Food I have known

How do you spell ramekin?

January 14th, 2012 § 1 Comment

Inspired by a New York Times slideshow on brunches, this dish included some Northern Waters andouille sausage, fresh spinach, red onion, local egg. Served with fresh croissants from Super One and oven roasted fingerling potatoes tossed with truffle oil.

: A meal inspired by something in the kitchen I’d not done much with: Ramekins that Michele must have found at a garage sale for about a nickle or something. Put a slice of andouille sausage in the bottom and into a hot oven to yield fat.

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: Add slivers of red onion, fresh spinach, a drop of heavy cream and a local egg. Bake for 10 minutes, taking out just before it looks ready as it will keep cooking.

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: Serve with fresh croissants from Super One (Northern waters gets some of its bread from them) and oven roasted fingerling potatoes with a dash of truffle oil (seriously a Christmas present from Michele).

Brussels sprouts on steroids

December 27th, 2011 § Leave a Comment

Just so I don’t forget this recipe. It was relatively simple and amazingly good. Of course, anything that is fried in good canola oil and then marinated in capers, anchovies, peppers, etc. I mean how bad could it be?
The trick seems to be frying two cups of parsley and capers as a final step.
http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/fried-brussels-sprouts-with-walnuts-and-capers-recipe/index.html

molAY at Mayan cafe

December 2nd, 2011 § Leave a Comment

Pork shoulder with green mole, fried plantains and yucatan Lima beans at http://themayancafe.com/. The beans were topped with pumpkinseeds, lemon and scallions. Life changing beans. Fantastic meal.

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Pastrami Wednesday at Northern Waters

November 9th, 2011 § Leave a Comment

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Great. Now I have to pay more for my milk

October 15th, 2011 § Leave a Comment

Dilly Bar was born and raised on Green Pastures Daily in Carlton where she will spend about 15 years producing milk.

The Hedquist family at Green Pastures Dairy in Carlton knew Dilly Bar was a special cow from the moment she was born. That happened early one spring a few years back when her mother calved her out on the edge of the property in a stand of trees. They went out to check on her and see that she was OK and then turned to leave the mother and calf so they could have some peace.

But Dilly Bar didn’t stay with her mother. She followed them. Back to the house and around the farm.

It’s no wonder she is one of the family’s favorite cows. Her black and white coat makes her look as though she is wearing eyeliner. And she seems to truly enjoy human contact; a nice, hard scratch on the spot between her eyes seems to be her favorite spot.

The author of Food I Have Known bonding with Dilly Bar the cow. (photo courtesy of Kim Kosmatka)

On a visit to the farm this week, I found myself just sitting in the pasture in front of this gentle 1,000-pound animal and scratching her head while she slowly pulled up shoots of grass and munched away. She occasionally moved closer and once nudged me with her snout when I wasn’t ready. The force pushed me back onto the ground. She just seemed to want more scratching. Eventually, she sniffed my hand with her massive wet nose and gave me a lick with her raspy prehensile tongue.

Aside from her great affection, Dilly Bar is really not that different from the other docile cows at Green Pastures. But the lives of the cows at Green Pastures at starkly different from those of most dairy cows in this country.

This Hedquist family bought their first cows from a farm a few miles away about 30 years ago and the small herd that is on their land now are all descendants of that first group. I’d always been told you don’t name your food so I was surprised to learn that each of these cows had a name. Dilly Bar, Fern and so on. Of course, you’d name a cow if you knew you were going to work with it and rely on it for upwards of 17 years.

It’s late fall and the cows are nearing the end of their milk production cycle, only producing a gallon or two of milk a day. Eventually, they will stop producing milk altogether; a process called drying off a cow. All the cows are pregnant and will produce calves in the spring and the cycle of milk production will start again.

When there is grass growing in the fields, the cows spend there time there. The family rotates the cows across the pasture, moving them from area to area so that no one spot if overgrazed. The cows ensure the pasture stays healthy. They pull up the grass and the roots with it, which helps the soil aerate and spreads seeds. Of course, their cow-pies ensure the pasture is also fertilized. The family does their best to simulate how a ruminant animal like a cow would treat the land in a natural situation as it migrated across the landscape, never staying in one spot for too long.

And, the result of all this effort is, well, you have to taste it. Which is what the students on their field trip from Marshall School did (chaperones as well). The first thing we did was make butter from the cream. It’s pretty simple really. Put the cream in a mason jar and shake.

And shake.

Keep shaking.

Almost done.

Nearly there.

OK.

Then you drain it and stir and stir until the liquid is released and runs clear. Then you get some crackers… so that’s what butter tastes like.

But the main thing that Dilly Bar and the other cows at Green Pastures produce with their milk is cheese. I laughed to myself as I came into the family’s store and saw the label on the cheeses. Of course, I knew this cheese. I’ve been buying it for years at the Whole Foods Coop. Needless to say, it’s remarkably good cheese, reminding me of some of the cheeses I had while I was in Amsterdam a few years ago.

Bromfield English cheddar and summer sausage from Green Pastures Dairy in Carlton.

That night as I made grilled cheese and summer sausage sandwiches with some of the cheese that Dilly Bar made for me and some of the meat that came from other cows on the farm (when the cows finally do stop producing milk altogether they are butchered), I think about how this experience has made me question my own buying habits.

The average cow at a large-scale dairy does not, to put it mildly, have the life that Dilly Bar does. For starters, I’m skeptical the thousands of cows on these factory farms have names. They spend their lives indoors, on cement floors where many of them are injected with growth hormones to ensure that they produce even more milk than they already do. They are simply seen as milk-producing machines, kept in large numbers with the emphasis being to produce as much milk as possible until their bodies simply wear out from the stress.

A reminder: Dilly Bar and her fellow cows at Green Pastures will produce milk for the farm for upwards of 15 to 17 years. At a factory farm, the average life span is about three years.

Perhaps consumers don’t care whether their food lives a “good life,” but maybe they should when the consider the impact of that life on the quality of what they are eating.

Willard Hedquist Jr. of Green Pastures is convinced that the milk produced at those factory farms is not worth drinking. Sure, it’s cheap — at least half the cost of milk produced on a pastured farm. But because it is produced in such large scale, it is homogenized and pasteurized and, in the process, rendered of most of the nutrients that made it worth drinking to begin with. What’s more, Hedquist said, because the animals are fed a diet of mostly grain, their milk does not have the complexity of nutrients and proteins that come from a cow that eats a wide range of grasses and all parts of a plant, not just the grain.

I bite into my sandwich and sit back in my chair. It’s not just food. Of course, the taste is complex and satisfying. That’s a given. But it’s also food that has a story. It’s story of one cow, raised on one farm by one family just down the road a bit.

And for me it’s another reminder that cheap food may cost more than I’m willing to admit and that my actions as a consumer send a powerful message to those producing that food.

In other words, it looks like the family milk budget just went up.

time to plant

October 6th, 2011 § Leave a Comment

It’s time to put the garlic in the ground. I love that my garlic comes from a kid named Max, who is 11 years old, lives on Park Point where he is homeschooled and has his own business growing and selling organic garlic. For Duluthians, you can buy Max’s stuff at the Co-op and Mount Royal.

Lunch at New Scenic Cafe

October 6th, 2011 § Leave a Comment

Lunch at the New Scenic today included fresh Mission figs in a sauce with blue cheese and a pan seared duck. The duck was good, not great but the figs were a real treat. Never had a fresh fig before. The best part of the day was hanging on the shore with Michele.