David Smith 9/1/13 David Smith 9/1/13

Sausage stuffed squash blossoms

Several days ago I pulled a rather large squash vine from the garden that was showing powdery mildew infestation. It was actually one-half of a plant that had an equally long vine trailing in the opposite direction, and since it's mate looked unblemished and had healthy squash attached I didn't feel like it was a great loss to cut and remove this section of the plant. I pulled the 7-foot vine into the driveway to let the sun bake and wilt it before disposing. A couple days later it still looked green and pliant. Even more interestingly, more than a dozen of the previously undeveloped flower heads had fully developed and opened as the severed appendage lay on the cement in the hot sun.

Rather than allow the bright yellow flowers to go to waste I clipped them and have used them as pizza toppings and stuffed and fried them for breakfast. I've loved the idea and image of stuffed squash blossoms ever since I first saw them in a Italian cookbook back in the 1980s. Even though I've made them many times since then they still strike me as exotic and picturesque.

This morning we made a stuffing of sausage, mushrooms, onions and cheese. The only cheese I had on hand was some ricotta, which is ok but not ideal for stuffing blossoms that are to be fried in oil. You have to fry quickly, lest the ricotta turn liquidy. I'd prefer something like a good parmesan or even a chewy pepperjack, but you work with what you have at hand. So I pre-cooked the sausage with the mushrooms and onions, let it cool and then mixed with the ricotta before stuffing the flowers.

Precooking sausage, mushrooms and onion. Not really necessary if you have a nice firm cheese to add to the mix.

Ready to turn after just a couple minutes.

Once the flowers are stuffed, dust with flour, roll in a beaten egg and then re-roll in flour spiced with salt, pepper and paprika. Fry quickly in heated oil, flipping with tongs after only a minute or two. Add fresh tomatoes, a cool, beautiful morning, and imagine you're in Italy.

What a great way to enjoy breakfast on this first day of September.

David Smith 8/29/13 David Smith 8/29/13

Beautiful heirloom tomatoes, courtesy of dirt, sunshine, rain & air.

Heirloom Tomato Salad.

How wonderful is it that nature provides a standard of beauty and flavor that no chef or artist can match? And it's there for us to simply accept.

David Smith 8/26/13 David Smith 8/26/13

Stuffed Grilled Zucchini

Simple heirloom tomato plates; drizzle with balsamic, olive oil, sea salt and cracked pepper. Badaboom badabing! I added this image to the post simply because I like it; relevant zucchini images to follow!

This year we eschewed growing the common, green zucchini such as you see in most grocery stores. Instead we opted for the more ornate costata romanesco variety, with its variegated coloring and ribbed skin. It's a lovely, mild zucchini that seems to be making an appearance at farmers markets everywhere.

Like most any zucchini, costata romanesco is prolific. Thus far this year we've harvested quite a number from the four plants we have vining their way through our garden. I try to pick the fruits when they are no larger than around 8" in length, although I inevitably find one that had escaped my previous day's rounds, hidden in among the big green leaves, and that has managed to grow to a hefty size seemingly overnight. Those big bruisers are still good eating, especially when seasoned and cooked on the grill.

Last night we hosted a small dinner for our dear friends Paul and Talane, who spend a month or so each summer here in Wisconsin from their permanent home in the UK. They're heading back to England this week, so we wanted to spend one more day before their departure chatting, eating and making our own grand plans to visit England sometime soon. I tried to make dinner a mostly Wisconsin-and-garden-centric affair, with homemade pizza of mushrooms and venison (recipe for that one coming tomorrow), stuffed grilled zucchini, mixed garden salad and heirloom tomatoes. We also had some great Wisconsin beer on hand with Leinenkugel's and Three Sheeps Brewery in the fridge, although we all ended up drinking vodka tonics throughout the evening.

"Stuffed" zucchini ready to hit the grill.

Here's my recipe for the Stuffed Grilled Zucchini, although to be fair, the zucchini isn't really "stuffed" so much as it's topped.

Ingredients:

zucchini, cut in half length-wise, and again in half cross-wise if they're big.
olive oil
bacon lardons
garlic cloves, 3 or 4, finely diced
shredded parmesan or parmegiano-reggiano
granny smith apple, diced small
serrano pepper, diced
onion, diced small
sea salt and cracked pepper
mozzarella cheese

1) Fire up your grill and get it up to around 350°-375°.

2) Scrape a shallow groove or channel down each halved zucchini with a spoon. Place the removed zucchini flesh into a shallow bowl for mixing with the other ingredients.

3) Oil and season the zucchinis all over, top to bottom, both sides.

4) Add the bacon lardons, garlic, parmesan, apple, serrano pepper, onion and S&P to the bowl and mix everything together by loosely tossing it around with your hands.

5) Place a goodly amount of the stuffing into the hollowed-out channels of the zucchinis.

6) Place the halved, "stuffed" zucchinis on the upper grill rack if your grill has one of those (like mine does in the pic) or to the outside of the hottest area of the grill. You'll want to grill these with indirect heat vs direct heat, long enough to soften the interior and melt and ever-so-slightly brown the cheesy stuffing on top. It should take around 15-20 minutes, give or take, with a closed lid on the grill...depending on how big the zucchini are and how often you open the lid to check and move them around as necessary so they don't burn.

7) When they look about done, sprinkle shredded mozzarella on top of each half, and let it melt and brown slightly to pull everything together and cement the stuffing to the zucchinis as you plate them; maybe another 2 or 3 minutes.

Now then, I have a friend who, when I shared an image of the grilled zucchini on my facebook page, said she'd like to make them tonight. But she's a vegetarian and so the bacon will have to go (shedding small tear as I write this). I'd suggest substituting something like tart cherries and/or another mildly hot pepper to funk up the flavor of the stuffing a bit. Cherries and zucchini are a great combination. But really just about any combination of ingredients that you like will make a great stuffing.

David Smith 8/23/13 David Smith 8/23/13

Ramp seed capers

Ramps (or wild leeks, as they are often called) have bolted and been going to seed for some time now. Forest floors that several weeks ago were covered with a lush carpet of their elegantly shaped leaves now display a chaotic peppering of skinny stalks topped with green clusters of heart-shaped seed heads. In just a few more weeks those seed heads, now soft and succulent, will crack open to reveal seeds that have hardened into small black BBs.

But right now those seeds have yet to fully develop, are juicy and crunchy to the bite, and have a much softer though still unmistakable flavor and aroma of garlic and onion. They're also abundant enough to make collecting an easy job. We harvested about a quart's worth in no time at all.

Developing ramp seeds make an interesting "caper" of sorts, not unlike the homemade capers you might make using nasturtium seeds. One of the more tedious aspects of pickling ramp seeds as capers is removing the little ½-inch stem that the seed head is attached to, if you do in fact choose to remove it at all. The stems are only mildly fibrous and are easy to chew, so I leave them on some of the seeds I pickle, as they don't bother me. But I do snip them off, with scissors, of enough seeds to make at least one or two jars that are stem-free should I wish to use the capers for dishes I might make if we have company.

Ingredients:

red wine vinegar
water, equal in volume to the vinegar
salt, ⅓-½ cup for every 2 cups vinegar
sugar, ½-⅔ cup for every 2 cups vinegar
bay leaves, 1 per jar

You can see I'm a little iffy on the amounts of salt and sugar. Adjust to your preference, depending on whether you like it saltier or sweeter.

1) Rinse the seeds in a few changes of cold water, picking out any chaff, bugs or other undesirable elements. Cut of the stems from the heads if you so desire. Chew a few with and without the stems to help you decide.

2) Bring the pickling brine ingredients to a boil and simmer for a few minutes.

3) Fill your jars with the seeds and pour the hot brine over them. Keep a bay leaf in each jar. Seal, date and place in the fridge. Or, if you want to preserve them for a longer period of time outside of the refrigerator you may preserve them in a hot water bath as you would any vegetable.

Use ramp seed capers anyway you normally would with an actual caper. I added a handful to my omelet this morning.

David Smith 8/21/13 David Smith 8/21/13

Wild Grapes

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.

David Smith 8/17/13 David Smith 8/17/13

Creamy Herbal Duck Egg Veg Tart

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.

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).

Ingredients

Crust:

flour 2 to 2½ cups
salt
butter 2 sticks, unsalted, ½-inch pieces
water about ¼ cup, ice cold

Filling:

mayonnaise 1 heaping cup
ricotta cheese 1 cup
3-4 duck eggs (or 5-6 chicken eggs)
fresh basil 1 heaping cup, chopped
sea salt, cracked pepper, cayenne pepper
garlic 1 clove, diced (or garlic powder)
goat cheese (or better yet, parmigiano-reggiano)
veg (tomatoes, zucchini, onion, okra, carrot, etc.) cut thinly

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.

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?).

David Smith 8/15/13 David Smith 8/15/13

A funny thing happened on the way to the garlic mustard patch

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.

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.

David Smith 8/15/13 David Smith 8/15/13

Unexpected guest for lunch today

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.

David Smith 8/12/13 David Smith 8/12/13

What's Up Doc? crunch, crunch, crunch

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:

carrots, 2-3 lbs, washed thoroughly. You can julienne these or slice them any way you feel like. I left them whole so that they wouldn't turn to mush in the hot water bath, which isn't a problem if you omit the bath and just make them as refrigerator pickles, and I left a half-inch of the green tops on as well, just because it looks cool.
3 cups vinegar
3½ cups water
1-1½ cups sugar
2 tbl salt
1½-2 tbl pickling spice
bay leaves, 1 for each jar
½ tbl peppercorns
garlic cloves, 1 for each jar
onion, roughly chopped into large pieces
dried thai peppers, 1 for each jar
sterilized canning jars and lids

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.

David Smith 8/7/13 David Smith 8/7/13

Image Archives: Rabbit & Kidney Pie

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.