Food Blog: jwagnerdsm

[jwagnerdsm]

GG Mora tagged me to blog this week. I hadn't intended on starting until Monday but one wave of guests (my wife's family) left this morning and our second wave will be arriving in a few hours so I thought I might introduce myself and give you a little idea what's going on here.

I live in Des Moines, Iowa, in a quiet neighborhood about ten minutes from downtown. I came here in 1991 to work at State Editor at The Des Moines Register. I grew up in the newspaper business, started writing when I was in junior high and have been involved in a variety of publishing pursuits since then. I was at the Register until 1997 when I became editor of The Iowan Magazine, a statewide publication akin to Arizona Highways, Vermont Life, Ohio, Wisconsin Trails, etc. I eventually became general manager of the company and, after a failed attempt to buy the business, moved to a small publishing company here that produces a weekly business journal, an alternative newspaper, and some custom publishing publications. I left that job in April to pursue freelance writing and to work on books, the first which was released in July and is now 990,387 on Amazon's list of best sellers. (Boy, I partied when I cracked the top million.)

Food has always been an important part of my life. My mother is a fine cook and it wasn't until several years after I left home that I realized how broke we were when I was a child and how deftly my mother managed to feed my family on a shoestring. Small town Iowa food is all about comfort: hot beef sandwiches are on the menu at every cafe in the state. The restaurants open early so that farmers can fill their stomachs before heading into the fields. Some of the food is very good, but I didn't sample Chinese or even very good Italian until I was eight or nine years old.

When I was 19, a friend told me: "You won't always find a good meal in a small town unless you learn how to cook." He also told me, "If you want to impress women, learn to make two or three dishes very well and they will think you are a master cook." My first challenge was risotto and today I think I make as fine a risotto as anyone. My favorite is a summertime risotto with a soffrito of tomatoes and honey that is finished with a handful of fresh chopped mint just before I put it on the table.

I've been married for six years and have two children: Zoey is five and Kiernan is two and a half. My wife, CeCe, is a lawyer. (Zoey was telling people that I was a homemaker until my book came out this summer.) My wife's skills make it possible for me to stay home to write. I also do 90 percent of the cooking, but CeCe is a wonderful cook. She makes the best Baklava around and loves to share the recipes that her Lebanese grandmother and aunts used to make for Sunday dinner.

This year, we are eating only food grown in Iowa. We started in April and will continue through the winter. Our food came from farmers markets, a CSA, and from a garden in our backyard. I would say that 90 to 95 percent of the food we eat is grown within 100 miles of our house. And I can pick up a can or a freezer bag of anything we have in storage and tell you something about the person who raised the food. We have a beverage exemption (my wife's only request when I came up with this idea) so that she could continue to have her coffee in the morning. I am a Diet Pepsi freak so I was happy to comply. We try to find restaurants that feature Iowa grown food, but don't have a hard and fast rule about that. The kids still get their peanut butter and bananas and other things that little bodies need that might not be available. We aren't playing "Survivor".

This was a good summer for vegetables and a warm fall means that we were still finding fresh vegetables as late as November. (Last week, a farmer friend called me and said that he had two pounds of Brussels Sprouts and some Spinach, which I quickly snagged.) During the summer, I froze about 40 pounds of sweet corn, 20 pounds of spinach, 15 pounds of brocolli, five pounds of cauliflower, 30 pounds of peas, and 50 pounds of string beans. I also canned tomato sauce, spaghetti sauce, salsa, raspberry and plum jams, cherries in their own juices, apple pie filling, and six kinds of pickles. We buy our meat from farmers in the area. I bake bread with whole wheat and use corn meal for muffins, etc. The fresh ground corn meal also makes the most spectacular polenta you've ever eaten.

I think I've become a lot better cook in the last year because of the ingredients that I am using. It's easy to take for granted the pre-peeled baby carrots, the salad mixes, etc. that we used to buy at the grocery store. Even canned goods seem like a luxury now. But it's nice to have total control over how foods are prepared. My wife and I have both lost about 20 pounds in the last year. We still eat like pigs, but we don't have foods that are laden with all kinds of fat.

This weekend we'll be eating leftover turkey, ham, stuffing, etc. But next week I'll be cooking for my family. I'll check in again later to tell you what we are eating. Thanks for bearing with me this week. I'm looking forward to this.

[Cusina]

I'm glad you got the tag this week. I've been reading your threads and am very much looking forward to having an in depth look through your blog. I had the pleasure of visiting a dear friend in Des Moines, attending the Iowa state fair and a sweet corn festival in a cute little town square (gosh, I can't remember the name, Adel? maybe?) this past August and now know first hand the glories of Iowa food.

[maggiethecat]

I too am delighted that you're this week's bloggeur. I've been interested in your Iowa Food Project, and it will be fascinating to see how it plays out day-to-day. And I second the beverage exemption, not being able to instantly conjure Iowa vintages.

But if there's wine in Iowa, I'm sure you know the best.

[slkinsey]

Why don't you give us a little taste of things to come by giving us an overview of your Thanksgiving? Weren't you the one who said you wanted to... well, shove Thanksgiving up your in-laws' a**?

[guajolote]

I too am delighted that you're this week's bloggeur. I've been interested in your Iowa Food Project, and it will be fascinating to see how it plays out day-to-day. And I second the beverage exemption, not being able to instantly conjure Iowa vintages.

But if there's wine in Iowa, I'm sure you know the best.

of course, maggie is almost your neighbor

[ronnie_suburban]

I'm really looking forward to this...your intro hooked me.

=R=

[jwagnerdsm]

We had 14 people at our house for Thanksgiving again this year: my wife's two sisters, her brother and his wife and college-aged son, her parents, one sister's significant other, and the four of us. They arrived the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and stayed until Saturday. There's really no nice way to put this so I'll just say it: none of them, except my mother-in-law, can cook anything more complicated than grilled cheese sandwiches and Campbell's Soup. Again this year they all asked what they could bring, but since I wanted to do an all Iowa dinner, I simply asked them to bring snack food and their favorite booze. My mother-in-law brought a honey-glazed ham from a local gourmet shop (an Iowa product).

The day they began to arrive I drove out to a health food store in suburban Des Moines and picked up a 19 pound turkey, fresh killed the day before. I order him in July at the Downtown Farmers Market and got a call last Sunday to pick him up on Tuesday. He cost me $33. On a whim I also picked up a loaf of homemade bread and a peach pie that the farmer's mother had made.

When I got home on Tuesday there was a phone message from a local television station asking if they could spend the day with me in the kitchen and then tape us eating dinner. They had heard about our local food project and had tried to do something this summer, but the story fell through. They decided that our story would be a nice alternative to the typical Thanksgiving stories about people eating at work and homeless people eating in the shelters.

Also on Tuesday I went downstairs to our deep freeze to pull out a bag of spring peas that I had frozen last May, a bag of green beans, and a bag of corn that I had blanched with a little cream and sugar before freezing. I had picked up 40 pounds of potatoes a week earlier and had plenty of onions, celery, garlic and carrots on hand from a delivery two weeks ago. I also had 40 pounds of whole wheat flour and 20 pounds of corn meal from a local farmer. His story is on my web page under the Iowa Grown heading.

Then, late last week I scored two nice sized bags of spinach and two pounds of Brussels Sprouts. So I decided that instead of a lettuce salad we'd do a Spinach salad. (Some hyrodoponic bibb lettuce is grown here year round but our market is open on Fridays and Saturdays and I wanted to be sure it was fresh on Thanksgiving so I passed on it.)

I decided to use sklinsey's method of preparing a turkey two ways, a good decision in retrospect since Thursday was the most hectic Thanksgiving I have ever experienced. (I froze under the television lights and just kind of muddled along for a critical half hour period Thursday afternoon. And one of CeCe's sisters announced late Thursday morning that she was baking a pumpkin pie and then parked herself in the middle of the kitchen making the crust and the pumkin filling. I was furious but couldn't express my outrage.)

The turkey two way (sounds kind of kinky when I write it) requires you to debone the bird, marinade the dark meat in port and red wine, a bouquet garni and some aromatic vegetables while brining the breasts. Then you take the carcass and make a white stock, simmering it for several hours. I followed Fat Guy's suggestion and simmered it overnight. I was skeptical at first but when I woke up at 4 a.m. to check the stock, it was emitting a delicious turkey smell and my eight o'clock it had reduced down some and created a nice clear, clean tasting stock.

Dinner was scheduled for 3 p.m. but because the television crew was coming my wife decided to decorate the house for Christmas and rearrange some furniture. And people kept crowding into the kitchen. I opened my first beer at 10:30 a.m. and wondered how the hell I was ever going to get everything ready?

Because the vegetables came from local gardens I spent more time than usual scrubbing the potatoes and sweet potatoes. I usually plan on one potato per person for mashed potatoes but psyched myself into increasing the formula to one and one-half potatoes. I covered the Yukon gold in cold water at about noon and brought them to a boil and then let my brother-in-law run them through the ricer. You'd have thought it was 1958 and I just showed him the first computer. He was amazed by that ricer.

At the same time I steamed the sweet potatoes and then simmered a sauce of Iowa Maple syrup, salt, and bourbon. I put those in a casserole and deposited the dish in a roaster set at 375. My sage stuffing with fresh sage and croutons I made from home baked whole wheat garlic focaccia (delicious but a pain in the ass) went into a crock pot that sat on the floor near the roaster.

I was making a creamed soup (thanks Jackal for the recipe) that I would heat in a pumpkin in the oven when the television crew arrived. We spent a half hour getting acquinted, doing a brief interview, and running a mike cord up my back. In the living room, my in-laws were getting soused. My two children were tearing around the house. My five year old girl was performing a ballet in the living room and wondering aloud why the television camera man was ignoring her. And worst of all, my two year old was unplugging the crock pot and the roaster. AND I DIDN"T FIND OUT THAT THIS HAPPENED FOR ANOTHER 45 MINUTES. My father-in-law later said, "I saw him do it but I thought you wanted him to."

"Why," I asked, "would I 1.) want a 2-year-old to play with electrical cords and 2.) unplug dinner?"

"Well, I don't cook," he told me.

So now it's 1:45 and I still haven't put the turkey breasts in the oven. My mother-in -law, a teetotaler of sorts, is into her third glass of wine, my b-i-l has polished off half a bottle of Glenlivet. I made an executive decision and decided not to make the corn souffle, instead serving cut corn with butter. I scooped the dressing into tall ceramic urns and wedged them around the turkey, rolls, and green bean casserole in the oven. And I had another beer. And I got one for the camera guy as well. "Lee," I said to him. "We're not eating at three."

Dinner was finally served at about 4:30 p.m. My mother in law got up from the table just as the soup was being served and wobbled into the bathroom and then into the downstairs guest room where she passed out, allegedly from the flu. But everybody else ate like condemned men and sang the praises of our meal. We fixed plates for the television crew and sent back stuff for the guys in the newsroom (especially since I had enough mashed potatoes to save Ireland from famine.)

It was a good Thanksgiving meal. The turkey was the best I've ever done. The potatoes were damn good, too. And the gravy was as good as I've ever made. But I was most thankful on Saturday morning when I lay in bed and heard the front door quietly shut: my in-laws left the house at 6 a.m. for the long ride home.

Edited November 30, 2003 by jwagnerdsm (log)

[jackal10]

I really admire your effort to eat local. Food miles are one of the big polluters of the planet, and lead to poor parts of the world growing export crops when they can't feed their own people. Keep those food miles down!

How was the soup? I plan to do a cream soups egCI unit next year some time, if the editors agree, and feedback woul be good. I would have heated it on the stovetop, and then poured it into the hollowed pumpkin. I don't trust the structural integrity of baked pumpkin.

When's the TV program? Can we see clips/stills?

Edited November 30, 2003 by jackal10 (log)

[herbacidal]

My father-in-law later said, "I saw him do it but I thought you wanted him to."

"Why," I asked, "would I 1.) want a 2-year-old to play with electrical cords and 2.) unplug dinner?"

"Well, I don't cook," he told me.

I'd respond, well do you use electricity?

Do you give your 2 year old electrical cords and outlets to play with?

And cooking is one thing, but people should know how to help.

I have no idea what a ricer is.

[jwagnerdsm]

I will see if I can download some stills. They did a nice job on the piece although it was a little vapid. I baked the pumpkin so that I could scoop out a little bit of the flesh with each ladle of soup. I really worried about the whole thing busting apart and, in fact, told the camera guy that things were a little iffy when I moved the pumpkin from a pizza pan to a serving tray. But it held together. And the soup won major praise. Thanks again for the great recipe.

[jwagnerdsm]

A ricer is a gadget that looks kind of like a oversized garlic press. You stick your cooked potatoes in it and press them through the sieve-like bottom and you get lump-free potatoes. A great gadget, although it's a bit of a pain.

[...tm...]

Sounds like a great Iowa Thanksgiving menu. Iowa maple syrup, who knew? I'm still a little bitter that due to a vomiting incident after McDonald's "pancakes" and "syrup" and the fraud perpetrated upon customers by so many restaurants claiming to serve "maple" syrup while serving corn syrup flavored like maple, I thought that I hated maple syrup from the ages 5-25 or so. Anyway, I've finally realized the error of my ways. And I'm interested in the rest of your Iowa foodblog.

[guajolote]

A ricer is a gadget that looks kind of like a oversized garlic press. You stick your cooked potatoes in it and press them through the sieve-like bottom and you get lump-free potatoes. A great gadget, although it's a bit of a pain.

here's a picture of a ricer

the MIL getting the "flu" is hilarious.

[elyse]

What fun your day sounds like. Good and bad.

[Cusina]

Wow, what a drama. And all on tape for you to cherish always.

Sounded like a great meal happened at your house despite it all. You deserve some sort of medal for all that perserverance. Food Valor under in-law duress. The last minute pumpkin pie would have sent me through the roof.

[woodburner]

My father-in-law later said, "I saw him do it but I thought you wanted him to."

I also truly admire your attempt to eat local. Keeping your composure regarding the electrical cord, brings you into sainthood.

Proceed.

woodburner

[slkinsey]

Okay, that was really amazing! I can't believe you had to work under the lights and pressure of television cameras, have celebrity-hogging relatives crowding the kitchen, have the electricity temporarily unplugged, etc. and still managed to keep your composure and turn out what sounds like a fabulous all-Iowa Thanksgiving dinner. If we had an eGullet award for Thanksgicing dinner, I would vote for you!

Can't wait to hear about further meals.

[jwagnerdsm]

Sounds like a great Iowa Thanksgiving menu. Iowa maple syrup, who knew? I'm still a little bitter that due to a vomiting incident after McDonald's "pancakes" and "syrup" and the fraud perpetrated upon customers by so many restaurants claiming to serve "maple" syrup while serving corn syrup flavored like maple, I thought that I hated maple syrup from the ages 5-25 or so.

There are a handful of maple syrup operations in northeast and eastern Iowa. Except for Green's Sugar Bush, it's mostly hobby farms. Greens is available in a few locations in eastern Iowa and produces probably our best maple syrup. I spent a terrific day there a few years back when the sap was starting to run.

[ronnie_suburban]

Then, late last week I scored two nice sized bags of spinach...

Is that what the kids are calling it these days? It should have made for quite the painless TG.

Seriously though, I admire you so much for navigating your way through the entire situation. I'm not sure I'd want any tv cameras around during some of my TG prep 'moments'...they're not usually suitable for public consumption.

=R=

[PopsicleToze]

I admire you pulling through Thanksgiving under that much pressure. Under that set of circumstances, I would have been the one with the "flu" by the time dinner was served.

[tejon]

Grace under pressure - I'm impressed that you kept it together so well. Can't wait to see the stills!

[jwagnerdsm]

Sunday:

On Sunday, my parents drove into town from Sibley, about 200 miles northwest of Des Moines, for a belated birthday celebration for my now five-year-old daughter, Zoey. My parents suggested leftovers for lunch and so I threw together a casserole with of bed of mashed potatoes zipped up with sour cream, some diced turkey and ham, topped with a quasi-tettrazzini sauce. For the sauce, I diced some onions and simmered them in butter then added a ½ cup of flour, some ground mustard and poultry seasoning, just a hint of cayenne, and some salt and pepper. I stirred it up to make a kind of roux (a very lumpy roux). But it worked itself out once I added two cups of whole milk, and a little bit of chedder cheese, plus some salt and pepper. It baked in the oven for about a half-hour at 400 degrees.

It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t the prettiest thing the look at – it didn’t sit up like I wished it might – but it had a nice flavor and the kids liked it. We used some of our fresh Spinach with goat cheese and some toasted bread crumbs to zip up the salad. Warm bread was served on the side.

Cooking for the kids has been one of the biggest challenges during the last seven months. They are good eaters but I think kids get used to the blander taste of processed food and so it’s easy to shock their little taste buds. They like bread hot out of the oven but won’t eat a nice home-baked sandwich loaf, preferring mediocre mass produced. Both of them (we also have a boy who is two-and-a-half) love fresh vegetables and spent the summer eating loads of vine-ripened tomatoes for breakfast, as a snack, and on the side during dinner. Zoey loves broccoli, particularly with a cheese sauce and they both are fans of carrots, lettuce salads, green beans and peas.

Their favorite dish is spaghetti. I canned several quarts of tomato sauce this summer and make a pasta sauce by first blonding some diced garlic and onion, then browning some Italian sausage links and ground beef in the pan. Then I dump in the tomato sauce and let it simmer for several hours. Midway through the simmer I’ll add some fresh herbs. Earlier this year I made several dozen meatballs and froze them. I thought the kids liked ‘em (my wife and I do) but one day as I drove Zoey and a neighbor to school, I heard her tell her friend that she wasn’t “crazy about Dad’s meatballs.”)

Last night, we grazed from the refrigerator and the kids ate some leftover pasta with cheese. We’re all fighting colds here right now so and the busy holiday week exacerbated our conditions so nobody is real hungry.

More about Monday later.

[slkinsey]

Ah, kids! The great irony is that in 20 years they'll be bragging to their friends about the food you gave them as children and pining for the flavors of their childhood.

[GG Mora]

Their favorite dish is spaghetti.

Have you been able to find locally grown/made pasta? Do you make your own?

When we were doing "Eating Vermont" week, I was able to get Vermont-grown wheat flour, but only stone ground whole wheat. I tried making pasta with the pastry variant, and it was pretty bad.

[SobaAddict70]

I for one wholeheartedly applaud your foodblog, jwag.

Too bad it's only a week and not a month. (I'd be interested to hear about Christmas. )

Soba