Eating Minnesota

Recipe: Arroz Caldo, or Fil-Am Chicken & Rice Soup

2011-02-11T16:27:48Z

In Hong Kong it's called congee in English and jook in Cantonese. The Filipinos call it arroz caldo, which means hot rice in Spanish. It's eaten all across Asia and has many names. It's very adaptable - can be vegetarian and the flavor varied from gingery and brothy (for when you have a cold) to garlicky with lots of chicken (when company's coming for dinner). It's eaten at any time of day, at home, served in airport lounges, sidewalk stands, etc etc. Most Filipinos consider the patis essential, but I'm not a fan, so in my recipe, it's a garnish. That's why I call it Fil-Am, or Filipino-American.

I have cooked this dish for my cousins in Norway, for a board meeting in Minnesota and for children everywhere, and everyone seems to like it.

]]> 3 T vegetable oil
4-6 cloves of garlic, minced
1 onion, chopped
2-inch piece of ginger root, sliced
1-1/2 cups of rice
10 cups of chicken or vegetable stock or water
½ pound chicken pieces (see below)
Salt and pepper to taste
Garnish: Fried garlic + chopped green onions + soy sauce or patis (fish sauce)

Fry the garlic, onion and ginger in oil on medium heat until it's soft and transparent. Add the rice and cook for 5 minutes on medium heat, stirring. The rice will get a bit brown.

Add the water (if using chicken with bones) or chicken broth (if using chicken filets). Bring it to a boil.

Add the chicken and simmer for 30 minutes, until the rice is fully cooked. The Filipinos use chicken with bones, cut into pieces about the size of one's thumb, which adds flavor to the soup. You may also use filets, chopped.

Before serving, adjust the seasonings with salt (not much, if you're using chicken stock) and pepper.

Chop a few more tablespoons of garlic and fry in oil until brown and crispy (don't burn it, though) for a garnish.

This soup tastes even better the second day, but you will need to add water or stock.
Serves 10.

Addendum: Just noticed this testimony to the importance of this dish in the Wall Street Journal !

Can you say Vaj? *

2009-05-27T16:08:16Z

Saveur magazine offers everything you ever wanted to know about butter ... and more. It describes the basic kinds of butter, 30 of the best, and a list of translations of the word in many languages. Have a read, and note the Minnesota entry on the Top 30 list: Pastureland Summer Gold.

]]> * Vaj is Hungarian for butter.

Dubonnet -- a walk back in time

2009-04-07T20:50:51Z

When QEII has finished waving from the balcony of Buckingham Palace and turns back into the room behind her to celebrate whatever occasion has brought her out that day, she is handed the same refreshment every time; one peculiar to her and, previously, her mother, the late Queen Mum.

The room into which she steps is a reception room and contains a bar. The royal barman gave the recipe for the queen's favourite drink in one episode of a recent PBS TV series, The Monarchy: The Royal Family At Work.

]]> Dubonnet and Gin

Into a crystal aperitif glass etched with the letter E, place two perfect cubes of ice and a lemon peel (no pips). Then pour one part gin (it should reach the bottom of the E) and two parts Dubonnet. Wiping away any drops that may have splashed, hand the drink to her majesty before the ice begins to melt.

I became intrigued with the barman's recipe and began a quest to find Dubonnet in the Twin Cities. I had no luck ordering a drink containing Dubonnet in several restaurants and bars. Most servers didn't recognize the name.

Taking pity on me (or perhaps tiring of the story), my husband located a bottle (domestic, sadly, not French) at Haskell's in St. Paul. Not wanting to waste the occasion, I brought the bottle along to a party and inflicted the drink on several unsuspecting non-Anglophiles before tasting it myself.

With such a big build-up, I was bound to be disappointed. Having tasted it finally, it made me think of the 1970s and the drinks my parents and their friends used to order. Back in the day, I got a Coke with a maraschino cherry and the grownups got drinks that smelled like Dubonnet at restaurants that are now long gone. Mr Nibs at 26th and 26th in south Minneapolis was for business meetings. The Parker House in Mendota Heights, with its parking lot filled with Cadillacs and its leather-covered piano bar, was for special occasions.

I intend to find another party, and to try the queen's drink again. But next time, I won't think of England.

Not a shwarma, not a gyro, but yum!

2009-03-18T21:41:53Z

Get yourself over to Mim's on Cleveland Avenue in St. Paul and ask for a salad with chicken. It has no name but must be the nicest salad in the 55108 postal code.

Really just a pita-less shwarma and rather unassuming in its styrofoam box, this salad is made of cabbage and lettuce, topped with garlic-mayonnaise sauce and raw onions, but heaped with that delicious spit-roasted chicken normally associated with shwarmas and their cousins, gyros. Topped with raw onions and a slice of lemon to greet your nose as you open the box, it makes a great lunch for anyone on or near the U of Minnesota St. Paul campus around lunchtime. Tell Mahmoud that Ann sent you.

A controversial subject--tipping

2009-03-13T21:18:21Z

Along with religion and politics, tipping is apparently a subject that's impossible to discuss in civil tones -- at least internationally. A recent BBC story about tipping in America described how US waitrons rely on tips to make up a significant part of their incomes, which puts pressure on their customers to decide how much to tip. (For anyone who is not aware -- this is not the case all over the world!) When it comes to tipping, travelers beware! Local customs prevail, and it's up to travelers to work out what those customs are, how much they agree with them, and judge the performance of their particular server.

So here's a primer on tipping in Minnesota, for those who plan to visit, and don't want to offend:
The service charge is not included in the restaurant bill unless the group is large. In this case, the service charge will be noted on the menu. Fifteen percent is standard; leave 20% for excellent service. As noted in the BBC piece, do not be anxious if your server seems overly familiar; he'll stop as soon as you've paid the bill.

By the way, if anyone out there knows, I'd appreciate some guidance on how much to tip a bartender here in Minnesota? I'm not sure I've got that right yet.

Fantasy restaurant

2009-03-03T19:57:11Z

When it comes to food blogs, The Heavy Table is in the big leagues, with a staff, contributing writers, starred restaurant reviews and ads.

Being a mere guppie in the foodie pond, Eating Minnesota recently entered HT's Create a Restaurant competition. Lo and behold, we made the list with the "Just around the corner" entry ! (Although we think the poem just below it knocked the ball out of the park in comparison.) The $20 gift certificate to Annano's deli will fund a weekend outing that may feed not only EM's family, but this blog as well.

Many thanks to The Heavy Table.

Two Scando-losses and signs of change

2009-03-02T23:00:35Z

Two Scandinavian institutions in Minnesota have closed in the past year, due more or less to the state’s shrinking Norwegian population. The Royal Norwegian Consulate General’s closing last summer was well publicized. There were protests, a letter-writing campaign, much outrage and then, when the Norwegian government announced that the honorary consul would be Walter Mondale, acceptance.

Less well publicized was the closing of the Scandia Bake Shop in south Minneapolis’s Nokomis Village. For 18 years, it sold a wide range of authentic and not-so-authentic Scandinavian cakes and cookies. You could stop in for a cup of coffee and a piece of kransekake or a bolle. Boller (balls), sweetened bread rolls, look very plain Jane, but are a bit sweeter, and come standard with your coffee in Norway, and thus very authentic. You would almost certainly take with you a loaf of Knipe bread, your basic hearty wheat bread, excellent with a brothy soup, and sold unsliced.

]]> Kransekake is at the other end of the baked-goods spectrum. Traditionally served at weddings, kransekaker look like a stack of rings (Krans means wreath), and are usually adorned with little flags. Wisely seeing the need for little luxuries between life events, the Scandia Bake Shop kept kransekake sticks in the glass case. For $1.50, you could have a four-inch slice of a very special day. Kransekake is basically baked marzipan, and being a sucker for nearly anything with almonds, I found it a very good reason to stop by when in the neighborhood.

As a kid growing up in south Minneapolis, I did not know that I was living in a bit of a time capsule. It seemed to me that I was surrounded by only two types of people: Norwegians and non-Norwegians. The Norwegians talked the talk (sometimes with a little English thrown in) and walked the walk – they baked their own krumkake at Christmas and blotkake for birthdays, and lapskaus made up a typical weekday meal. But Norwegians pretty much stopped moving to America in the 1960s. Many of them are gone now, and thus the closing of the consulate.

It seems to me that Scandia Bake Shop stepped in where the ladies-who-baked left off. It took the place of the ladies like my mother, who baked kringle on most Saturdays when the weather wasn’t too hot, but who got jobs outside the home during the 1970s, and who have begun in recent years to leave us for that big clean kitchen in the sky. The Scandia Bake Shop filled the void in our stomachs that we couldn’t fill between Christmas Julebords and Syttende Mai and Norway Day in Minnehaha Park.

With a shrinking concentration of hard-core lefse-eaters in Minnesota, the Scandia Bake Shop struggled in recent years but closed for good in January. That’s the bad news. The good news is that there are still some sources of good Norwegian food and culture in Minneapolis. One is Mindekirken, the church near Franklin and Chicago Avenues founded by immigrants more than 100 years ago and still worshiping weekly in the native tongue. It has weekly lunches open to the public with a decent approximation of “how it used to be”.

The other, not far from Mindekirken, is Ingebretsen’s, which claims to be the Twin Cities’ oldest food store, on Lake Street near Bloomington Avenue. With a cold meat and cheese counter, stocked to the rafters with canned and dried foodstuffs and a gift shop next door, this place is exactly the same as it was when I was a kid going in with my mom.

Ingebretsen’s is a gold mine of Norwegian ingredients, ready-made foods, jams, crisp-breads and chocolate bars. There is my all time favorite cheese, gjetost, which comes in two varieties – ekte all goat’s milk for the purists who like the tangy goat’s milk taste, and gudbransdal’s ost, which is sweeter because it’s half cow’s milk. There is the Danish Jarlsberg cheese and smellier varieties. As far as I am aware it is the last place in town where you can buy Norwegian meatball dough, a mixture of finely ground veal and pork that yields a lovely brown sauce. (Buy it by the ton – leftovers are just as good, and it freezes well.)

At Christmas, this place has queues out the door, but the rest of the year it does not. I have no indication that Ingebretsen’s will go the way of Scandia Bake Shop and the consulate. In fact, it may be thriving now that it is surrounded by the wonderful mix of food joints that East Lake Street has today – halal shops, Mexican carncierias, not to mention the nearby Midtown Global Market. I hope so. But I plan to put it on my list of “places to visit more often,” just to make sure.

Baking in a depression

2009-02-19T22:09:48Z

An old cake recipe reminded me how the economy goes in cycles. Very few people living today really remember the depression of the 1930s, but when I was a child we lived next door to Ben and Cel, a retired couple who stretched every dollar into five. Ben was an auto mechanic all his life and Cel stayed home, working at the Minnesota State Fair some years for extra money. They grew up on farms in southern Minnesota, moved to town when they finished formal schooling, and built a new house when they retired. One of the reasons they died with millions was their frugality, which lasted 50 years after the Depression was over. I wonder how our current deep recession will affect all of us 50 years from now?

The index card read, "Cheap, Quick Cake." The ingredient list and directions were as terse as the title, and the only descriptive words spoke of elbow grease, not taste. "Beat like heck". I took the instructions literally and eschewed the electric mixer in favor of the authentic experience. i can't say it's the lightest fluffiest cake I have ever baked, but it definitely lives up to its name.

Read the recipe:

]]> Cheap, Quick Cake

2 eggs (beat like heck)
1 c. sugar, gradually
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp salt
1/2 c hot milk
1 tsp baking powder
1 c flour
Add milk, vanilla, flour, baking powder & salt alternately.
Bake 25 minutes. 375 degrees.

Balancing butter

2009-02-09T19:33:28Z

Growing up in a dairy state, we learned all about milk fat, cheese production and calcium in primary school. We did not learn about gourmet cheeses (yellow and non-yellow was the limit back then, really) but even as fifth graders, we knew that whole milk was about 4 percent fat, and that skim was not really fat free, even though it looked blue.

With friends coming for a casual dinner on Saturday night, my young assistant and I made up a batch of Italian cornmeal cookies. The amount of butter worked out to about a half-tablespoon per cookie, so they they were definitely not health food. But the scratchy presence of the cornmeal added fiber, making their texture more interesting than shortbread or plain butter cookies. The liberal use of lemon zest also lightened them up. Dusted with baker's sugar, embedded with pine nuts, and optionally dunked in Cointreau or Vin Santo, they were, if I say so myself, just the thing in front of a big fire on a damp late winter's night.

I have noticed that the recipes in most fashionable cookbooks these days call for unsalted butter. The reasoning is that the salt content can vary among brands or countries, and that with unsalted butter the cook can control the amount of salt completely. Being no control freak myself, I have rejected unsalted butter as unnecessary in my kitchen. Unsalted butter tastes terrible on its own, and adds nothing to the taste of a slice of toasted bread -- without a bit of salt, it's just fatty milk. Salted butter does not contain enough salt to make a difference either way. So I've made it a rule to keep salted butter and margarine in the house. Margarine is for my fellow householders who watch their dairy intake, and butter is for baking. Both taste good on toast.

Stunted herbs

2009-02-03T20:03:06Z

Don't get me wrong, I like Minnesota winters. But having lived in a mediterranean climate for a couple of years, one thing I miss about the Bay Area is my kitchen garden. My rosemary bush thrived, except in the coldest part of the rainy season, and I could snip off a couple of inconspicuous limbs to stuff into a roasting chicken. In my first house, the 30-foot-high lemon tree outside bore fruit constantly -- very convenient when the odd drink or dish needed some lemon juice. For anyone who doesn't know what I mean, have a look at -- and be seduced by -- the northern Californian's pornography: Sunset magazine.

I attempt to keep a kitchen garden inside my kitchen here in Minnesota, but have had no luck this winter. the lavender bush from last summer is reduced to a small brittle clump. I have not attempted to keep basil plants, knowing how they love heat and sun, and how cold it is next to my kitchen windows.

The other day, hope arrived in the post: it is time to fill in the form to claim a plot in the community garden. By sending off a check for $20 and signing my name, I can now look forward to a summer of fresh produce. The yield from this plot will never be enough to feed the family, and it will not be very close to my kitchen, but I should be able to produce the little lovelies that make everything else taste a bit special.

An educational lunch

2009-02-03T19:26:00Z

An impromptu office celebration, partly in honor of a recently returned student worker from India, featured lunch from India Palace down the road. A discussion about Indian versus Minnesotan food ensued. What's the difference, apart from the spices? Mumbai, being a coastal city, has fish as a staple food. Minnesotans are also fish eaters, but the difference of course is the water and the climate. Mumbaians eat seafood from a warm sea and Minnesotan eat freshwater fish from cold (sometimes frozen-over) lakes. For variety, and for those of us who prefer to buy fish rather than catch it, Minnesotans ship in fish and seafood shipped in from all over the planet.

A post-lunch Google search turned up confirmation of my lunchmate Cat's recollection: that an Asian warm-water fish called tilapia is farmed in large quantities in Renville. They are raised in waters warmed by the heat that is a byproduct of sugar beet production, and the fish waste is used to fertilize the sugar beet fields. It all sounds very sustainable and lovely, except that the fish is shipped off to Chinese customers in Vancouver! Does anyone know if this Renville co-op still exists? If so, wouldn't it be nice if they could develop a local market?

A mediocre achievement

2009-01-29T15:56:38Z

It being winter in Minnesota, last night's dinner was what is known as "Del Monte cooking". Adapting freely from a recipe from MPR's Lynne Rosetto Casper, I threw together two cans each of white beans and kidney beans, garlic, bacon, lemon juice, parsley and, as it turned out, not nearly enough salt and pepper. Instead of fresh parsley, I used a dried bunch of last summer's CSA parsley. Winter on the cold prairie, and all that. Casper's recipe was for a salad, but I had no greens and thought maybe it would be good on warmed-up white rice.

This is no reflection on Ms Casper's recipe, but more on my free adaptation and lack of fresh ingredients. The verdict: bland and a bit gloppy. The kids were very kind and said they liked it. I now have a very bland leftover lunch to look forward to tomorrow.