Real Time Ribs and Cabbage 3

This recipe goes back to my mom's mom. It's a classic German preparation. The fancy formatting I think is thanks to some ancient computer recipe program that my brother had--I'm sure that was printed out at least a couple of decades ago. My mom would most often serve this with spareribs, too.




The apples, though wizened, are absolutely fine for a preparation like this. In fact, they've developed a ton of flavor and aroma sitting around getting wrinkled these past few weeks. No cosmetically perfect New Zealand grocery store specimen would even come close.

I used my trusty Benriner, Japanese mandoline, which made short work of the cabbage:



And the apples, which I shredded up skin and all (unusally pristine within, for Bide-A-Wee apples):



One small liberty I took with the recipe was to use some local maple sugar (from near Connorsville, Wisconsin), instead of white sugar. Thinking it would be sweeter than regular sugar, I halved the amount to start with. I can always adjust the sweet/sour balance later. Oh, and of course I used our own apple cider vinegar.



All together in the pot and simmering away now--and I just checked it to find it had run out of water, so I added a bit more, and also more salt. Another 15 minutes should do it. This is not the sort of vegetable dish that you want to cook al dente.

Real Time Ribs and Cabbage 2

Then the aromatics: onion, carrot, some celery root, garlic, a piece of leek I had lying around.

And the real magic, hard apple cider, from the Bide-A-Wee trees:



Along with about a cup of chicken stock, some thyme, and a grind of pepper, that'll do it.


Into a 275 oven it goes, and that's just fine for a couple of hours. I'll get on to the cabbage.

Real Time Pork Spareribs and Mom's Hot Red Cabbage

I'm putting together meals for a Bide-A-Wee weekend, and the thought occured to me to do a sort of "real time blogging" experiment. I already made up some oxtails earlier in the week, and now I'm working on braised pork spareribs which I'll serve alongside my mom's red cabbage and apple dish (given just a mild Trout Caviar treatment). The idea is to have meals made ahead that can just warm and finish atop the woodstove. I'll post each step of this process within ten minutes of its completion.

I don't have a recipe for the ribs, but recipes are highly overrated, I think (said the author of a cookbook-in-progress, oh dear...). I've got great ingredients and a nearly foolproof method, browning, then braising. It starts with Big Blue, our Le Creuset dutch oven:



And a couple of pounds of Hilltop Pastures Family Farm spareribs. Pasture-raised, wonderful pork. Salt, then brown in a bit of oil.



Okay. I'll be back shortly.

Hazelnut-Crusted Goat Cheese

I wanted another crack at the warm crusted goat cheese I mentioned in the previous post, the one that sort of dissolved on me when I made it out at Bide-A-Wee. While we often have ample time to cook at the cabin, by the time evening rolls around we don't have...light, or space, or equipment beyond the very primitive. I frequently find myself attempting preparations way too complicated for the surroundings. It builds character, is what I tell myself; Mary might describe it differently.

But back in Saint Paul this week I found I had some goat cheese left, as well as some of the cranberry maple chutney I detailed in the previous post. My second go, executed in the plain light of a chilly winter afternoon, taking lessons from the previous attempt, turned out pretty well, and made a delightful snack for tea.

This can be a little tricky, but it's worth the trouble, I think, at least a couple of times a year. The difficulties come from either the cheese melting too fast, or separating from the crust (another symptom of the same problem). The cheese I used was Donnay chevre, an excellent fresh goat cheese from Kimball, Minnesota.

This is a beautifully rich and tangy chevre; but for this preparation, it's a little soft, I must say. I try to get around that by freezing the cheese pre-frying, as described below. If you have a choice, I would go for the firmest fresh chevre that is still easily moldable--I mean, I wouldn't give up flavor for firmness, but all other things being equal, go for the firmer cheese.

It’s fun and local to make this with foraged wild hazelnuts. Look for the fascinating, frilly green husks on hazel shrubs in late summer. It’s best to pick them when they’re still a bit green; if you wait until they’re fully ripe, the squirrels will likely beat you to them. I’ve found that you can harvest them just after some of the husks start to open up. As they dry, the husks will open up around any nuts of a decent size. When you come to cracking them open, sort out the larger ones, and discard any that show little pinholes in the bottom—these have been eaten inside-out by some kind of insect, apparently one with a formidable proboscis (unless the hole is the result of some larva that grew up inside the nut, and burrowed its way out).

Wild hazelnuts are smaller than the cultivated kind; perhaps to compensate for this, their shells are much tougher to crack. You need a stout nutcracker that can handle small nuts. It takes a lot to get a little, but fortunately, for this dish we just need a tablespoon of nuts per person. Of course, you can save a lot of time and effort by just using store-bought nuts. But you’ll miss the fun, and sense of accomplishment!

Warm goat cheese is one of my favorite first course dishes. It really perks up the appetite, while at the same time taking the edge off if you’re ravenous. Walnuts or pecans could be used in place of the hazelnuts.

Hazelnut Crusted Goat Cheese, Maple Cranberry Chutney

Per person:

1 1/2 to 2 ounces fresh goat cheese, “chevre”
1 Tbsp hazelnuts, chopped fairly small
1 Tbsp bread crumbs
Freshly ground black pepper
Canola or peanut oil

Wet your clean hands, and form the goat cheese into little discs, or pucks, about 1 inch thick and 2 ½ inches across. Mix the chopped nuts and bread crumbs together. Grind a bit of coarse pepper on one side of the cheese. Pat half the nut-crumb mixture on that side, turn the cheese puck over and press the rest into the other side. Place the coated cheese pucks in the freezer for 20 to 30 minutes.

Heat a small skillet over medium heat—a non-stick one will work well. Add a thin film of oil, about a teaspoon, and let it heat for 20 seconds. Fry the cheese pucks on one side for 20 seconds, flip it over, cook for another 20 seconds; flip again, 20 seconds, flip again, 20 seconds, remove the cheese very carefully to the plate you’ll serve it on. If the cheese is starting to melt too quickly, turn the heat down, or remove it from the pan.

These are great with a chutney or relish, or atop a salad of tender lettuces or frisée tossed with your favorite vinaigrette. Then a slice of toast or baguette is all you really need, and the classic wine accompaniment for this Loire-inspired dish would be a white sancerre or saumur.



An alternate method: Frying a disc of soft goat cheese can be a bit of a daredevil operation. You can get a similar effect by placing the chilled, uncoated—“naked”—cheese discs on a lightly oiled piece of foil on a baking sheet, and heating them for 5 minutes in a 400 degree oven. While they heat, toast the nut-crumb mixture in a bit of butter or olive oil. Place the warmed cheese rounds on plates and top with the toasted topping.

Yet another thought, simpler still: Pack the cheese into a ramekin, sprinkle the raw nuts and crumbs over the top, and bake until the top is brown. For a crowd, holiday buffet, say, you could do a larger portion in a gratin dish, then either make canapés--toast point or cracker, schear of nutty cheese, dab o' chutney--or let the guests self-serve. Making holiday entertaining a tasty breeze! That's the Trout Caviar way!

And, of course--last thought on the topic--fresh chevre is often the vehicle for a number of mix-in flavorings--fresh herbs, cracked pepper, lemon zest, minced garlic or shallots. It can be a canvas upon which to daub your toothsome imaginings. Me, I like it plain, and a little crusty.


Speaking of crusty: The toast pictured here is kind of interesting: It's actually a batch of my standard yeasted pizza dough, "poolish" method, that I'd made up thinking to test a couple pizza variations at home, then didn't have time, so stuck it in a plastic bag and took it out to the cabin. Out there, without an oven, I had to improvise: I put a cast-iron skillet atop the Haggis woodstove, set a dutch oven in that, and let it heat while the dough warmed and proofed. Then I slid the dough into the dutch oven, clapped on the lid (sprinkled a bit of water on the dough), and covered it with a dish towel and a couple of hot pads. About an hour later I removed a loaf that, while rather pale and doughy, was nonetheless recognizably bread, rather than dumpling, biscuit, or bird food. Toasted up, it was A-OK.


Text and photos copyright 2010 by Brett Laidlaw

White Out

It was indeed white out this weekend, and very cold, windy, but thrilling, as well, and beautiful. We got out to Bide-A-Wee Friday afternoon, did some housekeeping, took a walk, brought in firewood, fried a couple of steaks, listened to some music, as well as to the increasingly emphatic predictions for the weekend snowstorm. Late in the evening it started, so that by bedtime, when I opened the cabin door it swept away snow as it opened, with a good six inches clearance from the deck.

Then Saturday morning looked like this:



And the afternoon, and evening, as well. We hunkered down. Mary shoveled a path to the woodpile, no farther. The car was parked at the top of our steep drive, just far enough from the road so the plough wake wouldn't bury it. Saturday brunch, scrambled eggs with smoked fish. Saturday supper, leftover sauerkraut, added smoked sausage (Whole Farm Co-op), and fresh Polish (Seward Co-op).


Sunday morning, bright, clear, cold, and white. The dogs were indignant at the bitter chill, lifted one frosty foot after another, looked at us as if to say, "Fix this, would ya?" They wouldn't stay out long, though long-legged Lily got some running in.



We had corn-apple pancakes for breakfast, listened to the radio, stoked the woodstove. All Sunday the wind worked the snow, shaping drifts, sculpting intricate designs on the surface. Occasionally it blew the windows open.

Sunday afternoon the plow came by--a road grader fitted with a massive wedge plow in the front, a wing plow on the side. I dug through the deep wake it left, and determined that we could get out if we needed too. The plow had made a pass on Saturday, too, but that only served to create a void into which prodigious amounts of snow could drift. Just east of our driveway entrance, the drifts were chest-high.


Sunday afternoon I worked on a relish to have with warm goat cheese. I meant to coat little pucks of fresh chevre with bread crumbs and black pepper on one side, crushed wild hazelnuts on the other, then fry them. I wanted something a bit tart-sweet to serve with them, and I've been noticing the fresh cranberries from Wisconsin Rapids at the co-op. The chutney would be the blast of color in a white weekend and an evening of white food. It was a total success. It needs a day to rest. I discovered that if you've forgotten or run out of dried apples, you can slice an apple, line a sieve with the slices, set the sieve in a cast iron skillet atop a Four Dog woodstove, and have dried apples in a couple of hours. They gave a nice, slightly chewy texture to the chutney.


I cooked the cheese a little too long, so it was difficult to turn and the crust kind of fell off. I shouldn't have turned my back on the frying pan; I should have stuck the coated chevre pucks in the freezer for a while before cooking them. It was tastier than it was beautiful:


Cranberry Maple Chutney
makes about one-half cup

½ cup fresh Wisconsin cranberries, quartered
1 small shallot, minced
¼ cup dried apples, chopped
2 tsp butter
Pinch salt
½ a small dried red chili, crumbled*
2 Tbsp maple syrup
½ cup water

Melt the butter in a small saucepan and add the shallots. Gently sweat them without browning for 4 or 5 minutes, until a bit soft and translucent. Add the rest of the ingredients, bring to a boil, and simmer, partly covered, until the mixture is thick and most of the water has evaporated, 10 to 15 minutes.

This is best if you make it a day or two ahead and give it some time for all the flavors to come together. Delicious with a round of hot goat cheese, and it would be great with pork, bison, venison, turkey, or game birds.

*Note: This was quite spicy; reduce the amount of chili if you’re concerned about it being too hot.

We followed that up with a creamy potato soup. Comfort food, indeed.



I'm not sure how much snow we got. My best guess: A lot. Over 18 inches was reported in the Menomonie area. With all the blowing and drifting, precise measurement is pretty hard, but I can say that there was knee-deep snow everywhere, and like, ridiculous snow everywhere else. A different world out there now. And I do believe that hunting season may be over (aside from plunking the odd rabbit in the front yard...).




Text and photos copyright 2010 by Brett Laidlaw

Delicious, Wisconsin

On the excellent Heavy Table website last week, editor James Norton took the author of a recently published cookbook to task for what he saw as a serious misrepresentation of the history of cheesemaking in Wisconsin. He carried the argument beyond mere factual error, ascribing the off-hand dismissal of a long history of artisan cheese in the state to the condescending attitude of the coasts toward the middle of the country in general:

Artisan cheese is haute cuisine, an art that is most naturally associated with Italy and France. These are places that the California and New York gastronomic communities look up to.

California and New York look down upon the Midwest on general principle (and not totally without reason, if you’ve ever dined poorly in a large Midwestern suburb). Midwesterners who move to California or New York are often the worst offenders on this front — no one wants to be seen as an apologist for something uncool.

Therefore: World-class fine food cannot come from the nation’s heartland. Burgers, fries, smoked fish, and other folk food; fine. Raw materials for California and New York chefs, fine. But world-class cheese? No; that would be a disruption of the natural social order.

There was a lot about that article, the response of the cookbook's author, the comments on Heavy Table, that got me thinking. My first reaction was almost one of shock, to think that folks elsewhere would look down upon the amazing food resources that we have access to here in "flyover-land." I must have assumed that since I, and many others, have been extolling the virtues of our local, seasonal delights for so long, with such enthusiasm, our impassioned hymns of praise must have been heard the world over(!).


Personally, I eat so well, every day, relying almost entirely on our local bounty, that I would tend to respond to any coastal slight with a satisfied little burp and a smile, acknowledging that, yes, you there in New York, in California, you've far more Michelin stars to gaze upon than us bumpkins, it's a shame we suffer so, and I'd wish them well, and then get back to my meal.



And then there was the whole question, the distinction Jim Norton raises, of "haute cuisine" versus "folk food," and his assertion that artisan cheese belongs to the former category. And now, I'd have to agree that artisan cheese is surely looked upon as exalted foodstuffs, it has the price tag to prove it, but at heart I think it's one of the folkiest foods you can find. I mean, take some milk, make it curdle, stick it in a cave to get nice and moldy...? Does it get any more peasant than that?

I think it points up, once again, a profound and meaningful paradox that runs through the whole history of cuisine both haute and basse, which is: Many of the most sought-after, priciest, most rarified ingredients in the world of "high cooking" come from the lowest of places, and have traditionally been fare not for princes, but for peasants. Wild mushrooms that spring from the forest duff, those cheeses moldering in dank country caves, wild game and fish and shellfish--these are often abundant and common in the places where they arise, and only take on the patina of luxury in the context of the gourmet table. Any culinary cook would drool at the chance to cook with ruffed grouse and pheasant and fresh venison, but in the hunters' kitchens lots of fine game birds get the cream of mushroom soup treatment, and tons upon tons of venison wind up as terriyaki jerky sticks....


I guess it's really a question of perspective, as to one person the scent of a black truffle is the world's sexiest, most exquisite perfume, while to the next it evokes nothing so much as a pair of sweaty socks left in the gym bag over winter break. It's a shame to see the whole fascinating history of Wisconsin cheese tossed-off in one ill-considered headnote; on the other hand, I really could not care less about what anyone else thinks about this region, our food, our goofy accents, or even our Jell-O salads. I know we've got it good, and as to the question of high cuisine and low, in my own life and cooking I don't see the paradox I described above--I don't even recognize the distinction.



I'm as happy with a great piece of smoked fish as with a finely wrought dish at a gourmet restaurant (my home-smoked herring turned out really well, by the way). On the cheese plate we set out for a Bide-A-Wee brunch in honor of our friend Pete visiting from Montana, we had a sort of fancy cheese ( Marieke gouda*), a lovely but not pricey, nonetheless "brand-name" one (Black River Blue), and a no-name aged white cheddar that we often buy from our friend Renee Bartz at Bolen Vale. All were excellent, but the cheddar was especially good, to me. I think Pete really liked the blue.


And on the pickle plate, while chanterelles are generally considered a delicacy, milkweed is generally considered...a weed, go figure. And ramps, while they now enjoy a vaunted culinary reputation, are almost a symbol of Appalachian peasant food. A green bean is generally considered a green bean, and that one was a salt-brined fermented version thereof.



Used to be the aristocracy ate white bread while the hoi polloi bitterly gnashed away at their grainy loaves, but what goes around does come around, and now it's a sign of culinary sophistication to enjoy whole grain sourdough breads. What was traditional is new, the low becomes high. I'd have to say, when push comes to shove and my back is up against the wall to make the judgment call:

It's all good.



And pretty much everything on that table came from Wisconsin--by which I do not mean to slight Minnesota, don't want to start another fight! Great Hope butter from Minnesota, and Whole Grain Milling, Natural Way Mills flour in those "peasant loaves." Pickled green beans, Minnesota grown, right here on Princeton Avenue. I love it when everyone gets along, so deliciously.



Text and photos copyright 2010 by Brett Laidlaw


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* When I originally posted this I said it was Roth Kase "gruyère"; that was incorrect. But that's another excellent Wisconsin cheese.

All Things Herring: Crudo, Pickled, Meunière, Smoked, Salted

I've been having a lot of fun with herring since I swung by Halvorson Fisheries in Cornucopia, Wisconsin, on the South Shore of Lake Superior, on the way home from Bide-A-Wee on Monday. Well, sort of on the way home. I mean, I did start out at Bide-A-Wee, and wind up home in Saint Paul--which is basically a home-to-home trip now--but the stop in Corny required a little detour, roughly five hours of driving. The roundaboutness of my route started to sink in as I crossed the towering bridge over the Saint Louis River from Superior to Duluth, and I thought, "Hmm, you know, when the quickest way back to Saint Paul is via Duluth, you've gone just a little out of your way...".

And then when the mild afternoon turned into a bit of a blizzardy evening and I was still just past Pine City, a good 60 miles to home, and the lane markers on I-35 disappeared, traffic was crawling along, the headlights showed a white-out, snowflakes the size of handkerchiefs, and I pondered, "If this doesn't let up I'm not going to make it home tonight, I'm going to have to find a place to stay, with two dogs, and a cooler full of fish...", and I looked at the trip odometer, which showed 160.2 miles, and then I looked at it again, what seemed like an hour later, and it read 163.4, well, at that point it didn't seem like such a swell idea, my little detour.

But as I continued on south I hit the rain/snow line, the white turned to wet, I could see the road again, and we made it home safe and sound. As I walked in the door I smelled this amazing smell, and there was Mary taking a tray of fresh, hot gouda gougères out of the oven, those fabulous little choux paste cheese puffs, and I'm thinking, "Shower, martini, gougères, fresh fish...", and I'm thinking, "My wife: I think I'll keep her."

That's all prologue to a week of much herring. Here we go:


Pickled herring, for which I adapted a recipe from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall of River Cottage fame. I wasn't looking to pinch someone else's recipe, was just seeking a general method, but when I saw that he uses apple cider and cider vinegar, I wound up following the recipe pretty straight. It's still evolving, just two days in the jar, but it has a much more delicate texture and subtler flavor than any of the commercial versions I've had.


It was in the process of making the pickled herring that I came upon the inspiration for the dish above, herring crudo with cider mustard cream and frizzled leeks. See, the first step in preparing the pickled fish is brining it, soaking it in salt water for a couple of hours. Once I had done that (I lightened Hugh's brine, which seemed really salty), I tasted just a sliver of the raw fish, to see how salty it had become. What I tasted was this brilliantly fresh fish, just mildly salty, with a fantastic texture, yieldingly firm it was, to coin an oxymoron; it tasted, in brief, how I always hope the fish at sushi joints will, though it rarely does.

I knew I had to come up with a dish to show it off, and I thought of the honey-mustard sauces you often get with gravlax, and that thought led to this reduction of cream, sweet cider, cider vinegar, with some yellow mustard seeds and a little Dijon mustard. The frizzled leek looks pretty and adds a crisp contrast to the softness of the fish, the richness of the sauce. Crunchy gray sea salt brings more texture and...salt. This is rather a cheffy dish, to be sure, such as I rarely attempt anymore, but it's really not difficult. It all depends on the freshness of the fish, of course. You could make it with any "sashimi-grade" fish from a reputable fish monger. I've since learned (Thanks, Google!) that lightly salt-cured, essentially raw herring is practically a national dish in the Netherlands. (I undertook this research after the fact, to see if there were any health concerns to be aware of, like, Of course no one eats raw herring, because of the deadly herring worm that eats your intestines from one end to the other! If the Dutch thrive on raw herring, I'm much comforted. They've always seemed a particularly vigourous, ruddy sort of folk.)


That was our first course last night, and we followed it with herring milkweed à la meunière, skinless fillets lightly seasoned, dusted in flour, fried in an oil-butter mix. La meunière is the miller's wife; she brings the flour, I guess, a small but important contribution to the dish. For the sauce you cook good butter--maybe three tablespoons for two people--over a medium flame, and as it starts to brown--to turn noisette, hazelnut color--you toss in capers, traditionally, but I used my little pickled milkweed pods. I added also a couple teaspoons of the pickling brine, and a good squeeze of lemon juice, and you're good to go. Very, very good. Everyone tends to think of herring as an oily, rather heavy fish, but in a preparation like this, and with the freshest fish--and skinless, at that--that's the furthest thing from the case. This fish was notably light in texture--fluffy even came to mind--under the crisp flour jacket.


We drank some of our own cider, the 2009. Talk about a happy meal. Somewhere along the way it occured to me that the heart of this meal was wild foods. The milkweed, another small but vital component, I picked on our land this summer, and of course the herring swim free, and apparently still thrive, in Superior's "ice-water mansions." I mention this because, with all the attention paid these days to the trendy aspects of wild foods, we tend to forget that all food was originally wild. All of our cultivated vegetables and fruits and grains are manipulated versions of something Great Nature first made. My point here is a little fuzzy even to me, but I was just surprised to realize that herring with milkweed pickles was wild food--the herring came from a fish market (albeit one that sits on the shore of Lake Superior) and the milkweed pickles from a jar in my fridge. There are also jars of pickled ramps in there, and fiddleheads, and chanterelles, and jams and jellies from blackberries, wild plums, etc. In our house, wild food is not a separate category of food; it's just food. And I think that's good.



I bought some smoked lake trout and whitefish at Halvorson's, but I decided to try my hand at smoking my own herring. I used my standard brine, a half cup each of salt and brown sugar to a quart of water, brined it for around ten hours, and now I'm smoking it hot, trying to keep the temp around 220. That should take three hours or so. I have an idea about a dish that will involve the smoked herring and all things apple--some kind of reduction of sweet and hard cider, cider vinegar, fresh or perhaps dried apples. Of course I'm using apple wood to smoke it.



Finally, salted herring. I have no idea what I'll do with that--well, I have fleeting notions, a fish pie, pasty, empanada-type thing has occured to me. The fillets we used for the meunière dish were big, so I took off the tail ends and tossed them in salt, left them in the fridge overnight. Now I'm letting them dry a bit, and I'll probably freeze them. We will probably see them again some time in February....



I guess it could go without saying, at this point, that I find it inspiring to have ingredients of this quality to work with--and I also have frozen burbot (eelpout), and beautiful butterflied smelts in the freezer, brought back on this trip. But being by Superior at the end of November has a melancholy, elegaic quality to it, as well. Part of it was that marbled gray sky, the flat gray lake, and the out-of-season feeling of a summer place sliding into winter. Part of it is the sense that commercial fishing on Lake Superior is itself rather a marginal, vestigial activity, so few are left that ply this trade. Without descending into the maudlin, I still have to wonder, five years from now, ten, will I still have the chance to make an impetuous detour, load my cooler up with blindingly fresh herring, whitefish, or lake trout?

A few shots through the car window, traveling west on Wisconsin 13 from Cornucopia toward Superior:







Text and photos copyright 2010 by Brett Laidlaw