What do Gaspe Flint Corn, the Harrison Cider Apple, the Cayuga Duck and the Fish Pepper all have in common? Well, according to the book “Renewing America’s Food Traditions-Saving and Savoring the Continent’s Most Endangered Foods” we are in danger of losing these foods from our collective plates. According to this book, edited by Gary Paul Nabhan, we are in jeopardy of losing hundreds of local foods, and thus, losing a significant part of our American culinary heritage.

Written by members of RAFT (Renewing America’s Food Traditions) this book highlights a number of those foods we are in danger of losing. From wild plants and animals to Native American crops and domesticated animals, America’s culinary heritage is disappearing at an alarming rate. There are many reasons for the potential loss of these foods. Dwindling habitat and over harvesting are endangering wild populations, while changing tastes have contributed to the decline of many domesticated crops. One of the biggest culprits though is our modern food transportation system. Crops that don’t travel well or suffer significant loss of flavor soon after picking just aren’t profitable for farmers anymore. Many of these crops and animals are losing out to modern hybrids that grow more quickly, produce greater yields, or demand less care.

Luckily, for the foods showcased in this book, there is still time left to save them from becoming just a memory. If you have a garden plot I urge you to seek out the seeds of some of these plants and experiment with growing them and using the crops they produce. Support your local farmers, especially those trying to save some of these heirloom foods from extinction. It is not a wholly selfless act you will be committing. Once you try some of these heirloom foods you will find they taste so much better than most of the stuff you can buy at the local grocery store. That’s because these foods were bred for flavor, not bred for traits that made them easily transportable for thousands of miles. It is up to us to decide whether these foods remain an important part of our culinary heritage, or whether we allow them to disappear from our plates forever.

It’s getting to be that time of year again, when Wanda and I start considering what we want to can for consumption over the winter months.  I’m not sure that we will do a whole lot this year, as we still have a lot of canned items leftover from the previous 2 seasons.  I imagine that, at the very least, we will make a couple varieties of pickled vegetables.  One of my favorite pickles comes from my Dad.  I’m not to sure where he got it.  It can’t be too old of a recipe as these pickles are not canned but must be refrigerated so they don’t spoil.  This makes them an easy first pickle for someone who has never pickled before.  It’s also nice to make when the weather is just too hot and you don’t feel like standing over boiling pots of jars, but you have a bunch of cucumbers that must be turned into pickles before they go soft.

I like this recipe because, while sweet, these pickles are not overly sweet and the onions add a nice subtle bite to them. Follow the recipe as listed below, or if you like onions as much as I do, go ahead and double the onions. There should still be enough liquid to cover it all.

Refrigerator Pickles
1 gallon pickling cucumbers, thinly sliced
4 medium onions, thinly sliced
5 cups sugar
3 cups white vinegar
1/3 cup pickling salt
1 teaspoon celery seed
1 teaspoon mustard seed
1 teaspoon turmeric
1 teaspoon dry mustard

1. Pack cucumbers and onions into a nonreactive jar (glass, stainless or a crock)
2. Mix together the remaining ingredients and bring to a boil to dissolve the sugar. Allow to cool completely.
3. Pour the liquid over the cucumber and onions and place in refrigerator,allowing to mature for at least 1 week before eating.
4. Keep refrigerated.

Wanda (my wife) and I used to dine on cheese and charcuterie plates quite often for dinner. I don’t know why we stopped as we used to really love to relax over a spread of meats, cheeses, and pickled vegetables and talk about our day. Tonight seemed the perfect time to re-institute this tradition. I had spent a long day at work and when I got home I needed to spend some time working on a recipe and article, for another website, that I had been pushing off, but now the deadline was looming. By the time everything was done I was in no mood to cook, and the hot, humid weather had sapped my appetite. I was about to blow off dinner altogether-Wanda could fend for herself-when I passed by one of the local cheese stores on my way to the store for a few things. Thoughts of our earlier cheese and charcuterie dinners swamped my mind and next thing I knew I had cheese in hand and was heading to the store to round out the dinner.

By the time I had completed my shopping I had 3 cheeses, prosciutto, sopressata, a melon, and a few things from the olive bar. For the cheeses I had picked a Manchego from Spain, a nice relatively mild, nutty cheese. The other two, both from Wisconsin, were a goat’s milk “”mozzarella” from Mt. Sterling Creamery, a slightly hard, aged cheese, that still retained plenty of that chalky, minerally flavor that makes goat’s milk cheeses so distinctive. The final cheese was Benedictine from Carr Valley. It is a washed rind cheese made from a mixture of cow’s, goat’s and sheep’s milk. The cheese was appropriately pungent and flavorful as all washed rind cheeses are, though a little less so than most of it’s European counterparts.

The prosciutto was used to wrap chunks of melon, while the sopressata was sliced paper thin. I also sliced some of the Hungarian salami that we are never without. It is produced by a company called Bende, just outside of Chicago. Bende is one of the only producers, in the US, making Hungarian style salamis and sausages and have earned a world wide following. The salami is redolent with garlic and gets a little kick from copious amounts of Hungarian Paprika added to the mix.

Dinner was rounded out by a variety of pickled vegetables including a mix of olives in a greek marinade, balsamic glazed pearl onions, and wonderful, spicy greek peppers filled with feta and marinated in olive oil. I still had a few mushrooms I pickled in May so I added those to the mix also. You can find the recipe for those here

While I would normally have served red wine, or beer with this meal, I wasn’t in the mood for beer and red wine just seemed too heavy in the humidity. Instead I choose to serve a Wisconsin wine from Door County Winery. It was a bottle of their cherry wine. While I usually stay way from these “fruit” wines, tonight it seemed the right choice. It was light and a little too sweet for me, but I have to admit it was refreshing and the sweetness really went well with the stronger of the cheeses.

There are many ways I know my wife really loves me.  Not the least of which is she occasionally makes me Eggs Benedict for breakfast.  I love breakfast foods, but hate getting up early enough to make them, something I need to overcome as one of my life long goals is to own a Bed & Breakfast.  Luckily I have a wife who is a morning person.  I remember the first time she made them for me.  The thing that scared her the most was making the hollandaise.  There seems to be a mystique about hollandaise.  Most people think that it is this extremely difficult operation that should only be attempted by a “trained professional.”  While it isn’t one of the easiest sauces to make, it sure doesn’t deserve its reputation as being too difficult for a regular home cook.

I am going to walk you through making hollandaise, showing you the few areas where things can go wrong and, hopefully, at the same time dispelling its mystique.  These instructions are going to look long, but don’t worry, it really is quite simple.  The instructions are long because I want to make sure I have explained everything there you need to know.  So here we go.

Hollandaise Sauce

2 each Egg Yolks
1 oz. White Wine (water can be used if you don’t have or use wine)
6 oz. Butter, clarified (more on that in a minute), warm but not hot
1/2 each Lemon
1 pinch Salt
1 dash Cayenne

First a note on the butter. Most chefs prefer to use clarified butter over plain melted butter for various reasons. One of the main reasons though is that non-clarified butter contains a lot moisture. When making larger batches of hollandaise this can thin the sauce more than a chef wants it to be. Taking the moisture out of the butter allows the chef to thin the hollandaise as he/she sees fit, and they can do it with liquids more flavorful than water. If you find yourself pressed for time, melted butter usually works quite well though so don’t freak if you don’t have time to clarify it. And now, back to the recipe. (continue reading…)

I recently returned from a 5 day vacation out to the East coast to get together with family. It was a fun filled 5 days full of laughter, reminiscing, a few margaritas….okay, more than a few, and food. Oh, the food. When my family gets together you know the days are going to be filled with plenty of great food! With 21 of us, and only the use of a home kitchen meals had to be simple affairs with as much cooking done outside as possible. Grill Night consisted of burgers, bratwursts, hot dogs for the kids and venison burgers for the more adventurous. Mexican Night featured soft tacos stuffed with marinated and grilled flank steak and chicken breasts and a pico de gallo sporting a trio of chiles, poblanos, anaheims, and cayenne for a little more heat. Sunday lunch saw the serving of a family favorite, chicken and homemade egg noodles served over mashed potatoes.  One night the kids in the group made funnel cakes, with the help of a few adults, but the big event was held on Saturday night – the Seafood Boil. With only 2 propane burners dinner was served in 2 courses. The first course consisted of Corn on the Cob and Steamer Clams. For those not familiar with Steamers, they are the clam of choice, in New England for a traditional clambake or for use in clam chowder. These medium sized clams are sweet and mild with just a hint of salinity to remind you of their home in the ocean. After being scrubbed and rinsed, they are often held in saltwater with cornmeal added to it to cause them to expel more of the sand they have ingested. Next they are steamed or boiled open and poured out onto large platters where guests help themselves. Since these clams spend almost their whole life buried in the sand it is traditional, after freeing the clam from its shell, to dip it in some of the clam broth, used in cooking, to rinse away any remaining sand, before dipping them in melted butter and eating.

Our second course found us dining on American Lobsters and Shrimp. The lobsters were cooked simply in salted water while the shrimp were cooked in water seasoned with Old Bay and Beer. I have eaten lobsters from around the world, taken from both cold waters and warm waters, but in my opinion none compare to the American Lobster. I have yet to find another species of lobster as sweet and tender as those found on the east coast of North America. Accompaniments were simple; a spicy cocktail for the shrimp and more melted butter for the lobster. For a shellfish lover like me, it was heaven on earth, and to serve anything else would have merely been a distraction.

This got me to thinking about how simple foods can be as exquisite as the most complex chef inspired creations. As chefs and gourmands we often forget this and need to be reminded every once in awhile. Awe-inspiring meals don’t always have to mean slaving away in a kitchen for hours while you hope the souffle won’t fall or the butter sauce won’t break. Sometimes it means just allowing the food to speak for itself. This becomes easy when you search out local foods in their peak season.

As a chef and foodie I spend a lot of my web-surfing time looking for new food and beverage related websites. Now as a blogger I spend a lot of time also looking for interesting and informative food blogs to see what others are up too. My “favorites” tab is packed with sites that I love to visit so I thought I would start sharing some of my favorites that I have come across. Each month I will highlight 2-3 sites that I think are worth sharing with all of you. Please feel free to let me know of sites that you think I should highlight, either by leaving a comment or by emailing me. While the vast majority of sites I will be offering up will be food related, occasionally I might slip in a site that has caught my interest for other reasons.

So without further ado, here are my picks for July:

The Food Timeline

For the total food geek in all of us, this site offers up tons of information on the history of food since the beginning of mankind. I have spent hours learning about the domestication of animals, how cheese was “discovered” and its development since ancient times, what medieval peasants ate, etc. In addition there are tons of historically accurate recipes to check out.

Three Men with Nothing Better to Do

Since it’s summertime I feel that a barbecue link is appropriate. This site may not be the biggest or have the biggest recipe archive on the web, but there is something about this site that I really like. What I will say is that they give great BBQing advice and the recipes I have tried all work well. It’s definately a site to check out.

Apricot season is short, usually running from the end of May to the end of July, sometimes as late as August in good years. With such a short season one must take full advantage of these golden fruits in the few weeks they are available. Unfortunately, this year hasn’t been a good year for apricots, judging by the ones we have gotten in Wisconsin. They aren’t overly sweet and when ripe most of the ones I have purchased have become mealy. All is not lost though. Sure they may not be perfect for eating out of hand this year but when grilled, slightly underripe apricots make a great topping for a variety of items from pork to ice cream. The simple recipe I offer today makes good use of this year’s so-so crop of apricots and makes an excellent ending to any dinner centered around the grill.

Vanilla Ice Cream Topped with Grilled Apricots and Honey
Serves 4

4 each Apricots (slightly firm and just a little underripe)
1-2 Tbsp. Vegetable Oil
4 Tbsp. Honey (your favorite kind)
1/4 cup Almonds
4 large scoops Vanilla Ice Cream

Earlier in the day toast the almonds in 350 degree oven until slightly browned. Cool and finely chop. While your main entree is grilling, cut the apricots in half and remove the pit. Once your entree is done, brush the grill clean. Brush the cut sides of the apricots with the oil and place on the hottest part of the grill. Grill for about 30 seconds turn over and grill 20-30 seconds more. It’s okay to get a little char on the cut flesh but try not to burn the skin side. Remove from the grill and set aside. After dinner, slice or roughly dice the apricots. Place ice cream in individual bowls and sprinkle with the apricots. Drizzle the honey over top of the ice cream and apricots and finally garnish with the toasted almonds.

I don’t know that I have ever met anyone who doesn’t like Strawberry Shortcake. There just seems to be something about the combination of buttery, sweet biscuit, fresh strawberries and rich whipped cream that appeals to everyone. I am no exception. As far as I am concerned, a well made Strawberry Shortcake, made with fresh from the field strawberries, says summer like nothing else. That said, I do like to experiment with the general recipe. Sometimes I will tinker with the shortcake (aka the biscuit), sometimes I will add different flavorings to the whipped cream, most notably adding a drop of almond extract in place of the vanilla extract, but mostly I play around with the fruit component. It is by far the easiest to fiddle around with, and has the most possibilities. From substituting another berry for the strawberries to adding grilled plums to the mix, I’ve experimented with countless variations.

This being 4th of July weekend I decided to do a Cherry Shortcake in honor of the day. I’m not sure why, but cherries seem to be associated closely with this holiday. Maybe its because of the legend of George Washington and the Cherry tree. I don’t know, but it sounds good anyway. I’ve added another flavor element in the use of lemon balm. It is used in the syrup I use to sweeten the cherries and as a garnish for the dish also. There is no particular reason that I chose Lemon Balm other than the fact that I like its taste and because I have a ton of it about to go to flower and I need to use some of it up. I think it adds a nice, subtle flavor to the overall dish.

Lemon Balm Syrup
1/4 cup Water
1/4 cup Sugar, granulated
1/2 cup Lemon Balm, leaves only

Combine water and sugar in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Remove from heat, add the lemon balm leaves and allow to steep for 5 minutes. Strain, pressing on the leaves to extract as much liquid as possible. Chill.

1 pound Fresh Cherries, pitted (for more color use a variety of cherries such as Bing and Ranier)

Cut the cherries in half, after pitting them and add them to the Lemon Balm Syrup. Toss to coat and allow to sit, in the fridge, for at least 2 hours.

Shortcake

2 cups All-purpose Flour
1/4 cup Sugar, granulated
1 pinch Salt
2 tsp. Baking Powder
1 each Egg, beaten
1/2 cup Half and Half
1 tsp. Vanilla Extract
6 Tbsp. Butter, chilled and diced

Preheat the oven to 400. In a large bowl combine the flour, sugar, salt and baking powder. In another bowl combine the egg, half and half, and vanilla. Add the butter to the dry ingredients and cut it in using a pastry blender or 2 knives. The mixture should resemble coarse crumbs when done. Add the wet ingredients stirring only to bring the dough together. Don’t over mix the dough. Turn the dough out onto a floured work surface and knead 4 to 5 times. Pat into a cirlce about 7 inches in diameter and 1 inch thick. Using a biscuit cutter 3 inches in diameter, cut out 6 rounds. Place on a sheet tray that has either been greased or lined with parchment paper. Brush the tops with an egg wash made of 1 egg, beaten with 1 Tbsp. of either water or half and half. Sprinkle tops with granulated sugar then bake for 15-20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. Place on a rack to cool.

Assembly
1 1/2 cups Heavy Cream
2 Tbsp. Sugar, granulated
1 tsp. Vanilla Extract
4 each Lemon Balm leaves, chiffonnade (a fine julienne)

Split shortcakes and place the bottom half in each of 6 bowls. Spread a dollop of whipped cream over the shortcake half. Divide the cherries and syrup among the 6 bowls. Top with top half of shortcake. Place a large dollop of whipped cream on top and garnish with a sprinkling of the lemon balm.

A quick perusal of our raspberry bushes tells me that raspberry season is not far away here in Wisconsin.  The thought alone makes my toes tingle as raspberries are my favorite of all the berries.  I can remember as a kid, growing up in Vermont, our little village was bespeckled with wild black raspberries.  Each day a bunch of us kids would ride our bikes all over town seeking out patches of these seedy, but luscious, little gems, picking only the ripest berries and popping them into our mouths; each of us racing the others for the biggest haul.  I believe that on more than one occasion a few fists were thrown also as we each jockeyed for our share.  A few days later, as more berries ripened, the ritual would start all over again. To this day, the mere sight of a black raspberry takes me back to those carefree days of childhood when my only worry was getting beaten for eating more than my share of the haul.

Fast forward back to the present; you’d think I have it made now; my very own raspberry patch, protected from raspberry thieves by our 4 foot high cedar fence. Okay, it’s not actually a patch, more like 2 or 3 bushes.  Unfortunately, that isn’t quite the case.  Of course, there are the birds who nab their fair share, though that is to be expected.  Then there is the 2 ½ year old daughter, who, last year tried to help pick a few but ended up smashing most of them.  I expect the same will be true this year also.  The biggest culprit though, is Dodger.  Dodger is our 7 year old English springer spaniel, and he loves raspberries.  Well, he loves most anything, but that is a whole different story.  Dodger loves raspberries, and in the course of his 7 years he has perfected his moves for plucking ripe raspberries off the vine without disturbing the unripe ones, or pricking himself on the raspberries’ thorns.  If I’m not fast enough, or diligent enough, every berry from ground level to about 3 ½ feet up will be his.  Luckily, this year looks to be a bumper crop so there will be enough to go around.

Every year as I see the raspberry bushes bloom and the fruit start to develop, I start making plans for all the ways I will use the raspberries I’ve grown.  But, I admit it, I am weak willed and often go for instant gratification as opposed to more long term rewards.  Translated, that means I end up eating more than I put in the bowl.  If I’m lucky, I might have saved enough for some raspberry muffins or scones.  The serious jam making will usually have to wait until we can get to a “U-Pick” farm where I try desperately to control all those reflexes I developed as a kid.  While some might view me as lacking will power, I prefer to think of it as honoring nature, because really, how can you improve on a falling-off-the-vine ripe raspberry that has been sun warmed until almost bursting.