Chocolate Covered Ground Cherries Jens Hegg Wednesday, September 17, 2014

This blog is rapidly becoming a foodie blog. I haven't even been posting mixed drinks the way I expected, let alone anything about my graduate program. But, this is one of my fall favorites and now that it's in season I thought I would share it.

Ground cherries are a relative of the tomato and tomatillo, but they are sweet and non-acidic. They don't taste like cherries, more like a burst of sugar and warm flavors without much tartness. They have a bit of mango and pineapple in there, but the taste is much more earthy. They are a bit vegetal, which turns some people off. Every year my grandmother eats a couple while telling me, "I'm just not sure I like them very much," which I think is kindof funny in an endearing way.

Ground cherries were once a staple of the American garden and there are numerous recipes for ground cherry pie online, along with many others. They apparently grow like weeds, much like their inedible cousin the chinese lantern, which made them a good choice for people who relied on their gardens for food. I planted a few of the fruit this year so we'll see in the spring how they grow. My favorite recipe, and one I haven't seen online, is to dip them in chocolate. With the husk pulled back into a little papery shuttlecock it makes an ideal way both to dip them and to eat them as finger food, not to mention that it's a really attractive looking dish that always gets comments.

Preparation couldn't be easier. Carefully peel back the husk and pull it backwards. It will naturally fold into a little tail. They are attached to the berry pretty tightly so they won't pull off too easily. The best berries are the ones that are golden in color. The greenish ones (as long as they aren't too green) are also sweet but have more planty taste.

Melt some chocolate in a double boiler. Really dark chocolate tastes best, it adds the right bitterness to fill in the profile. Ground cherries don't have a whole lot of complex flavor, so it's nice to have that bold bitterness of dark chocolate to fill things in. I could also imagine that orange infused chocolate like Alter Eco Dark Twist would be pretty amazing. If you haven't tried Alter Eco chocolate yet you are missing out, it's just incredibly flavorful and some of the best chocolate I've had. If you want the chocolate to look shiny you need to add some paraffin to the melted chocolate, otherwise it cools to a matte brown. The pictures here are of two batches, one with a bit of paraffin and one without.

 Once the chocolate is melted start dipping the ground cherries in. Putting them on the shiny side of aluminum foil will make it easier to get them off, the chocolate tends to stick down hard on a plate. You can peel them off and put them on a plate later. Put them in the fridge to cool, or just leave them out to cool. Once the chocolate is hard it's ready to eat!

Have fun.

Stuffed Squash Blossoms: the best of summer eats Jens Hegg Friday, August 29, 2014

Squash blossoms are really underrated in the US, usually relegated to Mexican food like squash blossom soup or in quesadillas. It's too bad. They taste really good and are a great way to keep your zucchini plants reproductive efficiency from taking over your life. 

I discovered stuffed squash blossoms several years ago and look forward to the time of year when I can pick a handful of big blossoms, stuff them with chevré, and make one of my favorite appetizers. As is the norm for me, I rarely use a recipe so if you want to make them you'll need to rely on some instincts and frequent tasting rather than measurements…more after the jump.

Black garlic and the perfect summer salad Jens Hegg Wednesday, July 30, 2014

I love chicken salad, especially with grapes, it's one of my favorite summer meals from childhood. It reminds me of harvest, dusty and hot. It is a cool respite to pull a cold chicken salad sandwich out of the cooler, sitting on the hot vinyl seat of a grain truck with a hot wind whipping over the stubble.

Weather on the Palouse has been sweltering. Yesterday was over 100º and the first combines started cutting grain. It's chicken salad weather, neither Katie or I could stomach a hot dinner. As it turns out, adding a bit of black garlic makes chicken salad amazing! You end up with the same awesome salad with these bursts of complex, sweet-tangy, umami flavor as you eat.

Black garlic is garlic that has been slow cooked for an extremely long time while still in the head. It isn't fermented, as is often claimed, and is a pretty recent invention. Like roasting, it takes away the intense garlic flavor. Unlike roasted garlic, black garlic is sweet and a bit tangy with the 'garlic' taste coming at the tail end. It's extremely mild and almost more like dried fruit. We had a head sitting around that I bought to experiment with about a month ago. I figured it was time to get rid of it and I was making chicken salad but didn't have anything sweet or tangy to kick it up a notch. It turns out black garlic makes an incredible addition to chicken salad.

I won't be posting measurements with my recipes on here (I rarely measure anyway) but here is what I put in the chicken salad we made. Mix it up and put it on a bed of the lettuce.

• Head of black garlic
• Cucumber
• Celery
• Fresh shelled peas from our garden
• The remains of a rotisserie chicken 
• Romain lettuce from the garden
• Sir Kensingtons mayonaise (which has some mustard in it, so if you use regular mayo you might want to add a touch of mustard)

Cinnamon and Sugar Jens Hegg Sunday, October 05, 2008

This is a picture of the best cinnamon roll I have ever had, bar none. A man on Palouse has outfitted the renovated hotel he owns downtown with a commercial kitchen and bakery/coffee bar. Unfortunately he isn't open for business, he's hoping someone will want to lease the space for a business.

He aught to do it himself. He baked cinnamon rolls as a special treat for the Palouse Days revellers and sold them at the bargain basement price of $1.50.

They were light and fluffy but with enough substance to keep them firmly in the bready category rather than pastry. They were stuffed with tons of good raisins and plenty of cinnamon and sugar. The bottom was the most amazing part. They were carmelized on the bottom with no burnt spots and a perfect layer of gooey and also crunchy sugar/cinnamon mixture. The cream cheese frosting topped it all off.

I didn't expect to find the perfect cinnamon roll in Palouse Washington, but hey, you take life as it comes. I hope he makes it a tradition.

Yummy! Peppers! Jens Hegg Thursday, October 02, 2008

Mmmm! I love hot peppers. Lucky me that there is a stall at the farmers market in Moscow, ID with at least 30 varieties of hot peppers grown in Royal City, WA. I grabbed a handful of unfamiliar looking ones with the hopes of making salsa as well as some interesting pepper dishes. My haul included a dozen or so aji limon, two mushroom habaneros, and a couple of Red Romanian peppers to put flavor in salsa.

I've been bumming around my parents place for a while now so I decided it was time to cook a real dinner for everyone. The result was asparagus, shrimp and smoked sun dried tomato lemon pepper pasta with aji limon and habanero and a side of sweet potato mash with hibiscus sauce. I love experimenting in the kitchen.

I used this recipe as the base (using the idea of aji limon from one of the comments and adding some habanero besides) and dressed it up to suit my taste. I used smoked sun dried tomatoes because they looked really good at the store. I had never seen them before. It turned out that they complemented the peppers perfectly and added a whole dimension to the pasta. 

I hadn't cooked with fresh hot peppers before but managed to keep the heat to just the right level. It put a lingering heat in the back of your throat but didn't overpower the combination of fresh lemon juice and unrefined sea salt or the asparagus. It would have gone over well even back in Scandanavian Minnesota where a rack of peppers like this in the farmers market is unheard-of. The lemony taste of the aji limon went well with the pasta and the habanero went right along with the tomato. 

I'm not sure why I settled on mashed sweet potato. It made for a very red shifted dinner (no, I assure you, the pasta was not running away. It stayed put!) but tasted great with the pasta. 

I wanted something to liven them up a bit and nearly made cranberry sauce. I love the combination of cranberry and sweet potato at Thanksgiving despite the odd looks I sometimes get when my cranberry sauce is somewhere other than on my turkey. Instead, I remembered we had a bag of dried hibiscus flowers from Trader Joe's in the drawer. They taste about like Craisins but with that interesting hibiscus undertone instead of just sour.

So...into the pot went about a cup of minced hibiscus flower covered with 1 1/2 cups of water and a couple of cardamom pods. After the hibiscus was losing it's color I strained out the chunks and added some lemon rind, lemon juice a bit of sugar and a bit of corn starch to thicken it up. Yummy!!!! This was a really fun and different sauce that would go great on steamed pears or some other desert. It also gave the potatoes some zing and added color and interest to the whole plate.

I would urge anyone to give this recipe a try. It's easy and leaves lots of room for creativity. It can be dressed down for lunch or dressed up fancy. It would probably even be good cold as a pasta salad. This is a keeper for me.