Finally (!) Tom bought a new bike this past Saturday after visiting each of the two Hub Bike Coop locations in Minneapolis. With a bit of deliberation between the Surly Cross Check at the LHT, Tom decided on the Surly Long Haul Trucker in Truckaccino (the color of cappuccino—only truck-like). Knowing that a new bike was coming, I’d given Tom a Leonardo Single-Bike Rack & Da Vinci Tire Tray having written about it here. And, since I received a Christmas wish of my own from my father, I was able to install it right away with proper anchors and all. Truckaccino fits in pretty nicely in our living room, I have to say. This weekend we’ll be heading back to the Hub to outfit the new bike with racks worthy of Midtown Farmers Market produce come May.

In other cycling news, Google released Biking Directions for Google Maps today. Biking Directions have been a long time coming—we can’t wait to plan a long ride. Lastly, I couldn’t resist sharing the Minneapolis trio of 2&21’s lated project posted yesterday under “Forget Lakes. We got bikes”. Full of facts on “what keeps bikers rolling through Minneapolis,” it’s well worth a look.

You may have heard that much Italian cuisine was born out of deep poverty, but would you believe they go so far as to eat mouse tails? Mouse tails made from pasta, that is. Code di topo are another gem from Oretta Zanini de Vita’s Encyclopedia of Pasta.

Although not made from actual mouse tails, this simple pasta shape is a testament to economy: the dough consists of only flour and water. Usually, I make pasta using flour, eggs and water in the food processor, pulsing the flour before adding the eggs and just enough water to bring everything together in a ball. I was glad to discover that this technique — using the food processor — works just as well omitting the eggs, slowly adding water until the dough coalesces. As with egg pasta, pasta made this way needs to rest for a half hour or so to allow the gluten to relax and make the dough workable.

The formation of the code was simple — probably a great activity for young helpers. Pinching off a piece of dough the size of a walnut, one simply rolls the dough out into a thin thread with one end tapered to look like  a mouse’s tail. The pasta should dry slightly on a kitchen towel before boiling it al dente.

Traditionally, this pasta is served with potatoes — a concept I couldn’t quite get my head around — but in Rovere, it is served in a simple sauce of garlic, chilis, olive oil and walnuts. This is one of my favorite pasta sauces, all the more so because I usually have all of those ingredients on hand. And that’s a good thing, since by the time you’ve decided to feast on mouse tails, you’ve pretty much ruled out going to the store.

Saint Albert was almost not a saint at all, thanks to the discovery during his beatification process of extensive studies of the occult: black magic. Among his writings on the subject was found a recipe for a depilatory potion that required burning a large frog whole and mixing the ashes with water then spreading the mixture on the to-be-hairless area. In the end though, Albert did earn his sainthood and luckily for us the Catholic parish in Seward bearing his name hasn’t taken any cooking cues from their patron; instead of burning it they prepare some of the finest fried and baked fish available for Lent, served for your convenience in two fast-moving lines. It’s the church fish-fry of the season and after the great time we had last year, Martha and I were not going to miss it.

Last year, we came on the last Friday of the Fish Fry’s operation, and it was crowded: line-wrapping-all-the-way-around-the-room crowded. This year we were a little more on the ball and showed up the second Friday of Lent. The room was certainly still full, but the line was not nearly as long and we were able to purchase our tickets ($10 for adults) and get our fish and sides in short order. So my advice to anyone thinking of visiting the great Saint Albert’s but intent on skipping the line is to get there sooner than later, before people realize Lent is almost over. Then again, waiting in line can be pretty fun; there are lots of interesting people to talk to.

The Catholic church sometimes gets a bad rep for being conservative, reactionary, even regressive. But it’s also rarely fair to judge individual parishes by the policy of the church as a whole, and without intending to direct any specific critcisms of St. Albert’s I’d like to commend them for their very environmentally-friendly reusable ticket system. I’d like to think I got the same ticket as last year!

There are a lot of reasons to make it down to Saint Albert’s for the fish fry: the always friendly volunteers who do everything from serving your food to clearing your plate, the irrepressible wit and humor of Fr. Joe Gillespie who works the crowd for the evening, microphone in hand, the bingo. But ultimately a fish fry is about the food. Given how much I enjoyed it last year, I was glad to see that the menu was unchanged from last year: in order there was: cheesy mashed potatoes, fried Alaskan Pollack, baked Alaskan Pollack, meatless spaghetti, cole slaw, rolls and of course tartar sauce and lemon wedges. Immediately after the savory line there’s a whole table of desserts to tempt you, but I’d recommend maintaining one free hand to pick up a glass of lemonade on your way to find a seat. You can always go back for dessert. And more fish.

The food prompted no complaints from me: who can object to lemon spritzed fried fish with tartar sauce? As with last year, though, the standouts were the sides; particularly, the meatless spaghetti which from its appearance you would expect to be as saccharine as any jar of Ragú but is actually somehow meaty and deeply flavored. I don’t know if this sauce is some secret church recipe or if it just comes out of a different can than I was expecting. Maybe it’s black magic. Frankly I don’t want to know. I just know I like it.

With two years under our belts at Saint Albert the Great’s, we’re starting to feel like regulars (though I can tell we’d need quite a few more years to meet others’ expectations for that title). Given how little time we spent in line this year, we might just be back before Easter. We’ll definitely be back next year, when I’m hoping for the addition of St. Albert’s famous blackened frogs’ legs to the food on offer. Does frog count as meat?

As much as I love to cook, I am really not a fan of kitchen gadgets. This is partially out of necessity; our very small kitchen doesn’t have room to store every species of specialized tool for making every conceivable cooking task a breeze. I also have a deep aversion to spending money, so when I walk into the local kitchen store whatever desire I feel is quickly snuffed out by a look at the prices. All that said, I can’t pass up a deal, so when Martha came home from some thrift-shopping with news of old-fashioned, hand-cranked meat grinders for the ridiculous price of $2.00, I made a quick decision: it was time to start grinding my own meat.

“But Tom,” you say, “it’s the twenty-first century. You don’t have to grind your own meat anymore! You can buy it ground in nice little packages from your local grocery. You can even get it pre-pattied for all your hamburger needs!” True, but then how would I get two dollars worth out of this grinder? Besides, there are some real advantages to grinding meat at home. If you’re worried about E. Coli,  grinding in small batches means less chance of mixing in contaminated meat (this always remains a possibility, of course). More importantly for me, by grinding at home I can control what beef gets ground. Specifically, I can grind in a high percentage of beefy, marbled short-ribs. Given the variety of beef cuts available, a grinder can take you way beyond the grocery store options of chuck or sirloin.

Although the pitted cast iron surfaces, wooden handle, and the fact that it was a consumer product made in the USA all suggested to me that my thrift store grinder was quite old, it appears that it was actually in production recently enough to be sold new over the Internet. My particular model was either old and neglected or just neglected enough to require vigorous a scrubbing down.

With a mind to that scrubbing, I fired up the Google to learn about meat grinder care and was surprised and a little disappointed that my meat grinder was actually a Food Chopper — a kind of proto-food processor. The difference seems to be that while meat grinder usually extrude the grind through perforated disks, the Universal Model 2 Food Grinder passes the food through a kind of toothed wheel that screws on to the end of the unit. Different tooth sizes and spacings are used to produce different sized chops. But you can in fact grind meat with a food processor (chill cubes in freezer 30 minutes then pulse), so it stands to reason that its predecessor would work well enough. I set about cleaning it anyway.

With all the parts cleaned and dried, I was excited to cube my beef and get to the business of grinding. For simplicity’s sake I planned to make hamburgers using a beef blend that has worked in the past: about 70% beef short ribs and 30% chuck. For the beef to be caught by the augur of the Universal Model 2, I cut it into 1″ chunks.

The grinding process went very smoothly; I was able to process the 1.5# of beef in under 5 minutes. I did notice two apparent flaws in the design: 1.) the cutting wheel is positioned too close over the base of the grinder, making it difficult to place any kind of tray in a spot where it will collect all of the ground meat and 2.) as I was grinding, I started to notice blood dripping onto the floor out of the place where the handle attached to the augur. Martha acted quickly, putting a plate down to protect our floor, but it seems to me that any blood that is squeezed out by the action of the grinder is blood that’s not going to be making your hamburgers juicy. Still, for a pound and a half of meat, I think we only lost a teaspoon of blood; hardly earth-shattering. This might be remedied in the future by remembering to chill the meat in the freezer before grinding to firm it up. The grind produced by the larger cutting wheel was suitable for hamburgers, though I might have liked it a bit coarser.

How were the burgers? They were good — how could anything involving that much short-rib go wrong? I was pleased not to notice any metallic taste from flaking off rust — we must have done a good enough job scrubbing. Ideally, I would like to do a blind taste-test involving store-ground beef, beef ground in a food processor and the Universal. I am also excited to use the grinder in other applications, especially revisiting my old friend the terrine. Now I just have to figure out where I’m going to put the thing.

When it comes to Spanish bar food, I don’t need much more than a plate full of jamón serrano to accompany a few cañas of beer. But for Martha, there is no better tapa than the croqueta: a deep fried little log of gooey delight (beer doesn’t hurt here either). Always looking for ways to please, and not exactly hating croquetas either, I recently fried up a couple of batches using two different recipes for Martha’s and my own enjoyment.

I made my first batch of croquetas using the classic technique (my base recipe came from Penelope Casa’s Delicioso: The Regional Cooking of Spain). The first step is to make a very thick bechamel: my roux consisted of 6 tablespoons of olive oil and ¾ cup of flour to which I added 2 cups of milk over medium heat. In preparing the bechamel I learned that a lumpy roux that just won’t break up can be remedied with the magic of a food processor, a most satisfying action after 5 minutes of uselessly hunting lumps with a whisk.

Lots of fillings can go in croquetas, but salt cod and cheese are two very popular options. Since we were fresh out of salt cod, I decided to go the cheese route. Obviously, a Spanish cheese  would have been appropriate, but I was not interested in going to the store, so instead I folded a handful of cheap provolone into my cooked sauce with salt and pepper for good measure.

As I mentioned earlier, croquetas are shaped like small logs. But how to give shape to liquid bechamel sauce? The answer is to chill it. Most recipes seem to recommend chilling the bechamel overnight before proceeding. Crunched for time, I got away with just an hour and a half of chilling.

After the bechamel was cold enough to work, I formed pinches of it into cylinders and placed them on a plate. Then, it was time to bread: separate dishes of flour, eggs, and bread crumbs and a fanatical observance of “wet hand, dry hand” rule make this a clean and efficient process. As the croquetas were breaded I placed them on a sheet pan to wait for their date with destiny—a pot full of 350°F oil.

Croquetas don’t take long to fry, just a few minutes until the breading is golden. If they sit in the oil too long, there’s a risk of the filling exploding out of the breading. They are best eaten very hot, washed down with the aforementioned beer.

We also enjoyed a few other Spanish standards: tortilla española, jamón (ok, prosciutto, but what can you do?) and aged goat cheese.

Making these must have given me the croqueta bug, because just over a week later I was hauling out the oil again for another round. This time, though, I used a recipe from the New York Times that was less traditional: rather than a bechamel, these croquetas were based on leftover mashed potatoes (the recipe was originally published in anticipation of Thanksgiving leftovers). It happened that I had a large amount of mashed potatoes left over from Martha’s birthday and this recipe sitting on my desktop for the past year and a half; it was a croqueta perfect storm, really. I made the recipe as described in the Times, again substituting prosciutto for jamón (but really, there is no substitute).

If using leftover mashed potatoes seems too convenient and not a little questionable to you, your suspicions are well-warranted. These croquetas had good flavors and were a good way to use up leftovers, but the heavy mashed potatoes just can’t compete with gooey, creamy fried béchamel. All considerations of time and convenience aside, I’d take traditional croquetas every time. But in any case, there’s plenty of room in our lives for all kinds of croquetas.

And therein lies the real joy of making croquetas at home: if you order them in a restaurant, you can expect three to five to a plate accompanied by a crazy urge to order more. Too much of this can break the bank. At home, relatively cheap ingredients are transformed into enough fried goodness to satiate anybody’s croqueta cravings.

Not exactly my favorite holiday, but I’ll take any excuse to bust out my heart-shaped molds!

The season at the Midtown Farmers Market officially ended in October, though some obsessive hoarding and a special winter market before Thanksgiving kept us supplied with fresh local produce into the beginnings of winter. Eventually though, we ate our way through our fresh supplies, leaving only a few cans of pickles and tomato sauce as well as some increasingly questionable ’storage’ shallots. For some reason — and that reason might very well have been a severe case of squash fatigue — there was one fresh vegetable that just wouldn’t go away: a Delicata squash that spent month after month untouched in our fruit bowl. That squash served as a reminder of the warmer, sunnier days of fall as we fought our daily battle of survival in the harsh Minnesota winter.

Eventually, though, the squash was due to meet its end, and there seemed no more appropriate time than our feast in celebration of Martha’s birthday. Cutting into our friend the squash — easily four months after it had been picked in mid-October — I was surprised at how well it had weathered the winter. It was certainly a bit dried out compared to what it would have been in the fall — especially the delicate threads on the inside — but the flesh was still firm and moist. I cut the squash cross-wise into rings, tossed them with olive oil, salt and pepper, and roasted them for twenty minutes. The flavor was as good as ever: sweet and tasting of pumpkins. Providing delicious local flavors in the dead of February, it’s enough to make one not revile the very thought of squash.

But, sadly, that is it for our fresh vegetables from Midtown; we’ll have to wait until the market starts to hit its stride again in late May before we can enjoy such treats  again.

For those of you not so lucky as to live within Surly’s distribution range, Cynic is a very full-flavored ale; as the beer hits the tongue it fills one’s mouth with bananas and cloves and maybe a hint of vanilla. As the initial banana blast dies down, a solid malty backbone makes itself known and and other spices appear, most notably cinnamon, which burns slightly. As the beer finishes, it snaps with some hop dryness, but this is by no means a hoppy beer. Compared to other saisons, Cynic is — like many of Surly’s beers — much bigger; the banana and spice flavors are prominent on the tongue and easy to identify, and the malt and hops are distinct and recognizable.

In the past when I have done pairings on this blog I generally planned them pretty carefully: starting from Garrett Oliver’s masterful Brewmaster’s Table I would pick a beer I could  find locally and plan to make whatever food Oliver suggested to go with it. Tonight’s pairing, however, was pure serendipity. On a recent trip to The Four Firkins, Martha insisted that we pick up a four-pack of Cynic. I was already planning on making Moroccan Chicken, a culturally inauthentic but nevertheless tasty recipe from Cook’s Illustrated. As I got to thinking about the richly spiced chicken in fragrant broth and the four cans of spicy, fragrant Cynic sitting in my fridge something clicked and a pairing was born.

Moroccan chicken — an adaptation of traditional Moroccan tagines for American kitchens — is made by cutting a whole chicken into eight pieces (a task I achieved effortlessly with my new boning knife — my latest kitchen obsession) and browning them in olive oil. Next, onions are sautéed with a few pieces of lemon peel, then garlic, paprika, cumin, cayenne, coriander and cinnamon go in the pot. Broth and honey are added to deglaze and form a braising liquid, then the chicken thighs and legs are added in, followed by large discs of carrot and the chicken breasts. The whole thing simmers away for 15 minutes, at which point the chicken is removed and olives are added. After five minutes of boiling to thicken the sauce, the chicken returns  to the pot accompanied by cilantro, lemon juice, and a paste of lemon zest and garlic. The result is a dish of strong spice and garlic, with notes of citrus and sweetness from carrots and honey balanced by bitter olives. Served over cous cous it is very satisfying, warming fare that takes little time to prepare. Doesn’t get much better than that.

Doesn’t get much better, that is, unless you happen to have a can of Cynic on hand. At this point I had built the pairing up so much in my mind that there wasn’t much chance I wouldn’t say it worked, but honestly — honestly! — this was a great combination. At the most basic level, any food that is spicy (spicy-hot) is great with beer as the beer’s carbonation helps lift the burn from your tongue, readying your palate for more food. But the specific spice flavors in Cynic — especially the cinnamon — were matched by those in the stew in such a way that they blended together beautifully, a seamless union of drink and food. The citrus in the dish, which is subtle and muted, was nicely picked up by the citrusy hops present at the end of a drink of Cynic; as the hops hit, they provided an invitation to explore the citrus in the stew more fully. So too the hops’ bitterness countered the sweetness of honey and carrots in the stew.

When pairing food and beer, selecting similar flavor profiles can be risky since the flavors in one might overpower or distort the same flavors in the other. But in the case of Surly Cynic and Moroccan Chicken, the flavors were in near perfect proportion to each other; each bite of this stew made me want another drink of Cynic, each drink of Cynic another bite of stew.

As January comes to a close, it’s really starting to feel like 2010. This weekend, while less activity filled than, say, our cross country ski marathon, was well enjoyed. On Saturday morning I was inspired by Bon Appétite to prepare crêpes for breakfast. With only one so bad it had to go straight to the trash (that was #3, one and two came out just fine), I am no longer afraid of this thin egg pancake with a French accent. Bon Appétite may be right, “crêpes are a cinch, with no special… pan required.” We enjoyed ours with a mix of cheeses inside (gruyère was the clear favorite) along with chopped cilantro and green onions and the occasional splash of chipotle Tabasco. If you’d like to try your hand at the recipe, hop over to Bon Appétite’s website. Don’t worry if you don’t have buckwheat at home; not about to run out on a Saturday morning, I used a mix of rye and whole wheat flours instead.

Martha: café con leche, largo de leche (left). Tom: tinto (right).

See you in February!

In mid-nineteenth century Italy, as power passed from one faction to another fighting to control the unification of the country, many lower-class people — ever ignored by political elites — resorted to brigantaggio, or brigandage, both as a means of securing a living and a form of resistance against occupiers foreign and domestic. In the United States today, the brevity of the Wikipedia article alone suggests the extent to which this movement has been forgotten. But where memory fades, food can preserve, and as we are talking about Italy it is only appropriate that the memory of the brigantaggio be preserved in its very own pasta shape: cappellacci dei briganti (brigands’ hats).

I discovered this shape while browsing through Oretta Zanini de Vita’s excellent Encyclopedia of Pasta, published last year in English by the University of California Press, which I received from Martha for Christmas. After introductory essays covering the significance of pasta in Italy and the methodology of her research, Zanini jumps into a comprehensive, alphabetically organized listing of pasta shapes, both home and factory-made. Many of the descriptions are accompanied by sketches, although as this is not a cookbook — something the author and translator both insist upon — the level of detail provided is generally insufficient to reproduce the pasta at home. Cappellacci dei briganti did feature a sketch, however, as well as the following description of how to make them:

The flour is sifted onto a wooden board and kneaded long and vigorously with a few eggs, water, and salt. The dough, which should be firm and smooth, is left to rest, then rolled out with a rolling pin into a very thin sheet. An inverted liqueur glass is used to cut small disks from the sheet. Each disk is wrapped into a cone around the tip of an index finger and the edge sealed, then one side is folded back like the brim of a hat. They are air dried and then boiled in plenty of salted water. (64)

Between the distinctive sketch and the intriguing history, I couldn’t help but try to make some brigands’ hats at home.

I started by making my all-purpose pasta dough, using a technique from Cook’s Illustrated. First, I put two cups of flour in the food processor and pulsed it a few times to distribute the flour evenly. I then added three eggs and allowed the machine to run until the mixture was granulated. To finish the dough I add water teaspoon by teaspoon with the processor on until it comes together in a single mass. Then I kneaded the dough a few times, shaped it into a ball, and let it rest in the refrigerator for a half hour. I suspect this method, utilizing a food processor instead of a hundred-year-old flour-soaked board, would be upsetting to Zanini and her sources, but it’s a clean and fast way to produce reliable pasta dough.

When the dough had rested long enough to be workable, it was ready to be divided in quarters and passed through the pasta machine (another gift from Martha, from a few years ago). Using a small wine glass, I cut circles out of the thin sheets of pasta.

The next step, which sounded so easy in the description from the Encylcopedia, required quite a bit of trial and error. Eventually I figured out exactly where to put my index finger — slightly off from the center to get a slanted cone — and how much of the dough needed to be folded over itself in a triangle to form the cone. This is definitely a place where fifty years of pasta-making experience — as opposed to 5 minutes of reading a book — would have paid off.

With a slightly off-center cone to work with, folding the brim of the hat was more straight-forward. The long part of the cone is simply folded up. The only trick to this was initiating the folds with the piece of pasta upside-down; trying to do it from the side resulted in a slightly crushed hat. Although I suppose in the line of duty, a brigand’s hat might get a little out of sorts.

After using all my dough to fill two sheet pans with hats, I boiled them for just under five minutes.

Anybody a little familiar with the Italian ways of pasta knows that at least as important as its shape is the sauce it’s served with. For cappellacci, nothing but a lamb ragú will do. Luckily, Clancey’s was able to provide a beautiful piece of lamb for a slow braise in a sauce consisting mainly of tomatoes canned during the height of the season last August — which tasted mercifully of summer and not botulism.

Though the brigands of Italy are long defeated and perhaps even forgotten, their hats — transformed into pasta and covered in a delicious ragú — deserve to live on.