The most striking feature of Wood Lake Nature Center in Richfield is the wetland that sits at its center. Even in winter — if you want to call this winter — when the pond is iced over and almost everything is dead, it brings a certain thrill of being an explorer or a pirate to venture out on the center’s causeways between the reed-covered islands, your heart jumping a bit when the floating bridge gives just a little under your weight. Martha and I enjoyed our walk there last Sunday and though I did my best to simply take in the natural beauty, it wasn’t long before my mind shifted to what we’d be eating for dinner.

An experienced forager would probably have been able to find a feast amongst the fallen leaves and icy paths, but since I have trouble distinguishing an elm from an oak, I couldn’t take my dinner inspiration directly from the land. Instead, I took it to a more conceptual level, asking, what really is a wetland? A soupy morass, a muddy stew of plants and animals, dotted here and there with islands of reeds that floating on top.

If there’s one thing my culinary education has prepared me for up to this point, it’s the cooking of soupy morasses. I had in mind a chicken stew — duck would have been too cute, let alone turtle — full of onions, carrots, mushrooms and peas and bound together by sauce velouté — chicken stock thickened with a roux. And those fluffy islands floating on top? Biscuits.

From browning the chicken to plopping the biscuit batter on top of the stew and baking it all together, this can all be done in one pot. I used:

Stew

• Olive oil
• 3 chicken leg quarters
• 2 onions, diced
• 4 carrots, peeled and diced
• 1/2# button mushrooms, quartered
• 6 T flour
• 6 T butter
• 4 c chicken stock
• 8 oz frozen peas
• Juice of 1 lemon

Biscuits

• 2 cups white flour
• 1 T baking powder
• 1 1/2 t sugar
• 1 t salt
• 1/2  t baking soda
• 4 T cold butter, cut into cubes
• 1 1/2 c cold buttermilk

Make the Stew: Heat oven to 350ºF. Sprinkle the chicken legs with salt and pepper. In a dutch oven, or a large cast-iron pan if you’re dextrous, heat a little oil over medium-high heat until shimmering. Add the chicken, skin side down, and cook until well-browned. Turn the chicken over and immediately place the vessel in the oven. Roast until chicken registers 170ºF — about 25 minutes. Remove chicken from pan and set on a plate. Drain any accumulated chicken fat and juices to a small bowl.

Place the dutch oven back over medium heat. Pour a few teaspoons of the conserved chicken fat in and add carrots and onions. Cook the vegetables until softened and slightly browned, 10–15 minutes. Remove to a large bowl. Return dutch oven to medium heat and add a few more teaspoons of the chicken fat (if that runs out, olive oil or butter is fine). Add the mushrooms and cook until browned. Add to bowl with the onions and carrots.

When the chicken has cooled, remove the skin and discard (or, if nobody’s looking, eat). Remove the chicken from the bones and shred by hand. Add chicken to bowl with onions, carrots and mushrooms.

Heat butter over medium heat in dutch oven. When foaming subsides, whisk in flour. Cook a minute or two, stirring constantly. Gradually whisk in chicken stock—keep stirring! Bring to a boil then add reserved vegetables and chicken. Turn off the heat, stir in peas and lemon juice, and adjust seasoning to taste with salt and pepper.

Make the Biscuits: Heat the oven to 450ºF. Combine flour, baking powder, sugar, salt and baking soda in the bowl of a food processor and pulse a few times to combine. Drop in butter cubes and pulse until distributed into flour, about eight 1-second pulses. Transfer mixture to a bowl. Fold in buttermilk with a rubber spatula until just mixed.

Using well-floured hands, plop small handfuls of biscuit dough directly on top of stew, starting in the center and working out to the edges.

Bake stew, uncovered, until biscuits are browned, about 25 minutes.

In a world where many people don’t get enough to eat, the fact that Americans waste nearly half their food represents a moral failure. What’s more, with the economic crisis in this country family food budgets are stretched tighter than ever; American families can ill-afford to waste so much. A lot of this waste results from overbuying: stuffing our refrigerators with more food than we can possibly eat before the crisper drawer starts to resemble the cast of Night of the Living Dead. Also responsible, though, are some of the bad — wasteful — habits encouraged by recipe writers that have us discard perfectly good ingredients.

Take chicken skin. Quite a few recipes that call for skin-on chicken parts, browned to contribute to the fond only to remove the skin before continuing with the dish. It makes sense — if the chicken skin was left to stew in the pot it would become flabby and unappetizing, and probably add an unsightly layer of fat. But the implication of the “remove the skin” step is that you should just throw it away. And you’re throwing away a gold mine.

Last night, as I was making a paella with six skin-on chicken thighs, I saved the to-be-discarded skins on a plate. As the paella was steaming, I heated up some schmaltz (saved from a roast chicken a few weeks ago) in a non-stick pan. In went the chicken skin, fried until crisp. Just like that I had the perfect appetizer — think pork rinds, except tastes like chicken — that left me a satisfied and ethical diner.

“They just don’t make cocks like they used to.” So laments just about every modern recipe for coq au vin, the venerable French braise of rooster in wine. The story goes that the dish was developed as a way to use the meat of tough old roosters past their prime; only a long braise could break down the serious connective tissue developed from a lifetime of crowing at the dawn, strutting around the yard, getting in fights — in short, acting like a cock.

Nowadays, the poultry we eat goes from eggshell to belly in as little as six weeks; not enough time to develop muscles flavorful enough to stand up to hearty red wine sauce. Recipes attempt to compensate for modern chicken’s relative blandness with modifications: reducing the braising time, using select parts of the bird. But what if instead of changing the recipe to suit the bird, you found a better bird?

The original concept of coq au vin demands a bird that has lived a hard life, working strength and flavor into its muscles as it struggles every day for mere existence. You could ask your butcher or farmer to track down the oldest, meanest bird in the hen yard and deliver it to your table, but such animals are in short supply and someone might get hurt. Or, you could turn to wild birds — game — that live less sheltered lives than today’s chicken. What about, for example, pheasant, which I happen to have in great supply thanks to the generosity of our friends Johnny & Stacie?

The pheasant in question came into my possession deeply frozen. As I was waiting for it to thaw, I created my braising liquid: I combined the better part of a bottle of red wine (California petit sirah from a certain Trader of value-priced wines) with three cups of chicken broth and brought them to a boil, reducing the mixture to about four cups.

After my pheasant thawed I rinsed the bird, removing any errant feathers and being sure to preserve some of the blood for use as a thickener later. I then cut the bird into quarters. If your bird was shot, as mine was, this is a good time to gently massage the flesh, attempting to locate the small balls of lead that brought about the pheasant’s demise. Don’t worry if you can’t find them, though: what your fingers cannot find your teeth surely will!

With pheasant appropriately divided and seasoned with salt and pepper, I proceeded to render the fat out of some chopped bacon (saving the crispy bacon bits for later of course). I then browned the pheasant pieces in the fat and set them aside. Next in the pot went a handful each of chopped onion and celery, and when that was soft a tablespoon or two of chopped garlic, along with a tablespoon of tomato paste. At this point, quite a bit of dark brown sucs had developed, so I deglazed the pan with some of the braising liquid, scraping up every bit of browned deliciousness. I then returned the pheasant pieces to the pot (along with juices) and poured in the rest of the braising liquid. It all spent the next long while gently simmering, slightly covered, until the meat was tender.

It wouldn’t be coq au vin — well, faisan au vin — without pearl onions and mushrooms. Since braising these along with the bird would turn them into an unrecognizable mush, most recipes call for cooking them separately and mixing them in before serving the dish. While you could brown the mushrooms and onions in a pan, I prefer to roast them; maybe it gives them a deeper flavor, but it’s definitely a lot easier. Just toss cut up mushrooms and onions with olive oil, salt and pepper and roast at 500ºF until they are as brown as you like them.

With pheasant starting to separate from its bones and mushrooms and onions a deep golden brown, I stirred everything together (remember those bacon bits?). If your sauce is looking a bit thin, now’s the time to stir in blood (or cornstarch if you’re squeamish). Over olive oil mashed potatoes, it was a rich and satisfying meal; not least because of the deep flavor of meat that had lived a life before it found its way to my plate. Since I’ve never eaten it I can’t say if it’s any better or worse than a wizened old cock, but I’ll take it over a six week chick any time.

Fellow Twin Citizens are probably familiar with Surly’s CynicAle, a saison/farmhouse style ale available year-round from Surly. Cynic will always occupy a special place in my heart: it was the first Surly beer I ever tried, one adventurous afternoon at Common Roots when I was taken in by its name’s affinity for my natural disposition. Cynic is the most approachable of Surly’s regular offerings, not having the bitter roastiness of Bender or Furious’s hop bludgeoning. This is also one of Martha’s favorite beers, and she is far more discerning than I.

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.

With the feast of our Lady of Guadalupe right around the corner — tomorrow, in fact — I took the opportunity to become acquainted with one of the most important traditions surrounding this sacred festival: tamales. While I’m an avid tamale consumer, I’ve never actually made them. So when I heard the kitchen at Church of the Ascension would be open last Saturday for anyone wanting to learn the art of corn-filled corn husks, I jumped at the chance.

The bill of fare for the evening included three kinds of tamales: chicken, pork and sweet. The chicken tamales were based on pulled chicken in salsa verde — tomatillos, cilantro, onion, etc. Some of the salsa verde also went into the masa, which otherwise consisted of maseca, lard, chicken broth and seasonings. The ingredients for the pork tamales were similar, except in place of salsa verde there was a salsa roja made from a whole lot of red peppers with garlic and herbs, and in place of the pulled chicken, pulled pork. The sweet tamales had the simplest masa of all, flavored only with a bit of sugar and filled with a prune.

The process for making all of the tamales was essentially the same: place a healthy handful of masa near the top and in the center of a presoaked corn husk, being sure to place the masa on the slightly smoother side (a subtle distinction to this güero’s hands). Stick the appropriate filling in the middle of the masa, then roll the edge of the corn husk over the filling, rotating slighly to form a rough cylinder. Fold up the bottom half of the corn husk and set aside.

Sweet tamales were a little different: before adding the masa, a thin layer of red food coloring is painted on the husk. As the tamales sit and later cook, this coloring soaks through the dough and imbues it with a bright pink hue. In addition to coloring the masa, the food coloring dyed my hands a bright-red. My mentors laughingly told me it would come off with a little bleach.

Watching experienced hands making tamales, I was struck by the differing techniques. Some were very meticulous, carefully spreading masa across the interior of the corn husk, laying the filling in a tight row in the center, then rolling everything so that the meat would be perfectly centered in a row of corn masa. Others took a more industrial approach, quickly plopping down a pile of masa before shoving some filling in the center, rolling, folding and starting another. A few rolled their tamales cigar-style,but others simply folded, ending each one with a firm pat. Regional and family variations abound.

I didn’t stay long enough to see the tamales get cooked, but I heard vastly differing claims as to how long they would need to steam, everywhere from a half an hour to four hours. The deciding factor seemed to be how many tamales one was steaming at once.

Where to get these delicious tamales? The ones I helped make were served at the Basilica of Saint Mary last weekend as part of a cooperative effort between the two parishes. But the official feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe is December 12th, and if you want to be at Ascension (1723 Bryant Ave N) at 5:30 AM for Las Mañanitas and 7 AM for mass, your reward will be delicious tamales and hot coffee. And if you’re not a morning person, there will be a fiesta starting around 4 PM. But with the skills I picked up in Ascension’s basement last weekend, I might just make some all for myself.