Dan’s Wild Rice Dressing

Our friend Dan is a gourmet cook. While I don’t aspire to such heights, I can follow a gourmet recipe if I have to. While Dan and I were talking food and politics one day, he asked for a piece of paper and jotted down a recipe for wild rice dressing that his father taught him. Like most experienced cooks Dan doesn’t work from a fixed list of quantities. Instead he starts with how much dressing he needs and adjusts everything to fit.

When I pleaded, he gave me some guidance. “Use about seventy percent wild rice to thirty percent brown. Cover the rice with a quarter inch of stock to start with and add more as needed. The sautéd meat and vegetables, walnuts and cranberries should total about a quarter to a third of the dressing. Use enough salt and spices to give you the flavor you want.”

Jerri’s grandmother’s recipe for pfeffernüsse has instructions Dan would understand: “Mix in enough flour so the dough is stiff but not too stiff, sticky but not too sticky.” You might ask, “How do you know you have it right?” The answer is, of course, make it a few times and you will know. And if you have baked a lot, you will have a better idea of when the dough is the right consistency.

Once we were all beginners in everything. We had to learn to walk, talk, read, write and calculate. The same is true for eating and cooking. As babies we were ignorant of any food except milk, but we learned to enjoy different foods as they were offered to us, many in the form of strained vegetables developed by Daniel Gerber in 1928.

Our ignorance of cooking lasted longer, since our parents kept us away from hot stoves and sharp knives until they felt we could be trusted with them. Eventually we learned to cook at least a few things, even if it was only mixing water with cans of condensed soup heated in a microwave oven.

The Christian apostle Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians talked about how we grow up and learn new things when he wrote, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.” I doubt that he was thinking about cooking when he wrote those sentences, but I’m pretty sure there were times when he had to fend for himself in the kitchen or camped out around a fire on one of his journeys along the Mediterranean.

There is no shame in ignorance. We are all born ignorant, but as Benjamin Franklin and others have said, the shame is in being unwilling to learn. So, if you have your parents’ permission or have left the parental nest, grab your pots, knives and other kitchen tools and tackle this recipe.

We are never too old to learn something new. And if you have never tasted good wild rice dressing, you are in for a double treat: learning how to make a particularly good recipe and discovering a delicious new food.

Here is what I did, and Dan approved of the result.

INGREDIENTS:

1 cup wild rice
1/2 cup brown rice
3 cups chicken stock or broth
2 T butter
1/2 cup diced smoked pork shoulder or lean bacon
1/4 cup chopped onion
1/4 cup chopped celery
1/2 cup chopped red bell pepper
1/4 cup chopped walnuts
1/2 cup chopped cranberries
1/2 tsp. rubbed sage
1/4 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
1/8 tsp. powdered garlic
1/8 tsp. dried marjoram
1/3 tsp. sea salt
1/4 tsp. celery salt
1/4 tsp. powdered onion
1/8 tsp. paprika

PROCEDURE:

Rinse the wild rice and put it in a one and one and a half-quart covered saucepan with two cups of stock. Rinse the brown rice and put it in a one-quart covered saucepan with a cup of stock. Bring each pan to a boil, reduce the heat and simmer until the wild rice grains pop open and the brown rice is tender. Stir occasionally and add a little more water or stock if the rice appears to be drying out before it is done. It will take the brown rice about forty-five minutes and the wild rice up to an hour and a half to cook.

Make sure the wild rice is fully cooked. As Dan puts it, “When wild rice is fully cooked it will split the husk, the ends will curl and the rice will be about twice the volume of uncooked rice.  The most important thing is that the wild rice is tender when you taste it.  It must not be crunchy.” Set the rice aside and prepare the sauté. You can cook the rice ahead of time and transfer it to a storage container until you need it.

To make the sauté, melt two tablespoons of butter over medium heat in a small frying pan. Cut the meat into a quarter to half-inch dice and add it to the pan. Clean and chop the onion, celery and pepper into a quarter inch dice and add them to the meat in the pan. Sauté the meat and vegetables until they are slightly browned, remove the pan from heat and set it aside.

Chop the cranberries and walnuts medium fine.

Put the rice into a large mixing bowl. Stir the sautéed vegetables and meat along with the walnuts and cranberries into the rice. Add the salt and spices and mix thoroughly. Stuff your bird or bake the dressing separately in a lightly greased casserole at 350º for about thirty minutes to blend the flavors.

NOTES: Dan says that you can feel free to adjust the seasonings to suit your taste and that “you can’t screw it up.” My advice is to follow the recipe the first time and go from there.

He also told me that this dressing is delicious with smoked pork chops as well as poultry.

If you don’t have sea salt, you can substitute ordinary table salt, but I like to use sea salt in most recipes.

Mom’s Hot Cocoa

One of the pleasures of taking a walk after a good snowstorm is the chance to observe the status of snow art and architecture in the neighborhood. The quantity and quality, as I judge it, varies from year to year, but there is clear evidence of creative urges in some children today.

Besides conventional snowmen, there are sometimes snowwomen and even snow families. I once saw a family of snow people complete with scarves, mittens and caps. The biggest one wore a beret, which made me think that it might be the Neige family visiting from France.

Snow monsters with strange faces, ears and protuberances have impressed me too, and I have marveled at how kids managed to sneak enough food coloring out of the house to turn their creations into red, blue or green individuals braving the whiteness of winter. With my first digital camera I took a photo of a snowman with an orange head, green jacket and blue bottom. Somehow the artists (there were lots of tracks around it) had also managed to trace a brownish stripe down the front. It looked something like a zipper.

I have been pleased to note that the construction of snow forts continues to this day, though none I have seen match the elaborate structures we built as kids, some designed after illustrations of medieval castles complete with moats, towers, keeps and dungeons. A couple of years ago, three ambitious youngsters built a good-sized fort with ramparts constructed of snow blocks quarried along the street and two access tunnels. Incidentally, the tunnels served their purpose: Neither I nor any other adult could get inside to attack the defenders. It was an impressive job that undoubtedly kept them out of their mother’s hair for a day or two.

Our mother encouraged us to build forts in the woods behind the house in summer and snow forts across the road where there were hard drifts along the snow fence. In fact, though modern mothers may disapprove, Mom sometimes ordered us to get dressed in snowsuits, boots, caps and mittens and go outside and play, even if it was below zero. Like eskimos we were taught how to live with cold, and we never ended up with any permanent damage.

One exception may be my ears, which are still very sensitive to below zero temperatures. That wasn’t my mother’s fault, however. She knitted me a warm stocking cap each year to fit her growing boy and told me to pull it down over my ears so they wouldn’t freeze when I walked to school. However, she couldn’t make me do that, because all us boys knew that only sissies pulled their caps down over their ears.

The teacher didn’t even tell on us when we froze our ears, since nearly every boy did it. She didn’t have much sympathy for us, either. “It’s your own fault.” she would say. “I’m sure your mothers told you to cover your ears. Just hold your hands on them and they’ll stop hurting after awhile.”

I think she told us not to do it again, too. Not that we followed her advice either, though many of us began pulling our caps down when we didn’t think anyone could see us. If you weren’t carrying books, you could cover your ears with your mittens. That was a pretty good technique because you could pretend to be adjusting your hat when you met someone.

Besides building snow forts we pulled our toboggan to a hill along the Namakagon River where we zipped down the slope and tried to keep from getting too scratched up in the blackberry bushes and thornapple trees at the bottom of the hill. We hiked or skied to a pond on the north forty of our property where we shoveled snow to make a skating rink, and of course we made snow angels, had snowball battles and in general enjoyed a time of year when, as a promoter of Bayfield, Wisconsin once wrote, there is no rain or mud or mosquitoes.

As much fun as those activities were, the best part was what awaited us after we had swept the snow off each other and gone inside. I can still smell and taste the cookies or cinnamon rolls and hot cocoa. In later years my mother began using chocolate milk mixes, but until I was nearly out of high school she bought cocoa powder in large tins for cakes, frostings, cookies and hot cocoa.

She made a syrup and stirred in milk. Then she put the pan on the back of the stove so the cocoa would be ready for us when we came in from the cold. She used real milk, but you can make it with low fat milk if you want. Speaking as an experienced consumer of hot cocoa, however, I assure you that adding a little cream or half and half improves the taste and texture.

INGREDIENTS:

2 T cocoa powder
2 T sugar
Dash of salt
3 T cold water
2 cups milk
1/2 tsp. vanilla extract

PROCEDURE:

Mix the cocoa, sugar and salt together in a saucepan. Stir in the water and bring the mixture to a boil over moderate heat. Use a fork to blend the solids into the water so you have a smooth liquid.

Whisk the milk into the chocolate with the fork and continue heating. Stir in the vanilla extract and stir the cocoa occasionally until it is steaming. If you want, you can top each cup with marshmallows.

NOTE: This recipe makes two cups of cocoa. Use your trusty calculator or a piece of paper and a pencil to increase the ingredients for the number of servings you need.

Once you try it, I think that you will agree that real cocoa powder, sugar and real vanilla with no ingredients added to extend shelf life or make it easier to stir the powder directly into the milk give this hot cocoa a richer flavor than anything from a mix.