The Dinner Files

Sometimes a favor flips itself over. You start off thinking you are doing someone else a favor and end up so grateful for what they have done for you.

About a week ago the lovely Tara Austen Weaver, author of The Butcher and the Vegetarian: One Woman’s Romp through a World of Men, Meat, and Moral Crisis, sent out a request. She asked that people check out her new e-book, Tales from High Mountain, part 1, about the months she lived in a very traditional house in a very traditional town high the mountains of Japan. It costs only $3.99, as a PDF or a Kindle download, with all proceeds going to on-going relief efforts in Japan. She set the price low to encourage buyers, but you can enter any amount you want in the final purchase price to give more, if you’re so inclined.

So I bought it and stayed up late reading it – remembering so well the unbelievable fatigue that can come when living in a foreign country, in a foreign language, in other people’s houses – and tweeted about it, trying to get the word out about her great writing and inspiring goal of raising money to help a country she deeply loves.

But I kept thinking. Her descriptions of the food were, of course, so tempting. I do not cook a lot of Japanese food. Hardly any, really. But that night of reading about Japanese food made me turn the next morning to Everyday Harumi: Simple Japanese Food for Family & Friends by Harumi Kurihara who, according to the press release sent with the book from the publisher, is the Martha Stewart of Japan. I have absolutely no idea how accurate that comparison is, but I do know that the recipes in this book are super simple and beautiful and there are at leasta  dozen post-its sticking out from its pages marking the recipes I meant to cook when I first looked through it. Then recipes for work needed to be cooked and other books showed up and piled on top and I simply lost track of those intentions.

Until, of course, I read Tales from High Mountain. So I cooked up the onigiri, rice balls with chopped chicken (although the book has you use ground, which I didn’t note until I’d chopped the chicken – I’m a good recipe writer and not really the best recipe follower). We loved them. Origiri are, according to this book, what Japanese people might eat when we would turn to a sandwich. Lightbulb. My son, age 8, does not like sandwiches. This makes packing his punch everyday sort of a pain. Not so this week. We made another batch of origiri together and have popped them in his lunch bag two days in a row now.

I thought I was doing Tara a favor and in the process giving some more money to natural disaster survivors (something no San Franciscan every sneezes at). In the process I had a stupid, quotidian, boring, and unremarkable problem that has vexed me regularly for years – what to put in that lunch bag – solved.

How is that for a lead-in to asking you for a favor or two? First, check out Tara’s post and consider ordering her book. Second, cook something totally new this week. Who knows what other problems – big or small – we might solve?

Origiri – chicken rice balls

This is my version – a bit less sweet and with a bit more chicken in the chicken-to-rice ratio.

Rinse 1 cup sushi rice (long grain really won’t work) in cool water until the water runs clear. Put in a rice cooker or pot with 1 1/2 cups water and 1/2 teaspoon salt, bring to a boil, cover, and simmer 15 minutes. Take off the heat and let sit 5 minutes. Uncover and let cool.

Meanwhile, put 1/2 pound finely chopped chicken thigh meat (or ground chicken if it doesn’t freak you out the way it freaks me out), 3 tablespoons tamari or soy sauce, 2 tablespoons sake, and 2 tablespoons mirin in a medium saucepan and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to a simmer and cook, stirring, until the chicken is cooked through and the liquid is pretty much absorbed, about 5 minutes. Let cool.

Combine the rice and chicken mixture thoroughly. With damp hands grad a small handful of the mixture and press – press really hard – into a ball or patty. Set on a plate and repeat – being sure to rinse and re-wet your hands between each one (you’ll be tempted to try to do a second without rinsing your hands first, don’t give in to this temptation, it will only lead to super-sticky rice-covered hands). Cover let sit a bit before eating or chill and eat later.

If the mixture is still a bit warm, the balls will not hold together as well, so don’t fret if they start plopping apart a bit if you’ve jumped the gun and made them before things are cooled off.

Can you count the layers?

I can. I did. If we’re willing to count the bit of sauce on the bottom of the dish – and I’m not at all sure we should be – then this lasagna has 18 layers of homemade pasta sheets, fresh tomato sauce, and creamy mozzarella cheese (with a smack of Parmesan on top). If we just want to count the pasta sheets themselves, then the answer is eight, which isn’t too shabby, though I say it myself.

It had been a good long time since I made lasagna, and the last time I made it… well, it was a disappointment at best. That one was too complicated, too many twists and turns and clever ideas and it all became a giant convoluted baked mess. Edible, to be sure, but hardly the triumph I was reaching for. So this time I kept it simple. Super simple. Too simple? Not really, but the light touch I gave this one caused my dashing husband to proclaim that it was more souffle than lasagna. I took it as the highest compliment. Or, to be more precise, I took it as a compliment once I stopped obsessively wondering if he really meant that there wasn’t enough food. There was enough food. Pretty much. Who knew the lasagna would turn out so tasty? Who were we to resist its charms?

Overly Long and Picture-Laden Fresh Tomato Lasagna Recipe

Start by buying super ripe tomatoes. The better the tomatoes, the better this lasagna will be. And by “better” I don’t mean fancy names or labels or heirloom-ness,  I mean ripe and super tomato-flavored. Taste before you buy. Also, less juicy varieties will work better here. Your Romas, your Early Girls, your plums.

Take about 3 pounds of those tomatoes and hull them (cut out their core). Chop them and run that mixture through a food mill.

Alternatively, you can purée them in a blender and then run them through a food mill or, if you don’t have a food mill, strain the mixture through a sieve to get the seeds and skin out – although that process is such a pain that I would then consider peeling and seeding the tomatoes first and then whirling them in a blender. In any case, you want to end up with a smooth purée of tomatoes with very minimal seeds or skin in the mix.

Pour this purée into a pot, add an onion that has been halved and peeled and about 6 tablespoons of butter. Bring the whole mess just to a boil.

Reduce to a simmer and cook, stirring now and again as the mood strikes you, until it is all reduced and dark red and yummy looking and a bit thickened up. This will take at least an hour and maybe two depending on how juicy the tomatoes were to start with.

While the sauce is cooking you need to make the pasta. Work 2 cups of flour, a teaspoon of fine sea salt, and 4 eggs into a dough. Knead this dough so it holds together and is nice and smooth – you can just do this in the bowl you mixed the dough in. No big deal. No need to knead it like bread dough. Put the pasta dough on a piece of plastic wrap, wrap it up and shape it into a flat disk as you do so. Put it in the fridge for at least 30 minutes. You could, of course, do this before you get the sauce started so that once the sauce is cooking you can start in the with pasta. I did not do that. I found there was plenty of clean-up, note-taking, and lunch-eating to do while the pasta rested.

Then you need to roll out the pasta. I divided the dough into 8 portions. Rolled one portion on the thickest setting, folded that piece like a business letter in thirds, rolled it on the thickest setting, repeated that move and then moved on, doing that with each portion of dough (adding flour as necessary along the way, of course).

I then took each piece through the next setting, and so on until the dough was rolled out on the thinnest setting on my pasta roller-outer. You may well have another method for rolling out pasta dough. Please, use that if it works for you.

Cut the pasta sheets into pieces that 1) will fit in the pan you’re going to bake the lasagna in and 2) that you can deal with and handle without losing your mind. For me that meant cutting each sheet into 3 or 4 pieces.

Put a large pot of water on to boil, add enough salt so it tastes salty, and drop the pasta sheets in for about 30 seconds each. Have a bowl of ice water ready to dunk the pasta into when you take it out of the boiling water to cool it immediately.

Lift pasta out of the water, running your hand down each piece to remove as much excess water as possible, and lay the pasta out on clean kitchen towels. Warning: this will most likely use up most of your counter space.

Thinly slice about 8 ounces of fresh mozzarella cheese. Finely grate about 4 ounces of Parmesan cheese.

Taste the pasta sauce, add enough sea salt to make the flavor really pop.

Put about 1/3 cup of the sauce in the bottom of a 9×13 (or there about) baking pan and spread it around. Arrange a single layer of pasta in the pan. Top that with just a bit of sauce – seriously, just the thinnest of layers that will fall far short of coating everything.

Then a layer of pasta. Then a layer of mozzarella – but not a solid layer, just pull each slice apart a bit and arrange about half the mozzarella in the pan. Top with pasta. Then sauce. Then pasta.

Then a sprinkle of Parmesan. Then pasta. Then sauce. Then pasta. Then the remaining mozzarella. Then pasta. Then sauce. Then pasta. Then sauce and the rest of the Parmesan.

Cover and bake for 35 minutes at about 375°F. Uncover and bake another 15 minutes or so. Serve with fresh basil leaves and some oven-dried tomatoes. I also offered up a platter of sautéed zucchini, all beautifully browned and yummy out of a cast iron pan.

I’d like to say that this feeds six, but that is stretching it. It really is terribly light. Delicious. But light.

Three years ago my best friend from high school, my son, and I went to the Deerwood Summerfest. My friend and I saw that this small town street fair was happening on our way to pick up my son from day camp. To be more precise, my friend saw that it was happening. What I noticed was a table from which Lutheran ladies were selling Swedish meatballs. On the way back to the cabin, we stopped, got out of the car, and walked around; I with single-minded plans of scoring some of those Swedish meatballs.

We got to the table that had had Swedish meatballs on it. It was empty. There was a woman there packing up the sodas (well, actually, she was packing up the pops because if you call soda soda in Minnesota it takes people a minute or two to know what the hell you’re talking about; if it’s fizzy and it’s in a can or bottle and it’s not beer, it is pop). I asked her what happened to the Swedish meatballs.

“Oh, well now,” she said, “those were only for sale until four.”

“What time is it?” I asked, thinking that it was, maybe, barely four o’clock.

She looked at her watch and sharply drew in her breath, “Oh, yeah, it’s four-oh-three.”

“Oh,” I said, clearly disappointed and adopting my native accent, “and so I guess you’re all out then?”

“Well I don’t know about that,” she said, “but it’s four-oh three.”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is an interaction that has haunted me for three years. Three years of three minutes keeping me from my dream of Swedish meatballs made by small town church ladies. And you just know those Lutheran church ladies of Deerwood, the town in which the hardware store sells not one but two models of lefse makers, know how to make a Swedish meatball right. A lady who was that judgmental about my thought that she might sell me meatballs just because there were meatballs left to sell when the sign plainly stated “10-4″ is just the kind of lady who is going to know how to make a Swedish meatball. She is going to make it old school and there will be plenty of cream in the mix and butter in that gravy because that is how you make them, cholesterol and newfangled ideas be damned. These meatballs will be bought and eaten by her neighbors and she knows what she would think about them if they didn’t make the very best meatballs possible, so she’s going to make that extra effort to make sure the meatballs are perfection. Church-centric cooking and baking in Minnesota are competitive sports as much as charitable activities.

So when my mom and I took my son to Deerwood Summerfest last week you know I was looking for those meatballs. We walked past the Lutheran church and my heart sank. Nada. No table, no church ladies, no meatballs Swedish or otherwise.

Luckily my son wanted to play the carnival games in the park, a spot from which we could see that there was something going on behind the church. While my mom got my son a corn dog, I hightailed it to the tented tables in the parking lot of the Salem Lutheran Church, traded my cash for tickets, walked right up to the lady overseeing the crockpot, and came into the possession of two Swedish meatballs on a stick, a small cup of gravy for dipping, and a baggie full of homemade lefse – not to mention change from the five I handed over to pay for the lot of it.

The meatballs were tender and moist and light. The gravy tasted as much of butter as it did of browning meatballs, just as it should. The lefse was still warm and thin enough to see through plus I managed to snag one that hadn’t had Parkway margarine out of squeeze bottle smeared all over it.

Best of all, and this goes without saying to all the transplanted Minnesotans out there, was, of course, that the meatballs were served on a stick. As every Minnesota State Fair goer knows, putting food on a stick, while seemingly just a practical way to serve food to people who are aimlessly milling around, has the unintended consequence of making said food taste better. Is it the woodsy flavor imparted by the stick? The attention one needs to pay while eating to make sure the whole thing doesn’t tumble onto one’s clothes? The knowledge that food-on-a-stick means you’re at a fair of one sort or another? These are questions I leave greater minds to answer. All I know is that now that my food fantasy of scarfing down Swedish meatballs on the mean streets of Deerwood has been fulfilled my next Minnesota food goal is to try some of that walleye-on-a-stick at the ballpark everyone is talking about. That fish has got to be delicious.

I’ve been enjoying a shorter-than-usual and yet still decadently long visit to northern Minnesota. There has been real sticky summer heat. There have been thunderstorms. There have been tornado warnings and watches. There has been walleye. There has been walleye eaten while playing bingo. There have been dives into cool fresh lake water and long swims along the shore. There have been bug bites so itchy they wake you up and ice cream cones licked while speeding over deep blue water in a fast moving boat. Fish and frogs and toads have been caught and released. A guitar was played and songs sung. Many many things have been grilled.

There was a breakfast at the Birchwood Cafe in Aitkin (home of the Gobblers!). It was a fine breakfast. Standard, quality diner fare except for two very Minnesotan touches.

First, and most delightfully, when the server confirmed that I, indeed, would like some coffee, she promptly brought me a thermal carafe full of the stuff to the table.

Second, and most charmingly, the Birchwood Cafe also offers “hot wild rice” as a side on the breakfast menu (it also puts it in the Great Northern omelet). A cup or a bowl, your choice.

I was in an eggy-hashbrowny mood that morning, so I did not order the wild rice. It got me thinking though. Planted a seed of wild rice for breakfast that grew into the wild rice porridge dish you see above. Leftover wild rice, heated up with a bit of milk, topped with toasted chopped nuts, a bit of maple syrup, and a drizzle of browned butter. Some dried blueberries would have been good, too, I’m sure, if I’d had them in the house.