Slow Food Fest -- August 14th, 4-7 p.m., Kirkwood Avenue between Indiana and Dunn.
Participating Restaurants Include: Tallent, Finch's, FARM, BLU Boy, Nick's, Feast, Upland, One World, Mad Tad's, IMU, Happy Pig, Recess Indy, Recess Indy, Bloomingfoods, Brown County Coffee.
Tickets -- $30 in advance (Tallent, Finch's, B'foods); $40 at the door, cash bar.
Be there!!
(You can click on the poster to read it more clearly. Details follow below)
Slow Food Bloomington is proud to be part of the Bloomington Eats Green Weekend -- three events celebrating local sustainable eating in January.
First, two speakers:
On Friday, January 22, noted ethnobotanist (and native Hoosier!) Gary Nabhan, is speaking on "Renewing America's Food Traditions." On Saturday, January 23, Joel Salatin, of Polyface Farms, who has been featured in the Omnivore's Dilemma and Food Inc., will bring his irreverent touch to "Holy Cows and Hog Heaven."
Both talks are in Woodburn 100 on the IU Campus, from 6-7:30 p.m., free and open to the public
And then the food!
Sunday, January 24, Slow Food Bloomington presents "Hog Heaven: A Celebration of Local Pork from Snout to Tail (that's everything but the oink!)" From 3-6 p.m. in Alumni Hall of the Indiana Memorial Union, 14 local chefs will each take on one part of the pig to showcase the delicious versatility of Hoosier pork cookery. There will be local beer and wine, good music and great fun. Tickets are $20 in advance at Bloomingfoods, and $25 at the door. Cash bar.
Participating chefs include:
The Chefs Dinner is a couple of weeks past now,
fabulous as always. We’ve been buzzing with guests and good food here and I am
fighting a deadline on our textbook revisions (should be done in a month,
except for the copyediting, etc.) but I do intend to get back to blogging – I
miss it.
Meanwhile, I had a request for the recipe for the sublime
watercress soup Chef Daniel Orr (FARMbloomington) made for the dinner and like the
good guy he is, he sent it right away. He used rice as the thickener for
the one he made for the dinner, but says this one with potato is good too. Make
it quick, while the markets still have watercress – and serve it chilled!
Wild Creek Cress Soup
Makes 2- 2 1/2
qts.
5 bunches watercress-
stems and leaves separated
2 onions, sliced
6 cloves garlic
2 potatoes- cut in
rustic dice
2 parsnips- peeled and
roughly chopped
1 fennel bulb
1 cups white wine
2 qt. vegetable or
chicken stock
½ pound spinach
1/2 pound sweet
peas
1 apple- peeled,
cored and diced
Tabasco
Salt and Pepper
Sweat onions in a heavy
bottomed pot. Add chopped garlic and half of the chopped watercress steams. Add
white wine, stock, potatoes, parsnips and fennel. Simmer until potatoes and
parsnips are tender, then season add the watercress leaves, spinach, peas and
apple.
Return to a boil, take
off heat and puree immediately in blender. (note: puree mostly the solids at
first for you may not need all the liquid. You can always add more if you need,
but you can’t take it out.)
Cool the soup down fast
by placing the soup in an ice bath. Adjust seasoning and serve cold with
whipped crème fraiche and fresh watercress.
To serve hot reheat just
before serving. Great hot with oysters!!!
The Slow Food Bloomington Chefs Dinner is coming up this Sunday at 5:30 at the Bloomington Convention Center. Here’s the menu (subject to final tweaks and improvements.) The wine pairings are still in the works. Tickets are available for $100 per person at Bloomingfoods East and West, or email me if you are out of town.
Slow Food Bloomington
Chefs Dinner 2008
(vegetarian alternatives available on
request)
Hors d’oeuvre
Pinwheels of Capriole Farms Goat Cheese
and Heartland Family Farm Summer Savory
Gregg “Rags” Rago, Nick’s English Hut
Wibs Cornmeal Toast points with Braised
Fiedler Farm Pork and Baby Fennel
&
Market Cucumber Slices with Schacht Farm
Chicken Salad
&
Deviled Red Rosa Farms Quail Eggs
&
Local Bean and Potato Canapés
Alan Simmerman, Bloomingfoods
~~~
Pulled Fischer Farms Pork “Sandwich”
Greg Hardesty, Elements, Indianapolis
~~~
Chilled Heartland Family Farm
Cress Veloute with Trader's Point Creamery Yogurt and Spiced Sesame
Paillettes
Daniel Orr, FARMbloomington
~~~
Spring Salad of Local Greens, Caramelized
Peaches, and Boudin Noir, Sherry Vinaigrette
Regina Mehallick, R bistro, Indianapolis
~~~
Ed Mundy’s Rabbit Crepinette with
Homestead Growers Mushroom Crepe and Roasted Harvest Moon Flower Farm Beets,
Whole Grain Mushroom Jus
Jeff Finch, Finch’s
~~~
Intermezzo
Sorbet
Krissy and Christine
~~~
Duo of Long Farms Elk, Braised Heartland
Family Farm Cabbage, Wib’s Grits, Farr Ridge Red Wine Vinegar Gastrique
Dave Tallent, Restaurant Tallent
~~~
Capriole Old Kentucky Tome Frico Taco
with
Heartland Family Farm Micro Watercress
Greens,
Strawberry Gastrique ,
Capriole Soft Goat Cheese Hush Puppy
Tad Delay, Limestone Grille
~~~
Dessert Trio:
Chocolate and Capriole Farms Goat Cheese
Tartlet,
Hunters Honey and Heartland Family Farms
Strawberry Ice Cream-filled Profiterole,
Raspberry Rose Macaroon
David Fletcher
and Scott Jackman,
BLU Boy
Chocolate Café and Cakery
Well
this is kind of embarrassing, but here I am. Politics still driving me crazy, but one must eat, after all.
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.
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.
À bientôt!
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!
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 1st 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?
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?
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.
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