Hey! Look at us gettin’ all inspired.
June 24, 2009
I am probably the luckiest girl in the world. I don’t mean to be, I just am. I’m friends with several of the best chefs in Minnesota. Not only are they great cooks, but they have created philosophies and ways of doing thing which makes each them completely unique and wonderful. To top that off they even love to teach, which means that I get to call them up and say, “Hey, what’s on your mind? Anything you want to share with some of my favorite cooks?”
When I asked my friend Scott Graden, owner/chef of the award winning New Scenic Cafe in Duluth that question and he answered, “Inspiration is everywhere and it’s so much more important than recipes and ingredients. I’d like to talk about that.” In my head I shouted, “woo hoo!” Then we chatted and brainstormed on how to go about doing a workshop on inspiration, came up with a plan and that he promptly forgot.
I, however, did not. It turns out that the things that inspire him most are the people and the land around him. Hence, on our weekend in Duluth we got to meet with Stephen Dahl his herring fisherman and David Rogotzke his maple syrup maker and salmon fisherman.
It really was the best adult field trip for cooks ever.
We started off the day at the New Scenic Cafe where Scott was kind enough to talk to us about his experiences as a restaurant owner and chef. He went over where everything came from, how it happened and why he made the decisions he did. He gave us an amazing insight into the tenacity and drive he had to bring the Cafe to what it is today. (This included living in the garage for 5 years.)
Simple Spinach Meal (or Appetizer)
March 25, 2009
It’s rainy. It’s cold. We’ve both got this stupid flu that keeps coming and going and I really just want it to go away now. Had big plans to make dinner. The mind is willing the body is not. Gotta just try to make something simple, healthy and good. Gotta try to melt the crust on my mood. I thought about it for a bit and then I made this.
It would be very easy to change this around to whatever flavor profile you were looking for. A bit of crispy bread, fresh greens, creamy cheese, something sweet, crunchy and acidic and you’ve got a combo that will (more than likely) work. And of course if you blend it all up, you’ve got a dip.
Oh, and it takes about 7 minutes to make, total.
Spinach & Chevre on Crusty Bread with Balsamic Reduction
Balsamic Reduction
(Take 1 1/4 c red wine and 1/4 c balsamic vinegar and bring to just boiling. Reduce heat and simmer until liquid is reduced by at least half around 1/2 – 2/3 c. Cool and store until needed. Keeps forever in the refrigerator.)
1 baguette, sliced
You can just slice up the baguette and serve on that, or brush slices with olive oil and brown in a 400°f oven until browned. This is the best option if they’re going to sit around for awhile.
2 – 3 T apple juice
1 bag spinach (or similar amount)
1 – 2 oz chevre, crumbled
2 T lightly roasted almonds, chopped
salt, pepper & cayenne pepper to taste
Heat juice in pan until boiling. Toss in spinach, cover and pan steam until dark green and wilted.
Turn off heat. Let cool down. Drain out extra liquids. Mix in chevre, almonds and spices and stir until mixed in with some lumps. Top baguette slices with a couple of tablespoons of spinach mixture. Drizzle with balsamic reduction.
Serve with some fresh berries.
Cooking MN: It ain’t all hot dish and lutefisk up here.
March 10, 2009
Hi.
I’m so impressed with my cooks that I have to share. I’m sorry if you don’t care, but we are doing some good cookery up in this tundra, pardon-my-french, please.
First off, in case you don’t know, I have a group now. (Hello group!) They can cook. (I love that they can cook!) So I set them up with Scott Pampuch at Corner Table, who happens to be able to cook as well, in fact he’s a James Beard semi-finalist-for-best-chef-in-the-Midwest-cook. And then he and my cooks went to town making a really nice meal.
We divided them up – color circles on name tags mean something sometimes. They were given leaders and joined; team meat, team starch, team veggie, team dessert and team egg. (Once the people knew what was going on… they couldn’t help but make a team egg to be coached by Chef Pampuch. The man knows his way around an egg.)
And this is what happened (approximately) – recipes (not even close) for apple caramel bread pudding and eggs on toast to follow.
I love a taqueria… and their tacos.
January 26, 2009
It’s one of those quirky things about me; I am just not capable of passing by a flea market that boasts that it’s the largest in Georgia. There is just no way to do it. And when at the end of that flea market you find a taqueria that sells lengua tacos… Oh my. I swoon.
So I present to you, my day at the flea market (with tacos + lengua and salsa recipes at the end!):
Oh, how could you possibly drive by this one a beautiful fall day?
Ah, look at it. Isn’t it just lovely? Granted the lengua one is a bit obscured by the steak taco, but you get the idea. (YUM! That’s the idea.)
Wildpepper Salsa 3 ways
September 7, 2008
Harvest time around here means that it’s the perfect time to make up some Wildpepper salsa. We use it in a bunch of different ways – and since it is so perfect for harvest time I figure I may as well share with you. (Aren’t you glad you’re you? If you were anyone else, I totally wouldn’t do it!)
I’ll warn you straight off, I don’t really remember what was in the original recipe. Which is to say – that this salsa has become such a staple in our house that I can’t be sure where it started (nor can I seem to find it on my computer – but I’m sure you could find it online.) I do know it was a recipe posted by Jim Campbell of Mild to Wild Pepper and Herb company. If you’ve never tried his bbq or hot sauces I highly recommend them. They’re really good and he seems like a really good guy.
Salsa
6 tomatillos
4 roma tomatoes
4 jalepeno peppers
3 aniheim peppers
2 yellow onions, quartered
2 ears corn
juice from 1 lime
1 bunch cilantro, coarsely chopped
salt to taste
Put all ingredients except lime, cilantro and salt on the smoker or grill. Grill over medium heat until veggies are tender, pulling them off the heat as they’re done. Deseeded remove stems and outer skins of all veggies. Put all veggies except corn in the blender. Blend until they’re the consistency you want. Cut kernals off corn. Put in a large container. Add in the blended veggies. Add in lime, cilantro and salt.
Confetti Nachos
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Oh, how I love the falafel.
June 23, 2008
Let me count the ways… All right, there aren’t many ways, but I do love the falafel. The best falafel I ever had was in Austin, Texas. Ah, Austin, home of many vegan delights… Yes, it was silly – but we had driven from Minneapolis to Austin, and after Iowa it gets hard to find much to eat on the road besides meat. I needed a break, and it was so good. The little patties were crispy on the outside but tender, savory and flavorful on the inside.
Falafel made from scratch at home has always eluded me. But I’ve had to keep trying because the place by my house that has falafel on the menu serves up these mini falafel pucks that only serve to make me wish that I was in Texas. Or knew how to make it myself. It seemed that every time I tried the little beasts would explode or suffer from some sort of garbanzo bean plate tectonic syndrome. Soon there would be little fried bean bits floating and bursting into flames in hot oil, victims of the unfair and unstable universe on which they lived. And I didn’t have a clue why.
“It’s street food for crying out loud! It can’t be that freakin’ hard,” I’d cry to Marv who would just roll his eyes over my falafel incompetence. Then, while I was on a plane, I read a description of falafel that said it was a dough made from garbanzo beans and spices that’s fried in oil and served in pita bread with cucumber sauce and lettuce. A dough. Doh! All the recipes I had tried were basically bean patties with nothing holding them together.
Armed to the teeth with this new information – I had another go. And it worked beautifully. Yea! Falafel for me!
Falafel
Jalapeno Poppers
March 3, 2008
I think that if my marriage was on the brink of destruction, I would make these. I think you would have to think twice about divorcing a woman who makes her own jalapeno poppers. Cuz you could divorce her, but how would you get the poppers?
On the other hand, if my marriage did destruct, I would get all the poppers…
Now, I can’t abide by fancy ingredients in my poppers. I’m just a straight up pepper, cream cheese & fried batter kind of a gal. Even so, getting them right was kinda hard. First off, turned out that the peppers need to be cooked, otherwise they were too tough. Originally, I tried steaming, because I was only trying to make them pliable, but it turned out that roasting them in an oven brought out their sweetness, which was awesome. And getting the right combo for the batter was kinda annoying; too wet, too dry, too thin, too whatever. Finally, I got it nailed down pretty good.
There were also a few hiccups in the process. I tried a few different ways to cut holes, empty out seeds and insert cream cheese. It turned out the easiest way was to just slice out a hole on one side and scrape out the seeds. And while we’re on the subject of seeds, they’re the best way of moderating the heat you want. More seeds = more heat. If you’re not sure what that means for the peppers you have, just try one. Then you can determine how many of them you want in your popper.
Jalapeno Poppers
Chubble: Part 2
February 29, 2008
I pretty much only make chubble once a year; Christmas time. I give it away as presents and then it goes away for another year or two. I set aside a day and just go to town making about 12 loaves at once. It turns out that not everybody does a baking day, so I got a lot of questions after I posted the chubble recipe the first time about what to do if you don’t want to serve it that day.
Well, I really didn’t know. I could guess, but actual hands-on knowledge eluded me. I decided to change that. I basically ran through every iteration of bake/freeze/rise I could think of. Oddly enough, they all worked out pretty well. The results are listed below.
In order to not get bored, I decided to do a different variation, gruyere with the bacon, Marv makes and green onions. It was really good. You might want to try it. Enjoy!
Gruyere & Bacon Chubble Stuffs
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Poutine is food of the gods!
December 8, 2007
(Provided they are drunkard gods! Oh yeah.)
I gotta say, poutine has never been my favorite thing. But I do not live somewhere that poutine is an art form. Around here you’re lucky if the fries are done and the cheese is warm. Don’t even get me started on the horrors of gravy from a box. Thus, I had to try myself. Go rogue. Make it on my own. The results: very… very…. tasty.
My first introduction to poutine wasn’t even poutine. I was in New York with a friend and we basically bounced from restaurant to restaurant for about an hour to find one that would seat us even though we weren’t interested in having a full meal. Finally we landed at a French bistro where we were treated to some amazing pommes frites with gravy. Oh, they were good. The gravy was so amazing, I wanted to buy a bucket of it to baptize myself.
So fries and gravy; good. But fries, gravy and cheese curds? Well, everything is better with cheese. (And I was told repeatedly tonight – bacon.) According to wikipedia poutine is, “a Quebec dish in which cheese curds are served layered on top of french fries, and melting under piping hot gravy.” The rest, is mechanics.
Mechanics are important. So, I decided to start with the best recipe for french fries that I know of even though I’ve never made them. They’re Emeril Lagasse’s Perfect Fries or something like that. They’re simple. They’re good. No argument from me. (I have rewritten the recipe for myself here because a) it’s not much of a recipe and b) it’s more fun to make a photo recipe.) The second part isn’t really rocket science either – buy some cheese curds – preferably of the “squeeky” variety.* The gravy is the big unknown. I had read that poutine gravy was supposed to be chicken gravy and I’d been wanting to see if you could make a good chicken gravy from grocery store chicken broth. And guess what? You actually can. Top off your meal with a pint and….
I say, get your bacchanal on and have yourself some poutine.
French Fries
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Tasso.
September 22, 2007
Marv says to me, “I think I’m going to make some tasso next.” I say, “Okay. What’s that?” Cajun ham, very dense and flavorful, kinda like prochuitto but it’s cajun so it’s crusted spices on the outside. Hm. Sounds okay to me.
It’s better than okay. It’s super easy to make, incredibly flavorful and versatile. I’ve been using it as a less fatty bacon, in salads, pasta, on sandwiches in soup. You don’t need very much to add flavor and interest in foods. Marv took 3lbs to work and watched it disappear. (He doesn’t really work with enough people for that to be reasonable.)
Tasso is made from pork shoulder butt. It’s brined for a week or so and then rubbed with a spice mixture that has cayanne and garlic in it and then smoked for a relatively short amount of time – 3 to 5 hours or so. But, I suspect there are as many ways to make this as there are people making it.
Tasso, the Recipe
10+ lbs pork butt roast
Brine
1 3/4 c Tender Quick
1 1/2 c brown sugar
1 T cayenne pepper
1 T black pepper
1 T ancho pepper
2 T onion powder
2 T garlic powder
1 gallon water
Rub
2 T ground mace
2 T garlic powder
2 T onion powder
1 T black pepper
1 T paprika
1 T chipotle powder
1 T dried sage
1 T dried thyme
2 T honey
Bone your pork butt if it’s not already boned. (Crikey, that’s a bad sentence.) Slice butt into large chunks 3″ x 3″ x however long the meat is. Combine all the brine ingredients and mix well. Put pork into a 2 gallon ziploc bag and pour the brine over it. Let it rest in your refrigerator for 5 days to a week.
Remove from refrigerator. Rinse and pat dry. Mix together rub ingredients and rub thoroughly. Hot smoke – 225°f – 250°f until internal temperature is 160°f – 165°f.
It will keep in your refrigerator for 1 – 2 weeks or you can freeze it for much longer.
Tasso Green Bean Salad
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Feed me! 
