Riverside Ovens
Test Kitchen

The real Chicken Lo Mein meal, originating from Cantonese cuisine -- one of eight official Chinese preparation styles -- is a complicated but rich and rewarding dish.  First, you have to come to accept the Enoki Mushrooms.  As with all mushrooms, it might be wished for to not look at the fungi's

Enoki Mushrooms

bizarre shapes and fanned undersides until they are diced down and cooked, at which point they seem to make one of the great transformations in all of cooking.  The Enoki is a thin stemmed bunch with a very small terminal cap. When first picked up as a bunch they look something more like an unusual plastic candy, white, almost gooey, and as uniform as they are at the top.  Once you cut off the stem of the clump, all those strands separate and become more easily cookable.  The rest of the Lo Mein

includes many of the expected usual suspects: scallion, carrots, celery garlic, wonton noodles, baby bok choy, chicken and both sesame oil and soy glaze for that final richening sauce that gives Asian food its very distinct charm.  In essence, all of the vegetables get diced and reduced down, including the Enoki, while the wonton noodles quickly boil. Add some of the noodle water to the vegetables to soften, then finally the noodles themselves, a large clump that fills the pan, and all that is waiting is

Baby Bok Choy

for the soy and the oil.  At this point, you can begin to test which of this dynamic list of ingredients stand out.  At every bite of the Enoki mushrooms, a strange and exotic flavor arises, similar to other mushrooms in their earthy bounce, but because of the texture of their thin-ness, even more distinct.  The obvious second highlight is the baby bok choy, a great treat to add to almost any type of stir fry.  The noodles and the chicken speak for themselves in a familiar way.  One of the great secrets of Chinese food, is that they have found a way to pull together some of the more healthy ingredients imaginable, but by adding noodles and sauces turn what might be a light meal to something very sound and filling. In this way, a great family weeknight meal.

Some Notes on India

"I began to realize that the entire land of India is a great network of pilgrimage places–referential, inter-referential, ancient and modern, complex and ever-changing." – Diana Eck, from India: Sacred Geography











There might be more questions to consider when thinking about the history of India than right here at home in America.  To dig any deeper than the 1500's on the North American continent is a difficult matter.  We find out more and more about the true original settlers of our land, the native Americans, every day, but it comes in archeological smatterings and much tapestry of linking tribal stories and buried dwellings.  India is a vast and diverse country with ancient underpinnings.  As with other countries, continents, we do not talk about India as somewhere merely with a modern beginning but would speak of it in the same breath as China, Mesopotamia, Africa and the like.  In her introduction to India: Sacred Geography, Diana Eck reveals that she finally found a unifying thread to weave her own story of an India she knows and has lived – that India, in all its diverse religious leanings (Buddhism itself had began near Benares, or Kasha, City of Light), could be revealed as a vast network of routes to seek religious awakening, or what is commonly called pilgrimages, whereby the pilgrim sacrifices much security in order to either find our simply co-experience an unity and awakening.  Taken as a whole, and understood as not something that happens with a brief minority, but great majorities of people, the cycle of giving up something in order to move along a known spiritual route for the same of great understanding, lead Eck to perceive the idea of Sacred Geography. Such a revelation seems to quickly brighten the map of India. What may be initially imagined as a vast and foreign entity, strung through by the world-renown Ganges River, and set off by a seemingly unusual language, becomes something more of a rich-veined map, full of the same sort of character many modern viewers might think of when they remember Gandhi the movie.  Benares is the spiritual capital of India and a place that is seen internally as not only a pilgrimage stop-over, but for many, a sacred city to lay oneself to rest and many bathing ghats (baths on the Ganges along the banks of the city) are cremation zones as well as baths for ritual.  The imagined geographical zone of comfort could be thought of the same kind of compliment that we hope many Americans experience when they visit great and beautiful wild lands as a compliment to churches.

Riverside Ovens
Test Kitchen:
The Strange Case of the
Pan Fried Meatloaf

"People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do?... The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry." MFK Fisher from "The Gastronomical Me"













When the hunger strikes, as Fisher plays it above, and the deadline for the produced meal is fast approaching -- or to be a bit behind schedule -- there are some hopeful safeguards against failure.  These safeguards come in many forms and by degrees, but there are some real standards: the best one is that you have done some planning from the day before or that morning.  A daily trip to the grocery store should bring back to your refrigerator all of the necessary items for even the simplest recipe.  If the meal is complex, let's hope the planning has been as complex and that the proper ingredients are

clean, dry, refrigerated pre-prepared if necessary, and that the oven has been preheat.  Then, for better or worse, there are the only vaguely imagined recipes that will, you already know by the late afternoon, maybe or may not work perfectly, but it will be attempted because the alternative will be bread and braunschweiger, which only approximately 1 percent of the population of your family can even look at...from a distance.  My strange case of the pan fried meatloaf was a combination of vague

intentions, reduced time, but eventual luck.  I had foresight to defrost the package of four ground turkey patties.  These could be used as simply as to fry and serve, maybe bread, maybe applesauce, but at least there would be the patty.  In the pantry I then found an ancient packet of meatloaf seasoning -- yes, this would liven it up a little. With a simple dash of ketchup over the top of the tucked loaf, and there would a version of the one of the more venerated meals of all time: the meatloaf, or scrapple as it might have known in previous times, which had always consisted of some form of meat with a binding agent and hopefully, where available, seasoning.  The Argentinians called it Pan de carne and filled it with ham, cheese and carrots; the Austrians called it Faschierter Braten, not filled, but wrapped in ham before baking; the Cubans made pulpeta and stuffed theirs with hard boiled eggs; the Czechs made sekana, stuffed by gherkins and wienerwurst. The idea dawns on you that meatloaf had been ancient version of the "5:00 Hustle" and one could easily envision large farm families of 5, 10, 15, looking around the stone-walled kitchen for their own version of gourmet items of offal, onion bulbs, and brown eggs, perhaps a lean strip of unused pork, squashing it all together and tossing it over the flame. The result would have been anything but alluring visually, but fatty vegetableized loaf would have packed a calorie load that might have lasted until the same time

next day.  Conditions here, safe to say, not as dire as all that, but the need for the hustle and a calorie load still with us.  Other products in my kitchen that I could raise to the level of meatloaf were shallots, orange grape-size tomatoes, and the egg.  I gooped all of the components together and let sit in the refrigerator to form. Our appointment went a little late; the cross town to school, then back home was trying to drive through ferry of parked cars and there tends to be two fire engines squealing past side streets per trip in the city.  Meatloaf takes at least 30 minutes to bake, sometimes more depending on the thickness of the loaf. What to do, what to do?  Off to the ceremony in 45 minutes. I took a cake spatula and duly cut the loaf into two inch slices and tossed them onto the frying pan in coconut oil (important fat content for our purposes), and let them sizzle, all four sides, for at least 8 minutes per side.  The outside became beautifully marbled, the shallots began waft and the tomatoes to soften.  Most importantly though -- and this is what separated the loaf from the standard burger, other than shape -- was the meatloaf seasoning, full of dried onions and other red meat compliments.  On the plate the large cubes of meatloaf looked just a little bit more appetizing than the standard-fare meatloaf, browned on all sides, juices rising, and ketchup along the side. This strange case finished with the surprising revelation that this was one of the best pieces of meat that we had ever had. It was turkey, which can tend to be a little less flavorful than a good bunch of red meat, but the meatloaf seasoning did well to balance this out.  The shallots and tomatoes inside the meat, bound by an egg, created a level of texture usually not had in a standard burger.  Most important...finished in 15 minutes and back on the road again, through the ferry load of cars on the street, past the six firetrucks no doubt rushing back to the station for a bite of meat loaf.

Riverside Ovens
Test Kitchen

Mushrooms are a wildly usable natural ingredient. It's hard to think of many things that it would not be suited to compliment.  Of the top of my head, I could see a diced portobello enhancing the texture and flavor of virtually any soup, both broth based or tomato based; nearly any kind of meat except for

maybe fish; salads and definitely rices.  The Wild Mushroom Risotto recipe calls for only 2/3 cups of diced porcini mushrooms, a type that wasn't available at the store, so a quick swap to portobello worked just fine.  Start the dish with a standard shallot sauté in oil, then a pinch more oil and 1 and 1/2 cups of Arborio rice, a large and silky style that is well suited to soaking up the mushroom liquid, 1/2 cup of white wine and a full 4 cups of chicken broth.  As the recipe suggests, the process of making the rice is to slowly dissolve the broth, ladling in smaller portions at a time, absorbing the

liquid, then ladling more for what could take up to 35 minutes constant stirring.  The result, however, is a very fluffy and flavorful batch, not sticky or burnt (because of constant stirring).  I placed a batch of boiled asparagus over the arborio and alongside slices of lemon pepper pork loin. A small bowl of cauliflower hummus lined by carrots and this became an earthy, fresh dinner, with hints of coming spring spiced in.

Arboretum Diary:
The Grady Tract

"The thrushes were hurrying back to the wood where the blackbird was croaking hoarsely, a sort of neighboring, as if ordering all the birds to keep quiet and go to sleep." Renard, "The Woodcock"









The small parking lot to the Evjue Pines of the Grady Tract, Arboretum, is set right at the cross hairs of some of the heaviest traffic in the city, where Seminole meets the Beltline East, and one couldn't imagine a more unusual spot to locate the beginning of a linkage of Oak Savannahs inside Kettle Moraines and finally a fully restored marshland Prairie.  But that is the unusual jewel of the city, the Arboretum, as it is made up of pockets of restored naturally occurring forms of habitat.  Once past the initial part of the trail, the pines do a nice job of silencing the ongoing traffic and then quickly the fields of oak grubs take over and long stretching knolls of restored oak savannah spread out in holes

and hillocks.  This morning the recently knocked down swaths of forest stand in piles of cherry, walnut and some oak, all soon to be burned away, the same natural process that allowed for the savannah to occur pre-settlement.  Hawks, robins and chickadees the primary birds here this morning, geese in the background and a lone woodpecker pounding in the background.  Down into the Greene Prairie, though a more lively story as the sedge and bulrush begin green and the water subsides enough to reveal the wood planks as walkway through the immaculately restored marshland.  Sandhill Cranes can be common to see in the vast wetland, but today's show is a flock of Goldfinches that stir at my arrival and they playfully disperse into a near by underbrush.  One of the more vibrant birds in north america, the gold finch can be common here all year round, are seedeaters, and like the open edges near creeks and water.  The sun is not out today, so the rest of the Greene Prairie is a bit quieter than it had been in the day past at 60 degrees and sunny, when the Noe Woods, a scattering of pine and oak, was worth a concert ticket.

Riverside Ovens
Test Kitchen

The beauty of the frittata is that virtually anything goes – if you have 10 eggs on hand, a favorite meat in mind, and some fresh herbs, a frittata could be yours in 30 minutes.  This particular recipe calls for smoked salmon and chives, but I could as easily see crumbled pork sausage or good ham at

the bottom of the pan with fluffy eggs cooked over the top.  First need is to chip away the smoked salmon to bite size pieces and set aside.  Whip up 10 eggs and some rich milk in a bowl, add some diced chives and grated cheese if desired (we skipped the cheese in this case but added some extra

coconut oil for richness and texture). Add the chipped salmon to the bowl, softly stir, and season by at least salt and pepper, then dump this mixture into a pan that is deep enough and that is okay for the oven.  Let the mixture solidify for just a couple of minutes over medium heat on the stove top, then bake uncovered for 25 minutes in a 350 oven.  The frittata is done when the top begins to brown and

fluff up; the sides begin pull away from the greased pan and should easily cut all the way through.  We served with sweet potato waffle fries as our sort of hash brown substitute.  When an egg dish, for whatever reason, sounds like a good dinner option but a fried egg or omelette seems too much like breakfast, the frittata might be the ticket.

Arboretum Diary

"Silent and quite lifeless as we approach it, it'll start to live as soon as it thinks we've gone, because we're as quiet as it is." Renard, "The Sparrow"











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At the hour when the rain stops and the wildlife anticipates some time for open hunting, the birds come out as if on cue and early spring chorus begins in earnest.  We had entered the Wingra Spring Parking Lot, a very common trail which leads to a less than common marshland surrounding this edge of the Lake. Here are natural springs and where they bubble up through the mantle and flow on into the lake, through underbrush, reeds, cattails and bulrush, it leaves a blindingly green trail of what looks to be water clover. Needless to say this spring trail must be a boon for birds of all seasons. Finches and titmouse hover over the thin branches skittering from place to place, likely eyeing up our invasion the space known to them as the great bath, seeds trickling over rocks, insects rising to the

surface as if self-advertisement for a free meal.  Along the two-inch thick mud trail, through a mix of oak, pine and occasional birch, a Downy Woodpecker bobbles against the tough and ancient crust of an oak.  A few steps forward up on the very tops of three old pines stumps, overlooking the marsh as if sentries, are three turkey vultures, steady as statues for the moment.  So the cycle has begun. Seeing these large New World Vultures from the back looks very much like the back side of golden eagles. As we saw only one initially, we thought it possible, but then saw the other two stationed at around 20 foot intervals, shaking their wings from the recent rain.  The binoculars revealed the greatest obvious difference between the two species, the red ugly head in comparison to the stealthy and stoic head of the golden eagle.  As one jumped from its perch through a forest underbrush that was still void of its leaves, it was easy to hear the vast flap of the wings against the silence.  No doubt in this northern climate, recently landed from migration, this large bird comes to Wisconsin considerably hungry and what better place to wait your turn at the table than a fresh marsh spring.