Trout and sprout salad, pages 108 and 109

Finally, another recipe that I can share with you. This is one of four recipes MDC published on-line to give people a "taste" of what the book is like. It's a pretty loose recipe, actually.

I tell you, a person feels so very good after having a meal like this. The clean, flavorful protiens with the smoked salmon, the fresh, flavorful dressing, the plate of raw vegies, and the cool noodles--what a "good" meal. It was a good meal because it was tasty. And, it was good in that it's the sort of food that is terrific for your body.

Here it is, folks:
Trout and Sprout Salad
Ingredients:
Leftover grilled or baked trout, broken into bite-sized pieces
Fresh spinach
Mixed lettuces
Bean sprouts
Cilantro
Green onion
Garlic tops (the green tops of fresh garlic) or freshly minced garlic
Soy sauce
Sesame oil
Rice wine vinegar
Instructions:
I tossed the trout together with all the vegetables, a little soy, toasted sesame oil and rice wine vinegar. It was perfect! You also could add such things as peanuts, mung-bean threads and avocado. Fresh orange sections, carrots, red peppers or cucumbers come to mind, as well.

Fettuccine with chanterelles and smoked trout, page 182

Hey, here's a twisted silver lining about the drought. I've been worried about how in the world we'd find summer and fall mushrooms to use for recipes in the book. I've never seen them before, that I know of, and don't have any close friends or family who can identify these mushrooms, either. But, here the drought comes upon us making a perfect excuse for not finding these mushrooms. Knock, knock, Ann. There's no fungus in the woods! Duh on me. Fungus takes a certain amount of moisture to fruit and right now moisture is something we are very much lacking.

So, I feel relatively comfortable giving up on wild chanterelles and hen of the woods this summer, and substituting them with more exotic mushrooms I can find at the store. 
 
Last night we tried the pasta with chanterelles (substituting oyster mushrooms) with smoked trout. On the stove Fred smoked the trout that we caught earlier this spring. The mushrooms are sauted in olive oil and butter with herbs, then the trout, cream and lemon juice are added.

Bernadette (sorry for always repeating this but just in case you are new to the blog, Bernadette Dryden is the author of the recipe book we are working through) said in the book that she served the pasta with brushette. There's no recipe for the bruschette (toasted bread rubbed with garlic and olive oil and topped with fresh tomatoes and basil) , but I thought I'd give it a try, too. Unfortunately, we forgot to get bread at the store, and was too impatient to go back to the store, so I make bruschette with bagels. And, let me tell you what, that's mighty tasty, too.

This was yet another very fine dinner. I'm getting so spoiled using this recipe book.

Squirrel and dumplings, page 49

This weekend we made one of the two remaining squirrel recipes: squirrel and dumplings. It's a recipe in the book that author Bernadette Dryen put in from "squirrel aficionado Kevin Lohraff. The recipe is more like a telling of how to make squirrel and dumplings than specific directions. In a couple of paragraphs, Kevin tells the story of how he makes this dish, with no specific measurements or times.

I had a queer combination of feelings when making this dish. I'd just been watching a cooking show on T.V. which got me inspired to feel all gourmet-like. On the other hand, I was making a gravy with fried squirrel drippings!

First I boiled two squirrels in an electric skillet outside to keep the heat out of the house. Then, I sauted mushrooms, garlic (and this I added to the recipe) and shallots in butter in a big pot on the stove. In the same pot, I browned the boiled squirrel pieces that had been floured. Then, all that is scooped up and a gravy is made in the pot with water and flour and the drippings (and I added milk). Next, the squirrel and mushroom mixture plus parsley is added back in with the hot gravy, drop biscuit dough from your own favorite recipe is added in balls into the pot, and the whole thing cooks with a lid on on the stove top.

It's a mighty fine dish. I liked it much more than I thought I would, Henry ate too many servings to be thought of as decent, and Fred liked it as well. O mostly liked the dumplings.

My sister and her kiddos came to visit this week. She warmed up the leftover squirrel and dumplings for lunch and was unsure about the wee little bones in the dish. It was a bit of a turn off for her. But, after she tried it, she was convinced. Squirrel is very good! And, her kids gobbled it up, too.

A blog that's too sweet? You decide. No-cook blackberry spread, page 152

Just before  Fred and I married, when he had graduated college but I had not yet, he lived in the country on a a farm adjacent to his parents. The land around his house was hilly and scrappy with cedars and briars. Fred's landscaping maintenance  at the house was to borrow his dad's tractor to brush hog the "yard." Beyond the fenced in area, cattle took care of the mowing for you. Fred got a black lab from a coworker of his named Backie (the dog that is, not the coworker) that kept him company on the farm. Fred and Blackie had a good, simple relationship. They ran together in the early morning on the gravel road that went between his dad's and his neighbor's fields. Then Fred would leave for work, Blackie would roam the farm and perhaps beyond, and they'd meet up again in the afternoon.

The land around Fred's place was crazy with wild blackberries. The rough hills were in the perfect stage of succession for them--grown up enough to allow time for shrubs to grow, but not grown up enough for hardwood trees to shade them out yet.

I very much remember Fred telling me when the blackberries were ripe and that he and Blackie would go together to pick them in the hot summer evenings. Fred would pick and Blackie would eat the berries right off the bush. Then, Blackie would cough and cough because the blackberry stems would stratch his throat. I wasn't sure if Blackie ate the berries because he liked the taste or because he wanted to partner with whatever Fred was doing.

I remember coming down from college to visit Fred during blackberry season on a day that he was working. I had gotten to the farm before Fred was home and decided to kill time by picking some of the blackberries myself. Up the hill I trotted, and up the hill trotted Blackie after me. I picked, Blackie ate and coughed. I very much liked having Blackie there to keep me company. And, I so remember Blackie's absolute loyalty to Fred. As it approached time for Fred to be coming home, Blackie started heading to the house. That was his routine. I kept calling him back trying to keep him with me. But, Blackie wouldn't have it. It was time to go meet Fred and that was what he was going to do.

Fast forward 16 years. What's changed? Two boys are added to the mix. Blackie is long gone but we have a new black lab cross named Josey.  It's blackberry season again.  Fred's been working out of town for several days  and I'm waiting for his return this afternoon. It's feeling all pretty similar really.

I made the no-cook blackberry spread from the book this week with blackberries that Fred and the boys picked. It's equal parts blackberries and sugar (which as it turns out is a tad too sweet for me) mashed with a potato masher and refrigerated. You can't get any simpler than that. Perhaps I'll add more blackberries.

Mostly, I'm thinking of Fred on his way home, blackberry season and the hot Missouri summer, and me once again filling my time until Fred comes home. He's got two more loved ones looking forward to his return than he did 16 years ago, his new dog is not quite as sane as Blackie  (but just as lovable, in my opinion) and we are all looking forward to Fred coming home, especially me.

A wedding toast: blackberry cordials, pages 152-153

I run with a group of people on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 5:30 a.m. One of the people I often run alongside of is Jon Rosen, at least on days that I’m feeling particularly fast and days that Jon is moving slower than usual.

Jon just married, or perhaps we should say eloped, with another runner, Lisa. The two snuck off to Hermann about a month ago and tied the knot without making a big deal about it to anyone else. “It’s just like Vegas. You can do it all in one day here. No blood test or anything. They just ask you if you’re already married, and you can lie if you want to,” Jon said.

Although the wedding was personal and low key, the party celebrating it was kind of the opposite. The refrigerator magnets they had made up to promote the wedding party, which was dubbed Rosenfest, bore the tagline, “Leveraging 45 years of marriage experience.” A party reminder encouraged people to take time to stop and smell the Rosens.

I tried Googling “Inappropriate Wedding Gifts” to figure out what to give the Rosens, and I did find several “Inappropriate Wedding Gifts” lists, but as usual, I found ideas that are not my own to be lame. But then I remembered that Jon has been a reader of Woods To Food, so I was inspired to give them something from the book. Of course my first thought was squirrel, but it was 106 on the day I needed to the get the gift, and when I poked my head outside the door at the farm, all of the squirrels were holed-up in the shade.

That, and I knew that a fresh squirrel dish wouldn’t be needed that night. Meat for the party was being provided by Sean McCollegan. Sean has a smoker he and friend built that looks like a tornado shelter for two or three families. He’s starting a catering business on the side called The Cowbell. For the party he smoked pulled pork, ribs and brisket, and all three were the best I ever had. I wouldn’t really want to put my squirrel up against that.

But I did have the wild blackberries, hand-picked by three generations of Koenigs. There is a recipe in the book was for Blackberry Cordial, with the entire ingredient list being blackberries, sugar and vodka.

I purchased a bottle of McCormick’s vodka for the recipe, primarily because it’s a local food product, made in Weston, Missouri, but also because it is $7 a bottle, compared to the fancy stuff that is $20 and up.

For the recipe you put it all in a quart jar and cap it. Every other week you open it up and stir it, for two months, or more if you want it to be even better. The amount of liquid only made the jar about half-full, but I think maybe all the extra air was necessary for the fermentation process. It looked a little skimpy for a wedding gift, but since their party info said “Absolutely No Gifts,” I figured it would suffice.

The wedding party was tremendously fun. Fake Elvis recreated the wedding ceremony on their front lawn. Although all of Jon and Lisa’s running friends made for the trimmest, most athletic looking party crowd I had ever seen, they had no problem putting away the massive about of meat (15 racks of ribs, 15 pounds of pulled pork, 14 pounds of brisket)  Sean smoked up for them. And considering Jon’s booze consumption at the party, having to wait a few months to drink the black berry cordial will probably be just fine.

Crawdads Part 2

It seems cliché to talk about the weather, especially when it’s bad, but when it’s this bad it’s impossible not to. It would be like walking about with an arrow sticking out of your chest, and not mentioning it in conversation.

We went down the creek on the farm to try our hand at crawdads there. We actually found more than we found in the Bourbouse, and they were a bit bigger. That is to say, some of them were. Most of them looked more akin to crickets than to seafood. But we still collected enough to make a small meal.

Everything on the farm was unbearably hot. It was hard to touch a metal gate long enough to open it. I thought I’d try some jug fishing for catfish, and when I went to pick up some scrap iron to use as anchors I could barely handle the metal. And we had to splash water on the boat at the pond to cool it down enough to sit on it.

Dad had warned me that when he tried jug fishing, all he caught were turtles. I had the same luck, catching one turtle in a short time with two jugs. I cut the line and let him go. He looked a little sad and pathetic with a big hook piercing his lip, but really no worse than those kids that hang around outside of the mall.

So we returned to Columbia right after lunch with potatoes, crawdads and blackberries in hand, not a ton of any, but enough to get by. Not bad for a 24-hour visit.

Potatoes, crawdads, blackberries

It was high time the boys and I pursued some more wild edibles, and they had just finished summer school, so we went to the farm and left Ann at home so she could focus on her job.

When we arrived at the farm, it was about 10 a.m., and my Dad was ready to set in on our potato harvest before it got too hot. You might question me referring to potatoes as wild edibles, but the way we raise them they are. We don’t really garden them, we just set them free. We planted them during one of trout fishing trips back in March, my Dad strawed them soon after, and we hadn’t seen them since.

The little patch of ground we had fenced off from the cattle and pony behind the Quonset building was certainly growing something, but we were hard pressed to find a potato. The most plentiful plant was the cocklebur. But when we dove in, we were able to find a few old, dried up vines, and a couple that were still a little green. The potatoes were all close to the surface, and the red ones were bigger than the white. We dug a little more than a five-gallon bucketful.  I’m sure there a few more there, but it wasn’t worth more exploratory digging.

After lunch my sister Christy took us to the Bourbuese River near Highgate to catch crawdads. The boys used Oliver’s tiny dip net from his aquarium and a lid from a coffee can to capture several. While we were catching them we heard something bleating like a goat. I went up the river bank to check it out, and found a young deer caught in a fence. It was caught between wires at the haunches, and it’s hind legs were hanging above it. I was able to get it out without too much trouble. It seemed alert and active, but it’s back legs were stiff. I’m hoping that once it got it circulation back to its legs it was able to fully use them again.

Even standing in the river, the heat quickly drove us back to the house. We took a swim in a neighbor’s pool after dinner, and then followed my sister’s tip to some blackberries on my cousin’s farm. With everything running so early this year, and the heat, and the drought, we were afraid we’d missed blackberries for the season. But my cousin’s farm got a good rain that my father’s didn’t, and it had blackberries and green pastures to show for it. A lot of the berries were still red, and the ripe ones were small and sparse, but Dad, the boys and I did gather enough for a few recipes. Not bad for less than a day on the farm. More to come on the next day.

Morel Lover's Creamed Morels, pages 188-189

Dehydrated morels cooking in the water they were reconstituted in.
I bet the dish is best with dried mushrooms rather that fresh.

Tonight I made the last of the morel recipes with the last of the dried morels that our kind blog reader from St. Louis sent us. It's morels sauted with shallots in a cream  and marsala wine sauce, basically.

I'm shaking my head in astonishment trying to come up with words on how good this dish is, knowing that whatever I say won't begin to do justice to it.

How about this. Last Saturday while helping my friend sell cheese at the Farmer's Market, I fellow tried a sample and then exclaimed a religous expletive at how fantastic the cheese was. He didn't even realize what he'd shouted. Well, my reaction to this dish is kind of like that. You've got to make this recipe! You hear me out there? Do it! Do it! Do it!

The recipe calls for dish with good bread to soak up the sauce. I poached 1/2 a chicken and served that as well as wide, thick noodles to soak up the sauce. We had a lovely baguette from Uprise bakery and a tossed salad as well.

This is the sort of meal that you just can't get at a restuarant. The flavors were unbelievable. The richness of the cream sauce was cut by the cleanliness of the chicken and salad so you didn't feel too bogged down afterward. We ate and ate and ate 'til we couldn't eat no more (Henry had something like five servings, for exampe). This is the sort of meal that makes life rich.

Although poached chicken was excellent with the morel dish and noodles worked well to absorb the sauce, I think there could be other lovely combinations as well. Right now, though, I'm having a hard time convincing myself of that! It's going down as one of my favorite meals from the book.

The creamed morels are so yummy.  Make the dish for your self, your family, or your friends. Just make it. It's not a diffult or time consuming dish. And, you'll make someone's day.

Thanks again for the dried morels. We couldn't have done it without you!!