Cherries, Chicks and Fire in Paradise

Lessons in Survival from My Cousin Dalia

When we arrived in Magalia, CA in mid-June to visit my cousin Dalia Mathan, a veterinarian in the neighboring town of Paradise, I brought a bag of fresh cherries and some dark chocolate I’d picked up at a grocery store en route. “I’ll take the chocolate,” said Dalia as she greeted us from a seat near the vegetable garden in front of her rustic two-story home, “but you can keep the cherries.”

The reason for her response soon became clear: behind the house was a glorious bing cherry tree covered with fruit that was on the verge of perfect ripeness. It was enclosed in netting to protect it from the voracious birds that had stripped the other two cherry trees bare before Dalia could pick a single one.

“I planted the tree almost as soon as I moved here in late 2000,” my cousin told me. “I’ve always loved cherries. This one tree has become my pride and joy.”

I thought the fruit looked perfect for eating, but Dalia demurred. The cherries were a deep red, but the sweetest ones turn almost black, she said.

“How sweet are they?” I asked, my mouth starting to water.

“Intensely sweet.”

Cherry-Rhubarb Crisp

We were visiting my cousin at the beginning of a two-week road trip in mid-June. At the time, it seemed the curve in the COVID-19 epidemic was beginning to flatten. The virus certainly felt very far away from this bucolic ranch.

Photo from Margalit Mathan of the ripe bing cherries from her sister Dalia’s tree. Margalit and family picked the last of the cherries in mid-July. She turns them into pie, crisp and jam.

In addition to eating the cherries, adding them to smoothies, freezing them and giving them away, Dalia told me she loves to bake the fruit into a cherry crisp, adapting a recipe she found in The Joy of Cooking that calls for canned cherries (click here for the recipe). She reduces the sugar because her cherries are so sweet, subs almond meal for the regular flour, and adds extra oatmeal.

(I riffed off a different recipe and made a cherry-rhubarb crisp. You can find the recipe at the bottom of this newsletter, along with a link to the podcast I did with my cousin.)

Cherry trees are only part of the charm of Dalia’s 36-acre property, named Doon Grade Ranch after a carriage road that used to bring supplies to a town up the hill.

Until recently Dalia ran horse boarding, breeding and riding businesses on the property. “Now it’s just my home,” she said.

Dalia with Leela, one of her two dogs.

She keeps her five horses there and rides them as often as she can. She also cares for two dogs, three cats, and about 20 chickens—plus assorted baby chicks. The hens produce a fair number of eggs—8 to 10 a day—that she shares with the workers who live in a residence on another part of the ranch. She also makes them into frittatas using the vegetables from her garden.

As if the ranch and its animal and human residents weren’t enough to occupy her time, there’s her veterinary practice, which Dalia started 20 years ago in Paradise, where she moved in 1987 after graduating with honors from the School of Veterinary Medicine at UC Davis. The town is located about 12 miles east of Chico and 90 miles north of Sacramento.

Miraculously, both her practice, Animal Hospital on the Ridge, and her ranch survived the deadliest and most destructive fire in California history—the so-called Camp Fire that destroyed 95% of Paradise, burning more than 18,000 structures and taking at least 85 lives, on November 8, 2018.

AFP/Getty Images. If you want to know more about what happened in Paradise, check out Ron Howard’s powerful new documentary, Rebuilding Paradise.

On the day the fire broke out, family members and friends were unable to reach Dalia and were extremely worried about her safety, but luckily we soon learned from her brother Dan and sister Margalit that she had evacuated from the area, along with her dogs, cats and workers, plus three of her horses.

“My sister Dalia is an enormously resourceful, self-sufficient, intelligent woman,” Dan wrote in an email to relatives and friends a day or so afterwards. “I have confidence that she'll figure what she should do, now and in the long run.”

Dalia and her sister Margalit as kids

I remembered Dalia and her older sister Margalit, both a few years younger than I, as little kids I had found engaging and fun when I visited their mother, my Aunt Gerda, in the Berkeley hills as a teen. I recalled that Dalia often played with plastic toy horses in her downstairs bedroom adjacent to her mother’s darkroom, where my aunt, one of my father’s three younger sisters, spent countless hours developing striking black and white photos of landscapes, relatives and people she encountered on her frequent travels.

Aunt Gerda with her older brother, my father, on a visit to their former home in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1987. They left at separate times during the 1930’s after the Nazis came to power.

When Dalia got a little older, she told me she wanted to be a veterinarian—a goal from which she never wavered. Following the fire, she seemed equally dedicated to helping members of her adopted community and continuing to care for their pets.

But how do you go on with your life and career when you’re serving a town of some 26,000 residents who have lost their homes, neighbors, businesses and way of life in the space of a few hours?

Dalia’s reaction was in character with her big brother Dan’s description: she went to work and figured out what to do.

Since she had a permit to drive supplies through town to her ranch because of the horses she kept there, she saw the destruction and subsequent rebuilding from Day 1.

“It was horrible, but it was also one more thing that happens that you just have to accept and deal with,” she said.

Although COVID-19 has “put a little dent in everything,” she said, “the debris cleanup has been pretty amazing,” with many residents returning and rebuilding, though not everyone.

“A huge number of my clients left, period, but we’re seeing more and more coming back. Because mine is the only standing clinic left in town, I’ve also gotten a lot of new clients.”

There are new protocols because of the coronavirus: pets (she treats dogs and cats only) come into the hospital, while their owners remain outside.

“Since the fire, it’s been a lot harder, but we’re still a going business,” Dalia said. “We’re trudging along in the right direction.”

Quite an understatement from my very accomplished cousin.

Below is a recipe for Cherry-Rhubarb Crisp. It’s a mash-up of two recipes from Dorie Greenspan’s Baking: From My Home to Yours. It sandwiches a cherry-rhubarb filling between bottom and top layers of flour, oatmeal, nuts, sugar and butter. My original effort to adapt the Joy of Cooking cherry crisp recipe produced something that was gloppy, not crisp, and overly sweet. When I tried a second version that included rhubarb and let the crisp bake a little longer, it came out as I hoped. Here it is:

Cherry-Rhubarb Crisp

For the filling:

1 pound sweet red cherries, pitted and halved

12 ounces (about 3 or 4 stalks) rhubarb, trimmed, peeled and cut into 1-inch pieces

1/3 cup sugar

1 1/2 tablespoons cornstarch

1 teaspoon ground ginger

1/2 cup water (mixed with juice, if some drains off when you cut and pit the cherries)

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract (optional)

For the crisp mix:

1 cup all-purpose flour (or almond meal, if you prefer)

3/4 cup to 1 cup light brown sugar

3/4 cup old-fashioned oats

Pinch of salt

Pinch of cinnamon

1/2 cup chopped walnuts

1 stick (8 tablespoons/4 ounces) unsalted butter, melted and cooled

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Lightly grease a 9-inch square baking pan (Dorie Greenspan suggests porcelain or pyrex, but I’m sure metal would work also) and put it on a baking sheet lined with parchment or a silicon mat.

2. Mix pitted, halved cherries with the diced rhubarb in a bowl. Stir in sugar and ginger. Let sit for a few minutes.

3. Drain off any liquid from the fruit and add water to make a half cup.

4. Pour the water-fruit liquid into a small saucepan. Stir in the cornstarch until dissolved. Cook over a low heat, stirring constantly, until the liquid starts to thicken.

5. Remove from the heat and stir in the vanilla, if using.

6. Pour the thickened liquid into the cherry-rhubarb mixture, stirring until well combined.

7. In a separate bowl, mix the flour, brown sugar, oats, salt, cinnamon and nuts.

8. Melt the butter in a small saucepan and cool. Then pour the butter over the dry mixture, stirring to moisten evenly.

9. Spoon half the oat crisp mix into the pan, patting it down lightly to form a thick crust. Set aside the remainder for the topping.

10. Pour the filling on top of the crust, spreading evenly.

11. Scatter the remainder of the crisp mix on top, distributing evenly.

12. Slide the crisp into the oven and bake for about 60 minutes or until the topping is golden brown and the filling is bubbling up around the edges.

13. Transfer the pan to a rack and allow to cool until it’s warm or room temperature.

Served with vanilla ice cream, whipped cream, full-fat yogurt or on its own, this is a delightful summer dessert. It would also be a treat in the fall made with apples and cranberries.

Thanks for checking out the latest edition of Ruth Talks Food. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend, and don’t forget to leave a comment. Click the fruit tart link below to listen to my entire conversation with Dalia at her ranch in June.