Raw Green Prickly Fish (Whitefish Ceviche in Green Apple Juice with Green Prickly Ash, Salted Milkweed, and Honewort)

Here below, the epistemology of a northern pickled fish.

I used to do a lot more kitchen experimentation than I do these days.  I would wrap lobster up in wonton skins, brown those like potstickers, and serve them with a fermented black bean sauce; encase a trout in a crust made from pounds of salt; simmer down elaborate sauces of exotic provenance.  I had a run of really good dishes, which one evening ran aground on the now infamous "Brook Trout, Beets, and Bacon," which still sounds to me like it could work, but which, at least as I prepared it some years ago, most assuredly did not.  Oh, how it did not work.

I don't think I'm exactly a stodgy cook now, but I do tend to lean toward variations on the classics rather than flat-out innovation or experimentation.  In general, I'm more than happy to eat that way, tweaking preparations that I know make the best of what's available in the here and now.  Once in a while though, I'm happy to be jolted out of my rut--however pleasant a rut it is--and given a chance to try a new technique, or new ingredients--or old ingredients in a slightly different form.

In the case of this ceviche of Lake Superior whitefish, I wasn't quite jolted--more like nudged, gradually, to try something quite simple but also somewhat risky.  I've said it before and I'll say it again:  I'm really a rather cautious eater; I only want to eat delicious things, and so I'm hesitant to undertake dishes that might not ring the delicious bell, and which might leave me, at dinnertime, with a plate of something I have to either choke down or chuck out.  Such a sensibility really does work against innovation.  But--

Three things came together, over a period of several months, to produce this dish--which is quite a freight of influence when you consider it's just a few slivers of cured fish, but here goes:

1)  My discovery, last fall, that raw Lake Superior fish could be delicious.

2)  My desire to make more use of things growing wild out at Bide-A-Wee.

3)  Inspiration provided by "tweets" from chef Rene Redzepi at Noma restaurant in Copenhagen ( @ReneRedzepiNoma ).



The first two are self-explanatory, the third perhaps less so:  Noma is a restaurant intensely devoted to making delicious things from intensely local, Nordic foods.  The website states: "Noma is not about olive oil, foie gras, sun-dried tomatoes and black olives. On the contrary, we’ve been busy exploring the Nordic regions discovering outstanding foods and bringing them back to Denmark: Icelandic skyr curd, halibut, Greenland musk ox, berries and water. We comb the countryside for berries and herbs that others would not bother with and work with foods that aren’t part of any system of formalised cultivation and consequently cannot be obtained through ordinary channels of distribution."

It's a forager's restaurant, in other words, but one raised to the nth degree of culinary refinement, a restaurant that has been named the best in the world--an impressive accolade, even given the subjectivity of such ratings.  The few dishes listed on the website menus seem sort of normal: scallops, watercress, oysters, asparagus, veal, sorrel.  The inspirations that chef Redzepi "tweets" about are, to a forager, well, inspiring:  unripe juniper vinaigrette; a dessert of hay and chamomile; grilled onions, wild thyme, and gooseberry juice; "pig in the swamp with swamp juice."  Frankly, I have no idea what most of these things would taste like, or even what they literally are, in some cases.  But I find Noma's inventiveness with these down and dirty local ingredients utterly compelling.  I mean, I've got gooseberries and chamomile and hay, and rhubarb, fennel, sorrel, currants, raspberries, blackberries, venison--this is stuff from here.  Finally, it seems, there's a world-renowned chef who has embraced The Trout Caviar Manifesto, to wit:  Our stuff is as good as anybody's stuff, and part of the reason it's good is that it's ours.

But that it's ours is only part of the reason it's good.  It has to stand on its own, in the end, and then the trepidation comes in, for me, to create something really novel and delicious "with foods that aren’t part of any system of formalised cultivation."  It's a bit of a game, really--I mean, who cares what two people in Saint Paul ate one evening in July of 2011.  But to me it's also expressive, and goes again to that persistent question of why we forage, which I will answer this time around by saying that it's to know something, first by looking for it, then by finding it, then by cooking with it, then by eating it, and finally, for me, by writing about it.

I said this was a lot for a few bits of fish to support, but I'm in too deep to turn back:


Green apples, they fascinate me.  Apples fascinate me, ever since I became co-proprietor of our unruly Bide-A-Wee "orchard."  And I'm impatient--I don't want to wait for ripe apples to do something with them.  I used some green apple juice to flavor a cocktail a while back, but mostly I just taste my way around the land, spitting out mouthfuls of incredibly sour, astringent green apple, until the miraculous day of ripening occurs.  Then it occured to me, putting green apples together with my interest in raw local fish preparations, that that highly acidic juice might work like lime juice in a traditional Latin American ceviche.

When I got down to trying it, I found that I'd succumbed to impatience again.  The apples were so green, it was difficult to get any juice out of them.  I pureed a couple of cups in the food processor, and had to add some water to get it to blend.  I then ran that pulp through a food mill to press out the juice, and strained that through cheesecloth.  The resulting juice had some nice apple aromas, and was fiercely astringent.  I did not think it would taste good on its own, but I wasn't going to give up.  To 1/4 cup of green apple juice (the apples were green, but the juice was now a forbidding brown) I added 2 tablespoons of sweet cider, and 1 tablespoon of apple cider vinegar.  That tasted acidic enough to cure the fish (and curl your hair), but balanced enough to enhance the flavor of the dish, as well.

The dish would need some other flavors.  An onion element, in the form of pickled ramps, was a natural.  Salted milkweed buds as garnish, another shoe-in.

We have growing on our land in great, wild profusion, groves of prickly

ash. We appreciate these thorny groves for the wildlife habitat they provide, for the beauty of their flaming red leaves in autumn, and, quite tentatively, for their fruit, which happens to be closely related to Sichuan peppercorns, one of my favorite spices.  The unlikely secret to the appeal of the prickly ash fruits is that the shrub bearing them is in the same family as citrus trees, and the "rinds" of these tiny fruits produce remarkably citrusy aromas--tangerine is the strongest correlation, to me.  They also, like Sichuan pepper, create a numbing sensation on the tongue.  The Chinese word for that sensation is ma, and so when you see a dish labeled ma la on a Chinese menu, you know the dish contains (or should contain) plenty of Sichuan pepper (and the la is for chili hotness).


I've done a bit with our local prickly ash berries, but mostly in its dried form, after the shells open in the fall to disgorge a hard, black seed--skip the seed and keep the husks.  I took that approach because dried is how I've always seen Sichuan pepper.  But our local prickly ash spice, though fragrant and interesting when green, didn't hold those qualities when dried.  Well, duh, then why not use them fresh and green?  And so I did.


One final herbal, savory element:  honewort, a new wild green to me this year, thanks again to Sam Thayer's books.  This prolific umbelliferous plant also goes by the name wild chervil, but it doesn't taste or smell like anise-y chervil.  It's more celery-like, to my taste, and a tablespoon or so of chopped leaves and tender stems brought a real depth of flavor to the dish.  Thayer says honewort makes an excellent broth, right up there with stinging nettles, and I believe it.  I also used a few of the green honewort seeds, which had the same flavor, even more concentrated.

I took a few thin slices from a fillet of Lake Superior whitefish, quarter-inch thick or so.  I tossed those with some fleur de sel and set them aside while I prepared the rest.  I crushed and roughly chopped a generous teaspoon of the green prickly ash berries, and chopped the honewort, stripped off a half teaspoon of the seeds.  Sliced one pickled ramp bulb.  Mixed everything into the fish, along with a splash of canola oil (wished I'd had some good local sunflower oil in the house, but alas).  I let it cure in the fridge for a couple of hours, stirring from time to time.

I served it sprinkled with a few salted milkweed buds.  The first bite of a dish like this always fills me with terror.  The first bite told me the apple mixture had "cooked" the fish, set up the proteins so it did not taste precisely like raw fish, but had a pleasant texture, both firm and yielding.  Having assured myself that it was not yucky, I attempted a more subtle critique.  The crunch of pickled ramp was excellent against the fish.  The prickly ash berries were in chunky pieces, and when you bit one--wow.  A citrus explosion (so nice in a northern ceviche) and just a fleeting hint of  the numbing quality.  The honewort greens gave resonant background flavor, the seeds were intense points of the same flavor.



It tasted like nothing I'd ever eaten, and like something I'd very much like to eat again.  It tasted vividly of where we live, and told me something new about that place.  Expressive, that's how the best food is, I think, and this one was there.

Tasty Buds

I'm going to make a bold prediction:  milkweed will be the new ramps, the hot wild food that will grab the attention of chefs and home cooks alike.  And may I say, should this come to pass, it will be long overdue.  Whether you love, loathe, or linger in indifference toward ramps, it's hard to dispute the fact that they have become a bit overexposed, have held an exceedingly long reign over our springtime culinary imagination.  I think this may be because, as wild foods go, ramps are particularly reliable, abundant, and affordable.  Not everyone will shell out the $30-plus a pound for wild mushrooms, but a bunch of ramps at $2.50 per gives a lot of flavor for the dollar. 

Restaurant chefs know exactly when they'll be able to get ramps, and the cachet this wild springtime food gives to local-seasonal menus is a bargain for them, as well.

Milkweed is equally abundant as ramps--maybe moreso--it has a longer season, and it's edible in several forms, from shoots, to buds, flowers, smallish pods, and the immature silk that Sam Thayer calls "milkweed cheese."  It is, indeed, thanks to Thayer that I, and many others, have come to know and appreciate the culinary qualities of this long misunderstood plant.  It was thought for a long time, and by many so-called experts (including the venerable Euell Gibbons), that milkweed was inherently bitter, and that any form of it therefore required cooking in several changes of water simply to make it palatable.  In a thorough and utterly convincing essay (the first of his work that I encountered), Thayer laid that notion to rest.  I won't bother to paraphrase further what you can read for yourself right here.

So far the milkweed parts I've worked with have been the flower buds and small pods.  Our Wisconsin land must be rife with the shoots in spring, since it's rife with mature plants right now (our Saint Paul front yard has a nice crop, too), but I haven't managed to catch them at that stage.  What I've mainly done with both buds and pods, other than just munch on them, desultorily, during walks around our land, is to pickle them.  That's how I spent most of my day today.

I gathered maybe a quart of the bud heads (I doubt that's botanically accurate, but it will do), giving each a little shake as I picked it to dislodge any insects--many insects like milkweed, not just monarch butterflies.  My fingertips became sticky with the latex that gives milkweed its name, but I was able to rinse it off easily when I was done; I believe that Thayer reports a somewhat caustic effect from longer exposure of skin to the latex.  Once I got the buds home, I rinsed them thoroughly, then chilled them in the refrigerator overnight.  That actually seemed to have firmed them when I came back to them.  This afternoon I used a paring knife to cut the buds off the flower head, a pleasant little chore accomplished while watching "The People's Court."  I didn't bother about the little tails that remained attached to the buds; they're edible, as well, and likely will largely disappear after pickling.

I applied three different methods to preserving them. First, I took about three-quarters of a cup of buds and mixed them with nearly a tablespoon of coarse salt--fleur de sel, in my case. I bottled them and will refrigerate them. I imagine these may ferment somewhat and develop a bit of pungency with time. I hope so. Another cup I immersed in the sweet and sour and salt brine described here--I used the larger, "purpler" ones for this; these ready-to-open buds had a slightly sweet and floral taste that I thought might come through in that brine. The rest, a scant cup, I will prepare in the "cornichon method" also described in that post.

The flavor of unseasoned milkweed is nowhere near as assertive as that of ramps--but then, outside the allium world, what is?  It's mild, green, a bit like lightly steamed green beans, I'd say.  The buds have a nice crisp "pop" when you bite into them, the small pods, as well.  Up to an inch or so in size the pods remain tender enough to steam or stir-fry.  The uses of the silk, that "cheese," I have yet to explore.

I've been calling these pickled buds milkweed "capers," but I think I'll drop that term.  Nonetheless, you can use them in most of the places you'd use something like a caper--in salad dressings, to flavor an egg salad or deviled eggs, sprinkled over grilled or fried meat or fish.  I'm going to mix some into mayonnaise tonight, along with some chopped pickled ramps, to make a wild tartar sauce to serve with fried whitefish.

I would never advise anyone to use this blog, or any simple descriptive or photographic source, as a field guide to wild edibles--always consult a good field guide or two or four, or a trusted friend who knows about these things.  That caution registered, milkweed is among the easiest of wild foods to identify.  The buds will be on the plants for another week or two.  As you can see from the photos here, some have already bloomed.  It's not the sort of thing one wants to subsist on, but milkweed provides many opportunities through the spring and summer to get a delightful, safe taste of wild foods.

Milkweed:  It's the new ramps.  You read it here first.

Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

Quick, Pickle! (Freezer Dill Cukes in Strawberry Vinaigrette)

I got thinking about pickles thanks to my friend Tom's recent post over at marthaandtom.com .  There hasn't been a lot around to pickle so far this year.  I did up a jar of ramps earlier in the spring, and I wanted to do some asparagus, but thought I might have missed the boat.  The Minneapolis Farmers Market came through for me--at the North Lyndale site on a weekday morning I was able to find excellent asparagus, along with hothouse cucumbers, snow peas, strawberries, and green garlic.  All of the above were put to use in a quick pickling session that produced a half pint each of pickled asparagus and snow peas,* and a quick cucumber pickle inspired by my friend Tata's method (see below).

The asparagus and snow pea pickles were quick in that they took little time to make, though they need to cure a few days to develop best flavor.  This is my main pickling M.O. these days, a sort of stealth/guerilla approach that allows me to get some pickles in jars before I realize I'm "preserving" or embarking on a "canning" endeavor. 

Fact is, I rarely process anything anymore (and never much did).  I don't make large batches of anything, prefer freezing my excess tomatoes rather than canning them, and have an extra fridge in the basement, purchased to hold cases of butter and many dozens of eggs during our market baking days.  So the few jars of cornichons, bread & butters, ramps, etc., that I put up go into that basement fridge, where they keep just fine.  If our apple and blackberry crops come through this year, as it's seeming they will, I'll devote a few days to jam and jelly making, for sure, but the processing kettle doesn't really see a lot of use here.

The strawberries hereabove mentioned didn't get pickled, per se, but they did meet up with vinegar and other things in a dressing for a rather oddball, but tasty and refreshing, salad.  We've had really, really fragrant, wonderful strawberries this year, mainly from Wisconsin, and I'd been thinking about ways to use them other than the usual sweet applications--not to say I have anything against strawberry shortcake, strawberries over ice cream, or, in an inspired Bide-A-Wee breakfast one-off, butter-toasted croutons with strawberries, cream, and maple syrup.

The notion of a strawberry vinaigrette intrigued me, but I didn't know what to serve it with.  I thought of blanched English peas, but they didn't seem substantial enough, and I thought the dressing would slide right off those smooth little orbs; snow peas, likewise, seemed too slippery.  I was stymied.  Then I read Tom's post, and I remembered Tata's quick freezer pickles, and I thought, Hmmm....  Seemed dicey, but if I wanted to use the strawberries in a savory way, I couldn't hedge my bets.  I can well imagine that the combination of strawberries, dill, and garlic will turn a few heads, but stick with me a minute. 

I think this hinges on how we think of fruits and their uses, and how we categorize flavors.  I got the idea last summer to put cucumbers and crab apples together in a pickle, and it was wonderful.  I thought then, and I was thinking in preparing this salad, that I was combining disparate elements, fruit and vegetable, but then I thunk again:  I do not know how all this shakes out botanically, but a cucumber is by nature what we widely consider a fruit, to wit, a melon.  It's a pale watermelon without the sweetness.  It's a juicer, milder zucchini.  In Chinese, of which I know a smidgen, and most of it food-related, the relationship is clear:  cucumber, huang gua (yellow melon); zucchini, nan gua (south[ern] melon); winter melon, dong gua (winter melon).  (I don't know what the Chinese for watermelon is, but I'm going to fling out a guess:  xi hong gua, literally "western red melon."  I'll Google it later.)  A salad of watermelon with feta cheese is in danger of becoming a cliché before it's time; strawberries and cucumbers might just work.

In fact, it worked very well indeed.  Combined with tart and savory things in the dressing, the berries expressed their tart and fragrant side.  Napping the chilled, salty, garlicky cukes, the vinaigrette provided a delightful counterpoint.  I think this would be good on blanched or quick-pickled green beans, too.  Perhaps they'll overlap for a week, so I can give that a try.

I tried the combination in a different variation this past weekend at Bide-A-Wee, tossing cucumbers with green garlic, goat yogurt, cider vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper, and topping that with sliced strawberry and salted milkweed flower buds--excellent.

It's worth noting that these quick salted pickles contain no vinegar--the combination of a vinaigrette on a vinegar pickle might be a little much.  Perhaps some intrepid soul will try that out and report the results.

The freezer pickles are good on their own, beside a burger or sandwich (hell, I'm sure you know how to eat a pickle...).  The dressing, too, could simply go over mixed greens--a gutsy salad, with some arugula, cress, mizuna, mustard, what-have-you, would be best, I think.

Strawberry Vinaigrette

1/2 cup chopped very ripe strawberries
1 tablespoon cider vinegar (preferably unpasteurized)
3 tablespoons canola or grape seed oil
1 teaspoon honey
pinch salt
a few grinds of black pepper
a good pinch of espelette or cayenne pepper

Combine all in a blender or mini food processor.  Blend until smooth.

Tata's Quick Freezer Garlic Dill Pickles

1 large cucumber
a few sprigs of fresh dill, chopped
2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
coarsely ground black pepper, about 1/2 teaspoon
1 teaspoon salt
 Coarse salt, like French gray sea salt, or fleur de sel flakes

Peeling lengthwise, take a few strips of the cucumber skin off with a vegetable peeler, leaving a few strips of skin intact, creating a striped effect.  Halve the cucumber lengthwise and remove the seeds.  Cut each half into three long strips, then cut the strips into two-inch lengths.  In a quart zip bag combine everything but the strawberries, close the top and mix everything together thoroughly.  Place the bag in the freezer for 23 minutes.  Remove the bag from the freezer and mix again.  Leave it in the fridge until you're ready to finish the salad--or just use it as a pickle.

To make the salad, dump the cucumbers into a mixing bowl, dill, garlic, and all.  Pour off any liquid that has accumulated.  Toss with the vinaigrette.  To each portion add a few slices of fresh strawberries and a sprinkle of coarse salt.  Serve.

______________________________
*I put up the asparagus and snow peas in the brine described here , except that I made the brine with a little more salt and a little less sugar than that recipe calls for. Also, to the asparagus I added chile, garlic, black peppercorns, and a good sprig of dill (volunteering willingly in my garden this year); to the snow peas I added chile, garlic, Sichuan peppercorns, and a couple slices of ginger. A jar of each was quick to make, though these are not "quick pickles" in the way Tom uses the term. They need to cure for a week or so to be really nicely pickled, and I'll just keep them in the fridge and use them up within a few weeks.


Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

One Odd Apple

The several dozen apple trees (probably over a hundred all together) growing on our Wisconsin land come in many shapes and sizes.  The trees range in size from around eight feet on the small end to over twenty feet tall (guessing, but some of these trees are really big).  Some are compact in their growing habit, and some majestically sprawling, with stout horizontal branches that invite you to climb up and take a seat in the cool shade on a hot afternoon.  Quite a few are composed of many trunks, acquired from shoots pushing up from rootstock in their carefree years before we arrived to harass them, try to get them to make something of themselves, and a few are miraculously kempt, requiring only a few judicious pruning cuts to give them a shape that would be quite at home in a real orchard.

And while most of the trees are found in irregular groupings in the open areas on our property, there are a number of large, healthy trees that now find themselves growing in the middle of the woods--mainly among the younger stands of birch and aspen.  Some of those trees may be wild, seedling trees, or they may have been planted on purpose, and only later in life became isolated in the forest as those faster-growing species colonized the area.

What all these trees have in common is that, regardless of differences in size or posture, they look like apple trees.  The main trunk or trunks rise to a certain height, then branch out to form a spreading crown.  Wild and unruly though many of them are, they are recognizable even at a distance as apple trees.

All but one.  That's the Anomalous Apple, so I think of it, pictured above, as best I could manage--its trunk starts at the very bottom left and angles toward the upper right.  It's growing no more than a couple of feet from the much, much larger trunk of a mature white oak on the north side of our land--that's a limb of the oak visible behind the Anomalous Apple.

I first noticed Anomalous this winter on a snowshoe walk through the woods.  Here was a tree that had to be some kind of fruit tree, and its bark said apple to me, as did the bare wood of the small dead branches which were the only branches close enough to the ground for us to really see.  It wasn't a plum or cherry, the most common wild fruit trees on our land.  It really seemed that it had to be an apple tree, except that the trunk, instead of rising to the usual four to six feet, then spreading its arms to make apples, the trunk surpassed that height and just kept going, straight up, right into the branches of its companion oak, with only minor, twiggy side branches along the way.  It looked like an apple that yearned to be a pine tree, is what it looked like. 

Well, I'm not a forestry expert.  I decided to keep an eye on it and see what it would turn out to be, once it leafed out and, perhaps, even bloomed.  Likely it would reveal itself to be something quite obvious, in hindsight, and certainly not an apple.  Except, it is.  Or, I'm pretty well sure that it is.  It leafed out, and the leaves looked like apple leaves, only unusually large, perhaps to compensate for its sunless situation.  It blossomed, and examined through binoculars, those blooms well over our heads did indeed look like apple blossoms.

You can just make out the fruit in the photo above--it's awfully hard to shoot, aiming upward at the brighter sky from below in the dark woods.  Here's a tighter crop:

The little apples are mostly around the edges of the picture.  It's a curiosity, for sure, and I can't wait to find out what those apples taste like once they ripen.  While we speculate about which of our other trees might be wild trees, unique to our little plot of land, this one, this Anomalous Apple, we're sure about.  Apple trees take a long time to reach full size, but oaks take even longer.  Somehow an apple seed found its way into the old oak and maple woods, managed to germinate, and, against all odds, survive for all these years in what has to be one of the more uncomfortable situations an apple tree could find itself in. 

It would seem, once again, that Great Nature has found a way.  Now we are only left to ponder, Why?  Maybe just because it can.

Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

At Bide-A-Wee, June 2011

This is the fourth summer since we purchased our Wisconsin property, "Bide-A-Wee Land," just long enough to really start to get a feel for the place.  We've seen enough changes of season to be able to anticipate, a bit, but there's enough variety in those seasonal turnings that we can still be surprised, or find new things to notice, with each progression.

One very broad observation that we've made, starting in the very first year we owned the land, is the stunning transformation that occurs between, say, mid-May, as the trees are just starting to leaf out, the thickets to thicken, the meadow plants to gain momentum, to the end of June, when the real heat of summer comes in, and with it the astounding profusion of greenery that takes what was previously a rather obvious landscape and elaborates it with layer after layer of texture, color, contrast, depth, and life.  It's particularly striking on our very hilly acres, as the elevation compounds yet again all those layers, and the spare scaffold shapes of winter trees fill out and up, turning hills into mountains, modest inclines into imposing cliffs.

It's a little startling in some ways.  Through this long spring, after the winter of deep and persistent snows, we really enjoyed the freedom of movement the flattened brown meadows afforded us--we could walk anywhere we wanted, on our own two feet!  No skis or snowshoes required, and nothing to stand in our way.  Now, within the span of about three weeks, the meadow vegetation is waist-high and still gaining.  You can get through it, sure, but the gopher mounds that cover most of the lowlands make the walking treacherous when you can't see the ground, and the blackberries have sprung up, making long pants and tall boots imperative for any bushwhacking. 

So we tend to keep to a few well-worn paths.  Our friends Renee and Mark Bartz helped us out with that a couple of weeks ago--they brought over a 4-wheeler and a deck mower and cut a swath from the cabin down to the north meadow, where some of our best apple trees are.  I got to try my hand at it, too, mowing the hilltop circuit just above the cabin.  It is a lot more difficult to drive a 4-wheeler pulling a deck mower over bumpy terrain than it looks.  I was pleased with myself for not flipping over, or driving into a tree.  Mark, who's lived in this area all his life, said he'd never seen a piece of land quite so gopher-infested as ours.  A mark of distinction over which I am not sure we should be proud....

When a belt fell off the mower partway through cutting the Bide-A-Wee yard, I was left to finish the rest by hand, with my trusty scythe, which is really an extremely efficient piece of equipment once you learn how to use it.  It's better on some kinds of plant matter than others, and it really pays you back to keep it sharp with peening jig and whetstone, but under the right conditions I can cut a mighty swath in very little time.  And it's an excellent workout, to boot (but one must remember to wear gloves, lest one wind up with weeping sores between thumb and forefinger where the blisters have burst, as I experienced last week).

"Mowing the lawn" (and expanding it a bit) after a two-week absence produced this haystack, and another, even larger one:

In amidst the green profusion, of course, there are fruity things happening, too.  Mainly, the apples:

Blackberries, some still in bloom, while many have already set fruit, and it's looking like a good year for them:

A lesser-known wild fruit is the haw or hawberry, fruit of the hawthorn tree.  I've done a bit with haw fruit in the past, and it's something I'm really eager to explore further.  Last year we harvested exactly zero haws--it was that poor a year for wild fruit.  In a good year the bright red fruits, rather like rosehips, hang on the shrubby trees long after the leaves have fallen.  Not all haw fruit is delicious--you really have to taste around until you find a tree with sweet, flavorful fruit.  Fortunately, hawthorn trees are abundant on our land, and in the region generally.

Also abundant, moreso than I ever imagined, are black cherry trees.  They will grow to 50 feet tall or better, with trunks that can exceed a foot in diameter.  Until you learn to recognize them by their bark, though, you won't know that these mature trees are cherries--the first branching on these big trees occurs way high overhead, and the fruit is indistiguishable in the overall canopy of mixed hardwoods where they occur.  The fruit, therefore, we gather from baby specimens. Serviceberries also in the picture, left, with the green cherries top and right.

The prickly ash spreads and fills in on the old farm road, creating "verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways" (thank you John Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale").  Prickly ash is in the citrus family, I was amazed to learn, and it produces a profusion of tiny berries in the the fall.  The husks of these berries have two remarkable qualities:  first, they smell very, very citrusy, mainly like tangerine, to my sniffer; second, they produce a numbing sensation on the tongue when you chew them, exactly like Sichuan peppercorns, to which--ta da!--they are closely related.  I've done a little cooking with them, but the jury's out.  They don't seem to retain their fragrant or numbing qualities (that's ma in Chinese Pinyin) once dried, so I think I'll try using them fresh come the fall.

Coming back over the hill toward the cabin, Lily went on point in the greenery.  When I let her go she sniffed avidly down the hill ahead of her, and fixated on a particular spot, but there was no bird.  Likely it flushed ahead of us.

The main meadow, and the "Tardis" outhouse:

On the hilltop circuit, an Aldo Leopold bench that Mary built:

A good place to sit and take it all in.  Summer starts to seem long by this time of year, but we know what an illusion that is.

Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

And the Rest Is Salad....

So for the second longest day of the year, the leftovers from the longest day dinner, reconfigured, did quite nicely.  There was a bit of everything left from our solstice aioli supper--trout, potatoes, beets, asparagus, snap peas.  I picked red lettuce, sorrel, and some smaller purple mustard leaves from the garden, along with a baby turnip.  Mixed the leftover aioli and sorrel-tarragon mayo with olive oil and a little cider vinegar.  Fried off the potatoes and when they were nicely brown added a couple of sliced purple spring onions to wilt, and the beets to warm a bit.  Tossed the greens with the asparagus, peas, and the dressing.

On the bed of greens I portioned out the roots, and topped it with poached trout, the very thinly sliced turnip, another drizzle of dressing, and a superfluous (but colorful and tasty) garnish of a sliced strawberry (picked up at a roadside honor stand on the road to Bide-A-Wee, $2 a quart, fantastically fragrant--it has been a great year for strawberries).

A bowl of steaming soup might have been more appropriate to the weather--the high of 63 matched the "record low high" for the date.  But we were not complaining.  With toasted sourdough and a glass of cider, strawberries over ice cream for dessert, we were content.

Solstice Aioli

Going back to that idea of honing a finer sense of the seasons , I can report that it's the season of setting fruit out at Bide-A-Wee.  Last year was a dismal one for our apples, as well as for most of  the wild fruits, except for the wild plums, which seem to come through every year.  This year the hawthorns, black cherries, chokecherries, and serviceberries are all setting up nice crops.  In spite of a cool pollinating season, the apples look good--the largest are already an inch-and-a-half across, and reddening.  We have one more gallon of sweet cider in the freezer--maybe barely enough to get us through to a first pressing of this year's fruit if we ration it carefully.  A couple swallows in the morning is enough to start the day off on a happy note.

It's haying time, too--our friend Renee Bartz told us this weekend that they'd cut their second crop of hay, and now hoped for a few dry days to get it baled (not looking like that wish will come true).  You see this age-old practice taking place all across the Dairy State countryside.  Where one day there was a field of tall grass, the next there's a shorn landscape looking something like a very rustic golf course, except dotted across it are the cylindrical bales of hay, a lovely sort of order brought out of the unruly growth, entropy reversed.

With the cows out on new grass, the raw milk we get from the Bartz's Bolen-Vale farm is the richest of the year.  Last weekend we skimmed the cream from the top of the jar and spooned it over the first strawberries of the summer, and we swooned.

And at the market, the season is that of the first summer vegetables.  The leafy things were pleasant enough, asparagus delightful, but it's greatly heartening--and appetizing--to see the next wave coming in, in this case young beets, snap peas, and most gloriously, the first green garlic.  That market haul, and a successful outing on the trout stream (oh, really, they're all successful, whether I catch fish or not), set the scene for an aioli dinner to mark the summer solstice.  (For the mayo/aioli how-to click here.)

Please note that no adjective accompanies aioli here, nor ever will, unless to make the derisive point that none ever should.  Aioli is aioli is aioli.  Chipotle aioli?  Nah.  Lemongrass aioli?  Skip it.  Garlic, oil, egg yolk, a bit of mustard, a squeeze of lemon juice, a pinch of salt, that's what's in aioli.  Oh, now I've read that in Provence some local variations omit the egg yolk, using cooked potato or bread as the binder.  I've never tried it that way.  You could call it garlic mayonnaise and not be far off, except that aioli deserves a more prominent place at the table than is commonly accorded mayonnaise.  It needs to be seen and appreciated, inhaled, dolloped out in copious portions for dipping and dabbing--a clandestine schmear on a sandwich or burger doesn't do it justice.

See the two unctuous globs on the plate above?  The yellow one  on the left is aioli, of course, and the green one is sorrel-tarragon mayo, which only had some garlicky undertones because I chopped the herbs in the same place on the cutting board where I puréed the garlic for the aioli.  I did that on purpose.  To half a cup of mayo I added four smallish sorrel leaves and just a sprig of tarragon, the most assertive of herbs, to my taste.  A dandy combination--but not aioli, mais non.

As for the trout, it was poached in a court bouillon flavored with green onion tops, carrot, thyme, tarragon, cutting celery, black pepper, and some Breton bouillon flavoring containing sea salt, algae, fennel, and some other spices.  We picked it up at a small market in Brittany a good while back.  It seems to keep.

The beets (Menomonie farmers market) and potatoes (not local, I'm afraid), I roasted with olive oil, thyme, rosemary, fleur de sel, black pepper, and chopped green garlic, at 375, for 40 minutes covered, another

15 uncovered.  I peeled the beets first.  And then the asparagus and snap peas (stringed) were blanched in salted boiling water for two minutes.

An aioli plate is the ideal sort of meal for long summer evenings, and this was the longest of all.  We sipped a petit chablis, our glasses
appealingly misted in the humid evening.  The monsoon rains came and went, a downpour, a sunburst. I guess you could say it's summer.