the Ponsford life

 

I love this picture of Lewie, even though it's blurry. Lewie Dewandler, who lives on the Ponsford prairie and has been parching our wild rice for years (and is one of most bullshit-slingingest, tender-hearted characters I've ever met) broke his foot this summer and can't do the heavy lifting and stoking that parching requires--but also can't stay away from the parching shed. I said, you're sitting pretty close to that fire. Then the barrel rolled back toward him on that track by his elbow and he leaned over and kissed the oily, sticky, hot wingnut.

 His son and daughter-in-law parched our rice this year, the same way Lewie has always done it, the best way: over a wood fire.  (This wasn't ours. We had only three bags, or 135 pounds, which is a lot for us but just fringe for them.)

Here's Aaron's dad, just before he almost tipped the canoe. He and our friend Jim riced the creek below the house this year and in just three strenuous, hot 2-hour sessions, they had the batch.

I love fresh-rice day, when we bring home the finished rice that was gathered in the "front yard." Indian creek: you can't swim in it, but you can eat it.

Like every year, I cook the rice very simply when we first get it, to get a sense of the batch. I posted the recipe for simple wood-parched wild rice with thyme and garlic in the Enterprise this week:

http://www.parkrapidsenterprise.com/event/article/id/20242/

But back to Dewandler's place. A wild-rice parching mecca and a toddler's paradise, the rolling farmyard is full of wandering dirty dogs and clumps of weathered half-broken toys, all cooler than the ones Hank has at home. Lewie's grandkids run around on their own mini-four-wheelers, and Hank commandeered one right away. Poor kid, living in the country and no four-wheeler to call his own.

 

 Serena reclaimed hers with a wordless point.

He understood exactly. And grieved for hours afterward.

the bread baker's apprentice . . .

 

makes flour pictures

 

and learns a new word: tacky.
All of this eats up an hour and usually requires a shirt change, but even if his help slows me down, I'm not in a hurry. When it comes to bread, time is flavor.

I've a big devotee of leisurely bread--sourdough, levain, poolish--but not necessarily a regular practitioner. I mean, it's tough to get into sourdough! You have to be either driven by professional discipline or consuming passion, both of which require scads of time. Even for me, a food-obsessed ex-chef, it requires time I sometimes do not have.

So I came up with this bread that I can start right away in the morning and finish by dinnertime, and it comes together so easily that even us slow-waking people of the world can assemble it before they have that first rousing cup of coffee in hand. The key was to come up with a ratio of cold buttermilk to hot water which, when added together to the yeast and molasses, create an ideal blood-warm temperature for proofing the yeast. So you don't have to take the temperature of the water or worry about burning your yeast with scalding water, which is what I usually do when I'm not totally on top of it. I must have come up with this method in the late afternoon.

 The bread itself is a great daily loaf: mostly rye, so it stays moist and soft for days, with a deep dark caramelized crust that tastes like sweetened, toffee barley--if there were such a thing. Anyway, a big slice of it with a little cheese on top lasts me until noon (and beyond) and it tastes wholesome without being wholesome. Less hippie co-op, more Berlin.

Here's the finished loaf

and more of the little bread-baker, working on his pinch-and-fling technique for dusting the board:

For the recipe (and more blah-blah about rye bread) go to my local newspaper column: http://www.parkrapidsenterprise.com/event/article/id/20019/group/entertainment/

pickled plum trajectory

 

Here's our plum tree at the bottom of the hill, bent nearly in two from the weight of the plums. They're small this year but profuse.

I cooked them initially in a sugar syrup spiked with lots of vinegar and a pungent bag of cloves and crushed cinnamon sticks. The recipe I followed, a very old french one, called for 30 cloves but I added only 12 or so. In the words of Thomas, the Austrian sous chef at the Danube restaurant in NYC: "too many cloves tastes like too much Christmas." So true, dude.

But I followed the rest of the recipe to the letter. It's a classic fruit confit, or preserve, as we say in English.  Boil the syrup, skim it, add the plums and bring to a boil. Remove plums with a skimmer and reboil the syrup to concentrate it. Add the plums back in and leave to steep. Repeat two more times before canning it.

The long slow soaking in the increasingly heavy sugar syrup causes the fruit to absorb the sugar and gradually turn denser and sweeter and almost candied. It's like an exchange between the fruit and the syrup: the fruit absorbs sugar, the syrup takes on the flavor of the fruit. Eventually, they achieve a similar sugar density, which is what makes them safe to keep for a long time.

Ah geez, is this making any sense? It's kind of technical. But all any of us need to know is that this three-day process makes the plums taste really, really good, almost lush: softer but denser . . . sweeter but still tart around the pit.

 

Sometime this winter I have to make a pate (maybe a coarse one, with duck) so that I can serve these alongside. I wait patiently for the duck hunters who troll our creek in the wee hours on Saturday mornings to feel bad about disturbing our weekend sleep and lob us a duck. In the meantime, I'm going to serve the plums with a lemon pound cake tomorrow for my cooking class. Here's that recipe.

Lemon Yogurt Pound Cake with Pickled Plums

Cake adapted from an old Saveur Magazine

3 sticks butter, plus more for the pan, at room temperature

3 cups flour, plus more for the pan

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon fine salt

3/4 cup whole milk yogurt

1/4 cup fresh lemon juice

1 teaspoon pure almond extract

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

1 teaspoon pure lemon extract

3 cups sugar

6 large eggs, at room temperature

Lemon Syrup:

1/3 cup fresh lemon juice

1/3 cup sugar

Heat oven to 325°. Generously grease a light-colored 10" tube pan with butter. Add 2 tbsp. flour; turn the pan to coat it evenly with flour, tap out any excess, and set aside. (The inside of the pan should be smoothly and evenly coated with butter and flour, with no clumps or gaps.)

Using a sieve set over a bowl, sift together remaining flour, baking powder, and salt. Repeat 2 more times. In a measuring vessel with a pourable spout, combine yogurt and lemon juice and the almond, lemon, and vanilla extracts. In the bowl of a standing mixer fitted with a paddle, cream butter at medium-low speed until light and fluffy, about 2 minutes. Gradually add sugar, 1⁄4 cup at a time, scraping down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula, and beat until satiny smooth, about 3 minutes.

Add 1 egg at a time to the butter mixture, beating for 15 seconds before adding another, and scraping down the bowl after each addition. Reduce the mixer speed to low and alternately add the flour and milk mixtures in 3 batches, beginning and ending with the flour. Scrape down sides of the bowl; beat just until the batter is smooth and silky but no more.

Scrape batter into prepared pan and firmly tap on a counter to allow batter to settle evenly. Bake until light golden and a toothpick inserted in center of cake comes out moist but clean, about 1 hour and 15 minutes. Let cake cool in pan on a rack for 30 minutes. Invert cake onto rack.

For the glaze, combine the sugar and lemon juice in a small pan over low heat and cook, stirring, until the sugar melts. Brush the warm syrup on the cake, in two additions, until all of the syrup has been absorbed.

Slice the cake and serve with pickled plums (and whipped cream, if you like).

Pickled Plums

From The Good Cook: Preserving, by Time Life Books, Richard Olney, Editor

Makes about 6 pints

4 pounds slightly underripe plums, each pricked in server places with a needle
8 cups sugar
1 cup water
2 ½ cups vinegar (white or apple cider)
5 cinnamon sticks, broken into small pieces
20 whole cloves

Make a spice bag by placing the cinnamon and cloves in the center of a clean square of cheesecloth, tying up the four corners into a bundle. In a large saucepot, bring the sugar and water to a boil over high heat and cook for about 10 minutes to make a clear syrup. Add the vinegar and the spice bag and boil for five minutes more.

Add the plums and bring the mixture to a boil over medium heat; to avoid breaking the fruit do not boil it hard. Skim.

Remove the fruit from the syrup with a skimmer, then boil the syrup over high heat for five minutes. 

Remove from the heat, return the plums to the syrup and allow the mixture to coo. Refrigerate for 24 hours.

The next day, bring the mixture to a boil, remove the plums, boil the syrup for five minutes, return the plums to the pan and let the mixture cool. Let stand another 24 hours. Put the plums into pint jars, cover and process for 20 minutes in a boiling water bath. Store for at least six weeks before using.

Brooklyn kitchen . . .

I'm sorry, but you just can't compete with this. The beauty of cooking here is almost too much sometimes.

 

Washing tomatoes in my enamel sink.

 

  

Dishes are a chore, but the view helps. Even the rogue horseradish on the right, which I can't eradicate from my flower bed, has a certain sturdy elegance.

 

Shelling beans. 

  

Roma tomato sauce and yellow cherry tomato coulis.

  

The second coming of favas.

street corn

I'm holding back a messy pile of recipes and photos that will someday be blog entries--surely, once the garden frosts and wipes out all my looming projects (tomatoes to can, baby eggplants to cook, turnips to pick, etc.).

In the meantime, I'll link to my weekly column in the Park Rapids Enterprise. This week, corn and a few corn recipes. Do try the maple bacon. It's so good that I curse myself for introducing such a fattening, addictive thing into the repertoire.

http://www.parkrapidsenterprise.com/event/article/id/19559/

three guys cleaning fish

They look happy, don't they? They should, after coming home with a bucket of bluegills.

It should be a crime to deep-fry such fresh fish. I've been reading a lot of Japanese cookbooks this summer, so I knew right away what I wanted to try, a recipe simply called "salt-broiled fish."

After the boys gutted and scaled them, I rubbed the fish all over with a generous amount of kosher salt and then let them sit and perspire for half an hour. I then blotted them and skewered them, two through the gut, just handles really.

Aaron built a licking-hot oak fire and we grilled them quickly and served them with ponzu sauce (soy, mirin, ginger, lime juice, a piece of kombu, really easy to make). There was a little picking and engineering to be done at the table, but once you lifted the backbone off the first side, it was all-clear easy eating.

weekly column

The food column I write for my local paper, the Park Rapids Enterprise, is now online so that those who don't subscribe to the Enterprise (and you have to ask yourself, why don't you?) may read it. I highly recommend the Enterprise, especially for you Midwestern expats. Nothing I've ever read on the subway has earned me as many curious looks from my over-the-shoulder-reading neighbors as the front page of the Enterprise. Pics of high school royalty are especially odd to them.

This week I wrote about kimchi, a personal passion and a private pig-out food for me. Here's a picture taken after I first packed it into the crock:


and here it is, 8 days later:



As my dad would say, "it's loverly." And the kimchi fried rice, which I just made for lunch, is a must-try.