I have been baking for as long as I can remember, and I have published many of my favorite recipes for pies and cakes and breads in books and magazine articles over the years. My recipe for cream puffs is very unusual: The traditional pâte à choux is topped with a disk of sugary tart dough, then baked and filled with a fluffy mix of pastry cream and whipped cream. The result? An amazing play of textures, crisp and flaky against creamy and light.
Perhaps my favorite kind of baking is pie baking—maybe because making a perfect crust can still be a challenge despite years of practice and expertise, but probably because the fillings and textures can be so wonderfully varied. It is always exciting to roll out a round of pâte brisée and fun to create a new edge for the tart or a new topping for the pie. I chose to include rum-raisin pie here because at Christmastime it reminds me of eggnog laced with rich dark rum and topped with generous dollops of whipped cream.
Of course I must mention the dozens of cookies, the fancy cakes, the savory biscuits and breads, and the basic glazes and frostings that fill the pages of my new book. I am sure they will give you hours of pleasure and your families many moments of joy. Please purchase this book at your earliest convenience! If not, you'll surely be missing out on a large assortment of treats.
I always have so many uses for pumpkins and squash in October. Ever since I started planting these wondrous members of the Cucurbitaceae family, I have proudly displayed the most unusual in and around my home. I have gilded them and carved them and used masses of the shapely objects to line the stairways up to my house and to cover the tops of retaining walls. And I have cooked them—using them for culinary experiments and for favorite tried-and-true recipes for pies and cakes as well as savory dishes such as mouthwatering butternut squash risotto, and thick, warming soups and purées. I also have grown gourds, dried them, drilled holes into them, and hung them on racks and in trees as charming houses for a variety of feathered friends.
Last fall, my new vegetable garden in Bedford produced a bumper crop of pumpkins and squash. I was thrilled because, for several years, the old gardens at Turkey Hill had not been productive. Whether this was because the soil needed amending just for the squash (pumpkins and squash prefer compost-enriched soil, full sun, and lots of room in which to spread out) or the weather was not conducive to growing mammoth pumpkins, I am not sure. All I know is that I missed seeing scores of bumpy, bulbous, warty, colorful shapes, from small, striped, and dotted gourds hanging on the metal trellis to giant apricot and orange pumpkins lying atop cushions of straw.
I find that cooking squash and pumpkin in the oven brings out the flavor beautifully. Try varying your seasonings—cilantro instead of parsley, summer savory instead of thyme. All the late-summer herbs taste good with squash. This pasta topping can even be served alone, without the pasta and ricotta, alongside a roasted pork chop or a pan-seared swordfish steak. The butternut squash risotto is an amazing dish, and one whose creamy texture, lovely pale-orange color and memorable taste will make it a family staple. I think it is great as a first course and also as a side dish for a lamb shank.
I have not yet succeeded in growing a really mammoth pumpkin—there are websites and books and videotapes devoted to the subject of “pumpkin culture,†and they are all intriguing. And the Internet is full of pumpkin trivia and facts and figures. Before I did an online search for pumpkins, I did not know that Illinois produces more than anywhere else and that 90 percent of all pumpkins grown in the United States are used for jack-o’-lanterns.
Maybe we can all change that by cooking with pumpkins and squash a little more frequently—you’ll get bigger doses of vitamin A, higher quantities of beta-carotene, and other healthful dietary necessities.
And if by chance you are not fond of pumpkins as food, maybe you can take up pumpkin chunking—a sport devoted to catapulting pumpkins as far as one can. Sound like fun? Lol.
At a dinner I hosted recently, one of my dining companions, Jim Santora, an advertising executive who has run thirty-seven marathons, told me that he had instantly responded to the fact that in my new house, a restored 1925 “fancy†farmhouse in Bedford, New York, all of the colors in all of the rooms, although different in tone and hue, correspond to one another. I was so pleased to hear his remarks, for I have tried so hard, in each house I have decorated, to make sure the rooms are harmonious with one another, that there is a subtle flow of color. I tried to ensure that, in going from one room into another and another, or looking down a hallway into every room, there was never a jolt, never a jarring sensation. I wanted to be sure that somehow a dissimilar color or tone had not snuck in, destroying the serenity I was trying to achieve. I even joked with Jim that if I had a child who had to have a lavender room, I would paint the entire inside of my home shades of lavender and blue that would complement one another much like the shades of gray and green and brown that he was seeing in the rooms at Bedford.
Designing colors, creating a palette of new shades and hues and tones, is one of my favorite things to do, and I am inspired by the strangest and most common and most unexpected of things and objects and ideas.
For Bedford, my inspiration came while shopping at one of the huge pier antiques shows along the Hudson River in New York City. Kevin Burger, a friend and employee and a very fine painter (of landscape paintings—not of walls), was with me, as was Kevin Sharkey, our editorial director for decorating. I was picking through trays of cameo bracelets, admiring the oddity of the settings and the carvings, when Kevin B. said the cameos would make fabulous new paint colors. I laid out the three bracelets and a ring the dealer had and immediately loved what Kevin had seen: The colors of the cameos were beautiful and odd and harmonious and weird and indescribable. There were so many hues and shades, and I knew instantly that I could use the color of almost every one of them in the farmhouse.
I bought two bracelets and the ring, and asked the dealer what they were made from—the only cameos I knew were carved from shell, and these were obviously different. He explained that they were known as lava jewelry. Each cameo was carved from a piece of porous but smooth lava from Mount Vesuvius, the notorious volcano that erupted centuries ago, covering the city of Pompeii. In the late nineteenth century, pieces of jewelry were made by local goldsmiths and silversmiths to sell to the Victorian European and American tourists. Since our shopping spree, I have found other superb examples of lava carvings and have used their coloring for more paints.
But lava was not my only inspiration. The gray I used to paint and stain every exterior of every building at Bedford comes from a piece of Italian-made paper that was given to me; and the gray leather of Kevin B.’s uncle’s gloves (his uncle from Rome, keeping with the Italian theme) was the inspiration for the glaze on some of the wooden paneling.
Two other materials offered inspiration: finely ground green tea from Japan and a swatch of linen in a similar green fabricated in Kyoto. The green, though harsher and brighter than any of the lava colors, somehow has some of the same qualities. One whole room, at one end of the house, was painted this wonderful shade.
For another building on the property, which will ultimately house my library of books, I chose to create a different palette, based on the many colors I found while gazing at a giant Brazilian Tun shell. Inside and out, the shell was composed of hundreds of colors that were complementary and unusual. Yellows and pinks and golds and tans and grays and beiges abounded, and I had to narrow my choices, but ended up with another interesting palette that is lovely to live with.
For now, I will continue to concentrate on color and applying color to the architecture and the fixtures that will make my house a home.
I first ate mussels when I was served a big shallow bowl of very small, fragrant, steamed-open mussels at a friend’s house. We were crewing on a sailboat off the coast of Rhode Island and had stopped for a night to visit a family in an old house atop a craggy rock along the shore. Clinging to the seawater-washed rocks, like thousands of dark-blue pendants, were clean, sparkling mussels, just waiting to be harvested. I didn’t need much persuasion to pop one or two into my mouth to savor the fine soft texture, the sweet taste, and the pungent pepper with which they had been cooked. My second bowl of mussels was consumed not long after, in a tiny Greenwich Village restaurant named La Petite Ferme. There, the moules came cold, tossed in the shells with a thick, mustardy vinaigrette and lots of chopped parsley. Heaven! Since then, I try mussels whenever and wherever they are offered. Despite the fact that most edible mussels look much alike—they are differentiated primarily by size, and color—they can taste remarkably different, depending from whence they came, what kind of water they lived in, and how they were prepared.
To love mussels, I think it is important to understand exactly what they are. They are bivalves—mollusks, like clams—with a single hinged shell, and they are filter feeders, existing solely on the water from the area in which they live, filtering tiny particles of phytoplankton and other organic materials from the water.
Because I like to cook for large groups of people, mussels have become a regular part of my repertoire; they are so very, very easy to prepare and serve. to cook six pounds is really not much more difficult than to cook three pounds—just double up on the big covered kettles or spacious skillets.
In Maine, it is not atypical to start a luncheon with big steaming bowls of moules marinière, subtly flavored with white wine, a bit of heavy cream, and chopped parsley, basil, or chervil. I often follow that with a grilled half of a steamed lobster swathed in a shallot beurre blanc and a colorful salad of greens and herbs from the garden. (A delicious alternative would be my tomato tart from our July issue.) Or for dinner, we might begin a meal with black pepper mussels. These are mussels in the shell that are quick “roasted†in a covered pan on the stove with lots of freshly ground or cracked pepper. The mussels are so good preceding a simple pasta with oil, garlic, and basil or a piece of grilled fish. Or for lunch or dinner, I might just serve large bowls of mussels vinaigrette à la La Petite Ferme, with crusty French bread, sliced lengthwise and grilled with olive oil and garlic and herbs, and a string bean and beet salad. of course creamy mussels can be varied by adding peeled chopped tomatoes at the last minute; the mussels also can be removed from the shells, the liquid strained, and some more milk or cream added for a delicious chowder (add boiled new potatoes and sautéed onions for substance). With a chowder lunch, I like to serve cornbread, grilled sausages, deviled eggs, and a tomato salad or green salad. Getting hungry? The best thing is that these recipes take less than ten minutes. Once you have made them, you’ll be ready for more: mussels fra diavolo, mussels with black bean sauce, mussels rémoulade, and a bouillabaisse studded with mussels.
Having grown up in New Jersey, with the tradition of the perfect Jersey tomato planted firmly in my skull by my father—a tomato grower of some repute among the other local backyard growers—I do have a standard by which I grow and judge tomatoes. This standard applies to size and shape and color, but most particularly, for me, to taste and texture.
Our garden on Elm Place in Nutley was organic, the soil enriched with composted everything, even the heads and innards of the many, many fish that Dad caught in the ocean and lakes and cleaned right into the tomato patch. It was not uncommon for us to compare his Super Beefsteak, Burpee Big Boy, and heirloom Italian plum tomatoes. And we always weighed the monsters on my grandfather's old green scale, which, not infrequently, tipped to three or even four pounds under the weight of one Beefsteak. What a great treat to slice one of those giants into thick slabs to eat with salt and pepper and a splash of cider vinegar.
The Big Boy—that special hybrid introduced in 1949 by Oved Shifriss, who named it in honor of his newborn son— was Dad's favorite. Its uniformity of shape and intense red color and excellent taste appealed to all of us, and for me, it was not deposed until Better Boy was introduced in 1975. I started growing it and using it in my BLTs with home-cured, smoked bacon and crunchy lettuce. I also tried the new 'Early Girl' and 'Supersonic' and 'Spitfire' and 'Jet Star,' ultimately settling in for years and years of experimentation with twenty or so of the hundreds of varieties of heirlooms and hybrids that are available in scores of good seed growers' catalogs. My friend Amy Goldman, for example, is writing a book on tomatoes, and she tells me that she has found seed for more than one thousand interesting types.
Tomatoes are so versatile and so delicious. I enjoy them whole with coarse salt; hollowed out and filled with lobster or crab salad or tuna fish or couscous or pasta; baked, oven-dried, or dehydrated; puréed in sauces; peeled and sectioned in salads; and cooked in soups. And nothing gives me more pleasure in the garden than to pick numerous types and sizes and use them to make one of my favorite summer lunches: a savory tomato tart.
The original recipe was given to me by senior food editor John Barricelli— he made it for me one day, and I loved it so much, we used it for a television segment. I have altered the recipe a bit, sometimes using Gruyère or goat cheese instead of the fontina, sometimes using cherry tomatoes (some sliced, some whole), or a mixture of big tomatoes and cherries, or an assortment of colorful sliced heirloom varieties. Even the type of garlic alters the taste. But the tart is always really tasty, and is always a beautiful sight. The larger the tart, the more impressive; if you have a generous paella pan, you can double or triple the recipe and bake as big a tart as your oven can hold. The only thing to keep in mind is to bake it fully so that the crust will be crisp and golden brown all the way to the center of the tart.
Canned tomatoes are a staple that I have made every year since I first planted my own tomatoes. Using my mother's very simple recipe (she "puts up" between fifty and one hundred jars each season), I peel and seed masses of ripe red and sometimes yellow tomatoes, fitting them tightly into sterilized pint, quart, and even two-quart jars. The jars are processed in a hot-water bath and allowed to cool; then they can be stored for up to a year in the pantry. Used in soups and sauces and stews, these home-canned tomatoes are indistinguishable from fresh ones. Sometimes, when draining the tomatoes for a rich Bolognese sauce, I have a cup or two of juice left, which can be used in Bloody Marys or served on its own over ice with salt and freshly ground pepper—it is the best tomato juice on the planet.
I remember exactly the time and place when I had my first glimpse of a real cutting-flower garden. I was 19 years old, driving by myself in unfamiliar territory on the eastern end of Long Island. My new husband and I were visiting hismarried sister inWesthampton for a long summer weekend, and I, curious to see the beautiful seaside towns, drove on Route 27 to the village of East Hampton.
I found myself meandering down a wide, London plane tree-lined avenue called Lily Pond Lane. Toward the end of the lane, on the right, was a sight the likes of which I had never seen. Behind a short, pristinely pruned privet hedge was an immaculate flower garden— straight rows of asters, delphinium, dahlias, phlox, zinnias, gladioli, stock, lilies, marigolds, daisies, snapdragons, cosmos, Queen Anne’s lace, and even hydrangeas. They were all upright, blooming, ready to be cut and arranged for the large rooms in the tile-roofed mansion across the street. I stopped the car and took mental notes of everything I was staring at. I saw that there was a substantial greenhouse tucked in behind a much taller privet,where the annuals were propagated before being set out in the garden, an immense serpentine perennial border backed by a yew hedge, as well as a modest split-rail fence covered in pink climbing roses. I vowed, then and there, to have a cutting- flower garden someday so that I, too, could have fresh flowers growing all season long, from tulips in early spring to dahlias in late fall.
I did honor my vow, and planted a cutting garden at Turkey Hill in Westport, filling it with bulbs for spring and summer bloom, and experimenting every year with different annuals to see which ones I liked best for cutting and flower arranging. My favorite cutting flowers are not really surprising. Many are old standbys that I saw so many years ago on Lily Pond Lane, or were inspired by Mrs.Vincent Astor’s garden in Northeast Harbor, Maine: China asters (Callistephus chinensis), tall, plump snapdragons (Antirrhinum), astilbe, columbine (Aquilegia ‘Mc-Kana’ hybrids), Canterbury bells (Campanula ‘Cup and Saucer’), calendula, coleus, cosmos, towering delphinium (‘Pacific Giants’),carnations (Dianthus), foxglove (Digitalis ‘Excelsior Hybrids’), larkspur, nasturtiums, lavender ‘Hidcote,’ big-flowered African marigolds, scabiosa, rudbeckia, stock, sweet peas, lupines, amaranthus ‘Love Lies Bleeding,’ and, of course, zinnias.
I have added quite a few things to my garden on Mount Desert Island, Maine, which is essentially a cutting garden, far from the house, protected from wind by a woven willow-wattle fence. There, I love the green bells of Ireland, the Ammi majus flowers with giant heads like Queen Anne’s lace, dinner plate dahlias, Echinops, Eryngium, and extra-tall ageratum. Each summer I devotedly make pilgrimages to gardens in SealHarbor,Maine, and in the Hamptons on Long Island to view new varieties of annuals others are experimenting with, to see if I, too, will adopt some of them for my gardens.
I am really not as fussy about the color or variety of plant as I am about its growing habit, strength of bloom, and usefulness in arrangements. I used to be a bit more inflexible—at Turkey Hill, I banned red flowers and preferred that nothing yellow except daffodils be grown. Now, I love to experiment with color and have had a lot of fun with odd tones such as chartreuse, black, and deep oranges and magentas, as well as blues and grays and silvers. And red has been permitted, in different tulips, poppies, zinnias, and crocosmias, and I love it.
I plan my cutting gardens year-round—I take notes each season as to what is doing well and what could be improved upon. Last year I planted a dwarf ageratum instead of the tall type, and it was a waste of space. And the variety of Amaranthus ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ from one grower was far superior to that of another. Bulbs can be of great value in a cutting garden and should be ordered in the summer for fall planting and spring picking. Look for different varieties each year, and plant a few between your rows of annuals.
Remember, not all cutting flowers have to be flowers. This year I am going to include lots of plants for their leaves; colocasia, ferns, begonias, geraniums, and coleus come in many different colors. They will look gorgeous as cut “flowers†all year long.
I have very few rugs and carpets, but the ones I do have are removed and sent to be professionally cleaned if they have had a lot of traffic. Otherwise, I just shake them outside and hang them over a line to freshen in the breeze. If I had wall-to-wall carpeting or big rugs, I would most assuredly have them shampooed now. It’s also the time to give the floors a good cleaning and to wax or polish them.
The egg is probably my single favorite food. In fact, I would call it the ultimate comfort food, reassuringly basic but always deliciously special at the same time. A whole meal can be made of this simple pleasure, and I have some recipes to suggest here so you can do just that, whether for yourself or, even better, for company. Breakfast or brunch is a wonderful time to entertain and to cook with eggs, and the recipes I use for those occasions are not hard to make but are always very happily received. One recent Easter, I served a particularly elegant egg dish: poached eggs spooned into hollowed-out artichokes, topped with hollandaise sauce and thin ribbons of smoked salmon.
I love to scramble eggs with lots of cream and butter, and serve them to guests piped or spooned back into the eggshells, which have been well-rinsed and then quickly boiled to make them food-safe. A dollop of crème fraîche and caviar finish off each serving, which is presented in an egg cup and eaten with a little spoon. The secret is to make the eggs rich and not too cooked, and I have served these surprising treats even for a large, stand-up brunch.
The best everyday scrambled eggs are even simpler—just eggs, salt, pepper, and the best butter, a perfect quick supper when I arrive home after a long workday, before I check e-mail and settle in to read. Heat a thick pat of butter until melted in a heavy nonstick pan, add three or four fork-beaten eggs, and scramble over medium heat until the eggs are just cooked. Serve on buttered bread, such as slices from a round of country rye.
What could be tastier than this egg salad recipe? Just mix together nine hard-boiled eggs, peeled, and roughly chopped; 1/3 cup mayonnaise; 3/4 teaspoon dry mustard or 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard; 1/4 cup diced celery; coarse salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste; and 1/4 teaspoon Madras curry powder (optional). My daughter, Alexis, makes an even simpler version, seasoned with mustard, pepper, lots of celery, and little pickles called cornichons.
I also love perfectly cooked hardboiled eggs, peeled, sliced, and layered on hot buttered white toast or a soft baguette, finished with coarse or sea salt, freshly ground black pepper, and, maybe, if there is some, a sprig or two of fresh crisp watercress. (I will post the recipe for it, along with other egg ideas, at marthastewart.com/eggs. This useful page will also include the recipe for coddled eggs, made in covered cups in a water bath, which are particularly wonderful with a fragrant slice of mushroom or truffle cooked right inside.)
