In my latest newspaper column I wrote about our recent applesauce-making day. What follows is a photo story of that saucy party.

Gingerbread
Adapted from Cook’s Illustrated Cookbook

This cake is quite spicy. The ginger flavor is much more pronounced in
this cake—both ground and fresh!—than in the cake I grew up eating. For a gentler cake, omit the fresh ginger.

3/4 cup strong, dark beer such as Guinness
½ teaspoon baking soda
2/3 cup molasses
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
1/4 cup white sugar
2 eggs, beaten
1/3 cup flavorless oil such as canola
1 tablespoon grated fresh ginger, optional
1½ cups flour
2 tablespoons ground ginger
½ teaspoon each, baking powder and salt
1/4 teaspoon each, cinnamon and black pepper

Bring the beer to a boil in a small saucepan. Remove from the heat and
stir in the baking soda. Pour into a large bowl and whisk in the
molasses and sugars. Add the eggs, oil, and fresh ginger.

In another bowl, combine the flour, ground ginger, baking powder, salt,
cinnamon, and black pepper. Add the dry ingredients to the wet in three
parts, whisking until smooth after each addition.

Pour the batter into a greased 8×8-inch pan. Bake at 350 degrees for
35-45 minutes. Serve with fresh applesauce or a dollop of whipped cream.

This same time, years previous: dam good blackberry pie, dimply plum cake, caramelized cherry tomatoes, down in the peach pits

Seven (eight? nine?) years ago when the locusts swarmed, my brother caught some, fried them up, and ate them. He fed one to my daughter and she ate it. We have it on video. It’s one of our family stories, the type of thing that the kids like to brag about.

John the Baptist has nothing on us.

So when the locusts swarmed again this spring, my children immediately thought of my brother. However, my brother was on the other side of the world, teaching in Qatar at a Carnegie Mellon branch school. He told the kids, “If you catch them and freeze them, I’ll eat them when I come back.”

That was all the prompting the kids needed. They immediately became professional locust hunters, plucking them off branches and plopping them into old sour cream containers.

I knew not to peak into the unlabeled containers banging around in the freezer. However, once I found a pretty red Christmas tin, and, thinking that maybe my mother had squirreled away a tin of cookies, I popped off the lid. A bunch of locusts, rigid and frosty, stared up at me. I may have screamed a little.

When my brother came to visit this weekend, the kids put all the locusts into a pretty little tin, wrapped it up in newspaper, and gave it to him as a belated birthday present.

Turns out, frozen locusts can stick to your fingers and look very much alive.

“Maybe they’ll come to life once they warm up,” my brother said.

They didn’t, of course, but wouldn’t it have been wild if they had?

That afternoon, my brother and the kids and the dead locusts took over the kitchen and I fled the house to go for a walk. Before I left, I gave them permission to use the camera.

According to my Canon Rebel spy, my brother fried the locust in oil.

Just look at this picture! I do believe one of my children is a food photographer in the making!

My brother ate one—shall we call it a loquito frito?—and pronounced it not too tasty. (Duh.)

So he mixed up some bread dough and made a locust pizza on the grill.

Pizza. It makes anything tastes good!

And then he put on a wig.

For bravado? To better identify with the honey-and-locust-eating prophet?

He took a bite.

Ewwww!

And then he packed up the leftovers to take with with him. He said he’d eat the locust pizza for his next day’s lunch, but I think he was bluffing. He probably tossed it in the first garbage can he came to.

This same time, years previous: tomato bread pudding

We had a fantastic supper the other night.

At least I thought it was fantastic. I had almost as much fun making it as I did eating it. Maybe more.

It was four curses long:

1. Sliced radishes with butter to spread on top and coarse salt to sprinkle them with. And tomato slices with dollops of cucumber mint salad on top (mayo, capers, mustard, red onion, vinegar, mint, cucumbers, S&P).

2. Grilled zucchinis that were then relaxed in a lemon-olive oil-basil dressing.

3. Spaghetti tossed with Pumpkin Seed Pesto and fresh Parmesan.

4. Bubbling hot blueberry cobbler with vanilla ice cream.

I did not plan this menu. I started thinking about supper a little before 4 pm, and it came together as I went along.

This cobbler is just a butter-and-sour cream rich biscuit dough that gets torn over a panfull of sugared, lemon-spiked blueberries. We feasted till we about popped.

And then my parents stopped by and I dished some cobbler into little ramekins for them.

My mother approved of the topping. She liked that it was so crunchy.

By the end of the evening, this was all that was left.

I put it into a little ramekin and ate it the next day, hunched over the counter, my back to the children.

And it was wonderful.

Blueberry Torn-Biscuit Cobbler
Adapted (but not much) from the August 2012 issue of Bon Appetit magazine

Next time, for more texture and flavor, I may swap out some of the flour for some oats or the multigrain mix.

1 ½ cups flour, plus 3 tablespoons
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
1 cup sugar, plus 3 tablespoons
½ teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons butter
½ slightly heaping cup sour cream
6 cups blueberries
juice and zest of one lemon

In a large bowl, toss together the blueberries with the one cup of sugar, the three tablespoons of flour, and the lemon zest and juice. Tumble it all into a 9×13 baking dish.

In another large bowl, combine the remaining flour, baking powder, 3 tablespoons sugar, and salt. Using your fingers, cut in the butter. Stir in the sour cream. Knead very briefly, just till it comes together. Tear the biscuit dough into bits and scatter it over the berries.

Bake at 375 degrees for 40 minutes or until golden brown and bubbling merrily.

Serve with vanilla ice cream.

In case you are under the impression that all my meals are seasoned, balanced, and finished off with a noteworthy dessert, allow me to set the record straight:

1. I can’t cook hamburgers. The other night I tried, once again, to make a good burger, but I made the patties too thick (about an inch instead of a half inch) (my carpenter husband was appalled that his wife could be so measurementally challenged) and they were raw on the inside. We threw them back on the grill (all except for my youngest son’s burger—apparently he likes to hear his supper moo), and they turned out yummy, but by then it was far too late for any possible cooking goddess glory.

Also, I bought American cheese (oh yes, I did) to top the burgers and made McDonald’s special sauce to go on them. And we had Pringles and mushy watermelon.

2. And then another night we ate eggs and toast and everyone was still hungry when we finished.