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.

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.

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 Рtransformed into pasta and covered in a delicious rag̼ Рdeserve to live on.