The latest from Twitter: @Peace_Coffee plays cupid with “Caffeinate Your Cutie,” @triplerockmpls is serving @surlybrewing Mild at $3.50 a pint, @bittercube celebrates the long-anticipated opening of Eat Street Social, and @Masu_NE will feature a suggestive little Valentine’s Day roll through Tuesday.
by Lori Writer on September 6, 2010
Lori Writer / Heavy Table
Subscribing to a CSA (community supported agriculture) farm share can be both exciting and overwhelming. There’s something thrilling about the anticipation that builds all week, leading up to delivery day when you lift the lid of your box to discover what combination of fresh-off-the-farm produce your farmer has brought: Perhaps gnarled heirloom tomatoes in Crayola-vivid yellows, oranges, and reds; or crisp carrots tied in bunches and with feathery tops still attached; or juicy cantaloupe with its gentle, sweet perfume. But it can be a challenge to find new ways to use up all of that produce, especially vegetables you’ve never seen before (like celeriac, or Harukai japanese turnips) or vegetables you’ve seen before and dislike (kale or black radish, for example). The newly released cookbook Eating Local: The Cookbook Inspired by America’s Farmers, by Sur La Table with Janet Fletcher [304 pages, jacketed hardcover, Andrews McMeel Publishing, LLC, $35.00] strives to help you “make the most of the fresh ingredients from your CSA box or farmers’ market and celebrate the goods grown in your community.”
Not merely a cookbook, Eating Local also profiles 10 CSA farms that “are a representative cross section of the movement,” including Nitty Gritty Dirt Farm in Harris, MN, which both cultivates produce and raises livestock, and Morning Song Farm in southern California, which claims to be the nation’s only rare-fruit CSA. Collectively, the 10 profiles sketch out for us the life of a CSA farmer, from starting the farm, to selecting crops, to packing the boxes each week. Of Nitty Gritty Dirt Farm, the authors write, “Empty cardboard boxes stand ready in the shade of the hoop house, waiting to be filled according to [farmer] Robin’s posted diagram: heavy stuff on the bottom, shapes juxtaposed artfully, a riot of color on top. She wants shareholders to open the box and be stirred by the beauty.” Each profile contains snippets of insight, from kitchen tips such as “Take pesto beyond basil. Substitute spinach, kale, or garlic scape for some or all of the basil” to a listing of the farmers’ favorite crops, to a sentence or two discussing the farm’s philosophy.
Nitty Gritty Dirt Farm contributed three recipes: Pickled Yellow Wax Beans with Fresh Dill; Nitty Gritty Dirt Farm’s Slaw; and Nitty Gritty Dirt Farm Ketchup.
Recipes — 150 of them – are divided among three major sections, vegetables; fruits; and poultry, meat, and eggs; and then organized alphabetically for easy reference by primary ingredient within each section, from artichokes to turnips; apples to pomegranates; and beef to pork. Many of the recipes, such as Grilled Goat Cheese Sandwich with Asian Pears and Prosciutto or Grilled Cauliflower Steaks with Tahini Sauce, require the use of a grill, so, if you do not enjoy grilling, this might not be the book for you. Because two of the three sections are produce-focused, many of the recipes are vegetarian; however, even in the vegetables section, some of the recipes call for anchovies, a bit of bacon, or slices of sausage. Storage and gardening tips appear at the back of the book.
Sprinkled throughout the book are creative suggestions for using parts of the vegetables one might normally discard: Use “bok choy ribs as a celery substitute, or as low-calorie dippers in place of chips for guacamole”; or tender, young radish greens to make pesto; or carrot tops to make soup or sparingly in juicing and in salads. One recipe, Warm Chard Ribs with Yogurt, Toasted Walnuts, and Dill, centers entirely around the chard rib, which more commonly ends up in compost heaps.
Continue reading Eating Local: The Cookbook Inspired by America’s Farmers »
Lori Writer / Heavy Table
Neatly boxed, brick-shaped, and sometimes shelf-stable, grocery-store tofu is an orderly food. It’s versatile, lending itself to seemingly infinite dishes: sweet or savory; hot or chilled. And it’s cheap, as sources of protein go. Even organic tofu won’t set you back more than $2 a box. Is there any advantage to making it from scratch? It requires only three ingredients — dried soybeans (available at food co-ops and natural foods stores), water, and a coagulant, such as apple cider vinegar — and it’s not difficult. Similar to cheese, tofu is simply curdled soy milk, strained of its whey, then weighted and pressed into a mold. The heavier the weight and the longer the pressing time, the firmer the tofu. Silken tofu (kinugoshi) — which is used in desserts and soups — is the cottage cheese of the soy bean world: It’s curds that have not been separated from their whey or weighted and molded.
The primary challenges of scratch-made firm tofu are three-fold: planning ahead enough to remember to soak the soybeans overnight; acquiring or creating a mold; and deciding what to do with the by-products of making soy milk — soy pulp (okara) and soy whey. I found that making soy milk yields a disproportionately large quantity of creamy, white pulp that has the appealing appearance and texture of mashed potatoes. You end up with more okara than you do tofu. Although I found and tested many recipes calling for okara, I didn’t find many that excited me enough to recommend them (I include a recipe for Okara Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies at the end of this story). The authors of The Book of Tofu, which is an excellent, albeit somewhat dated, resource if you are serious about making your own tofu, suggest that okara “be used in waffles, cornmeal muffins, spoonbread, and all yeasted breads. Use 2 parts flour to 1 part packed okara.” They suggest you add the whey to soups. Frankly, though I find it difficult to overcome the guilt of throwing out the okara and whey, I have come to view these items as waste products, not byproducts.
Lori Writer / Heavy Table
In the end, I found that my homemade firm tofu didn’t taste substantially better than the store-bought variety, though it certainly contained fewer preservatives. It was also more perishable and fragile. I didn’t appreciate the expense of buying a tofu press or even minor hassle of making one and decided I preferred to use a cheese-cloth lined stainless steel colander as my mold, and a saucer weighted with a jar of peanut butter topped with a heavy book as my weight. Sure, the tofu came out a little funny-looking, but that’s part of its charm. I also found my homemade tofu was more sponge-like than store-bought, and, therefore, more readily absorbed flavors and sauces: perfect in David Chang’s Cherry Tomato and Tofu Salad (recipe below).
I also experimented with a couple of coagulants and actually preferred using apple cider vinegar versus the liquid nigari that I purchased from United Noodles in Minneapolis. The apple cider vinegar lends a slight tang to the final product. You can also use lime or lemon juice.
by Lori Writer on August 9, 2010
Every other Monday throughout the summer and fall while locally raised produce is spectacular and abundant, the Heavy Table will be exploring vegetarian cuisine, both in the kitchen and at local eateries. Read other stories in this series.
Lori Writer / Heavy Table
Glorious August.
Long days, borealis nights.
Cukes, by the bucket.
Recipe haiku.
Heavy Table’s answer to
excess cukes: bad rhyme.
Tired of pickling?
Drink your cukes instead: iced, spiced
Agua Fresca. Ahhhh.
Lemonade Chiller,
tart and sweet. Leaves you cool as
any cucumber.
Sorbet with Salsa,
spiced, spiked palate refresher.
Minnesota ice.
Want to heat things up?
Batter and fry them. State Fair
style, but sans the stick.
Saute them: nutmeg,
herbs and butter. Princess Kay
and Court would be proud.
Lori Writer / Heavy Table
Cucumber pizza
sounds totally wrong. Try it.
It might surprise you.
Around the world in
eighty salads: Korea.
Japan. China, smacked!
Vietnam. Turkey.
Greece. Israel. Morocco.
Cukes grow everywhere.
Whoops, your cuke is Hmong?
This Mint Cooler is for you!
Cuke that tastes like fruit.
Got melon and cukes?
Stir things up with Granita.
Vegetable ice cream?
Vexed by zukes and cukes?
Sliced thin, fragrant with mint. Call
it spaghetti squash.
Cold Cucumber Soup
calls for six cukes. Clean out the
refrigerator!
Too many tomatoes? Check out our tomato-ku.
Lori Writer / Heavy Table
by Lori Writer on July 26, 2010
Every other Monday throughout the summer and fall while locally raised produce is spectacular and abundant, the Heavy Table will be exploring vegetarian cuisine, both in the kitchen and at local eateries. Read other stories in this series.
I love cookbooks. Well, books of all kinds, really. I love the cool, smooth feel of paper and the smell of fresh ink. I especially love dusty old family cookbooks, with their brittle and stained pages and penciled-in markings. But, mostly, I love the potential every new book holds to change my world or, at least, my perspective, and to transport me to somewhere new and exotic for a brief visit. I read cookbooks like novels. At my house you’ll find them on my nightstand, tucked under my bed, pushed under the sofa, and piled in a stack on the floor in front of my bookshelf, waiting to be reshelved.
So, when I saw seasonal and local cookbooks sprouting in bookstores everywhere this past spring, I couldn’t wait to explore them all once our local growing season kicked into gear. Between six recipe testers and tasters, we tested 28 recipes from six books, never fewer than three recipes from any one book. I personally tested no fewer than two recipes from each book, and usually four or five. I hadn’t bought this much butter and Parmesan cheese in years. I also read all 1,715 pages of text. While many of the books have a vegetable focus, none has a strictly vegetarian focus. Nevertheless, we focused our efforts on testing vegetarian recipes from the books. I had intended to declare one book the winner above all others, but found, in the end, that the best book is the one that suits your particular tastes and needs. Therefore, I’ve summarized the key qualities of each book, listed in alphabetical order below, so you can decide which one suits you.
Lori Writer / Heavy Table
Cooking from the Garden: Best Recipes from Kitchen Gardener, edited by Ruth Lively [300 pages, hardcover, The Taunton Press, $29.95]
Cooking from the Garden is a compilation of 200 recipes from now-defunct Kitchen Gardener magazine that includes recipes from renowned chefs and authors such as Deborah Madison, James Beard Foundation Award winning author of Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone; Chicago-based chef and cookbook author Rick Bayless; and Minneapolis-based chef Lucia Watson and food writer Beth Dooley.
Two of the five recipes we tried, Lynn Alley‘s Strawberry Smoothie and Nan Wishner’s Crustless Vegetable Quiche turned out to be real favorites. The strawberry smoothie, though basic, has turned into a morning staple in the household that tested it, using peaches now instead of strawberries. The quiche made use of a good amount of garden vegetables, including kale, red onion, carrot, and potatoes, and got an appealing kick from Chinese five-spice powder which, especially when ground from scratch, is the star of the dish.
Lori Writer / Heavy Table
We also tried Beth Dooley’s and Lucia Watson’s White Bean Salad with Rosemary-Balsamic Vinaigrette (see recipe below) and thought it was pretty good, a B or a B+, though I wanted to add a splash of acid, apple cider vinegar, or lemon, perhaps. We didn’t use the optional homemade croutons, so perhaps that would have provided the missing element had we tried it. Unfortunately, the recipe was missing some clarification in the ingredient listing, which called for ”4 cups cooked — or white beans,” which we decided meant 4 cups of cooked white beans. No directions were provided for cooking the beans, so we used our own method. Continue reading Seasonal and Local Cookbooks: How They Stack Up »
Tags: Alice Waters, Beth Dooley, Carole Topalian, Cathy Thomas, Chez Panisse, co-op, cookbook, Cooking from the Garden, CSA, Edible, Edible Communities Publications, Emeril Lagasse, Everyday Cooking with Organic Produce, farm, farm to fork, Farmers' Market, Fast Fresh & Green, Fast Fresh and Green, Fine Cooking Magazine, Fresh from the Farmers' Market, garden, gardening, Golden Fig Fine Foods, Heartland, Janet Fletcher, Kitchen Gardener, Laurie McCann Crowell, Lenny Russo, local, localvore, locavore, Lucia Watson, Lucia's, lynn alley, nan wishner, Native Harvest Wild Rice, organic, Rick Bayless, rosemary campiformio, Ruth Lively, San Francisco Chronicle, Savoring the Seasons, seasonal, Susie Middleton, Tracy Ryder, Trotter's Cafe and Bakery, vegetarian
Every other Monday throughout the summer and fall while locally raised produce is spectacular and abundant, the Heavy Table will be exploring vegetarian cuisine, both in the kitchen and at local eateries. Read other stories in this series.
As a co-author of an upcoming book about Minnesota sandwiches and the people who prepare them, I ate a lot of sandwiches in the first half of 2010, mostly Vietnamese bánh mì sandwiches and Somali sambusa, but also, in support of my co-authors, the occasional meatloaf, fried walleye, or hot dago sandwich. I ate sandwiches for breakfast. I ate sandwiches for lunch. And, yes, I ate sandwiches for dinner. Sometimes for every meal in a day. Sometimes in family-owned delis so small I couldn’t turn around without clobbering someone with my purse; sometimes in celebrity-chef-operated restaurants anchored by shiny art museums.
Fortunately I like sandwiches, so this was not a problem, except that, Minnesota sandwiches, at least the iconic ones, tend to be incredibly, gloriously meat-tacular. So, the first thing I did when I submitted my chapters to my editor is swear off bacon-wrapped, pate-slathered, or deep-fried meat sandwiches. But, after months of eating, breathing, and dreaming sandwiches, I found I couldn’t give them up. Thus began my quest, still ongoing, for vegetarian, sometimes even vegan, sandwiches.
Lori Writer / Heavy Table
French Meadow Bakery and Café in Minneapolis serves up a vegan Grilled Reuben Tempeh sandwich ($9) stuffed with thick slabs of marinated tempeh (pressed cakes of cooked and fermented soybeans) and tangy sauerkraut and spiced tomato aioli piled onto slender slices of house-baked rye bread. The sandwiches are grilled until the bread has achieved that toasty, buttery exterior you look for in a grilled cheese sandwich, except that it’s all vegan, so there’s no butter and no cheese. Sandwiches come with your choice of chips and salsa, mixed greens, or, as pictured in the photo above, a spicy slaw. Continue reading Two Sandwiches, Two Ways »
by Lori Writer on June 28, 2010
Every other Monday throughout the summer and fall while locally raised produce is spectacular and abundant, the Heavy Table will be exploring vegetarian cuisine, both in the kitchen and at local eateries.
Lori Writer / Heavy Table
I think of Duluth, with its cool fog and hilly terrain, as San Francisco on Superior. The nighttime chorus of bellowing foghorns is my comforting lullaby, in the same way that the frantic call of the loon is my Minnesota-born husband’s. And this is the time of year when my husband, seeing the mist of sweat beading on my brow and knowing that my San Francisco-raised self cannot tolerate St. Paul’s humid summer heat without an occasional de-wilting respite, will say, “Let’s go to Duluth!”
“Let’s go to Fitger’s!” I’ll respond.
I love lounging on the sidewalk patio of Fitger’s Brewhouse with my iced tea and burger and watching the meandering pedestrians. You never know when you’ll see someone wearing a clown nose or a puffy pirate shirt. And my husband is always happy to sample their rotating list of house brews.
But the best part of Fitger’s is their Harvest Moon Wild Rice Burger, either the Classic ($8.49), topped with cheddar cheese, aioli, sprouts, and tomatoes, or the Pub Style ($9), topped with Swiss cheese, sauteed onions, mushrooms, and chipotle pepper sauce. While most restaurants’ vegetarian burger patties seem mushy or uninspired or warmed in the microwave (and often all three), the ones at Fitger’s Brewhouse have a firm, satisfying texture. The bold cheeses and flavorful sauces provide appealing savory notes, and the crunchy fresh vegetables and whole-grain bun allow you to pretend you’re being completely virtuous.
Lori Writer / Heavy Table
Sometimes, though, as much as you believe the breeze off of Lake Superior is the only solution to the relentless heat, you just can’t drop everything and run to Duluth, where the temperatures are civilized. Things stand in your way: graduations, family commitments, long overdue work projects that won’t die. Why not have your Fitger’s Wild Rice Burger at home? Because they guard their recipe, that’s why. When the Heavy Table asked, they declined, in a Minnesota-nice sort of way, of course: “The Brewhouse Harvest Moon Burger is something we are very proud of. As many times as we’ve been asked, our policy is to hold the old family recipe tight to our vest.”
Curse those vested family secrets.
Not ones to give up easily, we decided to create our own wild rice burger, inspired by Fitger’s, with the recipe below. It’s not the same as an afternoon dining on the big lake, but if you serve these with a cold beverage, close your eyes, and hold your face up to the air-conditioning unit, you, too, can dream of Duluth. Continue reading Fitger’s Brewhouse’s Harvest Moon Wild Rice Burger »
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