of the hot custard), and a dash of vanilla. Then I cooled the custard, added four sliced bananas, and spooned it into the graham cracker crust.

The Culinary Arts Institute Encyclopedic Cookbook has five different meringue recipes. I have always topped my banana cream pie with meringue instead of cream, and like the "Brown Sugar Meringue." This consists of 2 egg whites beaten until stiff with 4 tablespoons brown sugar and a dash of vanilla. Once I had made the meringue, I topped the pie with it, being sure to connect with the crust all the way around so the meringue wouldn't shrink, and then baked it at 350 degrees for 10 minutes until the meringue was a nice golden brown.

Rather than make a second pie just for myself, I  made four, small graham cracker crusts so that I could experiment with a batch of the custard filling. The first pie I made plain banana cream, to the second one I added coconut to the custard, and for the last two I mixed banana and coconu in the filling.

My husband and I split one of the banana-coconut pies. We both liked it, but agreed that it was too sweet to eat very often. And it certainly took longer to prepare, assemble, and clean up after than a fresh or frozen-fruit pie. Retro pie was fun, but for now is done!

Pizza on the Grill

A few weeks ago my husband and I had the pleasure of dining again with friends at Simone's Plain and Simple in Wellman, Iowa. We have dined there several times before (see http://alltheingredients.typepad.com/weblog/2007/06/plain_and_simpl.html ), but have never had the wonderful pizza Simone bakes in her brick oven in the yard. This time we had the pizza.

My daughter accuses me of being a "coffee snob" because I know exactly how I like my cafe au lait, and will only drink it one way when I order it in a coffee shop. However, I have definitely become a pizza snob. I want specific things out of my pizza: I prefer my crust thin; I want the tomato sauce (if there is one) not to have sugar in it--I want to taste the actual tomatoes; I want good quality cheese, whatever type; and I want fresh toppings--meat, vegetable, or both. This is not the kind of pizza my children like.

The last time we had take-out pizza from someplace they picked, the dough was soft and chewy, the sauce sweet, and the cheese an amalgamated melted mess on the surface. The pepperoni pizza had neat rounds sealed under the cheese topping, and tasted no differently from the plain cheese pizza. Both were greasy and awful. I would rather not eat pizza than eat what passes for pizza in the middle America town where we live. I am now a card-carrying pizza snob. So I was more than a little excited to have Simone's pizza cooked in her brick, European-style oven.

The pizza was sublime. The simple crust was rolled extremely thin and topped conservatively. As Simone said, "There is no pizza supreme here." The up side of this was with only three or four items on top of each type of pizza, you could taste the freshness of each. Not a single pizza she served even had any tomato sauce, and only the Pizza Margherita had any tomatoes at all.

Simone's brick oven was heated with wood burnt into fiery red coals, and was approximately 700 degrees, so the thin crust cooked quickly and was almost cracker crisp. Toppings included onions, escargot, creme freche thinned with a little Greek yogurt, walnuts, Gorgonzola, Parmesan cheese, and wilted greens, all in various combinations. Only the Pizza Margherita bore any resemblance to pizzas I have eaten before. Walnuts on pizza was a completely new and unexpected taste sensation. By the time the pizza roasted in the oven, the walnuts (coupled with the wilted greens and Gorgonzola) were also roasted and sizzling. The combination of tastes and textures was addictive. I came home wanting my own brick pizza oven.

Then I found a new book in the grilling section at the bookstore where I work, Pizza on the Grill, by Elizabeth Karmel and Bob Blumer. Whenever I have grilled pizza before, I have ended up with a burnt crust and underdone toppings. With it's "1-2-3" method, Pizza on the Grill solves that problem. First you cook your pizza on one side over indirect heat, coals on one side, pizza on the other. (The illustrations and directions in the book are for both gas and charcoal grills.) Then you remove it, flip the pizza over, put on your toppings, and slide the pizza back on the grill, lid down, to cook the rest of the way. A pizza takes roughly 7-12 minutes, start to finish, with any meat toppings pre-cooked. I made cheese pizza with a rough tomato sauce from organic canned, fire-roasted tomatoes, and the sweet sausage and pepper pizza from the book. I also made a roasted veggie pizza using leftover vegetables that I had grilled two days earlier. And, inspired by Simone, I made a tomato sauce, hazelnut, and gorgonzola pizza which was fabulous.

The recipe in the book produces a crust that is thin and crispy, and if you pull the pizza directly over the coals for a minute or so at the end, you get a nicely browned bottom crust. The pizzas end up being oblong instead of round to fit half of the grill--something everyone commented on.

My husband said it was the best pizza I had ever made--he especially liked the sweet sausage topping. The kids didn't like it, I think, because of the slightly smokey taste in the crust. But it is now my new favorite way to make pizza.

Although I still have my eye on the $2,000 terra-cotta beehive pizza oven that Williams Sonoma sells...

Hello, Cupcake!

Last week in our house, we had two birthday celebrations and Mother's Day in the span of two days. May rivals December in terms of making treats for celebrations, and it can be quite a challenge to always come up with something new. One year I baked a cake for my son (Birthday #1), bought an ice cream cake for my husband (Birthday #2), and pushed the two remaining halves together for my visiting father-in-law (Birthday #3). My father-in-law thought he got the best end of this deal since he got two flavors of cake and ice cream all in one.

This year I had one day off from work to bake and prepare treats for my husband and son's birthdays and the dinner party we were having for Mother's Day. I decided to go with chocolate cupcakes. I could bake a huge batch and decorate them differently for each person/celebration. I had recently bought the most creative cupcake book ever: Hello, Cupcake! Irresistibly Playful Creations Anyone Can Make. This new cookbook illustrates techniques for making imaginative cupcakes using simple techniques and candies that you can find at your local grocery or convenience store, and in the gas station candy aisle. There are cupcakes for holidays and special occasions, plus a zooful of animal creations: http://www.hellocupcakebook.com/ .

My son Zach hates peas. He hates peas so much that when he was a child, I gave him  certificate one year for Christmas that stated that he never has to eat peas. In fact, he hates peas so much that people have given him canned peas as a present. Twice friends have come back from England with cans of "mushy possessed peas" for his collection. Featured in Hello, Cupcake! is a TV dinner where one of the cupcakes is decorated with peas and carrots. That was what I made Zach for his birthday.

The first part of making these cupcakes was finding the candy. Supposedly, green Nerds make great, round peas. Only Nerds has new flavors and none of them are green. There's a store in town that carries everything from farm implements to obscure fuses and fishing lures. They had bags of fruit candies that featured small, round green "peas" of fruit flavor. The carrots were quartered Starbursts--all on top of chocolate cupcakes frosted green. I served them in a saucepan.

For Mother's Day, my daughter Emily and I made the spring garden--chocolate cupcakes covered with "dirt" and topped with candy vegetables. First the cupcakes were frosted with chocolate and then dipped in Oreo cookie crumbs. Then they were topped with the "vegetables." The lettuces were Frosted Flakes dipped in white chocolate, colored green. The carrots and radishes were cut and shaped Starbursts (Hint: 10 seconds in the microwave makes them much more malleable). The seeds were chocolate-covered sunflower seeds that I found in a gas station candy aisle. The outer shell of the pea pods were flat sticks of chewing gum wrapped around green M&Ms. The garden cupcakes took longer to decorate than the peas and carrots, but were the hit of our Mother's Day dinner.

My husband got a platter of the chocolate cupcakes decorated by Emily in different patterns with "dirt," chocolate sprinkles, and M&Ms for his birthday part of Mother's Day.

The directions for the styles we made from Hello, Cupcake! were clear and easy to follow once we had assembled our candy ingredients. The book has designs for holidays and special occasions such as weddings and baby showers, plus cats and dogs of all breeds. My daughter Emily has already picked out the horse cupcakes she wants me to make next month for her birthday at the stable where she rides. This book would make a great present for the bakers in your life!

And now for something completely different...Lollyphile!

I have long had a special fondness for sweet and savory flavors together. I have often been made fun of because I like odd combinations of food. Pretzels are much better eaten with a square of dark chocolate (I don't prefer pretzels already dipped in chocolate because I want to be able to control the sweet to savory ratio myself.) I have to have a nice piece of sharp cheddar cheese with my apple pie. Or my pecan pie. Never ice cream or whipped cream. The sharpness of the cheddar balances the sweetness of the pie and keeps it from being too sweet. I love a nice Belgium waffle or stack of pancakes with maple syrup for breakfast, but only if the are accompanied by nice crispy, salty, strips of bacon. Sweet and savory is a delicate balance, and I beginning to experiment with adding spicy heat to the equation.

Recently I had a birthday, and a friend sent me a true "foodie" present: Maple-Bacon lollipops from Lollyphile, a new San Francisco candy company: http://www.lollyphile.com/ . Made with organic Vermont maple syrup and sustainable, organic cured bacon, these are lollipops all grown up. There are several candy companies I have read about over the last few months that make bacon candy--almost always paired with chocolate. That doesn't seem like the right sweet flavor to combine with the sharp, smokiness of bacon. But maple candy? That's perfect.

When you open the box, the Maple-Bacon lollipops smell faintly like my kitchen on Sunday morning after breakfast. The pungency of bacon is there, as well as the sweet smell of maple syrup. The lollipops are clear, smooth amber maple-flavored pops studded with tiny bits of diced bacon. The two flavors blend in your mouth just like a bite of breakfast. I also like the combinations of textures: smooth maple versus bumpy bacon. All Lollyphile needs is a coffee with cream sucker to complete the meal.

In these days when molecular gastronomy is becoming all the rage, and chefs can make "caviar" pearls that taste like green apples, it's wonderful to have a small sweet treat that encompasses an entire meal. Currently, Lollyphile only has one other flavor lolly for sale, Absinthe. I will have to try that next!