Highbush cranberries: redeemed?—Recipe: Chipotle-cranberry barbeque sauce

In my vision, the highbush cranberry sauce crosses the River Styx. Or the River Yahara, maybe. Anubis places its bitter heart on one side of the scale, and weighs it against a sugar cube. If the cranberry falls, it goes to hell and the compost bin. The sugar falls, and we all go pick more cranberries in the Elysian Fields, which, the Egyptian mythmasters forgot to mention, is full of cranberry bushes. Just like Madison.

I’m the lone taster so far, but I think the highbush cranberry is redeemed (See previous post: “Theory: If the highbush cranberry were any good, it would have been eaten by now.”) I offer you all this recipe to illustrate my experiment, not as the last word on the berries. Lacking a sieve, my straining method is primitive and laughable, my return on cranberry goop meager.

Recipe: Chipotle-cranberry barbeque sauce.
Makes a little more than one pint. You could easily improve that yield.

3 cups highbush cranberries
1/2 cup chopped onions
bit of oil
1/2 cup champagne vinegar (I’d use cider vinegar if I had it.)
1 cup brown sugar
1 dried chipotle pepper
pinch cloves
pinch allspice
several pinches cinnamon
pinch white pepper
salt to taste

1. Start hydrating that leathery old chipotle pepper in hot water.

A pox on the seeds, even if they do make more berries.

2. Cook cranberries in water until they’re soft.

3. Meanwhile, saute the onions in a bit of oil. (Other recipes say to boil the onions with the berries. But then they clog the strainer—and you don’t get the lovely Maillard flavors.)

4. Strain the berries. I forced the berry goop through my bowl-shaped strainer, and for Pete’s sake, you ought to be able to do better. Pureeing in the blender is a terrible shortcut, let me tell you. The highbush cranberry has a single large seed that just kills the party whenever it is encountered.

Highbush cranberry goop.

4. Add the onions. Puree the result in the blender.

5. Add everything else. Cook it down for a half-hour or more. The flavors meld, and it turns from a pinkish red to a lovely golden brown.

A variation: Cook it less, and leave out the chipotle, and you’d get an interesting, bitter-edged ketchup.

There you go. I imagine it would go well on pork or, if you don’t eat pork, raccoon.

The raw and the cooked: Trouble in Dairyland

A tall glass of milk. It’s a fearful quantity I haven’t drunk in years. This I gulped down completely, nervously, my own guinea pig. It was cool, rich and delicious. Though … to be honest … no more so than a high-quality milk like Strauss Family Farms in the Bay Area, or Blue Marble here in Madison. And, dear friends, for those of you curious about the digestibility of the raw versus the cooked: it still produced what I will call some Inner Turmoil.

Of course, the fight over raw milk isn’t about my belly or my palate. It’s about personal choice thwarted by an agency that way overstates the risk of a nutritious food. Or it’s about not allowing people who are misinformed to feed a risky substance to kids, who can’t choose for themselves. Depending on whom you ask.

I’ve been asking lots of people about it, as I report a series on raw milk for WORT-FM, Madison’s volunteer-run radio station. (Back on the radio! You can hear the first story with this download: I’m around 23:00.)

The head of Food Safety, Steve Ingham, told me he’d had raw milk once. He was 20, and it was an awkward family situation, and he was nervous about it but figured he’d make it. I also met a research cheesemaker at UW-Madison who grew up drinking raw milk and now is leery of it, saying he knows too much now.

Not all the germ-savvy fear raw milk. I just learned of a farmer-microbiologist who does his own bacteria testing.

Risk, worry, step aside for tasting notes. The milk was merely as excellent as any other. But the cream! The cream was yellow and so thick it required a spoon to pull it out. The butter, made by the farmer’s friend, a golden mass, sweet and strong, making the store butter I live on seem like plain pale wax in comparison. At the French Laundry, I remember, there was a butter in-between course, a sort of palate cleanser. Two tiny dishes we passed around the table; one salted, one not; two very different flavors. It was an awakening, a reminder to pay attention to the simple base of your food. The raw butter was like that. But what how would that same cream, from the grass-eating, name-bearing, loved cows, have tasted had it been pasteurized first? Would it be any less delicious?

In Africa I grew to appreciate the taste of boiled milk. (Though, in context, I also came to enjoy whole-milk powder, Nescafe and La Vache Qui Rit.) So I do not trust my own judgment.

Bill Anderson ought to know; he’s an assistant cheesemaker at Bleu Mont (of Private Reserve fame. Dear lord, that’s good!) He says tasting pasteurized-milk versus raw-milk cheese is like listening to trumpet versus whole symphony.

I’ve dulled my senses with mulled wine for the moment — after all, it’s a snow day — so further taste trials will have to wait.

Some answers to common questions about my raccoon

Medium cat, small coon. Now you know.

1. It did not come with a skin.
a. If it had, I would have saved it for you.

2. It is approximately the size of a small cat. See above.

Coon in a bag, as they say.

3. It bears no tire-marks. (See previous posts.)

4. It does not look like a coon, particularly. It looks like a piece of frozen meat. See right. So sorry to disappoint.

Theory: If highbush cranberries were any good, they would have been eaten by now.

Hard times, people. Were we relying on the woods for substantial calories, we would be starting to eye those wiry jackrabbits that run across the Capital City Bike Path.

Regarding mushrooms, checked the old mushroom log near my house, the one that’s been producing food since August. Provider Log, we call it. Pocketed a last few old oysters, now dried out and frozen, old holdouts. Shivered. No velvet stalks; I have been wondering what the limits of these so-called cold-weather Flammulinas are, but they are gone from the logs where they were a month ago. Perhaps they went to Florida.

Cat inspects cranberries ...

The only berries left are the ones nobody wants, not even the birds. Highbush cranberries. They still line the Yahara River, and many other places. W. and I started picking them, optimistically, in Cowee Meadows, north of Juneau, in July, when they were peach and blush and hard as rocks. We have tried them every now and then ever since. W. made some gorgeous ruby jam in September. Recipes often call for more sugar than berries—anything that requires that much sugar is a stretch to call edible—and these were not ripe. We had trouble admitting the jam’s terrible bitterness and it stood for weeks in the fridge, beautiful, untouched.

... and decides an empty paper bag is more interesting.

Finally the cranberries are ripe. But still troubled: “Highbush cranberries have a single seed which is not eaten,” says the Internet, far too late to warn us. Our downfall here is that we despise the act of straining food. Over here we are closer to the Campfire than the Haute school of cuisine. This winter we plan to extract fish from the frozen lakes and sap from city maple trees. We will shoot rabbits, if we find we are up to the violent task. But what is out there now? I mean, outside grocery stores and restaurants. Highbush cranberries, as far as I can tell. I suppose I should get a sieve, and a whole lot of sugar, and try again.

Fridges of the future, tell me your secrets

I do enjoy looking in other people’s fridges … They are places of privacy. Our failed experimental marinades, still “good” in theory if not fact. Our self-improvement attempts despite busy schedules—stacks of individual fat-free yogurts. Bachelorhood, poverty, decadence, obsessions. All speak when you open that door. But what places remain private in the modern age?

I have a vision of a Foodbook, an app in which our Bluetooth-enabled refrigerators with food-recognition software list the exact contents of our fridges for all in our social networks to see. Would it shame some of us to clean it more often? (It would for me.) Provide a way for some to display their superiority through the proxy of the finest cheese, just as with personal devices? That could be annoying.

I just looked in mine, and it said I could keep up better with the vegetables. Let’s all look!

More than you wanted to know about me.

Ignoring the condiment door—

Six kinds of cheese, none more than $15 a pound; two cheddars, a blue, a swiss, a chevre, a parmesan. A log of chocolate cookie dough. Mushrooms, dried, from the last harvest of the log down the street, now so long ago. Some unidentified red berries that W. picked (W., ?). Three quarts of pickled peppers, a half-pint of pickled onions, a quart of apple butter. Soy marinade?, date uncertain. Two half-pints of roasted tomatillo salsa and a jar of cornichons. Pomegranate molasses, outside covered in same. Porter mustard. Half-and-half. Two yogurt containers of unattractive pumpkin-pesto pasta leftovers, circa one week ago, nearly through the mandatory guilt-shedding waiting period before it can die. One yogurt container of yogurt. Wilting parsley, wilting cilantro. One leaf of chard, wilting. Two scallion stalks, wilting. Two-thirds of a cucumber, flaccid. A half-bag of spinach—not wilted (hooray!). Eight grapefruit, five satsumas. A pan of roasted beets. A half-can of tomatoes, recent enough to still be of service. The largest item is a tub of salted lemons, made in Alaska and hauled to Wisconsin with the rest of my stuff, now half-eaten. Who can live without salted lemons? Not I.

The snapshot is never the whole story. After all, you might be mistaken from mine that we subsist on pickles and cheese. In fact we have greens growing in the yard, and a variety of meats, from ham hocks to coon, in the freezer. And we just happen to be out of beer; this must be remedied hastily. You would be right to conclude, however, that we are obsessed with pickles and cheese. That we buy basic ingredients rather than prepared things. And that, like doctors, we are conservative when it comes to declaring the moment of death. All fair, all true.

Recipes for Poor Folks: Miso Soup

Once again, Need drives me over to Invention, plops me down and makes me like it. I am poor — which fact the ATM informed me, yet again, just as I was about to get some money for lunch. I abandoned the plan and rode my bike home with my mouth hanging open to catch the snowflakes.

Thoroughly chilled, I looked in the fridge. Nothing. I grit my teeth, I girded my loins, I spit. Really? Nothing? No. A fiction. First of all, there are so many condiments a person could live on those alone for a week. Second, I have greens growing in the garden, miso paste, and always some dried noodles. I’ve eaten it a million times before, but still it always feels like Invention pulled magically from an empty fridge.

So this is what I eat when I am cold and poor and lazy. Miso soup, which, to quote M.F.K. Fisher, “can be stretched this way or that and made country-simple or town-elegant.” (Naturally I have been reading Fisher’s thoughts on thrift — still standing, sturdily! — How to Cook a Wolf.)

Boil a bowl’s worth of water with a piece of kombu. Add a handful of bean-thread or rice-stick noodles. Give them a couple of minutes. Add a handful each of fresh spinach and frozen corn. If the noodles are done, pour the soup into the bowl. Mix in yellow miso paste, maybe 1.5 T for a bowl, but to taste. Add sesame oil.

The literary raccoon

The coon question is not settled. The old “Joy of Cooking” had a raccoon recipe, I am told, but the new version we have is silent on the subject. So is Alice Waters’ “Simple Foods,” for which I had such high hopes. Does Julia Child address the matter? “Italian Classics” does not. I suppose Italy doesn’t have many raccoons.

But there is a gold mine, if you look. From the ever-supportive parents: The Original Road Kill Cookbook (a present from me years ago).