What's on my Plate?

The celebrated winter-only washed-rind cheese from Jasper Hill Farm is one of my all-time favorites.

It is made with raw winter milk from Ayrshire cows, washed with ale from the acclaimed Hill Farmstead Brewery in neighboring Greensboro (in Vermont's pastoral Northeast Kingdom), and then wrapped in spruce bark and aged 60 days. All of this makes it amazingly complex, a cheese to savor and enjoy on a quiet winter evening.

You can find it in February and March at Whole Foods. It is pricely, but worth every penny.

The sea clam,  more properly known as the Atlantic Surf clam (Spisula solidissima to malacologists), is a big critter: we keep only clams that are as big as the palm of a grown man's hand. After shucking, about 2/3 of the clam is edible, so you can get a good meal from a couple of them.

Sea clams have a large foot that provides a lot of meat. That's what was used by Howard Johnson when they popularized clam strips. 

Sea clams are mighty fine eating. They have a naturally sweet flavor that makes great New England-style chowder, especially with summery herbs. I also enjoy it in a Portuguese Pork Alentejana.

The meat is found mostly in a large foot and two adductor muscles, plus a few odd bits. While shelling clams, it is tempting to eat a couple of those adductor muscles, and that's a good thing.

I used sea clams to make an old Cape Cod Sea Clam Pie from Suzanne Cary Gruver's  Cape Cod Cook Book.

NOTE: Vermont changed its grading system on 1/1/2014. Please see Maple Syrup Standards for important information.

Maple Syrup is the quintessential New England sweetener. It can be tricky to cook with, but plenty of recipes exist, so there is no need to restrict its use to pancakes!

Recipe on this site include the Maple Cream Pie, the Chestnut-Stuffed Pumpkin, the Chicken with Pecans and Maple Bourbon Butter, and the delightful Van Vleet cocktail. 

Maple Syrup comes in different grades, depending on how dark it is.  In Vermont, the grades are:

• Grade A Fancy, or AA, is the lightest, most delicate. I like to use it when the maple is the predominant flavor in a dish and the nuances will be noticed.
• Grade A Medium Amber and Grade A Dark Amber are in between.
• Grade B is the darkest and most "maply". This is a good choice for kids and when the flavor will compete with other strong flavors in a dish.
• Commercial Grade is the darkest, with the simplest, sweetest flavor because it has to be boiled the longest to achieve the proper density.

Who makes the best maple syrup? You can get it from Canada, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts, sometimes in Connecticut, and upstate NY.  Canada and the US have similar rules for grading syrup, and the New England states largely follow USDA guidelines, except for Vermont and New Hampshire, which require slightly higher sugar content.

We were passing through Vermont en route to Lake George, New York when we found these. Annette had asked for something green and spring to accompany a chowder dinner or perk up a salad.

I had never tried pea greens before, but they were wonderful! They are tender-crisp, filled with water like bean sprouts. I think their best use is as a garnish or in a salad. I might float some atop a cream soup. 

I found the pea greens to be more flavorful than bean sprouts and crisper than alfalfa sprouts, with a delicate flavor that evokes springtime.

I saved a pinch of them to dress up a grilled Clem's Sausage patty. Their cool crispness and spring flavor made the perfect contrast to the rich, spicy pork.

We sampled three cheeses from Sankow's Beaver Brook Farm,  of Lyme, CT:

• Pleasant Valley sheep's milk cheese
• Pleasant Cow, made from Jersey cow milk
• Nehantic Abbey, an aged cow's milk sheese

We all found the Pleasant Valley to be pleasant indeed, very delicate and not at all sheepy, but in the end it was a good nibbling cheese, not a revelation. Of course, you don't expect every cheese to be a revelation, but it happens often anough that you just can't help hoping the next one might make you smile.

The Pleasant Cow we all liked better, and some of us liked best. Still not a five-star cheese, but a very good one with a sense of coastal Connecticut terroir.

Both of those cheeses are aged 60 days or more, but the Nehantic Abbey gets 6 months. That was my favorite of the lot, but I was alone in that opinion. It is sharper and tangier, and it doesn't necessarily play well with many foods, but I thought it went very well with a Berkshire Brewing Company Coffee Porter.

These cheeses are hard to find very far beyond their home in Lyme, CT. I got them at a market in Haddam, CT just before the bridge to East Haddam and the Goodspeed Opera House.

Tonight we tried three cheeses from Nezinscot Farm:

• Gregarian
• Nezinscot
• Glorianna

All three were bought at the same time, at K. Horton Foods at the Portland Public Market House in Portland, ME. they were sampled in Plymouth, MA the day after they were bought, with some help from Maine Meadmakers Lavender Mead, Bull Jagger No. 19 Baltic Porter, and a thimble-full of Redbreast Irish Whiskey.  

We all liked the Glorianna the best. The Gregarian had some initial charm, but it was ultimately a bit waxy and had nothing to quite close the deal.

Three out of four of us noticed some culinary possibilities creeping up in the tangy Nezinscot before the night was done. I remember thinking that there was a recipe in the back of my head that yearned for that Nezinscot tang, something of the potato or macaroni tribe that would join with the Nezinscot and run off to new artistic heights.

I noted that Nezinscot Farm has a cafe and pastries that may necessitate a trip to inand Maine. This is not a tragedy. The Pilgrim with foresight can see an easy trip to Turner for lunch, then a pleasant drive to North Conway, NH by way of Ebenezer's Pub, just in case you get thirsty...

It may be worth noting that we tried three Connecticut cheeses on the same evening, and the best of them could not beat the least of the Mainer cheeses.

I love cream! And I especially like heavy cream from brown-eyed Jersey cows. I try to have the heavy cream from Vermont's Butterworks Farm always in the house. Others are available, sometimes even at Whole Foods, but I always have magical results with the cram I know.

All cream is not the same. Cream from Jersey cows is very high in butterfat, which gives it a noticeably more golden hue than the usual supermarket cream, most of which comes from the common black-and-white Holsteins. Most of New England's commercial dairies have Holsteins because Holsteins produce a lot more milk than Jerseys, Guernseys, Milking Shorthorn, Brown Swiss, and other older breeds.

Jersey cow cream is so rich that you can thicken it with a few good shakes (as used on an Irish Coffee), and whip it in no time at all. I love the stuff!

One of the classic Venetian dishes I made for Annette's Venetian Birthday Feast was Baccala Mantecato, or creamed baccala. Creamed in this case means it is almost pureed and then olive oil is added, but there's a trick.

The basic recipe:the salt cod is freshened, then cooked in milk, and finally pounded into smithereens while extra-virgin olive oil is added.

The secret to a traditional Baccala Mantecato is that the fish must not be pureed in a food processor. You need the fibers to be intact when they absorb the olive oil.

The recipes say to pound the freshened, cooked fish in a mortar and pestle, but it doesn't take long for the busy cook to realize that you can only do a little at a time in a common mortar-and-pestle, and it is a slow process to pound each little bit. And after a preliminary pounding to get the big chunks into a manageable size, then you go at it again to reduce it to shreds.

I didn't have that much time, but a food processor is forbidden - what to do? How to beat on the fish adequately without the whirring blades? I'll tell you how I handled it. If you have a better idea, please list it in the comments below.

I used my KitchenAid food grinder attachment, without the cutting blade or the final disc. I reasoned that just passing through the motorized screw would take care of that laborious first step of breaking the chunks into manageable pieces.

It worked! The fish came out looking just like the first bits I had pounded. I gathered them up and went after them with the mortar and pestle, but this time the work went a lot faster. I added the oil and parsley as directed and it produced a lovely, delicate appetizer,

The earliest memory I have of my mother teaching me anything about cooking (possibly earlier than staying away from a hot stove) was to ALWAYS bake with butter. It is burnt into my memory indelibly. 

I love butter. But butter isn't always just butter. There are different brands, different seasons, different shapes...does it make any difference? It depends what you are doing with it.

I knew an old woman who despised unsalted butter, said it "tastes like vaseline", wouldn't have it in the house. On the other hand, I prefer unsalted always, because I can add as much salt as I need when I need it. If all you do is spread it on toast, maybe you need the salt, but there are many way to enjoy butter. (No, I am not referring to Last Tango in Paris!)

Butter is so fundamental to western cuisine that it deserves a ful democratic treatment.  Let's use the comments area to review, compare and contrast salted and unsalted, cultured (and barbarian?) butter, seasonal variations - can you really taste the difference? Can you put it into words?