Click the image to see this photo set on Flickr.

Thanks to the Monday holiday, Tom and I have today, tomorrow, and Monday off. This time last year we were headed to Red Wing, MN; this year we’ll be exploring the Twin Cities. With a couple of pairs of rented skis, the plan to stay in town is shaping up pretty well. We’ve light-breakfasted (on granola), skied, and brunched already. We’ll see where the afternoon takes us….

As I’ll be stuck at work this afternoon, I decided to volunteer on my own this morning to get started on what Common Roots is calling the final harvest. Details below.

It’s been a great season for the Common Roots garden. The garden has already provided 1300 pounds of produce! Frost is predicted soon, so TODAY between 2:30 and 5:30 Common Roots will be harvesting most of what’s left, planting the boulevard strip on Aldrich Ave, and doing some weeding.

Danny would be happy to have as many hands as possible. If you’re interested in helping out, follow Common Roots on Twitter and give a tweet that you’d like to lend a hand, or email info (at) commonrootscafe (dot) com.

Common Roots Cafe
2558 Lyndale Ave S
Minneapolis, MN 55405
(612) 871-2360

Update: “today” above refers to Thursday, October 8, 2009. If you are interested in volunteering in the future, feel free to contact the address mentioned.

Cooking in a modern kitchen is all about control: I have implements for cutting food into pieces of exacting dimensions; I can measure volume and mass;  I apply precise amounts of heat to pans that have been engineered to have efficient and predictable conductivity. Sous vide and molecular gastronomy take control to the extreme.

As much as the modern cook might swear by his coterie of gadgets, for the past few million years people have been making do with decidedly more primitive means:  fire and sticks, maybe a vessel or two. With all the conveniences that abound in the kitchen today, these basic conditions are hard to imagine.

Unless you go camping! While I have my fair share of outdoor gear, my camp kitchen is very basic—I enjoy the challenge of cooking over fire as well as the feeling of connection to those generations past. It helps to go beyond brats and hotdogs—not that there’s anything wrong with brats and hotdogs. Sometimes, though, you need to test just how much you can cook when you’re out on the range with no range.

For example, could I roast a chicken? I just so happened to have obtained a 2.2# young chicken from the Midtown Farmers’ Market (Chase Brook Natural). I was lucky to get a small chicken since the high temperatures of a wood fire would make it tricky to cook a large bird through without scorching it. I decided to butterfly the bird (cut out the backbone and flatten it)—with no good way to form a cover over the fire to trap the heat I wanted to get the bird as flat as possible to ensure even exposure. I rubbed the chicken down with salt, pepper, olive oil and herbes de provence before leaving the safety of our kitchen.

Cooking anything over a campfire calls for coals, not flames. Flames would burn your food. This means you have to plan ahead, starting the fire an hour or so before starting to cook. Playing with fire is one of the best parts of camping, so this really isn’t a bad deal. But if you’re hungry, you’ll wish you had started chopping wood an hour earlier.

Although not the best heat-retainer, aluminum foil works pretty well as a cover, which helps get some of the heat to waft over the top of the chicken while the bottom was getting direct exposure to the heat of the coals. To further improve the speed and evenness of the cooking, I employed the Italian ‘bricked chicken’ technique of weighing the bird down. I’m not so macho as to carry around bricks in my backpack, so I made do with what was available: in this case very nicely squared firewood.

After ten minutes on the cavity-side and twenty more on the breast-side things were looking good. I flipped the bird once more to finish a few stubborn undercooked spots (yes, I bring a Thermapen camping, don’t you?). Then I put it on a tray, tore/hacked it into quarters, and dug in. The heat of the fire resulted in crispy, golden-brown skin with just enough charring to make it attractive looking and smoky tasting.

All of this primitive cooking really brought out the wild beast in me—with the smell of roast chicken I was out of control. And that, after all, is what camping is all about.

At the risk of being un-of the moment, I’d like to share some pictures from our February weekend in Duluth, MN. Allow me to set the record straight… this was the site of our first first picnic, attempted on the shores of Lake Superior and finished with gloved hands inside of a state park shelter with beautiful views of the lake.

If not for the snow, doesn’t this look like a lovely day for a picnic?

I thought it was a nice enough spot, and there were picnic tables. Tom reluctantly unloaded the (unnecessary) cooler.

In the end we got a little too cold and sought refuge. But as I said, we still had a lovely view of the lake. And with our teeth not so chattery and our hands not so cold, we were able to enjoy Tom’s creations a little more: lamb liver and pork terrine, baguette, Trader Joe’s dijon (too dijon for me, just dijon enough for Tom), olive oil, and parsley sprigs. It’s true that I continued eating with my leather gloves on. Tom found his fleece gloves didn’t take well to dipping bread in olive oil; he went bare-handed and was rather cold.

Finally, here’s the view from the shelter along with a few pictures from our stay in Duluth, MN. All images from the picnic were taken at Gooseberry Falls State Park. I’d like to return to Gooseberry Falls in the summertime, if we have a chance, to see the falls in their unfrozen state. Despite the cold, if you like to walk or hike, Duluth and the surrounding areas are a great place to visit. I’m sure it’s even better above freezing.

Martha and I love picnics, probably because they combine some of our (at least, my) favorite things. Those being:

• Eating
• Being outside
• Drinking

As soon as the weather starts to turn to the right side of warm I am pushing to be eating food outside. Actually this year we tried at least one picnic on the wrong side of warm; generally speaking, a picnic in Duluth in February is not a good idea. But last weekend, with temperatures in the 60s here in the Twin Cities, it was time to brave the south shore of Lake Calhoun for the official start of the picnicking season.

Although eventually I’d like to get more adventurous with picnic food, long habit dictates that the focus of any picnic should be bread, cured meat and cheese. With Martha working we needed to have an evening picnic and since it still gets dark sooner than I’d like we needed something simple and fast, i.e. sandwiches. Inspired by countless bocadillos consumed in Spain, I went with Boar’s Head Virginia ham (jamón york rather than jamón), very generic white cheese, and butter, on my standard wild-yeast boule.

The first picnic of the year is a real celebration of spring, and no vegetable says spring more than asparagus. My favorite way to prepare asparagus (and almost any vegetable) is to roast it with olive oil, salt and pepper. I whipped together some mayonnaise to serve as dip. This was the first asparagus I have eaten all year (it’s still out of season here but there comes a point every year where I kind of give up on local produce) and it was everything I wanted it to be. I doubt I could articulate exactly what makes spring asparagus so awesome, but if you’ve had it you hardly need an explanation. 

It was a very simple picnic, but those are usually the best ones. As we set out on our bikes for the lake the all-day blue sky started to cloud up, and the wind sure can blow on the lake, making it was a little too cool to be comfortable. We did not linger after eating. But hey, less than perfect weather is just a part of being outside and what makes picnicking so fun.

And as for the last thing I like about picnics, drinking, it is illegal to consume alcohol in Minneapolis parks. We certainly did not conceal a bottle of wine between our stainless steel water bottles. That would be illegal.

WOW! My place of work became the most exciting place to be ever today. Look who visited me at my window…

Can you identify my new friend?

UPDATE: This is indeed a saw-whet owl. Here’s what I found out from Dr. Phillips, a favorite professor and friend, about our little guy here…

“I think what you’ve got there is a Saw-Whet Owl, a pretty uncommon sighting (although my Peterson’s Bird Guide lists this species as “a very tame little owl”). The last time I saw one it was about 1979…. What were the circumstances when you took this photo?”

Now that I’m not at work, I can write a little more about what happened. I was on the telephone talking to one of the Swedish instructors when a *thump* little owl hit the window. I was already looking out the window and saw it hit “The Posten Window” which is at a right angle to the original glass that the owl hit around maybe 3:30 in the afternoon? At this point, it sort of floated down onto the snow pile gathered around the Christmas tree decorated with lights for the holidays. Still on the phone, the first thing out of my mouth was “Hur säger man ‘owl’ på svenska?” (Turns out the word is uggla.) After finishing the conversation and promising to take pictures for her, I hung up. In the only way I know how, I started to freak out and try to take pictures, alerting lots of colleagues in the meantime. Still, I was walking slowly so that I didn’t startle my new friend. I didn’t want him to leave! I got more daring and starting opening our double-wooden doors just a crack to get pictures without a pane of glass in the way. At some point I decided to call another person on the staff who has helped to rescue birds in my window in the past. Seeing the owl so still, we wanted to make sure he was okay. Our rescuer arrived with gloves etc. to check out the situation. I was able to capture the above photo just before the rescuer got too close with a cellphone camera and scared the little guy away. At least we knew he could still fly! My last sighting of the saw-whet was after his flight into another nearby evergreen. Can you find him?