A Few Tastes of Maple

I got a chance today to talk maple syrup cookery with Rob Ferrett on the Food Friday segement of Wisconsin Public Radio's Central Time and have compiled here a few of the recipes I mentioned on the show.  I've made this dish a lot lately, while testing the recipe out for the cook-off, at the cook-off, and then as the featured dish I prepared at Kate's Occasional Cafe at the Dairyland Cafe in Ridgeland this past week.  I'm still not tired of it.

Sichuan-Spiced Maple Chicken Wings (This recipe was inspired by Teresa Marrone’s Two-Pepper Maple Chicken Wings from Modern Maple.)

Serves 2 as a main course, 4 to 6 as an appetizer

Serve these spicy-sweet wings over a bowl of rice, accompanied by a stir-fried vegetable, for a main course; or as a zingy appetizer—keep a cold beer close at hand.

2 pounds chicken wings (about 10 wings), tips removed, separated in 2 pieces

¼ teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons soy sauce

1 tablespoon oil (sunflower, canola, or the like)

2 teaspoons sambal chile paste (or to taste)

¼ cup maple syrup

3 cloves garlic, coarsely chopped

2 tablespoons coarsely chopped ginger

1/2 teaspoon ground roasted Sichuan pepper

1 teaspoon coarsely ground black pepper

4 scallions, trimmed and cut into 1-inch pieces

Preheat your oven to 425.  Combine all the ingredients except the scallions in a large bowl and toss to coat the wings with the seasonings.  Place the wings and seasonings in a heavy roasting pan, and bake, stirring every 15 minutes or so, for 45 minutes.  Add the scallions and continue baking, stirring occasionally, until the wings are well browned and the seasonings have become a glaze that coats the wings.  This will probably take another 15 to 25 minutes.

Options:  For really dark and glazy wings, turn on the broiler for the last few minutes of cooking, and turn the wings a couple of times so they brown evenly, being careful that they don’t burn.

            If you have a convection feature on your oven, you can produce excellent results without resorting to the broiler.  Bake at 400 convection and check every 10 minutes, adding the scallions after 30 minutes.  Total cooking time with convection should be 40-45 minutes.

These wings can be made ahead and reheated before serving.  

Maple Spice Grilled Sirloin (original post here)

serves 4--next time I make this I'm going to try it with venison

1 1/2-2 pounds sirloin steak 

Marinade:

½ teaspoon ground cumin

2 teaspoons sunflower or canola oil

1 teaspoon sambal oelek chile paste

1 tablespoon maple syrup

2 teaspoons soy sauce

Pinch salt

Lots of freshly ground black pepper

1 large clove garlic minced

Combine all marinade ingredients and pour over the steak, coating well.  Marinate the steak for a couple of hours at room temp.  Prior to grilling remove the steak to a separate plate, saving the marinade.  Add hte marinade to 1/3 cup chicken stock in a small saucepan and bring to a simmer. 

Grill the steak over hot natural wood coals to desired doneness--about 3 minutes per side for rare, 4 for medium rare.  Let the steak rest on a platter for at least 5 minutes; add the juices that the resting steak produces to the stock and marinade mixture.  Serve with grilled vegetables and salad. 

The Thighs Have It

In terms of underappreciated, tasty bargain meats, chicken thighs are right there with pork shoulder steaks, in my opinion.  The thigh is my preferred part of the bird, though I fully appreciate the wing thing, too.  Chicken wings prepared in a Sichuan dry-fried manner are an exquisite treat.  The thighs, though, are more accommodating in a knife-and-fork meal context, and when they are boneless, why, they make positively civilized eating--cooking them over nice smoky hardwood coals keeps them on the rustic side.

Ramps season is starting as the maple season ends, and I often wind up putting the two together, frequently on chicken.  This is a flavorful, simple dish to celebrate the return of grilling weather (well, comfortable grilling weather; we cook over the coals year-round).

A paillard is a flattened out piece of meat.  I wail away at my thighs with the side of a heavy cleaver--a meat mallet, or even a small sauté pan will get the job done.

Maple-Ramp Marinated Chicken Paillards
Serves two to three

4 boneless chicken thighs, skin on
½ cup chopped ramps, whites and greens
Juice of ¼ lemon, and some zest, if you like
2 tablespoons maple syrup
½ teaspoon sambal oelek chili paste (or more, to taste)
¼ teaspoon salt
Freshly ground black pepper

Purchase boneless skin-on chicken thighs, or bone them yourself. Place one thigh at a time on a cutting board, and with a meat mallet, the side of a heavy cleaver, or a small, clean saucepan, pound each thigh vigorously until the meat is about ½ inch thick—the surface area of the thighs should nearly double.

Combine the rest of the ingredients in a mixing bowl and add the chicken, coating it well on all sides. Let the chicken marinate for at least 60 minutes at room temp, or longer in the fridge. When you’re ready to cook, prepare a fire of natural wood coals, and grill the chicken over medium-hot coals, turning often, for 12 to 15 minutes total. The chicken should be very well browned on both sides.

If you have extra ramps, toss a few in what remains of the marinade, and grill them along with the chicken.

 


Sweet & Sour (Tree Crop) Chard (original post)
serves two generously
5-6 good-sized chard leaves (2 cups chopped)
1/2 medium onion, sliced
2 Tbsp olive oil
1 cup chicken stock (or 1/2 cup stock, 1/2 cup water)
2 good pinches salt
a few grinds black pepper
2 to 3 tsp maple syrup
1 to 2 Tbsp apple cider vinegar
options: a bit of thyme, a small knob of butter stirred in at the end

Cut the thick ribs out of the chard leaves, and slice these diagonally into 1/2-inch pieces. Tear or cut each leaf into four or five pieces. Heat a 10-inch skillet or the like, and add the olive oil, then the onion and the chard rib pieces. Add a couple of pinches of salt, the stock (or stock and water, or water). Cover and cook over medium heat for 6 to 8 minutes, until the chard is starting to soften. Then add the chard leaves, and as soon as they wilt into the liquid add the vinegar and maple syrup. Cook uncovered for another three to four minutes, until the chard is tender to taste and the liquid is somewhat reduced. Taste for salt, sweet, and sour. Serve in a dish

 

Roast Baby Carrots with Maple-Mustard Glaze (original post)
2 cups baby carrots, scrubbed (mine weighed 9 ounces)
1 1/2 Tbsp maple syrup
1 tsp canola or grapeseed oil
pinch of salt, grind of pepper

Combine all the above in a gratin dish or small baking dish. Roast, uncovered, at 375 for 45 minutes, until they become a little brown and glazy. Stir them every 15 minutes during this time.

Remove from the oven and add:

1 rounded tsp grain mustard
1/8 tsp piment d'espelette, or a good pinch of cayenne (optional)
1 tsp red wine vinegar

Add another grind of pepper, taste for salt. Serve warm or at room temp. 

Cluck U

(Update at 6:35 p.m. July 4:  My friends Nate and Karen have just notified me, via compelling visual evidence, that this preparation requires a larger than average cast iron skillet: https://yfrog.com/Himg875/scaled.php?tn=0&server=875&filename=ma0bda.jpg&xsize=480&ysize=480   Nate's exact words, echoing a classic line from American cinema: We're gonna need a bigger skillet.... Mine is about 13 inches outside top measurement, about 12 inches inside bottom, the actual cooking surface.  Sorry for any inconvenience, and happy Independence Day~ bl )

Here’s how I like to do a whole chicken over the coals—the grill it & skillet method.  This technique combines the best aspects of grilling and roasting—a nicely browned and smoky piece of poultry, and really flavorful pan juices that flavor the other things cooked in said skillet (vegetables, mushrooms), which can also be deglazed for a simple sauce.  How it goes is:  you butterfly a bird by cutting right down the backbone with poultry shears, then bash the poor creature a bit to flatten it out.  Season well—more on this below.  Build a hot fire of natural charcoal, or actual wood, my choice.  Brown the bird nicely all around, then put it in a big skillet to finish cooking, during which time you can add those accompaniments mentioned above.  This method requires minimal supervision, and prevents those harrowing grease fires that nearly always come with grilling chicken over direct heat.

It was a hot and steamy day, and I had a hankering for spicy, garlicky chicken.  The original inspiration for my marinade came from a Saveur magazine article from some years back, about a region in Portugal (I think) where the specialty was grilled chicken with a very piquant marinade/sauce, and there were whole restaurants devoted to this single dish.  They used a special kind of chile grown in Africa, piri-piri, I think it was called.  At any rate, that was the inspiration, but I took a very simple, wing-it approach.  All I wanted was spicy, garlicky, and grilled.

I started by making some quick-pickled chiles by breaking a half dozen dried red chiles in half and dumping out the seeds.  Into a small saucepan I placed the seedless chiles, along with about a half cup of apple cider vinegar.  I brought that to a simmer, turned off the heat, covered the pan and let the chiles steep.  Once they had softened and plumped up I chopped four of the chiles (an arbitrary number, I didn’t want it too hot).  I chopped a load of fresh garlic, maybe five or six decent cloves.  To the chiles and garlic I added about ¼ cup of the soaking (spicy!) vinegar, a couple tablespoons olive oil, lots of freshly ground black pepper, and lots of coarse salt, maybe a teaspoon and a half to two teaspoons.  Smeared that all over the chicken in a big bowl and let it sit for a couple of hours.

At grilling time, then, I cleaned up my grill grate, lifted the chicken from the bowl letting the marinade drain back—we want this for later—and started grilling bone side down.  It took a few minutes to brown the bottom nicely, and then I flipped it.   Watch carefully for the first few minutes of skin-side cooking to make sure your fire is not too hot.  The skin lying flat over the fire will brown very nicely, of course, but there are folds and crevasses where the legs and wings meet the body that require a little manipulation to get brown—arrange birdie on either side to get those parts nicely seared.

I do a couple, three turns from bone side to skin side to get it really well browned.  Then into the skillet it goes, and you cook it, turning a couple times, once again, until done.  A meat thermometer inserted into the thickest part of the breast, near the bone, should read 160.  I have found that the legs actually cook faster than the breast in this method, and the breast is usually very moist and flavorful.  Just the same, we eat the legs and wings first, and save the breast meat for sandwiches.

Add accompaniments to cook in the skillet for the last half hour or so.  In this case, it was just Chinese broccoli.  Mushrooms, wild or otherwise, are great cooked this way.  Potatoes should be cooked most of the way, and only finished and browned in the skillet—they won’t have time to cook from raw.  When everything was nearly done I poured the marinade remnants over the chicken, and some of that dripped down and sizzled in the pan, making a nice base for deglazing into a pan sauce.  Add a little water if the drippings are threatening to burn.  Turn the bird a couple of times in those juices. 

Just before serving I returned the chicken to the grill over direct heat to re-crisp the skin a bit.  I deglazed the pan with nothing more than water (Chateau Sink, as Jacques Pépin says…).  We served it with a lovely couscous pilaf that Mary made, and drank cold, white Spanish wine.  We dined al fresco, and though we are in the longest days, it was already too dark to get a decent photo of the table.  A quite Iberian dinner hour.  I am certain that you can use your imaginations. 

Text and photos copyright 2012 by Brett Laidlaw

The Thighs Have It

In terms of underappreciated, tasty bargain meats, chicken thighs are right there with pork shoulder steaks, in my opinion.  The thigh is my preferred part of the bird, though I fully appreciate the wing thing, too.  Chicken wings prepared in a Sichuan dry-fried manner are an exquisite treat.  The thighs, though, are more accommodating in a knife-and-fork meal context, and when they are boneless, why, they make positively civilized eating--cooking them over nice smoky hardwood coals keeps them on the rustic side.

Ramps season is starting as the maple season ends, and I often wind up putting the two together, frequently on chicken.  This is a flavorful, simple dish to celebrate the return of grilling weather (well, comfortable grilling weather; we cook over the coals year-round).

A paillard is a flattened out piece of meat.  I wail away at my thighs with the side of a heavy cleaver--a meat mallet, or even a small sauté pan will get the job done.

Maple-Ramp Marinated Chicken Paillards
Serves two to three

4 boneless chicken thighs, skin on
½ cup chopped ramps, whites and greens
Juice of ¼ lemon, and some zest, if you like
2 tablespoons maple syrup
½ teaspoon sambal oelek chili paste (or more, to taste)
¼ teaspoon salt
Freshly ground black pepper

Purchase boneless skin-on chicken thighs, or bone them yourself. Place one thigh at a time on a cutting board, and with a meat mallet, the side of a heavy cleaver, or a small, clean saucepan, pound each thigh vigorously until the meat is about ½ inch thick—the surface area of the thighs should nearly double.

Combine the rest of the ingredients in a mixing bowl and add the chicken, coating it well on all sides. Let the chicken marinate for at least 60 minutes at room temp, or longer in the fridge. When you’re ready to cook, prepare a fire of natural wood coals, and grill the chicken over medium-hot coals, turning often, for 12 to 15 minutes total. The chicken should be very well browned on both sides.

If you have extra ramps, toss a few in what remains of the marinade, and grill them along with the chicken.



Text and photo copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

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

Not Too Local

"Most of my mother's family came from way out in west Texas in a little town called Lockney, which is somewhere close to Lubbock, but not too close to Lubbock--nobody likes to be too close to Lubbock."

Nanci Griffith, in between-song patter on her live album, One Fair Summer Evening
_______________________________________

One key to making it through the winter, eating local here in The Frozen North, is not trying to eat too local. Though we may have our principles, this is not a contest, nor should we turn the celebration of local foods into a hair shirt of grim obligation and deprivation. While a hair shirt might provide welcome warmth, it's likely to be itchy. Pull on a nice cozy sweater, instead.



It's still the first week of the new year, but winter has been with us a fair while, already. Time for a little vacation to warm, exotic climes; spicy grill-smoked chicken wings can take us there. And we're not abandoning our principles, entirely: though the flavorings are foreign--lime juice, fish sauce, Sichuan pepper, non-local chilies--the chicken wings are local (Kadejan, in this case), and the carrots, too, and the leek is from our garden. You could make your own noodles, if you like, but we find it convenient to keep a few packages of Chinese egg noodles, thin and thick, in the pantry.

This was a treat on a cold, snowy evening. The wings are well and truly smoked--"Chicken bacon!", Mary exclaimed--as they are tossed with salt hours ahead of cooking. That cure allows the flavors of fish sauce, lime, chili, garlic, Sichuan pepper, etc., to penetrate the meat. Then add the applewood smoke, the char from the grill...oh, my.... I'm glad we made extra.

My sambal carrot salad, the carrots grated coarsely rather than shaved, made a crisp, sweet contrast. New Glarus bock, a fine Wisconsin brew, brought east and west together ably.

A bowl of extremely non-local guacamole whetted our appetites very nicely. No regrets.

Oh, and ma la, that's Chinese for numbing (from the Sichuan pepper) and hot (from the chilies), a classic Sichuanese formulation. This dish is not especially ma la. If you want it moreso, toss the wings with ground roasted Sichuan pepper and chili oil after grilling. We enjoyed the mild heat and spice, and interplay of flavors.



Smoke-Grilled Ma La Chicken Wings

3 pounds chicken wings, separated at the joints (save wing tips for stock)
¾ tsp salt
2 tsp fish sauce
1 ½ tsp sugar
Juice of ¼ juicy lime
½ tsp crushed black peppercorns
1 tsp whole Sichuan peppercorns
2 large cloves garlic, sliced
2 scallions, chopped
2 medium hot red chilies (jalapeno or Fresno), seeded, cut into quarters the long way
2 small hot green or red chilies, Serrano or cayenne, sliced

Mix all the above ingredients in a large bowl, and let sit several hours or overnight.


Natural chunk charcoal
Apple wood or other smoking wood of your choice
2 small leeks, cleaned and sliced in half lengthwise, or 4 scallions
Thin Chinese egg noodles, a bundle-and-a-half per person (sesame oil, toasted sesame seeds, salt)

Light a fire of natural charcoal in your barbeque grill. Have another, smaller grill on hand to keep hot coals going. When the coals are hot, move 2/3 of them to the smaller grill. Move the remaining coals to one side of the grill (the front in a clamshell-Meco-type grill). Add some wood chips to the coals. Arrange the chicken wings on the grill away from direct heat. Close the lid and smoke for 45 to 60 minutes, maintaining a temperature of at least 200 degrees—I keep an instant-read meat thermometer in the top vent of my grill to monitor temperature. Check a couple of times to make sure the grill is maintaining heat, especially in cold weather. Turn the wings over halfway through. Add hot coals from the smaller grill as needed, and add charcoal to the smaller grill to keep a good supply.



Once the wings are smoked, carefully transfer coals from the smaller grill to the larger, so as to have a hot fire for browning the wings. Now grill the wings over direct heat, turning often. Cook until they are very well browned and crisped. Remove them to a warm oven as they are done. When you have room on the grill, add the quartered medium-hot chilies, and the leeks or scallions. Grill until they are browned and tender. Chop the leeks for easier eating after they are grilled.

Serve over Chinese noodles tossed with sesame oil, toasted sesame seeds, and a bit of salt, and sambal carrots (but shred or coarsely grate the carrots rather than shaving them thin). Place bed of noodles in a large shallow bowl, top with some of the carrots, then wings on top of that. Drape a few shreds of leek over the top, and the chopped leeks around the edges, and the grilled chilies around the edges, as well. Serve with cold beer and paper towels to wipe your hands and greasy chin. Pretend you are at a street stall in some steamy south Asian city. Forget the hell about winter.




Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

Unfussy Fowl (from "Favorite Recipes of Minnesota Meats")

There's no other week of the year during which over-sized poultry products receive as much riveted attention as Thanksgiving week, of course, much of it reaching near-existential levels of agonized scrutiny: To brine or not to brine? Baste? When, with what, butter, stock, orange juice, Dr Pepper? Whole bird or separate the parts? Stuffing in or out (and if it's out, how can it be stuffing...?)? Heirloom or Butterball? Follow Jean-Georges, or Grandma Jeanne? Chuck it all, and go out for pho?

It all gets a bit fraught, to be sure, calling for help-lines, stacks of magazines all taunting the harried cook with images of the perfect bronzen bird, and that big bottle of wine you thought would last through dinner--oops, it didn't make it past the crab dip....

As a bit of an antidote--and not that I think this is going to cause anyone to alter their Turkey Day menus--I offer this elemental preparation, chicken baked with cream and onions. A bit of flour, salt, and water are the only other ingredients.

I brought home this little pamphlet-style cookbook after helping my mom sort through stuff during her recent move:



The moment I laid eyes on this recipe, I knew I had to make it:



The simplicity of the ingredients is compelling; the confidence in the instructions inspires confidence in the cook. And, what the hell, you stick it in the oven for a good while, take it out: Supper. It's the sort of recipe, too, that starts the cook thinking of variations--sure, you could use white wine or cider instead of water; slice some mushrooms to bake along with the chicken, or other vegetables; throw in a couple of sprigs of thyme. But I doubt, really, that you would get something better than this. Get really good, local, natural chicken, certainly (Kadejan is great, always available at our coop); and for us the cream is always Cedar Summit.



The only variations we made to the recipe were these: We used thighs only, instead of a cut-up bird. I salted the chicken, then rolled it in the flour, instead of mixing flour and salt. We baked it at 375 for about an hour and a half--I would have tried Mrs Hecht's long cooking at 350, but we were running a bit late, didn't want to be having dinner in front of the ten o'clock news.... Oh, and I basted it a few times in the course of the cooking.

Alongside we just had a tasty little gratin of butternut squash, a piece of bread, and a glass of cider. We gave thanks.

I love these sorts of old-timey themed cookbooks--I've got another around here somewhere, "Dishes Men Like," I think it's called, put out by the Lea & Perrins folks, and yes, every single recipe calls for Worcestershire sauce. As for the Minnesota meats book, published in 1966, it presents a really fascinating snapshot of where the Midwestern kitchen was headed at the time. For while some recipes show the brilliant simplicity and respect for ingredients of Mrs Hecht's, and others go right back to the farm (a head cheese recipe calls, indeed, for a hog's head, tongue, and heart), plenty of others show convenience foods creeping into recipes--a chicken recipe on the same page as Mrs Hecht's calls not just for two cans of "cream" soup, but for a half-pack of dried soup mix, too.

The section entitled "Foreign Favorites" is a hoot, containing recipes for "Creole Pork Chops (Hawaii)"; "Porcupine Meat Ball Sauce (Italy)"; three preparations of "Meat Balls (Sweden)," two for "Good Meat Balls (Sweden)", and, naturally, just one for "Best Meat Balls (Sweden)".

Flipping through books like this is as much (maybe more) an anthropological as a culinary activity. I find it a bit nostalgic (coming across a recipe very like my mom's sweet & sour spareribs), a bit appalling (the number of cans that get opened), a bit disheartening (I won't name names, but a "recipe" calling for nothing but hamburger, frozen french fries, and cream of mushroom soup, can only mean: "I just don't give a damn; it's food, and if you're hungry, you'll eat it..."), and extremely entertaining, for those reasons and more.

All the recipes, of course, are attributed to women, and almost every one a missus (including one Mrs. Walter F. Mondale, Wife of U.S. Senator from Minnesota, for Minnesota Wild Rice Casserole; if you grew up around here, you've eaten this dish, and you probably liked it just fine. My mom put water chestnuts in hers...).

Favorite Recipes of Minnesota Meats Edition, copyright MCMLXVI, Favorite Recipes Press, Inc., Louisville, Kentucky.

Chestnut Season

Just when you think the last of the seasonal delights has come and gone from the market stands, when the corn and tomatoes have gone by the bye, when even Brussels sprouts and celery root are seeming old hat, and the next new thing to anticipate are the pungent ramps of April, May's asparagus, many wintry months away: Along come the chestnuts.

I wasn’t at all expecting to see them as I made my way through the produce section at the Seward Co-op last week. I had a mess of other dishes on my mind, based on the plethora of squashes, the verdant bouquets of kale in my garden, the last few pickings of green beans, and my newly dug potatoes. But there they were, the first of the season, fresh up from Iowa (I’m not completely sure, but I think they must have come from the J & B Chestnut Farm in Winfield, Iowa), and I couldn’t resist them. They should be around for a while now, so I just bought a small sack full, and traipsed gaily to the checkout with glowing anticipation of many happy chestnut moments to come.

Yes, I’m a produce geek, I can’t deny it.

Chestnuts are by no means as common as squash or Brussels sprouts, of course. They’re a relatively new arrival in our market, as a few growers see their hybrid chestnut groves mature, bringing back a once-common tree that disappeared with the chestnut blight that swept the continent with a terrible swiftness in the early part of the 20th century. Chestnuts, indeed, are something of a rarity, certainly a delicacy, with a price tag to match, $10 a pound or more. The best ones are meaty and sweet, and they suggest nut, fruit, and vegetable all at once. They can go savory or sweet, main course to dessert, equally well, and they cross continents and oceans in their appeal--you’ll find chestnut recipes from France and Italy, and well as China and Japan.

Before the Real Bread hiatus, our chestnut bread was a seasonal favorite, inspiring fervid devotion among our customers. Indeed, there were people we didn’t hear from all year until chestnut bread time--generally early November, when the chestnut flour was ready--came around.

I’ve got a Sichuan chicken and chestnut recipe that I love, surprisingly mild considering its region of origin. This recipe is a simplification and Westernization of that dish, using hard apple cider where the Chinese version would use rice wine, increasing the amount of meat to make a single main dish. I really like the Chinese way of making a meal from several dishes of equal status, along with rice, but when I’ve got the season’s first chestnuts, I don’t want anything else stealing the spotlight.

We used our own hard cider from home-pressed apples. I realize that good hard cider can be hard to find, and if you can’t find one that you like, I suggest this ersatz: In place of the cup of hard cider called for below, use a ¾ of a cup of good sweet cider, 1 tablespoon of good apple cider vinegar, and top it off with a bit of water. That won’t be the same as the hard cider, but it won’t be bad, at all.



Chicken with Chestnuts and Cider
Serves two generously

16 chestnuts
4 chicken thighs (or thighs and wings, legs, whatever parts you like; we prefer thighs)
2 tsp canola oil
1 medium onion sliced
1 small carrot sliced
1 cup dry hard apple cider
1 cup chicken stock or water
Salt and pepper
3 sprigs fresh thyme

First you need to get the chestnuts out of the shell. With good, fresh chestnuts, this isn’t difficult. Begin by cutting an X into the flat side of the shell, just barely penetrating the shell without cutting into the meat. I like to take a small paring knife, and (CAREFULLY!!!) grasping nearly the entire blade in my fingers, draw the tip of the blade across the shell. Once the shells have been scored, you can roast them on the stove top (our woodstove, the Haggis, is perfect for this) in a heavy skillet (like cast iron), until the flaps of shell created by your Xs start to peel back; or place the nuts in a pan in a 400 degree oven for about 10 minutes. Peel the nuts as soon as they’re cool enough to handle. Carry on as below.

Salt and pepper the chicken pieces. Heat the canola oil in a high-sided skillet or dutch oven, and brown the chicken well on both sides, about 15 minutes total. Remove the chicken from the pan. Brown the chestnuts over medium low heat, watching carefully, turning frequently so they don’t burn. Remove and set aside. Pour off excess fat, leaving about 2 teaspoons. Add onions and carrot. Saute until the onions are wilted about 5 minutes. Add the cider, scraping up the brown bits with a wooden spatula. Add stock or water, the thyme, and a pinch of salt. Return the chicken to the pan. Bring to a simmer and cook partly covered for 30 minutes. Add the chestnuts and cook for another 30 minutes. By this time the liquid should be considerably reduced. If you want a thicker, sauce-like consistency, remove the chicken and chestnuts and reduce the sauce over high for a couple of minutes. Taste for salt, and add a little more pepper if you like.

Serve with buttered noodles, or just a piece of good grilled bread.

Variation: Finish the sauce with a quarter-cup of heavy cream, and you’ll have something that would be quite at home in a Normandy farmhouse.



Text and photos copyright 2010 by Brett Laidlaw

Grill-It Skillet Chicken & Oysters

I found a log liberally covered with lovely fresh oyster mushrooms last week. I wanted a tasty, simple dinner for the first night out at Bide-A-Wee. Grilled chicken is great, except when the fat drips on the coal, creating towering gouts of flame that carbonize the skin whilst the meat remains cold and bloody. I love the "iron on the fire" method.



Brown the chicken nicely over the coals.



Transfer to a cast iron skillet, and when it has rendered a bit of fat, add some garlic and onions, and some kale.



When the kale has wilted, toss in the oyster mushrooms or other fungi of your choice. Let everything get very simpatico and well acquainted.



Timing is not crucial here as long as the heat is mild. You can have another glass of wine and read another article in the NY Times magazine if you like, or just sit and see what birds come to the feeder. With this withering heat back upon us, we may wish for summer's end ASAP, but it will be here soon enough. No need to rush it.



We served this with pasta. I made the simplest of sauces, just deglazing the pan with a little water (Chateau Sink, as Jacques Pépin calls it), swirling in a bit of butter at the end.




Text and photos copyright 2010 by Brett Laidlaw

Senses of Summer

Chanterelles are my favorite wild mushroom, and raspberries my favorite wild fruit, and in both cases it’s the aroma as much as the taste that I’m drawn to. In the case of the wild raspberries we find at Bide-A-Wee, I’m fortunate to find pleasure in a bowl full of splendid smells, because it’s right difficult to gather any quantity of berries. While we have raspberry canes in abundance, those canes don’t tend to bear a lot of fruit. We don’t have this problem--well, not a problem, exactly, more just a situation--with black raspberries or blackberries, but our red raspberries rarely seem to be well pollinated. Many blossoms simply don’t turn to fruit at all, while others form only partial berries. Here I must note that I was about to refer to the many individual sub-berries that make up a single raspberry as “dem little doots,” but mindful that my friend Teresa Marrone might be reading this, and with her splendid tome Abundantly Wild close at hand, I can report dat dem little doots is properly referred to as globular drupes. Which actually doesn’t sound all that different, when you look at it.



Anyway: When picking raspberries from our Bide-A-Wee patches, one is rarely dropping full berries into the bowl, but rather is usually gathering dem little doots--er, dem glopular droops, I mean, oh, skip it…. Even so, even with the doot-drupe situation of unfulfilled berries, I can collect a small fragrant bowl in just a short while; not enough for jams or such, but plenty enough to appreciate that wonderful smell, and to cook down a bit to mix with some of my friend Mala’s rockin’ homemade whole grain mustard as a glaze for grilled chicken, a condiment to enliven a sausage--mixed grill for another Bide-A-Wee bachelor dinner. Mary’s been subsisting on Maid-Rites this past weekend at a family reunion in, well, where would you expect to find a Maid-Rite, a.k.a., "loose meat sandwich" (Look out! Meat on the loose!)?

Has to be the great state of Iowa.

Oh, and the other thing I like about raspberries: It’s the red.



Raspberry Mustard

1 cup raspberries
1 Tbsp honey
3 Tbsp grain mustard
Pinch salt
Espelette or cayenne to taste, optional

Wine or raspberry vinegar to thin the glaze, if needed

Combine the raspberries with about one tablespoon of water in a small saucepan. Bring to a boil and simmer, stirring for two or three minutes, just until the berries become soft. Press the berries through a strainer, scraping the bottom of the strainer to get the thicker pulp. Return the juice to the saucepan with the honey, bring to a boil, and reduce by half. Pour the mixture into a small bowl and let cool. Add the mustard and a good pinch of salt, and the chili if desired.

For a glaze for grilled meat or fowl, thin with a little vinegar (or wine, or beer) if it seems too thick. Brush on at the very end of grilling and watch carefully to prevent burning.

Text and photos copyright 2010 by Brett Laidlaw

Chicken Noodle Soup, "Comme Chez Nous"

I guess one knows that one does not approach cooking in the typical American way when one delights in dealing with lamb tongue and kidney, yet is flummoxed in the face of a boneless, skinless chicken breast....

I had bought a whole chicken to make stock. Boned it out, saving the thighs and breasts. The wings and drumsticks were sacrificed to the stock (but the dogs got the meat from those later). The thighs are our favorite part of the bird. We use them to make Nicoise chicken, chicken in vinegar,etc.; bone them out to make "kung pao chicken" (gong bao ji ding), or any other Sichuan stir-fried dish. But what to do with the breasts, devoid of fat and almost all flavor? Anything is good when it's swimming in a spicy, tangy, savory broth. Let's make chicken noodle soup, sort of southeast Asian style.

I don't know if this is from Vietnamese pho, or some Indonesian soup I read about--you start by searing some shallots and ginger (a couple small shallots, halved, four or five slices of ginger, no need to peel) in just a film of oil until they are really quite dark, nearly black. Add a dried red chili or two towards the end, letting them get dark and fragrant, too--ahh-ahh-ahh-choooo! Like that.


You've got some stock simmering. You want a couple cups of stock per person. I soaked four or five dried shitake mushrooms in boiling water for at least 20 minutes. So my stock consisted of: 2 cups chicken stock; 1 cup of shitake soaking water; 1 cup water. You could use more stock for the water if you want it richer, but it's full of flavor this way, too.

Put the seared shallots, ginger, and chili into the simmering broth. Slice the soaked mushrooms, and add those to the broth, too.

The searing continues, though more moderately, through the rest of this dish. That's a large part of the distinctive flavor of the soup--that said, if the vegetables get too dark, it can make the broth bitter, so you have to be a little careful.

Other than the mushrooms and the ginger, everything is local:

--Sweet dumpling squash from our garden, about half a squash, peeled and sliced about 1/3-inch thick.
--Frozen sweet corn from the market, a generous cup of kernels, thawed.
--Red onion (1/2 large) from market, sliced.
--Kadejean chicken breast (one), sliced crosswise, 1/3-inch thick.




Heat a large skillet and add a bit of oil. Lay in the squash slices and cook over medium high heat for a couple of minutes, until the one side is getting a nice charred appearance; turn over, do the same on the other side. Check for doneness, and if the squash isn't done to your taste at this point, add a little water, cover, and steam for a couple of minutes. Remove lid and turn heat to high until all the water is boiled away (this is the "potsticker method" of steam-searing vegetables).

Set the squash aside, add a little more oil to the pan, and add the sliced onions. Cook over high until the onions start to brown, then add the sweet corn and sauté until the corn starts to color, as well.



Remove the corn and onions from the pan. Add a little more oil, and when it's hot lay in the chicken slices. Cook over high heat for about a minute and a half, until the chicken is getting charred on one side. When the hot side is nice and brown, and the top still looks raw, add the chicken to the broth--do not sear the other side. This way the chicken has some slight chance of not being overcooked.

Add all the other vegetables to the broth. Let it simmer together for a couple of minutes.

Now put it together: Cook your noodles; we used thin Chinese noodles, the dry ones that come in plastic packages of eight bundles, and we used three bundles for two people.

Flavor your broth: I added several glugs of fish sauce, a couple teaspoons of soy sauce, a drizzle of sesame oil, a little sugar. Taste for salt and general depth of flavor. Add more of above as desired. Place a portion of noodles in a wide bowl. Divide the meat and veg between the bowls, bathe it all in hot, wonderful broth. Garnish with lime slices, if you like.

Thank the chicken for all its parts, and the great wide world for its splendid spectrum of flavors. Slurping is not only permitted, but encouraged.



Text and photos copyright 2010 by Brett Laidlaw

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