A fairly amazing-sounding Better Beer Society brown bag series event at Butcher & the Boar, some revised menus at local restaurants, a local foodie’s epic Mother’s Day feast, tasting notes for Summit Pilsner and Steel Toe’s Provider, the Star Tribune’s Taste 50, and a new urban farm in Minneapolis.
Katie Cannon / Heavy Table
Ah, the holidays: An intoxicating elixir of family, friends, celebration and just a tiny dash of gift-related panic to keep things interesting. We ask: If you’re going to give, why not give food? And if food, why not something both fantastic and local? Thus: We’re pleased to present 2011′s Heavy Table Holiday Gift Guide.
Got a cheese lover on your list? Our local cheese shops stock such a wide variety of excellent Midwestern cheeses that you don’t have to automatically reach for the brie and call it a day. Instead, try an all-Minnesota cheeseboard that will be gobbled up faster than your turkey dinner.
We put together a tasty trio of Bent River ($22 / lb at Surdyk’s), a Camembert-style cheese from Mankato’s Alemar Cheese Company that stands head to head with similar French variations. Spring for an entire wheel — one sliver of creamy, oozy goodness from the wedge is never enough. Add a chunk of Friesago ($19 / lb at Surdyk’s) from Shepherd’s Way to bring the rich warmth of a sheep’s-milk cheese to the board, and round out the selection with Northern Lights Blue ($14.49 / lb at Surdyk’s), a raw-milk cheese that wows with its creamy texture and flavorful blue veins. Throw a couple of apples in a basket and a sampler of Ames honey ($19 at Surdyk’s) and you’ve not only given someone a thoughtful gift — you’ve supplied the food for his or her holiday cocktail party.
If you’re looking to keep your cheeses straight and introduce them to guests, a set of writable cheese tags is just the ticket. The Heavy Table worked with local ceramic artisan Katharine Gotham at the Northern Clay Center to create these elegant porcelain cheese tags that can be written on (and erased, and re-written on) with markers. The theme is the Upper Midwest — each set includes a Minnesota, a Wisconsin, and a triangular shape. Learn more about them and buy them right over here.
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
The next North Coast Nosh purveyor sip-and-sample takes place Jan. 20, 2012 and it should be a tremendous event — more than 20 vendors including Patisserie 46, YumMi Banh Mi, Joia Soda, Lift Bridge Brewing, Black Forest Inn, and Chowgirls Killer Catering will be joining us at the beautiful and spacious South Minneapolis headquarters of Open Arms of Minnesota. Everyone will bring samples, so no one should walk away hungry (or thirsty).
If you’re tired of giving stuff to people, give tickets to the next Nosh, instead — you’ll help support the local food scene, The Heavy Table, Open Arms, and your friend or family member’s first-hand knowledge of delicious Midwestern eats.
Katie Cannon / Heavy Table
Though beloved Rogue Chocolatier relocated from Minneapolis to Massachusetts this year, you can still find delicious, locally made chocolate treats — particularly for fans of dark chocolate. Madison-based Gail Ambrosius crafts both whimsical (chocolate frogs, $6 for a package of two at Surdyk’s) and hardcore chocolate confections (70 percent cacao Colombian dark chocolate nibs bar, $5 / each at Surdyk’s). For those who prefer a burst of sweetness with their dark chocolate, pick up a three-pack of Mademoiselle Miel’s honey bonbons ($7 at Surdyk’s). St. Paul beekeeper Susan Brown places a dollop of Ames honey inside a super-dark chocolate shell topped with gold leaf for a decadent yet balanced bite. And for that special someone who can’t choose between caramels and beer, now you don’t have to search for two gifts — pick up a handful of Surly Furious caramels (75 cents each) at Local D’Lish. Produced by Sweet Goddess Chocolates in New Prague, these tasty chews offer the hoppy flavor of the beer together with the sticky sweetness of a buttery caramel.
A sleeve of shortbread is easy to slide into a stocking, and St. Paul-based A Gourmet Thyme sells several fun flavors at Local D’Lish ($6.75). The cayenne seems tame at first, but the kick comes through when you swallow, and you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t enjoy the espresso cocoa nib flavor. For someone who prefers man the oven him- or herself, pick up a tin of Lacey Sue Z. ($8.29 at Surdyk’s), a chocolate chip cookie mix created by local food legend Sue Zelickson. The almost translucent, wafer-type cookies not only offer a buttery, brown sugary crunch, but they also benefit St. Louis Park social services agency Perspectives.
Katie Cannon / Heavy Table
If it’s your first holiday season since a friend or relative moved out of state, put together a Minnesota care package to send him or her a taste of home. The Secret Garden, a gourmet packaged foods producer based in Park Rapids, combines beans and Minnesota wild rice in its Minnesota Minestrone mix ($7.50 at Local D’Lish). Add some strawberry or blackberry jam from Gunflint Trail in Grand Marais ($6.49 at Surdyk’s) and some Bliss pumpkin spice granola ($8 at Local D’Lish), and he or she may decide to move back.
James Norton contributed to this story.
by Susan Pagani on August 1, 2011
Maria Manion / Heavy Table
Minneapolis ice pop producer 10,000 Licks wants you to help launch their fledgling business through a Kickstarter campaign: “We think we’ve got the makings of successful business,” says cofounder Andi McDaniel in the campaign’s video, during which her voiceover is accompanied by fanciful, cartoon ice pops dancing across the Stone Arch bridge, the Minneapolis sky line, and the whiskers of a nonplussed cat. “One that would bring joy and whimsy and nostalgia and just sweetness to Minnesota in the summertime.”
In mid-July, we met up with McDaniel and her partner in ice pops, Sarah Newberry, at the Fulton Farmers Market. It was their first day at market and — excessive heat, passing thunderstorms, and a few ice box issues not withstanding — things were going well. Passersby were enticed by the brightly colored pops to stop for a sample, and sales seemed good, especially among small people. We enjoyed a lightly sweet, refreshing watermelon-mint pop, a lush strawberry-basil pop (more basil please!), and a creamy blueberry-lemon grass pop. However, our favorite was the ginger-cantaloupe, which was slightly sweet with a sly, spicy heat from the ginger. Like a good, homemade sorbet, all of the pops tasted just like their fruits, flavors that were enhanced rather than enveloped by sweeteners. “Ice pops are simple and nostalgic and fleeting,” says McDaniel. “We had someone refer to our sweet-corn pop as ‘summer on a stick.’ That should be our tagline; it embodies summer. It’s not like hotdish, it’s not complicated, it’s simple and it delivers.”
Maria Manion / Heavy Table
McDaniel and Newberry both have day jobs – journalist and music therapist, respectively — and so have had to bring 10,000 Licks to life in the in between times, making licensing calls at lunch, testing recipes, and engaging the blogosphere at night and on weekends. They are producing the pops in the shared kitchen at Thuro Bread in St. Paul, and source as much of their organic fruit as they can locally, through farmers markets and co-ops, and the rest through Upper Midwest organics distributor Co-op Partners. “I love the traditional four seasons and really celebrate all of them,” says McDaniel. “The ice pops grew out of that. Well, it’s a combination of loving weird flavors of ice cream and appreciating that summer is so short here and so spectacular. Pops are an easy way to capitalize on our short growing cycle and really good produce.”
“I worked on organic farms for several years,” she adds. “So that’s something that’s really important to me — ultimately, I want to have my own organic farm. I’m never more at home than when I’m harvesting herbs, bringing them inside, and chopping them into something. And that’s what I like about the ice pops; they’re just one step above that raw ingredient.”
One important step. For a home cook, the most difficult aspect of making a popsicle is water balance. Many a popsicle has come out of the freezer bright with fruity goodness only to diminish to an ice cube with a few good licks. 10,000 Licks’ pops are deliciously pulpy and fruity ’til the last lick. “I didn’t realize it would be such a challenge,” says McDaniel. “When you Google it, people will say you can freeze anything, but it’s not true. Our initial pops were not delicious; they had a good flavor but the texture was inconsistent and they were icy.”
After much experimentation, McDaniel and Newberry discovered that — again, much like sorbet — pops need a base that can carry the fruit or vegetable juice. They use a simple syrup made with local honey and infused with herbs as the base for most of their pops, but say it’s not a science and each flavor reacts differently. As one might expect, berries have a great consistency that lends itself well to the process, distributing fruit and water evenly to make a nice consistent texture; whereas lavender lemonade, with its high water content, wants to turn to ice. Sweet corn pops need a sugar-based simple syrup or they won’t stay on the stick.
Maria Manion / Heavy Table
The other piece of advice McDaniel offers is to let your mixture cool completely before freezing. She is still a bit traumatized over a batch of chai pops that went horribly awry, likely because she poured it into the molds and stuck it in the freezer scalding hot, causing her to waste a lot of product. “Cool, stir, and freeze,” she admonishes.
McDaniel and Newberry believe funky flavors, quality pops, and local spirit will carry the company. “Starting out, we thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a company in the Twin Cities making popsicles out of fresh, local ingredients? I guess we’ll have to do it!’” says McDaniel. “So we’re kind of saying to our community, if you think it would be cool to have this, too, support us — and we’ll be here for you down the road.”
The 10,000 Licks Kickstarter campaign has until Sunday, August 28, 2011, to raise $10,000. McDaniel and Newberry are offering rewards for each of their 11 sponsor levels, which start at $5 and run to $1,500, including free pops, sweet tote bags, recipes, a popsicle named after YOU, and, yes, singing popsicle grams. At press time, a day into the campaign, they had 12 supporters, pledging a total of $1,500.
Kickstarter or no, you can support 10,000 Licks and your own summertime joie de vivre by picking up pops at the Fulton Farmers Market every weekend through September. You’ll also find them at various and sundry events around town — such as the IATP Bike & Bite, August 13 — look for updates on their Facebook and Twitter sites.
Maria Manion / Heavy Table
Jason Walker/Heavy Table
Last April, this recipe showed up in the Churn’s Flickr Photo Roundup. Wanting to make homemade booze without much effort, and being a huge rhubarb fan, I had to give it a try.
Turned out pretty easy, provided you are patient. Each step can take weeks, and the wine is not worth sampling until at least six months’ aging. Wait about a year, though, for the effusive sweetness to wear off, and it’s downright decent. No wine connoisseur or even a casual fan will consider this a remarkable product, but for the do-it-yourselfer with simple expectations, it’s surprisingly drinkable.
It’s rhubarb season, so finding five pounds either from your patch or the farmers market won’t be difficult. The recipe states to cover the rhubarb with boiling water – in my crock, that became one and a half gallons of liquid.
Jason Walker/Heavy Table
From there you strain, heat and add fruit, sugar and yeast. The original recipe called for an incredible amount of sugar – nine cups per gallon of liquid. I shrunk that to seven, and it worked well.
Jason Walker/Heavy Table
Also, once the wine is siphoned into the glass bottles, it can set for months and probably years in a cool, dark place. Mason jars with caps and bands work great to loosely cover the wine. It will be super-sweet at first, but given time, the rhubarb flavor will shine through.
Jason Walker/Heavy Table
Make this in spring, and it should be really good come the holidays. It’s sweet, tangy and enjoyable. Drink alone or as an aperitif, or mix with club soda or lemon-lime pop, or add to a gin and tonic. Considering the small amount of work required, it makes a damn fine sippin’ wine.
Here’s my amended version of the original recipe:
Rhubarb Wine
Finely dice five pounds rhubarb and put into a crock. Cover with boiling water and let stand three days. Strain.
Heat clear juice to almost boiling, measure and return to clean crock.
For each gallon of liquid add two oranges and one lemon, sliced very thin.
Add seven cups of sugar for each gallon of liquid.
When lukewarm, add yeast (for two gallons, add about ¼ ounce yeast). Stir well and let ferment about a week.
Strain, return to clean crock and let set about two weeks.
Siphon into clean glass bottles, put on covers very loosely and let set until it turns clear. This will take several months. Taste-test often until wine reaches desired flavor and smoothness.
by Sean Weitner on April 4, 2011
Sean Weitner / Heavy Table
When you drive away from the capitol in Madison, WI, you do so on one of eight radial roads. If you take the northeast spoke, you’ll cross I-90 in about eight miles, which defines the city’s eastern edge. But keep going; when you’re 12 miles from the capitol, you’ll hit the burgeoning ’burb Sun Prairie. The road, now US Highway 151, continues due northeast, and once the epicenter of 2011′s national labor unrest is 24 miles away in your rearview, you’ll arrive in Bristol, a town of fewer than 1,000 households. Three right turns lead you to the North Bristol Sportsmans Club, which holds four smelt fries a year.
Non-Wisconsinites, or perhaps non-Midwesterners, might be braced for an ethnographic study of culture clash: gustatorially curious urbanites from the land of recent Jesse Jackson and Michael Moore serenades venturing into more conservative climes where the fairy lights above the bar are decorated with alternating red and green shotgun shells. I’ll even raise the stakes by saying one of our party was not just a Wisconsin state employee but a public radio staffer, making her perhaps the nation’s most beleaguered-by-pundits worker.
John Kovalic / Heavy Table
But the thing is, that isn’t the thing at all. OK, as we were stalled in the eight-by-eight lobby of the North Bristol Sportsmans Club, with the inner door clogged by the tails of two queues — one for the wait list, one for drink orders — a becapped fellow looked around and cursed the internet. (Although our party first learned of the club via a flyer at a dive bar; you can impute how many points better or worse that is than the internet on your damned-hipsters scale.) But on a population density basis, I don’t know if there was higher concentration of fun anywhere in the county that night.
The Sportsmans Club splits its rectangular frame: In the same space taken up by the dining room on the left, the kitchen, bar, and bar seating squeeze into the right. The narrow alley in-between, the one that the aforementioned lobby opens into, is in practice clogged with bar spillover — though everyone’s waiting for smelt, sardines are the appropriate ichthyological simile. For the entirety of the 90 minutes we waited to be seated, the only way to move through the club was gentle elbowing or precarious sidling-with-drinks, and ultimately my party got broken in two, with my half unfortunately positioned directly beneath the PA. Still, for a country-road gun club on a late Saturday afternoon, the energy in the room is terrifically high, jovial and boisterous and rippling with laughter. Continue reading The Smelt Fry at the North Bristol Sportsmans Club »
Katie Cannon / Heavy Table
There’s a holiday in Sweden that’s all about waffles.
Well, sort of. Swedes and their descendants can thank a long-ago miscommunication for Våffeldagen, the annual excuse to indulge in carb-loaded waffles topped with fruit and cream. Those particularly well-versed in the more orthodox Christian traditions may recognize tomorrow, March 25, as the Feast of the Annunciation — the date nine months prior to Christmas which symbolizes the angel Gabriel’s visit to Mary to tell her she would give birth to Jesus [Corrected for accuracy, 3/24/11]. In Sweden, the day was instead known as Our Lady Day (Vårfrudagen), and it was widely observed in days gone by. However, since different dialects pronounced the name differently, the altered “Våfferdagen” was soon mistaken for “Våffeldagen” — and Waffle Day was born.
Waffle Day, to be fair, is a celebration nonetheless — a celebration of spring, and the increased supply of eggs and milk that comes with it. What better way to enjoy the change of the seasons? Today, the quintessential Swedish waffle is a heart-shaped treat*, topped with fresh strawberries or jam and whipped cream. We chose a cardamom-spiked recipe (below) to add to the Swedish flair, but your go-to buttermilk recipe will do just as well. Add macerated berries or jam and top with a dollop of vispgrädde (whipped cream), and you’re good to go!
Katie Cannon / Heavy Table
Cardamom Våfflor
From LearnSweden blog
3 eggs
¼ c sugar
⅔ c all-purpose flour
1 tsp ground cardamom**
⅔ c sour cream
3 tbsp melted butter
Beat the eggs and sugar on high in an electric mixer until thick and pale. Add the flour and cardamom and mix well. Add the sour cream, then fold in the melted butter.
Brush a heated waffle iron with melted butter and pour in some batter. Cook the waffles until golden brown per your waffle iron manufacturer’s instructions. Remove the waffles with a fork, top with your choice of accompaniments, and enjoy!
*Heart-shaped waffle irons are available online or through Ingebretsen’s.
**If you’re motivated, your best bet here is to use whole white cardamom pods (available at Penzey’s) and grind them fresh with a mortar and pestle or spice grinder — you’ll obtain much more aromatic, flavorful waffles.
If you want to experience Waffle Day but would rather have someone make waffles for you, stop by the American Swedish Institute (2600 Park Ave. S., Minneapolis) on Saturday from noon to 4 — for $3, you’re entitled to a waffle and all the toppings!
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
When winter comes around, I often pull out the 1920s-era recipe for my Grandma Dilley’s popcorn balls. Half popcorn, half candy, these spiced caramelized delights are light, airy, sweet, flavorful — and festive.
While relatively easy to make, these popcorn balls take a bit of finagling. Temperature is critical, and you have to move quickly to form the popcorn balls while the candy is still hot… without burning your fingers. The good news is that when you’re done making them, they last for quite a while in a sealed jar, and they look decorative, too.
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
Yuletide Popcorn Balls
14 c popped popcorn (I like Clem’s Homegrown Popcorn from Castle Rock Township, MN — available at Golden Fig in St. Paul)
1 c sugar
⅓ c water
⅓ c corn syrup
1 tsp salt
¼ c butter
1 tsp vanilla
¼ tsp cinnamon
⅛ tsp allspice
pinch of cayenne
Pop your popcorn and put it into a very large bowl.
Combine sugar, water, corn syrup, salt, and butter in a saucepan over medium heat. Stir frequently and check with a candy thermometer until temperature reads 255°F.
Remove from heat and mix in vanilla and spices.
Pour the mixture over the popcorn and stir with spoon until candy is well distributed.
Carefully pick up popcorn and gently form into spheres, about the size of a tennis ball.
Be careful as candy is very hot but cools quickly and must be formed before cold.
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
Recent Comments