St. Paddy's Day

Shepherd's Pie and a Guinness at Paddy Coyne's for St. Patrick's Day. I love shepherd's pie so much I ditched the corned beef and cabbage. At the end I threw some salt on my Guinness just to see how that tastes - it was really good! This pub was crazy wild.

The funny thing is I don't have a drop of Irish blood in me. Whattya gonna do?

A Taste of Trees

Washington State’s The Herbfarm, a top-rated restaurant, is always on the delicious side of eating discoveries. They have an interesting take on trees as “…the unheralded workhorses of the food world” giving with their fruits and nuts, but also “flavors from their flowers, saps, berries, seeds, bark, leaves, needles, and even smoke.” Herbs, mushrooms and truffles grow under them and the moon smiles over them.

The dinner series begins February 17 with nine courses sequenced for flavor and paired with wine. What’s to eat? There are more things at http://www.theherbfarm.com, but check out these these courses from the menu:

• Sumac-Crusted Pacific Albacore Tuna, Parsnip Cream & Oregon Olive Oil, Fennel, Apple, Radish, and Flat Leaf Parsley
Paired with 2010 Adelsheim Auxerrois, Ribbon Springs Vineyard, Oregon

• Charcoal-Grilled Saddle of Lamb, Rosemary-Farina Cake, Sausage of Wild Black Trumpet Mushrooms and Lamb, Slow-Roasted Onions, and Brown Butter-Birch Tree Syrup Sauce
Paired with 2007 Rôtie Cellars, Southern Rhône Blend, Washington

• Woodinville Whiskey Mini Savarin with Walnut Butter, Bay-Walnut Cream, Walnut “Sand,” Whiskey Snap Tuile & Salted-Big Leaf Maple Syrup Ice Cream

A Rocket Scientist's Molasses Cookies

What does a rocket scientist know about baking cookies? When Anya Stettler (one of the few rocket scientists I know) pulled these molasses cookies out of the oven, they looked perfect, smelled warm and spicy and were soulful, tender and full of buttery, sugary, molasses-y flavor. I grabbed a couple of them and asked how she did it.

She has spent her life with math, chemistry and physics and there was never any hint she baked wonderfully, but there was no ignoring those cookies on the plate. I have spent my life baking cookies and while mine taste good sometimes they look like I dropped them on the floor.

She started baking in the last few years and pretty much mastered it right away. Her scientific training let me in on why her cookies are so good.

Her big secret is that she uses a precise recipe, follows directions (who would ever think that would work?), pulls equal blops of cookie dough from the bowl, then thoughtfully rolls them into perfect balls and sets them on the baking sheet. Most people approximate the ingredient amounts in recipes, substitute this for that, flop things onto cooking vessels and might not know that glass measuring cups are for liquid and metal/plastic are for dry ingredients (they measure differently).

Because her mom is gluten intolerant, Anya made the smaller cookies on the plate with a gluten-free baking mix so she wouldn’t be left out.

Twain's Feast: My New Favorite Book

We’re all looking for the next good read and last week I got a review copy of Twain’s Feast, absolutely a good read. Andrew Beahrs, an anthropologist and writer, takes a look at foods loved by Mark Twain and rediscovers and eats them in their natural locales. It’s travel, history, food and locavor-osity all mixed into one book that keeps you mesmerized with its effortless yarn spinning.

Beahrs doesn’t write with a big ego or with annoying fake bravado, and he doesn’t smile at everything he eats and repeat ‘good stuff’ or ‘delicious’ – when it’s bad he says so and in a way that’ll make you laugh.

Feeling romantic about stewing raccoons? Beahrs tells of Coon Suppers in Gillett, Arkansas where the smell of the animal’s fat made him nauseous as it bubbled in the outdoor cooking pots. Dogs won’t even eat raccoon fat. At the supper Beahrs attended, a local nodded at the kettles of coon stew and said, “Yeah, we’re gonna eat real well but it won’t be coming out of there.”

Slow cooking with onions and vegetables eventually tamed the beastly flavor and yesterday in Seattle (one leg of his book tour) Beahrs said the flavor was hard to discern and compared the texture of slow-cooked raccoon to pot roast, which for some may be as close as they get to trying raccoon stew.

What did he like? When he tried Olympia oysters grown by Washington’s Taylor Shellfish it put him in Twain’s shoes. “Those Oly’s were a Twain moment for me.” Sheepshead fish in New Orleans and maple syrup made his like list too, though he guessed he’ll never know what prairie chicken tastes like (a Twain favorite) because they are almost extinct now.

“Twain appreciated the best of what was there,” says Beahrs, “and when something was good he knew it.” Beahrs shares that with Twain and between the two of them this book is food writing at its very best.

Moonshine and Everclear Taste Test

I don't know exactly why I bought the corn whiskey. I was curious about moonshine, and it's moonshine corn whiskey made by Junior Johnson, a Nascar driver whose family has been in the moonshine business for a long time. This bottle is legal for some reason, and a friend told me it tastes much better than the moonshone he drank as a kid in Aberdeen, Washington.

The Everclear is something I keep around to make holiday fruit explosions and bitters, and it's fun to offer to people at a party.

The taste test between these two revealed:

• The corn whiskey was an abhorrence. Cleaning chemical nose, blistering on the palate and with a faint cheap whiskey note. It made the Everclear look good.


• The Everclear was wild tasting, with an acid nose, incinerating on the palate and with no flavor notes at all. From here on out I'm only using it with blueberries and kiwi.

I will be looking for other ways to get rid of the corn whiskey, and right now it is in the running for a birthday gift for my brother, maybe made into sweet jelly for his morning toast.

Apple Clafouti - a Recipe from a French Girl

Apples are bliss for me. I buy a box or two of rose-and-gold farm apples in the fall, mixing up the varieties as much as I can. Then I have lots for thick apple pies, almond hazelnut crisps, rich homemade applesauce and this clafouti. I can make an apple something at the drop of a hat.

This clafouti recipe is an old French country dessert with a batter that holds together whatever fruits are ripe in the back yard. It’s one of those recipes that everyone asks for. When I bring it to family parties, sweet old Uncle Phil has as many helpings as he can nab. When I ask him if he’s had a bite his eyes just twinkle and he shrugs his shoulders and then looks over at empty pie plate. I’ve worked it over from a recipe I found in Savuer by Sally Schmitt, who owned The French Laundry until 1994. I leave out the cinnamon, much of the butter, and the cream becomes milk, but I don’t skimp on the brandy.

It is an aromatic and plump, heady dessert, so let it glow in your favorite deep dish pie plate. I use a10-inch Emile Henry, but if I had an old French oval pottery dish I’d switch to that. The batter creeps gently between the apple slices so in the end each slice is held lightly against its neighbor, in a state of sweet creaminess.



Apple Clafouti
by Alicia Arter

Batter:
3 eggs
1 cup low-fat milk
4 Tbsp. butter, melted
1 tsp. vanilla extract
2/3 cup all-purpose flour
2/3 cup sugar
¼ tsp. salt
¼ teaspoon pepper

For the apples:
1 Tbsp. butter
4 apples, using three or four different types
½ cup sugar
3 Tablespoons of brandy

For the pie plate:
½ teaspoon butter
1 teaspoon sugar

Preheat oven to 400 degrees

Apples:
1. Peel and core the apples, then slice in ½-inch thick pieces (so they cook uniformly).
2. In a large frying pan on medium heat, melt the butter and then add the sugar and rum. 3. Stir to blend. Add the apples and stir to coat. Cook for 10 minutes covered until apples are beginning to get softer. When done, reserve the juice in the pan to glaze the clafouti just before serving.

Pie Plate:
1. Grease the pie plate with the butter then coat with the sugar. Put it in the oven to warm while you make the batter.

Batter
1. While the apples cook, put all the batter ingredients in a food processor and blend thoroughly. There will be no lumps in the batter.

Assemble:
1. Take the hot pie plate out of the oven and fill with about 2 cups of the batter. Put the apple slices in the pie plate and then cover with the rest of the batter. Sprinkle 2 teaspoons of sugar over the top. Bake in the center of the oven for 30 minutes until golden and the center is set. When done, remove from oven and pour the pan juices over the top. Serve warm or cooled.

Recipe (C) Alicia Arter 2009. Do not publish without permission

Hand Churning Butter

Last week I ran into the old glass and wood Dazey butter churn from the family farm, so I decided to try it out with a pint of non-homogenized cream from a local dairy.

After 40 minutes of hand churning the curds appeared in a puddle of buttermilk. Draining the curds didn't make them look much like butter, so I grabbed a circa 1880 cookbook for instructions. Wash the butter in water. So I did and then stirred and pressed it.

How was it? Sweeter and creamier than any butter I've ever eaten, be it local, Plugra, Irish, French butter in Normandy, English dairy butter in Stratford, Polish butter in Lancut, Poland and what have you. And rather than the fatty mouthfeel and neutral taste of commercial unsalted butter, this all-Jersey cream butter was silky and ethereal.

Its pronounced sweet taste, though, was what surprised me most of all. The cream it came from wasn't sweet, the whey/buttermilk it made wasn't even tangy, so something really good happened during those long minutes of hand cranking. All that remains to see is if I can get the same effect with my standing mixer. There’s a good reason those old butter churns aren't used anymore.