Summer Shredded Beef (Crockpot Barbacoa)

From my mother I learned not to panic when the Minnesota summer explodes into a rare heatwave the very day that you have ten people coming for dinner. Do not even turn on the lights in the kitchen. No, just calmly get out the extension cord and leash it to a crockpot sitting outside. As hers did, my hot-weather crockpot usually contains a chunk of chuck roast which, after 8 hours, will slowly melt at the edges like an iceberg in a warming sea.

Her famous summer shredded beef swam in a shimmering copper bouillon that took both its color and potency from a packet of Lipton's Onion Soup Mix--and don't knock it, either. The low, sweet scent of dark onion burrowing into the unraveling beef stands tall in my childhood memory, lords it over the space of time like good pipe smoke.

But I can no longer stand the dry husk sound, that rattlesnake shake, of the seasoning packet, and over the years I've somehow lost my taste for it as well. Kids seem to like the high drama of salt and faux-flavor, but now my palate craves the floral notes of freshly crushed spices, the warmth of real onions. For authenticity, I try to maintain the perfect consistency of my mother's shredded beef, and make sure it's juicy enough to soak its bleached white bun all the way through to the plate. A properly made summer shredded beef requires a dimpled paper napkin.

Because my brother Bob--the Mexican-food-lover--was coming, I made barbacoa, or pulled beef with chiles. The marinade for the beef began in a bold way, with a hank of dried chiles and a handful of spices, but after eight hours of slow cooking it mellowed to a rusty sauce--tasty but benevolent. Bob, and he's an expert, said it was correct: barbacoa isn't necessarily spicy. (Good, because we had kids to feed.) But he needed hot salsa.

So for his potion I chopped up the first of my ripe roma tomatoes, a garden onion, the straggly ends of cilantro, a handful of basil and two full serranos, and hit it all with lime and salt.

In the end we had something much kickier than our mom's shredded beef. But the hard roll--its top skin crackled like an old map, one of the few breads that the local grocery store bakery still makes so right--brought it all home for us.

Crockpot Barbacoa

This recipe will serve at least 12.

7 dried pasilla or guajillo chiles (or a combination of both)
2 chipotle chiles (canned in adobo or dried)
15 allspice berries
5 whole cloves
2 teaspoons cumin seed
12 cloves garlic
1/2 medium onion
1 1/2 teaspoons salt, plus to taste
1 bunch fresh oregano
1/4 cup apple cider vinegar, plus to taste
5 pounds chuck roast or Texas-style beef ribs
1 cinnamon stick

Pour boiling water to cover over the dried chiles and steep until cool enough to tough. Remove the stems and pinch out some of the seeds, and reserve the liquid.

In a dry blender, combine the allspice, cloves and cumin seed and process on high, until finely ground. Add the soaked chiles (including the chipotles, in whatever form), garlic cloves, onion, salt, oregano and apple cider vinegar. Process on high until smoothly pureed, adding some of the soaking liquid if necessary.

Place the beef in the crockpot container, add the seasoning paste and, if you have time, leave to marinate for at least 8 hours before cooking. Add the cinnamon stick and 1 cup of reserved chile-soaking water, cover tightly, and cook the beef on high for 1 hour, and then on low for another 6 to 7 hours, or until the feels tender when poked with a fork. (I do this overnight.) Remove the beef to a plate, skim the top of the liquid to remove the excess fat, and return the meat to the pot, shredding it roughly into the sauce. Season to taste with more salt and vinegar, if necessary.

Serve the beef on crusty rolls, with slices of avocado, fresh spicy salsa and crema, or sour cream seasoned with lime juice, salt and pepper.

Red Currant Compote

The currants have returned.

Around the 1950's there began a widespread removal of both the wild and cultivated berries of the Ribes species--black, red and champagne currants, and gooseberries--because they were found to cause White Pine Blister Rust, a disease that kills the slow-growing white pines, the eventual giants of a mixed coniferous forest.

Back when we first lived out here, circa 1997, I wanted to plant a fleet of red and black currant bushes so that I could make my own cassis from the black currants, and summer pudding from the red ones. We quickly learned that they were banned, due to the blister rust. By the time we'd moved back here for good, four years ago, the ban had been lifted: it seems that planting white pines bred to have natural resistance to the blister rust was doing a better job of eradication than pulling up the Ribes. We laid in a plot of black currants right away. My neighbors to the south, Kent Sheer and Vicki Cherpulis, began planting a forest of currants at their farm in Wadena, Green Island. 

Lucky me, I had the chance to pick their red currant bushes this year, which were sufficiently loaded enough to allow a few experiments. 

These days they're an uncommon berry, but you don't have to look very far back into recipe books to find mention of red currants. The German and Scandinavian immigrants brought with them tons of recipes for their beloved red fruits: Red currant pies, mixed red berry puddings, compotes for ice cream, and on and on. Loaded with natural pectin, pure red currant juice practically turns itself into jelly with a little cooking. And what a jelly, setting into a deep red glass, glowing eerily from within. It was so textbook perfect it reminded me of the old dime-store candies: the juice tastes unfamiliar, something like a cross between raspberry and strawberry, but then . . . maybe it tastes more like red, in the same way that purple candies don't taste like grape, but more like purple.

The jelly is great, but it doesn't mix so well into yogurt, which is my little habit. I messed around with more of the painstakingly cleaned berries (prepping these babies will leave you with sticky fingers and a stubbornly nearsighted range of vision) and figured out a soft compote that leaves the berries virtually untouched. Left whole, they pop in the mouth like caviar. 

Well, that is, caviar with seeds. There's an town in France known for a lovely version of this currant compote made with seeded currants, each center nib skillfully poked out with the eye of a needle, but for me that's a bit like peeling grapes--unnecessary, bah, more appropriate for the slower eras.

I neglected to pit my berries, and when we spooned the jeweled compote over ice cream, the seeds were no more bother than the seeds in raspberries--or possibly less, because there were fewer of them. My husband's grandmother, now 92 years young, didn't have a problem with them. A good Norwegian, I think she appreciated the revival of this particular red flavor. We sat on the porch, pretty quietly, all of us smitten by the sight of bright berry syrup making a river run through the cream.

Red Currant Compote

1 1/4 cups sugar
1 1/4 cups water
3 cups picked, washed red currants
2 tablespoons lemon juice

To clean the currants, strip them from their stems, cover with lots of cold water and skim the bits that float to the surface. Drain.
Combine the sugar and water in a wide sauce pot and bring to a simmer, cooking until the sugar is dissolved. Add the currants, return to a simmer, and cook 1 minute. Drain the currants, saving the juice, and return the juice to the pot. Add the lemon juice. Boil the juice until a droplet feels sticky when pinched between your fingers, or until it reaches about 225 degrees. Add the berries and return the mixture to a boil. Ladle the compote into sterilized half-pint jars, top with lids and bands and either refrigerate or freeze. If you'd like to preserve it, process the jars 10 minutes in a boiling water bath.

New Potatoes with Purslane

Our hot summer weather has done a good job of incubating the potatoes. Around this time I usually start digging around the potato plants to see if I can rob the cradle for the babies; I was surprised this morning to find them already nearly fully grown.

I may have missed out on the baby potatoes, but I do still have the privilege to send these purple beauties straight from the cover of black soil to the plate, so that they retain that waxy texture particular to the freshly dug. This new potato obsession is an important thing among gardeners and old-timers, but most people these days erroneously equate "new potatoes" with what they find in the stores under that label, the "b" size baby reds. Those are the right size, but size isn't what makes them desirable: rather, it's their freshness, the short window of time they've spent out of the ground, that makes them "new." You want to catch them during that slim interval when their flesh is the texture of alpine cheese and their skins are as thin as tissue paper. The Scandinavians and Germans know what I'm talking about: they race their potatoes from the garden to the kitchen in much the same way that Americans have always dispatched field corn to the pot--with a real sense of urgency.

This morning after I drained my second cup of coffee my forgotten breakfast was beginning to ping loudly in my hollow core, and I knew I needed something substantial. I pushed back the computer, wedged by feet into my squashed gardening shoes and set out for the potato beds. They were more than ready. Minutes later, with such potatoes in my hands I couldn't help but think a potato salad from one of my favorite Ernest Hemingway books, his non-fictional A Moveable Feast, the one about his life as a young writer in Paris. The stories are about hunger--more for accomplishment than for food I think--but there is also plenty of French food and drink in it, bistro fare mostly, and many tall beers. Throughout the book he accords little description to the food, yet in that maddening Hemingway-way makes all of it seem to hover in the air at close range, merely sketched out yet somehow fully rendered, and always highly aromatic. Here, at Lipp's Brasserie, the fat slices of potato slide among each other like a pile of well-oiled poker chips: "The pommes a l'huile were firm and marinated and the olive oil delicious. I ground black pepper over the potatoes and moistened the bread in the olive oil. After the first heavy draft of beer I drank and ate very slowly. When the pommes a l'huile were gone I ordered another serving and a cervelas."

Often when I shoot for pure minimalism--whether in food or in writing--I fail at it, and today was no different. I just couldn't resist adding a few handfuls of purslane, Portulaca oleracea, which were stretching out in low-lying webs nearby. With their plump oval pods of sour, puckering liquid, they have a flavor not unlike sorrel leaves but a snappier texture, and I thought they'd give the vinegary dressing nice echo. Before noon the purslane is still flowering, and I pulled it out right after I took this shot. Later on in the day the flowers disappear, like Morning Glories.

Here's a recipe, although you hardly need one. The thing to remember is to forget about using a spoon to mix; new potatoes are fragile and break easily. Imagine yourself instead a French waiter in the bistro kitchen, flipping the potatoes in a wide bowl to apply a fresh gloss of oil before shaking them out onto the plate.

If you don't have purslane invading your garden beds, as I do, you might be able to find it at a farmer's market. Or you can substitute arugula.

New Potatoes with Purslane

Serves 4 to 6

2 pounds freshly-dug new potatoes
1 tablespoon dijon mustard
1 1/2 tablespoons malt or wine vinegar

1/2 teaspoon salt, plus more for cooking potatoes

1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
2 cups washed, chopped purslane


Put the potatoes in a large, heavy sauce pot and fill with water to cover. Bring to a simmer and season the water heavily with salt. Cook gently until the potatoes are just tender when poked in the center. Drain and let sit until cool enough to handle.
In a large bowl, combine the Dijon, vinegar, salt and pepper and whisk until smooth. Add the olive oil and mix to combine but don't emulsify them together. Slice the warm potatoes over the dressing and flip the bowl to coat the potatoes. Add the purslane, flip again and pour out onto a serving platter. This salad is best eaten at room temperature; the potatoes lose some of their fleeting fresh texture after being refrigerated.