smitten kitchen

I have decided not to leave. Yesterday, I was eating a drippy peach we’d bought from one of those roadside stands that have baskets of homegrown stuff and instruct you to leave your money in a little container (you know, just like in Manhattan!) over the sink and two tiny deer and a bunny appeared in the woodsy area next to our house and seriously, I cannot believe that people own these places and willingly rent them to strangers. Where else could they possibly want to stay?

Here, there are small beaches where you are frequently the only person on them. Seagulls caw and while I’m sure they’re saying, “Over here! There’s a chubby baby boy napping and he looks very tasty!” I like them anyway. There are enough wineries that if you tried to hit two a day for a week, you wouldn’t get to all of them (but you should try, anyway) and every farm stand brags about their blackberries. There’s an old-fashioned chocolate shop with an actual old-fashioned looking guy in the next room, making your daily dose of dark chocolate turtles. We’ve passed something called a Farm Preschool which I’ve decided I’ll attend instead of the baby because why should he have all the fun? I’m reading a book I was sure I’d find unendurable and actually liking it (though likely because I’m still on the part about the eatin’). And there are 7-11’s all over this town.

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Seeing as I can’t get enough of those I Don’t Need A Special Occasion To Make Cake Cakes and also those Of Course You Can Stop By At The Last Minute (psst, ’cause I’d already made some cake) Cakes, I am clearly long overdue to make a classic French yogurt cake. I first learned about yogurt cakes nearly five years ago from Clotilde; they’re perfect anytime-of-day cakes (bless the French for understanding the utmost importance of this), not too sweet, fluffy and perfect just from the oven or wrapped in plastic for a day or two, as the corners soften. Most people don’t measure them — the math is based on the volume of your yogurt cups (they use two), to which you add an equal amount of sugar, a double amount of flour, a little less than one of oil, two eggs and some leavener and flavors.

Those flavors are usually gentle things, like a bit of lemon zest, or vanilla, a splash of rum or maybe a handful of berries. But I — having all but given up on waiting for the market to produce the things I really want to eat, at least for this weekend — spied a bag of golfball-sized grass-colored limes at Whole Foods this week and did not blink an eye before tossing them onto Jacob’s stroller (I dread when he gets big enough to fill it out, and he can no longer be reasonably expected to schlep groceries home for me) and since I’d already gone down that path, decided not to even pretend that I wanted to resist the 2 for $5 blackberries, admired the pretty pretty grass color against the dark magenta-violet berries and knew at once I’d have to put them together.

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Alex loves limes. I mean, loves them. He eats them, and no, I don’t mean dusted in sugar. No, not squeezed into a glass of seltzer. He simply eats them, the way that most people eat those slices of oranges that come with your fortune cookies at suburban Chinese restaurants. He eats the wedges that people put out on their bars for cocktails, the slices that come on top of a pile of Pad Thai, those on the side of a sizzling fajita platter and the other half I haven’t used in a recipe, lying unloved on the cutting board.

The first time I saw him do it, I was taken aback. “Did you just eat a lime?” Perhaps it was because it was from my gin and tonic, it was an early-on date and he’d obtained it in a “Are you using that?” kind of way. But I loved that he didn’t think it was the least bit odd. I love that now we’ll be at a party or bar and one of our friends will notice his lime-eating ways for the first time and be shocked.

I seriously think they dipped his baby bottle in vinegar. It’s the only logical explanation.

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From the self-indicting delight of tiny infant fists gripping grownup forefingers to the calculated pinhole photography that lines my cubicle, I’m one of those girls, it seems, that can’t get enough of diminutive proportions. This absorption extends to the culinary world; from miniature artichokes and petite eggplants to pearl onions and microscopic zucchini, I find Lilliputian produce irresistible, and am incapable of not bringing them home by the bagful and readying them for their close-ups.

Baked goods are in no way spared these indignities. Puny cupcakes are always chosen over their brawny siblings, as are cheese puffs, scones and black-and-white cookies. “The more, the merrier!” I cheer until every flat surface (all three of them, that is) in our also-tiny apartment are filled with rows of one-bite delicacies and I exhaustedly wonder why I created three times the amount of work for myself.

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