Sourtooth

weird lunch

2012-02-13T12:47:00.009-06:00

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

2012-01-09T06:10:00.007-06:00

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

2011-11-22T16:05:00.002-06:00

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

2011-10-22T14:02:00.006-05:00

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

2011-10-03T10:01:00.000-05:00

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

2011-09-03T08:24:00.131-05:00

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.

One Bonfire Leads to Another

2011-08-24T10:30:00.003-05:00

The other day a great dish was born out one of those long staredowns with a campfire. What did a fellow cook once call that? Oh yeah. TV for hippies.

Ha, 'tis. My hippie tendencies didn't die when we drew the powerline all the way back here, but this time the dancing flames took me to an unlikely place, to an old idea that sprung from a French-trained, New York City chef. For some reason, David Bouley (of Bouley and Brushstroke in Tribeca, and formerly of Danube on the same block) doesn't have the press following that Daniel Boulud or Jean-Georges Vongerichten have, but I would guess that more great chefs of my generation have come from his kitchens than any other in New York. He's a truly brilliant, improvisational, inspired cook.

I worked for him for about three years--with a summer taken off to come back here to roost. (It wasn't exactly an honorable discharge, but he took me back.) In all that time listening to him talk about food--and he talks a lot, and nearly always about food--he kept circling back to a few key experiences: working for Roger Verge in Provence, the precision of Joel Robuchon's kitchen, and his French-born grandmother's cooking at their farm in rural Connecticut. Among other things he talked about how in the fall his grandparents would rake all the leftover garden roots together and bury them in the ashes of a large brushfire. Late in the day when the fire died down they'd uncover the vegetables, peel them, and disgorge their soft, pudding-like insides onto his grandmother's good country bread.

No doubt that Bouley's cuisine was influenced by his time with Roger Verge, a pioneer in the '70's and '80's in leading French food away from its heavy, reduced meat sauces to lighter, fresher sauces based on vegetable pulps and juices. But there's no doubt that his own personal cooking style was enriched by his epiphany with the ash-baked pulps. So many of the sauces and Bouley and Danube (his Austrian restaurant and locus of my first serious restaurant job, R.I.P.) were based on so many dabs of different vegetable purees, which we made by baking vegetables overnight in their skins--not under a head of ashes, but to softness nonetheless. I remember the Ocean Herbal sauce, for example, an amazing bright green sauce that we served with seared scallops (scored deeply before sauteeing so that they looked like browned, waving anenomes) and squirrelly little squid bodies, so young they needed just a split-second against the hot metal to curl. The sauce required a spoonful of onion puree, a dab of gray-green fennel puree, a squirt of each chive, basil and dill oils, just a spoonspit of garlic puree and a ladleful of fresh clam water.

We also made beet puree, often used to thicken a red wine reduction, which became a sauce for the lobster dish. There was caviar on that one, of course.

At the thought of caviar I broke my reverie and got up to fetch the foil. I wrapped the beets I'd dug the day before, in bundles of two and three depending on size. Before going to sleep I pushed them down into the deep bed of coals and raked a thick coverlet of ash over them.

I woke up fretting that the coals had been too hot and that the beets had surely incinerated to black balls of coal, but I unwrapped the foil packs to find these beauties--soft, yes, but not charred to smithereens by any means.

They were incredibly soft--much more so than my usual baked beets. This one gooshed out with a squeeze. Beet lotion.

They peeled easily, though, and in the end I had a bowl of rough-looking egg-shaped beet roots, some with circle-shaped char sores--the most delicious, smoky parts. I started to dice them roughly, as I usually cut beets, but then I changed my course and started ripping them into chunks. It felt more right. I then spotted the bowl of cherries at my elbow and started ripping a few of those in half, shoving the pits to the side. In the grip of a total Austrian daydream now, I fired a small pan on the stove and added a little oil and a handful of beetle-shelled green pumpkin seeds. As they popped I flipped them in waves, threw salt at them, and remembered fondly that olive green oil that leaks from them as they heat and turn crisp. I poured them onto the beets, gave a good stir and tipped the entire bowl onto a small platter. With a shake of balsamic vinegar (thumb on the hole) and a few scrapings from a block of parmesan, I had it. In combination the salad was smoky, sweet, tangy and crunchy, but the beets were just out of line, way better than roasted beets and leagues superior to boiled. They tasted earthy. Just as they should.

Fire-roasted Beets with Cherries and Pumpkin Seeds

2 pounds red beets (about 8)
2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
juice of 1/2 lemon
4 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 cup sweet cherries, pitted and torn in half
1/3 cup pumpkin seeds
shaved parmesan cheese for garnish
salt and pepper

Wrap the beets in three foil packs, doubling the foil and pinching the edges to close up any holes. Bury the packages in the hot coals of a campfire and leave until morning.
Unwrap the packages and peel the beets. Tear the beets into bite-sized pieces.
To toast the pumpkin seeds, heat a saute pan over medium heat. Add 1 tablespoon of olive oil, and the pumpkin seeds. When they begin to pop, flip the seeds to cook them evenly. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and toss until most of the seeds have popped and crisped. Transfer to a plate.
Mix together the beets and cherries. Season with salt and freshly ground black pepper, the balsamic vinegar, lemon juice and remaining 3 tablespoons olive oil. Slide onto a platter and garnish with the pumpkin seeds and shavings of parmesan (or pecorino) cheese.

Making a cookbook

2011-08-12T10:00:00.003-05:00

Last week I wrapped the recipe photo shoot for my upcoming Midwestern cookbook. Every shot of every dish was taken here at my house, some outside in the grass, others on things as diverse as our 1902 piano, a bookcase inside the woodshed, the dining room floor and one of my husband's abstract wood carvings. It's funny, but the photo shoot made this project--which I've been carrying around with me for so long that it seemed like my secret, or my secret hobby--much more public and concrete, and alive.

The shoot fulfilled all my wishes for it (and then some) but I'd like to share a little about what a cookbook photo shoot entails, because before the process began the photo shoot was a locus of confusion for many of my friends and family. This is understandable; cookbook photo shoots are a little foreign in these parts. I even remember being confused once about assisting for a photoshoot for a new Manhattan restaurant I cooked in. At the end of the day in the locker room I confessed to my friend Jason: "he said photoshoot, so I wore mascara today." To this day I cringe about that.

Photos for cookbooks are trained pretty closely on the food itself. The prop stylist assembles an appropriate palette and dishware for each shot. The food stylist cooks from the recipes with a mind on the visuals, making everything look just a bit more luscious. The photographer shoots it from its most appealing angle and monitors the whole process. It is my job to make sure that the food looks just like it will when you make it at home and to put the dish in a setting appropriate to the story about the recipe.

I chose a veteran food photographer for this. Jennifer May, who in addition to her magazine and newspaper editorial work has photographed a number of cookbooks, some for my publisher Clarkson Potter, flew in on the New York-to-Fargo indirect. Kendra McKnight, a French-born food stylist, came in from Montreal. The prop stylist was Alison Hoekstra, who brought a car stocked with the best props from thrift shops across the state. She and our three fabulous assistants drove up the four hours from Minneapolis. Then we got to work, shooting between 7 and 9 recipe shots each day, averaging about 11 hours to do it. A few photos of our process follow.

Here we are, Jen, Alison and I looking at a shot in the middle of my prop-strewn dining room.

That's me cooking butter-basted walleye, shot through the porch screen.

Here I am cooking in a nice, very pale shirt. Not my usual duds.

We're laughing here at the bravado of a quite-pregnant Kendra wielding a blowtorch, the "fatboy" as it was called.

Jen didn't hesitate to rig up a bug-defying headdress--fashionable even in the deep woods--to get the shot.

This one cracks me up. We shot a piece of pie in my very clean bathroom because--I'm sorry--the light flowing through that window was amazing. The paper here holds a place for the eventual pale froth of whipped cream.

Here we have craft services, otherwise known as my mom Karen and my aunt Renee. Renee threatened to dig deep into the area's semi-sweet salad history and make a spicy cucumber jello that wobbled under the weight of its miracle whip, but they caved to their innate good taste and instead brought delicious things like this tomato tart. You'd think that with cooking eight recipes a day we would have had enough food leftover to feed a village, but at lunchtime their delivery was always welcome. They bit back their impulse to add bacon to all of the vegetables (because of Alison's vegetarian affliction) and compromised with a daily bowl of chopped cooked bacon on the side, a fillip that pretty much sums up my childhood. By day two they had adopted the name "The Worker Bees" and will soon be working on their own project, The Worker Bee Cookbook.

Throughout all of this, my husband was working behind the scenes, shimming tables, making wood fires in the grill and generally being there for all of us.

Each member of this crew was dynamite, but many thanks go to the talented Kendra McKnight for making my food look drop-dead delicious. (She is pictured below with her custom-K water glass.) And thanks to Jen May for her singular vision. Her photos proved to me that this area isn't just stunning to me alone, but universally stunning, and oddly epic, too. In eight days she captured so many of the soaring emotions I've had since moving back home, all of them rendered in that particularly hard-to-pin-down, flatly dramatic Midwestern way, and for that I am grateful to her. And lucky.

At the end the interns, Angelina and Nick, along with our assistant Luisa, dried their dishpan hands and came outside to ring in the last recipe shot. Fittingly for a Midwestern cookbook, we shot it on a stack of firewood. In truth, I had intended to lug that lovely, worn tabletop all the way to the porch but had to re-grip halfway so I set it down on the woodpile. I squinted at it and thought to myself, "End-of-shoot fatigue or strike of inspiration? You know what? I think it works."

Here's Luisa Fernanda Garcia-Gomez, taking her first break in days.

Ditto for Angelina and Nick, my excellent interns from Macalester College.

We wrapped with a swim in the incredibly clear Bad Medicine Lake, and then a bonfire with our friends, both of which we sunk into, wholly appreciative.

Jen May wrote an entry on the shoot as well, here, and of course she accompanied hers with amazing snapshots.

How a Four-Year Old Makes Lemonade

2011-08-11T07:15:00.000-05:00

Beef au Jus

2011-06-28T15:02:00.000-05:00

One evening, as the sun sunk in the sky and we found ourselves caught in a particularly tight circle of suburban hell, our blood sugar dropping a level more each time we swooped past yet another fast food hut, my husband gave me the usual "it's not your last meal" speech.

And this time he added "I think your problem is that you hate sandwiches."

Crashing and dramatic, I fought the point, something along the lines about how nixing Subway does not translate to hating an entire genre of food.

Except that he's right. Pull the bahn mi and barbecued pork to the shore as exceptions, along with my grandma's pickle sandwich on white, for both its gastronomic and nostalgic value, and we're totally not counting schwarma because it rarely stays inside its pita pocket and it's just too damn good . . . it's true: I kind of don't like sandwiches.

Part of this might have to do with the lunch places in our little burg here. Who wants to guess what percentage of them serves just soup and sandwich? Build your own sandwich? Predictable soup?

I have a problem with menus that hinge on a ham sandwich--especially when neither the deli meat nor the bread nor the sauce are particularly distinquished.

No, I'll be really honest. I think it should be illegal to serve a ham sandwich in a restaurant. A dish that anyone can slap together in their kitchen in the middle of the night, in the dark, without training a single brain cell on it, should not be a unit of exchange.

And it's not just the lack of cooking, nor the filling nature of the sandwich, nor the double-handed pawing involved in eating it, either. (Although whenever I turn a hamburger or a grilled cheese around in my grubby little hands part of me feels like a raccoon sitting at the edge of the compost pile). It's the deli meat that troubles me.

Even before I read an online comment from a chef friend of mine whose charcuterie program aims to unseat what he calls "year-old deli meat"--is that really true, Mike?--I've distrusted those burly meat chunks behind the glass. How long have they been there? Why is that that sitting out unwrapped like that?

I know too much about food service and how processors rely on vacuum-packing to extend freshness to know that it's entirely possible that the time span between when that chunk of meat hits its first cure to when it hits the bread might very likely be close to a full year.

Thinking about this led me to make my own cold roast beef this week. Like I said, usually I don't plan on sandwiches, but it's summer now; it's hot outside and dim and cool in the kitchen when lunch rolls around, we're all busier, and sometimes we just need to grab a cold sandwich and a glass of sun tea and hit the day.

So I had Bart the butcher cut me a top round of beef, ruby and nice. I gave it a good preliminary salt-rub, as I've been doing lately with almost all of my meats, slicked it with a little olive oil and then chopped up an impressive amount of fresh rosemary and rubbed that all over it. I patted on plenty of coarse black pepper. I peeled a bunch of garlic cloves, cut them each in half, stabbed the meat at regular intervals and buried the garlic inside. I seared it very quickly over high heat in a saute pan, forked the meat to a rack in a baking pan, deglazed the pan with red wine and chicken stock, poured that under the rack (for making the jus, of course) and popped it into a 300 degree oven. About three hours later the internal temperature was 120 degrees (rare). Little did I know that it would zoom quickly to 125 (medium-rare) so when I caught it the lever was inching toward 130 degrees (medium). I wish I would have pulled it at around 122, but it was still very good.

I swished a little stock in the pan to loosen the bits and poured the jus into a couple of shallow bowls; sliced the beef as thinly as possible, toasted the hard rolls to give them a crackling surface, stirred some horseradish into sour cream for a sauce, and made a green salad.

My husband said "Hey! You made sandwiches for supper!"

Cheers all around. Let's wait to see what he says when I cart it out every day for lunch.

Is it too late for a smelt fry photo essay?

2011-06-06T11:23:00.000-05:00

Smelt--a sleek, silvery fish that runs in hordes this time of year in the sloshy, overfilled rivers of the upper midwest--began appearing in my local grocery store about a month ago. Around the same time, smelt fries, such as this one at the Fargo Shriner's club, were held at local churches, Eagle's Clubs, American Legions and other such venues. Every year we intend to hit the smelt fry at Gethesmane Lutheran Church in Snellman on Mother's Day, and every year we miss it for some reason or the other. But thanks to our quick-thinking friend Colleen in Fargo, we were able to take in this one at the Shriner's. And in its glory, too. These people were serious about their headless fish; they must have served thousands that day. To keep things interesting (and soothingly cacophonic) they were barking out a meat raffle at the same time.

To give the name "smelt" to as delicate and fine-boned (dare I say, fancy) a fish as this one is like christening a sweet little baby with a clunky, oversized name. Smelt is a great fish, one of our region's finest. The meat is sweet and snow-white, and the backbones so tiny and loose after frying that they nearly fall onto your plate. Halfway through my meal a part of me pitied that this smelt fry used such a heavy jacket of breading--but really, nothing can mess with its purity. It shines through.

Anyway, no more talking. The photos speak.

James Beard hits Walmart

2011-05-28T12:03:00.004-05:00

For change of pace, here's our Mother's Day lunch at the Modern in New York, our son here giving me the best Mother's Day gift I could ever wish for: a peaceful lunch with my husband, liverwurst, tarte flambee and a fine glass of gruner veltliner.

(Who says germanic food is boring? That mustard was spicy! And the tarte was sublime.)

We were in New York for the James Beard Awards, as I was nominated (and then, unbelievably, won!) for a series of features with recipes I wrote for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. And if that weren't the cake and its icing too, I am pictured here still drifting on the nimbus mist from a month previous, when I sold two books (a midwestern cookbook and a narrative with recipes to follow) to Clarkson Potter--an outcome for my cookbook proposal so thrilling that it jumped the daydream. The germ of this midwestern cookbook started growing about fifteen years ago when we were living in this cabin, back when it was rustic and my evening reading was lit by oil lamp; it percolated the whole time I lived and cooked professionally in New York, and then it required about six months-worth of figuring out how to translate my blunt, overwhelming love for the midwest and its cuisine into something that anyone, midwestern or not, could consume. But I finally found the track, and the project has begun.

I really don't know how to justify this flood of good fortune except to say that I have always been good at bingo, a fact which might have finally rubbed off into other areas of my life. (And, possibly, that my isolation here on the hill has turned up my focus in a productive way.)

Coming home to Two Inlets from the awards in New York I thought, you know, it's pretty cool to live in this small town in northern Minnesota where only a few people know what the heck a James Beard Award is, and most of those due to the piece about the win that the local paper ran on the bottom of its front page.

In some ways the local article means more than the Publisher's Weekly notice, because I've long known that if something appears in the Park Rapids Enterprise, it is real. And to prove it, I have the receipts: friends and regulars from my cooking classes have been sending the sweetest notecards from whose folds fall the clippings about me--sometimes laminated, sometimes loose--delicate gray leaves falling into my lap, flooding me with the hope that I will one day be as thoughtful and generous as these lovely people.

It's also worth noting that of those who congratulate me on the book or the award, about half of them are gently poking fun at me, as we do in small towns to people who gain exposure from the outside. Implicit in a small community is the shared understanding that people and relationships matter more than accomplishments--a principle I subscribe to, too. Don't get me wrong, people around here honestly think the accolades are great, but they also find it funny and surreal that I am getting credit or payment for what I do all day long, which to them looks like ridiculously frequent grocery shopping, some browsing at Rich's Antiques (prop-hunting!), and a whole lot of sitting in front of the computer in the solarium at Bella Cafe, or, computer on my lap, boots propped in front of the fake fire at Jack Pine Java. (Of course they're not privy to the constant cooking, or the late-night deadlines.) To them, it's a miracle I get paid for that, much less bring home stinkin' awards. This irony is worth a couple of dramatic bow-downs upon my entrance to Bella, which I've graciously accepted.

As for James Beard in Walmart, which I promised: So at Walmart yesterday we ran into our friend Ray who works in the photo department. An ambitious home cook, Ray really understands the significance of both the book and the JBA, and was congratulating me and all that as we walked toward the toy section. My kid pulled a pink styrofoam pool noodle from the aisle-end stack and started swinging. My husband pulled another, Ray another, and as we talked they all had a good three way thromp. A good hit to the butt sent our kid into hysteric giggles. (You gotta love an good impromptu noodle fight.) A guy wearing a Walmart polo showed up, joined the conversation, nodded at me, offered his mild, sincere congratulations and then said, "Hey Ray, can you come and help this guy with a TV?" The guy, standing shotgun, was wearing cowboy boots, belted gardening jeans, a two-day beard and a worn embroidered cap. He had the insouciance that affects most of the people who live in rural acreages around here, the lingering self-possession of the pioneers. And he said, "No kidding. That's great. James Beard . . . did you know that James Beard was an opera singer before he did the food thing? Wagnerian. Don't know if he was any good at that or not."

And with a quick salute he turned and followed Ray to go pick out his TV. Sir, I wish I had been more quick-on-the-draw with my manners enough to ask your name. I did not know that about James Beard.

It just goes to show that here, due in part to the dressed-down dress code, or maybe because these isolated forest pocket places attract some pretty singular folks, you can never guess who it is you're talking to. A shared love for this patch of country equalizes this town. I grew up here and have been coming and going from this place for a long time, but this one fact still interests and amazes me.

Water from Trees

2011-05-16T15:22:00.005-05:00

It took a long time for summer to arrive but the other day it finally stormed in, installing the heat and the greenery in a single day.

And to think, just two weeks ago I was still dodging snow clumps. The days were warming but the nights were still cold, and the birch sap was beginning to run from the trees. We lived in a truly gray landscape. My husband took some photos of the bare trees against the sky, threw them into iphoto, and when he toggled between color and black-and-white we could hardly tell the difference between them.

Just look at the glass of birch water I'm holding: colorless and pure, it is the talisman of the dramatic week between Minnesota winter and Minnesota summer, a charged sliver of time in which nature drains all the color from the sky, gathering energy so that it can pounce into the next phase, like how a cat coils before jumping up onto a high couch. In places with more gradual seasonal shifts they call this interval "spring."

So you might say, "that's a mighty big glass of birch sap you've poured yourself!" To which I respond, "Yes. I plan to replace all of the water in my body with birch sap." I read a Times piece once about Korean people who drink five gallons of fresh maple sap at a time with the goal of driving all the winter toxins out of their body, and every year that is my plan, but I can usually only drink two glasses a day.

This year on the first day of birch tapping I downed three glasses fast but then I felt a little funny inside--a strange inner vibration--as one might after chugging three glasses of anything. Or maybe there's a little unidentified something-something in this birch sap. It tastes pretty plain, like clean water with a dropper of maple syrup stirred in, but there's also a slightly unsettling woodsy undertone, as if you were drinking it not from a glass but from a dug-out birch mug--freshly hewn for you by an elf. In any case, I consider two glasses per day sufficient for a spring tonic.

Most years birch trees begin their run about 10 days to 2 weeks after maple sugaring, and this year was no different. To check the sap, we let the little guy drill the first hole.

Sure enough, it dribbled out immediately. We hooked up blue plastic bags to each tap. They don't look as romantically old-school as metal buckets but I think they're a little more sanitary. During the second night the temperature dropped well below freezing and the birch sap froze solid in the bags, ran over, and drooled icicles.

But then it warmed up and the sap ran freely again and we continued boiling it down, which is definitely an outside operation. Keep in mind that while it takes 40 gallons of maple sap to make 1 gallon of syrup, it takes 60 gallons of birch sap to make the same amount of syrup. Birch sap is thinner and less sugary than maple sap, making it all the more precious. It tastes very similar, but again, a bit woodsier on the finish. I think it's more interesting-tasting than maple syrup, but that may be because I'm more accustomed to maple. In terms of quality they're on par with each other.

As befits any authentic sap-boiling operation, we have a hackneyed rural set up: my outdoor wok burner (one of my best cooking purchases ever) set up on my father-in-law's childhood red wagon, a propane tank for powering it, a strainer for sieving out bits of blown-in wood bits, and a useful stump stool.

When the syrup turned amber-colored I brought it inside and strained it once more into a wide-bottomed saucepan. Then I boiled it again until the bubbles grew larger and it foamed up vigorously when stirred. That little spurt of energy when touched was a pretty good indicator of doneness. I let it cool and then poured it into sterilized jars. From the countless gallons of birch sap we harvested this year we yielded about 5 pints of syrup.

I'd like to make custards with this, and ice cream, but for now I've been stirring a little of it into my salad dressings, and into cold, local whole milk (yum, maybe the best), and I can't resist a little birch and banana snack. A quick bowl of banana-snack is something I only eat when I'm alone, usually with half a mind on it. The birch syrup makes it a little more intentional.

pork belly hotpot with baby bok choy

2011-04-27T00:21:00.002-05:00

Foodwise, this is always a weird time--post-local potato, pre-local asparagus--and it's strange to watch the collisions between the stodgy winter stockpile and the first tendrils of the season. Like today, coming back into the house with the first armful of baby bok choy from the greenhouse, I creaked open the door of the deep freeze on the porch and finally saw it, the official end of winter: the bottom of my deep freezer. Of the pig that I fabricated in the fall just one roast, two packs of chorizo and a boatload of pork belly remain.

No, more than one boat's worth of pork belly. A fleet. I'm beginning to think I should have turned more of the belly into pancetta, because giving it a spring spin has been addling my brain. Honestly, it's what's left but it is not what I'm craving.

Then I remembered this hotpot, a recipe I saw in the thunderous Meat by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. This book, from a great British chef who works on his farm in the country, is a near-biblical take on meat eating, mixing ethics and streak-of-lean in a 50-50 ratio, and it is full of affecting photos that drape raw and cooked chunks of meat alike with heartbreaking beams of light . . . in short, it's a book that makes your mouth whimper and water like only a collection of carnivorous recipes can. I loved Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone when it first came out as well, but I adore the book of meat.

But thanks to our new greenhouse, it's not all pork belly all the time. Now I can pad my fatty fauna with unseasonably early flora. Last fall we acquired a portable building, covered it with two layers of greenhouse plastic and backed it up next to a window of my husband's studio building, the one that opens up next to his wood stove. The idea is that the heat from the stove heats the greenhouse and the moisture from the greenhouse humidifies the studio. It works spendidly, except when it's 30 below zero.

Inside, we have tubs of spinach and arugula on the right, a flat of bok choy and baby greens on the left, leeks and onions in the trays in front, and I guess a scattering of junk in the middle.

I have been shearing the tubs of spinach and arugula with a scissors but we needed to actually thin out the bok choy planting, and with those came all the dirty little roots, still thin and wispy. I swished the whole plants in a large bowl of water. After a couple of rinsings the roots washed clean, and I didn't bother to trim off the whisker end.

True to his calling, Hugh of the meat book does not mar his Chinese Pork Belly Hotpot with any greenery--but like I said, I had loads of thinnings, so I dumped in a good clump and drowned them with broth.

The pork was almost pudding-soft, the noodles slippery, the greens mustardy, the broth simple and right. The freshly picked greens wilting in the hot broth felt like shocks of spring, like meat versus vegetable, matched to a fair fight. Even my husband crowed over the hotpot and he purports not to like "asian soups." I wouldn't say he's a picky guy, especially about food, but he has a few strong prejudices--against nuts, for instance. He'll eat toasted or glazed nuts in a salad but if he cracks into a walnut inside a brownie his jaw will freeze and he will expel it into a napkin as if it were a bite full of rot. (His explanation--"I just don't like cold, wet nuts"--is a tough one to argue against.)

The asian soup thing is a little more mysterious, but I would bet it has to do with the downtrodden condition of the floors in the divey pho places that I frequent. I suspect that this cruddy visual coupled with the unexpected earthy smell of soy- and fish sauce-spiked pork broth come together to form a sense memory that repels him.

But not this time. Here we have fresh broth, distilled from an Amish pork belly, and bok choy sproutlings which, in this climate, are akin to miracle babies.

Chinese Pork Belly Hot Pot with Baby Bok Choy

adapted (pretty much) from Meat, by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

2 pounds meaty fresh pork belly (unsmoked)

2 Tablespoons shaoxing wine (substitute sherry)

2 Tablespoons soy sauce

4-inch piece fresh ginger, peeled and sliced into thick rounds

3 small red dried chilies

1 star anise

2 teaspoons rice wine vinegar or chinese chinkiang vinegar

pinch of salt

pinch of sugar

7 ounces (1/2 package) rice noodles

2 large handfuls baby bok choy

4 scallions, thinly sliced

Cut the pork belly into 1-inch thick slabs, then cut each slab into two-inch thick pieces, sort of rectangular. I trimmed the top 1/2-inch of fat or so in places where there was absolutely no meat in sight. Don't worry if the belly seems really fatty; much of that will cook into the broth and you will skim it off later. (And the rest you will sip, and love.)

Put the pork belly in a 3-quart pot and cover with water by one inch. Bring to a boil and then drain, discarding water. Wash and rinse the pot and add the pork back in. Cover again with fresh water by one inch. Add the shaoxing wine, soy sauce, ginger, chilies, star anise, vinegar, pinch of salt and pinch of sugar. Bring to a simmer and cook, uncovered, until the pork is very tender, about 2 to 2 1/2 hours.

As it cooks, soak the rice noodles in cold water to cover. Heat a small pot of water for cooking the noodles.

When the pork is tender, drain, pouring the broth into a large bowl. With a ladle, skim the fat from the surface of the broth: touch the round bottom of the ladle to the center of the broth and then begin to make concentric circles, swirling, until you've created a little whirling gyre. Dip the top of the ladle into the swirling broth, working outward, scooping up the fat at the top of the broth. This sounds hard, but it's very easy, a natural motion. Don't worry about removing every droplet of fat though.

Discard the chopped ginger, chilies and star anise and add the pork back to the broth. Season the broth with more soy, shaoxing and salt to taste. Bring to a simmer to reheat. Meanwhile, cook the noodles in boiling salted water for about 3 minutes, or until chewy tender. Drain and add to your bowl. Add the baby bok choy and scallions to the hotpot, swirl together, and ladle over the noodles. Serve immediately.

MON-ster COO-KIES!

2011-04-05T10:51:00.002-05:00

It snowed last night. I know that everyone else has been wearing their wellies and spring coats for weeks now, but we're still kicking through dry piles of silvery fluff and I'm still making cookies, and more bean soup (I'll spare you) and brown, hulky casseroles with brittle crunch tops.

Yesterday, home for yet another inside day with my three-year old, I dragged out the "cake decorating" bin, the plastic tub into which I throw all the candy crap that he brings home from daycare--and there is a lot of it, an armful from Valentine’s Day alone. He never eats it. The little guy seems to have inherited my disinclination towards sweets. The other day we were in the grocery store and walked past the lady handing out sample cubes of white sheet cake and I said, “Do you want some cake, buddy?” and he said, “No thanks, I want real food.” This is not where I’m going to tell you that he cheers for his kale porridge. Hardly. The kid is on a steady diet of mac and cheese and diluted apple juice nectar. But in any case he’s more sour tooth than sweet tooth.

Warm just-baked cookies are a bit of an exception for him, as they are for me.

I whipped together the batter, and then we went to town. Monster cookies are the battle royale of cookies: peanut butter, nuts, chips, m and m’s, sprinkles, leftover candy trinkets . . . I let him throw all the candy he wanted into the batter—except the gum drops, which I tried to convince him would be weird—and gave him the wooden spoon. As heavy as mixed rockcrete, the batter resisted his efforts at stirring. He mostly smacked at it.

Truthfully, monster cookies don't usually tempt me. They’re so . . . pop. Day-glo. Chock-a-block. Becky Hom-ecky. They just never seemed to have a perfect form to aspire to, like the ideal chocolate chip cookie, puffy peaks and soft, chewy interiors, or the stellar oatmeal raisin cookie, the health shelf made decadent.

But the monster cookie base batter is truly delicious: throwing a cup of peanut butter into a normal chocolate chip cookie dough is a stroke of shining genius. It gives the dough flavor. And these, a variation on my chocolate chip cookie recipe, are as decadent as that comforting old friend, but glitzier. Cookies with benefits.

Sometimes, especially when one is dead-sick of winter and leaning hard into spring, more is more. As kids know, there is great pleasure in wanton candy usage. Restraint is for wussies, anyway.

Monster Cookies

Makes 3 dozen big cookies

3 ½ sticks butter, room temperature

2 cups white sugar

2 cups dark brown sugar

2 tablespoons brewed coffee

1 cup peanut butter

3 large eggs

1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

4 2/3 cup flour

2 teaspoons baking soda

1 1/2 teaspoon salt

2 cups instant oats

1 16 ounce bag chocolate chips, preferably Nestle’s chocolatier

4 regular-sized bags M & M candies

1 cup mixed nuts, roughly chopped

3 Tablespoons sprinkles, optional

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, beat the butter until soft. Add the sugars and beat until well-incorporated and slightly fluffier, about 3 minutes. Add the coffee and peanut butter and mix until combined. Add the eggs one at a time, beating until incorporated before adding the next. Measure the flour, baking soda and salt into a bowl and whisk to combine. Add the flour in three additions, beating slowly. Stir in the oats, chocolate chips, M & M’s, nuts and sprinkles (and any other candy you like) by hand. For best results, chill the dough thoroughly before baking, though they can certainly be made right away. Drop about 2 tablespoons onto a cookie sheet and bake at 375 degrees for 12-14 minutes, or until golden brown on top. For a chewy texture, don’t overbake.

shell beans, back around

2011-03-16T17:06:00.003-05:00

I hate to inject unease into my food blog (as these are supposed to be cheery) but the last couple of weeks have thrummed with odd notes. My little guy got sick, enough to scare the lights out of his mother, then a coastline of people were wiped out in Japan and that area of the world threatened with nuclear fallout (which, of course, everyone knows about) and then there's the dangerous matter of the March thaw here on the hill: Yesterday in my very own driveway I literally skated around the car from my kid's car door to the driver's door, clinging to the window strips for balance, when suddenly the butt of the car slid backward about six feet, wheels swinging toward the hillside. It stopped at the foot of a Norway pine and I jumped into the front seat screaming, at once terrifying the kid in the backseat and testing my husband's threshold for driveway drama. ("It would have stopped you know!") He's right: the car slide was no big thing, but I immediately read it as a symbol of the general unsteadiness.

So naturally, as someone who likes to cook does in times like these, I scrubbed my counters and cleared the kitchen windowsills of clutter and started just making something, anything, to get back to the baseline.

I wanted something as comforting to make as it is to eat, so I improvised a new burnt sugar pudding. Remembering how pastry chefs always risked bitterness when caramelizing white sugar to the point of no-going-back, lost-in-the-dark, almost-burnt amber for caramel ice cream base, I dumped a cup of sugar in a pot and cranked the heat. I didn't take my eyes from it or stop stirring until all the dairy was in and I had a burbling mudpie of burnt sugar pudding, tasting just like the best of those dark caramel ice creams--like toasted marshmallows and just-roasted coffee beans--and looking as tan and healthy as doeskin.

I have no photo for this, nor a recipe ready to post. In fact, no one here even ate any of it.

Well, I should say: I had a spoonful of the delicious mush in a teacup, swirled with another spoonful of whole milk yogurt, which in my world constitutes "being on a diet" and doesn't even count. My ailing three-year-old, the pudding's intended, took a pass because it did not look like mac and cheese. It hit the back reaches of the fridge on its first toss, but it was still a comfort for me to make it.

Things returned to a more normal volume after a long chit-chat with my sister-in-law.

It's a very long story, but my husband's sister and I have been close friends since we were ten--and we don't know, probably before. A few years ago I found a photo of her fourth birthday party in her parents' junk drawer and there was the four-year-old me in it, sitting in pigtails and a party dress, shoving down cake. We are sisters.

Anyway, this is to say that she and I are the aunts who call each other almost every day and have conversations in semi-conscious states of being. We puddle-jump from one hot daily to the next before invariably landing on the hottest topic of all: What We Are Making For Dinner Tonight. When she superimposed my craving by saying, "Gosh, I am kind of hungry for beans . . . you know?" I knew that she'd voiced the perfect balm. We've contemplated each others' chickpea cravings, yens for black beans and baked bean impulses before, and they've always turned out as well or better than expected. Beans in general, I've found, pull through. They're good performers.

And the shell beans from last years' garden, which I picked, cryovacked and froze sometime last August, are no exception. If you know shell beans you probably love them. But for those who aren't acquainted, shell beans (or "shellies" as they're affectionately known) are simply the mature beans that you shell out before they've had a chance to dry in the pods. In markets they're usually sold in their pink and white pods as "fresh cranberry beans." You can steal from any dried bean to make a shell bean, but for some reason commercial growers usually use cranberry beans. When shelled, they look plump and iridescent, like opals. They take just forty minutes to cook to full tenderness, never split apart, and have seemingly invisible skins that seem to disappear in your mouth. The insides are thick and creamy, almost like fudge. I love them so much that I picked all I could last summer and froze them in little bags, hoping they would emerge from their thaw with the same attributes. Which, luckily, they did.

I dumped two of those bags in a pot, covered them with water and started simmering, vaguely thinking of soup. To add a little fiber to this starch fantasy I threw in handfuls of vegetables: green beans, cubes of cabbage, edamame. And of course chunks of ham, because I usually have some around. To thicken the broth I smashed a few spoonfuls of beans against the side of the pot and then swished in a cup of grated parmesan as I took it off the stove.

In the end I ended up with a sort of garbure, or the famous stewed hodgepode of beans and cabbage and (traditionally) duck or goose from Southwest France. Mine exhibited a strong springtime lilt, a keening toward warmer weather, green hills and bluer skies.

Shell Bean and Spring Vegetable Garbure

1 pound shell beans (substitute dried pinto beans, but allow another hour for initial cooking)
3/4 teaspoon salt + to taste
4 cups water
3 bay leaves
6 ounces (about 1 cup) chunks of ham
1/4 small cabbage
1 cup trimmed, halved green beans (5 ounces)
1 small leek
2 teaspoons chopped fresh thyme
2/3 cup shelled edamame beans (from 6 ounces of podded edamame)
2 Tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 ounces parmesan cheese, grated (about 1 cup)

Combine the beans, 1/2 teaspoon salt, water and bay leaves in a 2-quart saucepot. Bring to a simmer and cook until the beans are tender, about 40 minutes. (If using a dried bean you will need to cook another hour or so. Add water as needed.) The cooking liquid should be about level with the beans. Add a little more water to just cover the tops.
Cut the cabbage into bite-sized squares. Halve the leek lengthwise, cut off the top 3 inches or so and strip off the flimsy outer layer. Run water in between the leaves to remove any grit. Slice the leek lengthwise again and then dice into bite-sized pieces.
Add the ham, cabbage, green beans, leek, chopped thyme and remaining salt to the bean mixture. Bring to a simmer and cook about 10 minutes. Add the edamame and cook another 10-15 minutes, or until the vegetables are tender. Taste for salt. Depending on the sort of ham used, you may or may not need any more.
Smash spoonfuls of the bean mixture against the side of the pot to thicken the broth. Season with freshly ground black pepper. Stir in the extra-virgin olive oil and then, off the heat, most of the parmesan cheese. Save a little to garnish the tops of the bowls. Serve immediately.

German Lemon Waffles

2011-03-09T07:51:00.002-06:00

A few years ago I extracted an ancient cast-iron waffle iron from the cluttered back forty of Rich's Antiques, a labyrinthine thrift/antique store in Park Rapids. It was beautiful but pretty crusty so Linda (the owner) gave me a break on it. The stamped iron clamshell sat lightly in a cradle of cast iron that fit over the burner, and I imagined myself gracefully making waffles on a lazy morning, my kitchen stitched with arctic light, casually flipping it over at just the right moment . . . instead I sprayed it with Easy-off and propped it in a corner of my husband's shop for a couple of years before finally sending it off to the dump. Household cleaners bounced off; the toxic spray had no influence on it. So for Christmas this year I opened up a large box to find--you guessed it--a modern Teflon waffle maker.

I'm making up for lost time with this waffle iron. I've made four different recipes from four different reputable sources and every time I thought, "oof, I can't finish this one." (Which is probably a good thing.) But honestly, the waffles I made caused me to question my faith in waffles: the worst ones were cottony and waddish and left me with the phantom impression that something was stuck in my throat; the best of the worst were lighter, but custardy and wan.

It took another treasure from Linda's compulsive hoard (er, antique store) to save the day: a taped-up book rescued from a pile on the floor, titled Pancakes Aplenty. It was written in the 1950's by Ruth Ellen Church, the food editor from the Chicago Tribune. She must have gotten married at some point following its publication because someone has taped a tag with the word "Lovrien" over the "Ellen Church" on the spine--but who? A very meticulous librarian, I am thinking. "Oh boy, I think she's Lovrien now, I had better change her name."

This recipe was good but not perfect: they were tender but really floppy, insubstantial, almost too light. But I loved the lemon juice in them! Finally, a waffle with flavor. I brought in some buttermilk, reduced the eggs and increased the flour to normal waffle proportions, subbed oil for the melted butter and added an extra egg white, both to create crispness. Something worked, because now the waffles have thin and crisp edges that give way to soft, tender middles; I could eat two in a sitting, but won't.

In the end my waffle recipe differs significantly from Ms. Church/Lovrien's, but I think they match the spirit of the photo exactly. First I take a moment to feed my African violet, then I sit down to a waffle accompanied by lots of black coffee, like espresso with a lemon twist on the rim.

German Lemon Waffles

makes 7-8 large Belgian-style waffles

3 eggs
1 egg white
1/4 sugar
3 Tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1/3 cup canola oil
1 cup buttermilk
3/4 cup heavy cream (substitute sour cream or more buttermilk if you want)
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 teaspoon vanilla extract

soft butter and maple syrup for serving

Preheat your waffle iron.

Separate the eggs, putting the yolks in a mixing bowl and the whites plus the extra white in another large mixing bowl.

Whisk the yolks with the sugar and lemon juice until smooth. Combine the buttermilk and cream in a measuring cup. Dribble the canola oil into the egg yolk mixture, whisking constantly, until emulsified and sort of thick, like a mayonnaise. Add the buttermilk/cream mixture in a thin stream, whisking until smooth.

Sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Add the dry ingredients to the egg yolk mixture, whisking until fairly smooth.

With an electric mixer, whip the egg whites until they hold soft peaks. Gently whisk 1/3 of the whites into the batter, then carefully fold in the rest of the whites with a rubber spatula.

Brush a little soft butter on the waffle grates and add about 3/4 cup batter, or whatever will fill your waffle iron. Cook as directed. When done, spread the waffle with soft butter and serve with maple syrup.

an Amish dinner, with apple tart

2011-02-28T09:38:00.003-06:00

One Saturday late last fall we were driving around, loosely, returning from an errand that would conveniently take us through Wolf Lake farm country just in time for the sun to hit the hills, and we decided to look for an Amish farmstand. We needed a few more squash for winter, and some fresh cabbages for another batch of kraut, if they still had them.

The first guy we met jumped off the buckboard of his corn picking wagon, and he had plenty of apples and some squash (and jalepeno bread-and-butter pickles), but no cabbages and no eggs to spare. But we hit the jackpot at the next one down the road. Bushels of tomatoes, tight-skinned eggplants. Six varieties of peppers! We bought enough to fill the back of our car. The farmer, a white-bearded man named Robert, was new to the area and chatty, interested in politics, especially as they applied to the food system and farming, interested in a wide range of subjects it seemed. He said he was a writer and pointed to a large barn across the yard--full of 6,000 books, he said. Maybe 8,000. We asked him: "would you ever come to dinner at our place?" And he said, "yes, we do that." We walked toward his house and onto the porch, bang into a cloud of intoxicating spices and the delicious spew of leisurely stewing meat. He wrote down his address and the number for their community phone booth.

"Oh my gosh," I said, "what are you having?"

"My wife's making chicken curry," he said.

Something that he'd talked about that day--the tagging of cattle for identification--still had me at two in the morning, so there I found myself, googling an Amish man. And would you believe it, I found something, a link to a typewritten manifesto, over twenty pages long. I stayed up reading his manifesto about NAIS, the government decision to electronically tag every animal in the country in the name of food safety. He makes a convincing argument that NAIS will set insurmountable hurdles in front of small farmers and local food production, and I do believe he has an urgent point here. He also succinctly describes the Amish lifestyle. It's an amazing read. I dragged my husband to it the next morning and we came to the conclusion that he is nothing less than the Amish Wendell Berry. Check it out: Robert Alexander's Declaration

He called us about a month later, from their communal phone, to set a dinner date. As we were hanging up I quickly asked, "Oh, is there anything you don't eat?" This was a question leftover from my fine dining days, and one I immediately wished I could retract. You ask this of bony urban types you suspect of veganism, or of gourmands you plan to serve a tasting menu--not of Amish farmers. He said, "Oh. No. Like what?" I tried to recover. "Oh, no, nothing. Just local food!"

But it does bring up a point: what do you make for Amish folks, especially at the end of February? I opened my canning cupboard and sighed. The shelves gaped with the missing. From my fall canning only apple sauce and apple juice, and one odd jar of beet pickles, remained. I opened the freezer. I did have pork from my fall pig, grabbing the monster boston butt that I had been saving for a special occasion. I dug deeper and found a package of our garden eggplant that I'd smoked and frozen last fall.

So here would be the menu.

To start, a big loaf of homemade bread, to serve with:
fresh cheese (made from local slow-pasteurized milk and some buttermilk) topped with sweet peppers in sour orange vinaigrette
and
a spread made from the smoked eggplant, mixed with homemade mayonnaise and warm spices
and
a chunk of Marieke Gouda, an alpine-style cheese from Wisconsin

and then:
porchetta-spiced slow-roasted boston butt roast
salsa verde: parsley, capers, tarragon, garlic, basil
risotto with bits of cauliflower and tons of Wisconson Sartori parmesan cheese
carrots caramelized in my cast-iron skillet with maple syrup
grilled mushroom salad with toasted almonds, bibb hearts and fried garlic breadcrumbs

And for dessert, apple tart: a thin layer of apples macerated in reisling on top of homemade quick puff pastry, baked quickly in a hot oven, brushed with an apple glaze and served warm, with a tuft of whole milk yogurt-enriched whipped cream.

It was a pretty ambitious menu for a day which included keeping a three-year-old fed, apple-juiced and entertained, but I managed to pull it together in the home stretch. Just as I was finishing cutting the carrots I saw our friends B and C walk into the porch, and then two dark figures behind them, in capes, one of them with a stiff three-pointed bonnet casting shadows. I mean no disrespect, but the Amish woman's traveling garb is as disarming as a nun's habit in a film noir flick.

Within a few minutes all eight of us were standing around with drinks in our hands (white wine, elderberry spritzers or good beer) and the din of conversation rose high. Which was good as I was still cooking, for which the good women of the group kept me company. Funny, but as we traded canning and preserving stories--what to do with apple juice when the apples have a lot of natural pectin, how to deal with a surplus of cherry tomatoes . . . --we found more common territory than not. We played recipes like chips thrown into the center pot and it grew pretty high.

After all, each of us had at one point or another lived without electricity or modern conveniences. My husband and I lived in our place without any running water or electricity for three summers, and didn't get real electricity run back here until 2007. (When we remodeled the kitchen we painted over dark oval smudges on the rafters, the shadows left from the years we set an oil lamp on the shelf over the sink.) Cheryl just recently got a modern bathroom, after years of taking saunas or showering in the summer breeze--but her kitchen sink still sports a trusty handpump. Amber lives in a adorable dollhouse-sized place in the small town of Hewitt, perfectly set up for the two of them, her kitchen having no plastic slot for a dishwasher.

So we all marveled at mine, just a week old, as it finished its cycle. Looking for more water glasses, I pulled out a hot tumbler and ran water in it to cool it off. It snapped in two even pieces, one for each hand. Embarrassed, I mumbled that it wasn't a favorite, to the chorus of "Don't worry about it! That's okay! We can reuse our glasses!"

Deborah said she liked the fresh cheese. "Do you have a cow?" she asked. "Oh no," I said. "No animals yet." She scooped some on bread and brought it across the room to her husband.

"We have a cow," she sighed. "Just one, but I run out of things to do with the milk. We eat a lot of cheese in the winter."

We finally sat down at the table and talked in rivers, as usual, though I think we found some unusual intersections. It made me think that most people sanction their involvement with modernity at some juncture; the Amish just draw an early and hard line. But some people I know don't want to own two cars. Some drive two cars but limit their kids' TV-watching to an hour a day. Some avoid processed food. Some burn wood for heat. Some hate banks. Some people, more resistant, don't want to be on the grid or use power tools.

I also think that when it gets to this point, to real simple living, that there are more decisions made on the impulse to actively do than to resist. Homesteading, broken down into daily chores, is physically active, really a verb. And it's a lot of work! To drink great water, you need to pound your own shallow well. To eat garden vegetables in the winter you need to can them. Eating meat from around here takes some organizing and, sometimes, some front-yard butchering.

But no matter what you choose to do, the lines we draw eventually make a picture, a form.

Speaking of pictures, here's the apple tart. Needless to say, there are precious few photos from the Amish dinner party. (I figured it would have been rude to snap them, even if I was trained on the food.) But I dragged the tart into the pantry and got this one. I wanted some sort of relic to remind me of the evening and the tart turned out well: I love its rusticity, and how easy it is to assemble. On the plate, the thin lid of apples taste so fresh, even mid-winter, and the billowy puff pastry crust feels weightless and fancy, especially when matched with its weight of downy whipped cream.

Apple Tart

Maida Heatter’s Quick Puff Pastry

1 1/2 cups flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 sticks (1 cup) cold butter, cut into cubes

1/2 cup sour cream

5 apples, peeled and cut in half

4 Tablespoons sugar + more for sprinkling on top

juice of 1/2 lemon

1 Tablespoon white wine, such as reisling

for glaze: 2 Tablespoons peach or apricot jelly

Combine flour and salt in a mixing bowl. Add the butter and cut in with a pastry cutter until the butter is the size of very small peas (work it a little longer than you do for conventional pie dough). Add the sour cream and stir with a fork until the dough clumps. Gather the dough into a disk. Remove dough onto a lightly floured board and form into a rectangle. Chill for one hour in the refrigerator.

We will give the dough two “turns” or the process of rolling it out and folding it into thirds:

Bring the dough out of the refrigerator and give it the first turn: Roll the rectangle into a rectangle twice its size, keeping the same basic proportions. Fold the top of the dough toward you, about two-thirds over. And then fold the bottom half up over the folded dough. It’s like folding a business letter in thirds. Refrigerate for thirty minutes.

Give the dough another turn, repeating the above process. This time refrigerate for at least 45 minutes, or until thoroughly chilled.

Combine the sugar, lemon juice and white wine in a large bowl. Peel the apples, cut in half and remove cores. Slice thinly crosswise into arcs and place in the bowl. Turn gently to cover with the sugar mixture.

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

Roll the dough out so that it’s an inch larger than a standard sheet tray. Place on the top sheet tray. Arrange the apples in four overlapping rows down the tart, leaving a two-inch border on all sides. (Reserve apple-marinating juice.) Fold the edges up over the apples, making decorative pinched corners if you like. Sprinkle evenly with a couple of tablespoons of sugar.

Bake at 425 degrees for 40-45 minutes, or until the pastry has turned deep golden brown and the apples are tender.

Put the jelly in a small saucepan and heat over medium heat, adding enough of the apple marinating liquid to thin it out a bit. Brush this glaze on the warm tart and serve immediately.

blue cocoon

2011-02-15T07:57:00.003-06:00

Do you think our grapes will make it?

We've had an extremely cold winter here in Two Inlets, Minnesota, i.e., one of the coldest places in the country. It has been so consistently cold--20 below, 30 below zero--that my three-year-old has learned the meaning of the word "brutal" (and uses it often); that my mukluk boots squeak and shuffle against the bleached frozen ground as if rubbing against a piece of dry, hard styrofoam; that the truth of this arctic landscape on which we somehow make our home comes out in hushed early morning conversations with family and close friends. Just as we call friends at four in the morning to tell them to go outside and look at the northern lights, so we call them at four in the morning to ask them to check their thermometer and see if they've got 40 below, as we do, or worse. If they've got colder, then we know for sure that our thermometer bottoms out at 40 down. And this is something we should know.

A string of weeks with temperatures that loiter well below zero calls for something stronger than a mere stew, though hot liquids do help with resiliency. Last week, I needed to make something seriously warming, a recipe that forms its own cocoon.

Chicken with forty cloves of garlic should do it. This is a recipe that calls for mixing chicken with forty cloves (about four heads-worth) of garlic, herbs, a heroic amount of olive oil, and then battening down the hatches and sealing the joint between the pot and the lid with a cord of raw bread dough. The bread is not meant to be eaten but instead functions more like weatherstripping. It causes the contents inside the pot to suffocate in, and then succumb to, their own juices.

The sealed pot is essentially an oven-within-an-oven. It's almost like baking.

Armed with one of my monstrous farm-raised chickens and a promising recipe from one of my favorite cookbooks, Simple French Food by Richard Olney, I jumped in, following his recipe bead by bead. And I was not disappointed. Two hours after sealing the pot I cracked the bread, opened it up and was met with this sight: the chicken, in the very pattern in which I'd laid it down but now with a new bronze cast. Clouds of earthy, almost metallic rosemary and garlic rolled up, strong enough to fill twenty households.

Okay, so I did change one step. My chicken was muscular, so I thought it would be better to cook it a little slower for just a little longer. And I thought that a full 2/3 cup of olive oil sounded dangerous, so I scaled it back to a mere 1/2 cup. (You can successfully reduce it to 1/3, I think, and still open the pot to a passel of olive oil- and chicken juice-infused cloves of garlic.) And I added rosemary.

Not counting those little things, I followed it to the letter.

And if you could put aside the ridiculously lush, tender chicken for a second, here was the real treat of the dish: a garlic clove, falling out of its brittle paper, collapsing on a piece of toast.

Poulet "aux 40 Gousses d'Ail"

from Simple French Food, by Richard Olney

serves 4

1 chicken, cut up as for a saute (or 4 legs, thighs and drumsticks separated)
4 heads (6 ounces) firm garlic, broken into cloves, cleared of loose hulls, but unpeeled
2/3 cup olive oil
1 teaspoon salt
freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon finely crumbled thyme
2 branches celery
3 sprigs parsley
2 bay leaves
2 sprigs rosemary
flour for dough

Put the chicken, garlic, olive oil, salt, a generous amount of black pepper and thyme into an earthenware casserole, turning around and over repeatedly with your hands to be certain of a liberal and even coating of oil. Force the celery, parsley, bay leaves and rosemary into the interstices of the chicken.
Prepare a dough of flour, water, and a dribble of oil--it doesn't have to be smooth, but it should be pliable and soft enough to make a snake shape--and roll it into a long cylindrical band. Cover the casserole with a lid, moisten the ridge of teh casserole and press the roll of paste into place. Cook in a 325 degree oven for two hours and break the seal of paste at the table.

Steak in the Sauna

2011-01-20T15:05:00.009-06:00

(The sauna on the shores of Fish Hook Lake)

After being away from New York for three years I can really feel how my inner beat, which not so long ago revved in a high register, has decelerated enough to allow for browsing and its attendant benefit, the unexpected revelations that come out of small-town small-talk. For example, I was at Harvala's Appliance the other day--finally buying a dishwasher!--and wandered into the attached gift shop, a white space brightened with the bold blue stripes of the Finnish flag and the jewel-toned hues of Iittala glassware.

In the sauna section I ran my fingers over the soft cedar, the thick bowls and cupped scoops, thinking about a gift for my in-laws who have a little cedar sauna building next to the lake. Burt, the owner, joined me. As always, he wore a workshirt embroidered with his moniker, "The Mild Finlander."

I flipped through a sauna cookbook and said, "Hey, Burt. I cooked a steak in my in-laws' sauna last night. Something I've been meaning to do for years."

Heh. "I remember that we used to cook sausages in the sauna."

"No kidding."

"Ya, my uncles would bundle up sausages in layers of foil and set them on the edges of the coals, and then when we came in they'd be hot, and all cooked."

"So there's a tradition of this? Of cooking meat in the sauna?' I asked.

"Yeah, sure. People used to put all kinds of things in there."

"They had no problem, sitting there sweating, cooking next to their meat." I said.

"Heat is heat!" he boomed, a true appliance salesman.

So it seems that the sauna-cooked steak, which I had placed in the lineage of modern sous vide (immersion waterbath) cookery, has an earlier provenance, a Finnish precedent.

Every fine dining restaurant in which I ever cooked used sous vide technology--not just because it was trendy, but because everything came out of the bags perfectly cooked: bright, juicy, inviolate, pristine. We dusted veal loins with porcini dust, cryovacked them, and cooked them at 65 degrees C. (149.0 F.) for 30 minutes. We vacuum-packed brined slabs of pork belly and cooked them in 82 degree Celcius (179.6 degree F.) water for three days straight, yielding meltingly tender meat so gently and consistently cooked that it retained all of its composure, and could handle being sliced into silky ribbons the width of fettuccine. I did the same thing to cubes of quince in sugar syrup and left them for 12 hours, until they turned the bright, incandescent coral hue of wild salmon. (For more about sous vide, go here and here.)

Modern kitchens, and especially the ones taken with the more scientific approach to cooking, use Celcius these days, and that divide between Celcius and Fahrenheit long kept me from an unsettling truth: we sit in a sauna at 180 degrees Fahrenheit, sometimes 185 or 190 degrees, sometimes for 45 minutes or longer . . . and if you are as hard-core as my sister-in-law, you sit for longer and in hotter.

Yeah, that's right, we cook ourselves in the sauna at an even higher temperature than which the modern chef cooks a steak. We might as well be sitting next to our supper.

So I finally did it. I wanted to cook the steak at the normal sauna temperature of 180 instead of the chef's 140, just to account for the meat not being cryovacked. Although in a sense, when we tugged on the airtight door, we were all cryovacked. The heat inside the sauna bum-rushed the camera lens, so the pics are all warm and dozy. But there I am, in a swimsuit, sitting next to the beef. This photo, and its appearance on the blog, tells you what I will do in the name of science, and for a good steak.

Even though I've been privately cheering for this event for a few years, the steak itself was no lark--it was seriously good. First, I hunted my in-laws' drawers for the perfect dish. This little metal chafing dish, circa 1980, had good conductivity and fit snugly around the piece of filet mignon.

I rubbed the steak with salt, pepper and olive oil. We preheated the sauna and when we entered it--my husband, his dad and myself--the temperature was 170 F. Within a minute of dousing the the hissing hot rocks with ladlefuls of lake water the temperature rose to 180. Noticing that the air above our heads felt hotter than the air at our feet, we pulled a work ladder into the sauna and set the steak pan on top of it, like so:

For me, the ladder ruined the mise en scene, but this placement ensured that the steamiest air rolled around the meat. We sat until we were all fully sheeted with moisture (I noticed small bubbles on the surface of the steak, as if it was sweating, too) and then ran out into the dark, dodging pine cones on the lawn, toward the lake.

I jumped off the dock into shallow water, rubbed a few handfuls of icy water down my limbs and clambered back out. My husband and his dad, however, went fully polar--as in, completely under the 40-degree water. They came up howling in unison, slapping the lake surface and sounding like a couple of dogs in distress: "Bhoof! Bhoof!" Barks of happiness, trust me.

And we all did this not once, but three times, as is customary. I have polar beared for real in the past, once even submerging myself when ice floated at the center of the lake, and it is as exhilarating as you think it must be, but also, as shocking to the system as wet-skin contact with high voltage.

After an hour of this we hit the house, mopped off, sat at the table in our towels and each slowly dribbled a river of good beer down the throat of a tall glass. But every 15 minutes I went back to the sauna to throw more water on the rocks and to poke the steak. After 2 hours and 15 minutes, it was done. It measured 125 degrees at its thickest part.

I quickly seared the steak in a hot pan to form a nice crust on the outside--the trouble with all sous vide cooking is the lack of crust . . . it always looks sort of pallid--and then let it rest for five minutes before slicing. You tell me, perfect or what? It was buttery tender. I loved the scent of rosemary with the steak, though after awhile I couldn't be sure that what I was tasting wasn't actually cedar.

Is there a recipe here? Sort of.

I used an 6-ounce portion of beef tenderloin, a 3-inch thick filet mignon. Rub with salt, pepper, rosemary and set onto a bed of rosemary inside a small metal or glass baking dish. Of course, you can do three or four of these steaks--or more--at once.

Preheat the sauna to 180 degrees. Set the steak on a shelf or ladder near the temperature gauge, which in our case was about 2 feet from the ceiling of the sauna. Keep the temperature inside the sauna between 180 and 185 and cook, flipping once in a while, for two hours and 15 minutes, or until the steak tests 125 degrees on a meat thermometer and feels medium-rare to the touch. Keep in mind that a thinner steak may go faster.

Heat a small saute pan over high heat and add a film of canola oil. Season the steak with another sprinkling of salt and pepper and sear both sides of the steak quickly, over high heat, until dark brown. Remove to a board to rest for at least five minutes before slicing thinly and serving.

Vietnamese Shaking Venison

2010-12-29T12:50:00.009-06:00

Ah, lovely. Vietnamese Shaking Venison in front of the Christmas tree. It's become a bit of a tradition for me to cook strictly Asian food between Christmas and New Year's, and I tell myself I do it to give my body a break from all the butter and cream, but the truth is, I also crave the big flavors. The triple-threat of lemongrass, ginger and lime could cut a blizzard wind, and the rush of chili lifts my mood as surely as a few extra hours of daylight might.

For years I've been meaning to make Charles Phan's Shaking Beef from his famed San Francisco restaurant, The Slanted Door: little cubes of beef tenderloin seared in a pan until medium rare and swirled in a rich and spirited Asian brown sauce . . . but I never seem to find myself with beef tenderloin on hand. I do, however, have a bunch of frozen venison tenderloins clacketing around in my deep freezer, and I seem to remember that my friend Mai Ly (a fabulous Hmong cook from St. Paul who let me into her kitchen for a single, glorious day) mentioned that venison was very common in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. There they hunt the native Sika deer, an old strain of deer that retains its spots into adulthood. Come to think of it, maybe it was Minnesota deer hunting that drew the Hmong people to Minnesota, not the Lutheran Church, as widely thought. They certainly didn't come for the weather.

So I just went for it, cutting up the venison loin into 1-1/2 inch cubes: large enough to take a sear and still remain nice and pink inside. I followed Chef Phan's recipe for the most part, but I added a spear of minced fresh lemongrass to the marinating meat (lounging in plenty of chopped garlic and black pepper above) and I made the sauce to taste.

This is not a beautiful shot, and all should immediately notice the almost-too-dark meat impressions on the bottom of the pan--although, as an aside, I do think that Asian food can take the junkier, this-side-of-burnt pan flavors in stride . . . just think of it as extra umami. But the cooking teacher in me just wants to point out that we should always leave at least this much room between meat chunks when browning. The spaces are critical, for if the meat is packed in tightly it will sweat and steam and never form a nice crisp dark brown edge, as you see above, and never taste quite as bright either. Steamed meat not only looks different than sauteed meat, it tastes muffled. Or as we would say in our Dr. Seussian household these days, it tastes like miff muffered moof.

I browned the meat deeply on two sides, but left the sides untouched and the venison still rare inside. At this point, I deglazed the pan with the simple "shaking beef" sauce: soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, grated ginger, sugar, fish sauce, a touch of spicy sriracha, and then added lime juice to taste. (I used about two tablespoons.) By the time it hit my plate, the venison was cloaked in a rich and spicy sauce but perfectly rosy and juicy inside.

Hunters, take note! This is by far the best venison dish I've ever made. And that's bumping venison bolognese (which I set high above the traditional one) and venison chili (whose rights I will fight for) into second and third place, respectively.

P.s. Should you find yourself on the hunt for more great game recipes, be sure to check out Hank Shaw's website: Hunter, Angler, Gatherer, Cook. It is the mother lode.

Vietnamese Shaking Venison

Adapted from Charles Phan's Vietnamese Shaking Beef, The Slanted Door

Serves 4

2 pounds venison loin (a.k.a, backstrap)
4 garlic cloves, minced
1 piece lemongrass
2 Tablespoons canola oil
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 Tablespoons sugar, divided
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/2 head lettuce leaves
1/4 cabbage, shredded
3 carrots, shredded
1/2 large cucumber, peeled and sliced
1/2 bunch basil, washed, dried and ripped (thai basil if you've got it)
4 Tablespoons soy sauce
1 Tablespoon water
1 Tablespoon fish sauce
3 Tablespoons rice wine vinegar
2 teaspoons grated ginger
1-2 teaspoons sriracha (or any plain hot sauce)
2 Tablespoons lime juice, more or less

Cut the vension loin into 1 1/2-inch cubes. Peel the lemongrass until you reach a pliable center stalk. Cut off the dry ends and then finely mince the tender part. Add to the beef, along with the minced garlic, half of the canola oil, salt, half of the sugar and the freshly ground black pepper. Marinate at least one hour and as long as overnight, refrigerated.

Assemble your vegetable platter: Using your largest platter, lay lettuce leaves around the edges, then fill the middle with shredded cabbage and carrots. Ring the lettuce with coins of cucumber and sprinkle the center mound with torn basil. Or do whatever you like. Just make any sort of vegetable bed. Here's mine, for reference. Fresh torn mint in place of the basil would be good, and I might have thrown fresh bean sprouts on this if I'd had some.

For the sauce, simply combine the soy sauce, water, rice wine vinegar, fish sauce, ginger, sriracha and remaining tablespoon sugar in a small bowl. Heat a large saute pan over medium-high heat and add the remaining tablespoon of canola oil. Add half of the meat in one layer, leaving plenty of space around each piece, and sear deeply on each side.

Remove the browned meat to a bowl and repeat with the rest of the venison. When the second side of the second batch has browned, add the rest of the meat to the pan and add the sauce. Swirl to combine and heat the meat through. Taste the sauce and add lime juice, spoonful by spoonful, until it tastes rightly balanced: not sour, but vibrant. I used about 2 tablespoons. Pour the meat cubes and all of the sauce over the platter of vegetables. Serve with steamed rice.

Olive Oil Thumbprint Cookies with Bittersweet Chocolate

2010-12-21T10:42:00.004-06:00

Whatever happened to gold dragees, those shiny metallic beads? When I was a kid we used them around the holidays as cookie-toppers. Each one was the size of a b.b. and about as hard.

I woke up early yesterday, for some reason rustled up by the kid crawling in next to me at three in the morning (who immediately fell into his shallow dreaming), and in that fog between an uncomfortable doze and the realization that I should just get up, the dragees were dancing in my head: good idea or evil tooth-buster?

When I finally walked into the store, twelve hours later, I found that they didn't have any gold dragees.

The snow was starting to fly in loops by then and a thin, heavy layer of it swept across the road like a cotton coverlet. I had the repaired snowblower in the back of my SUV, cushioned at the bottom with my junky gym shoe (please ruin me, it said) and taped at the top so as not to poke through the fabric ceiling. At every stop it nodded deeply, like an old horse. Snowblowers are bottom-heavy.

(Aren't snowstorms ghostly?)

Despite the obstacles I stopped at another store--I should say, the only other one in this burg. They stock pretty much the same stuff as grocery store number one, but it's smaller and they fancy themselves just a bit shinier. You know, they carry more organic meat and the natural sour cream that I love, and they might just have gold dragees.

But sorry, today the world was shutting down early and someone wasn't thoughtful with the candy order. I drove the 25 miles home wondering: do they even still make them?

I'm usually not one to get fixated on the candy condiments, but I came up with this little olive oil cookie accidentally last summer, when I was in the process of trying to develop a decent olive oil pastry for a tourte des blettes, that sweet-ish swiss chard tarte from Nice, France with raisins and pine nuts. And I spent so dadblamed much money in its development (probably at least 10 dollars of olive oil) that when I finally realized how failed crust number four could be rolled into a legion of delicious little sugared shortbread cookies, I vowed I would top these rich dubloons with a big fat gold dragee. As in golden for expensive! But also because I remember my mother pinning down the centers of her sugar cookies with a single dragee, like an golden center button on a cushion.

These are cookies for people who are indifferent to cookies, even in the holiday season. I am one of these strange folks. I can take or leave the sweets. I show up for salt and sour . . . and honestly, I dream about the meat: the slow-cooked pork, the pancetta, the pates and all of that. And I've come to realize that, for me at least, I cannot eat both fatty meat and sweets. To maintain self-recognition, I must pick one of the two.

So you can imagine how a non-sweet cookie throws that. To bring them further into dessert territory, I poked the balls with the end of a wooden spoon and in the last few minutes of baking filled the divot with some of my homemade strawberry jam from 2009. (Thumbprint cookies are a good use for last year's jam; but always be sure to boil it first.)

Still, these cookies are less sweet than the average--but also, I think more interesting. They're not poppers but nibblers: good with tea, with coffee, with a glass of wine.

But now I'm caving to the Christmas fairy and thinking I should top these cookies, which I baked last night, with a drop of dark chocolate, the element of baking that is second-best to gold. So I took one bittersweet bar (Nestle's Chocolatier 62%, which I think is good chocolate for the money--not Valhrona, but good enough for this) and chopped it finely, and then put it through my favorite tempering process, one I learned from a pastry chef I once worked with who was into shortcuts: Melt 2/3 of the chopped chocolate in a double boiler and when it's melted and hot throw in the final 1/3 chopped chocolate. Take it off the heat, stir and let cool a bit, stirring every minute or so. When it thickens and feels room temperature, use it.

It should hold its temper--at least 75 percent of the time. And if the dot on top of your cookies blooms and snows over, do you really care? I just don't. For home cooking, this is as precise as my chocolate work gets.

Oh, and I did some googling on the dragees. They do in fact still make them, in both silver and gold metallic, but the feds have gotten ahold of them and now they are considered non-edible decorations, and completely banned in California.

Contraband! All the merrier.

Olive Oil Thumbprint Cookies with Bittersweet Chocolate

makes 50 cookies

2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

6 Tablespoons unsalted butter, cold and diced

1/2 teaspoon salt

4 Tablespoons + 1/2 cup sugar

1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil

1 large egg yolk

4-5 Tablespoons milk

1/2 cup raspberry or strawberry jam, heated, strained and cooled

3 ounces dark bittersweet chocolate (62% percent or more)

Mix the dough as for a sable tart crust: mix together the flour, salt and 4 Tablespoons sugar and cut the butter into the flour mixture with a pastry blender, mixing until it has the texture of coarse meal. Add the olive oil and mix with a fork until combined. Whisk the egg yolk with 4 tablespoons milk. Pour in the egg mixture and mix until the dough comes together, adding the last Tablespoon of milk if necessary. The dough should be moist, but still crumbly. Turn out onto a counter and press the dough into a lump. Let sit for 30 minutes.

To bake: Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Put the remaining 1/2 cup sugar in a small bowl. Scoop the dough by the heaping tablespoonful and roll into balls. Roll each ball in the sugar. Press onto a cookie sheet in rows, forming a little divot in the center of the cookie with your thumb or the end of a wooden spoon. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, or until light golden brown. In the last minute or two of baking, pull the sheet from the oven and fill the divots with jam. (I drop the jam into a quart-sized plastic bag and snip the end; it makes an ersatz pastry bag.) Bake another minute or two to set.
Cool cookies completely.
To temper chocolate: chop the chocolate finely with a heavy knife. Bring about two inches of water in a small pot to a simmer. Set a metal bowl in the pot so that it sits over the water. (Or use a double boiler. But this is how I do it.) Add 2/3 of the chopped chocolate to the bowl and let it sit. After a few minutes it will melt. Add the rest of the chopped chocolate and remove from the heat, taking care not to let any water drop into the chocolate. Stir off heat until the chocolate thickens and has cooled to room temperature. Scoop it into a pastry bag or a quart-sized ziploc bag. Snip just the very tip of the bag. Fill the jam divot up with a bit of chocolate. Cool before packing away in a tin.

Best Darn Chickens 'Round

2010-12-20T04:09:00.000-06:00

Venison, pork, now chicken . . . the month of meat continues. To see how I wrestle with a plump farm-raised chicken from my local farmer, check out my piece in the Minneapolis Star Tribune this week: Chicken (not so little). In the pan above I am gently cooking chicken breast pieces in brown butter and their exuded juices with a little tarragon and parsley. It's a simple dish, but if the chicken has flavor, as this one did, it will floor you.

For folks in rural Minnesota, here's the contact information for the chickens. This is the second year I've gotten my winter freezer chickens from Mary's Best Darn Chickens 'Round in Frazee, and there's much to recommend them, besides the killer name. But put your order in with Mary in the spring; she does sell out.

butchering a pig in the yard, part two

2010-12-10T12:51:00.007-06:00

Before I began the second side, I had to take a minute to regard the impressive accordion of fatback--and to give thanks to these Amish farmers who did such an amazingly fastidious job on this hog. I counted three specks of sand, all of which I simply picked off the surface, and those probably blew in on the wind.

You'll note that they skinned the hog. It was my choice: they said that they didn't scald hogs, but they'd burn and scrape off the hide, which sounded time-consuming and disgusting and I wondered how clear the skin would actually be when they were done . . . and as they lacked refrigeration, I didn't want to make the choice to bring heat near the meat.

So even though I do appreciate a nice bit of crackling skin now and then, I had it "skunned" (as they say around here).

I realize that I omitted some key steps in the preceding post; namely, the ham, the hock and the organs. I cut off the hams, wrapped them in huge dishtowels and shoved them into my refrigerator; the next day I drove them to my cousins' butcher shop, two hours away, for smoking. They dry-cure the ham and then smoke it over some top-secret blend of wood to which I am not privy. It might have some fruitwood in it, and it gives the meat a distinctive background tang.

The organs were dropped into cold water to chill, then packed into a cooler overnight. The liver was clear and lovely. I cryovacked it straight-away and dropped it into the freezer, where it will wait until I make pate grandmere later this month, for Christmas.

And the head. I had intended to spare you, but since my 3-year-old got an eyeful, so shall you all. He seems not to have suffered any emotional trauma from this, or from the deer-abattoir of the week before. In fact, two days after this was taken, as we were sitting down to a breakfast of fresh sausage patties and toast he said, "Mama? Our pig tastes ged." This from the kid who's coming off a month-long mac-n-cheese fast? Monumental.

You might notice that the ears are missing. Yeah, the feet are gone too. Either they tossed them (impossible to skin, the ears and feet must be scalded) or they saved them for themselves. I would have liked to have dealt with them myself, as I really do like braised, stuffed trotters--that lip-smacking gelatin, the rich meat . . . so delish--and I've been wanting to try breading and frying the ears. So next year I will ask them for these parts.

(I think this just became an annual event.)

I will definitely need to prepare an outdoor burner for the scalding, though. The last time I tried to scald pigs' feet and ears inside the house was almost four years ago, when one of my cousins came up to process a hog for us. He did the dirty work and I walked away with two buckets of precious parts.

I could almost smell the braised trotters over de puy lentils--if it weren't for the enormous plumes of pig-stall fumes traveling from the pots up to the rafters--and inside the pots, of course, the hair remained stubbornly stuck to the skin. My husband came inside, shot me a bloody look, stacked one pot on top of the other and threw the stinking contents into the woods. I remember being thankful. At the time little Hank was still in the hopper, just about two weeks to the finish line, and at that moment the chef lady toddled over to the glider, sat down and surrendered herself completely to the squeamish pregnant lady.

Okay, so, we have plenty of meat here. There's no need to mourn the second loss of the feet. We will catch up with them someday.

Second side. You see that sheet of white fat covering part of the ribs? That's the leaf lard, the stuff I've rhapsodized about before.

(Look at the kid: No big whoop, just a pig's head, and he's back to truckin'.)

This leaf lard may not look like much, but it's just one step away from the most decadent, old-fashioned pie crust ever--minus the kidney. On second thought, maybe not. All the kidneys I've sampled in the past have always had that twinge of strange acidity to them, a not-so-curious sourness, but these, spanking fresh and coming from such a healthy, wholesome pig (an Amish pig, for christssake), I vow to try. I should put them together. Some steak and kidney pie, perhaps?

The second time around I took better care of the tenderloin. It was easy to remove in one nice piece.

Okay, so this is how I removed the ham from the other side, too. I pulled the hog to the edge of the table, made an incision above where I thought the joint might be, then started pushing down on the leg. The shiny ball joint bobbed to the surface, and I simply cut around it.

Next I separated the shoulder from the abdomen. I cut it a little less generously this time: more belly, less shoulder. Not consulting the Mangalitsa pdf anymore, this side I cut up intuitively, following the divisions that felt most natural. It turns out I fabricated this one American-style.

We got out the sawzall again, to remove the chine bone once more. We're old pros now.

Spareribs against blue sky . . . what a beautiful sight. More of the second side after the jump.

A nice pearly-pink side of spareribs. I can almost smell the indirect grilling now. A spice rub, salt dust, some oak and old grapevine smoke . . . that's all this will need. I will be saving this guy for the first light of spring.

Here we cut the pork loin from the belly, doing an o-kay job. Next year I need to work on my loin removal. I think they could have come out cleaner and more complete.

I love this belly pic. It's fatty but meaty. And it's not nearly as chubby as some of these hogs that chefs are butchering now for charcuterie. They're tearing into hogs that weigh upwards of 400, 500 pounds. I can see how the mature hogs would make exemplary hams and salamis, but honestly, this one had enough fat for me. I bagged and sealed at least ten pounds of pure lard, some in large pieces for making lardo, the rest for grinding up or rendering down.

As I worked on this pig a lot of decadence began to swirl in the menu in my head, but one thing I am surely making is chicken fried in lard. (What about chicken-fried liver fried in lard? Or just chicken-fried lard? Add some bacon to that? If we eat anything like this we will have to start a project involving the dry-stacking of field rocks from the front 80.)

Here I am dealing with the second pork shoulder in the warm afternoon light. The first I left in one big piece; the second I will split into Boston butt and picnic.

I am following my plane of incision, the point of my knife seeking the joint.

This is most of it, minus the hams, the head and the organs.

It wouldn't be a proper butchering day without making something straight-off. I was by myself in the kitchen so I didn't have the time to make sausage that day, but I did start a pot of leaf lard to rendering.

Mostly, I hung out with all my belly, none of it destined for the smokehouse. (My family makes great bacon, so I can just buy that.) No, I had other plans for these slabs. Two of them were going down for pancetta, some of them I'm going to cook sous vide and then give them a black maple glaze (recipe here) and I really would like to try to make a chinese hot pot with the fresh belly. I worked in a Chinese restaurant for a year in NY; when the Chinese cooks said pork they usually meant pork belly, sometimes stir-fried and other times braised until tender.

This one is for my mom. She makes a wonderful slow-roasted Boston butt rubbed with thyme, garlic and sage. She lies about how long she cooks it, saying, oh, three hours or so. No. She bakes it for almost five hours, until the edges of the roast turn into a salty, garlicky, black-peppered scaffolding of sorts, barely holding up the soft, collapsed pudding of meat inside. It's amazing.

I know that all of the recipes I've mentioned thus far are visions. Bona-fide ones will follow, promise.

But here's what I used to make my pancetta, from Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn's excellent book, Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing. I have one already rolled and frozen in a few batches, and the second one is coming out of the cure today.

how to butcher a pig in your front yard

2010-11-30T10:57:00.004-06:00

First off, my chef friends would correct me. I didn't really butcher the pig, because it came to me already killed, skinned, halved and chilled; I fabricated it. Which is to say, I cut it up. Technically correct or not, fabricate is a terrible word to describe all the decisions that accompany the division of an entire animal. I mean, when you've got a 260-pound pig on your table you're not constructing or fabricating the thing, you're working reductively to cut its royal hogness into smaller, more manageable, roastable parts.

I've cut up countless chickens, some ducks, a baby lamb, a 100-pound pig and, as of last week, two deer. But none of it prepared me for this hog, which I ordered a few months ago from an Amish farmer. We arrived at his farm in September looking to supplement our smallish harvest of potatoes and squash, but when we saw the fleet of pigs roaming on the open fields snacking on peas and grass, I signed myself up for a whole pig. These were just as I like my meat: raised honestly, organically but not organically-certified, and going for 75 cents a pound instead of the usual 3 dollars-plus. I figured that if the farmer was going to skin and halve it for me, I might just keep a cheap thing going and cut it up myself.

No problem!

The farmer called me from the Amish communal phone (I imagine this thing as an vintage booth sitting at the nexus of four field corners) to tell me that they were processing the hog that evening and that I should pick it up the following morning at 10. At precisely the hour we pulled up and parked in front of their house, a 1960's rambler retrofitted with no electricity and no running water, the walkout cinder block basement functioning very well as a root cellar and vegetable store.

The farmer and one of his strong, apple-cheeked sons lifted the hog, which they had skillfully spliced into two halves down the spine and then sandwiched back together again, onto our trailer. We dropped the head and the organs into a cooler, racheted the behemoth down, balanced a piece of insulation on top to keep the sun off of the meat, and then sped home, taking the paved roads.

It was pretty close to perfect butchering weather: high-30's overnight, low-50's in the daytime. Ideally I would have liked the daytime temp. to be around 40, but the pig was thoroughly chilled and remained so for the duration of my work.

One thing became immediately clear: the fat outweighed the lean on this pig. The farmer said that his pigs were mixed breed, of duroc, berkshire, and something-else parentage. So I knew it wasn't a "the other white meat" sort of hog, but that it was what they call Chuffy: old-school, husky, bred for lard and intramuscular fat, the perfect sort of meat for curing and smoking.

I knew this, but when I cut into the belly my eyes still bugged. Check out the girth. (Don't mind my fey hand.)

Here is where the confusion set in. The thing was so fatty I couldn't see my way out. I ran inside, grabbed my laptop and went to woolypigs.com, the website for mangalitsa pork that I had been mooning over for weeks, and straight to their mangalitsa butchery pdf. Mangalitsa are old-fashioned, curly-haired Hungarian hogs which the Austrians--people who love their speck and bacon and sausage--have never given up. The thick pads of lard are high in unsaturated fat and oleic acid; they cure very well and the dark meat, threaded through with rivulets of fat, tastes uncommonly good. Check out the Austrian farms section of Wooly Pigs, where you can witness crazy Austrians pressing entire boned-out pig halves into single blocks of speck or rendering out cauldrons of lard, squeezing out the brown cubes of cracklings (known as greaves) before folding them into dark rivers of chocolate. Chocolate! I have worked with Austrian chefs, have watched them whip lard with pumpkinseed oil and spread it on bread as if it were cream cheese, so I know they have it in them to combine the two kingdoms of sugar and lard. They are masters of fat.

My husband soberly punctured the greaves-chocolate daydream, begging for his health: "Don't do it." (But I may have to!)

Professionals will note that I should have removed the tenderloin before separating the shoulder from the belly. Yes, that was my first mistake, and I did lose the tip. But for the rest of the first side I honored the Mangalitsa pdf and did what it told me to do.

And that involved the sawzall. Enter, husband. Yes, I used a new blade.

This cut separated the belly (which at this point still includes the ribs) from the loin. The chine bone, the dull-looking one at the top of the loin roast, needs to come off at some point, too.

But next I cut off the ribs.

Aw, stunted tenderloin.

And then I cut a nice roast from the top of the loin, the fattier and thicker end nearest the shoulder. In my family we just call this "the pork roast we like," or the "bone-in loin roast, you know, shoulder end" but I will shorten that to Thielen Family Roast. Give it a spice rub, roast it slow and low on the bone, and after a couple of hours the ribs will be both crisp and tender and the loin, buffetted by its little bone cage, will remain juicy. You know, I really should have cut it bigger. At least one more ribs' worth.

(Did you see that fat cap?)

On to the shoulder. I throw big parties around here, so I left it large. All I needed to do here was remove the hock.

My father-in-law, background hands in this operation up to this point, came in to help me on this one. A retired doctor who was a general practitioner here in town for over thirty years, he has seen it all: surgeries, autopsies, etc. And now, hog on the table. He instinctively started directing my knife. "Just follow your plane of incision," he said. I followed, feeling like a med student, but the joint obediently popped and snapped open at my knife.

After knocking down the first side we took a short break, so I will here, too. Part II of the Amish Hog Takedown will follow shortly.

And for more on Mangalitsa hogs, go here, to a piece I wrote for a local blog.

guts + glory

2010-11-24T09:58:00.004-06:00

This is the second year we’ve hosted deer camp at our house, and by now I’ve learned that my preconceptions about it were all wrong.

The fraternity is high, but that’s not the entire point. There is some drinking and stogey-smoking, but not an unreasonable amount. There is spirited conversation, but everyone wants to hit the pillow early, to stem the pain of the predawn rise. At deer camp, coffee is king, no one is cavalier, guns are handled like newborns, and everyone looks forward to the prize with mixed emotions.

This year our party brought down two does on the first day. That night we feasted on the venison terrine I made with meat that a friend got during bow-season, more or less following a recipe from Charcuterie, by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn. I wanted a more rustic-feeling pate, so I kept the mixture coarser than they described. With some Dijon and my pickled plums, it tasted earthy but tame. Its surprising mellowness set the mood.

The guys brought in the liver (enormous, the color of espresso) and what was left of the heart (as Darrin, with real bravado, pierced this doe through the heart from a distance of 300 yards), and the tenderloins. I rolled those in a mixture of toasted ground coriander seed, clove and black pepper and then sautéed and butter-basted them to medium-rare--magenta on the inside, molasses-brown on the outside. They were deliciously metallic and woodsy at the same time.

The next day, we dealt with the two does hanging from the wood shed trestle. Darrin left the yuck—the innards—back in the field, and after hanging eight hours in the high-30’s degree night air, they were thoroughly chilled. My husband Aaron found the beauty in this:

And Darrin and his brother Todd got to work taking off the hides.

Their other brother Brian and I set up the cutting boards and started trimming meat as quickly as they could throw it our way. Actually, we soon fell far behind them. Removing every scrap of silverskin and fat is putzy work, and you have to remove all of the pungent tallow and every thread of gristle if you want really clean-tasting meat.

Many paper towels were used, and we had a bucket of light suds with a drop of bleach. For a front-yard operation, our scrupulousness bordered on the nerdy.

A few hours later, as the sun slipped in the sky and we started to feel a cold charge in the air, we brought the full tubs of meat inside to begin the business of grinding, wrapping and cryovacking.

Finally, we stood around the table of packages in a ceremony known as the Great Divide. Who gets what? Who wants to haul it? And whose wife eats venison?

This one does. (I hear of many who do not.) I took a few roasts, sifting through for haunch, the tenderloin from the smaller doe and a few pounds of ground.

cream of celery soup

2010-11-08T12:04:00.003-06:00

When it comes to gardening my enthusiasm runs in spurts: rich veins of activity followed by stretches of slothfulness. I'm big into ordering seeds, planting, daily harvesting and, of course, cooking and preserving. But prepping beds, weeding, propping up plants . . . not so much. Thank god for my husband, who picks up most of the slack. But our garden is pretty large, so most of the time we don't get to the fine work, especially the hilling and blanching.

And blanching, apparently, is what celery needs.

B and C, friends who keep an unbelievably lush and productive garden, seemingly in another growing zone, fitted some PVC tubes over their fledgling celery in early July so that it could grow in pitch darkness, thick and pale and tender. Ours sprouted quickly into wild fans of dark green stalks, mostly hollow, with full heads of dark green, pointed leaves--and there they stayed.

Earlier in the season I served the celery raw, with a bagna cauda (hot anchovy-olive oil bath) for dipping. The celery stalks were a little stringy but made up for it in strong, grassy celery flavor--almost, but not quite, reaching the level of intensity of Asian Celery. If that scrawny Asian celery constitutes 10 on the celery-flavor scale, and storebought is 2, then mine is about an 8.

So what to do with these clumps, the last of it? Well, I thought I should make something that downplayed its texture and highlighted its bold flavor, obviously its strong point. Cream of celery soup? Would that be good?

Oh, yes. Instead of adding the automatic potato I thickened it with rice, like you do a bisque, for an extra-velvety texture. In fact, this is just the kind of break-out, long-distance home run of a dish that makes a vegetable like this one--destined for our dust bucket--turn around and get itself put back on the seed list. We'll grow it again, maybe next year with shades. If we get to it.

Funny, but as I was pureeing the soup I was talking to a food-editor friend (and just how annoying is it when someone is blending while you're on the phone?) and she was talking about an amazing restaurant she'd just visited, Miller Union in Georgia. I looked it up and saw this review and their signature dish, Farm Egg Baked in Celery Cream. Serendipity. And another great use for my spindly homegrown.

Cream of Celery Soup

As the celery sputtered in the butter I was reminded of waking up on Thanksgiving morning to the aroma of my mom cooking onion and celery in butter for the stuffing. She used an illustrious amount of butter--measurable in sticks, not tablespoons--in which the cubes of vegetables swam, perfuming it. The cloud-scent drifted from the kitchen to hang over my bed, my cue to get up and pitch in.

So I think I'll make this for Thanskgiving. In little cups, it will be the perfect starter.

serves 4; makes 6 cups

3 cups chopped homegrown or farmer's market celery
1 cup chopped celery hearts and leaves + a pinch for garnish
1 leek
1 kohlrabi
6 Tablespoons butter
1/2 teaspoon salt + to taste
20 turns black pepper (generous pinch)
6 Tablespoons jasmine rice (unwashed)
5 cups light chicken stock (substitute veg. stock or water if you like)
2 dried bay leaves (or the snipped half of a fresh one)
1/2 cup heavy cream + more for garnish

Wash the celery and separate the leaves and centers from the stalks. Chop the stocks until you reach 3 cups. Chop the hearts and leaves and measure 1 cup.
Pare the kohlrabi thickly and cut into medium dice.
Discard the floppy outer leaves and the leek top. Split the leek down its belly, from top to tail, and run water into the leaves. Cut into medium dice, roughly.
Heat the butter in a wide pot over medium heat and add the celery, leeks and kohlrabi. Season with salt and pepper. Cook for 15 minutes, or until the vegetables are softening. Add the rice, chicken stock and bay leaves. Bring to a simmer and cook for 25 minutes, or until the vegetables are fully tender. Add the cream and stir to combine. Taste for salt and add more as needed.
Puree the soup in two or three batches in a blender (carefully, as blending hot liquids is a little risky), and push the soup through a fine mesh sieve into a clean saucepot. Reheat the soup gently before serving, garnished with a little swirl of cream and some chopped celery leaves.

Whoa!

2010-11-04T09:54:00.001-05:00

Stop the homesteader hamster wheel. I am not ready! My knives are dull, my deep-freezer needs defrosting . . . but the pig I ordered from an Amish farmer (his place above), the free-range baby stuffed with field peas and milk and not a little squash, is indeed a'coming. Early next week in fact. I will line a truck with plastic and go pick it up three days after deer hunting opener. The farmer will skin it, split it in half and hang it in the chill air overnight; all I'll have to do is cut and portion it, which shouldn't be that hard.

My uncle, a butcher, says that I should have no problem. "Call the guy back and tell him to keep it clean and that you want the kidneys hanging, for the leaf lard. Use a meat saw or, heck, your sawzall for the roasts. Just get a new blade."

So armed, I'm heading in. Wish me luck, and speed, and stay tuned for the hog-butchering day highlights. Headcheese, fresh bacon, leaf lard, chorizo, fresh breakfast sausage and pancetta are all on the schedule.

One of these little grazers is mine!

the simmered supper

2010-10-29T14:55:00.002-05:00

Maybe it’s the silvery chill outside, the steady drizzle washing the color out of the trees, or maybe it’s just some inexplicable hardwired Midwestern stuff, but today I woke up craving meat and potatoes. Not just meat but BEEF, bolstered with some of our fresh potatoes chilling out in a cooler on the cement floor of my husband’s studio. (GOT to get that root cellar next year. I pine for nothing more fervently than that.)

Lately I can’t shake these Teutonic visions. I’ve just picked up three more of my treasured Time-Life Foods of the World cookbooks, all from the Eastern Europe and surrounds: The Food of Germany, The Cooking of Vienna's Empire, and then my score, Quintet of Cuisines: the loose-ends, the collection of five fringe cuisines, including Poland and South Africa. So that lovely chuck roast I have in my fridge will meet its end in “kavalierspitz,” or Austrian boiled beef, a dish on the opposing side of onomatopoeia—that is, something that sounds underwhelming but tastes so divine. And with it, for kick, a chive sauce and some freshly grated horseradish, the very roots that came up in my flowerbed again this year. I know no greater revenge than microplaning them to sweet, snowy smithereens.

But about the boiled beef, you know it’s not just a traditional dish in Vienna—it’s more like an art or an obsession. At Danube in NYC (R.I.P.), Bouley’s haute Austrian restaurant, we made a very precise version of the classic. We started traditionally with a large pot of water, not stock, and then dropped in some bruleed onions, charred to blackness face-side-down on the flat top, some oxtail, some marrow bones, vegetables, allspice, peppercorns, fresh bay leaves . . . . and then the top blade roasts, known as chicken steaks on the east coast. The chicken steak is a long lozenge of beef with a sinewy strip of elastin running through its middle and a shaggy cap of fat on one side. (Yes, leave it on!) I've never seen a chicken steak in the Midwest but chuck roasts flank the meat case around here like burly defensemen and the ones from my family’s meat market are always nice and marbled, so I will gladly use one. Go big D:

And then if you add these bruleed onions for caramel color and an underlining smokiness:

you’re off to a good start. I was too lazy to round up the oxtails and marrow bones of the Danube version so instead I lifted an idea from the Time-Life Viennese book, to use chicken wings to add viscosity to the broth. They were great: didn’t obscure the beef flavor in the broth and they also made convenient kavalierspitz-submergers (it tends to float and crest the surface), much better than the always-advised plate, which just seems to totter on top of the iceberg.

Later on, as we were digging in, as I crooned over the tender meat and ladled on more sauce, my husband an I had a little discussion about which is better cold-weather food: boiled dinners or hotdishes. (We’re entering winter and, with it, wool socks, hot drinks and these sorts of hypotheticals.) He’s a hotdish guy--especially when I subvert the ‘50s and make them with homemade “cream of ____“ soups, or my own rolled tator tots, recipes I dare not share because they are so ridiculously time consuming—but I’m a fan of a carefully boiled roast, whether pork, beef or lamb, the kind of meat that falls into the broth like your favorite winter hat falls into a puddle, soft threads disintegrating on contact. I quickly reach my limit for cheesy noodles (around, like, December) so I obviously cast my vote for the simmered supper, all tenderness and molten golden broth.

Kavalierspitz

Both recipes are taken from my time cooking at Danube, so it makes sense that similar versions can be found in East of Paris: The New Cuisines of Austria and the Danube, by David Bouley, Mario Lohninger and Melissa Clark, a book I also worked on. If you want to dress this up or make it into a holiday meal, add a large piece of beef filet during the last 45 minutes-1 hour, depending on its thickness. Stick a thermometer in it periodically and pull it out when it reaches 125.

4 pounds beef chuck

4 large chicken legs

2 quarts water

4 teaspoons salt + ½ teaspoon at the end

1 onion

1 teaspoon allspice

10 juniper berries

1 teaspoon black peppercorns

2 sprigs thyme

1 head garlic, cut in half

4 bay leaves

2 large carrots

2 large parsnips

3 purple-shouldered turnips

2 kohlrabi

10 fingerling potatoes

fresh horseradish root, peeled (optional)

Chive Sauce

1 cup white or wheat bread cubes

1 whole egg

2 egg yolks

3/4 cup whole milk, or to cover

2 small Bubbie's fermented dill pickles, or about 3 Tablespoons chopped cornichons

2 heaping Tablespoons sour cream

1/4 cup champagne vinegar

1/4 cup broth from the kavalierspitz

1 1/4 cup canola oil

3 Tablespoons chopped chives

salt and pepper to taste

Heat a cast-iron pan over high heat and line it with a piece of heavy duty aluminum foil. Cut the onion in half cross-wise and remove most of the onion skin, but leave the root and blossom ends attached. Plant the onion on the foil, cut side down, and cook until blackened, about 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, heat the water in a large pot. When it boils add the beef, salt and chicken legs. Bring to a simmer and skim off all the foam.

Make a sachet from cheesecloth, wrapping up the garlic head, allspice, juniper berries, black peppercorns and thyme sprigs, and add to the pot, along with the bay leaves.

Peel the parsnips and trim the ends, and the same for the carrots. Cut them all in half lengthwise.

Trim the turnips and kohlrabi more thickly with a paring knife, because they're fibrous about 1/4-inch down, and cut them in halves if small, quarters if large. Wash the potatoes and trim out any eyes.

Simmer the meat for 3 to 3 1/2 hours, keeping the broth at a low burble, skimming the fatty broth at the edges now and then. The meat should test tender when poked with a thin fork. Add the sachet and the vegetables and cook another 30 minutes or so, until the vegetables are tender.

Carefully lift the meat and vegetables to a platter (I use a skimmer). Strain the broth through a fine mesh. Cut the meat into thick slabs, be sure to salt and pepper well, and lay onto plates, preferably something with higher sides. Position a few vegetables and potatoes around the meat and then ladle on some broth. Serve with the freshly grated horseradish and some of the chive sauce.

To make the chive sauce, first hard-boil an egg, peel and chop; set aside.

Place the bread cubes in a bowl and cover with milk, turning now and then to coat.

In a blender cup, place the egg yolks, pickles, sour cream, champagne vinegar and broth from the kavalierspitz and blend on high. Dribble in the canola oil slowly, until a thin mayonnaise-like emulsion forms. Add the chives. Transfer the sauce to a serving bowl and stir in the chopped egg. Serve with the kavalierspitz, and use any leftovers to sauce a potato salad. Great stuff.

gleanings

2010-10-17T23:16:00.004-05:00

I woke up in the darkness today and was lucky to find on first grope my thickest wool socks, fluffy and pancake-brown, perfect for sitting in the kitchen and watching the sky turn blue.
By that time I heard the first shots from duck hunters out on the creek (they were literally jumping the gun on daybreak), I had drunk half a pot of coffee and was monitoring a pan of beets in the oven--slicked with oil, salted, peppered, littered with herbs, steaming to softness under their lid and at some point starting to caramelize and wrinkle on the bottom.
I was surprised to find that baked beets actually smell better than muffins and take the chill out of the air just the same.
When you have as many roots as I do, packed in the fridge, stuffed in the pantry, you really shouldn't be baking anything else. I brought in all the beets, carrots and parsnips from the garden yesterday, leaving the celery, kale and swiss chard in charge. The favas beans, safe in their insulated pods, think it's spring again and are sprouting flowers. The broccoli doesn't know whether to stop or start, either. I picked at the gleanings, a corona of single flowers, but still tender and good for throwing into our morning eggs.

It didn't seem like the parsnips did very well this year but you never know until you dig, and it was to my surprise that we yielded an entire dump truck load. (About a meal here.)

As you can see the final beet harvest wasn't bad, but it would have been much better if the gophers hadn't sampled them. Next time, guys, just go ahead and finish what you take.

But today, by the time the beets had cooled enough to peel I stood in the kitchen, fully lit and myself fully caffeinated, and rubbed off their skins with a towel, and I thought, oh, the roots are just coming in and already I'm sick of beet salad . . . with walnuts, with goat cheese, with blue cheese, with what else? It is possible that I've overdone it in the past. So I came up with this one, a good thing, but maybe a stretch of geography. (Are there many beets in Japanese cuisine?) I tossed the roasted beets with a crunchy toasted almond and sesame gomasio (that's Japanese crushed sesame seed salt), some maple, soy and balsamic, and served it all over japanese-style beet greens, simply boiled and seasoned. With a side of creamy mint-green wasabi-spiked cucumber salad, and a thin slab of grilled chicken, I had the stuff to hit the exact coordinates of my craving and, bonus, I'd worked my way through about 1/32nd of the vegetables choking my fridge.

Beet Salad with Almond-Sesame Gomasio

beets

1 1/2 pounds smallish beets

2 Tablespoons canola oil

1 Tablespoon water

3 cloves garlic, crushed and peeled

2 sprigs rosemary or thyme

2 teaspoons maple syrup

2 teaspoons soy sauce

1 Tablespoon balsamic

1/4 cup whole almonds

2 Tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

2 Tablespoons sesame seeds

salt

pepper

1-2 bunches beet greens or 1 bunch collards

sesame oil

Preheat the oven to 350. Place the beets in a 9 x 13 pan and drizzle on the canola oil, water, salt, pepper, garlic cloves and herbs. Shake to coat and cover the pan with aluminum foil. Roast for 2 hours, or until tender when poked with a fork. (Baking time will depend on the size of the beets.)

Leave to cool until warm and peel, rubbing off the skins with a paper towel and slicing off the tops and bottoms with a paring knife.

Cut the beets into quarters and toss with the maple syrup, soy sauce, balsamic. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Combine the almonds and extra-virgin olive oil in a small saute pan and heat over medium-low heat. Cook, stirring, until the almonds turn golden brown. Remove the almonds to a mortar (or a cutting board) and throw the olive oil into the beet salad.

Add the sesame seeds to the almonds, season strongly with salt and pepper, and crush finely. (Use the flat side of your knife to crush if you're using a cutting board.)

Bring a 1-quart pot of water to the boil and season with salt. Add the beet greens and boil until very tender, about 4 minutes. Drain and press on the greens to remove excess water. Chop roughly and season with salt, pepper and sesame oil. To plate, fan out the greens and cover with the beets. Sprinkle with almond-sesame gomasio. (The photo above is light on it; before I dug in I hit it with much more gomasio. Delicious.)

wasabi cucumbers

1 large hothouse cucumber, peeled

1 1/2-2 teaspoons wasabi paste

1 garlic clove, finely grated

2 Tablespoons mayonnaise

2 Tablespoons sour cream

2 teaspoons rice wine vinegar

1 teaspoon mirin (optional)

1/2 teaspoon sesame oil

salt and pepper

To make the cucumber salad, slice it lengthwise and then crosswise into thin arcs. Mix together the wasabi paste, garlic, mayonnaise, sour cream, vinegar, mirin and sesame oil. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Mix the dressing into the cucumbers and serve right away.

taste, memory

2010-09-17T13:20:00.010-05:00

The new Food Arts came today and I inhaled it. It’s the industry rag for chefs and it’s chock full of gossip, openings and closings. But I love the menu previews the best, where the chefs show a few dishes from their new menus and then give verbal run-on recipes (“take that jus and reduce it to a syrup . . .”). They read more like poetry than instruction.

I spend all my time writing really precise recipes now, measuring black pepper by the 1/8 teaspoon, but when during my first really serious cooking job I remember being struck by the simple beauty of a celery root puree recipe the other garde manger (cold appetizer cook) passed to me. It had arrows showing the order of composition and, also, the passage of time:
“brown butter-->shallot-->celery root-->sweat out all the way-->white wine, reduce-->fill up with half-milk/half-veg stock.”

Written on frayed-top pages ripped from mini-notebooks, recipes were folded into thick squares and passed quietly through the kitchen. As in any good game of telephone, their contents changed in the hands of the most recent player, the last cook’s sauce tasting totally different from the first cook’s. In this way, the recipes were transmitted almost orally, and these scraps were just shreds of folkloric history.

Nowhere in such a recipe does it say how much to add. Whether you're making a small batch of sauce or a large batch, when you deglaze with wine it is assumed that you add enough to just cover the bottom of the cooking pan, and when you add stock you add just enough to reach to the top level of the solids, the vegetables, scraps, etc.

In fact, these recipe had a lot less to do with what you do (because a line cook should know) and more about when, and making any sense of it at all depended on a shared visual knowledge. When the butter has browned, add the shallots. When the shallots have softened, add the celeriac (thinly sliced, of course.)

Here’s another one.

Monk sauce refers to the pool of burgundy sauce we served with the pan-roasted monkfish. Made from a base of reduced veal stock (75%) and chicken stock (25%), if was fortified with port wine, cherry tomatoes, of course mirepoix (celery, onions and carrots) and then set to steep with cilantro stems and white peppercorns. Finally, we strained it through a fine mesh chinois, and then again through cheesecloth. The cook here wrote “fishnet,” and it’s possible he had sexy stockings on the brain, but I’m pretty sure he meant cheesecloth. I don’t remember whose recipe this was. My guess, he was European.

What’s interesting here is that these recipes don’t concern themselves with the time it takes to do something. What I mean is this: Recipes for home cooks give you two clues to move on to the next step: a visual cue (when something has browned, for instance) and then a time (about 10 minutes). Cooks recipes don’t specify how long, but rather concentrate on what level of cooked-ness it should have, which is far more precise.

I wish that recipes for home cooks were written this way because I feel like the double-pronged direction (the time plus the visual) sometimes trips up the reader. I know it does for me, on the rare occasion that I follow a recipe. How should you know which one to follow? (Pete Wells’ NYT essay this week touches on this. Love it.)

For that matter, how’s a person supposed to know when the vegetable is done “sweating?”

You know what? You’ll recognize the beauty when you see it. A vegetable has finished sweating when it has fully succumbed to the heat. The slices will look wilted and show the beginning spots of rusty caramelization. It will have surrendered its juices to the butter. At this point add the stock and cook it a little further into submission . . . and after that, when you puree it, it will taste more purely of that vegetable than you thought possible. Give it a taste and virtually file away the memory of that flavor. In the end, I’ve come to realize that taste-memory is far more precise than any recipe, no matter how loose or how detailed.

eggplant bonanza

2010-09-14T07:34:00.004-05:00

That glut of food down the hill, or the fenced patch of weeds and trailing vines formerly known as "the garden," is making me more magnanimous than usual. I'm chucking vegetables into pots, stripping kale from its stems at warp speed and lopping off way too much good stuff when I cut up a tomato, just to get through them. But I'm telling you, I want to get these vegetables taken care of, and they just keep coming, Strega Nonna-style.

My eggplants are glorious. Check it out. Scads of shiny baby eggplants, weighting down the stalks like iron lanterns.

Store-bought eggplant do not compare to fresh eggplant. They're silkier, paler and when cooked slow and low, they will melt in your mouth. The only problem with growing them is that they come all at once. I've been throwing them on the stovetop to smoke and wither down every chance I get, and I even froze a bunch of them for making babghanous, the smoky eggplant and homemade mayo dip that I adore.

But the other day I peeled back the burnt skins and pureed the smoked eggplant, pumped it up with farm eggs and a pretty healthy pour of heavy cream and slowly baked the custard. I wouldn't bake it uncovered again, strictly for visual reasons, as the skin it formed on top was an unappealing leatherish army green, but still, the custard was delicious in small doses and carried a great deal of smoky eggplant flavor through. (My thought: it might be better as a sformato: baked in individual cups in a water bath. Next time.)

Tonight I took the leftover eggplant custard and mixed it into a batch of steamed basmati rice with dill and toasted almonds and found myself stumbling onto something pretty great. Smoked eggplant dirty rice? Oh my god. And it's vegetarian. No matter which way you lean on the protein spectrum, this stuff rocks. But the next time I may forgo making the custard; I'll just add the crushed smoked eggplant to the sauteed onions and almonds, add the rice, bury a cinnamon stick and a few bay leaves in it, and steam. (Sorry, there's no recipe. It was pure improvisation.)

But my absolute favorite way to make eggplant comes from this little Uzbekistani restaurant on Brighton Beach Boulevard in Brooklyn. We stumbled up from the beach one day, our noses leading us to this restaurant whose windows, open to the street, were exhaling great puffs of smoke. My gut identified it as pork. Inside, two guys were spinning shaskliks (kabobs: some pork, some lamb rib, some ground lamb) over chunks of charcoal as if caught in a hot game of foosball. We ordered a couple of those, and they fully lived up to the smoky hype drifting out onto the street, but the revelation of the day was the eggplant and tomato "salad," a dish of shining cubes of purple eggplant, some tomato and a few spent petals of onion. The entire thing had been cooked into submission, and in an ungodly amount of olive oil, too.

But that day I discovered something: I hadn't been cooking my eggplant near long enough. And another thing: if you cook the eggplant in its skin for a long time in olive oil, like a French confit, it comes out as soft and luscious (and nearly as sweet) as a marshmallow. I kid you not. So this is my rendition of the Uzbek eggplant-tomato, studded with cinnamon and bay, honey and plenty of olive oil. In our house it goes by the feckless name "eggplant stuff," but we think of it with great reverence.

tomato and eggplant confit

1 pound eggplant, preferably a small variety

1/2 large onion

2 beefsteak tomatoes,

3 garlic cloves, peeled and thinly sliced

2 bay leaves

1 teaspoon honey

1/2 cinnamon stick

juice of 1/2 lemon

1/2 cup canola oil, divided

1/4 extra-virgin olive oil, divided

1/2 teaspoon salt

10 turns black pepper

Heat half of the canola oil in a large sauté pan over medium-high heat. Add one-third of the eggplant and fry until dark golden. Remove to a paper-towel lined plate and repeat with the remaining eggplant, adding the rest of the canola oil as needed.

Blot the eggplant well and season with a little salt.

Peel the tomatoes: stick a fork in the center of the tomato and hold it over the gas flame until the skin pops, rotating the tomato. Peel the skin and cut the tomatoes into chunks.

Heat the 2 Tablespoons of olive oil in the pan and add the onion. Cook over medium-high heat until darkened around the edges. Add the garlic and cook for another two minutes.

Add the tomatoes, cinnamon stick, bay leaves, honey, salt and the rest of the olive oil. Shake the pan and don’t really stir; turn the vegetables over very gently to combine. Turn the heat to low. Cover the pan and cook over low heat until the eggplant is soft and there’s liquid in the pan, about 20 minutes. Uncover the pan and cook over low heat until the thick liquid clings to the vegetables, about 15 minutes. Turn out into a shallow bowl and serve hot, warm or at room temperature.

chanterelles, for real

2010-09-07T22:29:00.004-05:00

I had given up the hope of ever finding chanterelles here. It seemed that our dusty-bottomed, pine-needled woods would never give them up.

But then one day, as we were sitting down to a proper diner out on the porch (both the dinner and the alfresco part being rarer and rarer these days . . . ) a tiny truck pulled up, rusty but agile, clearly a feral sort of woods truck. And our friend T. popped out, looking a bit wild himself, and loped to the house swinging a lovely wooden basket which was, as he came closer, full of chanterelles!

"I took these to the OBT and no one wanted them." He laughed, knowing full well the value--both gastronomic and economic--of these mushrooms.

(That's Osage Bait and Tackle to the uninitiated, a bait store within a bar within a restaurant--of the freezer-to-fryer variety--and that night night anyway, it was full of chickens.)

I accepted the basket gratefully before asking him to join us for dinner, right after which I fetched my stiff brush and started carefully brushing their tops and gills, using a paring knife to take off their dirty bottoms and gently scrape away the tough skin there.

They were pretty lovely specimens. I handled chanterelles often during my cooking days and these were just as I remembered, if not fresher-looking than the ones we used. I didn't need the mushroom book (though I would eventually take an identifying spore print); I knew immediately that they were safe because my hands recognized them--their putty-ish orange surface, as if they'd been sculpted from latex. Also, unlike their lookalike, the ominous-sounding Jack O'Lantern mushroom, these grew individually and not in clumps, and their gills didn't always connect from the base to the tip; they showed the occasional run or clump, which is a chanterelle giveaway.

Beneath them he had tucked some hens of the woods, too. They're tougher, and longer-lasting, so I thought I'd confit them in olive oil sometime that week. But the chanterelles, we were eating those as soon as possible.

I'd messed up wild mushrooms in the past, by over-decorating them . . . not this time. I was going to keep it simple and let the chanterelle flavor come barrelling through.

So I mixed up a batch of pasta dough, using this Mario Batali recipe, and then, with some help from my wee assistant, started making the tagliatelle:

I browned a stick of butter (yes, a stick; these are chanterelles!) in a pan, added a couple of sprigs of rosemary and took it off the heat. The butter rose in a heavy foam, the bubbles spilling over the rosemary, spewing sweet pine scent. Then I added the sliced chanterelles and the garlic, along with a little olive oil to keep the butter from overcooking, and sauteed until the mushrooms wilted and tasted cooked through. I then added about a cup of fresh corn kernels and cooked it all another minute.

When the tagliatelle was done, it was time to toss and to add grated parmesan:

and then to sit down with to our plates:

My brother pointed out that I should have kept it simpler--just brown butter, chanterelles. What was up with the corn? I bluffed and said it was a classic pairing, corn and chanterelles. I looked over and his protests seemed to be muffled by an enormous tangle of tagliatelle. It was either what I said or what I made that caused him to buy it. At any rate, it was a dish that couldn't be made any other week of the year, in any other place.

cast-iron a.m.

2010-09-02T15:47:00.004-05:00

Cast-iron carrots and parsnips. It may seem an odd choice for breakfast, but with a chunk of good bread and a little bacon on the side (you can see mine steaming in the background) fried roots for breakfast are heaven.

This is really private-dinner material, a sideline kind of thing that only assumes center of the plate real estate when you're alone, or when an odd day prevents you from making a full dinner. Yet a mess of butter-fried roots is an oddly satisfying meal, if you take the time to fry everything long enough--twenty minutes or longer to cook them to full tenderness--and it gets really good if you can just trust the pan, turn your back and let it burn a bit. The charred bits are addictive, and the sweet parsnips and carrots hold up well against the slight bitterness of the black edges.

This was something I used to make for myself during college, one of the weird little dinners I devised as I was finding myself in the kitchen. I'd cut the carrots and parsnips into long daggers, all of pretty much equal thickness, and then fry them in an illegal amount of butter until spotted black on the outside and tender within, and then I'd pour the whole pan over a mound of plain white rice to catch the sweet butter and root juices.

But on Saturday morning we just mopped up the juice with day-old ends of baguette, a charred root in one hand and a piece of bacon in the other. And it was not a bad way to kick off the weekend.

the baby garden

2010-06-08T15:14:00.000-05:00

I can't remember a June garden equal to this one, and these shots were from last week. Off the charts.

fry + flip

2010-05-29T14:30:00.015-05:00

Chance and circumstance worked together back in 2004, and I found myself cooking in a Chinese restaurant for a year. It was an unintended blip in my French training, but the things I learned during that year really improved my cooking: the Chinese chefs taught me the details of texture, the difference between steamed and boiled, between fried-moist and fried dry. I also learned that a good stir-fry is nothing but a jumble of shrewd, quickly-made decisions—and if you’re me and non-native to stir-frying, a bit of luck, too.

First of all, all of the pieces of a stir-fry must be equal in size. If Wei-Chan--the Chinese chef of the wok line--was stir-frying vegetables, they were all cut into more or less equal pieces, usually no larger than the size of a quarter.

Secondly, the wok must be hot and the work conducted in it fast. If you’re going for an authentic stir-fry, the wok must be so hot that a drop of water dances on its surface. If you can’t reach this temperature in your wok, switch to your widest bottomed pan and crank the heat as high as it goes.

I am always puzzled by the recipes I see for stir-fries with meat, because they’re nothing like the method I learned from the Chinese chefs. First of all, they cut the meat into very small or very thin pieces (usually when it is half-frozen, which makes it easier) and then marinated the meat with a combination of soy sauce, sugar, shaoxing wine, sesame oil, bean paste, ginger or garlic, whatever is appropriate to the dish.

Then, they cook the meat first, by dipping it briefly in a wok full of either hot oil or boiling water for about a minute. Either way, this initial cooking sets the meat--which is essential. If not for the initial cooking, the meat would ooze juice when cooked again, and oozing juice will dilute and muddy the sauce, and you will have gravy.

Hard and tough vegetables, such as broccoli or green beans, get a quick pre-boil, too.

See, the final stir-frying isn’t really cooking everything from a raw state, but rather quickly frying the cooked parts together and binding them together with a slightly thickened sauce.

The cornstarch slurry is key. I remember that Wei-Chan kept a small dish of cornstarch/water slurry next to his wok, and after he had tossed together his stir-fry and the hot pieces were flying into the air and falling back onto each other in a cluttered heap, he would grab a pinch of cornstarch from the white mass settled just below the milky water in the bowl, and fling it into the wok. Within seconds, the heat would bind the cornstarch to the vegetables and the meat, and suddenly the whole thing glimmered and took on a paper-thin layer of shine. Done right, every single piece of a stir-fry should be enrobed in a thin layer of sauce.

Obviously, what I’m describing isn’t easy. Performing this operation perfectly takes years--but it's an admirable pursuit, because you never forget a great stir-fry.

Cantonese Chicken Stir-Fry

You can freely substitute ingredients. The method is what matters.

Serves 3

1 pound boneless chicken breasts
1 teaspoon sugar, divided
1 Tablespoons + 1 teaspoon cornstarch, divided
2 Tablespoons Chinese Shaoxing wine, or sherry
1/4 cup water or chicken stock
3 Tablespoons soy sauce, divided
1/2 teaspoon salt, + to taste
1/4 teaspoon black pepper, divided
2 Tablespoons canola oil
1 pound asparagus, tough ends snapped off
2 cobs fresh corn or 1 package of shiitake mushrooms, sliced (optional)
1 bundle scallions (green onions)
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 Tablespoon grated fresh ginger
2 Tablespoons pine nuts
1 Tablespoon sesame oil

Cut the chicken breasts into nickel-sized pieces and drop into a bowl. Add half of the sugar, 1 tablespoon cornstarch, half of the shaoxing wine, 1 Tablespoon soy sauce and half of the salt and pepper. Mix to combine and marinate for at least 30 minutes, or as long as 4 hours.
Wash the asparagus and slice into 2-inch long pieces. If using the corn, cut off the cob. If using the mushrooms, trim of the stems, wipe the caps clean, and slice thinly.
Wash the scallions and slice thickly on the bias.
Mix together the water or chicken stock, remaining ½ teaspoon sugar, 1 teaspoon cornstarch, 1 Tablespoon shaoxing wine, and 2 Tablespoons soy sauce and stir to combine.
Fill the wok (or a large skillet) with water and bring to a boil. Add the asparagus and simmer one minute, or until crisp-tender. Scoop out with a skimmer and set in a colander to drain. Add the chicken to the boiling water, simmer one to two minutes, or until just cooked through in the center, and drain.. Wipe out wok/skillet.
Heat over high heat and when it starts to smoke, add the canola oil. Add the ginger, garlic and pine nuts and cook 30 seconds. Add the asparagus and corn or mushrooms and cook until hot. Add the chicken and cook another minute.
Add the bowl of mixed liquids and cook until the liquid bubbles and thickens. (If this doesn’t happen within 30 seconds, your wok is not hot enough.) Add the sesame oil and turn out onto a platter to serve.

morel minority

2010-05-28T14:22:00.001-05:00

I found some, in my yard! More than one! For years now I've been developing recipes for one morel: asparagus with one-morel vinaigrette, a small morel compote to daub on soup . . and now maybe I can make a batch of creamed morels that will cover more than a few pieces of grilled bread.

In my mania, I began to see mushrooms everywhere. Funny, but it's usually in the fall that I see these white fungus mushrooms . . . .

Ha! That's because it's a piece of rained-on kleenex! Must turn down the mushroom-goggles now.

Sunday Morning Corn Dogs

2010-03-26T22:26:00.002-05:00

I think it is time to devote some space to kid food—seeing that a two-year old is my most constant, devoted, and demanding customer.

Seriously--and this is classic two-year-old stuff--he sits at the counter and orders. As if there were a menu. “I want tatos! And trees! (Broccoli.) I want fries!” I know I’m not the only mom of a two-year-old who experiences this. As soon as you teach them to express themselves they turn into articulate little highnesses. Overnight.

For example, last week we drove through the bank drive through and he yelled, “Fries! I want a big fries!” The teller smiled; that was good for two tootsie rolls.

Yesterday I introduced him to a pot of corn grits with cheddar cheese and after a few bites he said, “what’s this name?”

Grits.

“I like grits. Grrrr. . . . its!”

It’s holy fun to say, this new thing called grits, and sufficiently porridgy enough to win his love. This is a kid who likes his mush. Mashed potatoes are the golden grail, but we are trying to branch out.

When he was a baby I fed him all kinds of interesting purees, without much resistance: smoked turkey and wild rice, squash, pineapple-oatmeal, beet-pear. (That last one was good enough that I served it and made it later for us).

But then his mouth clamped shut and ever since I’ve concentrated less on the particulars of what he eats and more on just getting him to eat something. It’s pure calories that concern me. I haven’t stopped trying to introduce him to things, but it does grow frustrating. You would think he would like a very plain rice pudding with raisins (no) or grilled cheese sandwiches (nah) or fried fish (nope). This week he likes pears and hot dogs and meatballs--and fries, the only constant in our lives--and when he was a baby he loved kimchi (the spicy fermented Korean cabbage), which is a wild card. I’ve come to understand that kids are exploratory beings and prone to waffling—then again, maybe only by making such radical choices can you discover what you like.

Not a lot of vegetables in this line-up, you notice, but it’s not from lack of trying. (What we lose in veggies we try to make up in fruit.) Broccoli he likes, if you call them trees. An attempt to pass off cauliflower as a white tree was not successful. He is just one of those kids who likes pale, starchy food. Its appeal is pretty universal for the underage set.As his 5-year-old friend says when she comes to lunch, “I like paste. Things like bread and noodles.”

So I figured that the pasty cornbread batter would reel him into liking corndogs. I like them, although they’re often a little greasy for me. Then I remembered a recipe for corndogs that I had bookmarked a long time ago but which I had hoped, for the sake of my health, that I would never get around to making at home. But then one Sunday recently we woke up and it seemed like a good idea for brunch. Kind of like a corn muffin and a sausage, right?

Not really. They were delicious—far better than anything you can pick up on the fly—but still deep-fried. It was little heavy before noon. You know the breakfast is too heavy if the acidic bite of strong coffee does nothing to cut it. I’d try them again, but for dinner.

The boy, characteristically, was more interested in the shape than the taste. He nibbled a bit, then waved it in the air, not eating it but instead using it to conduct a little fanfare for paste on sticks.

Corn Dogs

Recipe from Gourmet Magazine

This recipe calls for grilling the dogs before cooking them in the batter, but I boiled mine and they were good.

8 hot dogs

1/2 cup plus 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour, divided

About 8 cups vegetable oil, divided

1 1/2 cups cornmeal

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon sugar

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/8 teaspoon cayenne

2 large eggs

1 1/4 cups well-shaken buttermilk

Equipment:

a grill pan; 8 wooden ice-pop sticks; a deep-fat thermometer

Oil grill pan, then grill hot dogs over medium-high heat, turning occasionally, until lightly charred on all sides, about 5 minutes total. Transfer to a plate and cool slightly, then insert a wooden stick into each hot dog. Put 3 Tbsp flour on another plate and roll hot dogs in flour to coat, shaking off excess.

Heat 3 inches oil to 350°F in a deep 3-qt heavy pot over medium-high heat.

Meanwhile, whisk together cornmeal, remaining 1/2 cup flour, 2 Tbsp vegetable oil, baking powder, sugar, baking soda, cayenne, and 3/4 tsp salt in a medium bowl. Add eggs 1 at a time, whisking well after each addition. Whisk in buttermilk.

Transfer some of batter to a tall glass, filling it almost to the top.

Working in batches of 2 or 3, dip hot dogs, 1 at a time, into glass of batter to coat (add more batter to glass if necessary), then fry, turning occasionally, until batter is cooked through and golden-brown all over, about 3 minutes. Transfer corn dogs to paper towels to drain. Return oil to 350°F and refill glass with batter between batches.

'Beggies!

2010-03-22T17:45:00.001-05:00

In the vegetable world, the good keepers get taken for granted. If you ask anyone who was reared before trucks began criss-crossing the country to bring summery vegetables to our frozen winter landscape, they will usually express something other than fondness when it comes to the root crops: beets, squash, turnips and parsnips.

But I’ve noticed that they reserve their highest venom for one tuber in particular: rutabagas. “Beggies!” spat a local source, close to 90 years old. “Feed ‘em to the deer!” (Something about his tone betrayed the hidden truth, that perhaps he’d eaten plenty of them in his younger years.)

My mother’s creamed rutabagas, a slamming side dish that she brings out in the wintertime to accompany a long-cooked pork roast, changed my mind about rutabagas forever. I’ll just tell you how it goes, because it’s more method than recipe. She boils chunks of rutabega to fork-tenderness, then whips them, gradually working in enough heavy cream to add lightness to the dish but not so much as to mask the flavor of the creamy vegetable itself. And knowing my mother, it’s safe to guess that there’s probably a bit of butter in there as well. (Safe to add gobs.)

Although some of the farmers who homesteaded this area clearly grew sick of eating rutabagas, Finnish culture celebrates them. They’re hoisted to prominence in a dish called “lanttulaattikko‏“ a tongue twister of a baked dish that translates to rutabega soufflé, which doesn’t sound all that appetizing in our language--about as yummy as “duck soup” sounds. Best to stick with lanttulaattikko‏.

I emailed a friend of mine in Finland to ask for the recipe. We had cooked together at a couple of fine dining restaurants in Manhattan where we were more apt to be shaving truffles than coarsely mashing ‘beggies, so my habit of inquiring about the most traditional of Finnish specialties usually amuses him. He sent the recipe, along with a note: “This is totally basic comfort food, so don’t expect miracles. Jazz it up and get back to me.”

I don’t know if what I did qualifies as jazzing it up or not. Mostly, I just translated the recipe from the metric (taking a wild guess at what a decaliter of rye bread crumbs might look like), added a few sliced almonds to the bread crumb topping for extra crunch, and popped it in the oven.

When it emerged, my mother happened to be in my kitchen and she was happy to help me taste-test. We scooped out a corner just as soon as it hit the trivet, and while it was unreasonably hot, the success of this dish was immediately apparent.

The top billowed and crested before finally settling into a wrinkly nut-brown cap, crusted with addictive bits of buttery bread and almonds. The rutabaga and the cream melted into a soft-textured pudding, earthy and sweet and laced with nutmeg. It was substantial yet light, and after a few bites my mom and I put down our forks at the same time and said, “Thanksgiving.” Do you know how good something has to be to make the shortlist of Thanksgiving side dishes a full six months in advance, and by unanimous vote? Sometimes comfort food does perform miracles.

Lanttulaattikko‏

Finnish Rutabega Souffle

1 1/2 cups fresh rye bread crumbs, divided (from 5 slices rye bread)
1 extra-large rutabega, or two medium (2 ¼ pounds)
1 medium russet potato
¾ teaspoon salt + more for salting water
¼ teaspoon black pepper
3 eggs, separated
1 cup cream
2 Tablespoons sugar
3/4 teaspoon grated nutmeg
½ cup (1 1/2 ounces) sliced almonds
3 Tablespoons butter, melted + more for baking dish

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
Make the rye bread crumbs by pulsing slices of rye bread in a food processor until coarsely ground, leaving some chunks for texture. Measure ¾ cup into one bowl and ¾ cup into another.
Cut the top and bottom from the rutabega with a heavy knife. Stand it on one end and cut off the peel in slabs. Cut the rutabega into fat slices and then into 2-inch cubes. Peel the potato and cut into 2-inch cubes as well. Combine them in a 2-quart pot and cover with water and add some salt to taste. Bring to a simmer and cook for 20 to 25 minutes, or until the rutabagas are soft when pierced with a fork. Drain.
Separate the eggs. Put the whites in a bowl. Add the yolks to one dish of rye bread, along with the cream, nutmeg, black pepper and salt. Mix to combine.
Add the sliced almonds and melted butter to the other bowl of rye bread crumbs and toss to combine.
In a large bowl, whip the whites and sugar with a mixer until soft peaks form. In another bowl, whip the rutabega/potato mixture until as smooth as possible. (It will still have some lumps.)
Butter a 1-quart baking dish. Add the egg/cream mixture to the rutabagas and mix well. Fold in the whipped egg whites. Pour the mixture into the dish and top with the reserved breadcrumbs. Bake at 375 for one hour, or until golden brown on top and beginning to pull away from the sides of the dish.

cheeky

2010-03-15T23:50:00.004-05:00

This photo kills me.
My husband snapped this in a farmer's market in Riga, Latvia, circa 1998. It was held in a chilly and cavernous concrete warehouse and all the vendors wore fancy paper tiaras and, as you can see, many coats at once. I love this woman's obviously work-worn coat and her tireless cheer. I love the dramatic showing she's giving the pig jaw. I love that it is special, a mite better than the others, charcoal-spotted . . . dammit, a half-a-pig-jaw worth a hoist.
Pig's jaw . . . even those who claim to use everything on a pig, including the squeal, might consider the jaw exempt. Traditionally, I believe it has been thrown to dogs. I can't think of a single recipe that uses it . . . maybe soup? If so, that's thrift at its finest. (Though you note, the jaws cost less than the pieces of the head.)
I think I got around to posting this tonight because I have had pig on the brain all day. We're going in on pigs with some friends this summer. They'll spend the summer rooting in their second garden and we'll process them in the fall. The boy has already named ours Old MacDonald. Cute, but I have a feeling it might change.
So anyway, come next fall, this could be me.

goop and goo

2010-03-12T09:57:00.006-06:00

This is the footpath crossing our driveway. Black quicksand it is, as dark as texas tea and as sticky as bittersweet chocolate fudge. Each step ends with a loud sucking sound.
Some years spring comes dramatically here: the ice cracks and shrinks on the lakes, and warm air eats pockmarks into the snow dunes. But this year, spring is weepy--slow and steady and dripping. Hurry up! I want to get into my flower beds!
(My new favorite blogger--a funny, funny Minnesotan--describes this week better here.)
What does it all mean for my life in the kitchen? For one thing, we're still craving winterfare, the foods that pad so as to shield you from the arctic wind. I made split pea soup last night, for christssake. And then Hank wanted to try a brownie, and how do you deny a two-year-old his first brownie?

I found a recipe online, courtesy of The Wednesday Chef courtesy of Alice Medrich. (Holy blog-surfing this week! Unusual for me.) We had to decorate this serious brownie, this salute to dark chocolate, with a silly sprinkling of "nums," or m & m's.
This is the raw shot, but they didn't look much different when baked: more solid, obviously, but still tasting just like a lick off the chocolate cake spoon. Because they're made with cocoa instead of chopped dark chocolate, these brownies are deeper and stickier (and maybe slightly less interesting . . . ) than the Martha Stewart brownies, but they also cost about ten dollars less to make. Noteworthy, if you're into cheap, decadent, gooey things, which I am.

Recipe here:

then we had a little lamb . . . a tender little baby lamb

2010-03-03T15:00:00.007-06:00

Friends from New York City ask me what it’s like to live in the country and sometimes I don’t know where to begin, or how to explain the differences between living there, inside the buzzing hive of Brooklyn and here, distinctly outside, beneath the moon-washed sky of the rural north.

I grew up here, so moving back home was a familiar return. The reasons I love it are both dense and infinite, blurred by the intensity of my childhood memories smacking up against the present. So when pressed with that question I just pick something, one detail. Lately I might say something like, “It’s great. I have a big chest freezer full of local farm-raised chickens and I just picked up a whole baby lamb. Packaged, I mean, split into roasts and chops. It weighed just fifty pounds at processing!”

Silence. I’m sure they think I’ve gone a little loopy. I was the girl who, two years ago, was gushing about scoring marked-down boots at the sample sale, and now all I can talk about is a rare adolescent sheep.

A new chest freezer has eaten up all my available shoe money. It looms large and signifies a lot of things. For starters, it allows me to select the meat I want to eat all winter. Chickens? Pork? A quarter beef? Venison and Lamb? (Each fall I pick my protein cocktail for the winter; when you're dealing with whole animals, an assortment wouldn't fit.)

Secondly, keeping everything frozen requires some planning, especially because I like to defrost meat slowly in the refrigerator or in a bath of ice cold water. But even this feels right, like working here in the kitchen should involve planning and slow processes. Maybe until now I’ve been craving the time for my intentions to unfurl, for food projects to stretch out and find their necessary shapes; for old ideas to come to fruition.

Like the baby lamb. This year I knew I wanted some lamb in the freezer, but I didn’t want a mature one; I needed to find a baby, sixty pounds or less.

Back in New York I worked in a restaurant where we cooked an entire baby lamb every night for dinner service. It was a true milkfed baby and weighed just thirty-five pounds dressed. It was fork-tender, pale and tasted so unlike the ruddy full-grown Colorado chops I knew that I would have sworn if was veal if not for the quarter-sized lamb chops.

Other cultures--the Greeks, for instance--like their lamb young, too. I think that at a certain age, lamb begins to take on the muskiness of mutton. Some people like the flavor but I usually find that lambs processed at a weight of 125 taste too strong for me. The fifty-pounder still tastes like lamb--but calmer, sweeter and more delicate.

I called my cousins. They have a butcher shop in Pierz, MN, and they’re accustomed to my picky requests (and my mother’s picky requests, and my grandmother’s picky requests . . . .)

They called the next day with good news: the farmer said he’d bring in a 50-pounder. A few days later I drove down to pick up my lamb and ever since I’ve been defrosting a package a week, progressing slowly through the bounty, and making sure to save one leg for Easter.

I made a very exciting batch of golden yellow lamb curry last week, but this recipe suits the fine meat a little better, shows off its youth and tenderness.

Norwegian lamb and cabbage stew

Serves 4

This traditional recipe—a boiled dinner of lamb and cabbage—has simple spicing but no garlic. It relies of the spiciness of the peppercorns and onion, and the earthiness of the lamb. Lamb neck works well here, but so does lamb shoulder.
Serve with boiled potatoes (mashed a bit on the plate to soak up the juices) and green beans.

3 pounds lamb shoulder or neck, cut into 3-inch cubes, preferably on the bone (ask your butcher to saw for you)
1 Tablespoon canola oil
2 1/2 teaspoons salt, divided, plus to taste
1 sweet onion
2 Tablespoons black peppercorns
2 large sprigs rosemary
10 allspice berries
1/4 head green cabbage, cut into 2-inch squares
1 medium rutabega
9 cups water
Heat a heavy soup pot over high heat and add the canola oil. Season the bones and neck with 1/2 teaspoon salt and brown the meat on all sides; remove.
Peel the onion carefully, keeping the root end intact. Cut in half lengthwise and add to the hot oil in the pot. Brown deeply, and remove. Pour out the oil, and add the meat and onion back to the pot. Cover with the 9 cups of water.
Make a sachet out of a square of wet and wrung-out cheesecloth: put the peppercorns, rosemary and allspice in the center and tie up the corners into a tight package. Add the sachet to the pot and bring to a simmer. Skim off any foam and excess fat and cover the contents of the stew with an offset lid.
Bring the liquid in the pot to a soft, inaudible simmer and cook for 3 hours, or until the lamb tests almost fully tender when poked with a thin fork. Skim off excess fat from time to time.
Season the broth with the remaining salt to taste.
Add the rutabega and cabbage and simmer very slowly for one more hour, or until the vegetables are fully tender.
Serve the stew with boiled, buttered potatoes.

bahn mi-mad

2010-02-03T11:35:00.005-06:00

I make an effort to keep my lunches unpredictable and varied because I feel that eating the same thing at the same time every day isn't good for us; it's something an old dog does. I base this assumption on the hunch that people are meant to take in as many tastes, textures and nutrients as they can.

But when it comes to the Vietnamaese bahn mi sandwich, I’m a plodding old hound ambling up to her dish. There have been stretches of time—the winter of 2008, for instance—when I ate bahn mi sandwiches for lunch at least four days out of seven. I allowed this in the hope that indulging the obsession might cause it to eventually run out of rope, that I would someday just get sick of the deliriously good combination that makes up a bahn mi sandwich: the charred sweet sheaves of meat, tangy strings of pickled carrot and daikon radish, cilantro and cucumber all bound together beneath a cool blanket of mayonnaise . . . a swipe of liverwurst to add background, a bullet of fiery red chili sauce for heat, and the sum of this ensconced in a softer, kinder and gentler-to-the-mouth version of the classic French baguette.

Of course the boredom never came. How could it? There’s just too much going on here, and all of it is good.

I was in Los Angeles this week and found an excellent bahn mi at a food truck parked outside a museum. Like New York, LA is a city gripped by an obsession with both bahn mi sandwiches and portable food trucks. If for some reason you haven't heard, large trucks such as the kind that serve treats at fairs are staffed by excellent chefs and are equipped to cook and serve food anywhere they can park and unfold a counter. They’re on the move, parking themselves at a different meter every day, sometimes twittering their location to a devoted band of loyal foodies and fans. Many of the trucks in LA are devoted to tacos, but some serve fancy hotdogs, others southern barbecue, and more than a handful serve bahn mi sandwiches.

When I spotted one last week the pang of missing my favorite Brooklyn bahn mi shop quickened my pace across the street. Would it measure up to Hanco? Would they be as good as the bahn mis in the St. Paul Asian markets? Would they have bubble tea, too?

Oh yes, yes and yes. I ordered a grilled pork bahn mi and watched them layer it on: a smear of mayo, a curlique of sriracha, a thatch of carrot pickle, a crown of cilantro.

What is this madness and why is it so addictive? This is a sandwich with genuine vivid energy, a phenomenon that only seems to happen with two cultures run smack into each other. No doubt the bahn mi probably wouldn’t have come to be if the French hadn’t colonized Vietnam and introduced liver pate and baguettes into the cultural lexicon. But thank god the Vietnamese knew which things to steal and which to keep and that they had the impeccable taste to combine them.

soup whims

2010-01-14T11:51:00.002-06:00

For me, hunger has always ridden shotgun to procrastination.

This is why, in 1994, caught between a budding gourmet culture (running on what the Silver Palate began in the 1980’s) and a hippie/veggie campus mentality, I found myself at hunching over a blender in a corner of my living room at three o clock in the morning, pureeing squash soup. It goes without saying that I was not finished with the paper whose due date was looming. No, shrinking. Vaporizing. For some reason the outlet in the kitchen didn’t accommodate the blender, and for some reason I was elaborately liquifying instead of just assembling my midnight snack, but whatever the case I couldn’t ignore my rumbling belly any longer.

I also couldn’t, unfortunately, shush the machine. I remember two things about this moment in great detail: the ragged look on my roommate’s face when she opened her door and the bright flavors of the soup itself. A shade not unlike International Orange (the soup, that is), it pulsed with flavors of cooked apple and fresh ginger. Not only did it fill me, but it helped me to turn up the pressure by burning up a few hours that I couldn’t afford to lose.

I think that you’re either a pureed soup person or you’re not. I love a well-made pureed soup, a bisque or a veloute. My husband, on the other hand, will suffer quietly through an entire bowl of pureed soup. Somehow in watching him rhythmically string together the smooth spoonfuls I will be able to sense his dissatisfaction, as if he were telegraphing to me in Morse code his wish for a little texture.

So these days when I consider the possibilities for transforming all the squash still leftover from the garden into dinner, I remember to start with whole aromatic spices--to flavor not just the soup but its steam plume, too--and to add something to chew on. And I try to begin this process at a reasonable hour.

Squash soup with wild mushrooms and corn

Serves 4 to 6

1 large onion, diced
4 Tablespoons + 2 Tablespoons butter
2 cloves garlic, minced and divided
3 Tablespoons tamarind puree (can substitute orange juice)
1 1/2 teaspoons harissa, Moroccan chili paste (any hot sauce will work here)
1 teaspoon coriander seed (substitute 1/2 teaspoon ground coriander if necessary)
1/4 teaspoon cumin seed (substitute ground cumin if necessary)
1 teaspoon whole allspice (substitute ½ teaspoon ground if necessary)
4 cups cooked pureed squash, from a buttercup or butternut squash
5 cups water (or half-chicken stock/half-water)
2 Tablespoons brown sugar (optional)
3 ears corn on the cob
8 ounces shiitake mushrooms
1 Tablespoon minced fresh oregano (optional)
maple syrup, for garnish
hot chili powder, for garnish
salt and pepper to taste

For the cooked, pureed squash, cut a large orange-fleshed squash in half and scoop out the seeds. Sprinkle both cavities with salt and pepper and dot with butter. Wrap tightly in aluminum foil and bake in a 375 degree oven (cut-side up) for 45 minutes to 1 hour, or until very tender. Cool squash slightly before scooping out the flesh. Pass the squash through a sieve, measure out four cups and reserve.
Heat a large soup pot over medium heat and add the onions and 4 Tablespoons butter. Season with salt and pepper and cook until lightly golden and tender, about 20 minutes.
Heat a small sauté pan over medium heat and add the whole spices; cook until lightly toasted. Grind in a spice mill or mortar and pestle until fine. Add the allspice.
Add the spices, one minced garlic clove, tamarind and harissa to the onions and stir to combine. Cook for 5 minutes. Add the squash and water or chicken stock and bring to a simmer. Season with salt and pepper to taste and cook slowly for 20 minutes to let the flavors come together. Add the brown sugar if the squash you used isn’t very sweet.
Puree the soup in four batches in a blender. (It’s a good idea when blending hot liquids to lay a thick towel on top of the lid to catch any spurts.) Push the blended soup through a sieve into a clean pot. Taste for seasoning, adding salt and pepper as needed, and reserve until ready to serve.
Cut the kernels off the corn cobs; remove and discard the shiitake stems and slice the caps thinly.
Heat a sauté pan over medium-high heat and add the remaining 2 Tablespoons butter. When hot, add the mushrooms and the remaining minced garlic and cook, stirring, until wilted. Add the corn and cook until just tender, about 2 minutes. Season with salt and pepper to taste and add the oregano.
Heat the soup to steaming. Ladle into bowls and top each with a generous spoonful of mushrooms and corn. Garnish each bowl with a swirl of maple syrup and a pinch of hot chili powder.

Squash Minestrone

Serves 4 to 6

To save time, you can substitute a can of cooked navy beans for the dried beans. For directions on cooking and pureeing squash, see the above recipe.

3/4 cup dried navy beans
pinch of baking soda
4 cloves garlic, divided
7 slices thick-cut bacon, diced
1 medium sweet onion, diced
3 Tablespoons butter
2 stalks celery, diced
2 carrots, diced
3 cups finely shredded cabbage
2 cups cooked pureed squash
5 cups water
1 1/2 teaspoons minced rosemary
1 1/4 teaspoon salt, or to taste
15 turns freshly ground black pepper, or black pepper to taste
1/2 cup egg farvel (tarhonya) or orzo pasta
grated parmesan cheese for garnish

If you have time, soak the navy beans in water with a pinch of baking soda a few hours before you want to make the soup. (If not, just proceed from here.) Cover the beans with water and add a pinch of baking soda and 2 whole peeled cloves of garlic. Cook until tender, about 1 ½ hours, adding water as needed. Season lightly with salt and reserve the beans in their cooking water.
In a wide-bottomed soup pot over medium heat, add the bacon. Cook until shrunken but not crisp, about 5 minutes. Remove and transfer to a dish, leaving behind the fat in the pan. Add the onion, butter, celery, carrots and ¼ teaspoon salt. Cook over medium heat until the vegetables are tender, about 15 minutes. Add the cabbage and remaining two cloves of garlic, minced, and cook until wilted, about 5 minutes. Add the squash, water, rosemary and remaining salt and pepper to taste. Cook at a gentle simmer about 30 minutes, until the flavors come together and all vegetables are tender. Add the cooked beans (along with about 1 cup of their cooking liquid) and farvel pasta and cook until tender, about 15 minutes. Taste for and adjust final seasoning and serve, garnished with parmesan cheese.

Birch de Noel

2010-01-06T12:36:00.003-06:00

For years I’ve wanted to make a “buche de noel,” or French “Christmas log.” It’s a jelly roll cake without the jelly, both filled and frosted with chocolate buttercream. Decorated with squiggly lines for bark and cocoa-dusted meringue mushrooms, the finished cake should look like an oak log.

But a mid-December woods walk, partly a scouting trip for visual inspiration, changed my focus. I kept zoning in on birch logs in various states of decline, lounging in the snow. The white-on-white palette of the snow and the birchbark was stunning—arctic and simple—so I decided to make a “birch” de noel instead of a buche de noel. To make it more dramatic I would lengthen the cake by stacking three jelly rolls end-to-end. And to be true to local flavors I would fill it with maple buttercream and crushed walnuts, and frost it with an off-white rum buttercream. And definitely there would be lichen, fashioned out of more buttercream. I rolled a few choice pieces of lichen-studded bark from some dead logs and put them in my pocket.

Two weeks later I baked the cakes, using a simple sponge cake. For the maple filling, I started with a simple buttercream recipe and spiked it with as much maple syrup as I could stand to spare, some brown sugar instead of white and a few drops of maple flavoring.

Ends trimmed and stacked one on top of the other, the three cakes made a log about four feet long. To make it look realistic, I cut a sliver of cake from the middle and gave it a gentle curvature, then lopped off the bottom two inches of cake, uncoiled until I reached the center and stuck that piece, like a small branch, near the top. The exposed cut sides of the cake, with the blond cake and tan filling, looked enough like the real birch wood for me to leave it alone.

I covered the rest of the cake with rum buttercream and then dragged my spatula across the log to make the bark, discovering that the sloppier I did it the better it looked. I spooned a little melted chocolate into a plastic bag, snipped it carefully at the tip, and piped very thin lines across the log. Then I piped the light-green clusters of lichen.

It was getting close, but it didn’t quite look real. Then I realized that birch logs aren’t really pure white, so I started dusting the frosting with cocoa and powdered sugar, and that seemed to do it.

Coincidently, when cut in half the trimmed cake ends looked just like shelf mushrooms, or polypores, especially when coated in cocoa and powdered sugar, and I think their addition really made the cake.

Laid out on a simple wooden pedestal and surrounded with candles, the birch de noel looked like an anesthetized piece of the forest. It was a bit unnerving, the way nature at close range can be, but it the pure silliness of it all swept any oddness away. I thawed the bags of fresh birch sap (or “water) I had tapped in the spring and saved for just such an occasion—though I couldn’t have imagined one more apt—and we drank to the purity of the brand new year, to fresh snow, to the wonders of water from trees and bark spun from butter, and to the friends with whom we share it.
(recipe after the jump)

Birch de Noel

Makes enough for a single birch tree cake; for a three-log tree, make three pans of sponge cake and double both of the buttercream recipes.

Sponge Cake Sheet
The Joy of Cooking, by Rombauer, Rombauer Becker and Becker

3/4 cup sifted cake flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 cup sugar
5 large eggs
1/4 cup milk
3 Tablespoons unsalted butter

toasted walnuts, chopped (if you have leftover candied walnuts, use those)

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Grease a 17 ½ x 11 ½-inch rimmed baking sheet and line the bottom with wax or parchment paper.
Measure the sifted flour and then, along with the baking powder, resift into a bowl; reserve.
Combine the eggs and sugar in a large bowl and beat until light-colored, tripled in volumne and the consistency of softly whipped cream (about 7 minutes in a heavy-duty mixer with the whisk attachment, about 10 minutes with a hand-held mixer).
Combine the milk and butter in a saucepan and heat until melted and steaming.
In three additions, sift the flour mixture over the top of the egg mixture and fold.Add the hot milk mixture all at once and fold in until well combined. Scrape the batter into the pan and spread evenly. Bake until the top is golden brown and springs back when lightly pressed, 8 to 10 minutes.
While the cake is still hot, run a knife along the edges to release it from the pan. Immediately invert the cake onto a clean, foil-lined surface and remove the pan. When the cake is cool, peel off the paper liner.
Spread the cake with 1 ½ to 2 cups of maple buttercream filling and sprinkle with chopped walnuts.
Fold the short side of the rectangle tightly over and then continue, keeping the roll tight, until you have a cylinder. Wrap in plastic and twist the ends tightly to compact the cake. (You may reserve the cakes this way in the refrigerator up to two days, or in the freezer, before frosting.)
Prepare a batch of rum buttercream and reserve at room temperature. Take out one cup of buttercream and tint it light green to match lichen; reserve.
Trim the ends from each cylinder (reserve them for the mushrooms) and stack the logs end-to-end on a very long platter (a block of clean wood works great). Smear each end with rum buttercream and press together to make a seamless log. Cut the bottom two inches from one log and unroll until you have two inches of center; attach near the top to make a short branch.
Frost the entire cake with a thin coat of buttercream, then frost again with another smoother coat. To make the bark, roll your spatula across the log, leaving the buttercream to roll up roughly in spots, like rolled-back birchbark.
Melt 2 ounces of chocolate in a double boiler over hot water, then scrape into a plastic freezer bag. When cool enough to handle, snip the very tippy-tip of the bag. Pipe vertical lines across the log at intervals.
Cut the reserved cake-ends in half. Brush generously with cocoa and a bit of powdered sugar. Attach randomly on the cake to resemble shelf mushrooms, or polypores.
Spoon the green buttercream into another freezer bag and snip the tip at an angle. Pipe ruffled clusters of buttercream to resemble lichen.
Dust the cake randomly with cocoa, dragging your pastry brush across the log. Do the same with the powdered sugar.

Maple Buttercream

2 large egg whites
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup maple syrup
1 Tablespoon water
pinch of cream of tartar
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon maple extract
1 1/2 sticks (12 Tablespoons) unsalted butter, softened

Have the butter and egg whites at room temperature.
Whisk together in a large stainless steel bowl (or standing-mixer bowl, if using) the egg whites, brown sugar, maple syrup, water and salt. Set the bowl over a larger pot of simmering water and heat, whisking constantly to prevent the whites from cooking, until the mixture reaches 140 degrees on an instant-read thermometer. (It will feel very hot to the touch.)
Remove the bowl and add the cream of tartar. Whip the whites until cool and tripled in volume, about 10 minutes. The meringue should hold glossy peaks. If still warm when beaten, let sit at room temperature until cooled off.
Beat the meringue, adding chunks of room-temperature butter. Continue until all of the butter is incorporated and the buttercream is smooth. Whisk in the maple extract.

Rum Buttercream
Adapted from Martha Stewart Weddings

Makes 4 cups
5 egg whites, room temperature
2 Tablespoons water
1 1/4 cups sugar
2 cups (4 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
3 Tablespoons dark rum (may substitute 2 teaspoons vanilla extract)
1/4 teaspoon coarse salt

Whisk together in a large stainless steel bowl (or standing-mixer bowl, if using) the egg whites, water, sugar and salt. Set the bowl over a larger pot of simmering water and heat, whisking constantly to prevent the whites from cooking, until the mixture reaches 140 degrees on an instant-read thermometer. (It will feel very hot to the touch.)
Remove the bowl and whip the whites until cool, tripled in volume, and forming a meringue wth stiff, glossy peaks. This will take about 10 minutes. If still warm when beaten, let sit at room temperature until cooled off.
Beat the meringe, adding chunks of room-temperature butter. Continue until all of the butter is incorporated and the buttercream is smooth. Add the rum and beat to combine.

the Ponsford life

2009-10-16T09:48:00.009-05:00

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 my father-in-law, just before he almost tipped the canoe. (With a full load of rice, it is easy to do.) 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/

time is flavor

2009-10-08T10:15:00.004-05:00

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

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

2009-09-24T14:43:00.003-05:00

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. (after the jump)

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 . . .

2009-09-16T11:49:00.002-05:00

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

2009-09-03T15:33:00.000-05:00

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

2009-09-03T15:19:00.001-05:00

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

2009-08-07T15:01:00.003-05:00

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.

wild raspberries

2009-07-30T09:11:00.005-05:00

I'm a shameless dork when it comes to picking wild raspberries. That's me in the hooded net shirt. After the year that I came running back to the house with half a bucket of true beauties (the raspberries were comically huge that year, and the deerflies were uncommonly vicious . . .) and a maze of throbbing pink welts dotting my shoulders, my body shaking from the shock of that many deerfly bites all at once, I finally got smart.

Anyway, I'm too busy cooking to write this week! Raspberries, haricots vert and cucumbers all need picking. Kimchi and creme de cassis (made with black currants) are bubbling away in the pantry. Fermented pickles, cherry tomato confit and preserved eggplant are in the hopper. And I need to start freezing raspberries in earnest. I love them dropped into lightly-whole-wheat pancakes.

But here's a quick recipe, if you find some nice raspberries: I dropped some onto my pie crust scraps, sprinkled them with sugar and baked at 400 until lightly golden. So delicious. Hank crushed them in his mouth, proclaiming it "good red tandy." Raspberries=red candy.

And then I had to make pannacotta, because I like a neutral custard with the intense wild berries. I made this one with half-cream/half-yogurt and a touch of honey for flavor, and then sprinkled all of it with Thomas Keller's chocolate walnut dentelle. The crunch is crucial. I'll post the recipe after it appears in next week's Star Tribune.
(recipe after the jump)

Here it is:

YOGURT PANNA COTTA

Serves 8.

• 11/2 tsp. gelatin

• 1 tbsp. cold water

• 11/2 c. cream

• 1 tsp. vanilla extract

• 2 strips lemon peel

• 1/3 c. sugar

• 2 tbsp. honey

• 11/2 c. whole milk yogurt

• 2 c. wild raspberries

• 2 tbsp. powdered sugar

Directions

Mix the gelatin with cold water in a small bowl and let sit for 5 minutes.

Heat the cream with the vanilla extract, lemon peel, sugar and honey until steamy. Turn off the heat and let steep until warm.

Whisk the gelatin into the warm cream until dissolved. Add the yogurt and stir until smooth. Pass the custard mixture through a fine mesh sieve into a large liquid measuring cup. Divide the mixture among 8 small custard cups and refrigerate until set, about 4 hours.

Pick through the wild raspberries, discarding bits of leaf and stem. Wash briefly only if they appear dirty.

Pick out 2/3 cup of the least beautiful or softest raspberries, and mix in a bowl with the powdered sugar, smashing with a fork until puréed. Let sit 20 minutes, and pass the mixture through a fine mesh sieve set over the bowl of remaining raspberries. Discard seeds and mix the raspberries and sauce together gently.

To unmold the panna cotta: Run a thin knife around the circumference of the custard to loosen it, and dip the bottoms of the custard cups into hot water. Turn the cup upside down in the middle of a shallow bowl or plate and remove the cup. If the custard doesn't come out, dip it again into the hot water. Serve with the raspberries and sauce.

Truth in Advertising, Highway 10

2009-06-16T09:53:00.004-05:00

My husband has a recurring worry that sets in between the moment he orders and before his food comes. He fears that his plate will arrive with a meager portion and that he won't get enough to eat. Ever since I told him that Jorg (my boss at the german diner I cooked at when I was younger) would gauge portion size by peering out the little window above the line and checking out the size of the customer--large guys got two pieces of schnitzel, diminuitive ladies one small one--he frets that someone in the kitchen will underestimate his hunger. Across the table I'm often worrying that the portion will be huge and I'm going to eat too much, but I know that many other people share his anxiety. They must, because Keith's Kettle, a restaurant on Highway 10, markets to them.

I think the sign is saying, you're going to get enough to eat here. On the drive from Minneapolis/St. Paul to Two Inlets I've passed Keith hundreds of times, maybe a thousand. His face has become both more reassuring and slightly more alarming over time. It's nice to calm the people and let them know they'll be well-fed, but let's not glamorize it, Keith.

Car Cake, Car Cake, Car Cake

2009-05-24T16:55:00.006-05:00

I really geeked out on this. And by the end of the night I had somehow reeled Aaron into the action, too. He was wishing he had a few chisels in the house (to notch windows or some such craziness) but he did pretty well with the knife. We were going for a muscle car, but it ended up looking more like a Chrysler K-Car, no?

Underneath, it's a lemon pound cake, about three layers for the road and three for the car, cemented together with lemony cream cheese frosting. I topped it with homemade marshmallow fondant (super easy to make, and very fake-tasting, but the kids loved it), tinted black for the road and (obviously) blue for the car. Chopped walnuts mixed with brown sugar for the gravel.

But Hank didn't really care what it tasted like. We had to hold him back from the "Car Cake! Car Cake! Car Cake!" His little arms and legs were swinging.

Here's a nice one of Aaron's grill and headlights.

Brotchen fur den Arbeiter am Berlin

2009-05-10T23:32:00.017-05:00

When I worked at the Schwarzwald Inn on Main Street in Park Rapids (it's a German-inflected American Diner) we had a section on the menu called Sandwiches fur den Arbeiters (or something, excuse my German, but sandwiches for the worker), hot sandwiches that involved stacking clods of roast pork or beef--or three hamburger patties--between squishy white bread, cutting the sandwich on the diagonal, spreading out the points, dropping a ball of mashed potatoes in now yawning space in the middle and covering the entire thing--to the plate's golden border--with tanned, leatherish gravy.

Now, most of the food in Berlin was far better than anything at the Schwarzwald, but I picked up on some sort of German guiding principle that made this hot beef possible in the first place.

In the mornings we ate these enormous sandwiches.

I couldn't keep up that pace if I lived there, but I woke up every morning thinking about that awesome pumpkinseed bread (kurbiskernol brotchen). I never finished them. Now I know where the German side of my family gets their idea of a serving. Germany is a country full of food-pushers, feeders, pushy women like my Grandma Dion who heave new hills of unwanted food onto your plate when you turn your head.

At Galleries Lafayette food court, I found these--the most adorable sausages I've ever seen. I just had to buy them for Aaron, though I probably ate more than he did. They were tangy, like soppressata. Some are rolled in dried herbs, others in black pepper and some in pecorino cheese.

Now, my half-eaten piece of rhubarb meringue cake. It was lovely (crisp on the bottom and everything below the marshmallowy sugar cloud was brilliantly unsweet) but again, it suffered from a portion control problem. I kind of felt like the incredible shrinking woman over there . . . all the food just kept getting bigger.

I felt like a tool taking a picture of my breakfast sandwich, but whatever. I took better stock of the whole food experience as I pored over German cookbooks at the wonderful Dussman (like a more upscale Barnes and Noble). I realized that every time I go to Germany I realign my culinary sights, or widen them, to include humbler ingredients. Like, "oh yeah . . . a good potato with flaxseed oil. So nice."

The thing I like about German food (good German food, I mean, and it's not ubiquitous over there) is that they give their plain jane ingredients higher aspirations. Potato salad, for example, can be inspired, with just the right amount of vinegar and perfect miniature cubes of bacon ; bitter greens get an artful and generous sling of tangy dressing and they never crush the greens; they make about 30 different kinds of pancakes, some flat and flappy, some soaring, some cumulous . . . but in general, it's generous cooking, and honest, and I believe that those are two qualities that any important cuisine requires. In some ways, German food is a lot like Midwestern food: there's a big fat bland lid sitting on top of this sincere, vibrant, fresh food culture. It takes just a little jostling to shake it loose. And even though it's a very generous cuisine, the good stuff always shows a certain sense of restraint.

The Famous Pearson's Salted Nut Roll

2009-05-06T10:49:00.018-05:00

Extreme frugality, coupled with a real respect for industrial food, has led us to this cultural cul-de-sac: here in the rural Midwest, we like to make our own candy bars.

As city people are dropping cash to replicate the cucina povera dishes of Tuscan grandmothers (such as panzanella—stale bread salad—and spaghetti cacio e pepe--pasta with pecorino), out in the Midwestern countryside we make replicas of store-bought treats: bar cookies that taste just like a snickers bar or, even better, a mars bar; sticky cakes meant to summon up taste memories of heath bars; our own minature reese’s peanut butter cups. On the savory side, we make homemade mini meatballs in light tomato sauce that tastes like spaghettios (Okay, I confess: that one’s probably mine alone). I have neighbors who preserve their own alaska-caught salmon and boast that it tastes “as good as from the store.” And probably better, I want to say, but hold my tongue.

On the other hand, maybe it’s not just thrift but the distance you live from town that spurs you to make your own candy bars. What if you're marooned out in the woods, or snowed in, and you're craving something decadent and junky? Believe me, you'll figure out a way to get it.

Last week I was craving a Pearson’s Salted Nut Roll, that wonderful candy bar made right in St. Paul on West 7th Street, but I didn’t want to drive the five miles to the Two Inlets Country Store to get one. So I sifted through some internet recipes and most called for marshmallows, which I didn’t have. In the back of my pantry I found a stowaway jar of Marshmallow Fluff, long past its prime, if that's even possible. (It tasted fine.) And then for the caramel I melted down all of my mom’s homemade caramels left over from Christmas. (You could use those caramels in little wrappers). I made a snake of marshmallow fluff nougat, covered it in melted caramel, rolled the thing in peanuts, and presto, I had what I wanted. Unlike the salmon that was “just as good” as the canned stuff at the store, this one was better than anything I could buy.

In fact, it was a temptress. After a few days of Aaron and I taking secret turns whittling small chunks off of the nut roll, I walked into the pantry, sure it was all gone by now, to find just the end nubbin wrapped in about an acre of crumpled plastic wrap. Clearly, he was hiding the last of it from me, but as I lobbed it into my mouth I felt no guilt. I can always make another nut roll. Or maybe next time I'll attempt a Whatchamacallit, a candy bar that I love unconditionally.

pearson’s salted nutroll

makes 2 nutrolls

1 cup marshmallow fluff
1 1/2 cup (more or less) confectioner’s sugar
2 cups salted roasted peanuts, lightly crushed
10 ounces caramels, homemade or store-bought

Melt the caramels in a saucepot over low heat.

Beat the sugar into the marshmallow fluff gradually, until it becomes so stiff that mixing is difficult. Turn it out onto a workspace heavily coated with confectioner’s sugar and knead in the rest of the sugar, until it becomes stiff and pliable. Roll into two logs.

Butter the centers of two rectangles (approximately 9 x 13 inches) of parchment paper. Spoon a layer of caramel down the center, in a rectangular shape. Sprinkle with the nuts. Set the sugar roll in the center. (The caramel should be larger.) Cover the roll with more caramel and sprinkle heavily with crushed peanuts, pressing into the caramel.

Immediately slide the roll onto a plate and chill in the refrigerator. Repeat with the second roll.

To serve, trim the excess nuts and caramel and slice into portions. If the roll has flattened, gather the paper around the candy and roll until cylindrical; chill again.

Wrap extra tightly in plastic wrap and store at room temperature. (In a secret place, if necessary.)

slower-than-slow cooking

2009-04-01T17:23:00.010-05:00

artichokes in prosciutto vinaigrette

My article about sous vide cooking (poaching in plastic cryovac bags) came out today in the Minneapolis StarTribune. The recipes I developed for it (artichokes with prosciutto vinaigrette, tender chicken in toasted hazelnut oil and toffeed pears in-a-jar) turned out pretty well. I think they give due props to this awesome method which encourages fruits and vegetables to give up their strongest, most private flavor compounds and meat to collapse to spoon-tenderness.

I haven't cooked with sous vide in a few years, but working on this story reminded me why I should return to it now and then. Cooking in plastic bags sounds weird, but it's the equivalent of turning it up to 11, and doing it at home feels totally rock-star. I'm thinking now of what I can pick in the garden this summer and throw in a bag: fresh shell beans and cippollini onions, and plums from front yard with honey, and maybe spring chicken in cream . . . num.

Check it out, and then get a food saver and play away. (I LOVE mine, maybe too much, and have cryovacked everything loose in the kitchen: wild rice, beans, loose cinnamon sticks . . . it all looks so neat and compact.)

http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/taste/42262542.html?elr=KArks7PYDiaK7DUqEiaDUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aULPQL7PQLanchO7DiUr

P.S. the artichokes can easily be made vegetarian. In fact, in the summertime I'd probably go this route. Just omit the bacon and prosciutto and add finely chopped black (nicoise!) olives to the final sauce.