Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
Post #2079: Moosioloi and other kitchen adventures
Yesterday was a bit of a kitchen day – and a playing music day – and an eating day. It was a day at home after a month of mostly being away – and it was sorely needed.
The upshot of that kitchen day was a number of small experiments – the first being the olive-tasting that I wrote about in my last post. I later fed some of the olives to our friend Jon who came over to teach us about pasta-making and he said they were the best olives he had ever tasted. Real deal!
Then we got onto the pasta making. We had decided some time ago that moose ravioli was a think that should exist in the world. With a freezer full of moose, a pasta roller given to us by a friend, and Jon to show us how to put it all together – we decided that this was the time to make some food magic happen.
I won’t go into great detail here about the process, since there are a million places that you can learn about making stuffed pasta on the Internet, but I will give you the recipe (below) so that if you happen upon some ground moose (or venison, or beef) you can replicate the amazingness that was our pasta dinner.
The finished produce looked like this – not the prettiest thing I have ever made, but one of the tastiest by far:
We served this alongside pickled beets, a salad of greens, apple, and almonds, a tuscan bread and a nice chianti. All around fabulous food experience!
Moose Ravioli
Pasta Dough:
3 eggs
2 cups of flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
water if necessary
I do my dough in the Cusinart with the dough blade so I can only do a batch as large as this at a time. Basically, you throw all that into your food processor or breadmaker and churn until it forms an elastic and non-sticky dough.
We made two batches of dough which would feed 5-6 people (or 4 very hungry people and our dog).
Moose Filling:
4 cloves garlic
1 onion
1 pound moose meat
1 moose sausage (which gives a bit of fat and flavour)
1/2 cup blue cheese (or more if you like)
1/4 cup pine nuts
1/2 a bunch of Italian flat-leaf parsely
Saute the garlic and onion, then brown the meat. Once the meat is cooked, crumble the blue cheese into the mixture along with the pine nuts. Stir and season to taste. Add the parsely near the end. We added a lot of blue cheese which meant we didn’t need any additional salt, but fresh ground pepper bumped the whole thing up.
This filling recipe is enough for two batches of the dough recipe above.
Sauce
1-2 cups Tomato sauce
Fresh rosemary (to taste)
We used the tomato sauce that we canned this summer and added about a 1/4 cup of fresh rosemary from the garden to it. You don’t want the sauce to overwhelm the plate, so just make enough to coast the pasta.
Once the pasta is made, and then cooked, toss it in the tomato sauce and serve with parmesan cheese.
And delish! If you have a chance at some moose this season, and an afternoon with friends – this is a great social activity and meal rolled into one.
Next post? Homemade granola and yogurt – the second part of yesterday’s experiments.
Post #2078: Report back on the olive experiment
Remember how I bought ten pounds of olives back in September – and I wasn’t really sure what to do with them or how they would turn out? Well. I’m glad to report that the water-cured olives have so far turned out great, and the brine-fermented olives seem to be doing their thing. Here is the blow-by-blow on what I think about each:
Water-Cured: Cracked
Besides lye-curing, the quickest way to cure olives is by water curing them. This involves breaching the flesh of the fruit and then soaking them in water for up to a month, changing the water each day. This leaches the bitter oleuropein out of the fruit, and once that is done, you can cure the olives in brine.
One way that you prep olives for water-curing is by cracking them with a back of a spoon – you don’t want the pits to come loose, by you do want to create a split in the fruit so the water can do its work. We transferred these olives from the water to a herb-brine at the end of October and started eating these about two weeks ago. Here is what my cracked olives look like now, two and a half months after I started the process:
By far, this is the quickest fermenting method as the smashed olive allows for a lot of “flushing” to happen in the water cure. Also, these olives pick up the brine flavours quickly (after four days in the brine they were edible). On the downside, the smashed olives seem to be degrading relatively quickly and they are softer on the inside than I would like. We have eaten close to half of the jar, so that’s fine – and I’m thinking of turning the rest into tapenade.
Water-cured: Cut
Everyt
hing about these olives is the same as above except instead of smashing them, I took a paring knife to each one and made an incision. They look much nicer as a result, and they have held their firmness since being transferred into the fridge. They are certainly more bitter than the smashed ones, but not unbearably so and I think the slight bitter taste gives them a bit of kick. This combination with the brine makes for a very edible table olive, and truly – these can be ready in as little as six weeks. I just broke these open for eating today though and I do think the extra month in brine really makes a positive difference.
Brine-Fermented, Unbroken
These olives have also been kicking around in the curing process for two and a half months, but unlike the water-cured olives they still about about two and a half months to go. Brine fermenting leaves the olives intact, but takes much longer to cure them. You can see from the picture that the olives look a lot more “whole” and less degraded than the split examples above (the photo at the head of this article is of the brine-fermented olives you see on the plate here. Although I know these are far from ready, I did brave a taste today – I couldn’t help myself really since I was photographing after all. And though these are still on the not-as-edible side of bitter – they are actually ok, as in they don’t make you gag from the astringency. I definitely want to leave them until the new year – but by far these had the strongest flavouring from the brine, plus they are as firm as ripe olives can be with no degradation of the flesh at all. I don’t think these olives fermented as actively as I would have liked in the beginning, but still they seem to be well on their way to becoming an edible thing.
Overall I am quite pleased with the olive experiment so far and have no problem serving the water-cured olives over the holiday season. That means that when olives come into Vancouver in early fall, there is plenty of time to cure some up for Christmas gifts with the water-curing method. Though cutting is more work, I think that I prefer this over the smashed olives because it leaves the fruit with better consistency over time – but if you don’t mind a softer olive, or want olives for tapenade, the smashed route leaves them less bitter.
I’m really looking forward to the brine-fermented olives in the new year – and I highly recommend trying this out when you have fresh olives available. I can easily see doing double the amount next year and putting together some Christmas gifts of small jars of olives to give away with the other seasonal treats.
Post #2077: Knowing the flowers
On Saturday, I drove up to the cabin with one of our land partners so we could drop off a loveseat that we got for free from someone in the city. It was a quick trip up and back on the same day, but we wanted to get in there before more snow hit the ground. Although it’s pretty bare in Princeton at the moment, the hills around and the elevation our place is at has definitely seen some cold temps and precipitation. There was just enough that I could take my showshoes for a spin up above our place, following the trail that Brian and I flagged in the summer.
Now the we have the cabin really underway, I am starting to know the landscape around our lot. I’ve taken up my plant guides for the interior, and started to photograph what I think might be edible for further verification. We’ve found the moose wallows, and noted the tracks of various animals – including snowshoe hare on this most recent trip. We’re cutting old trails back into place and following ones made by the deer. It’s a process – to really know a place deeply – and one that I feel is just beginning for us after two years of hanging around this place.
At the zen-do on Sunday, we talked about the climate change summit, and a poem by Gary Snyder was read. The last three lines of the poem sounded:
“stay together
learn the flowers
go light”
And it brought me to thinking about this long process of getting to know a place – to “learn the flowers” and how the transience of our current society makes it very hard for us to know places deeply enough to care for and caretake them. Some of that transience is forced – as in the migrations out of the Middle East right now – but in the North American context there is a sense that to be transient is to be free. And freedom is of high value in our context – thus to be tied down, to know a place, to live in a grounded and rooted way is to be unfree and that is deeply unhip.
But if we don’t know the flowers, follow the animal trails, learn the parts of our landscape which sustain life – then how can we in turn sustain more than just lifestyle?
I expect that is in effect the difference that this hinges on – we value lifestyle over life, and confuse the two in the process.
I don’t have a punchy way to finish this post – the thoughts are still in formation as I type and I’ve just flown across the country to attend a week of meetings in Ottawa. And that speaks to my own issues with status and lifestyle that are too much to get into right now.
So – to being grounded, placed, rooted, and a little bit stuck – I am increasingly of the mind that this is the only way we are going to get out of the mess that we are in. Dig in, plant a garden, watch the seasons rise and fall.
Post #2076: Fall turning winter.
It’s crisp here, and I’m in between trips east – trying to catch up and plan all at once. So I leave you with a photo from my neighbourhood walk on Saturday. More shortly.
Post #2075: We never stand still
I have been away from my life most of the last two weeks – first in meditation retreat, and then I left almost straight for Gatineau (the lesser cousin to Ottawa) where I post from now. It feels like forever that I have been gone, and I’m reminded of the years in which I lived like this non-stop. The years before I met Brian and we made a home together, when I didn’t mind whether I was home or in a hotel.
That it makes such a difference to me now speaks to how my life has changed in the last eight years. I remember telling Brian when I met him that he was just going to have to live with the fact that I was on the road all the time. And he was totally willing to accept that! But as it turned out….. I wasn’t. The last significant period of travel for me – when I was on the road for about three months solid – came to a close five years ago this month (I remember, because I’ve got a date on my collective agreement that proves it).
We are so often faced with moments that remind us of where we have been, and where we belong now. I am having one of them tonight – lonely in a Ramada in the wasteland of a casino district, processing another loss from my past, thinking about how easy it is to fail to notice what’s important, how we are conditioned to forget to awaken to our lives before they are over.
While I make no pretenses to having discovered my true nature, I do take some comfort in a life that is more settled now than it was ten years ago – and a love that has built a home where I would far rather spend my days than in the hotels of *any* country.
Red Cedar 