Trout Caviar

Cool News About the Book, and a Couple Local Events

2012-01-29T18:06:00.000-08:00

We received some exciting news this weekend: The Trout Caviar book was named a finalist for the 2012 Minnesota Book Awards . It's one of four finalists winnowed down from over 40 nominees in the general non-fiction catergory. Looking at some of the excellent titles that weren't named finalists, I have to say, I feel a bit abashed; but hey, I'll take it, and gratefully. The awards ceremony takes place on April 14.

Also, I've got a couple local signings lined up in the next few weeks:

On Saturday, February 4, from 2:00 to 5:00 p.m., I'll be meeting and greeting and signing books at the Seward Co-op at Franklin Avenue and Riverside in Minneapolis.

Then on Saturday, February 18, I'll be at the River Market co-op on Main Street in Stillwater from noon to 3:00. Valley Bookseller will also take part in this event.

In both cases, there will be snacks prepared from recipes in the book. Hope to see you there.

A Tale of Three Tarts

2012-01-24T09:18:00.000-08:00

Nothing facilitates culinary creativity like a well-stocked larder. And nothing is more essential to a well-stocked larder than bacon. Cuz where do you think the word larder comes from, anyway? Comes from lard, which is French for bacon. You learned something today, didn't you? You're welcome.

Actually, that derivation just occured to me as I started writing this, but it turns out it's spot on. Here's what my Webster's New Twentieth Century Unabridged has to say: "larder, n., [ME, larder; OFr, lardier, a larder, a tub for bacon; LL. lardarium, a room for meats, from L. lardum, the fat of bacon, lard.]" (Another thing I've just learned is that it's really hard to type and use the mouse with a big honkin' dictionary on your desk.)

I wish I had known that (about the etymology, not the awkward dictionary) when I was writing this essay I recorded for Wisconsin Life on Wisconsin Public Radio,"The Importance of Bacon" (a variation on a chapter in the cookbook). In light of the faddish frenzy that has arisen around bacon in the last couple of years, I'm sort of ambivalent about my role as evangelist of smoked pork belly, but that WILife essay is something of a defense and apology for my position, which I'm happy to expound upon further here.

What disturbs me about the bacon craze is, 1) The seemingly indiscriminate approach, which implies that all bacon is good, without distinguishing greatness from dreck, and 2) The culture of gluttony it seems to promote.

Now, at some level, the appeal of bacon is so great that even the worst bacon is good. But the watery, chemical-laden supermarket bargain bacon, made from pork that comes from who-knows-where, is only good because the sledge-hammer combo of salt, smoke, and fat can disguise many flaws. Set next to really good, natural bacon, from well-raised pigs, it looks like exactly what it is: rubbish. When I'm cutting bacon from one of my home-smoked slabs, I'll often taste a sliver of the "raw" stuff; I don't think you'd be tempted to do that with the $1.89-a-pound product from Bob's Food Barn.

And as for the gluttonous, drooling, stuff-your-face attitude, the bring-on-the-fat, over-the-top, clog-my-arteries, please, approach, well, I feel that's wrong at so many levels, I'm just going to let it go at that.

Pizza night chez Trout Caviar last week perfect illustrates why I glorify bacon, and other rich and wonderful products of our region--they are splendid when used in a balanced approach to cooking and eating. Combined with good bread (the crust), savory vegetable elements (onion, sauerkraut, leek, potato), a delightfully satisfying whole results, in which you can have your tart and eat it, too, literally--one recipe's worth of Bacon Onion Tart (p. 108) provided Mary and me with dinner for two nights, and a happy hour snack, to boot.

The recipe in the book has you divide the dough in half for two tarts; I did mine in thirds. Tart #1 was the traditional tarte flambée or flammekeuche, the Alsatian classic topped with crème fraîche, onions, and bacon.

For tart #2 I rinsed about a cup of sauerkraut (make your own via Trout Caviar, p. 222!), squeezed it quite dry, and sautéed it in a bit of duck fat with a small leek sliced. That mixture was combined with crème fraîche, and got a sprinkling of grated Wisconsin havarti cheese (I'm on a havarti kick recently, thanks to the Stettler Cream Havarti from Decatur Dairy in Brodhead, WI; we get it at Renee's shop in Connorsville ).

And for tart #3, I sliced a small potato as thin as I could; I spread some crème fraîche over the dough; placed the potato slices on top; scattered one thick slice of bacon in fine dice over the top; added a handful of Wisconsin "gruyère" (Roth Kase).

The tarts baked at 525 for, what, five or six minutes. You just watch for the crust to brown and the toppings to bubble. With a salad, a glass of riesling--voilà. Little better on a cold January evening; get in a brisk walk or a turn on the skis as the sun drops down through streaks of gray and pink. Sip a glass of that crisp, tart, fragrant wine as you work on putting your tarts together. Something else that really heightens culinary creativity is knowing whom to steal ideas from, and I raid the Alsatian larder regularly.

And here we are back in the larder: I decided to make this dinner mid-afternoon of the same day, and didn't have to go out for a single thing Bacon, onion, leek, 'kraut, cream, cheese, the dough makings--these are things we almost always have in stock. If I hadn't had those particular cheeses, I'd have used something else, or left it out. If my 'kraut crock was running low, I'd have taken out a packet of blanched, frozen garden kale, and used that. I'm not opposed to recipes, the dear knows, but I prefer to think in terms of methods of preparation, rather than hard and fast rules or lists of ingredients. There aren't many recipes that can't stand a certain amount of substitution or variation--and who knows, by adding your own twist, you might just come up with your new favorite dish. The spud 'za pretty much stole the show in this instance; it will find a place in the regular rotation.

One quick note on crème fraîche: You can buy this product at co-ops and better grocery stores. For the recipe in the book, I suggest just mixing sour cream and heavy cream half and half. If you have more time, you can produce a homemade version by mixing sour cream and heavy cream--a tablespoon or two of the former for each cup of the latter--and setting the mixture in a warm place--your oven with the light turned on, for instance--overnight. The next day it should be nice and thick and tangy.

Text and photos copyright 2012 by Brett Laidlaw

Smelt Po'boys with Wild Remoulade Sauce

2012-01-18T08:54:00.000-08:00

We've been in eat-out-of-the-freezer mode for a couple weeks now. When there's not enough space in the freezer to chill your martini glass, you know something has to be done. I'm not really a hoarder of stuff, in general, but I am something of a pack rat when it comes to food. My refrigerator is a pickle museum; I curate a jam and jelly collection there, as well. Apparently I have a horror of endings, for I keep jars that contain a half-inch of blackberry preserves, one lonely cornichon, some scraps of fermented vegetables. Sometimes I find jars of pickles entirely absent of pickles, nothing left but the brine. And then, frighteningly, I'll return that jar to the fridge, thinking, hmm, there was that pickle brine rye bread recipe someone sent me eight years ago, maybe I'll make that....

As for the freezer, that's more of an archaeological situation when it comes to determining what's in there, scraping back through layers of time, discovering freezer burned trout frames, sacks of berries of dubious provenance. I swear to god, I recently pulled out a zip bag containing a frozen block of something, and in the space where you note the contents, it said "SOUP?" That got tossed.

But there's good stuff in there, too. A lot of the very best fish we eat comes frozen, believe it or not. On our trips to the South Shore of Lake Superior we always stock up on fresh fish at Halvorson Fisheries in Cornucopia. Sometimes the fish is frozen and vacuum-packed there, and sometimes we bring the fresh-off-the-boat lake trout, whitefish, and herring home and freeze what we won't use fresh.

So in our freezer clean-out mode, courtesy of Halvorson's, we've recently had burbot bourguignon (eelpout in red wine, by another name), fish tacos also made with burbot (an intriguing freshwater cod that Amy "Sourtooth" Thielen writes about here ; I'd really like to get up to the Eelpout Fest this year). And our last frozen fish from Corny was a package of smelt that had been in the freezer for at least a year, so I had my doubts as it thawed, but you know what? Here's what: Fish that is packed absolutely fresh, and properly frozen, and kept frozen, is great even a year later. The vacuum-packing provides no opportunity for freezer burn or staling. The smelt had very little "fishiness" to them; rather, they had a cucumber-y, watery scent like some oysters have. Their fate was to be dipped in a light tempura batter, fried, and served on homemade rolls with a remoulade sauce perked up with chopped pickled ramps and salted milkweed bud "capers" on a north-meets-south po'boy. We don't do a lot of deep frying, but a few times each winter we'll fry up fish or shrimp for po'boys or tacos. It makes for a fun and summery meal, most welcome in the depths of January.

It's a joke around our house that writing a cookbook is a rather elaborate way of organizing one's recipes, but damn handy once it's done. There's truth in the gag, too--putting together this meal, I made the buns from the Cornmeal Honey Butter Bun recipe (p. 120), shaping oval buns of about 5 ounces of dough.

The remoulade started with a batch of mayonnaise (p. 219), to which I added some mustard, worchestershire, finely diced celery root, salted milkweed buds, and chopped pickled ramps (p. 224). The tempura batter is in the Walleye Taco recipe (p. 165). And alongside we had Oven-Fried Roots (p. 192)--potato, celery root, and mystery pumpkin (yes, I know, pumpkin is not a root; but it cooks up sort of...rootish).

The beer, Bitch Creek Extra Special Brown, was an impulse buy purchased for all the wrong reasons--because it's from the Grand Teton Brewing Company, and Mary used to live in Jackson Hole, in the shadow of the Tetons; and Bitch Creek is a famous western trout stream, and there's a fly pattern named for it . In spite of that, it was excellent--deep, dark, toasty, and bitter (as I poured out the last few drops to rinse the bottles this morning I got to thinking of beef short ribs braised in Bitch Creek ESP, lots of leeks and onions, maybe a dash of cocoa, some allspice...).

We still haven't made much of a dent in the freezer inventory, and chances are that some day soon I'll get it in my head that I can't go another week without a piece of grilled lake trout, a plate of Herring Milkweed Meunière (p. 171), and I'll hit the road for the South Shore, returning with a cooler full of fish, most of which will go in the freezer.

Hey, I just remembered, there are still some whitefish livers in there. Now, if I can only find them....

Text and photos copyright 2012 by Brett Laidlaw

A Rustic Pork Terrine with Chestnuts and Dried Apples

2012-01-10T14:38:00.000-08:00

In writing about a stew of grilled lamb meatballs with grilled and coal-roasted vegetables in the 2011 highlights round-up, I rather surprised myself by spontaneously asserting that "the possibilities of ground meat are vast and enticing." Right up to the moment I wrote that, I wouldn't have considered myself the biggest fan of decentralized animal flesh, but it didn't take much thought to come up with an impressive list of dishes both down-home and haute-monde that feature that humble ingredient.

My mother made a great meat loaf when I was a kid, nothing fancy (and I shudder to think that it might have involved cream of mushroom soup...), but entirely delectable under its lacquered exterior of well browned ketchup. Recalling autumn or winter evenings, coming in from the woods, the soccer field, the hockey rink, to a supper of Mom's meat loaf, baked potato, and baked squash--plenty of butter on the last two--still brings me an upwelling of warmth, emotion, and a deep, primal satisfaction. And then fried meat loaf sandwiches from the leftovers, the edges crisped in the fry pan, on bakery bread with butter and ketchup, my god!, I still can't think of anything I'd rather eat.

The hamburger can be regrettable fast food, or the platform for cheffish excursions into wretched excess, but I think it achieves its ideal form in the homemade burger sculpted from freshly ground chuck, liberally seasoned, cooked medium rare over the coals on in a heavy skillet, parked on a quality bun and garnished to taste. This is a classic American sandwich, and the French chefs, bless their hearts, just don't get it. A great burger doesn't require foie gras, truffles, or other "luxury" adulterations.

One of my all-time favorite meals is based on chopped beef, that isn't even cooked: steak tartare with grilled sourdough, a stack of crisp, salty frites, a glass of bordeaux--excuse me, I'm getting a little drooly.... That's been my birthday dinner the last two years, lest anyone suspect that I overstate my enthusiasm for it.

And now, if the French don't quite comprehend the essence of le hamburger, that's not to say that they're total slackers when it comes to working with cooked ground or chopped meat. You take pretty much anyone who has traveled in France, and say the word paté or terrine, and then just wait for that groan of remembered ecstasy to start, as their eyes roll back in their heads as they recall that slice of paté de campagne from the unassuming traiteur in that little village, unwrapped on a roadside bench beside a vineyard in, let's say, Beaujolais, smeared on a piece of baguette and with the first unctuous, savory, melting taste--sacré bleu! how did they do that?

Cold cut supper: homemade chicken liver mousse, store-bought La Quercia speck, Spanish chorizo

A good paté doesn't seem like it should be so hard to make, but it requires a balance of richness, meatiness, texture, salt, and spice that can be extremely difficult to achieve. I suspect that many home cooks have balked at the amount of fat frequently called for in paté recipes, and so cut back, and regretted it. In addition to the fat mixed in to the forcemeat, the baking dish is often lined with fatback or caul fat--you can practically hear your arteries clanking like rusty heating pipes just reading the recipes. The fortunate corollary (not coronary) to that fact is that you don't need half a pound of paté per person to have a satisfying meal, rounded out with bread, salad, a glass of wine.

I haven't made an exhaustive study of this branch of charcuterie, but I've dabbled in it over the years, and I recently came up with a really nice version, one that I'll use as a template for future patés. This one was based on pork, three kinds: shoulder, belly, and bacon. I added chicken livers for that distinctly paté-like texture. Good bread crumbs soaked in reduced cider also contributed to texture and flavor. Chestnuts and dried apples made up the seasonal garnish. Last time I checked, those excellent Iowa chestnuts were still available at Seward Co-op.

This is best made a couple of days to a week ahead. Weighting the paté after the baking changes the texture in a desirably Gallic way. I made this in a 750 ml (about 3-cup) Pyrex rectangular baking dish; the mixture filled it pretty much to the top, which turned out okay, but you might want to use a slightly larger vessel.

Pork Paté with Chestnuts and Dried Apples

1/4 cup applejack or calvados (apple brandy)

8 rounds of dried apple, about 1/8-inch thick

3/4 cup sweet apple cider reduced to 1/4 cup

1/3 cup dried breadcrumbs from an excellent loaf, sourdough whole wheat or the like

12 chestnuts, roasted and peeled

1 large or 2 small shallots minced, about 1/2 cup

1 large clove garlic, minced

1 ounce bacon, chopped fine

Soak the apples in the brandy, covered, for several hours or overnight. Soak the breadcrumbs in the reduced cider. Cook the bacon in a medium skillet over medium low heat until some fat starts to render; add the shallot and cook gently till translucent; add the garlic, remove the pan from the heat, and add the contents to the soaked breadcrumbs. Add any unabsorbed brandy from the dried apples to the pan, swirl around to rinse, and add this to the bread, etc.

8 ounces pork shoulder
4 ounces pork belly (or very fatty shoulder)
4 ounces chicken livers.

2 egg yolks
1/2 teaspoon salt
Ground black pepper
2 pinches quatre-épices

I use the meat grinder attachment for my KitchenAid mixer: Grind the shoulder and belly twice through the coarse blade. Then grind one-third of the meat again through the fine blade; also grind the chicken livers with the fine blade. Add the egg yolks, salt and a few grinds of pepper, quatre-épices, along with the bread mixture, to the meat and mix very well.

Let this mixture macerate for 4 to 6 hours, or overnight. Butter a mold. Place a one-inch layer of meat in the bottom, and lay half the apple slices on top. Cover with a thin layer of meat, and add the chestnuts, pressing them into the meat. Add another thin layer of meat, the rest of the apples, then the rest of the meat. Place two bay leaves on top, and a few sprigs of thyme, if you like.

Bake in a bain marie (water bath), covered, at 325 for 45 to 60 minutes, until liquid is bubbling vigorously in the baking dish and the meat is quite firm to the touch. Carefully remove the bain marie from the oven, and let the paté cool in it for about 30 minutes. Placing a weight on the paté will give it a denser texture, like the classic French version. A piece of heavy cardboard cut to fit just inside your baking dish, wrapped in plastic wrap, with a couple cans of soup for weight, will work fine. Refrigerate unde weight for a day or two before serving.

Text and photos copyright 2012 by Brett Laidlaw

And the Winners Are...

2012-01-06T07:28:00.000-08:00

The lucky winners of the Trout Caviar book give-away are:

Sylvie, down in old Virginie, Rappahannock, to be exact, who wrote of blackberry wine, epic canning, drying peaches, pawpaw harvest, and more.

Jeff, who celebrated a surprise morel harvest and butchering the doe he shot on opening weekend of the deer season.

And Gloria, the biggest fan of the pungent ramp, who also enjoyed locally produced preserves, wild mushrooms, and the Saint Paul Farmers Market, particularly the produce from Sor Vang's family.

I really enjoyed reading everyone's favorite food memories of 2011. This was a blind drawing of all who wrote in with their 2011 highlights, one entry per customer. I put each person's name on a slip of paper, dropped them in a bag, and my wife Mary (Pastry Goddess, Plate Licker, Soup Smiler, etc.) drew the names. I was there to see that she had her eyes closed the whole time.

Thanks to everyone who participated, and thanks for reading Trout Caviar. We're going into the fifth year of the blog, hard to believe. I'm feeling as jazzed about this celebration of local, seasonal eating as I ever have--maybe more than when I first started the blog, since I had no idea then what I was doing, or where it would lead. I look forward to sharing my foraging, cooking, eating adventures in 2012, and to hearing about yours. Your participation, your feedback and insights and occasional quibbles (but quibble all you want, really), that is what keeps this interesting.

To the winners of the drawing: Please email me at brettlaidlaw@eckmeier.com to give me a mailing address; I'll sign the books, of course, but also tell me if you'd like yours inscribed with a pithy little message, and if so, to whom. Thanks.

Be back soon with new stuff. Oh, and by the way, I'll be doing a cooking demo tomorrow morning, Saturday, January 7, on KARE 11 television here in the Twin Cities, 9:43 a.m. I haven't been on TV before, and I am, uh, terrified!

Happy New Year from Bide-A-Wee

2012-01-01T00:01:00.000-08:00

Wishing you health, contentment, great adventures, and many happy repasts in 2012 and beyond.

Forage.

Cook.

Eat.

Repeat.

All best~ Brett, Mary, Annabel, & Lily

2011 Highlights: Vite, Vite! The Rest

2011-12-30T10:29:00.000-08:00

This is it, the ultimate post for 2011, an eventful year indeed for us. Quicky, quickly, the final list of highlights:

I continued refining my method for micro-batch canning and pickling. The basic brine I describe in the book ( and here ) I put into use to preserve a pint here, a half-pint there--green beans, asparagus, snow peas, ramps, shallots, fiddleheads. Whatever I had a surplus of, I'd just pack into a jar (with perhaps a quick blanching first), make up a little brine (seasoned as I saw fit, garlic always, and a bit of chile, maybe some Sichuan peppercorns, allspice, a couple cloves, a point or two of star anise; herbs like tarragon or thyme), pour it over, cap, stick it in the fridge, check on it in a few days, a few weeks, or perhaps even a few months. At Thanksgiving I had a lovely variety of tart and briny things to put out on the relish tray. As martini garnish, a tip of pickled asparagus is delightful.

The specific dishes that really stayed with me were those where I took a deeply local approach. The ceviche above, from last July, combined raw Lake Superior whitefish with green apple juice and our own cider vinegar, green prickly ash berries (related to Sichuan peppercorns), seeds and chopped leaves of honewort (aka "wild chervil"), and brined milkweed flower buds. It tasted amazing, and unlike anything I've eaten before. It's a direction I fully intend to pursue in the coming year.

Another delightful concoction employing the fruits of our land and the market was the caponata-inspired relish shown below , made with eggplant, apple, cider vinegar, maple syrup, a few aromatics, and a sprinkling of those milkweed bud "capers" again.

Mary and I left the dogs at the East River Road Kennel (aka Mary's mom's house), and spent a weekend on the South Shore of Lake Superior at the end of August. The photos from that trip have disappeared. We enjoyed many excellent meals on the trip, from the fried whitefish livers and broiled fresh lake trout and whitefish at the Village Inn in Cornucopia, to fantastic fish tacos post-bike ride at the Beach Club on Madeline Island, to a lakeside brunch of smoked fish, goat cheese, local apples and rye bread, washed down with the delicious water from the Corny artesian well.

And of course we loaded up with fresh fish from Halvorson Fisheries in the Corny marina. Also into the cooler for the trip back to the cities went a package of fresh whitefish livers. Though we always seek out this local delicacy in South Shore restaurants (I think of them as "South Shore sweetbreads"), I had never cooked with them before. I soaked them in milk, seasoned them well with salt and pepper and sambal, gave them a light breading and fried them up with onions. Served them with something I called "apple marmalade"; I have no memory of how I made that, but the combination was fantastic. Again, from humble ingredients, such a feast. We followed that first course with pan-seared lake trout in red wine sauce with a stew of local shell beans, bacon, and leeks.

The possibilities of ground meat are vast and enticing. While I do love a good cheeseburger, the most memorably delicious meat patty meal was this stew of grilled ground lamb meatballs with beets, eggplants, and subtle middle eastern seasoning:

In late September we roasted a whole lamb over the coals at Bide-A-Wee. Jean-Louis constructed an excellent spit for the occasion, and oversaw the grilling process. The lamb came from our friend Tina, who lives just up the road from Bide-A-Wee (though we joke that she lives in "southern Wisconsin," since she's on the other side of highway 64). It was a much larger animal than I had expected, pretty much filled the cargo compartment of our Jetta wagon when I picked it up at the processor. It easily fed the assembled crowd, and continues giving to this day: I'm simmering some of the leftovers for a lamb, beans, and greens stew that will be our New Year's Day supper.

And just about every day, we realized anew that eating locally and seasonally is not a challenge, but an outright joy. It's a familiar topic in these pages, I know, but one I'm happy to repeat again and again. And I'm not planning to stop.

Bar 5 duck confit with pan-seared squash, apples, and cabbage

Lake Superior whitefish, cabbage, leek, chestnut braise, soft polenta with pumpkin seed oil

May your 2012 be filled with great meals, friendship, and fine adventures.

Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

2011 Highlights: Les Oeufs Sauvages

2011-12-29T09:08:00.000-08:00

There's still time to get your entries in for the Trout Caviar book giveaway --leave a comment about one of your 2011 LOCAL! food highlights by January 1; be specific, be evocative, regale and entice us!
____________________________________________________

Early this year things got pretty intense with the final push to finish the book--well, one of the final pushes; like a Hollywood slasher flick, the work on the Trout Caviar book had a lot of false endings. I had a big deadline at the beginning of February, or was it the end? At some point I took the approach of "Shannon can't read everything all at once," and I started sending things in piecemeal. Shannon is Shannon Pennefeather, whom I certainly hope I have mentioned before, my editor on the book, and managing editor of the Minnesota Historical Society Press.

Shannon is also a kind and talented person endowed with considerable insight and an even greater gift of patience. I acknowledge her in the book by saying that she "worked very hard to turn an enthusiastic mess into something a good deal less messy, while leaving all the enthusiasm in." Hmmm, and yet somehow she let me end that sentence with a preposition. I suppose she would have found it presumptuous to edit her own acknowledgment. The truth of the matter is that my book would not be the book it is without her thoughtful editing and brilliant organization. And just so as not to leave anyone wondering: I am very, very happy with my book (leaving room for some after-the-fact picky self-criticism; whatever's wrong with the book is pretty much my fault).

Then as long as we're on the topic of highlights, I'd say that working with Shannon was one of the bright spots of 2011 for me. So thanks to that lengthy digression, this post is two-fer.

Back to the supposed "final days" of work on the manuscript: I took several writing retreats out to the cabin in January and February, me and the dogs. In the snowy, silent countryside there were few distractions other than stoking the fire. After hours of editing recipes I could clear my head with a snowshoe walk around the hilltop or a turn on the skis. There were a lot of fun things about working on the book; editing recipes was not one of them.

But in the midst of tweaking and editing existing dishes, I was coming up with new ones at the same time. This one, called "Hens and Eggs and Bacon" in the book, is my take on a delightful bit of Burgundian comfort food, oeufs en meurette--poached eggs in a red wine sauce. I gave it an air of the wild with the addition of hen of the woods mushrooms. I believe I've gone on record as saying that hens are the bacon of mushrooms, so this is a sort of bacon-on-bacon-on-egg dish, and how could that be bad?

Serve one egg per person for a first course; a two-egg portion, along with good crusty bread and a salad, makes a satisfying winter supper. The version pictured here was a Bide-A-Wee lunch during one of those writing retreats, and a better lunch for a snowy day, I can't imagine. It gave me the strength to pick up the editing pen again and tackle the eternal question, "Should that be thinly sliced, or sliced thin?"

Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

2011 Highlights: My Crock

2011-12-28T07:31:00.000-08:00

There's still time to get your entries in for the Trout Caviar book giveaway --leave a comment about one of your 2011 LOCAL! food highlights by January 1; be specific, be evocative, regale and entice us!

I'm finding that my 2011 food highlights consist more of things I did than of things I ate--though I'm sure I'll be able to dredge up a memorable taste sensation or two, as well. Late last winter Mary and I took a drive south from Bide-A-Wee down Wisconsin highway 25 to the river town of Downsville. There we met potter John Thomas and his wife Kathy Ruggles, shared a cup of tea and talked about the tumultuous political situation engulfing the Badger State (it's worth remembering that the whole occupy phenomenon started with anti-Walker protestors flocking to Madison and the state capitol building).

We came home with my very first crock, an earthtone beauty that I filled with vegetables mid-summer; it's been fermenting ever since. Now it's filled with cabbage that has become sweet and sour, crunchy and salty--the basis for a wonderful choucroute garni dinner, on the elaborate end, or fabulous hot dog garnish, at its simplest.

Prior to acquiring this gorgeous vessel I'd always done my fermenting in quart jars, and that works just fine. I use the same recipe, either way: for each pound of shredded vegetables--cabbage, kale, beets, turnips, etc.--I add 2 teaspoons of salt. Rub the salt in well, pack the veg in quart jars, or into the crock with a weight on top. Into a cool dark place, and fermentation will start almost immediately. Your vegetables will be nicely sour in a few days, and will continute to gain character as time goes by. After a couple of weeks I usually refrigerate the jars, and there they will keep indefinitely. My crock is sitting on the kitchen counter, which is probably fine in a cool winter kitchen; but I oughta check on it, I guess.

Bonnie Dehn, the "Herb Lady" from the Minneapolis Farmers Market, mentioned the last time I was on the Fresh & Local Show with her and host Susan Berkson that you can even ferment cabbage in a zip-top bag. Worth a try, though I wouldn't leave the 'kraut in the bag longer than needed to get it sour, for fear of chemicals leaching from the plastic.

Fermenting your own vegetables is one of those age-old means of food preservation that can seem daunting until you try it and see how simple it really is. Trust nature, and your nose. Acquiring a taste for fermented food opens a whole world of gorgeous, pungent variety--some of the most distinctive and delicious foods from around the globe are of the fermented variety.

Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

2011 Highlights: Pumpkin Seed Harvest

2011-12-23T01:35:00.000-08:00

Get your entries in for the Trout Caviar book giveaway--leave a comment about one of your 2011 LOCAL! food highlights by January 1; be specific, be evocative, regale and entice us!

One of my local food highlights of 2011 didn’t actually involve any food—well, not directly, at least. Last October Mary and I were driving through the western Wisconsin countryside, and came across an intriguing scene. Off to our right was an unremarkable field in which were growing, it appeared, squashes or pumpkins of some sort. The intriguing part was the odd contraption parked near the side road, around which an group of people were gathered, intent on a mysterious task.

In addition, between the county road we were driving on and the contraption and crew, there were piles of what appeared to be smashed-up pumpkins. We peered intently as we drove past, up a hill and around the bend. A couple hundred yards along, I swung to the shoulder and hung a U-ie. We had to go back and see what was going on.

Once we started down the side road and approached the group of people, I knew what we had come upon: it was harvest time in the fields where the pumpkins that produce Hay River Pumpkin Seed Oil are grown. Ken Seguine was the man in charge, and he was working out the kinks in a newly automated form of pumpkin seed extraction—prior to this year, a dedicated group of volunteers performed the task of smashing open pumpkins and sorting out the seeds by hand.

The new pumpkin seed machine consisted of a sort of conveyor belt/elevator that lifted the pumpkins up, to be dropped into a grinder that busted them into pieces. These pieces fell into a rotating, perforated drum. As the drum went round it further agitated the pieces so that the seeds fell out and dropped through the perforations into a bin below.

The rest of the process from there is a bit of a trade secret, but it involves toasting and then pressing, and the result is a fragrant, dark oil that’s popular in Europe (particularly Austria), but nearly unknown in this country—indeed, Hay River is the first pumpkin seed oil produced in America.

I’ve just gotten a fresh bottle of the oil to experiment with, and will write more about the culinary applications of the oil in the next few weeks—a slaw of raw kabocha squash, celery root, and apple tossed with a pumpkin seed oil, cider vinegar, and honey dressing was a winner. I just love that this kind of thing is going on out in the western Wisconsin countryside.

Free! Free! Free! The Great 2011 Trout Caviar Giveaway and Year-End Round-Up

2011-12-20T15:37:00.000-08:00

I've got books, Trout Caviar books, and three of them are looking for a new home among Trout Caviar readers.

What you do, you just leave me a comment on this post relating one of your favorite local food moments of 2011: a first (like, I would say I made birch syrup for the first time this year); a goal achieved (like, I would say I achieved a goal of serving woodcock glazed with birch syrup), an appreciation of a grower, producer, market vendor, etc. These are just examples. Do not let me cramp your style. Mentioning birch syrup will not improve your chances of winning.

I'll chime in with some of my top 2011 moments in the next week and a half, too (though I think I've said enough about...nuff said).

Come the New Year, I'll just dump the names of all the contributors in a hat, and draw three out. You may mention as many highlights of the waning year as you like--and I will very much enjoy reading each and every one--but you only get your name in the hat once.

This offer is void where prohibited, and prohibited where void.

Happy solstice, joyous holidays, and best wishes for a marvelous 2012. Thanks very, very much for reading Trout Caviar.

Brett

The Curious Case of the Wild Asparagus (Foraging with The New Yorker)

2011-12-16T07:00:00.000-08:00

The New Yorker magazine recently joined the throng of publications touting foraging as a thrilling throwback activity that connects us to our savage roots even as it lends cachet to the menus at some of the world's most talked-about--and expensive--restaurants. Jane Kramer penned this piece; you can read the full article here. It's an interesting article, very New Yorker-ish, as you might expect.

This passage I've quoted below struck me as odd when I first read it. I read it again, and then I understood why. It's an example, I think, of how the aura of something can fog the reality of it. Any avid forager or gardener will likely see what I saw. I'm eager to hear your reactions. A little puzzle for the weekend.

...we turned onto a quiet road that wound through fields of alfalfa and wheat and soon-to-be-blooming sunflowers, and parked next to a shuttered and, by all evidence, long-abandoned farmhouse that I had passed so often over the years that I thought of it as my house and dreamed of rescuing it.

Foraging places are like houses. Some speak to you, others you ignore. I wasn’t surprised that the land around that tumbledown house spoke to Paterson. He jumped out of the car, peered over a thicket of roadside bush and sloe trees, and disappeared down a steep, very wet slope before I had even unbuckled my seat belt—after which he emerged, upright and waving, in an overgrown copse enclosed by a circle of trees. Cleared, the copse would have provided a shady garden for a farmer’s family. To a forager, it was perfect: a natural rain trap, sheltered against the harsh sun, and virtually hidden from the road. Everywhere we turned, there were plants to gather. Even the wild asparagus, which usually hides from the sun in a profusion of other plants’ leaves and stalks, was so plentiful that you couldn’t miss it. We filled a shopping bag.

Wild asparagus has a tart, ravishing taste—what foragers call a wilderness taste—and a season so short as to be practically nonexistent. It’s as different from farmed asparagus as a morel is from the boxed mushrooms at your corner store.

From A Reporter at Large: The Food at Our Feet: Why is foraging all the rage? by Jane Kramer
The New Yorker magazine, November 21, 2011

Along the Fencelines

2011-12-14T12:17:00.000-08:00

The Europeans have their ancient, charming hedgerows, and New Englanders their stone walls to divvy up the countryside, but it's barbed wire that tamed and partitioned the American west--and that includes western Wisconsin. Those fencelines that follow the town and county roads can be a northern forager's last resort to gather some wild foods before the weather gods realize we're staring hard at the winter solstice, and

let the other shoe drop (this week's damplish thaw even allowed me to harvest more fresh greens from my garden; this won't last).

Ploughs and ditch-cutters both must leave a little leeway along the wavering barbed wire fences, and that small margin gives hope and a chance to a variety of wild food plants--asparagus, plum, grape vines, hazelnuts, jerusalem artichokes, black cherry, elderberry, and nannyberry, to mention a few. It was an unexpected glut of nannyberries that caught my eye last weekend along a Dunn County road. Clusters of black fruit still remained on several shrubby trees that I passed on the way back to Bide-A-Wee from picking up a newspaper in town (said paper contained a really nice account of Lily's and my recent hunt with Saint Paul Pioneer Press outdoors writer Dave Orrick).

Nannyberries, with a vine that is probably...

I pulled over and slopped through several inches of dirty snow to have a look, and a taste. This far into December, I didn't expect that the berries would be good for much, so I was surprised at how sweet and flavorful the flesh was. There's a reason, I guess, that another common name for them is "wild raisin." I filled a small sack and took them back to the cabin to see what I could do with them.

At another spot I was fooled by a nannyberry look-alike:

...a type of smilax; edible but, according to one wild foods expert "probably icky."

I wasn't sure what this was--thought it might be Carolina moonvine (a wild guess), but couldn't find corroborating evidence on that. That's when it's nice to have a true wild food expert in the address book: my friend Teresa Marrone wrote back right away, nailing the ID as a type of smilax, or greenbrier . (If I had had Teresa's excellent Wild Berries and Fruits Field Guide close to hand, I wouldn't have had to bother her, but it's nice to break up the day with a little email banter.) Teresa described the smilax berries as "edible but rubbery and distasteful when fresh." Ever the scrupulous researcher, she went on to speculate that in their desscated state they were "Probably icky." Now my curiosity is piqued, and I'll have to give them a taste if I come across them again. She also said that in spring the young shoots were edible and enjoyable, and noted that Sam Thayer writes about smilax in one of his books; I have those books, of course, but everything is in Wisconsin, while I write from Saint Paul.

Each year as the foraging season winds down to its last dribs and drabs, just before everything becomes well and truly frozen or buried in snow, I like to find some unlikely remnant, a little something to see out the

The beak-y protrusion at the ends of nannyberry branches are distinctive.

season on an up note--a few dried prickly ash berries to flavor a fruit sauce for duck; some blackberry leaves or late sprouting nettles to steep into tea; dandelions or sheep sorrel that green up in a December rain, as we're seeing now. This year the nannyberries were my last best hope, it seemed.

I started by sorting through them and separating berries from stems, discarding especially gnarly looking berries, or ones the birds had pooped on. I wound up with a generous cup of berries from my small harvest, and those I placed in a small saucepan with water to cover, covered the pan, and set it on the woodstove to simmer. I didn't really time it. I checked on it every now and then, added a bit of water as the level cooked down. As they cooked they gave off a layered aroma, of fruit, of tea, of bramble leaves--reminiscent of haw berries simmering.

When it seemed that they were soft-ish I poured them into a sieve, keeping the water, and mashed at the fruit with the back of a wooden spoon. I wasn't able to get too much pulp out this way, so back in the pan the mashed nannies went, more water to cover, and back on the Haggis to simmer. In another 15 to 20 minutes I gave it another go--much better this time. All that remained in the sieve were the skins and the large flat seeds, much like a watermelon seed, that come one to a berry.

I chopped a few slices of dried apple and added these to the nannyberry...slurry, I guess it was, thicker than juice, thinner than a paste. I wanted the apple for texture, and also for tartness to balance the nannies' sweet, rather bland taste. When fresh and just ripened, nannyberries have an appealing date-like texture and a flavor that reminds me of dates and banana. The dried ones were less subtle, some nuance lost as they dried along the fencelines. I hoped the apple would perk up and round out the flavor of the concoction as a whole.

I just happened to have a chunk of sweet and salty, dense and crumbly ten-year-old Wisconsin white cheddar in the cooler. I was thinking of quince paste, or a mild chutney, that would complement but not upstage the cheese. I considered a bit of spice, or heat, or an allium element, shallot or garlic. In the end I let it be, just the nannyberries, apple, and a pinch of salt.

The compote did not want to be photographed; something about the glossy sheen confounded the focus every time.

I considered it a quiet triumph. The cheese and my nanny-apple compote got along very nicely. The no-name cheese--a "commodity cheese," it might be called, but what a ludicrous misnomer--came from Bolen-Vale, for around $12 a pound. And now, it's not that I think the $20-plus-per-pound farmstead cheddars are over-priced, it's just that, having tried a few, I find that none please me as much as this modest over-achiever.

I've said enough. A slice of grilled sourdough and a glass of wine, raised in a solitary toast to what may have been (or may not be) the end of the foraging season, made a very satisfactory Bide-A-Wee bachelor supper, and pleased me very much.

Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

On Woodcock

2011-12-08T09:59:00.000-08:00

One of the most fascinating and endearing creatures that inhabits our Wisconsin property is the American woodcock, scolopax minor. It's a migratory bird that makes epic, apparently solitary journeys from the northern U.S. and southern Canada to more temperate climes--notably the Louisiana bayou country--in autumn, and back again in spring. Considering that woodcock use their elongated bills to probe soft soils for insects, they return to our region remarkably early, often when there is still snow on the ground, and only the south-facing slopes have melted. It's a curious strategy, it would seem, that leaves them vulnerable to late snows and cold snaps. We've sometimes seen the weak, dazed birds staggering along the shoulder of the road, too feeble to fly, after a March or April storm has swept through. Well, there must be some wisdom in nature's plan, as the species does manage to survive.

Once we've observed the first returnees in March, we look forward to a spectacle that makes these birds both endearing and thrilling, comic as well as marvelous. It's the mating behavior of the male woodcock (if you break the name down etymologically, it seems odd that there would be female woodcock, but there you go; I don't think I've ever heard or read the term woodhen). Almost immediately upon arriving in their northern breeding grounds, the males of the species stake out territory in an open space. It is here that, each night through the spring--sometimes into early summer--Mr Woodcock does his mating dance.

It's a circular dance, somewhat arduously accomplished in the dry grasses in our fields, the moreso because a woodcock is a rather stout, short-legged creature. That adds to the comic aspect. Then there's the peenting. I didn't make that word up. Peent is the term that ornithologists have come up with to describe the sound the woodcock makes as he toodles along in his roundabout dance. It's a nasal utterance somewhere between a quack and a croak--well, just say the word peent, and give it a good Dylanesque twang. Before we were aware of the source of this odd sound, we often heard it coming from the field on moonlit nights, and invented a mythical Bide-A-Wee beast, the duck-frog, to explain it.

But now for the thrilling part. At some point in his dancing, peenting frenzy, the woodcock decides it's time for a change of strategy. He takes flight with the twittering wing-flitter sound familiar to upland bird hunters, and streaks into the dusk; he follows a circling path in his flight, as well, soaring out of sight far up into the darkening sky. And then he stops; stops at the apex of this climb, almost directly over the spot from which he flew, and descends, fluttering back and forth like a falling leaf, producing yet another sort of sound--what to call it, a sort of undulating whistle, fwoot fweet fwoot fweet fwoot fweet. And he lands where he started from, and begins again.

Last spring one woodcock established his dancing ground on the hill just above our cabin, and I was able to creep up on him and observe his tottering progress through the grass. More exciting still, his flight path on his ascent took him directly past the cabin's deck, so we could sit out and see him go past, try to follow his progess up into the evening sky, wait for the sound of the return to earth. Perhaps I'm easily amused, but I couldn't get enough of it.

This behavior is supposed to stop, I suppose, when the woodcock attracts a mate--that's the whole point of it, after all, unless woodcock enjoy this sort of virtuosity for its own sake; and you know, now having mentioned that, I really hope they do, unlikely though it seems. Well, our Bide-A-Wee woodcock, it appeared that he was destined to remain a lonely bachelor, for his peenting and dancing, his nightly flights, went on for weeks, both in the evening, and then again in the morning--it's brought on by a certain quality of the dusk and dawn light. On nights of bright moon, it sometimes continued through the night. At some point it stopped; whether he did attract a mate, or just felt his chance had passed, we'll never know.

Through the summer we rarely encounter woodcock on our property. I assume they're still there, hiding back in the impenetrable thickets. We come across them again in the fall, when the leaves start to drop, the meadow grasses to dry and recede. And then of course, in the fall, it's hunting season.

We don't hunt birds on our land, though we have woodcock, grouse, the occasional pheasant and transitory turkeys. We prefer to think of our little plot, just 20 acres, as a gamebird refuge--the partridge and timberdoodles need only deal with their natural enemies, foxes, owls, hawks, and what-have-you. The flesh of these birds is delectable, but the pleasure of encountering them throughout the year exceeds even the delights of an excellent meal.

But we do hunt them, of course, in the public hunting grounds with which western Wisconsin is amply endowed. I believe that the birds we find, in much the same cover that ruffed grouse frequent, are migrants. As the winds turn to the north and temperatures drop, they come through in waves, and though they travel singly, from what I've read, they tend to congregate in liminal terrain at the edges of woods and marshland, or creek bottoms where damp soil provides them the nutrition needed to fatten up for the long flight south. For a bird whose behavior and movements are famously mysterious, you can come across quite a lot of them in a day of hunting, especially with a pointing dog to assist.

I did not come across a lot of them this year, however. Various circumstances conspired against my spending much time in the woods before the woodcock season ended in early November. I shot one woodcock, one. We made a point to savor it.

I'm a firm believer in the concept of terroir; I believe that the food of a place carries the taste of that place (I almost called this blog Taste of the Place, before switching to the more esoteric title). And I believe that foods that occupy the same space, even if, say, one is a bird, and one comes from a tree, have a certain simpatico, partake of a sort of sympathetic magic that can create great synergy in the pot and on the plate. Hence: grilled woodock glazed with birch syrup.

I'd been trying for a couple of years to make birch syrup, which is produced in exactly the same manner as maple syrup. In outline, it's simple--tap a tree, gather sap, boil it down, voila, birch syrup. But birch trees aren't as free with their sap as maples, in my experience, and they run later than maples, too. The warmer weather can bring problems--bugs in the sap, or spoilage if you don't check the bags frequently. Last spring I finally gathered enough sap--just a couple of gallons--to boil down for birch syrup.

The sugar in birch sap is less concentrated than maple sap, therefore, more boiling down. More boiling down means more heat applied to the sugars. The result is something nearly as dark as molasses, though not so thick. My entire yield of birch syrup, in two boilings, was probably shy of a cup, but intense stuff it was, once I tasted it. It's nearly as sweet as maple syrup, but with an appealing, very slight bitterness, as of caramel just starting to burn. There are also vegetal notes, a slightly spicy tingle, and a hint of menthol.

I'm so accustomed to the taste of maple syrup, I don't really taste the wildness in it anymore. But the taste of the wild is pronounced in birch syrup, and that, along with the darkness of it, took my mind's palate to another season, the autumn, bird hunting season, and I imagined the woodcock riding the lashing north winds down from Canada and into our region, finding a respite in our charismatic coverts, the scrappy edges of woods and marsh, among the dogwood, prickly ash, alders and hazel, flanked by islands of tall white pine, oak savannah remnants. And I thought, if a woodcock or two wound up in my game pouch, that a fitting seasoning would be a brushing of birch syrup, an appropriately northern condiment, and suitably wild, to match the dark, gamy meat of the woodcock.

I do love a recipe with a nicely conceptual, geographical and seasonal basis. I rarely sit down to write about food without recalling Lévi-Strauss: Food is not only good to eat, but good to think about, as well.

Getting on to the food, then: the remnants of the previous night's grouse dinner provided a very nice starter to our woodcock delectation (I can't really call it a feast, since one woodcock provides but a few bites of meat). I diced up the leftover grouse breast, combined it with what was left of the potatoes and cabbage, added stock: a delicious soup that tasted like anything but leftovers.

To accompany the woodcock I made chestnut mash. These beautiful chestnuts from Iowa are available at local co-ops now, and I can't get enough of them. For this dish I:

Roasted, peeled, and coarsely chopped 15 chestnuts;
Sautéed a chopped shallot and 2 tablespoons of finely diced celery root in 1 tablespoon butter until the shallot was translucent;
Added the chestnuts, along with 1 tablespoon dried apple minced, and 1 small potato peeled and diced;
Then 3/4 cup of unsalted chicken stock and a generous pinch of salt.

I simmered that, covered, for around 40 minutes, then removed the lid and cooked it gently until most of the liquid was gone. I should have a food mill out at Bide-A-Wee--it's a great, non-electric kitchen tool. But I don't have one there yet, so my "purée" was produced with the back of a fork, leaving an appropriately rustic texture. You could use a blender or food processer, too.

Then on to the woodcock, which I halved, simply seasoned with salt and pepper, and put on the grill. It took just a few minutes per side, little bird that it was, and on the final turns I brushed it a couple of times with the birch syrup, which gave the skin an appealing burnish.

And when it came to eating, did it live up to all the forethought and verbiage? You couldn't taste the birch so much on the breast portion, though it did lend a subtle sweetness. On the legs, my favorite part of a woodcock, the flavor was more pronouced, and it was wonderful--both sweet and a little bitter, melding wonderfully with the fatty skin and savory meat. This is the definition of a delicacy, to me. There's a book out recently detailing the last-dinner-on-earth requests of famous chefs; they didn't ask me, dang it, but this would be mine: a plate of grilled woodcock thighs with birch syrup glaze.

Next time, next year, if all goes well, I'll have another try at this dish. I would do it pretty much the same way, although I think I would reduce the syrup a bit to make a stronger glaze. It's nice to have something to look forward to.

Here's a pretty good overview of all things timberdoodle.

Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

My Thanksgiving Leftovers Were Better Than Your Thanksgiving Leftovers

2011-12-01T11:27:00.000-08:00

Unless you, too, had Kentucky Hot Brown turkey sandwiches built on homemade levain brioche toast:

With home-smoked maple-cured bacon:

Smoke-grilled turkey breast:

Mornay sauce flavored with six-year-old Wisconsin white cheddar:

And THE LAST! two fresh garden tomatoes, a small brandywine and a little peach number. The perfect use for those late season tomatoes:

With thanks to Lucky Peach , vol. 1, iss. 2. Lucky Peach is the new magazine venture of Momofuku's gonzo genius David Chang and writer/editor Peter Meehan. I'd seen mention of the Hot Brown--a hot, open face sandwich created at the Brown Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky in the 1920s--in the past, but the simple flow chart in the magazine made it a must-do. The theme of this issue is "the sweet spot," and it hits its target, indeed. They had me at the correction cartoon that starts off the magazine. Corrections in newspapers are usually dry and factual, and printed in small type at the bottom of the page, so as not to call too much attention to themselves. Lucky Peach goes the other way, 180 degrees, dramatizing the screw-ups from issue 1 in full-color cartoon glory. And, uh, there were a couple of pretty major errata.

But nothing was wrong with the Hot Brown recipe--except that the portions truly are designed for the drunken jitterbugger (or in modern times, wasted frat boy) crowd. I'm sure we used half the turkey called for (14 ounces for two!), and I halved the mornay sauce--the magazine recipe made a pint; a cup was more than enough.

What you do: Toast your brioche or another type of good white bread--this is the rare recipe that truly requires a soft-ish loaf. They ask for Texas toast, which I think just means thick-sliced white bread. Challah would be good. We had four slices from our brioche loaf; with larger bread, cut the slices in half diagonally--you must have two portions of bread per person; explanation below. Lay the slices in a gratin or other baking dish. Slice the turkey fairly thick and lay that on the bread.

Making the mornay sauce is the hardest part, and not all that difficult. Melt a generous tablespoon of butter in a small saucepan, and as the foaming subsides, whisk in a rounded tablespoon of all-purpose flour. Keep whisking, cooking over medium heat, until the roux takes on a little color. The recipe called for cream, but I used whole milk; I know, that's not like me, but we get this excellent unhomogenized raw whole milk from Renee at Bolen Vale, and the cream rises to the top, and I didn't shake it up, so; maybe it was more like half-and-half. Whisk in your dairy a bit at a time, whisk whisk whisk to break up the lumps. When all the milk or cream is in, continue cooking until the mixture comes to a bubbling simmer and starts to thicken. Take the saucepan off the heat and stir in cheese: the recipe asked for a half cup of pecorino romano; I used the cheddar, likely at least a half cup grated medium. I added small handfuls at a time and tasted until it tasted cheesy. I had used up what I grated, so I grated a little more for topping.

My one personal addition to the recipe was a generous teaspoon of sambal oelek chili paste. I highly recommend this variation.

Spoon the mornay over the turkey, and put your pan under the broiler, pretty close, until the sauce starts to bubble and brown. Then take it out and add the tomatoes and a sprinkling of cheese. Back under the broiler until the cheese melts. One more back and forth: bring it out, add the bacon slices that you've precooked, then back under the broiler just to warm everything through.

It wasn't in the recipe, but Tom's excellent cranberry-orange relish from Thanksgiving made a delightful contrast to the rich flavors.

You absolutely must serve each person two portions, so if your bread is big, cut the slices in half before assembling the dish. The reason each person needs two pieces is that you will scarf down the first one in a matter of seconds; seeing that there is a second portion on the plate will cause you to sit back, to reflect, to smile at the thought that there's another piece of Hot Brown sandwich there which you can eat more thoughtfully. You may assume the happy yummy face seen on my wife, above.

This was just flat out the best thing I ever ate with turkey in it. You could also make it with chicken, or perhaps leftover roast pork. In the absence of good tomatoes, I might make a slaw or remoulade to serve alongside or dollop on top. And the thought of a poached or over-easy egg on top makes my mouth water just a little....

The sprig of parsley is de rigeur.

(I haven't forgotten about my ode to a timberdoodle, the grilled woodcock post; but Thanksgiving intervened. Next time it's back to game on the grill.)

Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

A Very Bide-A-Wee Thanksgiving

2011-11-28T12:48:00.000-08:00

Martha took most of these excellent photos at the first Bide-A-Wee Thanksgiving gathering. She and Tom were among the small group of pilgrims who travelled through the Wisconsin countryside resonating with rifle reports as the firearm deer season continued. Also joining us were Jean-Louis and Nina, and their dog Georgia. We started with Tom's delicious turkey paté and a relish tray that helped me thin the inventory in my pickle museum--spicy snow peas, soy sauce flat beans, asparagus, sweet gherkins, and cornichons. Then we feasted on confit of turkey legs and wings (salted and spiced then slow roasted in duck fat), maple-herb cured turkey breast cooked on the Bide-A-Wee fire with red wine-port sauce (none dare call it gravy!); pommes boulangère courtesy of Jean-Louis, chestnut-sausage stuffing, rutabaga remoulade (both mine), Tom's fresh cranberry-orange relish, and brioche nanterre au levain. Then after a walk around the hilltop as dusk was coming down, we finished up with Martha's luscious pumpkin pie (recipe on the Libby's pumpkin filling can, she claims), and a beautiful apple tart on homemade puff pastry by (who else?) Jean-Louis.

The turkey was a broad-breasted bronze, raised just down the road by our neighbors Mandy and Jeremy Berg. And even this turkey non-enthusiast must admit that it was a damned tasty bird.

By the end of the day we were sated, glowing, grateful, and exhausted as our guests started homeward under a sky full of stars as brilliant as any we've seen at Bide-A-Wee. We hope your Thanksgiving feast was equally enjoyable.

The pilgrims:

Jean-Louis and Nina.

Mary with a better shot of J-L.

Tom holds forth.

Fearless fotog Martha; blurry but the best I got of her.

The pitmaster.

Groovy reflection shot with most of us.

Canine contingent:

Georgia, Nina, and Lily.

Annabel in standard dozing mode.

Lily, the great hunter.

A little local color.

The feast:

Tom has been working on perfecting his turkey paté for three years; I'd say he's just about there.

Country loaf, levain brioche.

The maple-herb-cured breast on the grill. It was grilled & smoke-roasted.

Rutabaga remoulade, with apple, sorrel, a mayo, sour cream, cider vinegar dressing.

Confit turkey legs and wings and chestnut dressing warm on the Haggis.

Cutting up the confit...

...and the breast.

Tom's cranberry orange relish.

Diverse libations enlivened the day.

A flavorful plate.

And another.

We forgot to take pictures of dessert.

Aftermath.

A delicious and memorable day.

Grilled Grouse at Bide-A-Wee

2011-11-22T07:57:00.000-08:00

When I wound up with a grouse and a woodcock thanks to Lily’s miraculous pointing breakthrough and some fortunate shooting on my part, I started imagining a wild-inspired feast. I know some very capable hunters, expert gun and dog handlers, for whom ruffed grouse is basically a chicken substitute during the season. They take a limit of five birds almost every time out, fill the freezer by season’s end. Forget about pork—for folks like this, partridge is the other white meat.

This is not a situation that I can even begin to imagine. I feel fortunate to harvest a few game birds each year, and so each bird in the bag is an opportunity to experience unique flavors. Wanting to make the most of this precious meat places a certain amount of pressure on the ambitious cook. As I started planning how these first birds of the season would be prepared, I thought, nice as it would be to have them at Bide-A-Wee, in the midst of the landscape from which they came, I would be better off cooking them in my Saint Paul kitchen, where there’s an oven, hot and cold running water, lights, and all the other modern conveniences.

And then I thought: the hell with that. Cooking at Bide-A-Wee has its challenges, but Bide-A-Wee is where these birds belong, and that’s where we’ll cook them. There’s a temptation to get all gourmet and elaborate with “special” meat like game birds, but I managed to overcome that, too. I simply grilled both birds. The grouse was flavored with nothing but salt, pepper, a smear of butter, and smoke; the woodcock had nice deposits of fat stored up for its anticipated, interrupted, migration, so I eschewed the butter, but finished it with a glaze of birch syrup. I’ve been thinking of grilled woodcock glazed with birch syrup ever since we made the syrup last spring.

My original idea for a side dish to accompany the grouse was a bubbly, brown gratin of homegrown potatoes, cream, and chanterelles. With no oven

at Bide-A-Wee, we would have to Plan B that idea. It turns out that, while it wouldn’t have the nice brown crust of a gratin, a pot of potatoes simmered in stock and cream until the potatoes are tender and the liquid is nicely reduced is a gorgeous thing in its own right. I’d call it stovetop scalloped potatoes. To start I sautéed some sliced leek in butter, then added the sliced potatoes, maybe a cup of stock and a half cup of cream, sprig of thyme. That simmered very gently for quite a while. About halfway through (whenever that was) I added chanterelles that had been oven-blanched and frozen last summer. Salt and pepper and a bit of butter rounded it out; a slosh more cream toward the end.

For vegetable, sweet buttered cabbage—the recipe’s in the cookbook. It’s a simple preparation, but illustrative: in the past we would often just sauté shredded cabbage in butter or olive oil, perhaps with a bit of onion, leek, or garlic, add water and steam until tender. But while I was writing the cookbook I decided to make more of a “recipe” out of the dish—I blanched the cabbage first; used shallot and garlic to flavor the dish; tossed in a bit of sugar and a splash of white wine. Now that page in the book (page 190, as a matter of fact) is one of the most visited in our copy.

I’m not sure how to describe the taste of ruffed grouse. I will tell you that I just got shivers remembering the flavor of this one (either it was supremely delicious, or the woodstove needs stoking; probably a bit of each). The breast meat is the main event, and there’s a lot of it—we find that one grouse feeds two people easily. The breast meat is as white as chicken, finer grained, juicy when cooked properly, and variable according to what the bird has been eating, though it usually has a slight, appetizing tang to it. “Cooked properly” means as little as possible; you don’t want any of the meat to be flabby and pink, but if you can catch it just past that point, that’s perfect. When I first started cooking grouse I was absolutely paranoid about overcooking it, and so occasionally cut into grouse breast that had to go back to the stove for a refresher course. Don’t go away and forget about grouse cooking on the stove, grill, or in the oven, but don’t fret too much, either. Think about cooking it to medium, how a lot of us prefer our pork chops now that the fear of trichinosis is largely a thing of the past.

And cooking it on the bone is the way to go; unless you want an elegant preparation of slices of grouse breast fanned on the plate and bathed in a sauce made by reducing the superb stock obtained from simmering the carcass with a bit of white wine and lots of aromatic vegetables. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Well, our first game dinner of this autumn was a triumph, if I say so myself. These local flavors combined so beautifully on the plate. The grouse was cooked to a golden turn and flavored with oaky smoke. The potatoes were velvety comfort infused with the aroma of chanterelles. A very nice red burgundy wine was quite, quite suitable.

With ingredients like this, the “Eat Local Challenge” is one we’re happy to meet, any day of the year.

Next time, ode to a timberdoodle.

Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

The Birds of November

2011-11-15T04:55:00.000-08:00

It’s been a while since I've written anything about hunting here. Simple reason: there has not been much to report. The last really notable outing afield occurred two years ago, when I shot a pheasant, grouse, and woodcock—the three main “upland game birds” of our region—on the same day, at a public hunting ground near Bide-A-Wee. That was a remarkable hunt for a couple of reasons. One, I’d never accomplished that “triple crown” feat before, and it had been a goal of mine. Also, the grouse was pointed in absolutely classic fashion by our young dog, Lily. Previously she had mainly been known for flying heedlessly through woods and field, launching anything avian in her path into the air well out of shotgun range. We knew she could point; we did not know if she would.

She found the bird at least a hundred yards ahead of me and remained staunch in her point for the two minutes or so that it took me to make my way over to her through gnarly terrain. Just as I came up to her rigid,

quivering form, the bird got up, and I dropped it with the first shot. That was a notable achievement for me, too; grouse are very fast flyers, hard to shoot, and I’m frankly not that great a shot. I already had a pheasant in my vest, a bird that I had walked up, shot, and retrieved with no canine assistance whatsoever. The dogs were running around back in an alder swamp. They heard the shot and came running out to find me standing at the edge of the field with a pheasant in my hand. “Hey, look what I found,” I said. “What have you two been up to?” They wagged their tails and sniffed the bird. I think they looked a little shamefaced. It was a classic moment in the field, one I’ll never forget.

The final bird of the day was a woodcock, which I shot over Annabel’s point, again on the first shot. I don’t think we encountered any other birds that day, though my memory on that point is not completely clear. If it’s accurate, this would have been a hunt on which I killed three birds with three shots, and no misses. That’s something that’s unlikely to happen again.

It was an extremely satisfying day afield, and one I had really hoped to build on in 2010, but you know what they say about plans. October last year was ridiculously warm, dreadful hunting weather. I had to make an unexpected trip to deal with family matters at the end of that month, I blew out my shoulder, then it snowed. In all of 2010 I hunted twice, fired the gun four times at two grouse, missing badly on all shots. The one time I hunted alone with Lily, I’m not sure if she was in the same county with me for much of the outing. And Annabel, then 12 years old and game but a little gimpy, and largely deaf—well, I didn’t know if we would ever again put the bell on her orange collar and send her out with a “Hunt ‘em up. Where’s a bird?”

Based on that dismal year, I couldn’t see things going anywhere but up in 2011, but the season did not have a promising start. Another too-hot October, another unanticipated October trip taking a week out of the brief woodcock season. With no real training in the interim, but lots of self-directed “hunts” on our land—home to both grouse and woodcock, and the occasional pheasant—Lily had become an over-stimulated bundle of bad
habits. I didn’t know if we would be able to bring her back. One short outing with Annabel showed me that she could come along on hunts, but only with a chaperone. I was feeling glum about the season, to say the least. I was feeling even glummer about my future as a bird hunter.

Lily is still a couple months shy of her sixth birthday. She’s in her physical prime, and she’s an incredibly athletic dog. There’s no mistaking the sheer, unabashed joy she displays as she catapults up and down the Bide-A-Wee hills. She is also a very sweet girl, eager to please, devastated when she disappoints (our joke about Annabel is that she, too, is eager to please…herself). I had Lily’s temperament going for me when I decided I had to give her a few more tries before reaching any conclusions.

Some memorable hunting and fishing outings are memorable for reasons quite apart from fish in the creel or a bird in the game pouch. Our hunt at a small hunting ground near Bide-A-Wee, just Lily and me, will stick with me for a long time. After several hunts where she seemed to be simply running around in the woods, no sense of purpose about her at all, she suddenly…started…to hunt. Some lightbulb went off for her. Maybe the “chats” we had had on previous outings impressed her. Maybe she just needed to encounter a few more birds in the proper context. The remarkable thing was how sudden the transformation was. From one hunt with absolutely no pointing, or intimation that she even knew how to do so, suddenly she was a pointing machine. Like someone flipped a switch, or switched dogs on me.

We went in to a stand of small aspen. Lily was working ahead of me to the left. Even before the point I sensed something different in her manner. She was out of sight when her collar started a steady beeping (it’s an electronic collar that beeps every ten seconds or so when she’s running, then every second when she stops). As I came up behind her I could see from her body language that, yes, there was a bird, but maybe not right there. Close, not in front of her nose. I went in ahead of her, circled to right and left. No bird. I told her to hunt and she zipped past me, slalomed through a patch of dogwood. She drew up short, all four feet planted solidly on the ground, and swiveled her head sharply to the right. Then she did not move.

As I approached a woodcock flushed, mere feet from her quivering nose. It veered skyward, over the tops of the aspens, and I had to turn and get the gun up high, and I missed, and I missed again. I cursed, but I recovered from the disappointment quickly. Lily broke her point with the shots, but came to me when I whistled, and I praised her as few dogs have ever been praised in the history of bird hunting. Then we carried on, and in a few minutes she pointed another woodcock (or perhaps the same one), and again my shooting let us down. But again we were SO HAPPY! Finding and missing woodcock is the best game EVER! We had one more bird encounter that day. On the flank of a distinctive little piece of topography, a sort of rocky knoll covered with scrub oak, dogwood, and stunted jack pine, Lily stopped, her head directed downhill, a solid point. The grouse didn’t hold for long, though. It flushed within range of a shot, but entirely out of sight behind a patch of pines. That was it. Three birds found, pointed, nothing in the bag. A great day.

One thing that has been disconcerting this year has been a general scarcity of birds. Often in woodcock season, as the birds are migrating through, I’ll find eight to twelve birds in the best bits of cover. This season I think the most timberdoodles (woodcock have a lot of nicknames) encountered in a day was four. Lily and I hit a fresh piece of terrain on a cool gray morning, just a couple days from the end of woodcock season—pheasant stays open in Wisconsin through December, and grouse to the end of January, though it’s rare that conditions allow comfortable hunting much past the beginning of December. It was great looking cover—scrappy patches of dogwood and alder along a small creek, extensive stands of young aspen, or “popple” as it’s locally known. We didn’t flush a bird. Well, maybe a chickadee. Lily hunted well. She gave me a “false point” once, came to a dead halt and wouldn’t move even when I told her to hunt after I’d circled entirely around her. She was pretty sure there was something there, but there wasn’t. Could be a bird had flushed ahead of us, leaving a strong scent but no feathered evidence. We made our way back toward the car, and I was thinking it was going to be a lost day, but for a pleasant, if somewhat arduous, walk.

We came up out of a ditch and on to the dirt road that dead-ends farther back in the hunting ground. I could see the car in the parking area just ahead, and I broke open my gun—a side-by-side 20-gauge. I had Lily at a heel as we came up on the road, but when I saw the road deserted I let her go, and she immediately left my side and dropped down in the ditch on the other side of the road. I heard the collar start its steady beeping, and assumed she was stopped for a drink of delicious ditch water. But the beeping went on, and I heard no slurping. I realized she was on point.

I found her on a solid point beside a clump of alder. The cover was thick on the road side, more open farther in, and I was fortunate that the woodcock when it flushed did not veer for the road but rather followed the edge of the alders. The flush came as I was just even with Lily, so I didn’t have too much time to think—this is good—and I dropped the bird with the first shot. It fell in the center of another clump of alders, and was an easy find. I saw it before Lily did, but waited for her to come around and track it down. It had hit the ground dead—when I opened it I found that a pellet had gone right through the heart. Lily came up to the bird and sniffed at it, mouthed it a bit. Our dogs haven’t been trained to retrieve, and don’t seem to take to it naturally. I gave her a chance to bring it to me, but didn’t insist. I picked up the bird and put it in my vest with warm words of praise for my dog. First bird of 2011, first bird in two years.

We had another successful outing a couple of days later, the closing day of woodcock season, although we saw no woodcock. At the small hunting ground near Bide-A-Wee where Lily had had her turn-around day, we finally

started to see some grouse. I walked up one bird that Lily had run past, and missed my shot. Farther back in a mature woods with a boggy section I knew grouse frequented, Lily started to get “birdy”—that is, she broke out of her broad crossing runs and began working a smaller area in more detail, her nose close to the ground, her tail going like an airplane propeller. I turned to the left, she turned to the right—my instincts were better, and the grouse flushed in front of me. I took one errant shot before the bird curved out of view in a stand of pine. Lily came barreling back my way, and I told her “Whoa!” She didn’t seem to hear. I told her again, but it still didn’t sink in. Three times is too many times to have to tell a bird dog to freakin’ WHOA! Once I did get her attention, we had another of those “chats.” She promised she would try to do better, and almost immediately, she did.

Not two minutes later, in this same open area of mature oak, elm, and maple, she went on point again. Woods like this are not supposed to be good grouse habitat, but the grouse in these parts apparently didn’t know that (we have the same sort of joke about trout that don’t seem to know that they shouldn’t exist outside of “designated trout streams”). In dry years, and also in mid-winter, I think they seek out the spring seeps in this area for water and for the little green things growing there. This time Lily went on point along a big deadfall, an oak that had tipped over pulling its roots right out of the boggy ground. I came up near that tall root clump; Lily was on point around mid-tree. The grouse flushed, and flew straight away from me barely over head-high. I had to make a quick sidestep to clear the tree, get the gun up, and I would only have a single shot.

I took it; the bird did not drop, but it seemed to dip. I was pretty sure I had hit it. I stopped and quickly replaced the shell I had spent, then started walking briskly in the direction the grouse had gone. Lily passed me and I asked her if maybe it was possible there was a bird on the ground around here. Her answer was immediate: she went into tracking mode; she had found the scent of the running bird, and was following it avidly.

It didn’t take long to find the wing-shot bird. Lily subdued it, I came and took it from her, I broke its neck—not something I relish doing, but we who eat meat have to accept the fact that animals die for our pleasure; this was just a particularly intimate illustration of that fact.

Overall, in terms of the pointing, the adjustment, the shot, the tracking, that was one of the more remarkable bits of dog-and-hunter work I’ve been involved with in my brief hunting career. We had a quiet celebration over the bird that had given its life to make it possible, and made our way back to the car.

A lot of hunters wouldn’t see two birds in two outings as much to write home about. In spite of hopes and anticipation, my woodcock season ended with a single bird in the bag, an appetizer for two. But for me those

outings marked the beginning of my new hunting life with my “new” dog, Lily. It’s tough to leave Annabel behind—but it’s even tougher to hunt with her. I worry constantly that she’ll wander off in the woods, and with her deafness not hear us to find her way back. I worry that when her enthusiasm overcomes her physical limitations, as it always does, she’ll injure herself without even knowing she has done it. More than that, we’ve had a good run together. She brought me into this world which I find as compelling and challenging as anything I’ve ever done. It’s Lily’s turn now, and the education continues.

Next time, bird cookery at Bide-A-Wee.

Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

"90 Percent of Good Cooking..."

2011-11-10T09:36:00.000-08:00

"...is good shopping," is a chestnut (pun fully intended, as you'll see) I keep trotting out when I'm talking to people about the book. I think sometimes people don't believe me. I get these skeptical looks, as if people are thinking, "Well, yeah, you can say that 'cause you know how to cook...". I stand behind the sentiment steadfastly. But please note that I did not say the 90 percent of good cooking is shopping. I said: good shopping. That means knowing where to get the best stuff; it means anticipating seasonal goodies like, for example, chestnuts. And it means knowing when to get out of the way as a cook and just let the ingredients shine.

Case in point: the dinner pictured above, prepared here in Saint Paul last night. Bison blood sausage from Seward Co-op; Iowa chestnuts, also from Seward; savoy cabbage, onions, and fingerling potatoes from the Minneapolis Farmers Market; Bide-A-Wee apples. A splendid autumnal tableau, prepared in one skillet. What I contributed in the area of cooking skills: I used duck confit fat to brown the vegetables; I deglazed the pan at the end with a little chicken stock and a splash of red wine, little water.

That's right: I said bison blood sausage. I imagine that this is the sort of thing that will have a polarizing effect. On the one side: blood sausage? Eeewww! On the other: blood sausage! (Accompanied by Homer Simpson-esque drooling sounds.) But really, this is nothing so radical. The Seward butcher counter has become well known for its amazing array of sausages and their inventive combinations of flavors. I prefer the subtler palate, and believe it or not, the bison blood sausage is definitely on that end of the spectrum. The ingredients are: bison, beef, pork, bison blood, buckwheat, onion, salt, sage, white pepper, granulated onion, marjoram, cardamon, nutmeg. The spice profile is distinct and wonderfully appetizing, but not overpowering. The texture of the sausage is fairly fine, not too rich. The salt level is just right, letting the other flavors of meat and spice come through (this is surely a matter of personal taste, but I sometimes find Seward's sausage a bit too salty, which is about the only criticism I've ever had).

I don't have a drop of Scandinavian blood in me, but this sausage struck me as very Swedish, in a good way. I can easily see it as the centerpiece of a Nordic holiday table, resplendent in candlelight that glints off the ruddy cheeks of a tow-headed crowd of hungry Swedes. Please pass the aquavit. Tak.

But I digress. The sausage was excellent, and the chestnuts were lovely, too, sweet and fragrant with spicy, caramel notes. Cabbage and fingerling potatoes cooked in duck fat--what could be wrong with that? But the apple, from one of our Bide-A-Wee trees, browned on the outside, almost custardy within--that was the perfect match to the sausage, and a bite of each taken together was sublime.

Best of all, this was incredibly simple to put together. I did the potatoes first, and moved them to the oven to keep warm. Then the sausage, cabbage, and apple all cooked together. I brought the apple and cabbage out of the skillet when they were cooked, and added the onion to brown a bit, then the chestnuts and a little water, covered and cooked five minutes or so. When everything was done and out of the pan I added two cubes of frozen chicken stock, and maybe a quarter cup each of red wine and water. Deglaze, reduce, serve it forth.

Peeling the chestnuts was accomplished by cutting an X into the flat side of the shell with the tip of a paring knife, then roasting them in a dry pan in a 375 oven for 15 to 20 minutes, until you see the flaps of shell start to peel back around the cut. Then remove the pan from the oven, cover with a dish towel for five minutes, and peel while hot--the skin is likely to adhere to the nuts if you let them cool. You'll be seeing a lot of chestnuts here in the coming weeks. They're among the seasonal products I anticipate most eagerly.

Here's another great thing about honing one's shopping skills: This meal was extremely economical, delivering maximum flavor for the dollar. The chestnuts are a bit pricey, $9.99 a pound, but I probably used less than four ounces. The sausage was just $6.99 a pound, so our .69 pound package cost $4.82. So flavorful was the sausage, and really, the whole plate, that we had leftover sausage--bison blood sausage sandwich for lunch! Everything else cost around a dollar, total. The delightful bottle of bourgueil we drank with it was by far the most expensive element (what, 13 or 14 bucks?), and well worth it. I'm not averse to spending money on food or wine. I just want to be sure I get the good stuff.

Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

A Dinner Too Far / The Sirloin Strikes Back

2011-11-08T13:25:00.000-08:00

Today's double feature showcases the struggles, hardships, and eventual heart-swelling triumph of a much-anticipated Bide-A-Wee supper in the first act; and in the second part of the double bill, the thrilling tale of how a modest piece of beef overcame an overly conceptualized side dish to win the admiration of hungry diners.

To put it another way:

In a world where overwrought home cooks obsess over the local and seasonal, and go to torturous extremes to distill gold from the dross of roots and grains, how can a humble piece of sirloin rise above the fray and stake its claim on the lawless frontier of dinner...on a plate...on, uh, the table?

Well, let's start with the wheatberries. I've had this notion, a long time brewing, of a rich and satisfying risotto-like dish, based not on rice (which doesn't grow around here) but on wheatberries, which do--the wheatberries (wheat seeds, in reality) in my Bide-A-Wee cupboard come from just a few miles down the road in Connorsville, grown on the Bartz farm . An earlier attempt at such a dish foundered on the shoals of underdone wheatberries. I learned from that attempt that the wheatberries must either be cooked a very long time, or sprouted for a couple of days prior to cooking.

I'm against the idea of a "risotto" that cooks for hours, and I like the idea of sprouting, which sort of precooks the berry, sans heat, and creates a natural sweetness in the grain. Sprouting grains is the first step in malting, a process used in the production of whisky, beer, and, of course, malted milk balls. As the seeds sprout, the starches therein are converted to sugars. The soaking process also allows the hard seed to absorb water, so that after being kept nice and moist for two or three days the sprouted seed is quite edible--just like beans sprouts or alfalfa sprouts, though a good deal more al dente.

So: my idea was to sprout wheatberries for a couple of days, then combine them with some sautéed onion, a fine dice of celery root, chicken stock, herbs, a suitable amount of butter, and finally, some hen of the woods mushrooms. This was to occur on Saturday night at Bide-A-Wee. We would serve it with a piece of grilled sirloin we'd picked up at Seward Co-op . Seemed eminently do-able.

But you know how things that seem eminently do-able in the encouraging light of morning can come to seem, by the end of that day, in the fading evening light, not so do-able anymore, and as delicious as that anticipated meal sounds, it would sound way better if someone else were making it? That was where I was on Saturday evening, after a morning radio interview, family luncheon get-together, packing-up-driving-out-unpacking, fire lighting organizing, pour a drink and--hey, can we call out for pizza?

Well, at Bide-A-Wee, no, we cannot. You just have to down that martini, buck up, and get on with it. The first thing that went out of the picture was the grilling. It was after seven, it was dark, and I had no desire to be going in and out of the cabin to tend a fire. The woodstove was blazing away. We would sear the steak in a cast iron skillet atop it. I got going on the "risotto" of wheatberries. I chopped a small onion and made a very small dice of half a small celery root--about 2/3 cup once diced. In a saucepan atop the Haggis I melted a tablespoon or so of butter, added the onion, and as it began to wilt, the celery root. As that took on a little color I dumped in the sprouted wheatberries. That was half a cup to begin with, now swelled to a generous cup, so it appeared. Stir that a bit, add salt and pepper, then around a cup of chicken stock. When that got to a simmer I covered it and let it cook very slowly. I figured that it wouldn't need to be stirred as often as a proper risotto. I checked back in five minutes. Didn't look like the wheatberries had taken up any stock. Gave it another five. Same deal. Ten more. No real change, though the berries did taste like they were softening.

What I eventually learned from this round of wheatberry risotto experimentation was:

1) I should stop trying to make risotto out of things other than rice, and
2) When wheatberries sprout, converting starch to sugar, then the starch is no longer there to thicken the dish.

What I wound up with, in the end, was a sort of a brothy pilaf, and I let that cook uncovered while the steak cooked, to reduce the stock and intensify the flavor. (A side note: Originally I had planned to add some frozen sweet corn--also from Connorsville!--to the "risotto," but the wheatberries themselves had a crisp vegetable sweetness quite like corn, so I left it out--it went into the next night's lamb stew, instead.)

And so we turned to the steak. I put the cast iron skillet on the stove, added wood and worked the bellows to get it really hot. I salted and peppered the steak and brushed it with a little oil. It was a Hill & Vale bone-in sirloin from the butcher's case at Seward. You don't see bone-in sirloin that often. It has always been one of my favorite cuts of beef. It doesn't get the kind of press that a marbled ribeye or strip steak does, but the flavor can be extraordinary. So I had high hopes, though I also knew that a simply cooked piece of meat can often be overshadowed by a meticulously planned side dish like the one that was...currently failing to materialize on the woodstove.

The skillet wasn't as hot as I would have liked when the steak went in. On the turnover the sizzle was largely gone. We added wood, we bellowed. I figured this was going to be one that we would write off to experience. Planning simple meals for the first night at the cabin was supposed to have been a cardinal rule by now, but, you know, you get cocky....

About this time I remembered the hen of the woods mushrooms that I was going to put in with the wheatberries. They were precooked--in fact, they'd been roasted off in some pork fat rendered from a piece of belly I'd braised earlier in the fall--and they were--well, they were hen of the woods roasted in fresh pork fat, what more do I need to say? As the sirloin rested (preparing to strike back!) I deglazed the pan with a little red wine, added some more chicken stock and the mushrooms. That reduced quickly and wonderfully. We served it up.

For a meal that bore little relation to what I had originally had in mind--no, strike that: Without qualification, it was superb. Let's start with the steak: chewy-tender, deeply beefy, with a compelling tang and savor to it--the best piece of beef I've eaten in a long time, and not diminished at all for not having been grilled. The mushrooms with their porky undertones provided a complementary meatiness and texture.

And then the wheatberries and celery root: the wheat was sweet and slightly crunchy, the celery soft and savory. Neither risotto nor pilaf, but a beautiful autumnal dish that I'll make again, and I'll just call it: sprouted wheatberries simmered with celery root.

This is a lot of verbiage expended on one Saturday supper, I realize. But in doing interviews to promote the cookbook, I've been asked about my approach to cooking, this expanded sense of "foraging" that I'm trying to shove down the public gullet(!), and what it means for cooking to be "ingredient-driven." Well, I think this sort of goes to all those topics. For what it's worth.

Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

Getting Fresh with Some Local Ladies

2011-11-04T08:37:00.000-07:00

I'm really looking forward to a return visit to the Fresh & Local Show, to chat with Susan Berkson and "herb lady" Bonnie Dehn about all things local, seasonal, delicious, and maybe just a little bit wild. Live on the air tomorrow morning, Saturday, November 5, at 8:00 a.m. on 950AM here in the Twin Cities. Or listen later, if you like, via podcast at that Fresh & Local site.

Also appearing on the show will be Kelli Abrahamian, who writes the blog I Had a Delicious Time , and who is an aficionada of farmers markets and leafy greens (she tweets as @crazy4kale).

Corn in the Mornin'

2011-11-02T09:37:00.000-07:00

I woke up out at Bide-A-Wee recently with a powerful craving for grits. White corn grits, the good, long-simmered kind, preferably hominy grits, with that appetizing masa-like aroma. Since I woke up in the middle of Wisconsin, I quickly accepted the fact that my craving would not be fully satisfied that day. While biscuits and sausage gravy--a dish I think of as being almost as southern as grits--is surprisingly common on Wisconsin diner and café menus (with wildly varying preparations, as well as levels of edible-ness), I've yet to encounter grits anywhere in Minne'Sconsin, other than a specifically southern-themed restaurant.

I first got a taste for white corn grits during the year I spent in graduate school in Roanoke, Virginia (1985-86, things were still cooling down from the Civil War...). And honestly, most of the grits I consumed there, as part of a typical diner breakfast, were not very good. Those generally were made from instant or quick-cooking grits. Their flavor was wan, and their main function was to soak up butter, salt and pepper, Tabasco, and egg yolks. Wishing to attempt a better rendition at home, I found that, even in Virginia, it was pretty hard to find honest, genuine, long-cooking grits. And up here in the frozen north? Think, "mail order."

I've tried two kinds of vaunted mail-order grits. A few years back I ordered an assortment of ground corn products from the relatively famous, extremely expensive Anson Mills . And I was not impressed, not by any of what I bought. That turned me off of pricey excursions into southern foodstuffs, until I was introduced to Hoppin' John's grits by Mike Phillips--then the chef at Craftsman restaurant , now the main man behind the utterly toothsome charcuterie of Green Ox Meat Co. Mike did a demo at the Midtown Farmers Market where he grilled previously cooked, molded, unmolded and sliced chunks of the Hoppin' John's grits, served them with grilled vegetables, I believe, and perhaps some of his early ventures into prosciutto making. A tasty day at the market, indeed.

So I ordered a few pounds, and enjoyed them while we had them. But then, you know, with that whole local-seasonal thing we've got going here, I didn't keep up on the food through the mail. But I might have to order some again. A steaming plate of fragrant grits makes an exceptionally appealing basis for a winter breakfast. The most recent Saveur features another brand, Old School . These sound like the real deal, and are reasonably priced, $3.49 for a two-pound bag, plus shipping.

Hoppin John's website is wonky today.

But back to that Wisconsin October morning, and a very reasonable solution to my grits craving, all things considered: coarse polenta from Whole Grain Milling , finished with a handful of smoked Marieke gouda ; home-smoked bacon; Sami's delicious free-range eggs from Hilltop Pastures Family Farm . While it did not move us to start conversing in a southern drawl, we gave it two hearty "You betcha!"s, and we cleaned our plates.

How we make polenta: four parts water to one part polenta. We find that 1/3 cup polenta makes a good two-person portion, so we heated 1 1/3 cups of water. Bring the water to a boil, and stir in the grits using a fork or a whisk. Keep stirring vigorously until the mixture is smooth--we haven't found lumping to be a problem with this polenta, so long as you stir briskly as you add them. Now turn the heat down way low, and stir the polenta often with a wooden spoon or the like. You don't have to stir constantly, but when you do stir, be sure to scrape the bottom of the pan to loosen anything adhering there. They'll be done in 20 to 25 minutes. Just before serving we always stir in a nice spoon of butter, and season well with salt and pepper. And, as mentioned, a handful of grated smoked gouda enriched this breakfast version.

In a comment to a recent post here Tom mentioned "explosions of hot corn magma," those sometimes vexing and messy (and even painful, if you wind up in the line of fire) volcanic eruptions in the polenta pot. We don't seem to have too much trouble with this, and I think that's because: 1) We keep the heat very, very low, and 2) The 4:1 ratio uses more water than many recipes call for; as the mixture only thickens toward the end, less likelihood of explosions.

As fall turns to winter and the braising pot rarely leaves the stove, polenta becomes a more and more common part of our meals--breakfast to lunch to supper.

Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

A Clearing in the Mist

2011-10-29T09:03:00.000-07:00

In spite of the fact that the October landscape is often wreathed in mists, I find autumn to be a season of clarity. The clarity comes in part from a sense of ease, the space to breathe, that accompanies the end of the growing season. Everything that comes with summer, whether pleasure or chore, builds together to create a sense of busy-ness that, by late August or early September, can be as oppressive as July’s humid heat. There’s the garden to weed, mulch, water, harvest, preserve, reseed…. There are trout to be caught, mushrooms to be foraged; then apples to be picked, pressed, dried, sauced. The Haggis needs reblacking, we ought to get a shed. And the city house is no less demanding.

Comes a day, after the frost, when, whatever one did accomplish from that never diminishing list, it doesn’t matter. That list is over. Did you set that extra gallon of sour dills to brine? Nothing to be done about it now, either way. When the September freeze in Connorsville brought an abrupt end to the sweet corn season, there went my chance to try Amy’s aunt’s method of preserving it; also vamoosed, the obligation to trot out the corn spoonbread recipe I’d meant to put up on the blog. Big plans to test out various methods for keeping hen of the woods mushrooms were dispatched by the September drought.

If those examples seem a little on the negative side, it may be because autumn does confront us with many scenarios of subtraction, but in what is taken away we also find benefit, and renewal—the leaves drop from the trees, but give us back the bones of our Bide-A-Wee hills, and a new sense of trees, stark and graphic, perhaps, but beautiful, too. As the corn is stripped from the fields, the last cutting of hay rolled into shining round bales, we see the contours of the land again; I take an elemental sense of reassurance from that.

On the topic of hay I could become ponderous—mainly because, while I find it utterly compelling, I don’t really know that much about it. It seems to me the most basic of crops, the least intrusive form of agriculture, almost in line with foraging. While it doesn’t occur without human intervention, still it seems a nearly pure form of the alchemy of soil and sun that drives the planet and all life thereon; in the rituals of the haying season, hardly changed since people first cut grasses to store as livestock feed through the winter, it ties us to early ancestors. Hay gives us milk, butter, cheese, meat. The wedge of cheddar is the iconic Wisconsin headwear, but I’d like to see people here sporting haybale hats.

I spend a fair amount of time driving around the Wisconsin countryside, and at this time of year I notice a change in the residents of the small towns. I notice less traffic, for one thing, fewer people moving to and fro. I also sense (could be it’s just me) subtle changes in how they interact. I see pairs of pick-ups parked cab to cab on the side roads, the drivers chatting, in no hurry to be anywhere. In town a white-haired lady will cross the street to lean in the window of a car that pulled to the side of the road and called out. Small groups of people, just pairs or trios, linger in front of the post office, the grocery store, the cooperative. They are mostly older, and in the afternoon sunlight that slices through low gray clouds, and filters through the waning leaves, there is something poignant in how that light, at once forgiving and foreboding, brings out the features of their faces: they seem extremely human. As if Grant Woods got together with Edward Hopper to paint these tableaux.

The days are short, and even for an autumn-lover like me, now shrinking with alarming pace. The light compels remembrance. Try not to let it slide into nostalgia, which once was thought to be a fatal disease. But the stillness of an October day of sunlight and cloud, warmth in the light and a penetrating chill in the shadows, seems to require one to reflect. There are no endings that are not as well beginnings, but the balance isn’t always doled out equally to all, with passing years. See entry “Nostalgia, as fatal disease…”. Let’s move along.

I go out looking for something to forage, as if finding wild harvests will suspend the season here, or at least the day. By the parking area of a hunting ground I find the wild plum trees plum-less, but strung with grape vines thick with dark purple fruit. Many of the grapes are shriveled half to raisin state, but when I taste them I find that they are some of sweetest wild grapes I’ve ever found. I pick a small sack full; I have no idea what I will do with them, but I feel a responsibility to find a use for them. In a streamside woods I go digging for ramps—a thin tan stick topped with a monochrome starburst of small black seeds is the giveaway; the pungent bulbs lie beneath. I gather just a few, because it’s hard to work around the edges of a clump when you don’t have the leaves to guide you, and I don’t want to remove whole clumps.

In the Bide-A-Wee north woods I seek out the stinging nettles patch, and find that quite a few small plants have sprouted from seed late in the summer. The head-high patch of mature plants has mostly vanished, flattened by frost, wind, falling leaves of oak and maple. Back at the cabin I make a glass of nettle tea, sweeten it with maple syrup from trees growing in that same woods, tapped for sap that was boiled last spring into this perennial sweetness. The tea is clear, slightly green-gold. It’s a libation with all sorts of implications that I think would be spoiled if I tried to sort them out.

I sit down at the laptop on the tippy table of white pine that Ivan Schrock made, and start to write about autumn, its sense of clarity.

Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

October Bonus

2011-10-25T12:16:00.000-07:00

When one is able to harvest tomatoes, green beans, and basil from a Minnesota garden on October 24, I think that is an event worth commemorating with the creation of a new dish. Well, a new-ish dish, maybe, not a reinvention of the wheel, but at least a let-the-garden-take-the-lead sort of dish. Braisey. To serve atop polenta, to feed to a hungry wife coming home in the dark from her training session in preparation to ski the kortelopet at the American Birkebeiner this coming winter (I'm going to ski it, too, but as a bagged-out but still (unjustifiably) cocky former athlete, I'll wait to start my training until a couple weeks prior--I mean, how hard can it be to ski 23 kilometers? A kilometer is only like, what, 50 feet or so? Piece of cake).

In addition to the fresh green beans--which are flat romano beans, and by no means of haricots verts tenderness at this season--there are also the ghostly, apparently useless husks of dried-up beans hanging on the vine. Appearances are deceiving here, for you can open those dry white shells to extract the dried bean seeds, which are just like the dried navy beans you'd buy at the co-op, only much fresher and tastier. They'll provide a creamy sweet undertone to the stew.

A leek previously pulled and cleaned up should be used up; the kale is the most prominent vegetable remaining in the garden, and will lend a leafy note. This will need a lot of garlic: it goes so well with beans, tomatoes, and greens. Foraging in my fridge, I found a cup of brown chicken stock--that goes in, plus another cup of stock or water; you could use vegetable stock to keep it meat-free.

I sauté the leek in olive oil, then add four crushed cloves garlic, then tomato (a cup and a half total, chopped cherry and larger tomatoes), cooking gently to let the tomatoes dry out a bit. Then in go the dry(ish) shelled beans, stock, and a few torn leaves of basil. Simmer 30 minutes. Add a good fistful of fresh beans, sliced on the diagonal into 2-inch pieces, and a few leaves of kale, stripped from the stems, shredded or torn. Simmer another 30 to 40 minutes, adding water as needed to keep it brothy, until everything is tender. We are NOT looking for al dente vegetables here.

Now cook up some polenta, finishing with a nice dollop of butter. A grate of cheese makes it a rich, filling vegetable dinner, BUT:

A slice of bacon makes it a vegetable dinner with BACON! I just brought a fresh batch out of the smoker. It is a rule in our house that some of the bacon gets eaten hot, fresh from the smoke.

I picked one more meal's worth of beans from the surprisingly still-green vines. I much prefer pole beans to bush--longer harvest time, easier to pick, and as they grow up a trellis, they take up less garden space. There's frost a-comin' this weekend, but I can't feel anything but grateful for this Indian summer harvest. A bit of frost will sweeten the kale, turnips, and carrots, anyway. To everything its season.

Radio Day

2011-10-14T09:27:00.000-07:00

Imma be on the radio this afternoon, 3:00 to 4:00, talking with Jean Feraca on the Here on Earth show's "Food Friday," on Wisconsin Public Radio: http://www.wpr.org/hereonearth/archive_111014k.cfm . I'm going to try to retain some semblance of calm, but in reality I'm absolutely giddy about this opportunity. I'm kind of a WPR groupie, and Here on Earth is my favorite WPR show (though I enjoy the whole weekday line-up--Joy Cardin, Kathleen Dunn, Veronica Rueckert*, and Larry Meiller).

It's a call-in show, and I'd really love to hear from Trout Caviar readers if you're out there listening. You can hear it on the Ideas Network of Wisconsin Public Radio, or stream it live from their website (I'm certain that most of you are much more clever about this sort of thing than I am; there's a "Listen" tab just above the blurb about me and my idyllic childhood). If you'd care to listen to the show later, it will be archived promptly after airing.

Okay. Wish me luck.

________________________

* One of Veronica Rueckert's interviews led to this lively Trout Caviar discussion a while back, about where food and cooking fit (or don't fit) in the realm of the aesthetic: http://troutcaviar.blogspot.com/2010/12/is-cooking-art-can-food-be-art-discuss.html

The Cheese Course: It's What's for Breakfast (Roth Butterkäse with Cornmeal Crusted Fried Apples)

2011-10-12T13:26:00.000-07:00

This was a simple delight, and a bit of a surprising combination. Not that there's any secret to the simpatico between apples and cheese, but the maple syrup (Bide-A-Wee brand) snuck in there as an unusual and pleasant liaison. Walnut bread--a favorite (of mine and our customers) during the Real Bread era, and which I've rarely made since we stopped the mass baking--completed a wholly satisfying breakfast plate.

Roth Käse Butterkäse is a soft, buttery cow's milk cheese from the folks who make award-winning gruyère-type cheeses down in Monroe, Wisconsin. It is mild and mouth-filling, not a challenging cheese, just an entirely enjoyable one. It reminds me a bit of havarti. We pick it up from our friend Renee's Bolen-Vale cheese shop on highway 64.

For the apple: Peel and quarter a good-sized firm tart apple. Remove the core and cut each quarter again so you have eight wedges. Mix a quarter-cup of cornmeal with a bit of salt. Dip the apple pieces in milk, then toss them with cornmeal to coat. Fry in butter over medium heat, turning several times, until the cornmeal crust is brown and the apples are tender. Serve with slices of cheese and maple syrup.

Walnut bread: Add whole raw walnuts to a sourdough rye or whole wheat dough in a ratio of 1 part walnuts to 4 parts dough (e.g., 4 pounds dough, 1 pound walnuts). Knead the walnuts into the dough just before you shape and proof the loaves pre-baking. Adding walnuts to the dough when you first mix it will make the bread go purple in a reaction with the tannins in the nuts.

And I can't go without mentioning the coffee! Café au lait made with really strong Café du Monde New Orleans coffee, from a can that one Don Roberts of Otter Creek dropped off at our place some while back, with warmed raw milk from the Bartz's Bolen Vale Farm. This was the farthest thing from just-roasted arabica beans freshly ground and gently brewed, but it was delicious--tasted just like Paris.

Bide-A-Wee breakfast table--liberally garnished with apples full of charcacter

Pesto: Not Just for Basil Anymore

2011-10-09T08:46:00.000-07:00

What I'm about to say will likely astound some of you, particularly any of you young whipper-snappers who've know little or nothing of the days before burrata, Neapolitan pizza, foie gras carts as common as hot dog stands, and free-range artisan single source heirloom poultry in every pot, but here goes: I was there when pesto was invented. Well, maybe not "invented," but I do recall very well those days when basil pesto arrived in a great fragrant tsunami on these shores. That was also the time, not surprisingly, when rare and exotic foodstuffs like real parmesan cheese, prosciutto, balsamic vinegar, and extra virgin olive oil were first becoming known here. Funny, huh? Before that time, all we knew of food started at Hamburger Helper and ended at Shake N Bake chicken. This was a mere twenty years ago. I know that many of you recall those innocent days as well as I.

The reason I'm taking this trip down memory lane is to help explain why I don't really like basil pesto anymore. The reason: so smitten was I with this rarified blend of fresh basil, garlic, cheese, pinenuts, and olive oil, I gorged on it until, frankly I was sick of it. I burned out on basil pesto in the mid-90's, and I've never really recovered. That tragic occurence also took away a lot of my enjoyment of basil itself. I mean, I don't dislike basil, but I'm really much more of a thyme guy.

My solution for getting back into the pesto game after my disillusionment with basil is this here mixed-herb pesto, which allows me to put away some summery herbal freshness without the Genovese flashbacks. Interestingly, basil is the main herb in this mix, since it's the most abundant in my garden right now, but it recedes under the influence of the other greenery. To the basil base I always add plenty of thyme, a good amount of mint, parsley, and some cutting celery.

Poking around my Saint Paul garden at this time of year is really a sort of domestic foraging, and while I was wending my way through renegade squash vines, I spied some neglected carrots, and grabbed a few sprigs of the freshest green tops to add to my pesto. I also pinched off a few tomato leaves, which are indeed edible, and bring that appetizing savory quality. I also came across some rather sad, underachieving fennel plants that I planted mid-summer. No bulbs to speak of, but I was able to glean a few feathery, anise-scented fronds. Add some sorrel, and a handful of chives. I think that's all of it. Rosemary and tarragon I avoid--they'd be too assertive in the mix; well, maybe just a little of each, but be careful.

Rinse and spin, jam it all in the FP. I added also the juice of one-quarter lemon and a couple good pinches of salt, then about a quarter-cup of olive oil to start. Start blending, and add more olive oil as needed to make the emulsion. This herb base can be amended later with cheese, garlic, nuts, or used as is.

How I will use it: drop a cube into the soup pot just before serving; smear on lamb chops, chicken, or fish pre-broiling; stir into a wine-stock pan sauce for a steak or chop; melted into hot polenta, or rice pilaf; or on pasta, of course, with the traditional additional flavorings.

Conveniently, one FP-load of herbs made enough to fill one ice cube tray. Knock another fall chore off the list.

Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

October Foray

2011-10-05T14:35:00.000-07:00

I have to admit, I've been in a rather prolonged blogging slump, and a lousy time it is to have one, too. What with the book just out, I ought to be keeping these pages sparkling with gorgeously appetizing photos, irresistible recipes, and scintillating prose. What I've been feeling, however, is a general feeling of: Meh. Or rather, that's how I feel when I'm back in Saint Paul, contemplating sitting down in my office, going through photos, transcribing recipes.

It's odd: Many times, out and about in Wisconsin, or even in my garden here in town, I've got sort of a running voiceover going for the blog, with a ton of things I'm eager to talk about: coming across the Hay River pumpkin seed oil crew processing pumpkins in Dunn County on a perfect fall day; picking the last of the apples, and pressing them into cider; picking nannyberries at Bide-A-Wee (which I'm still not sure what to do with); the whole lamb we roasted out at the cabin a couple of weeks ago; even the potato truck that turned over on Wisconsin highway 25 in downtown Ridgeland last weekend, sending a tidal wave of russets spewing across the roadway (no one was hurt; some townsfolk partook of the gleaning opportunity, filling drywall buckets with scattered spuds).

What I need to learn to do, I think, is to quell the internal narration and save all that inspiration for when I can use it. I really wanted to get a post up today, but nothing was coming. So I did what I often do when I'm backed up like that: I headed for the woods. The idea wasn't even so much a forage as just a head-clearing and a have-a-look-around. I can't remember when the last measurable rain fell here, and the woods were extremely dry the last time I went out, at least a couple of weeks ago. Not ideal conditions for mushroom hunting, to say the least. Pleasant for walking though, which creates a bit of a forager's paradox, that often the best times for foraging, the warm, damp times, are the least enjoyable times to be in the woods. Mushrooms, mosquitoes, deerflies, and nettles all like it wet and hot; me, I prefer cool and dry.

And then, you know, while it's always nice to come back from the woods with some material product of the foray, it's hardly ever a sure bet. If you're going to keep at it, you have to be able to deal with coming home from time to time with an empty collection basket.

Things actually started off in promising manner when I came upon a cluster of honey mushrooms (pretty sure those are armillaria mellea; I haven't gathered any in a couple of years, and I haven't gone through the ID process with these ones). Attractive though they were, and seemingly sound at first glance, I discovered that most of them were buggy--some sort of larvae had eaten their way up through the stipe and hollowed out the center of the cap. Nothing for the table there.

Around the base of the stump (oak, I believe) on which the honey mushrooms were growing were these specimens with the singularly unappetizing name of "abortive entolomas" . These blobbish white mushrooms occur when the entoloma abortivum fungus parasitizes the armillaria. These are edible, though I have never eaten them. Like the honey mushrooms, these were a little the worse for wear.

That turned out to be the fungal theme of the day: too dry, too late--shoulda been here last week, and what do we have to do to get a little rain around here. The most impressive fungal find of the morning was this:

I guess this is a hen of the woods, but a very washed-out looking one, indeed. (The grifola umbellata shown here looks more alike in color, but it's listed as very rare.) It's the biggest specimen I've found this year, and in some time. But this, too, was considerably past its prime, soft-textured, yellowed underneath, somewhat bug-infested.

And it went on that way. A barely-there sulfur shelf, or chicken of the woods:

A withering hen:

*****

"The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight
The water mirrors a still sky...".

There are always the consolations of poetry. It wasn't twilight, and no water to be seen, but those lines from Yeats's "The Wild Swans at Coole" kept going through my head. Though the days of late have been unseasonably warm (bouncing back resoundingly from a frosty 25-degree morning at Bide-A-Wee last weekend), it certainly feels as if nature is staging its rehearsals for retirement. Keats wrote of the gathering swallows that twitter in the skies in autumn, but the turkey vultures are gathering, too, taking it all in from their splendid vantage until the north wind blows again to sail them south.

I came home empty-handed from this outing, but at once fuller and lighter of heart, if that makes any sense. And I didn't get a recipe out of it, but I got a little something to pass along, which I think is really what keeps this going, anyway. So: happy forays to all.

Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

Roasted Squash and Apple Soup ("It's All About the Garnish")

2011-09-28T17:00:00.000-07:00

It's a stalwart cook indeed who can look upon autumn's bounteous offering of bright, appealing squashes and pumpkins, and refrain from making soup. I've failed that test again, but with a purpose.

The problem with squash soup...well, where to start? Too sweet, too gloppy, too monotonously...squashy. To cut into that imposingly bland flavor (which I like, don't get me wrong), strong spices are often employed, but the curried squash soup, for instance, is by now such a tired cliché, some people must think that squash naturally tastes like curry powder. Sometimes squash soup gets the Thai treatment: lemongrass, coconut milk, bird-eye chiles. I think that's trying a little too hard.

And the texture, what to do with the texure: add too little liquid, in the form of stock, milk or cream, and you've got baby food rather than soup; too much, and the result doesn't taste much like squash (I hear some of you saying, "And what's wrong with that...?").

This preparation is a step in the direction of a corrective to this gnarly dilemma. Better cooks than I have ventured down that path, I'm sure, but here's my stab at it. I don't think this is the end of the road, but it's good (a cup of Cedar Summit cream will tip most anything in the "good" direction). Another autumn will bring more wagonloads of autumn's most recognizable vegetables, their colors nostalgically mimicking the turning leaves; and once again we won't be able to not make soup.

I counter the sweetness and blandness issues in one blow, by adding tart apple and fresh apple cider. These are both highly seasonal ingredients, as well, so we're keeping with the autumnal soup spirit. Roasting the ingredients until they are slightly browned brings up the flavor, too. And why add maple syrup, if we're worried about the soup being too sweet? Well, the maple has a different sort of sweetness, very complementary to the tart apple and cider, I think, and a little sharpness of its own, and a roundness. To achieve a pleasant texture and deepen the flavor, I use good chicken stock to simmer the soup, and that good cream to finish it.

And: I garnish the hell out of it. This is the "secret" to excellent creamy soups, I think, especially those that threaten to overwhelm the palate with sameness if not carefully disciplined with the application of fresh, complementary and contrasting flavors and textures at the table. You could almost look at the soup per se as a blank canvas, and take on the role of the Jackson Pollock of soup in your extravagent garnishings.

We actually have a saying around here (you can ask Mary, she'll back me up): "It's all about the garnish," is what we say. Have a try. (If I seem to be damning this soup with faint praise, well, that's just how I am; in fact it is a very satisfying dish on a cool autumn evening; a piece of crusty bread and a green salad will make it a meal.)

Roasted Squash and Apple Soup
serves four as a main course, six to eight as a starter

2 pounds squash (trimmed weight), peeled, cut into 1 1/2- to 2-inch pieces, 7 to 8 cups--butternut would be ideal
1 tart apple, peeled, cored, and quartered
4 large cloves garlic, peeled
3 shallots (each the size of a small egg, about 3 ounces total), peeled and halved, divided
2 tablespoons olive oil
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1/4 cup sweet apple cider
4 cups chicken stock (unsalted or low-salt)
Sage and thyme
1/8 teaspoon espelette pepper or a couple pinches of cayenne, optional
1 cup heavy cream
4 teaspoons maple syrup

Preheat oven to 425. Toss the squash pieces with the olive oil and a couple good pinches of salt, and place them on a baking sheet. Roast for 20 minutes. Set aside one half of a shallot--to be used later as garnish. Add the apple, garlic, and remaining shallots to the baking sheet, toss to coat with oil, and roast for 20 minutes more, until the squash and apples are soft and a bit browned--they may even be quite mushy at this point, depending on the produce.

In a large saucepan combine the roasted vegetables and apple, the stock, cider, 1/4 teaspoon salt, and few grinds of black pepper, 1 teaspoon of fresh thyme leaves (or 1/2 teaspoon dried), and 4 sage leaves, chopped (or 1/2 teaspoon dried). Bring to a simmer and cook, partially covered, for 30 minutes. Allow the soup to cool to lukewarm, then either pass it through a food mill, or puree it in a blender; return the resulting puree to the saucepan.

The soup can be made a day or two ahead up to this point. When you are ready to serve the soup, add the cream, maple syrup, and the optional espelette or cayenne. Bring to a simmer and cook very gently for 5 minutes. Taste and adjust for salt. If the soup seems too thick, thin it to where you want it by adding a little more stock, water, or cream, as you prefer.

Serve with any or all of these garnishes:

--Finely diced apple tossed with a pinch of salt and a squeeze of lemon juice to keep it from browning.
--Grated sharp white cheddar.
--The reserved shallot, minced, lightly browned in butter or olive oil: drizzle in a swirl over the top of the soup.
--Butter- or bacon fat-toasted small croutons or coarse bread crumbs from a good country or sourdough loaf.
--Crumbled bacon (or a fine dice of it; our homemade bacon doesn't tend to crumble).

Playing with Fire: Campfire Stew with Lamb Patties, Beets, and Eggplant

2011-09-21T06:12:00.000-07:00

I really got the most out of my campfire with this dish—I roasted beets, charred peppers, grilled eggplant, seared lamb patties, and toasted bread (and when it was all over I smoked a trout over the waning coals). It’s a bit of an elaborate preparation, but much of it is pleasantly, passively accomplished while you sit by that glowing campfire as the cool autumn evening comes on, barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day and touch the stubble plain with rosy hue, hedge crickets sing, gathering swallows twitter in the skies, and all that sort of lovely Keatsian stuff.

The original of this incredibly flavorful deconstructed stew was a recipe in Saveur magazine a year or two ago, and I’m thinking the country of origin was Syria. But I consulted no recipe for this version, merely retaining the combination of beets and lamb, with spicing no more exotic than a teaspoon of sambal and a little cumin. The wonderful flavors of the fresh, seasonal ingredients, intensified by the fire of hardwood coals, are what take it well above the ordinary.

I consider it as much a pleasure as a challenge to create a complex, sophisticated dish like this using caveman technology. Doing a lot with little is the mark of the good cook, I believe—and a lesson that applies in many areas of life other than the culinary. You could make this in a civilized kitchen, broiling the eggplant, roasting the peppers under the broiler or on a burner, pan-searing the lamb and oven roasting the beets before bringing them all together to simmer and meld at the end. It would still be a great dish. But there’s no question that uniquely rustic flavors develop in cooking over hardwood coals, and your appetite gets a boost from all that fresh air.

Since everything warms together at the end, the various parts are all made ahead, which takes a lot of pressure off. You could even roast your beets a day or more ahead, taking advantage of the remnants of one night’s campfire, as Amy “Sourtooth” Thielen describes so evocatively, cutting down the cooking time for finishing the dish. At Bide-A-Wee we grill at pretty much every opportunity—or cook over the campfire by other means, with cast iron skillet or dutch oven.

This is the perfect time of year for ambitious campfire cooking: the days are still long enough that there’s adequate daylight to illuminate your efforts, and the cool evenings make us yearn for hearty fare. From the equinox on it’s a slippery slope—diminishing daylight, evenings more chilling than bracing; once we fire up good old Haggis, our woodstove, we’ve ushered in the braising season (though we’ll still grill until the firepit is covered in snow).

The lamb “burgers” could be served as just that, a stand-alone main meat course on plate or bun, topped with well-grilled onions and/or other grilled vegetables, a ratatouille, cucumbers in sour cream or yogurt, couscous or a pilaf, what have you. On a bed of lentils, perhaps? The "secret ingredients" in the lamb patties: excellent sourdough breadcrumbs; a grated apple.

Why don’t I use ground lamb more often? Sourced from a small local farm (Shepherd’s Song in Connorsville, WI, in this case, though Minnesota’s Sheepy Hollow and Hill & Vale are also excellent), it is wonderfully flavorful, versatile, and affordable. I’m gonna do more with ground lamb.

Chickpeas would be good in this in place of the cannellini beans, and heighten the Middle Eastern inflection.

Campfire Stew with Grilled Lamb Patties, Fire-Roasted Beets, Eggplant, and Cannellini Beans
Serves four

For the lamb patties:

1 pound ground lamb
1 small onion minced
4 cloves garlic minced
1 teaspoon sambal chile paste
½ teaspoon ground cumin
2/3 cup fresh bread crumbs
1 small apple, grated, skin and all, about ½ cup
2 tablespoons olive oil
½ teaspoon salt
Freshly ground black pepper

Heat a 10- or 11-inch cast iron skillet and add the olive oil. Add the onion and cook over medium heat until it is translucent, 4 to 5 minutes. Add the garlic and cook for 1 minute. Remove the pan from the heat and allow the contents to cool for a few minutes, then mix it into the ground lamb along with the apple, bread crumbs, sambal, cumin, salt and a few grinds of black pepper. (No need to wash the pan, as you’ll use it again to simmer the final preparation.) This mixture can be prepared up to a day ahead. Just before grilling, form the lamb mixture into meatballs about 1 ½ inches across, then flatten the balls slightly to form plump patties—they’ll brown nicely on the grill this way (and not roll away…). You should have 8 patties, 2 per person.

½ cup dried cannellini beans
1 small, firm eggplant
1 large red bell pepper
2 medium hot banana peppers
4 small beets
1 small onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
½ cup red wine
3 cups water
1 cup chopped tomatoes
2 tablespoons olive oil

Cook the beans to tenderness by your preferred method, drain and set aside (or substitute a generous cup of canned cannellini beans).

Down at the campfire: wash the beets and wrap them in foil, two to a packet. Place the foil-wrapped beets in the coals and roast for 40 minutes, turning them every 10 minutes. Remove from the coals and allow to cool, then slip the skins off and quarter the beets.

Slice the eggplant the long way into ½-inch thick slices, and brush both sides with olive oil. Season with salt and pepper, then grill until soft and brown, and coarsely chop. Roast the peppers over the coals until the skin is blackened on all sides. Place the peppers in a paper bag or a covered bowl for 10 minutes to help the skin release. Scrape off the black skin and remove seeds and veins. Roughly chop the pepper.

Grill the lamb patties until well browned on both sides. To the cast iron skillet set on the grill grate (or use the stovetop, if you prefer; I finished this version on our Coleman camp stove), add 2 tablespoons olive oil, then the onion, and cook until it is translucent. Add the garlic and tomatoes and cook gently until the tomatoes have reduced to something of a paste. Add the wine, 3 cups of water, and then all the precooked ingredients, along with a ¼ teaspoon of salt and a few grinds of black pepper. Simmer for 15 minutes. Serve with grilled bread.

Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

Publication Day

2011-09-14T15:21:00.000-07:00

Friday, October 30, 2009: I'm deep in the midst of the final Real Bread baking of the regular market season. Since it is the last market, advance orders have been big. It's a warm day, and I'm surrounded by a dozen bowls of fermenting dough. It's the middle of the afternoon, and the ovens have been on since 8:00 in the morning, and they'll be blazing for several hours more. Then there's the dough to make that we proof overnight and bake in the morning. When I'm all done and slumped in the bathtub (most likely with a scotch on the rocks in hand), Mary will come in to return some order to the floury chaos, and set up ingredients for the scones she'll bake in the morning.

The last baking, and I should be in a good mood, anticipating more carefree weekends as we move into November and December. I am not in a good mood, however. I am, in fact, in an absolutely foul mood, downright owly, as my friend Lynn Ann would say. I'm sick of bread, sick of spending my Saturday mornings in a roasting parking lot after spending all of Friday in a roasting kitchen. I hate the feel of bread dough on my hands, and getting hit in the face by a blast of steam when I open the oven door and forget to step back. As much joy and satisfaction as we've derived from being part of various farmers markets the past seven years, I'm just sick of it all right now. There's no looking at the bright side. I'm just burned out; or maybe more fitting to say, I'm baked.

Mary comes down the stairs and into the kitchen as I'm fuming under the blackest cloud of the day. She says: "Somebody from the historical society press just emailed you. She's been reading your blog and she wants to know if you want to do a cookbook."

And I'm like, "Hell yeah, I do." And all of a sudden I feel a little better.

When I get a chance for a break I go upstairs and read the email. It's from one Shannon Pennefeather, and it begins:

Hello! I’ve been following your Trout Caviar blog and feasting my eyes on your fabulous cast-iron, propane, and grill cooking. Thank you for letting your readers visit Bide-a-Wee with you.

I wonder if you’ve considered collecting your recipes into a cookbook. Perhaps a wild game, freshwater fish, local ingredients approach, given your morel hunting, your trout sorrel sauce, your duck several ways. Enhance the narrative with the theme of living the good life, as every Francophile knows how to do.

I wrote right back with my utter willingness to turn the Trout Caviar blog material into a cookbook. I met Shannon on a chilly November day a couple of weeks later, and submitted an official book proposal to the Minnesota Historical Society Press in early January, and had a contract worked out within a few weeks. In early 2010 my deadline of February 2011 for a finished manuscript seemed a very long ways off. Now I know that a year and a few months to pull together a book of recipes, essays, and photographs is, well, like no time at all.

The idea of the book went through some changes along the way. We skewed the theme to focus on wild foods and foraging; I balked at being labeled a modern day hunter-gatherer (I mean, come on, I'm way too suave and sophisticated to pull that off!), but I happily donned the mantle of "a northern forager." The notion of foraging gets some tweaking in the book's concept. The Trout Caviar notion of foraging embraces seeking out the best possible raw ingredients from many sources--the wild, the market, the garden, specialty shops. This approach, I hope, makes the book useful whether you want to take to the woods to find your supper, or are more comfortable gleaning the best local foods you can find at your co-op. By providing accessible entrée into this way of thinking and cooking, I very much hope that the book will make foraging for wild foods seem not so daunting as it might to the uninitiated.

Some things I learned in the process:

* Writing recipes that are both easy to follow and interesting to read is both an art and a skill, and a lot harder than it looks;

* I don't do desserts;

* But I love cheese;

* 150 recipes is a really lot of recipes;

* While I thought the book might stand out for its meat dishes, I'm really quite proud of my salads, soups, and fish dishes;

* Mushrooms are photogenic;

* Soup is not.

And a lot, lot more. This truly was a learning and changing experience in many ways, some of which I'm probably not even aware of yet.

When I first announced that I was working on the cookbook I put out a call for recipe testers, and several people responded. The fact that I didn't get around to assigning recipes for folks to try was due simply to the fact that I never got organized enough to do so. As the months went by and the pages and recipes piled up, I just had to keep moving forward. With recipes that I wasn't quite happy with, I just chipped away at refining them a bit at a time on my own. I even had Mary test a few recipes for me (note to prospective cookbook authors: DO NOT have your spouse test your recipes, especially when the result is supposed to be your supper). So this is just to say that I really appreciated the offers of help, and I didn't snub anybody who offered assistance--the job just stayed in-house, is all.

I truly appreciate the support and continued readership of everyone who keeps up with Trout Caviar. I'm also extremely grateful to all the great people at the MHS Press who helped put the Trout Caviar book together: Shannon Pennefeather, my editor and the MHS Press managing editor; Pam McClanahan, director, and Ann Regan, editor-in-chief. Dan Leary headed the production staff; Cathy Spengler produced a beautiful design and layout for the book, and Judy Gilats set the type. Nancy Root Miller of Waupaca, Wisconsin, proofread the final version, and her enthusiasm for the book was really encouraging.

The book is dedicated to Mary, Pastry Goddess, Plate Licker, Bread Sniffer, Soup Smiler, and so much more.

Trout Caviar: Recipes from a Northern Forager, sees its official debut tomorrow, Thursday, September 15, 2011.
Cheers, everyone. Many thanks~ Brett

The Season of Too Much to Do

2011-09-07T08:49:00.000-07:00

The title could apply to any of our non-snow-covered seasons, I know, but seems particularly apt this time of year. So much so, my mind just stalled in looking for a place to start the list. Well, the garden, of course, is reaching a crescendo which, were a garden a symphony, would resound of swelling, urgent strings, pounding timpanis, wildly bugling bassoons, capped off by a thunderous cymbal clap, signifying a kitchen counter covered with green and half-ripe tomatoes, fading into October. My Saint Paul garden early in the year was a disgrace, an embarrassment, with carrots and even beans (beans, dear lord!) that wouldn't germinate or grow, lettuce that didn't thrive, reluctant leeks. I told myself, well, radishes and turnip greens are my favorite vegetables, anyway....

The trick, as it turns out, was to ignore it. I maintained a basic sort of order out there with the occasional frantic weeding, and focused on how wonderfully the tomatoes were doing in my tiny Bide-A-Wee garden, thriving in honest-to-god full sun. And I enjoyed the wild harvests from ramps, cress, nettles and other wild greens, on into black cap raspberries, July chanterelles, August blackberries. Watched the progress of the Bide-A-Wee apples, anticipated cidering time.

Cucumber and pole bean mountains.

In the interim, nature did what nature does, and found a way. In early August something came over my pole beans, cucumbers, leeks, and kale. Eruption would seem to describe it pretty well. What was looking to be a very paltry harvest became, seemingly overnight, more than I would handle. I made cornichons, bread & butters, sour dills. I found many uses for romano beans--including an excellent bean-on-bean salad with flageolets and romanos, red onion, hen of the woods, loads of olive oil and some cider vinegar. I hope to make that again while the hens are around, and will attempt to codify it into a recipe then.

Romano pole beans, good at any size.

Around mid-summer a squash or pumpkin vine sprouted in the compost, and grew timidly for about a month. This is a typical occurence here, and always a nice surprise when free food emerges from the "trash." This year's model is a sort of white pumpkin, and is now growing with alarming prodigiosity--seems like it extends its reach by a couple of feet a day, and is branching out in many directions. I recall I picked up the parent pumpkin at a Wisconsin roadside honor stand last fall. We admired its decorative qualities a little too long, and it rotted before we got a chance to taste it. We'll be able to remedy that omission this year, looks like.

In a summer when I feel as if I've done little to no preserving, I take a mental inventory and realize that I've made all those cucumber pickles, plus an impromptu corn relish, pickled ramps and milkweed buds, blackberry runny jam, tomato sauce; and I've frozen corn (kernels sliced from the cob, fresh) and turnip greens and red kale (briefly blanched, packed into sandwich bags). I've also kept that crock stocked with mixed vegetables, using up garden surplus and the remains of market purchases before they become compost-worthy.

Suyo long is my favorite cucumber variety for Chinese or western salads, and bread & butter pickles--much less seedy than most slicers.

Oh yeah, and then there's the apples.... Our apples, right now, are both a delight and a terror. A delight because it has been a wonderful year for them, and our splendidly diverse half-wild orchard is producing abundantly. It has been great fun to taste our way from tree to tree and week to week, as the apples progressed from "sour, astringent, spit-it-out," to "now that has interesting flavors (though you still spit it out)", to chewable, eatable, and finally, absolutely delightful.

Now, the terror: This year our apples seem especially prone to falling off the tree either just as they ripen or even slightly before they are ripe. We missed a weekend at Bide-A-Wee for a lovely trip to the South Shore of Lake Superior, and when I came out to the land the Wednesday following, I found that several hugely laden trees had dropped most of their apples in the time we'd been away. I commenced frenzied picking of anything left on those trees, and an assessment of the state of ripeness of the other trees. Another brief absence from the land, just a couple of days, and more trees had dropped most of their fruit. Panic. We'd waited two years for a decent apple crop, since last year's was beyond meager, an off year in the biennial fruiting cycle worsened greatly by a late-May frost that followed a very warm April which had the trees flowering early.

I think we're going to be okay. We've salvaged enough to fill a carboy or two with cider to ferment, and to freeze a few gallons for fresh cider--that's our morning "orange juice" these days. It's just an odd, perplexing, and unhappy phenomenon, this premature dropping of the apples. In past years we've picked apples well into October, I have photos of apples with snow on them, I really do, like, look here:

October 11, 2009

A few trees aren't nearly ripe, and are holding their fruit. Even one heavy cropping tree can provide almost more apples than you know what to do with. And then, there's always next year, or the year after. By that time we hope to be living in the country full time, our attention not so scattered. That's the other complication here, the back-and-forth life. I treasure every day we spend at Bide-A-Wee, and the effort required to prep for the weekend there, and to close up for the return to the city, is entirely worth it. But I've come to realize that between the coming and going procedures and the travel itself, it takes a whole day out of the week. And there are only seven days in a week, you know. You probably knew that. I'm only just starting to realize it....

So the season of too much to do can also be the season of too much to think about, which may be even more taxing. I find I've been suffering a bit of blog fatigue lately, not because I can't think of anything to say, or don't have finds and dishes and photos I want to share, but precisely because there's just too much of all that.

The wild black cherries are excellent this year.

I want to do the dry-fried green beans, the corn spoonbread, the ode to the blackberry, an exploration of black cherries. Then the hen of the woods come in, fishing season has just three weeks left, those apples aren't going to press themselves. And one of these days those Trout Caviar books are going to arrive (hey, where are those Trout Caviar books?), and with them a lot more delightful complications.

I hope you're finding better ways to simplify in the season of too much to do than I am. The list gets shorter with concerted effort, then it grows again. Today I've got bank, library, laundry, pick the garden, water the garden, unload the apples brought home yesterday, return emails, pack a few things and the dogs, and head back to Bide-A-Wee to set up for a full day of apple picking tomorrow. As the evening comes on with its cool and quiet, and I build a fire to sit by with a wee dram of scotch, I won't feel much burdened. The fact that the lawn needs mowing, wood needs hauling, the woodstove needs painting...oh, why did I have to bring that up? No, really, it'll be okay. It's good to be busy; the efforts will bring their rewards.

Garden & griffon, Annabel, to be precise.

Crock Art

2011-08-31T07:33:00.000-07:00

When you mix up vegetables and salt, put a weight on top to extrude the juices, and tuck the lot away in a coolish spot for a few days, you expect a fresh and tangy batch of fermented goodness to result. But other tranformations can occur, as well. Fishing around in my most excellent Dunn County Pottery crock recently for veg to top a rice bowl lunch, I extracted this exquisite little morsel: a quarter of a tiny eggplant that went into the brine with the first batch of vegetables. It started out as a typical midnight-dark eggplant (though tiny), and faded in the brine--though faded doesn't quite seem the right word for this gorgeous change--to the lovely bit of vegetal jewelry you see here. Almost too pretty to eat--and I must admit, it actually did look better than it tasted, a little on the tough side.

But I still feel that it contributed more than its share to a weekday lunch. The fermented carrots, long beans, chile, and cabbage provided plenty of crunch and zip to help the rice go down very nicely.

The basic formula is 2 teaspoons of salt to a pound of vegetables. You don't need a crock to make fermented vegetables, either. A gallon glass jar will do, or a wide-mouth quart if you want to start small. Just about any good, fresh vegetables can be fermented this way. Though I warn you: If you put red beets in the mix, you'll get a color transformation far less sublte than my blanched eggplants. Sandor Katz's Wild Fermentation is my guide in most things fermented.

Got Corn?

2011-08-26T06:34:00.000-07:00

Parcelling out the year into meaningful seasons can sometimes require keen observations of subtle natural signs--the buds breaking on apple trees, hen of the woods beginning to emerge on oak stumps, the slight shrinkage of the leaves that occurs after dog days' swelter breaks.

Or, it may simply require that you keep your eyes open while you're driving country roads, where, this time of year, the signs of a much anticipated confluence of culture and agriculture spring up in glorious, homespun exuberance: Get your sweet corn here!

Corn season was slow to arrive this year--a cool, wet spring kept a lot of farmers out of the fields, and slowed growth once they were able to plant. The steamy July helped the crop to catch up. It was

astounding to see how quickly the stalks ascended along the road to Bide-A-Wee once the hot weather hit. We shook our heads in sympathetic dismay at the spindly sprouts of late June, which by the end of July were miraculously over our heads.

We haven't done much fancy with the sweet corn this year. Boil it briefly or, preferably, put it on the grill, those have been our main method. I've used it in a stir-fry or two, and yesterday I put up a couple of pints of a corn relish with eggplant, tomatoes, and cherry
peppers. To grill corn, I've learned that the simplest method is the best. I used to peel back the husks and pull out as much of the silk as I could, wrap it back up and then put it over the coals. At a

cookout with the Bartz family last summer (they run the Bolen-Vale dairy and cheese shop on highway 64 in Connorsville, and grow sweet corn), I learned that the de-silking is unnecessary. Renee just put whole ears in the husks, previously soaked in water, right on the grill. Now I dispense with the soaking, too. In the process of cooking, the delicate silk basically disappears, or is easily removed along with the husks, post-cooking, and there's plenty of moisture in the husks of really fresh corn to keep it from burning up. I turn the corn until the husk is black all around, and it's perfectly done.

That's all the cooking advice I'm going to offer here. Instead, I'd like to know how you best enjoy high summer's sweet corn bounty, and how you like to preserve it for the colder months, if you do. Freeze, dry, pickle? On the cob, or off? In return for your kind suggestions, I'm going to dig around in the recipe books for a really good sweet corn spoon bread I came up with a few years ago. Mary remembers it very fondly. I'm hoping she can also remember where I put it....

How to Overcook Green Beans, pt. 1

2011-08-24T13:40:00.000-07:00

The first slender, delicate green beans of summer--those véritable haricots verts--are things of beauty, indeed, and in preparing them you must watch over the cooking time nearly to the second, a minor kitchen tragedy if they go even a shade past tender-crisp. Just blanched or steamed off-raw, tossed with good butter or a slick of walnut oil, scattered over a salade nicoise, they're a treat worth anticipating through the bean-less months. They can even be consumed raw, and with great pleasure.

But as the season wears on, if you miss a day or two of picking in your garden, and the market offerings swell past pencil-thick, the beans call for a different sort of treatment. They're still perfectly edible, more than palatable, but they've developed a good deal more...beaniness, perhaps, as the seeds swell, the shell thickens. They don't need the kid glove, dainty-doily treatment at this stage, and in fact long cooking can bring out a savory side of them you won't get in a quick blanch.

For this preparation the cast iron skillet is our friend, as is companionable bacon. Then a bit of onion, maybe a sprig of thyme, dash of salt, and time--that's the recipe. At Bide-A-Wee we'll often do this sort of dish on the campfire or woodstove, lacking an oven. But the oven is great, too, if not so picturesque. The dark, shiny things in the skillet, those are pieces of bacon rind--use it if you have it.

Here's all you do: wash and stem a fistful of beans per person. For each two people, a good thick slice of bacon, diced about 1/3-inch. Again for two, a small onion, roughly chopped. On campfire or stovetop (needn't be a woodstove, any fuel source is fine) heat a skillet big enough to hold the beans in one layer, more or less. Add the bacon, and as it starts to render fat, add the beans. Toss often, cook a long time, at least a half hour. Halfway through, add the onion. Stir occasionally until the beans are tender, dark, even black, in spots. Be careful about the onions, which will become bitter if they get too dark. Add a little salt at the end, a grind of pepper.

Oven version, heat at 375, ovenproof skillet, of course: add the bacon to the skillet and put it in the oven for 5 minutes. Bring it out and add the beans, tossing to coat with fat. Bake 20 minutes. Add the onion, toss well, bake another 20. Finish as above.

It's a really lovely side dish to anything--or part of an all-vegetable meal--from August until the frost. To make it vegetarian, skip the bacon and toss the beans with olive oil. We sometimes add a few cloves of garlic in their jackets.

How to Overcook Green Beans, pt. 2 will take up Sichuan dry-fried beans.

Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

A Sweet Disorder

2011-08-15T13:16:00.000-07:00

"A sweet disorder in the dress/ Kindles in clothes a wantonness" were lines that came to mind as I put together this not very composed salade composée. It's more of a strewn salad, I suppose, though one deliberately strewn. An artful disorder was what I was after, an arrangement of disparate bits in atypical combination, but expressing a sense of the season, what we see around us now in the meadows at Bide-A-Wee, at the market.

The poem, by the way, is by Robert Herrick, full text click here. At first I wrote "pome," an appropriate typo as there's a pome on the plate, slices of our first ripe-ish apples (whether they are crabapples or merely stunted, we can't be sure). Also blackberries, challenging to harvest, so redolent of August meadows. The taste of blackberries brings along with it the smell of crushed monarda, the hum of bumblebees.

Some meat is nice in a composed salad, and here it's smoked duck left over from that magret I smoked last weekend, sliced as thin as I could. Then beautiful little haricots verts (blanched about three minutes) from the Dallas, Wisconsin farmers market. We visited two Wisconsin countryside farmers markets last week, the Dallas market, and one in Boyceville. One had two vendors, the other just one. Dallas was the big one. And yet we came away with those beautiful beans, a bucket of tiny cucumbers that I'm turning into cornichons and sweet gherkins, ground cherries, lovely tomatoes, corn, a red cabbage, sweet onions.

We made a mellow vinaigrette for the salad, olive oil, just a splash of cider vinegar, pinch of salt, dash of honey, and I muddled a few berries into the dressing. While I'm not a fan of seeds in blackberry or raspberry jam, I actually enjoyed the crunch of the seeds in the whole berries on the salad. The apples were still quite tart but aromatic and flavorful, and combined with a bite of the smoky duck, perfect.

It's a salad that invites you to visit different parts of the plate, try different combinations--there's no prescribed way to eat it. A messy composed salad is art imitating life which imitates art, a studied disarray which "Do more bewitch me, than when art/ Is too precise in every part."

Text (except the Herrick) and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

Smokey the Duck

2011-08-11T09:08:00.000-07:00

I've been on a mission to demystify smoking since the very beginning of Trout Caviar. I'm evangelical about it, in fact, ever since my lighbulbahaeurekacometojesus moment when I realized: "Hey, cavemen did this. Maybe I can, too." Now, it's nothing against cavemen (I gather they're sort of sensitive), and I'm quite certain I'd not survive an attempt to bring down a mastodon with crude weapons. I give them lots of credit for that. I can, however, salt meat and expose it to moderate heat and smoke. That's all home smoking entails, and it need not be an involved or mass-production type of undertaking.

Case in point, this hot-smoked duck breast I prepared out at Bide-A-Wee last weekend. While packing food for the cabin I took my duck breast and salted it generously, at least twice the salt I would use if I were cooking it right away. I added pepper, and sprinkled on some quatre épices. Then I rubbed a bit of maple syrup lovingly over both sides, and let the meat sit in a plastic bag for two days.

When I was ready to smoke it, I readied the elaborate smoking system we use out at the cabin. Built a fire so there were nice coals going, moved the coals to one side of the grill and added a piece of apple for aromatic smoke.

I laid the breast on the grate away from the heat.

Covered it with the custom-made "Bide-A-Wee Deluxe Smoke Catcher" (aka, the lid of a small portable grill).

Let it smoke a while. Maybe an hour.

You can imagine that we don't exactly have pinpoint control over the temperature in a set-up like this, and in fact this breast smoke-roasted a little hotter and faster than I would have hoped. But because of the cure of salt and maple syrup, the meat remained moist. It was also rich and smoky, nicely chewy, slightly gamy, exactly what I like about duck, maybe my favorite meat. At the end of the smoking/cooking, I cooked it skin-side-down over direct heat, to render some fat and crisp the skin a bit.

It did not hurt at all that the duck was served alongside a pile of very tasty rice mush: risotto with chanterelles and hedgehog mushrooms. The hedgehogs, hydnum repandum, are interesting fungi, less common than chanterelles but fruiting at the same time (obviously). They are in fact related to chanterelles in realms of fungal classification, and have a similarly enchanting aroma, sweet, so they're sometimes called "sweet tooth" mushrooms. In either case, the common name refers to the spiky spore-producing structure this mushroom has where others have gills, which resemble the spines on those twee, beloved denizens of English hedgerows.

If you're fortunate enough to find hedgehogs, remember the spot. They come back quite reliably year to year.

Bide-A-Wee Caponata (With Reflections on Unexpected Influences)

2011-08-09T09:33:00.000-07:00

I find it amusing and instructive to look back over the years, think of how I cook today, how I cooked back when, and consider how I got from there to here. I can see now a whole pile of extremely various factors: Mom & Dad influences; my late-teen swing into vegetarianism; time spent on the east coast, and in Virginia; certainly my year in China, and travels in France, but also time spent on the shores of Lake Superior, and a bike trip in Nova Scotia. People I met influenced me greatly, as well, and so did television cooking shows (I've mentioned Jacques Pépin's Today's Gourmet more than once, but I also fell in love with Madeleine Kamman through her long-ago cooking series), and books.

Among the books that have had the biggest impact on how I approach cooking, I'd love to be able to say that it was conscientious study of the methods of Escoffier and Careme that formed my culinary thinking, with peripheral influences of Basques, Tuscan, and Catalan gastronomy--but, you know, I'd be lyin'. And while I've had Mastering the Art... on my shelf for many years, I mostly pick it up to put it down again. I used to own a Joel Robuchon book written by Patricia Wells, Simply French that was so absurdly misnamed, it got me all rankled every time I picked it up--the recipes therein are simple if you own a truffle farm, and a flock of fattened fowl to harvest foie gras, and then there's the caviar.... I finally had to get rid of it.

But there's one modest, unassuming cookbook that I first purchased decades ago, and that has stayed relevant to me all that time. I've mentioned it here before, The Country Gourmet, by Gil and Sherril Roth. The Roths were New York chefs transplanted to North Carolina, where they set about growing most of their food, and procuring what they couldn't produce from local sources. In other words, they anticipated the whole local-seasonal eating trend, with a strong strain of self-sufficiency in the mix. The book is arranged more or less by the seasons, and it ranges from the stalwart basics to the oddly idiosyncratic--there's a chapter devoted to a dinner of Indian dishes, for instance, which still strikes me as odd when I'm flipping through the book, though I've tried some of those recipes, and they're good.

I suppose I just found The Country Gourmet at exactly the right time in my development as a cook; it amazes me to think of all the things I learned from it. The bread recipes with variations expanded my bread baking horizons, and the homemade pasta section is still a go-to source for me, both for basic recipes and excellent rustic preparations like pasta with cabbage and onions--this book also introduced me to pasta alla carbonara. Here's where I learned how to make sauerkraut in jars, picked up a winter-time staple that is Portuguese kale soup, and even a dog biscuit recipe that I used in our Real Bread years, and which earned a devoted following (right, Jen --or should I ask Lily...?).

The personal tone of the Roths writing is utterly engaging. They're not pushing any agenda or working some tricksy angle--they just share their enthusiasm for good, honest food and the joys of connecting with the seasons through gardening, preserving, and cooking. Amazingly, you can pick up a copy for one red cent, plus shipping, of course. I recommend you do so.

All of this is a (typically) roundabout introduction to a sweet and sour eggplant and green apple relish I whipped up this weekend, Bide-A-Wee caponata. My first exposure to caponata was through a recipe in The Country Gourmet. Caponata is a Sicilian dish made with eggplant, tomato, olives, capers, often raisins or currants. Having not been to Sicily, I'm not exactly sure how it's served there. I see numerous references to it as a component of an antipasti platter, and it's more often referred to as a relish than a vegetable side dish, from rather brief research. It's often referred to as "Italian ratatouille," but I think that's misleading, as rataouille can be a meal in itself, and I don't think caponata would ever be served thay way.

The Bide-A-Wee caponata recipe presented here is very much my own interpretation, a Mediterranean-meets-Dunn County deal, fer sure. To start with, I omitted two of the constant ingredients in every caponata recipe I've seen--tomatoes and olives. My capers were salted milkweed flower buds, and the fruit component, chopped green apples. My vinegar was not balsamic but apple cider, and the sweetness to match the sour: maple syrup, of course.

For the green apples I looked for ones that were starting to ripen--not the kind so tart and astringent you have to spit it out before you've even chewed. In fact, I used three kinds of apples: one that was becoming sweet, but had little complexity; one still quite tart but developing interesting flavors; one tart and extremely aromatic, with the smell of excellent apple cider. That said, you could make this with one kind of really firm, tart-sweet apple.

Otherwise it's pretty straight-forward. Everything cooks in one pan; it's best if made a bit ahead to let the flavors blend, and served at room temperature. Given that we had already strayed very far from the traditional preparation of caponata, we served it idiosyncratically, as well: first on tacos of flash-fried thin-sliced boneless beef short ribs; then on chicken sandwiches; finally, the last few bites, on crackers. It's great stuff, complex in flavor and texture, silky and crunchy by turns, tart, sweet, smoky--compelling, I dare say. I'm planning to make a big batch soon, freeze portions for the winter. It's a vibrant taste of summer that I know will be welcome come January.

I'd love to hear about what cookbooks, or other sources of inspiration, have stayed with you over the years, unexpectedly, or not.

Bide-A-Wee Caponata: Sweet & Sour Eggplant, Green Apple, Salted Milkweed Relish
Makes about a cup

3 tablespoons olive oil, divided
1/2 cup chopped onion
1 hot Hungarian chile, chopped (about 1/2 cup)
1 rib celery, chopped
3/4 cup eggplant, skin on, in 1/3-inch dice
3/4 cup green apple or crisp tart-sweet apple (see above), skin on, in 1/3-inch dice
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 tablespoons cider vinegar
1/4 cup water
1 tablespoon maple syrup
1 tablespoon salted milkweed buds, rinsed (or use small capers, prefereably salt-packed)
salt and pepper

In a medium saucepan heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil. Add the onion, celery, and chile, and cook over medium-high until wilted. Add the eggplant, apple, and a good pinch of salt. Cook until the eggplant is soft, 3 to 4 minutes. Add the garlic and cook for one minute. Add the vinegar, 1/4 cup water, and the maple syrup. Simmer gently, uncovered, for 5 minutes, until most of the water is gone. Remove the pan from the heat and add another good pinch of salt, a few grinds of pepper, and the milkweed buds or capers--save a few buds back to garnish the top. Set aside at room temperature until you're ready to serve; if you'll be serving it a day or more later, refrigerate, then bring to room temp before serving. Drizzle one tablespoon olive oil over the top just before serving.

Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

Grilled Fingerling, Green Bean, and Chanterelle Salad

2011-08-05T15:27:00.000-07:00

Here's a quickie as we zoom into the weekend: Ladies and gentlemen, start your grills! And make a salad.

It's been too hot to cook for a lot of the summer, with humidity that saps energy and appetite, but we can't let the splendid products of the summer--from market, woods, and garden--pass us by. One night last week we summoned enough will to fire up the grill, prep a few vegetables, and grill ourselves a salad, which we served with some paté previously made, some bread, a glass of icy white wine; we were glad we did.

I like this simple dish for several reasons: it features an unusual--to my mind--combination of vegetables, with an intriguing variety of textures; it's a meal-size salad that isn't a voluminous pile of greens (though you could serve it on a bed of greens); though I made it with foraged chanterelles, it would be equally good (though perhaps not quite so pretty) with store-bought oyster mushrooms, or sliced portabellos; and I came up with a clever way to sort of grill/stir-fry vegetables over the coals without having everything fall through the grate, with no special equipment involved.

To start with the last, of which I thought I had taken a photo, but I guess not: What I did was, I took a stainless steel rack, such as one would use to cool cookies, and I put that on top of the regular grill grate. I'm talking about a rack with quite a fine grid to it, maybe quarter-inch squares. When the coals were ready I spread my prepared vegetables over the rack, and nothing fell through! It took a little care to keep everything above the fire line as I tossed and turned the vegetables to brown them, but it worked really well. When it came to cleaning up the rack, because it is stainless it washed up nicely with a scrub from the Dobie. No down side that I can see so far, though it remains to be seen how the lightweight rack will hold up after repeated uses.

To prep the vegetables for the grill, I cooked the fingerlings--beautiful rosy-skinned spuds we picked up at the Menomonie Farmers Market--for around ten minutes, shocked them under cold water, halved them the long way. Then in a big bowl I tossed the potatoes, raw green beans, and mushrooms pulled into big shreds together with some olive oil, salt and pepper, fresh thyme and sage. Those all went on the rack over medium-hot coals, and I turned and moved the vegetables around until everything had nice color on it. About halfway through the grilling I tossed a good-sized sweet white onion, cut into rings, into the mix. Some of the beans and some of the onion got quite dark--a good thing, I think.

Après grilling, I put everything back in the mixing bowl and added a little more olive oil and maybe two tablespoons of cider vinegar--but a wine vinegar or even light rice vinegar would work, too. Taste for salt, add another grind of fresh pepper, perhaps some additional fresh herbs--bit of flat-leaf parsley, a few leaves of basil?

I had grated some Wisconsin asiago to sprinkle over top, but found it redundant, intrusive, even, to the fresh summery flavors and textures of the salad.

Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

Our Own Private Chengdu

2011-07-30T07:19:00.000-07:00

The hot and soupy weather we've been swimming through the last few weeks has at least one fringe benefit for me--it reminds me strongly of the year (1989-90) I spent teaching English at Sichuan University (sichuan daxue, Chuanda for short) in Chengdu, the capital city of Sichuan province in southwestern China. It also makes my kitchen intensely fragrant with the scent of hua jiao, Sichuan pepper, that I keep in a bamboo container in a cupboard. When it's this humid and warm, every time I open my cupboard I'm just about knocked over by that tart, citrusy smell.

The guide books characterize Chengdu's climate as "subtropical monsoonal"--so now you know how to describe this summer in a nutshell. Whether the cuisine of Sichuan evolved as a response to the climate, or through other factors, it's certainly true that the vibrantly flavored food of Sichuan is just the thing to boost the appetite on sticky hot evenings. Sichuan cooking--and Chinese cooking in general--also allows you to perform a leisurely prep of your ingredients (perhaps while sipping a cold beer), then finish the cooking--generally stir-frying--in just a few minutes (then pop another brew to drink with dinner).

The distinctive flavor combo of Sichuan food is the yin-yang duo of ma la: ma for numbing, from fragrant Sichuan pepper, la for spicy hot, from chile peppers. In addition, Sichuan dishes are often quite salty, from soy sauce and fermented bean paste, and brightly piquant with vinegar, usually a pungent dark vinegar that gives Sichuanese liang ban dishes--salads, basically--a unique and exotic kick.

Of the dishes shown here, two are standard dishes that I and my friends and colleagues at Chuanda would order at the little open-fronted restaurants that lined the alleys just outside the university gates. I'm swooning in memory to recall the full-sensory assault that a slow walk through those narrow lanes entailed on a warm damp evening: the strangely pungent smell of raw rapeseed oil--the standard cooking oil--turning from repellent to appetizing as it heated in a wok; the funkily delicious aromas rising from bins of bean paste, dried shrimp, and other aromatic goods at a vendor's stall; the savory scents wafting from a hot pot restaurant where bubbling cauldrons, topped with a slick of fiercely red oil, held highly aromatic broth, the secret ingredient of which, so it was said, was an opium poppy seed pod. There were less appealing olfactory elements, as well--a breeze from the east would bring the air off the river, far from pristine; a passing bicycle cart carrying a container of nightsoil left a fetid wake--it was my year-long nightmare that I would some day collide on my bicycle with one of these ripe vehicles that carried dilute human waste to fertilize the vegetable fields just outside the city (and there's your explanation for why the Chinese do not eat leafy green salads...).

Seated at a small table in one of the very basic restaurants, we would order tea and pijiu, beer, and never bother to look at a menu, which, at any rate, we couldn't read, since it was entirely in Chinese characters. The thing is, the Chinese customers didn't bother with a menu, either, and it was about two-thirds of the way through my year in Chengdu that I discovered that my favorite small restaurant, "The Sisters," even had a written menu. Instead, we just ordered according to the ingredients we saw displayed at the cook's station--if there was eggplant we'd get yu xiang qiezi, fish-fragrance eggplant; if there were fava beans, liang ban can dou, a salad dressed like the cucumbers shown here. Always you could get mapo doufu, the wickedly ma la Sichuan tofu in meat sauce (which is never nearly ma enough at any American Sichuan restaurant--it should set your mouth tingling to where you think your tongue has swelled to twice its normal size), or shui zhu rou pian, perhaps the hottest Sichuan dish of all--pork slices stir-fried with hot bean paste, simmered in water, poured over vegetables in a small casserole, then topped with absurb amounts of ground dried chile and Sichuan pepper which is set sizzling when anointed with smoking hot oil; its name translates, innocuously, as "water-cooked meat slices."

Well, I could go on. But on to the dishes here displayed, a simple, nearly vegetarian meal we put together on a recent, extremely Chengduvian evening. First the cucumber salad, liang ban huang gua. When I was in Chengdu I ate this at least once a week while cucumbers were available, but I've never seen it on a menu here, even though there are now several authentic Sichuan restaurants in the area (as for what passed for Sichuan cooking up until recently, the less said, the better). There's often a cucumber dish on the appetizer menu, but it's often cooked--which is fine--and bland--not so fine. This salad is one of my favorites, and especially good if you have the long, ridged Asian cukes, but fine with any kind.

Sichuan Cucumber Salad (Liang Ban Huang Gua)
Liang Ban means "cool, mixed", and generally denotes a salad

1 medium cucumber

If the skin is tender, leave it on; if it seems tough, remove all or part. Trim off the ends, then halve it the long way, and if it is very seedy, remove some or all of the seeds--the Asian cukes tend to have fewer and smaller seeds than the typical American slicer. Cut each half in half again, the long way, and with the side of a cleaver or chef's knife, whap these long pieces a few times--assertively, but not vindictively. This opens up the flesh a bit to take in more dressing. Now cut the cucumber strips crosswise into roughly 3/4-inch pieces.

The dressing:

2 large cloves garlic (or more, to taste--there's a sort of variation on this salad called suan ni huang gua, which is cucumbers in a sea of puréed garlic)
1 tablespoon soy sauce
2 teaspoons Chinese dark vinegar (see picture)

This is the brand of Chinese dark--not black--vinegar I buy

1 1/2 teaspoons sugar
2 teaspoons chile flakes in oil (or to taste; use some sambal if you don't have the chile oil)
1 teaspoon ground roasted Sichuan pepper
1 scallion, chopped fine
sesame oil, optional

Peel the garlic, crush it with the side of a cleaver or big knife, then mince it very fine. Combine the garlic with all the other ingredients except the scallion and sesame oil. Toss the cucumber pieces with the dressing and transfer to a serving dish. Sprinkle with the scallions and a few drops of sesame oil, if you like.

This will serve two to four, depending on how many other dishes you make. The two of us polished this off easily on the night in question.

Corn in China is called yu mi, or "jade grain"--and in these pictures I think you can really see why. This dish is yumi chao lajiao, corn stir-fried with chile (or sometimes qing jiao yumi, green chile corn). Corn, needless to say, is not native to China--but then, neither are chiles, which virtually define Sichuan cooking in most people's minds. But corn is fairly common in Sichuan and Yunnan, and this simple stir-fry with chiles fresh and dried, garlic, and whole Sichuan peppercorns, is its most common manifestation.

Sichuan Stir-Fried Corn with Chiles (yumi chao lajiao or qing jiao yumi)

2 ears corn, kernels stripped from the cobs
2 fresh chiles, halved, seeded, cut into 1/2-inch pieces--anaheim, hungarian wax, banana, a not-too-hot jalapeno
3 cloves garlic, peeled, roughly chopped
3 scallions, white and green, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
3 dried red chiles, broken in half
1 teaspoon whole, untoasted Sichuan peppercorns
1/8 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons oil (peanut, canola)
sesame oil, optional

Get a wok very hot. Add the cooking oil, and as it just starts to smoke, add the dried chiles and the Sichuan pepper. Swirl these in the oil, then add the corn, fresh chiles, garlic, and salt. Stir-fry over highest heat for 2 to 3 minutes--watch that the garlic doesn't burn. Add the scallions and stir-fry for another minute or two--some of the corn should be getting a bit brown on the edges. Transfer the corn to a serving dish, and sprinkle on a few drops of sesame oil, if you like.

This dish can be made with frozen corn, thawed, patted dry with paper towels. A little bit of sugar can be added if the corn isn't very sweet.

The third dish, chanterelles with bacon and garlic chives, was my own concoction, and while decent (it has home-smoked bacon, and chanterelles...), it's not one I'd make again. The bacon overpowered the chanterelles--it might actually be better with something like oyster mushrooms, and more chile.

We always serve steamed jasmine rice in a small bowl for each person, and pretty much always drink beer with Sichuan food. We take the Chinese approach of dipping into the communal bowls with chopsticks (though a spoon helps with the corn).

I'll pull out a Sichuan recipe--and reminiscence--from time through the rest of the summer, while the market stalls are full of produce begging to be stir-fried, and the hua jiao is at its most fragrant.

Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

Why We Eat In

2011-07-27T09:16:00.000-07:00

It is not that I am not interested in restaurants. As with most other areas of the contemporary food scene, I take a keen interest in ambitious restaurants near and far. I keep up on local restaurant news via the food sections of our local newspapers, and particularly through the excellent local food website, The Heavy Table. I'm even well informed about New York restaurants--reading Sam Sifton's reviews in the New York Times is a Wednesday happy hour ritual for me. I follow some chefs on Twitter (David Chang of Momofuku, Rene Redzepi of Copenhagen's Noma, as well as top local, local-foods champions like Scott Pampuch ), and I admire like hell the dedication and artistry of other local chefs, like Mike Phillips--late of the Craftsman, now maitre charcutier at Green Ox Meat Co.-- and Alex Roberts of Restaurant Alma , who possesses the subtle skill and intuition to make the best of any ingredient that comes before him.

Having said all that, I must admit that I rarely eat in restaurants these days, and at the high-end gastronomic ones, hardly at all. The photos here should help explain why. This was a Bide-A-Wee dinner of homemade buckwheat pasta with fresh-foraged chanterelles in Cedar Summit cream , Au Bon Canard magret (the breast of fattened duck, via Clancey's) with a sauce of foraged black cap raspberries, red wine, and home-smoked bacon. Farmers market green beans shriveled in the rendered duck fat.

Now, I really enjoy cooking, and I think I've picked up some skill and a few bits of knowledge over the years that have made me both a more imaginative and more capable cook (which you wouldn't know from the big bandage on my left thumb right now, where I sliced off the thumb-tip with a Global chef's knife a couple of weeks ago...). But I want to make it very clear that I do not consider my abilities to be anywhere near the level of the professionals who work the line every night. I am very certain that if I tried to match that intense pace of cooking for even one night, I would have my sad ass handed back to me in a Cambro and run off crying for my mommy. (Furthermore, I'm sure that my sense of food today has been formed in part by excellent restaurant meals in years past.)

What it is, it's the ingredients, the stuff we can get now, that hasn't always been available to us. I could not have prepared this meal ten years ago--Au Bon Canard did not exist, nor did Clancey's. The buckwheat and whole wheat bread flour in my pantry, from Whole Grain Milling, allowed me to create a pasta both rustic and elegant (and the dough skills I picked up during our Real Bread years gave me the confidence to whip up a batch of fresh noodles on short notice).

Ten years ago I was still figuring out the fungal schedule in my local woods, and I'm sure that the whole foraging-friendly zeitgeist that has developed since then has had something to do with my continuing enthusiasm for wild foods (indeed, I don't think that Trout Caviar, Recipes from a Northern Forager would have come together in that earlier time; you can order it now at Amazon, by the way...!).

Come to think of it, I'm not sure that Cedar Summit products were easily available ten years ago--Dave and Florence Minar were just starting to sell their superb organic dairy products at farmers markets in 2003, the same year we started Real Bread. When they showed up for the first time at the tiny St. Luke's market where we were selling, we fell down before them in adject adulation, and cried, "We are not worthy!"

Times have indeed changed for the better for those of us who care what's on our plates.

I'll take some credit here for coming up with a really good buckwheat pasta formula, and an excellent sauce for the duck from a short pantry.

For the pasta I combined:

2 tablespoons buckwheat flour
1/4 cup whole wheat bread flour
1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons unbleached all-purpose flour
good pinch salt
1 egg
water, about 2 tablespoons

Mix all the dry ingredients in a large bowl. Crack the egg into the center and add a tablespoon of water. Mix with your hand or a fork to combine. Add additional water a tablespoon at a time if needed, but careful not to over-wet the dough; it should be fairly stiff. Knead the dough for a couple of minutes, then let it rest, covered, for 20 to 30 minutes. Knead again to achieve a smooth, stiff dough, then let it rest again, covered, for 20 to 30 minutes. Divide the dough into four pieces and roll each portion out in a pasta machine, working down to the second-thinnest setting. Let the sheets of dough dry for around an hour--I drape them on a chair back. Then cut them into fettucini (or thickness of your choice--but I wouldn't go too thin, as the buckwheat makes them somewhat fragile) with the pasta cutter attachment. Cook immediately, or drape them on your chair back to dry, and use within a couple of days. Fresh or dry, the pasta will only take a minute or two to cook to al dente.

For the chanterelle cream sauce, I sautéed chanterelles in some of the duck fat left from searing the magret. As they started to brown I added salt, pepper, and some chopped shallot and fresh thyme. Another minute or so, then I sloshed in cream--about a half-cup--then I added the just-cooked pasta and tossed to coat. Serve it up.

The sauce, black cap raspberry, red wine, bacon: I was about out of chicken stock, usually the basis of my "fancy" sauces. I had maybe a quarter-cup, two ice cubes worth, in the freezer. But I had bacon, the excellent home-smoked stuff . I diced a thick slice very small, started rendering it in a small saucepan. Add shallot, garlic, and a small not-too-hot chile, chopped fine. As all became wilted I added my bit of stock, a slosh of red wine, and black raspberry juice, which I had made by simply combining a generous cup of berries with water not quite to cover, bringing it to a simmer, then passing the berries through a food mill. I reduced the sauce by half, then added salt and pepper. I probably swirled a bit of butter in at the end, can't recall for sure. All the flavors came together really well, and I liked the texture from the bits of bacon and vegetables. It didn't taste like bacon--the smoky pork melded into the other flavors, and echoed the rich duck (which is practically like poultry bacon, on its own).

Just a beautiful meal, elaborate compared to how we tend to cook at Bide-A-Wee. And while the result did show the the maker's care and imagination, I find it impossible to look at that table without recognizing that such a spread would not have been possible without the superb raw ingredients available to us now, with thanks to the people who bring them to us, not forgetting to mention the contributions of Great Nature, the great provider. Salut.

Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

The Very Long Hot Dog Blog

2011-07-22T02:02:00.000-07:00

Don't worry: It's the dog, not the blog, that is long. Way long.

Surely one of the highlights of the two years that Mary and I spent peddling our bread in the Saint Paul Farmers Market system was getting to know the Wemeier family of Bar 5 Meat and Poultry. John and Laura Wemeier and family (Liz, Mik, Jake, and Jess) are the kind of people who make you love farmers markets, and meat. The Bar 5 motto--"Everything from Feet to Feathers"--may be literally accurate but hardly describes the glorious variety of their products. The beef, pork, and chicken are all excellent, but I really love that Bar 5 also has rabbit and duck on a regular basis. And then there are the cured and smoked meats, poultry, and sausage--this may be what really sets Bar 5 apart. Their smoked chicken is great, but the smoked duck is beyond--put a few thin slices of this stuff, just warmed in the oven, and a bit of the skin, crisped in a fry pan, on a plate with a few leaves of, I don't know, endive, or some tiny green beans barely steamed, and a drizzle of light vinaigrette on the vegetables, and you'd think you were in a Michelin-starred restaurant.

But I came here to talk hot dogs. Well, I just have to say that a couple of my other favorite Bar 5 products are the Hungarian bacon and Grandpa's Sausages. And also, I must quickly add that the Wemeiers are some of the swellest people I know--warm, welcoming, funny, kind of rowdy. It doesn't come close to describing them to say that they are salt of the earth, but they are that, and more--pepper of the earth, and zesty Hungarian spices of the earth, and probably still more.

I'm coming to the hot dogs. Just before the Fourth of July, Bar 5 "tweeted" that they were making foot-long hot dogs, the one time each year they do it. But we were in Wisconsin, an hour and a half from the Saint Paul market. I called my friends Fred and Kim to see if they were going to the market, and they were, and they scored me a pack of the attenuated weiners, and I was stoked.

But I was also presented with a challenge. As a bread guy, I've always contended that the most important part of a sandwich is the bread--well, as important as any other ingredient, anyway. I knew I wasn't going to be able to find top quality foot-long hot dog buns. I would have to make my own. I pondered the formula. Le Bun is a great hamburger vehicle, but a bit dense as a hot dog bun. I would use less cornmeal, and maybe skip the honey. And then, this wasn't any hot dog, but a foot-long one, which puts it in a different category. In France they serve longish sausages on a section of baguette opened the long way--that is indeed the Gallic homage to le hot dog. I make a fine baguette, but I thought it would be too crusty for comfortable eating. A little milk and butter would soften things somewhat, while still maintaining a crunch to the crust.

I wound up making it a naturally leavened (sourdough) bread, because I had a nice bubbly sponge going for another batch of bread. I would not say that this is the perfect foot-long bun, but it was damn good. It is an excellent piece of bread with just enough "bunniness" to fulfill its functional role.

The Bar 5 hot dogs are all all-beef old-fashioned frankfurters, and they are superb. I usually prefer a pork-beef frank, but I cannot fault this dog, not at all. Great snap to the skin, beautiful level of spice, an utterly appealing meatiness to the whole thing. I believe it's the same formula as the normal-length dogs, available each week at the Saint Paul and Minneapolis farmers markets. Tell them Brett and Mary said hi.

On my dog I like mustard, ketchup, onions, and kraut. Some hot dog purists will sneer at the 'chup, and go right ahead. I've just made a batch of sour dill pickles, and we're having foot-longs again this weekend, and I will chop some of those to add to mine. Can't wait.

Foot Long Buns

2 cups very well refreshed liquid starter (400 grams)
1 cup water
1 1/2 tablespoons sugar
1/2 cup milk
1 tablespoon salt
3 ounces melted unsalted butter
1/4 cup whole wheat flour
1/4 cup cornmeal
unbleached all-purpose flour

Combine everything but the AP flour, then start adding the AP. Add a couple of cups and mix well. Continue adding flour a half cup at a time until the dough is difficult to stir--sorry, I just never measure the main flour in any dough. Dump the dough on your work surface and knead it for a minute or two, adding flour as necessary to keep it from sticking, until you have a soft but manageable dough. Leave it alone for at least 15 minutes. Knead again for a couple of minutes, return the dough to the bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let rise at room temp until doubled in volume--at least four hours. Alternately, proof it in the fridge overnight, take it out in the morning, and let it come to room temp.

For the foot-long buns I portioned out five-ounce pieces--I also made a bunch of regular-size buns, three-ounce portions. Work the foot-long doughs into very long, skinny ropes, at least a foot long. Arrange the dough on parchment-lined baking sheets, cover with plastic wrap, and let proof at least an hour, probably more, until they are noticeably risen--my first baking was actually a little under-proofed; the second one, proofed an extra half-hour, was much better.

Bake at 400 for 18 to 20 minutes, until the tops are nicely browned. If you have a baking stone, carefully slide the parchment and buns off the baking sheet and onto the stone for the final two to three minutes of baking to nicely brown the bottoms, too.

Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

The Time of the Yellow Mushrooms

2011-07-19T13:03:00.000-07:00

It's probably been a dozen years since I first encountered chanterelles in a western Wisconsin woods. I was amazed to find them, frankly; I didn't even know that they grew here, and I'm not sure many other people did, either. That was well before the days of the great foraging/wild foods explosion, though the spring morel hunt was a well-established rite of the season. But by midsummer, when the chanterelles start to push through the oaky duff in our region, most people with an interest in food from the wild seek it from a comfortable seat in a fishing boat in a walleye lake, enjoying cool breezes and cold beers, not in a dank and musty wood, assailed by mosquitoes and deerflies, stung by nettles, scratched by prickly ash. I will honestly admit that when I set out one morning this week, in the midst of this historic heat-and-humidity incursion, for a first check of my favorite chanterelle grounds, I wasn't sure if this constituted a hobby or a compulsion. My glasses were fogging the minute I put them on in the morning; I sweated through my t-shirt just putting on my boots. Well, the sacrifice makes the reward all the sweeter.

What keeps me going back is the fact that spotting my first chanterelle of the season each year is still as great a thrill as finding the first one ever, those dozen years ago--and each subsequent find is almost as satisfying. While some wild foods offer a fair certainty as to where and when to find them, mushrooms, even the most reliable of them, are often a crapshoot, or a wild goose chase. Chanterelles will be found year after year in the same places--except, of course, when they're not found at all, or sparsely. But a warm, wet early July provides a pretty good set-up for the chanterelle fruiting, and if this miserable sauna-like spell of weather has any upside, it would certainly be the appearance of those lovely golden fungi.

I look on rocky slopes in woods of white oak. The western exposures seem to fruit first. If temperatures moderate, the picking can be good for a few weeks. A little rain is good, but torrential downpours splash mud on the mushrooms, tough to clean out of the convoluted folds, and an overly damp and moist spell encourages rot and insects.

The harvest can be prodigious. Best to enjoy them while they're fresh, for while there are various ways to preserve them, nothing compares to the fragrance, taste, and texture of the fresh ones. Likewise, while a bumper crop can encourage kitchen experimentation, our first picking of the year is almost always a simple sauté served alongside a French omelet.

I clean the chanterelles as well as I can in the woods. A pastry brush is handy for removing loose soil, but if the folds are very dirty I'll often use my knife to scrape them off entirely--there's really no other way to clean them of embedded dirt. Back home I don't hesitate to use water in the final clean-up, no matter the copious opinion to the contrary. I always fall back on the counsel of one of my food heroes, Jacques Pépin, who laid the situation out very clearly in one of his Today's Gourmet shows: "It's not that you don't wash mushrooms," Jacques said. "If they are dirty, then you wash them."

Of course, you don't want to soak them for any amount of time. I'll just run each mushroom under cool running water, as briefly as possible, then shake it off and place it on paper towels to drain. Mushrooms contain a lot of water to start with, so if they do absorb a little more, it's not the end of the world. All the moisture will boil off in the cooking.

For the cooking, then: Cut or tear the chanterelles into bite-sized pieces. Get a sauté pan hot and add a tablespoon or so of butter (or olive oil, if you prefer). Add the mushrooms and give them a good toss--the aroma that comes off as the first 'shrooms hit the hot butter sets me back in a swoon every year. The liquid will begin to express quickly. Stir the chanterelles from time to time until most of the liquid has evaporated. Now add a good pinch of salt and a couple tablespoons of minced shallot. Continue cooking until the mushrooms are a bit brown, and done to your taste.

For the omelet, I beat together three eggs with a good pinch of salt. An eight- or nine-inch non-stick skillet is ideal. Heat the skillet and add a couple teaspoons of butter. As the foaming subsides pour in the eggs, and with a fork stir the eggs vigorously in a figure-eight pattern, shaking the skillet back and forth as you do so--this is to break the egg into very small curds, essential for a proper French omelet (and another technique I picked up from M. Pépin's excellent TV shows). Stop cooking before the eggs are totally set, as they'll continue cooking after you've plated the omelet. Lifting the handle of the skillet toward yourself, gently fold the near edge over toward the lower side once, then again. Give a little shake to move everything toward the lower end, then invert the whole pan carefully over the serving plate, tipping the omelet out. Correct the shape to an elongated football form with two forks.

Spoon the chanterelles alongside. Dust some finely grated gouda or gruyère over the omelet, a grind of pepper, perhaps a scattering of herbs. Now the itchy buggy woods are far behind, but your harvest carries the best sense of that place to the table. There's no question you'll go back.

Blueberry Maple Toast

2011-07-17T09:00:00.000-07:00

And now for something a good deal less demanding than whitefish ceviche with yada yada yada. For what could be less demanding, less requiring of exegesis, than toast? This is a typical sort of Bide-A-Wee breakfast--could be dessert, too, for that matter. A very few very good and altogether familiar ingredients make for a lick-your-plate kind of breakfast. Is it lazy man's french toast, or absolutely indolent man's blueberry pancakes? Take your pick.

Of course it depends on good bread--a rugged, whole grain and/or sourdough loaf, preferably homemade (but if you live where you can easily find an honest loaf at a bakery, well, lucky you). Here one of our deprivations at Bide-A-Wee--lack of electricity--actually proves an advantage. With no toaster at hand, we make toast by heating a cast iron skillet, adding a little butter, then cooking the bread until lightly browned on both sides. Our toast, therefore, is actually big butter-fried croutons. No, I do not mean to imply that there is anything wrong with that. This is a great way to use bread slightly past its prime, or even moreso. If you can slice it, you can revive--nay, glorifry! [sic: that's a typo worth keeping]--your near-dead bread this way.

Our neighbor up the hill and across highway 64 (down there in southern Wisconsin), Tina, has a gorgeous spread with gardens that are so beautiful and abundant, they could make you weep. The blueberries came from her place, and the maple syrup is our own. What I did here, I heated some maple syrup--say a half-cup for two people--added some blueberries--a third-cup? as many as you like--and brought it to the simmer. The berries were then soft but not disintegrated. Spoon that over your toast. A lashing of yogurt--goat, here--helps balance the maple sweetness. I garnished with a few black caps, the first few ripe ones of the season. And that reminds me that you could use berries other than blue the same way.

I don't think I need to say a single thing more about this, except: Be sure to wipe your chin when you finish licking your plate.

Raw Green Prickly Fish (Whitefish Ceviche in Green Apple Juice with Green Prickly Ash, Salted Milkweed, and Honewort)

2011-07-13T15:43:00.000-07:00

Here below, the epistemology of a northern pickled fish.

I used to do a lot more kitchen experimentation than I do these days. I would wrap lobster up in wonton skins, brown those like potstickers, and serve them with a fermented black bean sauce; encase a trout in a crust made from pounds of salt; simmer down elaborate sauces of exotic provenance. I had a run of really good dishes, which one evening ran aground on the now infamous "Brook Trout, Beets, and Bacon," which still sounds to me like it could work, but which, at least as I prepared it some years ago, most assuredly did not. Oh, how it did not work.

I don't think I'm exactly a stodgy cook now, but I do tend to lean toward variations on the classics rather than flat-out innovation or experimentation. In general, I'm more than happy to eat that way, tweaking preparations that I know make the best of what's available in the here and now. Once in a while though, I'm happy to be jolted out of my rut--however pleasant a rut it is--and given a chance to try a new technique, or new ingredients--or old ingredients in a slightly different form.

In the case of this ceviche of Lake Superior whitefish, I wasn't quite jolted--more like nudged, gradually, to try something quite simple but also somewhat risky. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'm really a rather cautious eater; I only want to eat delicious things, and so I'm hesitant to undertake dishes that might not ring the delicious bell, and which might leave me, at dinnertime, with a plate of something I have to either choke down or chuck out. Such a sensibility really does work against innovation. But--

Three things came together, over a period of several months, to produce this dish--which is quite a freight of influence when you consider it's just a few slivers of cured fish, but here goes:

1) My discovery, last fall, that raw Lake Superior fish could be delicious.

2) My desire to make more use of things growing wild out at Bide-A-Wee.

3) Inspiration provided by "tweets" from chef Rene Redzepi at Noma restaurant in Copenhagen ( @ReneRedzepiNoma ).

The first two are self-explanatory, the third perhaps less so: Noma is a restaurant intensely devoted to making delicious things from intensely local, Nordic foods. The website states: "Noma is not about olive oil, foie gras, sun-dried tomatoes and black olives. On the contrary, we’ve been busy exploring the Nordic regions discovering outstanding foods and bringing them back to Denmark: Icelandic skyr curd, halibut, Greenland musk ox, berries and water. We comb the countryside for berries and herbs that others would not bother with and work with foods that aren’t part of any system of formalised cultivation and consequently cannot be obtained through ordinary channels of distribution."

It's a forager's restaurant, in other words, but one raised to the nth degree of culinary refinement, a restaurant that has been named the best in the world--an impressive accolade, even given the subjectivity of such ratings. The few dishes listed on the website menus seem sort of normal: scallops, watercress, oysters, asparagus, veal, sorrel. The inspirations that chef Redzepi "tweets" about are, to a forager, well, inspiring: unripe juniper vinaigrette; a dessert of hay and chamomile; grilled onions, wild thyme, and gooseberry juice; "pig in the swamp with swamp juice." Frankly, I have no idea what most of these things would taste like, or even what they literally are, in some cases. But I find Noma's inventiveness with these down and dirty local ingredients utterly compelling. I mean, I've got gooseberries and chamomile and hay, and rhubarb, fennel, sorrel, currants, raspberries, blackberries, venison--this is stuff from here. Finally, it seems, there's a world-renowned chef who has embraced The Trout Caviar Manifesto, to wit: Our stuff is as good as anybody's stuff, and part of the reason it's good is that it's ours.

But that it's ours is only part of the reason it's good. It has to stand on its own, in the end, and then the trepidation comes in, for me, to create something really novel and delicious "with foods that aren’t part of any system of formalised cultivation." It's a bit of a game, really--I mean, who cares what two people in Saint Paul ate one evening in July of 2011. But to me it's also expressive, and goes again to that persistent question of why we forage, which I will answer this time around by saying that it's to know something, first by looking for it, then by finding it, then by cooking with it, then by eating it, and finally, for me, by writing about it.

I said this was a lot for a few bits of fish to support, but I'm in too deep to turn back:

Green apples, they fascinate me. Apples fascinate me, ever since I became co-proprietor of our unruly Bide-A-Wee "orchard." And I'm impatient--I don't want to wait for ripe apples to do something with them. I used some green apple juice to flavor a cocktail a while back, but mostly I just taste my way around the land, spitting out mouthfuls of incredibly sour, astringent green apple, until the miraculous day of ripening occurs. Then it occured to me, putting green apples together with my interest in raw local fish preparations, that that highly acidic juice might work like lime juice in a traditional Latin American ceviche.

When I got down to trying it, I found that I'd succumbed to impatience again. The apples were so green, it was difficult to get any juice out of them. I pureed a couple of cups in the food processor, and had to add some water to get it to blend. I then ran that pulp through a food mill to press out the juice, and strained that through cheesecloth. The resulting juice had some nice apple aromas, and was fiercely astringent. I did not think it would taste good on its own, but I wasn't going to give up. To 1/4 cup of green apple juice (the apples were green, but the juice was now a forbidding brown) I added 2 tablespoons of sweet cider, and 1 tablespoon of apple cider vinegar. That tasted acidic enough to cure the fish (and curl your hair), but balanced enough to enhance the flavor of the dish, as well.

The dish would need some other flavors. An onion element, in the form of pickled ramps, was a natural. Salted milkweed buds as garnish, another shoe-in.

We have growing on our land in great, wild profusion, groves of prickly

ash. We appreciate these thorny groves for the wildlife habitat they provide, for the beauty of their flaming red leaves in autumn, and, quite tentatively, for their fruit, which happens to be closely related to Sichuan peppercorns, one of my favorite spices. The unlikely secret to the appeal of the prickly ash fruits is that the shrub bearing them is in the same family as citrus trees, and the "rinds" of these tiny fruits produce remarkably citrusy aromas--tangerine is the strongest correlation, to me. They also, like Sichuan pepper, create a numbing sensation on the tongue. The Chinese word for that sensation is ma, and so when you see a dish labeled ma la on a Chinese menu, you know the dish contains (or should contain) plenty of Sichuan pepper (and the la is for chili hotness).

I've done a bit with our local prickly ash berries, but mostly in its dried form, after the shells open in the fall to disgorge a hard, black seed--skip the seed and keep the husks. I took that approach because dried is how I've always seen Sichuan pepper. But our local prickly ash spice, though fragrant and interesting when green, didn't hold those qualities when dried. Well, duh, then why not use them fresh and green? And so I did.

One final herbal, savory element: honewort, a new wild green to me this year, thanks again to Sam Thayer's books. This prolific umbelliferous plant also goes by the name wild chervil, but it doesn't taste or smell like anise-y chervil. It's more celery-like, to my taste, and a tablespoon or so of chopped leaves and tender stems brought a real depth of flavor to the dish. Thayer says honewort makes an excellent broth, right up there with stinging nettles, and I believe it. I also used a few of the green honewort seeds, which had the same flavor, even more concentrated.

I took a few thin slices from a fillet of Lake Superior whitefish, quarter-inch thick or so. I tossed those with some fleur de sel and set them aside while I prepared the rest. I crushed and roughly chopped a generous teaspoon of the green prickly ash berries, and chopped the honewort, stripped off a half teaspoon of the seeds. Sliced one pickled ramp bulb. Mixed everything into the fish, along with a splash of canola oil (wished I'd had some good local sunflower oil in the house, but alas). I let it cure in the fridge for a couple of hours, stirring from time to time.

I served it sprinkled with a few salted milkweed buds. The first bite of a dish like this always fills me with terror. The first bite told me the apple mixture had "cooked" the fish, set up the proteins so it did not taste precisely like raw fish, but had a pleasant texture, both firm and yielding. Having assured myself that it was not yucky, I attempted a more subtle critique. The crunch of pickled ramp was excellent against the fish. The prickly ash berries were in chunky pieces, and when you bit one--wow. A citrus explosion (so nice in a northern ceviche) and just a fleeting hint of the numbing quality. The honewort greens gave resonant background flavor, the seeds were intense points of the same flavor.

It tasted like nothing I'd ever eaten, and like something I'd very much like to eat again. It tasted vividly of where we live, and told me something new about that place. Expressive, that's how the best food is, I think, and this one was there.

Tasty Buds

2011-07-07T07:47:00.000-07:00

I'm going to make a bold prediction: milkweed will be the new ramps, the hot wild food that will grab the attention of chefs and home cooks alike. And may I say, should this come to pass, it will be long overdue. Whether you love, loathe, or linger in indifference toward ramps, it's hard to dispute the fact that they have become a bit overexposed, have held an exceedingly long reign over our springtime culinary imagination. I think this may be because, as wild foods go, ramps are particularly reliable, abundant, and affordable. Not everyone will shell out the $30-plus a pound for wild mushrooms, but a bunch of ramps at $2.50 per gives a lot of flavor for the dollar.

Restaurant chefs know exactly when they'll be able to get ramps, and the cachet this wild springtime food gives to local-seasonal menus is a bargain for them, as well.

Milkweed is equally abundant as ramps--maybe moreso--it has a longer season, and it's edible in several forms, from shoots, to buds, flowers, smallish pods, and the immature silk that Sam Thayer calls "milkweed cheese." It is, indeed, thanks to Thayer that I, and many others, have come to know and appreciate the culinary qualities of this long misunderstood plant. It was thought for a long time, and by many so-called experts (including the venerable Euell Gibbons), that milkweed was inherently bitter, and that any form of it therefore required cooking in several changes of water simply to make it palatable. In a thorough and utterly convincing essay (the first of his work that I encountered), Thayer laid that notion to rest. I won't bother to paraphrase further what you can read for yourself right here.

So far the milkweed parts I've worked with have been the flower buds and small pods. Our Wisconsin land must be rife with the shoots in spring, since it's rife with mature plants right now (our Saint Paul front yard has a nice crop, too), but I haven't managed to catch them at that stage. What I've mainly done with both buds and pods, other than just munch on them, desultorily, during walks around our land, is to pickle them. That's how I spent most of my day today.

I gathered maybe a quart of the bud heads (I doubt that's botanically accurate, but it will do), giving each a little shake as I picked it to dislodge any insects--many insects like milkweed, not just monarch butterflies. My fingertips became sticky with the latex that gives milkweed its name, but I was able to rinse it off easily when I was done; I believe that Thayer reports a somewhat caustic effect from longer exposure of skin to the latex. Once I got the buds home, I rinsed them thoroughly, then chilled them in the refrigerator overnight. That actually seemed to have firmed them when I came back to them. This afternoon I used a paring knife to cut the buds off the flower head, a pleasant little chore accomplished while watching "The People's Court." I didn't bother about the little tails that remained attached to the buds; they're edible, as well, and likely will largely disappear after pickling.

I applied three different methods to preserving them. First, I took about three-quarters of a cup of buds and mixed them with nearly a tablespoon of coarse salt--fleur de sel, in my case. I bottled them and will refrigerate them. I imagine these may ferment somewhat and develop a bit of pungency with time. I hope so. Another cup I immersed in the sweet and sour and salt brine described here --I used the larger, "purpler" ones for this; these ready-to-open buds had a slightly sweet and floral taste that I thought might come through in that brine. The rest, a scant cup, I will prepare in the "cornichon method" also described in that post.

The flavor of unseasoned milkweed is nowhere near as assertive as that of ramps--but then, outside the allium world, what is? It's mild, green, a bit like lightly steamed green beans, I'd say. The buds have a nice crisp "pop" when you bite into them, the small pods, as well. Up to an inch or so in size the pods remain tender enough to steam or stir-fry. The uses of the silk, that "cheese," I have yet to explore.

I've been calling these pickled buds milkweed "capers," but I think I'll drop that term. Nonetheless, you can use them in most of the places you'd use something like a caper--in salad dressings, to flavor an egg salad or deviled eggs, sprinkled over grilled or fried meat or fish. I'm going to mix some into mayonnaise tonight, along with some chopped pickled ramps, to make a wild tartar sauce to serve with fried whitefish.

I would never advise anyone to use this blog, or any simple descriptive or photographic source, as a field guide to wild edibles--always consult a good field guide or two or four, or a trusted friend who knows about these things. That caution registered, milkweed is among the easiest of wild foods to identify. The buds will be on the plants for another week or two. As you can see from the photos here, some have already bloomed. It's not the sort of thing one wants to subsist on, but milkweed provides many opportunities through the spring and summer to get a delightful, safe taste of wild foods.

Milkweed: It's the new ramps. You read it here first.

Quick, Pickle! (Freezer Dill Cukes in Strawberry Vinaigrette)

2011-07-06T09:02:00.000-07:00

I got thinking about pickles thanks to my friend Tom's recent post over at marthaandtom.com . There hasn't been a lot around to pickle so far this year. I did up a jar of ramps earlier in the spring, and I wanted to do some asparagus, but thought I might have missed the boat. The Minneapolis Farmers Market came through for me--at the North Lyndale site on a weekday morning I was able to find excellent asparagus, along with hothouse cucumbers, snow peas, strawberries, and green garlic. All of the above were put to use in a quick pickling session that produced a half pint each of pickled asparagus and snow peas,* and a quick cucumber pickle inspired by my friend Tata's method (see below).

The asparagus and snow pea pickles were quick in that they took little time to make, though they need to cure a few days to develop best flavor. This is my main pickling M.O. these days, a sort of stealth/guerilla approach that allows me to get some pickles in jars before I realize I'm "preserving" or embarking on a "canning" endeavor.

Fact is, I rarely process anything anymore (and never much did). I don't make large batches of anything, prefer freezing my excess tomatoes rather than canning them, and have an extra fridge in the basement, purchased to hold cases of butter and many dozens of eggs during our market baking days. So the few jars of cornichons, bread & butters, ramps, etc., that I put up go into that basement fridge, where they keep just fine. If our apple and blackberry crops come through this year, as it's seeming they will, I'll devote a few days to jam and jelly making, for sure, but the processing kettle doesn't really see a lot of use here.

The strawberries hereabove mentioned didn't get pickled, per se, but they did meet up with vinegar and other things in a dressing for a rather oddball, but tasty and refreshing, salad. We've had really, really fragrant, wonderful strawberries this year, mainly from Wisconsin, and I'd been thinking about ways to use them other than the usual sweet applications--not to say I have anything against strawberry shortcake, strawberries over ice cream, or, in an inspired Bide-A-Wee breakfast one-off, butter-toasted croutons with strawberries, cream, and maple syrup.

The notion of a strawberry vinaigrette intrigued me, but I didn't know what to serve it with. I thought of blanched English peas, but they didn't seem substantial enough, and I thought the dressing would slide right off those smooth little orbs; snow peas, likewise, seemed too slippery. I was stymied. Then I read Tom's post, and I remembered Tata's quick freezer pickles, and I thought, Hmmm.... Seemed dicey, but if I wanted to use the strawberries in a savory way, I couldn't hedge my bets. I can well imagine that the combination of strawberries, dill, and garlic will turn a few heads, but stick with me a minute.

I think this hinges on how we think of fruits and their uses, and how we categorize flavors. I got the idea last summer to put cucumbers and crab apples together in a pickle, and it was wonderful. I thought then, and I was thinking in preparing this salad, that I was combining disparate elements, fruit and vegetable, but then I thunk again: I do not know how all this shakes out botanically, but a cucumber is by nature what we widely consider a fruit, to wit, a melon. It's a pale watermelon without the sweetness. It's a juicer, milder zucchini. In Chinese, of which I know a smidgen, and most of it food-related, the relationship is clear: cucumber, huang gua (yellow melon); zucchini, nan gua (south[ern] melon); winter melon, dong gua (winter melon). (I don't know what the Chinese for watermelon is, but I'm going to fling out a guess: xi hong gua, literally "western red melon." I'll Google it later.) A salad of watermelon with feta cheese is in danger of becoming a cliché before it's time; strawberries and cucumbers might just work.

In fact, it worked very well indeed. Combined with tart and savory things in the dressing, the berries expressed their tart and fragrant side. Napping the chilled, salty, garlicky cukes, the vinaigrette provided a delightful counterpoint. I think this would be good on blanched or quick-pickled green beans, too. Perhaps they'll overlap for a week, so I can give that a try.

I tried the combination in a different variation this past weekend at Bide-A-Wee, tossing cucumbers with green garlic, goat yogurt, cider vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper, and topping that with sliced strawberry and salted milkweed flower buds--excellent.

It's worth noting that these quick salted pickles contain no vinegar--the combination of a vinaigrette on a vinegar pickle might be a little much. Perhaps some intrepid soul will try that out and report the results.

The freezer pickles are good on their own, beside a burger or sandwich (hell, I'm sure you know how to eat a pickle...). The dressing, too, could simply go over mixed greens--a gutsy salad, with some arugula, cress, mizuna, mustard, what-have-you, would be best, I think.

Strawberry Vinaigrette

1/2 cup chopped very ripe strawberries
1 tablespoon cider vinegar (preferably unpasteurized)
3 tablespoons canola or grape seed oil
1 teaspoon honey
pinch salt
a few grinds of black pepper
a good pinch of espelette or cayenne pepper

Combine all in a blender or mini food processor. Blend until smooth.

Tata's Quick Freezer Garlic Dill Pickles

1 large cucumber
a few sprigs of fresh dill, chopped
2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
coarsely ground black pepper, about 1/2 teaspoon
1 teaspoon salt
Coarse salt, like French gray sea salt, or fleur de sel flakes

Peeling lengthwise, take a few strips of the cucumber skin off with a vegetable peeler, leaving a few strips of skin intact, creating a striped effect. Halve the cucumber lengthwise and remove the seeds. Cut each half into three long strips, then cut the strips into two-inch lengths. In a quart zip bag combine everything but the strawberries, close the top and mix everything together thoroughly. Place the bag in the freezer for 23 minutes. Remove the bag from the freezer and mix again. Leave it in the fridge until you're ready to finish the salad--or just use it as a pickle.

To make the salad, dump the cucumbers into a mixing bowl, dill, garlic, and all. Pour off any liquid that has accumulated. Toss with the vinaigrette. To each portion add a few slices of fresh strawberries and a sprinkle of coarse salt. Serve.

______________________________
*I put up the asparagus and snow peas in the brine described here , except that I made the brine with a little more salt and a little less sugar than that recipe calls for. Also, to the asparagus I added chile, garlic, black peppercorns, and a good sprig of dill (volunteering willingly in my garden this year); to the snow peas I added chile, garlic, Sichuan peppercorns, and a couple slices of ginger. A jar of each was quick to make, though these are not "quick pickles" in the way Tom uses the term. They need to cure for a week or so to be really nicely pickled, and I'll just keep them in the fridge and use them up within a few weeks.

Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

One Odd Apple

2011-06-30T10:48:00.000-07:00

The several dozen apple trees (probably over a hundred all together) growing on our Wisconsin land come in many shapes and sizes. The trees range in size from around eight feet on the small end to over twenty feet tall (guessing, but some of these trees are really big). Some are compact in their growing habit, and some majestically sprawling, with stout horizontal branches that invite you to climb up and take a seat in the cool shade on a hot afternoon. Quite a few are composed of many trunks, acquired from shoots pushing up from rootstock in their carefree years before we arrived to harass them, try to get them to make something of themselves, and a few are miraculously kempt, requiring only a few judicious pruning cuts to give them a shape that would be quite at home in a real orchard.

And while most of the trees are found in irregular groupings in the open areas on our property, there are a number of large, healthy trees that now find themselves growing in the middle of the woods--mainly among the younger stands of birch and aspen. Some of those trees may be wild, seedling trees, or they may have been planted on purpose, and only later in life became isolated in the forest as those faster-growing species colonized the area.

What all these trees have in common is that, regardless of differences in size or posture, they look like apple trees. The main trunk or trunks rise to a certain height, then branch out to form a spreading crown. Wild and unruly though many of them are, they are recognizable even at a distance as apple trees.

All but one. That's the Anomalous Apple, so I think of it, pictured above, as best I could manage--its trunk starts at the very bottom left and angles toward the upper right. It's growing no more than a couple of feet from the much, much larger trunk of a mature white oak on the north side of our land--that's a limb of the oak visible behind the Anomalous Apple.

I first noticed Anomalous this winter on a snowshoe walk through the woods. Here was a tree that had to be some kind of fruit tree, and its bark said apple to me, as did the bare wood of the small dead branches which were the only branches close enough to the ground for us to really see. It wasn't a plum or cherry, the most common wild fruit trees on our land. It really seemed that it had to be an apple tree, except that the trunk, instead of rising to the usual four to six feet, then spreading its arms to make apples, the trunk surpassed that height and just kept going, straight up, right into the branches of its companion oak, with only minor, twiggy side branches along the way. It looked like an apple that yearned to be a pine tree, is what it looked like.

Well, I'm not a forestry expert. I decided to keep an eye on it and see what it would turn out to be, once it leafed out and, perhaps, even bloomed. Likely it would reveal itself to be something quite obvious, in hindsight, and certainly not an apple. Except, it is. Or, I'm pretty well sure that it is. It leafed out, and the leaves looked like apple leaves, only unusually large, perhaps to compensate for its sunless situation. It blossomed, and examined through binoculars, those blooms well over our heads did indeed look like apple blossoms.

You can just make out the fruit in the photo above--it's awfully hard to shoot, aiming upward at the brighter sky from below in the dark woods. Here's a tighter crop:

The little apples are mostly around the edges of the picture. It's a curiosity, for sure, and I can't wait to find out what those apples taste like once they ripen. While we speculate about which of our other trees might be wild trees, unique to our little plot of land, this one, this Anomalous Apple, we're sure about. Apple trees take a long time to reach full size, but oaks take even longer. Somehow an apple seed found its way into the old oak and maple woods, managed to germinate, and, against all odds, survive for all these years in what has to be one of the more uncomfortable situations an apple tree could find itself in.

It would seem, once again, that Great Nature has found a way. Now we are only left to ponder, Why? Maybe just because it can.

At Bide-A-Wee, June 2011

2011-06-28T14:19:00.000-07:00

This is the fourth summer since we purchased our Wisconsin property, "Bide-A-Wee Land," just long enough to really start to get a feel for the place. We've seen enough changes of season to be able to anticipate, a bit, but there's enough variety in those seasonal turnings that we can still be surprised, or find new things to notice, with each progression.

One very broad observation that we've made, starting in the very first year we owned the land, is the stunning transformation that occurs between, say, mid-May, as the trees are just starting to leaf out, the thickets to thicken, the meadow plants to gain momentum, to the end of June, when the real heat of summer comes in, and with it the astounding profusion of greenery that takes what was previously a rather obvious landscape and elaborates it with layer after layer of texture, color, contrast, depth, and life. It's particularly striking on our very hilly acres, as the elevation compounds yet again all those layers, and the spare scaffold shapes of winter trees fill out and up, turning hills into mountains, modest inclines into imposing cliffs.

It's a little startling in some ways. Through this long spring, after the winter of deep and persistent snows, we really enjoyed the freedom of movement the flattened brown meadows afforded us--we could walk anywhere we wanted, on our own two feet! No skis or snowshoes required, and nothing to stand in our way. Now, within the span of about three weeks, the meadow vegetation is waist-high and still gaining. You can get through it, sure, but the gopher mounds that cover most of the lowlands make the walking treacherous when you can't see the ground, and the blackberries have sprung up, making long pants and tall boots imperative for any bushwhacking.

So we tend to keep to a few well-worn paths. Our friends Renee and Mark Bartz helped us out with that a couple of weeks ago--they brought over a 4-wheeler and a deck mower and cut a swath from the cabin down to the north meadow, where some of our best apple trees are. I got to try my hand at it, too, mowing the hilltop circuit just above the cabin. It is a lot more difficult to drive a 4-wheeler pulling a deck mower over bumpy terrain than it looks. I was pleased with myself for not flipping over, or driving into a tree. Mark, who's lived in this area all his life, said he'd never seen a piece of land quite so gopher-infested as ours. A mark of distinction over which I am not sure we should be proud....

When a belt fell off the mower partway through cutting the Bide-A-Wee yard, I was left to finish the rest by hand, with my trusty scythe, which is really an extremely efficient piece of equipment once you learn how to use it. It's better on some kinds of plant matter than others, and it really pays you back to keep it sharp with peening jig and whetstone, but under the right conditions I can cut a mighty swath in very little time. And it's an excellent workout, to boot (but one must remember to wear gloves, lest one wind up with weeping sores between thumb and forefinger where the blisters have burst, as I experienced last week).

"Mowing the lawn" (and expanding it a bit) after a two-week absence produced this haystack, and another, even larger one:

In amidst the green profusion, of course, there are fruity things happening, too. Mainly, the apples:

Blackberries, some still in bloom, while many have already set fruit, and it's looking like a good year for them:

A lesser-known wild fruit is the haw or hawberry, fruit of the hawthorn tree. I've done a bit with haw fruit in the past, and it's something I'm really eager to explore further. Last year we harvested exactly zero haws--it was that poor a year for wild fruit. In a good year the bright red fruits, rather like rosehips, hang on the shrubby trees long after the leaves have fallen. Not all haw fruit is delicious--you really have to taste around until you find a tree with sweet, flavorful fruit. Fortunately, hawthorn trees are abundant on our land, and in the region generally.

Also abundant, moreso than I ever imagined, are black cherry trees. They will grow to 50 feet tall or better, with trunks that can exceed a foot in diameter. Until you learn to recognize them by their bark, though, you won't know that these mature trees are cherries--the first branching on these big trees occurs way high overhead, and the fruit is indistiguishable in the overall canopy of mixed hardwoods where they occur. The fruit, therefore, we gather from baby specimens. Serviceberries also in the picture, left, with the green cherries top and right.

The prickly ash spreads and fills in on the old farm road, creating "verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways" (thank you John Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale"). Prickly ash is in the citrus family, I was amazed to learn, and it produces a profusion of tiny berries in the the fall. The husks of these berries have two remarkable qualities: first, they smell very, very citrusy, mainly like tangerine, to my sniffer; second, they produce a numbing sensation on the tongue when you chew them, exactly like Sichuan peppercorns, to which--ta da!--they are closely related. I've done a little cooking with them, but the jury's out. They don't seem to retain their fragrant or numbing qualities (that's ma in Chinese Pinyin) once dried, so I think I'll try using them fresh come the fall.

Coming back over the hill toward the cabin, Lily went on point in the greenery. When I let her go she sniffed avidly down the hill ahead of her, and fixated on a particular spot, but there was no bird. Likely it flushed ahead of us.

The main meadow, and the "Tardis" outhouse:

On the hilltop circuit, an Aldo Leopold bench that Mary built:

A good place to sit and take it all in. Summer starts to seem long by this time of year, but we know what an illusion that is.

And the Rest Is Salad....

2011-06-24T09:20:00.000-07:00

So for the second longest day of the year, the leftovers from the longest day dinner, reconfigured, did quite nicely. There was a bit of everything left from our solstice aioli supper--trout, potatoes, beets, asparagus, snap peas. I picked red lettuce, sorrel, and some smaller purple mustard leaves from the garden, along with a baby turnip. Mixed the leftover aioli and sorrel-tarragon mayo with olive oil and a little cider vinegar. Fried off the potatoes and when they were nicely brown added a couple of sliced purple spring onions to wilt, and the beets to warm a bit. Tossed the greens with the asparagus, peas, and the dressing.

On the bed of greens I portioned out the roots, and topped it with poached trout, the very thinly sliced turnip, another drizzle of dressing, and a superfluous (but colorful and tasty) garnish of a sliced strawberry (picked up at a roadside honor stand on the road to Bide-A-Wee, $2 a quart, fantastically fragrant--it has been a great year for strawberries).

A bowl of steaming soup might have been more appropriate to the weather--the high of 63 matched the "record low high" for the date. But we were not complaining. With toasted sourdough and a glass of cider, strawberries over ice cream for dessert, we were content.

Solstice Aioli

2011-06-22T11:08:00.000-07:00

Going back to that idea of honing a finer sense of the seasons , I can report that it's the season of setting fruit out at Bide-A-Wee. Last year was a dismal one for our apples, as well as for most of the wild fruits, except for the wild plums, which seem to come through every year. This year the hawthorns, black cherries, chokecherries, and serviceberries are all setting up nice crops. In spite of a cool pollinating season, the apples look good--the largest are already an inch-and-a-half across, and reddening. We have one more gallon of sweet cider in the freezer--maybe barely enough to get us through to a first pressing of this year's fruit if we ration it carefully. A couple swallows in the morning is enough to start the day off on a happy note.

It's haying time, too--our friend Renee Bartz told us this weekend that they'd cut their second crop of hay, and now hoped for a few dry days to get it baled (not looking like that wish will come true). You see this age-old practice taking place all across the Dairy State countryside. Where one day there was a field of tall grass, the next there's a shorn landscape looking something like a very rustic golf course, except dotted across it are the cylindrical bales of hay, a lovely sort of order brought out of the unruly growth, entropy reversed.

With the cows out on new grass, the raw milk we get from the Bartz's Bolen-Vale farm is the richest of the year. Last weekend we skimmed the cream from the top of the jar and spooned it over the first strawberries of the summer, and we swooned.

And at the market, the season is that of the first summer vegetables. The leafy things were pleasant enough, asparagus delightful, but it's greatly heartening--and appetizing--to see the next wave coming in, in this case young beets, snap peas, and most gloriously, the first green garlic. That market haul, and a successful outing on the trout stream (oh, really, they're all successful, whether I catch fish or not), set the scene for an aioli dinner to mark the summer solstice. (For the mayo/aioli how-to click here.)

Please note that no adjective accompanies aioli here, nor ever will, unless to make the derisive point that none ever should. Aioli is aioli is aioli. Chipotle aioli? Nah. Lemongrass aioli? Skip it. Garlic, oil, egg yolk, a bit of mustard, a squeeze of lemon juice, a pinch of salt, that's what's in aioli. Oh, now I've read that in Provence some local variations omit the egg yolk, using cooked potato or bread as the binder. I've never tried it that way. You could call it garlic mayonnaise and not be far off, except that aioli deserves a more prominent place at the table than is commonly accorded mayonnaise. It needs to be seen and appreciated, inhaled, dolloped out in copious portions for dipping and dabbing--a clandestine schmear on a sandwich or burger doesn't do it justice.

See the two unctuous globs on the plate above? The yellow one on the left is aioli, of course, and the green one is sorrel-tarragon mayo, which only had some garlicky undertones because I chopped the herbs in the same place on the cutting board where I puréed the garlic for the aioli. I did that on purpose. To half a cup of mayo I added four smallish sorrel leaves and just a sprig of tarragon, the most assertive of herbs, to my taste. A dandy combination--but not aioli, mais non.

As for the trout, it was poached in a court bouillon flavored with green onion tops, carrot, thyme, tarragon, cutting celery, black pepper, and some Breton bouillon flavoring containing sea salt, algae, fennel, and some other spices. We picked it up at a small market in Brittany a good while back. It seems to keep.

The beets (Menomonie farmers market) and potatoes (not local, I'm afraid), I roasted with olive oil, thyme, rosemary, fleur de sel, black pepper, and chopped green garlic, at 375, for 40 minutes covered, another

15 uncovered. I peeled the beets first. And then the asparagus and snap peas (stringed) were blanched in salted boiling water for two minutes.

An aioli plate is the ideal sort of meal for long summer evenings, and this was the longest of all. We sipped a petit chablis, our glasses
appealingly misted in the humid evening. The monsoon rains came and went, a downpour, a sunburst. I guess you could say it's summer.

Why We Forage (Part II)

2011-05-31T15:59:00.000-07:00

Sautéeing bracken and ostrich fern fiddleheads

Why we forage is so as to know our way around this place.

I spend a lot of time flipping through books on wild foods, like those by Sam Thayer and Teresa Marrone (linked at right under "Bide-A-Wee Friends and Neighbors"), and I'm constantly amazed to see how little of the surface of wild foods I have even scratched. I don't think of myself as an expert, at all; rather, in this area, as in many things that I enjoy, I prefer to remain the happy amateur, noting that amateur comes from the Latin "to love."

But you do, you know, if you stick with something, come to know a thing or two, and so here's a list of the wild food plants I've cooked with, just running them off the top of my head:

Oyster mushrooms
Watercress
Wood nettles
Stinging nettles
Ostrich fern
Bracken fern
Wood sorrel
Sheep sorrel
Dandelion
Violets
Hen of the woods mushrooms
Black trumpet
Golden chanterelles
Hedgehog mushrooms
Puffballs
Raspberries
Blackberries
Grapes
Plums
Asparagus
Haw berries
Nannyberries
High-bush cranberries
Blueberries
Ramps
Sulfur shelf mushrooms
Tooth mushrooms
Fawn mushrooms
Boletus variety mushrooms
Honewort
Lamb's-quarter
Staghorn sumac
Black cap raspberries
Hazelnuts
Burdock root
Milkweed
Maple syrup
Birch syrup

And I've probably forgotten a few. My point here is that I never set out upon a concerted study of wild foods, never have devoted myself to eating them exclusively or primarily--though this year I've been making more of a point of it. I pick up a new wild food item or two each year, and I learn by going where I have to go, as Theodore Roethke put it, so compellingly, in his poem "The Waking."

I am sure that the wild foods trend will ebb down in time; I am just as certain that as it does so it will leave behind, like bright baubles of beach glass on a sandy shore, a few devoted souls who became caught up in it, for whatever reason, and who found in it that compelling something that will have them heading out to the woods again, year after year, and they'll take someone with them, and if it's the right someone, that right someone will lead another newcomer into a woods full of ramps or chanterelles, a blackberry patch or a plum grove, and a lovely and sustaining tradition will endure.

Furthermore, I would say: See Patrick's comment on the previous post. He boils a lot of my thinking down far more succinctly than I've been able to do.

Bide-A-Wee Chop Suey: wild asparagus, ramps, bracken and ostrich fern, morels

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I've been working pretty intensely on the cookbook for a good few months now. The end is really and truly in sight: one more read-through of the proof-read page proofs, then it's off to the printer and nothing more to be done. (You can place an advance order alreadly at Amazon, by the way.) Having spent so much time poring back and forth over what is basically the content of this blog, I'm feeling, for the moment, that anything I put up here is something of a rehash--you might have noticed that I was citing myself in the previous post, which, while amusing in some ways, I do not think is an awfully good sign, over all. Therefore, so as not to become tedious, I'm taking a couple of weeks off, with every expectation that I will return refreshed. We've been eating well here, and coming up with interesting preparations of the swell foods of the season, from woods, stream, market, and garden. I just haven't been able to find interesting ways to write about it.

So happy June; eat well, have fun. Thanks, all. Back soon.

Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw