Recipes

This is the eighth post in a series about hunting for food -- truly meeting your meat.

I ran into a problem last summer: too many herbs were coming out of my garden, so many that I couldn't keep up with them. The easy way to deal with this overflow would've been to make large batches of pesto and tabbouleh, or other variations on crushed-herb sauces or greens-and-grains salads. I did my best, but I still had a surplus. By the end of the growing season, I had to cut back armfuls of sorrel, thai basil, lemon thyme, curry, and others. All these great flavors (for which I had so many plans last May), and I ended up pitching them into the compost bin. It was silly: what was the point of nurturing these plants out of the dirt if I was only going to transform them back into dirt in a few months?

What snack do you turn to between meals, after a workout, or following a physically demanding project (like running a race or putting in the garden!)? Snacking choices say a lot about what the body needs – to replace and rebalance nutrients, restore fluids and enable overworked parts to recover.

As a hunter, one of my primary thoughts when I am out in the field or forest is: How am I going to use whatever I kill? One of the complaints I hear from people who hunt is that they get tired of the same old ways of preparing wild game. It seems like a lot of hunters let their wild game go to waste or give it away because they don’t understand how versatile wild game can be. I grew up in a family that took most of the venison we shot and turned it in to summer sausage or jerky -- not very creative. We ended up giving a lot of it away because after eating the first 30 pieces of jerky or summer sausage sandwiches every day for a week, you lose interest and don’t want to eat either anymore.

In my last culinary school update for this series, I wrote about making Peking ducks, the most memorable project our class has undertaken so far. The heart of our culinary program, though, lies not in our afternoon classes but our morning labs. From 7 a.m. until at least 11 a.m., we students sleepily shuffle in to prepare for the school’s breakfast and lunch service.

This is the fifth post in a series about hunting for food -- truly meeting your meat.

This is the tenth post in the series Great Grains, highlighting unusual whole grains and easy ways to incorporate them into your diet.

Now that I’ve provided an overview of Minnesota State Community and Technical College’s Culinary Arts program and also what I learned in my first few wine classes, I’m moving on to our Poultry and Seafood class. Spring break is quickly approaching and will mark the end of our poultry unit and our transition into seafood.

This is the ninth post in the series Great Grains, highlighting unusual whole grains and easy ways to incorporate them into your diet.  Check out posts on bulgur,

I maintain that there's a ridiculous secret lurking underneath the craft cocktail movement: as complicated as some of these cocktails can get, it's actually almost impossible to make a bad drink. As my instructor said on day one of bar-tending school: the most important ingredient is ice; you can never have enough. (This instructor was a guru and mentor to me years ago, a person who had devoted his adult life to making drinks. Actually, he's now more of a cautionary tale than anything, but I'll keep the practical knowledge he imparted.) My experience has proved that all you need to do is get some liquor cold, mix in complementary flavors, serve immediately, and a decent drink is inevitable.