About Brussels Sprouts...and Two Upcoming Workshops

Joel Rosen sent us this letter about Brussels sprouts. He also told us about some upcoming workshops. Below Joel’s letter is a good Brussels sprouts recipe!—Maggie


“Fall garden harvest is nearing the end. Everything is done here except Brussels sprouts, which have reached peak sweetness in the past 10 days. The trick this late in the year is finding a time to pick them. If you pick them when they're still frozen, you need to peel a couple of outer leaves and eat them shortly after they thaw out (cooked or raw). If you can find a window of opportunity where they thaw in the afternoon sun on the stalk, they can still be kept for several days in a cool place before eating without loss of quality. Once we've experienced temperatures of -5F or colder, the texture goes pretty rapidly with the variety I grow. I consider it a bonus when we can still eat Brussels sprouts for Thanksgiving (likely this year).

Some people like to dig up the plants roots attached and store in the root cellar. They do keep reasonably well this way, but if you wait as long as I do, you'll never get them out of the ground unless you mulch heavily (at least 6" of straw) or get an early heavy snow cover…

A heads up for anyone you know interested in organic and/or sustainable farming: two very well know personalities will be keynoting events in Minnesota this winter. Eliot Coleman, innovative market gardener from Maine and author of several indispensable books for organic growers, is keynoting the Minnesota Organic Conference on Friday, Jan 16 in St. Cloud. He will also be conducting a breakout workshop on High Tunnels (For those interested in organic row crop farming, Fred Kirschenmann, probably the nation's best known organic grain farmer will delivering the Saturday keynote in St. Cloud)

On Saturday Feb 21, Joel Salatin, for many years a renowned innovative grass/livestock farmer and even better known since Michael Pollan's book, will be keynoting the Minnesota Sustainable Farming Association's Annual Conference in Northfield at St. Olaf College. Salatin will also be conducting a breakout workshop.

These individuals will no doubt attract a lot of attention, so anyone interested should register for the session/day of their choice soon. I can provide more information/links for interested parties.

--Joel Rosen”

A Good Brussels Sprouts Recipe

2 pounds Brussels sprouts, trimmed and uniformly sliced
2-3 T butter
2 T sliced almonds
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
salt and pepper to taste

Melt butter in a large deep skillet over low heat.
Add the almonds to the butter in the skillet and cook slowly in the butter until the almonds are toasted. Increase heat to medium. Add the Brussels sprouts and garlic and quickly toss to coat with the hot butter. Sprinkle the red wine vinegar over the sprouts and toss again to coat. Cook, stirring frequently, until sprouts are wilted. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Kale

See that mountain of kale? Before it got to be a pile by the sink it had to be picked, the large veins removed, then chopped and washed three times in sinks filled with cold water.

The next step was to plunge it into boiling water for two minutes, then let it cool in another sink full of cold, cold water. Then you drain it and pack it in freezer bags.

The boiling water makes the kale wilt and turn dark green.

When it was all over, that big pile of kale fit easily into two, one-quart bags.

That’s the bummer about kale. Since I was a girl it’s been my very favorite vegetable. But it takes a lot of work to get a little kale.

All the greens are like that. Chard, beet greens, mustard…it doesn’t matter. It takes a lot to make a little.

Some things are just like that.

Greens are awesome things. They’re packed with vitamins (no wonder—when they’re condensed like that) and they taste…wonderful!

Kale is sweet and mild this time of year. And the plants themselves are amazing! The kale that’s still in the garden is still standing and edible even after several nights with temperatures in the teens (it would have been better if it was all picked now, but processing takes so much time!). Joel Rosen, from the Lake Superior Chapter of the Sustainable Farming Association, told me frost signals the plant to send sugars from the roots into the leaves.

I cook kale in salted water until it gets tender (kale can be tough sometimes), and then add vinegar or soy sauce when I eat it. My grandmother used to cook it with ham. Any way you do it, it’s yummy!

(P.S. the third photo is Dinosaur kale, aka Italian kale—it looks totally cool!)

-Maggie Montgomery

Second BIG CARROT Found - and it's BIGGER!

Unbelievably, another huge carrot has been found in East Nary, at the residence of Dennis and Maggie Montgomery. The carrot, weighing in at 1# 8.5 oz, smashed the previous East Nary carrot record by 2.5 ounces.

“I couldn’t believe it when I weighed it,” said Maggie Montgomery. “It’s a lot uglier than the other carrot but quite a bit bigger!”

When asked if this carrot would be stuffed and mounted, Montgomery said, “It’s too late. We ate it. Just that one carrot was all we needed for a big pot of stew.”

Holtan Wrecks KAXE Kitchen in Soup Face-Off

Yes, it's true! Producer Heidi Holtan made a colossal mess in the kitchen in a vain attempt to win KAXE's first-ever soup throwdown.
She omitted that fact in her blog post below. Here's what happened:
On Thursday the staff realized there was no food scheduled for lunch on Friday of KAXE's Great Moments pledge drive.
Fresh from a weekend watching the Food Network during down time at the NFCB conference, Heidi and I agreed to create soups from ingredients found around the station. We could each bring an ingredient from home. Don Boese (a founding member of the local gourmet club) would judge the soups!
I brought a jar of home-canned tomatoes.
Heidi brought boullion cubes. She also claimed the entire contents of the KAXE freezer for her own.
I scrounged some garlic and part of an onion (left over from Chef Charlie's visit the previous day) from the fridge and asked Scott Hall if I could use some of his peanut butter. He said yes.
Heidi stole a frozen White Castle hamburger from Rev Dave. Rev Dave had written clear instructions on his burger box (something about death to transgressors) indicating that he did not want to share.
I browned the onions and garlic, seasoned them with curry powder and red pepper flakes (liberated from a puddle of honey in the lazy susan in the cupboard), added the tomatoes, a little water, peanut butter and a can of coconut milk (from the back of another cupboard--it had been there for a year, maybe more).
Heidi thawed the stolen hamburger in the microwave, whizzed it in the blender, added water and boullion, heated it up, and whizzed it again.
During the second whizzing, the burger water WHOOSHED out the top of the blender, across the counter, and splattered the walls! The entire kitchen was a disaster!
As you probably read in Heidi's blog post below, judge Don Boese liked the burger soup and declared the contest a tie.
He faulted the crunchy peanut butter in my soup and, although I thought the curry powder might curry favor, it did not. The soup was a bit spicy for Don. "They should be eaten together," he asserted. "The mild, all-American flavor [of a pulverized and watered down White Castle hamburger] is complemented by the spicy flavor of the peanut butter soup."
Was the curry powder too overwhelming? Will the kitchen ever recover? Should we find another judge?
We'll find out during the next KAXE food throwdown!

Chateau Blanc Recipe from the KAXE Throwdown

If you didn't hear the KAXE Cafeteria Soup Throwdown last Friday, Maggie and I were given the following instructions:

Make a soup from the ingredients currently in the Kitchen

Bring 1 ingredient from home

Wow the judge (Don Boese)

My ingredient from home was Beef Bouillon cubes. And I came up with what turned out to be a surprisingly good soup. Some call it the White Castle Soup, I like to call it the Chateau Blanc Soup. *

Here's the recipe:
1 frozen white castle burger (SORRY DAVE!)
1 beef bouillon cube
3 cups of water
day old French bread
butter
1/2 cup onions
2 tsp red pepper flakes
dash of salt

Cut crusty french bread into bite size pieces. Heat butter, onions and red pepper flakes in a sauce pan. As it gets hot and bubbles, add french bread and fry up until browned. Set aside.

Follow directions on the white castle box for thawing/cooking in the microwave. Plop burger in a blender. Puree for 1 minute. Add to pan you cooked the french bread in.....add water - continue to stir. As it begins to bubble, put back in the blender to further puree (it was a little tough getting the bun completely pureed).

Put back in sauce pan and simmer for 5-10 minutes. Serve with breadcrumbs sprinkled liberally on top. Pay no attention to the terrible color and tell no one what you put in it! you'll be surprised by the reaction! Don Boese reacted "It is very American! Surprising!"

The only negative thing to come out of the 1st ever KAXE Cafeteria Throwdown was that no winner was declared. Don said he thought the two soups complemented each other so well he couldn't choose!!! Maggie and I will have to go head to head once again to find out WHO the KAXE Cafeteria Head Chef will be! Stay tuned for more....

*I don't recommend trying this one at home.

Maggie's Local Food Update 3-12-08

There is lots of local food news around KAXE this week!

Scott Hall and I talked with Kent Lorentzen of Jacobson this morning. Kent is a local farmer and manager of the Grand Rapids Farmers’ Market. The Grand Rapids market is open Wednesdays and Fridays through the summer. This year, they’re moving to a new location, across the road from the Central Square Mall (on Highway 2). They’re also opening earlier this year (the first Saturday in May) to sell bedding plants and other items like jams and maple syrup. Kent specializes in beets, potatoes and onions. His garden is about 100’ x 120’, and he has a potato patch that is between half an acre and an acre in size. Kent said several members of the market specialize in certain foods that they can grow best on their land. Market members pay annual dues and a daily fee. For more information, and pictures of last year’s market, visit their website: http://www.grfarmersmarket.org/.

About ten people attended KAXE’s book club meeting last night, to discuss Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Vegetable, Miracle. It was a lively discussion that encompassed recipes, apple tree pruning, and raising calves. It was also a yummy discussion. Participants brought a variety of local food—beets, potato salad, cheese, venison sausage, salsa, blueberry muffins, and black current wine.

Jane Grimsbo Jewett, volunteer producer for many of KAXE’s local food segments and staff member for MISA (the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture) has offered 5 hogs for sale (they are sold by the half). The cost is approximately $234 for a half hog (that’s about 80# of meat net), including slaughtering and butchering by Beier’s Country Meats. The hogs will be butchered in late March or early April. Those ordering hogs would be paying the grower (Jane) $1.60/# for the animal. Beier’s charges $45 to slaughter and $.50/# to cut and wrap the meat to your specifications. The staff at KAXE has purchased two halves. That leaves 8 remaining. If you eat meat and are interested in some sustainably raised pork—email srose@kaxe.org (Stephanie Rose). You can sign up for an entire half or, if other people go in with you, you can split up a half.

Finally, KAXE staffer Linda Johnson is organizing a seed exchange, for those who save seeds or wish to procure some. If you’re interested in participating, email her: ljohnson@kaxe.org. She’d like to set up a day for the exchange!

If you are a local food producer, or if you know someone we should interview about local food, please let us know. Also, we’re interested in your local food recipes. We made local crepes in the KAXE kitchen this morning (with a dash of non-local Cognac in the batter, courtesy of KAXE historian and gourmet club member Don Boese). Do you have a favorite local food breakfast?

Local Dining in January

It’s January. Happy New Year! January is month 7 of Dennis' and my local food diet.

With the addition of 2 lambs from Erling Lofthus in Guthrie last week, our larder is now overflowing. We have sources for local eggs and dairy. I am in the habit of baking sourdough bread each week and making tortillas, noodles, and sour cream often. The work of preserving the garden is done. I plan to experiment with making cheese and using a pasta machine as soon as time on the weekends clears up a little bit.

Last night, Dennis and I were discussing what to say for a local food report on KAXE on Wednesday morning. It didn’t seem like much was happening.

“Why don’t you just say what we had for dinner tonight?” Dennis suggested.

That sounded reasonable!

Here’s the menu:
Appetizer: Pickled golden beat slices (refrigerator pickles—because our homemade vinegar is of unknown acidity), sliced smoked gouda and aged gouda cheese from Green Pastures Dairy in Carlton County. Homemade sourdough bread.
Main course: Sunfish from Pimush Lake dredged in flour from Natural Way Mills and fried in butter from Dahl’s Sunrise Dairy in Babbitt
Green beans from this summer’s garden
Cabbage salad with shredded carrots, apples and beets. The dressing was a mixture of homemade wine vinegar and honey
Steamed sweet corn from our garden
Baked garden potatoes with butter and homemade sour cream (made from Blackstar Dairy cream from Solway)
Wine: We each had a glass of rhubarb wine from Forestedge Winery in Laporte

Here’s the sour cream recipe:
Sterilize a pint jar and lid by boiling them for 10 minutes (use a saucepan that has high enough sides to immerse the jar).
Fill the sterile jar with a little less than 2 cups of cream from Blackstar Dairy (it is RBGH-free and does not have any additives—you can use whole milk too, but real sour cream is awesome).
Put a vegetable steamer in the same saucepan to keep the jar off the bottom and stand the jar of cream in the hot water (you can also use a double boiler for this).
Heat the cream until it reaches 180 degrees (use a dairy thermometer if you have one—the temperature is important! Put it directly into the boiling water to check for accuracy (should be 212°) and adjust accordingly (my thermometer is about 10° off, and this affects the consistency—“stringiness”—of the finished product).
Cool the jar to room temperature in cold water.
Add 2 or 3 T fresh (freshness is important!) buttermilk to culture the cream (because it has been pasteurized, it lacks the natural bacteria to spontaneously culture itself properly). Stir and put the lid on the jar.
Leave the jar on the counter for 2 days. When it’s thick, stir and put it in the fridge for a day before using. It keeps for about 4 weeks.

-Maggie

Local Food Beat...LEFSE!

from Maggie Montgomery

On Tuesday this week (December 4th), I had the honor of serving as a judge for the third annual Lefse Festival Cook-off, a fundraiser for the Beltrami County Historical Society. It was a snowy night, and I was subbing for KAXE’s Member Services Manager, Jennifer Poenix who couldn’t make it because of the bad weather.

Eight teams/individuals competed in the cook-off, held at the Hampton Inn and Suites in Bemidji. There were demonstrations, snacks, extravagant candies and baked goods for sale, pumpkin soup, wild rice, and door prizes. There was a three-piece band that included a tuba and sometimes veered from the Norwegian theme into a distinct oom-pah-pah!

Some competitors dressed in costume. All had long lefse sticks, patterned rolling pins, cloth-covered lefse boards for rolling, and electric lefse griddles. At one point the cooking was temporarily halted when all those griddles heating up at once blew fuses! The competitors brought their dough either completely mixed or else they added the flour at the last moment. One dipped from a big metal bowl with a favorite spoon. Others made patties or loaves.

One of the best things about lefse is that it can be made almost entirely from local ingredients. Most recipes contain russet potatoes, butter, cream, flour and salt. Some people include a little sugar to help the lefse brown.

We four judges got to taste all the lefse. We ate it plain and we ate it slathered with butter and sprinkled with sugar. We didn’t know whose lefse was whose. The tasting was an education, and the more experienced judges passed along some hints as we went along. Some lefse was too dry and floury. Some had a greasy feel in the mouth. Some was thick, and some very thin. Some was browned perfectly and some not enough. The smell of good lefse is heavenly!

Our unanimous choice for the winner was Jason (Jay) Seitz, a plumber from Bemidji. He and his young son wore camouflage and worked from an unassuming deer-stand-turned-lefse-stand at the back of the conference room. Jay also won the people’s choice vote! Jay said he learned the art of lefse making from his mother-in-law. His family is getting together to make their holiday lefse this weekend.

I don’t have Jay’s recipe but I do have two others. The first is from Carol Bauer. The second comes from Anita Norden. It is her mom’s recipe

Carol Bauer’s Lefse
8 cups riced potatoes (5# russets—only use russets)
1 stick butter
1 T salt
½ c. cream
3 c. flour

Cut up and boil the potatoes. Put them through a potato ricer and mash. Add cream, butter and salt. Put them on your porch or another cool place until they get COLD. Then mix in the flour.

Form into “loaves.” To make the loaves, gradually add flour to the potato mixture, then roll and mold with your hands until they form loaves. Carol generally makes 4 loaves.

Use one loaf at a time while you are grilling the lefse—leave the others in the refrigerator, covered.

Slice off a chunk, roll to a thin 8 or 10” round (on a cloth board sprinkled liberally with flour, using a textured lefse rolling pin), pick it up with a lefse stick, and bake it on a hot lefse grill (465-475°), flipping once or twice.

Put it on a plate under a cloth, fold into fourths, serve with butter and sugar or anything you’d like!

Irene Keit’s Lefse
Cook Russet potatoes (10# makes about 4 qt., 35 lefse)
Salt pretty heavy. Don’t let them get too done or they pick up moisture and potatoes become too “wet”. While warm, rice the potatoes, measure them and add:
4 qts. Riced potatoes
¾ c. lard (if using Crisco, add 1c.)
Mix up and cover with a damp dishtowel and allow to cool

When cool: Mix 1qt. Potatoes, ¼ c. whipping cream and 1c. flour
Mix with hands (like meatloaf) and form into small balls
Keep the balls cool and covered with the damp cloth.

There is definitely a trick (or two or three) to this, but here’s one big hint—don’t let the lefse sit on the board too long or it will stick!

Groceries on a Local Food Diet

One of the questions Dennis and I are asked most often about our local food diet is “How much do you spend on groceries?”

I admit that we haven’t been tracking that very well, but we believe we spend much less for groceries now than we used to. Last summer we probably spent more on food than usual. We bought seeds, bought bushels of tomatoes and other veggies at the farmers’ markets, and wine at Forestedge Winery, among other things. But now that the harvest is in, we’re mostly living off the larder.

This morning I looked through my checkbook for the month of November, trying to get an idea. I write all our debit card purchases in the checkbook as if they were checks, so that’s included, but Dennis may have made some cash purchases (mostly eggs).

I found 6 food-related entries. We spent $47.09 on butter and milk from Dahl’s dairy (this was actually for October and paid on October 31). That was a higher-than-average month for dairy. There was also a $30.67 check to Harmony Food Co-op (mostly for the thanksgiving turkey, but all food-related). Otherwise we spent $18.79 at Lueken’s and $31.61 at Teal’s. Those last two are supermarkets. We buy laundry detergent, fabric softener, dish soap, paper towels, and other non-food items there. I remember buying 2# wild rice at Teal’s and some local onions there. We get cream and milk from Blackstar Dairy at Lueken’s. The bulk of those purchases were non-food items though.

The other two entries were from dining out. We ate some pizza on our way home from a day in Brainerd ($22.04) and I bought lunch for myself and some other folks at the Effie Café this week during a work-related trip ($55.74). We also ate out with friends one time when we went to see a concert, but we paid cash that evening (I estimate $60 for the night, including drinks???).

So that’s it!

Eating out for any reason is a big expense, but we still do it from time to time, if we’re away from home, working, or spending time with friends.

Maggie's Local Food Diet

Here's a posting from Maggie's Local Food Diet.

Local Food Thanksgiving

Today’s the day before Thanksgiving. Already! Happy Thanksgiving everyone! There really is so much to be thankful for.

Dennis and I are doing ok on the local food diet. We ate out with friends last night and saw a great music concert at Brigid’s Cross Irish Pub in Bemidji. I think Dennis is at home right now cutting up a quarter of a deer (a gift from Tom and Heidi—Dennis didn’t get a deer this year).

Pretty much all of our garden is in now, except for a little kale and a few “volunteer” suiho greens. Once they’re gone the garden will officially be put to bed. That’s one thing to be thankful for—being done with gardening for the year! It’s fun work, but time-consuming. However…after this our fruits and veggies will come out of the cellar or the freezer or a jar (except for some cilantro in pots, and some seeds to sprout).

Dennis pulled up the parsnips yesterday. They’re in a wheelbarrow on the porch, waiting to be scrubbed and put in the cellar. This is the first time we’ve ever grown parsnips. Joel Rosen said that for maximum sweetness we should wait until there have been temperatures in the teens before picking them. That was a little tricky, because when the temperature heads to the teens the soil starts to get a little stiff (as in frozen). But it worked, and they’re in the wheelbarrow now.

I’ve cooked parsnips before, but just a little bit, mainly adding them to stir-fries or putting them in soup. This morning on the radio I asked if anyone knew how to cook parsnips. Don Boese said to peel them, slice them thinly, and caramelize them in butter. Missy Roach sent some recipes from a Williams Sonoma website that looked great—including mashed potatoes with parsnips and horseradish, glazed parsnips and carrots with sherry, and parsnip and carrot soup.

Ann Sliney from Bemidji sent the following:
When I was a little girl, my mother peeled parsnips, parboiled them, sliced them lengthwise in flat strips, and sautéed them in butter until they were a lovely brown. I thought they tasted so good, they could be served as dessert.

Ann continued: Are you familiar with Farmer John's Cookbook: The Real Dirt on Vegetables by John Peterson and Angelic Organics? Bill and I discovered it when several recipes from it appeared in the Park Rapids Enterprise. We liked them so well, we ordered the book from Amazon. I see that Farmer John has quite a bit on parsnips...

Today on the Morning Show Scott and I got to talk to local food producer Roger Hanson of R & R Hanson Turkey Farm in Aitkin County. Roger and his brother have the only remaining commercial turkey operation in Aitkin County (although in the past Aitkin County had many turkey producers—hence the name of the Aitkin High School mascot—the Gobblers).

They just shipped out the last of the 136,000 turkeys they raised this season. Some of their turkeys are “natural’ (meaning they are not fed meat-based feed and are not treated with conventional antibiotics) and some are conventional (the feed contains meat and bone meal and if necessary the conventional birds are medicated). The Hansons sell their natural birds to Trader Joe’s.

Turkeys are harder to raise than other fowl because they are more susceptible to certain illnesses. The Hansons have a confined turkey operation. Roger says confinement keeps the turkeys from picking up diseases from other birds and wildlife. Minnesota produces more turkeys than any other state in the nation. According to Roger, this is because of our proximity to sources of feed and Minnesota’s perfect turkey-rearing climate. The Hanson farm is a “small” operation. Some farms in this state raise millions of birds.