orange salad with olive oil and pistachios

This year, as we all know, spring has come early, as evidenced by the migratory birds who swoop down on my lawn to efficiently pick it clean of suddenly uncovered bugs and bits of whatever else they eat. They arrive en masse and scatter at the drop of a leaf, but return within seconds to peck at the dirt with increased diligence. I've wasted some time watching them (and coveting their focus), so I know.

In contrast, fat robins bounce all over the yard, solo, as if looking for something they've lost. The sedum has erupted into tight green roses and the chives have already sent up thin spires (their green onion flavor sweeter now than anytime in the season) and then there are the trumpeter swans, whose return to the creek is about two months early.

These swans, their honking as inelegant and brassy as ever, turn our creek into a boisterous main street in the grip of spring fever. In pairs of two they swoop the creek, flying low, bellowing to their friends hanging out on the ground, whipping around at the end and taking the return flight slow. They cruise like teenagers, with unrestrained enthusiasm, totally oblivious to bystanders.

With all these spring hormones loose in the air, I want to make something equally dynamic for dinner, something bright with life force. And so I went to the store to stare at the heads of cauliflower wrapped in plastic and the bags of carrots and potatoes, the leeks obviously separated from their dirty fronds so long ago. I've spent all winter squeezing the life and flavor out of these things--and I've thoroughly enjoyed it, too--but at this point, late March, the end of the world calendar for cold-climate vegetables, I looked at them with--I can't help it--total disappointment.

And then I saw the oranges. Redemption. I wanted to make a vibrant salad--but nothing with onions (too sharp) or black olives (too expensive, too distracting), which are the traditional elements of the Middle Eastern orange salad. So I made up something new last night from a mixture of sliced Cara Cara oranges and Minneola tangerines. Alone, they were both amazing, dripping with juice, their forthright acidity perfectly moderated with the smack of ripe sugar.  I ate one of them au naturel, then sliced the rest and laid them out on a bright turqoise platter--it doesn't get any more spring-like than South Beach aqua--and doused them with extra-virgin olive oil: my best, a gift bottle, a golden elixir. Then I splashed on some more. I tipped the plate and dipped a spoon tip into the pool of liquid and decided that tart orange juice and good olive oil was an intoxicating soup--and would it work for a cleanse if I promise to drink a pint of it every day? I could try.

The rest of the salad accumulated like people arriving to a party. Salt and pepper were sprinkled, to make it clear that this thing was savory. Aleppo pepper went down, for moderate spice, and then crushed pistachio nuts from Arizona, totally in-step for both flavor and color, and parsley leaves, hardly chopped, strewn like herbal grass clippings, ceremonial.

This week I realized that I much prefer for spring to arrive when the citrus is still at its peak. Can we do this again next year?

Orange Salad with Extra-Virgin Olive Oil, Pistachios and Chili

4 oranges (a mix of Cara Cara and Minneola Tangelos)
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/2 teaspoon Aleppo pepper (substitute 1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes)
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground coriander seed
4 tablespoons best extra-virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon chopped parsley
2 tablespoons crushed pistachios

Lop the tops and bottoms from the oranges and then slice off the skin and pith in long, curving swoops. Trim off any remaining white pith with the butt end of the knife.
Slice the oranges crosswise into thin rounds and arrange on a platter. Sprinkle with salt, pepper, Aleppo pepper (or a few pepper flakes), ground coriander seed, olive oil, parsley and pistachios.
Let the salad sit for at least 30 minutes before serving.

my week with Marilyn Hagerty

This Marilyn Hagerty thing is still circulating. If you haven't seen it, a prolific, veteran lifestyle reporter from the Grand Forks Herald posted a review of the new Olive Garden in town--a quickly-drawn but earnest assessment of the restaurant--from which she walked away being "impressed." The review was picked up by foodies across the country, shared and tweeted until it reached viral proportions. Most people mocked her willingness to accord a chain restaurant an actual review; the rest of them swooned to her sincere, objective appraisal of "the largest, most beautiful restaurant in Grand Forks." After she defended herself with unexpected spunk--"If anyone's got time to sit out there and nitpick, I kind of feel sorry for them. Get a life."--everyone fell in love with her feistiness.

For me, the review dredged up an emotional history of eating here. Initially I had to laugh at what seemed a somewhat naive view of the chain restaurant's dull, mechanized wheel of mediocrity ("I watched the waiters in white shirts, ties, black trousers and aprons adorned with gold colored towels. They were busy carrying out bread and pasta.") although I realize that her poker-faced factual description is due in part to her journalistic ethic. (You present the facts.) Her straight-talking is also symptomatic of living in stoic North Dakota farm country where snarkiness--as represented by the anonymous tweeting masses--is akin to peppering your dialogue with a bunch of curse words: it's lazy and it's disrespectful, and these people are nothing of the sort. 

Surely Marilyn has reviewed every restaurant in Grand Forks--the good ones, the bad, and the terrible. But as a food writer and chef myself, I had to groan because (surprise) I do not much like chain restaurants, and I always slump when I see their popularity go unchallenged. And yes, in minor metro areas, places such as Fargo, Grand Forks, Bemidji, Detroit Lakes--the towns I drive to when I want to buy printer cartridges or a new pair of jeans--chain restaurants are widely accepted as good restaurants. 

Then I had to turn the laughter on myself because as my sister-in-law (and childhood friend) reminded me that when my mother took the two of us to eat at the newly opened Olive Garden in Fargo circa 1986, we dressed up. I can guess what I was wearing: a tight jean skirt, a cropped sweater and pointy velvet shoes with a clicking metal buckle. We thought this new Olive Garden was great--me, probably,  because I had ate my first caper; Sarah, most likely, because of that awesome dessert called tiramisu. (For the record, none of us liked the deep-fried breadsticks.) 

If I want to explore this vein of my life, the vast pre-fine-dining part, it just gets worse. 

Again, when my mother and I went to shop at West Acres Mall in Fargo (1 1/2 hours away) we really looked forward to the mother-and-daughter pitstop we would take at the "new" Country Kitchen. (They built the restaurant right in the mall!) We had a standing order: 13-bean soup and a bran muffin, because "their 13-bean soup is so good." (Sorry, Mom, I know your tastes have since changed, as have mine.)

It was the late 1980's when Park Rapids got its first year-round fast food restaurant--before that, the Dairy Queen and A & W both closed down for winter, as did the independently-run Dixie Drive-In. So when Hardee's came to town, it was an event. Families mobbed the place after church. We stood in lines in our nicest coats and rabbit ear muffs, waved at other families, and sat down with our burgers and fries. My mother extolled the excellent Mushroom and Swiss burger, but I remember being entranced with the curious rubbery texture of the ham on the Ham and Swiss. My brothers and their friends hopped like crickets around the self-serve pop machine, giggling and making "kamikazes." For many years, it remained a family place. My neighbor's mother worked there part-time, and I remember going there after school because she would let us buy raw, un-baked chocolate chip cookies. 

Are you still with me?

Even though my own relationship to food has changed radically over the years, I still can understand what it means when people in Park Rapids actually wish for an Applebee's to come to town or, at the very least, a Perkins. 

In a word, it's consistency. Here in Park Rapids (population 3,709) we have a couple of good restaurants amid a lot of other disappointing ones. They vary dramatically. One night it's fine, the other you get oil-slugged fries because the stoned cook confused 275 degrees for 375 degrees. (Dude, it's your main heat source. Mark it with some tape.) Also, the service in small independent joints can be bad. Staff smoke breaks are epidemic, leaving tables stranded like icebergs in an empty sea.

Following nights like that, tequila chicken delivered by a server trained to chirp sounds pretty good. Also, and this is very key: rural people, including those in small rural cities in the Midwest, simply don't go out to eat much. They eat at home, many of them quite well. So when they go out to eat, they don't do it with much discernment or any kind of awareness of "the trends." They eat out for a change a scenery, and not necessarily with high expectations. As my mother taught us growing up, "you always eat better at home than you do in a restaurant." Ask anyone from the rural Midwest, and I bet they will tell you that their mother told them the same thing. 

That said, eating now in Chicago, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Omaha, Madison . . . is like being in another constellation entirely. I have put 40,000 miles on my car this year driving around this region, eating and researching, and in every regard I have found places equal to the high level of cooking in New York or Europe. I have found surprisingly little that is derivative of the coastal mainstream, and much that suggests an interesting revolution here in the middle of the country.

Of course, that's the cities. But with a little fine-tuning of your perspective and a bit more grunt work, you can eat well in the small towns too. I've found that if I seek out homemade pie, the rest--fried perch, homemade soups, a good hot beef--naturally follows. 

At any rate, I am taking suggestions for the best restaurant in Grand Forks, because that town needs some redemption. Please post below. Within a 50-mile radius, please. 

Ranging

We left Kansas City at 10:15 a.m. yesterday--me with breakfast on my lap, a Gates burnt ends sandwich--and pointed the car north. We arrived in Two Inlets 14 1/2 hours later, 640 miles behind us, with stops for proper meals of course. 

I didn't photograph the sandwich because I knew that it would never be able to capture its beauty. In my experience snapping food, hacked pork doesn't have a good side. (Has the Gates burnt ends sandwich ever been photographed? Or does it exist only in the mind, passed from one gluttonous dreamer on to the next?) I can only say this, that this sandwich--four inches of chopped, caramelized smoky pork ends wet with a bit of sauce, sidelined with spicy pickles, on a soft eggy bun--is a triumph of human achievement. It is, as Colin Firth said of Meryl Streep at the Oscars this year, "unreasonably good." 

And by eating the barbecue I had been avoiding during my two days in Kansas City, I finally saw the topography of the food scene there. The barbecue, which is excellent, is the tallest hill in town, but it's not the horizon or the fringe, places that tend to be more interesting. The city has other great restaurants and they're all advancing an alternate cuisine of the area by making use of the seasonal vegetable bounty, but most of them also continue to mine the possibilities of the pig. 

With great success, too. Take a look at this charcuterie plate from chef Michael Beard at 715 Restaurant in Lawrence, Kansas, a college town just 45 minutes from downtown KC:

He spent some formative time cooking in Italy and it shows: Duck terrine with pecans at 12, Fegatini, rich quenelles of winy pork liver at 2, a perfect housemade Mortadella at 5, and Soppressata Toscana, which resembles headcheese more than it does salami, at 8. Essentially, it's Italian headcheese, cured with lingering warm spices and thinly sliced. Everything we ate was wonderful, but this plate shows the maturity of this restaurant and this chef. He's certainly not the only one doing it well in the Midwest--in terms of serious production, there's La Quercia from Norwalk, IA, and the soon-to-be-reopened charcuterie project from Mike Phillips in Minneapolis--but it's just another amazing example of how explosive the charcuterie can be when old-world knowledge meets a properly fattened heartland hog. 

The local beers--Ad Astra from Free State in downtown Lawrence, and a pilsner from Boulevard in KC, my husband's new favorite--stood up to the food. Rough limestone formed the walls, the lighting was warm but sensible, even in the open kitchen, which felt more like the center of the campfire than a fluorescent line of production. The ship was run by a crew of warm-blooded Midwestern girls, all of whom seemed to have their heads screwed on straight, to know their port from their pilsner and the pleasures of a bone-in ribeye. They dressed subtly in the regalia of the southern Midwest--a boot here, a quill earring there. I couldn't help but notice that it's a look that stands better against barn wood in Kansas than it does in Brooklyn. 

Dinners like that, and in so many places I went last week make me wonder where the hell I am; no longer is this the candied-apple Midwest of my childhood. (Though I did see candy apples on this trip, and some toothpick holders.) But sometimes it seems like everyone in the Midwest is making beer, cheese or charcuterie--and then you realize that, yes . . . they are. It's no dream. Dust off the breweries and kick the antique stores out of the creameries, the real stuff is returning.

I'll continue this soon. I need to get through Omaha, the prairie star of our trip south. But for today I'll leave off with more shots through the car window. The ferocious wind throughout Nebraska and Kansas took us by surprise. It routed the winter fields, kicking up a lot of dust and confusion, making a blind.