Bringing the Outside In

Balsam boughs strewn across the mantle, candles everywhere, ceramic animals lined up around a straw-filled manger, even a living tree in the den, for Christ's sake! These are all attempts, as greenery and light fade from the landscape, of bringing the outside in.

The mood hit me early this year, and I actually made a special effort on the culinary front. In was so cold on my final trip to the farmers' market downtown that the cauliflowers were turning color.

How often have I remarked, when Hilary and I are tromping past a clump of sumac trees at the edge of a field, "You can make tea out of that." Well, this fall we harvested a few clusters of seeds and stuck them in our pockets. Back home, I dried them for a few days, then removed the seeds, boiled them for a while, then strained the liquid. Voila! Tea.

My second effort was to roast the seeds from the Halloween pumpkin that had been sitting on the kitchen counter, uncarved, for quite a while. In an effort to jazz them up a bit, I unearthed a recipe that included Worstercheshire sauce and garlic salt. (Was I breaking the rules, here?)

The tea was mediocre—a poor imitation of Red Zinger, which isn't all that great to begin with. The pumpkin seeds were better. I tried to imagine that the roughage supplied by the woody, fibrous stuff, which was impossible to masticate fully,  would be good for my digestion.

I located a final "outside" recipe in the Sioux Chef cookbook recently published by the U of M Press. It was simplicity itself. Take some dry white beans, soak overnight, then boil along with a cedar branch.

While the pot was bubbling on the stove, the air in the kitchen smelled like a cedar-lined sauna—in a good way. But the beans themselves took on none of that flavoring. They simply tasted like beans, and I ended up whirring them in the food processor  along with raw garlic, salt, and quite a bit of olive oil. Tuscan bean dip meets the North Woods.

Such experiments are unlikely to make their way into the family cookbook that I rewrite every few years, but I still consider them worthwhile. Now, when we're walking past a copse of sumac trees, I won't be tempted to say, "You can make tea out of those." Rather, it will be, "Remember the tea we made?"

Yeah? So what?

I might mention one additional effort involving a butternut squash baked with just a tablespoon of maple syrup and a bit of crushed rosemary. The recipe doesn't come from the Sioux Chef cookbook, but it makes use of a few ingredients that figure prominently in Dakota cuisine. The chunks of squash, fully cooked but still firm, betraying just a hint of sweetness, are quite good as an appetizer or in a salad.

But what I especially love is the sight of the low afternoon sun blasting in across the chunks of vegetable flesh.