Carrot and Seed Salad

Speaking of fashion, back when I lived in Colorado, I wore green puffy vests, blue ones, pink ones, sweaters in red and purple and brown. You know what living in New York for six years does to your wardrobe? It turns it all black and gray. That's a lot less depressing than it sounds, actually, because for the fashion challenged among us, I have to say that matching blacks with grays is infinitely easier than dealing with color. God, did I just type 'dealing with color'? Save me.

But when it comes to food, especially in the winter, you might have noticed that I gravitate A Lot to orange. Orange here, orange here, orange here. Might just be my new favorite color. And if I were less annoyed at having to spend any more than 10 minutes picking out an outfit, it might even be a color I'd love to wear (I know I already linked that post, but it's a beautiful one). The reality is that I'm no fashionista, so if I can't wear it, I might as well eat it. After all, if you're going to dress in black and gray during days so filled with black and gray, well, orange you glad I'm blogging this recipe? (I'm so so so sorry for that horrible pun. I really am.)

I made this to accompany some roasted lamb shanks and some sweet and sour onions I made for a dinner party. A dinner party, by the way, thrown for two of the coolest people I have ever met. Two people who I actually picked up in the park. I mean, literally picked up since I asked them for their number after about half an hour of standing around watching our dogs play together. Central Park is like my own personal bar for picking up friends. More about the dinner party later, as I blog the rest of the meal. But for now, I want to say that I think it's important to have something fresh on the table amidst all of those dishes that have been roasted and braised and stewed and simmered.

This recipe comes from the lovely book Breakfast, Lunch, Tea: The Many Little Meals of Rose Bakery, which I have been coveting since flipping through it at The Morgan Library gift shop. If you're ever in New York and need a somewhat off the beaten path sort of cultural adventure, the Morgan is one of my favorite little places. And the gift shop a great place to be convinced to buy some beautiful book or other. So anyway. I have a technique when choosing a recipe to serve to guests that I don't plan on trying out beforehand. It's called the Amazon review pages. One commenter said this salad was her favorite, so I made it, and it was great. The seeds really add a great textural contrast to the shredded carrot salad, which can be kind of one dimensional otherwise.

Carrot and Seed Salad
Adopted from Rose Carrarini's Breakfast, Lunch, Tea

1 cup raw, unsalted sunflower seeds
1 tablespoon canola oil
Sprinkling of salt for roasting the seeds
8 medium carrots, grated (by hand if you're ambitious, or in the food processor)
Handful of chives, chopped
1/2 cup lemon juice, which is the juice from about 2 1/2 lemons
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoon sugar
3 tablespoons olive oil

Spread the seeds on a baking sheet and toss them around with 1 tablespoon canola oil. Sprinkle with the salt and toast in an oven preheated to 350F for about 10 minutes. Check, though, because it could be more or less depending on your oven. Shake the pan a couple of times while they're toasting to prevent burning. Set the seeds aside to cool while you work on the rest.

Place the carrots, now grated, in a large serving bowl and set that aside also.

For the dressing, whisk together the lemon juice, salt, black pepper and sugar. Then add the olive oil in a stream while continuing to whisk (or just dump it in and whisk it around). You can add more or less salt, pepper and lemon juice according to your taste, so be judicious at first.

Pour the dressing over the carrots, and mix, then add the cooled seeds and chives. Serve

Light Cauliflower Soup

Do you read fashion and design blogs? I love them. Am totally addicted. Maybe it's because I'm still trying to shed what's been called my 'uniquely Colorado' sense of style, which is a euphemism anyway. My way of putting clothes together that doesn't exactly fly in Manhattan. One of my good friends used to describe me as the girl who wore puffy vests. It might also be because my apartment is pretty much exclusively "decorated" with cheap bookshelves that kind of sag and bow in the middle, and sometimes just fall apart completely. In both fashion and design I like to live vicariously.

One of my favorite themes that seems to get used a lot by people with an eye for both fashion and design is to focus on one color. Orange, or white for example. Now, as I said, I have an eye for neither really. But New York is so blanketed in snow right now that white is an almost self-evident theme. I wasn't here for the massive post-Christmas blizzard we had because I was at home in Colorado, and this time I vowed not to miss one of the most amazing experiences New York has to offer in the winter: a walk through a blanketed, and still-pristine Central Park.

Lucky for me, I had a couple of puppies happy for the chance to go snow-snorkeling. A favorite activity of almost every dog I know.

And of course, what goes with white snow, if we're going to uphold our theme? White food! White soup, more specifically, and a white cauliflower soup to be exact. R remembers eating something similar all the time in Norway (another place that fits in so well with our winter white theme), where he says his mother used to make it frequently. I was going to get her recipe, but by chance I had a number of things to be used up in the fridge, a leek for example, and half a carton of milk, that I thought I had this one under control.

It's a light cauliflower soup, made with skim milk rather than heavy cream, some vegetable stock, a leek and a head of white cauliflower. Really, it could not be easier. And it turns out that, although I doubted it at first, cauliflower soup is incredibly satisfying. There's something potato-y about the texture, which is smooth and hearty and incredibly warming. R kept asking, as we slurped down our soup, if I was surprised at how good it was. He has this ability, that boy, of kind of reassigning credit even if I made, and made up, the soup. But the truth is, I was surprised by that humble little cauliflower. It was delicious.

Light Cauliflower Soup
A conglomeration of many different recipes, ultimately dictated by the contents of my refrigerator

Oil for the pot
1 leek, trimmed of green leaves, white part sliced
1 head cauliflower, cut into chunks, the core discarded
3 cups skim milk, plus more for thinning out later
2 cups vegetable stock
Salt and white pepper to taste
Handful of chives chopped, for garnish

In a large soup pot, heat some oil over medium heat. Add the leeks and cook for about 5 minutes until softened. Add the cauliflower, the 3 cups skim milk, and the 2 cups stock. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer. Cook until the cauliflower is cooked through and can be easily broken apart by a spoon. Don't worry if the liquid doesn't cover the cauliflower, it will steam anyway and be fine.

Since this soup is meant to be easy, just use an immersion blender if you have one to blend the soup, but take it off the heat first. If not, you can use a regular blender and then just transfer the puréed soup back to the pot when it's done. The soup will be pretty thick at this point, so return it to the heat and add more milk or stock to thin it out until it's the consistency you like. Warm it up a bit so the addition of the milk/stock doesn't cool it too much. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Ladle into bowls, and add a handful of chopped chives to each serving. I just use kitchen sheers to cut the chives directly over each bowl.

Norwegian Coffee Bread or Hvetekake

White bread, as we know, gets such a bad reputation. Especially the prepackaged cottony, light-as-air stuff that can be compressed into a ball the size of a can of tuna. But there is no reason light and cottony should be dismissed out of hand. For one thing, it's possible to make real bread with such an ethereal texture. It's the perfect bread for serving alongside coffee, topping with butter, sugar or jam, or traditionally with a Norwegian brown cheese called brunost. This is the kind of bread that gives easily, without an armature of crust that can make an open-faced treat messy and difficult.

If you don't bake bread but want to, you should start here. It's so easy, requires only two rises, and the payout is not one, but two perfect loaves, one of which will only be dented on the top (as you can see mine was) if you drop it on its head while flipping it over to tap its bottom, checking for that hollow sound that indicates it's done. Luckily being dropped on its head never really hurt a loaf of bread (my sister might say that I am not so lucky).

Aside from being light and airy, this bread tastes of milk and cardamom, two of its main ingredients. A subtle sweetness, and a subtle spice (just like Norwegians, perhaps?). The day after I made it, after the first loaf had nearly been decimated, I got a text from my Norwegian husband claiming it to be the best bread ever. The recipe comes from Beatrice Ojakangas's The Great Scandinavian Baking Book, which, if you're interested in Scandinavian baking, is pretty much the gold standard here in the US, and the recipient of a James Beard award. And even though Ojakangas grew up in Minnesota (as so many Scandinavian-Americans do), and even though I, a native Coloradan made the loaves, R could only exclaim "We Scandinavians really know how to make bread."

A note about scalding milk: To scald milk, put it in a small pot over medium heat and bring it nearly to a boil, stirring the whole time so a skin doesn't form. Set aside and let it cool to lukewarm as indicated in this recipe. Evidently this is a practice commonly called for in older recipes in order to kill off bacteria in the milk. Since milk these days is pasteurized, it's usually no longer necessary. However, the website OChef cites the consummate expert Shirley Corriher who says that scalding milk before baking bread is still a good idea because there is a protein in milk that can somewhat reduce the rise of a bread. So what the heck, scalding doesn't exactly take long and it's not difficult anyway.

I'm send this bread to Yeastspotting.

Norwegian Coffeebread, or Hvetekake
Adopted from Beatrice Ojakangas's The Great Scandinavian Baking Book

2 packages active dry yeast
1/2 cups warm water (105F - 115F)
1 1/2 cups milk, scalded and cooled until lukewarm
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground cardamom
3 tablespoons melted butter
4 - 4 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
Extra melted butter for brushing on the loaves

Scald the milk (see note above) and set aside to cool to lukewarm. Dissolve the yeast in the warm water in the bowl of a standing mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Let the yeast sit for 5 minutes so it can activate. Stir in the milk, sugar, salt, cardamom and melted butter on a low speed. (This all can also be done without a mixer, just stir the ingredients in by hand.)

Add 3 cups of flour to the mixture and increase the speed to medium. Beat until the mixture starts to get glossy, then add in one more cup of flour and stir for a few minutes more. Turn the mixer off and let the dough rest for 15 minutes while you switch to the dough hook. After the dough has rested, use the dough hook to knead the bread, adding in the last 1/2 cup of flour gradually until the dough comes together in a ball. Alternately, if you're kneading by hand, flour a clean surface with some of the rest of the flour and, well, knead by hand, adding in the rest of the 1/2 cup flour as you go. Kneading should take about 10 minutes, and the dough will be smooth and shiny.

Clean out and dry your mixer bowl, then oil it and place the dough back inside. Turn the dough over in the bowl so that the dough is oiled on all sides, cover the bowl with a kitchen towel and set aside in a warm place. Let the dough rise until doubled in size, which will take about 1 hour.

Once the dough has risen, divide it into two equal parts and shape each part into free-form round loaves. Place the loaves on two baking sheets covered in parchment paper, and set aside again in a warm place. Allow the loaves to rise until nearly doubled in size, about 45-50 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 375F. Brush the risen loaves with a little melted butter and bake for 30-35 minutes. The loaves will be golden and should sound hollow when tapped on the bottom (don't drop them on their heads!). Brush again with butter if you like, and cool on wire racks.

Shaker Bean and Cider Stew

It's not that I'm down on snow. When I was growing up in Colorado, winter was my favorite season because of all the things we could do in it. Because in Colorado you can drive up to the mountains in the morning, past peaks that are actually perfectly pointed. Perfectly pointed mountain peaks. I miss those.

And you can cross-country ski by old log cabins in the late afternoon.

Or snowshoe through the woods, on similar late afternoons as the snow starts to turn blue in the twilight. For future reference, that's the time to start heading back, because the sun sets fast. And though both my sister and I know that most basic of outdoor rules, we ignored it on our last trip and ended up snowshoeing through the dark, taking wrong turns, and having to call the local Nordic center for directions out of the woods. I know I should be ashamed, but it was still fun.

Snow can be a wonderful thing. But I'm sitting in my New York apartment now, in the darkness of a Friday night that is too cold, which caps off a Friday day equally unbearable. The beautiful, cottony snow flurry we had last night has turned into the kind of brown and unbelievably slippery slush that makes walking both treacherous and just plain messy. It doesn't help that I live on the top of what must be the only steep hill in Manhattan. We're talking San Fransisco steep, and although building owners are supposed to be responsible for their sidewalks, the string of buildings lining the hill always seem to forget. Or not care.

You can probably guess that I'm about to say something like, 'on a day like this, only stew will do.' And not because it rhymes. Because it's true. Perfect for after days spent on the trails, or days spent braving the horrid city streets.

I originally started this post by gushing, 'You know what's even better than stock in soup? Cider. Delicious, delicious apple cider.' It makes me think of autumn, the sweetness and freshness of the air transferred to the broth. But because the cider is sweet, it's best to use a slightly hotter sausage in this stew, which comes from The Shaker Kitchen, a book that prides itself on a return to 'real food' and 'real' traditions. Written by Jeffrey Paige, himself not actually a shaker, he learned to live with these recipes while serving as the chef at The Creamery, the Canterbury Shaker Village's restaurant. If you're going to use dried beans, you'll have to start by soaking them the night before. But after that the stew is mostly left unattended to simmer away on the stove while you, in the face of a weekend plunged into the single digits, refuse to move from your couch. Even in Manhattan, a return to simple things.

Shaker Bean and Cider Stew
Adopted from Jeffrey S. Paige's The Shaker Kitchen

2 cups dried white beans, such as great northern or cranberry for example
3 cloves garlic, passed through a press
1 medium white onion
2 leeks, tough green leaves removed, white part washed and sliced
2 medium carrots, sliced into 1/4" coins
1 pound smoked sausage, also sliced into 1/4" coins
1 quart apple cider, plus more if needed
1 quart vegetable or chicken stock, plus more if needed
2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
2 teaspoons minced fresh thyme
Salt and pepper to taste

Pick through the beans, then put them in a bowl and cover with cold water. Allow them to soak overnight. When you're ready to make the soup, drain the beans and set aside.

Heat a large soup pot over medium heat. If you're using 'normal' sausage, you probably don't really need to add oil, but if you're using a leaner sausage like chicken or turkey, you can add a little oil to the pan. Brown the sausage for about 7-8 minutes, then remove to paper towels and drain.

Add the onions and leeks to the pot and cook in the rendered fat from the sausage. If the pot is dry, add some oil. Cook until the onions turn translucent, about five minutes. Add the garlic and continue to cook for a couple more minutes, until the garlic is fragrant. Add the beans, the carrots, the cider, the stock and the herbs to the pot. Bring the liquid to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer uncovered for 2.5-3 hours until the beans are soft. If the liquid gets too low, add more cider or stock.

When the soup is ready and the beans are soft, season to taste with salt and pepper and serve.

Smoked Salmon for Breakfast

In theory, breakfast is my absolute hands-down favorite meal. In practice, it's either non-existent, boring old milk and cereal, or a piece of fruit grabbed off the counter. So even though I'm not one much for resolutions, I like the idea of a good breakfast. Last time R and I were in Norway I was struck by the fact that Norwegians really know how to do breakfast. There was a spread every morning of whole grain Wasa crackers on which we loaded various toppings from cheese, jam, cold cuts with lettuce and tomato, chunks of crab, herring, even little mini shrimp. I mean, it's like a real meal. With real food that's actually good for you. Imagine.

So when browsing around the various food blogs and sites, I started link hopping and ended up on Bon Appetite's New Year's Food-Lover's Cleanse. Ugh with the resolutions, I know. But I have to give credit where it's due, and the idea fits so well with this blog and its Norwegian leanings. Not to mention that I frickin' love smoked salmon. And I love it even more when it's laying on a dollop of plain yogurt that's been mixed with chives and a little red onion.

Which is why the Norwegian tradition of these little open-faced cracker things is so genius. If you whisk up the yogurt mixture the night before, they're a completely assemble-and-go affair. And of course, you don't have to save them for breakfast. I find myself craving them constantly.

Smoked Salmon for Breakfast
Adopted from Bon Appetite's Food-Lover's Cleanse

Wasa crackers, your favorite variety
1 cup low-fat (or not, it's up to you) plain yogurt
1/4 small red onion, diced
Handful of chives, minced
Slices of smoked salmon

Whisk together the yogurt, onion and chives. Spread a dollop of the yogurt mixture on each Wasa cracker and then lay a slice of smoked salmon on top. Enjoy!

Carrot Bisque with Banana and Coconut Milk

It seems like as soon as winter really kicks in to full speed, all of my spoons are instantly dirty. My bowls, too, star stacking up in the sink. Everything is bowl food. Chunky soups in broth, pureed soups made of vegetables and some kind of cream or milk. So I hope you're thinking of getting on a soup kick as well, because I have a handful of recipes coming up for steaming bowls you can wrap your hands around for mitten-less warmth. Of course, soups are comforting, and if they're made of carrot they can bring a splash of welcome color to the grayest of days. They're also a great way to eat vegetables without feeling like you're eating the dregs of winter.

This velvety Carrot Bisque is from the January/February issue of Vegetarian Times, to which I treated myself on the flight back to New York from Denver after the holidays. Both sweet and spicy, a ripe banana gets puréed with carrots and a healthy serving of coconut milk, making it at once exotic and homey. And at the end, for extra good measure, a spoonful of coconut milk reduction gets swirled into the purée.

Sweet & Spicy Carrot Bisque
Adopted from January/February 2011 issue of Vegetarian Times

Canola oil for the pan
1 medium yellow onion, diced
1 teaspoon plus a pinch of salt
2 tablespoons minced fresh ginger
1 tablespoon curry powder
1 pinch cayenne pepper
4 large carrots, peeled and sliced into 1/4" rounds
1 ripe banana, sliced
1 14oz. can coconut milk, divided
juice from 1 lime, to taste

Heat the oil in a large saucepan and add the onion with a pinch of salt. Cook over medium heat for 5 minutes, until the onions are soft. Add the ginger and continue cooking for a minute until the ginger is fragrant, then add the curry powder, the cayenne and 1/4 cup water. Stir the mixture so that the onion is well-coated with the mixture.

Add the carrots, the banana, 1 teaspoon of salt and 4 cups of water. Bring the liquid to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer for 25 minutes, uncovered. Carrots should be soft enough to pierce with a fork. Take the soup off the heat. You can purée your soup in a blender, or, if you prefer a little texture and less clean-up, use an immersion blender. Return the soup to low heat, and stir in 1 cup of coconut milk and lime juice to taste.

In a small saucepan, simmer the rest of the coconut milk over medium-high heat until reduced by half. This should take about 10 minutes. Ladle the soup into bowls and swirl in a spoonful of the coconut milk reduction. Serve.

Struan, Peter Reinhart's Reputation-Making Bread

If you're like me, you rue those electronic e-readers not necessarily because you're sentimentally attached to the physical book (although there is that as well), but because they make it a lot harder to surreptitiously see what people are reading on the subway. If you're a can't-mind-your-own-business kind of subway rider like I am, and if you'd been sitting next to me on the six train the other week, you would have seen me nose-deep in Peter Reinhart's (of The Bread Baker's Apprentice fame) first book, a slim little paperback called Brother Juniper's Bread Book: Slow Rise as Method and Metaphor. And if you were a member of the general population, you would probably have thought 'what a weird girl.' What can I say. I do my best reading on the subway.

The book, as I mentioned Reinhart's first, is from an era in which he was known as Brother Peter Reinhart because of his membership in the Christ the Saviour Brotherhood. He founded the famous, but now sadly defunct Brother Juniper's Bakery in Forestville, California with his wife in 1986, as an offshoot of the Brother Juniper's Restaurants run by the brotherhood. Bread quickly became the focus of the bakery, and by Reinhart's own admission this unique, and until them somewhat forgotten Struan, became a major draw.

While each chapter of the book is dedicate to a musing on some aspect of bread-making followed by a recipe (with titles like 'A Note on Yeast and Salt' and 'On Not Cutting into Bread Too Soon'), part one ends with a chapter called 'And Then There Was Struan,' as though the mere mention of the bread says it all. According to Reinhart, Struan is a Scottish harvest bread, made of all the various grains gathered in the autumn. It also makes the most fabulous toast, and would go smashingly alongside a bowl of autumn soup. As a measure of how good it is, this recipe makes three loaves and R had the brilliant idea of freezing two of them. No sooner where they chilled than we had polished off the first and were ready to rip into the second. And then the third. It's slightly sweet with brown sugar, moistened with buttermilk and chewy with a slew of different grains, none of which overpower.

I'm sending this to Susan for her weekly Yeastspotting. If you love bread, check it out.

Peter Reinhart's Struan
Adopted from Peter Reinhart's Brother Juniper's Bread Book

7 cups bread flour
1/2 cup uncooked polenta
1/2 cup rolled oats
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup wheat bran (try Bob's Red Mill)
4 teaspoons salt, sea if you have it
3 tablespoons active dry yeast, bloomed in 4 tablespoons lukewarm water, or 2 tablespoons + 1 teaspoon instant yeast
1/2 cup cooked brown rice
1/4 cup honey
3/4 cup buttermilk
About 1 1/2 cups water plus 4 tablespoons that are lukewarm, depending on conditions when you're making your bread
3 tablespoons poppy seeds for the top
1 egg beaten into 4 cups of water for the egg wash

Put the yeast in 4 tablespoons of lukewarm water and let it stand until it bubbles, if that's the kind of yeast you're using. In a large bowl, combine the flour, polenta, oats, sugar, bran, salt and yeast. Whisk together to mix. Add the brown rice, honey, buttermilk and one cup of water (leave aside the extra 1/2 cup for use while kneading). Squeeze the ingredients together with your hands until the dough comes together as a ball.

Sprinkle some flour on a clean surface and turn the dough out onto it. Clean out the bowl, dry it, and set aside. You'll have to knead this bread for about 12-15 minutes because of all the grains. It will lighten in color and stop looking like porridge as it comes together. The dough should be a bit tacky and light golden, but not sticky when you're done kneading.

Put the dough back in the now-clean mixing bowl and cover with a damp kitchen towel. Put the bowl in a warm place for the dough to rise until doubled in size. This should take about 1 hour.

Cut the dough into three equal sections and form into loaves. R wasn't here when I made this bread, so I don't have pictures of the process of forming the loaves. But if you're unsure of how to do it, this About page has instructions and pictures. The only thing is that while the instructions there say to roll the bread out with a pin, you can simply use the heels of your hands to push from the center of each section out to flatten it. Put each loaf into a greased bread pan that's 9" x 4 1/2" x 3", seam-side down.

Brush the tops of the loaves with the egg wash and shower them with the poppy seeds on top. Cover the loaves and allow them to rise until the dough mounds over the tops of the pans. Preheat the oven to 350F and bake for 45 minutes. The bread is done when it sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom and is a golden brown in the crust. Allow the bread to cool completely for 40 minutes before cutting into it, as it continues to cook even after being removed from the oven.

My Great-Grandmother's Plum Cake Won First Place in MoMA's Recipe Contest

My Great-great-grandmother's German Plum Cake recipe won first place in a competition sponsored by MoMA (The Museum of Modern Art, New York). (You can see a video of the event here, complete with yours truly all dressed in chef's clothes, and then saying a few words about the dessert at the dinner for which it was made). Here's the story.

So back in October I was planning a trip to the MoMA to see their exhibition called Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen (which, by the way, is on view until March 14, so you can still see it). The show is part of a series called Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art, which seeks to highlight some of the (often overlooked) contributions made by women to the history of modern art. Counter Space celebrates MoMA's acquisition of a complete Frankfurt Kitchen, designed in 1926-1927 by Grete Shütte-Lihotzky and manufactured for public housing projects in and around Frankfurt after World War One. The show also features a collection of design objects and period kitchen appliances.

In conjunction with the show, MoMA hosted an event that combined art with food called Kitchen Culture, a dinner held for about 100 guests that featured a napkin-folding lesson, performance artist Nicholas Dumit Estevez and his 'performative recipes' and musician Robert Rotifer's 'musical ode' to the Frankfurt Kitchen. For the dessert to be served with the meal, MoMA held a recipe contest in order to find German dessert recipes that dated from before 1950. Well, my Great-grandmother Erna Welp's Pflaumekuchen, or German Plum Cake recipe won first place (it was actually her mother's recipe).

I got to go to MoMA the day before the event and make a very scaled-up version of the cake with pastry chef Cristina Nastasi (who was about the nicest, least intimidating pastry chef ever, not that I have a lot of experience with pastry chefs). My sister and I were both given the opportunity to attend the event, and I talked about my family's German Plum Cake at the end of the meal as it was being served. And now for the grand finale: MoMA recorded much of the event, including the baking of the cake, and a few of my brief words about it for a 5 minute video. So if you want to see the video, go here. I show up about half-way through.

And because I wouldn't want to leave you without a new recipe, when Cristina Nastasi was considering what to serve with the cake (genius that she is), she settled on something called 'Country Cream.' Normally we just serve it with whipped cream or a dusting of powdered sugar, but country cream is really delicious, with a bright dairy tang, and relatively unusual. Of course I asked her about it, and then I found a recipe for you. It's adopted from Jill Norman's encyclopedic The Cook's Book, and is meant to accompany her Pumpkin-Chocolate Chip Cheesecake.

Country Cream
Adopted from Jill Norman's The Cook's Book

1/2 cup sour cream
1/2 cup mascarpone
1/2 cup plain, full-fat yogurt
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Place all of the above in a mixing bowl that's been set over a larger bowl filled with ice. Whisk the mixture until it holds soft peaks and looks like heavy whipped cream. Serve over, or alongside, Erna Welp's Pflaumekucken.