Riverside Ovens
Test Kitchen

"And my pantry contains not just the staples you would expect, but the extra seasonings, condiments, and embellishments – for lack of a better term, the grace notes – that truly define my cooking and my home."
– Alice Waters, from My Pantry

It would be hard to imagine the history of the farm to table movement in America without the presence and guidance of Alice Waters. In two bits of culinary history trivia, among so many others to choose from, we can see how Waters and the movement co-evolved, so to speak. At 19, living in France as a student, she said she “lived at the bottom of a market street, and I took everything in by Osmosis.” Years later, in the beginning stages of creating the local food market at her Chez Panisse, it was Waters’ self-invented in-house ‘forager,’ Patricia Unterman, who received a call from another local food activist Sibella Kraus to see if she was interested in helping to revitalize the Ferry Market Building in San Francisco as a hub for bringing together farmers and restaurants and sell to the public as well. The rest is farm to table history. It seems very fitting then that Waters’ 2015 cookbook My Pantry: Homemade Ingredients That Make Simple Meals Your Own (Pam Kraus Books) anticipates yet the next progression in a growing niche by advancing the idea that “Simplicity and economy and ease in the kitchen all come from having a pantry you’ve made your own from ingredients you’ve mixed and made yourself.” The recipe book, made up of chapters like “Spice Mixtures and Condiments,” “Nuts,” Beans and Other Legumes,” “Cheese,” and “Sweet Preserves,” provides busy but conscientious home cooks with some simple recipes that allows us to rely less on processed food and more on prepared recipe staples. What better way to celebrate the treasure of the pantry than with her daughter, Fanny Singer, an art historian who happens to illustrate this artful and timely book.    

Into Restoration

"I was driving through Minneapolis one winter night with my five-year-old daughter. She looked out of her window and spied the moon. 'Oh!' she exclaimed. 'That's why we haven't been having a moon at home. It's been up her in Minneapolis!'" – Gruchow, from Journal of a Prairie Year









When working with real naturalists, you find out there are still many mysteries left in the natural world to provide questions that lead not only to pleasant debate but, most importantly, set them off in the direction of clue hunting out in the field. In fact, I can now plainly see, as we worked through winter twig identification, and then soon after took our tour through the Longenecker Garden and into the Gallistel Woods, that this was the very motion of spirit for restoration naturalist: raise a question or point of interest in the classroom, then go find out the answer in the woods. What a good life this is. The question was whether the particular twig we had in front of us, a slender, nearly yellowing, somewhat bent at its center point and definitely bent at the terminal bud, was a hackberry or not. Briefly looking through the hand drawn twigs list, only one showed a "strongly angled" terminal, but other features were not certain. The Hackberry is an interesting tree, no least of which for its name, derived from 'hagberry,' meaning swamp berry, a name used in Scotland for cherry. Maybe most interestingly, it is written that a fully mature Hack can become similar in size and shape to oaks in open savannah, and oh how the birds love the free sweets of the edible berry.

Walking through Longenecker as a novice would be a sheer exercise in mystery if it weren't for the convenient rusted metal tags found dangling by branches at the southside of each tree or shrub planted. A naturalist had off handedly admitted to self that this street scape line of experimental plantings was a veritable hodgepodge, but in that also the seeds, literally, of one of the great sweetshops for naturalists known anywhere. The Pawpaw tree was blooming fruit. Who had ever seen such a thing? This particular single tree (usually paired) had been hand fertilized, was blooming its fruit in October, and could be picked and eaten for it's small banana shape comes out the flavor of custard! Small mystery one. What about bizarrely scraggly and spiny open husk creatures at the floor of the tree ahead?  The horse chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum on tag), is an ornamental tree that relieves itself of heavy duty fruit "2-2 1/2 " in diameter; a brown spiny or warty capsule, splitting into 2-3 parts; 1-2 large rounded shiny brown poisonous seeds; maturing in lat summer," and coveted by the turkey crew that roves Longenecker cooks hawking an early morning city market. Looking left and right for the next naturalist moment, we had walked directly under the hackberry without noticing much the fairly non descript bark color of the tree. It still carried green leaves though, and in among the cluster, the small purple berries which we tried and spit out the tiny seeds within the fruit. Pulling down one of the leafed twigs, I pondered whether this terminal bud was angled as the one inside the building. Yes indeed. The color of the skin of the twig, however, was not quite the same. Could age transform color to some degree? I couldn't say. Nor was the tree as large, yet anyway, of an oak in the immediate area. We slowly moved on to the conifers upfield. I never received my definitive answer. I tried a hackberry for the first time. We will have to return sometime further examine.










 

Frautschi Point
A Nature Story

"Keeper had jammed the figurine into her pocket on her way out of her bedroom, right before she sneaked out of the house. Yemaya, queen of the sea, head mermaid. She was one of seven, carved for Keeper by Mr. Beauchamp. She called them the 'merlings'" – Appelt, from Keeper



4.

What exactly was Trace and her treehouse teachers supposed to do? The very single day of the school week that they cherished most, the 'out of the building day' was going away? Gone, adios. The three of them had what they came to call a pow WOW, the wow standing for 'We're Outside Wednesday'! and resolved that they would from this moment forward get every seventh grader at Leopold Middle to let moms, dads, caregivers, all, that they wanted WOW back! NOW WOW? They knew that had to have a catchy phrase that everyone would remember. Questions would come up. Teachers would wonder how to reconnect learning goals with time outside. NOW WOW created lesson plans up in that tree house, they began to call for 'green time' after school...! Parents began to have to land questions about rock formations, asked to identify big trees across the street, where did the water come from...oh my, it took awhile! All of this was a good start, but they needed an event. They decided it would be the Devil's Lake field trip. That was where all of the grown ups would come to understand just how badly these seventh graders needed their outdoor education! "We have to work on getting all the right chaperones" The three of them were walking home from school when the plan was hatched and it was Claire who was notoriously the team builder. "Principal Merling has to be there. Mr. Sorenson...my mom!" When she said this she realized that it was her very own mom, my oh my, who had wondered about WOW. "What exactly does your class do on those days anyway?" she had asked. Her mom was very busy. She was in finance and an up can coming partner in a firm of accountants. "The world doesn't solve itself," she would say. "Study, learn... a good trade." On weekends Claire schemed of getting her family out to the Arboretum by talking up the lilac bloom near mother's day. "There is a boardwalk that goes right into the marsh at Wingra Woods. You can stand there at the edge and watch the tiny fish swimming. It is where the native Americans used to live..." Her mother's eyes would wash over and she would raise her eyebrows. "The mosquitos are horrendous in those swampy areas."

Into Restoration

"It has been often said, and I shall argue the case myself, that the only remark of nature is its silence, but that is not because the world around us has nothing to say. It is because we come unequipped with ears to hear." – Paul Gruchow, Journal of a Prairie Year






10 -16


By October at the Arboretum, as our naturalists had commented, 'it's all done now.' This was nothing more than a common observation we likely all made to ourselves, as we took a brief walk outside into the native flower garden, looked out among the remaining native burr oaks, the red cedar, still a beautiful forest green, up onto the glowing red and orange ash, and beyond. The comment simply meant that there were no wildflower species yet flowering, virtually all, except the small white aster, had gone to seed, became crusty as burnt sticks still upright, and the color, the almighty characteristic of all wonderful plants, had faded for the season where it will its turn next spring or summer, depending. For the trained naturalist, this isn't such a tragic thing. Identifying features, as we would learn, were still as abundant as the eye might choose. For the untrained, however, reading the winter twig or the crisp ovular head of an old coneflower, is more of a challenge, and that was the point of the exercise.  Leopold himself often talked about the 'pretty' being the first and most obvious tantalizer for the common person to become enamored with the natural.  The theory of the land ethic might go that in order to become an initiate in the world of land ethics, we all have to find some point of entry into interest, and how things look is a natural start. It's likely not much a stretch in further logic to realize that the number of enthusiastic observers drop off significantly as the season changes from the radiant variety in the early August prairie to this moment now, deep October, soon to turn to the matting down by monotonous snow whereby those same plants become mere brown lumber in among the shoots and valleys of white clumps.

To be capable of combating this lack of interest as the seasons change is a great prize. As an author of  'twig' reading mentions in the first paragraph of his article, "What an interesting world awaits those who can enjoy the out-of-doors in the frost and winter weather. The trees, so bleak and bare, really become old friends to be recognized by their shapes and by the scars and buds upon their branches. Become an initiate in the art of recognizing trees without their leaves and you add a new interest and a new past time to your winter activities." What a pitch-perfect thing for the trained naturalist to say to the novice. As a lover of the pretty, it is far too easy -- and one might even make the point necessary -- to merely pass by the crush of a million features offered by every species along the way.

That ash that so majestically represents the corner of the native garden plot in a full bloom of October colors will soon be a massive rising cascade of pitchforks. We pass and briefly comment on its gray dreariness, its grayish brown bark, the prospect of the ash borer, and so on. And yet, as we walk up to the leaf bunches head high and bring down the branch we can begin to look more closely at what is happening under the color, for the color here, as with the plants, will soon be gone. Reading the buds, as the naturalist language might go, becomes not only an interesting past time for the sake of seeing old friends, but a critical mode for identification. Looking more broadly over the landscape of the entirety of the Arboretum, where raw, sometimes native, woods merges with restorative plantings, identification becomes quite critical. We are moving beyond the realm of friendly encounter of the pretty and into the realm of science.

The winter twig offers some similar features to look at and once distinguished the twig itself becomes its own thing pretty. The terminal bud at the end is a small treasure of identification, changing in shape, size and pattern of scaling. The terms from here, moving in towards the trees, are lenticel, leaf scar, bundle scar, lateral buds and terminal bud scale, the last of which is a ring that measures the growth from one season to the next, measured to the end of the terminal bud. Every tree will have its distinct features; to memorize these features, maybe go so far as to hold up to the hand held magnifying glass, is the new off season walker's prize of the visual.  Thinking of the zoom lens of interest in the natural world, it seems important to still consider the advice that was implicitly written all through the works of Leopold: always consider aesthetics of the natural world. Don't ignore the complexity of soil and landscape, but also don't become automatons of fact. Maybe where science meets philosophy is where art stems from, a goal that everybody could out, or maybe already does without knowing it?

Frautschi Point
A Nature Story

"What makes a ten-year-old girl think she can go out in a boat alone, at night, with only her dog for a sailing mate?
  Well...muscles. Exactly!"

– Appelt, from Keeper





3.

And so the Bees Knees Bee Center was born from that very short and cold moment standing in the shallows of Lake Mendota and saving that little honey bee from a very uncertain fate. Now, not to confuse anything, Trace and her dad and Sam had already started on rehabilitating the old building down there by shore, but it was entirely another thing to know what you were going to do with it once it was finished. You have to get people to the place. You have to get students down along the half mile trails and past the community garden. You have to get everybody out of their classrooms and out of their houses and jobs!  But there would be no stopping Trace after the day that she experienced her seventh grade field trip to Devil's Lake in Baraboo WI, that magical lake that is surrounded by rock forms that looked like something out of the old cartoons of Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner.  She remembered the day often with her and her two friends Haley and Clair. The three of them had been working on expanding the 'mondays outside' program at Leopold Middle ever since Mrs. Sheranden had announced that starting in the spring, unfortunately, there was not going to be the afternoon option of outdoor learning. Some group of people somewhere up or down the line had decided that there wasn't quite enough 'going on,' as she put it, on those hours in the field. Trace could remember phrases like learning objectives and words like impact. This was too bad on one hundred levels. The three of them had carved out a little part of the world on those hours outside. They knew all of the pockets of places to run and hide and chase away the likes of little Harvey and Clair's little brother Josh. One day way back at the beginning of the school year, when some of the plants were still in bloom, Mrs. Sheranden set each of them out along the edges of the woods to inspect the wilting milkweed leaves for holes.  "It's very possible that Monarchs had been nibbling at these leaves." As she was saying it, standing there with a little disk magnifying glass in her hand as always, no kidding, a fully grown Monarch had flitted just behind her as if listening and landed on her shoulder for about two seconds, then flitted back up and down as if on a string to the little woodland patch.  Behind her, built onto the jagged old oak placed at the center of the playground was a tree house that the kids had to stand in line to get up into. The three girls, when they got their turn, went up into treehouse and practiced their own classroom, handing out lesson plans for fun, and teaching the next set of kids in their own imaginative ways about the great oak that might someday just walk away like they do in Lord of the Rings, or how a classroom could be out in the middle of the pond behind the edge of he woods on a floating raft "with sides to climb and we could sing." All of this was in fact a far cry from the drudgery of the rest of their day inside. Not that it was all bad inside the school. There was plenty to talk about. There were the gum splotches on the undersides of desks. There was little Harvey to attend to in the halls when. Mrs. Sheranden's biology class was just fine as they sat inside desks and looked at the pictures of things. But something had happened in those months outside. When Mrs. Sheranden announced that there would be a trip to Devil's Lake, the eyes of the girls brightened to wide stars.

Frautschi Point
A Nature Story

"She needed the moon to rise, which would make the rope go slack, which would mean she could untie the knot, which would mean she could set her plan into action. Her perfect plan.
'Come on, moon,' she implored. Didn't it know she was in a hurry?' – Appelt, from Keeper






2.

Trace found a small twig from the grass pile at the edge of the beach and slipped it under the bottom of the kicking bee to see if it would grab. The bee pulled itself right side up and slowly began to walk itself along the twig like a tightrope walker. "Don't even think about it," she said kiddingly to Sam, who was mesmerized by something living and breathing right at their fingertips. "It looks like a little golden buffalo" he said. Trace lifted it up closer to their faces with her hand underneath in case it dropped. She didn't want the bee to stranded in the cold water again. "A buffalo! With wings? You are an odd one Sammy-O, that I will give ya." Sam took the twig from her and began examining with the eyes of an eight year old, which is to say a very fresh set eyes, eyes that have yet to name or calculate. "It's head is fluffy and shaped like a buffaloes. Its butt end kind of curves down too. I think they are little golden flying buffalos." He quickly pictured in his mind the simple pictures of the once great animal as found in textbooks, or the buffalo they saw just last summer so hot at the Vilas Soon. He imagined a giant set of wings on it. When hunters came after it, the buffalo would give a quick and funny wink and fly off and be safe somewhere over on the other side of the bluff or the prairie. Trace set the twig and bee down a few feet into the beach sand and watched it slowly gets its bearings, hopefully dry off, then fly away to an edible flower. It was at that very instant that she had her idea for how to make this nature center work. It would be the first and only of its kind...she hoped. BEE RESTORATION, she saw written on a sign. School classes would flock in to their little family nature center. Researchers from around the country would inquire. Field trips, new models for school hours, bee hives, honey for all!  She walked through the clearing toward the trail and then beyond where the old building sat and where her dad was ripping off patches of the roof at a time. "We were thinking that if our nature center became a bee restoration headquarters that a lot of people would come." The rehabilitation of the old building had reached the stage where the crow bar met the wood and it began to seem that the day when this would become the real thing, a real and true nature center, was looking farther off in the future. "I like it. I like it a lot," he said, prying off a piece of the front gutter that had been growing tree sprouts itself.  "Everybody secretly loves bees," he said. "First, the roof. Then the foundation. Then the interior. I hope I have the order right."

Frautschi Point:
A Nature Story

"She hoped the not-allowed word ('stupid') would sink down to the bottom of the pond and etch its way into the crabs hard shells. She couldn't see them, but she knew they were down there, scuttling along the bottom of the pond." – Kathi Appelt, from Keeper




1.

Every time they came down to Frautschi Point Trace always wondered how far she would have to walk out into the shallows before it got too deep to walk anymore and she would have to leap in. She pictured this over and over again because she had always been afraid of water, especially anything that she could see that looked like it was moving, that was the worst of it. "Go ahead and jump in yourself," she said, somewhat slyly, to her little brother Sam who didn't much like cold water either but would do anything on a quick dare. From the shore down near the point at the beach, Lake Mendota looked like something out of a Caribbean painting -- the blue surface of the lake was flat and blue, barely any breeze, and sailboats still smoothly glided across the horizon point white as clean sheets, but it was October on a sunday and the air was beginning to cool. Mendota was mostly deep and was never particularly warm. Sam was in the shore water ankle deep. "Come look at this," he said, pointing down at a band of weeds and muck reaching in at the sand. Trace plunged over slowly, the rocks small and gritty at the bottom. "I see lake grass and foam. It looks like something you might eat!" she said, pointing down to it. It was true. Sam had a peculiar habit of trying to eat nature. When they walked here sometimes after school, dad always kept one eye on the trail and another on the quick hands of Sam, who might pick off a berry of a buckthorn or a random leaf. "Not that one, buddy, not that one." Trace's dad was not an expert in edible nature, so the general rules were to look, let live, move on. "But the berry's look like little cherries," Sam might counter. He once brought a small bag of picked lily pads back home and slipped two of them into water boiling for pasta on the stove. When Trace warned against eating the 'seaweed' at this ankles, she meant it.
   "It's a bee," he pointed, flipping over some of the floating grass. "It's all tangled up and upside down. Let's save it!"