Home»food

All Red Potatoes

Aug 10th, 2009 1 Comment
Red Potatoes

Red!

Among the items in our first CSA box was a mixed bag of pota­toes with skins rang­ing in color from light brown to red. The list that accom­pa­nied our sec­ond box included the line “All Red Pota­toes,” and we assumed that sim­ply meant that we’d got­ten all red-skinned ones that time. Imag­ine our sur­prise when we quar­tered a few of these pota­toes to boil and dis­cov­ered that they’re red all the way through! And what’s more, the color doesn’t fade dur­ing boil­ing (like the gor­geous deep laven­der skin of the Pur­ple Viking potato); if any­thing, it becomes more intense.

Cabbage Leaf with Stuffing

Cab­bage Leaf With Stuffing

After our ini­tial expe­ri­ence with the All Red pota­toes we knew we wanted to try them mashed, but got dis­tracted find­ing ways to use up our CSA items with short shelf lives. So the pota­toes just sat around until this past week­end, when we decided to try them with some items from our most recent box. We’ve been inun­dated with cucum­bers, so we made a sim­ple cucum­ber salad with dill, mint, feta, and a bit of red wine vine­gar. We also had a gor­geous head of savoy cab­bage, the large leaves of which we decided to stuff for a main course.

Stuffed Cabbage Leaves

Stuffed Cab­bage Leaves

The recipe we used for the cab­bage came from here (I’ll give you the basics of the recipe, but fol­low the link if you want more expla­na­tion). First, blanch a few of the big leaves then set them aside to dry. Saute some diced onion (we used a cipollini), then add some of the inner cab­bage leaves, roughly chopped. Once the leaves have reduced some­what, add diced car­rot. Cook cov­ered for fif­teen min­utes or so, then stir in some chopped cooked bacon (the recipe actu­ally calls for speck, a Tyrolean ham, but we had bacon that needed to be used up). Spoon stuff­ing into the leaves, fold them up, grate some Parme­san on top, and bake for 15 min­utes at 200°.

Red Mashed Potatoes!

Red Mashed Potatoes!

The stuffed cab­bage was quite deli­cious, and the leaves turned out a gor­geous bright green. But, the visual stun­ner of our meal was unques­tion­ably the mashed pota­toes. The crim­son flesh, flecked with deep red skin and the green of fresh Ital­ian pars­ley was sim­ply aston­ish­ing. And they tasted great, too. The fla­vor is more com­plex than your stan­dard potato, but I don’t have a good way to describe it. Suf­fice it to say that mashed with pars­ley, gar­lic, cheese, but­ter, and a bit of milk, they delight three of the senses. If you ever see All Red pota­toes for sale, buy them!

Sprecher Brewery Tour

Aug 3rd, 2009 Leave a comment
Sprecher Sign

Sprecher Sign

This past week­end, Veron­ica and I took a quick overnight trip to Mil­wau­kee. We went for a vari­ety of rea­sons: to visit her fam­ily, to see some of her friends, and to go to the big annual book sale at All Saints’ Cathe­dral down­town. Those plans left us some free time on Sat­ur­day, so we decided to take a tour of the Sprecher Brew­ing Com­pany in Glen­dale, a Mil­wau­kee sub­urb. Sprecher is best known for their root beer and seven other vari­eties of soda. And with good rea­son — the New York Times rated Sprecher root beer the best out of 25 brands from around the coun­try. Indeed, soda was the only prod­uct I asso­ci­ated with them until last week. But Ran­dall Sprecher started the com­pany as a beer brew­ery, and they brew a wide vari­ety of beers.

Giant Container of Honey

Giant Con­tainer of Honey

The tour was short (due to the small size of the brew­ery, but pretty good. Since it was the week­end, no one was there actu­ally brew­ing or bot­tling, but our guide gave detailed descrip­tions of both processes, along with some of the company’s his­tory. At the end of the tour of course comes the req­ui­site tast­ing ses­sion &mdash four sam­ples of your choice from a selec­tion of ten beers on tap. But we, along with about ten other peo­ple, bypassed the nor­mal tast­ing in favor of a spe­cial Reserve Tast­ing. This tast­ing included sam­ples of ten dif­fer­ent Sprecher beers (includ­ing some pre­mium vari­eties not avail­able in the reg­u­lar tast­ing), each paired with a dif­fer­ent cheese.

Badger Hops

Bad­ger Hops

We tried, in order, their Hefe Weiss, Extra Pale Ale, Mai Bock, Pub Brown Ale, IPA², Abbey Triple, Pipers Scotch Ale, Black Bavar­ian, Bar­ley Wine, and Bour­bon Scotch Ale. The var­i­ous cheeses came mostly from Wis­con­sin cheese mak­ers, includ­ing Sar­tori, Maple Leaf, Carr Val­ley, and oth­ers. The only cheese from out­side the state was the deli­cious Ker­ry­gold Dubliner, which was paired with Sprecher’s oak bour­bon barrel-aged Bour­bon Scotch Ale. Matt, the guy run­ning the tast­ing, did a great job telling us about each cheese and each beer as we went along, and we were pro­vided with tast­ing sheets with more detailed infor­ma­tion (IBUs, degrees Plato, types of hops, etc.) and space for tak­ing notes as we went.

Veronica at the Tasting

Veron­ica at the Tasting

It was nice to sam­ple so many beers at once; the process gave not only an overview of Sprecher’s beers, but a good side-by-side com­par­i­son of dif­fer­ent beer styles. I think Veron­ica and I agreed that the Abbey Triple was our favorite, fol­lowed closely by the Hefe Weiss. From there our indi­vid­ual rank­ings diverged some­what. The cheeses were all quite deli­cious. Who­ever selected the pair­ings knew what they were doing; some cheeses com­ple­mented their respec­tive beers, other pro­vided delight­ful con­trasts. This sort of thing seems to be catch­ing on — the New Glarus Brew­ing Com­pany (which I’ve now toured three times) near Madi­son just announced their own Hard Hat Tours, which are behind-the-scenes guided tours cul­mi­nat­ing in a beer and cheese tast­ing ses­sion. Per­haps it’s time for a fourth trip to New Glarus…

P.S. - Sorry about the crappy qual­ity of the pic­tures, three of them were taken with my phone.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma

Jul 21st, 2009 2 Comments
The Omnivore's Dilemma
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
A Nat­ural His­tory of Four Meals
By Michael Pol­lan, Michael Pol­lan
Pen­guin, 2007
World­Cat•Library­Thing•Google Books•UW-Madison

In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pol­lan sets out to trace the ori­gins of three meals, each the prod­uct of a dif­fer­ent food chain. These food chains — the indus­trial, the pas­toral, and the per­sonal, as he calls them — basi­cally rep­re­sent in reverse order the var­i­ous human rela­tion­ships with food. In doing this, he hopes to shed light on what he terms America’s “national eat­ing dis­or­der:” we lack national food tra­di­tions, and are often so far removed from our food’s ori­gins that we have to rely on food com­pa­nies and nutri­tion­ists to tell us what to eat. For Pol­lan, this dis­or­der reached its height with the Atkins diet craze, that fad that sought to suck the soul (bread, pasta, even fruit!) out of Amer­i­can meals and replace it with large quan­ti­ties of meat.

In America’s indus­trial food chain, every­thing seems to revolve around corn. Gov­ern­ment sub­si­dies encour­age farms to pro­duce far more Zea mays than the Amer­i­can peo­ple can eat. It falls to food sci­en­tists to fig­ure out what to do with the sur­plus (and suc­cess­ful corn-based prod­ucts only lead to a demand for more corn). Today, corn is processed by so-called “wet mills” into dozens of diverse sub­stances: vit­a­mins, corn oil, adhe­sives, sta­bi­liz­ers, acids, ethanol, emul­si­fiers, and sweet­en­ers (includ­ing the sneak­ily ubiq­ui­tous high-fructose corn syrup). These var­i­ous “frac­tions” of corn are the build­ing blocks of the processed foods industry.

Read more

CSA Box Number Three

Jul 18th, 2009 6 Comments
The Contents of Our Third Box

The Con­tents of Our Third Box

This morn­ing, we picked up our third CSA box of the sum­mer. This box was the biggest yet — 3/4 bushel, whereas our pre­vi­ous boxes were only 5/9 bushel. Plus, this time our farm offered basil as an ‘option’ crop, mean­ing that they left a huge box full of it at our pickup loca­tion and said “take as much as you want.” Since I neglected to bring a bag, I lit­er­ally stuffed my pock­ets full of basil. Tomor­row, we’ll make a big batch of pesto and freeze it in single-meal por­tions with the help of a cou­ple of ice cube trays. Our goal is to make enough while basil is in sea­son to make it through the win­ter (we eat lots of pasta).

While we have no doubt what to do with the basil, we’re not so sure about some of the other items. What, if any­thing, can you do with pick­ling cucum­bers other than pickle them? Can the two of us pos­si­bly make it through four reg­u­lar cucum­bers before they go bad? What should we do with beets? Can we find a way to pre­pare our cau­li­flower that we’ll actu­ally like? What’s spe­cial about Cip­polini onions? But, we’ve done pretty well with unfa­mil­iar veg­gies so far, so I’m sure we’ll have some inter­est­ing culi­nary adven­tures this week!