High on the Pie Scale
The tastiness of loquats notwithstanding, we found something in our garden this spring that rates at least two notches higher on the pie scale.
I’ve been growing Surinam cherry trees for more than 20 years, but only as container plants until the last five. It started when I bought a small seedling from a botanical garden in Southern California in 1986. The garden’s mother tree was probably 25 or 30 feet tall, but these plants are more often grown as hedges or shrubs in the Caribbean and Central and South America, where they originate. They put out beautiful but tiny white powder-puff flowers that morph into what look like tiny green pumpkins. These grow to about the size of sour pie cherries and turn bright red. You really need to let them get as ripe as possible for the best eating; otherwise they taste a bit like a lemon-cherry combo. There’s also an indescribable kind of spicy tang that some people apparently find objectionable, but we really like. The fruits are packed with vitamins A and C, and various trace minerals.
My little tree produced a couple dozen cherries after about three years, by which time I was living in Arkansas and dealing with occasional actual snow and temperatures in the teens in the winter. I planted the cherry pits, and about 18 of them sprouted. I put these in pots along the south side of my house, and left them out that winter. Literature says the plants are hardy to 28 degrees, and established trees may be hardy to 22. About six of my seedlings lived through a winter that saw the temps dip into the mid teens a few times.
I kept one of those cold-hardy seedlings and my original tree in large pots, and moved them with me over the next few years. I lost the original, but still had the seedling when we moved into our place here on the river back in 2003. With our mild winters, it seemed safe to plant it in the ground.
It was. It’s underneath a big pecan and probably would like a little more sun, but the Surinam cherry tree now is about 12 feet high, and this year it had its first bumper crop of cherries. I won’t go into recipe details, but suffice it to say these tart cherries make as fine a berry pie as you’re likely to find anywhere. Substitute them in your favorite recipe if you happen to be lucky enough to have a tree.
I was so impressed with the taste that I planted a new crop of seeds, which haven’t yet come up (germination takes three to four weeks).
Everyone is not impressed with this tree, however, and in southern Florida they are on the invasive plant list. That means they’ve been observed crowding out native plants, which is hard to believe from my experience, because these tree-shrubs are so slow-growing. I don’t know of any other state that has so labeled the Surinam. Here, I’ve never observed seeds sprouting on their own, but of course animals could carry them a long way out of sight. The birds, perhaps too busy watching all our figs ripen, seem to leave our Surinam cherries alone.
I have plans to try them as a hedge in the front yard. Any time I can replace a purely ornamental shrub with something that gives back fruit as tasty and healthy as these cherries, I’m going to give it a try.
→ B.Dunn, May 23, 2008, 05 22 am
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First Fruit Harvest
Around here, loquats make up the first harvest of the year, flowering beginning January or so and ripening in March and April. Ranging from dark yellow to organgish-red, and from round to oval, these apricot-sized fruit are found on a fast-growing, tropical-looking broad-leafed evergreen that makes a great privacy screen.
That’s why we planted three originally, but after the third year, they started producing hundreds of orange fruit. And it turns out that although we bought them at the same time from the same local nursery, they’re three different varieties.
Lots of people seem to either let the fruit serve as bird (and kid) food, or make up loquat jelly.
Myself, I prefer pie.
If you have a favorite peach pie recipe, you can pretty much substitute peeled, seeded loquats that have been quartered. Or bake them into a double-crust pie thusly:
Pick 3.5 to 4 pounds of loquats. Rinse them off in a colander.
Pre-heat your oven to 450. Roll out pie dough into a 9-inch pie plate and reserve more dough for the top crust.
You will have snapped the stem end off of the fruit in the picking process. Now cut off the other end, peel each one with your fingers (it comes off fairly easily). Then take a paring knife and slit the fruit down one side. Slide your fingers in and pop out the seeds and discard them. (I’ve seen some recipes suggest keeping a few seeds for added color and flavor in the pie. Don’t do it, as they are reportedly toxic.) Now cut or tear the fruit into three or four pieces and put them into a medium mixing bowl.
Now take about a half-cup of water and the juice of a lemon or lime, and mix it together with the fruit in a pan, on medium to medium-high heat. Cook for about 15 minutes. Then mix the following ingredients together, and add to the pot:
- About a cup of sugar
- a half-teaspoon of salt
- two tablespoons of flour
- two teaspoons of cinnamon
- a quarter-teaspoon of allspice or cloves
Stir into the fruit mixture until it thickens, which won’t take long. Then pour the mixture into the pie pan. Place the rest of the pie dough on top and pinch the edges together around the pie plate rim and the bottom crust. Get a fork and poke some holes in the top crust in a cutesy shape.
Bake the pie at 450 degrees for 10 minutes, then turn the heat down to 350 and bake for 30 more minutes.
Let it cool, then dig in. Or, it’s pretty darn good the next day if refrigerated overnight.
→ B.Dunn, Apr 12, 2008, 05 07 pm
If Life Deals You Basil
The two basil plants by the garage have stood up to the heat really fine this year. They’re big and bushy, but lately starting to produce flower buds.
That means it’s time to use the basil or lose it.
To extend the useful culinary life of the plants, you can pinch off the tips of the stems, along with 2-4 leaves. Then the plants will fork each place where they were pinched, doubling leaf production.
These plants are so large that pinching off the stem ends (and picking a few of the biggest and best single leaves) gave me almost 100 leaves.
That’s enough for four batches of pesto, which was exactly what I intended to make, until I took the leaves inside, washed and drained them and discovered that I had no lemons in the kitchen, and only enough olive oil and parmesan cheese for two batches. But I also had plenty of limes.
So it was time to make a double batch of
Non-Classico Pesto SauceIngredients:
– 48 leaves fresh basil
– 4 fat garlic cloves
– 1 and 1/2 cups extra virgin (but of course) olive oil
– 1 cup grated parmesan cheese
– 4 tablespoons walnuts (or pine nuts if you can find them)
– Juice of 3 limes
– freshly ground black and white pepper to taste
Put a large pot of water on to boil, then cook up a 16-ounce package of linguini, fettucini or your favorite pasta.
Put the basil, garlic and half the olive oil in a large food processor or blendor set on “chop” or “grind” or one of the lower settings so as to keep the mixture on the coarse side. Hit the button.
Add the cheese, the rest of the olive oil, the lime juice, walnuts and pepper. Blend until the oil mixes nicely with the rest of the ingredients.
Mix half the sauce with the pasta, and sprinkle on a little more parmesan if desired.
Store the other half of the sauce in the refridgerator, or freeze it to use later.
If you picked basil first and checked for ingredients later, like I did, and wound up with twice as much basil as you needed, allow the basil to dry, then freeze it in plastic bags for winter use when fresh herbs are hard to come by.
→ B.Dunn, Aug 14, 2005, 04 33 pm
A Little Relief
The big deal around here is that it’s actually raining, hard, right now.
That shows what an exciting life I lead. The last time it rained, though, was in May, more than six weeks ago. We’ve had the driest June on record in this part of Texas, with maybe a quarter-inch of rain in a month that usually has 5-8 inches. A lot of garden plants died prematurely, and a lot of the tropicals are pretty stressed, because the localized drought included temperatures averaging above 95 degrees.
We’ll be lucky if we get a half-inch today, but enough has fallen so far that I can put off my watering chores for the evening. I was soaking the back garden one night, the “garage garden” and bananas the second night and the tropical plants the next.
And the water bill was getting a little out of hand.
The only plants seemingly unaffected by the dry & heat have been the figs. Despite frenetic feeding by the birds and squirrels, we’ve still managed a nice harvest of Brown Turkey figs from the monster bush out back each day for the past week or so.
They’re great fresh, but this variation was rather tasty last night:
—Pre-heat your oven to 425 degrees (F)
—Cut the ends off of perhaps 20 ripe figs, then cut them in half length-wise and lay them cut side up in a lightly greased baking pan or cookie sheet.
—Combine a third of a cup of honey with a third of a cup of good sipping whiskey in a sauce pan and bring to a boil while stirring. Turn off the heat.
— Drizzle a little of the resulting syrup over each fig.
—Put the baking pan full of figs in the oven and allow to bake for 5-10 minutes, until they soften slightly.
—This is the part where you eat them.
→ B.Dunn, Jul 13, 2005, 03 44 pm