Smultronstället

It is always nice to bake a cake for someone's birthday. What about when you bake a cake a week before their birthday just to test if it will be good? The only cake I've ever really done before was the three milks cake that I posted here a while back. At the same time I was thinking about birthday cakes I had huge batch of local strawberries that came with my CSA. This reminded me of the Ingmar Bergman film Wild Strawberries where I remembered a scene where they are eating wild strawberries with some fresh milk. That sounds great! Wikipedia tells me that the Swedish title of the film is Smultronstället which literally means "the wild strawberry patch", but can also be taken to mean a "underrated gem of a place (often with personal or sentimental value)." That sounds great too! And really if strawberries and milk sounds good, just imagine strawberries and three milks!

I pretty much followed the exact process given in the old posting, but would reduce a bit more the amount of sweetened condensed milk. This cake is already pretty sweet to begin with and the strawberries only add more.

Wash and halve the strawberries (these were small local ones, if your strawberries have been taking steroids, you may want to cut them smaller!). Then incorporate them into the cake batter and put in the over for 20-30 min at 350 F.

While the cake was taking its time in the oven, I made the frosting. This also could be a bit less sweet. I beat 2 egg whites with a little less than half a cup of honey in a double boiler.

Which after a few minutes magically looks like this:



Don't forget to take the cake out of the oven! Or else it may look a bit darker than this:

Poke holes throughout the cake and then pour the milks on top!

Add some more strawberries? Sure, why not?

And the frosting!

Then go jogging for maybe half an hour before eating so that you don't feel bad about eating this. The actual birthday cake cooking will happen soon, also with strawberries, but maybe in a different form, with fewer milks, and more relaxed jogging requirements.

Scapes!

My CSA is now in summer mode so I am getting deliveries every week. It seems they've had a pretty wet spring with the wettest April and May on record which caused flooding on some farms in the area. Today was the second delivery of the summer share that I am signed up for.



Included in the CSA were a bunch of garlic scapes. These are the green part of garlic that grows above the ground, they are only in season for a short bit of time, and are a bit like scallions but for garlic! They have a nice garlic flavor, but slightly more mild.

I decided to make some shrimp sautéed with garlic and dried hot pepper along with some chopped scapes.

Prepare several cloves of garlic and some chopped scapes:



Sauté some garlic and dried hot pepper in olive oil:



Add the shrimp and the chopped scapes:



Toss in some cooked spaghetti and serve:



I made a small salad to go along with it using the greens from the CSA topped with some sautéed scapes. So easy!

Taco Taco

I made these tacos on two different days a while back but hadn't got around to posting it here.

Fish Tacos Made Easy
I wanted to do some quick fish tacos and decided to go with some pan fried cod along with poblano pepper, corn, guacamole, and some of the salsa from the last posting.

I started by roasting some poblano peppers over the open flame on the stove:



Once they were nice and blacked I tossed them in a sealed glass container to let them sweat a bit before peeling the skin off and chopping them up.



Then I chopped up some tomato, jalapeño, and some corn to add to the poblano peppers.



After pan frying the cod, I tossed in the rest of the ingredients and cooked for a few minutes.



I heated two corn tortillas in a pan and then prepared the taco!









Sausage Taco!

After the first round of tacos I still had some tortillas left, so more tacos!

I also had more corn and wanted more poblano. So I combined corn, tomato, hot pepper, with some sausage that I initially pan fried. The tortillas were prepared with goat cheese and then layered with the roasted poblano and the remaining ingredients. Look!