Fresh Tart

After a snackful weekend loaded with the usual Super Bowl suspects - raise your hand if you too had con queso with tortilla chips - today I was ready for a pile of fresh, tender-crisp vegetables. This is my go-to stir-fry, flavorful, light, and adaptable in every which way. Feel free to substitute or add pea pods, peppers, mushrooms, eggplant, summer squash...basically any tender vegetable that loves a quick saute.

Ditto the protein, by the way. I love beef with broccoli, but chicken breast, pork, or tofu are all stir-fry classics. The trick for tender meat is to "velvet" it in a slurry of egg white, cornstarch, and wine while you chop vegetables. I add a generous pinch of Chinese five-spice powder to the mix because I crave the stuff. Typically a heady mixture of cloves, star anise, cinnamon, pepper, and fennel (variations abound, found in most grocery stores), it's an easy way to add a big punch of flavor to a quick stir-fry.

This is not a saucy dish, but there are definitely enough pan juices to enjoy spooned over rice or noodles. If you choose noodles, cook and drain them, then dump them into the wok with the meat and vegetables and toss. Lightly crushed peanuts or toasted almonds are a delicious garnish on pretty much anything, but particularly vegetables alongside a soft, chewy starch. Go for layers of flavor! Go for layers of texture! Go!

Recipe for Beef & Broccoli Stir-Fry at TC Taste/Minnesota Monthly Magazine.

What to bake when you prefer the salty over the sweet? And you're busy? (And you can't eat gluten?) These easy beauties, which have become everyone's favorite Christmas cookie, including mine.

The original recipe caught my eye a few years ago as the Minneapolis Star Tribune's 2009 Cookie Contest Winner. If you love almonds and caramel and butter and Christmas, you'll be as smitten by these decadent cookies as the Strib'stasting panel clearly was (their verdict: "love" and "beautiful").

As a gift to the baker, these are bar cookies, which Minnesotans know are the most magical (and easy!) of all. Other than allowing time for the shortbread crust to chill before baking, they come together in minutes. After they cool for awhile, cut them into tidy triangles, pour yourself a glass of milk, and dig in.

Despite their simplicity, the triangles are elegant on a cookie plate AND disappear blessedly quickly. You can focus on how nutritious almonds are to lull yourself into cookie complacency, but a cookie isn't Christmas without a hearty dose of butter and sugar, and these are no exception.

Thank goodness!

Recipe for Almond Triangles at TC Taste/Minnesota Monthly Magazine.

You're home from work, starving, standing in front of the fridge with your coat still on. You spy a couple of eggs, a spot of bacon...breakfast for dinner is sounding fast and fine. And it IS fine, of course, given bacon and eggs is one of the best food combinations on the planet. But if you're wanting something a bit more dinner-y, with a hit of carb comfort to chase away the day, remember carbonara, aka bacon-and-egg pasta.

Carbonara purists will be annoyed with the suggestion of bacon over the classic pancetta, but my goal here is a fast, satisfying bowl of pasta with ingredients you're likely to have on hand. If you have pancetta - use it! But if bacon is what you keep on hand, it's perfectly fantastic in this dish.

Your evening will basically play out like this: Set a pot of water on to boil. Hang up your coat. Pour a glass of wine.

Brown some bacon and garlic. Cook the pasta. Grate some cheese. Beat an egg. Toss it all together. That's pretty much it. What emerges is creamy, chewy, decadent heaven, topped with plenty of freshly ground black pepper to balance the richness, ending a long, cold day with a warm, full belly.

Read a book. Go to bed.

Sleep well.

Recipe for Spaghetti Carbonara for One (or More) at TC Taste/Minnesota Monthly Magazine.

While you're busy baking holiday sweets, don't forget a nod to the savory. Homemade crackers are a thousand times tastier than their boxed counterparts (just like cookies!) and are a breeze to whip up. The cheesy, nutty crunch of these almond-meal cheese crackers needs no topping, just a measure of discipline to not inhale a panful in one serving. A salty corner here, a browned edge there, and snip, snap, gone.

This recipe is a terrific base recipe, delicious as is as well as highly customizable. The best part of cooking is making a dish your own, right? If you're new to cooking, it's important to follow recipes exactly while you get a feel for how things work. But as you taste and learn and understand the basic science, I'm all for playing around with seasonings, experimenting, whether to use the ingredients you happen to have on hand or to try something completely new. I happened to be feeling nostalgic about the rosemary in my fridge, as it's the last taste of my garden, so I added minced rosemary - and several grinds of black pepper - to the mix.

Lovely.

Recipe for gluten-free/grain-free Cheese Crackers with Rosemary & Black Pepper at TC Taste/Minnesota Monthly Magazine.

Happy Almost Thanksgiving! If you're searching for a refreshing, flavorful salad for the holiday table, I've got just the dish. This wild rice salad has been a Meyer family favorite for years and I'm always happy to see it on my plate. Right when the richness of buttery stuffing, buttery mashed potatoes, and buttery gravy threatens to tank your palate, slide your fork over for a bite of this salad, snappy and downright refreshing with orange zest and the crunch of toasted pumpkin seeds.

Bonus 1: It tastes even better the next day, which makes it a perfect do-ahead dish as well as a leftovers treat.
Bonus 2: It can easily be made vegan.
Bonus 3: You can play with the ingredients to your heart's content. Pine nuts instead of pumpkin seeds. Pomegranate seeds instead of golden raisins. Add cubes of roasted squash. Add cubes of apple. Just don't add marshmallows...

Enjoy a lovely meal, everyone!

Recipe for Crunchy Wild Rice Salad with Citrus Dressing at TC Taste/Minnesota Monthly Magazine.

As we head into holiday entertaining and craziness, don't forget about popcorn! I am NOT talking about microwave popcorn, I'm talking about the real deal, popped in a pan, which takes about 5 minutes to make and tastes 50 million times - maybe 100 million times - better. When you're done, you have a bowlful of fragrant crunchiness ready to be tarted up for a party (or plopped in front of the TV with a glass of wine aka dinner).

When I was a kid, we were butter-and-salt purists, preferring plenty of both. Don't get me wrong - browned butter with sea salt to this day makes up 80% of my popcorn consumption. I make it for my son's friends, I set it out at our pool for swim parties, I make a batch after a night out with the girls. But it's great fun, and almost as easy, to play around a bit with creative flavor combinations, which are both addictive and gorgeous, and tend to blow guests away for very little effort.

Recipe(s) for Pumpkin Seed/Brown Butter/Crispy Sage, Bacon/Caraway Seed/Bay Leaf, and Curry Powder/Honey/Lime Zest popcorn (and other ideas too) at TC Taste/Minnesota Monthly Magazine.

One of my favorite New York food treats is to inhale pork in many forms at Momofuku Ssam Bar. The Bo Ssam pork shoulder is particularly delightful, served whole and fall-apart-glistening for the table to share. Everyone grabs tongs and snaps at the meat like a pack of well-dressed wolves, filling lettuce leaves with slabs of silky shoulder topped with sticky rice, raw oysters (!), kimchi, and a bright blast of ginger scallion sauce. As gorgeous as that pork shoulder is - and it is a stunner, not to be missed - this last trip it was the addictive ginger scallion sauce that I couldn't stop thinking about.

Luckily, I possess the Momofuku Cookbook and just looked the dang stuff up when I got home. It's a snap to make and I am not exaggerating when I say that its sparkle belongs on everything: noodles, all vegetables, scrambled eggs, rice, tofu, soups, all meats, your finger. So. Good. (After a little googling, I find I'm not the only one obsessed with the stuff: Sarah Gim's take on Tastespotting blog and Francis Lam's "explosive" version on Gilt Taste, which I also can't wait to make.)

For the photo, I tossed the sauce with hot rice noodles, ladled a bit of rich chicken stock into the bowl, and added a few pickles and crushed peanuts for crunch. Let's call that dish Five-Minute Comfort, because that's exactly how long it took to make (given already prepared sauce and a stash of chicken stock in the freezer). The other dish is chopped Brussels sprouts stir-fried with some of the sauce, topped with cubes of crispy fried tofu, topped with more sauce and a few dashes of toasted sesame oil. I dub that dish 15-Minute Comfort.

I ate them both right after the pic (separately and then tossed together, yes!)...snip, snap, gone.

Recipe for David Chang's Momofuku Ginger Scallion Sauce at TC Taste/Minnesota Monthly Magazine.

Do you invite people to your home for dinner or do you break into a January-in-Minnesota sweat at the thought? I love eating in restaurants, but the nights spent with friends and family in our home, or in theirs, are the best of all. When I was a newlywed, I was so excited to be a grown up that I almost killed myself preparing elaborate dinner parties in tiny kitchens. I don't regret those experiences one bit, but these busy days, I prefer to keep it simple. I think my guests have more fun and I know that I do.

Especially when the dinner party is spontaneous! I just love a last-minute dinner party, when guests pitch in with the chopping, and setting the table, and we all sit around chatting and relaxed. Hear this Minnesotans - there is no need for fancy appetizers before dinner! Sometimes I think the pressure of fussy appetizers kills a party more than the dinner itself. Pop some bubbles and set out some salty nuts, raw vegetables, and a slab of good butter. Delicious. Done.

Or make frico! If you keep a block of Parmesan cheese in your fridge, you're ready to impress in mere minutes. Frico is basically fried grated cheese, toasted in a pan to a crisp wafer of whoa, ready in five minutes or less. Slide the golden crunchy cheese onto a plate and let your guests break off pieces to devour between sips of wine.

It's lovely to fry a bit of sage in the pan before sprinkling in the cheese. Ditto stirring around a bit of garlic. This Melissa Clark version from the New York Times jumped right out at me a couple of weeks ago. Isn't the scorched zucchini pretty? It's also a nice foil for the richness of all that toasted cheese. Clark's introduction didn't put me off either: WHY there is no cult devoted to crunchy fried cheese is beyond me. It’s as rich as bacon or pork belly, as crisp as chicken wings, and as tempting as a foie gras doughnut.

I couldn't agree more!

Recipe for Melissa Clark's Zucchini Frico at TC Taste/Minnesota Monthly Magazine.

I just returned last night from a weekend of eating my way through New York. While we had a killer time eating very special things, I thought on several occasions...I eat better than this in Minneapolis. What?! But yes! I've been thinking this on the last few trips I've taken, especially pork dishes, which I declare: Minneapolis has conquered. If you're a regular at Butcher & the Boar, Corner Table, The Craftsman, Piccolo, Heartland, The Bachelor Farmer, Haute Dish - plus many, many other spots in town (name them below, please) - you are eating better pork than New Yorkers.

Yeah, I just said that.

In fact, the way my week played out last week now seems supernaturally designed to illustrate just this point. I was invited to the staff meal prepared by Doug Flicker of Piccolo Restaurant, to promote his inclusion in a new cookbook, Come In, We're Closed: An Invitation to Staff Meals at the World's Best Restaurants. Co-authors Christine Carroll and Jody Eddy spend two years traveling the world, enjoying staff meals (the meal served to restaurant staff before service) in 25 iconic restaurants. Any jealousy I felt about the authors terrific idea was wiped away by chatting at the dinner with Eddy, who is lovely and a bit in awe herself at what she and Carroll experienced and achieved.

Flicker's staff meal was a buffet of rib-stickin' Southern love, with piles of pulled pork, collard greens, red beans & rice, coleslaw, and cornbread. I meant to eat lightly, taste things, then go home to cook dinner for my family. Uh no. I saw the spread, squealed, and proceeded to pile my plate high, trying to take pictures while balancing the bounty, and tucked into some of the best pulled pork this pork lover has ever had. And collard greens! I confess that I also have a soft spot for collard greens, but these were such a treat. Even though the collards recipe is not included in the book, the recipes for Cast-Iron Cornbread with Maple-Bacon Butter, Celery Root and Almond Slaw, Mr. Pickle's Pulled Pork with Johnny Two Socks' BBQ Sauce, and Slow-Cooked Red Beans with Ham Hocks are included. Eddy generously shared the recipe for the collard greens, so armed with this, and the book, I have my next dinner party already planned.

A few days after the Piccolo staff meal, I sat my Minnesota self down at Red Rooster Harlem, the highly-acclaimed fusion-soul food restaurant of Aquavit chef Marcus Samuelsson. Back in the day, when Aquavit still graced Minneapolis, it was one of my favorite restaurants. I was seriously excited to eat my way through the menu at Red Rooster, but our meal was...not good. I'm not the only one who thought so - we were a group of 8 disappointed diners - but I knew that I was very much comparing my meal to the staff meal at Piccolo, wishing I were back enjoying that meal...

So hey. I love you NYC, and I'll be back soon to eat and be inspired and come back with a million ideas. In the mean time, I'll be eating just beautifully in Minneapolis, thank you.

Recipe for Linh Ho's Collard Greens, via Chef Doug Flicker of Piccolo Restaurant, at TC Taste/Minnesota Monthly Magazine.

Burger maniacs (including myself), I have a proposition for you (us)...pork burgers! Why do we all not eat pork burgers? I'm not suggesting that beef burgers are anything but delectable, but I have been pondering - given the borderline gastronomic insanity over bacon, pork belly, and charcuterie - why the heck isn't a fabulously juicy, porky burger on every menu in this town?

I took my question to Karen Weiss of Little Foot Farm, host of this summer's Outstanding in the Field farm dinner. Weiss and her partner Sally Doherty raise heritage breed hogs on their picture-perfect farm for chefs like Lenny Russo of Heartland Restaurant and Mike Phillips of Three Sons Meat Co., but they also sell their highly-prized pork to the public, including ground Gloucester Old Spot (GOS) pork.

Weiss confessed that she's on a mission to convince Minnesotans that pork burgers deserve a spot on everyone's grill, particularly best-quality pork like she and Doherty raise, the kind that actually tastes like pork.

Pork!

After grilling a few batches myself, I can not agree more. Not that I thought I wouldn't agree - it's no secret that I'm a big, BIG pork fan - but holy cow my friends, the first batch of burgers I pulled off the grill were not savored, they were inhaled. I seasoned them with nothing more than salt and pepper so we could enjoy the clean, rich, pure pork flavor that Little Foot's tender loving care delivers. In a buttered, toasted bun, of course. Gah.

For round two pork play, I added cheddar cheese and tomato jam. Kablam. Future rounds might go breakfast-y with a fried egg and a crumble of bacon to gild the lily. Or Asian-style with scallions, ginger, and a splash of soy sauce. Or bratwurst-esque with caraway cheese and sauerkraut on a pretzel roll. Or even quicky barbecue, with a slathering of sauce topped with slaw before devouring. You get the picture - keep it simple, or go with classic-for-a-reason pork accompaniments. All paths lead to porktastic.

Go!

Tips for perfect, juicy burgers at TC Taste/Minnesota Monthly Magazine.

To purchase Little Foot Farm pork, call 612.207.9771 or email customerservice@littlefootfarm.com.