Riverside Ovens
Sustainable Test Kitchen:
Thai Grilled Chicken

"At the most basic level, we cook to provide nourishment. But that's only the very beginning. We also cook to express our love, our desire to care for others. Some of us cook as an outlet for creative instincts, to fashion out of a set of ingredients something new that is much more than the sum of its parts. Or we may cook to explore different cultures, to better understand the way others experience the world. Many of us cook for solace...." – editors, Cooks Illustrated









For the intentional cook, there are many reasons, motives and moods associated with the cooking experience. The last post was interested in doing some testing of the process of the insta-pot, a relatively new fashion in cooking culture that seems to get support from the home cook and chef alike. With the insta-pot, there are possibilities to solve the recurring problems of time efficiency along with preserving nourishment – you can use good fresh ingredients and keep the good stuff locked in the pot. Time is of the essence.  But even though time saved is a very practical motive for serving a regular dinner, so the notion of slow cooking slow food is another experience altogether and one that allows the cook other entry points into the testing of why we cook and what we cook.  This past weekend I wanted to try the Thai Grilled Chicken recipe out of Cook's Illustrated.  I have been grilling game hens from the basis of the same recipe for twenty years.  I have always enjoyed the prescribed (at least) 45 minute grilling time for these small birds that offer, as Cooks tells us, "a high ratio of flavorful skin to meat." My old recipe called for little more than a skin lather of melted butter, dijon mustard and some chipped rosemary and then essentially let the hens sit over a heat level that

doesn't burn the skin. This slow method not only works its way up, but obviously, because in a covered grill, works its way all the way around the hen and creates a good baking method. There are few more powerful repositories of flavor than the game hen, with its small components moist and carrying any sauce you choose very well over the time duration.  To add one more enjoyment to the process, I had the fortune of being able to cook this time at a small cabin where the grill is located on a deck overlooking a small pine forest which looks down onto a lake.  Sometimes it's a good idea, as the editors above relate, to take a step back from the usual mechanics of the daily cooking routine, and realize that there are all kinds of reasons to enter into the cooking process.  To grill for others a meal with a new recipe in the safe confines of a forest is getting awfully close to the cooking utopia, and one I assume many cooks and chefs alike have considered over the years: 'how could we offer our eaters the experience of the outdoors and good food together?'  We could assume that this process probably tugs to certain strands in the DNA that go far far back; it certainly would not have had to been meat over the fire, but a vegetarian option also sat there in our communal dna right alongside.  To see the trail of coal-fired smoke rise up from the four smoke holes on top of the grill along the limbs of the pines is something that the ancients might very well have taken for granted, but for us, in the middle of busy lives, and offered likely far too many non self-created eating options, its seems a good idea to cherish the time as it moves along as slowly as the summer breeze that circles along the surface of the lake.

I felt like there was no real need to follow the recipe in its entirety in this case.  It is a beautiful recipe and is motivated by what is called "gai yang, it's street food that originated in Thailand's northeastern Iran region but has become ubiquitous throughout the country." The hens in this native case are butterflied and marinated in a cilantro, garlic fish sauce concoction, then served with sweet spicy dipping sauce and sticky rice.  As I was going through the grocery store considering the thirteen ingredients, I considered ahead that I might, at time of cooking, be far more interested in the smell of the grill and the passing of time and the pine limbs than the scrubbing of dishes, so found a nice jar of Thai cooking paste in the Thai section of the store and decided that would be my lather.  No need to butterfly this time, although the pictures of the bamboo rods through the hen halves slow cooking at an elevated distance above the heat looked very alluring to say the least.  I lathered the skin and set them on the grate and listened to the crackle as the slow cooking process did its work under the green hood of the grill.  By the end, the hen disassembled with ease; extra Thai paste was available for dipping. It is a sort of finger maintenance food to be sure. What we gave up, however, in the pre-cooking stages, we gained as deck time breathing in deeply the lake air.

Riverside Ovens
Sustainable Test Kitchen

"A confession: I already own a stovetop pressure cooker, the conventional kind that you would heat over a burner and then regulate yourself. It is currently supporting a colony of dust bunnies in the back of my highest cabinet, behind the panini press. I never got over my fear of exploding split-pea soup to use it with any regularity."
   – Melissa Clark, from NYT Food







There is a lot to consider when thinking over how to apply ideas of sustainability to good food and cooking practices.  The questions might range from philosophical to carbon foot print, from slow process to mindful eating, from local to organic. The modern consumer invested in social innovation and sustainability is, first and foremost, a thoughtful and planning consumer. But how to do this when the hours in a day are rolling by; the intentions for cooking a dynamic meal are there, but then there is the recipe to read, the grocery to visit, the peeling and prep, the dishes to retrieve (and later clean), and finally the execution of the cooking itself.  If we could all run our own restaurant at home for ourselves, that would allow for our days to become like the imagined ones of the great New York chefs who wake in the morning to beat the rush at the docks for fresh seafood, then off to the local farmer's market, maybe pull a few herbs from the rooftop herberium to boot.  In short, the home dining experience has become more complicated than ever. To quickly cook two, three, four ingredient meals gets results quick, but the ingredients more than likely will be processed; to cook long, doing your best to stay mindful, to breath through it, care for the food, and serve a nutritious meal might mean giving up your day job.  

We recently took an instapot cooking class at the local Sur La Table and might have found a tentatively working answer to some of these question. Not that the pressure cooking concept is new, but it is in trend right now and so as good a time as any to test for oneself what the popularity is all about.  For me, sustainability in cooking should have a few criteria built into it: is the food more natural than processed, is from local sources or organic sources if possible, 

and does it ultimately promote the intentional process of slow cooking?  There are many others to consider, but these are a good start.  For our class we prepared a pressure cooked cheese cake, mushroom risotto and beef spareribs, all within about an hour and forty-five minute range. This included the prep of the ingredients and the making of a side salad, not pressurized. 

The cheesecake was more than efficient, easy to make and it did come out with fully gelled and moist texture throughout.  Because the cooking time for the cake was something like 15 minutes, though, the ingredients did come out with the same silky denseness as most cheesecakes we might come to know.  It had formed something like the texture of a custard with rice beads. The graham cracker crust and the caramel salt topping gave the cake the extra flavor that it needed.

If the cheesecake showed some weaknesses, the mushroom risotto was the true standout from the instapot.  We started with some usual preparation on the stovetop, including some vinegars and wines, but quickly began to use the sautéed function of the instapot, which worked well 

within a very short period of time, eventually coming to dump the arborio rice packets, the mushroom, and the liquids into the cooker for something like 30 minutes.  As the instructor promised, if there was one comfort food meal that she uses the instapot for at least once a week, it is for a variety of risotto dishes. The pressure concept worked well to congeal all of the ingredients, self-season as it formed and reduced on its own, and came out with the kind of perfectly clumped softness to remind you of nothing better in restaurants.

Now, about the meat? It is mentioned in instapot writing that the pressure process is making paleo diet seekers very happy.  From our experience in the class, I would have to agree. We applied some browning heat, some flour, and some seasoning to the beef short ribs before we placed them into the instapot along with a red wine and onions mixture.  These were large chunks of bone-in meat.  Normally when a cook sees this, they would certainly brown and flour, but it would be a perfect application for the slow cooker, maybe leaving in the mass of pieces for a five or eight hour process depending low or high.  Our ribs came out of the cooker after 30 minutes.  As we tonged them out, the bones slid off of the meat (important to consider attitudes of red meat and sustainability at this point...where did they come from? Grass fed?, etc.) and a texture had formed by the reduction and the floured surface. As our instructor said out loud, "you'll have a hard time finding better than we are about to be served." She was right. It is possibly true that the slow cooker process might allow for the meat to absorb more of its surrounding ingredients, including, say, carrots, onions and celery, but it also seems important to think that sometimes slow cooked ribs lose their own character through the elongated process, where in the instapot, the ribs kept their distinct texture and flavor, while carrying, at least on the surface, some of its other ingredients.

If this prep had happened at home, without the extra time of instruction and collaboration, it is more than a little possible that all of this could have been done, with two pots, within an hour time.  Some of the stovetop prep could have been handled in the pot itself, as it does have a sautéed function.  By the end, if the process were streamlined, far fewer dishes would have been used, and very few of the native nutrients would have been lost: unlike boiling, any vegetable that cooks in the instapot can circulate back onto itself.  Cooking sustainably does seem to have some tension between efficiency and slowness.  It felt like there was a kind of middle ground being established in the instapot process. Energy consumption and water consumption way down. Flavor and texture way up. It is still impossible to beat the long and slow forming of a slow cooker aroma in the kitchen, but all things considered, it now has a real competitor on the counter.

Prairie Views:
Showy Sunflower

                                "...they
are everywhere in the diligent
   cornfield rising and swaying
       in their reliable
finery..."  
      – Mary Oliver, "Morning Glories"






Even by the thick morning fog
   bent as if laboring at an angle
      of their long-leaved hips
           they show themselves

by early autumn the highest
    players among the prairie bluestem,
         the long exited compass plant,
              the twining cow parnsip.

They bloom late as the famous
    do when they wait for the crowd
       to settle into their easy seats
           then lift up their faces

like flower heads, all made up
    by the glitter of sunlight
         in love with the quiet music
            of themselves.

Cattail Journal 

"in a silky agitation,
    went leaping
        down into the shadows
             of the bog..."

– Mary Oliver, "The Pinewoods"






afternoon along the drive
    has lost its light
        by the arches of the tamarack
              that line the marsh

just as soon be a critter
   of the forest entering
        by four small legs and feet
             the wooden bridge

quiet, side to side, to peek
   at the footing of the black
      peat that looks like tar
          and carries closer to the shore

the great forests themselves
   of cattails and rushes;
       this time there is no need
            to stop

and stand against the wood
   rails of the lookout
      but must slink in among
           the stiff new stalks

yet unseen by the eyes of we two legs.
   where there is that moment
      that the dream of where the dirt
          goes to water

and off onto the silky stillness
  of the pond is nothing,
      fatefully, underneath
          or above
       

Praire Views

"All I am saying is that there is also drama in every bush, if you can see it. When enough men know this, we need fear no indifference to the welfare of bushes, or birds, or soil, or trees.  We shall then have no need of the word 'conservation' for we shall have the thing itself. The landscape of any farm is the owner's portrait of himself." – Leopold, "The Farmer as Conservationist"









It is early morning, the sun has begun to warm the very tips of the big bluestem at Curtis Prairie, but they are still heavy by night dew and lean in over the narrow trail as if at either side slowly straightening back to their assigned daily positions after a night of long whispering.  To run through this bluestem archway could be done in a couple of ways.  If I bent down on my haunches, I might just slip through unblemished or I might dash through and take the mildly sharp slap of the wet racemes across the cheeks. I raise both of my arms up and find that my forearms are capable guards against any light injury.  Back in among the big blue are bright yellow clouds of the goldenrod, still, like a fixture, and what defines the field palette at this moment.  I realize that the prairie is made for many speeds, and that we could all be thankful, for not everybody is going to willingly dash through. The prairie is a maze made for walking, searching for milkweed and the monarch; it is made for the examiner's careful review, as she might lift up the milkweed leaf seeking to determine the difference between the fledgling instar egg and the aphid. Even the motorist, buzzing by at 65, might awe and wonder whether there is a more peaceful slice of time out there than the belt line.  That there is "drama in every bush," I see, isn't necessarily the story line. The story has more to do with setting foot on the farm or prairie in the first place.  Take the turn into Olbrich Gardens parking lot tomorrow, take twenty minutes to walk through the treasure hunt of foliage and serpentine secrecy of the hidden chairs or benches, and by the next week that twenty might turn to forty, the next, an hour, and so on. The prairies are near extinct not for any more reason than the mind's inability to give oneself self-permission set inside earth time and participate in the drama of every bush.  The farmer might be one of the last few remaining who stand inside earth time, looking out, no doubt, to the rush of the rest of the machinery of the world and wondering himself, in reverse logic, I wonder what that is like?  The answer might not be one or the other by itself. The city man must here and there take a jog through the bluestem. The farmer might miss his remnant prairie that much more as he passes by from a distance, hand tight on steering wheel, watching for merging traffic, and wondering what he might do without.  

Cattail Journal

"In Wisconsin 'man bites dog' is stale news compared with 'farmer plants tamarack." – Leopold, from "Natural History"








9-11

The long and winding isthmus that is Arboretum Drive, from Vilas to the Nature Center, is as easy a way to enter into natural history as there is in the city.  The Wisconsin mind collectively knows the cattail marsh and its thousands of living symbols that can take over a bog at any disturbance. Leopold wanted more tamarack in through these edges for the sake of enhancing a wild game habitat, including, of course, birds of any feather that might like to sail across the natural blinds of six foot tall cattails.  We park at one of the very small and remaining lots across from an access point to Gardener Marsh then walk across the narrow two-board walk that offers up two decks, both inside the cattail explosion, if you will.  Red-wings are known to lay claim to a particular acreage of these watchtowers, built by a sinewy and durable fiber that can withstand the poundage of the bird and also any wind that our northern state can muster.  Native Americans used the rhizomes to eat and turned the stalks to papooses, or to bolster moccasins. Ancients used to pound out the cattail for the starch to heat and use as rudimentary flat bread.  If you needed a medium for paper, here also was a promising source.  The tamarack at the edge of the bog in unison with the cattail work to create sphagnum moss or what is here called peat. The boardwalk serves a clean means to walk through a waterlogged marsh but also a good way to keep feet off the slimy and very product peat soil.  There's water out in the pond, shade under tamarack, black and nutritious dirt for growth below; in its whole a wild filtering machine where biota works stalk in beak to propel thousands of cattail seeds. Cover no doubt makes small frye fish feel a little more safe. A bufflehead might work around the island out off the main channel seeking the frye if the crane doesn't get to it first.  These are merely the functioning and the livelihoods. What do we know of humans' ability to perceive and understand natural symbols? If Wisconsin is known as the drift less area, it might also be known as one part of the most vast marshland stretches in the world as part of the Mississippi River Watershed.  The twenty minute walk across the convenient spans of two by fours is a short tunnel through 20,000 thousands of years.  To replant a tamarack on the farm is worth a good bit more than the two hundred dollars it costs to buy the tree.



  

Experiments in Hlaf

"In Egypt they ate quite simply. Every-day bread was made from spelt, the dried pounded centers of the sacred lotus plants, and for feasts fine wheaten flour in loaves. They caught fish and spread them in the sun to dry, thick with salt."  – M.F.K. Fisher, "Greek Honey and the Hon-ZO"









As I look through the bottom rack of the grocery shelf for the latest organic instant packet for some form of bread making or another, I have nothing over the ancients. I take my boxed packet of banana bread home with me, quickly read the illustrated instructions on back – whip the liquids, add nuts (if chosen), then add the mix, stir and unload into a greased pan. Bake for an hour and it is nicely assured that my kitchen at least will smell of that wonderful combination of banana and grain that is impossible to duplicate in any other way but baking.  I like that it is fast and do appreciate made banana bread over store-bough, no how good that version is.  At the moment of cutting through the first piece, as it still steams in the middle, and lather with a pat of butter, I think back to the hundred loaves that I 'made' via the bread machine, the familiar sound of the cycles from warming, to mixing, to sitting and rising and finally baking. Again, the kitchen alive with a sort of genetically familiar smell that got there in the DNA from 30,000 years of the human history of baking.  I too have tried my hand at the hand mixing of ingredients, the eventual fold-over and the baking, but it has always felt something like the novice fisherman who is sent out into the middle of the lake to find his catch not knowing where and why they may lurk. Anybody can hold a pole and swing a line; the good

fisherman knows the edges of the structures of the lake, time of day, and that the size of the common frog he is trying to replicate. To that analogy it seems a responsible thing to do find out first that the Old English word for bread was hlaf, or modern loaf.  Bread, as we might imagine, is one of the oldest known prepared foods beyond the simplest form of feeding, hunting or gathering.  It's fascinating to consider the process of my bread box mix to an ancient process of extracting roots of plants like cattails and ferns, spread out on a rock, then placed over a fire to form a primitive flatbread. In that case, I wonder of the cooked cattail smell around the small camp fire and flashes of insight that might have arisen as the tasters, certainly admiring the creation, thought that perhaps the cattail bread was a bit bitter, and wondered if there might be a way to sweeten.  My own banana bread turned out quite sweet despite using only moderately ripe bananas (poor planning). It will be moist inside its plastic bag for over a week and the butter I lather over its top will add an enhanced form of sweetener that turns the bread to dessert. I wonder how long it took for the ancients of tropical climes to consider squashed banana as a stabilizer?