I’ve had a jar of fermented nasturtium capers burning a hole in my fridge from the 2018 growing season for a while, waiting for the perfect partner. This past week, the partner showed up in some fresh lamb sweetbreads. Sweetbreads can be a hard sell, and I get it, but in the scheme of organ…
Salad
Roasted Beets with Snowsweet Apples, Angelica and Dried Cranberry
Here’s a great alternative to the horrific Midwestern holiday salad of mayonaise, cool whip, fruit jelly and stuff I think is called ambrosia. Mayonaise, fruit jelly, and, nope, not for me, I’ve never liked the stuff. What I do like, is roasted beets, preferably dressed in a creamy something, along with crunchy apples and thick,…
Woodchuck Salad with Hickory Nut Oil and Squash
When I was in Costa Rica I ordered a tuna salad at a little restaurant and throwing the cautionary tales of eating only cooked food to the wind (which I later paid for after drinking a couple drinks with ice) in order to have as big a variety of local food as possible. The salad…
A Raw Porcini Affetatti
Years ago when I was working at Pazzaluna, I was on the garde manger station making hot and cold apps, salads, and desserts, as well as curating a daily changing selection of antipasti I came up with. One of my favorite snacks, and plates to make was the affetati, an Italian platter of cured meats….
French Morel Mushroom Salad
The connection between memories and what we eat is a strong one. If I wanted I could recall my entire life as a timeline through what I ate, or just foods I remember, each particular thing imprinted for a reason only my esculent oriented brain could tell you. Wild mushrooms are no exception, and the…
Aronia Berry Vinaigrette
I’ll be honest and tell you I’ve never picked Aronia berries (a.k.a chokeberries or Aronia melanocarpa) in the woods after a long hunt, or after walking around the edge of a clearing during berry season. They’re just not that common where I’ve hunted. But they’re often in urban areas, and I have no problem picking…
Dotty’s Wild Green Salad
I never liked salads as a kid, they were always like watery, tasteless lettuce. If I ever did eat a salad it was assassinated with dressing, croutons and cheese, since it’s hard to make fat, salt and carbs taste bad. Even through my teenage years and into college, I still wondered why people ate salads….
Watermelon Salad With Purslane and Anise Hyssop
Watermelon salad is on plenty of menus in the summer for good reason, it’s cold, refreshing, and evocative of the season. At it’s best it can be paradigm shifting, at it’s worst, it’s nothing more than a glorified fruit salad. While I was in San Francisco this past month, I had one that was basically…
Spring Vegetables With Spruce Tips and Lemon Agrumato
Out of all the dishes I created for Slow Food MN’s “Where the Wild Things Are” farm dinner, this was probably the crowd favorite. The evolution of it was a little interesting. The hosts of the event looked at my original menu and suggested we add a vegetable side of some kind to appease vegetarians…
Heirloom Tomato Salad with Pickled Chanterelles and Ramp Leaf Oil
I never thought something as simple as making a salad could remind me of why I cook in the first place. I cook for a living, but before I made money doing it, I just lived to cook. Making things in the kitchen was my creative outlet, and made people around me happy. Ever since…
Fried Oyster Mushroom Croutons
If the restaurant were to fail, finding a way to mass produce these would make me rich I tell you. They’re not so much a crouton as they are crispy, deep fried mushrooms, but calling them deep fried mushrooms would insinuate that they’re served hot, which they aren’t. Personally, the word “deep fried mushroom” conjures…
Fiddlehead Salad With Spruce Tips, Peppermint, And Pecorino
Here’s what I made with the last of my fiddleheads this year, it’s a great little spring salad. The origins are Italian. In the Spring, it’s an Italian tradition to have fresh fava beans with hunks of pecorino cheese, a great example of less is more-just beans and cheese, that’s it. A colleague of mine,…
Wild Greens That Survived Winter, With Celeriac And Cheese
Like most people, I think of seasons as static: Winter turns to Spring, to Summer, to Fall, and then repeats. It really isn’t true though, the change of seasons is gradual, and the transition between them blurry. At the restaurant, the first day we saw snow melt a server pulled me aside and asked me:…