Skip to content

Posts tagged ‘Wisconsin’

Apr 24

6 Comments

Spätzle with ramps, mushrooms, and lemon

Spaetzle-ramps-mushrooms2

The start of spring comes with its own set of significant yearly milestones – the last bit of snow melting, the first 60+ degree day, the first walk without gloves, the first drive home with the windows open, the first dinner on the grill. And here in Wisconsin, there’s a particularly joyous spring milestone to mark the start of spring harvest – wild ramps. I wrote a bit about ramps last spring to a somewhat puzzled response from folks living elsewhere, but there’s somewhat of an introduction to them in that post should you need a bit of background. The best way to describe them is as tiny little wild leeks, with a sweet, onion-garlic sort of flavor. Like spring, really.

If you’re a culinary sort living in Wisconsin, you probably don’t need any introduction. You know why one of my favorite farm stands went through 1,200 bunches of ramps on the first day of the outdoor Capitol Square farmers’ market, and why we had to try a few grocery stores before finding one that still had them in stock. You know why all the restaurants in town scramble to get together their ramp specials, and how canning aficionados dust off their equipment to get some pickling done within ramps’ painfully short little harvest season.

I wanted to work ramps into our dinner plans this week, but we weren’t sure we’d be able to get our hands on any in this first harvest week, so I planned a side dish that would be good enough without them – tiny little spãtzle dumplings (a classic go-to side in our house) together with some lemony sauteed mushrooms. A perfect base for a bunch of ramps, or not.  Read more

Feb 15

Caramelized banana malts (and a tiny little excuse)

Hello there! Happy day-after-Valentine’s. I bet what you need right now is another dessert recipe. Yes? Great. We’re on the same page.

Caramelized-banana-malt

Many apologies for my disappearing over the last few months. Three months, to be exact. Three fairly queasy, fatigued, food-averse months. That’s right, I’m using the little, tiny human growing inside me as my excuse, and believe me, it’s a pretty good one. I wouldn’t wish a job working with/talking about/thinking about food upon any newly pregnant lady, not ever.

But I’m coming back to life, step by step, or at least figuring out what life looks like in these somewhat disorienting circumstances. I’m certainly not in fighting form – a few days ago (one of my first non-teaching cooking attempts in the last three months), I transferred a skillet of pan-roasted chicken thighs from the oven back to the stove and almost immediately grabbed the searing hot handle of the skillet with my bare hand. After a few less-than-ladylike words and some quality time with a running tap of cold water, I turned back to the stove – and proceeded to do the exact same thing with the other hand.

This is your brain on pregnancy. Read more

Feb 19

2 Comments

Raised waffles with Patterson Sugar Bush maple syrup

When I wrote a few weeks back about how much I love the slow mornings we try to wrest out of our week, I heard from many of you that you love these mornings as well, and that you too work hard to wrest them out of your weeks. This tells me two things – first, that we need more of the quiet mornings and less of the wresting, and second, that we have a special love for the food we eat in the mornings, whether they’re slow or fast. We each have foods we eat to make our mornings, perhaps in an attempt to steer the rest of the day in a direction to our liking, and we hold these foods with special regard, whether they’re routine or more improvised. As far as I’m concerned, breakfast is the official opening to the day regardless of when it’s eaten, and I generally put a good amount of intention into what I choose.

If you’d like to open the day in a particularly lovely way, these waffles might be the ticket.

Buckwheat_waffles Read more