While watching my alma mater make it into the national championship I was enjoying a treat inspired by many a dinner in Case Hall: Spartan Sausage Bread. It is just regular sausage bread but prepared in a Michigan State cafeteria, or in this case, by a Michigan State fan and alumnus. I’d like to think my making this bread contributed in no small way to tonight’s win, so in the interest of the national championship I wanted to make sure everyone has the recipe for Monday.

Start with a Midwestern-American style pizza dough; I used Peter Reinhart’s from American Pie. Mix together:

• 11 1/4 oz flour
• 1 1/2 T honey
• 1 t salt
• 1 t instant yeast
• 1/8 c vegetable oil
• 1/2 c 2% milk
• 3 oz water

Stir/knead everything together for a few minutes. Allow to rest for five minutes and then knead another two. Divide into two equal balls, place in oiled bags, and refrigerate for as long as possible. You need to have them back on the counter and rising two hours before you want to bake them.

When the dough is ready, pat and roll it out into a large rectangle if you can manage it, but probably more like an oval.

Cover it with 1/2# of your favorite Italian sausage, browned, and shredded cheese (either your favorite cheese or whatever happened to be skulking in the back of your freezer).

At this point, it’s ready to roll. You might want to use a bench scraper to avoid tearing the dough as you roll it into a loaf. When you have done this with both dough balls, hopefully you intuited that you need to have a 375° oven roaring. 

Because this was the Final Four, I decided to get fancy and brush both loaves with egg wash then sprinkle them with salt before baking them for 40 minutes. They came out deep brown:

Now your excitement will be palpable, but they still need to cool. Luckily, a riveting first half kept me glued to the TV so that by the time half time rolled around, my delicious snack was ready.

Go Green! Go White!

On this, the second-to-last Friday of lent (and the last one where you can eat a proper meal), we decided it was high time to check out one of the many fish fries available to us in the Twin Cities. Since it was our first and last for the year we decided to go with the best and headed straight for the Church of St. Albert the Great in Longfellow. We were greeted by the most welcoming of open doors:

After descending a short staircase we were plunged into considerably more insanity:

This is a very popular fish fry! For how crowded it was (and it was extremely crowded) the people at St. Albert’s did an awesome job keeping the line moving and getting everybody fed. It’s obvious they’ve done this before. With two serving lines for added speed it was a matter of ten minutes until we had paid our ten dollars a head and loaded our plates up with fish and starches. Finding four seats together in the room pictured above seemed unlikely, so unfortunately we missed Fr. Joe Gillespie’s lively announcements throughout dinner as we headed up to the gym. But there was bingo!

There is obviously an art here to piling up your plate, and from what I saw some people have refined this art to a far greater extent than I. The food was great, a perfect example of its kind. The fish was fried Alaskan Pollack which was mild and meaty and extra delicious when slathered with copious amounts of tartar sauce. There was also some sort of baked fish, but I was here for a fish fry, damnit. What really shined about this meal was the sides:  the meatless spaghetti sauce managed to be pretty meaty tasting and the cole slaw, which gave me and my dining companions some pause for appearing to be drenched in mayo, ended up being very light and tangy. I wished I had gotten a (much) bigger pile. The low point for the sides was the mashed potatoes; not the worst mashed potatoes I have ever had but they tasted distinctly reconstituted. But that is really a minor quibble in the face of the great food and the extremely friendly and welcoming people serving it. St Albert’s, I’ll see you next lent!

Even being in Egypt for a short time as I was, one can’t avoid encountering fuul. Fava beans show up all over Egyptian cooking (more deliciously, in my opinion, in ta’amiya) but simple fuul is one of the basic staples of the Egyptian diet.  It is Eaten at all times of day, especially at breakfast. In the hotel I stayed at in Alexandria, it was the breakfast served to Egyptians, while foreigners got the Syrian treatment of bread, cheese and fresh vegetables (at this point in the trip the last thing I needed to eat was more beans so I embraced my foreignness).

Fuul is, at heart, a big pot of beans, cooked slow until soft and mashable. There is a actually quite a variety of fava beans available in this world, and in fact fuul is the general Egyptian term for them, but it most commonly refers to this dish of small, round fava beans cooked until they are mushy (fuul medames to be exact). People make this at home in special pots, but I also often saw housewives and children go to local restaurants to have whatever container they happened to have filled up with the stuff.

I’ll concede that that doesn’t look or sound too appetizing. For me, the best part of fuul is not the beans themselves, but all of the toppings: fuul is served with a variety of additions, which each diner can add in at their preference. I assembled a fine passel of ingredients, including lemon (very important), ground cumin, aleppo pepper, pickled beets and rutabagas, minced parsley, salt and pepper and yogurt (the yogurt is more of a Levantine thing as well. I just gravitate that way). Chopped hard-boiled eggs are traditional, but yuck, none of those for me.

Once you’ve added all your fixins’ you mash it all together on your plate and then eat it with plenty of pita bread.

OK, so it’s a little disconcerting to dig into a big pile of beans for breakfast, nor does it bode well for anyone who needs to spend time with you that day in an enclosed space. But if you can get over that, this gives you a really hearty start to your day.

As the gainfully employed among you are no doubt aware, Friday was just two days ago. That meant, for those of us walking in the path of the Lord this Lent, meat was out. Beer, on the other hand, is very much in for Lent. And for those of you who find the idea of drinking during this solemn season a tad irreverent, witness the Paulaner monks of Munich who fast during Lent and Advent, eating no solid food but instead consuming a nutritious beer they brew themselves. That’s religion you can believe in!

The beer for the evening was Lindemans Cuvée René, a gueuze, created by blending young and old lambics and then allowing the resulting beer to undergo a second fermentation in the bottle. For this particuar beer, Garrett Oliver has strong words of praise:

Lindeman’s only traditional lambic shows the brewery’s true mettle in the form of Lindemans Cuvée René. This beer is a hazy deep gold, with orange highlights. The nose is a complex riot of bright and dark aromas–green apples, Seville oranges, lemon zest, damp leaves, wet wool, and fino sherry. On the palate the beer is as tart and bright as fresh lemonade, bone-dry and flintily fruity with an acidic pale sherry finish. Other beers may pay the bills, but René Lindemans likes this beer best, and he named it after himself. Try it with shrimp, crab cakes, or ceviche.

Looking at this beer, it seemed like pretty standard territory for a European-style ale, and I expected the flavor to be generally beery and aley. As soon as this hit my tongue I realized how wrong I was. This beer really tastes nothing like beer we are used to; this was cider, and dry cider at that. As far as I know this gueuze is made with barley like most beers, but if you couldn’t see the label you would most likely mistake it for Strongbow or some kind of very lightly carbonated sherry. I didn’t bother to review Oliver’s tasting notes before opening the bottle so this was a huge surprise, in Martha’s case an unpleasant one. I actually liked this beer once I could accept it for what it was, rather than what I expected.

Although I didn’t look at his tasting notes carefully enough to know what to expect, I did pay attention to Oliver’s pairing notes when planning this meal. Shrimp, crab cakes and ceviche are all mildly ocean flavored and also usually involve some kind of acidic accompaniment (in the case of ceviche the acid is integral), probably to compliment the acidic notes in the beer. With a whole bag of it in the freezer from a previous meal, shrimp was the obvious choice. I decided to make shrimp salad; the lemony dressing would supply the wanted acid. Following the recipe in Cook’s Illustrated #87, I cooked the shrimp until just opaque in a court bouillon and let it cool. My dressing consisted of mayonaisse, lemon juice, tarragon, parsley, scallion, celery and salt and pepper, which I mixed with the chopped shrimp. Served on freshly-baked white buns with a leaf of escarole included for purely aesthetic reasons, this was a nice seafood salad. The shrimp flavor was mild; the strong flavors were the lemon, the onion and the tarragon. Apparently shrimp salad gives people trouble when it is rubbery, but I was very careful about not overcooking the shrimp and this was not a problem.

And the pairing? This was the first time that I felt that Oliver’s pairing idea just didn’t work. The beer was so forceful and strong and that of the shrimp so delicate and subtle that taking a swig of beer after a bite of salad knocked all the salad flavors off the palate. It could be that Oliver had a different shrimp preparation in mind, like fried shrimp, that would give it more oomph, but I could never see this beer working with ceviche. It might work better with a fruit dessert, perhaps even worked into a sauce. With fish, I bet it could stand up to something more assertive like salmon; but it might stand up and fight rather than achieving some kind of ideal harmony. This was a really good beer and a pretty good salad, but together, they did nothing for each other.