Slowly

This is the kind of dish at which our Haggis woodstove excels. Do not ask Haggis to stir-fry--that is not in the Haggis genes. Haggis will sear a steak only reluctantly. Haggis is a phlegmatic creature; sudden changes in mood do not suit Haggis. Haggis can cook an egg, or an assemblage of eggs, like a frittata, very well, slowly brown a piece of meat or fish, render bacon solicitously.



But where Haggis really shines is in the long, slow simmer. On a winter afternoon still deep in the white but leaning toward spring, Haggis emanates a gentle heat for hours, coddling a pot of chicken and vegetables flavored with homesmoked bacon. The pot never comes to a boil--it's kind of a backwoods half-assed sous vide, if you like. In the end the broth is deeply, beautifully imbued with the flavors of all the components, yet the meat and vegetables retain their integrity--the vegetables are still a bit crisp, the chicken is not stringy or washed-out tasting.

This is the kind of simple food I love, and I think one grows to appreciate this kind of cooking over time. It's a good thing that some benefits come with age.



Chicken Bacon Hot Pot

Very slow cooking produces a succulent broth and meat and vegetables that retain excellent flavor and texture.

2 ounces slab bacon, in 1-inch chunks
4 chicken thighs or a small chicken quartered
1 large carrot, quartered the long way, cut into 2-inch lengths
1 medium onion, sliced
1 rib celery, halved the long way, cut into 3-inch lengths
4 small potatoes
3 cloves garlic, whole, unpeeled
1 turnip, peeled and quartered
¼ cup white wine or dry vermouth
2 sprigs thyme
Salt
Mustard
Cornichons
A light vinaigrette
　
Brown the bacon in a heavy dutch oven. As it starts to render fat add the chicken and brown well on both sides. Remove the bacon and chicken from the pot. Drain off excess fat, leaving about one tablespoon in the pot. Add the onion, carrot, celery, and garlic cloves. Sauté until lightly browned. Deglaze the pan with the wine. Return the chicken and bacon to the pot. Add four cups of water, the thyme, and ¼ teaspoon of salt.

Cook at the lowest simmer, the surface just shivering, for 60 minutes. Do not let the liquid boil. Add the potatoes and turnip. Simmer 60 minutes more, or until the vegetables are tender. Serve with dijon mustard, cornichons, and a bowl of vinaigrette on the side, if you like.



Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

My Wild Bachelor Weekend

Mary hightailed it off to Iowa with her mom for a Mother's Day excursion this past weekend, leaving me to get as wild and crazy as I wanted. Well, as wild and crazy as you can get while tethered to a pair of griffons.

Strip clubs, all-night poker games, smoking cigars and shootin' pool! Yee-haw!

Right. I did get a little wild in the Bide-A-Wee "kitchen," though. Saturday night I put together a dish of pappardelle with "pheasantback" mushrooms, ramps, and watercress. (Sunday it was grilled brown trout, fiddleheads and ramps in a nettle-bacon broth; that's for next time.)

I often come across pheasantback (or "dryad's saddle," its more mythological title; what the hell is a dryad, again?) in the spring when I'm walking along the trout stream, or when I'm out on one of my usually futile morel hunts. This shelf-like polypore fungus often grows on dead elm trees, under which one will find morels, if one is lucky. But I consider myself lucky to find a pheasantback, too. For one, I find them beautiful. For two, they are quite edible. Some 'shroomers agree with that assessment. Some don't. (Tom Volk belongs in the mushroom hall of fame if there is such a thing, but I think he must have only tried cooking really old pheasantbacks, to find them tough and rubbery.)


The pheasantback's distinctive aroma of watermelon rind is fascinating to note, but less compelling as a flavor on its own. So I like to add flavor to this mushroom in the cooking. A little bit of soy sauce adds depth of flavor--it's a cheat, maybe, but a good one. A nice young pheasantback has a wonderful texture, dense and silky at once, like many of its cousins in the polypore world, which includes the legendary cèpes or porcini. Polypore mushrooms emit their spores not through the gills you find on button mushrooms, portabello, and the like, but through those many little holes you see on the white underside. Poly- = many; -pore = pore. Get it? Polyporous squamosus is its Latin tag, which I believe means "scaly polypore."



To make the dish: But I want to go back a little first, describe how I got the cress.

I spend a lot of time on the road between our house in Saint Paul and the Bide-A-Wee cabin in Dunn County, Wisconsin. At its simplest, the trip to Bide-A-Wee (once we're on the freeway) involves exactly three roads (the freeway, a state highway, our town road) and four turns (left, right, left, right, you're there). And while the scenery is quite pleasant along that straightforward route, anything becomes a bit boring with repetition--and freeways are generally boring, anyway.

Sometimes I just want to get there or back as directly and quickly as possible, but mostly I like to vary the route. I'll turn off the main route at some point, to follow whim and scenery, county road to town road, paved to gravel, farmland to forest. Closer to the city the roads pretty much follow a grid pattern, but in the hilly land in eastern Saint Croix, Polk and Dunn Counties they take their path from the contours of the land, winding through pastoral valleys, following the course of this area's many streams and rivers. I would have thought that after more than three years of wandering the backroads of western Wisconsin on the way to and fro Bide-A-Wee, I would have exhausted all options; somehow, I keep finding more.



Saturday I found myself winding along a gravel road that curved past small dairy farms, woodlots, the odd patch of sugarbush. The road dipped under a low railroad trestle, just one lane there, and as I turned a blind corner I spotted ahead a telltale hump in the road--a culvert, a brook. As I crossed it I glanced down and saw water, so I stopped--sometimes these are dry runs, or just a trickle through the weeds.

This one was a sweetly flowing little creek, only a few feet wide, but clear and sparkling, and upstream of the culvert, in the middle of the stream, was a little island of watercress. I hopped down there and observed that a spring fed into the creek just there. I couldn't see far up it before the alder crowded in. I pinched some leaves from the tops of the plants I could easily reach, put them in a sack and climbed back up to the road.

I was about to get back in the car--the dogs were eager to know what I'd been up to, they'd worried about me, out there all by myself--when I noticed across the road a grassy path leading down a short distance into the woods. Intent on checking out the stream, I hadn't seen it before. Now I went over and walked down it (a little self-conscious, for I was trespassing, though there was no posting, and in Wisconsin none is required of landowners). The path ended just thirty feet off the road, at the source of the spring--pure, icy water flowing out through an aperture at the base of a little limestone cliff, just a sort of tall hummock, really, with moss growing on the damp exposed stone. From there the spring traveled fifty feet or so down to the creek, and for this whole length it was a carpet of dark green, glossy watercress.

I love springs, and spring creeks, and topography, and cress. It's hard for me to imagine a more charming natural scene than what I found there. I gathered a few more leaves (poached them, I guess, if you want to be technical about legalities) and went on my way.

The dish, then: I had thought I would use Chinese noodles, but we didn't have any. In the end the substitute pappardelle was a superior choice. I wanted something a little richer to add along with the mushroom, ramps, and cress: an egg. I beat up one egg, added some chopped ramp and cress leaves and a little salt, scrambled it very soft in butter.

Into that same pan went a little more butter and the chopped white parts of five or six small ramps. As they started to soften I tossed in the sliced pheasantback--no salt, because of the soy. Then as the mushrooms started to brown I splashed in a bit of soy--a couple teaspoons?--and also a bit of vinegar (I think it was some of our blackberry vinegar), a teaspoon, I'd say. Finally I added a couple good handfuls of coarsely chopped watercress. The cress gave off just enough liquid as it wilted to deglaze the pan and make a simple sauce.

The noodles I cooked to al dente ahead of time, and as the sauté was coming together I set the pan containing them on the side of the Haggis to warm(I needed a fire in the woodstove, it was going down into the twenties overnight!), loosened them with a little butter, flavored them with some salt, pepper, and a bit more chopped ramps greens and cress.



Serve out the noodles, top with all the veg, dollop the soft herby eggs around the sides. I would certainly make this again.

Solstice Solace: Autumn Vegetable, Chicken and Sausage Hot Pot

At Bide-A-Wee as we enter solstice week the sun touches the distant southwest hilltops by a quarter past four in the afternoon. We take a walk around our own hilltop circuit to catch the last of the daylight. We turn to take in the whole horizon, we peer down into the shadowed, snowy valleys, as if to fix it all in memory, to capture it in case this sunset should fail to resolve itself, come morning, into the dawn of another day, as if this fading glow might be the last of light to grace the world--the immemorial fear of northern peoples facing down the shortest days, the longest nights.

The sunsets have been beautiful, but we can't look at them without a sense of longing, almost of regret. You almost want to reach out and try to pull it back, though the descending sun now seems a universe away. You want to implore, with Faustian gravitas: "Ah, linger on, thou art so fair!"

Good luck with that. We watch the light fade, and feel with its departure a deepening chill. We finish our walk and crunch and squeak down the snow-covered gravel driveway. By five o'clock it is completely dark, and we are in for the night.

In places where the winter nights are this long, or longer, and vodka is cheap, you can see how folks get into trouble. Rather than pouring out tumblers of cheap hootch, we go through our evening rituals: bringing in wood and stoking the fire in the Haggis, replacing and lighting of candles, fluffing up of dog bed, general tidying (in a 12-by-16-foot cabin everything must have a place), assembling of reading material (and scrounging of reading glasses), tuning in the radio to WOJB--"Woodland Community Radio, 88.9"--from the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe reservation in Reserve, Wisconsin.

And of course, dinner preparation. In general we try to keep our Bide-A-Wee cooking simple, ever so much moreso in winter. With a pot gently simmering on the woodstove we can sit down with a drink (make mine Balvenie Double-Wood), a glass of wine, and eat when we and the pot agree we're ready. I've written about a Bide-A-Wee hot pot dinner before, and I do so again here without shame. It's the sort of simple, satisfying food that really highlights the flavors of local produce--sweet onions, carrots, leek, potato, cabbage, parsnips, turnips. The fact that it's December, not late February, is relevant: we haven't been eating roots and cabbage for three months straight; we can still regard them as "fresh vegetables."

Fresh vegetables, each with a story: It occured to me as we peeled and washed and cut up the vegetables for this hot pot that I could connect people and places with every one of them. The turnips were those I rescued from the garden just before the Big Freeze, carrots and leeks garden produce, too; the cabbage, onions, and parsnips I purchased from market vendors, the families of Va Vang and Tim Vang, specifically, at our last markets in November. Peeling a parsnip, I recall the last cold, wet hour of our Thanksgiving market; the rain swept in to erase our Real Bread sign, bringing an emphatic close to the 2009 season, but we were cheered by the comradeship of the vendors who stuck it out, the devotion of the customers who came out--even on foot, even on bikes!--in such dismal weather for one last market shopping.

And in the midst of making that meaningful mise en place, laying out that comfortingly monotone still life, I was reminded that the pleasures of cooking, especially cooking with local ingredients, go far beyond the satisfaction of eating good food. Eating, well, it's eating: you make food, you eat it, you're done. You extend the pleasure, and the meaningfulness, when you take time to think about your meal, to grow your own food or buy it from people you know (or forage, catch, or shoot it...), when you prepare it carefully, appreciatively, and share it at table with others who see as much in it as you do.

Then some humble roots and simple meats simmered together become all you might desire, a steamy feast, homely but delicious.


Hot pot, huo guo, pot au feu, boiled dinner. Grilling over an open flame may have been the first form of cooking; once mankind got a pot, the water-cooked meal probably superceded it in popularity. The simplest way to make a meal like this is to just put all your ingredients in a pot of water, bring it to a boil, simmer it until it's done. In this case I rendered the fat from some home-smoked bacon rind, browned the chicken and sausage to give it a little more depth of flavor, and added the vegetables in two stages, according to how long they needed to cook.

Leftovers can be served cold with a vinaigrette dressing, the pot au feu salad, a French classic. If you chop the leftovers, add some well-reduced chicken stock, and pour it all into a mold, you get an aspic-bound terrine, quite elegant as a first course with a dab of dijon mustard, some cornichons and crusty bread. We turned our leftovers into soup, chopping the leftover meat and vegetables into bite-sized pieces, adding a bit of stock and a few more veg; finish with a slug of red wine and a tablespoon of butter. You won't feel like you're eating leftovers.



Autumn Vegetable, Chicken and Sausage Hot Pot
Serves three, or two with lots of leftovers--it just happened we had three knockwurst in the freezer, and the packet of chicken thighs contained three. Vary the vegetables according to what you have, adding them to the pot according to their respective cooking times--squash, rutabagas, kholrabi, chard, other cooking greens, etc.

A couple of pieces of good bacon rind or a slice of bacon, optional, but highly recommended
3 chicken thighs (we like Kadejan, available at most co-ops here)
3 sausages, like knockwurst or bratwurst
1 parsnip, peeled, cut into 2-inch pieces
1 medium carrot, peeled or scrubbed, cut into 2-inch pieces
1 small leek, white and light green part, cleaned, cut into 2-inch pieces
2 small onions, peeled, halved through the root end so they stay together
1/4 of a smallish green cabbage
2 small potatoes, peeled or scrubbed, as you prefer
1 large clove garlic
1 small turnip, peeled and quartered
1 small dried or fresh chili, seeds removed, optional
a couple sprigs fresh thyme or a pinch dried
salt and pepper

In a large dutch oven slowly render the bacon fat from the rind or the bacon slice--if you don't use bacon or rind, just put a little oil or butter in the pot. Salt the chicken on both sides, and brown it alongside the bacon, starting starting skin side down. Brown the sausages, too; they shouldn't take quite as long as the chicken.

Add four cups of water to the dutch oven, along with the carrot, leek, onions, garlic, thyme and chili if desired. Bring to a boil and simmer very gently for 30 minutes. Add the potatoes, turnip, and cabbage, and simmer for another 30 minutes, at least.

As long as you keep it at a bare simmer--le fait frémir, as the French say, make it shiver--it's pretty hard to overcook it. Before serving taste for salt. Serve with dijon mustard, crusty bread or croutons, some cornichons or a freshly made vinaigrette, or all of the above, as you prefer.


Text and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw

Forage's End

It was another warm and gentle late fall day, November bringing us what we expected from October--a kind and lulling Indian Summer glow, but more somber, because the angle of the sun was that much lower, the woods that much grayer. I spent the morning gathering firewood, another kind of foraging.

I have discovered that gathering firewood may be the task for which I am best suited in life--it is among the most simply satisfying things I have ever done. I trudge up and down the hills with my trusty chainsaw, working at a measured pace. I'm not felling big trees, which is dangerous, especially with a couple of dogs running around, but harvesting down logs and branches, cutting the dead low limbs of oak trees. The odd small dead tree, shed of bark, not yet rotting, I will drop. A small oak like this, that lost the race to the sun to other trees, now fully air-cured, makes the best kind of firewood. I make a point of leaving larger dead trees standing, as homes for cavity-nesting birds.

I'll amass a cache of wood in a certain section of the woods, then gradually haul it back to the cabin in our little black metal cart or the black plastic ice fishing sled. I go from lumberjack to beast of burden. It is a full-body workout, and the steepest part of the journey is just before I reach the cabin, providing a test of will as well as strength--can I push on those last fifty feet, can I. Now I must dodge fallen apples, too, from the trees that overhang the path here, or take a very painful and discouraging spill.

I split the larger logs in the driveway at the cabin. I also bring back apple branches from last winter's pruning, now nicely dried, and reduce these to kindling. I gather these smaller sticks into faggots (not a word you hear often in a positive sense these days), ready to be popped into the woodstove (faggots for Haggis!) when we need fast heat.

As I watch my wood rack filling up with logs and kindling, my mind travels ahead to the next season: the cabin swaddled in snow, a well-laid fire in the woodstove springing into flame with one match, the cabin quickly warming, a savory pot set to simmer on top of the stove.

Our property comprises twenty acres but if you flattened it out we'd have forty. A few hours traversing of the hills, especially burdened with firewood, tuckers me out. My morning's work had left the woodrack much fuller than when I arrived; I felt I had done right by Bide-A-Wee, and earned a rest. But I found I still wanted to be outside and doing something, just working at a gentler pace. I remembered a big burdock plant that I had spied earlier in the summer, growing just beside the driveway. Burdock root is edible and pretty good when cooked properly. This plant had leaves as big a rhubarb leaves (the two plants are, in fact, related). I figured it would give up a decent root.

And so it did--a decent, but very odd, root. Burdock usually sends its long taproot pretty straight downward, often a couple of feet down. It takes some careful digging to extract intact. This plant was growing in particularly heavy clay, with impervious packed gravel not far below, and so compensated by multi-furcating, sending roots of different sizes off in different directions. I had to check the leaves, now frost-wilted, to be sure it was actually burdock.

Back at the cabin I cleaned up and peeled a portion of it, cut it up and set it to cook.

Then I went out to gather a few of the last apples still clinging to the trees, a sort of sentimental, ceremonial act to end the fruit season. I had no particular need for the eight or nine apples I snatched from the high bare branches with the apple picker. We have boxes of apples at home. The ground around the late-ripening trees is covered with fallen apples, but we leave those lie. The deer and grouse and probably any number of other woodland creatures nibble at them.

All summer long I had meant to make tea from blackberry leaves. In full procrastination mode, I let that activity slide until all but, let's see, eight leaves remained on the dark canes. We started with forty bazillion blackberry leaves; there should have been something special about the eight that remained.

I boiled some water and brewed up the leaves in the nifty new Japanese teapot--cast iron with an enamel interior--that I got for my birthday. The tea had a distinctive flavor--a little herby, more generally vegetal, a bit savory like nettles tea. It won't replace a good jasmine, sencha, or orange pekoe, for me. I suspect that it is reputed to be good for you.

About this time I noticed a certain...lethargy, I'd call it, in my foraging. There was a quality of going through the motions, of doing this because the stuff was there, because I could. I recognized this not with annoyance, but simply with curiosity. I thought, well, that's an okay reason to do it. But I did have to wonder why I bothered with some dirty root from a noxious weed, when at home I still had lots of produce in the garden--leeks and carrots, beets, turnips and kale, fennel, chard, cabbage--as well as squash, celery root, potatoes and more from garden and market, stored in the garage.

It was just, as I say, curious. Maybe I just wanted to see what was under the ground.

Kicking through fallen apples and dried leaves, feeling a slight chill even in the bright sun, the calm air, I felt the sense of the season sink in, and then my mind traveled two ways--ahead to the winter that could descend any day now, lock in tight, white and cold until March; back to the abundant harvests and forages that had reached their peak just a few fleeting weeks ago. I thought of baskets of brilliant chanterelles, streams full of eager brook trout, the apple trees so laden the limbs drooped to the ground; I thought of the day I gathered a stunning still life of close to a dozen different wild fruits. This is not hyperbole in the service of nostalgia for a time long lost; this was the way it was, not long ago, at all.

Now, mealy haws, some shriveled grapes (yet now at their sweetest), these last apples.

I guess I was ready for the change, but missing already what was barely past. Held between the two as if trapped in amber the color of the late afternoon sun. I might still find a variety of wild foods before the snows come. Indeed, one December day a few years ago, hunting in the snow, I happened upon a hen of the woods mushroom, frozen but otherwise fresh-looking. I took it home (this "hen" the only "fowl" in my game pocket that day), thawed it, enjoyed that big 'shroom over several meals. I could find butternuts, black walnuts, nannyberries. I might dig another burdock root before the ground freezes hard, or go looking for jerusalem artichokes. I might not. I know it's coming to an end, coming to a change. I'm good with that.


I simmered the burdock with in soy sauce, rice wine, and maple syrup, with a little chili and chopped leek. I made an apple "kimchi" based on an idea from David Chang's Momofuku Ssam Bar restaurant in New York (we had lunch there on a recent trip). We're going to have those dishes tonight alongside soup noodles. I'll pass along the recipes if they're any good.


Text and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw

Two Birds at Bide-A-Wee (Part Two: Pan-Roasted Grouse in Cider Cream Sauce)

Annabel, our senior griff', is eleven years old now, and though she has slowed down quite a bit, and gets up a little gimpy from her frequent naps--a touch of arthritis, most likely--she can still find and point grouse. She sort of moseys through the woods now, not looking particularly intent on anything, but when her nose detects the scent of a bird, everything changes. Very few pointing dogs actually assume the "classic" pointing pose, front leg lifted and cocked. In fact, when one of my dogs stops on a hunt with her foot in the air like that, I pretty much know it's not a serious point.

Instead, they will stop with all four feet planted, stop as soon as they catch the scent of a bird, and turn their heads toward the scent. Then it's my job to find them, frequently in thick cover (an electronic beeper collar helps here), figure out exactly where the bird is, maneuver to gain the best angle for a shot, walk in to put the bird up, and knock it down with my 20-gauge side-by-side shotgun.



Matters do not often unfold in exactly that fashion for me. I miss my share of birds, or they flush wild or fly low through the brush or disappear behind trees. Then Annabel will break her point and run in crazy circles, barking in excitement, or frustration, it's hard to tell which. This is by no means "classic" bird dog behavior, either. In fact, even if I do manage to hit the bird, she still runs around barking at the sound of the gun, and she is of almost no use in helping me find the down bird. Lily is much better. Every bird I've shot with her in the field, she has been right on it. She doesn't retrieve, but that's fine by me. Having a bird in a dog's mouth for any amount of time does nothing to improve the quality of the meat.


On a rare warm day in October, I went out with just Annabel to hunt a smallish state hunting ground near Bide-A-Wee. We started late morning with the temperature climbing toward 60. We hadn't gone far into a stand of young aspen before my moseying dog stopped at the edge of a clump of dogwood within the aspen, and as I approached her a grouse flushed and escaped low behind thick cover. As I watched it go without firing a shot, a second bird got up and disappeared into a grove of white pine before I could locate it.

That was encouraging, and as we worked our way through that patch of aspen we located a couple more grouse as well as two or three woodcock. I think I missed on one of each, and had no shot at the others.

As we left the aspen stand and started up a little knob of a hill covered in dogwood, small oaks, prickly ash and assorted scrappy cover, Annabel stopped--again at a juncture of aspen and dogwood. I moved around to her right, to try to get the bird between us, and just as I crossed an opening in the trees, the grouse flushed. I hadn't expected the bird to be that close to my pointing dog, but the opening in the trees gave me a perfect shot. I turned to my left as I raised the gun, and brought the bird down with the first shot.

Annabel began running around, barking.

I had shot the bird at quite close range, and thought I had seen where it fell, but these animals are extremely well camouflaged. It took me a couple of minutes to find the bird. Annabel was no help whatsoever, but I certainly would never have shot that bird without her point. When I found the bird I called her over, and we engaged in a sort of dog-and-hunter high fives. "Whatta you know, we got one," I said. "Good girl, good dog." But she was off already to look for more.

It was nearly noon then, and getting hot for hunting, so we called it quits shortly after. In just an hour we had moved at least eight ruffed grouse and four or five woodcock.



I gutted the bird as soon as we got back to the cabin, and plucked it a day or two later back in Saint Paul, let it air dry in the fridge, and took it back out to Bide-A-Wee to cook for dinner the following weekend. I had thought I might grill it, then finish it in a cider and cream sauce, but October had returned to its chill, wet, blustery ways, that sun-washed morning in the woods a distant dream, so we fired up the Haggis and got out the cast iron.

First, I want everyone to appreciate the superb job I did plucking that bird. I know that anyone who has ever tried to pluck a grouse will be impressed by how clean that bird is, how intact is the skin. The skin of a grouse is delicate, and often torn by shot or dog tooth. It's no mean feat to wind up with a bird that nice. It's a tedious process, but it's worth it to me, and then, I'm not usually burdened with dozens of grouse to pluck in a season. A lot of hunters don't bother with plucking. They'll usually skin the bird, a quick and simple process. Others will "breast out" their birds in the woods, leaving behind everything but the boneless breast meat. This is both illegal, for a variety of reasons, and a terrible waste of excellent meat and bones--the carcasses of grouse produce a spectacular stock, and there's a decent amount of meat on the legs, too.

In preparation for cooking, the well-plucked bird is cut in half, seasoned with salt and pepper, smeared with butter. It's a very lean meat which benefits from a little added richness. It also benefits from bacon, but then, what doesn't? I rendered off a couple of tablespoons of lardons from our home-smoked bacon, and in that fat I browned an apple, cored and cut into eighths, not peeled.


Some sliced red cabbage and onions, sautéed, then simmered with a bit of water and cider, cooked on the Coleman stove. A handful of fingerling potatoes I grew at Bide-A-Wee were boiled separately and kept warm on the side of the wood stove.


Then I browned the grouse. Threw in some chopped leeks.

Added a cup of chicken stock, a half cup each of Cedar Summit cream and our own apple cider, a few sprigs of thyme (we can reach out the window and snip it from our potted herb garden on the south side of the cabin!). I finished cooking the grouse in the slowly reducing sauce--it was barely bubbling--for ten or fifteen minutes. Towards the end I put in the precooked potatoes to warm up.



And we served it forth. A well-cooked grouse is among the most exquisite things you can eat. This bird, well, I'd say it produced some of the finest meat I have ever tasted, lean but moist and tender, with a flavor both pronounced and subtle (but I'm not going to say it tasted wild...).

Just a really fine thing to eat, and a celebration of the land and the season. That said, there's no reason you couldn't do the same thing with cornish hens, or chicken.




Thanks, Annabel.

Text and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw

Two Birds at Bide-A-Wee (Part One: Duck Breast, Haw Sauce, Celery Root Fries)

As much as I love cooking over an open fire--grilling over hardwood coals, smoking or smoke-roasting with apple and oak--it is also extremely pleasant to move indoors as the weather cools, fire the woodstove, heat the cast iron skillet, and listen to dinner softly sizzle or simmer while we sip an apertif by candlelight (which is both wonderfully romantic and entirely necessary, as we have no electricity at Bide-A-Wee). With all the gadgetry in the modern kitchen, and the widespread misconception that more expensive equipment will make you a better cook (and your life, therefore, complete), it's a particular pleasure to be able to turn out wonderful seasonal meals from a hunk of black iron sitting on a hot metal box. This time out, it's duck breast with haw sauce served on fried polenta with celery root fries and fillet beans. Next time, pan-roasted grouse with cider cream sauce, fingerling pototoes, red cabbage.

I've mentioned my fascination with the hawthorn tree, and with its fruit, the haw or hawberry. Hawthorn grow wild and profusely on our land in Wisconsin. Here above you see the haw, and the thorn. Wicked thorns. You want to be careful if you find yourself in the midst of a hawthorn thicket. The shrike, the only carnivorous songbird, sometimes impales its prey, small rodents and other birds, on the thorns of hawthorn. A perching bird, it doesn't have the raptor's claws to hold and tear apart its meal, so uses the thorn like a fork, its beak the steak knife. It has earned the nickname "Butcher Bird." (We saw a northern shrike take a vole from under our bird feeder last winter; a remarkable thing to see.)

There are lots of types of hawthorns. Some seem to make little or no fruit, and some bear pomes no bigger than a blueberry, and the best for eating that we have found carry bright red fruit that closely resemble rosehips, and indeed roses and hawthorns both belong to the botanical family rosaceae--apples are in there, too. Hawthorn trees are disctintive in the landscape, small and gnarled, the trunks and branches often colored with lichen. Those thorns set them apart from small, wild, seedling apple trees or wild plums. In late fall and into winter, they often hold their bright red fruit, and the contrast between those cheery berries and the tortured shapes of the trees is striking--a tormented artist who paints serene and beautiful canvasses.

That's our 3 3/4-year-old griffon Lily giving scale to a hawthorn tree with nice fruit. You have to taste around to find nice hawthorn fruit, and you have to use your imagination. Even the nice, plump haws that we have found are mostly skin and seeds, and what flesh there is is rather pulpy and dry. These are not for eating out of hand, though you could probably survive on them if you had to.


But when you cook them in water for a rather long time they soften, and then you can push the mash through a seive, and you wind up with a good amount of fragrant mush, slightly sweet, with an aroma that's somewhere in the midst of vegetable, fruit, and roses. You can sweeten that to make a simple jam. In Britain hawthorn jelly is well known.

Those are nannyberries with haws, above. I sometimes fall into the lazy shorthand of describing the flavor of a wild food as "wild," and while that characterization is no doubt literally true, it also strikes me as close to meaningless. A mushroom, a berry, a game bird, a trout, all are wild, and may be said to taste "wild," but what does that mean, for each type of food, and do they share anything in common, all being wild? And then, on further consideration, I think that there is something valid there, as long as it is further qualified. In fact, all those things do taste wild, in that they have a flavor very different from their domestic counterparts. If you've ever picked wild blueberries from the top of a lichen-covered rock in northern Minnesota, Canada, or wherever those wild wonders grow, and compare their sun-warmed flavor with the bloated, bland, watery farmed type, I think you'll see what I mean.

When a wild food is domesticated, it is bred to emphasize certain characteristics, to eliminate others. Sometimes the favored characteristics are good ones--like sweetness or juiciness in fruit--and sometimes they are merely convenient--pickability, shipability, shelf life. And sometimes the characteristics that are selected out--well, rightfully so, one might say. There's often a slight or even a pronounced astringency to wild fruit that we rarely find in farmed fruit today. There is also, I would say, a much broader range of flavors than we are accustomed too, and it may take a bit of tasting to become so. Some will find it not worth it, but if you're a regular reader of these pages, I imagine you would want to try.

Start tasting haws in mid-September, and when you find they've acquired some flavor--some sweetness, some perfume--pick a good cup or so. They seem to improve with a frost, and the fruits stay on the trees long after the leaves have fallen.

Rinse the haws and remove any stems. Add three cups water, bring to a boil, slowly simmer, covered, for about 45 minutes. The haws may still look quite intact at this point, but if you press them they should yield, skin splitting, pulp emerging. Keep some of the water, which has quite a bit of flavor, and will help as you sieve the pulp. Just dump the berries and some water into a wire mesh sieve, and press with the back of a spoon. The juicy stuff with come right out, and with a little more pushing, the pulpy stuff will follow. Soon you'll have nothing but dry seeds and skin in the sieve. Be sure to scrape the last of the pulp from the outside of the sieve.

Now I realize this has been more about the berries than the bird, but everyone knows what a duck breast is, and how many have tried haws? But, on with the bird: You've got a nice fat magret de canard. That's the breast of a fattened duck raised for foie gras--ours from Au Bon Canard and Clancey's. These things usually weigh 12 ounces or better, so for us, one feeds two. You may have to look around, or use both breasts from a regular-size duck.

I have heated my cast iron skillet on the Haggis (our pet name for our woodstove; I know...), and I've cross-hatched the skin of the duck with a sharp knife or razor--just cut a titch down into the fat, not reaching the meat--to let the fat flow forth as it cooks. I cook it slowly, skin side down most of the time. As the fat flows forth I add to the pan about a half a celery root trimmed and cut into french fry shape, and also a handful of fillet beans, last of the season from the market, and absolutely wonderful. Now everything sizzles away in duck fat. Meanwhile:

On the propane camp stove my sauce is making. It's a generous half-cup each of chicken stock and dry red wine, which I reduce by half, to which I then add about three tablespoons of haw purée and a tablespoon of maple syrup, a grind or two of pepper, couple pinches salt, taste for seasoning. Simmer very quietly as the duck rests.

I have pan-fried some slices of set-up polenta. I finish my sauce with a knob of butter (I would call that a tablespoon and a half...). We find the magret properly rosé. We find in the celery root and beans a splendid counterplay of late-fall flavors. We find that haw sauce is something unique and delicious, and an excellent partner to the rich, savory duck in all ways--in its mild sweetness, its fragrance, and even in that lingering astringency. We find that we are happy campers, delighted to have made the acquantance of the haw.

Text and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw

Duck, Deconstructed

We eat pretty well out at Bide-A-Wee, especially considering that we have no kitchen to speak of--no sink, no refrigerator, no appliances of any sort as there is no electricity to run them. Well, we have an oven, but it has to be preheated for about three hours before it's ready to use. In the cold months we simmer and braise very merrily atop our woodstove, Haggis. At any time of year I'm happy to grill over hardwood coals--last winter I actually built a fire and grilled steaks in the midst of a wind-chill advisory.

In the warm months our main heat sources are the campfire/grill and a two-burner Coleman propane stove. Pretty basic equipment, but still there's not much you can't cook very creditably with it. For weekend trips we tend to keep things fairly simple--a steak and veg on the grill, potatoes in the coals, or even a made-ahead stew or hearty soup that we just have to heat up.

When we have a few more days to slow down and relax, it's often a pleasure to cook out of doors, and prepare things a little more elaborate. So on our last Bide-A-Wee vacation we brought along a duck. The breasts and thighs were grilled and napped in that unchaste berry sauce described in the previous post.

The carcass and neck, with all the fat and skin removed, were chopped up and browned well in our dutch oven. Then I added a variety of aromatic vegetables--leek, fennel stalks, carrot, onion, garlic--stirred those around with the duck bits for a while, added some thyme and black pepper, covered it all with water and let it simmer for a couple of hours. That provided the basis for my berry sauce, as well as a rich element in a South Shore fish chowder I prepared a couple of days later. I had enough left over to add to a cassoulet that I made at home in Saint Paul, using duck confit that I prepared at Bide-A-Wee.


Drumsticks, wings, heart and gizzard, liberally salted, peppered, tossed with thyme and a few cloves of garlic. At home I would have used the quatres-épices confit spice , Madeleine Kamman's recipe. I had some b-b-q spice rub at the cabin, quite a similar thing, in fact. With a little piment d'espelette, it worked fine.

To make confit you need fat, lots of fat. Fortunately, ducks come with lots of fat. You obtain rendered fat by cutting the fatty duck skin into strips, about a half-inch wide by two or three inches long. Put those in a pan, cover the duck skin with water and bring it to a boil. Simmer medium briskly until all the water boils off. At that point most of the fat will have rendered out of the skin. Watch carefully as the duck skin turns a nice golden brown. At that point you've gotten out all the fat you're going to get.

Fish the cracklings out with a fork, and drain them on a paper towel. With just a little salt, these become one of the best things you could put beside an aperitif, a glass of scotch or a martini, assuming they survive until happy hour. At our house they often mysteriously disappear well before dinner time.

The duck legs and wings sat in their seasoning overnight, and I dried them with paper towels just before cooking. At home I'm usually making confit with four drumstick-and-thigh portions, and I use a big casserole or dutch oven. With the smaller batch I made at Bide-A-Wee I just put the drumsticks and wings right into the pan in which I rendered the fat, and when I was finished cooking a couple of racks of spareribs, I put the confit pot on the grate, under the lid, to cook slowly as the coals died down. I turned the duck once or twice while it cooked, slowly turning tender and unctuous in the bubbling fat.

I find it both enjoyable and satisfying to spend an afternoon that way, with lots of pots on the fire, making a lot from a little, anticipating the fine eating that will be my reward. Nothing went to waste. Instead of "Duck, Deconstructed," I could have titled this "Everything but the Quack".

Text and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw

The Cheese Course: Marieke Aged Gouda with Blackberry-Apple Compote

We discovered a new cheese (new to us) at our favorite country cheese shop, Bolen Vale Cheese in Connorsville, Wisconsin. It's an aged raw-milk farmstead gouda, "Marieke," from Holland's Family Cheese in Thorp, WI. According to the good old Google Maps, that's exactly 69.7 miles from our Bide-A-Wee, out Wisconsin 29 east of Chippewa Falls.

I'm not sure how much age is on this cheese; it's not so old that it's getting those crystalized salt encrustations, but it has started to develop lovely caramel notes. It's also nicely sharp and rich, definitely a cheese-stands-alone sort of cheese.

To accompany it I made a little apple-blackberry goop--apples from our land and the blackberry preserves also made from our own hand-picked berries. To match the caramel flavors in the cheese (and to fill the cabin with the smell of browning apples), I let the peeled, chopped apples (two quite small ones) brown slowly in a little butter, till they were quite dark in spots. Then I just added a couple tablespoons of the homemade preserves, a pinch of salt, a few grinds of black pepper. Served it with toasted whole-grain sourdough.

It's best if you prepare this on top of a wood-burning stove, while outside the windows the hills are resplendent under a fresh coat of snow. It makes the endless winter a little easier to take....

Our woodstove, from the Four Dog Stove company of St Francis, Minnesota, has a name. It's name is "Haggis" (thanks to Melinda, Bide-A-Wee's official Nomenclature Tsarina).

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The local foods* tally for this cheese course:

Marieke gouda from Thorp, WI, 69.7 miles from Bide-A-Wee
Apple-Blackberry Compote, Our Land
Homemade whole-grain sourdough, all Minnesota flours, from Whole Grain Milling and Natural Way Mills
Hope Creamery butter, Hope, MN

Non-local ingredients: salt, pepper. The sugar in the preserves is beet sugar from Crystal Sugar HQed in Moorhead, MN; so, while industrial, it's more local than, say, C & H.

This is a pretty dang local cheese course, in my opinion.

* I am swearing off the term "locavore." It is a dumb and awkward-sounding word. It would seem to designate someone who feeds on the locals, or on places. I've gone along with it in the past because it is in fairly common usage, but I've decided we need some standards, and not just any old thing will do. If someone comes up with a better term for the philosophy and practice of local, seasonal eating, I'll be happy to consider it. I'm still mulling the pros and cons of my own coinage, terroirista.

Text and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw