Sweet on Demand

Peach turnover filling

Friends marvel that I’m not bigger than I am. I’m not svelte but given the sheer amount of energy I devote to all things food (talking about it, making it, eating it) it is easy to understand why someone would assume I would need a crane to get me out of the house. While I’m always at my biggest size when I live in the Bay Area, a region that shares my food obsession and indulges me in it on all fronts, the thing that keeps me within reasonable limits has been my preference for salt to sugar. 

Savory over sweet is my general declaration, with very few exceptions. I’m a sucker for Rice Krispie treats (cooked by me in excessive amounts of butter) and things with flaky crusts. Left to my own devices I crave salt and spice, I find savory satisfying. And for those rare exceptions, I’ve trained myself not to keep those things on hand. When I shop, I skip those aisles. That way, if I decide to eat sweets I have to have a full on craving worthy of me getting in my car and driving to the store. It is an extra layer between me and the things that are great for my health or continuing to fit into the clothes I already own.

In the last few years I’ve fallen in love with cooking. 

buttered figs with vanilla salt

My time living abroad taught me that I could cook but not necessarily that I loved it. It was something that passed the time and allowed me to suspend occasional bouts of homesickness when I could eat things that were my comfort foods. With the passing months in foreign places I added new things to my culinary arsenal with varied success. Spätzle was a pretty huge disaster but Pajeon was added to my list of things I could produce in a pinch. I learned cakes and cinnamon rolls but none of those things typically call to me in the middle of the night. I love flaky dough and my time abroad was typically, although not exclusively, in sweltering places that didn’t lend themselves to making pie doughs (not to mention I often had to fashion boot-leg Dutch ovens to cook at all). 

But these days cooking is my meditation. Now I scour through websites and recipes call out to me. I save them and plan and shop to be able to make them. I have new ingredients and spices added to my arsenal incrementally and I am learning to use them outside of the specific recipe(s) they were purchased for. I’m getting good at improvising. 

This has led to a problem.

All of a sudden I don’t have to go to the grocery store to purchase the sweet treats that I crave. All of a sudden, everything I want is accessible through my generally stocked fridge. Butter? I have salted and unsalted by the pound in my freezer. Cocoa? I keep unsweetened powder in my pantry. Most everything else can be produced with flour (unbleached and whole wheat) and sugar (brown, white, and powdered). In a pinch I can make brownies or cookies or cake or…most recently, peach turnovers (ugly though they turned out).

This week my CSA box presented me with fresh figs. Unlike dill, which I had no concept of how to use and had only experienced in its dried form in a recipe gone wrong back in my high school days, figs I’d seen a little more of. My fondest memory was a giveaway at Central market years ago when someone handed me a wedge of fresh fig slathered with mascarpone cheese and a pistachio. It was the most decadent piece of simplicity I’d had. Something I remember almost 15 years later. But I wasn’t going to buy mascarpone just for that (although I do have pistachios on hand) and so what could I do with them?

Zee gave me fancy salts for my birthday earlier this year. Aleppo salt and sumac salt and truffle salt and…vanilla salt. I’d never heard of such a thing and so threw myself into reading up. How would I use vanilla salt? Baking of course.

But my brain got to working the other day, the figs beginning to overripe on my table. I cut them into even slices, revealing their jeweled inside, and placed them in a pan sizzling with a pat of butter. Then I sprinkled them each with a tiny pinch of vanilla salt. The sugars in the fig caramelized a little and I flipped them each over and a few minutes later, slid them and the buttery juice they produced onto a plate. 

There it was. A marvelous sweet treat with a subtle salty counterpoint that I made without leaving my house. With no added sugar and just a smattering of butter, there are worse things I could make.

Not the prettiest but pretty tasty for my first attempt at lemon lava cake

Last week it was lemon lava cake (a recipe I’d been eying for months and finally had folks over to try it out on…nothing like the satisfaction of making lemon curd in advance and then seeing the whole recipe fall into place) and the week before that it was oatmeal raisin cookies.

Last night fresh peaches, all summer smelling and perfect, were the object of my attention. I wanted so much to bite into them directly but recently I’ve realized I’m allergic to stone fruits and consuming them immediately sets my Eustachian tube to itching annoyingly. So I knew I’d have to cook them; in some ways, such a waste. Still, I had puff pastry in the freezer (left over from an experimental meal gone wrong a while back). I peeled and sliced them, their bright orange flesh taunting me, and then mixed them with brown and white sugar and a little bit of cinnamon and a pinch of that delightful vanilla salt. And then I wrapped them inexpertly into the puff pastry. They resembled presents wrapped by young and well-meaning children. 

The finished product wasn’t perfect by any stretch but it satisfied my sweet tooth without having to leave the comfort of my kitchen. And therein lies the problem…sweet things on demand is probably not the best thing to happen to me, even if they are delicious.