Christmas In Dry Valley

The view of Rich Mountain from parent's front porch.

My Mom, Dad and brothers moved to the foothills of the Smoky Mountains in Townsend, Tennessee about a year after I started college. My mother's side of the family is from this area, in fact she was born here. Her parents, my Nana and Grandfather, moved to the suburbs of Detroit in the early 1950's to find work in the auto industry when she was one year old, as did many out of work Southerners. East Tennessee in the 1950's was poor and rural, and Detroit was a boom town. Many of these Appalachian expats didn't end up finding any manner of real happiness in Detroit. Some stayed. Some actually moved to the Copper Mountains in the Upper Peninsula because they somewhat resemble the Smokies. Many returned to the mountains they loved. Poverty, it seems, is a more easily accepted lifestyle when you are in a place you have very real love for deep in your bones. My Grandfather drank himself to death in the chair he sat in every day after work in the suburban Detroit home where he raised my mother and uncle. I couldn't tell you if it was because he missed the mountains. He died just a few short months before I was born.

So it wasn't much of a surprise that, after Nana died, my family decided to move south with the help of a bit of money she left them. They have struggled, as most people in east Tennessee seem to, but I think they are very happy to be there. And I have been very happy to visit. We started visiting Tennessee when I was very young and I have spent almost every Christmas there since they moved. Even though I have never lived there,  Tennessee is very much a part of me. Many of my relatives have heavy southern accents and I have great aunts named Bobby and Gladys and Phyllis, most of whom kept extravagant beehives or similar fashionable hairdos most of their lives. My mother cooked things like biscuits and gravy and fried chicken when we were growing up, just like Nana and her sisters would when we visited.

I love the food of the American South, especially the food and food traditions of Appalachia. In the South, where racial divides have historically run very deep, it can be hard to tell where the line between soul food and southern comfort food is. This is what I love about the dinner table. It is truly a harbinger for commonality, equality and democracy. Not so long ago in Townsend it wouldn't be unusual to find smoky country ham, hominy or fine grits, beans baked with ham hocks, wild watercress wilted in bacon fat, or greens in pot liquor on local stoves. Today, the small town of Maryville, the closest metropolis, is surrounded by malls and chain restaurants. My mother and I were talking about how strange it seems to both of us that you can't find a local restaurant that makes a home made biscuit. You are hard pressed to find anything more than typical commodity products on grocery store shelves, barbecue joints are few and far between (though there are a couple of good ones), and you are unlikely to find someone under the age of 50 who has ever tasted wild watercress. But this is still a very, very good place for food.

The renowned Inn at Blackberry Farm is here, where John Fleer got people thinking about the fine food traditions of the foothills and paying good money to experience it. My mother owns a bakery, Wild Mountain Rose Bakery, where she makes delicious, hand made bread from her wood fired oven. The Market in Maryville which sells her bread has a really remarkable butcher shop in it.

And then, of course, there is Allan Benton. Allan Benton is a bit of a hero of mine. He has recently become very well known thanks to the likes of David Chang et al. I have been a customer for some time, before the hoopla. Allan is friendly, kind, and gracious. More often than not he is taking orders by phone at his shop in Madisonville and he will happily drop what he's doing to give passers by a tour while telling the story of Benton's, a story that started with his childhood in Virginia: killing, butchering, curing and smoking hogs for the family. He makes ham and bacon the way he was taught in the hills as a child, and this is what makes his products so special. Many country ham producers in the south are changing their hams to suit modern tastes: lessening the salt and smoke, controlling their curing cells to keep the funk at bay. But a Benton's ham is made as it always has been. It is as aggressive and wild and boisterous as the south itself and is probably very much like the hams that were made by the first foothills settlers two centuries ago. Admittedly, it's not for everyone.  In fact, we had to stop putting Benton's bacon in our burger because too many Yankee princesses were complaining that it was too smoky (as it turns out, Allan says even in Tennessee they sell more unsmoked bacon than smoked). But I love love love it. It is an experience not unlike drinking Scotch from Islay, whisky that is peaty and smoky sometimes to the point of becoming medicinal. And once again, some people love it, others don't. This area was settled in large part by Scots, so this comparison seems all too appropriate, as does my appreciation for both, as a Scot descendent myself.

Many years during the Christmas visit we make the trek out to Madisonville to see Benton's. One of the little known gems you can get there is his breakfast sausage. It is a raw pork sausage studded with nutmeg and sage packed in to a sleeve of burlap and cold smoked. It is without a doubt the best breakfast sausage on earth. I am very proud of my own, but it falls very short of Mr. Benton's. Having breakfast sausage on hand in the Millar house means biscuits and gravy will follow. I have been working on perfecting my own biscuit recipe and am always excited to make them for Mom to see what she thinks of version ?.0. My mother puts Pet brand evaporated milk in her gravy. I never knew this and when she told me I was a little suspect. As it turns out, a lot of people in East Tennessee cooked with cans of evaporated milk. There was a Pet production facility here so it was inexpensive, and it kept well without refrigeration. This was pretty important in a part of the country that was economically depressed and that sees raging heat and humidity in the summer months. Some of these hollers and mountain communities didn't see electricity (and therefore refrigeration) until the 1970's. So if you didn't have a cow, you had no milk unless you had Pet.

I have always loved my mother's biscuits and gravy above all others, so as I was making gravy this morning, I did as she suggested and used a can of evaporated milk. And the lights suddenly went on. I have never been able to make it myself as well as she could, and now I know why. Evaporating the milk concentrates and faintly caramelizes the lactose, milk's natural sugar, which gives the gravy that same subtle dairy sweetness, and turns good into great.

This is one of the reasons I love to cook with my Mom. I constantly pester her with questions, and sometimes I am blindsided by some little nugget of wisdom that I never thought to ask about and she never thought to share. She taught me to cook and she is still teaching me. My personal history is wrapped up in the things she learned to cook from her mother, right along side the history of the people of this region, all those good things to eat, and the wonderful stories that get passed around our home. Stories about great grandmother Rose who cooked most of her life on a wood stove and could tell with a pass of the hand if the fire was ready for baking a pie. Or how she taught them the hard but necessary truth about where chicken comes from when she went into the yard and wrung a bird's neck to make dinner one night. Or what it is like to go without so your children will have something to eat that day in school. Or, perhaps, a story or two about the great abundance of both food and joy around the table on Christmas night, now that the days of living on the edge of hunger are at least for now a memory for my family. It is quite often a story about something simple, a piece of candy her mother gave her, maybe, that will cause her to pause and remember Nana, her sweet and giving mother, who she lost too soon, who stayed connected with the tall, rocky hills of Townsend, and kept them alive for her daughter, who kept them alive for me. Cooking and eating are one of our great cultural archives, but also one of our most fragile. Writing about food helps, but it does not replace the acts of cooking and eating. If we don't take a little time to preserve the foods that are so central to our personal histories by bringing them to life in the kitchen and the dining room, they will be lost and unrecoverable. This yearly sojourn to Tennessee brings things to life that I may never cook in a restaurant. But they remind me who I am, and put my feet firmly in the red clay of Tennessee, if only for a moment.

Miracle Tonics

I have been in a very bad mood at work lately.

I am admittedly not very far from flying off the handle about something on a fairly regular basis, but the last couple of weeks have found me very often unjustifiably and irrationally angry at the slightest provocation. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is the onslaught of corporate christmas parties filling our docket this month, and principally one which has been spirit dampening and soul crushing at every turn. This particular group has loads of money to spend. You would think this is a chef's dream, but that is a horrible myth. The fact is, the more money someone has to spend, the more they have to say about how it's spent, and money, I am quickly learning, very rarely is an indication of good taste. The big check waltzes in to a restaurant and demands their tastes be met without one care in the world about what wonderful things a talented, professional, and knowledgable crew might be able to do to make them happy if they would only open their hearts to it. Very quickly, all dreams of culinary liberation through finance fade. Very quickly, that opportunity cook with Alba white truffles or pour some stellar grower champagne gets shoved aside for someone who wants a mountain of shrimp cocktail and filet with lobster tail, enough filet, mind you, that each and every guest is allotted over a pound. With this group, it's all about more, not better.

But they have that check. That huge check. And they are not naive; they know exactly what power they have. No restaurant is in the position to turn it down. So you do it. You book the party and you order the shrimp. You make the cocktail recipe they brought you by Sarah Lee. And I am a bit of a prima donna. So it kills me. It really and truly crushes me. My profession, the craft that so many thoughtful, passionate, creative people have dedicated so much labor and love toward giving it the remarkable beauty it has in modern times, deserves better than to be some philistine's errand boy.

But, the money is there and so is your standard. You cook from scratch, order the best shrimp and the best filet, and you cook a delicious, if not inspired, meal, which is exactly what happened. I spoke in the prime rib post about how much I enjoy finding some love for the over done and abused, and shrimp cocktail & filet sure fit that category. So my staff and I took them very seriously, as seriously as we would have taken those Alba truffles.

And two extraordinary things happened.

Two extraordinary broths happened.

First:
The filet was marinated in a powder we made form dried porcini mushroom, fennel, and cayenne for a couple of days.  This is a cheesy, steak house chef wanna be preparation but it's tasty, and when it rested out, the jus it left behind was shockingly good. Blood red and powerful, infused fully with the flavor of the spices and dried mushrooms. The beef and porcini packed enough amino acids into that roasting pan it could have spawned new life. We knew it would be good, but when it came time to execute, the conscientious sourcing, the extra care put in to preparing the steaks for roasting and the pitch perfect roast and rest left behind a liquor so very and unexpectedly special, that it led us to cook something else we normally would have very little love for, something that is typically made with very poor ingredients and very little care or attention: a French dip. Made with the left over filet (as you might imagine, there was plenty), some home made bread, French raclette, grilled red onions. Brian, barely audible past the mouthful of broth soaked beef and bread, murmured "best French dip ever".

To my way of thinking, a jus is the best of the flavored cooking liquid cannon. Jus is the liquid that naturally runs from a roast as it rests before carving, sometimes augmented by a little stock made from the same beast. So it isn't water steeped with bones, it is the pure, undiluted juices of the animal, plus whatever salt and seasoning the cook used to get the roast ready for the oven. And in my world it's hard to imagine better friends to lovely, rosy, day old roast and some soulful jus than bread, cheese, and onions.

Second:
We decided to make risotto with the lobster this year. Last year, they asked for way too much. One of our cooks spent an entire shift killing lobsters and they ate less than a third of it. So we took a different path, used fewer lobsters and had shells for stock. We also needed to poach Mount Shrimpcocktail along with twenty pounds of stone and snow crab. So we used the lobster stock as the foundation for a court bouillon to which we added some late season blanched celery & leeks from our friends at Visser Farm, lemons, fresh herbs, white wine, a small handful of salty olives, some Spanish piquillo peppers and coarse, dried Aleppo pepper. I began poaching the crab and some proteins started to collect on the surface and throughout the broth. Then I moved on to the shrimp, fantastic brown shrimp from the Gulf (Americans are justifiably proud of the shellfish that is raised near it's shores -- it is the best in the world). As I was poaching the proteins began to amass in the bouillon and toward the end it started to clear. I realized almost too late, just as I was getting ready to get rid of it, that I had made consommé by sheer luck. And it was delicious.

Consommé is a very finely clarified and fortified stock or broth (the fortified part is often over looked, but is crucial). It is one of my very favorite things to make. How good your consommé is depends largely on the excellence of the broth you start with. Get a rich, flavorful broth and build a raft made from the same uncooked protein used to make the broth and aromatics. As the proteins cook and coagulate, they act like a fine net, catching all the particulates that make a stock cloudy. If done properly, the strained liquid is crystal clear and deeply flavored. Egg whites are very often added to the raft. They coagulate very well and make for a strong raft resulting in a super clear broth. The problem is they also strip out flavor and color, so the very best consommés use only meats to form the raft. The exceptions, obviously, are vegetable consommés, which have no protein as their base and must use egg whites. There are other ways to clarify broths, like ice filtration, but the old way is the best way, mostly because the ingredients in the raft also fortify the broth, boosting flavor and contributing color. It is a very favorite if old fashion method. It's lost favor over the last few decades, perhaps because it is expensive and simple to the point where modern diners no longer recognize or appreciate its value, or maybe because it's sometimes used as a restorative by the ill, elderly, or weak who want something nourishing but not particularly challenging to eat.

If consommé boils or undercooks, it fails. The idea that one so tasty came together by accident was probably much more exciting to me than it was to my cooks, who seemed a little bewildered by my enthusiasm. To me it was reminder that no matter what you're doing in a kitchen, even something as tired and overdone as shrimp cocktail, if you cook with good food and treat it with care and respect something delicious and sometimes something unexpected will result. These broths were restorative indeed, a quiet and simple reminder of how good work truly is it's own reward.

***
So, there can be some confusion in edible liquid nomenclature. The words broth or jus or stock are used somewhat interchangeably. Please allow me to give my own little glossary of terms, most of which is probably sound, historically speaking, and some of which comes from my personal and not at all defendable musings:

STOCK: Bones and/or vegetables and aromatics simmered in water. Used as a base for soups and sauces or as a cooking medium for other meats, vegetables, or grains.

BROTH:  Stock which also uses a little lean meat to boost and deepen flavors. Sometimes a broth is the by product of cooking meat for consumption, like in chicken and dumplings. Broths are rich, rustic, and flavorful, and often served as is to accompany poached meats and vegetables.

JUS: The juices that run from a roast, perhaps extended with a little wine or perhaps stock made from the same animal. They are dense and deeply flavorful, and usually a bit aggressively seasoned from contact with the roast.

ESSENCE:  A broth reduced by half.

CONSOMMÉ: Clarified and fortified meat, fish, or vegetable broth, typically served as soup.

GLACE: A very heavily reduced, gelatin rich meat stock or broth, usually used as the base of a sauce.

An Evening In The Pursuit Of A Roasted Chestnut

Mel Torme wrote about chestnuts roasting on an open fire in the midst of a heatwave. "Think cool, be cool", he thought. Less than an hour later, his beloved winter memory became a song, and before long that song became American folklore. It's an image so powerful you need not have actually experienced it to understand it at a Pavlovian level the moment someone starts crooning. It is a very deep rooted, cultural, emotional picture of winter and the holidays.

This year a few days before Thanksgiving I was able to finally give myself fully to the idea of winter when we used our fire ring for the first time. Amy bought it on a whim, and couldn't help but add the grill that covers it, god bless her. She had also bought a few pounds of chestnuts with the intention of making stuffing for the Thanksgiving gathering we had been invited to by our friends at Eater's Guild Farm. We lit a fire because we felt like it and remembered almost incidentally that we needed to prep the chestnuts, so that great holiday mythology became reality. Most people would just turn on the oven. But we had the chance to fill our Thanksgiving stuffing with the true spirit of the holidays so we went for it.

The fact is, there are very good reasons that chestnuts were once roasted on an open fire. The wood smoke, the intense heat that caramelizes the shells, the simple fun of it, all three infusing the nut even more fully with the feel of fall. Sometimes we forget when roasting chestnuts in an oven, when we're looking mostly for the shells to become brittle so they can be easily peeled, how important it is to actually cook them, thoroughly and a bit aggressively, to really develop their flavor.

More importantly, the act of lighting a fire on a cold, crisp late fall or early winter day fills you with the essence of the moment. The fire we built was in great excess of what was needed to roast the chestnuts (we did cook dinner on it later as well) as was the effort to build it. We wandered our property collecting downed wood that we thought would produce a good smelling smoke. We spent the better part of an afternoon gathering wood and tending the fire toward a plush bed of temperate coals, then stoking it with a little green wood to give a muscular, perfumed smoke. We scored the chestnuts carefully and deliberately, lounging comfortably beside the fire. Then roasted them until they were blushed with char and cracked open looking like a flower at hell's gate. We greedily dove into to the peeling, hands getting tender and rosy from the heat and now sharp, dry shards of the smoky shells. But there was no way to wait for them to cool. We were caught up in the moment.

Not too many people roast chestnuts anymore. The work involved is too daunting. The black walnut or beechnut, two other native fall treats, are even more overlooked for their mis en place intensity. Especially black walnuts, which oxidize and go rancid so quickly it almost seems like you're racing the clock even as you struggle to get them from their shells. But if you slow down, take the time to enjoy the prep, the real act of cooking, especially if you can light a wood fire and give it some seasonal context, you might find the work less tedious, even enjoyable. We don't eat foods so much that we have to work hard for, which is unfortunate because it gives our diet a sort of lazy and unnecessary boundary. The idea that we might live our whole lives without chestnuts and black walnuts just because they are a pain in the ass makes no sense to me.

These days many people think cooking is tedium and that stands between them and the more common use of their kitchen. We don't enjoy cooking anymore. We think of it as a chore, something that takes us away from our real lives. We look for "thirty minute meals" to give us back the time we want to spend with our loved ones instead of incorporating the act of cooking, which is so loaded with love and life and the expression of our place and time, into our lives. Cooking is bursting with the stuff of our real lives, but for some reason, we disregard it for time with the tv. We treat it with the same disdain we treat doing the laundry or scrubbing the toilet.

I can tell in an instant which of the cooks that come in to my kitchen will be in it for the long haul. They are the ones who enjoy dicing, tournet, peeling potatoes, even washing dishes. They enjoy the everyday, the mundane, the grunt work. The real work. Cooking.  Believe me when I say your cooking will taste better and your kitchen, your family, and you yourself will be happier, better off, when you do the same. There is no way to fake careful attention and respect for the food before you.

Don't rush through the prep. Don't hurry to get to the plate. Build a fire. Relax and fuss over it for a bit. Roast. Be slow and deliberate. Smile and talk comfortably with the friends and family around you. Dinner is coming. And it will be be good, as will be the time spent in its pursuit. But only if you are mindful enough to make it so.

Four Whole Fried Chickens And A Coke

It would take no more than a cursory glance in my direction to tell that I am a man who prefers hedonism to health. I enjoy food, both "good" and "bad". I love gin and whisky, cheese and other animal fats, carbs, and until a little over a year ago I absolutely loved to smoke. And I do mean loved it. I have since become that most hypocritical of non-smokers (the one who lectures smokers on the folly of their bad habits), mainly because I quit a day late and a dollar short and will suffer the consequences of my live today pay later philosophy until the day I die. At the tender age of forty one I became someone who will be on medication for the rest of his life, and this medication will only somewhat arrest the decay of my lungs, not repair or relieve my condition in any way. The news could have been far worse. I was basically told that I can live a long and somewhat normal life without my current condition getting worse. So I don't get to burn out after all. I will fade away. And perhaps have a very long time to dwell on it. But I don't have cancer. Which, to be honest, after twenty years of smoking, one could argue was easily deserved.

So I dumped smoking to avoid death and possibly divorce (my wife's parents only recently both passed away from maladies brought on or worsened by their smoking), which led me to also evaluate some of the other things that affect my health, specifically food and alcohol. To my way of thinking, and I stand by this implicitly, a life lived in the confines of prohibition is no life at all. If there were two lines in the great before, one for those who wanted to live long and live without, and one for those who were okay with the idea that a slab of foie gras and an early death didn't sound so bad, I would clearly be lining up to kill the duck. I could of course come to regret this point of view, wishing as the light was slowly dimming, that I'd eaten more oat bran and thought more sensibly about drugs in college, so I could be here for just a bit longer. But I like to think that I'll look back and think my road was worth walking, and that the price to walk it was money well spent.

What I don't want is to wither. To live a life where the indulgences of youth (and middle age) destroy the years I am standing on this earth. Die a few years early, who fucking cares. Death comes to us all and when it does, the moments of regret for me will be few. In many ways, I made my life full and big and worthy in the wake of my bad decisions. But lethargy, depression, immobility, slowly watching the things in life you thought you'd have time for someday become things you consciously know you will never be able to do, even though you will be around to make time for it: this  makes me remember how much I love vegetables and fruits, and that it is not actually a sacrifice at all to choose them over ice cream and potato chips.

I'm not there yet. I am a person who makes change slowly, but once the seed is planted, eventually it will sprout and grow. Jake ate. Elwood had no soul on his plate. Jake died too soon. Elwood lived long enough to make the most unwarranted sequel in movie history. Somewhere in there is a place where whisky and wheat grass and red meat and kale, work in harmony to bring health and happiness to someone who finds so much of his happiness in food and drink. It is not about going without. It's about making room for all, because I love them all and I believe that a life lived with joy and the inclusion of things that bring us joy, is a healthy life, and a life lived long enough.

The trick is to find the right mix of hedonist and puritan so that life stays rich and joyful but doesn't end or devolve too soon. If I am wrong and I find myself at the end too soon, I hope my loved ones will not begrudge me that one last sip of whisky, and not judge me too harshly for knowing the right thing to do but not doing it (let's face it, we all know what to do: eat sensibly and exercise -- this basic tenant has not, nor will it ever, change). I'm sure I will wish in those last moments that we could all stay together forever. What I hope is to not not look back and wish we would have spent our time together indulging our joy despite our impending demise.

I wish for us all a life well lived, with many moments of recklessness and repression of common sense, sewn together by just enough desire for self preservation to keep suffering at bay. But not so much as to keep the best and the worst of the world out. Never so much as that.

Cheesy Beef, Beefy Cheese

The first time I had Epoisse a part of me thought it was the best steak I'd ever eaten.

Thelma and Louise at Cato Corner

Epoisse is a raw cow's milk cheese from Burgundy, called the king of all cheese by Brillat Savarin. It is a washed rind, or "smear ripened" (I hate that term) cheese. A bacteria called B. Linen is inoculated on to the rind of the cheese which causes it to ripen quickly, turning it soft in texture and strong in aroma and flavor. In the States, we'd call this category stinky cheese, which gives us one of the few truly American cheeses, Limburger. This category of cheeses is my favorite. Big, bold, assertive, and complex . After gaining an appreciation for these bruisers one may find all others a little boring. My very favorite is actually made in America, at Cato Corner in Vermont, and is called Hooligan. Could there possibly be a better name for a cheese so pungent, such an assault on the senses, but so inescapably tempting? Your better senses tell you obviously you must stay away. But, no...

Anyway, Epoisse. Epoisse is big, brutal, runny, offensive and beautiful in every way. It comes packed in a small balsam box because it is so ripe, soft, and runny, that without reinforcement it would burst like a flood swollen dam. It quivers maliciously at the thought of escaping the walls of its overripe, nearly desiccated orange rind. It is a small wheel and typically eaten by cutting the top off and spooning the paste out and spreading it on dark bread within reach of a good, strong Flemish beer.

But the first thing you are struck by when you first eat Epoisse is that it unmistakably tastes like beef. Roast beef. Like soft, yielding, knee buckling beef fat. This made me wonder why more cow's milk cheeses don't taste more like beef. They have the same source, after all.

I was reminded of this connection tonight when tasting a roasted prime rib of beef. Prime rib is a cooking conceit I have had little love for for most of my career. In the Midwest, prime rib is a staple of every cheap buffet and mediocre steakhouse, every wedding banquet and hotel catering menu, and is despised by most cooks who take cooking seriously. It's usually badly executed and overpriced, prized only for whatever worn out cachet it still carries amongst very unfoodie types. But I sometimes develop a weakness for the abused culinary heroes of yesteryear. I begin to wonder why they came to prominence in the first place and think about what luster they lost and how we might regain it. To that end, we have recently been cooking whole rib primals for large groups at Reserve.

At Reserve we pride ourselves in our aging program. We bring large cuts in and dry age them for far longer than industry standard. This is a practice gaining a little popularity in high end steakhouses around the country right now. We buy green (un aged) beef and hang it in a very cold cooler for a minimum of thirty five days and it stays there until it sells. During one particularly long summer dry spell for beef sales we had a rib primal hang for nearly 100 days. Dry aging is the best means of aging beef, and long aging brings out the funk. As beef ages, bacteria and lactic acid go to work on the comparatively simple proteins, fat, and carbohydrates present in meat and break them down. When they break down they become very complex and nuanced. The same thing occurs when cheese ages. Up until 28 days, a steak will taste like a steak. After that, mushrooms, blue cheese, flavors of the deep woods or pasture. Normally these primals are cut into steaks and grilled. They are rarely, even in highly vaunted steakhouses, roasted whole. But today we did. And in the rib we roasted today: the flavor of nearly spoiled milk.

Sounds horrible, doesn't it? Believe me, it was not, and I have a dozen staff members who ate it and will attest to it's deliciousness. When I say nearly spoiled, I'm not talking about sour. I'm talking about the onset of fermentation, the positive acts that bacteria have on foods before they begin to biodegrade and become inedible. I'm talking about the development of amino acids (umami) in great number. The best way I can think to describe it is like the transformation that occurs when sugar is turned to caramel. For the most part, sugar is just sweet. Caramel is smoky, deep and rich. This was not the flavor of fresh milk, sweet and wholesome and clean. This was the flavor of age. Milk on the road to becoming parmesan.

Lactic acid also continues to break down connective tissue and soften muscle fibers. Around sixty five days or so the texture can become a little livery. Until then, the texture gets soft, supple, and incredibly tender. The rib we ate tonight was 50 days old and was tender enough to easily pinch a salty, garlicky snack off the crust of the roast. Here's the thing about a giant roast like prime rib. A good one will have a very soft, rare interior with a dark crust where most of the seasoning resides, even after a day or two of rest. The seasoning doesn't really make it's way to the middle, so the best forkful is a chunk from the middle and a sliver from the grey, slaty edge.

So, this was no Vegas buffet prime rib. This was prime rib in it's glory, long aged, perfectly cooked and seasoned. The group we served it to tonight ordered two but didn't even finish one. They picked at the first one, pushed it around and sneered at it because it was "still mooing". The great shame of wasting something so rare, so well executed by my cook Brian, so expertly aged & butchered by my sous chef Brandon...not happening. We ate it. The whole staff. We carved and attacked that rib like it owed us money. This cut and the people who cooked it took prime rib back to the mountain top. A great and glorious moment in the cuisine of middle America.

Su Casa Es Mi Casa

The big window at The Goose.

It may surprise some people to know how often I frequent The Blue Goose Cafe. It is my home town diner in Fennville, Michigan, and it is a small town diner in every way. There is nothing grown locally or organically on the premises unless by accident, and no real worries about what their food "means" on behalf of the owner or chef. As you can tell by reading earlier posts I think a lot about how I source my food and what kind of story it tells, and the more jaded among you may find my patronage of a small town diner in some way disingenuous. But the fact of the matter is I don't like looking at what I do as a cause. The fact is I want to cook and I want to tell a story, which, I suppose, is my story. At the Blue Goose, the story is still there. It just isn't the same as mine. I t took me a long time to realize that my story wasn't the only story, and even longer to be comfortable with the idea that this doesn't at all diminish my story's value.

I am very humbled by restaurants like the Goose, restaurants that don't over think things, that just go out there everyday and do good work. They work with great pride and dignity. Pretentiousness is not even possible here. There is no chance anyone will be made to feel out of place. They know me by name, know how I take my coffee, know that I like honey with my biscuits, and they really and truly care that I am happy when I leave. They don't give a shit about James Beard semi finalist lists and write ups in magazines, and these things surely do not intimidate them or inspire them to treat me differently or lay my table out with extravagances. I sit down, they receive me warmly, I order and eat, and I pay my bill. They smile genuinely and attend to me properly and with real affection.

The same is true at Su Casa, though the lens is different.

At Su Casa, they answer the phone in Spanish. This is because the restaurant was opened by a Mexican family who intended to feed the local migrant population, which has for years given the restaurant an unimpeachable authenticity. Fennville was a very serious fruit town for a great deal of its recent history. Many migrant workers came here to pick tree fruits and blueberries and grapes and many settled here. Those days are all but gone now but to this day these travelers from Mexico have a pronounced presence in the city of Fennville and to this day they answer the phone at Su Casa in Spanish.

When I first moved here, the restaurant was in the back of a super mercado in a broken down building that made you really think you had been transported to Mexico. The parking lot was a collection of large shards of concrete jutting in to the air in all directions. There were seriously times when I felt so joyfully, completely immersed I wondered if I should be drinking the water. There were layers upon layers of posters and old tape on the doors and walls, VHS rentals of movies I'd of course never heard of, a long meat case filled with fried pig skin, liver and intestines, and huge cuts of bleeding red meat behind a pane of insulated glass with one long, arcing crack that ran the length of it. Bins of tamarind candy and dried chilis, a soda merchandiser filled with Jarritos & glass bottles of Mexican Coke (still made with cane sugar, not corn syrup), a cafeteria style dispenser churning horchata. And in the restaurant, hand painted Oaxacan murals on the walls and old posters for bull fights. On the menu, (in Fennville Michigan!) tripe, tongue, baby octopus, beef cheek: the drooled over currency exchanged for cachet by every big city chef hoping to prove the honesty of his connection to the world of real food, the food of poor grandmothers with deeply weathered faces and sunken, curled spines.

A part of the mural at the new Su Casa.

But Su Casa is in the very same spirit as the Goose. It is a place where people come to get fed and find comfort, find something they know, and put themselves in the care of someone who knows they like their barbacoa with onions and cilantro, and a slice of lime in their Coca Cola, and extra pico de gallo with their flautas. Su Casa has since moved in to new, fancier digs, and yes I'm one of those sad sacks who misses the old place, though I am very happy for their success. I recently had a mild panic attack when the Blue Goose was remodeling and the large paintings Sue Park and her students had done of the town were taken down. I was assured they'd be back, and smiled widely when I saw for myself that they were.

These are the rooms where, by some small standard, anyway, I became a local. Though really in Fennville "local" is not defined by how many years you've been there, but by how many generations are behind you. But at the Blue Goose and Su Casa, slowly I was recognized, called by name, and it was assumed I did not need to see a menu. I was not born here, but I perhaps somewhat presumptuously call it my home (it's only been a little north of a decade, after all). And when pressed, I always name it as my favorite place to eat.

Because I Wished To Brine Deliberately

The woods are a remarkable influence on the lives of West Michiganders, especially in the fall and early winter. The trees are dozens of colors. Ducks, deer, and geese draw hunters out and game starts hitting the dinner table in their homes and the homes of their friends. Many of them are much better shots than cooks, and often wild game ends up in chewy teriyaki jerky, or abominable chili and gumbo. If you are lucky enough to know a hunter who is also a good cook, cherish that relationship like gold.

Fisherman too. Sometimes the great freshwater fish around us gets treated with ham fisted brines and cures before they hit the smokehouse. Too much soy or teriyaki again, granulated garlic and onion, too much sugar.  To me these things don't really speak to the place trout come from. Lately I've been testing a brine for smoked rainbow trout that draws on the flavors you might find in the forest. Dried chanterelle and lobster mushrooms, juniper berry, rosemary, and laurel. I haven't really gotten precisely what I 'm looking for,  but I'm closing in on it. This brine worries me in a restaurant setting. Dried mushrooms are expensive and their impact is subtle. This is one of those moments where the "value for money" question might get raised by a diner who doesn't notice the details. More on perception of values in a later post. Believe me, I have lots to say on the subject.

I went for a walk in the fields of my neighbors' farm with my dogs today. It was raining slightly and the  bright trees were starting to lose their leaves. I thought about how much time I've spent in the woods in Michigan and how much I love to cook the foods that live there. The mushrooms, the ramps, the black walnuts and chestnuts, deer, trout. To be truthful, the wild food around us is not always good. Sometimes deer eat garbage and fish swim in polluted waters. I hope I'm not the last generation of Michigander to see hundreds of thousands of crayfish scuttling on the shore of the beach on a moonlit night when the waters were clean enough to support them in massive numbers. I wonder how many people who have lived in Michigan their whole lives even know that crayfish used to be abundant here. Or that our rivers and streams teemed with rainbow and brown trout but now most of the trout we eat, including the ones pictured above, are farmed. These are the very real and immediate consequences of poor stewardship of the earth. It changes what we eat which changes who we are. I hope it is not overly romantic to think we are going in back in the right direction in some important ways.

There is a philosophy amongst heritage breed farmers that says you have to eat it to save it. And it's true. Raising Red Wattles can't be a novelty, an experiment, if we expect them to be around in a hundred years. If we don't use it, we lose it. The same goes for wild food. We will take better care of our waterways, fields, and forests if we appreciate what's in them, both for their beauty and their usefulness in the kitchen. We have to be responsible and moderate about it, of course. But when the opportunity comes, I can't think of a more delicious way to commune with nature and become inspired to take good care of it.

Eat some venison with chanterelle mushrooms and be a part of Michigan before there was agriculture. And don't leave your goddamn beer cans in the woods.

The Light In The Morning

There is no way my oafish phone photography could possibly do justice to the impact early morning light has on Reserve's dining room. There are enormous windows to the south and east -- original to the 100+ year old building which, despite some high dollar remodeling, remain the room's most impressive architectural feature -- that let the day's first sun slip into otherwise unnoticed corners or rest warmly on the stone bar tops and near bare walls. This is the best time of day to be at Reserve. It is also something the overwhelming majority of people who step through Reserve's door will never experience for themselves.

Opening day at Reserve began for me at about four in the morning as I drove from my home near the lakeshore to Grand Rapids in cold, oppressive darkness. A local television station was running a live spot on their morning show so an already long day became incredibly long, nearly twenty hours by the end. When the TV spot was over, the GM and our "Wine Girl" went home to go back to bed for a spell, but I live an hour away from Reserve so that wasn't an option. I decided to use that time productively and go the the farmer's market. While I was there, the sun started to rise (the irreplaceable experience of spending time at a farmer's market in the very early morning is another worthy post, especially for a second shifter like myself who is not used to being up at such uncivilized hours). I took my time gathering what we needed for our first service, loaded the car, and drove back. By the time I got back to the vacant, pristine restaurant, the morning sun had taken over. It does this everyday. Whatever effort was put in to making that space remarkable is marginalized each and every day when daylight asserts itself.

Over two years later, this light still stops me when I'm there in the morning. The room is still and quiet, but emotional, graceful, and expressive in ways it will never be at other times of the day. When I can I sit at the charcuterie bar for a minute, where the light comes in with least resistance. Today, I thought about how many moments like this will go largely unexperienced by most people who interact with the restaurant.

The truth is, most of the marrow of a restaurant stays in the bone, where even the most engaged fan will never experience it. Restaurants only get the chance to express who they are on the plate or in the glass. That occasionally can be expanded by a talented and knowledgeable server or a visit from the chef, sommelier or manager for guests who are interested in lending an ear. Most customers make value judgements about a restaurant before their first visit is even over. They don't eavesdrop on the conversation that takes place between chef and farmer or chef and cook to learn why the menu is as it is. They don't watch a cook as he moves from pot to pot and see the whole of his experience with food inform each move he makes. At the end of a busy service when the fans are turned off, they don't hear the hood vents drop and the clean kitchen fall peacefully silent. They don't see the light in the morning, hours before the first customer comes in. These are the things that make a kitchen home to a cook, and they are supremely unimportant to the diner.

This is as it should be. The diner should concern himself with his food and drink, the service, the comfort of the room. But it seems prudent to remember that what one experiences in an hour or two is no more than a fraction of what any good restaurant is really about. As a diner, you might be surprised to see how far showing a little interest in the back story can bring you into the fold. When I'm in a good restaurant, I put my menus down and let them take care of me.  A real professional, someone who works hard everyday to understand his work inside and out loves the opportunity to just do his best. Even the most ardent oenophile, jaded food critic, or well travelled foodie cannot hope to understand the inner workings of a good restaurant as well as a conscientious insider. Leave your preconceptions and expectations at home. Let yourself be surprised, enlightened, and challenged. Be happy to let your experience be something you didn't expect when you walked through the front door.

Let the sun shine in.

Roll Credits

For those of you who haven't seen it, here is the video we produced as an introduction to St. Anthony. We're hoping to do a few more in the coming months.


St Anthony: An Introduction from St. Anthony on Vimeo.

It occurred to me that we had not yet thanked and credited the friends who helped put this together, principally Tommy Valdez, who made it. He photographed, filmed, edited, story boarded, and whatever else it takes to make something like this on very short notice with, well, no resources. We are not only very grateful for his efforts, but honored to work with someone so talented. We are also thankful to Ian Anderson who helped photograph as well.

The music is Annabelle's Waltz by The Corn Fed Girls, one of my very favorite bands, local or otherwise, who generously allowed us to use their music in exchange for "vittles". Special thanks to Darcy Wilkin for facilitating.

The video was filmed at my home, Fenn Valley Vineyards, Red Horse Ranch, Evergreen Lane Farm, Kismet Organics, and the home of Mike and Michelle Shaw on the beautiful Kalamazoo River watershed.

Those kind enough to give up a piece of a beautiful Sunday summer afternoon to appear in the video are Fred Bueltmann of Red Horse Ranch, Mari Reijmerink of Kismet Organics, Cathy & Tom Halinski of Evergreen Lane Farm, Roberta Casasanto, Mike and Michelle Shaw, and of course, my lovely wife Amy Lee Cook.

Welcome

Wendell Berry once wrote that eating is an agricultural act. I suppose that means cooking is as well. When he wrote it he was trying to remind us all that even if we haven't set one foot on a farm in our entire lives, when we eat we are at the end of a process that begins when seeds are sown, and that it is important to know the origin and character of our food.

When I decided to make food and cooking my livelihood I took a good look around me. I looked at the industry, it's professional & educational institutions, it's stewards and leaders and it's bad actors and clowns. I wanted to find the place where bullshit stopped and real work began. I very much wanted to be genuine to the things and people that inspired me and this repeatedly and inevitably led me back to the farms and farmers who raised the food I worked with. Every time I opened a box and started working with vegetables I didn't buy from a farmer I knew I was less moved to give it my full attention. It didn't inspire or excite me. Gradually those foods started disappearing from my kitchen. A natural consequence of this was a desire to be very seasonal in my cooking, of course, but I also felt the urge to take a deeper look around me. I wanted to know why we grew the foods we do here and what they say about us as a culture. I wanted to start cooking in a way that honestly reflected this place, to find a way to communicate West Michigan on a plate so clearly that to cook in this fashion elsewhere would seem disingenuous. In short, I wanted what I did in the kitchen to have context.

This last little bit is a work in progress. But it's the idea inspiring St. Anthony, the new restaurant in Douglas I'll be running with my friend and colleague Brandon Joldersma (soon, hopefully). If you get the chance to eat at St. Anthony, I hope it will feel like Michigan to you, like it is something you could only have found here, in this place. I am not a locavore and I can assure you that foods from far away that have that same context, that great story, will be welcome in our kitchen any time. I am bothered by the idea that buying locally is sometimes considered a "movement". To me it should just be our daily habit; observed and quietly celebrated. I don't think it's necessary that buying wholesome food from a farmer you trust makes a statement. It should just be another thing we do in our daily routine that makes our world full and well rounded.

I don't really know what I hope to accomplish with these posts. I'm not going to fret over how many followers I have nor do I have any desire to "monetize" or become often read. I want to have a place to start writing down our story in detail. Each time we roast and bake, peel, pickle, ferment, smoke or in any way take action on an agricultural product there is a reason for it that I will share here. Hopefully a few people may find it interesting. Also, keep your eyes here if you are interested in knowing how the restaurant is coming. Hopefully we'll be cooking food instead of talking about it in very short order.

I have great respect for what farmers do and in the end I felt a little presumptuous calling what I do agricultural, even with Mr. Berry's permission. I don't know where agriculture stops and cooking begins. But I do know that the closer you come to that line, the better your cooking will be.

See you soon.
Matthew