My Plate or Yours?

A Few Good Meals

Well this is kind of embarrassing, but here I am. Still no closure in my political world but I have dug my heels in now and I absolutely WILL NOT vote if they steal this nomination from my candidate. And that’s all I will say about that.

Food. Of course I have been eating all through this ordeal (though there have been a few moments when I actually lost my appetite.) Some highlights really stand out.

A visit from Dave and Krissy Tallent in Apalachicola. We had the best meal ever at David and Ryanne Carrier’s Avenue Sea. We all ordered the tasting menu and it’s worth reliving here:

Started with 3 oysters on the half shell for the oyster eaters, with citrus mignonette and tiny julienne radish and candied tangerine peel. (I had the green salad with fines herbes and cabernet vinaigrette.)

Cobia carpaccio with Thai peppercorns on a small heap of shredded cabbage with rice vinegar and sugar.

Oysters poached in olive oil with picholine olive tapenade, garlic, and shaved fennel with a crisp toast. (I had a poached egg yolk and rapini, poached garlic and olive oil.)

Gulf hopper shrimp sautéed in their shells in smoked paprika oil with green garlic and preserved lemon.

Carrot soup with curry scented crème fraîche.

Chevre agnolotti with roasted beets and a beet reduction.

Octopus in casuela with chick peas and chorizo (I had risotto with cabrales and apple.)

Roasted grouper in Benton bacon on lentil du puys with sauce Robert

Beef on pomme de terre puree (I had wild mushrooms, sautéed.)

Cheese – Rocastin (French sheeps milk cheese), pecorino noce, sweet grass dairy Georgia gouda, sweet grass dairy ripe goat with vegetable ash, Epoisses, cabrales, candied pecans, quince paste, apples, sherry soaked golden raisins.

Butterscotch crème brulée with pecan sandies; olive oil cake with chocolate sorbet and bitter orange sauce; crepes with almond mousse and strawberries; some kind of chocolate pave with tangerine sorbet.

Oh my God it was good!

Two great side benefits of that Florida trip – cooking with Dave which is always the most fun, even in my tiny Apalach kitchen and Dave going out with David Carrier to meet his seafood suppliers and arranging to get FRESH GULF OYSTERS, SHRIMP AND GROUPER OVERNIGHTED TO BLOOMINGTON!!! As a direct result we had fried grouper cheeks and chips with a smoked paprika remoulade one night at Restaurant Tallent and I can’t even tell you how good that was!! One of the best things I’ve ever eaten.

Another highlight of the last weeks (months?) has been a couple of wonderful meals at FARMbloomington. One was breakfast – amazing biscuits and gravy even I can get excited about (that's them in the picture above.)

Now, remember, here in Indiana, “biscuits and gravy” usually refers to a white sludgy flour concoction full of sausage and tasting strongly of black pepper, slathered over biscuits. I am not saying it doesn’t hit the spot every once in a while, but mostly that’s because it’s one of those white comfort foods that kind of puts you into a refined starch coma.

But the biscuits and gravy at FARMbloomington are eye-opening. First the biscuits are really something – flakey and rich and wonderful. But it’s the gravy that really turned me on – it’s actually light and flavorful, full of red and green peppers and chunks of kielbasa. A vibrant (and much healthier) cousin to the usual Hoosier fare.

And then there was dinner. I was invited to a departmental dinner there recently (old I.U. colleagues) that had every single one of us doing back flips.

We started with a couple of “welcomes from the chef” – a salmon tartare that was herby and spicy and just superlative (I have had these excellent raw fish preps from Daniel Orr before and they are always knockouts) and a wild rice pancake with goat cheese that I’d have been content to have as an entrée.

For a first course I had the tuna ceviche in white balsamic and coconut water – more raw fish wonder, this one crunchy with bits of coconut (tiny chunks, not shreds) – just super. Jer had the butternut squash banana bisque that is becoming legendary around here – it was garnished with crab meat and fruity chiles. Elsewhere around the table, out of reach of my questing fork, were Caribbean prawns on a bed of tropical slaw and soup made from house-corned beef. I did snag a bite of pizza with shitake mushrooms, ricotta and truffle oil, which I have had before, and which I love.

My main dish was the best thing I think I’ve ever had at FARM: a vegetable plate with spinach and basil risotto in the middle, butternut squash with blue cheese and hazelnuts, grilled veggie and mushroom ragout, tofu with curry and sesame, fried leeks, mixed grain pilaf, and broccolini in garlic oil. Every component was perfect and an adventure to boot. (And, just because I love them, I had a side of Daniel’s fries, covered with chiles and cheese.)

Jer had duck in a barbeque sauce on a bed of warm potato salad, which he said was great, and others had the tandoori salmon, the skirt steak and frites, and the chicken with black vinegar and chile paste.

We managed dessert – barely. Jer and I split a berry tart full of lemony pastry cream.

And while I am on a FARM roll, I should mention a recent meeting with farmer friends that ended up being a bar snack feast – soup (tomato), edamame with dipping salt, fries (natch),  pizza, white bean hummus, and I can’t even remember what else, but really, really good stuff!

Lots of other good stuff going on here (foodwise) but tons of deadlines and the relentless beat of the primaries. I will post again soon.

Primary Flavors

Sorry for my blogging silence of late – I’ve been broadsided by my day job.

Besides writing about food, what I do is teach political science and write about American politics. With primaries and caucuses every other day (or what feels like every other day), this is our silly season. And I may as well admit it, I am a junkie. I have swapped food blog reading for politics blogs and I LOVE IT.

In fact, I am pretty amused to see that the last post I made was January 4, the day after the Iowa Caucuses. There have been some memorable food moments in my life since then, however, If I could stopped being distracted enough to write them down.

• Most of the last month was in Florida, including a week with my mom. High points included      some best-ever fried shrimp at the Owl Café – a restaurant I love but often forget since the arrival of Avenue Sea. That is a mistake.
• Also with Mom I spent one evening making a fearsomely good tuna noodle casserole. There is nothing more to be said about that. If you don’t know how good a from-scratch tuna noodle casserole with olive oil packed tuna and tons of mushrooms can be, then that’s just sad.
• FARMbloomington is open and I have a piece about it in the current issue of Bloom Magazine. The food in general is good, but when Daniel himself makes the vegetable plate it can be an      awesome thing.
• Made a quick trip to Oregon for family reasons and stuffed myself with Vietnamese food – sure wished I could do that here at home!
• Found out that Bloomington’s original Ethiopian restaurant has returned. The owner has owned an Italian restaurant for years but yield to entreaties to reopen Ashenda. So now you walk into Puccini’s and turn right for Ethiopian food and left for Italian. Only in Bloomington…. The food is great though -- the Ethiopian food, anyway!)
• Spent yesterday and the day before working with a farmer friend to perfect a tomato sauce      she intends to sell at our market. She froze a ton of tomatoes from      last summer and they are stunningly good. I always think canned tomatoes are a good substitute for fresh during the winter, for sauces and stuff, and in general they are, but Teresa’s frozen tomatoes are spectacular.      Cant’ wait til she starts to market this sauce.
• Related – had Teresa’s fresh (day old) eggs for breakfast yesterday. Rich and wonderful and from happy chickens to boot. All eggs are not created equal.
• Heading to Paris this evening for our annual Valentine’s Day trek. This time we renting an      apartment instead of staying in a hotel – it’s much cheaper and with the dollar the way it is, we’d rather spend our money on food, not housing. Plus, we get a kitchen to cook in!! What a treat. Hopefully once we are there the prospect of good eating will push politics out of my mind and      I’ll get a blog post or two in.

À bientôt!

 

Eat More Chicken

So it’s not a gorgeous picture, it tasted gorgeous and that’s what counts.

Here’s the thing. Even during my meat eating years I wasn’t all that big a fan of chicken. It just tasted like, well, chicken. A little dry, boring, nothing to get worked up about unless you coated it with fry, which we never did in my house. We either grilled it and doused it with lemon and garlic in the Lebanese way or ate a hybrid dish my dad used to make from Craig Claiborne's NYT Cookbook that he called “Poulet Morengo Chicken Portuguese” (catchy huh?) I hated it.

Since venturing back into the land of the omnivores, chicken has given me great pause. I hate what they do to commercially raised chicken and I just flat out won’t eat one, which really narrows my chicken options. The few times I’ve gotten a good local free range chicken I have fried it, with good results, but otherwise, eh, I just haven’t been that into it.

But right before we left Bloomington to come to Apalachicola I bought  ten nice fat chickens from Schacht Farm and we brought two of them with us, frozen, in the cooler. Last night we cooked the second one and it was a poultry revelation.

I used one of my favorite standby cookbooks for when I really don’t know what I am doing – The America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook. They suggest a way of grilling chicken I hadn’t run into before, taking out the backbone and laying the bird flat on the grill, skin side down over indirect heat for half an hour. Seemed straightforward enough, and hard to mess up.

So that’s what we did. Started with a tasty chicken whose good life I could vouch for. Brined it in 2 quarts of water, ½ cup salt, ½ cup sugar and some chopped garlic for an hour. Took it out and dried it off.

Tweaking the ATK recipe, I heated up a cup of olive oil, lots of chopped garlic, a couple tablespoons dried basil, red pepper flakes, pepper, and a shake or two of cinnamon. Loosened the chicken’s skin and spooned the oil/garlic/basil mixture all under the skin. Saved some for later.

Grilled the chicken as per the recipe – skin side down off direct heat for about 40 minutes. That was it. Carved it and ate it with potatoes and carrots roasted in a bit of the same oil. Meanwhile I had simmered the oil so the garlic was soft and I drizzled it all over the cooked chicken, potatoes, and carrots. Squeezed a lemon over all.

Amazingly good. The chicken was beyond flavorful – a tasty chicken to start out with, then the brine, then the flavored oil, then the grill. Really special. Did NOT taste just like any chicken I’d ever eaten!

Happy 2008!

I haven’t been such a hot blogger this year – what with one thing and another there were some long dry spots between posts on my end. I haven’t been able to read blogs as regularly as I’d like, either.

Makes me feel especially guilty when I consider what I have gained from you all while I have been slacking. When we lost our good Gina girl in July and had a scare with Ginger shortly after, the support you all offered touched my heart and kept me going. When I did get my head above water long enough to post, you were still there to read and comment. And when I wondered how Jerry and I should celebrate the New Year, you all told me exactly what to do.

So many thanks to one of my favorite bloggers, Lydia at The Perfect Pantry. I always learn something about food when I read her blog, but this week, in a really lovely post, I also learned about the tradition of seeing out the old year by welcoming the First Light of the new one.

She and her friends build a bonfire in a field and toast each other with coffee as the sun rises on the 1^st of January. What a lovely idea! So this morning, early, we poured coffee into thermoses, bundled ourselves and the dogs into the car, drove across the bridge to St. George Island, and stood and saluted the sun as it came over the horizon. It was a heartwarming welcome to a new day and a new year.

On the way back, mindful of my lesson last year from another favorite blogger, Lisa (The Homesick Texan), we stopped at the Piggly Wiggly for black-eyed peas and collards. Lisa reminds me yearly that eating black-eyed peas on the first brings good fortune in the new year. Last year wasn’t free of grief or sorrow or hard luck, but it was a very good year overall and I am sure it was those peas. This year I followed, roughly, the recipe Lisa adapted from Gourmet, but I don’t have a Texas tummy  so I reduced the chipotles and the garlic a bit. 

Instead of ham, I used some outstanding smoked sausage from Bradley’s Country Store in Tallahassee that was brought to us by some new friends who are also, indirectly, blog-related. I “met” John when he read my blog post about a restaurant he was interested in and it turned out we had both politics, food and a couple of friends in common. He and his wife came down to Apalachicola one night last  week to try out the restaurant with us, and they came bearing sausage. Who says you should beware the people you meet on the Internet?  (When I posted this I couldn't get the store's web site to load for me.  If it doens't work for you, try this. It looks like a terrific place -- one we will try to visit before we head back north this weekend.)

Now John and his wife echoed what Lisa has posted several times – the appropriate accompaniment to black-eyed peas is cornbread, baked in a cast iron skillet. The only hitch was that I didn’t own a cast iron skillet.  I think, because I’d never seen anyone in my family cook in one, that I was a little intimidated by the whole “seasoning” mystique. Time to be over that! So when we drove to Panama City today  to get a ladder my husband wanted, I found a cast iron skillet as well. It wasn’t old and it was preseasoned – two strikes against it (a third was that it had Emeril’s name on the label) but I followed Lisa's recipe and it worked like a charm -- the cornbread was wonderful, full of corny goodness and crackly on the bottom!

So we ladled up the rich smoky pea stew and dunked our cornbread in it and said a heartfelt thanks for good friends, cyber and otherwise, who made this last year such a good one. Here’s to all of you – happy 2008!

How did the rest of you welcome the New Year?

Life in the Slow Lane

Ah, Life in the slow lane, at last. School’s out, we are in Florida,  took a long walk on the beach this afternoon with the dogs (who have come down here with us for the first time), and all’s right with my world.

I meant to make a long detailed post about the Lebanese feast I wrote about here, but now it seems so long ago that I will only say that is was wonderful fun cooking with Cindy and Candy, that the food was great (and way too much!!) and that the evening ended with me laughing as much as I have laughed in a long time. It doesn’t get much better than that. I have some good pictures of the food, which stuck pretty close to the menu I posted before, but I didn't save them properly on my laptop, so I can't post them.

Since then, and it seems like a year ago, there have been some other very good food moments in my life. I had my food and politics class over for dinner (the very next day after the feast, which is one reason I never got the post done) and made the squash and shiitake mushroom pasta dish I usually make since it uses good ingredients I can get locally and that’s what the class ends up being about. But these students asked me to cook something with grass-fed beef since we had just finished reading Omnivore’s Dilemma and they were curious about what it tasted like. Fortunately, Sahara Mart is carrying Fiedler Farms beef again, so I was able to get two large chuck roasts and cut it up into stew for 22. Browned it and braised it in red wine and added a million garlic cloves and onions and mushrooms and cooked it for hours. It was pretty good, though I am not sure anyone could tell that the beef was different from the kind they usually get. Interestingly, though, even some vegetarians were willing to give it a go since I could vouch for the humane raising of the animal. And of course, they knew my story on that.

We also had our first meal at FARMbloomington, Daniel Orr’s new restaurant. Daniel has quite the resumé, but he really isn’t trying to put his cooking skills to the haute cuisine test in this place. He bills it as “Real food for real people” and it is – delicious, well-cooked Hoosier-bistro-type food, relying on local ingredients when he can get them. We tried a lot of the tapas items from the bar as well as most of the dishes on the limited dinner menu (you don’t want to know what we managed to spend!) and the highlights were some fabulous fries, with chilies and garlic in a saffron aioli, a great skirt steak (Fiedler Farms again) with celery root puree and onion rings, a terrific pizza with wild mushrooms and feta, woodsy and wonderful, the salmon tartare (Daniel shines with raw fish preparations), prawns with an excellent fruity and spicy dipping sauce, and some really good spiced nuts. The desserts were good too, but honestly, by the time we got to them I could hardly breathe, let alone taste. I look forward to seeing what else he does with the place when it officially opens on January 14, but the initial signs are good – a great thing for Bloomington to have another casual, good restaurant that relies on local stuff.

What else? We had a yummy meal at Avenue Sea, here in Apalachicola on Christmas Eve (a place I have written about here and here.)   Two of us started with oysters – clearly the best of the bay – fat, fresh and perfect. They were dressed with a radish julienne and the juice of a kumquat-like fruit that I think they called a Calamondin Orange. [That’s them in the pic at the start of this post.] Anyway, the oyster-lovers among us said they were among the best oysters they had ever had – pretty high praise from these picky folks. I had the chestnut soup because I think David Carrier’s soups are superb and I never miss one. I had this one last Christmas Eve too and it is lovely. Then salads – a shrimp salad with arugula that I had a bite of and that was very good. I ordered a plain green herby salad with a cabernet vinaigrette. I am not precisely sure why this vinaigrette is so good but it is outstanding – and I order it every time I am there. For main courses most of us had the grouper on mashed potatoes with wild mushrooms. It was moist and delicious and though I am not a fan of huge slabs of protein on my plate, even when they come from the sea, this was just right. Desserts were also good, as always. Mine was a crème puff filled with a tart, lemony cream and surrounded with little triangles of citrus. Gorgeous and delicious. We are going to go try the bar menu there tonight, and then we will be going back tomorrow with the friends of some friends – folks actually that I met on the Internet through this blog. I am sure I will be reporting back on that.

For Christmas dinner we ate here at home (our Florida home, that is.) A trip to Island View Seafood in Eastpoint was a delight.  We made Alligator Point clams steamed in white wine with garlic and tomatoes. I threw some butter into the broth and didn’t think about the fact that it was salted butter, but with the saltiness of the clams it was almost too much. Another reason to remember to get unsalted butter! After that I made a shrimp dish with pasta. I slit the shrimp almost all the way through and seared them hot and quick in a skillet in (salty) butter and olive oil. They cooked in a second and a half and I pulled them out and set them aside. Sautéed some shitake and button mushrooms in more butter until they browned up, added some minced garlic and scallions and chopped red peppers, and some diced roma tomatoes. Seasoned it with a nip of good curry powder (it wasn’t distinguishable in the final product but it gave it some good depth), a quick hit of cayenne, and a splash of white wine. Cooked it down and squeezed in half a fat orange’s worth of juice and then swirled in a bunch more butter to get a nice creamy sauce. Added the shrimp back in just to get hot, squirted in some lemon to freshen it up, and tossed it all with some linguini. It was super, super good.

So, that’s what’s new on our plates these days. I am on leave this next semester (time to revise our American politics textbook) so I hope to have a more flexible schedule for cooking, eating and blog-posting. How about you – what delicious things did you eat over the holiday?

 

Ghosts at My Table

We meant to go to Florida for Thanksgiving this year but stuff came up. Had to go to Savannah on business last weekend and then some paperwork needed to be dealt with here and then… I don’t know, four days in a car with two dogs to spend three days in Apalachicola didn’t seem like the best of deals. We will take them for three weeks over Christmas instead.

Anyway, the upshot was that we were here in Bloomington without plans. I got busy figuring out a last minute menu and managed to luck into a Red Bourbon turkey from Matt and Mandy at Schacht Fleece Farm (thanks, Sarah, for letting me have one of yours!)  By the time a friend realized we would be here and invited us for dinner, I had amassed too much food to cook, so we decided to have dinner on our own.

Well, we cooked a feast, of course. I am constitutionally incapable of cooking only enough food; it is always too much.  And it had been a while since I cooked holiday fare and I was itching to make the old favorites, and experiment with a few new ideas. So, anyway, I got cooking early this morning and kept on going and going….

But here’s the weird thing. Maybe I just have an eerie relationship with past and present right now due to finally having had the time this last week to read the final Harry Potter book (seems like the dead don’t really stay dead very well in the wizarding world) but all day my mind has been inhabited with the ghosts of Thanksgivings past. It’s been a long while since this day hasn’t been so full of making new memories that I had time to slow down and enjoy the old ones.

And my, but we’ve had some marvelous Thanksgivings. Thanksgivings with family – parents and kids and grandkids -- and some with good, good old friends. Many in this old house, a couple in Florida, even some in other countries. As I cooked though the morning, and as we got the food on the table (and ate til we could hardly breathe), Jer and I reminisced and laughed and remembered. It may have been just the two of us this year, but the table was crowded and we were content.

Still had way too much food, though. Too bad ghosts can’t eat!

And here’s the dinner report:

The heritage turkey was extraordinary! Small, for just us two, but perfect. We used a Weber Grill recipe, of all things – brined it overnight in apple juice, salt, and herbs. Roasted it on the grill, breast down in broth for an hour then right side up for an hour. Kept the white meat amazingly juicy and the broth made the best gravy I have ever had in my life – rich and appley (I added some cider), with a slight hint of smokiness from the applewood on the grill. Sensational.

And all the sides were delish too. Roasted root veg (carrots, parsnips and rutabaga) with a splash of sherry vinegar; roasted Brussels sprouts with applewood smoked bacon and an apple cider glaze; candied sweets; mashed potatoes; bread dressing; cranberry chutney; and Gujerati-style green beans with garlic and black mustard seed. Dessert? You’re kidding, right?

Oh, yeah, and Jer baked a loaf of bread from this recipe in Wednesday's NYT.  Pretty amazing -- it has the no-knead loaf beat all to hell for convenience, and it tastes great too.  Thanks to Kelley at the Almost Sustainable Kitchen for the heads up on it.

Amazing Soup

A couple of weeks ago several student members of Slow Food Bloomington got together to work on chartering an IU chapter of Slow Food on Campus. As the faculty sponsor, I got to tag along, which was a good thing because they met over a terrific potluck supper at one of the student's apartments.  Among the treats on offer (with almost everything made from local ingredients) were samosas, hummus, red beans and rice, roast beef, and one of the best soups I've had in memory!  I was so hooked on Sarah Almuhairi's Curried Butternut Squash Soup that I begged for the recipe and permission to share. Both were granted.  I made the soup for dinner last night, and am finishing it off, cold, with a splash of cider vinegar, for breakfast this morning, even as I type this.  It's a complex and mysterious combination of sweet, tart and spice, and it's just fabulous. 

A couple of thoughts about this soup.  First, it calls for grains of paradise, a peppery/cardamommy spice that I had never used before (and in fact had only heard of in the last month or so.)  I liked it so well I left the grains in the pepper mill with my regular peppercorns for a nice twist of spice. It's worth getting if you don't have any.  Second, Sarah suggests heat-lovers add some chipotles in adobo to the soup.  I am and I did and it was great, but I think it might have overwhelmed the intricate and delicious play of apple and squash with the curry flavors.  Another time, I'll ratchet it back. And finally, it was the perfect soup to make with the contents of this week's CSA box, full of butternut squash and apples.  And there is enough left over that I can make this soup again for Thanksgiving. My taste buds will be singing all week long!

Enough of me -- here's Sarah's recipe. 

Curried Butternut Squash Soup

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 tablespoon butter

1 medium butternut squash (3-4 lbs), peeled, seeded, and cut into ½ inch cubes

3-4 tart baking apples, such as winesap, Granny Smith, or Jonathan, peeled, cored, and cut into ½ inch cubes

1 large onion, peeled, halved, and finely diced

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 teaspoon chopped fresh rosemary

1 teaspoon chopped fresh thyme

1 tablespoon garam masala

½ teaspoon ground grains of paradise

about 4 cups rich chicken or vegetable stock

To taste:

Apple cider vinegar (1 tsp – 1 tbsp)

Salt and fresh ground pepper

Lemon juice (optional – depends on how tart your apples are)

Heat oil and butter in a large soup pot over medium-high heat until shimmering. Add onions and a pinch of salt and cook until soft, translucent and starting to take on color (about 10 minutes). Add garlic and chopped herbs and sauté for 2 minutes. Add apples, squash, garam masala, and grains of paradise, and stir to combine. Cover with stock, bring to a boil, and then reduce heat to a rapid simmer. Cook for 30-45 minutes, or until squash and apples are meltingly soft.

Remove soup from heat. Using an immersion blender, blend soup to a smooth puree. Alternatively, you could transfer soup to a food processor or blender in batches. Before serving, add cider vinegar and, if using, lemon juice. Taste and adjust seasonings to your liking (depending on what stock you use, you might need to add up to a teaspoon of salt).

Sarah's Notes:

One of my favorite garnishes for this soup is a dollop of strained Greek-style yoghurt mixed with shredded cucumber, topped with copious amounts of fresh ground pepper. However, sour cream and chopped parsley would also be good, as would any kind of homemade crouton or crostini.

There are as many garam masala recipes as there are North Indian cooks. The garam masala I use is the prepackaged, preground blend from Sahara Mart and is a little bit spicy. I am a spice fiend, and if I'm just making this for myself and the boyfriend will also add ½ tsp of either canned chipotle pepper in adobo sauce or dried ground chipotle chili powder. It gives a really nice smoky bite to the soup (if you like your soup to bite back!)

 

 

Like a Kid in a Candy Shop

 

Ever since I read here about the opening of Goose the Market in Indianapolis I have been itching to get there and last night we finally managed it. Easy to find on the corner of 25^th and Delaware, the Goose is a gem of a place, stocked by owners Chris and Mollie with delicacies like these:

• Local meats. They carry lamb from Viking in Morristown, pork and poultry from Gunthorp Farm in La Grange, and beef from the Sennett Cattle Company in Waynetown.

• Cured meats. Clearly Chris’s love, there are house-cured bacons, sausages and other treats (including lamb bacon, and even some prosciutto in the works), and imported varieties as well. We brought home some Toscano Salami and some amazing La Quercia Rosso – an “American prosciutto” from Iowa!! Pretty fabulous stuff.

• Cheeses. They carry a small, but ever-changing array that includes the best of Capriole and Traders Point, but also some treats from farther afield.  We tried the Garrotxa – a sensational dry Spanish goat- and also spied my favorite Taleggio in the case.

• Prepared foods. These vary too – last night Chris had a calamari salad, smoked trout, roasted cauliflower with truffle oil, and cured olives.

• Produce. It’s winter, of course, so don't look for any out-of-season tomatoes and eggplants  here. Instead the bins are full of sweet potatoes, quinces, persimmons, squash, potatoes, onions, and other good things.

• Dairy and eggs – Traders Point yogurt, milk; Stout’s Melody Acres eggs.

• Fish – not in stock, but you can special order by Thursday evening for fresh delivery on      Fridays.

• And more. The downstairs is full of wines, beers, and dry goods. Didn’t have time to look too closely since we had arrived shortly before closing, but I made a quick tour and snagged a jar of Duke’s Mayonnaise. Can’t wait to go back and browse.

Opening a store like Goose the market has been my dream for a very long time. I’ve gotten so interested in meat curing after my efforts at bacon making this summer that I am thinking of going to the Iowa Meat Lab to learn more. And I’ve always wanted a little shop to sell the food finds of my travels. Not sure such a place is ever going to be in my future, but I am going to enjoy this one vicariously for now.

Goose the Market

2503 N. Delaware St.

Indianapolis, IN 46205

317-924-4944

www.goosethemarket.com

 

Cravings

I can’t get Lebanese food off my mind. Maybe it was the visit to London last weekend that included TWO visits to the excellent Ishbilia in Kensington), maybe it’s the genes, maybe it’s that Lebanese food is delicious and we can’t get the real deal here in Bloomington. Whatever.

I have a friend and fellow food writer who’s got the same yearning for grape leaves and kibbeh, and we’ve been planning a communal feast for a while now – somewhere off in the distant when-we’re-not-so-busy future. But I came home from London hungry, and we’ve set a date for early December and invited enough friends to fill a long table for ten.

But what to cook?

Friday morning we sat down with every Middle Eastern cookbook we own (there were more than 20 on the table, including the one from my grandmother’s Syrian Orthodox Church in LA, circa 1969) and began to plan. We are “just” going to do a mezze, lots of small dishes, but by the time we got done listing the must-haves (classics like hummus, tabouleh, kibbeh, labneh), some favorites from other Middle Eastern cuisines (Imam Biyaldi!), and a few things we were seduced into trying (like the gorgeous eggplant slices with yogurt, tahini and pomegranate from Arabesque) the list, like all good mezze lists, grew long.

Currently it looks something like this:

Olives

Feta

Pickled turnips

Bread and zaatar

Grilled Haloumi

Bread

Hummus with fried lamb

Muhummara

Smoked eggplant salad

Labneh

Toom

Tabouleh

Stuffed grape leaves

Imam biyaldi

Eggplant slices with yogurt, tahini and pomegranate

Mujadara

Kibbeh nayye

Ful medames

Fatoosh

Falafel

Fried kibbeh

Potato kibbeh

Baked kibbeh

Grilled chicken with sumac

Pomegranate sorbet

Maamoul

The prep has begun with mail order purchases of cheese, olives and chilies, and the ordering of lamb. Tomorrow I will get the pickled turnips underway. Presumably I will eat other things between now and Dec. 1, but my dreams are running to zaatar over pumpkin pie spice just now.

Stay tuned.

I'm Back

Hey, remember me? Sorry for the blogsilence but I don’t multi-task well under the best of circumstances, and lately blogging added just one chore too many for my beleaguered brain. Besides, I’ve barely cooked a thing for days and I haven’t read a food blog in months. 

The “why” is Home Grown Indiana – finally signed, sealed and delivered in duplicate (with an electronic backup) to I.U. Press last Monday. My coauthor, Scott Hutcheson, and I managed to pull the finish off long distance – I was in Oregon on family business and he was in Lebanon, Indiana, sick as a dog, and between late night and early morning emails and a long drive for him down to Bloomington, we turned it in by the deadline (the third attempt at a deadline, I should add. One coauthor managed to miss the first two. The Fifth Amendment says I don’t have to tell you which one that was.)

Anyway, it is done and we are thrilled and pleased. The book is a compendium of information about eating local in Indiana. There are longish profiles of some very cool producers in the state who raise, grow or make every delicious thing you can think of (including beef, caviar, chickens, cider, cheese, lamb, potato chips, sausage, wine and much more) and of some of the chefs who use this local bounty in their restaurants.  There are shorter profiles of lots of other food producers and lists galore, of restaurants, farmers markets, wineries, breweries, festivals. And there are information boxes that explain some of the hot trends (and sometimes controversial issues) that surround our homegrown food supply -- things like grassfed beef, raw milk, and pastured poultry.

This book won’t have the gorgeous food shots of Indiana Cooks! or any photos at all, for that matter. A coffee-table book it ain’t. Instead, it will be a book to keep in the glove compartment, for the times when you want to take a long drive in the country and find good food on the road; by the computer, so you can plan food hunting expeditions, farm visits, or days out with the kids (or just order local ingredients over the Internet); and in the kitchen so you can try the recipes contributed by top notch chefs around the state who go the extra mile to source a significant portion of their food locally. To keep it affordable it will be a paperback and we hope it turns out to be one of those books whose ratty, dog-eared appearance shows it to be well used and well loved.

So….now the production process begins. The book will be out as soon as IU Press can get it – look for it in early summer of 2008. I’ll keep you updated here and Scott and I plan a joint blog (stay tuned) to track the progress as well.

Meanwhile, I feel like a giant weight has lifted from my spirit – for the first time in months I don’t feel guilty for having so many things to do that I end up giving less than 100% to all of them. Still plenty to do, mind you, but I am going to enjoy the euphoria for a bit.

To celebrate my return to the world of the cooking, I signed Jer and me up for the CORE Farm winter CSA and we got our first basket of goodies yesterday. [CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. Basically, it is an arrangement between farmer and consumer where the consumers pay a set fee up front and then get a weekly basket or box of produce all summer – or winter – long. It helps offset the farmers’ costs up front, where they need it, and the customers have the fun of getting a surprise food package every week.]

We've belonged to a CSA before and we loved it, though cooking from ingredients you didn't choose or anticipate is always a challenge.  Core Farm CSA is a joint effort between Teresa Birtles of Heartland Family Farm and Andy and Amy Hamilton of Musgrave Orchard, so there is a good mix of stuff (gorgeous produce, fresh-as-can-be eggs from happy chickens, cider pressed onsite, and other goodies.)

 

 

Yesterday’s basket contained peppers (many, many peppers), potatoes, squash, greens, basil, apples, cider and tomatillos. Try planning a dinner from that!

I couldn’t get it all into one meal, of course, but I came close. I sautéed some sliced onions and some of the less-hot peppers and some chopped garlic in olive oil. Added the greens (nice, chewy, bitter greens like kale and sprouting broccoli) and cooked them down. Splashed in some sweet vinegar and added lots of salt and pepper. Meanwhile I roasted the squash, scooped it out of its shell, diced it up, and added it to the pan of greens. Diced some potatoes and roasted them with a bit of olive oil, salt and pepper until they were crispy. Kept them aside.

I let the greens and squash simmer a bit. The squash wasn’t as sweet as I’d thought it would be and it needed something. I dug around in the spice drawer and turned up a set of spice mixes created by a new chef in town, Daniel Orr, come to open FARMbloomington. I am doing some writing about him and he’s given me the spices to try out. Generally I am not one for pre-mixed spice combos, but Daniel’s interest me because he uses a flavor palate very different from mine and one I am not very adept with. So I opened each jar and sniffed, to see if any would go with my greens and squash mixture. When I got to his New Regime blend – coriander, star anise, ginger, mustard, pepper, and spices I thought I had a match, so I threw some in. Daniel says “don’t be afraid of flavor” so I threw in some more, mixed it all up with a dash of cayenne, and threw the crispy potatoes and some toasted pistachios on top for texture and crunch.

It turned out to be great –- warming and fragrant, a little sweet and slightly exotic. I made some pasta, added some of the cooking liquid to the sauce (and, following Mark Bittman, made sure there was lots more sauce than pasta) and tossed the whole thing together. Yum. I am having leftovers for breakfast right now.

Today’s challenge is to deal with the rest of the basket. Salsa verde for sure, but that leaves a lot of basil and all those chilies and more potatoes. The cider, however, is almost gone. An autumn dream all by itself, we got hooked on mixing it with some Traders Point Creamery kefir I got at market yesterday.  The kefir is tart, and refreshing and incredibly healthy by itself; the cider gives it an apple-y  sweetness, turning it into a creamy treat. Think I’ll go get some of that for breakfast too!