recipe love, the summer berry crisp

my first crisp, made with cherries, strawberries and a few apricots

ahhh, the crisp. As you’ll discover, perhaps the best part about this deeply satisfying dessert is the contrast in textures, a sweet layer of molten, fruity love hidden just below a dense, caramelized, buttery surface-  a surface that truly does remain gloriously. . . “crisp”.

I have L. to thank for this sharing this recipe. Not only only does my new pal L. know a heluva lot about succulents, he knows a heluva lot about food and cooking. He can write damn well, too. Check out his site here. After reading his loving descriptions of food and where to shop for it (he can tell you not merely which farmer’s market you should visit, but even which vendor will have the best example of any kind of produce), I was inspired to tackle some of his recipes. The crisp is the first one I’ve made and I have to say, I hit the ball out of the park with it. My guests were cooing in delight and so was I!

Willie’s Crisp (click here for the recipe. . . )

Cherry/Strawberry Crisp; follow the link above for the recipe

You can’t go wrong with this recipe. In all cases L. gives you a lot of useful information that you wouldn’t normally find in a recipe, such as how to modify the amount of sugar depending on the variety and relative ripeness of the cherry.  Or the practical instructions on how to work with the butter and crisp topping without it pulling off with the fork. And, he describes his enjoyment of the food and why he loves it- in short, why he’s sharing it with you.

That’s foodie love.

>> UPDATE 13 July 2010

-my second crisp also turned out well! This time I used half sour cherries and the other half, equal parts blueberries, strawberries and tayberries. (If you, like me, had never heard of a tayberry, my friend L. at Matte Gray tells me “they’re a cross developed by the Scottish Crop Research Institute in about 1970. They crossed an unnamed tetraploid raspberry hybrid of theirs with an American “Aurora” blackberry, and the result was a berry so fine they named it after the River Tay.”

cherry, strawberry, blueberry and tayberry crisp recipe