Ramps, Morels and Other Door County Fun

Before I get too far ahead of myself, I wanted to post a few links to some excellent recent radio shows featuring topics near and dear to my heart. First, Here On Earth with Jean Feraca has had some wonderful Friday Food shows. Check out The Forager's Harvest, Vanilla, and Restoring America's Apple Culture. Michael Pollan had an interview this week on Democracy Now with the wonderful title: "Don't Eat Anything You've Ever Seen Advertised." Lastly, check out Sally Fallon's recent interview on The People's Pharmacy with Joe and Terry Graedon.

Now on to the good stuff! I took a short vacation to Door County, Wisconsin this week to visit my friend Steph and her husband Scott. Lucky for me, they are interested in local foods, and even luckier, it was the high season for wild baby leeks (ramps) and morel mushrooms!

We harvested the ramps in wooded plot close to their house near Sister Bay. They were everywhere!

I only managed to find one morel. Here it is - it just popped into my view when I wasn't even looking for it.....which is ironic, since I did a bit of actual looking without any luck at all. I was pretty happy to find this one! Luckily Steph has a friend who is a good morel hunter, so we were not lacking in mushrooms to cook with!

Morels are a little tricky - they have a mild flavor that's easily overpowered, so you have to pay special attention to how you prepare them. We decided to stuff three of them (one for each of us) and use the rest in a mushroom cream sauce to have over fettuccine. To keep things exciting, Steph and I decided to try our hand at making fresh pasta. Neither of us had ever done it, but she was able to borrow a pasta machine from the local restaurant she works for, and both of us have a healthy sense of adventure!

I really wish I had remembered to write down the recipe! It was flour and a little salt mixed together and then turned out onto a board. You make a well in the flour and add eggs (more yolks than whites) and then mix it all together with your hands.

The mixing part was a little easier said than done!

But it wasn't too difficult to get it into the flat blobbish shape you see above.

After chilling in the fridge for about an hour, the dough was ready to go. The basic idea is to condition it slowly into thinner and thinner sheets until it's the perfect thin-ness for the pasta you're making. First, you cut the blob into quarters and run one quarter through the machine once on the thickest setting to make a sheet. That sheet gets folded into thirds and run through the machine again and again, slowly working your way toward the thinner settings.....


It worked like a charm! (I can't pretend we didn't have any trouble, but by the end we were feeling like pros!)

Next, you run the thin sheet of pasta through the cutting teeth of the machine to make the fettuccine shape.


Easy breezy! I had no idea pasta making was this easy and fun! I'm definitely going to have to look into purchasing a pasta machine like this one - I think they run around $100, which isn't too bad....

Meanwhile, we started preparing the morels. The best way to clean them is to soak them in salted water to get any bugs and/or dirt off. This was a necessary step - we were amazed at how many ants and other bugs were still living inside them!

For the stuffed morels, Steph's husband Scott prepared a simple goat cheese and chive (from the garden) stuffing.

We whipped up a beer batter (flour, baking soda, eggs, and beer) ......

....and fried them in oil. The oil was a tad too hot, so they ended up almost burning, which was a bit of a bummer. It could have been much worse though. Retrospecively, I think I would have chosen a milder cheese, or no stuffing at all. They were delicious, but it was a bit hard ot pick out the delicate morel flavor over the tangy goat cheese.

We put the pasta on the stove to cook - I kept being amazed that we had made it and it was acting so much like regular pasta.... what a revelation!

Scott did a beautiful job of cleaning the ramps. Aren't they just gorgeous?

These are them prepped and ready for the cream sauce. Scott pretty much took over the sauce making which was fine since he's a really good cook. I love learning new things from cooks this way!

He started with bacon.....

When it was crispy, he added the ramps, then the mushrooms, and a few ramp leaves for color.

Finally, some Manchego cheese and a whole lot of heavy cream. This was not a low fat sauce, but oh my goodness, it was good!

Steph and Scott decided the occasion warranted the opening of a very special bottle of wine - it was given to them as a wedding present and retails around $200. It's rare for me to get to sample wine this expensive - what a treat! It was really nice too. I wish I could do it justice with a long flowery description, but the truth is, I'm just no good at wine tasting. I had no problem deciding that I liked it though!

It was 10pm by the time we dished out our food, which isn't bad until you remember that we started cooking at 5:30.... Ah well, time with friends in the kitchen is time well spent!

For dessert we cooked up a Door County made fruit pie. It was delicious - a true Door County experience. I'm still wondering however if Bea really understands all the connotations of her Ho-Made Pies....

I took full advantage of all the special Door County eats and came home with a cooler full of fun stuff: this smoked whitefish, frozen cherries, jam, cherry brats (I couldn't resist!), a ton of freshly harvested ramps, morels, and I'm sure I'm forgetting a thing or two. Yay for vacations!
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Mother's Day in the Gardens

Lots of pictures to share today! We spent the entire day in the garden on Sunday. Dave and I now have plots spread around the city: one at Quann Community Garden near our house, one in our way-too-shady-backyard, and a new one on East Main Street across from our other brother's and sister in law's house. We visited them all on Sunday as you will see.....

First we headed out to Quann Community Garden to see how our little 10x10 half plot was doing. We found it quite mucky from recent rain, and starting to get a little overgrown with weeds, but it's small enough that none of that was too big a challenge.

You can see the potatoes we planted two weeks ago are coming up nicely! We're planning on planting almost the entire plot in potatoes, minus the little asparagus patch and some lettuce that I transplanted. The first row is red potatoes that we planted two weeks ago, then on Sunday we planted another row of fingerling potatoes. We'll come in in a few weeks and do one more row I think....

The red potatoes are coming up beautifully!

Here are the little lettuce transplants I put it. These were started indoors a few weeks ago....

Quann Garden provided us with a bale of straw that we used to mulch in the potatoes.

After working our little plot, I wandered around and looked at some of the other plots. Some of them are really nice, others haven't been touched yet this season. I guess everyone is on a slightly different schedule.

This very large plot is just immaculate. There are a lot of Hmong and Hispanic gardeners at Quann who really know what they're doing!

The strawberries in another plot were blossoming! It won't be long now - I am so ready for berry season!

This garden had an extraordinary amount of peas. I'm guessing they're shelling peas - I really can't imagine a family eating this many sugar snaps!


This is the spot we cleaned out on East Main Street, across town. It's about 16x16 - bigger than the Quann plot. It took a fair amount of work to get it looking like you see above, but nothing seems too bad after working full time on a farm! My plan is to grow corn, beans, and squash there in a companion planting - the beans grow up the corn like a trellis and fix nitrogen.....next weekend I'll come in and plant it.

Right across the path I noticed a lot of dill coming up - someone must have had a dill plant there last year. I saved most of it - I figure it will make excellent baby dill greens!

This is my brother Ben and sister in law Erica's plot (my mom has part ownership too since she helps take care of it and lives about a block away). It's just one plot down from the spot that Dave and I cleared.

Ben and Erica's new puppy, Olive, was excited to help with all the gardening! She loved chewing on the weeds.

Here is mom picking stinging nettles for dinner (yes, my family is just crazy enough to eat nettles!). They're a great source of iron.....and a good spring green. Just be careful not to touch them!

When we were all done in the garden, we trooped over to mom's house for dinner. I made salad with radishes and lettuce mix from the farm, plus arugula and pea shoots from my backyard. I sprinkled some violets on top for color - how pretty!

We also grilled a chicken. Mom made a stuffing with bread crumbs, the giblets from the chicken, asparagus, and chives. I was a little worried that a stuffed chicken would remind me too much of autumn meals, but the asparagus and chives really helped spring it up a little.

Oh, and don't forget our backyard garden! I took the plastic off our cold frame last weekend, and things have been growing like crazy. The arugula is especially doing well - much better than the other things I planted.....We'll have to eat it soon before it's too big!

The spinach is also starting to do well finally.

I moved all my remaining seedlings outside, in preparation for planting next weekend. The squash is doing OK, although there's definitely some yellow leaves. Hopefully it'll get over it once it gets in the ground.

Phew! Busy times!
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My Rabbit Story

This meal has a long story attached to it, but unfortunately I did a lousy job of taking pictures, so you'll just have to read about it......

One of my coworkers on the farm, Julie, raises pastured meat rabbits. One of the does (breeding females) has been giving her trouble - always getting out, not a good mother...generally not conforming. She escaped last week and all the farm workers had to troop out to the pasture to try and retrieve her. After that, Julie decided that it was time for her to go. She sequestered her in her own cage over the weekend, and on Tuesday drove her to my house and slaughtered her in my backyard.

I didn't take any pictures of the butchering process. It was very interesting to watch - Julie is an expert and explained what she was doing as she did it....The rabbit is stunned by a blow to the back of the head with a pipe, then hung up and the arteries are cut and the blood drains out. Apparently this is the most humane way to go about it....the bleeding is what actually kills it, but it is out cold by the time it gets to that. It was surprisingly easy to watch.....the skinning and gutting were a little more difficult, but still really engrossing.

After it was all done, we put the rabbit in the refrigerator to let the meat age for a few days. I marinated it over night and we had Julie and another of my coworkers over for a grilled rabbit dinner.

We marinated it whole, but unfortunately I didn't get any pictures. Right before we cooked it, Julie helped us cut it up into the pieces you see above. The marinade was really simple: a lot of salt, olive oil, white vermouth, white wine vinegar, chives from the garden, green garlic, powdered rosemary, and a little bit of sucanat..... I marinated it overnight to make sure it would be moist enough. There was a bit of worry about this since it was an older female rabbit that had had litters.

Here it is laid out on the grill.....

I pedaled down to our community garden plot and picked our first batch of asparagus! It was big and beautiful and oh so sweet.....we really lucked out to get a little batch of mature asparagus in our plot. It's purple when raw, but turned green when it was cooked. I tossed it in a little bit of the marinade and put it on the grill just a few minutes before the rabbit was done. Perfect!

If you weren't already getting hungry, this picture should do the trick.....What a beautiful meal!

We ate it with salad from the farm and some locally made sourdough. The rabbit was really really good - denser and more meaty than chicken, but still really white and delicate......I highly recommend it! It was really an experience to go through the whole process: seeing it graze in it's pasture, taking it home, watching the slaughter, marinating the meat, grilling it, and eating it. It's not too often you get to see this sort of thing from beginning to end......
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