Simply Superior Soup (or "Effing French Cooking Magic")

It’s the last week of December 2015 as I (begin to) write this, 2016 looming just days away, and for cooking options we are decidedly into the winter larder.  On December 6 we were amazed to eat, and very much enjoy, the last garden tomato.  The last leaves of fresh kale were part of a festive Christmas dinner:  seared venison loin (harvested from the Bide-A-Wee property last year) with a rich, savory red wine and port reduction; lima beans simmered with stock and aromatics, then pureed, a surprisingly luxurious result from a humble dried bean; then the kale, braised with chestnuts and garden leek, a splash of our homemade cider vinegar.  Though we haven’t really celebrated Christmas in any traditional way for some years, I’m not going to let an opportunity for a festive dinner go by.  And anyway, we think of it as a continuation of our solstice festivities—especially appropriate here, as Mary’s birthday occurs during the same time.

Once those last leaves of kale vacated the crisper, dinner planning turned a page.  It’s true that there’s still quite a bit of “fresh” produce, from both garden and farmer’s market stock-ups, in our cellar, in the fridge.  But the term fresh doesn’t really mean the same when applied to storage carrots, cabbage, squash, and onions, as it does when describing a handful of beans or a bowl of tender lettuce harvested from the garden to be prepared and served minutes later.  Those winter stand-bys are fresh in the sense of not being frozen, dried, pickled, fermented, etc., but…you know what I mean.  It’s not the same as throwing dew-dappled snap peas in the wok or snipping fragrant dill into a dressing.  Our vocabulary fails us in efficiently denoting that crucial difference:  there’s fresh produce, and then there’s fresh produce. 

This is not to disparage the stalwart vegetables of winter, not at all.  Like reliable character actors, they show up and fill their roles with unfailing professionalism, year after year, decade after decade, while the fad for arugula fades, or a trendy heirloom cucumber turns out to be just another pickle, after all.  Cabbage, potatoes, carrots, squash, onion, leek, turnip, beets--the roster might at first glance suggest daily supper at the gulag:  bung it all in a kettle, boil until done.  But there’s a saying I like (and as far as I know, I came up with it), goes like this:  There’s meat, and then there’s cooking.  Which is to say:  It’s not always only about the ingredients, but often as much or more about imagination and skill in preparation.  Today’s soup, which we had as a first course on Christmas night, is a perfect example.

If it hadn’t come with a sexy French name, I might never have tried it.  Puréed cabbage and potato soup sounds, you must admit, a good deal less appealing than Crème de Choux aux Beurre de Roquefort.  The source is Madeleine Kamman’s In Madeleine’s Kitchen.  There are three remarkable and surprising things about this recipe:

1)  In spite of the cream—crème—in the title, there’s no cream in the soup.

2)  In spite of the fancy-sounding title, the list of ingredients is short and plain.

3)  In spite of the short, plain ingredient list, the resulting soup is delicious, even luxurious, the result of “Fucking French cooking magic,” as I described it, enthusiasm overwhelming decorum, in a tweet.

There are a couple of secret ingredients:  walnut oil, and confit fat.  But I think you could do without those if you don’t have them, substituting good butter for the confit fat, olive oil for the walnut oil.  However:  if you haven’t tried French walnut oil, it is well worth seeking out.  A commonly available brand, and the one we always buy, have even brought back from Paris in the past, is J. Leblanc.  It’s pricy, but a little goes a long way.  For me, a salad of fresh tender lettuces straight from the garden, dressed with nothing more than walnut oil and a bit of fleur de sel is one of life’s simple luxuries.  But I’m getting ahead of the season.  Just one more note on the walnut oil:  the French stuff is made from lightly toasted walnuts, so it’s amber in color and has that nutty fragrance and flavor.  The golden walnut oil often sold at “health food stores” and co-ops is not the same.  The French walnut oil should not be used for cooking, only dressings and seasoning.  (NB: the English name is in small print on the bottle, so you’re looking for a bottle labeled “Huile de Noix,” as above.  For Mpls/St Paul readers, Cooks of Crocus Hill carries it, but are currently out of stock in all stores.)

The basis of the soup is potatoes, cabbage, and water.  It gets a smoky depth of flavor from bacon.  Not a lot of bacon, either, less than an ounce per person in Kamman’s recipe (she actually calls for pancetta).  No cream or milk, as noted above.  No stock, just water (you can call it Chateau Sink, as Jacques Pepin sometimes jokes, or perhaps Domaine du Tappe, to French it up).  There’s a bit of garlic, whose presence is felt.  The beurre de Roquefort is simply blue cheese and soft butter mashed together, a few grinds of coarse black pepper—a simple compound butter; it’s worth making extra, for it’s nice to have around, to smear on a burger, say.

And that, my friends, is it, the ingredient list in its entirety.  You gently render off small cubes of the bacon or pancetta, add potatoes and garlic, then the cabbage.  This sweats for a few minutes (“mellows,” in M Kamman’s version), then you add water and simmer until the cabbage is very tender.  The well mellowed vegetables and bacon are then whizzed up in a blender (I used a food processor, carefully spooning out the solids, adding liquid gradually; an FP is really not the best appliance for pureeing soups, I’ve learned from bitter experience).

And get this:  it suffers not at all from being made a day ahead and reheated just before serving.  On Christmas Eve I added a little crunchy garnish, chopped goose skin cracklings—yeah, I happened to have some lying around; don’t hate me because I’m beautiful—from the goose we cooked for our first solstice celebration.  When I made it again for lunch I toasted some small croutons in olive oil—it’s really about the textural contrast, that crunch to perk up the creamy soup.  (See:  "It's all about the garnish".)

Coming back around to my earlier point and seasonal eating and the winter larder:  this is a fabulous dish that you would never make in the summer, but which is perfect for the cold months when, you know, you have a lot of potatoes and cabbage around.  It also reminded me how absolutely lovely and civilized it is to start a meal with a soup, so elegant and yet so comforting.  A fading tradition I hope to start reviving in our house.

My adaptation of Madeleine Kamman’s recipe:

Creamy Bacon, Potato, and Cabbage Soup with Blue Cheese Butter

Serves four as a first course, two to three as a main course—add salad and crusty bread to make it a meal

2 ounces bacon or pancetta, preferably in one chunk

1 tablespoon duck confit fat or butter

1 medium or 2 small potatoes, 6-7 ounces total

1 large or 2 small cloves garlic

¼ of a green cabbage, about 12 ounces

1 tablespoon walnut oil, plus additional for garnish*

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

For the blue cheese butter:

2 ounces unsalted butter at room temperature

2 ounces blue cheese

Croutons or cracklings, optional but highly recommended

In a small bowl, mash the butter and blue cheese together with a fork until well blended.

Cut the bacon or pancetta in small dice, about ¼-inch.  Peel the potatoes and cut them into smallish cubes, about ¾-inch.  Shred the cabbage into ½-inch strips.

Heat a medium saucepan and add the confit fat or butter, then the bacon.  Cook over medium-low heat.  As the bacon renders its fat and begins to brown, add the potatoes, tossing them in the fat, then cook, stirring occasionally, until they become a little bit brown, 4 to 5 minutes (you’re just looking for a golden color, not deeply browned as for hash browns).  Stir in the garlic and cook for another minute or two, then add the cabbage, a couple generous pinches of salt, and several grinds of black pepper.

Turn the heat to low, cover, and let the cabbage sweat (“mellow” is the term M Kamman uses) until well wilted, about 5 minutes.  Add 3 cups water, bring to a boil, turn down to a simmer, and cook partly covered until the cabbage and potatoes are very soft, 15 to 20 minutes.

Let the soup cool for a few minutes before pureeing.  If using a food processor, separate the solid from the liquid parts of the soup and purée the solids first, then gradually add in the liquid.  When everything is in the FP, purée for about a minute.  At the end of the minute, drizzle in the walnut oil.  Return the soup to the saucepan.  Reheat just before serving.  (Note:  Kamman directs you to strain the soup back into the pot after puréeing; I did not bother with this step, finding the soup smooth enough to my taste without straining.  Straining would no doubt produce an even more velvety and elegant purée, if that's what you're after.)

To serve:  heat the soup and taste for salt; you will probably want to add another pinch or two.  Ladle the soup into bowls, and to each add about a tablespoon of the blue cheese butter.  Add croutons or cracklings, as you please, drizzle a small amount of walnut oil over the surface of the soup, and serve.

*If you don’t have/can’t find walnut oil, use a flavorful olive oil—or, perhaps pumpkin seed oil, such as Wisconsin’s own Hay River Pumpkin Seed Oil.  And, how about this—if using pumpkin seed oil, think about substituting butternut squash for all or part of the potatoes, then garnish with toasted pepitas instead of the croutons/cracklings.

Happy soupage!

Ma Poutine

When they write the history of popular food in the Twenny-Tens (if there’s anyone with enough arterial fortitude to survive it and write it), I imagine this moment, glistening with bacon fat and given gravitas by the six-pound cheeseburger, will likely go down—way, way, down—as The Age of Wretched Excess, and looking back through the haze of time and spattered fry grease, future food historians will recognize the imposing figure of Monsieur Poutine as one of our era’s most august ambassadors.

This French-Canadien concoction of french fries topped with gravy and smothered in cheese curds has somehow escaped the ghetto of post-hockey game Québécois bar food to become a poster child for the too-much-is-never-enough philosophy (if you will) of our food truck-obsessed culture (if you stacked up all the pulled pork sandwiches topped with runny mayo-slicked cole slaw served in America’s food trucks in a day, I imagine they’d reach to the moon and back a couple of times, though they probably wouldn’t stack very well, on account of all the grease…).  Martin Picard, of the fat-flecked Montreal abattoir-cum-gastro-temple Au Pied de Cochon, is likely responsible for bringing poutine into the foodie world, with his beyond decadent foie gras-topped version.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  As my friend Tom said recently after a home-based poutine foray went deliciously awry:  Poutine, always a good idea, always a bad idea.  Thing is, for me, poutine had always been just an idea.  Prior to constructing my own version as a Bide-A-While bachelor dinner the other night, I had never tasted the stuff.  Imagine that.  The idea just never held that much appeal to me—all I could imagine of the typical version was starchy, previously frozen french fries, poorly cooked, topped with indifferent gravy and obliterated by too-salty cheese.  Now, I’m a guy who grows sweaty-palmed and anxious when I pull my last piece of home-smoked bacon from the freezer, who always has a little pot of pork fat beside the stove—you know, for emergencies—but that image was too much even for me. 

Well, I guess it wasn’t so much the grease factor that put me off, but rather the uninspired monolithicness (just made that word up) of it.  After two bites, what would there be to taste?  Still, perhaps because of my Canadian heritage, or because I used to spend a night or two in bars after hockey games, the idea of poutine has always intrigued me, and I’ve cooked many a mental dish of it in the past few years.  This week, I finally put it on the plate.

I’m sure some chapters of the Confrèrie de Poutine would run me out of town on a rail for it, but I wanted vegetables.  Specifically, I wanted highly flavored vegetables, both tart and savory.  So homemade sauerkraut, rinsed and squeezed, formed a crisp and tangy bed for my poutine.  Celery root, one of the most umami-packed forms of produce, has been part of every poutine I’ve imagined, so a fine dice of that went into my gravy.

The base of my gravy:  bacon.  Duh.  And the potatoes were not deep-fried shoestrings, but rather wedges of wonderful, coal-roasted homegrown fingerlings browned well in that bacon fat.  This is sounding pretty good, isn’t it?  Adding more depth to the gravy were leek, garlic, and sambal.

To add a little wholesome heft—this was my dinner, after all—I fried an egg in the remaining bacon fat, and along with it I cooked a couple slices of under-ripe Green Zebra tomatoes, along with some thinly sliced jalapeno and shallots—nothing monolithic about the flavors of this dish.

La cuisine minceur?  Mais mon.  But neither was this a regrettable gut-bomb, and I cleaned my plate—well, gratin dish—happily.  I’ll make this again, but not for a while.  Some winter night when a wolfish wind howls down the valley and the stars overhead are so insanely clear and profligate in their splendor that it stirs something deep in my Canadian soul, I’ll look around the kitchen to see what we have, and remembering Tom’s dictum I’ll think, Poutine, that sounds like a good idea….

Ma Poutine

Serves one:

1 ½ ounces excellent slab bacon cut in 1/3-inch dice

3 tablespoons chopped white of leek

2 tablespoons finely diced celery root

2 cloves garlic, crushed and coarsely chopped

1 ½ teaspoons sambal

2 teaspoons flour

2/3 cup chicken stock (or another type of stock—mine was actually chicken-duck stock)

2 medium fingerling potatoes, pre-roasted, quartered the long way

1 ½ ounces white cheese curds sliced

A bit of butter

1 egg

2 slices green tomatoes

Thinly sliced jalapenos and shallots, optional

2/3 to ¾ cup excellent sauerkraut, rinsed in a couple changes of water, squeezed to remove excess liquid

Salt and pepper

Heat oven to 425.

In a medium skillet slowly cook the bacon until it is lightly browned and has rendered most of its fat. Remove and reserve the bacon. Pour off and reserve half the fat.  Brown the potatoes evenly in the fat that remains in the pan.  Spread the sauerkraut in the bottom of a gratin dish and place the potatoes on top of it.

Return the bacon to the skillet along with the reserved fat.  Add the leek and celery root and cook over medium until the leek is wilted.  Add the garlic and sambal and cook for a minute or two.  Sprinkle the flour into the skillet and stir and scrape with a wooden spatula for about a minute.  Add the stock a little at a time, stirring and scraping to deglaze the pan and dissolve the flour.  Add salt and pepper to taste.

Sprinkle half the cheese curds over the potatoes and kraut.  Top with gravy.  Wash the skillet and heat it with a bit of butter.   Fry the egg sunny-side-up, along with the tomatoes, jalapeno, and shallot.  Place the egg and tomatoes on top of the gratin, and sprinkle on the other half of the curds.  Place in the preheated oven until the cheese is melted.  Remove, top with the jalapeno, shallot and any fat remaining in the pan.  Open a beer, eh?  Dig in.

"One Can Dine Very Well on Potatoes"

You travel to France to see the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, to sip an espresso at a sidewalk café and munch on tangy saucisson sec while you quaff a glass of Beaujolais in view of the vineyard from which it sprung.  You travel for the expected sights and pleasures, but of course it's the unexpected encounters that make a trip truly memorable.

I think of our visit to a tourist office in the town of Villefranche, in Beaujolais.  We came in speaking French, Mary in the lead--or perhaps I went first, to make Mary look good by comparison.  The petite, dark-haired woman working there listened to our request for info on restaurants and wineries in the area, and scurried about the office amassing a pile of brochures and pamphlets.  She and Mary chatted while the woman reached into cabinets and leafed through stacks of materials.  The woman seemed distracted, and was becoming more animated, even agitated, all the time.

When finally it appeared that she might burst with excitement, she overcame that deep-seated Gallic reserve which makes it nearly impossible to ask a direct question of a stranger, and dared to ask us where we were from.  We said we were American.  Not French at all?  Not a bit.  Alors.  What had the woman flustered was that she couldn't place Mary's form of French; her accent was so good, she thought she must be French, but....  The implication was that her grammar didn't quite match the accent.  What she finally concluded, she told us, was that Mary must have been a French woman who had moved to America, and forgotten how to speak French! It was probably the most endearingly backhanded compliment the woman could have offered.  And after that dish of quenelles de brochet has faded in memory, and the Delacroix and David and Géricault we admired in the Louvre start to blur together, that's the sort of landmark of a trip that stays with you for years and years.

The title of today's post comes from another such encounter, during our first trip to France in 2001.  We went in early October, less than a month after the September 11 attacks, and shortly after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan.  This was in that honeymoon phase when much of the world drew together in sympathy with America over the shock and horror of those events.  I can't recall how many French people spontaneously mentioned the 9-11 attacks, and expressed their condolences, and incidentally thanked us, retrospectively, for America's role in saving France during World War II.  The French have a longer historical memory than we have (who doesn't?), and it was remarkable to be the recipients of this kind of outpouring of emotion, simply because we were American.

Well, the Frenchman who inspired today's post wasn't quite so sentimental.  We met him about a week into our trip, which started in Brittany and took us down the Atlantic coast to the mouth of the Loire, then up that splendid river into the Touraine, the area around the city of Tours.  We wound up staying a few days near Chaumont sur Loire, home to a lesser chateau, which at any rate we were only able to view from behind the locked gates, à cause de la grève--"because of the strike," the public workers' rolling strike over...I don't recall what. A cause de la grève we couldn't visit the chateaux, à cause de la grève we couldn't get into the Rodin museum. etc.  It became the tagline to our trip, not that we were much put out.

But with the chateau in Chaumont closed, we were looking for amusement, so we went to the tourist office in town--which also served as baguette depot on days when the boulangerie was closed.  There we met M. Guérand, in his early 30s I'd guess, longish dirty blonde hair and a three-day beard, cowl-neck sweater--so very French looking.  If he didn't have a Gauloise perched on his lower lip at all times, he should have.  Typical he was, in appearance at least, but not your typical tourist office worker in almost every other respect.  He wasn't from the area and didn't really know it very well.  He was from Paris, a graphic designer, unemployed, and they'd shipped him out here to the boondocks to fill a vacancy at the tourism office.  Waving at the rack of brochures was about as helpful as he could be in helping us find lodging for the night.  And as for sights worth seeing, well, in his view, one thing was as good as another. Merci, bien.

But we got to talking, about...just about everything.  He was pretty bored, so little tourist traffic in the area, since it was the off season, and à cause de la grève.  And probably Mary and I were just a wee bit sick of each other's exclusive company after many days on the road.  We spoke mostly in French, as his English was poor, and we covered 9-11 and its immediate aftermath, the Afghanistan invasion, the American media and its lack of intellectual depth (when we got home I sent him a package of the "better" U.S. current affairs magazines, to show him there was some intelligent life in America, and never got a reply).  It got philosophical at some point, as we pondered together why so many people spent their lives chasing after money, and never stopping to realize that money is just a medium, not an end in itself, and if you thought it was an end in itself, you could never have enough to be satisfied.  Deep stuff.  He also confided to us that he really could see no point to existence itself.  Shrug.  Fire up a Gauloise....

Eventually we came back around to our immediate needs:  a place to sleep that night, somewhere to eat.  By sheer luck we pulled a brochure that led us to a very odd but perfectly wonderful auberge, Chateau de la Haute Borde.  As for dinner, well, there were some restaurants in town, but this was Monday, and most were closed.  Furthermore, he wasn't really supposed to recommend specific restaurants, and anyway, he didn't eat out much.  He didn't care about food, himself, and seemed slightly exasperated with his countrymen and -women for their obsession with this trivial chore, feeding oneself.  To top it off, here in the land of charcuterie, in a sea of rillettes and rillons and foie gras, he was a vegetarian.  It was a healthier and more humane sort of existence.

Pause.

"I find that one can dine very well on potatoes."

He must have said it in French, but I have no idea how to construct that sentence.  We understood, we nodded.  We thanked him and said how much we had enjoyed our conversation, and made our way out into a gorgeous October afternoon in the storied Val de la Loire.  After checking in to La Haute Borde and confirming that their restaurant was closed, we drove into the city of Amboise and enjoyed a splendid dinner at a restaurant called La Comédie, where local young people came for pizza, and we ate sausage, duck, rabbit, as well as gratin dauphinoise--so yes, we dined very well on potatoes, among other regional delights.

Another thing you learn from travel, a cliché perhaps, but not a dreary one, is that sometimes it's the destination that delights, but often it's more about the journey.  An old verity appropriate to this shaggy dog story (histoire drôle sans queue ni tête!) about a dinner inspired by pommes de terre, though not composed exclusively of them.

I dug our potato bed this week, and I knew we must dine on them.  I plucked the first brussels sprouts from the garden, too.  Those things, along with some beautiful cippolini-type onions from the market we wrapped up in foil--a little salt and oil in the sprouts and potatoes--and into the coals of a fading fire they went.

Foraging in the fridge I found a piece of pork belly that I had brined as for bacon, but roasted in the oven instead of smoking.  To add variety to the plate, and for the hell of it, I put a couple of eggs in the coals for ten minutes at the very end.  I've never done eggs this way before, and they came out beautifully--yolk sunny yellow and set, white silky, not a hint of sulfurishness about them.

Then cheese, since we are in Dairyland--Marieke gouda both aged and smoked, Roth-Kase gruyère-style.  Hope butter, a sort of creme fraiche ersatz made by combining Cedar Summit cream and goat yogurt, some minced shallot added to that.  Pickles, since this was a sort of faux raclette meal.

This is how we dine on potatoes around here, and we dined very well, indeed.  Happy travels to all.


Text and photos copyright 2012 by Brett Laidlaw

A Shoulder to Cry For

We were planning a Mother's Day gathering at Mary's mom's house, around a dozen people, and we were in charge of the meat and potatoes.  A nice long-cooked pork shoulder came immediately to mind, but when I started looking at the offerings in the meat case at the excellent Seward Co-op all I was seeing were smallish shoulder roasts.  I went to the counter and asked the friendly Seward butcher--I'm pretty sure it was Karl, with whom I've chatted a few times, though we haven't been formally introduced [yes, it's Karl Gerstenberger; see his comment below]--I asked Karl if they had a whole pork shoulder in the back.  He said, yeah, he thought they did, but it was...big.  How big?  Well, let's see, said Karl. 

He went in the back and returned with a piece of meat of truly Flintstonian proportions (Pastures A'Plenty pork, I assume).  Once he took the shank out, I think it was still around 15 pounds.  I said:

"I'll take it.  I'm cooking for a crowd on Mother's Day."

"You're good to your mother," said Karl.

"Mother-in-law," said I.

"You're really good to your mother-in-law."

Well, I have a pretty great mother-in-law (I have a great mother, too, but she lives too far away: Hi, Mom!  Wish you could have been there...).  Karl asked what I was going to do with it, and I said I thought I'd just cook it a really long time, basting with cider.  We discussed the question of smoke, so good with this cut of meat, and I said I might do that.  The initial thought was more of a braise, but the meat itself dictated the final method:  I simply did not have a  pan large enough to braise a hunk of porcine exquisiteness that large.  Karl said he wanted to see pictures, and I said I could do that.  Hence, pictures:

Cooking the pork shoulder turned out to be an interstate affair--started Saturday evening at Bide-A-Wee in the Wisconsin countryside with a liberal salt and peppering, that's all.  We don't have a fridge there, but it dropped off to refrigerator temperature as evening came on, so the pork spent the night in the car.

In the morning, bright and early, I started a fire of oak and apple wood.  I browned the meat on the grill:

Then transferred it into this makeshift oven/smoker constructed of cinder blocks and pieces of some old farm implement we found in our woods:

After about four hours in the smoke the meat was not nearly done, but it had absorbed lots of smoke flavor. 

We packed up and headed back to Saint Paul, where the pork went into a 350 oven for another four hours.  I basted frequently throughout the cooking with some of our hard apple cider sweetened just a tad with maple syrup.  Only in the last hour of cooking did it really start to give up juices which, mixed with the cider baste, made a superb pan jus.

Mary made some biscuits.  I put together a potato gratin with a wild touch of sautéed ramps and blanched nettles mixed in--less rich that a gratin dauphinoise, the liquid was whole milk and chicken stock, and I tossed a bit of flour with the sliced potatoes and flavorings.

As we were getting ready to pack up and head over to Willie and Don's, I looked over the food waiting on the stove and said to Mary:

"Hey, look:  We made ham and scalloped potatoes!"

The meat was beyond, the potatoes, too, and the rest of the potluck was wonderful, as well.  A Mother's Day to remember.

Be good to your mother every day, and be good to yourselves, too.

Cheers, all~ Brett

October Garden

This is my potato harvest for 2010, from our Saint Paul garden. It's not a lot. But then, I didn't do much to get it. I decided to try the "vertical" approach to earth apple cultivation, where you plant pretty intensively in an enclosed area--like a cylinder of chicken wire, say--then keep adding soil, compost, straw, leaves, etc., as the plants grow up. At the end of the year, so I'm told, if all goes well, you just remove the enclosure and a great wealth of spuds tumbles out before you.

It didn't quite work out that way for me, but as I say, I can't complain--I devoted a three-by-three foot area of the garden to it; I planted whatever sprouty things I had left over in the cellar last spring; I added new material to the bin a couple of times, but when it got to be a hassle, I quit. As a result, my "vertical" potato tower loomed at least, oh, six inches?, from the ground by season's end.

Meanwhile, the wire enclosure served as a cucumber trellis. So I'm okay with a fairly meager harvest. As a result of over-planting, I got a lot of really small potatoes, little thumbnail-size spudlets that make you understand why the Chinese name for potatoes translates as "earth beans." I'm going to make an end-of-the-year new potato salad with those, tossing them with well-fried shallots and fried sage leaves, cider vinegar and sunflower oil--wicked local and seasonal.



It's been an odd gardening year for us, mostly because of our back-and-forth Minne'Sconsin life this summer. I finally planted a small garden at Bide-A-Wee in late July, but with no water or other amenities, making use of all that land and rich soil has been difficult. Everything we do at Bide-A-Wee is extremely labor-intensive--satisfying, but time-consuming. We're hoping to move more of the gardening out there next year.

At the same time, my city garden went woefully neglected this year. My weeding forays were strategically spaced enough that the garden was not completely subsumed, but the slugs got the upper hand in the bean plots, the carrots took three seedings before anything grew, some of my cucumbers never sprouted at all (or came up and were instantly eaten).... It was that kind of year.

And yet: The kale plants I've ignored all year are flourishing, my leeks are abundant, the pole beans are still giving (and have produced an interesting Blue Lake/Romano hybrid...). A late planting of carrots is coming along well, the tomatoes produced plenty in the very warm late summer. From where I'm sitting now, it's all good. Out at Bide-A-Wee it's Indian Summer, as we had a good frost in the last week of September. In the city I guess it's just a summer reluctant to depart.

But my recipes to work up for the week ahead include cider-braised pork shoulder, chicken in cider vinegar (maybe get some of my potatoes into that), delicata squash stuffed with a ground lamb-apple-breadcrumb mixture. Pretty autumnal stuff.

I'm off to the kitchen. I leave you with this oddity from the potato patch:



Text and photos copyright 2010 by Brett Laidlaw