We rarely complain about too much sun, and certainly won’t now. On a recent trip to Kauai (the rainy Garden Isle), the weather was so good we had almost too much light for photos. A problem we hope to have again. But we did manage to wake up early one morning to beat the sun and get some photos of the local flora. There is so much to see, this is just a taste. We hope you enjoy it. Aloha.
It may sound a bit contrived, but we do seem to have something about traveling to the end of the road. If there is a road that ends in a sunset, or a sunrise, we seem to find ourselves there. The beaches of Kauai or the East End of Long Island call to us almost every summer (that they are both about the same distance from Norcal is just a coincidence). Other than a clean horizon, these two places don’t have a lot in common….expect maybe for surf (another um….coincidence) and incredibly fresh fish.
And while we love the striped bass of Long Island (do we ever), the fresh ahi, also known as yellowfin tuna, of Kauai is our favorite treat. But, to be fair, there is great ahi and bluefin tuna in Long Island and our experience with this recipe started in East Hampton. Our friend Chad makes something between a tuna tartare and a Hawaiian poke’ every summer in Long Island, and now that recipe makes the trip to Kauai along with us.
We call this dish a tartar in respect for Chad, but it is pretty close to poke’, the Hawaiian staple of chopped raw fish, seaweed, salt, soy sauce, sesame oil and roasted nuts. Chad’s version omits the seaweed (we serve on nori) and adds finely diced sweet onion or shallot and a big pinch of lime zest that adds a bright citrus note that makes the dish truly sing. And depending on what’s available, some hot chili paste, Sriracha or wasabi add a nice kick.
This is an easy recipe to adjust as you make it, so just start with small amounts of the seasonings and tune / taste as you go. The key here is the ahi. Firstly, the ahi must be very fresh. It is best to make this dish in the place the fish was caught, or to get a piece of sashimi-grade ahi from a fish monger you trust. Once you have the ahi, you need to get it very cold (firming it up in the freezer for an hour is OK) and cut into small cubes of 1/2 to 1/4 inch. This takes a sharp knife, time and patience, but your efforts will be rewarded. You will also need to remove any white sinew you get while slicing, it is nearly inedible and will ruin the texture of the tartare. Then just take your chopped ahi, mix in the other ingredients and tune for your tastes. Fun.
As for serving the tartare, you have a few options. The easiest / fastest way is just to serve it with some crackers (Triscuits and rice crackers both work very well). But we prefer a trifecta of nori squares, quick pickled cucumber slices and potato chips. The tartare will keep a few days in the fridge, so serving it over rice as a main course is also a very tasty option. Usually, however, leftovers are not an issue.
Chad’s Ahi Tuna Tartare:
Notes Before You Start:
What You Get: One of the best fish dishes you can find. Healthy, too.
What You Need: A very sharp knife.
How Long? About 20-30 minutes. It all depends on your knife skills.
The Kona Castaway.
More tiki here at the farm. Why? Well….why not? When is it a bad time for a tiki drink? In winter, tiki drinks remind you of summer. In summer, tiki drinks are a celebration of summer. And in spring or fall they are something to enjoy wistfully, or as a harbinger of the warm months to come. Besides, they give you an excuse to pull out that Hawaiian slack-key guitar CD that’s been gathering dust…
The other reason to enjoy tiki is that you get to play around with all sorts of crazy ingredients. Special rums, orgeat, falernum, pineapple, cinnamon syrup, grapefruit, absinthe, passion fruit and just about anything else you can think of. Not surprisingly, the ingredient list of some tiki drinks looks like a congressional appropriations bill (and the likelihood of you making one at home is about the same as the odds of that bill passing congress). We do mix tiki drinks at home, but we can’t stop buying cocktail ingredients we are silly that way. Occasionally we actually find a simple tiki drink with just a few common ingredients. So what do we do? Add more ingredients, of course…
In this case we took the Castaway, a Beachbum Berry concoction of gold rum, Kahlua and pineapple juice, and decided to experiment. The Castaway is a good drink, as the pineapple and coffee play together way better than you might expect. A good sipping cocktail. But since we are often in Hawaii, and the local coffee is awesome, we decided to nix the Kahlua and use leftover Kona coffee as our base.
And after some (mostly) enjoyable trials, we got the Kona Castaway. The Kona Castaway combines aged Jamaican rum, light rum, coffee syrup, pineapple juice, Tiki bitters with crushed ice and a lime wedge for garnish. The main change here is making coffee syrup with a 1 to 1 ratio of leftover coffee and sugar. The coffee syrup is much smoother (and tastier) than Kahlua and gives you room to add more layers of flavor.
In this case, the aged Jamaican rum and Tiki bitters add spice and funk, and the lime wedge garnish (squeeze it into the drink) adds a nice citrus note to the coffee and pineapple. Overall you get a sweet sip with smooth, spicy coffee notes. The other cool thing you get is a nice frothy head from the pineapple juice. In some ways the Kona Castaway reminds us of a pint of Guinness with the frothy head and the coffee notes, but that only goes so far. It’s still a Tiki drink, after all….
The Kona Castaway:
Assemble:
The Castaway:
(From Beachbum Berry)
Ingredients:
Assemble:
The Best Strawberry Jam.
So what makes this strawberry jam the best? Well, it is just strawberries, sugar and lemon juice, so nothing gets in the way. If you have ripe, sweet strawberries, this is the real deal. And we use a technique that makes the process much, much easier. If you like jam, but don’t like all the specialized gear and the huge tub of boiling water, we have a solution: the oven.
It turns out you can sterilize your jars and lids in the oven, You can process the jam, too. (Just make sure your oven is true to temperature, they often are NOT, use an oven thermometer to be sure). Simply place your clean jars and lids on a baking sheet and heat in a 250 degree oven for at least 30 minutes. Remove the jars from the oven when you need them. Then fill the jars with jam, leave a 1/4 inch of room, wipe the rims clean, place the lids on, seal them and put the jars back in the oven for 15 minutes. Then take the jars out of the oven and they will seal as they cool. So. Much. Easier.
The other fuss about making jam usually has to do w/ pitting and skinning fruit, or in the case of strawberries, hulling. There are specialized hulling tools, but we use strong plastic straws (flimsy won’t work here) and run them from the bottom through the center of the strawberries. It is the fastest way to hull the strawberries, and something anyone (read, your kids or guest) can be dragooned volunteer to do. It’s almost fun, and you can snack on a few berries along the way.
As for the jam, we adapted the recipe (and the oven technique) from Blue Chair Fruit Company in Berkeley. Blue Chair has fine jams and marmalade, gear, classes and one of our favorite cookbooks. Worth a visit.
The Carlos danger Cocktail.
Time for another Mixology Monday! This time our host is also the “keeper of the flame” Fred Yarm of Cocktail Virgin Slut. Thanks again from keeping things going Fred. Let’s get right to our theme “Flip Flop”:
I thought of the theme for this month’s Mixology Monday shortly after making the Black Rene, an obscure drink from Pioneers of Mixing at Elite Bars: 1903-1933. The combination of brandy, amber rum, lemon, and Maraschino was tasty, but I felt that the recipe could be improved if I swapped in different ingredients. Taking a page from Max Toste of Deep Ellum who converted the Black Devil into the White Devil, I flipped around the ingredients to be pisco, white rum, lime, and Maraschino instead. With this combination that I called the White Rene, the drink really sang but it was still recognizable as being an alteration of the original recipe. Others have done similar swaps with grand effect including the Bluegrass Mai Tai that changes the two rums to two whiskeys and swaps lime for lemon from the classic while holding everything else the same.
Find a recipe, either new or old, and switch around at least two of the ingredients to sister or cousin ingredients but holding the proportions and some of the ingredients the same. The new recipe should be recognizable as a morph of the old one when viewed side by side.
This theme was a fun one for us to play with, as we were already doing some experimenting with tweaks to classics. So we decided to use the Manhattan as our foundation. Ever since we tried the excellent Ile St. Honorat from the Liquid Culture Project, an aged rum Manhattan variant, we have worked on our own version. Now we decided to do a fully “flipped” Manhattan using aged rum instead of whiskey, amaro in place of vermouth, and Amargo Chuncho (Peruvian) bitters for Angostura (we kept the orange twist we like to use with our Manhattans). We pretty much went for the “full flip”, just like that idiot guy from Manhattan Anthony Weiner sometimes fully “flips” into his alter ego, Carlos Danger. (Sorry, not much of a segue, but it’s what we had- and we couldn’t resist the name.)
Since we had the orange twist and the herbal, coffee-ish notes of the Amargo Chuncho bitters, the big question was the choice of aged rum and amaro. We wanted a mild, slightly woody sipping rum, and after trying a few bottles settled on the Matusalem Gran Reserva, a 15-year-old rum with well-integrated floral and burnt sugar flavors. The Matusalem is an easy sipper, and a good fit for this kind of spirit-forward cocktail. As for the Amaro, we tried a bunch. Maria a Monte was good but a bit too minty and boozy (worth revisiting, good stuff), Cynar didn’t quite fit and Averna was too sweet. We settled on Amaro Montenegro with its less bitter, light herbal and orange peel notes.
So how does the Carlos Danger taste? It has light floral, orange and coffee notes up front with a bit of kick from the booze in the middle (it’s a strong drink, no question). But the cocktail closes with a soft, dry vanilla note from the rum and amaro that is simply delightful. We tried the Carlos Danger up and on the rocks and it works both ways. So if you want to try something new, try a Carlos Danger cocktail and leave that cell phone alone. Continue reading
Brown Sugar Poundcake.
This is some very tasty poundcake. It uses brown sugar and we serve it with fresh strawberries and sour cream (similar to how we serve strawberries with sour cream and raw/brown sugar). It tastes like a good poundcake with a deeper sugar flavor, as you would expect. The recipe comes from “Sweet Auburn Desserts” an excellent southern dessert cookbook, but it is just poundcake, no special steps, limited hassles, happy faces. We suggest you make it for a summer party. It is also very good toasted for breakfast (not that we would ever do anything like that).
So, since that doesn’t fill many paragraphs, let us tell you about the wild bunny running around in the kitchen. Since we have a large garden “farm”, we get plenty of critters. Some welcome, some not. The veggie beds are caged above and below, but there are still plenty of goodies (mostly in the orchard) to entertain the gophers, wood rats, moles, lizards and squirrels. We have a large deer fence around the “perimeter” to keep most of the deer, coyotes and perhaps larger animals at bay. These are our “passive” defenses, and they work pretty well.
As for the “active” defenses we have some traps for gophers (the enemy) and we happily dispatch wood rats (the ones that steal fruit) whenever we find their nests. But on a day-to-day basis, Oreo the cat is our primary “enforcer”. Oreo is a rescued barn cat that lost her tail to a coyote. She lost her gig at the barn. This ended up being a good deal for the cat, as she gets to practice her “craft” with minimal interference here at the farm. And, until recently, everything was good. But then things started to change…
First, the cat started to catch songbirds. She didn’t usually kill them, but would bring us a “gift”. The sight of Carolyn shaking the cat to release a bird (they usually get away in a puff of feathers) is…..”amusing”, to say the least. Then a few weeks ago some rabbits moved inside the deer fence and, suddenly, here is the cat bringing us bunnies as gifts. Not good. Bunnies are cute, the kids like bunnies. (And are we so “shallow” that we value cute songbirds and bunnies more than ugly gophers and rats? Yes, absolutely.)
So the other evening the cat brings us a still kicking live bunny as a gift. We come out to “free” the bunny and, once free, the bunny runs inside the house and into the kitchen (right past our puzzled dog, I might add). Now we are chasing a very scared bunny in laps around the kitchen island until it tries to hide and we finally catch it (gently) with a towel to move it outside. Great. Then we let it go and it runs right into the open garage! Ugh. Dumb. Bunny. (Dumb farmers? Maybe.) The bunny later escaped from the open garage during the night. We just hope the cat wasn’t waiting….Never a dull moment here at the farm.
Brown Sugar Poundcake:
(Adapted from “Sweet Auburn Desserts”)
Notes Before You Start:
What You Get: Poundcake with deeper sugar flavor and some extra color. Good cake for a crowd.
What You Need: No special equipment required. A stand mixer will really help, though.
How Long? A couple of hours, but maybe 15 minutes of active time. You start poundcake in a cold oven, so it takes 90+ minutes to bake. Plan accordingly.
Putney Farm 