A French club was coming in for dinner, and I was told they would expect escargot. The only problem was snails weren’t on the menu, and the party was coming in the next day. Fresh out of helix snails in cans, I gathered a party to excavate the deep freeze of the French concept/restaurant I…
Fish/Seafood
Halibut Cheeks with Wild Peppermint, and Watercress
A few years ago I was reading a book on Venetian cooking when I came across something interesting: a dish of scallops cooked in a simple pan sauce with peppermint. Along with watercress and teeny nettles, peppermint is the first wild herb I start to see in the Midwest. The mint seems to cry for…
Lobster Mushroom Burbot with Crayfish Butter
Burbot was one of those interesting local fish, like sunnies, crappies and perch that were hard to source through fish purveyors, no one seemed to carry it. Eventually I got to try my first after someone was nice enough to grab me a couple packages from a fish shop up in Cumberland, Wisconsin. I knew…
Puffball Mushroom Bratwurst
Here’s a fun way to use meat, and dried mushroom powder, specifically puffballs. In charcuterie and sausage making, milk powder is often used, especially in finely ground emulsions like bologna and hot dogs to achieve a nice, bouncy texture. Here, instead of using milk powder in the sausages, I use toasted, dried puffball powder, which…
Smoked Heart Sausage
A while ago I was planning the menu for a dinner revolving around lamb, which was going to take the shape of 3 separate courses dedicated to the animal. The first course in a menu like that I usually like to include offal, to convey the importance of whole animal butchery and how creative you…
A Northwoods Garum
Garum. Ever since I read Apicius I wanted to make, or just taste it. Maybe it was being a teenager (read as large child) fascinated with food other people always thought was weird that drew me to it, maybe the desire to eat the unknown, the old, the historic, I don’t know. What is it?…
Wild Rice Flour Crusted Sunfish
I love keeping a little bit of wild rice flour around for projects here and there. There’s a lot of gluten-free flours out there, but none that I’ve come across that pack quite the flavor punch of wild rice flour, amaranth flour coming in a close second. I don’t use wild rice flour specifically because…
Lobster With Yellowfoot Chanterelles and Dandelion Purée
A few years ago my girlfriend asked me the type of question that lets you know someone loves you: “Sweetheart, if you could eat anywhere in Provence, where would you go?” I knew the answer right away, even though I had never really thought I’d be able to go: La Bastide St. Antoine in Grasse,…
Braised Halibut With Chanterelles and Acorn Oil
One of my favorite things is talking to people about ingredients we’re both excited about. Last Spring I met my friend Francois who’s from France and now helps organize the logistics and sourcing of a well known restaurant in Duluth. He’d been following my work for a bit and made it down to the Slow…
Rainbow Trout Meuniere With Wild Capers
Spring is here and with it all sorts of little tender buds will be here soon. After cooking root vegetables and sauerkraut throughout a Minnesota winter, I’m pretty ravenous to find any little green thing at all. Here’s a recipe that celebrates that. Your classic meunierre, or “in the style of the miller’s wife” is…
Salmon With 6 Lilies and Saffron
Here’s a recipe with one of my favorite themes: members of the onion/lily family. I’ve shared a couple recipes that kind of function as a study in lilies, another being a spring version with sunflower seed crusted whitefish and trout lily. I borrowed the idea years ago from Mario Batali in his Babbo cookbook–one of…
Buckwheat Sole With Red Chanterelles and Carrot Ribbons
It’s chanterelle season again, and I was lucky enough to grab a few reds, which are a little hard to come by in my area. I wanted to make a dish that would compliment them, something easy, uncomlicated. Their aroma makes me think of vegetables that are sweet, in this case some carrots. It’s a…
Seared Tenderloins with Hericiums and King Crab
It’s been a while since I’ve seen some good fruitings of hericiums in Minnesota-a couple years. It’s not that I don’t have anywhere to go and pick them, it’s just that as is the case with hen of the woods and chickens, sometimes they skip a year or two and you won’t see them at…