raspberries

I didn't go to the farmer's market today. It seems that just about any day of the week you can find a farmer's market in town, you just need to know where to look. Sort of like an illegal gambling ring. The Saturday market is bigger, and there's slightly more variety, but for the most part your selection from every stall is the same. Everyone has carrots, everyone has cucumbers, everyone has squash, etc, and for all about the same (very reasonable) price and about the same quality. It's not like other towns' markets where there's the bi-color corn guy and the organic lettuce guy, and the cheese empenadas woman, and the heirloom melon dude. The Saturday market hasn't been around all that long, so I'm hoping in future years there'll be more variety.
The upshot of all this is that there's not as much pressure to get out early on a Saturday to go to the market. Instead today I got out early to go raspberry picking. Which was awesome. The berry farm is probably the hardest place to get to in Eau Claire, I got lost coming and going, but it was gorgeous. I parked next to a barn and went in and talked to the elderly gentleman who gave me a spiel about how to pick the berries and sent me on my way. To get to the berry rows I walked through this absolutely gorgeous flower garden that really set the mood. I mean, no matter how many bugs or thorns there were (and there were), it all felt very peaceful and wondrous after walking through that garden. It was a nice outing.
I expected a little more of a price cut, seeing as how I'm doing the labor of picking, but it's actually the same price as what I got at the farmer's market last week. But they tasted just a little sweeter having picked them myself. Next week I might go back for blueberries. We'll see.
Anyway, I picked three pints (took me a little more than an hour, I was picking fall berries and they weren't quite there yet) and a really nice woman I was chatting with while we picked told me that I should lay them out on a cookie sheet and freeze them, then put them in a ziplock for the winter. Which is what I'm going to do, if I don't eat them all first. Could happen, they're really good.

On another note, did you know the fruit is spelled rasPberry? I never noticed that p hidden in there. Man.

squash, tomatoes, and corn with jack cheese

From the Gourmet cookbook:

Ingredients:

• 3 Tbls vegetable oil
• 1 medium onion
• 2 small garlic cloves, minced
• 2 large tomatoes (about 1.5 pounds), halved, seeded, and chopped
• 2 pounds summer squash, cut into .5 inch cubes
• 1.5 cups corn kernels (about 3 ears)
• 2 cups coarsely grated Monterey Jack cheese (about 6 ounces)
• 3/4 tsp salt
• 3/4 tsp black pepper

Directions:

1. Heat oil in a 12-inch heavy skillet over moderately low heat. Add onion and cook, stirring, until softend, about 5 minutes.
2. Add garlic, tomatoes, squash, and corn, increase heat to moderate, and cook, stirring, until squash is tender, 10-12 minutes.
3. Reduce heat to low, stir in cheese, salt and pepper, and simmer, covered, just until cheese is melted, about 30 seconds.

Results:
I really liked the vegetables themselves, and I like that it seems like something I could do with frozen or canned veggies in the winter (if I can find frozen squash). But the cheese sort of did this sticky glomming coating thing with the fork when we ate it, which may be your thing but I find it distasteful. The cheese did thicken the juice, but it didn't add a lot of flavor except for the cloying sweetness of jack that I don't really prefer over other cheeses, and if I'm going to add that much fat to a recipe it'd better make it 50 times better. The next time I'll either leave out the cheese or add a little bit of flavorful cheese after serving so it can melt at the table (I'm thinking smoked gouda or chevre?), and instead add some smoked paprika or, I dunno, maybe celery salt? Hmm... The flavors were very nice the next day for leftovers.

I feel somewhat mollified that the same things that bother me about time travel also bothers physicists. Now, if only I can get them to agree with me about that darn theory of relativity.

Tip: When your corningware containing tacos will not fit in the microwave, putting it in the oven to melt the cheese is a viable option only if you: a) do not put it on broil, b) do not put it on the topmost rack, and c) do not forget about it until you start to see smoke pouring out of the oven.We ate them anyway.

Sour beer and sour grapes

We went to the Great Taste of the Midwest in Madison this weekend and sampled some tasty craft brews. My favorites were the sours from Jolly Pumpkin and the Annun Unum from Flossmore Station, also sour. I didn't like sour beers the first time I tried them, but now I find them refreshing.

The whole event was a pretty neat experience. It's held in a park on Lake Mendota (? possibly Lake Monona), and you get a tiny sampling glass to walk around to all sorts of good midwestern brewers. It was very well thought out, so much so that the lines for beer weren't very long, and I never had to wait in a line longer than two people for the port-o-potties.

The only sad part was a talk on beer and chocolate pairings that I went to in the education tent. Only the people with chairs (of which I was not) got chocolates and beer, and the whole talk was not about pairing chocolate and beer in general, but those specific pairings (THAT beer with THAT chocolate). I could overhear people in the chairs (we'll call them the Haves) chatting with their fellow Haves about how the chocolate was the most amazing chocolate they'd ever had, blah blah blah, while us Havenots were left to sit on the cold muddy ground with nothing to do but watch them lick their fingers. Before too long I left the education tent, as I was not being educated.

Zucchini in pasta sauce

I've been hearing that you can put zucchini in a pasta sauce and you'll never know it's there. It's true! Even Chris grudgingly admitted that he liked it. I shredded a zucchini on my box grater and sauteed the shreds with the salt, pepper, olive oil, and garlic that I was going to use to make the sauce anyway. (Next time I think I'll salt the shreds and let them drain in a collider for a while first, just to see what happens.) I meant to saute it until brown, but the zucchini actually just sort of built up a layer of browned mush on the bottom of the pan and I didn't want that to burn so I just aborted that plan (any ideas for how to avoid the layer of mush?). I deglazed the tasty brown mush with tomato juice from the can of diced tomatoes I was going to put in the sauce, then added everything else. Browned zucchini sort of gets that savory flavor that I'm pretty addicted to this time of year, and it added a subtle smokeyness to the sauce.

Let the bears pay the bear tax

Everytime we drive into Maryland, Chris starts looking for bears. There's signs all over the highway sporting a bear and a deer and it says, Watch for our wildlife. This promise has never been realized as the only bears we have ever seen have been in zoos (so not technically wild). We went to Colorado and Idaho hoping to see a bear. No bears, just disappointment.

Two days ago there was a black bear wandering around INSIDE the Eau Claire city limits. WHY have we been going to far off places to find bears when they were in Wisconsin all along? Will have to keep eyes peeled.