Food For Thought Recipe Contest.

Madison.

Now that's summer's here - and all the signs¹ point to it - it's time to get cranking on R.E.A.P.'s annual Food For Thought Recipe Contest. Last year was an unqualified success², but I have no such expectations this year. I'm considering it more as a chance to flex my culinary muscles, to try dusting off some old favorites and possibly come up with something new and worth repeating.

So far, this year, I've got four recipes more or less sketched out. I'm not sure when I'll have the time to test them - before August 18th, anyway - so I'm doing my best to think carefully and to modify some old standby recipes with new twists. I don't have anything really novel this year, anyhow. Nothing that doesn't require some seriously specialized equipment, like the cold-smoker, that is.³

So far this year:

• A crepe cake featuring strawberries and ricotta. I last made one of these many months back, when local pears were in season, just to see how locally-sourced I could make breakfast. By using whole wheat (Brantmeier Farms), eggs (Farmer John or Blue Valley Gardens), apple cider and pears (Ela Orchard), and maple syrup (Mother King's), the only potentially non-local ingredients were butter and salt. I've swapped out the pears in this one for jam and cheese, which is richer, less sweet, and (I hope) a bit more sophisticated.
  
  
• Sausage gravy and biscuits, featuring sage, chives and chive seeds from the garden. This whole recipe is an excuse to make use of the chive seeds I harvested on a whim one weekend. They're like misshapen, onion-flavored poppy seeds. That, and I love sausage gravy and need to make it an occasional part of my cooking repertoire.
  
  
• Welsh cakes with fresh currants. It's been a bountiful year for currants, and Sharon and I have had the pleasure of feasting on all sorts of different varieties: white, red, pink... I haven't seen any black currants, but I may have missed them.⁴ For my money, there's no finer addition to pancakes than red currants, all bright and tangy. Welsh cakes (picau ar y maen) are more like a flat scone, usually made with dried currants, but I'm determined to make a whole wheat version with fresh berries, which make for a much livelier biscuit.
  
  
• Lamb with lots of lavender. Also habanero peppers. Lavender's been a great success in the garden this year, with so many flowers that I'm not sure what to do with them. Lavender and habanero peppers are both so intensely floral that I think they'll be a great combination, so I'm banking on it. I won't be harvesting the chillis from the garden until after the contest, I'll bet, so I can't truly test this one out ahead of time. Still, I'm modifying one of Julia Child's recipes, adding roasted potatoes and compound butter, so I'm three-quarters of the way there already...

The next target - whether or not I can manage it - is to try adapting a miso-based Japanese pickling technique to use predominantly (or exclusively?) Wisconsin ingredients.

It's got potential.

* * * * *

¹Temperatures reaching into the 90s, humidity even higher, spectacular and sudden thunderstorms (complete with the associated flash flooding), and a refrigerator so full of produce that it's a struggle to eat it all in a week.

²First time trying, too. I try not to brag, but, damn, that felt great.

³Incidentally, that sucker works wonders. I'll get around to some "action shots" one of these days. Maybe for a day of fish smoking... weather pending. (See previous note on thunderstorms.)

⁴I know they've been implicated, in the states, as a vector for white pine blister rust. Recent research suggests that it's only a certain strain of the species, but that might explain it. That and the fact that most Americans have never seen a currant, and wouldn't know what to do with them.