Book Drawing Winners Announced

So I finally got around to drawing for the book giveaway I offered last month, and of the folks who entered by sharing one or more of their local foods highlights for 2009, the winners are:

1) Macaroni John
2) Rob
3) Laura

The books, as pictured above. The Angry Trout Café Notebook and The Omnivore's Dilemma are hardcovers in very good to excellent condition; Jacques Pépin's The Apprentice is a paperback with a fold on the front cover (but it's a very entertaining read). Thanks to everyone who entered.

Oh, also, I've changed my font, from the sans serif trebuchet to lucida grande, what you're reading right now. What do you think?

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

Pop Pop Pop

And now for something completely different.

There's been a lot of meat in these pages lately, organs, even--livers and kidneys and tongues. Oh, my. Rich sauces, slaughtered bunnies.

Time for a little palate cleanser. Time for some popcorn. This will sort of wrap up the 2009 Food Highlights (I haven't forgotten the book drawing, will get to that this week). The subject here is not just any old popcorn, but the best popcorn ever, and a local, homegrown product, to boot: Clem's Homegrown Popcorn from Castle Rock Township, Minnesota.

I first came across Clem's popcorn a couple of years ago at Greg's Meats on U.S. Highway 52 in Hampton, MN, on my way home from a fishing outing to the Whitewater area. Unsuccessful at putting a meal of trout in the creel (that hardly ever happens...), I stopped at Greg's to pick up a couple of steaks. A display of interesting cloth bags near the checkout caught my eye--hand-picked popcorn, "Minnesota Grown," how could I resist? And it was there, my friends, at an unassuming butcher shop in the middle of a cornfield, it was there, that day, that my lifelong quest for the perfect popcorn came to an end.

Popcorn is one of the world's most appetizing foods, and Clem's is the best popcorn in the world. It pops up into beautiful, full, tasty kernels with perfect popcorn texture. It leaves almost no "old maids," or whatever you like to call those unpopped kernels (recognizing that the term "old maid" is perhaps not considered quite politically correct these days). We pop ours the old-fashioned way, in a heavy-bottomed pan on the stovetop. We use canola oil to pop it, the least coating of the pan bottom, and top it temperately with Hope unsalted butter and sea salt. We eat it for lunch sometimes, or with happy hour, or as the classic TV-watching snack. And, as of today, I've eaten it as part of a salad! More on that below.


I've made my case, and now I'll let Cindy Plash, Clem Becker's daughter-in-law, tell the rest of the story. She tells it wonderfully well. It makes me like Clem's even more:

[15 February update: Cindy wanted me to mention a couple of other people responsible for making Clem's homegrown popcorn available to us. They are: "Randy Becker (Clem's son and my husband). He is the essential part of the whole popcorn business with his knowledge and strong back! Also, Imelda (mother-in-law) sews all of the bags (about 600 a year) that the popcorn is sold in--she definitely deserves mention." Happy to give credit where credit is due (and preserve family harmony!).]


Clem is my father-in-law who will be 90 years old this year. He started growing popcorn about 25 years ago, just for family and friends. I moved to Farmington and began learning how to grow popcorn in 1995. In 1998, we started marketing and selling the popcorn with the bag that features Clem picking popcorn. Clem still comes out to the farm to help with popcorn and last year he picked about 180 5-gallon buckets of popcorn ears. (I didn’t keep track of the number of buckets I picked.) We plant about three-quarters of an acre of popcorn.

We start picking the popcorn in late October and it will usually take about a month. Because we hand pick the popcorn, each ear is inspected and bad kernels are dug out with a special hand tool. The ears are then put on large screens to dry. We use a corn sheller to remove the kernels from the cobs. The kernels are put through a fanning mill that separates the large and small kernels (this is done because the large kernels will take longer to dry). The kernels are put into small boxes with screens on the bottom to dry to the perfect moisture for popping. After the corn is dried, we put the kernels through the fanning mill twice to remove the chaff (or "bees' wings"). The sheller and fanning mill are from the 1930s. All the popcorn is stored in five-gallon buckets and each bucket is popped to ensure quality and ‘popability’ (that’s my own made-up word) before it is packaged for sale. This past harvest was the best crop we’ve had at about 4,000 pounds.

Clem’s popcorn is available through mail order and the following retail outlets – Greg’s Meats in Hampton (on Hwy 52), Ferndale Market in Cannon Falls (31659 County 24 Boulevard), and Just Food Co-op in Northfield (516 Water Street South). We also participate in the Farmers Market in Farmington and plan to attend the Eagan Market this year.

We are a very small business and plan to remain small so that the quality of our popcorn will continue. Last year we sold out of popcorn by mid-October, but people will wait for the fresh crop, I think, because of our quality.

Here’s a recipe for popcorn salad:

Popcorn Salad

2 cups Clem’s Homegrown Popcorn, popped (use more or less popcorn, depending on taste)
2 cups diced celery
1/2 medium onion diced
1 can diced water chestnuts (drained)
8 ounce shredded cheddar cheese
½ cup bacon, fried and crumbled
2 cups of mayo

Chill for two hours before serving. Keeps well in the refrigerator for up to 48 hours.

(Note: Don’t ever use flavored popcorn such as white cheddar, it’s too salty.)


I made a version of the popcorn salad this afternoon. I wanted to play up the popcorn aspect, so I cut back some on the supporting cast of ingredients. I subbed apple for water chestnuts to keep it more local, and I omitted the bacon. Here's my version:

2 cups popped popcorn, Clem’s Homegrown
1 rib celery, chopped, about 3/4 cup
1/2 medium onion, chopped, about 3/4 cup (I used a red onion, which added nice color)
1 small apple, peeled, in 1/2-inch dice
3 ounces grated sharp cheddar cheese, about a cup
1/2 cup of mayo (I like Hellmann's, by which I mean, I adore Hellmann's, could live on Hellmann's...)

Yes, I was skeptical about popcorn salad. Who ever heard of popcorn salad? You know what? It's delicious. Put it on the salad buffet at next summer's barbecue gathering. You will get quizzical comments, you will get compliments, you will get requests for the recipe.



Thanks so much to Cindy for sharing the story of Clem's popcorn, and to the Becker-Plash family for their wonderful product.

A 2.25 pound bag of Clem's Homegrown Popcorn costs $5.00 (plus shipping if you get it by mail order). To place an order contact Cindy Plash by email-- cplash@frontiernet.net --or phone, 651.460.8034. Look for Clem's listing in the Minnesota Grown directory.

Update on ordering Clem's popcorn: Cindy just let me know that Clem's popcorn can also be ordered in bulk, any amount, for $2 a pound. Also, please note that if you're ordering small amounts by mail order, the shipping may cost more than the popcorn. The flat rate box is the most economical way to go, so get some friends involved. At Christmas I ordered a half dozen bags, and the shipping was $10.35 for the whole thing. (Added 11 February 2010)

Text (except Cindy Plash's story of Clem's popcorn) and photos copyright 2010 by Brett Laidlaw

Absolutely Offal

Here's a gallery of innards, what we did with the kidneys, liver, heart, and tongue of our Sheepy Hollow lamb.

Deviled kidneys after Fergus Henderson:

You cut the kidneys open, snip out the bit of gristle, toss them in flour seasoned with dry mustard, cayenne (or espelette), salt and pepper. Fry in butter, splash in some chicken stock and Worchestershire, serve on toast. A little cress salad (bought, not foraged), cool and crisp, made a nice counterpoint.

This was really pretty good. If you don't eat offal on a regular basis--and we don't--there are textures and...aromas, let's say, that are unfamiliar and not necessarily appealing, at first blush. Mary and I both started in a little tentatively, trying to decide if this was delicious, repulsive, or something in between. Our final verdict: Much closer to the delicious end. We cleaned our plates. We could have eaten more.

Next up, my own interpretation of Leopold Bloom's "liverslices fried with crustcrumbs":



I soaked the slices of liver in milk for a while. I seasoned with salt and pepper, dredged in flour, dipped in egg, coated with crumbs. Fried the slices in butter until the crumb crust was brown. To accompany, I just sautéed some red onions from the market and a bit of celery (from California) briefly, leaving it all nice and crisp, the onions sweet, the celery savory. I was pleased with the presentation, but...I just don't like liver that much. There's something unrelenting about both the flavor and texture of liver that's off-putting for me.

That said, there are some kinds of liver I do enjoy:



I found some foie gras from Au Bon Canard in the freezer, go figure. Seared and served with a dried apple-maple-vanilla compote, pretty good.

Our final offal offering was prepared a few nights later. We had some friends over for dinner, and as a starter we served an assiette of braised lamb tongue and stuffed, roasted heart (another of Bloom's favorites).


The tongue and the heart both are hard-working muscles--I'm thinking there should be something witty or trenchant to say about that physiological fact, but I'll let it go.

The tongue and the heart both are hard-working muscles, so they need a lot of cooking to become tender. The tongue was simmered in chicken stock with some garlic and thyme for a couple of hours. The heart I stuffed with breadcrumbs sautéed in butter with onions and garlic, moistened with red wine. Drape a couple slices of bacon over top, roast-braise with some chicken stock for a couple of hours.

For the sauce I combined the cooking stock from both, added some white wine, reduced. I served slices of the heart and tongue over a slick of this rich reduction, rained some chopped cornichons (our garden cukes) and some parsley over top. Being muscles, the heart and tongue tasted more like meat, less like innards. And they were good, but after our recent experiments with the edgier offal, also somewhat less interesting.

So there you have it. I wouldn't go out of my way to add any old offal to the menu. I would do kidneys again--our friend Jean-Louis, who shared the heart and tongue assiette with us, said that they're great on the grill. I would cook up another tongue, a bigger one. Heart, sure, I would give it another go.

On a trip in western France a few years ago, through the Sarthe region around LeMans, then through Normandy and into Brittany, I made it a point to try various kinds of offal. I had foie gras every chance I got, of course, and headcheese, marrow bones, veal kidneys. (About three days into a trip to France, we always notice that we've acquired "the breath of the carnivore," a ripe, carrion-like tinge in our exhalations; and we so eat salads for lunch for a couple of days.)

My biggest challenge came when I ordered "marmite de tripes Normandes," the symbolic dish of the region--tripe cooked a long time in a cocotte with vegetables. They brought the little dutch oven to the table, and ceremoniously removed the lid. As the fragrant heat rose up I leaned in to appreciate it with rich anticipation, and as the curling tendrils of steam reached my nose, my reaction was: Whoa! I think I'd like that better without the diaper! Which reaction I luckily refrained from expressing, just nodded and weakly smiled, instead, and wondered if there was a pizza joint in Domfront that might be open late....

But after that initial aromatic rush subsided, and I took a portion of tripe and vegetables on my plate, I found that it was quite to my liking, the broth rich and deeply restorative, the vegetables sweet, the tripe itself tender and satisfying, a bit like tete de veau, long-simmered veal head, a dish I love.

Expectations surely go a long way toward determining whether one is going to like a particular dish. In areas where tripe is commonly consumed, tripe is adored--Normandy, Rome, Mexico, even Philadelphia. Even with the current, somewhat faddish, appreciation of nose-to-tail eating, I don't think we're about to become a country of kidney-scarfers. I'm not a total convert to offal gastronomy, but I enjoyed our experiments with lamb innards, and I learned a lot from them. In future I'll take my offal where I find it, and be glad for the opportunity.


Text and photos copyright 2010 by Brett Laidlaw

Mary Had a Little Lamb

Mary had a little lamb. I had some, too. Tranche de gigot "La Boutarde," pan-fried leg of lamb slices the way they cook it at that Parisian bistro. It looks like Mary and I will be having a little more lamb in future:


That's our half a Sheepy Hollow lamb, dressed weight around 26 pounds. Sheepy Hollow is our Midtown Farmers' Market lamb vendor. Anne Leck is the woman behind Sheepy Hollow, which produces the best lamb around, in my opinion. Our friend Lynne arranged our lamb buy, and took the other half. She kindly let us have the offal: heart, liver, kidneys, and tongue. I am not at all sure what I'm going to do with that stuff. I'm excited about the opportunity to work with offal that's this fresh and lovely. And I am filled with trepidation, at the same time: I want to really like it, but I'm not sure I will; I want to do it justice, but I have almost no experience cooking this sort of thing. I think I'll let Fergus be my guide.

Another part of me, the Joycean part, is inclined to take this passage from Ulysses about Leopold Bloom's gustatory preferences, and just wing it:


"Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine."


You can be sure I'll give a full report, whatever I do. Forgive me for getting ahead of myself--having all those lamb innards in the fridge has me a little preoccupied.

The lamb leg cutlets were fantastic. The recipe, from Patricia Wells' Bistro Cooking, adapted from La Boutarde in Paris, is simplicity itself. That was exactly what I was looking for, because 1) I didn't want to go to a lot of trouble, and 2) I wanted our first taste of this lamb to highlight the flavor of the lamb, rather than showy cooking technique. The accompaniments were equally simple, a mixed mash--potatoes, carrot, celery root, and parsnip--a slice of fresh bread, a glass of red wine (the bargain brouilly we opened was halfway to vinegar; a four-dollar Argentine syrah saved the day).

This meat was simply wonderful. It was dense and a bit chewy, but supremely juicy, with a depth of flavor that's rare to find in meat these days. Mary and I agreed that the flavor was almost more like that of grass-fed beef than run-of-the-mill lamb.

A recipe in pictures:



Take two five-to-six-ounce boneless slices of lamb leg, about 3/4- to 1-inch thick. Salt and pepper the meat (I also added the lightest sprinkle of piment d'espelette, because I just can't help myself).



In two tablespoons of olive oil, soften six to eight cloves of garlic in their jackets over medium low heat. This will take around eight minutes. Do not let the garlic get too brown, or it will be bitter. When the garlic is soft, remove the pan from the heat and set aside.



Heat a sauté pan over medium-high heat, and spoon in some of the garlic oil. Add the lamb and cook three minutes per side for medium rare. Toss in a few sprigs of thyme halfway through the cooking.



When the lamb is done, remove it to a warm plate to rest while you make the simple pan sauce. Add the garlic to the sauté pan. Pour in about three tablespoons of water, and scrape with a wooden spatula to deglaze. Add one-quarter cup dry white wine (you could use red instead, but the recipe called for white and that's what I used here). Simmer until the sauce thickens a bit.

There should be some juice on the lamb resting plate by now. Pour that back into the sauce, and serve.




For the mash, we peeled two small russet potatoes (about lemon size), one small carrot, one small parsnip, and one-quarter of a small celery root. Quarter the potatoes and cut the other vegetables into 3/4-inch dice. Bring a pot of water to the boil, add the vegetables, and simmer briskly until they are very tender, about 15 minutes. Drain the vegetables and mash them with a fork or potato masher. Add a good tablespoon of butter, salt to taste, and a bit of the cooking liquid, if you like, to achieve your desired texture. In this case, I'd say I added a good half-cup of the cooking liquid.

Text and photos copyright 2010 by Brett Laidlaw

Bonus Post for Bunny Lovers

La Cuisine de Bretagne et d'Armorique, Clémentine Thibault (Editions Jean-Paul Gisserot)

Page 85:




Page 83:





Note that this book was purchased for 35 francs!

File under: "The French will be French."

Yummy Bunny

( Trout Caviar Sweepstakes, 2009 Local Food Highlights now in progress. Tell us about one of your 2009 local food highlights in the comments section to enter our book drawing.

And hey! Check it out! I'm tweeting! Who woulda thunk it? Follow Trout Caviar on Twitter by clicking the "Follow me on Twitter" button at right, below the "tweets".)




Alternate title, a la Updike: "Rabbit is Rich." Wild rabbit, like this one I shot out at Bide-A-Wee last week, is indeed rich. Tastes like chicken? Not a bit. But then I don't think a good farm-rasised rabbit, which I also relish, tastes like chicken, either. That said, the wild thing is in a class by itself.

One thing rabbit has in common with chicken, or any other fowl, is that some parts cook more quickly than others; some parts take to long cooking better than others. On a bird you have legs, which can take a lot of cooking, and the breast, which goes dry very easily. Rabbits don't fly (except in Monty Python...), so there's no breast meat to speak of. But like many another mammal, they have well-developed loin muscles, running right along the backbone. The loin from a wild rabbit is some of the finest meat you'll ever eat, in my opinion--tender, toothsome, savory, rich, just gamy enough. As to how to cook it, just think of how you'd prepare a pork loin, a good steak, a lamb loin chop--medium rare is best, to my taste, rare if you prefer; anything beyond medium is...too much cooking, I think (not to attribute moral imputations to one's preferred doneness of meat...!).

What I did with this bunny: Broke it down into its significant components: Separated the back legs(at the top) from the carcass , then the front legs (bottom). Trimmed up the sort of "flap meat" hanging down along the rib cage. Trimmed up the "saddle," the back of the rabbit, leaving the loin on the bone (middle).

All trimmings, including the head, I chopped up and browned in a bit of oil, added carrot, leek, onion, garlic, thyme, black pepper, celery root trimmings, white wine, water, and simmered for stock.

For garnish I rendered some cubes of homesmoked bacon. In that fat I browned cubes of parsnip, celery root, carrot, and squash. Set all that aside for later.

Browned the legs, tossed in a half an onion sliced, some cider, some of the rabbit stock. Cover and braise a good hour and a half.



Oh, those jowls, or cheeks, of which I have "tweeted"--I did indeed confit those, along with the heart, tossed them in some Sichuan five-spice salt to cure for a while, cooked them slowly in duck fat for a couple of hours, with a little chopped leek. It was just a rich couple of mouthfuls by the time it was done, served over a round of sourdough, but let me tell you, it nearly stole the show.

Toward serving time, brown the loin well in a bit of oil and butter, stick it in a 350 oven to finish, six to eight minutes. Let rest while we strain the braising liquid, add a little more stock to it, then the cubes of precooked bacon and vegetables to warm through.



Serve on soft polenta. We usually cook polenta in plain water. This time we used one-third each water, rabbit stock, and milk. It was excellent in its own right, but in the context a bit rich, like buttering the foie gras (a culinary version of gilding the lily...!).

If you hunt and like to eat, go get yourself a wild rabbit. If you don't hunt but know someone who does, implore him or her on your behalf. Invite the hunter to share the meal. Everyone wins (okay, everyone but the rabbit). Another good thing about rabbit: In Wisconsin, and I suspect it may be the same elsewhere, if you're hunting on private land, there's no closed season. You have to observe the daily bag limits and possession limits, and have a small-game license but that's it. Rabbits are plentiful, they get to be pests. Do your duty as a top-of-the-food-chain predator, and enjoy the perks.

Text and photos copyright 2010 by Brett Laidlaw