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A delicious summer pie: strawberry basil pie with balsamic vinegar!

It’s farm share season again, and so it’s time once again here in New England to grab all the best of the seasonal fruits and vegetables as they come. corwin recently called to say he was coming home with several quarts of the first strawberries of the year and so he thought I should make a pie. (It was my night to cook.) So before he got home I whipped up a batch of pie crust (I used the all-butter, food-processor variation of Flaky Pastry Dough from the 1990s edition of The Joy of Cooking and I added a bunch of fresh grated nutmeg to the dough) and then started looking at recipes.

The “problem” with plain strawberry pie is that it can actually come out too sweet and too homogenous. Some solve this by doing strawberry rhubarb, but we didn’t have rhubarb. Some suggest upping the acid content with more lemon juice, but you still have relentless strawberry, then. The nutmeg in the crust was going to help a little, as was the fact that I was going to do a lattice top, which gives the pie a little more toothsome bite, but how to add complexity and body to the flavor?

And then I realized I was staring at a small basil plant that has been growing on the kitchen counter for about two months now….

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Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.

All right, I'm back from Aruba and ready to dive back into the ten million things that were behind schedule when I left, and so are still behind schedule now... But overall, I have to say this "vacation" thing is a really great concept and I highly recommend it. I'm all tan now (no pun intended), only gained one pound while there (which is amazing, as I normally gain about a pound a day with vacation eating...), and I'm, you know, relaxed. BF and I also managed to have a lot of sex, which seems to be our pattern now--we're too busy to have it as regualrly as we'd like at home, so when we go on vacation it's like, oh, hey honey, what do you want to do today? Oh, I have an idea...!

Our first day there we were frolicking in the sea and some guy my parents know was like "oh, you must be newlyweds." What I wanted to say was "no, newly out of couples therapy!" (which isn't true, we've been out of therapy for a good while now), but instead said, "Um, nope. Celebrating 15th anniversary."

One night we went to Le Dome, the traditional French upscale restaurant on the island, and they'd asked me if it was a special occasion. I told them how we'd had out 15th a few weeks ago, but we'd been too busy to celebrate it. When we got there, they had put streamers and "happy anniversary" confetti on the table, and gave us complimentary champagne. A nice champagne it was, too.

Best meal by far was had at Chez Mathilde, though, which was more of a nouvelle fusion cuisine -- absolutely outstanding. Wish I had thought to tell them it was our anniversary, too. The amuse was a silver-dollar-sized potato pancake topping a dollop of tuna tartare. One of the appetizers was a "tomato carpaccio" (thinly sliced seasoned tomatoes) topped with crispy-fried chevre (soft goat cheese, and yes, crispy fried,) and toasted pine nuts... just an amazing group of flavors and textures. I can't even remember now the fish we had, it was so orgasmic I've actually forgotten it... and a veal dish that was possibly the best veal I've ever had, except perhaps in Spain, where what they call 'veal' is more like beef anyway. And banana souffle with vanilla sauce, followed by a handful of nice chocolates compliments of the chef. Oh, and we were drinking a bottle of the Baron de Rothschilds' Mouton Cadet Bordeaux, 2003. A rich, complex wine for a rich, complex meal. (Though I liked the Ribiero del Duero we had the next night even more... damn, I've forgotten the name but the cork is somewhere in my luggage....)

Anyway, I'm back now.