Happy Arbor Day! Celebrate with smoked paddlefish nicoise, page 114-115

Happy Arbor Day! What a great holiday, celebrating trees! Yah. Trees are great, aren't they?!

My arborist friend kindly invited us over to his (inagural, I hope) Arbor Day party/take-a-dish. Now wasn't that a good idea having an Arbor Day party? I rather think so. In fact, I'd love to hear about someone else seconding their action by hosting their own Arbor Day party.

I really wanted to share a dish from from our woods to food project for the take-a-dish. Since we recently got paddlefish, Fred smoked a batch of it so I could make the one paddlefish dish in the recipe book: smoked paddlefish Nicoise (pronounced ney-swaaz, or so I hear).

Nicoise for those who aren't familiar but want to be (and that should be all of us 'cause it's a fun dish to make) is a platter of cubes of firm fish along with lightly steamed vegies and potatoes drizzled with a lemon vinegarette and herbs, all served at room temperature.

Yum. I so enjoyed bringing this dish to the party. I used sweet little carrots from the farmers market with their tops still on, fingerling potatoes, campari tomatoes, fresh asparagus, corn off the cob, olives, our own hard boiled eggs, and of couse smoked paddlefish. We served the dish with a fresh baguette from Uprise, a local bakery. In fact, we ended up taking the baker's two boys home with us from the farmer's market so they could play with our boys!

I think people at the party enjoyed the Nicoise. I brought the recipe book as well to help explain to people our project of hunting/gathering/fishing and cooking our way through the Cooking Wild in Missouri book in a year while blogging about it. It's fun to talk about. One lady at the party had recently moved to Missouri and wasn't aware that there were trees that produced edible nuts here. Then another lady told her black walnuts were her absolute favorite nut. We talked about how it's interesting doing a year long project and that her husband, who'se a music fan, programmed his stereo to play a different song when he woke up every day for a year. Fun, eh? He kept a record of his songs.

I'm glad to have made Nicoise. It's quite pretty and like I like to eat: lots of vegies with some tasty and lean meat on a platter for all to share. Thank you, Bernadette, for the experience. And, thanks for the Arbor Day party, ya'll.

 

More donations to the cause

This from Ann:

We're rich! We just recieved a generous donation of both paddlefish and wild turkey from Kevin Lohraff (I'm not sure you read our blog but if you are out there, thanks!). Wow. Kevin is actually pictured with his son on page 81 of Cooking Wild in Missouri holding a paddlefish they had caught. The book provides the following information on paddlefish along with their photo: "Paddlefish (also known as spoonbill) are prehistoric fish found only in the tributaries of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers and in the Yangtze River in China. Since they are filter feeders, they will not accept bait or lures and must be caught by snagging."

Let's add up all the wild ingredients that have been graciously given to us for our woods to food project. Elderberries from my boss off her farm, gooseberries and persimmons from me ma', hickory nuts from a coworker's wife, morels from a generous blog reader in St. Louis, duck from Fred's hunting buddies, paw paws from a friend and now paddlefish and turkey. Gee. That makes us sound pretty needy, eh? That or there are a lot of nice folks out there interested in our project.

Let's see what we've come up with ourselves wild-ingredient wise: rabbit, squirrel, venison, duck, pheasant, quail, catfish, bass and sunfish, trout, black walnuts, pecans, persimmons (and some purchased morels).

What do we still have to go? More squirrel (they're not in season right now), Fred is still trying for his own turkey so we can have enough meat for all the turkey recipes, crawfish, walleye, blackberries, more gooseberries and various mushrooms (blewits, chanterelles,  and hen of the woods).

We're getting there, folks. Thanks to everybody for helping along the way.

Penne with pheasant in morel cream sauce, page 74

Pheasant (from Fred and his dad's hunting trip). Check

Dehydrated morels (from our hero in St. Louis). Check

We can finally make this recipe. I've been holding on to the last of our pheasant for some time until morels shot up to make this dish.

This is the sort of meal that the Internet still does not do service to. Yes, I can describe it. Yes, I can take pictures. But, really I'm looking for a scratch and sniff feature. Can anybody's smart phone do that yet? Got a scratch and sniff app? Because the aromas of this dish were backflipping good and without giving you a sample of that I don't think I can do the recipe justice.

The pheasant is boiled for a couple hours until it's able to come off the bones, the mushrooms are rehydrated, and a sauce is made with the pheasant broth, aeromatic/earthy broth from soaking the morels and cream. Oh, and butter and shallots. I'm telling you it's a sorry thing you can't smell how good this dish made the kitchen smell.

One small pheasant and a handful of morels really makes an outstanding dish with this recipe and otherwise may not be enough to do much with. Certainly if you'd fried the pheasant and morels, which is how they are mostly eaten, you would have needed more bird and fungus to feel satisfied.

And, good it was to eat, too. Henry is crazy about the morels and got really excited about dinner. Oliver said he didn't want to eat any pheasant (because it's hard for him to think of eating wild animals) but then asked for extra "chicken" in his pasta. Sure, Oliver. Fred had several helpings and seemed to really enjoy coming home to such a nice dinner. It was a busy night for us which usually means snackier type dinners.

It's nice to light up your family's face and sometimes dinner does just that. And, it helps to have these great wild ingredients and a fun recipe book to lead the way.

Rubbing it in?

Whilst purchasing a hot fudge sundae this weekend, we glanced at Culver's sign. Grrrrrr. I'm thinking about buying a sandwich, wiping the tarter sauce off and scraping off the breading, sticking the fillet on a hook and calling it good.

Pea shoot-spinach salad with bacon and morels, page 187

Farmer's market basket (with a thai basil plant for another
Cooking Wild recipe yet to come)

So, now that I have generously been sent dehydrated morels (for two recipes), I figured it was my turn to step up to bat and complete the morel section by getting fresh morels for the third recipe. Enough looking. From what I understand, morel season is at its end. Hopefully, the morel vendor at the Columbia Farmer's Market would be selling them one last time on Saturday and I'd be able simultaneously pry the $15 for half that number of morels from my clenched, sweaty hand.

After one or two bouts of giddy small talk mixed with nervous pacing mixed with "Are you sure we should do this, Fred?" I finally squeezed the trigger and bought the morels. The fresh morel recipe also calls for pea shoots which would have been fun to grow but since I haven't, I needed those at the same time as the morels. Fortunately, I have spotted one vendor selling pea sprouts at the market before I purchased the morels, sealing the fate of me making the most expensive salad I've ever produced (by about 10 fold). Fred teased me after I bought the morels and had made a fast track to the pea shoot vendor by telling the vendor he might as well charge me $25 for the pea shoots because money was no object with making this recipe, apparently.

Happy birthday to my mom!

Fresh, robust spinach was available at the market, also, and I had in great parmesan cheese, so we were set to go.

I made the salad with steak from the farm, crusty fresh french bread, braised carrots and steamed artichokes for a birthday present for by mom. Yowzers, it was a good meal.

The salad recipe is so fantasic. The dressing, made with lemon, mustard, olive oil, vinegar, etc. was tasty and light. Pea shoots and spinach together were gorgeous and tasty as well, and sauted morels, fried bacon and large curls of parmesan really did make for an absolutely outstanding affair. It was a birthday-type gift.

My folks thought it was the best salad they had ever had . . . as Ashley Judd would say . . . in all their born days. It was so beautiful, special and rich in a flavorful way. If you want to eat like a king, this salad would be a good way to get it done.

Friday the 13th

Henry and Oliver at the Italian restaurant.

April 13 was Ann’s birthday, and I wanted to make it a good one for her, mostly because she deserves it, and also because she had put so much into my birthday. Being on a Friday, it seemed like a perfect time for a road trip. Why not make it a road trip that would help us on our quest to make every recipe in Cooking Wild? My target: Walleye.

This required some advance planning. The first step was retrieving the boat from my parent’s farm and getting it sea-worthy. The boat was fine, but the trailer lights needed some work. By some work I mean fidgeting with them for an hour or two, for a few nights in a row. Finally, they were all aglow.

Another step was further educating myself on Walleye. I got some books from the library and read several websites. I determined that Stockton Lake would be our best bet in Missouri.

Next, book accommodations for Stockton. This was harder than I anticipated, not because it was hard to find a place, but because there were too many options. I finally settled on Cabins at Stockton Lake, www.cabinsatstocktonlake.com. I picked the smallest cabin, but it still had a full kitchen, and the boys didn’t even have to share a bed. And being April, it is still the off-season, so rates were $20 per night cheaper.

Now that we were beginning to get the hang of trout fishing, we would be trying a totally different kind of fishing in which everything we had learned was of no value to us whatsoever. In addition to my books and websites, I sought advice at the Bass Pro. The first three people I talked to in the fishing department just shrugged, and said they had never fished for Walleye. They referred me to the fourth.

“Sure, I’ve been Walleye fishing twice,” he said. “I never caught one, though.” But his uncle had caught Walleye, at least one, at least once. He shared his uncle’s tips with me, which were consistent with the books and online references I’d read.

The next challenge was finding a restaurant for Ann’s birthday dinner. Ann’s such a good cook that it kind of hard for her to eat out, because the food usually isn’t nearly up to the standard that she cooks  for us at home. To get from Columbia to Stockton, you can either take 65 through Sedalia or 54 by Lake of the Ozarks. I opted for the Lake route, figuring it would offer more options. It had plenty of options alright… about 100 bars, all of which had similar bar and grill menus. Not the best choice for a birthday dinner, so I started searching upscale. There were several of these, too, but most were steakhouses. I get my steak from the farm, and I’m confident no restaurant will match it in quality. Plus, these fancy-schmancy places were getting $40 for a dinner. Not from us they weren’t.

Finally I found Biggy’s (www.biggysatthelake.com) Although the name was suspect, it is an Italian restaurant that makes all their own pasta, sauces and bread. And it had prices that seemed more appropriate for a mid-Missouri restaurant.

Ann likes surprises, so I kept her in the dark about all the plans, although she may have suspected something when I just happened to stay up until midnight two nights in a row to work on the boat trailer lights. By the time Friday morning came around I was too beat to muster a special birthday breakfast on my own, so I buzzed over to Uprise (www.facebook.com/uprise-bakery) and brought home croissants, muffins and a Latte.

In previous years I’ve put a priority on making a birthday cake from scratch. My track record has been hit and miss, so this time I opted for a mix. But I still wanted something a little different, so I found a Tres Leches cake mix. I knocked it out that afternoon, squeezed the cake caddy into the cooler, and we were off.

Biggies didn’t disappoint. Ann had lasagna and I had ravioli, and both were great. We drove through a hard thunderstorm shortly before getting to Stockton, and it was still pouring when we arrived.

The cabin was very comfortable, and spotlessly clean. It’s always interesting to check out the kitchen in a rental cabin and see what you have to work with. In this case there were about three varieties of salt and a five-pound container of cinnamon. The cookware was everything you would expect, and some things that you wouldn’t, like a large non-stick wok.

The table service was also ample. This is somewhat ironic, as there was no table. The cabin could sleep up to seven people, but did not have a kitchen or dining room table. There were two stools at the bar. Ann noticed this immediately, I wouldn’t have noticed until meal time. I’m pretty sure the cabins were designed and furnished by men, who probably thought people would rather eat on the couch why watching television. My other clue about the masculine influences in the decor: two magazines on the coffee table, one on cage fighting and the other on welding.

Henry and Oliver work on their short game.

The next morning it was still raining hard, so we opted not to get an early start. We went to the lodge, and Henry and Oliver had a go at the putting green, which was flooded, while we talked to the manager. He said the walleye were hard to predict, due to the crazy warm early spring, followed by a more seasonal cool-off.    

We finally took to the water later that morning. It had cleared off, so from the little I knew of walleye, our mid-day chances might be slim. We gave it a go for a couple of hours without luck, so we took a break back at the cabin. We had an earlier dinner at the cabin (Stockton has an excellent grocery store), and then took back out to the water.

In case you’re considering going for Walleye yourself, here’s a summary of the advice I read and tried:

• Fish the windswept points: Check.
• Fish the shoreline around downed trees, rocks and debris: Check
• Fish the shelf, where it drops off deep: Check
• Use a jig: Check. Try a nightcrawler on a jig: Check. Ditto for a spoon: Check. Ditto for a spinner: Check.
• Use a natural looking minnow is bright light: Check
• Use a brightly colored minnow when skies are overcast: Check.

I could go on, but you get the picture. All of the efforts resulted in one fish, a perch that Ann caught on the new birthday fishing rod that Oliver had given her the night before. It could have been a keeper, but with only one we decided to let it go.

I got in a little fishing early Sunday morning, but we needed to get back for Henry’s lacrosse game, and another storm came in when we were getting ready to leave anyway.

It was a fun weekend. Stockton is a very nice small town, strikingly well maintained and clean. It has recovered well from the tornado that hit it a few years back.  Tell me another town in rural Missouri with a population of under 2,000 where you can get whole-bean coffee, or a cappuccino (thanks to Hammons Nut Emporium, www.hammonsproducts.com).

We all would have loved to have caught at least one walleye, but my expectations weren’t that high going in. Maybe later this summer. I hear you can catch them at Long Branch.

The Eagle Has Landed