Riverside Ovens
Test Kitchen

1. Poached

Eggs are one of the most fickle food staples to cook.  Poach em, fry em, scramble em, frittata them, omelette them, there are as many ways to prepare the gooey gobs as there are tastes and time.  Maybe that's what makes them, also, one of the most common that cooks enjoy to challenge themselves.  This past week alone I have tried to poach, to pistou, and to scramble.  As for poaching, I have made

Mediterranean Pistou Eggs

many mistakes. The most common have been either to plop the eggs into too deep a basin of water, only to see the egg whites loosen and spread around the pan like lost galaxies. In this case,  you end up with a still in tact yolk, but the rest is soupy water.  The other mistake is to plop from too far away above the boiling water (hopefully some vinegar added). Here, again, the whites have a tendency to split and become nothing more than gooey water.  I finally recounted all of my past mistakes and found a technique that tends to offer, bubbling up to the surface, a whole poached egg, clean on the

surface, hot all the way through, but a yoke that isn't hardened but liquid.  The first key is to use a shallow pan, one that might offer sides at least 2-3 inches high, so not a sauté pan, but more of high rimmed sauce pan.  What is important is that the boiling doesn't dissipate once the eggs are plopped. The shallower the pan, the closer all the water stays to the heat source and the boiling stays continuous on the eggs, shaping them and keeping the whites in tact.  Many cooks have written that at least a tablespoon of vinegar should also be added to the water, expediting the boiling process.  A pinch of salt, in the case of poaching, will obviously add seasoning, so this can be adjusted according to taste.  Maybe the most important new technique, however, is something that helps before the

plopping even occurs -- go ahead and crack your eggs into a fine mesh colander in the sink before they head to the pan. Excess whites that might have separated anyway seeps through the colander and the egg that is left is firm and in tact.  Slip these eggs into a measuring glass with a handle and then use this to very gently pour into the pan of boiling water.  At this point, you finally have a technique that just about ensures success: shallow boiling water and an egg that is fairly tight.  From here, it's mostly about watching and plucking at the point that you want the egg to be done; the earlier the runnier; the later, the harder the yoke will become.  Placing these perfectly warmed orbs onto toast points is a very simple breakfast or lunch option. Most importantly, it no longer has to be an experiment every time.

 

Governor Nelson State Park

"Glistening sun to-day, with a slight haze, warm enough, and yet tart, as I sit here in the open air, down in my country retreat, under an old cedar." Whitman "February Days"











One open day of vast blue skies, at the park benches that line the shoreline of state park, and one envisions, easy enough, the tan hued families sitting atop of purple beach towels in June.  The blue and blue, of water and sky, occasionally the thin-hooked mast of a sail drifting by as lazily as a seagull's wings against a slight northeasterly breeze.  We carefully walk over the rip rap today, coated by the melt as it swells and drifts out into the vast white bubbling frozen lake.  A stiff wind has picked up and it bites through our caps.  It wakes up the eyes and stirs up a clambering raucous in the oak savannah that rise up just slightly as drummonds behind us.  Foot tracks reveal a great migration to open water across the slush.  Weasels, fox, otter tracks all.  The old scars of ski tracks line the trails where tufts of prairie grass now show, matted, bent to the will of the winter, but not seemingly for long. There across the lake the great city ice cap the Dome over looks the isthmus waters still and without a single blink.

Governor Nelson State Park
Lake Mendota

"The wind in the patch of pine woods off there – how sibilant." Whitman, "Distant Sounds"












Feb. 12

Wild the running of the swiveling streams through playground snow melt on a sunny February morning.  Puddles arranged at the foot of the iron play swings, the base of the sitting caterpillars, claws gnashing at the half-ice and old wood emerging. Slides slid down into miniature lakes bright as stars by the tipping of the crystal white sun.  Look at the old beach, carved out, placid, belly full of ice ramming into the coming of the flow of Lake Mendota ice plates! Seagulls land at their leisure on the jigsaw icebergs floating just barely below the surface, peck at the surface, then lift off to the next ice dune.  As does behind us the wind tumbling crisply down the rolling hillocks cracking like a whip  the leafless limbs of the oak trees, petering out at our feet.

On the Yahara A-Z

Y.

Ale Asylum has become the great Madison Brewery.  There are others: Wisconsin Brewery Fitchburg, Capitol Brewery Middleton, Next Door and One Barrel very close to our house but, when all said, Ale Asylum has grown in size, distribution strength and creativity.  Ale Asylum was originally born

in a small, nondescript industrial space across the street from the Dane County Airport.  Drive by it, back in those days, and unless you were a local die-hard you might just as soon driven right by thinking that it was nothing more than a novel retail shop.  A few years passed and Ale Asylum grew its following dramatically. Ale Asylum's signature beer, Hopalicious, could suddenly be found in

grocery stores around the state. The next step? One of the great brewing facilities that we have seen since the original Red Hook Brewery that we stumbled across many years ago in Woodville (Seattle) Washington.  A grand complex, built for heavy brewing and distributing and definitely for the sake of bringing as many people into the bar as beer going out the door in sales, its a great masterpiece of

restaurant and brewpub, open to the public, and open to any and all customers who like to sample snappy titles like Bamboozleator, Bedlam, Velveteen Habit and Demento, just to name a couple.  The good rides right along with the quality beers. A giant pulled pork sandwich is a great centerpiece; Perch tacos are spot on; and a Quinoa Burger hangs out at the end of the menu for the Vegan Opportunities.  At the end of it all, if you've planned well, why not take home with you a Growler of Hopaliciouc, the smooth sailing pale ale that most everybody likes.

Hey, Coach! ch. 19

"So at five after one we were ready to begin. We had an eater, a biter, and a crier. I also thought my mother was slightly crazy for dreaming up the party in the first place. 'Doesn't Fudge have any normal friends?' I whispered." – Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing








Little Brother's tactics weren't working very well with the disappeared basketball team.  Cookies sounded good and all but let's face it, cookies were on the way at home too, it would just be another hour, maybe a few minutes more, and each of the boys would get picked up and on their way home, where it was safe and quiet, where hamsters, video games and snacks awaited.  But then a pure vision came through the door of the 5th grade Spanish room.  It was an unlikely sight, but none of the disappeared basketball team would have mistaken the sight for anybody else in the world, not at that moment, because somewhere back in the mind it was the very sight they feared more than any other. "Hey, Coach!" Tyler smiled, his teeth blaring out white as a line of long icicles.  The other boys milled around the desks, set back a ways from the entrance, burying their noses in their class iPads.  Who knows, maybe she wouldn't notice.  Little Brother, on the other hand, took right to The Eighth Grade Girl something like a scout might his leader. He contemplated saluting but thought better of it. The Girl didn't look pleased.  She was bigger than everybody else in the room by a foot.  Today she was wearing a headband, her hair pulled back crisp and tight.  No frills, just high tops and strong basketball legs.  "Boys fifth grade basketball team," she yelled out, standing her ground right there at the entrance, scanning the room, a ball inside a locked right arm. "Let's go!" Will bounced up out of his seat as though his very own hamster had been set loose in his pants leg. Henry and Randall had stopped their teasing of Jess Sheindeinst's purple socks and snapped to, like good soldiers, and slinked up to the front of the room. Carl perked up, "well, we just thought that there wasn't practice today, because my mom said so. We don't have practice today, do we?  Only tuesdays and wednesdays.  "Every day," The Girls said, as she handed Carl the ball. "Hold that. The rest of you get your gear, and I'll meet you over in the Dome. Now." The boys didn't feel like this was the way things were usually done.  Nobody talked to them like this.  Not mom, not dad.  Maybe older brothers, maybe.  She meant business, this girl.

The boys were set up in four corners around the lane. They looked every which way around the gym but the right way. Matt asked if he was point guard; Trent wanted to be center, although he was by far the shortest boy on the team.  Henry and Randall started to drift away from their corners of the floor near the gym wall, Henry throwing a ball at the heels of Randall.  Before they could get another throw at one another, there she was, the coach, standing behind them, shaking her head in silence. "Nope. Not a chance." She handed both of them two basketballs.  Dribble both of these for the rest of the practice." "
"We can't even dribble one!" Randall contested.
"You will be able to by the end of practice," she contested back. "You will be." The rest of the boys tightened back to their corners, passed to the next player, then followed their shot to the next slot.  For this, Scotty would soon be considered team hero, or he might be team enemy number one.

On the Yahara A-Z

X.

X-marks the spot for authentic French food at La Kitchenette, Willy Street.  What an experience it is to travel no more than a mile and a half to a little French joint that cooks and speaks French. So much

so that the waitress, wonderfully, doesn't hardly speak a word of English. You point at the menu item and try as best you can form the proper syllables for the Croque Madame, for example, Bagnat or Forestiere.  Inside this very small one-room 12 table cafe is a back wall coated by chalkboard paint where the daily menu and hand drawn pictures of various provinces of France are written, so that if the menu is too small to point to, a simple finger in that direction will do.

Dangling lights above are made of rope and hold two old fashioned orange-line lights, bringing to each table a taste of the Mediterranean.  For lunch, a steaming hot bowl of French Onion soup makes for a perfectly warming introduction. As you scoop through the thick crust of cheese to get to the smooth onions, you can hear that the two tables surrounding you are speaking in French, or trying to, as this might be a place where the dabblers in the language might feel comfortable stretching their vocabulary for a captive audience.  The Croque Madame is a true French staple of a sandwich.  The sandwich, being born in Paris as a way for outside vendors to feed workers during shifts in Paris, is

another great foray into the culture without actually being there. The Madame, unlike the famous Monsieur, is ham, mustard, Béchamel sauce, swiss cheese and finally draped by a perfectly sunny side up egg, round and bright white.  This is a sandwich to eat with a knife and fork. Picking it up might mean tipping the egg or it might mean having to bite a three to four inch side wall hard to get

around.  Even though French bistro culture is often thought of as somewhat slow in service and sometimes to complicated by delicate sauces, these little lunches at La Kitchenette were prompt, hot, and simply perfect.

Riverside Ovens
Test Kitchen

"We arrived in the late afternoon, with the September sun tilting across the vines and bathing the chateau in a flattering way of pale gold; not the Pichon-Longueville needs any flattery. It was built in 1851, a period in architecture when turrets were all the rage, and Pichon (it's nice to be on first-name terms with a chateau) could be the model for a fairy-tale castle, suitable for princesses or damsels in distress." from Peter Mayle's French Lessons, "A Connoisseur's Marathon"








It's deep February, Wisconsin turns to an ice cube, sometimes a white ice cube, but sometimes dreary as a squirrel's fir, and so naturally the very season for taking the great imaginative leap away from this place and arrive, one hopes anyway, somewhere to the south of France where there are celebrations for frog legs, marathons built upon the premise of as many stops for wine tastes as the body and mind can muster, and long rounds of outdoor boules.  Here at the Riverside Ovens Test Kitchen, lights shining full tilt, fire place burning its fake logs, and the great sun stamped art out in the courtyard trying as hard as it might to sparkle, it might as well be the Chateau Mayle talks about in French Lessons.  The Chateau is not much unlike the great cozy French restaurant just a mile away from here, La Kitchenette, a little one-roomer, 12-tabler, where the back wall is a hand

sketched blackboard and the waitress, French as Aix en Provence, doesn't speak a word of English. Here is where the imaginative French edible garden flourishes in its well-tended bunches and a Pastis or two by siesta is no national crime but something more like a remedy shared by farmers themselves just now walking in from the coarse fields for the daytime meal that matters most.

Here at the Chateau, Cashew Chicken Stir-fry by Blue Apron is on the menu. Ingredients include

chicken tenders, jasmine rice, scallions, Napa cabbage, Tango mandarins, garlic chives, roasted cashews, sesame oil, ginger, soy glaze and cornstarch.  All of this had been recently collected at the

town market, fresh as morning, diced, sliced and peeled, leaving a small kitchen smelling of ginger and cabbage.  While cooking the jasmine rice, add minced ginger, celery and scallions to heated oil in a pan, add sliced cabbage and let cook at a medium temperature for five minutes, place on a plate, then re-oil the same pan and prepare for cornstarch coated chicken tenders, cooking 8-10 minutes. A

fairly simple dish in many ways, once the rice is boiled, the vegetables sautéed, and the chicken cooked, its time to assemble: add the vegetables to the pan of chicken, add soy glaze and 1/4 cup of water, let cook before finally adding sesame oil, raw garlic chives and segmented mandarins over the top, toss cashews over and...voila...a rich stir fry, crispy by the cabbage, rich by the soy glaze, and filling by the coated chicken.  The meal is completed within an hour, the creases in the doors of the Chateau release rich pungent aromas of cabbage and soy; the waiter, unfortunately, still working on his French.