The Dinner Files

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.

If you have never had a cheese omelet with a sausage patty or two tucked inside, please, do yourself a favor and go fry up some sausage patties, set them aside to drain while you whisk up an omelet, sprinkle on some cheddar, plop on the sausage, fold it up, and enjoy. This is how they make the “cheese omelet with sausage” at the Buena Vista Cafe in San Francisco (if you click on that link, beware – a very loud cable car will rumble through your computer), a fact that this friend and I discovered together one morning after a none-too-brief dip in the San Francisco Bay from the cozy base of the Dolphin Club. We needed warmth and nourishment and the Buena Vista was happy to oblige us. You may run into some tourists having too many Irish Coffees (BV proudly claims to have invented them), but their moods tend to be as jolly as the servers are sour and it’s all part of the grand experience. If you swam extra hard that morning, I recommend a shot of aquavit (one nice thing about the BV is no one blinks an eye at that breakfast beverage order – it is, actually, a suggestion on the breakfast menu); if not, the ever-filling cup of coffee is good, too. If you’re at home, roast up a few cherry tomatoes, as my clever friend did. They cut the heft of the sausage omelet quite nicely indeed.

I’ve been a bit mad for cherries this summer. Mad enough to keep buying them even as the rate at which we manage to eat them slows down. Even as everyone else thinks to themselves, “you know what? I don’t think I need to eat a pound of cherries today.”

Luckily, one so mad is also obsessed enough to spend some serious time standing at the kitchen counter pitting them and laying them on trays so as to freeze them.

My pal Cheryl is right, they are delicious just like that – frozen. Once my snacking on frozen cherries calmed down, I threw some in a blender with yogurt, mint, and a bit of orange juice. Perfect summer breakfast.

You could use fresh cherries, obviously, but using frozen cherries thrown right in the blender creates an icy-ness in the smoothie that is divine – and unlike actual ice, frozen cherries don’t water down.

I’m addicted. I cannot stop making and eating little layered concoctions with a base of ricotta. Ricotta with jam. Ricotta with honey. Nuts or crumbled wafer cookies or cacao nibs sprinkled in there somewhere. My favorite combination so far is to top the ricotta with the honeyed kumquats I made a few weeks ago – I’m running out fast and find myself wishing I had made a lot more of them – and some toasted walnuts.

I’ve been constructing them in simple glasses for dessert, as above, but also slathering them into cereal bowls for breakfast. Here’s the one I’m eating as I write:

Yogurt, of course, works, too. Note: my dashing husband vastly prefers them when made with thick Greek yogurt. He finds the ricotta “grainy.” Um, yeah, I think, that’s the whole point – the oddly dry-yet-still-moist, sort of chewy but still mainly smooth texture of ricotta is its entire appeal to me. But, if, like him, you like things more obvious and creamy, then by all means, use some yogurt. The nice thing with a parfait is that they are individual. So I make mine with ricotta and everyone else’s with Greek yogurt. It makes me feel quite kind and generous and thoughtful as I force yet more layered dairy product, sweet fruity element, and crunchy bits on my family.