Chunky Berry Soup, AKA Marak Fruit Roll-Up

This is a luscious summer soup, probably our favorite.  I found the recipe in the Inqy.  Eventually I realized that the strawberries were from Watsonville, CA and that the PA strawberry season is short and precedes the blueberry season.  Now I watch for the strawberries very closely, and with luck, like this year - you can snag strawberries at their end and blueberries at their beginning.
A perfect alternative is to substitute about 3 or 4 peeled, sliced ripe peaches.  You get the same texture and the same spectacular color, and the peach and blueberry season are in tandem here in the mid-Atlantic. I often double this recipe, since leftovers are so good.  Like with gazpacho, it's important to make it early enough so that it can chill for 5-6 hours.

1 pint blueberries, rinsed.  Pull off stems.
1 pint strawberries, hulled and halved or quartered,  **OR** 3 or 4 ripe peeled  peaches
1 c. white grape juice (purple works, too)
1/4 c. lemon juice
1/3 c. water
1 T + 2 t cornstarch
1/4 to 1/2 sugar

If you're using peaches, pour hot or boiling water over them and let them sit a few minutes.  The skins will slide off.
Place blueberries, strawberries or peaches, grape juice and lemon juice into a medium sauce pan, cover.  Bring to a brisk boil over high heat. [If using an induction cooktop, let it boil for 3-4 minutes. It comes to the boil so fast, the berries don't pop.] With a gas oven top, that takes awhile; with our new electric stove, it's really fast.  The only thing that takes any real time in this recipe is slicing the strawberries.

Remove from heat. In a measuring cup, mix the water and cornstarch into a smooth paste and stir it into the berry mixture. Return to heat, and quickly bring to a boil, stirring constantly.  This is the neat part - stir for one minute, and the liquid thickens and glistens.  Sweeten to taste with sugar.

Chill thoroughly - for at least 5 to 6 hours. The color deepens. 

Garnish with chopped fresh mint, sliced fresh fruit.  This is a deep, gorgeous color so serve it in bowls which will show that off!  It is refreshing, beautiful, and the lemon juice gives it a lovely tartness which tingles a bit on the tongue.  MMMMM.  The Fruit Roll-Up moniker came from Tasha, at Zach's bar mitzvah, when we served this.

This is DAT's favorite cold soup. Always makes him happy.

Red Lentil Soup

The recipe is originally Gloria Kaufer Greene’s wonderful cookbook, The New Jewish Holiday Cookbook. I took her recipe and added veggie hot dogs and brown sugar. It is nearly a stew in consistency, though if you want it thinner, just add more water or stock. The tomato and red lentils combine to make this soup a rich rusty-orange, very welcome on a gray day. Another virtue of red lentils is that they cook in just 40 minutes or so, making the recipe energy and time efficient. Garnish with a little green, and it’s photo worthy. It freezes well. A clever approach it to freeze the soup in small portions and take them out for a lunch or grab ‘em to go if you have a microwave at work or school.

I submitted this, unfortunately without crediting Greene, to Ellen Frankel's book The Five Books of Miriam, with my midrash: this is the only time in the Torah that a man cooks. I mentioned I make it on shabbat Toldot, the parsha where Esau sells his birthright to Yaakov for lentil soup. In her next edition of the book, Greene mentions this remarkable coincidence and says she has adopted this minhag too.

Red Lentil Soup – serves 6-8, plus plenty of leftovers
1 to 2 T olive oil
1 medium onion, finely chopped
2-3 stalks celery, finely chopped
1 garlic clove, minced
2 carrots, peeled and diced 
2 peeled potatoes, diced (optional)
5 to 6 cups stock (for vegetarian soups, Israeli powdered broth works well*)
2 cups red lentils
1 large (14-16 oz) can chopped tomatoes, including juice (run through the food processor
for 30 seconds or so, to puree)
½ t ground cumin
¼ t ground coriander
1 T lemon juice
1 T brown sugar
4 veggie hot dogs, diced
Salt and pepper to taste
Parsley, minced, for garnish
In 6 or 8 quart soup pot, sauté the onions, celery and garlic until soft. Add the carrots, and stir a minute longer.Add the broth, lentils, tomatoes, cumin, coriander, and lemon juice. Bring to a boil; then reduce the heat and simmer the soup, covered, about 40 minutes. Add the brown sugar and diced veggie hotdogs, season with salt and pepper to taste, and cook a few more minutes. Garnish with minced parsley.
*Powdered bouillon is very high in sodium so go lightly on the salt.
Guaranteed to lift your winter mood, along with leafing through gardening catalogues….

One-Bowl Banana Cake

I once found this in a magazine and loved the one bowl aspect. It's basically a banana bread but you can bake it flat in a pan so it's more like bars or cake. It is not consistent in how it comes out, probably depending on the moisture and size of the bananas and eggs. It's quicker than banana bread, or at least it seems like it is.

You can add chopped nuts and mini-chocolate chips. Bet it would be good with blueberries!
I like to frost it with straight chocolate chips. 

Hint: when you have ripe bananas, freeze them. You don't even need to put them in anything, they have their own wrappers. Just thaw them a half hour or so before you bake.

2 small to medium ripe bananas

1/3 c. vegetable oil

2 eggs

3/4 c. whole wheat flour

3/4 c. white flour

3/4 c. sugar

1 t. baking powder

1/4 t. baking soda

1/8 t. salt

~1/2 c. mini-chocolate chips (optional)

~1/2 c. chopped nuts, your choice (optional)
Chocolate chips for frosting. At least a few ounces, up to half a bag or so.

Heat oven to 350.
Spray a rectangular pan [this worked perfectly with a 1/4 sheet pan, in the Breville] with oil.

In bowl, mash bananas (a potato masher is perfect), and add eggs and oil, stirring. You could also do this in a blender or food processor and add the nuts, to grind them at the same time.

Add flour, sugar baking powder. baking soda, salt, + nuts and chocolate mini-chips, stirring until mixed. 

Add the banana/egg/oil mixture and stir in until thoroughly mixed. Use a spatula to scrape down the sides.

Bake for about 25 minutes until the kitchen smells great and the cake is lightly browned. You can turn the oven off for the last 5 minutes or so to reduce energy consumption - something I learned in the 1970's and still true today.

About 5 to 10 minutes after taking the cake out of the oven, sprinkle it with chocolate chips. Leave it for a few minutes and, with a spatula, spread the melted chocolate.

After the chocolate has hardened, cut into very small bars.  

Grandma Fritzie's Blueberry Muffins

Shula really loves blueberry muffins; at 22 months,
she calls them Mushrooms.

These are the best blueberry muffins I know, and they're easy.

From mid-June to late-July when the Jersey berries are plentiful, I make these quite a few times. [Seems like the seasons is extending a bit each year.]

Blueberries, milk, and part whole wheat: these are very nutritious, as well as a nice tender texture. I keep modifying it. Newest twist: lemon zest.

The basic recipe makes a dozen regular size or 20-24 mini-muffins. If you double it, you can make 36 slightly less-mini-muffins. If the portioning doesn't work out and you have extra batter, you can put the leftover batter in a greased mini-loaf pan and bake it along with your muffins.

If you let go of their muffin identity: I now bake them in the Breville in a quarter sheet pan for about 17 minutes. I cut the sheet into 16 with a pizza slicer. Blueberry Muffin Squares?

Heat oven to 400 degrees

Spray your muffin tins - try to just hit the muffin indents, since the rest of the spray will burn. I experimented and you really don't need to spray silicone tins, unless you've recently washed them with a baking powder paste that removes the accumulated oil on their surface.

3/4 c. whole wheat flour

3/4 c. regular flour

3/4 c. sugar

1/2 t. salt

1 T baking powder (that's right, it's a lot!)

1/2 c. skim milk (or higher fat milk if that's what you drink, or buttermilk)
1 egg

1/4 c. melted butter

1 c. blueberries (normal containers are a pint, so a half container) 

optional but yummy: lemon zest to taste

You'll need two bowls.

In the smaller bowl, add and mix the dry ingredients.

In the larger bowl, beat the egg and add the milk. (and zest)

Quickly add the dry ingredients to the wet - mix fast. Mixture will be lumpy, and with all that baking powder, it will begin to sponge up a little.

Add the melted butter and berries and stir as best you can, since it's quite thick.

Abba and Shula whisking the liquids - Mama was in Aspen

Using a soup spoon, scoop the batter into [easy version] a greased 1/4 sheet pan or [more effort required!] each muffin compartment (or whatever you call them.) If you spray the spoon with Pam, it helps the batter to slide off the spoon. If you make regular-sized muffins, you can use an ice cream scoop.
If there are a lot of berries sitting on top of the batter, they will explode and make a mess in the pan, so it's a good idea to try to cover them with some batter. Don't worry about trying to make them all exactly the same, but do make them reasonably similar in size so they bake at the same rate.

Bake about 15-18 minutes, until they are smelling wonderful and they are nicely browned. 

Let them cool for a few minutes. I am too lazy to use cooling racks, so I just twist them out of the tins and upend them to cool the rest of the way.

Soak the tins for a few minutes, but not overnight - they will rust. [Or get silicone tins].

These freeze really well. 

In 2024, the blackberries Micah planted started producing prodigiously!

This is a quart. To make a double batch of muffins, quarter them - they are so big. This is a generous amount for 24 muffins. Sprinkle with a little extra sugar, as they are quite tart. They turn crimson! 

They are really good - but of course they have seeds.

These Chestertown wineberries disintegrate when baked....

Gazpacho

Gazpacho is basically chopped Israeli-type salad in tomato juice, with some hot sauce and vinegar. Some recipes also call for oil, but I don't usually put it in. You can always add it to each portion. Some recipes call for tomato paste, but my favorite thickener is a ripe avocado, so that also requires advance planning. Or you could put in a dollop of guacamole.

Gazpacho is very forgiving. If you have some vegetables around, like it's tomato season, just put in more tomatoes. Or cucumbers. Below is a suggested list.

The main challenges of making gazpacho are:

1) Thinking ahead. A ripe avocado really adds nice smooth texture.

2) Chill the ingredients, even the pitcher, if you're making it the same day.

3) Lots of chopping.

1 bottle of tomato juice - at least one quart (32 oz)

1 onion

1 cucumber

1 pepper

1 or 2 tomatoes

1 ripe avocado

some carrots

celery (or other vegetables, cilantro is awesome!)

1/4 cup red-wine vinegar

dash of Tabasco or other hot sauce

Chop the softer vegetables in small chunks. Put them in the food processor.

You will need to do this in two batches.

For the cucumbers, peel and slice in half the long way. Halve each of the halves, and then with the point of the knife, slice/scoop out the seeds.

Add some of the tomato juice and process until smooth but with some vegetable flecks/chunks still visible.

Carrots need to be chopped finer or processed longer.

Add the first batch to your pitcher (or tureen if you have one).

Repeat a second time till all your vegetables are chunked and processed. Add to the pitcher and stir. Add the remaining tomato juice, vinegar, Tabasco and any spices you like. Tomato juice is quite salty, so no need for more salt. You could add fresh oregano, dill, parsley - whatever you have around.

Put in the ladle and stir it up.

Chill.

For serving, chopped herbs are nice on top, or a little guacamole. Croutons are a classic garnish.

This amount serves around 8.