The best part of having the sno cone maker is that we’re not limited to pre-made flavors. A little fresh fruit and simple syrup is all it takes to make our own custom flavors. This watermelon version was fabulous, and oh so simple. I happened to have vanilla simple syrup on hand, you could use any flavored or even herb-infused simple syrup to up the sophistication factor. But if you’re just craving a simple fruity slushie, watermelon and a little sugar are all you need.

Recipe: Watermelon Slushie (or Sno Cone)

Ingredients:

• 4 cups watermelon, cubed
• 1/4 cup simple syrup*
• shaved ice

Instructions: Load watermelon into your blender. Add simple syrup, cover and puree until smooth. Pour into a pitcher and refrigerate until ready to serve. Then, fill a glass or sno cone cup with shaved ice, pour watermelon syrup over and enjoy! Makes about a half quart of syrup.

* To make simple syrup: Combine 1 cup sugar and 1 cup water in a small saucepan. Bring to a gentle boil, whisking to dissolve the sugar. When it begins to boil, remove from heat and let cool. (You can add a vanilla bean half or a handful of basil or mint after removing from heat to add flavor.) Store leftover syrup in the fridge — and use for iced tea, coffee or cocktails.

While we’re on the subject of lesser known berries — those you may have grown up with but never see in a supermarket — we recently discovered that the mysterious berry-laden tree between our neighbor’s house and ours was a mulberry tree. I never realized we had mulberries around here, or that they grew on such tall trees. But a well-timed Washington Post article clarified the matter. I was spoiled growing up on a mountain in Oregon, where we routinely snacked on tiny tart red huckleberries, sweet thimbleberries and wild blackberries every summer. One regional berry you may hear a lot about if you torture yourself by following California food blogs, as I do, is the olallieberry. It was actually cultivated in Oregon (a relative of our beloved Marionberries), but I’ve yet to come across it.

Berries like these are one of the reasons we frequent farmers markets in the summer — aside from exposing our kids to unique berries they might never see otherwise, they also learn to appreciate seasonality and to savor the berries and fruits in their seasons. That’s not to say we never buy grapes in the winter, but they just taste so much better when they’re fresh and local.

Do you have a favorite regional berry from your childhood?

And now, five berry-themed links for your weekend enjoyment:

1. Gooseberry Ginger Jam from Doris and Jilly Cook

2. Mulberry Pie from Herban Lifestyle

3. Olallieberry Tart from Chez Pim

4. Vanilla Bean Marionberry Caramel Swirl Ice Cream (wow!) from Culinary Concoctions by Peabody

5. Maple Huckleberry Coffee Cake from 101 Cookbooks

Shared with Fight Back Friday at the Food Renegade.

After being told one local farm was out of strawberries, I rushed to our neighborhood farmers market first thing last Saturday to grab half a flat from Black Rock Orchard. I made a small batch of freezer jam and a pint of strawberries in vanilla syrup, a la Simple Bites, to stash in the freezer for next winter. And the remainder were set aside for Sunday evening strawberry shortcakes.

Growing up, I spent just about every Father’s Day weekend at the local grange strawberry festival — consuming and later serving massive amounts of fresh strawberry shortcake. While I’ve yet to find a berry here that rivals those from Oregon, with a little sugar, vanilla and cream a homemade shortcake is just about as satisfying. I macerate the berries with a touch of balsamic vinegar to help round out the flavor.

Recipe: Strawberry Shortcake

Berries:

• 3 cups sliced strawberries
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar

Instructions: Combine berries, sugar and vinegar in a bowl and let stand at room temperature at least 30 minutes.

Biscuits adapted from Alice Waters via Ezra Pound Cake

Ingredients:

• 1 cup unbleached flour
• 1/2 cup white whole wheat flour
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 6 tablespoons cold butter
• 3/4 cup heavy cream

Instructions: Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Mix together flours, salt, sugar and baking powder in medium mixing bowl. Cut butter into small cubes, and use pastry blender or hands to work butter into the flour mixture until crumbly. Add cream and mix until just combined. Shape dough into a disc and roll out on lightly floured surface to about 3/4-inch thickness. Cut out 2-inch circles and place on parchment paper lined baking sheet. Bake for 15-17 minutes, until just slightly golden. (Makes 6 biscuits.)

To make shortcakes: Beat 1/2 cup whipping cream with 1 teaspoon vanilla paste or extract until soft peaks form. Split biscuits in half and place bottom half on serving plate. Top with 1/2 cup of strawberries, including a good sized drizzle of the syrup that has formed in the bowl. Place top half of biscuit on top, add a generous spoonful of whipped cream and a few more berries on top for good measure. Enjoy!

Thanks so much to our first Local Potluck Tuesday participants last week — . Please join in and share what local foods you’ve enjoyed this past week!

Local Potluck Tuesday — a few guidelines:
1. Share a relevant post — a recipe, menu or pictures of a meal featuring local foods, from the farmers market, CSA, farm stand or your own garden — using the MckLinky widget below. In the link title field, enter both your post title and your name &/or blog name, e.g., “Lemon Cucumber Salad — Colleen @ FoodieTots.”
2. Bonus points if you included your kids in picking, growing, purchasing or cooking the ingredients for the meal! (And by bonus points, I mean increased likelihood of seeing your post featured in the following week’s post.)
3. In your post, please link back to this post here at FoodieTots, so your readers can find the potluck and be encouraged to join in as well.

That’s it! I hope you’ll join in and share what you’re cooking up to celebrate our local farms and the wonderful food they provide to nourish our families.

Now of course it happens from time to time that we wind up with too much milk in the fridge, and what better way to put it to use than with homemade pudding? It’s really not that much more difficult than stirring together a boxed mix, and tastes infinitely better. Of course, if the temperatures stay so high here we’ll be firing up the ice cream maker soon enough, but pudding requires less waiting.

I had had butterscotch pudding on the mind since reading about it on The Kitchn back at the start of the year. Of course, not one to leave easy enough alone I decided to follow David Lebovitz’s simpler recipe (minus the whiskey) but cook the butterscotch more as per Shuna Fish Lydon’s recommendation. If you read Shuna’s passionate plea to preserve real butterscotch, you’ll see why I felt compelled to follow her instructions. (Well, partially.) My brown sugar and butter took much longer than 10 minutes to melt and darken, probably because I used light brown sugar rather than dark (uh, duh), so my resulting butterscotch had an almost burnt taste. Next time I’ll stick with either one recipe or the other — or at least use dark brown sugar — but if you’re curious, here’s how I made it.

Butterscotch Pudding
adapted from David Lebovitz with inspiration from Shuna Fish Lydon

Ingredients:

• 4 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 1 cup packed (dark) brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon sea salt
• 3 tablespoons organic cornstarch
• 2 1/2 cups whole milk
• 2 large eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Instructions: Melt the butter and sugar in a heavy-bottomed sauce pan, stirring infrequently, until it reaches a syrupy consistency (10-15 minutes). Add salt and remove from heat.

In a mixing bowl, combine the cornstarch and 1/4 cup of the milk and stir until smooth. Whisk in the eggs to combine.

Add the remaining milk to the melted brown sugar, whisking until smooth. Then add the cornstarch/egg mixture and again whisk until smooth.

Return to medium high heat and bring to a boil, stirring frequently. Boil for one minute, stirring constantly, until pudding thickens. Remove from heat and stir in vanilla.

Pour pudding into a bowl and chill for at least an hour, depending on your patience level. I probably dug into mine after about 30 minutes. Makes 4-6 servings, and is best served with fresh whipped cream on top.

Shared with Fight Back Friday at the Food Renegade.

We used Ina Garten’s coconut cake recipe, though I used unsweetened coconut instead of the sweetened she calls for. Really, this cake is sweet enough. It’s a dense cake, but flavorful and stays moist for several days, which is important when you’re making a cake for just three of you. (Though we did take some to share on a snow-day playdate.)

Instead of Ina’s cream cheese frosting, I used Smitten Kitchen’s Swiss meringue buttercream.

This is the frosting I used on the boy’s 3rd birthday cake this past summer, and it was an all around favorite — not sickly sweet, easy to make, and it held up on a humid August day — what more could you ask for? It does use quite a lot of butter … fortunately I stocked up before the blizzard, but we still needed to restock when the husband went out for a between-storm grocery run.

After frosting, we took a snowflake stencil, cut out of wax paper, and laid it gently over the top. We sprinkled a heavy layer of dried coconut (unsweetened, again) over the openings, then removed the stencil to reveal our snowflake. I had tried to talk the boy into dying the frosting light blue so the snowflake would show up better, but he insisted that a snow cake had to be white. (Duh.) I think he was right though, as it turned out just lovely. Don’t you think?

(You could easily adapt this to make a Valentine’s cake by tinting the coconut pink and making a heart shape on top.)

You can’t have cake without ice cream, and I’d had snow cream on the mind ever since reading this article in the Washington Post. When I was a kid, the only thing we ever made with snow was orange juice-topped sno cones, not particularly creative. I remember wanting to make maple syrup candy, a la Little House on the Prairie, but I don’t think we ever did. So naturally I took advantage of the 30-some inches of fluffy white snow in our backyard to make maple snow cream — delicious and equally enchanting to kids and parents alike. (Well, this parent at least!)

Recipe: Maple Snow Cream

Ingredients:

• 1 bowl full of clean, white snow
• 1 cup cream
• 1/4 cup maple syrup

Instructions: Heat cream in a small sauce pan over low heat. When warm, whisk in the maple syrup. Remove from heat and let cool. Gather snow. Pour cooled maple cream over snow, stirring to combine and break up any chunks that form. Enjoy immediately! Makes 4 servings.

What are you baking for – or with — your Valentine? It turns out I’m not the only one with home-baked Valentines on the mind — Kelsey of The Naptime Chef and Jennifer of Savor the Thyme are hosting a “Food is Love” challenge. Hop over to either of their blogs for the details; enter by Tuesday, February 16, and you could win a prize from Scharffen Berger chocolates. Happy Valentine’s Day to you & your foodie families!