Field Trip Time!

You might be asking yourself as you look at the picture above - what the heck is all that mess? Well, that's a picture of about a gazillion (give or take a few thousand) swarming Golden Trout. And yes, they really are that color - when we pulled up to the Idaho Trout Company near Filer, Idaho today I caught sight of this milling mass of golden fish and told my husband that it looked like they were raising huge goldfish, not trout!

If you live anywhere near the Twin Falls area, you really should look into buying trout straight off the farm. The prices are fantastic - we got frozen, individually wrapped nearly boneless rainbow trout fillets for $1.75 a POUND. The golden trout, which have somewhat larger fillets with a tasty red meat that is something like a mild salmon, go for $2.00 a pound. You buy everything in five pound boxes, and if you call ahead they will have it all boxed up and ready for you. Here's a picture of a pretty big fella that was swimming off by himself near the fence.



We got something very interesting from the farm today in addition to the trout, but I'll talk more about that when I do up our Dark Days Challenge recipe blogpost for tomorrow night.

Recipe: Chicken Udon Soup - Dark Days Challenge

CHICKEN UDON SOUP
Serves 6-8

Soup Base:
1 large stewing chicken
1 Tbsp fresh minced ginger root, or equivalent dried
salt to taste
chopped green onion for garnish
Water to cover

Noodles:
4 cups flour
1 Tbsp. salt
2 eggs
Water

I was a bit rushed today, so I didn't get a picture of all the ingredients before I started. I wish that I had - the chicken we used was HUMONGOUS. It was an eight pound plus stewing chicken we bought from a local farmer a while back. Very tasty, it was, and there is plenty of meat for at least a couple more meals! Everything but the ginger root was local. This is a very simple soup with few ingredients. The only time intensive part is making the noodles, and that really doesn't take very long.

The first step is to rinse the chicken off and put it into a kettle large enough to have enough room to cover the chicken with water. Boil the chicken gently until the meat comes easily from the bones. Remove the chicken from the pot and cool it enough to separate the meat out. Set the meat aside for now. Bring the stock back to a simmer, and add the ginger. Let the stock sit on a very low simmer until the noodles are finished.

To make the noodles...stir the salt into the flour in a medium size bowl. Add eggs, and about a half cup of water. (You can add more later, how much you will need depends on the type of flour, the humidity and the size of egg you use.) Mix the dough well, adding just enough water to make a stiff, but still kneadable dough. Knead the dough until it is smooth, and let it sit for at least 15 minutes to relax. This makes it easier to roll out.

Divide the dough into three parts, and roll each portion out to approximately 1/8 inch thick. Dust the dough with a bit more flour, fold it over into thirds, and cut the folded roll into 1/4" or less ribbons with a sharp knife. Shake each noodle out gently and pile the finished noodles to the side until all are cut. These udon are made from whole white wheat, so they probably aren't the color one would expect. The flavor, however, was outstanding.



In the meantime, bring a saucepan of water to a rolling boil, and add a teaspoon of salt. Drop the finished udon noodles into the hot water a handful at a time. Stir them so they don't stick together, and cook them for one minute after they rise to the surface of the water. Scoop the noodles out of the hot water, rinse them lightly with cool water, and place them into a bowl. You want to partially cook the noodles separately first so the starch that comes off them in the first few minutes doesn't end up in your soup stock, making it unattractively cloudy and gooey.



When all noodles have been pre-cooked, bring the chicken stock up to a rolling boil, and slide the noodles into it. Cook noodles until chewy, but tender and cooked all the way through. How long it will take depends on how thick you made them, but it shouldn't take more than 3-5 minutes or so.



Into each soup bowl put some of the reserved chicken meat cut into bite size pieces, a nice large serving spoonful of the noodles from the broth, and some diced green onion. (These are the first of our shallots from the salad table!)



Ladle the hot ginger-flavored broth over all, and serve! Here is the finished dish - my noodles are a bit thicker and larger than is "traditional" but that's how we like them. You can make yours thinner and smaller if you like.

Recipe: Idaho Onion Soup - Dark Days Challenge

HEARTY IDAHO ONION SOUP (with ELK)
serves 4 - 5

2 lbs. elk (or buffalo, or beef) "osso bucco" (shank or leg steak)
2 large or 3-4 medium or small onions
1 large or two small carrots, chopped into largish chunks
1 cup diced celery, or 1/2 tsp celery seed, or 1/4 cup dried celery
1-6 cloves garlic (I used 6, we like garlic)
1-2 bay leaves
fresh herb sprigs - thyme, rosemary, etc.
6-8 whole peppercorns, optional
1 small bottle of beer, optional, your choice of style (here I'm using some wheat beer I made this fall)
1 Tbsp meat drippings, saved from the roasted meat, or 1 Tbsp olive oil to be used for sauteeing onions
salt to taste


This is a type of not-quite-classic French onion soup. Definitely winter comfort food! The flavor of homemade beef (or in this case, elk) stock is nothing like canned stock or that made from instant bullion. It has a complexity and depth of flavor that only slow roasting and slow cooking with aromatic vegetables and herbs can give. Because there is a fair bit of meat on the bones this makes a nice, light one pot meal with the addition of some bread and a salad. This recipe also finishes just as well in the crockpot, for those of us who have to be away all day and can't mind the stove.

Ingredients round up: Clockwise from high noon (okay, "high eleven-thirty"...) we have a bowl with some no-knead bread dough patiently doing its thing, a small bottle of home-made beer, three onions (storage sprouts and all), osso bucco elk leg shank steaks waiting to go into the oven, and one 2 lb. wheel of our inaugural farmhouse white cheddar cheese, ready to be opened and (hopefully) melted on top of the finished bread we'll be eating with the soup. I forgot to set out the herbs, spices and carrots for this picture, but they made it in later!



Roast the osso bucco in the oven at 400 degrees until nice and brown. If the meat looks like it might burn or become too dry before the bones are roasted, haul the whole thing out of the oven and cut the meat from the bones. Hold the meat aside until you assemble the stock, but roast the bones a bit more. The darker you can get the bones at this point (without burning them, of course) the richer the flavor and color of the stock will be when you are through. If you like the taste of roasted garlic and carrots and want to boost the flavor of the stock even more, throw them into the pan with the meat about thirty minutes before you take the pan out of the oven. Be sure to watch so the veggies roast but don't burn. Burnt garlic, in particular, tastes rather nasty.

If you want to use the crockpot method and don't have time to do all of this in the morning before you leave, try making the recipe up to this point the night before, then cool and refrigerate everything. The roasted meat and bones (and vegetables, if you decide to roast them first) should look something like this when you are finished.



Round up the rest of your stock ingredients, and set out the crockpot or stock pot you plan to cook everything in. Remove the meat from the roasting pan (reserving any drippings if you want to sautee the onions in them.) Place the roasted meat and bones into your crockpot or stock pot, adding enough water to cover all by a good couple of inches. Add the chopped carrot, garlic, celery or celery seed, the peppercorns and the herbs. Slice up the onions now into thin rings, throwing the clean skins and peels into the stock for flavor. Pour in the beer (I used it to deglaze the roasting pan first.) Put a lid on the crock pot or stock pot and let the whole thing simmer on a back burner for at least a good 6-8 hours or in the crockpot for 8-10 hours. If cooking on top of the stove, be sure to keep an eye on the liquid levels so you don't run dry.



(Don't wander off for an hour to read your favorite food blogs, and forget to plug your crockpot in, like I did. Oh, well, at least it's a long weekend! And, as I told myself when I discovered the problem, it could have been worse - I could have decided to take a nap.)

In a medium skillet, add the reserved fat drippings or the 1 Tbsp of olive oil, and sautee the onion rings until they are transluscent and lightly caramelized. (If you don't have enough meat drippings to make a good tablespoonful, add some olive oil to the pan.) At this point you can put the finished, cooled onions into a covered dish and refrigerate them until the stock is ready.



With the bulk of the work out of the way, you can now take some time to work on your bread. You want to time your recipe so that it comes out of the oven about half an hour before the stock is finished. Ideally, your bread should be well baked and "settled," but still fresh and warm when the time comes to assemble the meal. If you will be out of the house, but have a bread machine, you could start your favorite bread recipe in it now and set the timer so that it begins to bake right after you arrive home (for safety reasons, you probably don't want it to go through the bake cycle with no one there.)

Here's a picture of the finished loaf from that bowl of bread dough goo in the first picture. I've got to tell you, that no-knead bread recipe is amazing. It's quite simply become the backbone of our meal menu these days. It could hardly be any easier than it is. Mix three dry ingredients with enough water to make a wet dough, let sit for 12 hours or more, half-heartedly shape the loaf, let it rise again, and bake. If you spend more than 10 minutes, hands on, actually making the bread, you're probably doing it wrong. I've had the goal of baking all our own bread for years, but with the usual recipes I could never manage it often enough to keep up with the demand for fresh bread around here. With this recipe, finally, I can. And as you can see, the technique produces the most amazing crust...my husband goes into raptures every time a loaf comes out of the oven, and he's got pretty high standards for bread.



To serve, strain the meat stock, reserving the meat chunks and if you wish, the carrots (and, of course, the stock!) for the table. The garlic will most likely have been liquified by the roasting and long cooking, so if you can no longer find it, that's where it went! Dice the meat and any retained vegetables into manageable sizes (I like approximately 1/2" dices) and put them back into the pot. Remove the sauteed onions from the refrigerator and gently stir them into the very hot broth. You want the onions to remain as intact as possible, so don't stir too vigorously. Taste and adjust for seasoning - it will probably need some salt.

Slice your bread and sprinkle your choice of grated cheese on top (or use thin slices to cover each piece) then run the breads briefly through the toaster oven or under the broiler until the cheese has melted and begins to turn golden brown around the edges. Ladle the hot broth and vegetables into soup bowls and either float a slice of the cheese bread on the top to sop up juices until it becomes "spoonable," or serve the bread dry on the side for dipping.

Recipe: Baked Beans and Elk Short Ribs - Dark Days Challenge

Finally, here is a full recipe, pictures and all!

BAKED NAVY BEANS WITH ELK SHORT RIBS
Serves 4-5.

2.5-3 lbs short ribs - elk, buffalo or beef should all work fine
1 Tbsp. cooking oil
4 cups soaked Navy beans (approx 2 cups dry, soaked over night if possible)
2 small or 1 large onion, diced
3 -4 cloves of garlic, chopped
2-4 pieces of sliced bacon, chopped into 1 inch pieces
2 Tbsp. deli mustard
1/3 cup honey, brown sugar or molasses
1/3 cup Worcestershire sauce
1 cup fruit preserves, jam, puree or marmalade
2 cups tomato juice, or approx. 1 cup thick tomato sauce and 1 cup water
3 cups water
1 1/2 tsp. salt

You'll need a large, heavy skillet or pot to brown the ribs in. You'll also need a large crockpot for slow cooking or a large covered casserole for baking this dish in the oven.

Here are the main ingredients...starting clockwise from "high noon" we have a half-pint jar of Sunshine Marmalade, a quart jar of home-canned tomato juice, two small onions and a small head of garlic, a tub with some home-cured bacon made from local pork belly, a 2.5 lb package of elk short ribs, and a four-cup measuring cup with soaked navy beans.



First, rinse the short ribs, pat them dry, and brown them in 1 Tbsp. oil in a large, heavy skillet. Get them good and brown and even a little crispy around the edges. This adds flavor and also helps cook out a bit of the extra grease. Don't worry, there's still plenty of flavor left. And don't forget that you're going to add some chopped bacon to the dish as well, so a little less grease here is a good thing.



To keep yourself occupied while the ribs are browning, you can start dicing up the onion, garlic and bacon. Don't worry too much about dicing the garlic super fine - chunky is good enough - you just don't want to spoon up some beans and get a whole clove of garlic in that one bite. Well, maybe you do. But, I really don't - I'd rather spread all that yummy garlic around a bit.



Pour the soaked beans into the bottom of the pot. Sure, they'll float around after you add all the liquids, but I like starting them off in a neat pile in the bottom of the crockpot anyway.



Toss the diced onions, garlic and bacon in on top of the beans. Mmmmmm! In case you were wondering, so far everything in the pot is local. It's already starting to smell good - and we don't have everything in it yet!



Measure out the mustard, and put that in, too. This is some home-made mustard I put together a week or so ago. It's yellow mustard flour and some whole brown mustard seeds, with some vinegar, water and a bit of salt. You can use whatever mustard you like best, or whatever you have in your fridge. I bought the makings from Penzey's, so this isn't really local. Maybe that will change some day - I know mustard should grow well here.



Measure out the honey, and put that in. You could add more honey if you like, but I didn't want the beans to be overly sweet. Just a tiny bit of sweet with the savory onion and the tangy tomato is what I'm after here.



See! Local honey! Believe it or not, I got it at Sam's. What you can't see in this picture is that the honey was so thick I had to literally squeeeeeeze it out of the jug like toothpaste. It had been sitting in our storage room. I guess it is a little cool in there right now.



Pour 1/3 cup of Worcestershire sauce in over it all. You could probably use soy sauce if you don't have any Worcestershire, but I think you'll be missing some of the flavor. Nope, Worcestershire isn't local. But it's good stuff!



Pour or spoon 8 ounces of your favorite fruit jam, marmalade or puree into the pot. I'm using something I call Sunshine Marmalade. It's an apricot jam that's been pepped up with some citrus zest and finely diced fresh ginger. We like it much better than plain apricot jam, which often seems to taste a bit bland to me. This was made from some really lovely home-grown apricots our next door neighbors gave us last year.



By now the ribs should be good and browned on both sides (you did remember to flip them every few minutes, didn't you?) Drain the browned ribs a bit, and plop them right on top of all the other stuff you just put in the crock. Sprinkle the salt in now.



Pour the tomato juice and water over everything, and plug the crockpot in and cook for 10-12 hours on low, or put it all into a large covered dish in the oven at 300-325 degrees for about 4-5 hours. You want it to cook nice and slow so the beans can soak up all that good flavor floating around and the ribs can become falling-off-the-bone tender. Keep an eye on the liquid levels so the beans don't dry out.



Here's the final product! The rib meat was falling off the bones, and the beans came out savory and just a little sweet. I added a bit of Tabasco Chipotle sauce towards the end - just a few shakes - and I think it made the beans a lot more flavorful. I think one change I'll make next time is to marinade the elk ribs overnight - they were good and tender and tasty, but not quite as flavorful as I'd like. I think a nice garlicky wine marinade, with perhaps a bit of mustard added, would be just the ticket.

Recipe: Hmmm, Corned Elk?

Now that I've found some good local sources for elk and buffalo meat, I've started thinking about all the things I could do with it. One of the areas of cooking that I've been experimenting with is making our own deli-type sandwich meats. Corned Beef is one of the deli meats I've been making for years. It's very, very easy, and much tastier than the corned beef in the store. So, I wonder - how would it work with Elk or buffalo meat? Would it be as good? Better? Well, I plan to give it a try!

In the meantime, here's the basic corned beef recipe we always use:

* Morton's TenderQuick salt - navy blue bag in the spice section, usually on the bottom shelf.
* Lean uncooked beef roast - that's the beauty of making your own - you can use *good* beef
* water - plain cold tap water is fine
* "Pickling spice" (or if you can't find that, mix peppercorns, red pepper flakes, crushed bay leaves, cloves, cinnamon chunks, whole coriander and mustard seed in a combination that pleases you.)

Find a large, non metallic container with a lid. A gallon glass jar or a couple of half gallon canning jars with lids work well. Or you can use a small, clean, plastic food grade bucket, or even a large, deep ceramic or plastic bowl with a makeshift cover. Just remember that whatever you use, it has to be deep enough for the meat to stay submerged in brine, and the whole thing needs to be able to fit into your refrigerator.

Cut the meat into chunks, or leave it whole. Chunks 4 inches on a side or thereabouts cure faster than a whole roast, but it's up to you whether to cut the roast smaller or not. Rinse the meat in clean, cool water and put it into your clean non-metallic container. Mix enough brine in a 1:8 ratio of Morton's salt to water to fully cover the meat, and pour it in. Throw in a handful of spices, put the lid on, and set it in the fridge to cure. Chunks will be ready to eat in about 4 days, but larger pieces might take up to 10. Fish out what you want, cook it however you like, and leave the rest in the brine for later. Up to a point, it just keeps getting more flavorful.

That's it! Corned beef at home is so simple and fast there's no reason to pay exorbitant prices for fatty, low quality corned brisket packed in brine at the store. Making your own means you control how much fat is in the final product, and also how spicy it is. You don't even have to add spices if you don't like them, it's your choice and won't affect the curing at all. You can also use plain kosher or canning salt instead of the Morton's, but it won't look like, and may not taste like, the corned beef you've had in the past. But if you have a thing about nitrates, give it a try on a small scale and see how you like it.

Major progress this week!

After taking on the "Dark Days Eat Local Challenge" I realized, too late, that we'd mostly eaten all the local meats I'd bought this fall. Ooops. So, yesterday and today I got on the phone to some of the folks I'd bought from earlier in the year and asked them if they still had any meats for sale. I also went to work online, trying to dig up some new suppliers. Long story short - I scored! We have one humongous roasting chicken and two nice pork roasts sitting in our freezer right now, plus some elk burger and elk stew meat on the way. What I managed to round up in the last 24 hours will be enough to make about 30 local meat meals!

As an added bonus, while searching I discovered some information that should help me track down some Idaho-grown wild rice, and perhaps even some more locally produced cheese! It turns out there is a large commercial cheese plant in Twin Falls that uses milk from local dairies to turn out all sorts of every day cheeses like cheddar, jack, and colby. I'm going to call their office tomorrow and see what brands their cheese is sold under so I can look for it in grocery stores here in town. This company is a subsidiary of a national cheese and dairy company, but the plant is here and they use all locally produced milk, so I'm counting it as local. We're making cheese here at home, too, but our first wheel of farmhouse cheddar won't be ready for another three weeks or so. (Yes, that red thing in the picture is it - lopsided and waxed rather awkwardly, but we hope tasty nonetheless!) It will definitely be nice to be able to get local ready-made cheeses to fill in the gaps between homemade batches.

The next major challenge is finding cooking oil...