Over the weekend I reorganized our spices, a project that involved transferring our dried herbs and spices into new jars. An unexpected perk of the process was the opportunity to take in the aromas of each. The wafts of cardamom seeds stayed with me through the day on Monday, and by evening I could no longer stand it; I announced that I would like to go to The American Swedish Institute for a visit to the Kaffestuga for cardamom rolls.

Tom, the in-house baker, immediately asked, “What do we need? Let’s make them!” I pulled The Swedish Table by Helene Henderson off the shelf and opened to the index where I found “cardamom rolls” under the letter C. To make your own Kaffebröd med Kardemumma you’ll need sugar, water, yeast, milk, cream, butter, flour, salt, freshly ground cardamom, cinnamon, eggs, almonds and pearl sugar. Pearl sugar and almonds, the last items on the list, were not on hand, which is why the rolls look a bit bare.

Tom went to work while I read in the living room and had the rolls ready just before bed, warming the kitchen and filling the apartment with the smells of cinnamon and cardamom. Warmed just before breakfast, the rolls made a wonderful start to a January morgon.

Eating local food when it is in season — elitist though it may be — is a good trend for food in America, one that I hope has more staying power than most foodie fads. To that end, I try my best to try to promote that style of eating, on this blog and in my life. Farmers markets, winter squash recipes, pickling — all are inspired by the desire to enjoy the unique fruits of Minnesota. But sometimes I worry that this parochial focus threatens to cut us off from one of the greatest joys of eating: food’s ability to transport us to a place far away from home — for a fraction of the cost of air-fare.

Yesterday in Minneapolis was one of those days when one might have wanted to be somewhere else. Seventeen inches of snow in the space of a day can make you question your choice of the latitude you inhabit. Actually, the snow was pretty enough to watch if you didn’t have to drive anywhere — a situation Martha and I thought we were in until we realized our car was parked on the wrong side of the street. An hour, many shovel-loads of snow, and several good samaritans later we had the car parked safely out of the way of plows and were back inside for the rest of the day, hanging our clothes up to dry and thinking about the joys and challenges of living in the Great White North.

But as we had breakfast in the morning, leisurely eating arepas individually buttered, salted, and topped with cheese, we might as well have been in Cali, Colombia, enjoying the morning hours before the day’s heat and afternoon rains arrived. Martha’s Aunt Stella would wake us each morning with these freshly-grilled corn cakes as well as orange juice and coffee. After taking our time over breakfast it was just a short walk to Uncle Joaquín’s café — attached to the house — for a tinto and conversation with the regulars. In Minnesota yesterday morning our orange juice didn’t taste quite as fresh, and the coffee could be better (we love our Peace Coffee but you can’t beat coffee right from the source) but the taste of lightly fried arepas made the snow seem remote, something we were reading about in El Tiempo rather than something rapidly burying our car in a small white mountain.

We make arepas with Masarepa blanca that we hand-imported from Colombia but that is also available in all the Hispanic grocery stores in Minneapolis and can be ordered online. I just follow the package instructions: mix a cup of masarepa with one and a quarter cups of water and salt to taste, let the mix rest a few minutes, and then form ping-pong ball-sized balls into flat patties with very wet hands to prevent sticking (I use a side bowl of water to keep my hands hydrated). Tradition calls for these to be cooked on a parilla, a device for cooking them directly over a gas flame, but I have better luck using a non-stick skillet instead — the arepas stay together, brown more evenly, and can be cooked more than one at a time.

After spending our morning in Cali and much of our afternoon in the harsh reality of Minnesota, by evening we were ready to take another trip. Black beans and white rice is a dish enjoyed throughout the world, especially in Latin America, but for me it’s something I associate most with Cuba. Since the snow shut down most of the grocery stores early we had to rely on the supplies already in the house. Delving deep into the freezer produced a ham hock, which when combined with dried black beans, a bay leaf, half an onion, salt and water and left to cook for a few hours before being spooned over white rice makes a satisfying meal whether you’re at 45 or 23 degrees north. It never snows in Havana, so how could it be snowing when you’re enjoying soupy black beans and rice?

Local food mega-site the Heavy Table recently stirred up controversy by deeming, after conducting a metro-wide tasting, the Bruegger’s bagel to be the best bagel in the Twin Cities. To have a giant national chain beat out all the local options was understandably upsetting to the many people whose culinary ethos is built around eating as locally as possible. I fall into this camp, when it comes to bagels at least, since I almost always choose Common Roots, for reasons entirely related to the cafe’s proximity to my home (this is a lazy decision, not an ethical one). Still, people are passionate about their bagel purveyors, and if you’d like to avoid the debate altogether your best bet is to make your own.

As with so many things bread-related, the first place to turn is Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. His bagel recipe takes two days: one day to mix and shape the dough, an overnight refrigerated fermentation, and the second day to boil and bake the bagels.

The dough consists of a sponge (1 tsp or .11 oz instant yeast, 4 cups or 18 oz bread flour, 20 oz water) that is mixed and left to rest two hours, until bubbly. To the sponge is added another ½ tsp or .055 oz instant yeast, 3 ¾ cups or 17 oz bread flour, 2 ¾ tsp or .7 oz salt and 1 Tbsp or .5 oz barley malt syrup.

With a total of 35 oz of bread flour hydrated by only 20 oz of water (57% hydration) this is a very thick, heavy dough. In the days before I owned a stand mixer I would labor for ten minutes kneading this dough into shape, and it was tough. A stand mixer with a dough hook makes the kneading easier, but be careful: the thickness of this dough will heavily tax the mixer’s motor and on weaker models could even cause failure. Pay attention to how your mixer is holding up throughout the process.

After the dough is kneaded together — whether by hand or by machine — it should be immediately divided into balls of 3.5 oz each. Rest the balls for 20 minutes under a damp towel, and then comes the fun part: shaping. There are two methods: the dough can be rolled into a thick rope and then doubled back on itself to form a ring, or — and this is my preferred method — you can punch a hole in the center of a dough ball and gradually enlarge the hole around your thumb, rotating the bagel. After each bagel has been formed it should be placed on a parchment-lined sheet pan.

Reinhart recommends letting the formed bagels rest at room temperature for ten to twenty minutes until a bagel dropped in a tub of water floats after ten seconds. When I was last making bagels I completely overlooked this step and the bagels came out fine, so you can do with it what you will. In any case, the bagels should end up covered in plastic wrap and in the refrigerator overnight.

If you’re very industrious and/or intent on having fresh bagels for breakfast, the next morning wake up early, set a large, wide pot of water to boil and heat the oven to 500ºF. When the water is boiling, place as many bagels as will fit comfortably — no crowding! — in the water; the bagels can come straight out of the refrigerator. Boil for one to two minutes on the first side, then flip and boil another one to two minutes on the second side (boil longer for chewier bagels). After both sides have been boiled, place the bagels back on the parchment-lined sheet pan — maybe sprinkled with a little cornmeal in the intervening time to prevent sticking — and top as desired. I sprinkled on sesame seeds or dehydrated onion in this case. Continue boiling and topping all the bagels.

After every bagel is boiled and topped, they are ready to be baked: bake 10 minutes total, rotating the pans halfway through. Allow to cool 15 minutes before eating. They are great fresh and also freeze very well; cutting the bagels in half before freezing facilitates easy future toasting.

Two days making bagels might seem like a lot of time, but it’s not actually that much active, working time. And when compared to the alternative — trying to navigate the minefield of the bagel shop preferences of your friends and loved ones — it’s a fairly easy choice to make. After all, after two days spent making them, nobody will have the nerve to tell you your bagels aren’t the best.

It’s almost election day, a time for Americans to exercise the most basic mechanism of self-government by choosing our rulers. Nobody can have failed to notice that the stakes are high this year. Issues that once elicited some kind of consensus have become the source of bitter disagreements.

As a food blogger, I have a civic responsibility to ask tough questions about our candidates: what will our gubernatorial hopefuls do to ensure equitable access to healthy food in Minnesota’s public and non-public schools? What policies will they adopt to promote safe, sustainable agricultural practices that provide food for all Minnesotans? And, most importantly, if our candidates for governor could be any kind of breakfast food, what kind of breakfast food would they be?

Tom Emmer: Emmer Pancakes

The answer for Republican Tom Emmer is easy enough, since he happens to share his name with a variety of wheat, namely emmer. Emmer, if you are not familiar, is an ancient strain of wheat — one of the first ever cultivated. It was the wheat the Egyptians used for bread and beer and was the basis for the campaigning Roman soldier’s porridge. Although emmer (Triticum dicoccum) has been largely supplanted by more common bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) in the modern era, it is still grown throughout the world. Bluebird Grain Farms in Washington makes an excellent emmer pancake mix: just add milk, buttermilk, an egg and butter. The cakes cook up very hearty and rustic.

I suppose the following objection could be raised to emmer: emmer is a dinosaur, a relic of the past. Emmer was literally around during the Stone Age; what possible relevance could emmer have for modern-day Minnesotans?

Mark Dayton: Date Scones

Mark Dayton — or is that Date-un? — is helming the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party effort for governor, and if you couldn’t tell from the horrible pun a few words back I am relating him to dates, the fruit of the date palm. Since breakfast was the agreed upon theme, I made date scones:

• 10 oz white flour
• 1 Tbsp baking powder
• 3 Tbsp sugar
• ½ tsp salt
• 4 tsp butter, diced
• 1 cup dried dates, pitted and roughly chopped
• ¾ cup cream
• 1 egg

Preheat oven to 425ºF. In a food processor, pulse flour, baking powder, sugar and salt to combine. Add butter and dates and pulse until evenly distributed. Meanwhile, beat together cream and egg. Pour flour mixture into a medium bowl and fold in wet ingredients until just combined. Transfer to a floured board; form dough into rough square and cut into quarters. Cut each quarter in half to form triangles. Transfer dough to sheet pan and bake 15–20 minutes, until just browned.

If you’ve never had a date they are large, oblong and raisin-like in their dried form, which is what is commonly available. Some will complain that they are just way too rich for the average Minnesotan.

Tom Horner: Plum Cake

Independence Party candidate Tom Horner proved a bit of a spoiler since his name is not shared with a food-stuff nor does it lend itself to an easy pun. But Horner does bring to mind a familiar nursery rhyme:

Little Jack Horner sat in the corner
Eating his Christmas pie,
He put in his thumb and pulled out a plum
And said “What a good boy am I!”

It turns out this association may be quite apt: this website claims that the true Jack Horner was a steward named Thomas Horner whose “plum” was one of the deeds to twelve plum manor houses that he was supposed to deliver to King Henry VIII at the request of the Abbott of Glastonbury. Horner’s descendants deny the story.

Mysteries about who exactly “Horner” is notwithstanding, the real question is “what the hell is Christmas pie?” Approximately 45 seconds of Internet search revealed that Christmas pie is a lot of different things, though most generally a pie served around Christmastime. With Christmas still months away, making Christmas pie would clearly be impossible. Instead I settled something with plums in it, specifically the Rustic Plum Cake published in the July 2007 Cook’s Illustrated.

I won’t say which of these breakfasts I preferred — that choice is up to voters — but I hope you appreciate my contribution to the heightening of the political discourse. Don’t forget to vote Tuesday!

For someone who basically refused the meal as a teenager, as an adult breakfast has captured a special place in my heart. Part of the reason for this must be my discovery that breakfast needn’t involve sickly sweet grains swimming in milk — I prefer butter and salt to jam and honey on the breakfast table. It might also have something to do with my only-three-years-ago decision to start eating eggs. Breakfast is the ovophobe’s worst enemy. But I don’t credit an adult love of omelets with my rediscovery of breakfast: that honor belongs to the breakfast sausage.

The only problem with breakfast sausage is finding a good one. Too often they have some funky off flavor, are too dry, or the texture is just off (we once had a package of links with the texture of hot dogs). Martha and I have made something of a quest of finding good breakfast sausages locally but so far haven’t found a keeper. But with my newfound sausage-making capabilities, a new possibility has opened up: I will make the perfect breakfast sausage.

I wish I could say this is the definitive recipe for breakfast sausage, the culmination of our quest. In truth its flavor was a little lacking. For one thing, the sausage was underseasoned — for once I needed a heavier hand with the salt. I also thought the fennel flavor should have been stronger and would have loved a little spice. Any maybe the garlic was a little strong (or, more likely, not strong enough). Let’s call Breakfast Sausage #1 a valuable learning experience that is hopefully a step toward the ideal sausage, be it Breakfast Sausage #2 or Breakfast Sausage #47.

Breakfast Sausage #1

• 2.5# pork shoulder (boneless)
• 92 g onion, minced
• 19 g garlic, minced or pressed through a garlic press
• 11 g fresh sage, minced
• 6.5 g fennel fronds, minced
• 12.7 g sea salt
• 3 g black pepper, coarsely ground
• Sausage casings

Cut the pork into ¾” cubes. Place on cookie sheet and freeze for 20 minutes, to firm the meat.

Spread onion, garlic, sage and fennel over meat chunks. Grind using coarse plate. Lightly toss ground meat mixture with salt and pepper to distribute evenly.

Stuff the sausage into casings (if you plan to case the whole recipe, you will need about 4′ of large casings). Leave enough room to twist smaller (3″) links. Twist, cook and serve.