Duck Fat and Politics

City Council and the Democracy of Competing Ideas

2011-12-21T22:51:00.000-06:00

Much attention has been paid to language used by Councilor Kris Vohs and Mayor Mary Rossing about dysfunction and incivility on the Northfield City Council. Several of the candidates hoping to fill the seat held by Councilor Vohs referenced it, and took it as fact that such conditions exists. I disagree wholeheartedly, and think Northfield is being well served by the City Council.

Debate, the exchange and rebuttal of ideas, and careful deliberation are the means by which we assess the merits of every motion that comes to us for a vote. In our deliberations we follow Robert’s Rules of Order, the standard manual on parliamentary procedure, but one that appears rigid and obsolete at times. Robert’s Rules are actually pretty logical, and provide a clear, equitable structure, ensuring that all members are heard and that one member cannot monopolize proceedings. Robert’s Rules has plenty of safety valves, too, and if a breach of procedure occurs – whether a councilor speaks out of order or disparages someone– each member of the council has the authority and obligation to interrupt and bring the matter to the attention of the mayor. No member of the council should allow any incivility to pass by unnoticed, and every member has a responsibility to address it promptly and directly.

During a recent meeting, I said the tax levy for the Economic Development Authority (EDA) should be drastically reduced, and the reaction from the mayor was thorough dissent. The direction of economic development and the EDA has been discussed frequently and consensus has been elusive; we argued back and forth, trying to squeak toward some common ground, but our views were not reconcilable. Discussions like that are difficult and even uncomfortable; I know that if I speak I may be challenged with spirited opposition, but as an elected official I have a responsibility to state my opinion publicly and put it to the test of my fellow councilors. We are equals on the council and we share the same rights and responsibilities, whether we exercise them or not.

One-time visitors to the council chamber certainly would have witnessed vigorous debate and passionate opinions that evening, but they were also seeing a cornerstone of democracy, the free exchange of competing ideas. Those hard debates are the necessary ones, the ones that ensure that all ideas are being considered, even if we reject them.

When the mayor and I met a few days later, there were no apologies, no averting of our eyes, and no discomfort, because what we had done a few nights earlier was what we were elected to do. So, we greeted each other with friendliness, smiled, and moved on to the business at hand. And when the matter came before the council the following week, we again disagreed. But take heart, because with so many issues queued up for consideration, we’ll all have the opportunity – many times over – to agree, disagree, change our mind, listen anew, learn, and serve our city. I love it.

My neglect prevailed

2011-10-05T00:29:00.001-05:00

My neglect prevailed, but I was given this growth, these abundant plants that pushed through dirt and grew, even as I ignored the claims of spring and summer, the edict of sunshine and heat. I forgot to care but was rewarded, by dint of throwing seed, with life-rich greens, and peas, peppers, beets, and leeks. And now October's thinning heat and the near memory of what just was is slowly packed and preserved in bags of frozen blueberries, jars of applesauce almost made, and sauerkraut fermenting in a big stone crock. Tradition is the memory of time, repeated.

Gio Thu - Vietnamese head cheese

2011-09-18T21:45:00.000-05:00

My wife grew up eating Gio Thu - Vietnamese head cheese, and none of my efforts to make a European-style head cheese have especially won her over. Our friends across the street threw a big party last week and they served a roasted pig. Luckily, some of their friends are vegetarian, and they didn't want the pig to look too pig-like, so they removed the head and gave it to me! My wife showed me a post on The Ravenous Couple and said their Gio Thu looked like the kind she used to eat. The recipe was certainly clear and straight forward, so I decided to give it a go. My ingredients were slightly different, mainly because I used a whole head and no hocks. Heads take longer for the meat to get tender, so I removed the ears when they were done and let the head simmer a little longer. I found an old coffee can and lined it with a big ziploc bag, and added enough weight on the top to press it down.
This evening we ate it for dinner, along with rice, swiss chard, and an omelette. I think it's the best tasting (and best looking) head cheese I've made yet.

Snap pea and rabbit risotto

2011-07-13T23:11:00.001-05:00

My freezer still has a lot of rabbits in it, and I took out two the other day. After they thawed I rubbed them with salt and put them back in the icebox, where they've been resting for a few days. I'm slowly figuring out ways to prepare rabbit that keep the meat tender and tasting like rabbit.

For the risotto last night, I cut the loins on a diagonal, very thin. In my enameled, cast iron frying pan I added a pretty big pour of olive oil and turned the gas on. Over high heat I fried the rabbit, adding only pepper. The thin slices curled up and browned quickly, so I turned off the heat. The meat was still very tender.

With our cold, rainy spring, my snap peas flourished, and now in the heat of July I'm harvesting the last of them, the tall vines disheveled and rampant. Chard runs wild and parsley flavors everything. At the end of the twenty-fives minutes or so of stirring the risotto I steamed the peas for just a moment, and added them to the creamy, plump rice. The rabbit bits were saved for the top of the dish; I usually mix the meat into the body of the risotto, but I figured I'd let everyone do that as they saw fit. Some, like my son, just ate it plain from the top, avoiding the chard.

Today I came home during lunch, turned on the oven, and quickly browned a few meaty legs in the dutch oven. A scant cup of rabbit stock was next and then I put the lid on and put the pot in the oven. I changed into shorts and headed to my community garden plot and did some weeding and picked a few young zucchini. When I got back home I showered and was soon back at work with clean clothes. I left the meat to cook in the slowly cooling oven that I turned off as I left the house.

When I got home after work I pulled the rabbit meat from the bones it was barely hanging on to, and put it into a bowl. I heated up the bit of stock in the pot and added a little flour to thicken it, and added a little more stock to make even more gravy. With this evening's beautiful weather we ate outside. I served the rabbit over rice with sauteed zucchini on the side, and a big Caesar salad from the garden.

I still have a few legs left; tomorrow it'll be something else.

Spring garlic

2011-05-29T22:29:00.000-05:00

I missed a few heads of garlic when I was harvesting them last fall, and as soon as spring came, those forgotten heads burst through the ground, green, leafy, and nearly as pretty as Siberian irises. And, they have the added benefit of being delicious.

Today I dug up one of the heads-gone-wild, and sliced all the whites and added them to a frying pan with a big glug of olive oil. After they simmered and softened I added a few eggs along with a generous portion of pepper. When the omlette-y egg covered the pan I added a heaped mound of arugula, a sprinkle of salt, and covered the pan with a lid. I flipped it once and let the arugula press into the smothering egg. A few corn tortillas with it and I had a most delicious Memorial Day weekend lunch, giving me energy and a happy belly to go back into the semi-soggy garden and plant a few more things.

Right now

2011-05-21T23:45:00.000-05:00

Last night while it rained I went outside and took pictures in my garden. "Right now," I thought, "everything is alive."

Earlier in the evening my daughter and I watched worms dart into the wet ground when we stomped or jumped; when I went out in the late evening damp they lay there plump and unconcerned, probably knowing all the birds were asleep. After such a long, cold winter, and a cold, wet spring, it's easy to forget how irrepressible life is, how the push of seeds breaks soil long before we're ready to garden. I missed a few heads of garlic last fall, and they were up and growing when the ground was half frozen. I managed to get a few seeds into a the ground on a single sunny day in April, and I nearly forgot about them with the subsequent weather. And now, when I'm still hoping for enough dry weather to get our garden planted, my peas are nearly a foot tall, and we ate a big bowl of arugula this evening. If a living thing is given half a chance it grows, flourishes, thrives on air, sunshine, water, and warmth. The wet air in the evening sometimes carries, in addition to its wet, the knock-me-over inhaled-intoxication of plum blossoms, apple blossoms, lilacs, and all things spring. Life comes so soon, so quick, and it's here right now.

Applesauce, again

2010-12-30T09:18:00.000-06:00

For the second year in a row, we purchased the bulk of our apples after Christmas and spent a long, steam-filled day in the kitchen making applesauce. Last Sunday we bought about one hundred thirty pounds of apples and spent the rest of the day (and into the wee hours of the next) making and canning just shy of 50 quarts of applesauce. Had I not lost two jars to breakage in the canning pot, leading to messy delays, we would have reached that milestone. We're lucky because there's also a pot of ready-to-be-eaten-but-uncanned sauce in the fridge, as well as a bag of apples in the hallway that are waiting to be turned into tarts and pies. We used two varieties this year, Haralson and Fireside, and the tart Haralson is my favorite for both eating and cooking. The Fireside is a sweet eating apple, but its taste is a little too green for me, so I used the Haralsons at a 3:1 ratio.

This was the first year we didn’t core the apples; instead, I simply chopped them into pieces and tossed them into the pot. To prevent scorching, I put a little water in the bottom of the two stainless steel pots used to cook the apples; I’ve had problems when I’ve used a thin-bottomed aluminum pot, so that one is now used beneath the chinois to collect the about-to-be-jarred sauce. We cooked the apples just long enough to mash the pulp easily, after which we put everything through the chinois, which purees the pulp, giving it a smooth, even texture while trapping the seeds and skins. Pushing the hot, pink pulp through the chinois, as my son is doing in the picture, is hard work, but we're richly rewarded for our efforts.

Our recently cleaned and reorganized fruit cellar now holds an entire shelf of jars, and during the course of the coming year the kids will make frequent trips into the basement to retrieve the jars one by one. It’ll be served as a topping for pannukakku, brought to school for a lunchtime snack, and eaten plain while sitting at the kitchen counter. We’ll serve it with pork roasts and chops, and sprinkled with wheat germ or fragrant Vietnamese cinnamon. And finally, we enjoy giving applesauce to friends, a simple gift that is the distillation of an entire growing season in Minnesota and a single, steamy day in December.

On the brink of Christmas

2010-12-23T15:45:00.006-06:00

Here we are, on the brink of Christmas, the cookingest time of the year. Christmas cookies galore, a pork roast in the icebox with its rub of kosher salt and crushed juniper berries, a ham waiting for tomorrow, and a few undecided choices for Christmas breakfast. My siblings and I have been reminiscing about our delight in sneaking Christmas cookies from the downstairs freezer when we were kids, and how even today we all enjoy them frozen. I just told my sister in Alaska that I still prefer a Christmas cookie that I’ve sneaked, even from myself!

Tonight the kids and I will bake our last batch for the season, and tomorrow we’ll start eating them. While I have no remorse about pilfering Christmas cookies relentlessly, I abstain until Christmas Eve dessert, the traditional start of Christmas cookie season. It’s only after we’ve tucked into the ham that our anise-laced cutouts reach their full potential, and the gingerbread men are best as we near the Epiphany. So for now, although the tins, canisters, and wax paper-lined shoeboxes are packed to the gills, I still have to scavenge for a little dessert. Luckily there’s still a little of that delicious sesame-honey crunch we bought in Greece. Merry Christmas!

My Garden in December

2010-12-12T16:39:00.002-06:00

The snow has stopped falling and the brilliant blue sky is washed clean. Enormous mounds of snow line the streets, proof of our industrious snow-blowing and shoveling. My garden is buried beneath the snow, the last of the brussels sprouts, beets, and leeks frozen 'til spring.
My wife and I recently spent two weeks in Turkey and Greece, our first vacation in the eastern Mediterranean. We loved the hamsi in Istanbul, the pomegranate syrup in Sirinci, Turkey, and the kebaps in Athens. But, what really struck me was a simple breakfast treat at our hotel in Athens, a small, clear glass filled with yogurt, honey, and pistachios. I was reminded that all food, when made with good ingredients, nourishes and sustains. The quality of the ingredients was outstanding, and the honey especially captured the intensity of the dry, fragrant shrublands known in the Mediterranean as garrigue. Just as great wine comes from stressed vines, it seems that great honey also comes from the stressed heather, thyme and other plants of the region. And where do the cows that make such yogurt graze? The few we saw were wandering through the same rocky terrain that obviously yielded much (including olive oil) despite its inhospitable appearance.
Foods that capture and embody the particulars of place leave a lasting memory, and remind us that what we eat is as rich with history and culture as the beautiful sights we travel to see.

...and politics (not... A Chicken In Every Pot)

2010-11-04T23:41:00.001-05:00

I picked these Brussels sprouts after a good, hard frost - cut them actually, cut each tight bud close to the wrist-thick stalk with a small paring knife. I shocked them in cold water after parboiling them in a scant half-inch of liquid water on the cusp of turning gaseous (the H2O, not the sprouts!) for a mere minute. Into the saucier I added a cut of butter, then slices of piment d'esplette, which I sauteed with all their seeds, adding a little heat to this fall classic. A big nob of leftover sweet potato was next, and finally, with the flame turned up, the Brussels sprouts. Salt, pepper, and a perfect fall dish, the heat of the peppers waking up the living green of this much-loved brassica.

And politics? Yes, I ran for city council in this beautiful, small, Minnesota college town on the Cannon River, and on Tuesday I won the election. On January 4th I'll take the oath of office and begin a four-year term as a member of Northfield, Minnesota's city council.

I started this blog with food on my mind. And it was hard to think about food without paying attention to the context in which it ends up on the tip of my fork, so I named this blog Duck Fat and Politics. From the beginning friends and readers have asked me about the politics part of the blog, and for the most part I've referred to politics as the broad set of relations between people and society, thinking less about electoral politics than the way we interact with each other (and our food.)

Electoral politics has long fascinated me, and I've often wondered if I'd be any good at it, making sense of competing, conflicting ideas, and making decisions I can live with, trying to address the complexities of living in a community. With a busy job, young children, and always making a real effort to be fully engaged as a parent and spouse, elected office was something just a little too far away, something that would require me to make sacrifices I wasn't able to make, or something that required qualifications and skills I didn't possess. So, while elected office intrigued me, it wasn't too pragmatic to think about a real run for elected office because of these limitations.

But, time passes (too quickly for the most part,) and a few years ago I renewed my lapsed subscription to The New Yorker, and noticed that my bedside pile of books was regularly growing and shrinking: time had returned! And I had time to think about politics and elected office again.

While I've written about politics only a few times in this blog, I'm surrounded by politics in the same way you are. Watching our economy expand and nearly collapse in recent years, I’ve been startled by the range of responses and reactions of individuals and political parties. So much change occurs on a local level where part-time elected officials grapple with the consequences of rampant partisanship on a national level.

Progress depends on compromise, and I don’t think the partisanship we see accurately reflects our various communities. We’re united by so many commonly shared beliefs yet we’re allowing the disagreements to set the tone of our political life. I’m comfortable with compromise, negotiation, and ambiguity. And at the same time, I know that at times progress occurs only when decisions are made and some possibilities are eliminated. I like arguing my point but I enjoy resolving things, too. I can’t promise a chicken in every pot, but sharing a big pot of stew might be a good place to start.

piment d'Esplette var. Northfield

2010-10-14T22:59:00.000-05:00

Piment d'Esplette has the same AOC protection that's given to wine, cheese, chickens (Bresse) and other regional or terroir-specific foods, so I don't know what to call this pepper grown in Northfield, MN via seed from a seed saver in British Columbia. The seed originated in Esplette, a small village in the Basque area of southwestern France, but I don't know how long it's been in North America, adapting to new weather and soil. My three or four plants grew well in the garden, but produced few fruits. I've saved the seed and will plant more next year, hoping to eke out a plant that likes our short summer and unpredictable fall. It's a delicious pepper with a little heat and rich, deep taste.

Harvesting leeks

2010-10-14T22:28:00.004-05:00

I'd keep my leeks in the ground longer, but I planted them at the community garden and our fall clean up day is Saturday; all gardens have to be empty by then. I started them by seed back in the late winter, and when I transplanted them into the garden they were small, thin, spindly, barely a plant you'd think to see when all else was gone. Someone else hasn't harvested their kale, still a shock of green-deep life on earth. At home my brussels sprouts grow still; I'll let frost and snow sweeten the nubs, kill the bugs. But now I've got these leeks, a huge pile of leeks. You can be sure I'll make a leek tart this weekend. And the rest we'll clean, cut, and cook, just briefly in a buttery pan, enough to break down some of that stubborn cell wall. After that we'll let them cool and fill small bags or bowls with Allium ampeloprasum, a freezerful of possibilities, and a long winter ahead.

Thinking about food last night

2010-09-25T22:10:00.003-05:00

I was thinking a lot about food at a remarkable concert by The Bad Plus last night. I can taste food, taste a dish and notice a seasoning, an influence, a remarkable combination of ingredients. A good reuben, a classic coq au vin, a 9x13 pan of baked macaroni and cheese, a single thick slice of a sun-warmed Brandywine tomato, a bowl of cereal before bed – every dish offers up something for which we delight, give thanks, and dig in. Food nourishes and gives, reminds us of our need for sustenance and soul, for fellowship as well as calories. The traditions of France, Thailand, and Vietnam, the serendipity of leftovers in the fridge, the strength of oatmeal on a cold morning, the joy of a quick lunch with my wife – these are the things of food, the stories and the context for what we eat and why we eat. There are stories and harmonies and seasons that play off one another, ingredients that shine or support, stand out or blend in.
I’m not trained in music; I know nothing formal about it at all, and I listen to very little recorded music. But live music is different, and though I don’t hear nearly enough of it, most live shows I go to send my soul flying. The few and far between shows of the past year have included the Dave Rawlings Machine, the Takacs Quartet, and last night’s show by The Bad Plus. I’m least familiar with jazz, especially new, cutting edge jazz, and before the show started I was wondering how to listen to it, wondering if there was a way to listen to music that was like tasting food or drinking wine. If there are similarities, I'd say both require attentiveness, a willingness to notice things, an ability to be surprised, an open mind, and flexibility. I started listening to the amazing drummer Dave King and I thought to myself, sure, he’s roasting the bones I’ll use to make my stock. He was wild, hitting the drums and cymbals with intensity, speed, and a lightness that bedeviled my eyes – how did all that movement result in such a light, clean sound followed by a power surge that stood my hair on end? Look, I said to myself, there’s the bassist steadying the universe with his string-pulled throbs, with his leeks, reducing wine to better define the edges of bone and char. I listened and I thought of food, and that let my ears relax so I didn’t work too hard to try to hear something that may or may not be present. Just like food, I thought. Enjoy it, taste it, sniff it and savor it. Ethan Iverson’s piano playing was a real engaging conversation, a collaborative energetic and joyful noise, one that pounded and touched those big Steinway strings in so many ways I didn’t know how he did it himself. And all the time I’m listening I’m thinking to myself, so this is jazz, this constant rearrangement of the ordinary, an extension of something small, a noticing, a wild exuberance that stretches and reaches and stops and there I was with my ears on high and I thought, I want to make a Bad Plus rabbit stew, a fat-wrapped rabbit with a deep black sauce, a red wine and chocolate and red pepper black pepper stew that’ll go with some kind of pasta – maybe thick, maybe thin, I don’t know. We’ll see what the fall brings. Last weekend I butchered eleven big rabbits and tomorrow we’re going to the Cities. Maybe we’ll stop at an Asian market and buy a big slab of pork belly and I’ll start next weekend’s stew.

September 1, 2010 Radio Show

2010-09-10T15:30:00.000-05:00

Jessica Paxton joined me in the studio for the September 1 broadcast of Duck Fat and Politics and we talked about all things Minnesota.

August 11, 2010 Radio Show

2010-09-10T15:27:00.000-05:00

The August 11 broadcast of Duck Fat and Politics was especially enjoyable because my wife Meaghen joined me in the studio and we talked about food and cooking and gardening.

Summer 2010

2010-09-10T15:17:00.000-05:00

We ended our summer in northern Minnesota, where each year we fish, play cards, swim, and sauna. One night we sat around a fire and my daughter roasted marshmallows for us. What a lovely night.

I've written this blog because I love to share food and talk with friends about tomatoes, sauerkraut, chickens and beets. But one season blends into the next and as this summer progressed I found myself unable to say anything else about the glorious Brandywine tomatoes I was slicing and eating, about the blood red beets we forked from the bowl at dinner time, about the rich yolks of our backyard hens. Additionally, as I read the 17 million other food blogs that also celebrate confit, ramps, and the ineffability of good zinfandel, I am bowled over by how many good writers and excellent photographers have surpassed my parochial interests and limited writing skills. Food is such a hot topic that I'm seeing some of the writing moving toward the competitiveness we see in sports, fashion and other interests and I wonder if we're all really and truly interested in piment d'esplette peppers or if we're searching them out because no one else has written about them yet? Do we enjoy slaughtering animals or are we trying to outdo the next writer who merely bought his sow's belly at a butcher's market? Me? I got my piment d'esplette seeds from a guy in Vancouver because I had read about the pepper for years and met a fellow blogger who is from the region in France where they're grown, and she knew the guy with the seeds. So while there may be a back story to the things we cook and eat and write about, it's easy to seem like a carpetbagger. So, all summer I've avoided writing, spending the time instead with family and friends, doing the things I usually do, and eating delightful things. I still have to figure out how to move past this awkward stage of my blog, where I've written about the foods and traditions I care about and don't want to be too repetitive. At the same time, I've missed writing and sharing the stories of food and the way it connects us as a family and as part of a community.

Fried walking catfish with fried holy basil

2010-07-19T00:11:00.003-05:00

This dish is as evocative of southern Thailand as any food I know. The village where I lived and worked was in the midst of southern Thailand's vast acreage devoted to rubber trees; what once was lowland rain forest had been cleared to make room for the long neat rows of rubber trees. Poor by any standard used in the United States, these rubber farmers felt the swings in worldwide rubber prices, and while their rubber trees gave them an opportunity to make more money than rice farmers, they continued to subsist on the foods they grew, foraged, or caught. Most yards had papaya trees, chili peppers, lemon grass, kaffir limes, galangal, ginger, tumeric, and an wide array of herbs, leaves, and other plants used for cooking. I often didn't know which planted were cultivated and which were wild.
The correct fish for this recipe is walking catfish, (although pla duk, ปลาดุก is also translated simply as "catfish,") easily caught in the streams of southern Thailand, but an unwanted, illegal, invasive species here in the US. I found them frozen in an Asian market in Minneapolis; the frozen fish cost $3.50. They remind me of bullheads, which could be used; so could any small catfish. Clean the fish, cut off their heads, and slice them into 1" chunks.
Holy basil (Ocimum sanctum, kha phrao, กะเพรา) can be grown as easily as other varieties of basil, and it's specifically used in a number of Thai dishes, so you might want to plant a little of it in your garden. This recipe calls for a lot; I like to pick a colander full, maybe 4 cups of leaves.
Fresh curry paste makes this dish sing. The curry paste is fried in a little oil, intensifying its flavor (and its fragrance, which is why I try to cook this outside, especially because of the frying involved.)
Palm sugar is the last thing needed, and a few tablespoons will be enough.

So here's how I make this delicious curry:

I lit my Weber Smokey Joe and when the charcoal was hot I put my dutch oven on top, and filled it with about 2" of oil. When it got to 400 degrees F. I slipped in the pieces of catfish and fried them until they were crisp. I removed them with a slotted spatula and put them on a brown bag.

Next, I fried the basil leaves. After I picked them I brought them into the kitchen and pinched all the leaves off their stems, so only leaves remained. They went into the hot oil and cooked almost immediately. In less than a minute, after swirling them once through the oil, I used the spatula and put the crisp leaves in a brown bag to drain.

I poured the oil into a glass jar, leaving only a few tablespoons on the bottom of the pot. Returning the pot to the heat, I put in the 1/2 cup or so of curry paste, and stirred it, watching it brown and cook. To this I added a few tablespoons of palm sugar, and tasted it to make sure I noticed the sweetness. Before the curry paste had a chance to burn, I added a little water, which sputtered furiously in the intense heat of frying curry paste. I kept stirring, and eventually it smoothed out like a nice roux. I added enough water to make it like a thick sauce, less than a cup, but every time I make this I think I should add a little more water because then maybe we'd have a little more leftover sauce, which is great with rice for lunch the day after.

To this bubbling brew I now returned the crispy fried slices of catfish, and stirred to mix the fish into to sauce.

On the heels of the catfish came the basil, and to the pot I now added 1/2 the basil, stirring it in gently, letting the crisp basil find its way into the mix.

When all was well and good I ladled it into a serving bowl and topped the entire thing with the second half of the crisp fried basil. What a sight!

We brought this to the table with fresh green beans and a lot of rice. Oh, and a few grilled hot dogs, too! This dish is way too spicy for our kids, and they were happy to eat Twins Ballpark hot dogs, the big fat ones.
I hope you'll take the time to make this curry; it's one of my favorite dishes. The curry sauce is fiery hot with a little sweetness, and the basil is infused throughout. Some of the basil loses its crispness, but by keeping some of it on top of the curry, every spoonful can bring a crisp bit with it. The catfish is a rich, oily fish, and it retains its flavor while surrounded by other strong tastes. 'Roi jahng hoo! as they'd say in Trang.

July 14, 2010 Radio show

2010-07-16T10:19:00.001-05:00

Wednesday's broadcast of Duck Fat and Politics was preceded by an afternoon of fierce weather, with several small tornadoes touching down within a few miles of Northfield, one of which was visible from the Carleton College campus. My guest on the show was Lynne Wilmot, whose chemical sensitivity has led her to live and eat as chemical- and toxin-free as she can. The show was recorded and is available for your listening pleasure!

June 30, 2010 radio broadcast

2010-07-13T22:41:00.000-05:00

I ended the month of June with a Duck Fat and Politics radio show that featured my sister Bridget, who's lived in Sitka, Alaska for seventeen years. We talked about food and fishing in southeast Alaska. I hope you enjoy listening!

June 23, 2010 radio podcast

2010-07-13T22:33:00.002-05:00

Here's the recording of the June 23rd Duck Fat and Politics radio show with me and my two daughters in the studio. We had a nice conversation about the eating habits of kids. I hope you enjoy listening.

How does it get to this?

2010-07-13T22:04:00.003-05:00

What started as a few rabbits for dinner became, over time, a reduced, softened and taste-enhanced mess of flavor, a fragrant and humble end to a long set of meals.

Here we are with warm days and evenings filled with soccer and baseball and sometimes weeding in the garden. Fancy meals are a rarity now; what we eat instead is fresh, simple, and easy to prepare. My youngest sister recently visited from Sitka, Alaska with her family, and I wanted to give them a taste of Minnesota in the summer. Admittedly, I’m envious of the range of fish they catch and regularly eat, but I love the food that we pull from our garden daily.

We started them with wide-cut pasta, an egg-rich dough we rested for hours before rolling it out, soft, pliable and generous. A simple tomato sauce and a garden-fresh green salad made for a meal within easy reach.

As the weekend started I cut up a few rabbits and made a nice stock with the bony parts, the base for Saturday night’s rabbit risotto with fresh snap peas. The rabbit pieces marinated for a few days with a rub of garlic, bay leaves, crushed juniper berries, black pepper, and salt. Visiting family members make great kitchen helpers, and I was happy to turn the risotto stirring over to my brother-in-law. As Randy stirred, I cut a tenderloin into thin pieces that cooked in minutes. With a last minute addition of both shelled and in-the-pod snap peas, the creamy risotto was flecked with bites of green freshness.

And finally this evening, just me and my daughter on a soccer night. A few thin leeks from the garden, sauteed in a little olive oil and fat. A big spoonful of whole wheat flour to darken and thicken the juices. And finally, the remains of the day, old slow cooked pieces of rabbit, now dissolved like pulled pork. And tender, meltingly so. A scoop and the brown jelly bits dissolve and splatter, thickening in the heat and almost-roux. Tarragon, a little milk, salt and pepper.

And off to the side in the shallow bowl, the bits of green? Oh, a little savoy cabbage from a friend's CSA share that he couldn't use this week because they were on vacation. So I cut thick slices of ginger, soaked dried shrimp in hot water, and crushed a few cloves of just-pulled Inchelium Red garlic, pungent and juicy. A few minutes in the pan and then we ate, my daughter and I, in the time before soccer with time to spare. She liked the cabbage and the rabbit, but didn't like the bits of bone that remained.

I watched soccer, sitting in my folding chair, the summer light so just, content, satisfied.

June 16, 2010 radio show podcast

2010-06-17T14:41:00.002-05:00

Yesterday's broadcast of Duck Fat and Politics was especially enjoyable because my three children joined me in the studio. We talked about what's growing in the garden and some of the meals we make at home. I hope you enjoy listening!

Chicken coop

2010-06-10T00:02:00.004-05:00

So what happened to spring? Glorious it was, but gone it is. Thankfully, I have something to show for it: a new chicken coop! Our chickens and rabbits were housed in an old gazebo in the backyard, a once-lovely structure whose floor rotted out. I tried several times to re-do it but finally gave up and decided that a new coop, built just for our tiny backyard, would give us the best result. I wanted something that wouldn't take up too much space, would safely and comfortably house the chickens, and would look nice. In the backyard of our last house I built an 8'x10' coop in the back of the enormous yard, and it didn't matter that the run was a bit derelict; it was mostly out of sight.
I struggled for a long time with the design. I wanted a coop that wouldn't look out of place next to our 1920s Craftsman-type home, and I eventually sketched out my idea.
Tearing down and removing the old gazebo was a big job, and over the course of several weekends and evenings after work, I built my new backyard coop, re-using at least some of the old one. The hens are now settled in, and the rabbits are content underneath the coop. I still have a larger hutch for finishing the rabbits. A large feeder and watering can are inside, and the nesting box is accessible from the outside, making them close to maintenance-free.

Rhubarb. Pie.

2010-05-12T23:27:00.001-05:00

I talked about rhubarb, arugula, pie (rhubarb) and cilantro chicken on Duck Fat and Politics this evening, but I was behind the control board for the first time, live, and halfway through the show I hit a button that stopped the recording of it, so there's no podcast to listen to. Whoops.

And big fat stalks of rhubarb mushroom up in our backyard and spread their elephant ears all Christmas-color-like, and I love pulling the stalks firmly; they pop like shoulder sockets must when a batter swings so hard and misses; there's suction, then give, and when they let go they come out cleanly, the whole stalk, emptiness in the ground.
Rhubarb sings its tartness, and I temper it with strawberries, blueberries, and sugar. Pie in May, baking right now in the oven, the house quiet, the kids asleep, the kitchen already cleaned up. Just smelling the pie, the buttery crust browning nicely. I make my crust with a combination of lard and butter or duck fat, but I forgot that I used the last of my lard awhile ago. I made this crust with butter and a few tablespoons of a several-times-used batch of duck fat, which is getting too salty to use in a non-savory pie crust.

Dried salted pig's liver, radishes, and boiled eggs

2010-05-01T23:46:00.001-05:00

I was drawn to this recipe by its extraordinary creativity. Fergus Henderson's The Whole Beast has a handful of recipes that cry out to be made and eaten. In all my cooking I had never seen a dried, salted pig's liver, and I had to try it.
The drying and curing process wasn't very different than that of making pancetta or another cured meat, but its deep red color was a vivid reminder of liver's organ status. The liver has been hanging in my basement for around a month, and with my brother-in-law visiting from Toronto and tender young arugula in the garden, tonight was a perfect time to make the salad. Some of my unpicked beets from last fall overwintered well, and their new leaves were also gathered. I hard boiled eggs from the backyard and sliced the radishes, coating the whole salad with a mild vinaigrette.
The liver, when cut through on the diagonal, was a deep, ruby red, dense, firm, and glossy. I never expected the texture to be so beautiful. I sauteed the liver slices in a bit of olive oil and splashed the pan with balsamic vinegar, and as soon as it was reduced I scooped the slices onto each salad, drizzling the remaining reduction on the greens.
Chewy but with give, meltingly rich, the liver was fantastic; my kids gobbled up slices and asked for more. Against the snap of radishes, the spare bite of vibrant arugula, and the creaminess of backyard eggs, the liver had such deep flavor that I could barely compare its taste to other dishes. Unlike a liver pate, the dried liver concentrated its flavor with a wonderfully clean profile; the flavor didn't expand across my palate; rather, it sunk into my taste buds, penetrating the greens of the salad with a shocking earthiness - the meat equivalent of my beloved, earthborn beets.
The cross-cut profile of the liver glistened like chocolate, and I'm wondering how to eat the rest of it. Fergus Henderson's salad is wonderful, and I'm sure to make it again. I also think thin shavings of liver could be used to add flavor and body to many dishes.

Rabbit cacciatore

2010-04-25T22:49:00.001-05:00

My son has the best nose in the family. I was starting a cacciatore, rich with oil, garlic, and minced carrots and celery, when I added a wedge of Taza stone ground chocolate; Henry called from the family room, "I smell chocolate." A dark piece to deepen the stew-sauce, red wine next, all bubbling thick and fragrancy, sweet, too. That old rabbit confit next, pieces still emerging from fat all tender and moist, breaking into chunks just right for a drizzle-grey spring dinner, candelit and tableclothed, clothes still carrying sawdust and paint from afternoon projects.
My daughter stirred the sauce, breaking each tomato in the hot pan, keeping it thick. For seasoning we added just a bit of fennel to the wine and chocolate, a last minute decision as my daughter smelled and rejected other herbs and spices. A quick sauce ladled over spaghetti, a beautiful balance of tastes.
The last time I opened an Ioppa 2001 Ghemme I wasn't impressed; tonight's was different, and the nebbiolo-dominated wine opened with cherries and violets, soft with leather-like tannins, graceful and still fresh. Cacciatore is known as hunter's stew, and the rabbit confit tasted better than most other meats would in the chocolate-and-wine-laced sauce, edible proof that raising rabbits in town is worth the effort.

Ramps

2010-04-22T21:13:00.000-05:00

Driving through eastern Tennessee yesterday afternoon I crossed the French Broad River, rounded a bend, and saw a pickup truck, a small table, and a large plastic sign with 'RAMPS' scrawled on it. I pulled over and walked up to the little table, heaped with bunches of just-picked ramps, a southern harbinger of spring.
A man in his twenties got out of the truck and we started talking. "Where did you pick them?" I asked, and he replied, "That's confidential," but when I told him I was just passing through he added, "I'll tell you that they were picked in Madison County," and wouldn't say anymore. The day before he had picked over one hundred bunches and less than a dozen remained. I asked the man his favorite way to prepare them and he said he ate them raw, almost every day.
With their sweet leaves that remind me of toothsome garlic chives, ramps taste more like young garlic than leeks. I kept them simple. After removing their roots and cleaning them well, I put the bulbs in a frying pan with a generous nob of butter. A few minutes later I added the green leaves, stirred them for a minute or so, and removed them from the heat. A generous shake of salt and pepper and they were ready to eat. We gobbled them down with grilled tuna steaks and a pinot grigio to celebrate my sister's birthday, and ended the delightful meal with her just-made carrot cake - mmmmm!

Southern swing

2010-04-22T20:10:00.001-05:00

The meat and three is a southern institution that most resembles a cafeteria to a visitor from the far edge of the northern United States. What sets it apart from a cafeteria, though, is its food - real southern food cooked day in and day out for so many years that over time each dish is perfected the way a canoe or dog sled or wind mill achieves a perfection of design: there's no more to pare away; all that remains is its heart and soul, beating, alive.
Arnold's in Nashville, Tennessee is just such a place, with long lunch lines and tables that are cleared as quickly as the chess pie is refreshed in the serving line. Okra cooked the way my mom cooked ratatouille, with olive oil and oregano. Greens scooped from a huge pan, just enough vinegar to add sparkle to the chew; hush puppies bigger than golf balls, brown and crisp with an almost sweet, tender interior; black eyed peas that speak of the earth; catfish as tender as the crust is crisp; and pie, real pie that nourishes us, reminds us that food ties us together, nourishes body and community and brings together people from all walk of life to say "Yes." Goodness, the chess pie - a simple custard pie rich in eggs, butter, and sugar, baked in a lard crust and served to make everyone who eats it heave a sigh of joy, contentment, pride and satisfaction that our regional cooking rises still, nourishing natives and visitors alike.

Rabbit sausage

2010-04-20T08:14:00.000-05:00

Saturday was enjoyed in the backyard, building a new chicken coop. I wanted to keep working until dark, so I paused only briefly to fire up our first grill of the year. The Weber Smokey Joe is the perfect size for family meals, and my wife grilled rabbit sausage over lump hardwood charcoal. Cooked over low heat, we removed the lid for the last few minutes to brown the links. Seasoned with thyme and accompanied by a cold Summit Pale Ale, the sausage was a great start to grilling season.

Lahp and sticky rice - the beginning of a Northeastern Thai meal

2010-04-15T22:41:00.003-05:00

If you want to dive into authentic Thai cuisine, here’s a great dish to begin with. This is the beginning of a rural meal with roots in the poor, northeastern part of the country known as Issan. Lahp was originally made with intestines and other bits of offal, and the heavy seasoning gave flavor to the only bits of meat the very poor could afford. Nowadays, it’s made with a range of meats – pork, duck, and chicken – but pork remains the most common. This highly seasoned dish is served with sticky rice and slices of cool cucumber and fresh basil leaves on the side.

Special equipment: stone mortar and pestle for the lahp and a clay mortar and pestle for the somtom (recipe coming in a later post.) Here’s a reason to buy two pieces of kitchen gear, one of which (the stone one) is absolutely indispensible for cooking Thai food. A stone mortar and pestle is used in this dish for crushing uncooked, dry-fried sticky rice rice into a fine powder. No other piece of equipment will adequately pulverize the rice. But, if you don’t have one, continue on with this recipe – a bean/spice grinder will do the job well enough for your initial forays into making lahp! But over time, a granite mortar and pestle is invaluable if you cook Thai food.

Ingredients
¾ - 1 pound pork. Let me suggest that you don’t buy ground pork unless necessary. Here’s why. If you buy an inexpensive piece of pork, say, pork shoulder, you can mince it the way Thais do, giving it a texture that’s not as uniform as meat that goes through a big grinder. Put the meat on a sturdy wood cutting block, and using a big knife, start chopping. You need a knife with a little heft, and one that has a mostly straight blade. Keep chopping using a rapid up-down motion, scraping the meat back together when it starts to spread out too far, turning it every so often to ensure you’re chopping it in different directions. The main thing to pay attention to is that strings of fat, sinew, or tissue don’t hold together, giving you a long string of partially chopped meat. After a few minutes it’ll begin to look minced, and when you’ve got a nice, fine mince, you’re done.

2 cups pahk chee farang ผักชีฝรั่ง, not well known in English but variously called culantro, sawtooth coriander or long leaf cilantro. Eryngium Foetidum. It’s a long, thin, green leaf, 6”- 8” long, perhaps as wide as a butter knife with a serrated edge. I can regularly find it fresh in Asian markets, and prefer it over mint, which can also be used. If you use the long leaf cilantro, chop it into pieces about ½”. Be generous with your measuring.

Roast 2 tbsp uncooked sticky rice in dry frying pan until it’s a pretty, golden brown. Roasting the uncooked rice gives it a deep, nutty taste, and it acts as a binder, as well, absorbing some of the the scant liquid that remains after the pork is cooked. I have a very small cast iron pan I use for this. Over medium heat I add the rice and gently shake the pan, keeping the rice in constant motion. Regular motion is especially important towards the end of the roasting time, when a little distraction can lead to burnt rice. Luckily, it’s only a few tablespoons and you can do it again! Dump into mortar and pestle (or spice grinder) and add 1 tsp salt. Pulverize in mortar and pestle until a fine powder. Be patient; it takes quite awhile. Set aside in small bowl.

Roast 20-30 dried Thai chili peppers in pan. (Those quantities are from the original recipe I first wrote in Thai. American tastes will probably think 6-10 chilies are adequate.) Using the same pan as the one used for the rice, dry roast the chilies until they’re charred; be careful, the smoky oil the cooking chilies can be an irritant. Crush in mortar, but keep chunky. There should be bits of skin from the peppers that are larger than what you’d find in a shake jar of “crushed chili peppers”. Set aside in small bowl.

Thinly slice 3-4 shallots. Set aside in small bowl.
Thinly slice 2-3 scallions. Set aside in small bowl.
Juice from 1 lime. Squeeze and set aside in small bowl.

Mince ¾ - 1 lb pork, chicken, duck or beef. In small sauce pan on stove, cook meat in a little water – maybe ½ to ¾ cup -- until cooked through. It should only take a few minutes. Take off stove.

Add lime juice and stir
Add fish sauce and stir
Taste. Correct balance of sour/salt, if necessary
Add crushed peppers – don’t add the whole amount at once if you’re not sure of your enjoyment of heat. Stir
Add crushed rice and mix in
Add shallots
Add scallions and stir
Add mint/ pahk chi farang and mix
Put in serving bowl
Sprinkle additional mint leaves on top

Eat with sticky rice and cold beer.

Shad roe

2010-04-15T14:04:00.002-05:00

During the shad’s annual run up the James River, Richmond, Virginia residents have historically indulged in shad roe the way many of us celebrate the return of asparagus. One longtime resident told me she used to eat the roe sacs wrapped in wax paper seasoned only with a little butter. The shad population, indescribably dense in colonial times, has suffered the way most fish species have in our polluted, over-developed waterways, and smaller runs have been the norm for ages. Indeed, several people I asked in Richmond had no idea of the shad run, while one said, “I know someone who’ll know." One phone call uncovered a supplier of them and I quickly found a restaurant serving them.

Edo’s Squid, a nice little restaurant off Broad Street in Richmond, posts its Italian-derived menu on just two sheets of paper hung on the exposed brick wall: choices today included skate wing, shad roe, quail, fried squid and several pasta dishes. The restaurant occupies the second floor of an old brick building and the lunchtime ambience was sunny and comfortable.
Shad roe are about the size of flying fish roe, perhaps a little bigger. The lobes are taken from the females and the two lobes weigh about three ounces apiece. The eggs are kept together in the sac, a thin membrane with several veins running along the bottom side of the sac. They’re usually served together as a main course or a single lobe for an appetizer.

Deep-fried bread, a lobe gently poached and sautéed, melted mozzarella cheese with a caper sauce on top, and a flourish a fresh, sweet and tart greens dancing on the other side of the plate, a green springiness to delight the shad’s return. The roe was cooked through, and I wonder if the quality of shad roe is high enough to eat raw; no one I spoke with had eaten it raw. The roe had a nutty, slightly salty taste, a pleasing texture up against the fried bread and mozzarella. The caper sauce was beautiful, and the capers themselves were the smallest I’ve seen – BB-sized, perhaps scaled to match the mass of eggs underneath my fork.

Earlier in the month I ate avgotaraho – cured and preserved roe from the grey mullet – a Greek specialty, and today I ate shad roe. I live in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, and I wonder if anyone eats the eggs of any of our local fish. Does anyone out there have any experience with the freshwater roe of our local fish? Are there any laws covering the harvesting of fish roe in Minnesota? Let me know if you have any experience with roe in Minnesota.

Beekeeping

2010-04-07T21:11:00.000-05:00

On this evening's radio broadcast of Duck Fat and Politics, I spoke with gardener and beekeeper Chris Sullivan-Kelley. She told listeners about several helpful resources and I want to post them here for your convenience.
The University of Minnesota offers an annual short course on beekeeping. Beekeeping must be experiencing a significant resurgence because the program's 250 person enrollment limit has a 140 person wait list; they're now offering a fall course as well.
Chris recommended Betterbee as a good online company for bees, books, and other beekeeping supplies.
If you live in Minnesota, check out the MN Hobby Beekeepers Association for more information. Others can find local resources online.
If you have any good beekeeping information, feel free to share it in the comments section. Thanks!

Duck Fast

2010-04-01T08:48:00.001-05:00

Stayed tuned for DUCK FAST, the quickest (and best) way to eat fast and look great. After all the time I've spent rendering duck fat, I've noticed that my hands look great. So, working with a small manufacturing laboratory, I've developed a hand cream that tastes as good as any mortar and pestle-made aioli. DUCK FAST works in two ways: first, just rub it on any chicken, pork, or beef, and have instant duck-flavored meat. And, while you're at it, lick your fingers any time you're feeling a little too hungry to wait until meal time. You'll notice before long that you're eating smaller meals and looking younger!
DUCK FAST is guaranteed to make all your food taste as though it was made in the south of France, and before you know it, all that finger-licking-good fat will wash away wrinkles, liver spots, decrepitude and mortality.

Slow pork roast

2010-03-28T23:53:00.002-05:00

Despite the hard work by pork producers to market "the other white meat," little has been done to keep people from cooking it to death.
I started my pork shoulder roast on Tuesday night, rubbing generous amounts of salt, thyme, garlic, pepper and rosemary into the flesh. I wrapped it tightly and put it in the back of the icebox until Saturday afternoon. A big roast, about 7 1/2 pounds, with a bone in it. I let it move towards room temperature for a few hours before I put it into a 400 F oven, surrounded by big chunks of russet potatoes. A few scoops of duck fat kept everything honest and well lubricated.
I had to remove the potatoes from the roasting pan after about an hour because they were browning quickly and the roast still had awhile to go. I cooked the roast until its internal temperature was just under 140 F, and removed it from the oven and covered it with foil; I used the resting time to finish the potatoes in a 9x13 pan, scooping a little of the fat to refresh the potatoes.
By the time we finished our salad, the thermometer in the roast almost read 160 F. I cut a few slices and the meat was juicier than a greasy hamburger and still had a nice pink hue to it. I served it with applesauce and a raisin-onion chutney. The potatoes were crisp on the outside and baked-potato fluffy on the inside.
We drank a stunning 2005 Alsace Grand Cru Mambourg Gewurztraminer and the massive floral nose nearly knocked me over. Simply swirling the glass made the dining room vernal. The intensity of the Gewurztraminer bouquet is unmatched, I think, by any other wine. I don't swoon very often, but every time I raised the glass I first pulled it to my nose and inhaled the memory of springtime love, wet plum blossoms splashed against dark bark, old Chinese poets remembering their youth. And with it, a still-pink, still-juicy pork roast with pork-and-duck-fat roasted potatoes.

Confit of rabbit leg

2010-03-14T21:56:00.001-05:00

I was going to roast a pork shoulder for dinner tonight but my wife and daughters went to see Mamma Mia, making a roast impractical, so I decided to break through the fat protecting my recently made rabbit confit and taste the early results. After a day outside in the early spring sunshine, not turning on the oven was fine with me.
Every batch of confit is different, and the changes I made while using rabbit for the first time worked well. Encasing the legs in a sheath of pig skin, and keeping the oven under 200F for the long, slow cooking really preserved the flavor and lightness of the meat.
Unlike duck or goose legs, rabbits don't have any protective skin that wants crisping, so after I extracted the first two legs that broke free from fat, a brief sizzle in the pan was all that was needed. Good mashed potatoes, and firm brussels sprouts rounded out the plate.
I had a glass of a Kante 2005 Malvasia from Italy's Carso DOC, a beautiful dry, minerally white wine. The rabbit legs were given a rub of thyme and juniper berry before they were confited, and the lack of fruitiness in the wine let those seasonings continue, in their now-muted role, to linger.

Rabbit: confit, sausage, meatballs, stock

2010-03-10T23:31:00.005-06:00

This week I cut up two rabbits and made numerous things with them. I was surprised at the 8 oz. hind legs, and as soon as I appreciated their size I thought of confit. I hadn't made rabbit confit before, but the legs had the same feel as the numerous duck legs I've slipped into pots of fat. Some of my rabbit stews this winter haven't gone over well with the family, so I decided to treat the rabbits the same way I do ducks - differently. I always cut up ducks and use the various parts separately; roasting a whole duck seems like a perfectly good way to ruin half a duck, so I keep away from that time-honored method.

When I make pancetta I'm usually left with a big piece of pig skin which I throw in the freezer; I first thought of wrapping the long, lean loins in the pig skin and roasting them, but decided to use the pig skin as a blanket, insulator, and moisturizer for the poaching-in-fat, slow-cooking rabbit leg confit. After marinating the rabbit meat with a rub that contained juniper berries, thyme, garlic, salt and bay leaves, I unfolded a long piece of pig skin and put it on the bottom of the dutch oven. The rabbit pieces went on top of that, after which I covered any exposed rabbit with another big piece of pig skin. I melted a pan of duck fat and covered the whole thing, and put it into a slow, 200F oven.

I made sausage with the loins and miscellaneous bits of meat, adding a little pork and back fat to the mixture. The sausage meat also marinated overnight, and the three pounds of links will probably be grilled. My meat grinder has a space in the front that, when I'm done grinding or stuffing, still holds nearly a pound of meat. I made meatballs with that loose meat, adding breadcrumbs, eggs, shallots and a little more seasoning before forming small meatballs that I poached in a reduced rabbit stock, made from the stripped-bare carcasses and enhanced with onions, celery, etc...

My kids and I enjoyed a simple plate of pasta, peas and rabbit meatballs this evening, and we all look forward to our upcoming meals with this versatile animal.

Just Food's Winter Eat Local Challenge

2010-02-28T23:11:00.000-06:00

Northfield's Just Foods Co-op is again sponsoring a week-long eat local food challenge. I'm again joining with a group of Northfield bloggers during the Winter Eat Local Challenge to write about it. It's fun to think about local food in Minnesota during the winter! I hope you visit their website and get some good ideas for your own kitchen. Here's a post I just wrote for the challenge:
Blueberries and planning

Wide pasta with fresh tomato sauce

2010-02-28T00:20:00.002-06:00

Tonight's pasta left me wanting more. As I was making the dough I added another egg because it felt too stiff and dry, but adding an egg made a sticky mess of the whole thing and it took ten minutes to really incorporate it into the mass of already-formed dough. There is nothing like the feel of well-kneaded pasta dough; it's softer than silk, pliable, fragrant, and almost cool to the touch.
I made sauce while the dough rested. A carrot, two stalks of celery, an onion, and half a yellow pepper in a big glug of olive oil. Salt, pepper, and a more-than-generous three-finger pinch of marjoram. For the past six months I've been using lots of marjoram; it adds a sweet, floral brightness that I can't seem to get enough of. Then a large ziploc bag of plain, frozen tomatoes, quickly cooked last fall to make it easier to put them into gallon-sized freezer bags. We lay them flat and stack them on the freezer shelves. Uffda, they were acidic, though, so I added a tablespoon of sugar and let everything simmer for a half hour or so.
My pasta machine's rollers go from 7 - the widest setting, to 1 - the narrowest, and the narrower the opening the thinner the pasta. I usually roll my pasta dough to a 2 or 3, making it thin but still with some body and heft. The dough was rolling out nice, and some of the pieces were extremely long, so long I had to cut them into thirds to fit on the table. I decided to hand cut the noodles tonight, and it's easy if a little flour is sprinkled on the sheets of dry-to-the-touch-but still-pliable dough. I rolled it up and cut it into 1/2 - 1 inch widths - I wanted a big, wide pasta this evening.

I've been having a little trouble lately with fresh pasta cooling and clumping up after it's cooked, so I decided to take the pasta right from the water and mix it immediately with the sauce. It cooked quickly - two minutes or so, and I used a pasta scoop to retrieve the long, wide noodles. With water still streaming off the noodles, I transferred them to the sauce pan, and then stirred them gently to coat them in sauce. From there the pasta went into oven-warmed bowls, and into the dining room.

What was it that made it so good tonight? The yellow pepper added sweetness to the sauce, and the summer tomatoes were bursting with flavor. The bite of fresh pasta can't be beat, especially when it's coated with just-cooked memories of last summer. Spring doesn't seem all that far off now.

Duck Fat Frittata

2010-02-25T21:55:00.005-06:00

I started this frittata with a few tablespoons of duck fat in the enameled cast-iron frying pan. A low flame softened the fat slowly, and as it melted it turned clear and pooled on the bottom of the pan. A sliced onion came first, followed by four or five small potatoes, also thinly sliced. I let them soften in the low heat while I fished a few rabbit hearts and kidneys from the bowl of many-times-used-for-confit duck fat, memories of poaching them in the fat many months ago a fading memory. I sliced the meat pieces and scattered them around the frying pan, letting the clinging fat melt into the whole. A generous sprinkle of tarragon followed by a little thyme, and then I shook a heavy dose of black pepper over the whole thing.

I broke five fresh eggs into a bowl and beat them with a fork, and then tasted the onion-potato mixture to see if any additional salt was needed. Turning the heat down very low, I poured the eggs into the pan and grated parmesan cheese over the whole thing. My eight-year old daughter and I read a reader’s theater version of Ronia, the Robber’s Daughter for twenty minutes or so while the frittata cooked, and when the whole thing was firm except for an egg-y liquid that moved just underneath a now-forming crust, I put it under the broiler for a minute or two. I let it rest briefly, but my daughter and I were hungry and no one else was home, so we each ate a pie-shaped piece of frittata along with a big salad. We speared lettuce on the tines of our forks, and had a contest to see how much lettuce we could retrieve with a single poke into the salad bowl. The frittata was delicious, but we remembered the Spanish omelette we ate at the beginning of winter at a friend’s house, on a baguette, and wished we had one. And for dessert, a bowl of applesauce with a deep dusting of Vietnamese cinnamon on top.

Pannukakku

2010-02-25T09:14:00.009-06:00

My friend and neighbor Doug shared this wonderful Pannukakku recipe because he, too, raises chickens and has an abundance of eggs; our family is quickly adopting his family's tradition of eating it weekly! Pannukakku is, besides being a wonderful word, a Finnish pancake that is more popover than pancake. The simple batter rests for a half hour before being baked, and the pan is coated with ½ stick butter. What I like so much about it is that it tastes so buttery; I think it’s because no butter is added to the batter, and the butter in the pan eventually pools on the top of the pannukakku, bubbling right on the surface and making it taste more buttery than it actually is. We still have many pounds of blueberries in the freezer, so lightly whipped cream is a great accompaniment to blueberries heated in a pan for a few minutes – it takes the chill out of them. A few years ago we went through a “Waffle Friday” faze, eating a wide assortment of waffles and toppings for Friday night dinner, so it’s nice to circle back with a new variant. I’ve seen pictures where the edges of pannukakku rise dramatically, like the wings of a spotted eagle ray gliding through the Caribbean.

Ingredients:
1-1/2 C flour (I use 1/2 C whole wheat)
1-1/2 C milk
6 eggs
1 T sugar
1 t salt
1/4 C butter for the baking pan

heavy cream for whipping

Directions:
In a bowl, whisk together first 5 ingredients until no lumps remain. Let stand 30 minutes. Preheat over to 450. Melt butter in a 9x13 pan by placing it in the preheating oven. (Remove pan when butter is melted to avoid scorching.) Brush entire pan with melted butter before pouring in the pancake batter. Bake 15 to 20 minutes, until edges are puffed high and golden. Top with whipped cream and fresh fruit (or thawed frozen blueberries.) Can also be served with a squeeze of lemon and powdered sugar. Serves 4 - 6.

1981 Chateau Haut Brion

2010-02-18T23:23:00.003-06:00

Three friends, sitting around a table with a beautiful bottle of wine. Dan, our host and generous provider of this 1st Growth Bordeaux, was a boy when the grapes in this bottle were growing. I took my first trip to Ireland and France in 1981; I washed dishes for months in a Greek diner in Buffalo to pay for it. I was in Ireland for about four months before my already-meager savings were gone, so I took a ferry to France and ended up near Carcassonne, picking tomatoes with Moroccans and eating my first brain tagine.
So here we were, decades later, marveling at the time that had passed since the wine was bottled. We were encouraged by the very small ullage, and excited when we removed the capsule and saw a cork in great condition.
From the first pour, this wine unfolded with strength, suppleness, and incredible elegance. Mature Bordeaux is such a joy to drink! Pencil shavings and moist tobacco, followed by deep green peppers and lavender. Joel pulled out its peaty earthiness, and we continually inhaled the ripe aromas of an old forest floor. We played with words and were repaid with a finish so long I could taste it when I went to work the next morning. Really. It is so enjoyable to give a great wine its due.
I think a wine like this is a contemplative balm; there isn't a barrage of berries or fruit to pull us into a talky streak; no, this wine sang to our northern, winter brains. As we drank the wine, each of us using all of our senses, our memories, our feelings, to embrace this wine and understand it, it was clear that whether someone's tasting notes contained "leather" or not was irrelevant. We can use all our words to name something but we won't be able to taste it unless (or until) we let the wine speak for itself. A wine like this really has its own personality, and it's completely different than a young wine, so much so that if we were looking for something familiar we'd miss the powerful, nuanced depth of the bottle. It's funny how we kept coming back to anthropomorphic descriptors to understand the wine, maybe because we've all known people much older than ourselves who puzzle, delight, mystify, and inspire us - all at the same time.
We couldn't hope for a better bottle of wine. The centuries of craftsmanship and vinicultural stewardship that have made Haut Brion a great estate were in abundance in this bottle, and all three of us were grateful for the opportunity to drink this wine, plucked from the procession of time.

Fasting

2010-02-15T22:05:00.006-06:00

It's easy to think about food when we have so much of it. It’s easy to indulge our interests when we’re encouraged to do so. Food is, after all, central to our existence. Although we’re emotionally removed from the burden of finding our food, we still spend huge amounts of our time surviving. But we never think of it that way. It’s just stopping at the coffee shop before work, having a doughnut with co-workers, bringing leftovers to work, thinking about lunch, eating and digesting it, wondering what to have for a snack, talking about dinner plans, stopping at the grocery store for milk and fruit, shopping, canning, freezing, gardening, and everything else that makes up a significant amount of our day, yet we never think of food as a survival issue. Just like how we drive 75 miles an hour on the highway and never think about crashing until we see one, and we instinctively slow down: we’re hurtling along in a box of steel and plastic and it’s dangerous! And food is still needed for survival, even when we dress it up in a restaurant and pay insane prices for a bellyful of nutrition. So even though we don’t think about it in terms of survival, we’re still fulfilling that function every time we eat. We’re mammals wandering the face of the earth, hoping not to starve, willing to do almost anything to survive.

And because our immediate survival isn’t usually on our minds when we eat our meat-and-three, it’s not surprising that the tradition of fasting has been abandoned by most Americans. While it still plays a mostly-symbolic role for a few Americans, fasting is still actively practiced in other parts of the world and by adherents to many faiths. But why fast? Why go without food and cause discomfort? What’s the point of it? Did fasting arise out of necessity? Why have people across time and continents willingly denied themselves food? One could probably stand a short distance from fasting and judge it as an unnecessary and perhaps bizarre ritual. From my perspective it seems like fasting is still relevant to people, but the farther we go from a sense of kinship – whether literal or spiritual – with poverty, the more remote the idea of fasting seems. Fasting might seem like an extreme sacrifice to well (or over)-fed people, but a more common exercise or discipline for the spiritually-minded and those for whom hunger isn’t a distant memory.

By fasting we recognize the primal role that food plays in our lives, that our attention to nourishing or simply filling our bodies is so dominant that we are aware of it only when we temporarily reject it. And when we do that we can ask what other questions need to be answered. Maybe fasting makes us more empathetic, more in sympathy with those who suffer the oppression of real hunger. Fasting can humble us, too, because we quickly feel that very little separates the rich from the poor, the successful from the downtrodden, when the pangs of hunger begin to gnaw. Fasting can give us strength, too, because we learn that our will, our spirit, our perseverance, can overcome limitations of the body. Food keeps us from starving, but I think of fasting as something more than mock-hunger. Are we, as living beings, our bodies alone? Or is there a part of us that hunger cannot starve, which is nourished in emptiness?

Hunger is something completely different, and its devastating impact is felt by more than 1 billion people worldwide. That number is so big it’s difficult to comprehend. How can that many people be hungry? And what can individuals do about it? It’s a global issue that is affected by the highest levels of politics, bureaucracy, climate, war, and distribution. Should we support any of the innumerable organizations that combat hunger, or urge our legislators to address hunger at a macro level? When we support our local food shelf are we ignoring the larger problems of poverty and public health? The ubiquity of fast food in the United States is directly related to our obesity epidemic, but it’s harder to sort through all the processed, prepared, and packaged food that sits on every grocery store shelf. From packaged lasagna to sweetened snack bars, the gap between food that we eat directly from the earth and that which goes through significant processing continues to grow. We are overrun by Kraft, Pepsico, and all the intermediaries who change our food. How are we to understand global hunger when we’re overfed and preserved by endless food additives?

With so many hungry people in this world, and with so much food wasted in the United States, should Americans make an effort to better understand hunger? Should we fast, not only for spiritual reasons, but to better know what hunger feels like? Maybe if we experience hunger we’ll begin to get an inkling of its corrosive effect on societies around the world. How many desperate acts begin with hunger? And how much indifference is exhibited by us with the full stomachs?

Big ravioli

2010-02-07T14:44:00.002-06:00

A cold winter day and with fresh eggs in the fridge I thought about ravioli again.
I chopped up and sauteed spinach, added a fair amount of fresh ginger and green onions, and cooked it a little longer. I broke up a hunk of blue cheese and almost a cup of ricotta. An egg, salt and pepper, and the filling was ready to go.
As I rolled the dough out, lengthening and flattening it, I wanted to try something different. So, instead of putting little teaspoons of filling onto the dough, I decided to make a few large ones, too - huge ones, in fact. I made a sheet of regular, 2" squares, and then went large. 5"x6" or so, and when I cooked them, one at a time, the edges of the pasta waved like a sting ray gliding through water. The large squarish shapes held together beautifully when cooking, and I used a slotted spoon to retrieve them. I swished them around in a little butter and served them whole; we folded them over like crepes and seconds couldn't come quick enough.

Kitchen

2010-01-26T22:59:00.006-06:00

When our white, solid-surface countertop developed massive cracks last year we took our time thinking about what to replace it with. We finally decided on soapstone, and chose a slab after viewing most of the available inventory in the Twin Cities. The installers did a great job and our next tasks were to find new knobs and pulls and to decide on a paint color. The knobs were easy but the right paint color eluded us all through the fall. Last week my wife found the right one and I spent the weekend painting the kitchen. It feels good to be done!

Soapstone is soft but non-porous, and we like its ability to withstand high temperatures. To get a sense of its hardness it’s probably better to think of wood than rock; it scratches easily but the tiny nicks disappear when the surface is oiled, and sometimes as soon as it’s wiped. A tomato, a lemon, a wine spill has no effect on soapstone; anything can rest on soapstone without staining it or penetrating its surface. Our stove isn’t large and I frequently remove the dutch oven or a hot frying pan from a burner and put it on the counter; I like that I don’t have to place it on a trivet.

The kitchen feels comfortable and balanced. The blue-grey on the walls brings out the green undertones in the soapstone, and the maple cabinets look warm in the room’s indirect light. Now that the kitchen is done, I can re-design the gazebo-turned-rabbitry-and-chicken-coop and replace it with a clean, simple structure.

Radio show

2010-01-18T23:25:00.000-06:00

As soon as I started talking on Jessica Paxton's All-Wheel Drive radio show last fall I knew I liked it. Talking about food on the radio felt as natural as listening to a baseball game on a long June evening. I like radio because it's just voices and words and sounds. We are born to talk, and whether we're sitting barefoot and full-bellied around a fire, or talking long into the night around a dinner table - dessert plates scraped clean, wine glasses stained red, and the conversation still moving along - we were born to talk, to eat, to share.
Well, starting next month I'll be hosting my own show on Northfield, Minnesota's KYMN 1080 AM. I love talking into the microphone at a radio station; I don't know if my voice is moving into the emptiness or the fullness of the night. I can imagine a voice rolling across the fields of Minnesota being picked up by a truck that's passing through on a long trip to California, New Mexico, Vermont. I'm still working with the station owner to find a time slot that works, but we're looking towards a mid-February beginning.
I'm planning to talk regularly with guests; I am going to interview the widest possible range of people involved in any part of food. Farmers, butchers, cooks, policy makers, hunters, vegans, gardeners, food bloggers and everyone in between or falling off the edges - I plan on talking with them. And you.

Thirty quarts

2010-01-07T22:49:00.005-06:00

We finished the Christmas holiday in the kitchen. Our local orchard remains open until New Year's Eve, and we paid our last visit at about three-thirty on the afternoon of the thirty-first. The snowy parking lot was empty and owner was on the phone when we walked into the storeroom. My son and I made our way into what is usually the refrigerated room, but with outdoor temperatures well below zero, it felt balmy inside. Crates of Haralson, Keepsake, and Regent apples still lined the walls, and it didn't take long for us to fill four twenty-pound bags.
The bags of apples sat in our back hall for a few days, but on Sunday we got to work. And work it was. Instead of taking down the Christmas tree we made applesauce, thirty quarts of cooked, mushed and canned apples to eat during the coming months. We made almost twenty quarts earlier in the fall, and although we had already eaten (and given away) a few jars, when the last counter was wiped clean at the end of the day we had more than forty quarts of applesauce in the fruit cellar. But, it was an all-day-and-into-the-night affair, the last day of vacation spent coring apples, cutting them into quarters, cooking them in a big pot, pushing sauce through a chinois and reducing all the work to a handful of peels that wouldn't fit through the holes. A few jars broke in the water bath and I had to run a strainer through the water to remove the suspended sauce. All afternoon we kept the huge canning pot filled with water, topping it off when evaporation exacted its toll.
"Was it worth it?" my wife asked when everything was done and the kitchen restored to its non-industrial, ready-for-school-and-cereal-and-toast-and-lots-of-lunches-to-be-made-the-next-morning condition, and I wiped the floors with vinegar and water to remove the hunks and drips and gobs of cored, smushed, cooked apple that would have otherwise been ground in and sticky, and I replied, "Yes," because we won't buy a single jar of applesauce this year, and all our applesauce comes from a single-source orchard about four miles from our home, and I know the blend of apples that we used to make the sauce, and each time a lid is popped we know we're in for a treat. Yes, it was work and it took time. Yes, I scraped my knuckles running the cherry-wood pestle around and around the stainless steel chinois, and yes, I did more of it alone than I wanted to. And yes, too, to our remembory of making applesauce in years past and opening a jar for a pork chop dinner or a PB&J lunch, to reminding ourselves and our children that the farmers and workers who make our food work hard, to being mighty thankful that we live in a bountiful, apple-rich state (even if it isn't beautiful western New York) and finally, yes to the unsurpassed quality, texture, color and taste of home-canned applesauce, which will, for the entirety of this year, run thick in our veins.

Offerings

2009-12-31T09:22:00.010-06:00

I end this year with a big pot of phố simmering on the stovetop. The slow gurgle of stock wafts upward like an Old Testament offering. What happened to food offerings? We now put money in a collection basket, but I think that’s a poor substitute; maybe we’ve got to put a little more skin in the game. As much as I love to cook and be with my family, when I look at the past year I also see food and my traditions as an impediment. What’s the point of a tradition if it’s got no soul? I grew up with lots of traditions and habits and over time I’ve come to call all of them traditions; it’s important for me to distinguish between the two. And when I married, I joined with my wife, and her past became part of my present and future, and the weave of our two lives (and pasts) is a complex one. I’ve rather heavy-handedly called all my habits traditions, which has the effect of putting them off-limits for change and discussion and evolution because I can be rigid about things. But traditions are organic and alive and the way we keep them real is to actively engage with them and let the new replenish the old. So, I offer up a pot of phố to the old year and new, recognizing that it is now part of my tradition, and that my traditions extend beyond my own past – our traditions keep the present alive, and nourish the future.

Pork roast ravioli

2009-12-27T23:19:00.004-06:00

We stayed in on Christmas, leaving the house only to shovel. Today we stayed in, too, but went sledding and took a walk after dinner, climbing over huge snow-plow mountains. On Christmas we ate a delicious pork roast, and with leftovers in the fridge I thought we should use it up. I cut a few thick slices of the roast and minced it with a big knife on my cutting board, added a little cottage cheese, an egg, sage, salt and pepper. I wouldn't normally make ravioli with already-cooked pork, but we were really in the mood for ravioli and the pork was sitting there.
I made the pasta dough and let it rest while we puttered around doing a few things. When it came time to roll the dough I got out the pasta machine, expecting my eight-year old daughter and I would follow our usual routine - I feed the dough into the rollers while she cranks the handle. As we got ready to start, my daughter said she wanted to roll the dough out herself and didn't want any assistance; once she started she wouldn't even let anyone else near the machine. She did everything - she cut hunks of dough, fed them through the rollers, she cranked the handle, and handled the flattened dough gently. Once she laid out the long strips of rolled dough, they were mine to use.
The pasta strips were 3"-4" wide and anywhere from 16"-24" long. I used about a teaspoon of filling for each ravioli, and we crimped the pieces with a chopstick. I put them into boiling water 10-12 at a time, and cooked them for about three minutes. I immediately transferred them with a slotted spoon into a large pan with sizzling butter, added more sage, a little salt, pine nuts, and a little more butter to keep everything sliding smoothly.
The texture of the cooked ravioli was perfect - the pasta had just a little bite to it, the pine nuts added crunch, and the minced pork blended nicely with the sage and butter. Ravioli is turning into a pasta we love to make because it always comes to the table looking good and tasting delicious. And now, with an eight-year old who's taken over the pasta machine, we might be eating it more often.

The Loveless Cafe

2009-12-19T16:19:00.001-06:00

On a dark highway on the far edge of Nashville’s influence, next to a gas station, sits the Loveless Café. Its old neon sign reminds us of the days when travel lacked the chain store monotony of today’s restaurants and lodging. People used to cook and serve food to people. No promotions from corporate headquarters and no market-research-tested food – just food. A sign on the door said they were closing at 6:15 for a staff party and when I looked at the clock just inside the door it was almost 630. The hostess looked up at the clock – just tilted her head a bit – looked at me, shrugged her shoulders and said “Just one?” She sat me at a square table in a corner, out of the way of the few remaining tables with customers, giving the bus staff and others space to clean up and be done.
There’s no need to gush over the food, but it’s necessary to commend the restaurant for continuing to serve traditional, unadorned southern food, almost untouched by the recent decades of bad food offered up by chain restaurants. I don’t know if it’s the burden of health department regulations or the staggering cost of insurance, but it seems difficult to open up a restaurant that serves good, plain, inexpensive good. The entrepreneurial spirit has been largely squelched by the fear of litigation, the threat of a food-borne illness, and the prohibitive cost of addressing those two concerns. One of the things I love about traveling to Asia is seeing the vigorous entrepreneurial spirit surrounding food. If someone wants to open a noodle shop in Vietnam, they do it. Put out a few low, plastic chairs and hang a sign. It was a lot easier to do that in the USA fifty years ago, and the Loveless Café is an enduring legacy of one’s ability to “serve food to travelers.” Maybe it’s easier for an enterprising young couple to take jobs managing a chain restaurant these days. How many banks are will to loan money to a restaurant that plans on serving fried chicken and good biscuits? And will private equity put its money into a place selling baked ham for $9.95?
Macaroni and cheese, green beans, creamed corn, hush puppies, sweet potatoes, cole slaw, baked beans, stewed tomatoes – these are the sides of old that ensured a diner would leave a meal full and content. And biscuits, good, plain biscuits. And when I ate my biscuits with gusto, spreading thick preserves and sorghum molasses on them, the waitress brought a few more. The biscuits were small, hot, and light, less flaky and a little more billowy than a hand-rolled one I’d make, and they were fresh and good. The fried chicken dinner (choice between light or dark meat – I chose dark) was hot, crispy, and juicy on the inside. Good fried chicken doesn’t taste greasy – it’s a delicate combination of texture and taste, held together by the coating on the chicken. Dinner came with two sides – the fried okra was hot, crisp on the outside, and fresh with a light batter coating, fried in oil, and heaped in a small bowl. The sweet potatoes were okay, but not as good as my lunchtime serving earlier in the day at Vanderbilt’s University Club, where the brown sugar, butter and salt were in such perfect proportion that I had to go back for seconds. The pie selection was broad, but I settled on blackberry cobbler. Southern desserts are a bit sweet for me, but this delicious blackberry cobbler was balanced with a depth of flavor that seemed to be a combination of orange zest and ground clove. Served in a ramekin with a shortcake topping, the cobbler was stained and thick with whole fruit, sweet to a point that nearly sent me into a sugar coma, but the small scoop of vanilla ice cream luckily prevented that!
I ate quicker than I normally would when dining alone, knowing that when the last few tables cleared out the restaurant staff would begin their holiday party. I left the restaurant in a good mood, content after a nice Southern dinner. The old neon sign still shined in the night, beckoning travelers to stop and refresh themselves with old fashioned food and hospitality.

Cholent and cassoulet

2009-12-09T14:15:00.001-06:00

Looking at the similarities between cholent and cassoulet, I think cholent gave birth to cassoulet as cooks and housewives in medieval France (or Aquitaine or Languedoc) took cholent from its specifically Jewish roots and absorbed it into the regional gastronomic culture of southwestern France.

Before Columbus brought beans from the Americas back to Europe, our common bean - Phaseolus vulgaris - was found only in the Americas. While chickpeas and lentils were available, a "bean" in pre-Columban Europe typically meant a fava bean. Both cholent and cassoulet are old dishes, and each was originally made with fava beans, the first important point of a shared past. Cholent is enriched by beef bones and meat, while cassoulet relies on a variety of meats, ranging from lamb or sausage to preserved duck and goose. Beef is the only meat not usually associated with cassoulet, and I wonder if that’s deliberate? Did non-Jews look at cholent and substitute other meats to make a point that they weren’t preparing a Jewish dish? In times of anti-Semitism or explicit persecution of Jews, adding a piece of confited pork would make a visible statement about one's dietary restrictions. Cholent was also made on occasion with lamb, an important meat throughout the Mediterranean and Middle East.

Cholent used to be made in a pot and sealed with a flour and water paste to keep in moisture. That’s identical to the medieval French daubiere, a slow-cooking clay pot with a raised lip that allows a flour-water paste to seal the pot completely. Cholent was always started on Friday and cooked in a low oven or placed at the edge of the fire and covered with hot ashes through the night and into Saturday, allowing Jews to eat a hot meal on the Sabbath without having to cook or light a fire.

I made cholent last week, piecing together fragments of recipes old and new. I started with fava beans, the small dark ones – minor types – known sometimes as horse beans or tick beans. After soaking them I added a meaty beef bone, onions, garlic, potatoes, and salt and pepper. I also added a small rack of lamb ribs and before the stew went into the oven I carefully slipped a few eggs into the mixture. I poured water and turkey broth over the beans and meat, and put the lidded, cast iron pot into a 200 degree oven.

When I pulled the cholent from the oven late Saturday afternoon, the long-simmered stew smelled beautiful in its hues of onion, brown, beef and lamb. I pulled out the eggs, whose white shells had turned tan during the long night of cooking, and cracked one open. A caramel-colored white steamed pleasantly and the now-hard egg left stains of taste on my now-tingling tongue. A bit of lamb fat floated on the surface and the plumped beans nestled with beef and translucent onions.

Cholent shares the same architecture but lacks the complexity of taste we find in a traditional cassoulet; as I prepared it, I thought it was a simpler dish. But it’s not hard to see how Jewish cooks laid the foundation for what we now think of as a quintessential French dish, and I’m going to keep exploring the connection between these two living cultural treasures of Jewish and French cookery.

Sweet potato ravioli

2009-12-01T23:49:00.006-06:00

Turkey wasn't the only leftover from Thanksgiving. This evening was a typical hurry up and wait evening, so I took advantage of a few time gaps to make a delicious ravioli with leftover sweet potatoes. Two of my kids had swimming and I had to drive, so when I got home from work I had to think about a split dinner: they can't eat a full meal before swimming or they'll be uncomfortable in the water, but it's close to bedtime when they get home, so I don't want them eating too much afterward, either.
As is typical on swimming nights, my daughter made a big bowl of corn and they also ate a piece of fruit. While they ate their pre-swim snack, I made a two-egg batch of pasta. We talked as I kneaded the dough and they wanted to touch it; everyone loves the feel of well-kneaded pasta dough; they rubbed it gently and marveled at the five-minute transformation from eggs and flour to this. I also popped the potatoes out of their skins and into a pan on the stove. I added a little sage, butter, and brown sugar and mashed it all together.

I put the ball of dough in a plastic bag and we all piled in the car and we made the rounds for our carpool. After dropping the kids off, my youngest and I returned home to make the ravioli. We took turns feeding the dough through the machine and brought it down to setting number three on the rollers. We laid the long, lasagna-like noodles on the counter and added spoonfuls of the sweet potato mixture to the pasta. I carefully put a top sheet on and hand-pressed the basic shapes before cutting them. After that, my daughter used fork tines to seal the edges.
They cooked in about three minutes and I drained them with a slotted spoon and added them to a large pan with melted butter in it. Our timing was perfect, and the last ravioli were going into the pan when the kids walked in. I heated up a few chunks of turkey and gravy, grated a little parmesan cheese on the ravioli, and and we ate like kings.

Mayonnaise

2009-11-30T12:32:00.000-06:00

Blenders, food processors and other new-fangled cooking implements are frequently used for making mayonnaise, but the old-fashioned mortar and pestle can't be beat for emulsifying egg yolks and oil.
Thai cooks use a clay mortar and wooden pestle for making somtom, a ubiquitious street food made with unripe papaya. I've found that this is perfect for mayonnaise because of its shape - deep and narrow with a lip that curls inward. Whenever I use a mortar and pestle I sit on a throw rug on the the kitchen floor; the rug absorbs some of the impact and keeps other things from getting dinged up.
I start with an egg yolk, and spend a few minutes pulverizing it at the bottom of the mortar: a rhythmic pounding and twisting that ensures its ability to bind with the oil. Then, slowly, slowly, a half teaspoon at a time, I add oil and continue to pound and twist the long wooden pestle. Salt, lemon juice, pepper, ground mustard, and other offerings are added slowly, never threatening the stability of the egg and oil.

Thanksgiving

2009-11-29T01:15:00.000-06:00

Thanksgiving is really about pie. We talk turkey and our president pardons one; most of us eat it, but a few, including the vegan from Bucknell, don't. Turkey is good, but it's made excellent with accompaniments: sauerkraut, cranberries, potatoes, gravy, and stuffing. Thanksgiving dinner is special because we eat together; across the country people share a meal that's similar to what everyone else is serving. Remove my sauerkraut from the table and add your - say, tamales, and you've still got Thanksgiving dinner. This year I included parsnips sauteed in butter and nutmeg; my mom used to serve them occasionally and always mentioned that they were part of her childhood Thanksgiving.
But it's pie that unites us. Pecan pie, apple pie, and pumpkin pie, the trinity of Thanksgiving pies. Just one gracing a table makes the holiday whole; add another and you're having a feast. Here in Minnesota pumpkin is hard to find this year; I went to the store on Tuesday and saw a sign that said, "Sorry, but due to a crop failure we have no pumpkin." So I bought a butternut squash, a few yams and sweet potatoes, roasted them in the oven, and mashed them together. Cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, allspice, ginger, salt, brown sugar, eggs, and milk - but it lacked something, so I grated orange zest, added molasses, and made it right. The texture was good, too - a thick, almost pudding-like density. Orange pie. I'll make it again. With a dollop of soft whipped cream or a scoop of vanilla ice cream, pie keeps us at the table, talking long into the night.

Butchering chickens

2009-11-17T22:04:00.005-06:00

We spent Saturday morning at a neighbor's house, helping them butcher a few chickens. A beautiful fall day with cool temperatures and no rain or snow. Our neighbors have an assortment of hens and they wanted to butcher a few of the older ones themselves, but they hadn't done it before. My kids and I have killed and processed enough animals to feel comfortable showing them how to do it.
We killed the chickens quickly, first breaking their necks and then beheading them; it was only a few minutes before they were all hanging from the playset to bleed out. We dipped the birds into a big pot of warm water and the feather plucking went pretty well, except for one bird with some tears on the skin. Then into a cooler filled with ice water before eviscerating them and pulling out the guts. I separated out the hearts, kidneys, and gizzards and later poached them in duck fat.
When the kids were cold they went inside and had steaming mugs of the most delicious Spanish hot chocolate. When we were finished we were treated to a wonderful brunch that included a Spanish omelette, dry-cured sausages, wheat beer, zinfandel, cheese and olives. Quite a repast after just ninety minutes of work!
We walked home full and content, carrying a chicken and a big bag of beets, happy to have helped out, glad that neighbors can turn into friends.

Sausage trio

2009-11-11T21:51:00.005-06:00

I feel like I’m learning a language that once was widely spoken but now is remembered by only a few old people and a small, growing number of non-native speakers. I served a trio of homemade sausages at our decade-old dinner club on Saturday. The centerpiece was a grilled rabbit sausage seasoned with juniper berry and tarragon; it was featured because my kids and I raised and butchered the rabbits we used for the sausage. Also on the plate was a grilled garlic and marjoram sausage; a simple garlic sausage poached in a reduced white wine and rabbit stock glaze; braised, home-cured sauerkraut, and duckfat-roasted potatoes.

A good sausage opens a door to a nearly extinct way of life in this country. After I cut up the rabbit meat, mixed herbs and fat and salt together, pushed the meat into a hog casing and finally tasted the juicy melding of texture and flavor, all contained in a perfect cooking medium (the casing,) I felt like John Keats in On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer – I was seeing and feeling and tasting sausage for the first time. Sausage, like Homer, has been around for a long time, and the craft of making sausage from scratch makes it clear what a perfect food the sausage is; like a sonnet it has a somewhat regulated form, with plenty of traditional variations – and a long history of improvisation on the inside.

While our culinary landscape was nearly razed by decades of indifferent food habits, small pockets of traditional food-craft continued and are now enjoying a buzz of attention. I hope we see a trend that materializes into an industry as rooted as the small craft-brewery tradition. Many cities in the US, including my hometown of Buffalo, New York, supported numerous breweries through the end of WWII, and then the gradual decline began, until too many people were drinking bad beer. By the late 1960s, local breweries were facing extinction. A decade ago the revival of beer-making skills was a solid trend, and today, the outlook for craft beer is remarkable. The selection and quality of beer today exceeds anything available twenty-five years ago; the craft didn’t die, and today’s brewmasters have reached new heights of creativity and good tasting beer. Will the same thing happen to other food traditions?

Earlier this evening I was reading a Trixie Belden novel (published in 1948) with my daughter. A chapter opens with Trixie feeding the family’s chickens and talking with her dad about having the cockerels for dinner that weekend. Somehow, between the end of WWII and now, most Americans gave up the backyard flock of chickens that were commonplace enough at the end of WWII to include in a popular series of books for girls. And now there’s this resurgence, a remembering of our parents and grandparents and elderly neighbors who immigrated here and brought with them the local traditions of their hometowns and cultures. They canned and made sauerkraut, raised chickens and butchered pigs, hunted and made sausage, and prepared endless meals the old-fashioned way – from scratch. Maybe enough of us will start making sausage and keeping a few chickens and pursuing other food crafts that larger enterprises will emerge to feed the hunger for better food.

Raising and butchering animals yourself lets you see all the possibilities for rekindling our traditional food arts. The simple act of having a few chickens lets you eat good eggs every day. And when you go beyond eggs the culinary horizons are endless. It’s easy to delve into a culinary tradition if you’ve got animals nearby; with fresh liver at hand, a pate is as inexpensive to make as a batch of tomato sauce, and readily available ingredients are available to make rich soup stock, extraordinary pie crusts, and things that will have your aging father or friend or grandma saying, “I haven’t had this since I was a child.” And you’ll be the lucky one, because you’ll get to hear their remembory.

Rabbit-stock risotto

2009-11-09T22:49:00.003-06:00

Coming home in the almost dark, the beginning of long nights. I pulled a pot of rabbit stock from the fridge and put it on the stove to simmer. I minced a large shallot and sauteed it in a heavy, cast-iron pan, then several thick slices of pancetta, cut into smaller pieces. I added two cups of Arborio rice and stirred it all together. A cup of red wine was next, adding color, fragrance, depth to the dish. From then on it was half-cups of hot stock, stirred in with a long wooden spoon, my son's arm tiring after ten minutes or so. Then a tablespoon of fresh thyme, minced. A few minutes before completion my daughter added a big bowl of peas. As soon as they were heated through I turned off the burner, added a hunk of butter and less than a cup of grated parmesan cheese. After I dished out the kids' portions, I added sauteed mushrooms, an added treat just for me and my wife.

Yes, cooking takes time. My kids didn't have school today, so while my son stirred he told me about his day, from trampoline jumping to ice cream with a friend and his mom. And I showed him how I like to stir risotto. He and his sisters set the table, lit candles, and brought the bowls of risotto to the table. Grace, and conversation while we ate. Yes, it takes time to cook, but what is time for if not to use with family?

Pasties

2009-10-29T22:07:00.004-05:00

A savory Cornish-style pasty turns a bleak, ill-humored day and resolves its blurred memories of unwellness into a well-fed, content family, despite the grey-edged rain upon rain.
I've got half a pan of headcheese and I want to eat it with everything, so I made a rich crust with a stick of butter and a big spoonful of rendered duck fat. No need for salt because this duck fat was already used to make confit. I divided the dough into five discs of unequal sizes and chilled it while I prepared the filling.
I also had a small plastic bag with kidneys and hearts that I wanted to use, so I cut them up and sauteed them with an onion and a little more duck fat. A few tablespoons of brandy started sizzling and I scraped up the little meaty bits on the pan. I still have a lot of thick, gelatinous stock from the headcheese, so I added a few hunks to the kidneys and let it cook down.
After peeling and slicing a few potatoes and an onion (we didn't have any turnips, another common ingredient,) the pasties were ready to be filled. I rolled the dough into 5" - 8" circles, and put in a bit of 'taters and onions, as well as a crumbled slice of headcheese. My wife and I got the kidneys and hearts, too, and the pasties were folded over and sealed, the once-open edge rounded up to keep any liquid from escaping. Head cheese is great for making pasties because of the gelatin that softens into a rich, flavorful broth in the oven. Halfway through the hour-long cooking, I used a funnel to pour a bit more of the rich stock into each half-moon pasty, sealed all around its edges.
A rich, flaky crust with a piping hot interior was the result, and everyone loved the novelty and the taste. Diced and shredded pork - and that's essentially what headcheese is - is a fantastic filling for a pasty like this. And the gravy that keeps everything moist and enriches the crust? I'll be making this again soon.

Headcheese

2009-10-26T23:42:00.006-05:00

There’s no avoiding the bad name; maybe Americans should look abroad and consider brawn, souse, or fromage de tête, syltty or huspenina, as it’s known in some of the lands of our parents and grandparents. Headcheese sounds like it’s made with mucus or boogers, and the name has somehow come into American English as a real unknown. What is it and why did people ever make it? Does anyone even care to know what it is, outside of the handful of bloggers who populate the internet and drive the search engines to their sites? You might even think I’ve moved away from my love of food and am searching for food with a shock value.
If you or I walked into a nice restaurant and saw Cheek Medallions from Berkshire Pig with Juniper Berries and Port Wine Cranberry Glaze we wouldn’t think twice about it, except to wonder if we should order it. But say headcheese and most people will cringe, even while admitting they don’t know what it is and don’t care to know; they assume it’s gross.

I made headcheese this weekend because I bought a pig and it had a head. Sure, I asked the guy at the meat locker not to grind it up, and I asked for the feet as well, but only because they’re part of the pig. Unlike restaurant food, which a chef can create from disparate ingredients and sources, headcheese comes from a tradition rooted in seasonality and culture. In cultures where families still raise a pig each year, headcheese is still being made. Look to any of the poorer European countries, from Moldova and Serbia to rural districts of wealthier countries like Italy and France, and you’ll find headcheese and its local variants. And headcheese isn’t eaten as penance, either; it’s a delectable way to get at the flavorful bits of head meat – imagine a concentrated combination of pulled pork and pot roast.
A head, with the brains removed, is soaked in a salt brine overnight, along with the pig’s feet. Next day the brine is dumped and the meat is cooked at a low simmer for several hours, along with bay leaves, peppercorns, juniper berries, and typical soup stock ingredients like carrots, celery, and onions. When the meat is fall-from-the-bone tender, remove it from the heat and let it cool. When you can handle the meat, separate it from the bones and fat. Strain the stock and boil to reduce by about a third to a half. The feet add huge amounts of gelatin to the stock, which makes the traditional aspic of headcheese a breeze to make.
Because headcheese is refrigerated, it’s important to season it heavily, so the flavors come through the cold. I added salt, marjoram, and re-hydrated a quarter-cup of wild mushrooms. Headcheese in many places call for vinegar, bringing to mind hasenfeffer and jugged hare. I used a saucier and kept reducing the already-rich stock, tasting as I went to ensure a strong flavor. I then put the meat into a Pyrex glass loaf and poured the flavored stock until it covered the meat, covered it with plastic wrap, and put it in the icebox. We ate it yesterday (and today) at lunch with a slice of bread and a gob of mustard.
There’s no reason headcheese couldn’t be warmed up so the aspic melts, and served with egg noodles. In fact, if you’ve eaten rillettes in a French bistro, you’re pretty close to headcheese, except that headcheese doesn’t have as much fat as the rillettes.
My guess is that headcheese is still popular where pigs are butchered on the farm because the process is so well understood. American consumers are suspicious of headcheese because our meat comes from huge factories and we don’t know anything about them. So, while Americans will buy millions of pounds of ground hamburger from unknown sources, few of us will eat headcheese. Is it because of the name or our suspicion of meat factories? If you know where your pig was raised and slaughtered, headcheese is an obvious addition to your repertoire of pork dishes.

Sometimes I just want to think about food

2009-10-25T23:58:00.000-05:00

I mess up in the kitchen as often as I succeed. My food isn’t always pretty and sometimes it’s too much of the same – some kind of stew with meat and beans. And too often I cook a dish but not a meal – delicious pasta but nothing else, and I have to scramble to make the meal complete, heating up frozen peas so we have a vegetable to eat.

Most nights I eat a bowl of cereal before bed – Shredded Wheat on the bottom, Corn Chex in the middle, and Kix on top. A light shines onto the counter where I sit; the rest of the kitchen is in puddled darkness. If I don’t read a cereal box I like to leaf through the pages of a cookbook and think about recipes. There’s clarity late at night when the house is quiet and the incipient rumblings in my stomach are quieted. Sometimes I just want to think about food.

Sausage

2009-10-20T20:29:00.002-05:00

Have I said how much I enjoy cooking with my children? Last weekend was a long one and we spent some of that time in the kitchen. First we made pasta, and all three kids took turns putting the dough through the rollers, cranking the handle, and gently guiding the pasta with open palms. With pasta hanging over chair backs we decided to make sausage with our new grinder.

I had already cut and seasoned a big hunk of pork shoulder butt; it was my kids’ muscle power that I needed now. Pulling all the sausage-making equipment out of the freezer, we set up on the counter and began grinding. Grinding was tough at times and they switched off regularly, watching the new-cut pork extrude out of the die holes. Once ground, we put everything back into the freezer while we cleaned up the area.

I took the hog casings from the bowl where they were soaking and ran water through them, causing the kids to laugh aloud as they inflated. If you haven’t seen hog casings before, they look pretty ugly in the bag. After all, they’re the lining of hog intestines, a light but very strong membrane. Packed in salt, they’re shriveled and kind of smelly. After soaking in water they become pliable and slippery, and when you run water through them you can see where condom makers found their raw materials in the pre-latex days.

Once the now-enlarged casings are put onto the end of the sausage stuffer, the real sausage making can commence. Making sausage is as easy as cranking the stuffer and getting a rhythm so the meat is extruded and the casing is extended at a consistent rate. We had a few wobbly moments when we pulled on the casing faster than the meat was filling it, causing irregular-looking sausages. Another time the casing didn’t move as quickly as the meat, resulting in a few blimp-type sausages. But all-in-all, the twenty or so sausages were not very different from the ones you find in the store. Except for the taste.

Pork shoulder, salt, pepper, garlic, and white wine: a simple, unadorned sausage. With endless cold, wet weather, we opted for the fry pan to cook them. A dab of butter in a heavy, enameled cast-iron fry pan, and an easy, medium flame. A few minutes to brown the sides, and about ten minutes with a lid, and they were ready to eat. I added a heap of sauerkraut to the pan and quickly braised the fermented dream-cabbage in the browned bits of sausage residue. On the burner to the left, boiled potatoes. Put it all together and that’s a happy meal!

Onion tart

2009-10-11T22:23:00.001-05:00

Winter weather has arrived too early, a days-long deep freeze that ended the gardening season quicker than the Yankees dispatched the Twins, alas. So, for a school potluck this evening, I thought an onion tart would be good. My daughter thought otherwise - she wanted me to bake a dessert, and when I told her what I was making she complained, "Aww, only the adults are going to like it!"
I love how much onions change when they're slow cooked, and a good tart showcases them perfectly. Tarts are good for an appetizer, a first course, or an easy dinner, and depending on what kind of pan or tray they're cooked in, they can be elegant or rustic. I use a bit of whole wheat flour in the crust so it has a nice color and texture. Cooking the onions takes a bit of time, but the recipe is pretty simple.

Crust
1 cup unbleached flour
1/4 cup whole wheat flour
2 tablespoons duck fat
3 tablespoons butter
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 egg, beaten
ice water

Mix flours in bowl, add salt and fats, mix with fingertips until pebble-sized. Add egg and mix. Add enough ice-cold water to hold dough together, mixing long enough before further additions of water to ensure that liquid is absorbed and distributed through flour. Form into ball, flatten slightly, wrap in plastic (I put it into a sandwich baggie) and refrigerate.

Tart
3-4 tablespoons butter
3-4 large onions
pinch saffron
salt and pepper
2 eggs
3 tablespoons sour cream

Melt butter over low heat in cast iron or other heavy-bottomed pan. Add thinly sliced onions and cook until soft, stirring occasionally, thirty minutes or longer. Crush saffron threads and mix with a little hot water. After onions have softened and the exuded liquid begins to evaporate, add the saffron and mix well. Add salt and pepper. When all the liquid is gone and the onions glisten with butter and feel thick, turn off burner and remove from heat and allow to cool. If you're in a hurry, put in refrigerator (or out the back door, if it's October in Minnesota!)

Preheat oven to 375°F.
Sprinkle flour onto your rolling surface and flatten your dough a little. When a ball of dough it first rolled out the edges sometimes begin to break and separate; I use my hands to keep the edges together and whole, the way a potter centers a new hunk of clay. Roll the dough to fit the pan; I use a standard tart pan with a fluted edge and removable bottom. Sprinkle the bottom of the pan with a little cornmeal and fit the dough into the pan.

Put cooled onion mixture into bowl and add 2 beaten eggs. Mix well. Add sour cream and mix in. Pour/scrape onion mixture into tart pan, using fork to spread evenly. Bake for about one hour, or until top begins to brown slightly. The tart can be served at almost any temperature. If served as part of a sit-down dinner, it can be served hot - forks will be needed. As an appetizer or potluck contribution, serve at room temperature so it holds its shape and can be stacked up next to a good Minnesota hotdish or macaroni salad.

Borscht recipe

2009-09-30T22:30:00.006-05:00

Make stock with the bony parts of two rabbits, cooking it long and slow to extract as much flavor as possible. Cook overnight, carefully topping off the stock pot with water before you turn out the lights and go to sleep, making sure the flame is as low as possible. In the morning, remove from heat; the stock should be peat colored.

In an enameled, cast iron pot, saute an onion or two and a carrot. Add dill and a nice fresh tomato from the garden. Pull four or five good-sized beets from the garden; wash off the dirt and peel them. Grate into the pot. Add stock by the ladleful. Remove meaty pieces from bones and add to pot. Simmer gently. Add a cup or two of uncooked, fermented sauerkraut. Add salt and pepper to taste. I made the borscht late at night, put it in the fridge, and reheated it for dinner the next evening, adding another two cups of sauerkraut before serving.

My wife also roasted sliced potatoes and onions in the oven and for my second helping I added a scoopful to the bottom of the bowl. My son likes sour cream; I like the tang of good kraut.

The way things are connected

2009-09-28T00:44:00.001-05:00

A pot of stock is cooking on the stove; our beets in the garden are huge, and the weather has turned blustery. Time for borscht.
But, I've been thinking about bread lately. I used to make it all the time, but other things have displaced the time I used to use for bread making. Before school began last year we bought a bread machine, and we've used it constantly; it makes a loaf that's good for the sandwiches my kids bring to school every day, and we haven't had to purchase bread since then.
When I started thinking about a rabbit-stock borscht my thoughts turned to bread again, and I remembered a beautiful recipe given to me a decade ago by a co-worker's mother in Des Moines, Iowa. Inga's mother, Vija, gave me a jar of starter for her Latvian rye bread, the most wonderful sour rye I've ever tasted. I made it for awhile, but over the years I lost the starter. I've continued to make rye bread occasionally, but nothing has compared to the still-sweet, slightly fermented rye I first tried all those years ago when recruiting for Peace Corps. It was probably a night like this when I wrote down the recipe in her kitchen as I watched her make it.
So, even though I should be asleep now, I just brought out my big stoneware bowl and added a few cups of rye flour, enough warm water to make it thin like pancake batter, about a cup of sugar, and a teaspoon of yeast. That'll be my new starter. The recipe uses only rye flour and has no added yeast. I added a little to start the fermentation, but I won't add any more.
Within a few days I'll have a big pot of borscht and a loaf of Vija's Latvian rye bread.

Apple season

2009-09-20T23:04:00.002-05:00

Apple season began around five this afternoon. I spent this beautiful September afternoon listening to baseball and washing storm windows and screens. Around four-thirty I knew we didn't have much time to get to the orchard, so I called to the kids and we hopped in the car. Ten minutes later we were glad to see an 8-6 sign nailed onto a fence post; we'd made it on time.
We walked into the refrigerated storeroom where they keep their apples; we wanted to taste a few before we decided what varieties to buy. Still early in the season, only one variety was available to pick, but there were a half dozen different apples in crates and bags. We tasted Early Blush, a fragrant, early season favorite, McIntosh and Cortland, Honeycrisp, Zestar, and Haralson. After tasting what was there, we bought bags of Zestar and Honeycrisp, both patented apples introduced by the University of Minnesota, and Haralson, a nice tart eating and baking apple, also introduced by the University of Minnesota, but back when land grant universities did work for the greater good of the state and its residents.

When we got home I put a pot of water for pasta on the stove and got to work making a tarte tatin, a reliable and delicious apple-upside-down tart. It went into the oven while the pasta was cooking and was finished before we were. We'll be eating a lot of these in the coming months. Here's how I do it.

Tarte tatin
Crust:
1 cup flour
3 tbsp butter
2 tbsp sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon
2-4 tbsp ice cold water
3-5 tart apples, cored, peeled, halved lengthwise and cut into thin slices
3 tbsp butter
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 tsp cinnamon
To make the crust, mix dry ingredients in bowl, add cold butter in chunks and mix with fork until pebbly. Add cold water one tbsp at a time and stir until flour holds together. Roll into crust the size of the pan you're using, using sprinkles of flour to keep from sticking.
Put a heavy, cast iron pan on stovetop and melt butter over medium low heat. Sprinkle brown sugar on top and let melt. I add the apple slices neatly and don't stir them once they're in. The thing to remember is that the apples shrink a lot; add at least four or five layers of them. After you've made it a few times it'll be easier to judge how many apples are needed. Add the apples and the butter-sugar mixture will bubble and sigh a little like a nicely stirred polenta. Keep adding the apples, making sure the whole surface is covered several layers deep. Sprinkle with cinnamon. After a few minutes, when the apples have softened up, remove from heat. Lay crust on top and poke a few holes in it. I fold any extra crust back on itself; it makes for a nice edge.
Bake at 375° F for about 45 minutes or until crust is browned.

When finished, put serving plate on top of pan and flip carefully. Let the upside down pan rest a few minutes before removing. Sometimes a rubber spatula is needed to dislodge a few apples stuck in the frying pan; it's also good for scraping any of the butter-sugar goo that's still in the pan.
Serve warm.

The smell of rot

2009-09-17T09:33:00.002-05:00

A walk in the garden and the smell of rot in my nose – slugs chew through tomatoes punked on the ground, thin walls blotched and putrid with collapse. Now is not the time to rest, glorious though these fall days are. The abundance around us will not last because a frost will come and kill what the slugs haven’t. For now, this bounty is ours to extend. Now is the time to can and preserve and salt and cure and freeze. This is the time to buy bushels of apples, heads of cabbage and pounds of tomatoes. This bounty is fleeting. We can eat local a lot longer than the first frost, and we can eat good food throughout the year without paying a fortune for it. If we don’t like the bland, cardboard tomatoes we find in the supermarket in February, then can the rich, flavorful, and bounteous ones today. As much as I enjoy being outdoors on these gorgeous autumn days, I know I’ve got to spend time in the kitchen.

We want good food but we don’t want to “slave” in the kitchen to ensure it. We’re used to buying whatever we want without regard for time or place. Maybe there are some things you can’t buy. As much as Hunt and Muir Glen want to convince us that quality can be bought for $.99 or $3.25 a can, there is pleasure in opening a jar of your own tomatoes in the depths of winter and smelling today’s warm September air, ripe and sun drenched. And rows of canning jars cooling on the dining room table add incalculable richness to our understanding of seasonality.

Just as we’ve lost so many old varieties of seed, we’re also losing traditional ways of storing food to extend its life. We’ve abandoned traditions because we have full refrigerators and well-stocked supermarkets. We feel we have no need to remember or re-learn the old arts of food storage. Root cellars are obsolete and canning, itself a relatively modern invention, is as archaic to many of us as a 33 record. Right now we’re surrounded by a lot of vegetables and it feels like they’ll be here forever but they won’t because winter is coming and the ground will freeze before we know it.

Do you want to spend an entire fall weekend in a hot, steamy kitchen? If you’re willing to, you might discover than it’s an enjoyable way to spend time with your kids or spouse or neighbors. Have a canning party now and in February you’ll savor the bounty of this season.

TV

2009-09-10T22:15:00.001-05:00

The most useful thing we can do – if we care about food and where it comes from and how it’s grown and prepared and what’s good for us and what tastes good, and if we want to sift through all the contradictory and overlapping claims about health benefits or environmental degradation or sustainability – is unplug the television set.

For the most part, the food traditions that were gaining a foothold in various regions of the United States have been in steady decline since the growth of TV as the national communications medium at the end of WWII and continue to the present day.

While there are a handful of traditional dishes that define a region of this country– clam chowder or gumbo, for instance – one of the foods that many Americans claim as a national dish is apple pie. My guess is that most of our grandmothers and many of our mothers made apple pie. We’ve elevated apple pie to the point where apple pie means America, so we should expect most Americans to cook it with familiarity. Yet, how many people still make it themselves? And yes, I mean the crust, too. And where do we get our apples – an orchard or the supermarket? And where are the supermarket apples from? And how many apple varieties grew in the US when your grandparents were kids, and how many are grown where you live today? How many Americans make their apple pie without a recipe, and how many make their own crust? We have innumerable cooking magazines that devote whole issues to apple pie and crust-making and the cooking shows on television celebrate its wholesomeness, yet this simple and humble and delicious dish is too complicated and time consuming for most Americans to make themselves.

We have a generation that’s seen so many commercials for Pillsbury and Baker’s Square that they’re convinced that it’s too time consuming and tricky to make a crust and that the one purchased in the store is home-style and better than the one they were thinking about making. And a cooking show might highlight a small town in Vermont where everyone picks their apples wearing fall LL Bean clothes, and you flip the channel feeling too discouraged to replicate the New England Autumn Feast. Then some food guru comes on and proceeds to make something extraordinary or simply sublime – either way you look at it and say to yourself, “I could never do that,” and instead of cooking you watch cooking. But more insidious than the cooking shows is the television itself, the enormous time sink that causes pie-crust making to be too time consuming, that burdens the hours of a day so significantly that a microwavable lasagna begins to make sense, and most of all, the steady drone of entertainment that turns the television viewer into a spectator. And food is alive and dynamic and cooking engages the mind and body and nourishes the spirit.

So turn off your television and cook. When you cook you focus on food. Let that be the beginning of how and what you cook. Ignore the latest trend that insists you begin cooking Lebanese, or French, or with whole grains or without butter. Don’t worry if your family doesn’t smile the same way as they do on Hungry Man commercials, and don’t worry if none of Martha Stewart’s simple wisdom has rubbed off on you. Television is noise, loud noise that distracts us from paying attention to real issues. And food is a real issue. Food is important and thinking about it and talking about it helps us learn more about how complicated and intertwined with our politics and economics it really is. Whether we grow it or buy it, prepare it or order it off a menu, food and the cultural practices surrounding it define us a lot. Even if we don’t know where the fried chicken we order in a restaurant comes from, it comes from somewhere and is part of an agricultural practice that may or may not reflect our politics and preferences.

I recently saw an example of vanishing food traditions on St. Croix in the Virgin Islands where my wife and I spent a few days. The question I asked everyone I met was, “Where can I find some good Crucian cooking, local food, not tourist stuff?” Most of the time people would shake their heads and tell me how little was available, how few restaurants served local food. I found a few though, and the conch with garlic and butter, the stew beef, the salt fish and head-clearing ginger beer were testament to traditions rooted in the Caribbean. And talking with residents not much older than me I heard stories of growing up without electricity and doing homework by small lanterns around the kitchen table. And as the benefits of closer ties to the US mainland accrued – like electricity and better health care – the same erosion of local culture that’s affected every region of the US took hold on St. Croix. Pizza and hamburgers, Coke and cable TV came into more and more homes and my guess is that you had moms and kids cooking and the conveniences that have added so much detritus to our culture gained a foothold there and haven’t let go since. And over time the same deterioration occurred and without anyone noticing the loss, only the old people were still eating salt fish and boiled eggs for breakfast, and only the poor neighbors were eating fried sweet potatoes, because one way to show you had a little money was to buy potato chips or whatever else it was that demonstrated that you were no longer so poor that you had to eat that “stuff” that your grandparents still ate. Nothing unusual about that at all, is there?

But one of the things we’re learning now is that as we reject a food tradition we’re impacting a lot more than what’s on our plate at the dinner table. Because if you stop eating sweet potatoes the farmers eventually stop growing them, and before long the variety that was adapted to the specific climate, soil, and sun of your part of the island is gone. Gone. And when someone remembers the sweet taste of that dish from their childhood and they go to find seed potato they discover that the variety grown by their grandpa is gone – extinct – and their only option is to plant a variety of sweet potato that’s from somewhere else. Or when a grown adult remembers a childhood recipe that tasted so good, there won’t be anyone who remembers how to prepare it, and so they’ll eat something from the mainland instead and that Crucian dish will be lost.

And then, the need to provide habitat to an animal that used to eat the bugs that damaged the sweet potatoes will be lost, and when that habitat is neglected it becomes more difficult to remedy the deficiency. Or when few people are eating conch people won’t notice – or care – when its habitat is degraded, and when that happens a whole series of ripples spread across the environment and culture and the man or woman who left decades ago to make their fortune in Boston may return and find an unrecognizable island.

How do we bring back that learning, that knowledge that’s so specific and personal and local? I think we start by turning off our television and taking stock of what’s around us. And as we pull a beet from the ground, or dig out hard, crisp potatoes, we start again with the elementary needs of feeding our body, family, soul, and culture.

I don’t think the efforts people are making to better understand food are gimmicks; there’s clearly an interest and recognition by people that the way Americans have been producing food and eating for the past half century has created reverberations that go far beyond the dinner table. Let’s try to understand what we’re eating and how we prepare it in addition to unraveling the complexities of food production and distribution. And the way to understand is to go back to the basics and learn to cook again. Don’t worry if you can’t live in Provence for a year; turn off your television and live in your own community for those twelve months. Grow garlic and visit a farm and eat with friends and find an orchard and cook with abandon.

Omelette

2009-08-25T13:51:00.000-05:00

Home for lunch on a rainy August afternoon. Early this morning a fierce thunder and lightning storm passed through the area, knocking out our power until late morning. We’re still not all the way in the groove of being home after vacation, and no one remembered to make bread. My oldest daughter revived some leftover batter and made waffles for her siblings; I made an omelette for my wife and myself.
We’re down to the tapered end of a great slab of pancetta, and I started with six or seven thin slices in the frying pan. (I didn’t roll this piece of pancetta after curing, but left it in slab form because it’s easier to cut.) A thinly sliced leek went in next, along with a piece of butter to keep everything lubricated. My wife’s been roasting tomatoes, and their rich, deep flavor is extraordinary; just before I added the beaten eggs I put in a few of these still-moist treasures. I added a little milk to the eggs and fresh ground pepper rounded out the flavor. I cooked it until the bottom was a little browned, then flipped the whole thing and adjusted the broken pieces until it fit together like a waterlogged puzzle.
Salty pancetta, sweet tomatoes, and buttery leeks held together by eggs, served fresh – I like coming home for lunch.

Duck Fat and Politics on the Radio

2009-08-23T23:43:00.002-05:00

Starting tomorrow, August 24, I'll be on KYMN 1080 AM every Monday afternoon from 4:45PM to 5:00PM (Central Time) for fifteen minutes of Duck Fat and Politics; it'll be a segment on Jessica Paxton's All Wheel Drive program.
KYMN streams live so you can listen wherever you are - I hope you'll tune in!
KYMN's website is:
http://kymnradio.net/

Northern cooking

2009-08-19T15:22:00.002-05:00

For the past six years we’ve rented a cabin on Burntside Lake in northern Minnesota, just a few miles outside of Ely. The evenings are usually cool and my wife likes to oven roast vegetables to warm up the tiny kitchen and eating area. We brought with us a big bag of garden tomatoes, beets, swiss chard, and lots of herbs. We stopped at the St. Paul farmers market and loaded the car even further with more fresh vegetables.

We start fishing off the small dock as soon as we arrive, and on Monday I made chowder using fresh corn, potatoes, and all the fish we caught on the first two days. I started by making a rich fish stock, the perfect use for all the pan fish that aren’t big enough to filet. Then, in a heavy-bottomed pot I sautéed a few onions, a tomato, a few sprigs of thyme, bay leaf, and a few slices of cut-up bacon (we’ve been eating so much home-cured pancetta this year that I found the bacon too smoky for the chowder.) I started ladling fish stock into the pot, and after a quart or more of stock had boiled down to a few cups I added a several cubed potatoes and let them cook at a gentle simmer. Then I turned the burner off and fished a little more. Before dinner I shucked four or five ears of corn and cut the kernels off the cobs. The corn made the liquid almost disappear, but I poured in a cup of half & half and colored it with a small mound of chopped tarragon. A few stirs later the chowder was ready for the table.

Monday's dinner began with a plate of brussels sprouts sautéed in a little butter and bacon fat. With nothing else except a heavy shake of salt and pepper, the little cabbages – browned on the sides, with a few bits of bacon debris lodged in the outer leaves and still a brilliant, glistening green – looked and tasted beautiful.

My wife’s been slow roasting beets, eggplant, and tomato slices in the oven and reducing to rich caramelized bites the vine-ripened produce of our garden and this season, distilling the abundance of August at 250°F.

Last night's dinner started with big hunks of smallmouth bass filets caught by my son, sautéed in butter after a quick dredging in pepper-rich flour. One plate in the middle of the table for the five of us, forks attacking the tender, flaky flesh. A light Selbach Riesling sparkled in the rays of sunlight pouring through the ragged clouds, and the table danced with its refracted light.

Plates of vegetables came next – the beets dressed in a little rice wine vinegar and paired with a few sweet and tart cherry tomatoes, drained of their water, holding only flavor. More tomatoes, each with a leaf of basil on top, a salute to unadorned food. And hefty slices of eggplant shrunk to not-yet-jerky-like consistency, still meaty enough mash with molars, still carrying traces of bacon grease and olive oil.

And in the evening, when the Milky Way pours out across the sky, we sweat and think and talk quietly in a hot sauna on the edge of a cold deep lake.

Hasenfeffer (Hasenpfeffer) or Sour Rabbit Stew

2009-08-11T23:33:00.010-05:00

As far as I can tell, hasenfeffer shouldn’t have a “p” in it because when it’s spelled hasenpfeffer it leads people to believe that pepper plays a role in this German stew with a well known name and unfamiliar taste. Hasenfeffer is a sour rabbit stew that gets its flavor from a heavily seasoned marinade in which the rabbit soaks for two to three days before cooking. The rabbit is then slow-cooked in a reduction of the strained marinade and served with something to soak up the remarkable juices – that’s the heart of this dish.

I think the recipe originated with a vinegar/wine marinade seasoned with juniper berries and bay leaves, and the likes of garlic, onion and carrots. Black peppercorns, clove, and cinnamon add considerable flavor and complexity to the dish, but if hasenfeffer started as an old German farm and hunting recipe, as I think it did, the poor farmers who made it wouldn’t have been able to afford such exotic spices. However, they’re widely available today and nearly all current recipes call for a medley of spices, herbs and other aromatics ranging from allspice and pickling spices to lemon peel and currant jelly.

Current recipes use either flour or sour cream as a thickener, but the dish traditionally used fresh blood to thicken the dish in the same way that jugged hare – a classic English preparation – does. The blood is added at the very end of the cooking and it isn’t allowed to boil (it could curdle.) Some recipes call for a little shaved, unsweetened chocolate, and others call for toasting the flour the rabbit is dredged in, but whether you use blood, flour, or sour cream the aim is to thicken the cooking liquid and add a little more flavor.

I found a few references on the internet claiming that feffer specifically refers to the use of blood in the dish, but I can’t find any confirmation of the word having that meaning. I spoke with one German professor who agreed that pfeffer doesn’t make sense for the dish, but he added that he doesn’t know of the word feffer used by itself, either.

With an abundance of rabbit meat in my freezer, I expect this recipe to evolve over time.

Good beer, skin-on mashed potatoes and braised kale are the perfect accompaniments for hasenfeffer.

Patrick’s Duck Fat and Politics Hasenfeffer

1-2 rabbits, cut into pieces. I like to use the meaty parts of two rabbits, reserving the bonier parts for soup stock.
1 ½ cups vinegar
1 cup wine
1 onion, sliced
1 carrot, cut into chunks
1 stalk celery, cut
3-4 cloves garlic
8-10 juniper berries
8-10 whole cloves
6 whole allspice berries
1 tsp mustard seed
2 bay leaves
1 piece cinnamon or 1 tsp ground
2 springs fresh thyme
Either ¼ cup fresh blood or ¼ cup sour cream
flour for dredging
salt

Combine all ingredients except blood, sour cream, and flour and marinate for 2-3 days in refrigerator. Mix daily.

When ready to cook, strain marinade and reserve liquid. Discard solids.

Add a little duck fat to dutch oven and turn burner on medium high.

Dredge rabbit pieces in flour and brown.

Turn burner on high and slowly add reserved marinade; reduce liquid almost completely before adding more. Continue until total liquid in dutch oven is 1 – 1 ¼ cups.

Reduce burner to very low, cover, and cook for 1 – 1 ½ hours or until meat is tender. Add a little water if necessary.

When meat is done, turn off the burner, let it cool, and refrigerate overnight.

Next day, before serving, reheat slowly. Taste for saltiness and add salt if needed. Just before serving, add either blood or sour cream and stir to mix, being careful not to let stew boil.

After the stew has been chilled and reheated, the meat begins to fall off the bone and shred like an old Brunswick stew or barbeque. I like it this way, but if you don’t want the meat pieces to fall apart, stir with care.

Blueberry pancake

2009-08-09T23:43:00.003-05:00

I made pancakes for the kids this morning and went for a run. When I returned I stirred up the remaining batter and poured it over a handful of blueberries sizzling in the frying pan. I scraped out just enough batter for one blueberry pancake.

Rabbit dividends

2009-08-05T22:56:00.021-05:00

The advantage of butchering my own animals is that I have the whole animal to use. Unlike a plastic-wrapped boneless, skinless chicken breast or a single grass-fed organic bison patty, a whole animal has lots of delicious parts (which many people have never eaten - except probably in hot dogs.)
The first thing we ate after butchering our rabbits were the hearts and kidneys, sautéed in a little grapeseed oil and flavored with fresh tarragon and a dab of heavy cream. My wife protested, while still managing to spear the last stray heart with her fork,"Why didn't you cook them the way you always do?" disappointed that I used cream with organ meats. We eat them often enough to have preparations we prefer. I sometimes have difficulty make pâté, but I made a pretty good country-style one with all the livers I had. We've been eating it for lunch this week -- a thick slice with a good pickle and a glob of mustard; after that and a piece of fruit I'm ready to return to work.
Last night I made stock with the bones; a slow-cooked, peat-stained stock that looks like a lake in northern Minnesota: tea-brown but perfectly clear. That's the result of a long, slow simmer throughout the night. And for tonight's dinner I used the stock to make my first corn chowder of the season, a real treat with fresh bread and a glass of wine. And marinating in the icebox is a big batch of hasenfeffer, a sour rabbit stew we'll eat on Friday.
Without a whole animal I'd be limited in what I could make. And for the majority of people who rely only on supermarkets for their meat, these stores are reducing the varieties of meats they sell, not increasing them. If you go into a typical supermarket in Minnesota, most of the pork is from Hormel and most of it has added tenderizers and flavor "enhancers" to keep it artificially juicy. And ask in the meat department for pig feet or hocks or pork belly and they probably won't have them. You get the boneless, plastic-wrapped meat and they include a microwave recipe on the label. Additionally, when the pig that gives up its pork chops is killed, the belly and hocks and liver are in the pig. In the old days a real meat market would carry many different cuts and varieties of meat and there were recipes and traditions and budgets for every part of every animal. What happens to all of that now? Does it go into the can of dinner your cat will eat? I like eating kidneys and livers and extracting marrow from bones. I like the bony carcass as much as the meaty legs and I use all the parts in ways that maximize their flavor and value. I want to make food that tastes good and I want to use the entire animal, not just the parts that look like they don't come from one.

Butchering rabbits

2009-08-02T23:38:00.026-05:00

When I saw the last bite of dinner on my plate - a bean, a piece of onion, a fragment of tomato, and a morsel of rabbit, all of which was improved by a most fragrant sauce - I was glad we bought a trio of rabbits last fall and have spent the past nine months figuring out how to manage their waste, breed them successfully, and keep them comfortable in our erratic weather.

Saturday afternoon we butchered our first batch of young rabbits: they were eleven weeks old and dressed out at about 2 ½ pounds apiece. I hung a green tarp along the fence to make sure none of our neighbors saw anything they didn't want to. A few came over and showed an interest and I was glad to show them what we were doing. Likewise with our kids. I told them that their involvement was voluntary, and wasn't surprised by their active participation. In addition to the work involved with bleeding, gutting, and skinning ten rabbits, we also dissected an eyeball, saw how poop travels through a body, cut open a stomach, cut a gall bladder to smell bile, began curing several pelts, and marveled at the texture of lungs.

Like anything I don't do frequently, butchering the first few took longer than the last ones. But, I was done in a few hours and now our fridge is full of fresh meat; I also have a big bowl full of livers that I'll cook tomorrow.

We were doing yard work again today and I didn't plan a special first meal with our rabbit meat, so I fell back on the familiar. After sautéing garlic in a little duck fat, I browned a few back legs, which are much meatier than the front ones. Then a sliced onion and a good pour of an Alsatian riesling, which I cooked down. A little water and I covered the dutch oven with a heavy lid and let it braise awhile. I went into the garden and cut a few large sprigs of tarragon and thyme. I added them and continued. My wife picked a colander of birthday beans from this year's bumper crop, and I stewed them with a tomato and a little swiss chard. Finally, a handful of fresh parsley on the rabbit and dinner was ready.

Why am I willing to wait nine months for dinner? What is it about growing vegetables and raising, killing, and cooking animals that fascinates me so much? I was never a farm kid and doubt I'll ever be one. But tasting that last forkful of dinner, all mixed up with rabbit juices and tarragon, I feel like I can look into the past and begin to understand some of what we've abandoned as we've shifted from an agrarian to a mass-marketed society. In a very short time we've lost languages, cultures, traditions and foodways. Cooking beyond a recipe calls for more than an ingredient list; it requires a certain understanding of - and access to - raw ingredients and cooking techniques, most of which can't be purchased in a store. And the stuff isn't fancy or expensive if it's part of your life and environment - making cassoulet in France in 1609 certainly didn't cost hundreds of dollars and multiple trips to Williams-Sonoma and other specialty stores. I want to keep some of these older food traditions an active part of my life and culture because I think they're just as vulnerable and perishable as a language or an endangered species.

Lobster

2009-07-29T23:31:00.002-05:00

We eat lobster with unpracticed abandon. During this annual ritual we shed our summer seersucker manners and revel instead in the savagery of mere eating. It’s so easy to do in Maine. A walk to the lobster pound to pick out our dinner; with a long-handled net one of the workers scoops our selection into a brown paper bag and drops that into a plastic one. We hand over our cowry and the trade is completed; out we go and head back home. Into a large pot filled with a few inches of boiling water go the squirming crustaceans, brown, blue, sea-floor camouflage. The lid is closed and in just minutes they boil and steam to perfection. In the time it takes to set the table we stop thinking about them as animals and begin smelling dinner. We lift the lid and retrieve these fiery beacons of summer.
We tear them apart, pulling off legs and pecking at their bellies. Once we’ve sucked the small bits of flesh from the now-hollow legs we move on, hungry for more. The claws are the first fruit that begin to satisfy our craving. These once-wielded weapons are the easiest to break open, and we celebrate these plump nuggets with a mouthful of ale or a gulp of wine. After all the prying and tearing and pulling and biting we eat the tail, breaking it from the top and turning it over to open it. We feast on the tail, savoring and ripping the meat with canines, incisors, and molars. This is how our species evolved, nimble-fingered mammals capable of tearing and chewing other living things. This insect of the sea brings us back to Maine year after year, and whether prices are high or low we feast on them night after night. We eat few other things so completely and in such an unadulterated manner. No separation between us and our prey as we reach for another one-pound soft shell. It’s hard to imagine us ripping apart a chicken or pig and breaking its bones as we tear into its flesh. But on these July nights the smell of pines mingles with the smell of dinner, and we sit with a mound of shells between us – heads, tails, legs – all torn asunder and discarded, and we are satisfied, content animals.

Chicken soup

2009-07-21T13:37:00.006-05:00

Rain at the cottage: the kids are in the kitchen playing Monopoly, our youngest nephew is napping, us parents are reading newspapers, magazines, and old books left here from summers past, and the plash of rain through the canopy of towering maples soothes us all as much as the huge pot of chicken soup simmering on the stove. A cut up-chicken, a few extra legs from the icebox, a heap of vegetables - onions, celery, carrots; a few herbs, and salt and pepper.
Here with several of my siblings, all of us remember our mom's cooking and expansive love and generosity. And I think about all the changes in eating habits since we were kids. While processed food was available when we were kids, its widespread presence in today's American diet is something my siblings and I shake our heads at. One of my sister's has food sensitivities and this morning she was saying how hard it is to find half and half that doesn't have preservatives in it. "Why," she asked, "can't I find a product that's just milk and cream? Why does cream need preservatives? People use it quickly, and it doesn't need anything else in it." She spends more time reading labels than she'd like to.
Making food isn't as time consuming as food marketers want us to believe. I can make a tomato sauce in the time it takes the water for pasta to boil, so what time savings is there by opening a can of prepared sauce? The time it takes to make a rich chicken soup is negligible; a few minutes chopping things and then hours of good smells to whet the appetite. A few voices rise to challenge a play on the Monopoly board and threaten the little one's nap, but the slow gurgle of stewing broth percolates through the cottage, filling each room with the fragrant scent of herbs and stock, keeping everything on a pretty even keel.
Taking short cuts seems too prevalent in our society and it's especially apparent in our food choices. The cooking I grew up with wasn't haute cuisine and it didn't require much more than a few minutes thought and a little preparation. Prepared and packaged foods may get us to the dinner table a few minutes quicker, but when we consider the afternoon smells of a long-simmered pot of soup as a mere prelude to the meal itself, I'll take the long road to dinner every time, and spend that time with family and friends.

Birthday beans

2009-07-17T21:37:00.006-05:00

I first planted these beans in the summer of 2003. We went to Paris the previous fall and bought these beans, Facila is the variety, on our daughter's first birthday. When they grew that first summer, we reminded her that these were her birthday beans, the ones we bought in Paris. She ate them with relish right off the plant. I saved seed from the best plants and the following spring planted them again. And here we are, harvesting birthday beans for the seventh time. And they're still my daughter's favorite.
This, perhaps, is how things get named. When I list these beans in the Seed Savers Yearbook I'll document that the bean was originally named Facila, and that it's a variety sold by Vilmorin, the old French seed house that's taken over a large share of the world's seed trade, but I may call them Birthday Beans instead. It's as good a name as any I've heard for a bean. I love the story we tell each other every year, and how we say Birthday Bean with more enthusiasm than, say, "zucchini." Our daughter was born on 9.12.01, and the moment she was born I saw proof that life is irrepressible, that life itself will bourgeon and blossom and will not fail, even when people do. And as these beans grow and nourish us each year, we, too, are renewed each time we save seed and plant it; we midwife the seed from one generation to the next.
Last night I picked a bowl-full for dinner. I blanched them very briefly - they were in boiling water for less than 30 seconds - because they're so tender and fresh and I just wanted to brighten them up a bit. I quickly doused them in cold water and turned the burner on high. Into the saucier went a teaspoon of duck fat; as soon as it was hot I added the beans, fresh tarragon, and a sprinkling of fine sea salt. Two minutes from the garden to the table, full of green and family lore.

Blueberries

2009-07-14T21:42:00.010-05:00

We picked blueberries on Sunday, twenty-three pounds of them. My wife and I said to each other, "Wow, ninety-five dollars is a lot to spend on fruit." I thought about all the pancakes we'll eat, all the pies I'll bake, and thought "Hey, my pies are probably ten-dollar pies, maybe even more when I use a lard/duck fat crust."
We'll get our money's worth. We'll stain our lips and eat pie before bed and then again for breakfast. I'll pour a blueberry compote over roast pork and bake whole berries into muffins; in March we'll still be eating blueberry pancakes on weekend mornings. They're all in the freezer now, two stacks of ziploc bags on the bottom shelf. Cup by overflowing cup and bag by bag, we'll eat July the whole winter long.
We picked on the very first day of the blueberry season because last year our vacation coincided with the season and when we returned it was over. We head to Maine next week and we'll pick wild ones along the mountain trails; the lure of them has turned my youngest into an avid hiker. She'll keep going if there are blueberries ahead, even if the trail is a difficult one.

Anticipating corn

2009-07-07T00:17:00.010-05:00

Last year I wrote about corn and wondered why we don't have a deep tradition of corn-based recipes for the month of August. If corn was native to China or France, I feel certain there'd be a whole cuisine that revolved around its seasonal abundance. And while I love corn on the cob, there ought to be richer food traditions that everyone knows and participates in. I know there are people out there who swear by a recipe or dish they know, but my question is, "Why don't all of us know it?" Why haven't we been able to forge a lasting culinary tradition when we're surrounded by mountains of corn for four weeks each year?
Corn season is just around the corner. I'll be making my corn chowder, you can be sure of that. And eating it fresh off the cob. But what else should we be doing with it?

And it's July

2009-07-05T22:54:00.001-05:00

And it’s July and I’m thinking about food. I made pumpkin pie for the 4th of July and a cold slice with fresh whipped cream tasted great. And baked beans and watermelon. We got beautiful lettuce from our neighbor’s garden and made a big salad. Grilled vegetables and plump hot dogs, too. Meaghen asked why I don’t make baked beans more often. This batch has pancetta instead of salt pork, and less molasses than usual. I think I’ll make the next pot with lemon grass, coriander, and honey and see if I can convert my wife, who likes her beans with cumin.
Today we sat in the back yard and ate cold, red watermelon when we were hot from lugging and cutting, hauling and tossing. Watermelon might be the most refreshing food ever grown.
This evening Meaghen made an omelette with pieces of pancetta the size of pats of butter, all sautéed and giving up their fat so the omelette could sizzle and float on a clear, fragrant film. I made swiss chard and used our last frozen tomato from last year’s harvest – wow, only a month until we start eating them from the garden again!
I’m sore from working outside much of the weekend. I’m still trying to improve the rabbit cages and chicken housing because I don’t have a good system for managing the urine and poop of the rabbits. I’ve suspended the rabbit cages so the cage floors stay clean, and currently the waste is falling onto a big sheet of 6 mil plastic, which I haul out every few days and dump. It’s a bit messy, and when we go on vacation in a few weeks the set up is pretty awkward for the neighborhood kids who will water and feed the animals.
After much talk we finally got more chickens. We have just four pullets (immature hens) now and we look forward to eating fresh eggs in a few months. But their housing isn’t finalized, either. What we currently use is fine while the weather is nice; I just keep them in a big cage and move it around every day, but we have such cold winters in Minnesota that better housing is needed for half the year. And with only four birds they won’t keep each other very warm. So, with both the rabbits and chickens, it’s winter that makes things more complicated. A urine-and-poop collection system that works in July may be unmanageable when it’s -20°F outside.
Our rabbits are due to kindle (give birth) any day now. I put the nesting boxes back in on Friday and the two does are beginning to pull fur from their chests and make the boxes, which are lined with hay, cozy and comfortable. Meanwhile, the ten bunnies that were born in May still aren’t large enough to butcher; I thought they’d grow a bit quicker.
Finally, I’m frustrated with my favorite fava beans. We inevitably have a spike of very hot weather sometime in late May, just when the favas are flowering. This leads to many dropped flowers and half-filled pods. I’m a little confused. Favas are grown and eaten throughout the Mediterranean basin, much of which is as hot as any weather we have here. Why aren’t they more heat tolerant? Do we only have varieties that were developed for England’s long, cool spring? I’d like a few varieties that tolerate the heat better.

Pancetta, garlic...

2009-06-27T21:47:00.002-05:00

With about five more pounds of pancetta hanging in the fruit cellar, lots of our recent meals include it. Early summer is filled with after dinner activities, so easily prepared meals are essential if we want to sit down together. Rice and pasta are the staples of these dinners.
Two nights ago it was pancetta, garlic, olive oil, fresh parsely and thyme, with a generous grating of Parmesan cheese over linguine noodles. Last night it was this: butter, pancetta, and shallots. Then generous pours of a mediocre Alsatian riesling, which I bubbled down. A quick paw through the icebox and a nice hunk of fresh ginger emerged. Thin slices of that, along with fresh thyme and parsley. Finally, peas, although they came from a bag, not the garden. Mix in penne noodles, and we’re good to go.
We keep trying new ways to eat pancetta, and they’re usually pretty good. I try to cook it long enough for its fat to flavor whatever else it's cooking with, but not so long that it loses its unique flavor.

Swiss chard

2009-06-23T22:24:00.003-05:00

We eat swiss chard almost daily during the summer and fall. We grow the beautiful variety called Five Color Silverbeet, a variety that was maintained by the Digger’s Garden Club in Australia after it was dropped by commercial seed companies. It was first re-introduced to US gardeners through Seed Savers Exchange, and in the past few years it’s been picked up by many seed companies in the US. The multi-colored ribs and big crinkly leaves are as pretty as anything grown in a Minnesota garden.
Beets and swiss chard are different varieties of the same genus and species, Beta vulgaris. Over time, beets have been bred for their tuberous root while swiss chard’s ribs and leaves are prized by cooks. Marcella Hazan, in Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, has a delicious swiss chard torte we’ve been making for years, but our daily standard is a bit simpler, and it’s quick and delicious. Here’s what I do:
Add a hefty pour of olive oil to a saucier or other fry pan;
Mince a few cloves of garlic and add them to the hot oil;
After the garlic cooks, add the diced stems of the swiss chard and sauté it like celery;
When the stalks are soft, add a whole tomato, preferably a paste variety with lots of meat and few seeds;
Mash the tomato a bit and turn the heat up pretty high to cook off the excess moisture;
Add a little salt;
Lay all the chard leaves on top of each other and roll them up like a fat cigar, then cut the fat roll of leaves into thin strips – maybe ½” or so;
Add the leaves to the hot pan, and stir it all around;
I usually cover the pan for a minute or two to let the steam wilt the chard leaves quicker. Cook the leaves for three or four minutes total.
When I come home from work and make this for lunch, I usually serve it with rice, and I always have a little bowl of nahm prick, a homemade, fiery Thai condiment, on the side.

Last night it rained

2009-06-18T00:23:00.005-05:00

Last night it rained. The 1.15 inch rainfall was welcomed by everyone (except the soccer players: one inch of rain over one square mile equals about 17.4 million gallons of water weighing 143 million pounds, or the weight of a train with 40 boxcars, according to the National Weather Service, so approximately 160 million pounds fell on the brave kids and parents who kept playing!)

I putter around my garden with a hose or watering can, gently soaking the leaves, roots, and soil, and I have thoughts that go in two directions. First, it’s hard not to think about places where large segments of the population don’t have access to water. As I watch a plant perk up with water, I wonder what it’s like to live in a water-deprived community, where the constant struggle to obtain water dominates daily life. Second, I wonder how we’ve allowed the marketing and sale of bottled water to succeed. Water is our most basic human need. If human rights have any meaning, access to safe, affordable water should be a priority for all governments. And in this country, where we use 20 times more water than some 1.8 billion people worldwide who use a mere 20 liters per day, we’re standing idly by while this most precious resource is being commoditized and privatized right before our eyes.

The biggest shock we’ve had in recent years was last year’s gas prices – when a gallon hit $4.00 people began to worry and panic. $4.00 for a gallon of gas was as terrible a scourge as anyone could remember. Yet, we’d still drive to the store and spend a dollar on a bottle of water. A dollar for about a pint of water. It makes gasoline look like a bargain.

http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/pdfs/report/HDR06-complete.pdf

Duck Fat

2009-06-08T22:07:00.008-05:00

A jar of duck fat, rendered from two ducks I cut up and cooked this weekend. As plain as this picture is, just a jar of nearly white, perfectly smooth fat, so it is.

The ducks were good. I grilled three of the legs and all of the breasts after marinating them overnight with a rub of fresh thyme, bay leaf, garlic, salt and pepper. We drank a 2003 Estancia Meritage, a birthday present from a cassoulet-laden feast two winters previous, and the sun-drenched grapes from Paso Robles, darkened and stilled in our Minnesota basement for a few years, opened up and with deep berries, licorice and spice, and welcomed my sister to our home.

On a surprisingly cold, rainy, June-grey Saturday we ate steaming hot bowls of duck-rich phố for lunch. Not much phố in Buffalo, but plenty in our kitchen after an all night simmer of bones and such. And again this evening, I seared the last leg and all the remaining meat bits in onions and fat, added flour, then stock, and made a bubbly rich dinner for another cold day. And still a half pot of stock in the icebox sits, brown dark and gelled, a stock for all seasons.

And when the stock is gone - tomorrow - a jar of duck fat will still sit in the fridge. And every time I reach for the jar and cook with it I'll be thankful I named my blog for it.

Succession planting

2009-05-31T22:22:00.003-05:00

Last week I visited the Chicago Botanic Garden for the first time and their vegetable and herb gardens were beautiful. I was struck by the perfect spacing of broccoli, chard, lettuce and other greens, and noticed that everything had been transplanted from cold frames. The lack of bare spots got me thinking about starting more things - even warm weather vegetables - in flats so that each spot in my garden might be filled with a healthy plant. I think it would be nice if I could plant a row of beans from a flat and have no bare spaces. I always direct-sow my beans in the row where they're going to grow, and I don't always re-seed bare spots because by the time a row is growing I don't think a two-week laggard will contribute much.
I do a good job starting tomatoes in my basement when the ground is cold and shovels are still by the door. But once the growing season starts, I tend to wait until a space is vacated before I sow anything new. My wife doesn't like seeing bare dirt in the garden; she thinks something should be growing there. So, with about two weeks before my arugula bolts, I decided to start a few things in flats and be ready when my lush rows of arugula turn to bitter, woody stems. Perhaps I can shorten the time before the next thing is ready to eat. So this evening, after I put the kids to bed, and just before this now-falling rain began, I filled two flats with beets, kale, cucumbers and beans.
I've never started beans in a flat and have heard they don't do well as transplants. Well, we'll see. Just as I don't mind losing a row or two of a too-early planted spinach or lettuce, it'll be good to learn if I can transplant beans. More than anything, I think the flats can be a good idea because it's easy to control the moisture for the germinating seeds. Until then, it's still arugula for lunch!

Frost free

2009-05-29T12:58:00.001-05:00

Just days or weeks after frost and threats of frost, I take for granted this regal green canopy under a blue blue sky. To remember time before this is difficult. Warm earth pushes seeds into air and light and green leaves unfurl their smallness, ready to burst and bloom and grow. How tender is that earliest push, a fuzzed wisp of life. Everything now is green and fresh and alive, and I'm going to eat it and smell it and absorb it with my eyes and feet and hands, forgetting frost and cold and the grey we know for months each year.

Rabbits

2009-05-23T22:35:00.004-05:00

Finally, baby rabbits. Our two does kindled about two weeks ago and ten of the thirteen kits survived and are doing fine. For their first eight weeks or so their diet is exclusively breast milk; the does usually nurse their young twice a day and otherwise leave them alone in their nesting box - a cozy box filled with hay and fur. The kits are born hairless and the does provide insulating warmth by plucking fur from their own chests in the days before they give birth. For the first few week or so the bunnies are nearly impossible to see unless you part the mound of fur that covers them and keeps them warm. Now that they're growing their own fur and are a bit bigger, the mother's fur has matted in with the rest of the bedding, and isn't needed for survival any longer.
We're going to breed the does several times during the summer, and we hope to have a full freezer by the time winter rolls around again.

Arugula

2009-05-18T23:54:00.002-05:00

Green again. The year's first arugula frittata on Sunday night, baked in the enameled, cast iron fry pan. And on the side, a heap of arugula, a mess of arugula, wilted in hot olive oil and touched with a pinch of salt. And May with its lilacs...

Vicia faba – Fava Bean

2009-05-02T23:53:00.001-05:00

The fava bean hypnotizes me with its early spring green growth. Its thick, almost waxy leaves push through the soil when I'm still only dreaming about my warm weather green beans. Very cold hardy, fava beans originated in the Mediterranean basin and, before the introduction of our common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) by post-Columban explorers, they were the main bean eaten in Europe, the Mediterranean basin, and central Asia. Varieties range from the small, almost pea-like favas known as 'tick beans" to the large-seeded varieties known well in England and Italy as broad beans or horse beans. In Italy and the southern Mediterranean a disease known as favism affects a small percentage of the population: eating even a small amount causes serious illness.

So here we are in late April (it's turned to May since I wrote this!) and my fava beans were planted a few weeks ago on a nice warm Saturday. A few rains in the meanwhile have warmed up the soil and given the seeds the moisture they need to germinate. As usual, I wish I had more in the ground, but living in town and having only a small garden, my spring favorites – fava beans, arugula, and spinach – have to share the space with soon-to-be planted summer things. Some years ago I obtained a small sample of a southern Italian fava bean, and I neglected to plant them. Last month when I looked at my seeds I knew I had to get this variety in the ground or I'd lose it Seeds tend to be viable for a few years longer than seed packets let on (I've successfully planted 5-6 year old seed) and these seeds were about five years old. From my sample of 20-25 seeds six plants are up and growing. If they do well, there will be enough to save seed from, and I'll have another small supply for planting next year. If next year's planting goes well, I'll have enough seed the following year to eat a few of them. But for now, I have to help these six plants along because I don't know if anyone else in the United States has this particular variety.

The challenge with fava beans in Minnesota is that our spring is so short. Favas prefer cool weather and their flowers abort in warm weather. The trick is to get the seeds in the ground as early as you can so that they flower before our summer heat scorches them. Additionally, aphids like fava beans a lot and the seeds need to be developing before aphids come along, or the plants can succumb to their attacks.

Cốm

2009-04-22T23:32:00.000-05:00

The color of cốm catches the eye first. Green, almost translucent, almost bright when light shines on it, cốm is a Vietnamese variety of sticky (or glutinous) rice harvested before it’s mature. According to Vietnamese tradition and my mother-in-law, who told me about cốm and directed us to the preeminent seller of bánh cốm (green rice cake) on Hanoi’s famed Hàng Than street, flooding forced villagers near Hanoi to harvest their rice crop before it was ripe. Faced with ruin or a partial crop, they opted to harvest the immature grains, and discovered cốm, which is pronounced by this English speaker with a long O, like "comb."
Today cốm is regarded as both a regional and seasonal Vietnamese culinary treasure. Each fall, villages in northern Vietnam, especially Vòng, regarded as the birthplace of cốm, harvest their rice when it’s around 100 days old, nearly two months before it would be harvested as “regular rice.” Cốm is pounded and cooked and roasted over fire to bring out its brilliant green color; any missteps and the green will be replaced by a dull brown, which fetches a much lower price.
After being soaked, the rice is mixed with sugar and coconut milk. It’s also flavored with pandan, which in Vietnamese is called lá dứa. When it’s fresh, it is wrapped in banana leaves and sold by street vendors. It’s also made into several well known sweets, especially one eaten during Tết, the Vietnamese New Year.

Thursday dinner

2009-04-16T21:55:00.003-05:00

While scooping second helpings for my kids, I was surprised to hear my oldest daughter call, "Dad, get the camera." She wanted to photograph her dinner plate, and when I asked her why she said, "It's delicious and you can blog about it."

The kids were all busy with after-school activities on this beautiful spring day and we didn't get home until six-fifteen. My wife was gone for the evening so I knew I had to make something quick. With leftover ham in the icebox I put a pot of water on the stove and got ready to make an easy pasta dish. I saw fresh green beans in the fridge and got to work. I minced four or five large garlic cloves while blanching the beans. A big pour of olive oil and the garlic was soon sizzling; I then added a few slices of ham that I cut into smaller pieces. The vibrant green beans were added next, along with a few fingers of tarragon and a pinch of salt. When it was all nice I mixed in the thin linguine and a topped it with a grating of parmesan cheese.

Twenty-five minutes from walking into the house to serving dinner. The kids had time to wash up and set the table, and we sat around talking for a good while after we finished eating. Even on a busy night (soccer, softball, and play practices) we lit candles, sat down to a good dinner, and talked with each other. Mealtimes aren't practice; they're the real thing every day. And some of them are blog-able, according to my daughter.

Challah

2009-04-15T22:24:00.001-05:00

Egg-rich and light, this loaf billows and swells, pushes into the oven's heat and rises pillow-soft. Saffron stains the dough deeper than eggs alone, yellow stretching into hues of gold. I love this bread, kneading it long and firm in the kitchen, certain there's a holiday at hand. It's ironic, though, that I make challah at Easter, since it coincides with Passover, the one time of year in Jewish tradition that challah is not eaten – challah is traditionally eaten on Shabbat and holy days. But Easter is the beginning of the liturgical year, the new year for Christians, so it's similar to the special challah baked for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year.
Room-temperature eggs are cracked one-by-one into the mixing bowl, and raw ingredients are transformed by the resistance of kneading from a primordial brew of goop to a near-living thing. Kneading bread silences time around me, creating a rhythmic space of push, fold, breathe, caress, and the counter I'm standing at is the solid surface of earth and home, the stability against which the dough is worked. In the push slap and thud of kneading, all that's needed is a pair of hands willing to work. My kids sit at the counter and when they want to knead they take the flexing ball of dough and work it awhile. They like the smell of fresh dough as it's beginning to soften under the force of strong hands, and they marvel at the dough's softness when we're ready to let it rise, quiet and undisturbed. Elastic in its slow-building warmth, a loaf of challah rises like it's the first loaf ever to rise. I braid my challah, hefting the snakes of dough over each other, entwining one strand within another. Glazed with egg yolk and topped with poppy or sesame seeds, a loaf of challah is a beautiful beginning to any meal.

Easter Sunday

2009-04-12T21:44:00.006-05:00

Easter dinner on the good china. My wife's parents both here, spring finally peeping. We walked to Mass and I threw a baseball with my son for a bit in the afternoon. My daughter and I went on a short bike ride and she led me to monkey bars at her old preschool. During the course of the day our kids entertained us with songs, "shows," and history projects. And just out the door in a small patch of garden, our arugula has germinated and a few other things are fluttering beneath the floating row cover, used not so much for temperature support but to keep ravenous squirrels from seeds.
Minnesota is waking up again.
But back to Easter for a moment. I think we mark time with holidays, mark time against its broader movement - the time that swoops us along - by remembering the rhythms and rituals we've inherited, invented, believed in. Time is too big, too fast, and in the eddies of Christmas, Easter, anniversaries, we recount our stories, tell our histories, remember the dead. And today feels like it's for the living, for walking in sunshine and tending to plants and children. This morning, on my knees, my eyes closed and my thoughts racing still, I wondered how I can find a way to say and be all the things inside me. How do I connect the life in me to the lives around me? I want to pass on these rituals of sitting and eating and talking and praying and hand washing-and-drying the dishes on Sunday because I, too, participate in this continuum of time.
Isn't each seed we plant connected to the beginning of time? When I hold a seed in my hand, it's the present of an unbroken succession of generations of seeds and plants going back in time, through time, before this specific variety or species even existed, (and still it travels backwards,) remembering in itself the time before it was what it is, because while there may be a beginning to the differentiation that marks the origin of this species there is no beginning of the life that spawned it, until we return to the beginning, and when I plant the seed I participate in the continuing story of life itself. Because the seed in my hand, the one I just planted, is here after all. It's managed after all its generations of mutations and droughts and competition among other species to be here. This life, this seed, this love, wants only to burst out and grow.

Spring planting

2009-04-05T21:29:00.004-05:00

Sure it snowed a little today, but spring is here. Yesterday I spent the whole afternoon in the garden and planted a lot of my spring favorites. First, I planted a variety of fava bean that I've never grown before - fave siciliane - sent to me by a fellow seed saver in southern Italy. The seeds are the largest fava seeds I've seen, and in a note he said they're delicious raw with parmesan cheese. I think our local cheese, Friesago Grano, from Shepherd's Way Farms, will be a beautiful accompaniment. Next, I sowed arugula and bok choy, followed by a row of swiss chard.

If you're a northern gardener who focuses on our summer delights like beans and tomatoes, I'd urge you to try a spring planting. The cool season things I just planted, along with peas and spinach, lettuce, beets, kale and others, all thrive in the early days of spring. Fava beans, for instance, should be planted early because they have to flower when the weather is still mild - if it's too hot the flowers will drop.

Occasionally a variety or two doesn't sprout. Perhaps it's because the ground was too cold or the seed was wet for too long. No matter, I can put in another row next week when it's a bit warmer and drier. But early planting leads to early harvests, and I can usually eat fresh leafy greens a month before my neighbors. Some northerners don't like to plant anything before Memorial Day, but if you wait that long you'll miss out on spring!

Vang Dalat

2009-04-03T21:44:00.003-05:00

I didn't expect my first blog entry (very late in coming) on Vietnam to be about wine. My wife and I returned from a ten day trip to Vietnam with suitcases full of foodstuffs, and one of the surprise finds in a Hanoi supermarket was a small selection of Vietnamese wine. The sight of local wine on a supermarket shelf was a real eye-opener. Yes, the world is flat, and it also has highlands in Dalat! Vang Dalat, the only brand of Vietnamese wine we saw, is produced by Lam Dong Foodstuffs Joint-Stock Company, privatized in 2003, according to their website. The grapes are grown around Dalat, a city that's known as the entry point to the central highlands of Vietnam. Dalat is about 1500m above sea level. The climate of Dalat is temperate, with average temperatures of 64°F, and lows around 40°.

The wine itself was nothing to write home about. The bottle we drank was red, a "Superior" bottling, and they sold a white as well. Only the nose, a delicate bouquet of strawberry, was memorable. Otherwise, the wine was thin and uninteresting, like a German spatburgunder in a vintage marked by heavy rainfalls. But to dismiss the wine itself is missing the point – what's interesting is that the Vietnamese are growing grapes and making wine! Wow, the grape has no barriers, and there's no reason why time, experience and severe pruning won't lead to a legitimate Vietnamese wine industry.

Bamboo and sardine curry

2009-03-08T13:44:00.018-05:00

Naw Mai Dong is typically (and accurately) translated from the Thai as "pickled bamboo," but I think "soured bamboo" is more accurate in terms of its taste; the sour of naw mai dong is more akin to sourdough bread than a dill pickle or another Thai favorite, gratiem dong -- pickled garlic.

Soured bamboo is a pretty intense taste, and I'm somehow reminded of dried porcini mushrooms, even though they taste nothing alike. I'm thinking instead of the powerful fragrance the mushrooms develop when they're softened up in warm water. And, when they're soaking in a covered bowl, the first smell of the porcinis can be quite heady; I feel the same way about naw mai dong. Soured bamboo can be bought in most Asian markets. If you can buy it fresh, do so; it's much better than the canned stuff.

It's been a long time since I lived in Thailand and my curry paste reflects a dozen plus years living in Minnesota; it's milder than it was when I first returned to the states, and I've gotten used to the ingredients available in local Asian markets. Bamboo and sardine curry is a delicious evolution of the first curry I ever made at my home in Trang Province in southern Thailand. Neighborhood kids showed me how to make it and I've got a soft spot for it.

If you haven't eaten canned sardines, give them a try. When I was an avid hiker, I always had them in my pack. They're good for you and because of their small size and feeding habits, they're considered sustainable, too. For curry, I use sardines packed in tomato sauce.

Making curry paste is one of the times a heavy mortar and pestle is essential. A food processor will chop things up but the fibers found in some of the ingredients really need to be pulverized into a paste, and a Thai cloak is unsurpassed for its ability to render a mash of ingredients into a smooth, particle-less paste.

Curry paste
10 dried Thai chili peppers
1 tbsp dried peppercorns
3 tbsp fresh lemongrass - the white ends from two stalks, cut finely
2 tbsp fresh galangal root, cut finely

4 cloves garlic
1-2 shallots
1 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp tumeric, or about an inch if fresh
2-3 tbsp gapi - shrimp paste

Put first four ingredients into mortar and go to work for a few minutes. After they're pretty smushed up, I add the next four ingredients, adding the gapi only after the paste is the correct texture. The reason I don't add the garlic and shallots at first is that they have a lot of liquid in them and it's harder to really pulverize the other ingredients if they're sloshing around. I like to cook my curry paste a little; I think it intensifies the flavors and I love the smell.

Bamboo and Sardine Curry
Peel and dice two potatoes or a few cups of firm, unripe papaya. In large saucepan or wok, add a few tbsp oil. Heat and add curry paste. NOTE: This curry stinks up your house, so use appropriate ventilation! Fry paste in oil but don't let it burn. Add a little water and mush it around until it's thick like re-fried beans. Cook it a minute or so, adding a little more water if you think it might burn. Add about a half can of coconut milk and about a half cup of water. Stir to mix. Add potatoes and turn heat down. Cover and cook for a few minutes.

If using whole pieces of bamboo, rinse under water and cut into lengths about 3" and then slice lengthwise into thin strips. I like about 3-4 cups worth. When the potatoes are still firm, add the bamboo slices. Stir together. Again, in another nod to an American palate, I now add the remaining lemongrass stems, cut into 3"-4" lengths. If a little more water is needed, add some. The consistency you end up with is one of personal preference. I usually like mine a little on the soupy side because we all like curry sauces on our rice, but some people prefer a much thicker curry. Likewise with the coconut cream -- it's very thick and rich and in a typical curry I'll use between a half and a whole can, depending on my mood.
When the potatoes are just about cooked through, I add a big tin of sardines. The oval cans weigh almost a pound. Add about seven or eight kaffir lime leaves and stir gently; the sardines are fragile and break up quite easily. Heat through. I put the curry into a big bowl and bring it to the table. We scoop spoonfuls of it onto our rice and always serve something cool with it, like leafy green vegetables or an omelette.

Lent and Local or Catholics and Co-ops

2009-02-22T11:37:00.003-06:00

As we approach the season of want, the season of hunger, we're reminded of our common agricultural roots, and the closeness of Christianity to the rhythms of time and the seasons. Embedded in the spiritual exercise of fasting is an even older condition: hunger. Whether physical or spiritual, hunger reshapes our sense of normalcy; it sometimes sharpens our awareness and heightens our senses, but left unchecked, it corrodes and can kill. Some religious traditions have made a spiritual discipline out of what used to be a common, shared reality. And while the Church has wandered and strayed as much as any one person, its roots are deep, profoundly deep, and we can still be nourished by its beliefs and traditions that reflect an older understanding of the world.

One thousand years ago, one hundred years ago, all food was local food. And March was difficult. Depleted winter stores collided with cold earth, food not yet grown. For Christians, Lent was the fast before the feast of Easter, with the physical and spiritual reflecting each other, synchronized. A spiritual voyage launched by a seasonal necessity. Today, in our non-seasonal, global appetite for whatever-we-want-we-want-it-now, Cub and the Co-op re-stock their shelves daily, and we expect our desires to be satisfied immediately. Instead of seeing our excess for what it is, we turn our obesity epidemic and fast-food or fancy-food fixation on its head, calling this overgrown appetite our right, our destiny, our blessing.

Are we entitled to eat whatever it is we crave? I don't have an answer for that question, but Lent and Eating Local are both compelling reasons to think deliberately about food and its place in the seasons of growing and eating. If we think about eating local we have to think about what it is we want to eat. Especially at this time of year, eating local is an exercise in long range planning about what we plant, grow, and harvest in the warmer months of the year. What remains of September's abundance that we can now draw upon? The doom of March leads me to think I should be growing and preserving much more food of my own. And that leads to a conversation about gardening and how we use our landscape – particularly us non-rural, grass-growing homeowners.

Even as I begin to think about eating local, I'm not sure I like all the implications. Take oranges, for instance. I can't imagine winter without oranges. The spray of a just-peeled orange in the cold air of winter is an unmatched fragrance. When I eat oranges in the winter I feel as alive and healthy and the first non-scurvied sailing crews! And what would happen to the Florida citrus industry if everyone in the north stopped eating oranges because they weren't local? On the other hand, what if Minnesota farmers were met by crowds of people wanting fresh, locally grown spinach in May? And what if consumers wanted four bushels of apples in September instead of three pecks?

Imposing disciplines on ourselves reminds us that although we are surrounded by an abundance of riches, our needs are few. The rest is manufactured. Eating local and fasting shouldn't be looked at as opportunities to assign blame or assume guilt. Eating local helps us think about our individual habits in relation to larger issues of food production, while fasting is a way to clarify our own needs by experiencing what some people feel each day – hunger.

Shortbread

2009-02-18T22:46:00.003-06:00

Shortbread is made with butter, flour, sugar and salt. It's as plain as plain can be. I like to shape the dough between my palms into a small ball and flatten it with the bottom of a glass, one-quarter to three-eighths of an inch thick. When the ball is flattened the edges break open asterisks-like, with stubby rays. These edges bake nicely in the oven, leaving the center a pale, off-white luminescent disk.

My wife and daughter like their shortbread with cornstarch, a new-fangled ingredient that adds lightness to the dough. My feeling is that corn starch flattens the flavor considerably, making an inferior baked good. We decided to have a Valentine's Day bake-off and decide as a family which shortbread we liked best. Luckily, we're an odd-numbered family.

After extensive negotiations to determine fair rules for a blind tasting, my daughter and I set to work. With softened butter at the ready, the dough takes only minutes to make. We both use our hands a lot, and once all the ingredients are in the mixing bowl we use our fingertips and hands to achieve the proper dough consistency, pressing and squeezing it into a manageable form.

We fortunately allowed decimal points into our voting, because fragments of numbers were all that separated our two entries. Had we used whole numbers only in our judging, a tie would have ensued. We learned that we like our preferred styles – we partisans all picked along party lines, even with our eyes closed! The outcome? When I'm baking, no cornstarch will be used, but when my daughter runs the kitchen, she'll do it her way.

1 cup butter, softened
2 cups flour
½ cup confectioner's sugar
¼ tsp salt
(Optional – ¼ - ½ tsp vanilla. I like vanilla, but even a small amount darkens the color of the dough and moves the flavor from a traditional shortbread into a different baked good.)

Cream butter and slowly add sugar. Add remaining ingredients and mix. Shape into 1" balls and place on cookie sheet. Flatten with bottom of glass. Bake at 350° F for 20 minutes or so. The edges should just be brown – don't overcook. Cool on a rack.

Rosenblum 2005 Monte Rosso Vineyard zinfandel

2009-02-12T10:47:00.002-06:00

This is a beautiful bottle of wine, a conversation starter that puts zinfandel in the age-worthy camp, a big wine with fruit, acid and tannins enough to lay down for a decade, and a perfumed nose so fragrant you don't have to drink it to be satisfied.

We opened this and put a short pour into our glasses and swirled it, dark red and thick, slow legs dripping down the sides like those new Ipod ads. We swirled and smelled and talked. The cleanest, sweetest nose imaginable, not a big, jammy nose so typical of these 15.2% alcohol wines – wow, and breath after breath the nose blew sea-fresh and calm. We circled back to it time and time again, each description closer and further off, no different than the feel of sunshine on our faces on the first sunny day after a snowstorm. We absorb equally the quality of light and the plum blossom perfection of the nose.

A strong trace of tobacco, oily rich and earth, deep berries and a disputation on indulgences, organized religion and the will of God. Such presence for a young bottle of wine! – a clean line of fresh pepper, still clustered and growing on the vine.

A digression: chili peppers, Capsicum frutescens, those hot little red "Thai chili peppers" aren't indigenous to Thailand; their center of diversity is somewhere near present-day Bolivia. They were one of the first fruits brought back to Europe by C. Columbus. In Thai, they are called prik or "pepper," while pepper, Piper nigrum, the tropical climbing vine, is called prik Thai, or "Thai pepper." Thais and the Thai language recognize the primacy of pepper, and they call it their own pepper, whereas the later introduction of chili peppers, a mere three or four hundred years ago, is given the simple moniker "pepper." I wonder if Thai pepper – our black pepper – had a different name before chili peppers were introduced, and Thais had to differentiate between this new pepper, and their own indigenous "Thai pepper." And, while we typically eat dried, crushed peppercorns, our "black pepper," Thais put whole clusters of fresh peppers in a few different dishes, and the flavor bursts out. – This is the clean, pungent pepper profile that washed over our taste buds halfway through the bottle.

Whenever I drink a good zinfandel I feel a billowy lightness underneath the intense, full expression of deep-colored berry fruit; I think it is the harmonious balance of the grape and a winemaker's skill. All that fruit needs something to keep it afloat, and this bottle has clean lines of tannin that keep the fruit from overflowing. And so we talked and drank into the night, a perfect expression of zinfandel. Go, find this bottle, and drink it! Feeling carnivorous? A thick steak with cracked pepper, dripping red from the inside out.

Tomorrow's dinner

2009-02-03T22:56:00.004-06:00

The dutch oven is in the garage now, resting on a shelf and cooling. Still in sub-zero temperatures, I think tomorrow's dinner - chicken paprika - will be a perfect antidote for this weather. And better yet, tomorrow is a busy evening and we'll be ready to eat as soon as I get home from work. We still have plenty of rice from tonight's dinner, and egg noodles take only a few minutes to make, if anyone clamors for them.
We like to cook in advance when it's practical, and some recipes take well to advance preparation and cooking. We make large batches of spaghetti sauce, and soups and stews are usually better when made the day (or two) before they're eaten. But just as often, we start thinking about what we're going to serve as we begin to make it.
I love the combination of butter, oil, and chicken fat that coats everything in chicken paprika. The chopped onions blaze with fragrance as they sputter and sizzle in the mixed fats and generous spoonfuls of sweet paprika. Everything simmers while the kids brush their teeth and bedtime stories are read. Then, in the quietness of a just-cleaned up kitchen and the settled routine of the evening's chores, I come by every so often and use a long wooden spoon to make sure nothing's sticking, and everything's cooking nice and slow.
Tomorrow's dinner is pretty much done. Sometime in the late afternoon my wife will bring it in from the garage and slowly reheat it. Just before serving, I'll mix a little flour into a cup or so of sour cream and add it to the simmering pot, a few minutes more on a low dancing flame. A salad on the side, a few sliced pears on a plate - a cold winter evening sounds pretty good.

Leftovers for lunch

2009-02-02T23:20:00.006-06:00

Yesterday I made pancakes for breakfast and corn bread for dinner, and we didn't finish either. I left the pancake batter on the counter overnight, allowing it to develop a little extra flavor. Mondays are busy with meetings, but I came home for lunch and made a quick leftover meal. I crumbled the dry cornbread into the batter, leaving it in small chunks, squished a banana into the batter, and gave everything a quick stir. A little butter in the frying pan and I poured the doctored batter in - there was enough left to fill the 10" pan completely. I turned the burner down and covered the pan with a lid. I flipped it after a few minutes and the edges were nice and brown and crisp and buttery; it rose about ¾". A few more minutes on the other side and I slid it out of the pan and onto a dinner plate, opened a jar of applesauce and spooned it over the pancake.
Most people probably would have thrown out both the old pancake batter and the dried out cornbread; I did neither, and lunch was delicious. A good lunch for another cold Minnesota day.