David Smith 8/17/13 David Smith 8/17/13

Creamy Herbal Duck Egg Veg Tart

Our tomatoes have only just begun to ripen here, so close to the cool of Lake Michigan. The first ones are always the most exciting to see. Yesterday I plucked a half-dozen cherry tomatoes and two very small, red Early Girls. We had also gone grocery shopping the day before, which included picking up a jar of mayonnaise and a carton of ricotta cheese (for stuffing cattail ravioli I'm planning on making today or tomorrow). So, with a handful of small tomatoes on the counter and restocked mayo and ricotta in the fridge, I thought a veg tart might be a good way to make use of our garden's gifts.

The differences between a quiche, a frittata and a tart are subtle. They're all basically the same thing, but with a few small variations. A quiche and a frittata are both primarily egg dishes, but a quiche also often includes cream or milk, has a bottom crust and is baked in an oven, while a frittata is an eggs and filler ingredients (e.g., veg) dish, no crust, cooked on a stove-top to start and finished in the oven. A tart is often a creamier, custard-like pie, heavy on ingredients like cheese and mayo and lighter on eggs, much shallower in height, and usually baked in a pan called...yes, a tart pan.

It's been quite a while since I've made a tart. In fact, I no longer even have my tart pan; I think I lost it or tossed it years ago. I'm really a frittata and quiche kind of guy, as I generally prefer my egg pies to be tall, savory and weighty. But for whatever reason, this morning felt like a tart kind of morning.

This recipe will give you enough to make a couple 9" tarts, with enough dough left over, if you roll it thinly, to make crust for a couple of small pot pies (those are on tonight's menu).

Ingredients

Crust:

flour 2 to 2½ cups
salt
butter 2 sticks, unsalted, ½-inch pieces
water about ¼ cup, ice cold

Filling:

mayonnaise 1 heaping cup
ricotta cheese 1 cup
3-4 duck eggs (or 5-6 chicken eggs)
fresh basil 1 heaping cup, chopped
sea salt, cracked pepper, cayenne pepper
garlic 1 clove, diced (or garlic powder)
goat cheese (or better yet, parmigiano-reggiano)
veg (tomatoes, zucchini, onion, okra, carrot, etc.) cut thinly

Crust:

1) In a shallow mixing bowl, mix a teaspoon of salt into the flour. Add the butter pats (make sure they're cold and firm) to the flour and start working it in until you get a nice, crumb-like consistency. It'll take a while, and you could use a mixer if you so desire, but I like to use my hands.

2) Once you get a fine, crumby mixture, add the cold water (ice cold water...yeah, put a couple ice cubes in it to make sure it's cold) and mix until you get a solid, firm ball of dough. If you need to add a bit more water add it only a teaspoon or two at a time. You want the dough to be firm. And use the dough ball to pick up any bits sticking to the bottom or sides of the bowl.

3) Wrap the dough in plastic wrap, flatten it a bit, and place it in the fridge while you work on the filling. It should stay in the fridge for at least on hour, but you could also make the dough a day or two ahead of time if you're planning to make the tart later on.

4) After the dough has had time to think about its behavior, pull it out and place it on a lightly floured surface, flour the top and roll it out to no more than 1/8" thick (I go less than that even, as the dough will puff a bit when it's baked). Cut it to fit your pie or tart pan and press it in up to the sides. Place the pan back in the fridge for 10 or 15 minutes. Turn your oven to 350°.

5) Take the pan (or pans if you've made more than one) out of the fridge and pepper the dough with little holes from a fork. Place a piece of foil, large enough to cover the crust, gently in the pan and fill it with dried beans to weight it down. This will help prevent the dough from puffing up in spots, keeping a uniform crust throughout. Bake on the bottom rack for about 15 minutes, until the edges appear as though they're beginning to brown. Remove the pan from the oven, remove the foil and beans (let the beans cool and return them to their container for future use or eating). Place the pan back in the oven and bake for another 15 minutes or so, until the crust is a golden brown.

Filling:

1) Mix the mayonnaise, ricotta, salt, pepper, cayenne, garlic, eggs, and chopped basil in a bowl.

2) Cut the veg into small or thin pieces.

3) Pour the cheese and egg mixture into the crust-lined pan, only filling it about half-way. Add the veg and pour more of the cheese and egg mix in to fill. Top with pieces of goat cheese (or parmigiano-reggiano).

4) Bake on the middle rack at 350° until the top starts to brown a bit and you gather that the interior has cooked and firmed up.

Cut pieces for you and your partner, pour a couple of mugs of good coffee (something like Anodyne Roasting's Ethiopian Yirgacheffe...awesomely delicious), and watch your ducks tool around the yard (you do have ducks, right?).

David Smith 8/15/13 David Smith 8/15/13

A funny thing happened on the way to the garlic mustard patch

I'm planning a nettle and/or garlic mustard pasta making session, so this afternoon we made a quick run to a spot that I haven't been to for a while, where I've always been able to harvest a ton of garlic mustard pretty much throughout the entire season. Surprise of surprises, the place was overrun with wild raspberry brambles. Raspberries had always been there in impressive quantities, but I'd not seen them SO thick that they actually seemed to smother the garlic mustard. Anyone who knows about garlic mustard knows that this invasive doesn't get pushed out by anything; in fact, garlic mustard is the one that almost always does the pushing. I'm wondering if some environmentally-minded and invasive-conscious folks took it upon themselves to pull a lot of garlic mustard this summer. That would be a good thing; there are plenty of other spots where the unwelcome biennial can be found.

We moved to another location to scout for more garlic mustard and nettles, but again i was thrown off target by the site of several sizable mayapple fruits. Oh such precious treasure! Upon sighting the mayapples I forgot all about garlic mustard and nettles, and began scouring several sizable patches of the umbrella shaped plants for more fruits. I found a couple dozen still-green fruits and a lone ripe one, soft, yellow and fragrant. I enjoyed this sweet gift of the forest, squeezing its leathery skin to break it open so I could suck out its softly seedy gel-like interior. I'd describe mayapples as having the flavor of a muskmelon crossed with a banana, with a hint of guava fruit perhaps.

Ripe mayapple fruit. Soft, yellow, fragrant and delicious.

Mayapples are a finicky wild edible, sometimes bearing fruit, sometimes not. And even when they do the window of opportunity is brief, as they ripen for a short while before being absconded by some wandering skunk or opposum...or, if I'm fortunate, by me. Last year was a dry year and I found nary a single mayapple fruit. Today I counted over 15 good sized fruits and a loose handful of small ones. I intend to go back every few days to check their progress. I'm hoping to be able to gather enough to make at least one jar of jam with a few left over just for eating out of hand.

Three mayapple fruits. Each plant produces but a single fruit.

David Smith 8/15/13 David Smith 8/15/13

Unexpected guest for lunch today

We've got a glut of rabbits this year, raising cain in gardens and flower beds. It's sure to be a good year come rabbit hunting season. Normally I shoo a garden thief off at least once, giving him one free strike, so to speak, but of course my protestations usually fall upon deaf rabbit ears. I think if you're going to resort to more drastic, permanent measures it's only proper and respectful to make honorable use of the animal...and we happen to love rabbit as an entree.

Breaded rabbit with hot pepper honey sauce; fried carrots and small salad of greens & cherry tomatoes; purslane relish & sweet vidalia onions.

David Smith 8/12/13 David Smith 8/12/13

What's Up Doc? crunch, crunch, crunch

The other day we pulled carrots from the small carrot patch in the garden. We made a pretty decent haul from the smallish space (maybe 4'x5') with a bulging armload of Short&Sweet and Scarlet Nantez. I'm getting ready to replant the bed with another round of carrots and radishes as a late summer to fall crop.

Carrots - Short&Sweet and Scarlet Nantez.

Since we'll be eating this bunch of carrots over the next two or three weeks I cleaned them fairly well before brief storage, giving the buggy ones to Jesse's rabbit, Eric. If we were planning to store them over winter I wouldn't clean them nearly as thoroughly, but would just pack in sand or wood shavings as is.

I decided to pickle a few jars of the smaller ones. I also saved all of the teeny-tiny carrots, which I'll use for some fun artsy-fartsy plating and photos. Following is the pickle recipe. I preserved these with the boiling water immersion method for long term storage in the cupboard, but you could also do them as refrigerator pickles by just avoiding the immersion step, which would also leave the carrots firmer than the hot bath method, as the boiling water cooks and softens them. I'll likely do a few additional jars of refrigerator pickled carrots so that we have some with crunch. I did two jars with both carrots and beets, the red ones in the photo.

Pickled carrots and pickled carrots & beets,

Ingredients:

carrots, 2-3 lbs, washed thoroughly. You can julienne these or slice them any way you feel like. I left them whole so that they wouldn't turn to mush in the hot water bath, which isn't a problem if you omit the bath and just make them as refrigerator pickles, and I left a half-inch of the green tops on as well, just because it looks cool.
3 cups vinegar
3½ cups water
1-1½ cups sugar
2 tbl salt
1½-2 tbl pickling spice
bay leaves, 1 for each jar
½ tbl peppercorns
garlic cloves, 1 for each jar
onion, roughly chopped into large pieces
dried thai peppers, 1 for each jar
sterilized canning jars and lids

1) In a heated skillet fry the garlic and onion for just a few minutes in a tablespoon or two of olive oil, mainly to flavor the pan. Add the carrots, in batches, and saute for a few minutes, but not enough to soften them.

2) Place a clove of the sauteed garlic in each jar, and pack with the carrots. Divvy up the onion between the jars too. Add one small dried Thai pepper to each jar.

3) Bring the vinegar, water, sugar, salt, spices, and bay leaves, to a boil and simmer for a few minutes. Take the bay leaves and add one to each jar of carrots.

4) Pour the hot pickling mixture into the jars. Make sure the rims are clean and seal with lids and bands. Immerse in a boiling water bath as you would when preserving with this method. 10-12 minutes is about right. Or skip the immersion method and place the jars in the fridge.

I like to mix pickled vegetables on the plate with fresh and cooked veg, giving a nice mix of textures, colors and flavors within the context of a single vegetable. So, with these pickled carrots, I might do something like adding them to a mix of sauteed carrots and slawed carrots, essentially offering three different versions of the carrot in one serving, as a side or an entree unto itself.

Carrot medley - carrot slaw with maple balsamic, pickled carrots, blanched and fried carrots with bourbon honey sauce.

David Smith 8/7/13 David Smith 8/7/13

Image Archives: Rabbit & Kidney Pie

Found this "old" photo (from a year-&-a-half ago) of a couple of meat pies I made for one of our foodie potlucks a while back. They were rabbit & kidney pies with maitaki mushrooms (hen of the woods). I like how decorative I got with the pie crusts.

Rabbit and Kidney Pies with Maitaki Mushrooms

David Smith 8/4/13 David Smith 8/4/13

Bluegills = summer fun & food

My daughter Jesse and I have recently begun hitting one of the several small inland lakes in the county. It's a picturesque little lake (under 40 acres) with just a few homes situated around its tree-lined shore. I fished this lake years ago and did fairly well for crappie, bluegill, largemouth bass and northern pike. I know there are some good-sized bass and northern in this tea-colored lake; every once in a while someone will be in the local news for hauling in a big one from its weedy depths. Last week was the first day Jesse and I fished it together and we saw a bass clear the water that I judged to be in the 4 to 5 lb. range.

This morning we went out to see how we could do with the bluegills. We kept a few from our outing last week and Jesse loved their delicate flavor after we got home and fried them up. Today we hauled in a couple dozen; nothing big, but big enough to keep and eat.

Pan fried bluegills are one of those "wild" foods that make me think of summer. When I was a kid my grandparents would clean them simply, by cutting off the heads, gutting and scaling them and that was about it. I think I was the first person in the family to learn how to fillet fish and so I pretty well became the official "fish cleaner" every time we went fishing. I was okay with that, as I found the process to be rather meditative, and I took a good measure of pride in my ability to fillet fish with minimum waste and maximum efficiency.

But every now and then I get a hankering for that old bone-in method of cleaning small panfish. It makes you use your fingers when you eat, as you need to pull and pick the bones from the meat, which is a simple matter, and eating with one's fingers is a great way to eat fish outside in the summer.

The cooking method is also simple. An inch of hot oil in a skillet and the generic flour-egg-flour (or bread crumb) dip before frying is all it takes. Salt and pepper the flour and take an assembly-line approach with a shallow bowl for each dip ingredient leading up to the skillet of hot oil. Drain the fish on a paper towel-lined plate for several seconds as they come out of the oil. Add some paper towels to wipe your greasy fingers and a pitcher of iced tea or a cold beer, and you're good to go. Hint: the tails are the best...crunchy like chips.

David Smith 8/3/13 David Smith 8/3/13

Elevated garden beds updates

Here are a couple of follow-up videos to the video we shared on July 3rd, about preparing and seeding a set of elevated garden beds we've got in the yard. The first video is only two or three minutes long and shows the growth of everything three weeks after seeding. I should have posted this video on the site here, and I don't know why I didn't, but I did share it on facebook.

The second video is from yesterday and shows some impressive growth just a week after the previous video. We cut the greens down for eating, and let them regrow again.

David Smith 8/1/13 David Smith 8/1/13

Battered & Fried Zucchini Blossoms and Herbs

My daughter Jesse and I went fishing at a small inland lake in our county yesterday. We caught a handful of panfish and had a lovely time on a quiet and picturesque lake. When we returned home I fried the fish, with a simple batter in an oiled skillet. They were, of course, delicious, as fresh caught panfish are.

Today I decided to stay with the batter-and-fry method, but chose zucchini flowers and a handful of basil and sage leaves as the "batterees". Fried zucchini blossoms always make me think of summer in Italy, with Italian farmers market vendors displaying mounds of big red tomatoes, brilliant yellow zucchini flowers and chunky bolete mushrooms.

Battered & fried basil and sage (left) and zucchini blossoms (right)

Sometimes I'll stuff the flowers with the traditional cheese or sausage mixture before frying. Today I just battered and fried them, with a pinch of sea salt as the only seasoning. A little light horseradish or lemon thyme aoli on the side for dipping is nice too.

The batter is simple and light:

1½ cups flour
1 or 2 tsp sea salt
2 or 3 egg whites
1 can of beer, preferably a pilsner or lager style

1. Pick 12 to 18 male zucchini flowers, the ones on the long, skinny stems. make sure there aren't any ants or other critters inside. Pick a handful of sizable sage and basil leaves too.

2. Heat an inch or two of canola oil in a skillet until it's good and hot and spits at you if you sprinkle a drop of water. Use one of those screened covers when frying too, if you have one.

3. Mix the flour and salt. Add the eggs whites. Pour in the beer as you beat the flour/egg mixture with a fork, until it's like pancake batter.

4. Dip the zucchini flowers and herb leaves into the batter to coat. Hold them above the bowl for several seconds to allow them to drain some of the batter off before adding directly to the hot oil, otherwise they get too bready. Fry until golden brown on the one side, then turn them over with tongs to fry the other sides. You'll have to work in little batches, depending upon how big your skillet is.

5. Let the finished blossoms and leaves drain on a plate with paper towels, and give a sprinkle of sea salt while they're still hot. That's it.

Like I said, fried zucchini flowers conjure images of Italy, but we're in Wisconsin so I used a can of Leinenkugels Original Lager as the beer for my batter. Italy...Wisconsin...Italy...Wisconsin...heh, they're both great places to be in summer.

David Smith 7/30/13 David Smith 7/30/13

Beet & Zucchini Salad

It's summertime, the garden is beginning to produce more regularly now, and so we're on an extended salad feast for as long as the garden keeps giving us fresh goodness. Pulled a mess of cylindra beets yesterday, which of course are delicious in all kinds of ways.

Here's another quick and attractive salad with only three garden veg: beets, zucchini, and green onions.

Boil the beets until they're soft but not too soft, maybe 5-6 minutes. Toss a couple baby zucchini in the boiling water when you've got just two or three minutes to go (zucchini takes less time to soften up). Pull the beets and zucchini from the water. Slice the zucchini like we did yesterday with the Warm Baby Zucchini Salad. Take a dry towel that you don't mind staining a brilliant red from the beets, and rub the skins off. Slice the beets into medallions. Slice the green onions into tiny medallions too, and separate the little rings of onion (it's easy enough to do with your fingers but you could also put the little onion discs in a bowl with a lid and shake the heck out of it to separate them).

Arrange a couple or more large, washed beets leaves on a plate, followed by the beets, zucchini and finally little green onions rings. Drizzle with extra virgin olive oil and sea salt. Simple as that!

David Smith 7/29/13 David Smith 7/29/13

Warm Baby Zucchini Salad

Here's a simple and darn tasty little ensemble (and pretty too) from this morning's garden pickings.

Boil baby zucchini's for just a few minutes, til they soften a bit and are nice and hot. Slice them at an angle, just because they look nicer that way. Add some sliced fresh heirloom tomato, a few basil leaves (green & purple here), and a zucchini flower torn or cut into little bits.

Drizzle with extra virgin olive oil, sprinkle with sea salt, and there you go.