strawberries and cream with graham crumbles

To unforgivably botch something great, if all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone, I’m starting to believe that all of Smitten Kitchen’s problems stem from my inability to leave exquisitely simple things like berries and cream alone. Or maybe it’s about me being unable to sit in a room alone with strawberries and cream and not eat them? One thing is clear; I think we know better than to entrust me with the work of great philosophers ever again. I’m sorry, Pascal.

Let me rewind. Because my son has been going to a day camp across town this summer, I’ve had a lot more excuses to swing by the big Union Square Greenmarket on my way back to poke around for inspiration, which is about as close as I’m probably going to get in Manhattan to a summer on the farm. I’ve learned a lot. As I gasped a couple weeks ago, I didn’t even realize the New York grew such great apricots, or that their season is so long. I’d always associated prune plums with late August and early September, but they’ve been out for weeks now. And, most excitingly for me, I always thought of strawberries as a June thing — they come early, leave quickly, and are often good but rarely transcendent. So, it’s been a treat to learn that the best strawberries, the tiny wild ones, show up later in the summer and are, as far as I’m concerned, the platonic ideal of what a strawberry should be — sweet, delicate and fragrant, with no two exactly alike.

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deb perelman

strawberries and cream with graham crumbles