The Grand Re-re-re-re Opening of the B.R.I.T.

Today I'm cooking with strawberries.

Yesterday was a balm.

After cleaning the house and cleaning vegetables and cooking beans and baking bread and pickling even more radishes, we drove 20 minutes North to where the Cumberland River curves sharply in on itself. My friend Jessie lives there in a small cabin next to a big flower farm. Between the flowers and road, she planted strawberry starts two years ago. Strawberries grow by sending out stolons, little stems that very much live up to their colloquial name, runners. And let me tell ya, hers have been sprinting. What was once 70 plants is now hundreds. (E says I should put plants in quotation marks, because it’s impossible to say where one ends and the next begins.)

We picked as the day turned from blazing sun to peaceful shade, our fingers coated in the foamy excretion of spittlebug nymphs. When three casserole dishes were full, we went home tired and sweaty. After dinner we sat at the kitchen table to hull most of our harvest for the newly re-opened B.R.I.T.! That stands for best restaurant in town, my silly little name for our chest freezer. I’m sure I’ll find good use for them later in the Summer, but for now my focus is on the small bowl of fresh strawberries in my fridge.

Already this morning I made an extremely buttery pie dough. I SUPER regret using all my 2024 corn cobs before strawberry season; strawberry with lime and corn is one of my all-time favorite flavor profiles. How delicious would pie dough be with concentrated corn broth instead of water!?!? Ugh, next year!! Later I’ll roll out the dough and form it into a galette with sliced strawberries, sugar, lime juice and lime zest. I’ll shellac the outer crust with an egg yolk and sprinkle on a generous amount of turbinado sugar.

While it bakes, we’ll eat dinner: whole wheat sourdough toasted deeply, drizzled with olive oil, topped with creamy white beans and parsley, plus a salad of yard lettuce, blanched snow peas, hemp hearts and honey balsamic vinaigrette. It’s very possible I still have thick, cardamom scented syrup from a can of gulab jamun in the back of our fridge and if that’s true, I’ll brush it gently onto the strawberries fresh out of the oven to make them really shine. I’ll serve the galette still warm, under a scoop of vanilla ice cream and maybe a dusting of black lime salt.