Gooseberry-blueberry crunch, pages 170-171

Gooseberries and blueberries before they are baked

My parents have a gooseberry bush growing in their back yard. Gooseberry bushes have narrow thorns with green, very tart berries that eventually turn pinkish purple as they ripen. That I know of, most people prefer them tart to cook with rather that letting them ripen. Gooseberries are a scruffy bush. They grow in scruffy areas, like along railroad tracks, in old fields, overgrazed woods and old homesteads. And they have a scruffy appearance with their scrappy thorns and disorganized branches.

My parents have a very old home. The gooseberry bush is growing beside a rickety apple tree next to the old chicken house turned garden shed. Mom froze two bags of gooseberries and let me have them to continue making recipes with this winter. Besides, the berries had been in the freezer long enough and were due to be used.

The first dessert recipe I made with gooseberries was kind of like a crisp with gooseberries, blueberries and a nutty, oat topping. Seemed like a safe bet for the good dessert and I was right. It was hard not to like.

I rarely choose to have ice cream on top of a dessert as I feel it pollutes whatever dessert is underneath, but this one called for it. The gooseberries are so tart and intense that I thought the ice cream mellowed it out nicely. Next time I make this dessert, and I do hope there is a next time, I think I'll try cooking the gooseberries down a bit in a saucepan until they open up rather than baking them whole. I'm telling you, when you took a bite of the dessert with a whole gooseberry and it popped open in your mouth, shewweee, it was
T-A-R-T tart.

Fred got me a new camera for Christmas with a larger apeture than I've had before. I am enjoying taking food photos with it, which is why he picked this camera out for me. Before, the two things I knew to look for on a digital camera were # of megapixels and how much it would zoom. I didn't realize what a big difference the apeture made it getting bright photos even in lower light.

Mallard stew with tomato and eggplant, pages 62-63

It's a Cooking Wild in Missouri marathon! Four recipes in two days is what we are attempting.

Tumeric, paprika, fennel, cumin, coriander and salt

The first I made was a duck dish. The 2 mallards, one pintail duck and one teal were all given to us by Fred's new duck hunting companion Bill Ward. Duck hunting season is closed for the year now and we had run out.  First impression I had of the ducks: that Bill Ward is a neat and tidy duck butcher. Thank you! I now know that it's not easy to keep the feathers from sticking to the meat and cutting out the meat in nice, big pieces. It's an art form, really, and I guess Bill has had enough practice to get that art form down. However, even the label on the zip lock bag from Bill looked like it was written by an architect, those perfect capital letters all even and easy to read. Not only has Bill had practice, I'm guessing from his hand writting that he is naturally inclined to do tidy work.

Anyway with Bill's duck I made a stew. It's a Moroccan dish again with lots of spices, onion, tomato and lemon. The dish is served over rice with cilantro and toasted almonds tossed on top.

Fred has been craving spicy food the last couple days and this so hit the spot for him. He was really looking forward to dinner as it was cooking and bragged on it several times during the meal. The duck breasts are cooked whole in the stew, so each person got a large piece of duck to try. I was afraid it would be too "ducky" for the boys to enjoy, but Oliver ate a whole breast and Henry had one plus.

I like it when people come in to the kitchen and light up at the aromas. And, let me tell you it's tons better that seeing a kid peer over the stove with a tear in their eye or hearing, "There's a lot of garlic in this recipe again, eh?"

Watching my family enjoy a meal is quite simply one of my very favorite past times.
Thanks for sharing the duck, Bill.

black walnut chocolate biscotti, page 128

I've never made biscotti, have you? They are a romantic-type food to me. Not romantic necessarily like Valentine's Day but romantic in the life-is-rich-if-you-have-a-biscotti type way. I think it's because I see them at neat places like coffee shop counters and book stores and such.

This is another recipe I made when Sara Hill came to do a TV spot about our project. I wanted to make something from the book to take on our travels for the holidays and thought biscotti would keep and travel well.

And guess, what, it turns out that this biscotti recipe makes something that closely resembles . . . biscotti!!! It's still shocking to me to cook something I've never made and have it turn out like I picture it.

The dough is very dry with no fat. First you make loaves and bake them, then cut the loaves into slices and bake the slices again to dry them a bit more. This dough is spiced with cinnamon, cloves, ginger and cocoa and has black walnuts, too, which are very flavorful in themselves.

I may like the idea of biscotti more than the actual taste. I am used to sweets being richer and can recall eating biscotti a few times and feeling a little flat about the results.

I haven't dug into our homemade biscotti batch yet. I am looking forward to sharing them with friends for the holidays and giving my full report.

1/1/2012 Full report: biscotti were nice as a hiking dessert and enjoyable to bring on our travels. See photos:

Christmas nutcracker

Our Woods to Food Christmas Gift Poem

by Ann Koenig

I didn't get a llama for Christmas

To munch on our lawn like I dreamed

Not sure quite what I was thinking

Apparently not logic, it seemed.

But, under the tree what could there be

But a spring loaded device of new

With a lever and cams it's cooler than lambs

This nutcracker will surely do.

So, all you walnuts beware

And, hickories you'd better hide, also

'Cause I don't think there's a nut in the world

This baby can't crack with gusto.

And to all the family and friends

who from us recieved a copy

of our new favorite gift to give 

A signed Cooking Wild in Missouri

Let me extend the offer

If you're ever driving past

To bring your whole nuts to our house

Our nutcracker's built to last.

Papassinos (Sardinian raisin and nut shortbread cookies), page 131

It is so the Christmas season. We've made a gingerbread house and actual cookies not from the frigerator section at the grocery store! That tells you right there that something special must be in the air. One of the Christmas cookies we made was papassinos from Cooking Wild in Missouri.

Really, as I think about it though, this story is about mammas, and specifically my mom.

Sara Hill with KOMU asked to film a story about the 'woods to food' project our family is doing. She wanted to film Fred and the boys hunting and then me cooking from the book. We set up Thursday to do this since the boys would be home from school. Anyway, because 1) I rarely seem to get done everything I picture getting done and 2) we're trying not to stress this season, Thursday morning came and I hadn't got the house straightened up too much.

My mom and dad were up to watch the kids for the day. And, while I went to work in the morning for a bit, Mom saw to it that things got tiddied up. Then, because the Sara Hill was coming at noon and the cookies I wanted to make needed to chill for four hours, Mom made the dough for me in the morning. Then, she trotted to the basement to help us catch up on laundary, helped my older son on his piano playing, and worked with the boys to clean their rooms - all before 11:00 a.m.

Then, when the film crew got here, she stepped outside with her dog, stepping away from the attention of the TV folks.

And, as it turns out, Sara and company filmed us making another recipe, but didn't stay long enough to film us baking the cookies anyway. They left to film Fred and the boys rabbit hunting and had enough footage by then that they didn't need to come back to see the finished product of what we were making.

Thanks, Mom, for supporting us on our project and our family! And, thanks to all the mommas this holiday season who are helping their adult daughters make "ends meet" with all the big and little things you do to keep our worlds turning in the right direction. Life is so much with better with you.

Cookies were good, by the way.

Merry Christmas, Mom, and to all a good night.

Venison ragu, page 24

I’ve been looking forward to making this recipe since before I got my deer. Ann’s been doing nearly all of the cooking, and I wanted to take a turn. This looked like a good one, and one that I could handle.

Ann was in the kitchen with me when I started. As she read down the ingredient list, she said, “Oh, that’s just gross.” She was referring to the six tablespoons of butter we were supposed use to sauté the onions.

I tried to sway her with math. “It’s a big recipe,” I said. “If you divide the butter out by the number of servings, it amounts to less butter than you’d normally use to eat a slice or two of bread.”

“Yes,” she replied, “ but this butter is being used to fry pork sausage.”

She had a point. Although I normally precisely follow all recipes, figuring the author of the recipe knows far more than I, I relented and cut back to three table spoons of butter. I put in the 1/3 cup of oil before we had a chance to discuss it.

The excess continued throughout the recipe. Once I had about three pounds of meat (venison and sausage) simmering, I added 3 ½ cups of milk to it, and then let it boil away. That was followed by adding three cups of dry white wine. I was all out of the cheap stuff, so I had to pop the cork on a bottle of Yellowtail that I had paid $5.85 for. This recipe was getting to be an investment. And in case you haven’t done the math, three cups of wine pretty much equals one bottle. There’s hardly enough left for a glass. I did substitute a big pile of tomatoes that we had left over from the garden for one of the 28-ounce can of tomatoes. These were tomatoes that we had harvested green right before a freeze, and I had finally got them ripe, so I didn’t want to let them go bad.

 We asked over company since it was such a big recipe. Our guests included three adult friends, and two kids that are Henry’s age.

All of the kids were polite enough to not say anything negative about the dish, but none of them asked for seconds. This surprised me, because they all like deer burger, and love pork sausage.

The adults liked the dish – okay. I don’t think anyone was crazy about it. Ragu Bolognese is a very different dish than spaghetti sauce, be it homemade or from a jar. It’s not just that it’s drier; I found myself longing for some oregano or basil, and not really needing the nutmeg. In order to appreciate the dish, I think you just need to get spaghetti sauce out of your head and treat this as something different altogether.

 A couple days later, Ann warmed up some of the leftover meat for lunch, and had it with some kale and good bread, and just loved it. This might be a dish that has some staying power after all.

Jim Low's Mallard Satay with Thai peanut dipping sauce, page 61

We've now had wild duck cassoulet (which one could call bits of duck hidden in a bean and sausage casserole) and duck rumaki (which one could call soaked duck wrapped in much bacon).

What we haven't had was straight up duck. You know, an actual piece of meat, naked, staring up at you, with no bacon, sausage or whatever to hide behind. And, I was beginning to think there was a reason for that. A reason like "plain old wild duck is too nasty to eat alone", for instance.

I had one more package of duck in the freezer from Fred's hunting expedition and a couple more recipes to choose from. I bought ingredients for mallard stew but got out of the mood for another tomato based wet dinner, so I shifted gear to the duck satay recipe.

BUT, satay is basically meat of a stick, like fair food only with a bit more spice. And, that stick wasn't going to do much hiding for the duck meat. How was straight up duck going to be?

I used the last four ducks for this recipe since that's what it calls for, feeling guilty that I might waste quite a bit. The meat is marinaded in wine, soy sauce, ginger, garlic and lime, then skewered and grilled. OK, in the recipe book the cool people grill over charcoal with soaked sassafras wood on top. Whatever. I didn't get to that.

Then, there's a Thai peanut dipping sauce to make. I loves me some good Thai food and was excited about the hopes of making a good peanut sauce.

Anyhow, we kept checking the duck satay with a flashlight on the grill. I didn't want to overcook and ruin the meat (hey, let's at least give the recipe a chance) but the duck wasn't browning much it didn't seem like. I guess that's because it's so lean. We made a guess that they were done and brought them in.

Fast forward to the end of the meal. Bamboo skewers are littering the table. Four are by my plate. About half a dozen are strewn around each of the boys and Fred's plates. The platter is bare.

So, this recipe proves it. Duck on a stick with no bacon or anything else to cover with . . . can be yummy.