my week with Marilyn Hagerty

This Marilyn Hagerty thing is still circulating. If you haven't seen it, a prolific, veteran lifestyle reporter from the Grand Forks Herald posted a review of the new Olive Garden in town--a quickly-drawn but earnest assessment of the restaurant--from which she walked away being "impressed." The review was picked up by foodies across the country, shared and tweeted until it reached viral proportions. Most people mocked her willingness to accord a chain restaurant an actual review; the rest of them swooned to her sincere, objective appraisal of "the largest, most beautiful restaurant in Grand Forks." After she defended herself with unexpected spunk--"If anyone's got time to sit out there and nitpick, I kind of feel sorry for them. Get a life."--everyone fell in love with her feistiness.

For me, the review dredged up an emotional history of eating here. Initially I had to laugh at what seemed a somewhat naive view of the chain restaurant's dull, mechanized wheel of mediocrity ("I watched the waiters in white shirts, ties, black trousers and aprons adorned with gold colored towels. They were busy carrying out bread and pasta.") although I realize that her poker-faced factual description is due in part to her journalistic ethic. (You present the facts.) Her straight-talking is also symptomatic of living in stoic North Dakota farm country where snarkiness--as represented by the anonymous tweeting masses--is akin to peppering your dialogue with a bunch of curse words: it's lazy and it's disrespectful, and these people are nothing of the sort. 

Surely Marilyn has reviewed every restaurant in Grand Forks--the good ones, the bad, and the terrible. But as a food writer and chef myself, I had to groan because (surprise) I do not much like chain restaurants, and I always slump when I see their popularity go unchallenged. And yes, in minor metro areas, places such as Fargo, Grand Forks, Bemidji, Detroit Lakes--the towns I drive to when I want to buy printer cartridges or a new pair of jeans--chain restaurants are widely accepted as good restaurants. 

Then I had to turn the laughter on myself because as my sister-in-law (and childhood friend) reminded me that when my mother took the two of us to eat at the newly opened Olive Garden in Fargo circa 1986, we dressed up. I can guess what I was wearing: a tight jean skirt, a cropped sweater and pointy velvet shoes with a clicking metal buckle. We thought this new Olive Garden was great--me, probably,  because I had ate my first caper; Sarah, most likely, because of that awesome dessert called tiramisu. (For the record, none of us liked the deep-fried breadsticks.) 

If I want to explore this vein of my life, the vast pre-fine-dining part, it just gets worse. 

Again, when my mother and I went to shop at West Acres Mall in Fargo (1 1/2 hours away) we really looked forward to the mother-and-daughter pitstop we would take at the "new" Country Kitchen. (They built the restaurant right in the mall!) We had a standing order: 13-bean soup and a bran muffin, because "their 13-bean soup is so good." (Sorry, Mom, I know your tastes have since changed, as have mine.)

It was the late 1980's when Park Rapids got its first year-round fast food restaurant--before that, the Dairy Queen and A & W both closed down for winter, as did the independently-run Dixie Drive-In. So when Hardee's came to town, it was an event. Families mobbed the place after church. We stood in lines in our nicest coats and rabbit ear muffs, waved at other families, and sat down with our burgers and fries. My mother extolled the excellent Mushroom and Swiss burger, but I remember being entranced with the curious rubbery texture of the ham on the Ham and Swiss. My brothers and their friends hopped like crickets around the self-serve pop machine, giggling and making "kamikazes." For many years, it remained a family place. My neighbor's mother worked there part-time, and I remember going there after school because she would let us buy raw, un-baked chocolate chip cookies. 

Are you still with me?

Even though my own relationship to food has changed radically over the years, I still can understand what it means when people in Park Rapids actually wish for an Applebee's to come to town or, at the very least, a Perkins. 

In a word, it's consistency. Here in Park Rapids (population 3,709) we have a couple of good restaurants amid a lot of other disappointing ones. They vary dramatically. One night it's fine, the other you get oil-slugged fries because the stoned cook confused 275 degrees for 375 degrees. (Dude, it's your main heat source. Mark it with some tape.) Also, the service in small independent joints can be bad. Staff smoke breaks are epidemic, leaving tables stranded like icebergs in an empty sea.

Following nights like that, tequila chicken delivered by a server trained to chirp sounds pretty good. Also, and this is very key: rural people, including those in small rural cities in the Midwest, simply don't go out to eat much. They eat at home, many of them quite well. So when they go out to eat, they don't do it with much discernment or any kind of awareness of "the trends." They eat out for a change a scenery, and not necessarily with high expectations. As my mother taught us growing up, "you always eat better at home than you do in a restaurant." Ask anyone from the rural Midwest, and I bet they will tell you that their mother told them the same thing. 

That said, eating now in Chicago, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Omaha, Madison . . . is like being in another constellation entirely. I have put 40,000 miles on my car this year driving around this region, eating and researching, and in every regard I have found places equal to the high level of cooking in New York or Europe. I have found surprisingly little that is derivative of the coastal mainstream, and much that suggests an interesting revolution here in the middle of the country.

Of course, that's the cities. But with a little fine-tuning of your perspective and a bit more grunt work, you can eat well in the small towns too. I've found that if I seek out homemade pie, the rest--fried perch, homemade soups, a good hot beef--naturally follows. 

At any rate, I am taking suggestions for the best restaurant in Grand Forks, because that town needs some redemption. Please post below. Within a 50-mile radius, please. 

Ranging

We left Kansas City at 10:15 a.m. yesterday--me with breakfast on my lap, a Gates burnt ends sandwich--and pointed the car north. We arrived in Two Inlets 14 1/2 hours later, 640 miles behind us, with stops for proper meals of course. 

I didn't photograph the sandwich because I knew that it would never be able to capture its beauty. In my experience snapping food, hacked pork doesn't have a good side. (Has the Gates burnt ends sandwich ever been photographed? Or does it exist only in the mind, passed from one gluttonous dreamer on to the next?) I can only say this, that this sandwich--four inches of chopped, caramelized smoky pork ends wet with a bit of sauce, sidelined with spicy pickles, on a soft eggy bun--is a triumph of human achievement. It is, as Colin Firth said of Meryl Streep at the Oscars this year, "unreasonably good." 

And by eating the barbecue I had been avoiding during my two days in Kansas City, I finally saw the topography of the food scene there. The barbecue, which is excellent, is the tallest hill in town, but it's not the horizon or the fringe, places that tend to be more interesting. The city has other great restaurants and they're all advancing an alternate cuisine of the area by making use of the seasonal vegetable bounty, but most of them also continue to mine the possibilities of the pig. 

With great success, too. Take a look at this charcuterie plate from chef Michael Beard at 715 Restaurant in Lawrence, Kansas, a college town just 45 minutes from downtown KC:

He spent some formative time cooking in Italy and it shows: Duck terrine with pecans at 12, Fegatini, rich quenelles of winy pork liver at 2, a perfect housemade Mortadella at 5, and Soppressata Toscana, which resembles headcheese more than it does salami, at 8. Essentially, it's Italian headcheese, cured with lingering warm spices and thinly sliced. Everything we ate was wonderful, but this plate shows the maturity of this restaurant and this chef. He's certainly not the only one doing it well in the Midwest--in terms of serious production, there's La Quercia from Norwalk, IA, and the soon-to-be-reopened charcuterie project from Mike Phillips in Minneapolis--but it's just another amazing example of how explosive the charcuterie can be when old-world knowledge meets a properly fattened heartland hog. 

The local beers--Ad Astra from Free State in downtown Lawrence, and a pilsner from Boulevard in KC, my husband's new favorite--stood up to the food. Rough limestone formed the walls, the lighting was warm but sensible, even in the open kitchen, which felt more like the center of the campfire than a fluorescent line of production. The ship was run by a crew of warm-blooded Midwestern girls, all of whom seemed to have their heads screwed on straight, to know their port from their pilsner and the pleasures of a bone-in ribeye. They dressed subtly in the regalia of the southern Midwest--a boot here, a quill earring there. I couldn't help but notice that it's a look that stands better against barn wood in Kansas than it does in Brooklyn. 

Dinners like that, and in so many places I went last week make me wonder where the hell I am; no longer is this the candied-apple Midwest of my childhood. (Though I did see candy apples on this trip, and some toothpick holders.) But sometimes it seems like everyone in the Midwest is making beer, cheese or charcuterie--and then you realize that, yes . . . they are. It's no dream. Dust off the breweries and kick the antique stores out of the creameries, the real stuff is returning.

I'll continue this soon. I need to get through Omaha, the prairie star of our trip south. But for today I'll leave off with more shots through the car window. The ferocious wind throughout Nebraska and Kansas took us by surprise. It routed the winter fields, kicking up a lot of dust and confusion, making a blind.

weird lunch

Let me tell you something about the small-town northern Minnesota grocery store in the middle of winter. In December the parking lot at J and B (Jeff and Bob's) freezes into a corrugated sheet of ice, like the surface of Pluto, and it stays that way until March. Propelling your full cart over the molded ice to the back of your car for unloading requires a good bit of strength, and a tolerance for the particularly grating sound of the cart vibrating over the ridges.

That's just the parking lot. Inside you'll find a store with more stockpiled food than a survivalist village's end-of-time bunker. To give a Brooklyn equivalent, just one of the two grocery stores here in town stock more than any of the small Met Foods in any neighborhood in Brookyn; each of them have middle rows whose selections rival a Fairway, one of the few truly comprehensive stores in New York. The meat selection is stupendous here, with a smokehouse on the premises. The produce department, however, reminds us where we are in the world: isolated, and pretty near to its frozen top.

So when I see something that looks fresh, the nutrient-seeking animal in me pounces on it, blind to provenance or seasonality. The other day, asparagus, well out of season here, must have been in season somewhere because it stood regally in the center of the produce aisle and it nabbed my eye immediately. I snapped up two bunches, and back at home I made a wild and surprisingly delicious mid-winter stir-fry that met my hunger for big green flavors full-on, a garlicky mix of asparagus, shell beans, shiitake mushrooms and--wild card--cheese curds.

The shell beans, at least, were from my summer garden. I picked them in the late summer the minute they filled out, slit the moist pods and dragged out the cool beans with my thumb, and then weighed, cryovacked and dropped each packet into the bottom of my deep freezer. I moved them to the door of my refrigerator a few days ago, and there they sat, plenty well-thawed, just gathering the nerve to go bad on me. Possibly more than any other thing that comes out of my garden, I adore shell beans, plucked at the adolescent stage when they seems more like vegetable than starch.

The odd addition of melted hunks of cheese here has not one but two real precendents. My mother often made a private meal for herself of quickly pan-fried zucchini, onions, tomatoes, toasted walnuts and cubes of white melting cheese. She offered to make extra for us kids, and we always declined, but more often than not one of us would bring a fork to her side and eat about half of her plate. Eventually she wised up and just started making a double batch. But there was something very intriguing in the odd combination of ingredients, and I've never been able to forget the semi-molten clumps of cheese.

And then a few days ago, at Perennial Virant in Chicago, I ate the most amazing starter, a hybridized Italian/Midwestern risotto cake into which whole Brunkow cheese curds had been folded. The risotto was then chilled, sliced, and panfried until the rice grew a delectable crust. I loved how Chef Paul Virant paired it with a pile of tangy olive-drab pickled green beans to contrast with the bites of soft rice and mellow cheese dragged out into long spooling webs. Days later, the combination of green vegetable and melting strands of white cheese was still front and center, demanding some sort of repetition.

Beans, Asparagus and Fried Mushrooms with Melting Cheese Curds

serves 4

2 cups shell beans (from 1 pound beans in pods)
4 tablespoons olive oil
pat of butter
3 cloves garlic, peeled and sliced
2 ounces (6 or 7 large) shiitake mushrooms
1/2 pound (handful) asparagus spears
4 ounces (2 handfuls) sugar snap peas
pinch of red pepper flakes
salt and pepper to taste
1/2 cup white cheese curds

If you have frozen shell beans in your freezer, cook them for 25 to 30 minutes in lightly salted water and drain . . . but it's my guess that no one has cryovacked packs of shell beans in their freezers. Put it on the list for next fall, but in the meantime, drain a can of borlotti or cannelini beans and proceed from there.
Wash the asparagus, snap off the ends and cut diagonally into 2-inch lengths. Rinse the snap peas and pull back any wiry ends. Slice the shiitake mushrooms.
Heat the olive oil in a large saute pan over medium-high heat. Add the shiitake mushrooms and cook, tossing, until they start to brown. Add the asparagus and garlic, season with a little salt and pepper, and cook until the mushrooms are dark at the edges and the asparagus is cooked through. Add the sugar snaps, red pepper flakes, and final seasoning, and cook until the peas are warmed through. Add the cheese curds, toss in the hot pan, and serve immediately.

Lutefisk Supper Pop-up

If you combine the bar festivals with the grocery store mini-restaurants, block parties, wild game feeds, and spaghetti supppers, and if you include all the other benefits and feeds held at various service organizations and churches in all of these little towns, you could probably say that rural Minnesota puts on more pop-up dinners in a given month than those given in New York, Los Angeles and all urban points in between. And the annual lutefisk dinner is the king of all pop-ups. 

This year I took in a good one. You can see from the sign below that this supper took place a couple of months ago at a Lutheran church in Bemidji, MN, a town 60 miles north of me. I was reminded of it once again during my husband's family's Christmas dinner as the lutefisk platter swept past me--once, twice, three times.

I eat lutefisk out of occupational curiosity. After sampling it at least six or seven times I think I can say with some authority that it is just not good stuff. Many ethnic Scandinavian Minnesotans pretend to enjoy it, but you also might notice that they are usually the biggest bullslingers in the bunch, and those with the driest of humors. I add my voice to a chorus when I say that lutefisk is truly terrible. 

First the cod is preserved in a lye solution. A week or two before serving, the cod must be soaked in fresh water each day for a week to leach out the excess, leaving the now-translucent fish plenty waterlogged. Then it is steamed or boiled until the edges soften into a watery jello. In my experience, no matter how it's cooked the center remains tough and stringy--to hold the chunk together, I suppose. Nobody ever salts it, though it cries out for something in the way of curing or seasoning. It does receive a gloss of melted butter on the plate, but in my opinion this balm comes way too late. Lutefisk eating is more cultural reenactment than anything else. 

Nevertheless, we went to this supper. We were drawn in partly by their lovely graphics, and also by the promise of meatballs.

After writing out our check and getting our tickets the staff ushered us to the church to await our turn. They told us they'd call our numbers when sufficient room opened in the dining room downstairs. 

My husband and our very hungry four-year-old took a pew behind about 60 waiting people. Near the altar a pianist and soloist entertained the crowd with an eclectic mix: an overly enunciated "Feelin' Groovy" slid right into a rousing rendition of "God Bless America." They played a peppy Beatles tune from the Sgt. Pepper's era. A woman in tip-to-top Norwegian regalia interrupted the song to call out the numbers: "361, 62, 63, and 64. And then I have two more spots . . .  but they're not together. Any takers? No, Ooo-kay. I'll go down and see what I can do."

Oh, dear Jesus.

As we waited the church filled with more and more people. 

The beautiful lady kept seeing what she could do, but after nearly an hour of this our kid wormed his way out of the pew and crawled onto the ruby carpeted landing, where he begun to dissolve. I got up and explained our case to the lady, who pulled some strings. They sat us at a table with the pastor of the church and his wife, both of whom were great conversationalists.

Seated, we passed everything around family style. Here's the lutefisk. 

I was surprised by how delicious the dinner was. The rutabagas were boiled and mashed with cream, butter, salt and pepper. And really, the flavor of rutabagas is thick like a chord. They need nothing else.

The lefse was as tender as a fresh flour tortilla and pocked from contact with the grill. The coleslaw did not come from a bag but was instead freshly shredded. The meatballs were good, the gravy was not too bad. And the lutefisk, well, I had a decent chunk and the melted butter was flowing.

I zoomed up on this group at the table next next to ours. Their plates are properly blanched: just potatoes, lutefisk, lefse and butter. Here you have photographic evidence showing the importance of the butter to a Norwegian holiday dinner. The guy in the background is opening his lefse to butter it before rolling it back up, and the guy in the foreground is pouring the melted butter over every hill on his plate.

Lick your fork, there's pie. Mine missed the mark, but I blame that on bad luck. I was away from the table when the pie cart arrived, so someone stuck me with a loser, a dense slice of apple crumb. Otherwise I would have picked the homemade pumpkin for sure.

Deer Camp

My husband took these photos while waiting for dawn to arrive on the morning of deer firearms opener. At this moment I was at home sitting on a wooden stool in the kitchen, chaperoning the dripping coffee, ears peeled for shots. 

My husband's deer stand sits on the edge of what we call the little field, an one-acre plot in the middle of our land. Fifteen years ago we had it plowed and disked for planting, but this field has foiled our every attempt to yield something harvestable from it. Potatoes, squash, plum trees--even horseradish and its taproot of steel--all have failed, probably because this is a high-traffic wildlife area. A couple of well-stamped deer trails feed into the field and a few others thread out of it. I imagine that the deer approached our fledgling crops with the same sense of entitlement you have when you walk up to a sample lady at the grocery store; that is, with the feeling that this tidbit is your due. With minimal thanks.

This explains why we now just mow the little field. And because we've given up on the hope of planting vegetables or fruit there, we figure that venison might be the only thing we'll ever harvest from that space. So it seems to be a good place for a stand. 

Around 10:00 on the morning of the opener my husband saw a large doe and immediately recognized it as our almost-pet driveway doe. She and her teen offspring have been standing next to the driveway and watching our comings and goings with extreme puzzlement since early summer. I'd slow the car and the mom would cock her head and lock her big doe eyes onto mine. Minutes would pass, seconds heavy with cross-species inquisitiveness. I'd roll down the back window and tell our four-year old, "Look! She's staring at you! Talk to her!" He rarely bought it but would usually holler at her to please me. I would coo to her and she stare back at me with a face that said, simply: "And who are you?" 

This is all to explain why my husband couldn't take a shot at her or her offspring. I was relieved to hear this, as I had been thinking about how she'd fare during the hunting season. My husband called his friend who was hunting the south side of our acreage and told him he saw Driveway Doe--and then his friend came and shot her. Hey, it's firearms season, and no deer are safe, not even quizzical (possibly brilliant) does. Although I do think that in a pre-cell phone era she probably would have made it out of there alive.

By the end of the day all four hunters had filled their tags, one for each, thus wrapping up the hunt but  just launching the meat fabrication process. Some people drop off their deer at a meat market to be cut and trimmed and made into sausages, but we like to do it ourselves so that we can control the quality of the meat from start to finish. Also, we enjoy suffering through the ritual of trimming cold meat on a cold board while standing in the saturating fall wind. This is part of it, too. 

That evening while the boys strung up the deer, I held dinner and started to flip through my charcuterie books, dreaming of venison sausage.

I like this photo of my friend Luisa with Todd, one of the Bruse brothers. Oh, what shall we do with the livers and hearts? Trim and bag them of course. Deer liver (the bruisy looking thing in the foreground) is surprisingly delicious.

That evening we ate cubes of deer liver fried in a cast-iron pan with lardons, rosemary and sherry, duck saltimbocca, spice-rubbed venison tenderloin, rutabaga and almond souffle, green beans with caramelized onions, a green salad, and for dessert (as if we needed it) I tested a recipe for my upcoming book, a pie gifted to the project from two South Dakotan/now-Brooklyn pie-makers, a marvelous Black Bottom Oatmeal Pie. (Think pecan pie filling with a deep chocolate bottom and toasted oats in place of the pecans.) It earned a resounding thumbs-up from everyone at the table. 

The next day our front yard was transformed into an abattoir. Thanks to my outdoor wok burner we could keep a simmering pot of hot water going, for sanitation and also for warming iced-through fingers. 

They began at dawn. We all feasted on bear and bock stew for lunch, and chocolate chip cookies, and by nightfall the operation moved inside. Using Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn's excellent Charcuterie as my guide I made 25 pounds of fresh sausage: 15 of Sweet Italian, 10 Merquez. I would have made more sausage but my supply of fresh fatback and pork butt was limited. Next year I'm stocking, though.

This looks chaotic, but we have stations: Cryovacking, Trimming, Sausage-making, Sausage-grinding, and KP.

Long after the roasts and loins and bulk sausages were bagged and cryovacked the grinding continued. Ground venison is extremely lean and a bit sweet, and I find that it goes very successfully anywhere that ground lamb goes: into kefte, moussaka, pilau. Ground venison gives bolognese sauce an exceptional advantage, something dark and haunting and actually far better than the same sauce made with beef, pork or veal (or a combo), as is traditional. The Bruse boys, who will take much of this home, also tend to cook a lot with ground venison.

At the end of a very long day we have the great divide, aka, who gets what.

Aya, look at the bounty! I couldn't fit the entire length of the meatscape into one photo so you'll just  have to trust me, there was more. We all dove on the sausage so it's clear that we need to train our focus on that next year. 

on the side

Here we are, living in "prime rib country" (a phrase that should be a bumper sticker) and my husband is the rare bird who just doesn't care for it. A steak, he reasons, needs its crust. So that's why I found myself this morning cutting an entire rack of organically raised miniature Highlander prime rib into 2-inch-thick bone-in steaks. Later tonight we will grill them over the wood fire, for probably one of the last outdoor cookouts of the season. (I must admit, I'm partial to the char edge of a good steak, too.)

Even though I enjoy almost nothing more that making big blow-out dinners for my friends, lately I've been struck how home cooking takes its power from the memorable small things. It's the private moments--the schmear of farm-fresh egg salad on sourdough toast, the plate of just-picked boiled-and-buttered green beans, the fragrance from the raspberry-picking basket--that you remember the most.

Last week's cabbage salad, thrown together one afternoon in between recipe testing, is one of those great peripheral dishes. When I see a fresh cabbage my mouth begins to water, reminding me that 60 percent of the blood running in my veins is Germanic. When I worked in kitchens I made staff meal veg. from cabbage so often that they called me the Cabbage Queen.

Have you ever made coleslaw from fresh garden cabbage? I remember when the first time, years ago, that I shredded a fresh cabbage from our garden. Juice dripped on my cutting board--juice!--and I thought I had raised some sort of strange cabbage hybrid. But no, that's just what cabbage does when it's fresh.

The other day I shaved a fresh chunk of cabbage and threw together this salad, inspired by one I had at Frankie's 457 Spuntino on Court Street in Brooklyn. It couldn't be simpler, or better, and is hardly a recipe--although I did write it down, as is my habit these days.

I love the combination of toasted walnuts and shaved parmesan cheese, and I'm always looking for an excuse to use my precious bottle of toasted walnut oil. (LeBlanc is the best.)

Cabbage Salad with Roasted Walnuts and Parmesan

serves four as a side

1/4 large head of green (or red) cabbage

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon black pepper

1 tablespoon sherry (or wine) vinegar

2 tablespoons toasted walnut oil (or extra-virgin olive oil)

2/3 cup toasted walnuts, chopped

1/2 cup coarsely chopped parsley

chunk of good parmesan cheese

The only thing that really matters here is toasting the walnuts. I put them in a small cast-iron skillet it in a cold oven, set the oven to 350, set the timer for 20 minutes, and they're usually perfectly golden when it goes off. What's the point in preheating the oven to toast nuts?

Shred the cabbage thinly with a mandoline (or by hand). Toss the cabbage with salt, pepper, vinegar, walnut oil and parlsey and mix with your hands to combine. Toss with the chopped walnuts, shave plenty of parmesan over the salad and serve immediately. You can make this a bit ahead, but it does wilt. 

While I'm drifting on margins and tangents, here's a recipe (sort of) for Roasted Applesauce.

Faced with baskets upon baskets of small local apples--some from our trees and a few from the Retz farm tree down the road--and wanting to make applesauce but not wanting to spend an entire day paring miniature apples, I laid one basket of apples in my largest roaster, sprinkled them with sugar, set the oven to 375 degrees, and let it rip. What emerged 45 minutes later was so lovely it pained me to push it through the food mill--but I had to, as the seeds were still inside.

The skins came off in one piece and tasted like candy. I couldn't resist transferring a couple of the prettiest ones to a bowl and eating them with a dollop of whole milk yogurt. These two.

Then I poured a couple of cups of apple cider into the hot pan to deglaze it and scraped up the caramelized bits with a wooden spoon. Feeding the warm apples through the mill took about four minutes, and the sauce was as thick as if I'd spent three hours cooking down peeled, cored apples. I tested the pH and even with the sugar I had added, the apples themselves were acidic enough to be safe to can. I poured the puree into my largest pan and put it back in the oven to heat up, readied my jars and canned the sauce. The whole operation took about two hours and I think it's some of the best applesauce I've ever made, and certainly the easiest. (I canned my pints for 25 minutes in a boiling water bath, but you can also freeze this sauce in heavy plastic ziploc bags.)

a savory zucchini bread

Those who stand in front of a hot loaf fall into one of two camps: people who rip into the steaming thing without shame, and those who let it cool before sampling. (There are also peak-pinchers, but that's another strain.)

I've always been the kind of person who waits for a loaf to cool before tasting, especially when we're talking about bread. I do think that prematurely slicing into a hot loaf of bread (and particularly rye bread) will prevent the inside crumb from cooking fully and evenly.

But today I made a savory quickbread that I could not resist. I dropped it carefully from its loaf pan, nudging it to sitting position with my knuckles, like a hot potato. Steam rolled up its edges. I took a knife to one end; it buckled a bit--way too hot, my friend!--but I managed to pull out a nice slice. Before I knew what was what, the crust slice was long gone and another one laid half-whittled on the board.

Skipping breakfast might have had something to do with that, but I also think that the French do the quickbread right: this one has cubes of ham, zucchini and lots of grated gruyere . . . all the comfort of zucchini bread, none of the sugar. It's like a giant gougeres, or French cheese puff, with a dose of American loaf-style practicality--and ham, which is always welcome.

Ever since I read the piece in the New York Times about French savory cakes (the article is here) I have been meaning to try this recipe. I rarely pass on a pre-published recipe here on the blog because I usually can't resist tinkering significantly with the ones I find (and also, because I have some weird Minnesotan ethic that pushes me to always Work harder! Be more original! Be more authentic!) but this recipe was so good I dared not change a thing.

(Take that back: I added cubes of zucchini to the batter. But this time of year I add zucchini to nearly everything, almost without notice, and it was a good addition.)

Unsalted butter for brushing pan

1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

3/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon black pepper

3 large eggs

1/3 cup milk

1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil

6 ounces baked ham, cut into 1/2-inch dice (about 1 1/4 cups)

6 ounces gruyere, coarsely grated

1 1/2 cups diced (1/2-inch dice) zucchini

Center a rack in the oven and preheat to 350 degrees.

In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, salt and pepper.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the eggs. Combine the milk and olive oil in a liquid measuring cup and pour in a thin stream, whisking, until incorporated into the eggs. 

Using a rubber spatula, fold the wet ingredients into the dry, mixing until just combined. Fold in the ham, cheese and zucchini. (The batter will feel stiff.) Pour into a buttered loaf pan.

Bake loaf until golden and a toothpick inserted in the loaf comes out dry, with a few crumbs attached, 45 to 50 minutes. 

Transfer the loaf to a rack to cool for 10 minutes before unmolding: run a thin knife around the perimeter of the loaf and upend it. In theory, you should really let this cool before slicing. A serrated knife makes the neatest slices. 

the preserving round-up

Yesterday's harvest represents an average day at this time of year. Total insanity. Some years I can the fruits and vegetables around here like a mid-century farmhouse machine, but this year I feel more like a tweaked-out squirrel, frantically shoving nuts down a hole. In other words, I'm busier and I'm making smaller batches of everything.

In front you can see the day's pickings from my pyramid of romano bean vines. They're wider and flatter than your average bean, and also a lot more tender. I cut them into diamonds and then quick-poach or stir-fry them. The zucchini plants are still producing, as are the cucumbers, although lately the cucumbers have tasted strong and intensely vegetal.  Due either to the recent dry weather we've been having or just the age of the vines, they lack the cucumber's usual refreshment.

The enormous bowl of grapes constitutes just half of those picked from a single vine. We pruned our grape vines pretty severely last fall to see if we could rid the plants of a stubborn fungus. I think it worked, but we saw no grapes from those this year. To think what I would have done if those vines had produced as well as this did one spins my head. Some day I will make wine, I suppose, but for today, I make a shelf's worth of grape juice and a bunch of grape fruit leather.

I cooked the grapes very briefly in a large pot, mashed them with a potato masher, ran them through my food mill and let the pulp drip its clear juice--which takes hours, by the way. And in the end, I had about a quart of pulp. I added more sugar, cooked it down further and started spreading it thinly on silpat-lined baking sheets for fruit leather. A bit of an art, this leather. Some recipes say you can spread it on greased cookie sheets (don't believe it) and not one of them that I consulted gave one whit of advice beyond "spread it thin." I learned from experience. Use a silpat (silicone pan liner) or at the very least greased parchment, and spread it to the thickness of about two quarters. To dry out to a leathery texture, bake it  6 hours in a 200 degree oven with an oven-safe prop wedged in the door to let the steam escape.

Last week I made my Great-Aunt Helen's fabulous freezer corn:

Most people blanch their cut corn kernels in boiling water before chilling and freezing, but Aunt Helen--the best fantasy storyteller of all the aunts and the hardest hugger I've ever known--had none of that: she just cut it from the cobs and mixed it with briny ice water before freezing. This is an amazing recipe. Come Thanksgiving you just heat it up and it pops in your mouth as if it were August-fresh. I swear it. And do as she says: rearrange your freezer so that you can lay the bags flat when you freeze them, or you'll be sorry later when you struggle with the lumpy frozen corn bags.  

Aunt Helen's Freezer Corn

15 cups corn kernels

5 cups ice water

1/4 cup sugar

1/8 cup canning salt

Mix everything together and scoop into heavy plastic freezer bags. Freeze flat.

We plant three packages of cucumber seeds every summer and from the bulk of their yield I make as many quarts of my grandmother's fermented dills as I can--garlicky, fizzy, sour and addictive. I usually also can a small batch--6 pints or so--of bread and butter pickles. This year I also put up a gallon jar of refrigerator bread and butter pickles, the kind you don't process in a boiling water bath. As much as I don't like how this momentous jar hogs the top shelf of the fridge, I really hate the idea of buying pickles in the winter--not when I have 20 cucumber plants that pop out knobby pickling cukes fresh every single day. That refers to those I catch in time, at their adolescence, the perfect size for pickling; I pitch the jumbos toward a special spot over the fence. (Actually, I've never seen where they land. Someday I have to visit this cucumber cemetery.) 

This year I added a pinch of curry to my bread-and-butter pickles. I like the yellow glow of the turmeric and also the jolt these pickles give my ham-and-butter sandwiches. 

Refrigerator Bread-and-Butters with Curry

This recipe makes 1 1/2 quarts of pickles, or 3 pints

3 1/2 pounds pickling cucumbers

1/4 cup pickling salt

1/2 small spring onion or Vidalia onion (3 ounces)

1 cup water

3 cups white vinegar

1 cup sugar

4-inch-long piece ginger (2 ounces)

6 cloves garlic, peeled

1 spicy red chile (red jalepeno for milder, Serrano for spicier), stem removed

1/4 cup finely sliced cilantro stems

2 tablespoons yellow mustard seeds

Scrub the cucumbers to remove the spines. With a mandoline or a sharp knife, slice them 1/4-inch thick. Toss them in a large bowl with the pickling salt and leave to marinate for 30 minutes. Fill the bowl with cold water to rinse the cucumbers and drain well, blotting dry with a towel. Mix the cucumbers and onions.

Combine the water, vinegar, sugar, ginger, garlic, chile, cilantro stems and yellow mustard seeds and bring to a boil, whisking to dissolve the sugar. Pour over the cucumbers and onions and let cool. 

Sterilize the pint jars, lids and caps. Fill the jars with cucumber pickles, cap and store in the refrigerator. 

It was a killer year for the eggplant, too. I grow one or two varieties, both of them quick-growing for our short northern season. Here you have Ping Tung long in the front and Swallow in the back. I love to stovetop-smoke them and mix them with yogurt for babaghanous, marinate them with a soy and honey and grill them, saute them with tomatoes, sugar, chilies and fish sauce for a vietnamese side, or steam them and top with ground pork and chili bean paste . . . . there's nothing like my fresh garden eggplant, and I can't really make these dishes as successfully with winter's grocery store eggplant, so I've been smoking, peeling and cryovacking the pulp lately, as you can see above. When you're smoking eggplant, think of it as toasting a marshmallow: you want to lightly blister the skin but not really burn it.