Smokey Deer

We’ve been on a steady venison diet here lately, thanks to one happy occurrence—the generous gift of a leg of venison from a friend—and one less fortunate one—the freezer dying on our spare fridge in the basement.  The venison had been in our freezer since it was passed along to me last fall, and as I was going to have to thaw it out all at once, I was waiting for the right moment.  But sometimes you choose your moment, and sometimes it is thrust upon you.  Hence, necessity being the mother of invention and all that, I got to work processing.  I was not a very experienced deer meat cook when I walked upstairs with that dripping, leg-shaped package; I’m a much more confident one now.

In the last three weeks I’ve prepared venison goulash, seared rye-crusted medallions, and that pan roast, which I’ve put to use in numerous ways.  But by far the most interesting and delectable preparation was this smoked venison “pastrami”.

I started by breaking the leg down into its component muscle groups.  Not all cuts of meat consist of a single muscle, of course—many are cross-sections of several groups.  But I don’t have a meat saw, and taking it apart at the seams, as it were, was the easiest, most logical thing to do.  I wound up with about a pound and a half of the dense meat from the shank, and several nice lean pieces from the upper leg, each around a pound and a half, also.  What looked at first like an enormous hunk of deer flesh yielded 8 or 9 pounds of usable meat—oh, and another pound-plus of trimmings, which the dogs greatly enjoyed.

To see what I was dealing with, I sliced off a small piece from each chunk and fried them briefly to assess the flavor and texture.  There were variations—this one a little more tender, this one a bit livery, etc.—but all were relatively tasty and tender.  They were, in effect, no different from something like the sirloin or top round cuts of beef.  The shank meat was destined for goulash.  From the other pieces I selected one to do the pan roast, and set a long, tenderloin-shaped cut aside to make medallions, and the last piece, more or less rectangular and about two-inches thick in the middle, I decided to smoke.

I cured it with a dry rub, and went for some fairly aggressive seasonings.  Here’s the recipe (chalkboard paint is fun…):

Hua jiao, once again, is Sichuan pepper, in this case the dry-roasted and ground up kind.  Ginger is the dry spice, chile a dried red one.  I used locally produced maple sugar, but you could substitute brown sugar in the same amount, or maple syrup, say 1 ½ tablespoons.  I massaged the meat with the seasonings and stuck it in the fridge for a couple of days, turning it several times.  Not a lot of liquid came off. 

Then I smoked it in my trusty Meco grill for about two hours at about 225, and I used wild black cherry as the main smoking wood, something I haven’t tried before. The end result was a delightful confluence of happenstance and experiment. I had no idea what the final product would look or taste like.  It smelled fantastic coming off the grill, and when I cut into it I was amazed at the color.  The taste is deep, layered, mysterious, and wild, but with a delicate texture that makes it seem refined, as well.  Really cool stuff.  What it reminded me of most was pastrami, which is smoked corned beef, so I guess that makes sense.

I have cooked slices to serve with eggs and polenta, and that was good, but I think it’s best straight up, on a slice of toasted country bread.  The sauce gribiche variation I came up with to accompany it doesn’t detract.  This is a really good time of year to dip into the pickle pantry for fresh and crunchy flavors.  The rhubarb pickles I made last summer have mellowed really nicely.  The sauce is composed of:

A grated hard-cooked egg

Dollop of Hellmann’s mayonnaise

A minced pickled ramp and a little of the pickling brine

Same amount minced pickled rhubarb

6 or 7 minced milkweed bud “capers”

A half teaspoon or so of sambal

I’ll run down the other preparations in another report.  All were worth recreating.

Text and photos copyright 2013 by Brett Laidlaw

Pan Roasting, Woodstove Style

Pan-roasted: it’s one of those menu descriptors that I always find appealing, like flame-broiled, wok-seared, fire-grilled. Maybe it has something to do with the muscular combination of noun and verb; maybe it’s the hyphen. The succinct combination is somehow far more appetizing than “roasted in a pan.” Whatever the source of that allure, if there’s a pan-roasted striped bass, pan-roasted duck breast, or pan-roasted double-cut pork chop on the menu, that’s what I’m ordering.

 Never mind that I’ve never been fully certain exactly what pan-roasted means, though I had an idea. So I looked it up, and found that the generally accepted definition involves starting a dish—usually a piece of meat—on the stovetop, searing it in a skillet or sauté pan, then finishing the cooking in a moderate oven. The idea is that the enveloping heat of the oven will finish the cooking more evenly than if you just left the pan on the burner. In some cases—that double-cut pork chop, for instance—I can see the logic. In others—the piece of fish—I think it’s probably more a case of menu puffery; once that fish fillet is browned on both sides, it’s practically done cooking. It really doesn’t require roasting. That doesn’t mean I’m not still a sucker for pan-roasted salmon with a ramp beurre blanc and nettle flan.

 All that being said, the kind of pan-roasting I’m talking about here is a method that doesn’t use the oven at all, but is ideal for woodstove or campfire cookery. And it elevates the importance of the pan, which should ideally be cast iron. The method evolved by happenstance, over years of cooking on the Bide-A-Wee woodstove, and really gelled in my mind with all the cooking we’ve been doing over the last few weeks on the new stove. It combines the qualities of the cast iron with the moderate, persistent heat of the woodstove. The results are savory, rustic, just the kind of thing you want to eat on a winter evening.

Now, I know some of the skeptics among you are going to say: You’re cooking stuff in fat in a fry pan on a stove top. How is this different from frying? Answer: It’s not. Except, when we talk about frying, I think it generally implies a fairly high heat, a larger amount of fat, a shorter cook time. You could call this low, slow frying, but in my mind the technique has more in common with pan-roasting, so I’m going with that. It’s a bit like the question of when something turns from a braise into a stew, from a stew into a soup.

Thelma Sanders Sweet Dumpling at harvest time

The two preparations I have here—acorn squash, a venison leg roast—are ideal examples of foods that respond well to this method. Both require a fairly long cooking time, and both benefit from long exposure to the hot—but not too hot!—pan. And in the case of the venison, there are beautiful drippings left to turn into a pan sauce (another of those simple yet supremely appetizing phrases).

The same squash, up from the root cellar a few months later; a wee bit wrinkled, still delicious

Given all that introduction, the method itself is pretty simple: for the squash, halve it, clean it, cut it into slices. With an acorn type, just go between the scallops, and with other kinds, make roughly 1-inch thick slices. What I used here was an acorn type called Thelma Sanders Sweet Dumpling—how charismatic is that? This has a fairly thin skin, which in fact is mostly edible by the end of cooking. The bottom, hollow part of a butternut also works well for this, and has nearly as tender a skin, once cooked. Delicata types would also work well. I would avoid drier types of squash with thicker rinds, such as buttercup.

So, you heat your cast iron skillet, and add some fat. Duck fat is beautiful, and my first choice for this. Rendered fat from excellent bacon is another good choice. Otherwise, the cooking oil of your choice, or clarified butter. You only need about a tablespoon. Add the squash slices and cook them on one side for 7 or 8 minutes. Turn them over and repeat. Keep turning at intervals until the squash is nicely brown all around and tender to taste. You could add a crushed garlic clove or a couple sprigs of thyme or rosemary along the way. At the end, season with coarse salt and freshly ground pepper. A dusting of paprika or espelette pepper would also be excellent, and ground Sichuan pepper (hua jiao) is a nice complement to sweet squash. Other possible finishes: a drizzle of pumpkin seed oil or melted butter, some chopped fresh herbs, finely minced garlic, or the the garlic, lemon zest, parsely combo called gremolata. Which makes me think that you could turn this into a vegetarian main course by serving the squash slices over pasta. In which case I imagine you’d want some excellent grated cheese to finish it off. I think I have a new dish to try out….

For the venison: this piece of leg was about a pound and a half, and nearly two inches thick, an excellent candidate for this kind of pan roasting. I salted and peppered it liberally. Heated a bit of sunflower oil in the pan, and added the meat. Let it cook 8 minutes per side, turning several times. It cooked a little more than 30 minutes, in the end. After the first turns I added a couple crushed cloves of garlic, a broken up dried red chile, and a couple sprigs of rosemary. As the meat browned and cooked very gently, and the aromatics released in the pan, the house came to smell amazing.

The meat came out a beautiful medium rare, and tender as can be.  We didn't eat it right away, but a couple of nights later I sliced it very thin and piled the slices on top of a piece of homemade grainy sourdough.  I then doused it with a sauce--a kind of jus--I had made by deglazing the pan with red wine and water.  I extended the jus with some chicken stock, and because it was quite spicy from the chile, I added a little maple syrup to balance the heat.  I also stirred some powdered cocoa into the syrup--a sudden inspiration--and the combination was terrific.

You don't necessarily need a woodstove for this kind of cooking.  The keys, I think, are the cast iron pan, the low and slow cooking time, and the appropriate ingredients.  It's a really mellow way of cooking, and foods prepared this way can often be made ahead and reheated--an ideal way to stockpile some made-ahead meals on a winter weekend afternoon.

Text and photos copyright 2013 by Brett Laidlaw

Wood Fired Up

We closed on the new old  house on January 30 of last year, at the title company's office in Menomonie, a 25-minute drive from the house (as well as from the Bide-A-Wee cabin).  Roughly 30 minutes after the last document had been inked, the last hand shaken, Mary was in the first floor bedroom tearing out the ancient, filthy shag carpeting to reveal fir floorboards that had been painted around the outer two feet (roughly) of the room--presumably an area rug had once covered the center of the room. (While this initial deconstruction was going on, I was moaning under the down comforter at Bide-A-Wee, victim of a stomach bug that had made the closing an excruciating experience; I don't think I'll ever eat seafood sausage again....)

With that initial un-rugging of the bedroom began a year-long cascade of projects that involved wood floor refinishing and installation, taking down an acoustic tile ceiling and a half-wall, paneling of walls and a ceiling, putting on gutters, moving an exterior stairway, replacing an exterior door, finishing dry wall, relining a flue, replacing light fixtures, building a garage, and painting, painting, painting, painting.  A lot of the work we hired out.  Our move to Ridgeland has been very, very good for the local economy.

About three weeks ago, just shy of our one-year anniversary in the house, we marked the culmination of Phase One with the installation of a woodstove, a Pacific Energy Summit model.  It is simply the greatest thing ever.  As I sit at the desktop computer in my office writing this, I'm yearning to be back down in the living room, gazing at the fire--in front of which the dogs have installed themselves more or less permanently, probably wondering in their flame-warmed dreams why on earth it took us so long to welcome this marvelous object into our home.  I feel pretty much the same way.  We're taking the rest of the winter off from major home reno projects; a kitchen re-do looms when warm weather returns, and that will require us to gather a great deal of strength and resolve.

Let me count the ways we love our woodstove:  Well, for starters, who doesn’t love looking at a fire?  The Haggis woodstove we have at Bide-A-Wee is excellent in many ways, but you can’t watch the fire unless you leave the door open, which is dangerous.  The new stove has this big glass door, perfect for fire viewing.  I find it calming, thrilling, and mesmerizing, all at once.  In the evenings I tend to forget we even have a TV upstairs (though I remain a devoted People's Court and Jeopardy fan).

 

Two, it is age-old technology brought beautifully up to date.  A modern motor vehicle bears really no resemblance to a horse and buggy, except for the wheels.  Modern woodstoves look and work very much like their ancestors—indeed, some new ones are designed to look exactly like the vintage models—but they are much more efficient in every way.

Three, following from above, a woodstove is a pretty clean way to heat.  Wood is a renewable, sustainable, and local source of fuel, and new technology makes these stoves up to 80 percent efficient.  When it’s burning hot with good seasoned wood, you see no smoke from the chimney.  And the fuel to feed it travels all of a couple hundred yards to get here (oh, well, some of it did come a couple of miles, as we recently purchased a cord from our friend Tina, who has a several-years’ backlog of wood in her yard).  Wood is also a fairly carbon-neutral form of fuel; it does release carbon into the atmosphere, but only at a faster rate than was going to happen anyway, as the wood broke down out in nature.  I’ve been harvesting small dead oaks almost exclusively, basically just taking advantage of natural attrition before those trees fall to the soil and rot.  (However, I’m being sure to leave a good number of taller snags for wildlife habitat.)

The woodstove gives us total heating and cooking independence, as long as there’s wood in the box.  I think I mentioned that the house came with a wood furnace in the basement, which we’d been using up until we got the stove.  But even that depended on an electric fan to work properly.  The Summit has no moving parts, but the door.  If the power goes out we'll still be warm and well-fed; the electric pump won't work, so we we'll have no water, but that's a separate issue.

And:  it’s a handy clothes dryer, combined with a simple drying rack.  This also helps, a little, to humidify the dry winter air.

The woolens chest had gone a little musty, requiring wholesale scarf and mitten laundering.

It is fabulous to cook on.  You knew this was where we were headed, didn’t you?  I’ve always enjoyed cooking on Bide-A-Wee’s Haggis, even though it’s a much less substantial stove than this one.  The Summit has a nice wide, flat top, plus a warming ledge behind.  We start putting the stove to use first thing in the morning, boiling water for our tea in the red kettle.  It requires a little patience, since you don’t necessarily have high heat on demand after the fire has burned down overnight.  But I like that about it.  It seems fitting with the slow food type of cooking at which a woodstove excels. 

I’ve simmered chicken stock, and soup, and just last night a marvelously complex venison goulash.  I’ve also pan-roasted a venison leg roast, fried steaks, warmed duck confit and braised cabbage.  The cast iron pans work amazingly well with the steady, even heat of the woodstove.  Mary made pancakes a couple weeks ago that came out better than they have in ages—even browning, terrific height, and thorough, consistent doneness.  Slices of squash slowly browned to tenderness in some duck fat give new life to that root-cellar mainstay, of which even I, a dedicated squash fancier, have been growing a little tired.  Not when prepared this way.

Venison goulash bubbled gently for  hours, filling the house with amazing aromas.

You can’t really bake on it, although I have made dutch oven bread on the Haggis before, and you could certainly do other kinds of flatbreads.  Frittatas and slowly scrambled eggs come out just lovely.  I know it will be perfect for paella and jambalaya, I just haven’t had time to try those yet.

When we redo the kitchen we’ll put in a really nice range, for sure, probably a dual-fuel model with an electric convection oven—that’s what I’ve found to be the best for baking and roasting, though I don’t use the convection fan for bread.  But in the cool months, when the stove is lit, I know I’ll still do plenty of cooking there.

Onions slowly caramelize for the goulash, while a venison leg roast cooks with chile, rosemary, and garlic.  Our downstairs freezer died, so I had to process a whole deer leg all at once.

Oh, and a collateral benefit to the woodstove:  It introduced us to a new skill, laying tile.  We built the pad that the stove sits on, our first such project.  It was surprisingly easy, and really, really fun and satisfying.  I’m eager to do it again.

How we chose this stove:  we didn’t do a ton of research, but we did read up on on-line reviews, and talked to people in person and via our Tell-All and HRTI Share list-servs.  From an email shout-out we heard from numerous people, and nearly all of them had a different brand of stove—Pacific Energy, Jotul, Vermont Castings, etc.—and they all loved them.  I don’t think we got a single non-recommendation.  We picked the PE largely because Tina has this same model, and loves it.  Also, since the PE stoves are steel, not cast iron, they can be placed fairly close to combustible surfaces, within a few inches of the wall.  This allowed us to tuck it in the corner so it doesn’t overwhelm our living room.

In choosing the size, again, we had the benefit of Tina’s experience.  Her house is smaller than ours, and more compact, so we went with the same size she has, the big one, even though it’s said to heat 3000 square feet, and our house is right around 2000.  But those ratings don’t give you any sense of what sort of weather they’re calibrated for; the stoves are made in British Columbia, in a region where it doesn’t get nearly as cold as it does here.  And what we’ve found so far is this:  if the outside temperature is above 30, we don’t need to burn much wood to keep the house toasty.  When the high temps were barely topping zero for a week straight, we kept that baby stoked, and we were not roasted out of the house, by any means.

So that’s the woodstove report.  We couldn’t be more tickled with this new addition to the family.  We only await a visit from Lulu, our Nomenclature Tsarina, to properly assess its character and offer a suitable name.

We got the stove from Stoveworks, with stores in Rice Lake and Hayward.  They were great.

Charge Ahead, Fall Down, Get Up, Repeat (New Year's Wishes, 2013)

From our bedroom window looking north.

2013 came at us from Day One with reminders of what winter used to be like, could still be like, north of 45 degrees latitude in the center of a continental land mass.  The thermometer registered 18-below on New Year’s morning at 7:30, then actually dropped a couple more notches, stopping at minus-20 as the sun crept over the southeast hill.  I looked at the dial with some disbelief, but when I stepped outside and heard the deck boards creak and groan with a frigid lament under my feet, I believed (I have not over-indulged this holiday season, so I’m certain excess weight wasn’t the cause of this phenomenon).  Also my nose hairs went instantly crispy, and my still sleepy eyes were like to be glued shut if I had stayed outside a minute longer.

Odd thing was, the needle stayed put at -20 as the sun grew stronger; Mary eventually went out and gave the dial a tap, and it jumped up suddenly to near zero.  Who knows where we actually bottomed out?  Cold enough.  But it warmed enough by mid-morning that we (Mary and I, guests Martha and Tom ) got into our skiing togs and hit the trails.  A glorious day for it—with bright sun and little wind the exertions quickly warmed us.  Lily charged ahead of us over the crest of the hill and her pounding paws kicked up a flurry of powdery snow while her breath billowed out in a steamy cumulus, caught in the sun’s sharp near-solstice angle on the line where snow meets sky.

 

We skied over the hayfield hill, swooping down the eastern slope to the boundary with LeRoy and Shelly’s land, traversed back up to the top and came down toward the house through the old pasture.  I took the hill first, on a slightly different line than I had taken before, and as I came around the curve and over the knob with speed, I saw that divot, and I thought Oh, crud….  I believe I was airborne for a moment; then I was anything but.  Wipe out. It must have been impressive, but I don’t know if anyone saw.  I got up and shook it off; I was a little embarrassed, but more exhilarated.

Top of the hayfield hill.

One thing I’ve been trying to do a lot while skiing this year is to fall down.  I know that might sound odd, and counter to the general aim of skiing, but I feel that one of the best things a 54-year-old can do is to fall down in the snow—provided that he is able to get up again, of course.  The key is to not be afraid of falling—charge ahead, fall down, get up, repeat.

That’s going to be the theme of 2013 for me.  I’m avoiding the resolutions game.  Except that I have already publicly resolved to eat more Wisconsin cheese.  And I want to learn to play Johnny B. Goode on the Ibanez Artcore electric guitar that Mary surprised me with on my birthday last October, best present ever.

Best present ever, the Ibanez "Blue Beauty"

But back to the ski trail—and just to digress here a bit: I have discovered this winter that one key to perfect bliss for me is to be able to step out my back door and ski in my very own woods; it’s a luxury, for sure, but one that I appreciate fully.

 

I took Martha and Tom through the woods to the northern tip of our land while Mary stayed out in the field (she’s particularly averse to trees on skis as she’s still just picking up the sport).  The woods trails could use some improvements, as there are a lot of downed trees and some brushy patches with no clear way through, but it is so quiet and beautiful there in the snow, skiing is really just a way to get there.  One charming thing I’ve noticed this winter is that there are often deer tracks running right down the ski trails—I don’t know if this is because the deer and I share an intuition about the best way through the woods, or if the deer are cleverly taking advantage of our efforts to lessen their energy output in the cold snowy weather.  Or perhaps they’re curious about these odd emanations in the snow, and follow them wondering what sort or creature they will lead to.  At any rate, it creates a pleasant feeling of simpatico with the animals, like, yeah, we all live here together.  We often see deer at a distance, in the woods at dusk, but I’ve noticed the hoofprints following the ski tracks nearly right up to our back door.

Après-ski, a warming lunch, and Mary and Martha sat on the couch knitting while Tom and I flipped through the Fäviken cookbook they brought us as a gift, wondered about just how tasty would be a tea brewed from forest leaves that have “almost turned into soil,” and vowed that we would mature our own cider vinegar in a charred, hollowed-out stump, so help us Odin.  (Fäviken is a Swedish restaurant on the cutting edge of atavistic Nordic cuisine, employing ultra-local ingredients like, yes, old leaves, moss, lots of other foraged stuff that is very far removed, indeed, from the typical European luxury ingredients like truffles and foie gras.  Some—well, a lot—of the recipes read like parodies of obsessive-compulsive chefdom in pursuit of the hottest trend, and yet I find the idea of digging down (literally and figuratively) into northern culinary roots really fascinating.  It’s the very idea I’m slowly developing for my next concerted project, as I look for emblematic foods, methods, and recipes that speak compellingly of our place.)

Tom and Martha took their leave mid-afternoon, to get back to town before full dark, and I took a nap.  I just zonked out, and woke feeling as if I were getting sick.  But I willed myself out of bed, put on my Swedish Army surplus wool knickers, whistled for Lily (Annabel, 14-and-a-half, pretty much just putters around the yard in the winter), pulled on the ski boots, clicked into the bindings, and headed back up the hill just as it was turning to dusk.  I followed the path along the edge of the field and then, near the top of the hayfield hill, turned left and worked a traversing course up to the highest point on our property, stopping along the way to remove a section of barbed wire.  I got to the top of the hill where a serious deer stand—ours, inherited—is slowly going back to nature, the plywood walls delaminating one by one.  Then I skied out to the tip of the promontory I romantically think of as “The Grande Esplanade”; from here there is a marvelous view of our house and outbuildings far below, and the valley and ridgelines running off to the south and west.

 

It was pretty much dark now.  I took in the view, and the silence, only enhanced by the bit of breeze that rattled some frigid branches.  A very light snow was falling, but I couldn’t really see it, only felt the flakes touch my face.  With my literary education and inclinations, I couldn’t help thinking of Frost, “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening,” and that was okay.  Whose woods these were, I knew.  The woods were lovely, dark, and deep, but I did not have miles to go before I slept.

In our woods going up is often easier than going down—certainly less dangerous.  But coming back down last night I found the line I’d been looking for all winter:  a long traverse of the big swale, between the oaks and maples, avoiding deadfalls and stumps and hidden barbed wire, so that I made it from near the top to the edge of the woods in one exhilarating run, in control but with enough pace to make it interesting.  It felt like an accomplishment, as if I’d worked out a writing problem, and it made me feel like, yeah, I will learn how to play Johnny B. Goode, the coolest song ever.

Then I skied to the top of the hayfield hill and finished with a lovely downhill run with a decent telemark turn, and as I glided into the yard I thought for some reason of Hemingway, something reminded me of a story from In Our Time.  I can’t help it; I’m made that way.

For New Year’s dinner Mary and I raided the fridge for leftovers—a couple of shrimp fritters that were excellent reheated and dabbed with mayonnaise; home-smoked duck breast and its accompanying sauce, so luxurious served on toast with a carrot slaw, “leftovers” seems a wholly inappropriate term.  Then the last remnants of some excellent cheese, Uplands Pleasant Ridge Reserve, and aged Marieke gouda (off to a good start on one resolution…).  We were both weary, we didn’t talk about too much, but it was pleasant.  We sat in our usual living room chairs and noshed.  Mary went to bed around ten; I practiced Johnny B. Goode for a while.  I’ve got about two-thirds of the intro down pretty good.

From my office/spare bedroom window; note Tom (L) and Martha's (R) herringbone ski tracks up the hill, impressive.

Thinking about the events of last year makes my head spin—we bought a house, sold a house, left the city for the country, plunged into home renovations, learned to live in a whole new place, embraced it; my mother went into a nursing home, had to leave her old life behind for one with not promising prospects, but she’s doing okay, has such a positive attitude, she sustains us all; our old dog Annabel had a major health crisis last winter (because of various and numerous fabric items she consumed), and last summer, a seizure, so she’s now on a daily dose of doggy downers; Mary became a country-to-city commuter; book events crescendoed in the fall then completely tailed off (don’t forget, I’m available for birthday parties, bar/bat mitzvahs, bachelorettes, etc.!). 

I hardly fished, barely hunted.  I found morels in our yard, chanterelles where I expect to find them, and missed out on most of the other mushrooms.  Our garden produced a lot of squash, but our apple trees bore little fruit.  We ate exceedingly well, and I grew rather tired of taking pictures of food, or looking at them.  Cutting, hauling, and splitting oak logs to feed our wood furnace has become a consuming concern for me; we could turn on the LP furnace, but to me that feels like a moral failure.  I’m heading up the hill with the chain saw and the ice fishing sled this afternoon.

Not the easiest way to heat a  house, but among the more interesting.

What’s past is past (or not, ask Faulkner), and I’m taking a clean slate approach.  Charge ahead, fall down, get up, repeat.  Focus on the possibilities; it’s never too late.  Resolutely avoid resolutions (except as noted).  Let conclusions present themselves.  Some of this applies to the future of Trout Caviar, as its five-year anniversary nears.   It’s usual to say something like, “Five years ago I never would have believed I’d be writing this damn thing five years later…”, but since, when I started this journal I didn’t put a term limit on it, it sort of makes sense that I’m still doing it, especially in light of the book, and all.

Which is to say:  I’m not sure about the future of Trout Caviar.  I ended the year in a bit of a slump, with only a brief, herring-induced bounce-back; I wonder how long the topic can remain fresh, or why, ultimately, I would keep at it.  I know I am not alone in this, since if you click on many of the sites in my “We Read These” list, you’ll find that there’s not much new to read on a lot of them.  It is probably melodramatic to say that I have seen the best blogs of my generation destroyed by madness, or that the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of a passionate intensity….  Well, melodramatic and derivative, and wrong.  If some of our comrades have fallen by the cyber-wayside, others have picked up the torch and race onward.

Nonetheless, what seems fairly clear to me is that the thrilling promise of a true “Internet community” is paling more than a little.  I’ll bet there are plenty of you reading this who have resolved to spend less time on-line, get off Facebook, give up Twitter.  Who doesn’t want to live her or his life more fully in the actual moment?  There’s good stuff to be gleaned from the Interwebs; it’s setting the limits that is tough.

I revile myself for caring about how many Twitter followers I have (300!), and I believe that the whole of social media creates a lot more heat than light, while at the same time, thanks to the “blogosphere” I’ve met lots of people who have enriched my life.  I’m not planning to crawl into a cave; or, if I do, I’ll be sure to bring my iPhone….

What I meant to say was:  Happy New Year.  The designation is arbitrary, sure, but nonetheless significant.  Marking passages is important, can lend clarity.  I hope your 2013 is filled with satisfaction and growth; that the people and things around you compel your interest, and that you spread it to others.  I wish you moments of calm reflection, bursts of inspiration.  Thanks for hanging around here.  It means a lot to me.

Cheers~ Brett

A Superior Supper

This was a sort of herring-inspired tapas supper, if you will, or perhaps smorgasbord would be more appropriate to northern provenance of the fish, and the Nordic twist I administered to a classic French preparation, fish quenelles.  Whatever you want to call it, a superior supper, indeed.

Quenelles de brochet, pike dumplings, is a standard in the cuisine of Burgundy and the northern Rhone.  Like most dumplings, it probably had humble origins--a way to use up bits of fish for the dumplings and the bones for the sauce.  But most of the quenelles recipes I'd encountered were from the haute cuisine end of things, exceedingly rich and fussy to make.  In these high-end versions, the fish was there to hold as much butter, cream, and eggs as possible.  The traditional lobster, shrimp, or crayfish sauce that anointed these ethereal pillows of poisson does not scrimp on the fat, either.  Which is okay with me, from time to time, but since we planned to sample a variety of dishes, I didn't want that much richness in the quenelles.

This was a preparation that had intimidated me for a long time--well, until last week, to be honest.  It seemed to have the potential to be phenomenally delicious, but the one time I tasted it in France, the dumplings were kind of rubbery, and fishy tasting, and the one time I tried to make it at home, following a New York Times recipe, was an expensive, extremely messy disaster--turned out the recipe in the paper was wrong, and my email prompted a correction, which was very small consolation, indeed.  I never made the corrected recipe.

I'm not sure what prompted me to try fish quenelles again--perhaps just to test the versatility of my splendidly fresh herring.  In one of Rick Stein's books I found the streamlined quenelle recipe I'd long been looking for.  This one used bread soaked in milk--a "panade"--to hold things together without too much butterfat.  Also, unlike every other quenelle recipe I had encountered, it did not ask you to push the fish paste through a sieve (how appetizing does that sound?!).  Before the days of the food processor, sieving the puree was probably necessary to achieve a smooth texture in the dumplings; modern technology has eliminated the need for that step, but a lot of French recipes have not caught up.  (Madeleine Kammen notes that she could never forget learning to make quenelles, pounding the fish in a mortar and pestle; she was always reminded by the painful bursitis in her shoulder....)

Although rich, most classic quenelle preparations make a dumpling that must be pretty bland.  There is rarely any seasoning besides salt and perhaps a bit of white pepper.  I wanted my dumplings to be flavorful independent of rich sauce, so I gave them strong, northern notes with apple cider vinegar, grain mustard, and shallot (and a nod to Mme Kammen with the pinch of quatre-épices, "confit spice," that I learned from one of her books; I have a tin of that in my spice drawer at all times).

Carrying on the Nordic theme, my chowder sauce is heavy on the hardy roots--rutabaga, parsnip, and celery root.  I toned down the smokiness of the bacon by first water-blanching the meat.  The sour cream and lemon added at the end of cooking gives this sauce a nice acid lift; it would be a bit flat without it.

Do not worry if you don't have herring caviar.  A garnish of chopped herbs would be nice, too--some snipped chives, perhaps, or a little dill.  I think thyme leaves would suit it, too.


While I was roasting my potato slices in duck fat for the caviar canapé, I added the "tails" of the parsnip and rutabaga, sliced in half the long way.  They made for a charismatic, savory garnish, and a very rustic-looking counterpoint to the elegant dumplings and roe.

For the other dishes in our Nordic tapas spread, Mary mixed leftover broiled herring with its homemade chile mayo accompaniment for a lovely canapé served on toast:

I combined smoked whitefish, apple, and roasted beets in a dressing of Smude sunflower oil, cider vinegar, some honey, about a quarter teaspoon of mustard seeds and a generous pinch each of caraway and cumin seeds, some shallot, I think.  A bit of a mess in the plate, but fresh and flavorful:

And then those luxurious rounds of duck-fat-roasted potatoes with sour cream and a liberal topping of the herring roe, home-cured:

I think we're going to start seeing more and more chefs exploring the possibilities of Lake Superior herring.  Anybody out there need a menu consultant?  I'm available....

Herring Quenelles with Nordic Chowder and Caviar

6 ounces skinless, boneless Lake Superior herring

1 tablespoon minced shallots

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

½ cup fresh bread crumbs

1/3 cup whole milk

1 teaspoon grain mustard

1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar

Pinch confit spice

1 egg

3/8 teaspoon salt

A few grinds of black pepper

2 tablespoons sour cream mixed with ¼ cup cream

Melt the butter in a small saucepan and add the shallots.  Just as the butter starts to sizzle, remove the pan from the heat and stir in the bread crumbs, then the milk.  Refrigerate until well chilled.

Cut or scrape away the line of brown-gray fat running down the herring fillets and discard.  Cut the fish into ½-inch cubes and place in the bowl of a food processer with the bread-shallot-milk mixture, the mustard, vinegar, confit spice, egg, salt, and pepper.  Process to a  very smooth puree, about 2 minutes.   Then, with the processor running, add the cream mixture and process just long enough to incorporate.  Refrigerate this mixture until you’re ready to make your quenelles.

Bring a saucepan of water to a simmer.

Using two kitchen tablespoons, shape quenelles, little football shapes, from the fish mixture.  They should be about 2 ½ inches long and just over an inch wide.  Poach the quenelles in the water, adjusting the heat to keep a gentle simmer, for 3 to 4 minutes, until they are firm.  Keep warm in a warm oven until ready to serve.

Root Vegetable Chowder

2 tablespoons each celery root, rutabaga, parsnip, and onion, in very small—less than ¼-inch—dice

1 ounce slab bacon, blanched in boiling water for 2 minutes, drained and minced

1 teaspoon butter or oil

2 teaspoons flour

½ cup fish, chicken, or vegetable stock

½ cup whole milk

Salt and pepper

2 tablespoons sour cream

Lemon juice

Herring caviar

Heat the bacon and butter in a small saucepan over medium heat, and as the bacon begins to render fat, add the vegetables.  Cook for about 3 minutes, until the onion becomes translucent.  Sprinkle the flour over the vegetables, stirring with a wooden spatula.  Combine the stock and milk and slowly add to the pan, scraping with the spatula to deglaze.  Add a couple of good pinches of salt and a few grinds of pepper.  Simmer for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. 

The chowder can be made two or three days ahead to this stage, and finished just before serving.  When you’re ready to serve, heat the chowder and stir in the sour cream and a squeeze or two of lemon juice, if you like.  Taste for salt and pepper and add more if needed.  Ladle some chowder into shallow soup bowls, place the warm quenelles atop the chowder.  Sprinkle herring caviar here and there on top of the chowder and the quenelles.  Serve.

Text and photos copyright 2012 by Brett Laidlaw

Fresh

Having stooped to the depths of writing about avocadoes in this journal supposedly devoted to northern foods, it was probably in everyone’s best interests that I took a little break. The hiatus was not planned, just happened, as each time I considered a possible topic for a post, my inner editor said, “Meh.” I needed some fresh inspiration, and I got it from a road trip that Mary and I took up to the South Shore of Lake Superior (aka “The Cheesehead Riviera”; I just made that up...), destination Halvorson’s Fisheries in Cornucopia, Wisconsin.

There we watched the herring boats come in on a chill but beautiful afternoon. They had to break through a couple of inches of ice in the harbor—the trip was a preview of things to come, too, as our northward drive took us from the dusting of Dunn County snow to nearly a foot along the shore. We loaded a cooler with fresh off the boat herring—including several whole fish that yielded a pile of roe—along with smoked lake trout and whitefish. 

Lake Superior herring is an under-appreciated, misunderstood fish.  Its reputation suffers, I think, from its being confused with other fish known as herring to which it is not, in fact, closely related. The Lake Superior herring, Coregonus artedii, is more closely related to trout and salmon than it is to the saltwater herrings so well known in northern Europe. It’s a reasonable surmise that Scandinavian and German immigrants in the northland mistook this freshwater fish that schools in vast numbers for the ocean fish they knew from home—there are, indeed, superficial resemblances in size and color. And when you consider that for many people, their main association with herring is with the pickled variety, perhaps of indifferent quality, there’s a general reluctance to embrace the lake herring as the superb and versatile food fish that it is.

 As for the name confusion, lake herring is variously known as cisco, bluefin, and, where it occurs in smaller lakes, tullibee. There have been efforts in some circles to “rebrand” lake herring as cisco, but I doubt that is likely to gain much momentum—especially since I’ve seen smoked herring and smoked cisco resting side by side in the cooler case in lakeside fish shops over the years. There’s little consensus on what to call what, it seems, at least at the local level.  So I don't think the term herring is going away.  We just need to work on spreading the word about what a delightful fish it is to cook with.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve prepared herring in a half dozen ways, and I’m still not tired of eating it. Last night a herring fillet went into a Sichuan-inspired dish with fermented vegetables and tofu in a hot bean sauce. On the our first night back from Corny, I simply fried fillets in a cornmeal dusting and served them with a crunchy, savory garnish of fried bacon, leek, and jalapeno, with a splash of apple cider beurre blanc. Other nights I fried chunks in a tempura-like batter for the best fish tacos I’ve ever eaten; broiled it and served it with a chile-laced mayonnaise; whizzed it up in the FP to make herring quenelles, fish dumplings that I served in a chowder-inspired sauce; and we snacked on the salted herring roe atop rounds of garden potatoes roasted in duck fat, with a dollop of sour cream.

That roe, by the way, is where the real money is for the Lake Superior commercial fisheries, Maureen Halvorson told me. Completing the ironic herring circle, it is shipped to Scandinavia, where it is considered a delicacy—even though it comes from a fish that does not exist anywhere near those northern European shores.

Here are a few more shots from our quick, fishy trip to Corny:

The beach at Corny, "The Cheesehead Riviera"

Cornmeal-dusted pan-fried lake herring with crunchy garnish, cider beurre blanc

It just occurred to me on this trip that they wear orange jumpsuits so they'll be easy to see if they fall overboard....

This was not the first time the three-hour drive to the South Shore was a time trip--that short distance often takes you to another season on the shore.

Waiting for the herring boats

Ice on the deck

The South Shore herring fishery is thriving; Halvorson's added another boat this year, bringing the fleet to four.

"...in the rooms of her icewater mansions...".

Text and photos copyright 2012 by Brett Laidlaw

There and Here (Avocado with Black River Blue Dressing)

In spite of my mother’s best efforts to cultivate an avocado forest in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, in the 1960s and '70s, impaling the smooth round pits on toothpicks and suspending them in water-filled juice glasses on the kitchen window sill, I still have yet to taste a Minnesota- or Wisconsin-grown avocado.  Amazingly, those gargantuan seeds did sprout roots, then sent up spindly leaders, which produced a few leaves, and then…who knows their fate?  Perhaps a few got potted, but I don’t recall alligator pears drooping from any of Mom’s houseplants. So, no, avocadoes can’t be counted among the delights of local and seasonal eating in the northland.

Which does not mean that I don’t eat them.  I do.  Lots of them.  They’re among those non-local foods that are regulars in our kitchen, but which I rarely mention here, preferring to focus on the local, but perhaps that gives a weirdly skewed version of our diet.  I would say that probably 90 per cent of our diet is locally sourced—all our meat and most of our fish, all our grains except for rice, pretty much all our vegetables and fruits.  Dairy?  It would be kind of absurd to look outside America’s Dairyland for milk, cream, butter, and cheese, wouldn’t it?  

Still, I would find myself pinched in the kitchen without imported rice, lemon, olive oil, black pepper and other spices.  Our condiment cupboard is not terribly local, with its soy sauce, sambal, rice wine, sesame oil, canola oil, Chinese vinegar—though things have improved there with the relatively recent appearance of local pumpkin seed and sunflower oils; and I am going to figure out how to make my own sambal, with homegrown chiles, next year.  I rarely take a sip of orange juice anymore, and I think I might have forgotten how to peel a banana, but my morning cup is tea from afar, and I enjoy a cup of coffee every once in a while.  

In the pantry I find ketchup made from homegrown tomatoes, honey from hives a few miles down the road, wild blackberry jam distilled from Bide-A-Wee berries, and our very own maple syrup; there is pasta from North Dakota, but also from Italy, China, Japan, and Vietnam.  We should be producing good tofu in our region, but I’m not aware that any is made here.  It’s a staple ingredient in our house, the basis for one of our most common one-dish meals, Sichuan mapo doufu.  I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned that, nearly five years into writing Trout Caviar.  I should have.

My point here, I guess, is that even as I become more impressed, year by year, with the ever growing breadth, depth, and quality of our local food sources, I don’t agonize over trying to make x-percent of my diet local, and I don’t apologize if a drop of Coke passes my lips from time to time, or a lobster from a distant sea finds its way into my pot.  I think it’s fair to say that my kitchen is locally based, and globally garnished, as this salad supper of avocado with blue cheese dressing illustrates. The proportions might seem reversed here, but there are more local ingredients in this than imported.

Avocado, mayonnaise, and blue cheese has been one of my favorite combinations since way back in my vegetarian days.  It’s sort of a study in close textural contrasts with wonderfully diverse flavors.  For the dressing I combined these local ingredients:

Wisconsin Black River blue cheese (1/2 cup crumbled?)

Minnesota Cedar Summit cream (2 tablespoons?)

Minnesota Smude sunflower oil (1 tablespoon?)

Wisconsin Menomonie Farmers Market red bell pepper and red onion and Wisconsin celery root from the co-op (about a tablespoon each minced for the dressing, more thinly sliced for garnish)

Menomonie market garlic, a medium clove minced

And these imports:

Hellmann’s mayo (couple tablespoons)

Sambal oelek (about a teaspoon)

Squeeze of lemon juice (I sometimes wind up with naked lemons after the rind has been stripped off bit by bit to garnish martinis….)

A few grinds black pepper

Mix well and adjust seasoning with sambal, lemon, pepper, and thickness with cream and oil—it should just flow. Unless you’re an absolute salt fiend, added salt is not necessary.

Spoon over sliced avocado—or over poached or sautéed shrimp; a nice grilled steak; any kind of salad; a sliced pear or apple; a hearty pasta like penne or rigatoni.

Serve with toast (from bread made with my nearly 10-year old house leaven, MN and ND flours) spread with Minnesota Hope Creamery butter.  Or serve on toast.  Not a bad breakfast using morning-after dressing.

Eat locally, think globally; shop thoughtfully, cook vibrantly, and have fun.