With the canning season beginning and (nearly) two jars of tomato sauce under our belts (note that jar #2 is not quite so full as jar #1), I got curious about meat sauces. Aside from the type of canned food I’d generally stay away from, you don’t often see pasta sauces with meat in the grocery aisle. If we’re using a pre-made sauce, most of us are adding meat at home. With that in mind, I began to wonder what sort of conditions one would need to can a home-made meat sauce: would it be much different from the process of canning vegetarian tomato sauce? I asked this question of the canning expert of the moment over at Apartment Therapy’s The Kitchn. Marisa McClellan, author of Food in Jars, gave her answer.

It’s actually a very different process. The reason we’re able to can fruits and some vegetables in nothing more than a boiling water canner is that they are high acid foods…. However, meat is a low acid food, which is the ideal environment for botulism. Because of this, low acid foods need to be processed in a pressure canner.

Read her full explanation here.

Could a Vitamin Water lover and homemade food and drink lover bring himself to make his own “vitamin” water? Maybe. Maybe not. Has anyone tried the homemade sport drink recipe from Tuesday’s Well section of the New York Times? For me, looking at this recipe just makes me want to make lemonade instead. Then again, if given the choice between an actual Vitamin Water and a glass of lemonade I’d choose the lemonade, too. Here’s the recipe below.

Sports drink recipe from “Nancy Clark’s Sports Nutrition Guidebook”

• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 cup orange juice
• 1/4 cup hot water
• 2 tablespoons lemon juice
• 3 1/2 cups cold water

In a quart pitcher, dissolve the sugar and salt in the hot water. Add the remaining ingredients and the cold water. The drink contains about 50 calories and 110 mg of sodium per 8 ounces, approximately the same as for most sports drinks.

Amy Thielen has an article in the The Star Tribune today entitled “MYOB {make your own butter}” that is very much worth looking over, even if it may seem like a far-out idea for some. It’s true: Tom is now making all of our bread, all of our yogurt, pickles of all kinds, and has attempted cheese on a few occasions. However crazily I may sometimes view these mysteries of home cooking and creation, Amy’s piece makes me want to MMOB (that’s make-my-own-butter). I especially like how she recounts the differences between winter butter and summer butter here in Minnesota:

Excepting the green months (May to October), your homemade butter made from Minnesota cream will be stone-white, which is a bit of a shock if you’re used to yellow butter, as most of us are. I thought immediately of Ma Ingalls in “Little House in the Big Woods,” and how she would color the winter cream by grating a carrot into a fluffy mass and squeezing its juice into the cream before churning…. Ma was a genius. Not only does the carrot juice tint the butter so it looks like it came from July’s prairie-grazing cows, but it also lends it a faint sweetness.

We are in the green months! There’s no better time to try… For the Strib’s recipes, try here. Have any of you done this before?

As projects go, what else is on the horizon? This is, of course, pure speculation as I can’t speak for Tom… Maybe beer, but with our hot water heat it’s hard to know if that’s a good idea. Canned goods fresh from the market to keep for winter’s un-bounty are a must (I look forward to learning more about this and helping as well), perhaps home distilled fruits concoctions? Our recent visit with my Aunt Martha and her husband Peter has inspired us down this road at some point for sure. My only (food) contribution of late has been sprouts, glorious sprouts grown right on my countertop. Once my day by day photo series is complete I will happily share how fun sprouts can be.

photo: http://belladia.typepad.com

Since the bánh mì is the sandwich of the moment—with a New York Times article and plenty of blog coverage—I thought I’d add my voice to the chorus.

My relationship with the venerable Vietnamese sandwich started well before I knew its name, when Emeril Lagasse (a man who I am not ashamed to admit inspired me to cook in a big way) featured a recipe for “Vietnamese-style Poor Boys” on one of his many Food Network shows. Emeril was taking a bit of liberty with his nomenclature, but I recognized a good thing when I saw it and made this sandwich several times over the years. My other bánh mì breakthrough was when I began working as a cook at Blackbird Café in Minneapolis, which features a pretty excellent version on its menu. Nothing like making a sandwich a hundred times to come to appreciate its nuances.

So there are my two big influences in banh mi-making: a creole TV chef and a South Minneapolis neighborhood restaurant. I’ve never been to Vietnam. But, great food knows no borders—earlier this week I set out to make my banh mi from scratch.

As with any sandwich this popular and widespread, or any sandwich at all for that matter, there is no exact consensus on what ingredients go in it. But from my experience eating the sandwiches, I knew what I wanted: liver pâté, roast and pulled pork, pickled carrots and daikon, sliced cucumber, cilantro, jalapeño and mayo all on a baguette-style roll.

Just as every house needs a foundation, every great sandwich needs to be built from a strong, tasty base; the first thing to tackle was the bread. Because it works very well for me, I used my standard sourdough bread recipe, which consists of mostly white flour with a little wheat flour thrown in and is hydrated to about 68%. This produces a nicely airy crumb while not being so wet as to be unworkable. After the initial rise I cut off 8 0z pieces and shaped them into rough bâtards. After a rest, a slash and 20 minutes on a 450° baking stone, I had respectable rolls on which to build my sandwich.

Although some restaurants omit it, in my mind liver pâté is essential to a great bánh mì—something about its rich fattiness and that funky liver flavor. Ever since finding an old copy of Terrines, Pâtés and Galantines in an antique store in Red Wing, MN I have been thoroughly immersed in the world of potted meats. Since it was going to be a spread for my sandwich, I needed to make a smooth pâté, rather than my usual chunky, rustic terrines. A food processor made this really easy: chunks of lamb liver, chunks of pork fat, spices are pureed in a matter of seconds. (Not really a process for the squeamish, you’re basically making liquid meat). If I were really anal retentive (ok, more anal retentive) I would have passed the resulting puree through a drum sieve to make sure it was perfectly smooth. To cook the pâté, without overcooking it, I utilized a double boiler. I cooked the ruby mixture until it had become more beige and granular and looked done. Pâté!

With the pâté resting in the refrigerator developing its wonderful flavors, it was time to tackle what is in some ways the star of the show: the pork. The question of the preparation of the pork is another area where pretty much everybody differs, but I fell back to experience. For one thing, I know that I prefer tender pulled pork to pork cooked more quickly.  Many of the bánh mì I have tried seem to use some kind of hoisin barbecue sauce, but I just rubbed the meat with salt, pepper and chinese five-spice. The warm, sweet spices are already somewhat present in the pâté and complement the heat of jalapeños.

Since the chunks of pork form a craggy, uneven layer, for a level sandwich you need something to build up while filling the cracks. This is where I like to bring in the pickled carrots. Since there was daikon at the farmers’ market, I used that as well (apparently this is traditional), shredding both.

I fell in love with making quick pickles at Blackbird. It’s as easy as taking a vegetable, cutting it into small pieces (or shredding), tossing it with a hot pepper, a garlic clove, whole peppercorns, coriander seed, and/or whatever other pickling spices call to you, and pouring boiling vinegar, water, salt and sugar over it all, then letting it sit in the refrigerator over night. I put a lot of sugar in to make a sweet pickle, since pork loves sweet things.

With a solid level built up by my pickled roots, I was ready to stack on the fresh vegetables. This was the only part of the process that felt like cheating since I didn’t have to do anything except for clean and cut the vegetables—it felt like it would have been more “from scratch” to have grown them myself. But since I won’t be growing hot peppers in my northern-exposed apartment windows anytime soon, store vegetables would have to do. It’s not like I raised the pig.

Thick slices of cucumber are essential to cool your tongue from the punishment meted out by thin slices of jalapeño. If you are one of those unfortunate individuals to have been cursed by God with a distaste for cilantro,that’s too bad, because the best bánh mìs pile it on, both the fragrant leaves and the crunchy stems.

With the sandwich elements perfectly balanced structurally, there remained only to add the finishing touch to top it all off and bind it all together: mayonnaise.

Mayonnaise can be put together from scratch really easily and can taste a bit richer and have a silkier texture than the heavily processed stuff from the jar (but honestly, if it weren’t for the ‘from-scratch’ gimmick behind this post, I probably would have whipped out the Hellmann’s). It’s just a matter of whisking an egg yolk with some lemon juice, salt, pepper and sugar and then slowly whisking in olive oil until you have mayonnaise.

And so, applying the top piece of bread, I had the scratch bánh mì: built from the ground up, each element custom designed to my exacting specifications. Was it worth it? Well besides the fact that it was more like fun than work to build each element of the sandwich, the sandwich itself was very good; I wouldn’t to call it “the ultimate bánh mì” because I have yet to meet a bánh mì I didn’t like. With pork, pâté, cool cucumbers, jalapeños, fragrant cilantro, sweet pickled carrots and rich mayonnaise on good bread you can’t go wrong. So while I instinctively bristle at all the hype, there is scarcely a sandwich that deserves it more than the bánh mì.

I’ve read a lot about “IKEA hacks” online but I’ve never attempted one myself. In fact, it’s probably still true that I still haven’t. I had help (the hands you see in the pictures below are my friend Rod’s), and it was more of a careful edit than a hack. Last month I came home with two Frösta stools from IKEA. Though I liked the shape, I was dubious about their quality, considering past experience with IKEA’s wooden chairs (background: Tom bought four Ivar chairs for his apartment while we were still in college. We used them at our dining table here in Minneapolis [see left] until one collapsed under him when we had friends over for dinner last fall… we were able to return them as IKEA’s staff determined they were defective… since then we’ve been using two blue Steelcase chairs I got for $10 each at the University of Minnesota Reuse Center). I brought the Fröstas home with the idea of test driving one; I left the other in its packaging to make for an easy return if necessary. My hope was that they’d make for great extra seating when we have guests, but my hesitations proved correct. With four legs, the stool was really wobbly. And, even though I had tightened the screws really well, the individual legs wiggled badly. With a 90-day return policy ahead of me, I decided to hang onto the stools until it made sense to make the drive out to IKEA again.

The stool and its still-packaged partner sat in the corner of our dining space until I read this post at Door Sixteen. Anna at Door Sixteen has a great eye, and this time she featured several Artek designs, the company Alvar Aalto, his wife Aino, and two others founded in 1935 (Artek meaning Art + Technology). Many of IKEA’s designs are inspired by Modernist classics, but I didn’t know of Frösta’s “inspiration” until I read Anna’s post. It’s pretty clear (Left: Frösta, Right: Aalto 60):

Frösta is made of Birch, just as the 1933 Aalto 60 is; it’s the finish on the Swedish-Chinese stool that makes it differ from the Finnish one as well as the height. Frösta is just a bit taller than the Artek stool. And the price… we can’t forget about the price. When she learned about my project, Anna from D16 pointed out that Aalto also designed 4-legged versions of the stool (the E60) and asked if I might be tempted to leave them as-is. The wobbles were driving me nuts, though, and I kept thinking back to math class: 3 points make a plane! With 3 legs instead of 4, I expected to reduce the wobbles significantly. Then the idea of glue arose as a solution to the wiggles. This is where my friend Rod came in…

Once decided, I asked Rod if he wouldn’t mind helping me make the change, and he very graciously said yes, telling me to bring the stools to him straight away the following day. After seeing the images of the Aalto 60, Rod agreed it would be an improvement to lose a leg on each stool and quickly went to work. First he measured and marked each stool’s seat, using one set of original holes to guide him. We didn’t measure out 120° angles, instead Rod estimated it would end up being about one foot between the points. This turned out to be almost dead-on. With a 1/16th of an inch adjustment we had evenly balanced lines. Next he created the holes. To control the depth of the drill, Rod attached a piece of black tape around his bit to avoid going through the stool’s seat (you can see it in the picture below left). Clever, no?

Once the new holes were finished, it was time to attach the legs. Rod added some Gorilla Glue before attaching the screws to make sure they’d really hold.

The verdict: three legs are better than four. This was a major improvement. Thanks to Rod!