Fish Camp: Foraging & Cherry/Bourbon Ribs

A cabin retreat will unexpectedly take over small bits and pieces of your life. Since building the cabin, more and more I’ve taken to what can only be called foraging for my groceries. And no. This isn’t about dumpster diving.

I spent the weekend at my fishing shack. I did some small maintenance there, but mostly laid back. On the way home, I stopped at a nearby orchard. Tart cherries are in season. I returned home with a farmer’s pint of those and began thinking about some sort of BBQ country ribs with a cherry-bourbon glaze.

Four walls and roof in the woods unexpectedly change other things too. I’ve become a bird watcher. It’s not an altogether bad thing. When I thought to build the cabin, I thought of a simple weekend shelter to camp out in while on fishing trips. I didn’t know I was building hermitage, a base camp for foraging and possibly the best bird watching perch in all of Wisconsin. If the hermitage part of it wasn’t completely unexpected, the foraging and bird watching were.

The cabin is about ten miles east of the Mississippi River, and well within the Mississippi migratory bird flyway. It’s perched on a steep hillside overlooking the Kickapoo River and its grassy floodplain. On my deck, my line of vision is directly midway into the treetops on the floodplain, and the deck is smack dab in the transition area between the floodplain and wetlands, and a hardwood forest. Perfect. I couldn’t have planned it better. I didn’t know that when I built the deck.

Now as for the cabin itself, it’s tiny – a main room, two bunk rooms and a camp kitchen. It’s rustic – no electricity and no plumbing. It is a simple shelter for weekend camping. Throughout Wisconsin, particularly in the North and in the West, there are very simple cabins scattered throughout the woods. They’re used mostly by hunters and fishermen. Mine is mostly a fish shack. The main room is like a big screened in porch. It is nicely ventilated by seven large windows and a patio door. Deer hunter’s like cabins with far fewer windows that are easier to heat.   

I’ve found it’s a place for simple living or maybe, to be more exact, for simply living. It is a place to move a bit closer to the natural environment we occupy, yet so happily pushed aside in the name of comfort. It’s a place to give time for thought – something we like to push aside with any number of mindless distractions. It is a retreat and a hermitage. The degree to which it’s that, it’s also perfect and more so than I had imagined.

But before I learned of those things, I learned about apples. The orchards on the bluffs overlooking Gays Mills are nationally renowned for outstanding apples. There is a weird microclimate that’s wonderfully good for apples, the growers tell me. According to their Web page (link):

“Farmers in the Gays Mills area learned early that the land on both sides of the Kickapoo River offered excellent conditions for apple-growing. In 1905, John Hays and Ben Twining collected apples from eight to ten farmers around Gays Mills for exhibit at the Wisconsin State Fair.

The exhibit won first prize, then went on to capture first honors in a national apple show in New York. This experience prompted the Wisconsin State Horticulture Society to urge a project of “trial orchards” around the state to interest growers in commercial production. The society examined a site on High Ridge and planted five acres with five recommended varieties.

By 1911, the orchard had grown so vigorously that an organization was formed in Gays Mills to promote the selling of orchards (sic). Today, more than a thousand acres here produce apples nationally known for their color and flavor.”

In returning from my cabin through August until November a parade of apples unfolds. More varieties than I could have imagined and certainly more than my grocer would carry.  

The Kickapoo Orchard produces a breathtaking list of at least forty varieties of apples. While some of these are common, most are obscure. The obscure ones tend to be ugly, tiny or obesely huge. Or they are varieties that are particularly good for baking, or for home canned applesauce.

The golden russet is a prime example of an ugly apple. It’s small, about the size of a medium onion, maybe smaller, and has a sort of dingy brown color like the potato with the same name. But they are so good, and they magnificently shine in a simple salad featuring apples, spinach, walnuts and a vinaigrette dressing.

Our grocers mostly want eating apples with eye appeal. The wholesalers who supply them want apples that keep and travel well. Between the two only a few varieties make the cut. Most of those are lacking in character and personality. Like fashion models, often there really isn’t much there. Also like fashion models, I guess, very few are genuinely fresh. Varieties of apples are in their prime for only a short while, though you wouldn’t know this if you only bought apples from a big grocery chain store.

The varieties for sale from the Kickapoo orchard change from week to week. While the apples season is long, the peak season for individual varieties is short. These apples are as fresh as fresh can be. From August through October I return from my cabin with two or three bags of apples, different varieties and share them with friends. From those trips, apple recipes took on a whole new meaning. There is a reason for my fondness for homemade apple sauce heaped upon potato pancakes and a growing fondness for apple cobbler. And there is a reason, too, for the walnut oil and sherry vinegar in my cupboard.

After having been schooled on lesson of apples from the Gays Mills orchards, the trips to and from my cabin have become foraging expeditions. I return home with foods that are very fresh, uniquely outstanding and often exotic: maple syrup almost as darkly brown as coffee; morel mushrooms; turtle meat when the Mississippi River commercial fisherman, who runs the Valley Fish and Cheese in Prairie du Chien (link), has it; and so it goes. I’ve become reluctant to buy fresh tomatoes, except in season and from roadside stands.

On this trip I returned with the cherries, Fountain Prairie skirt steaks and a jar of Wienke’s Market dill spears with onion and garlic. The pickles were as good as all but the very best put up by home canners. I bought them on the way to my cabin at Straka Meats in Plain, Wis. Staka Meats is small town butcher shop that processes locally raised beef and pork. And is often the case with small town butcher shops, it stocks an odd variety of other products that owner is particularly fond of. The Wienke pickles came from another small food processor on the other side of Wisconsin. The Wienke pickle story is a good one, an outgrowth from home canning (full text). I wish more of our food processors were like Straka’s and Wienke’s.  

The modern economy of food production, processing and distribution has pushed many good things aside.  Still, I like foraging and apples fresh from the orchard.

In any case, while I promised skirt steaks and bordelaise and am now suggesting the possibility of turtle soup or a beautiful apples salad, on my last trip tart cherries were in season. It’s something that can be made from fresh cherries for only a few weeks during the year. So BBQ ribs, with a cherry/bourbon glaze, are what it will be. To serve four you will need:      

4 meaty country style pork ribs

¼ cup of olive oil

¼ cup of tart cherry juice concentrate

½ cup of apple cider

1 tablespoon maple syrup

1/3 cup of bourbon (nearly 2 jiggers if that’s how you measure your bourbon)

Cornstarch wash

2 cups of pitted tart cherries cut in half, (Bing cherries will do)

Mix all wet ingredients, except the cornstarch wash, into a marinade, and marinade the ribs for about an hour. Cover the ribs and bake in a 325^o oven for an hour and a half with the marinade. Finish the ribs on a hot grill or under a broiler until nicely browned. (Mine in the picture are charred. It’s best to pay attention during this step.) Reserve the browned ribs in a warm oven 160 – 200^o.

Meanwhile transfer the marinade and pan juices to a sauce pan, add the pitted cherries bring to a boil and thicken into a glaze with a cornstarch wash. (If using Bing cherries cook for a minute or two to soften). Serve the ribs covered in sauce. Baked macaroni and cheese or a macaroni and cheese salad goes very well with the rib. Think of fruit and cheese, they’re perfect complements.

Skirt Steaks: Peasant Food and Grossly Underrated

John Priske recommended skirt steaks, as viable alternative to New York strip or rib eye steaks, both of which were sold out. John and his wife Dorothy operate Fountain Prairie Farms, where they raise Highland beef and operate a bed and breakfast inn.

Their farm is about 30 miles north of Madison, Wis. Their custom raised, slaughtered and aged beef has become popular with Madison foodies. They sell it at the Madison’s farmers’ market and directly to a number of restaurants in the region. They have a hard time keeping up with demand, particularly the demand for traditional steaks.

While visiting them a few years ago, the only steaks he had were skirt steaks. At the time I wasn’t familiar with cut.

“They’re really flavorful,” He said. “You sear them on the grill like a flank steak and thinly slice them across the grain.”

John was right. I’m particularly fond of the short ribs and ox tails he sells. These are peasant cuts of beef. Well the skirt steak is a peasant steak. It’s become my favorite.

Peasant foods often have very honest but nevertheless colorful names attached to them. Sometimes you just know some things are good by these common names. The steak comes from the belly of the beast. It’s one of four diaphragm muscles located between the brisket and the flank. We’re not talking rib eye, New York strip, T-bone or tenderloin.

In New York, the steak house name for this cut of beef is Romanian tenderloin. “Romanian,” in this case, tells us it’s not a tenderloin.  It’s a peasant steak and anything but tender. That’s why when seared to a medium rare it’s served thinly sliced. All the same, it is possibly tastiest steak from a side of beef which for years languished in relative obscurity.

Until the early 1970s, about the only restaurants featuring these steaks were Greek-American, where it was typically offered as a lowly breakfast steak. Otherwise, skirt steaks most often wound up with the other less than prime cuts and ground into hamburger. In the early 70s Mexican cuisine started to find its way into mainstream American dining and hence the skirt steak’s other common name -- fajita. Wikipedia tells us about its more colorful history:

“In Spanish "faja" means belt or girdle; "fajita" is the diminutive form. In original Tex-Mex culinary parlance, fajitas are a dish with roots in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas from a specific cut of meat: skirt steak. . . .

The first serious study of the history of fajitas was done in 1984 by Homero Recio as part of his graduate work in animal science at Texas A&M. Recio was intrigued by a spike in the retail price of skirt steak, and that sparked his research into the dish that took the once humble skirt steak from throwaway cut to menu star. Recio found anecdotal evidence describing the cut of meat, the cooking style (directly on a campfire or on a grill), and the Spanish nickname going back as far as the 1930s in the ranch lands of South and West Texas. During cattle roundups, beef were butchered regularly to feed the hands. Throwaway items such as the hide, the head, the entrails, and meat trimmings such as skirt were given to the Mexican vaqueros (cowboys) as part of their pay. Considering the limited number of skirts per carcass and the fact the meat wasn't available commercially, the fajita tradition remained regional and relatively obscure for many years, probably only familiar to vaqueros, butchers, and their families.”

Call it a cowboy steak if you like, it’s peasant food.  It is one of the few cuts of beef that’s great both for grilling and braising. Above all, it’s held in high regard for its flavor.

Think of a fancy restaurant describing its Romanian beef entre as “Thin slices of Romanian Steak slowly braised in rich mushroom wine sauce with . . .”

In a truly outstanding restaurant, the chef would not hesitate to pan sear a skirt steak in tallow, serve it thinly sliced medium rare nestled in a bed of caramelized root vegetables and topped off with an honest Bordelaise sauce. You get the picture. It’s not the one pictured here.

The picture with this post is from Recipes.Com. (Full Text, and do be sure to hit the side bar for Vegas Strip Steak. It looks a world like a skirt steak to me.) In this well received recipe for “Flank Steak Bordelaise,” the steak used is a less flavorful close cousin to a skirt steak. The sauce is “Bordelaise” in name only. A true bordelaise sauce is a demi-glaze based red wine sauce finished with a thin sheen of butter and diced bone marrow. Tallow, demi-glaze and marrow are far beyond the reach of most restaurants. Ironically, the things of haute cuisine have their foundation in peasant cooking. As for a true bodelaise sauce, it you have time for it, you can make it at home. Plan on spending a day making a good beef stock and reducining it to a demi-glaze.

In short this recipe, while highly rated, comes up short. It’s not a skirt steak and it’s not bordelaise sauce.

The butcher at my local store will occasionally offer skirts steaks. It seems that in Cedarburg, Wis., most consumers are not familiar with this cut of beef. It has become expensive. He doesn’t offer them unless they’re priced right from the packing house.

This weekend I’ll be visiting John and Dorothy Priske. I will buy a few skirt steaks. In a future post I’ll tell you how to serve these up with true bordelaise sauce.