Matters of Taste

Bike and Bumbleberries --- A Winning Combination

Bumbling idiots, I know all about. But bumbleberries?

It was a new one on me when I came upon Bumbleberry Pie on a breakfast stop during the RSVP Bike Tour from Seattle to Vancouver. If you read my earlier post you’ll know how much I loved the strawberry-rhubarb pie at Snohomish Pie Company, a delicious milepost on the 112-mile first day of RSVP Bike (Ride Seattle to Vancouver & Party) that I did with my son last month. Seems that fruit pies are one of the top tourist attractions in this area.

After overnighting with the other 1,198 bikers at motels in the town of Bellingham, we headed out under bluebird skies to complete the nearly-200-mile ride to Vancouver.

Nicholas and I opted to skip the lame “continental breakfast” offered by our motel, setting our sights instead on the town of Lynden, some 20 miles away, where the highly touted Lynden Dutch Bakery awaited.

For about an hour and a half we pedaled through a broad valley dotted with dairy, raspberry, strawberry and blueberry farms. I was more than ready for breakfast by the time we rolled, uphill, into Lynden, a charming hamlet whose claim to fame is its Dutch-American community – one of the largest in the U.S.

Front Street, the main drag, was dotted with a few cheering residents and an official RSVP stop featuring snacks and drinks.  But the riders-in-the-know headed to the Lynden Dutch Bakery, where friendly women in traditional garb manned the overflowing pastry counter and seated guests for the all-you-can-eat buffet brunch that draws tourists from all over.

Having no desire to A. spend a lot of time indoors on a glorious day or B. schlepp extra pounds of bacon and scrambled eggs along on the ride, Nicholas and I bought slabs of pie in to-go containers, tucked them precariously into the pockets of our bike shirts and biked a mile further to the inviting Woods Coffee shop where we got excellent lattes to accompany our pie. (Photo of the Bakery's Bumbleberry Pie is from Yelp.)

I had opted for Bumbleberry Pie, largely because I had never heard of such a thing. Must be some special berry grown only in the Pacific Northwest I speculated as I gobbled the luscious blend of flaky pastry and fat, juicy berries swimming in shiny, lightly thickened juices.

Only when I sat down to write this post did I learn that bumbleberry is a Canadian term, widely used in the Pacific Northwest, meaning a mixture of fresh berries, usually blackberry, raspberry and strawberry, but sometimes blueberry and boysenberry too.  It’s the most popular pie at the Dutch Bakery, which I guess means that it’s the best…made from whatever’s really, really good out there in the fields and woods.

 

 

The Good News about the San Diego Black-Out: BLT Chicken

When the lights went out last week, I was just about to hop in the car to pick up our son Nicholas at the airport. It was the start of a festive weekend, with both sons home and several family birthdays to celebrate. I had planned a special dinner for that Thursday evening, with a spinach-beet salad, an elaborate new chicken dish, and a giant baked cookie cake with candles.

Fat chance.

The normal 20-minute drive to the airport took an hour and fifteen minutes, thanks to clogged intersections and clueless drivers. The trip home took over two hours. The sun was setting as we pulled into the driveway and I sprinted into the kitchen to get as much prep done as possible before total darkness descended.

With six big flashlights and a GE Fluorescent Lantern stationed strategically on the countertops and beside the stove (our Wolf gas range was operating), Nicholas and I set to work. The spinach salad was a “go” –-- he cooked the beets in water spiked with orange juice, crumbled the goat cheese, and made a snappy vinaigrette with shallots and orange zest.

But the planned chicken dish was too complicated. So, in the last wisps of daylight, I quickly  thumbed through Rozanne Gold’s cookbook “Radically Simple,” in search of a chicken creation that I could make, basically, blindfolded.

BLT Chicken with Cumin Seed & Lime Mayonnaise was a huge hit.  It was easy enough to pound and marinate the boneless chicken breasts, then cook them on my Scanpan stove-top grill.  The “salad” of crisped bacon, romaine and halved cherry tomatoes was very do-able-in-darkness, too.  Ditto the “zesty” mayo topping.

We ate in our garden surrounded by a dozen real candles and a bunch of the battery-operated LED pillar candles that Costco sells. (I bought a load of those things because they’re cheap and, I think, very romantic. Little did I know I’d need them to navigate around my own house during nine hours of moon-less blackness.)

Dinner wasn’t ready ‘til close to 10, and by then I had abandoned the fantasy of making a birthday cake. Instead, I turned to a package of Nestle Ultimates Chocolate Chip Cookies, which we attempted to cook on a cookie sheet on our backyard gas grill.  They weren’t the prettiest cookies – those closest to the heat source were scorched – but they tasted great, and with yet another candle stuck in one of them, they conveyed the appropriate birthday wishes.

Here’s the recipe for BLT CHICKEN. Gold’s book has dozens of equally delicious and easy dishes that are even easier when you can see what you’re doing. It’s available at Amazon.com. 

By the way, an ordinary kitchen mess becomes a mega mess when you're operating by candles and flashlight. We left it 'til morning.

BLT CHICKEN WITH CUMIN SEEDS & LIME MAYONNAISE  

Serves 4

1/3 cup mayonnaise

Grated zest and juice of one large lime

4 large boneless chicken breasts, skin-on

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 large garlic cloves

5 ounces thick-cut bacon

2 large ripe tomatoes, cut into ½-inch pieces

1 teaspoon cumin seeds

6 ounces baby romaine, cut into 1 ½-inch pieces

1 tablespoon red wine vinegar

Salt and black pepper, to taste

 

Preheat the broiler. Stir together the mayonnaise, lime zest, 1 teaspoon lime juice, and pepper. Set aside. Toss the chicken with the olive oil, 2 tablespoons lime juice, and garlic pushed through a press. Add salt and pepper and broil, skin side down, several inches from the heat, for 3 minutes. Turn and broil 5 minutes longer, until the skin is crispy.

Meanwhile, cut the bacon into ½-inch pieces. Cook in a large skillet over medium heat until the fat is rendered, 5 minutes. Add the tomatoes and cumin and cook 3 minutes over high heat. Add the romaine and vinegar and cook until wilted. (I like it still somewhat firm.)Add salt and pepper. Serve the chicken topped with the lettuce mixture and a dollop of lime mayonnaise.