The Dinner Files

My plan was to use the sour cherries – something I never ever see in California – I bought at Clancy’s in Minneapolis and use the rest of the insane amount of blueberries my parents had brought up to the cabin and make scads of turnovers. These turnovers would be gorgeous and delicious and I would distribute them amongst our kind neighbors here at the lake – some of whom coughed up some Benadryl and Benadryl cream when my son got stung by a bee and others of whom are just jolly welcoming folks to whom I find myself driven to give turnovers.

So I made two batches of pie crust, tossed fruit with sugar and flour, and started rolling out circles. It ended up being 14 circles – six sour cherry turnovers and eight blueberry turnovers. Here’s the thing. Whether browning meat or rolling out pie dough, I like to take it to the limit. The limit is where really good stew becomes mind-blowing, where a nice pie becomes sublime. The thing with the limit, though, is it is the actual limit. Go beyond it and… things fall apart quickly. Good meat is burned. Perfectly ripe fruit boils into a mess of crust-less nonsense.

I went too far. I reached for the sun and my wax wings melted. That turnover dough wasn’t strudel-thin, but it was too thin for turnovers. Once in the hot oven the fruit just burst right out of those weak little casings and bubbled into a sticky, almost-burnt raft on the pan. The turnovers were still edible, but much of the juicy essence of the fruit ended up soaking in the sink.

They tasted fine, but only a few looked remotely gift-able. (The skillful use of a knife to cut off the burnt fruit dripping out of the sides saved the ones below for their photo shoot.) The Benadryl-giving neighbors (hey Rollins!) ended up with a turnover apiece. The other neighbors (hey Carlsens!) will get something nice soon. I have plans. Big plans.

Sour cherry turnovers

The sour cherries were awesome in these. Use any fruit you like, though, just cut the sugar back by about a third for fruit that isn’t mouth-puckeringly sour. This recipe makes six not-too-thin turnovers; increase at will if you have the gumption to roll out the dough.

1 recipe pie dough (for a one-crust pie)

1 pint sour cherries

1/3 cup sugar

a scant 2 tablespoons flour

Make the pie dough, divide it into 6 pieces and pat each piece into a 1/2-inch-thick disc. Wrap in plastic and chill at least an hour and up to 2 days.

Preheat oven to 350. Pit cherries. Have a large baking sheet ready. In a large bowl toss the cherries, sugar, and flour until some juice from the cherries and the sugar and flour form a sort of wet sandy mixture around the cherries.

Roll out each disc of dough into a 5- to 6-inch circle. Put 1/6 of the cherries on half of each circle, fold the dough over the fruit to make a half-moon shape, and crimp the edges. Put turnovers on the baking sheet, cut a vent or two or three in the top of each turnover, and bake until fruit filling is bubbling and the crust is the color of a wooden cutting board, about 50 minutes. Let cool.

Eat with coffee. I find they really taste best at breakfast. Turnovers are, after all, the original Pop-Tart.

The fishmonger at Lund’s grocery store in Minneapolis did not want to sell these mussels to my mom. She tried to buy them a week earlier and arrived up north at the cabin only to report that the guy wouldn’t sell them to her if she wasn’t going to cook them that same day.

WTF? I mean, ideally, yes, you eat any shellfish two seconds after you take it from the sea, but you don’t have to. Bivalves, in particular, tend to close themselves up and can hang out for a bit before things get ugly. Plus, you can tell when mussels aren’t good anymore – either they are open and won’t close before you cook them or they won’t open when you do cook them. Either way, things are clear.

I asked Mom to go back, to not involve him in the schedule, to slyly ask how often they got fresh mussels into the store and when the mussels she was buying had arrived, and to please bring me some mussels (my love of mussels is long-standing and pure) – I would worry about whether they were good or not.

It ends up Lund’s gets mussels in everyday. That means the mussels I grilled on Friday night, that my mom bought Thursday afternoon, had most likely been out of the water for less than 48 hours.

My dad lit the grill. I picked over the mussels. We threw them on the hot grill and took them off as they were ready. My dad, my dashing husband, my son, and I proceeded to eat them one after the other as they came off the grill, happily burning our fingers on the hot shells. I insisted on grinding fresh black pepper over them as they cooked, but I’ll admit it was gilding the lily just a bit.

And my mom, who so nicely ran the mussels maze on my behalf? She doesn’t care for shellfish. Even mussels, hot of the grill.

Grilled mussels

The recipe for grilled mussels is this: put mussels on a hot grill and cook until they open up and are cooked to your liking. “Your liking” can cover anything from those who like their mussels barely cooked – still tenderly raw and soft – to those who prefer to leave them on the grill until they get almost smoked, their meat condensed and the edges almost crisp. Experiment, taste, and see what you like best. How many should you grill? That depends on how many you want to eat. About 1/2 pound per person makes a nice little snack. If they are the main event, however, you’ll want closer to 2 pounds each.

Hunters, venison cooks, venison fans of Northern Minnesota! I am hear to deliver some good news. There are many many deer about. Many. And they are as dim as the bottom of a Eurasian milfoil-infested lake. As I mentioned last time, they are strolling down paths past bedrooms filled with humans. One earlier today stood, stark still in that way that they have, about 10 feet away from me on a back road that wasn’t untraveled enough for a deer on the edge of it to think a human was no threat at all.

I grew up in a family of hunters. But not deer hunters. My family are bird-hunting people. Ducks. Pheasants. That’s our game. I have a strong, visceral memory of being put to work plucking feathers at the age of about 5. We all sat around my uncle’s garage with large cardboard boxes between us, plucking, my great-grandparents leading the pack.I realize now, of course, that the adults had all had a cocktail or two, and that just might have contributed to their high spirits in face of this onerous task.

Deer hunters always struck me, and I mean no disrespect here although much will be taken I’m sure, as taking the easy hunting road. You put out a salt lick. You climb into your post. You sit. You drink. You wait. A deer comes along and you shoot it.

These deer I’ve been encountering? I have a sense I could walk up to them a give them a slap if I were so inclined. I want to yell at them to be afraid of me. To run. To save themselves. I want to warn them that fall is coming and the hunters will be out and this “I’m standing still so no one can see me” thing is not going to serve them well.

Yet these deer are really messing up my berry-picking. So the small and evil part of me that loves berries more than Bambi can’t help but think “yeah, stand still, M-Fer, your time will come soon enough.”

Of course, that time does me no good. The berries will be long gone by then and I will be back in San Francisco where neither wild deer nor wild berries occupy much of my thoughts most days.

Above you see a sample of the wild raspberries I covet and which these ample deer are snarfing down whenever I turn away. They are pictured alongside their larger, cultivated brethren. The wild ones we pick along with back road… well, 30 seconds into picking them and you see why someone who wanted to make a living growing and selling raspberries might start working on some hybrids and crossings and whatnot. These berries are so small that it takes 3 or 4 to equal a regular, already pretty darn small raspberry. They are so delicate that they often fall into separate drupelets as you pick them, so it’s best to hold the container or your hand underneath the berry as you pull it down off the bramble if you don’t want to lose any precious fruit.

Of course, for all their smallness and tenderness they are also sweet. And they taste of raspberries. Of pure, solid, amazing, fabulous raspberries.

We eat them plain. Or with some cream or yogurt. Or, if I feel like spending a bit of time in the kitchen, with buttermilk panna cotta.

Buttermilk panna cotta

I can’t think of a better way to put it than my dad did: “Honey, this white stuff is really good.”

1 3/4 cups cream or half-and-half

10 tablespoons sugar

1 package (1/2 oz.) gelatin

2 1/2 cups buttermilk

1 teaspoon vanilla extract (the good stuff shines here!)

In a small saucepan over medium heat, bring cream and sugar to a simmer, stirring to dissolve the sugar and taking care not to bring the cream to a boil.

Meanwhile, in a medium bowl or 4-cup measuring cup, dissolve gelatin in 2 tablespoons of cold water. Let sit 3 to 5 minutes.

Whisk cream mixture into the bloomed gelatin. Add the buttermilk and vanilla.

Divide mixture evenly between 8 small ramekins (6- to 8-oz. each). Put ramekins on a baking sheet for easy transfer (although there is rarely room enough in my fridge to do this – instead they end up here and there and all around the place and I find one a few days later and feel very lucky indeed) and chill until set, at least 2 hours and up to overnight.

To serve, unmold desserts by dipping ramekins into a bowl of very hot water and inverting panna cottas onto plates. You may need to slip the point of a sharp knife along the side to loosen the edge and allow the mixture to release from the ramekin. I find a bit of pounding and shaking at this point helps things along immeasurably. Hey, the worst that can happen is this:

Serve buttermilk panna cotta with fresh berries, if you possible can, although shavings of chocolate, some preserved cherries, and orange sections are all lovely, too.

Before we left the cabin in Minnesota we had what may have been the champion of leftover dinners. Fridge and freezer and cabinets were raided to create the semblance of a meal. Want to hear the truly crazy part? We invited guests.

My mom defrosted the smoked whitefish she put in the freezer after we couldn’t eat the entire fish my mother-in-law hand-carried from Zabar’s last Christmas. It was a little tough. So I scraped it and mixed in some mayonnaise, some mustard, a spring onion a neighbor had dropped off from their garden the day before, and the two mini sprigs of dill my mom managed to scrounge from her own garden. Plenty of freshly ground black pepper later and we had a pretty tasty dish.

While I was doing that, my mom put the last bits of cheese on what was left in an open box of lavosh crackers for a little appetizer:

As you can see, they got a wee bit burnt. We used some nasturtiums from the garden to distract people from the burnt sections and put them out anyway. Guess what? They were pretty good. Good enough so I had to swipe them off the table to get a picture. Good enough so we had to stop Ernest from snarfing down all of them himself.

Along with these delights were some beet greens, a warmed-up baguette, a salad with an avocado vinaigrette (thus using both the remaining lettuce and the half avocado in the fridge) and some ears of corn that hadn’t made their way into the pot the night before (or perhaps the night before that?) or the sweet corn pancakes. It wasn’t at it’s best. It was tough instead of tender, starchy instead of sweet, and the Minnesotans, who know from corn, just let it be:

Was the whitefish salad actually good? Were the crackers really edible? The uneaten corn is an argument in their favor, but as a whole we were a hungry crowd who were likely to eat most anything put in front of us. We’d had a big day. You see, my mom, aunt, uncle, and I took Ernest to Paul Bunyan Land. It’s a rite of passage for youngsters in the Brainerd Lakes area. I have an intensely clear memory of the giant talking statue welcoming “Molly and David Watson from Minneapolis” when my brother and I went as kids and wondering how on earth he could possibly know our names. I continued to think this even as I turned around to ask my mom how he knew our names and she was lagging behind us, having obviously whispered our names to the ticket-taker as we went ahead. But I had an impressive ability to allow myself to believe what I wanted to believe as a child (Santa Claus? I was fully on board with that in the third grade. The third grade people!), so I ran ahead to the first ride instead of connecting the dots.

Paul Bunyan Land has a new owner and a new location since I was a kid. It is less grand than I remember, has fewer rides, and is on a pasture between a corn field and a junk yard a few miles outside of town instead of on a concrete-slabbed brightly lit lot in Brainerd proper. It is bleak yet charming, a tricky combination that is partially achieved by staffing the place with a carefully maintained balance of surly teens and cheery retired guys. The whole thing was, to quote my aunt, “a hoot.”

Ernest liked the rides –

And my uncle liked the various Paul Bunyan-inspired sculptures –

But Ernest did not like the creepy giant statue saying his name. In fact, he didn’t like the creepy giant lumberjack statue sitting in a tree at the entrance at all. He didn’t like it so much that he refused to eat at a table near it. So we sat to the side while Ernest ate a hot dog, the grown-ups picked at a shared order of nachos, and everyone sipped a soda. I mean a pop. We were in Minnesota, after all.

“You’ll never believe what they served at Commons this morning,” my best friend my freshman year of college said as I took the seat next to her at our Humanities 110 lecture to which I stumbled recently awoken with a cup of coffee in hand, and to which she arrived worked out, showered, groomed, dressed, and breakfasted.

“What?” I asked, waiting for another horror story. We were both vegetarians and considered ourselves connoisseurs of good food. We found the college cafeteria predictably yet disappointingly lacking on both fronts. I had become disenchanted to the point where I was living on a steady diet of coffee and bagels from the coffee shop where I could spend un-used meal credits for a fraction of their cafeteria value.

“Corn pancakes,” she said, “made with leftover corn from last night. The corn was just thrown in the pancakes. It was horrible.”

I sighed. I shrugged. “But that’s what corn pancakes are,” I explained.

She looked at me incredulously. “I thought they’d have cornmeal in them or something, not leftover corn.”

“Yeah,” I replied, “you’d think, but corn pancakes are just pancakes with leftover corn in them.”

That, after all, was what life had taught me. Sometimes on a summer weekend morning when the whole family was up at the cabin at the lake from which I write this, my grandmother would announce that she was making corn pancakes. The first few times I heard this I’d get excited. I liked corn. I liked pancakes. Sounded like a sweet combination.

Then the platter would come out. My grandmother – maker of excellent pot roast, chef of Brie souffle, baker of “death bars” (so sweet and good they almost killed you), a lover of great good and tasty food – used to scrape the kernels off any leftover boiled corn-on-the-cob, mix up a batch of Bisquick pancake batter, stir the kernels into the batter, cook the pancakes, and act like we were supposed to be grateful. The kernels were tough by then, somewhat flavorless after a night in the fridge. They stood out like watery little nuggets in the fluffy cakes. There wasn’t even any cornmeal to serve as a conceptual bridge between the cake and the corn.

Then I went to camp and was served corn pancakes the morning after we’d had corn-on-the-cob for dinner. Corn pancakes, I learned, were nasty, horrid things.

I’ve since made more batches of cornmeal pancakes – crispy on the edges with a bit of body to fight the texture-destroying properties of maple syrup – than I can count.

And I’ve made dozens upon dozens of sweet corn cakes, in which I purée sweet corn kernels into the batter to great effect.

So when my dad and my son returned from a run to get the morning paper the other day with “a dozen ears of Minnesota corn” and my mom rolled her eyes and showed him the dozen ears she’d already bought, I decided to get busy and fix the corn pancake problem that had haunted me for so long.

It worked. If you find yourself buying a bit more corn than you really needed at the market this weekend, set aside a few ears to make sweet corn pancakes.

Sweet corn pancakes

Like all sweet, corn-y things, these pancakes have a particular affinity for blueberries – fresh on the side, as a syrup poured on top – but maple syrup works too.

About 4 medium ears of sweet corn

1 cup flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

1/4 cup sugar

1/4 teaspoon salt

3/4 cup milk

2 eggs

2 tablespoons vegetable oil

4 tablespoons butter, melted – plus more for cooking the pancakes

Shuck the corn and cut off kernels. You should have about 2 cups of corn kernels – a bit more or less won’t matter too much, but if you find yourself going over 2 1/2 cups, either stop cutting off kernels or reserve the extra for a salad or other use.

Heat a griddle or large frying pan to medium-high heat. Meanwhile, in a medium bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt.

In a blender or food processor, whirl the milk and 1 – 2 cups of the corn kernels until fully pureed (purée all the corn kernels for smooth, corn-flavored pancakes; purée half the corn kernels if you want to reserve some to add whole to the pancakes).

Add the eggs and oil to the milk-corn mixture and whirl until blended. Add flour mixture, 1/3 at a time, and whirl until smooth after each addition. Add the butter and pulse a few times to incorporate it into the batter. Stir in the reserved corn kernels if you chose kernel-laden cakes.

Coat the griddle or pan with a bit of butter or spray oil. Pour the  batter in about 3-tablespoon amounts to make 3- to 4-inch pancakes. Cook until bubbles appear over the entire surface, about 2 minutes. Flip the pancakes and cook them until they’re golden brown on the second side and cooked through, about 1 minute. Repeat with the remaining batter.

Like all pancakes, serve these hot with butter and berries or maple syrup.

“Well that won’t do us any good,” I overheard my dad saying last week into his phone, “Molly won’t be here then to cook it for us!”

That comment may make him sound like an opportunistic slave-driver, but it really was very sweet. He and a friend were making plans to hire a guide to take them fishing for walleye pike on a neighboring lake that actually has more then two or three of the coveted lake fish. They are experienced and avid fishermen who were looking to mix things up a bit from the bass and northern pikes they catch-and-release on our lake all the time. Plus, walleyes are known for being awfully tasty.

They came back with plenty of walleye. We invited seven people to dinner. Beforehand, my dad and I took a swim while Ernest fished off the dock. We were quite aways away when we heard a shriek. We saw my mom helping Ernest hold up the line with a really rather large fish on the end. We clapped our hands as we tred water and then headed back to see the prize.

It was a three-pound bass. It had pretty completely swallowed the lure. My dad removed the fish from the line as gently as he could. He moved the fish forward through a water a few times to give it a chance. He let it go and it tilted to its side. He grabbed it and coaxed it forward again. He let go and the fish started to float. No chance. He pulled it from the water and, luckily, I had been planning to take pictures of Ernest fishing and my camera was on the dock:

He and Ernest headed to the other dock and my dad showed my son how to clean a fish:

He gutted it and filleted it and rinsed it in clear lake water and handed me the fillets to add to our dinner.

And I was there to cook it and so I did the best thing I know of to do with delicate lake fish fillets: I pan-fried them. Sure, deep-frying works too, but the control and bit of moisture and cracker-crumb or cornmeal crust you can add so effectively – not to mention the lack of a giant vat of hot oil – makes pan-frying ever-so-much-more appealing.

Before you pan-fry, however, you must coat the fish with something to protect its delicate flesh from the heat. I did a triple-dip of flour, and then egg, and then cornmeal.

I worked up a guide to How to Pan-Fry Fish, with step-by-step photos taken on the cabin kitchen counter with my tri-pod set up quite precariously in the sink. Most people would then pan-fry on the stove, or, if camping, over a fire. We took a large cast iron pan and put it on a hot charcoal grill because who wants to wipe down the entire kitchen? We had everyone get their plates, grab a chair on the deck near the grill, and take the fillets as they came out of the pan.

I kept the bass separate so Ernest would be able to taste the fish he caught. We each had at least a bite and agreed: Walleye may be venerated state-wide, but the bass was tastier.

It’s been a banner berry year so far here at the cabin. Do you see those berries? Red and plump for their small size and so ripe they are almost falling off the bramble. We have a few raspberries near the cabin that my parents planted. They have some berries on them – enough to plop on top of cereal or for a quick snack. But for a real haul, for a serious amount of berries, for enough berries to serve as dessert to guests, a girl needs to head out to the road, walk or slowly bike or very slowly drive, and keep her eyes open for spots of red.

Those handfuls of wild blueberries Ernest and I found? Child’s play. On Wednesday we picked this in about half an hour:

And by “we” I really mean “I” since Ernest eats everything he picks. I can hardly blame him.

These berries were so ripe and so sweet and so lovely that when I served them with very lightly sweetened whipped cream and then offered everyone sugar to sprinkle on top not a single person took me up on the offer.

Last week I dropped Ernest off at the day camp in town he goes to when we’re in Northern Minnesota. I had some errands to do in the bigger town of Brainerd and so ended up driving through Ironton, not something I do much. Boy am I glad I did because I saw an addition to the town since I last drove through – whenever that might have been. As you might guess from the picture above, it rather captured the eye. I can barely describe the extent to which this flame-covered building with its bright reds and oranges and yellows stands out in a small town in Minnesota lake country. The folks here are practical, utilitarian, pragmatic people. Energy must be conserved for the long winter that always looms in the background. Colors are muted, speech is reserved, and blending in is highly valued.

Upper midwest culture firmly embraces (and enforces) a no-tall-poppy policy. Garrison Keillor has documented it extensively. Don’t stand out. Don’t draw attention to yourself. Who do you think you are? It is an aspect of the region that has not always served yours truly very well. I know what it takes to stand out here. I know the snarky comments and dry-humored back-handed compliments those flames attract.

So perhaps you can imagine how happy those flames made me as I drove (blah) through to do errands (double blah) on a gray day (triple blah).

And when I saw that this extremely tall poppy houses Louie’s Bucket of Bones, a rib joint and smokehouse (custom smoking available!), I nearly fainted with pleasure. Stenciled lettering promotes the establishment’s ribs, chicken, and catfish, as well as tacos and lasagna. A little something for everyone, I suppose.

Over the weekend I sent my brother to pick up ribs, both St. Louie style and baby back. Both were, in their unique way, fabulous. The tender, unctuous baby backs were preferred by half our group and the dryer, chewier St. Louie by the other half, so peace was maintained as we gnawed our way through our order until we had, indeed, created a bucket of bones.

We started with these:

Lake trout, two fillets sprinkled with salt and pepper and drizzled with olive oil (for the record, this was my suggestion on how to prepare them) and one lightly spread with hoisin sauce (for the record, not my idea and not, in the end, the best combination).

They were caught and cleaned by:

My Uncle Denny, griller of chicken and smoker of fish. In this case he merged these impressive skills and helped my father and my husband (how many dudes does it take to grill some lake trout? it ends up quite a few more than you may have guessed) cook the fish thusly:

And then we had:

I made the coleslaw and the potato salad (my trick for such delicious potato salad? dress the warm potatoes with vinegar and let cool to room tmeperature, then add whatever else you like in your potato salad – be it mayonnaise and hard-boiled eggs and bread-and-butter pickles or olive oil and capers – and serve at room temperature without ever refrigerating the potatoes), my mom made her famous corn pie. It involves canned corn and canned cream of corn and corn meal and it is very corny and quite amazingly delicious.

The extra nice touch is that we ate the lake trout that my uncle caught and cleaned and helped grill on placemats his wife, my Aunt Nancy, made and gave to us more years ago than any of us might care to calculate.

I owe many thanks to a good friend. She visited Ernest and me in northern Minnesota this past weekend and gave us two incredible gifts.

First, in response to me saying that it was too bad we didn’t have an ice cream maker or I would make her some of the awesome buttermilk ice cream I’ve been obsessed with, she told me she makes ice cream all the time with a bowl and a whisk (and a freezer, of course). So I gave it a try. OMG. Why do I own an ice cream maker? Why do I make space for it in my limited storage space? It worked great – just pour the cooled mixture into a large metal bowl, cover it, and whisk it up every 20 minutes or so until it’s ice cream. Side-by-side I’m sure ice cream maker-ice cream would be smoother, but without direct comparison, an ice cream-lover would find nothing lacking in the results of this low-tech method (which I wrote up step-by-step at Local Foods).

Second, she got Ernest into the idea of building a fort in the woods. Yesterday afternoon I went to the site with Ernest and something small, blue, and low to the ground caught my eye. There weren’t many of them, but they were delicious.

“Mama,” Ernest said as he crammed his tiny haul into his mouth, “the blueberries from the store are bigger, but these taste better.”

True that.