My plan was to use the sour cherries – something I never ever see in California – I bought at Clancy’s in Minneapolis and use the rest of the insane amount of blueberries my parents had brought up to the cabin and make scads of turnovers. These turnovers would be gorgeous and delicious and I would distribute them amongst our kind neighbors here at the lake – some of whom coughed up some Benadryl and Benadryl cream when my son got stung by a bee and others of whom are just jolly welcoming folks to whom I find myself driven to give turnovers.

So I made two batches of pie crust, tossed fruit with sugar and flour, and started rolling out circles. It ended up being 14 circles – six sour cherry turnovers and eight blueberry turnovers. Here’s the thing. Whether browning meat or rolling out pie dough, I like to take it to the limit. The limit is where really good stew becomes mind-blowing, where a nice pie becomes sublime. The thing with the limit, though, is it is the actual limit. Go beyond it and… things fall apart quickly. Good meat is burned. Perfectly ripe fruit boils into a mess of crust-less nonsense.

I went too far. I reached for the sun and my wax wings melted. That turnover dough wasn’t strudel-thin, but it was too thin for turnovers. Once in the hot oven the fruit just burst right out of those weak little casings and bubbled into a sticky, almost-burnt raft on the pan. The turnovers were still edible, but much of the juicy essence of the fruit ended up soaking in the sink.

They tasted fine, but only a few looked remotely gift-able. (The skillful use of a knife to cut off the burnt fruit dripping out of the sides saved the ones below for their photo shoot.) The Benadryl-giving neighbors (hey Rollins!) ended up with a turnover apiece. The other neighbors (hey Carlsens!) will get something nice soon. I have plans. Big plans.

Sour cherry turnovers

The sour cherries were awesome in these. Use any fruit you like, though, just cut the sugar back by about a third for fruit that isn’t mouth-puckeringly sour. This recipe makes six not-too-thin turnovers; increase at will if you have the gumption to roll out the dough.

1 recipe pie dough (for a one-crust pie)

1 pint sour cherries

1/3 cup sugar

a scant 2 tablespoons flour

Make the pie dough, divide it into 6 pieces and pat each piece into a 1/2-inch-thick disc. Wrap in plastic and chill at least an hour and up to 2 days.

Preheat oven to 350. Pit cherries. Have a large baking sheet ready. In a large bowl toss the cherries, sugar, and flour until some juice from the cherries and the sugar and flour form a sort of wet sandy mixture around the cherries.

Roll out each disc of dough into a 5- to 6-inch circle. Put 1/6 of the cherries on half of each circle, fold the dough over the fruit to make a half-moon shape, and crimp the edges. Put turnovers on the baking sheet, cut a vent or two or three in the top of each turnover, and bake until fruit filling is bubbling and the crust is the color of a wooden cutting board, about 50 minutes. Let cool.

Eat with coffee. I find they really taste best at breakfast. Turnovers are, after all, the original Pop-Tart.

Hunters, venison cooks, venison fans of Northern Minnesota! I am hear to deliver some good news. There are many many deer about. Many. And they are as dim as the bottom of a Eurasian milfoil-infested lake. As I mentioned last time, they are strolling down paths past bedrooms filled with humans. One earlier today stood, stark still in that way that they have, about 10 feet away from me on a back road that wasn’t untraveled enough for a deer on the edge of it to think a human was no threat at all.

I grew up in a family of hunters. But not deer hunters. My family are bird-hunting people. Ducks. Pheasants. That’s our game. I have a strong, visceral memory of being put to work plucking feathers at the age of about 5. We all sat around my uncle’s garage with large cardboard boxes between us, plucking, my great-grandparents leading the pack.I realize now, of course, that the adults had all had a cocktail or two, and that just might have contributed to their high spirits in face of this onerous task.

Deer hunters always struck me, and I mean no disrespect here although much will be taken I’m sure, as taking the easy hunting road. You put out a salt lick. You climb into your post. You sit. You drink. You wait. A deer comes along and you shoot it.

These deer I’ve been encountering? I have a sense I could walk up to them a give them a slap if I were so inclined. I want to yell at them to be afraid of me. To run. To save themselves. I want to warn them that fall is coming and the hunters will be out and this “I’m standing still so no one can see me” thing is not going to serve them well.

Yet these deer are really messing up my berry-picking. So the small and evil part of me that loves berries more than Bambi can’t help but think “yeah, stand still, M-Fer, your time will come soon enough.”

Of course, that time does me no good. The berries will be long gone by then and I will be back in San Francisco where neither wild deer nor wild berries occupy much of my thoughts most days.

Above you see a sample of the wild raspberries I covet and which these ample deer are snarfing down whenever I turn away. They are pictured alongside their larger, cultivated brethren. The wild ones we pick along with back road… well, 30 seconds into picking them and you see why someone who wanted to make a living growing and selling raspberries might start working on some hybrids and crossings and whatnot. These berries are so small that it takes 3 or 4 to equal a regular, already pretty darn small raspberry. They are so delicate that they often fall into separate drupelets as you pick them, so it’s best to hold the container or your hand underneath the berry as you pull it down off the bramble if you don’t want to lose any precious fruit.

Of course, for all their smallness and tenderness they are also sweet. And they taste of raspberries. Of pure, solid, amazing, fabulous raspberries.

We eat them plain. Or with some cream or yogurt. Or, if I feel like spending a bit of time in the kitchen, with buttermilk panna cotta.

Buttermilk panna cotta

I can’t think of a better way to put it than my dad did: “Honey, this white stuff is really good.”

1 3/4 cups cream or half-and-half

10 tablespoons sugar

1 package (1/2 oz.) gelatin

2 1/2 cups buttermilk

1 teaspoon vanilla extract (the good stuff shines here!)

In a small saucepan over medium heat, bring cream and sugar to a simmer, stirring to dissolve the sugar and taking care not to bring the cream to a boil.

Meanwhile, in a medium bowl or 4-cup measuring cup, dissolve gelatin in 2 tablespoons of cold water. Let sit 3 to 5 minutes.

Whisk cream mixture into the bloomed gelatin. Add the buttermilk and vanilla.

Divide mixture evenly between 8 small ramekins (6- to 8-oz. each). Put ramekins on a baking sheet for easy transfer (although there is rarely room enough in my fridge to do this – instead they end up here and there and all around the place and I find one a few days later and feel very lucky indeed) and chill until set, at least 2 hours and up to overnight.

To serve, unmold desserts by dipping ramekins into a bowl of very hot water and inverting panna cottas onto plates. You may need to slip the point of a sharp knife along the side to loosen the edge and allow the mixture to release from the ramekin. I find a bit of pounding and shaking at this point helps things along immeasurably. Hey, the worst that can happen is this:

Serve buttermilk panna cotta with fresh berries, if you possible can, although shavings of chocolate, some preserved cherries, and orange sections are all lovely, too.

For quite some time I did not understand the clafouti. Cherries (or other fruit) baked in a batter that results in a cross between a baked pancake and a tart and a custard? What’s with that? Something clicked when I finally made one myself – the combination of ease and deliciousness snapped together in my head and the clafouti became my go-to dessert during cherry season.

Cherry clafouti

Use any fruit you like, but cherries are traditional.

1 pound cherries

3 eggs

1 cup milk

1/2 cup flour

1/3 cup sugar

1/8 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon vanilla

Powdered sugar for garnish (optional)

Preheat oven to 350 and butter a baking dish in the 9 x 13 family – although a bit smaller than that is great. While the oven heats up, settle in and pit the cherries. I like to pit them over the baking dish so all their juices end up in the dessert.

Whisk or whirl in a blender the eggs and milk. Add flour, sugar, salt, and vanilla and whisk or blend until smooth. Pour the batter over the cherries.

Bake until batter is set throughout and the edges and top are browning, about an hour.

Let sit a few minutes. Cut into pieces and sprinkle with powdered sugar, if you like. The powdered sugar really dresses up this humble dish quite a bit.

I’m addicted. I cannot stop making and eating little layered concoctions with a base of ricotta. Ricotta with jam. Ricotta with honey. Nuts or crumbled wafer cookies or cacao nibs sprinkled in there somewhere. My favorite combination so far is to top the ricotta with the honeyed kumquats I made a few weeks ago – I’m running out fast and find myself wishing I had made a lot more of them – and some toasted walnuts.

I’ve been constructing them in simple glasses for dessert, as above, but also slathering them into cereal bowls for breakfast. Here’s the one I’m eating as I write:

Yogurt, of course, works, too. Note: my dashing husband vastly prefers them when made with thick Greek yogurt. He finds the ricotta “grainy.” Um, yeah, I think, that’s the whole point – the oddly dry-yet-still-moist, sort of chewy but still mainly smooth texture of ricotta is its entire appeal to me. But, if, like him, you like things more obvious and creamy, then by all means, use some yogurt. The nice thing with a parfait is that they are individual. So I make mine with ricotta and everyone else’s with Greek yogurt. It makes me feel quite kind and generous and thoughtful as I force yet more layered dairy product, sweet fruity element, and crunchy bits on my family.

Like any good San Franciscan, I know how to layer. I’ve lived here so long that I’ve become constitutionally incapable of leaving the house without a sweater, which, when I’m here is a good practice. When I’m in, say, Minnesota in August, however, it seems a wee bit pathological. As I type this I’m wearing a long-underwear-grade insulated silk camisole, a t-shirt, a wool/silk lighter weight sweater, and a big cozy cardigan along with wool tights layered with socks under a skirt that itself is multi-layered.

For Christmas a good friend sent me Terrine, by Stéphane Reynaud. In general the cookbooks are no longer such great gifts for me. I have a lot of them and they are part of “work.” As much as I like my work, it still occupies the work part of my brain and not so much the “fun gift” part. I’d like fewer cookbooks, in fact. I’m constantly culling the collection, trying to keep it manageable and in some small way useful. But friends write them and I’m happy to get those, and then publishers send them to me all the time for one reason or another, and the stacks re-form despite my best efforts. So when I opened the present and saw a cookbook I was, at best, underwhelmed. I mean, really, how many patés is a girl ever going to make? Especially with a dashing husband who is quasi-vegetarian?

Then I started paging through it. Oh. My. God. This book is beautiful and inspiring and makes me want to layer everything. Everything. Fish, vegetables, cheese, meats, sweets – everything.

So when friends were in town for the weekend and I had a good excuse to cook too much food, I layered like a crazy person. A terrine starter, then pizza because an all-terrine meal would be weird and my pizza is so good, and then the chestnut meringue “terrine” pictured above.

Of course, the chestnut meringue is not really a terrine. It’s just a layered dessert. It is also the best dessert I’ve ever made. I used the recipe in Terrine as a jumping off point, but cut down on the sugar in the meringues, added vanilla to the whipped cream to great effect, and fixed the messed up not-tested metric-to-American measurements.

Chestnut meringue “terrine”

I’m a lucky girl whose neighborhood market carries this delicious vanilla-ed Clement Faugier chestnut spread. That link will let you buy some if you are not quite so lucky.

4 egg whites

tiny pinch of salt

1 cup powdered sugar

1 cup heavy cream

1/2 vanilla bean, slit lengthwise

1/4 cup granulated sugar

About 1 cup chestnut spread

Preheat oven to 200. Prepare two or three large baking sheets by lining them with either silpats or parchment paper.

Whip egg whites until frothy. Add the pinch of salt, beat until they hold stiff peaks (you should be able to lift the beater or whisk out of the egg whites, turn it upside down, and the peak of egg white that clings to the beater or whisk should hold its position). Sift the powdered sugar onto the egg whites and use a flexible rubber or silicone spatula to gently fold the sugar into the egg whites. Deflate the egg whites as little as possible.

You can get fancy and use a pastry bag to pipe out the meringue onto the baking sheets, but that seems messy and silly to me (they get covered with whipped cream later anyway). I diviied out the mixture into three piles on the baking sheets and then used a spatula to form circles, each about 8 inches across. Bake 2 hours without opening the door or bothering them in anyway. Turn off the oven and let them cool in the cooling-off oven (this seems to help keeps the meringues from cracking as they cool.

Meanwhile, you can prepare the cream. Put the cream, vanilla bean, and granulated sugar in a small saucepan. Bring to a simmer over medium heat, stir to dissolve the sugar into the cream. Take off the heat and let cool to room temperature. Use a small spoon to scrape the vanilla bean flesh into the cream and discard the pod. Transfer cream to a medium bowl, cover, and chill until ready to use.

When ready to serve, whip cream until soft peaks form so you can dollop and spread it easily. Remove meringues from baking sheets. Place one meringue on a serving plate, spread with one-third of the chestnut spread and layer on one-third of the whipped cream. Repeat with all three layers. Bring to the table and accept your oohs and ahhs. Then destroy your creation by cutting it into slices. I found this serves 6 just right. You could stretch it to 8 but people might feel like they didn’t quite get enough. You could divide it among 4 for sugar hogs, no problem.

More adventurous, finicky bakers could always make smaller meringue rounds to create individual servings, which would undoubtedly be much prettier.

If you’re invited to my house for dinner anytime soon, consider yourself warned: come prepared for layers.

I’ve learned to trust a lot of conventional wisdom in the kitchen. New combinations can be great. Trying a new technique with a dish can yield delights. Finding one that works is exhilarating. But often there actually is a reason you’ve never had something before. I’ll never forget the first (and last) time I had that whole lobster-with-vanilla-infused-something. Not. For. Me.

This doesn’t mean I don’t experiment, I do. But my cooking, regular readers will notice, is more about good versions of the familiar; simple flavors well handled; slight twists to old favorites. My cooking is also about frugality, of making use of what is at hand, of not wasting perfectly good food.

I had my eye on those Asian pears from our CSA. They were starting to pile up. I like a crisp, sweet Asian pear as a snack, but even in season I don’t want one every day. And no one else in my house wants one at all – they’re too busy harvesting their own crunchy delights from the apple tree out back this time of year. I made a fennel and Asian pear salad – both major ingredients were very thinly sliced, drizzled with a bit of very tasty walnut oil, sprinkled with sea salt, and topped with a few freshly toasted walnuts. My dashing husband liked it, but said he’d prefer just the fennel.

Sigh.

So I did what I’d been told – by conventional kitchen wisdom – not to do. I baked the Asian pears. I quartered and cored and peeled and chopped 5 of them, tossed them with a tablespoon of cider vinegar, 1/4 cup brown sugar, 1/4 teaspoon garam masala, 1/4 teaspoon ground cardamom, 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger, and 1/8 teaspoon ground cloves, and put them in a 2-quart casserole. I then made a topping of 1/2 cup flour, 1/2 cup whole wheat pastry flour, 1/2 cup brown sugar, and 1/2 cup butter which I mushed together into a streusel-type thing with my fingers but which one could easily pulse up in a food processor if one didn’t live in completely unreasonable fear of having to wash the food processor bowl and top and blade and whatnot. I spread that mixture over the top and baked it all at 375 for about half an hour – until the pears were bubbling in the middle and the whole thing was a pretty brown.

For the record: Asian pears bake up just fine. They were sweet and tender and held their shape. That said, I’m sure Anjou or Bosc pears would be just as good and probably less expensive. But the advice to eat Asian pears raw is, I think, simply a result of the fact that they are so good raw – crispy and refreshing. If you have a mess of them and want to put them to work in a baked dessert, give it a try. I was delightfully surprised.

And that crisp? The leftovers really do make a most delicious breakfast. I’m just saying.