Culinary and other adventures in foraging, gardening, urban farming and more, in Wisconsin and the Midwest.
Found a good number of wild grapes today, in a location with grape vines I have occasionally checked in past years but had never found any significant amount of fruit before now. Other fruit, like apples, seem to be doing really well this summer, so maybe it's just one of those extra full and lush years. I'll be back to check these periodically now.
Wild grapes
Our tomatoes have only just begun to ripen here, so close to the cool of Lake Michigan. The first ones are always the most exciting to see. Yesterday I plucked a half-dozen cherry tomatoes and two very small, red Early Girls. We had also gone grocery shopping the day before, which included picking up a jar of mayonnaise and a carton of ricotta cheese (for stuffing cattail ravioli I'm planning on making today or tomorrow). So, with a handful of small tomatoes on the counter and restocked mayo and ricotta in the fridge, I thought a veg tart might be a good way to make use of our garden's gifts.
The differences between a quiche, a frittata and a tart are subtle. They're all basically the same thing, but with a few small variations. A quiche and a frittata are both primarily egg dishes, but a quiche also often includes cream or milk, has a bottom crust and is baked in an oven, while a frittata is an eggs and filler ingredients (e.g., veg) dish, no crust, cooked on a stove-top to start and finished in the oven. A tart is often a creamier, custard-like pie, heavy on ingredients like cheese and mayo and lighter on eggs, much shallower in height, and usually baked in a pan called...yes, a tart pan.
Veg tart
It's been quite a while since I've made a tart. In fact, I no longer even have my tart pan; I think I lost it or tossed it years ago. I'm really a frittata and quiche kind of guy, as I generally prefer my egg pies to be tall, savory and weighty. But for whatever reason, this morning felt like a tart kind of morning.
This recipe will give you enough to make a couple 9" tarts, with enough dough left over, if you roll it thinly, to make crust for a couple of small pot pies (those are on tonight's menu).
Two vegetable tarts
Veg tart
Crust:
Filling:
Crust:
1) In a shallow mixing bowl, mix a teaspoon of salt into the flour. Add the butter pats (make sure they're cold and firm) to the flour and start working it in until you get a nice, crumb-like consistency. It'll take a while, and you could use a mixer if you so desire, but I like to use my hands.
2) Once you get a fine, crumby mixture, add the cold water (ice cold water...yeah, put a couple ice cubes in it to make sure it's cold) and mix until you get a solid, firm ball of dough. If you need to add a bit more water add it only a teaspoon or two at a time. You want the dough to be firm. And use the dough ball to pick up any bits sticking to the bottom or sides of the bowl.
3) Wrap the dough in plastic wrap, flatten it a bit, and place it in the fridge while you work on the filling. It should stay in the fridge for at least on hour, but you could also make the dough a day or two ahead of time if you're planning to make the tart later on.
4) After the dough has had time to think about its behavior, pull it out and place it on a lightly floured surface, flour the top and roll it out to no more than 1/8" thick (I go less than that even, as the dough will puff a bit when it's baked). Cut it to fit your pie or tart pan and press it in up to the sides. Place the pan back in the fridge for 10 or 15 minutes. Turn your oven to 350°.
5) Take the pan (or pans if you've made more than one) out of the fridge and pepper the dough with little holes from a fork. Place a piece of foil, large enough to cover the crust, gently in the pan and fill it with dried beans to weight it down. This will help prevent the dough from puffing up in spots, keeping a uniform crust throughout. Bake on the bottom rack for about 15 minutes, until the edges appear as though they're beginning to brown. Remove the pan from the oven, remove the foil and beans (let the beans cool and return them to their container for future use or eating). Place the pan back in the oven and bake for another 15 minutes or so, until the crust is a golden brown.
Filling:
1) Mix the mayonnaise, ricotta, salt, pepper, cayenne, garlic, eggs, and chopped basil in a bowl.
2) Cut the veg into small or thin pieces.
3) Pour the cheese and egg mixture into the crust-lined pan, only filling it about half-way. Add the veg and pour more of the cheese and egg mix in to fill. Top with pieces of goat cheese (or parmigiano-reggiano).
4) Bake on the middle rack at 350° until the top starts to brown a bit and you gather that the interior has cooked and firmed up.
Veg tarts
Cut pieces for you and your partner, pour a couple of mugs of good coffee (something like Anodyne Roasting's Ethiopian Yirgacheffe...awesomely delicious), and watch your ducks tool around the yard (you do have ducks, right?).
I'm planning a nettle and/or garlic mustard pasta making session, so this afternoon we made a quick run to a spot that I haven't been to for a while, where I've always been able to harvest a ton of garlic mustard pretty much throughout the entire season. Surprise of surprises, the place was overrun with wild raspberry brambles. Raspberries had always been there in impressive quantities, but I'd not seen them SO thick that they actually seemed to smother the garlic mustard. Anyone who knows about garlic mustard knows that this invasive doesn't get pushed out by anything; in fact, garlic mustard is the one that almost always does the pushing. I'm wondering if some environmentally-minded and invasive-conscious folks took it upon themselves to pull a lot of garlic mustard this summer. That would be a good thing; there are plenty of other spots where the unwelcome biennial can be found.
Not yet ripe mayapple fruit.
We moved to another location to scout for more garlic mustard and nettles, but again i was thrown off target by the site of several sizable mayapple fruits. Oh such precious treasure! Upon sighting the mayapples I forgot all about garlic mustard and nettles, and began scouring several sizable patches of the umbrella shaped plants for more fruits. I found a couple dozen still-green fruits and a lone ripe one, soft, yellow and fragrant. I enjoyed this sweet gift of the forest, squeezing its leathery skin to break it open so I could suck out its softly seedy gel-like interior. I'd describe mayapples as having the flavor of a muskmelon crossed with a banana, with a hint of guava fruit perhaps.
Ripe mayapple fruit. Soft, yellow, fragrant and delicious.
Mayapples are a finicky wild edible, sometimes bearing fruit, sometimes not. And even when they do the window of opportunity is brief, as they ripen for a short while before being absconded by some wandering skunk or opposum...or, if I'm fortunate, by me. Last year was a dry year and I found nary a single mayapple fruit. Today I counted over 15 good sized fruits and a loose handful of small ones. I intend to go back every few days to check their progress. I'm hoping to be able to gather enough to make at least one jar of jam with a few left over just for eating out of hand.
Three mayapple fruits. Each plant produces but a single fruit.
We've got a glut of rabbits this year, raising cain in gardens and flower beds. It's sure to be a good year come rabbit hunting season. Normally I shoo a garden thief off at least once, giving him one free strike, so to speak, but of course my protestations usually fall upon deaf rabbit ears. I think if you're going to resort to more drastic, permanent measures it's only proper and respectful to make honorable use of the animal...and we happen to love rabbit as an entree.
Breaded rabbit with hot pepper honey sauce; fried carrots and small salad of greens & cherry tomatoes; purslane relish & sweet vidalia onions.
Breaded rabbit with hot pepper honey sauce; fried carrots and small salad of greens & cherry tomatoes; purslane relish & sweet vidalia onions.
The other day we pulled carrots from the small carrot patch in the garden. We made a pretty decent haul from the smallish space (maybe 4'x5') with a bulging armload of Short&Sweet and Scarlet Nantez. I'm getting ready to replant the bed with another round of carrots and radishes as a late summer to fall crop.
Carrots - Short&Sweet and Scarlet Nantez.
Since we'll be eating this bunch of carrots over the next two or three weeks I cleaned them fairly well before brief storage, giving the buggy ones to Jesse's rabbit, Eric. If we were planning to store them over winter I wouldn't clean them nearly as thoroughly, but would just pack in sand or wood shavings as is.
I decided to pickle a few jars of the smaller ones. I also saved all of the teeny-tiny carrots, which I'll use for some fun artsy-fartsy plating and photos. Following is the pickle recipe. I preserved these with the boiling water immersion method for long term storage in the cupboard, but you could also do them as refrigerator pickles by just avoiding the immersion step, which would also leave the carrots firmer than the hot bath method, as the boiling water cooks and softens them. I'll likely do a few additional jars of refrigerator pickled carrots so that we have some with crunch. I did two jars with both carrots and beets, the red ones in the photo.
Pickled carrots and pickled carrots & beets,
Ingredients:
1) In a heated skillet fry the garlic and onion for just a few minutes in a tablespoon or two of olive oil, mainly to flavor the pan. Add the carrots, in batches, and saute for a few minutes, but not enough to soften them.
2) Place a clove of the sauteed garlic in each jar, and pack with the carrots. Divvy up the onion between the jars too. Add one small dried Thai pepper to each jar.
3) Bring the vinegar, water, sugar, salt, spices, and bay leaves, to a boil and simmer for a few minutes. Take the bay leaves and add one to each jar of carrots.
4) Pour the hot pickling mixture into the jars. Make sure the rims are clean and seal with lids and bands. Immerse in a boiling water bath as you would when preserving with this method. 10-12 minutes is about right. Or skip the immersion method and place the jars in the fridge.
I like to mix pickled vegetables on the plate with fresh and cooked veg, giving a nice mix of textures, colors and flavors within the context of a single vegetable. So, with these pickled carrots, I might do something like adding them to a mix of sauteed carrots and slawed carrots, essentially offering three different versions of the carrot in one serving, as a side or an entree unto itself.
Carrot medley - carrot slaw with maple balsamic, pickled carrots, blanched and fried carrots with bourbon honey sauce.
Found this "old" photo (from a year-&-a-half ago) of a couple of meat pies I made for one of our foodie potlucks a while back. They were rabbit & kidney pies with maitaki mushrooms (hen of the woods). I like how decorative I got with the pie crusts.
Rabbit and Kidney Pies with Maitaki Mushrooms
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.
Mess of bluegills
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.
A plate of pan-fried bluegills
Evidence of a great lunch
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.
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:
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.
Handful of zucchini flowers
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.
Battered and fried basil and sage
Battered and fried zucchini blossoms
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.
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.
Cylindra beets
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!
Beet & 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.
Warm Baby Zucchini Salad
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.
Cali and some of her posse.
She's a sweetheart. There are sure to be some goat cheese and yogurt blog posts in the coming days.
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:
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.
Quartering unripe walnuts.
Part II:
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.
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.)
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.
Late season ramps
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.
Pickled Ramps with Apple & Cucumber in Honey & Fish Sauce
So, here's my recipe for Pickled Ramps with Apple & Cucumber in Honey & Fish Sauce.
Pickling recipe:
Also:
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.
Ramp flower bud (click to enlarge)
Ramp flower bud (click to enlarge)
Beets
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.
comb covered with bees
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.
late season ramps
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.
Since my April 30 blog-post I had those suckers we caught chunked and soaking in brine, and yesterday finished pickling them, using four different pickling recipes. I found a great new cookbook at the library, Scandinavian Classics by Niklas Ekstedt, and it includes some wonderful pickled herring recipes that I used for the suckers.
My grandfather used to pickle small northern pike in a more traditional vinegar/salt/spice pickling solution, the kind that you might normally use for pickled cucumbers. They were fantastic and I always liked seeing an open jar of his pickled northern in the fridge, so I could steal a piece or two. The foundational recipe for pickled herring in Ekstedt's book is not like the recipe my Grandpa used. Ekstedt's version is a sweet pickle, using no salt at all in the foundation pickle, and very little (a pinch) in the follow-up flavoring pickles.
I had the sucker pieces soaking in a light salt brine for 5 days, before moving onto the sweet pickle as outlined in the book.
Sucker meat
Here is Ekstedt's "Basic Pickling Brine for Herring", which I adapted for the amount of sucker I had:
Now you're ready to create various flavor brines that will give the fish distinctly different profiles (tastes and textures). I veered a bit, as I am wont to do, from Ekstadt's recipes in a couple of these. I'll just give you the recipes below as I did them. You ought to feel free to do fiddle and play with these as well.
Ramps and green Apple Pickled Sucker ["Ramps and Apple Herring"]
The recipe for the first batch I pickled sounded like the most interesting: "Ramps & Apple". I have plenty of ramps from the week's foraging harvests and so I was anxious to give this one a whirl. I followed Ekstedt exactly on this one.
Ramp & Green Apple Pickled Sucker
Herb Sauce Pickled Sucker ["Herring with Herbs"]
This one was really tasty.
Herb Sauce Pickled Sucker
Fennel Pickled Sucker ["Fennel Herring"]
Fennel Pickled Sucker
Tomato/Garlic/Onion Pickled Sucker ["Tomato and Sherry Herring"]
Tomato/Garlic/Onion Pickled Sucker
I plan on trying these recipes, and more, with any small "hammer handle" northerns I catch this year. Sucker meat is ok, but northern pike is firmer and smoother tasting. Let me know if you do any fish pickling yourself, and how it turns out for you.
We spent yesterday and today in Shawano County, at my parents' cottage. Kim had a job interview in Wittenberg and I wanted to check the countryside for more potential foraging locations. If you happen to be a friend on my own facebook page you may be familiar with our forays to the cottage. They usually involve a hammock, a few cigars, some good craft beer and grilling of meat. This week, however, Shawano seemed to still be trying desperately to shake off winter's chill and grab hold of spring. It was rainy and nippy, but a most enjoyable reprieve nonetheless.
A trio of wild edibles harvested from a beautiful hardwood forest in Shawano County. l-r: Virginia Waterleaf, Ramps, Trout Lilies.
Virginia Waterleaf. I would not normally dig up the whole plant like this, rather only a portion of the young leaves, but the spot from where these were harvested was being logged and dug up to make what looked to be an entrance road. This image provides a look at the root system.
Handful of Virginia Waterleaf. The oftentimes dappled or lighter "watermark" spots are not especially visible in this image, although they are there.
Handful of Virginia Waterleaf. The oftentimes dappled or lighter "watermark" spots are not especially visible in this image, although they are there.
As far as it concerns Creative Sustenance, I did indeed discover several new locations that look quite promising. One area in particular had me very excited. So much so that when I pulled into a muddy track entering a hardwood forest, where some heavy equipment had parked during the clearing of the area, I did so a little recklessly and risked getting stuck in the deeply ridged muddy tracks of the logging vehicles. But I was too pumped about seeing the acre upon acre of ramps, trout lilies and virginia waterleaf plants that covered the forest floor.
Virginia Waterleaf leaves, the primary edible part.
I grabbed my spade and quickly dug a few plants from the edges of the clearing where the big rigs had been working. I didn't feel guilty about the few shallow holes I dug nor the handful of plants I removed in their entirety, something I would normally never do, because I knew that this spot would soon be leveled and graded of all plant life as the road was put in. When I return and hopefully get the okay to walk the woods proper, I'll do so with my usual thoughtful stewardship of the woodland I'm responsible for when in it.
I was a little surprised at how deeply the trout lily bulbs were buried. Some were 8-12 inches or more below their mottled leaves, attached to creamy white "stalks", or scapes, blanched by many inches of mulched soil. The bulb depth told of an old forest, with decades worth of decomposing leaf matter. It was also an indication of the age of some of the plants that had seeded or reproduced vegetatively many years ago.
Trout Lily bulbs, cleaned and sweet as clover.
Ramps, cleaned and trimmed. They blanketed the forest floor for acres.
The soil was incredibly rich and black, like the most beautiful compost created from the hand of a master gardener. A half-dozen to a dozen worms seemed to be in every spade-full. Even though we're already into May right now, climatically it's still very early spring. Winter is still letting us know he hasn't given up the ghost quite yet. (Last night saw 17" of snow fall in Rice Lake, I was told. We saw a car pass us covered in several inches of the white stuff.)
Panoramic of Wolf River in Shawano.
This morning Kim and I drove over to the Shawano dam area of the Wolf River, as two of our cottage neighbors told me this morning that the sturgeon were spawning with great theatricality just a couple days ago. They described the big fish as looking like logs bouncing around in the water, swimming over one another, as thick as cordwood. Every year the sturgeon spawning run draws people to the river to watch the giant prehistoric fish do their thing. Unfortunately for us, the day was cold and the dam had been opened, changing conditions pretty dramatically. A good number of other people were also at the river, hoping for a glimpse, but we saw no fish. Still, it was cool to know that they were in there, hiding in the deep water.
The Wittenberg Sandwich.
Addendum: I call this my Wittenberg Sandwich, because I got all of the ingredients in or a bit outside Wittenberg this day. Jack cheese, sweet/hot mustard and vinegar&herb sulze from Nueske's Meats, ramps and virginia waterleaf greens from a forest a few miles from town. But the swirled rye I did get from a sweet little local butcher shop in Shawano. If you're not familiar with sulze, it's just head-cheese with herbs or spices and vinegar added. It was fantastic.
While scouting for young burdock rosettes today, I stopped at a small bridge a mile outside of town, just to see what I could see in the river below. The fast moving water was greenish but clear and, lo and behold, I could see several small groups of suckers. So, I drove home, grabbed the dip net and called my Dad to ask him if he wanted to join me for an hour of fun.
I set up the net on the bridge while Dad walked downstream a-ways and started "herding" suckers to my net. We had a blast, hollering, "Here they come!" "He went under the net!" "Got one!" (used that line several times). We thought we'd give it a whirl further downstream from the bridge, where I just threw the net into the river, watched for suckers speeding past and pulled hard and fast when one or more passed over the net. "Got one!" became "Holy cow!" when on one pull I hauled in six.
I cleaned , cubed and salt brined the fish for later pickling. The jagged odds and ends I breaded and fried for a tasty snack before heading back out to the woods for more wild edibles scouting.
Breaded and fried sucker bites.
The ramps are well on their way now; it won't be more than another week or two before the forest floor is carpeted with them. Trout lilies make good opportunity in the spots where ramps choose to share the ground. I harvested one modest cluster of ramps and a few sweet trout lily bulbs, enough to give everyone at home a bite or two.
Cluster of ramps.
Mottled trout lily leaf next to young ramps.
I love trout lily bulbs. They're one of the real treats of the early spring edibles. Sweet, crunchy, easy to harvest. I wish they were larger than pea-size, but were that the case I might make a pig of myself with them. As it is, they do well as simply a lovely little candy treat.
Trout Lily bulbs next to a bunch of ramps.
It seems that this year's "spring" has been stalled in winter-mode forever. April 23rd today and it's a crisp 42°. Someone said close to a foot of snow fell last night in northern Wisconsin. I'm not one to complain about weather; I enjoy all of our region's elemental inconsistencies. But even I am tired of waiting for spring warmth and sun. Mostly I'm tired of waiting for the flush of wild spring edibles that I covet each year.
Today my impatience got the better of me and so I went out and dug up just a few fledgling ramps, their leaves with no more than an couple inches of nascent growth. I don't normally like to do that, as the leaves of mature ramps are as flavorful as the bulbs. But I needed something now! Ramp and duck egg pizza is tonight's dinner entree.
Early spring ramps, with only an inch or two of new leaf growth.
Early spring ramps trimmed and cleaned.
Last week saw my daughter Jesse and I doing a bit of sucker fishing with our dip net. The suckers are running now, though not impressively, and as the larder is bereft of last year's pickled sucker I had a hankering to make some more. We scored a couple of modestly-sized males from the Little Manitowoc River, enough for two jars of pickled meat. See my recipe from last year's (2012) May 5th blog post (the only difference in the recipe is that this time I used apple wine instead of regular white wine).
Dip net. A lot of smelt and suckers, and even crayfish and a few snapping turtles, have made acquaintance with this small net.
Jesse with two small male suckers, our only fish on a cold, rainy day.
We hope to get a few more suckers this week, as I want to pickled at least a dozen jars-worth.
Pickled sucker. See the May 5, 2012 blog post for recipe.
The rainbow trout are running now as well. The day after Jesse and I went out, which was a weekend, I went out with rod and lure to try my luck alone. One beautiful, silvery 19" male rainbow was my reward, just enough to satisfy my wife and I for lunch that same afternoon.
Rainbow trout, caught in Little Manitowoc River on a small cleo. Pan-fried with a coating of toasted sesame seeds, he was just what the doctor ordered.
Yes, it's been cool to downright frosty this phony spring month of April, but a few fish and a handful of small ramps are enough to keep the fire in my belly alight.
Several days of rain made for a high and swiftly moving river.
