Fall Fun Part 1

In an effort to include more pictures, but not have to upload 35 times, I tried to make a slide show. But it is very small and hard to see the picture details. sigh.
If you know me, then you may see the pictures on my Flickr account. If you don't have access to my Flickr account then you may email me for access.

Fall Fun Part 2

Fall Fabulous Fun

We finally went corn maizin'! WOOT! I think we've tried for the past two years, but it never seemed to work out. This year, we weren't going to miss - all the right ingredients came together: beautiful day, fine friends, and a Yukon.

So we headed towards Monroe and went on a tour of the states.

I think Lucia got some better pictures...Lucia?

Madeline Island Review, cont.

Better late than never, I guess. To echo Loud: in summary, Madeline Island is utterly sublime. We spent another vacation dreaming up ways we could stay. Variations on the bed-and-breakfast theme won, with attached sustainable farm, catering and event services, art lessons and gallery, and, um, a cottage software development shop (?), of course.

Some highlights included:

• The dude who randomly stopped his car directly in front of the camera when we were taking a group picture in front of the chicken shack/diner. Props to Rick for directing us to the best of Wisconsin roadside attractions. We hit this doozy of a giant, possessed loon on the way home.



• As previously featured, we are good cooks. And good eaters.
• The signs at Tom's Burned Down Bar. Another favorite ...

• Joanna and Whitney maintaining a sense of humor in the face of car ridiculousness.
• Running along Lake Superior. So excited for the race in two weeks!
• Ferry rides and other such island prettiness.
  

The sole lowlight:

Frankly Lucia's continuing domination of the beer-shotgunning circuit is getting a little stale. The rest of us don't even have a chance, as evidenced by her clear and nonchalant victory here. Followed by others thinking they may have, in fact one, won. Ah, well, at least the dog enjoyed it.

What's your sign?

Apostle Islands, Fresh Food Strikes Back

Returned to the Madeline Island againg this year, a few more people in tow. Stayed in the same cabin.


The weather was perfect - PURRRRFECT.


What did we do - we ate...


and we ate...


and we ate...

Canning failure

Ok, so I failed in canning last weekend.
It wasn't the canning part, it was the tomato sauce that I was making.
So, I get 25 lbs of tomatoes.
I lay them out all nice.
I chop 4 huge onions and end up crying profusely because they were really pungent.
I blanch, peel and chop every single one of them.
I puree them and put them in a pot with the onions and a dozen other spices.
Then I turn the burner on with the intention of letting it simmer for 1-2 hours.
Well, I turned the burner on too high, then walked away, and burned the hell out of it.
I figured I could salvage what was not burned to the bottom of the pan, so I transfer it to a new pot, put it in the fridge overnight (cuz it's like 11pm at this point) and go to bed.
In the morning, I put it back on the stove to heat because it has to be hot when you can it.
I turn the burner on lower, and walk away.
And burn the hell out of it again.
Needless to say, I felt pretty lame.
So this weekend, the fiancé and I are going to get like 75 lbs of tomatoes, and make tomato sauce and can it along with just plan tomatoes.
This time, I hope to actually make it to the canning part.
I'll just try to think of last weekend as practice :)
And, here's a very appropriate comic for our current canning obsession, enjoy.
http://pbfcomics.com/?cid=PBF226-Preserves.jpg#211

Visual from previous posts

Willy Street Fair

Food for Thought Festival

Fabulous foodiness

Last weekend was a whirlwind of fabulous foodiness (or was it foody fabulousness?) here in Madison. Friday night was the Food for Thought Forum with Dan Barber, Leah Caplan, and Scott Williams. Here's a good summary in the Capital Times. Intangibles-wise, I found it an odd mix of personalities, as Dan is definitely a sarcastic New Yorker, Leah is a dry-humored, tell-it-like-it-is kinda gal, and Scott is about a sweet and earnest as anyone I’ve ever heard. Slight oddness in the Q&A part, but a good mix.

Saturday was the Food for Thought festival. I went to set up at 6 a.m. Despite a few glitches with non-functioning electricity for the sound system and a temporarily lost tent, everything went smooth as silk. The weather was fall-tasticly cool, and there was a steady crowd all day. Most of the exhibitors were happily busy throughout. I heard Cooking with the Stars was hilarious, though I didn’t get to see any of it. All of our volunteers were supahstars,and we got some good media coverage. My info tent spiel got shorter and shorter as the day went on, but it was a fun, exhausting, productive day.

After a nice nap, B&M and I attended the Slow Food RAFT picnic, which has a goal of celebrating-to-save some of our country’s native and heirloom food varieties – from produce to animal breeds. The menu featured some of these varieties from all over the country, including American Plains Bison over polenta (my favorite of the night!), a Mulefoot pork sandwich, an amazing wild rice and apple side, marrow fat bean salad with Door County cherries (my second favorite), fabulous Pleasant Ridge cheese, panna cotta, and hickory nut caramels with sea salt. Wow. We ate so much. So, what did we do next? Go to Cocoliquot for wine and chocolates, of course. What a meal!

Sunday consisted of a trip to the Willy Street Fair, where the infamous parade-o-various-ridiculousnesses passed us by several times and we had kettle corn. We also took a leisurely bike ride around the lake. And, across town, some more canning fabulousness that I hope we'll all get to sample.

Even though temperatures are back to summerlike this week, the air has imperceptibly and firmly flipped the switch to fall. I’ve had my first Bailey’s-n-cocoa in honor of the season. Here’s to many more fall-tastic weekends before winter sets in.

Advertising

This is sort of cheating, as I'm blogging about things that are upcoming, instead of reviewing wonderful Wisconsin things already done. But, these things are wonderful, and several of them are very, very important to me. So, check 'em out, and join me if you can!

1. REAP Food for Thought Festival, this Saturday and Sunday, Sept. 14-15. An annual celebration of, homage to, and teaching moment about all that is good and great about local, sustainable eating. Come to the forum Friday night or the festival Saturday morning. I'll be at the info tent at the top of the King Street on Saturday from 6 a.m. on - stop by and say 'hi'!
2. Eat Local Challenge, September 14-23. Take a challenge to eat at least 10 percent of your food from local sources for a week. Piece of cake! If you sign up and need any help meeting your goal, just send me an email, and I guarantee we can get you to 25% with very little trouble at all, no matter what your current eating habits are.
3. Slow Food's RAFT Picnic, September 15. Experience Wisconsin food heritage with a delicious meal of heirloom variety crops and animal products prepared by Madison's top chefs. (This is my reward meal for work on the Food for Thought Festival. B&M and I are going - let me know if you're interested in tickets. I'm sure they will sell out before the event.)
4. REAP's Local Night Out, September 27. Eat at a restaurant that is committed to using locally sourced food in their menus. This year's event is also a kick-off for the charter members of the Buy Fresh, Buy Local program, meaning that the restaurants are not only serving locally sourced menus on the night of the event, but have also committed to increasing their use of local goods throughout the year. I'll obviously be going to one of the restaurants that night - just let me know if you want to join me and which restaurant you'd like to visit.
5. MACSAC's Bike the Barns Tour de CSA, September 29. Come enjoy the crisp fall air and scenery, experience the glory that is our local CSA system, help raise money to support underprivileged families who want to eat local produce, and, of course, eat some amazing food.
6. ALNC's Pipers in the Prairie Event, October 6. This major fundraising event for children's environmental education programs features a prairie burn, bagpipers, scotch tastings, and appetizer goodies. As a fundraising event, tickets are $75 apiece or $150 per family. Or, you can let me know if you want to volunteer and go for free ;)

Recommended

While no weekend activities can compete with Lucia's canning extravaganza (61 pounds of tomatoes - utterly insane), I have a few recommendations from the past week.

1. Fish fry at Avenue Bar. I went there for fish during Lent last year, and we went back last Friday for the benefit of a friendly visitor from the South. They offer boiled and fried options, with the fried cod having won multiple "best of" awards. The reputation is deserved. The atmosphere is appropriately Wisconsin supperclub kitschy, as well. There is always a crowd on weekend - make reservations or go early.
2. Community gardens. Saturday morning, I rode my bike 20 miles on the annual Bike Tour of Community Gardens sponsored by the Community Action Coalition. This summer's Wednesday Latino Garden program took place in the Marlborough Park garden. That's where the tour ended up this year, so it was exciting to join in. The gardens are beautiful, and there is a real sense of community there. No matter where you live in Madison, there is one near your house. Go take a stroll through sometime before harvest ends. You'll see people from many different countries, vegetables you've never heard of before, and kids who don't have a lot of access to open space running around and doing manual labor with their families or playing with their friends. Fabulous. As a bonus, I got to ride my bike next to Mayor Dave and translate for him at our Evenstart garden. He is Midwestern nice, as advertised.
3. Orton Park Festival. Yet another Eastside festival with the usual assortment of food, beer, good music, and fabulous people-watching. The performance by Cycropia aerial dance theater was ... interesting. There were a few numbers, particularly an athletic throwing-about on trapeze by two men that was amazing. But, there was also much birds-on-stilts 'BRAWKKING' during the ten-minute breaks between each number, much blocking of views by annoying children or their kneeling parents, and some less impressive acts. On balance, I feel that the experience would be better in a theater with proper sightlines, lighting, and equipment and without the abrupt juxtaposition of Interpretive Art to beer-and-blues-bands. There is only one more festival left this year - the Willy Street Fair September 15-16. I will have attended all of the festivals except the Atwood one this year. Next year I will get my act together and bat 1.000.
4. Mirror Lake State Park. Due to planning negligence on my part, backpacking adventures were cancelled this weekend. We went hiking as a sad substitute. We eschewed perennial favorite, and probably very crowded, Devil's Lake for its near neighbor Mirror Lake. Mirror Lake has some nice hiking/skiing/mountain biking trails, a tannin-filled lake, and apparently a lot of camping spaces. It lacked the physical challenge of lugging up Devil's Lake bluffs, as well as the views verging on grandeur, but it was a lovely, pleasant place to hike for an afternoon. Also, it's close by and I think we ran into maybe two people on the trails the whole time, rather than playing dodge-hiker like you do on weekends at Devil's Lake.
5. Jada's Soul Food. I had a meeting off of South Park Street last night, and a couple of people mentioned this place. I'd heard glowing reviews before and felt not at all like cooking, so I stopped by on my way home to get takeout. The place is not fancy - a few fold-out tables and chairs covered with plastic tablecloths ala church dinner, a pool table with "No Profanity" and "No Gambling" signs displayed by the cue rack, and some, well, soulful music on the CD player. The man who took my order was incredibly polite. It took 15 minutes to cook the chicken, but OMG was it worth it. I'm a notorious chicken-avoider, but I wasn't quite up for catfish or chitlins yet. (If I'm going to eat meat, it's got to be on par with bacon or it ain't worth it.) Enter the best chicken I've ever had. Seriously. Still blazing hot when I got home, I devoured it. Fabulous batter, juicy, juicy, juicy on the inside. The mac-and-cheese side was also excellent, though it got to be a little rich at the end. This may have been due to my general excessive fullness. The greens were OK, but bland. Throw some bacon fat in there and you'd have yourself some mean greens. The next time I have a rich food/grease craving/bad day, I'm going here. And only eating half of my meal at a sitting so I don't spend the rest of the night in a digestive stupor. Yummm!

Canning Chronicles - Pressure Canning

As mentioned last week, I bought a pressure canner at Farm and Fleet. So this weekend I was going to get down to business and use it!

The problem was I only had about 10 tomatoes from my own 3 tomato plants:


My backup, Rick's garden, was hit hard by the heavy rains and resulting tomato splitting. This meant not much of a harvest there.

I found a pick your own vegetables farm: http://www.thetreefarm.org/

Rick and I went together. It was AMAZING! There is no reason to feel guilty ever again that I don't grow enough of my own vegetables. In fact, there was a lot of guilt about the amount of veggies going bad in the field.

I had a great time. Rick had a great time. Possibly too much of a good time. The receipt says we bought:

Tomatoes: 61 lbs, Cabbage 12 lbs, Cucumbers 6 lbs, Hot peppers 6lbs, 4 eggplants, 1 Bittermelon (anyone know what this is or what to do with it???) and then something I can't identify on the receipt: HOTY 11.3 lbs.

Besides being a bear to carry up the stairs into the kitchen (why can't I figure out how to make the dogs into pack animals?), ummm, what in the world was I thinking... 61lbs of tomatoes!

Rick and I spent Saturday evening doing the exact same thing over and over and over:
1) wash tomatoes
2) blanch tomatoes in boiling water
3) plunge tomatoes into ice water (note for you want to be canners: you need a lot of ice. If you run out of ice, those frozen ice packs do just fine. If those all get defrosted on you, then feel free to use the multicolored plastic ice that came with your summer cocktail mixing set.)
4) peel tomatoes and core them
5) chop tomatoes
6) cook tomatoes into a sauce

Some pictures from our processing night:



Sunday - ah, the easy part, right? canning.
Here is what I did - (after going to Farm and Fleet to get 2 more cases of jars, 5 gallons of cider vinegar, a Tide sized box of canning salt, mustard seed and dill seed)
1) start sterilizing jars in dishwasher
2) start huge vat of boiling water
3) clean cucumbers for pickles (those buggers get real dirty)
4) set all clean cans out on "canning station" table
4.5) feel good about how beautiful everything is in my kitchen
5) start heating up all the tomato sauces, salsas and stewed tomatoes from yesterday
5.5) remember that I have two cantelope that MUST be "processed" somehow today
6) get a bit overwhelmed at number of things on the counter!
7) cut cantelope, spread on baking sheet and put in freezer
8) cut up all the cucumbers, stuff into jars
8.5) get distressed about number of jars of cucumbers. There are two more jars than planned for! I fear some cucumbers aren't going to make it into the promised land of pickledom.




Once the cantelope departed into the freezer, and the sauces were boiling it was time to get started. Soon, the table of clean jars turned into this:

Notice that George and Deuce have morphed into vigilant jar herding dogs. They have rounded these all up into a tight pack. Only one was lost in the night to a poor seal.

At this point in the evening I am very proud of myself. and exhausted.

The most beautiful picture and yet the most depressing still awaits. The remaining bounty:


this is all still sitting on my table. I was too tired to do anything with them...oh, and my original tomatoes on the porch are still out there too! eek.

The final haul:
6 P and 1 Q of dill pickles
3 Q of spaghetti sauce
9 P of salsa (4 mild and 5 spicy)-all yellow
8 Q of stewed tomatoes (and 1 pint of lonely leftovers from each pot :)
3 Ziploc bags of frozen cantelope

The casualties: 1 broken glass jar, 1 quart jar of pickles had to be thrown away (lack of dill seed, never doing that again!),

Leftovers: more salt and cider vinegar than I know what to do with, all those vegetables on the table, hot peppers (Rick is going to make a sauce of some sort. I was pretty exasperated as he picked 6 lbs of tiny little hot peppers, I wasn't going to delve too far into what his plans were for them), and then of course the mysterious 11lbs of HOTY.

Final call- Fun, very fun. But could be enhanced by breaking it out over a couple more days, and including wine and some friends to entertain me.