David Smith 8/4/13 David Smith 8/4/13

Bluegills = summer fun & food

My daughter Jesse and I have recently begun hitting one of the several small inland lakes in the county. It's a picturesque little lake (under 40 acres) with just a few homes situated around its tree-lined shore. I fished this lake years ago and did fairly well for crappie, bluegill, largemouth bass and northern pike. I know there are some good-sized bass and northern in this tea-colored lake; every once in a while someone will be in the local news for hauling in a big one from its weedy depths. Last week was the first day Jesse and I fished it together and we saw a bass clear the water that I judged to be in the 4 to 5 lb. range.

This morning we went out to see how we could do with the bluegills. We kept a few from our outing last week and Jesse loved their delicate flavor after we got home and fried them up. Today we hauled in a couple dozen; nothing big, but big enough to keep and eat.

Pan fried bluegills are one of those "wild" foods that make me think of summer. When I was a kid my grandparents would clean them simply, by cutting off the heads, gutting and scaling them and that was about it. I think I was the first person in the family to learn how to fillet fish and so I pretty well became the official "fish cleaner" every time we went fishing. I was okay with that, as I found the process to be rather meditative, and I took a good measure of pride in my ability to fillet fish with minimum waste and maximum efficiency.

But every now and then I get a hankering for that old bone-in method of cleaning small panfish. It makes you use your fingers when you eat, as you need to pull and pick the bones from the meat, which is a simple matter, and eating with one's fingers is a great way to eat fish outside in the summer.

The cooking method is also simple. An inch of hot oil in a skillet and the generic flour-egg-flour (or bread crumb) dip before frying is all it takes. Salt and pepper the flour and take an assembly-line approach with a shallow bowl for each dip ingredient leading up to the skillet of hot oil. Drain the fish on a paper towel-lined plate for several seconds as they come out of the oil. Add some paper towels to wipe your greasy fingers and a pitcher of iced tea or a cold beer, and you're good to go. Hint: the tails are the best...crunchy like chips.

David Smith 8/3/13 David Smith 8/3/13

Elevated garden beds updates

Here are a couple of follow-up videos to the video we shared on July 3rd, about preparing and seeding a set of elevated garden beds we've got in the yard. The first video is only two or three minutes long and shows the growth of everything three weeks after seeding. I should have posted this video on the site here, and I don't know why I didn't, but I did share it on facebook.

The second video is from yesterday and shows some impressive growth just a week after the previous video. We cut the greens down for eating, and let them regrow again.

David Smith 8/1/13 David Smith 8/1/13

Battered & Fried Zucchini Blossoms and Herbs

My daughter Jesse and I went fishing at a small inland lake in our county yesterday. We caught a handful of panfish and had a lovely time on a quiet and picturesque lake. When we returned home I fried the fish, with a simple batter in an oiled skillet. They were, of course, delicious, as fresh caught panfish are.

Today I decided to stay with the batter-and-fry method, but chose zucchini flowers and a handful of basil and sage leaves as the "batterees". Fried zucchini blossoms always make me think of summer in Italy, with Italian farmers market vendors displaying mounds of big red tomatoes, brilliant yellow zucchini flowers and chunky bolete mushrooms.

Battered & fried basil and sage (left) and zucchini blossoms (right)

Sometimes I'll stuff the flowers with the traditional cheese or sausage mixture before frying. Today I just battered and fried them, with a pinch of sea salt as the only seasoning. A little light horseradish or lemon thyme aoli on the side for dipping is nice too.

The batter is simple and light:

1½ cups flour
1 or 2 tsp sea salt
2 or 3 egg whites
1 can of beer, preferably a pilsner or lager style

1. Pick 12 to 18 male zucchini flowers, the ones on the long, skinny stems. make sure there aren't any ants or other critters inside. Pick a handful of sizable sage and basil leaves too.

2. Heat an inch or two of canola oil in a skillet until it's good and hot and spits at you if you sprinkle a drop of water. Use one of those screened covers when frying too, if you have one.

3. Mix the flour and salt. Add the eggs whites. Pour in the beer as you beat the flour/egg mixture with a fork, until it's like pancake batter.

4. Dip the zucchini flowers and herb leaves into the batter to coat. Hold them above the bowl for several seconds to allow them to drain some of the batter off before adding directly to the hot oil, otherwise they get too bready. Fry until golden brown on the one side, then turn them over with tongs to fry the other sides. You'll have to work in little batches, depending upon how big your skillet is.

5. Let the finished blossoms and leaves drain on a plate with paper towels, and give a sprinkle of sea salt while they're still hot. That's it.

Like I said, fried zucchini flowers conjure images of Italy, but we're in Wisconsin so I used a can of Leinenkugels Original Lager as the beer for my batter. Italy...Wisconsin...Italy...Wisconsin...heh, they're both great places to be in summer.

David Smith 7/30/13 David Smith 7/30/13

Beet & Zucchini Salad

It's summertime, the garden is beginning to produce more regularly now, and so we're on an extended salad feast for as long as the garden keeps giving us fresh goodness. Pulled a mess of cylindra beets yesterday, which of course are delicious in all kinds of ways.

Here's another quick and attractive salad with only three garden veg: beets, zucchini, and green onions.

Boil the beets until they're soft but not too soft, maybe 5-6 minutes. Toss a couple baby zucchini in the boiling water when you've got just two or three minutes to go (zucchini takes less time to soften up). Pull the beets and zucchini from the water. Slice the zucchini like we did yesterday with the Warm Baby Zucchini Salad. Take a dry towel that you don't mind staining a brilliant red from the beets, and rub the skins off. Slice the beets into medallions. Slice the green onions into tiny medallions too, and separate the little rings of onion (it's easy enough to do with your fingers but you could also put the little onion discs in a bowl with a lid and shake the heck out of it to separate them).

Arrange a couple or more large, washed beets leaves on a plate, followed by the beets, zucchini and finally little green onions rings. Drizzle with extra virgin olive oil and sea salt. Simple as that!

David Smith 7/29/13 David Smith 7/29/13

Warm Baby Zucchini Salad

Here's a simple and darn tasty little ensemble (and pretty too) from this morning's garden pickings.

Boil baby zucchini's for just a few minutes, til they soften a bit and are nice and hot. Slice them at an angle, just because they look nicer that way. Add some sliced fresh heirloom tomato, a few basil leaves (green & purple here), and a zucchini flower torn or cut into little bits.

Drizzle with extra virgin olive oil, sprinkle with sea salt, and there you go.

David Smith 7/27/13 David Smith 7/27/13

40 miles to milk a goat

What kind of crazy person would drive 20 miles (10 each way) twice a day for a week to milk a single goat? My kind of crazy I guess, because that's just what I'm going to do. My friend Christine is going to New York for a week and asked for a little help with her critters while she's gone. So yeah, I'm helping a friend, but I'm also just having a bit of fun. I thoroughly enjoy Christine's goats, and am happy to have any excuse to hang out with them when I can.

I was hoping that more than one goat would require milking, but right now it's just the one from her small herd. Cali, short for Calliope, is the doe in question. That's her below, the one I've got my hand on.

She's a sweetheart. There are sure to be some goat cheese and yogurt blog posts in the coming days.

David Smith 7/23/13 David Smith 7/23/13

Walnut Liqueur: Nocino

Ever since I started doing small liqueur experiments a few years ago I've wanted to try to make Nocino, the Italian dark liqueur made from unripened walnuts. Last year our friends Christine and Brian Mittnacht purchased a small farm south of town, on which are a couple of walnut trees. Christine had the exact same thought I did about making nocino, and has three or four bottles in-process right now. Yesterday I stopped out to her place and picked three dozen unripe walnuts for the very same purpose.

I'm picturing a group of us sitting around the campfire after a great meal, everyone with a small bowl of homemade ice cream drizzled with dark, nutty, slightly spicy nocino...or little apéritif glasses of the silky liqueur (after dinner we would call it a digestif, before dinner an apéritif).

The recipes for nocino you may find are all rather similar. Some use more or less sugar, add or omit certain spices, vary the length of time the liqueur should sit and mellow, and so on. Some also add the spices and sugar right at the beginning while others add them after the green walnuts have steeped for a few weeks. I chose to add the sugar and spices after the initial steeping time (40 days), really only because I found that I had run out of cinnamon sticks (used them up making pickled grapes the other day).

So, here's the nocino recipe I'm using.
Part I:

around 3 dozen green, unripe walnuts, washed & quartered
zest of 1 lemon - use a vegetable peeler to peel strips from around the lemon
1 bottle vodka (most suggest using a cheap vodka; I say use a decent vodke, one you'd drink on its own)

1. Place the quartered walnut wedges into a large, sealable jar with the lemon peel strips scattered throughout.

2. Fill with vodka; seal the jar and set it aside somewhere cool to sit for 40 days. Give it a shake or back-&-forth every day.

Part II:

1/2 cup water
1 cup cane sugar
1 or 2 cinnamon sticks
5 or 6 cloves
I may add a tbl or so of honey too, I'm not sure yet

1. Combine the water, sugar, cinnamon sticks and cloves (and maybe the honey) into a sauce pan and heat to dissolve the sugar and steep the spices. When finished steeping remove the cinnamon sticks and cloves and let the syrup cool.

2. Strain the walnuts and lemon peels from the vodka. Add the cooled spiced sugar syrup to the vodka and now let that sit for another month or so. I understand that the longer it sits the mellower it gets.

3. After 5 or 6 weeks strain the liqueur to remove any sediment or bits that may be left. I'll likely use my coffee chemex and filters to strain. Bottle and cork it, make a funky label for it, and bring it out for that after dinner ice cream wind-down.

Ready to sit and work its magic. Patience required.

We'll update you again in 40 days.

David Smith 7/3/13 David Smith 7/3/13

Seeding greens into elevated garden beds

I haven't quite nailed down how to place and format videos onto the blog page so that they also get added to the video page. I'll have to figure that out as we'll be adding more videos to the site this year, the higher production quality Creative Sustenance videos that Josh and I produce together, and simpler, less visually impressive videos that I do myself.

I certainly don't have the skills or equipment to do the kind of film work that Josh does. He's a true artist with video. I'm just a guy with a Flip video or cheap Kodak camera. Also, our schedules and locales are such that it's not always easy for both of us to get together to shoot on the spur of the moment.

But I do have some things I'd like to share via video that are perhaps a little more off-the-cuff and low-brow than our official Creative Sustenance video projects. This little video on seeding greens into an elevated garden bed is that sort of thing. Someone asked me about the elevated beds we have in the yard and I thought rather than making a written blog entry about it, it might be fun and more effective to actually show what we do.

These kinds of rough video tutorials and varied subject matter videos will also lack the structure, format and time parameters that the Creative Sustenance videos have. Maybe I should call them Creative Sustenance Home Videos or something like that (how about CS Low Brow Videos?). In any event, here's our latest blog entry, in my own simple video format. (If nothing else, the quality of this video indicates, by comparison, just how brilliant Josh is at his job...hop over to the video page and take a look at our Milkweed episode again.)

David Smith 6/27/13 David Smith 6/27/13

Pickled Ramps with Apple & Cucumber in Honey & Fish Sauce

I've had a bag of cleaned ramp bulbs sitting in the bottom of the fridge for more than a week and thought I better put them up today. So this morning I put up 5 pint-&-half jars (24 oz. each). I've concocted and used a good number of recipes for preserving ramps over the years, and while there are one or two that I consider tried-and-true, I nevertheless enjoy playing with the process more often than not. This morning's effort reflects that experimental urge.

Ramps have such a powerful garlic/onion flavor, so I often try to balance that with some sweetness or sometimes even fruitiness. Late season ramps, which is what this batch was, are even more pungent than their earlier, fully leafed versions. I also prefer my pickled things to be weaker rather than stronger concerning sourness, so I try to use less vinegar when it seems prudent. You'll see in this recipe a tad less vinegar and a little more sugar (in the form of cane sugar and honey) than some other recipes call for.

I also added an ingredient, Asian fish sauce, I've never used before when pickling vegetables, but my post-processing tasting tells me it might become something of a regular ingredient in many more canning sessions.

I've been reading and enjoying Edward Lee's beautiful new cooking volume Smoke & Pickles (Artisan, 2013). Lee's riff on his grandmother's recipe for "Pickled Garlic in Molasses Soy Sauce" caught my eye, especially as he described it as going particularly well with fried quail. Not that I eat a lot of quail, but the pairing conjured a mental image that stoked my creative furnace a bit. I didn't use Lee's specific recipe, which calls for an impressive 2 cups of soy sauce and 1/2 cup of molasses, but it did get me thinking and inspired me to try something different with my pickled ramps.

Lee's heavy use of soy sauce and molasses got me thinking about umami , the alleged fifth taste we humans can discern. Rather than using soy sauce I turned to fish sauce, and ingredient I am finding more and more places for in the kitchen. A little fish sauce goes a long way, so I added only 2 tablespoons and a splash more, which i think provided the right earthy note I was looking for to play off of the pungency of the ramps and the sweetness of the sugar and honey.

I also added slices of seedless cucumber and tart apple to the mix. I felt that the cucumber would act as something of a neutralizer, mellowing some of the slightly harsher character of these late season ramps. The apple adds that element of sweet tartness that I liked in the recipe for Ramp and Apple Pickled Sucker a few weeks ago.

So, here's my recipe for Pickled Ramps with Apple & Cucumber in Honey & Fish Sauce.

Pickling recipe:

white vinegar 2 cups
water 1½ cups
cane sugar 2 cups
pickling spice* 1½ tbl
fennel seed 1 tsp
dried juniper berries* 1 tsp heaping
fish sauce 2-3 tbl
honey ¾ cup

Also:

ramp bulbs cleaned and trimmed, enough to fill 5 pint-&-half (24 oz) jars.
1 tart apple, sliced into thin wedges
1 seedless cucumber, sliced thinly

Sterilize everything like you normally do when canning. Boil the pickling ingredients together, stirring constantly (you don't want the sugar to cook or caramelize, just dissolve fully). Stuff the jars with ramps, cucumber and apple slices, alternating a few ramps with an apple and cuke slice or two, until you get to the top. Push everything down into the jar as tightly as you can, and add more if you're able to.

Pour the hot pickling mix over the ramps, sliding a butter knife down the sides of the jars, jostling the contents a bit to make sure you get any air pockets out of there. Add more pickling mix if you need to, but don't go any higher than about a 1/4" from the rim. Seal the jars with lids and bands, and process in your canning bath for 15 minutes. Gently remove the jars and space them out on your counter while you wait for that exciting "pop!" of the lids, ensuring a good seal. Mark with contents and date.

My Atlanta friend Bryan asked me what the ramps taste like. Well, I let the jars sit for a few hours this morning, to make sure everything had time to get acquainted, before opening one up. The smell was nice...sweet, a little oniony, but also faintly herbal and even a little floral. I took a sip of the liquid. Didn't make me pucker, which is good, and I thought, "Hmmm, I wonder how this would taste in a cocktail." (Might find out tonight.) I bit into a ramp, judged it to have the slightly tamed, sweet, umami vibe I was hoping for, and immediately sliced a few up to cover some natural casing hot dogs for lunch. Thumbs up.

* The pickling spice I often use is one I get at an Amish General Store in the country outside of Shawano, WI. I buy it in small bulk containers and it contains mustard seed, allspice, corriander, cassia, ginger, peppers, cloves, bay leaves and a few other spices.

* I pick juniper berries in early fall - September to October and later - let them dry and store in empty spice jars. If you too want to harvest your own, make sure you know what you're picking.

David Smith 6/19/13 David Smith 6/19/13

The "busy work" of gardening, beekeeping & foraging

We've been engaged in quite a lot of what I'm going to call "busy work" since my last blogpost back in May. The garden has been a struggle thus far this year, with a significant number of our vegetable seedlings dying from the wacky pseudo-spring weather we had. I reseeded portions of the garden beds and restarted plants for transplanting two or three times in the last four weeks. We're also experiencing something of a chipmunk plague this year. The little beasties seem to be everywhere, beheading sunflower, okra and squash seedlings and showing themselves with an almost mocking impudence. I'm half expecting to walk out onto the porch one morning to find several of them playing cards, using my radish greens as chips and eyeing me with an air of dismissive contempt.

Our foray into the world of beekeeping has also had its ups and downs these past few weeks. Our first package of bees didn't make it. The queen and a majority of the workers perished in the first week or so. I blame the erratic weather, which was hot for the first day or two after we installed them and then dipped to freezing for several days. We purchased another, larger packet and successfully installed them into the top bar hive I built and they seem to be moving forward with determined purpose, building combs and adding to their numbers at what seems to me to be a staggering pace. However, they've also had to work extra hard to repair some of damage we unintentionally did to the hive during our first few examinations, as we inadvertently broke a few combs and killed a good number of larvae. More on that in a succeeding post.

And of course we've been foraging and filming. We've got a good amount of film in the can, so to speak, and need to begin editing and releasing additional episodes of Creative Sustenance. We'll need to get into a production rhythm so that we're releasing episodes on a somewhat consistent schedule. Getting out into the field to forage and film is such fun. We truly are fortunate to live in a state with such an incredible abundance of wild edibles and beautiful locations. I think you'll like what we've got on deck with Creative Sustenance.