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!

Otto von Bismarck once famously compared legislation to sausage-making: either one was better left unseen. As even seemingly minor political questions in the United States become more and more contentious, Bismarck’s advice seems sage—at least when it comes to politics. What about sausage? Having never made sausage before, I couldn’t have told you. But I did spend my undergraduate career studying politics; if Bismarck’s comparison was apt then surely my knowledge of politics would make for easy sausage-making. As it turns out, the processes are remarkably similar.

Step 1: Ignore all the Experts

The world is filled with people who devote their lives to studying complex problems for no other reason than a desire to solve them. As a lawmaker, it’s absolutely paramount to ignore these people—after all, God chose you for office, not them. It goes the same with sausage; there are cookbooks in the local bookstore and library filled with sausage recipes: there are probably even some on my own bookshelf. The Internet gives me access to thousands of sausage recipes developed by competent cooks with years of experience making sausage. But what do they know? I went rogue and left the cookbooks on the shelves.

Step 2: Misunderstand the Situation

The background for this sausage-making session is this: last winter, my friend Shawn decided to become a vegetarian. Consequently, his freezer full of game—provided by his avid hunter stepfather—was of no use to him. And so one cold winter in the parking lot of Stub & Herb’s, Shawn provided us with a foam cooler full of mostly unlabeled frozen bags that he identified as duck, venison and goose—unfortunately I neglected to carefully remember which was which.

After the better part of a year dipping into this bounty for feasts of wild game, I was down to one large bag of unidentified meat. Pulling it out of the freezer I was pretty sure I remembered that this bag contained goose, but as days of gradual thawing in the refrigerator passed I became less confident. When sausage day came I had to rely on the same thing so many of our elected officials use every day: research? Hah, who has the time? I went with my gut. Looking at the deep red color, I took a deep whiff of the meat and decided with confidence that this was, without a doubt, venison.

Two weeks later I can say with equal confidence that the meat was definitely goose.

Step 3: Break it into Manageable Parts

The issues brought before our congresses are often hopelessly immense, affecting great segments of society. Faced with such a situation, many of us would be paralyzed: how can we change things when so many people will be hurt, even if many more benefit? But rather than freeze in the face of the immensity of their task, our august leaders know the best way to tackle a complex issue is to break it into smaller, easier-to-understand titles, sections, subtitles, subsections, addenda, clauses and footnotes. Or, when making sausage, cut the meat into manageable 1″ chunks. Putting them in the freezer for thirty minutes helps firm them.

Step 4: Add a lot of Extra Stuff

One and a half pounds of half-frozen chunks of mystery meat hardly sounds appetizing, nor are, in most cases, bills brought before Congress in their original form particularly palatable. Luckily, it’s easy to add in enough enticements to make even the worst stinker of a bill passable, or the lowest grade of soon-to-rot meat into a delicious hot dog. Passing a bill to cut Medicare benefits? Throw in a rider to insure children—everybody loves kids! Funding the military? Might as well build an ethanol plant back home; it’s a lot of money either way. Sausage-making is a little more constrained here since the adjuncts have to somehow go with the meat you are using, rather than just tossing in any old thing. For my goose (that I thought was venison) I added 44 grams of garlic and onion, 8 grams of black pepper, 3 grams of juniper berries and 15 grams of salt (NB: this sausage was over-seasoned, in the future I’ll cut some of the pepper and juniper).

Incidentally if I had added some pork it not only would have improved the sausage it would also have made the metaphor behind the post all the more fitting.

Step 5:  Mangle it Beyond Recognition

With the ingredients assembled, all that remains is to introduce your bill to the various committees, subcommittees, sub-subcommittees, caucuses, interest groups and lobbyists who will happily amend, rewrite and otherwise modify it. The process in sausage-making is much simpler—toss everything in a meat grinder running at full tilt—but achieves the same result.

This was certainly the step that Bismarck had in mind when he warned against observing these processes; in either case it ain’t pretty.

Step 6: Package It

All that grinding and chopping is sure to leave you with a mess and more than a little blood on your hands. The same is true in sausage-making. Few would be excited to eat the loose-meat slop that exits the grinder—what’s needed is a little salesmanship. Enter the sausage-casing: a way to take all those sundry bits and package them into an appealing cylinder that will plump as it cooks. Although it is important when filling sausage casing to leave enough space to be able to twist off the links, when attempting to pass legislation it is most important that the text be printed on as few pages as possible, lest your opponents gain a valuable prop.

Step 7: Ram it Down their Throats

The sausages are stuffed, the pages are all written and the votes taken, the only thing that remains is to foist your work on an unsuspecting public or, to borrow a phrase from some of our more enlightened contemporary political philosophers, to “ram it down their throats.” Of course, if you’ve done a good job obscuring the whole sausage-making process from your diners’ eyes, this will be less necessary as they’ll be allured by the aromas and ignorant of all the necessary gore. This is easy enough to achieve in a home kitchen—just have your guests arrive well after the meat grinder is cleaned up and put away.

The Midtown Farmers Market has so many great prepared food vendors this year: some old stalwarts, some newcomers, but always enough to offer a lively and interesting blend of ready to eat food for at market consumption. Local media have taken notice too; it seems every week there’s a new story on a vendor who sells at Midtown: The Magic Bus Cafe in Minnesota Monthly, Dandelion Kitchen in the City Pages, or the Heavy Table’s roundup of five flavors of Midtown.

While the latter piece was interesting in its own right, what really got my attention was the comments; particularly, those by Brian Ames of Ames Farm questioning how big a role non-producer vendors should play in a market. Or rather answering, “a heavy ratio of immediately consumable foods (ICF’s) to growers/producers at farmers markets is detrimental to farmers and growers in my view.” He goes on to argue that sales made to ICFs take dollars that could be going to farmers/producers.

Two years ago, when I started shopping at Midtown — the first farmers market I’ve regularly shopped at — I would have been on the same page with Mr. Ames when it comes to non-grower vendors; let the yuppies get their coffee and tamales, I was there to buy produce. Over the course of the past couple of years, though, I’ve come to appreciate — and befriend — sellers of ICFs. As some of the comments in response to Ames point out, they are part of a symbiotic relationship with the growers that helps to produce a farmers market experience that is unique — not just another grocery store.

In spite of the important role played by the food trucks, tents and taxis, I agree with Ames in as much as whatever other amenities they offer, a farmers market should be primarily about the farmers. Last year I made a serious effort to highlight the farmers — or at least their fruits — on this blog with weekly posts featuring the farmers market haul. I’ve cut back on those this year since it got a little boring for me (and perhaps for you?). But don’t take my silence to mean the farmers of Midtown aren’t weekly providing delicious produce; they continue to keep my basket and eventually my belly full of locally grown vegetables.

One producer I’ve been especially happy with is new this year: Gardens of Eagan. My love affair started when, on the first market day when all I was expecting was opening festivities and canned goods, they had a table full of strawberries. Not just any strawberries, either, but strawberries that were the sweetest I had ever tasted: ideal strawberries. I rode that wave for the month or so it lasted, and have also enjoyed various interesting lettuces and kale from the Gardens. Then last week, as I was in line to buy tomatoes (some of the first of the year), Gardens of Eagan’s Jennifer Nelson insisted I try a sample of their watermelon. Here again, the same experience as with the strawberries; I was tasting a fruit like no other I had tasted before, but that tasted like the fruit should taste. I hadn’t planned to buy a watermelon this week, and didn’t really have a solid plan for carrying it home on my bike, but after that one bite of perfect watermelon I didn’t have much choice but to buy one.

Midtown vendors have also been quick to supply the season’s first sweet corn: I bought half a dozen ears from Pflaum Farms two weeks ago, and last week tried the corn grown by Carmen of Peter’s Pumpkins and Carmen’s Corn. It’s still a little early for sweet corn — the flavor is not quite at its peak – but after enduring a whole winter with nothing but the frozen stuff, all these ears were welcome relief.

And of course beyond the sexy fruit, tomatoes and corn there is the regular mid-summer stuff like potatoes, summer squash, eggplant, peppers, cucumbers, herbs, lettuces, greens, onions; basically any vegetable that grows in this climate is growing now. This is the best time to shop at the farmers market: no mania or cult-like commitment required — the vegetables sell themselves. And, what’s more, you can also get a great breakfast from one of the many sellers of immediately consumable foods!