A is for Angostura Bitters

What are bitters? And why is the label for a particular kind, Angostura, too big for the bottle?

Bitters are a mysterious concoction of herbs and spices used in many cocktails, a mystery far more interesting and intriguing than the Colonel's blend of seven spices. Sugar and gentian are the only two acknowledged ingredients in Angostura Bitters. The secret recipe was developed in 1824 by Dr. J G B Siegert, a Surgeon General in Simon Bolivar's Venezuelan army.

This weekend, my fiance and I went to one of our favorite bars, Maduro. Sitting at the bar--really the best place to sit in a good bar--we saw a line of different bottles of bitters, including one with blood oranges and another with peaches. Matt ordered one of their specialty cocktails that called for bitters just so we could try one of these unique bitters--all of which also had mysterious origins and ingredients. The bottles also mentioned using bitters on food. Food?

Of course, I had to try it.

Despite subscribing to every food magazine and newsletter available, I had never seen a recipe calling for bitters. Angostura's website has a whole section of recipes, including a pumpkin soup. Being inundated with squash as we are, soup seemed like the perfect choice.  So I boiled and pureed and then added a few dashes of bitters to the finished soup. To be honest, I'm not sure I could exactly taste the bitters. There was a slight herbal flavor to the soup that may have come from the bitters, but I can't be sure. I like the idea of using bitters, though. Besides, it makes everything you make much more mysterious when you include a secret ingredient.

S is for TOO MUCH SQUASH

Winter in Wisconsin does not, thankfully, mean that the fresh produce has to end. We have a CSA share through December with additional "surprise" drops in January and February usually. And thank god because I've really become far too dependent on my share to actually buy produce at the store anymore. Those few months when I do, March and April, are really quite sad and radish filled (seemingly one of the few things always local at the co-op).

Yesterday, I picked up our first winter share of the season from Primrose Community Farm. This is our third year as members and it really is quite a spectacular share. It also requires quite spectacular arm muscles to lift and carry home. Yesterdays haul involved four grocery bags stuffed to the point of breaking (I'm actually surprised we made it intact) with potatoes, carrots, parsnips, onions, garlic, kale, lettuce (that's right! Lettuce in November!), cabbage, celeriac (when my fiance asked what it was, I told him it was an alien), sweet potatoes, and last but not least, 12 squash. 12!! This in addition to the two I still had sitting on the counter from my regular season share. This will challenge all my culinary creativity.

Two years ago, I had a falling out with winter squash.  I hadn't ever reached the end of rope with any vegetable before but the squash just got to be too much. I couldn't eat it anymore. The thought of it, the mere sight of it, made by stomach churn and I ended up tossing most of them--furtively-- into the compost bin. Not this year. I just came home with a stack of squash cookery books from the library so I can hopefully work through our countertop "patch" before the malaise sets in.

M is for Medicine that looks like candy

The Kitchen Bitch's recently posted find of a framed cereal taxonomy at a Minnesota Value Village brought me instantly back to the health room at my elementary school. Above the brown pleather bed hung a framed collection of drugs alongside candies that looked so similar that you might be fooled. I'm sure the point was to warn parents that kids may think medicine are candy, but how many parents were spending any amount of time in the school health room to notice this informative sign?

There was Nuprin ("little, yellow, different") and a yellow M&M. Some other pill that was small and yellow was beside something that looked like a Nerd. The aspirin affixed to the background but it's candy counterpart had been ripped off (the dangers of having candy in accessible locations in an elementary school), though I imagine it must have been something like a Smartie. What else is white and kind of chalky? There was also something red and a Reeses Pieces beside it. The frame was just high enough and the words small enough that it was hard to read from more than a foot or two away. The Advil looked remarkably similar to the now-defunct tan M&M.

I found this whole collection transfixing and even remember thinking that I might like to make something similar for my own room. The collection, always a little worse for the wear despite being at a new school, likely no longer exists other than in my head.

B is for Black Cherry Soda

We all have weaknesses and mine is for black cherry soda. Even after I've given up most other sodas, I'll still happily crack a bottle of black cherry whenever the opportunity arises. I have standards, though--it has to be in a glass bottle and preferably from a regional manufacturer. Even flavored water has a taste of place.

Years ago my dad and I created a ratings system for these sodas. It wasn't confined to black cherry--we'd also buy bottles of Nehi Peach, Moxie, KaPow!, and others--but if black cherry was available and we hadn't tried it before, that was the first choice. The empty bottles lined the shelves in the laundry room like trophies. The tops of the cabinets were lined with old beer cans, mementos of my dad's previous tasting adventures. A few still had beer in them for reasons that were always unclear to me. Beer doesn't get better with age, dad. Especially if that beer is from the late 1960s.

The ratings were taped to the inside of the pantry door. It was a check, check minus or plus system. Some got a double plus. None were terrible but some were definitely superior. One of the best was on tap at The Pyramid Ale House in Seattle. Fresh, rich and delicious.

One year we bought the Jones Soda Thanksgiving pack. Filled with sodas tasting of green beans, mashed potatoes, and turkey gravy, it was disgusting and fascinating all at once. Turkey was just as disgusting as it sounded, though, the corn was oddly delicious. 

The ratings system is still on, even though I've moved away. I've also branched out to other things, keeping lists of beers, whiskeys, bourbons, and tequilas with my fiance. We don't keep the bottles and cans like my dad, but the legacy of lists lives on.

C is for Compost

Living in the city makes composting difficult if not impossible. But I know that it doesn't have to be this way.

Growing up in the Seattle area, we had amazing recycling. I can only barely remember a time when we didn't recycle at home, at school, in public places... it just made perfect sense. It felt wrong, horribly, horribly wrong not to do it. Somewhere along the line, the city started collecting compost as well. We'd had a compost bin of sorts in the backyard for years but it was more for yard waste--it was all the browns--and not for food waste--the greens. So I'm not sure it really qualifies as true composting. But then we got a white plastic bin with a biodegradable bag that sat on the counter and became the depository for all food matter and napkins. My mom calls it the "worm bin" though, unfortunately, no worms are actually involved. Maybe we should just dump the bin out back with the yard waste but instead the city comes and picks that up along with our mixed paper, glass, and aluminum. And it's wonderful.

When I first moved to Madison, recycling was in its prehistoric stage here. I was shocked. Recycling bins stood alongside garbage cans on State St. but they were equally filled with trash--and I read in the newspaper that they all ended up in the landfill anyway. Things have improved since then but still no city composting program.

After a recent visit to Growing Power, my annoyance at tossing out corn husks and stems boiled over and I built a compost bin out of a Rubbermaid container that I drilled holes in for drainage and air flow. We put a bowl on the counter to collect the daily offering to the bin. And we're so thrilled with it. I even suggested that we could have people toss handfulls of compost rather than rice at our wedding. Why not? Compost is a beautiful thing.

B is for Blueberry

I started picking blueberries before I ate them. Blueberries were something my mom liked a lot and I happened to enjoy picking them so it worked out well. And I was never tempted to even put one in my mouth--unlike picking strawberries, where for every one that went into my box, two went into my mouth, the blueberries went straight from bush to box. Raspberries were a different thing altogether--not only did I hate eating them, I hated picking them, too.

The blueberries back in Washington were so large and purpley-blue that you barely had to pick at all to get them to fall into your hand. Even the slightest graze of your fingers and a handful would fall right off. I started going picking with my best friend's family in high school. We went to a farm in the shadow of Mt. Si in North Bend with the most magical name--Bybee-Nims. Who wouldn't want to pick blueberries at Bybee-Nims? Even if you were like me and hated blueberries, you wanted to go, if for the view of the mountain alone. And so we would go and I would pick 20 to 40 pounds in about an hour and a half with little to no effort.

Now when I live in a place where the berries are few and far between (completely unlike the berry nirvana of the Northwest), I, of course, have learned to love--YEARN even--for blueberries. Figures.

A is for Apple

Even though I grew up in a state known for its apples, I’d never really loved an apple until I moved 2,000 miles away—to a place known more for its cheese, beer, and brats, than its delectable fruit. And yet, even though images of apples were plastered all over any mention
of Washington state, the apples of my childhood were tasteless, boring, almost cottony in my mouth. Red Delicious, the virtual symbol of the state, was never delicious. It was the apple
you got in the school lunch line while desperately wishing you had brought something from home. So I never ate them unless forced to by mother who was too busy to notice that they were really terrible. These Washington apples weren’t the fruit of kings but were more the fruit of mediocrity.

The apples I discovered in Wisconsin, however, were altogether different. They weren’t uniformly dark red or light green or buttery yellow but were mixes of all of those shades and more. They snapped when you bit into them rather than sagging and finally giving way under the pressure of your teeth.

My first transcendent apple experience occurred in the fall of 2002. I remember it like other people remember their first kiss. It was called Pink Pearl, though there was nothing pink or pearly about its skin which was a homely yellow-brown. Its flesh was like nothing I had ever experienced before, marbled pink and white like those Pilsbury birthday cake mixes I’d always begged for as a kid. And the taste? The taste literally brought tears to my eyes it was so incredible and unknown to me.

It was also slightly embarrassing, as I was standing in front of the farmers’ booth, surrounded by other shoppers at the farmers market. I had no idea apples could taste like this—that really any
fruit could be that perfumed, sweet-tart, and delicious. And that that fruit could grow in Wisconsin rather than the Apple State.