The Mangler and Other Travel Tales

Jon and I love to travel around the Northwest. We can come up with all kinds of reasons to pack up the car and get away for a long weekend. We also love good food and we enjoy making good food together. Believe it or not, traveling allows us to do both while enjoy new places and people.
It seems obvious that you could find all kinds of wonderful new restaurants in which to enjoy great food while traveling. A couple of keystrokes on the computer and you can find the best places to eat wherever you go. A little pre-trip planning and you can sample delicious local fare for every meal of your trip. Of course, the reviews on-line aren’t always correct and eating out for every meal for days on end gets old, not to mention expensive.
It might be somewhat less obvious how making good food and travel go together and how cooking in your hotel room lets you explore new places and people the same way sitting down at a local restaurant does. But with a bit of preparation, cooking for yourself on vacation can be more fun, interesting and delicious than many of the eateries you might found along the way.
One of Jon and my early dates involved staying in a cabin on Orcas Island and cooking almost all our meals on a mini Weber grill armed only with a few tin pie pans and a serrated butter knife for cooking implements. We managed to make eggs, bacon and toast for breakfast and oysters and salmon for dinner. The whole experience was fun and creative. We laughed so hard about trying to cook with a butter knife, which we had affectionately named “the mangler”, that we had to take it home as a souvenir. We explored the small grocery store near our cabin and checked out the local fishmonger. We also learned quite a bit about what to do on our next trip to make our cooking on the road experience even better.
To have a great cooking experience on the road requires a few key things. The first is staying in the right place. Mariotts and Holiday Inns are not going to be very happy when the smell of bacon comes wafting out of your room every morning, and you won’t have much fun trying to cook it in the microscopic microwave they provide. Instead of looking for standard hotel rooms, look for ones that offer full kitchens or, better yet, find a house or condo to rent for a few nights. You’ll make up the little bit of extra expense by the saving on not eating out for every meal (or at least that’s how I rationalize it, although I’ve never bothered to do the math).
The second key ingredient is to bring your own knife. Our “mangler” experience has been repeated several times, although not quite to the extent of our first bad knife episode. Assume that whatever cooking knives you find in your rental kitchen will be as dull as a butter knife and bring at least one sharp knife from home. If you luck out and find a place with decent knives, you and whoever else is cooking with you can chop veggies together (but don’t plan on it, we’ve only stayed in one place where this actually happened).
Bring some basic ingredients from home as well. Most kitchens will have salt and pepper but that’s about it. Packing a few of your favorite spices so you don’t have to buy a whole jar just to add a sprinkle here and there will pay off. A small jar of cooking oil is also nice to have. If you are going to be traveling for a while and you’ve got room in the car for a cooler, pack some eggs or any veggies that won’t make it until you get home. We also pack tea, coffee and sugar so we don’t have to go searching for some first thing in the morning in a new town.
Jon is the breakfast cook in our family and he is rather particular about his egg pan, so we pack one with us. If you’ve got a kitchen utensil you feel naked without and you’ve got the space, by all means bring it along. However, I would recommend not bringing along the Kitchen Aid or the bread machine. There is a point of diminishing returns.Once you arrive at your kitchen away from home and scope out what kind of equipment you’ll be dealing with, it’s time for the fun to begin. Wander around town and check out the local shops. Is there a co-op or a small grocer that might have some local products you won’t find anywhere else? Is there a farmer’s market or a fish shop to pick up what’s fresh and local? How about a winery or brewery for just the right accompaniment to your meal? Can you actually cook all those great ideas in your less than well-stocked kitchen?
Be creative and fearless with your away-from-home creations. The great flavor of fresh local ingredients help you keep your recipes simple yet you’ll still wind up with a delicious dinner. Some of the best dinners we’ve made on the road have involved less than five ingredients and were put together quickly after a day of sightseeing.
There is one drawback to cooking on the road and that is that you still have to do your own dishes. There’s no waiter to whisk them away for you. But at least you’re doing them in some beautiful location, and if you did your research on lodging well, you might even have a view of the Pacific Ocean to do them by.

Dilly Bean and the Mangler

Homecoming Dilly Beans
Makes 5 pints

This recipe has nothing to do with travel cooking but I just made some this weekend and I can’t wait to eat them. They won’t be ready for a couple of weeks, just when I get back from a short trip so they’ll be a nice homecoming present.

2 lb. whole green beans, tips and tails removed and trimmed to fit upright in pint jars
1 t. red pepper flakes
5 dried dill heads or 2 t. dill seed
10 cloves garlic, peeled
3 c. vinegar
3 c. water
¼ c. non-iodized salt
5 pint canning jars with lids and rings
Sanitize the jars, lids and rings in boiling water for 5 minutes. Drain the jars and add one dill head, 1/5 t. of red pepper flakes and 2 garlic cloves. Divide the beans between the jars, standing them upright and packing them in as much as possible.
Boil the vinegar, water and salt together in a saucepan. Pour the hot liquid over the beans and fill to ½” of the top of each jar. Seal the jars with lids and rings and place in a simmering water bath. Once the bath returns to simmer, cook for tem minutes. Remove from heat, cool, and make sure the jars are sealed. Store for 2 weeks to let the flavor develop.
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Give Me Sorrel or Give Me Death

Fresh local greens are back. Finally. It was a long, potato and onion-filled winter, but now I’m gorging on fresh locally grown spring salad mix, spinach, and baby bok choy. Sure, I’ve had some store bought salad mix since that hard frost back in October, but it’s not the same (you’re lucky if lasts two days after you buy it and it’s kind of flaccid even when it’s fresh).
However, there is one green that I love for which I must wait patiently until spring. Because it starts to deteriorate so quickly after harvest, most supermarkets don’t bother carrying it. I can only find it at farmer’s markets or in my own garden. And there really is nothing else out there that compares with its lemony, acidic bite. Sorrel is my pay off for surviving the winter on root crops.
My mom was the one who introduced sorrel (Rumex acetosa) into my life. We always had a huge patch of it in the garden and she would make pots and pots of sorrel soup every spring. It was one of her favorites and she passed on her love of it to me.
I figured I would write this whole article about the wonders of this fine plant, where it originated from, and what chemical composition created its unique lemony flavor, thereby passing on my passion for sorrel to the Sandpoint community.
I did a bit of research and found that sorrel has been cultivated since the 16th century and is great in soups and as a sauce for fish. I learned that it is related to rhubarb and buckwheat. I found out that the sour bite I love so much is due to sorrel’s high oxalic acid content.
And then I learned that oxalic acid is poisonous. My mom wasn’t trying to pass on her love, she was trying to kill me, and while I’m the first to admit I was kind of a trying child, especially during my teenage years, I couldn’t believe she’d try to off me with sorrel.
Were there other foods she was trying to sneak into my diet to aid in my slow poisoning?
We’d have rhubarb pie every spring and rhubarb is also high in oxalic acid. It’s most concentrated in the leaves of the plant, not the stalk, and as far as I could tell she never slipped any leaves into my piece of pie.
Did she really not like lima beans or did she always give me her serving for nefarious reasons? Lima beans and other beans contain protease inhibitors and lectins that can interfere with proper absorption of nutrients in the digestive track and bring on symptoms of food poisoning. These toxins are inactivated by thorough cooking, but weren’t those lima beans always a bit on the crunchy side?
Was she feeding me too many alkaloids? Alkaloids are bitter tasting and toxic. Caffeine, nicotine, and quinine are a few common alkaloids. Green potatoes and potato sprouts are especially high in poisonous alkaloids, but Mom never served sprouting potatoes. She has always been a big fan of coffee and vodka tonics (tonic water gets its bitter flavor from quinine) but never pushed these on me as a kid. She did try to get me addicted to coffee soda for a while, but she was drinking more of it than me. Maybe she was using some other food to do me in.
Maybe it was the bamboo shoots? She would always add them to her delicious stir-fries. Bamboo shoots, if not properly prepared, contain high levels of cyanogens. Cyanogens break down in the body into hydrogen cyanide and can cause cyanide poisoning. I’m sure I saw her take them out of a can and I would guess the manufacturer made sure they were cyanide-free, but I can’t be sure.
She always encouraged me to eat lots of citrus, stone, and pome fruits, the seeds of which are high in cyanide generating chemicals, but at the same time she did advise me not to eat the seeds. Was Mom using some kind of reverse psychology on me? Did she secretly want me to chew my apple seeds?
All those interesting and not necessarily kid-friendly flavors that Mom had me try might have been another way for her to introduce toxins into my diet. Glycyrrhizin, the sweet flavor in licorice root, could have raised my blood pressure to dangerous levels. Coumarin in lavender could have interfered with blood clotting. And myristicin in nutmeg could have made me hallucinate so I wouldn’t notice any of it.
She may even have gotten my dad involved. Dad was the grill master in the family. Was he introducing too many PAHs (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) into my meat when he was barbecuing? PAHs are carcinogens that are formed when wood burns and are carried into the meat if it is cooked over high heat in an enclosed environment. But wouldn’t everyone’s meat be tainted, not just mine? And didn’t we have a gas grill with no wood to form PAHs?
Maybe I’m just being paranoid. Maybe my parents were trying to expose me to a wide range of foods and flavors to expand my palette, not poison me. Maybe my parents wanted to pass on their love of good food as a way to show their love for me, despite what a royal pain in the butt I was. And if that’s the case, I’m off to make a big pot of sorrel soup.

Vicki Reich lives in Sagle and loves her mom. She doesn’t believe for a second her mom ever actually tried to poison her (although she definitely had just cause) and only used the idea for entertainment purposes.

Sorrel Soup
Serves 4

1 tbls. Butter
1 large onion, chopped
4 c. chicken broth
1-2 large potatoes, peeled and diced (more potatoes makes a creamier soup)
3 c. chopped sorrel
Salt and pepper to taste
Plain yogurt or sour cream for garnish

Heat butter in a stock pot over medium high heat until melted. Add onion and sauté for five minutes or until the onion softens. Add the broth and potato. Bring to a boil then lower heat to a simmer. Simmer until potato is soft, 20-30 minutes. Add sorrel and simmer for 10 minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste. Puree in batches in a blender or in the pot with an immersion blender. Serve hot or cold with a dollop of yogurt or sour cream.

I Like Meat, Meat is Good

My husband is a carnivore. There is no denying it. Meals without meat are not truly meals in his mind. And you can’t really blame him. Meat is delicious and we are biologically rigged to think so. Our sense of smell and taste has evolved to let us know what foods are good sources of energy and nutrition. Our taste buds can perceive essential elements in food that keep us alive. The taste of meat tells our brains that it’s got the salts, sugars and amino acids we need to fuel our bodies. And the smell of cooking meat, well, that just makes us salivate.
Meat fueled the development of our big brains. It was the concentrated energy source we needed to withstand long migrations and cold climates. Meat has made us who we are today and how can you blame Jon if it’s hard for him to overcome 100,000 years of evolution.
But meat today isn’t the same as what our ancestors were eating. The age and fat content of meat has changed quite a bit in the last hundred or so years. Meat animals used to be slaughtered at much older ages. Most animals had some primary purpose like providing labor, milk, eggs or wool and were only slaughtered after they were no longer useful for those tasks. The meat from these animals was tough but had much more flavor and character. This was due to greater muscle development (which leads to toughness but also more flavor) and to greater accumulation of flavor characteristics in the fat.
As the middle class rose in affluence and the demand for more meat increased, production began to specialize in animals raised only for meat. And there was a profit to be made from raising animals as quickly as possible and slaughtering them at a young age. This lead to tenderer, fattier and less flavorful cuts.
It also led to CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations) and the desire to squeeze an extra penny of profit out of each animal. Because of that, industrially produced meat is chock full of hormones and antibiotics. Animals are raised in inhumane and cramped conditions then forced to eat waste products from other animal productions, all of which breeds diseases like E.-coli, Salmonella, and mad cow disease. It’s not very appetizing no matter how good it smells on the grill.
And while my husband loves his meat, he (and I) can’t stomach all the yucky stuff that’s in industrial meat. We buy our meat from local farmers who raise their animals humanely and feed them only grass.
Grass-fed meat varies in a number of ways from what you find in the grocer store. It’s lower in fat and the fat it does have is better for you. It’s more flavorful and may take some getting used to if all you eat is bland supermarket fare. It’s also from older animals (if you pump an animal full of growth hormones and feed it on grain, it reaches market weight a lot sooner than if you just let it graze on pasture).
These distinctions mean you have to cook grass fed meat differently. It only took one experience of overcooking a steak into a tough, unappetizing disaster, before I knew it was time to learn more about what was happening when meat cooked. After all, when you pay a premium for good, clean meat, you want to make sure you cook it right every time.
I turned to the bible of cooking information, “On Food and Cooking” by Harold McGee, opened to the chapter on meat, and read all 50 pages like it was a spy novel (it really is that fascinating). I learned that the muscle of different animals tastes pretty much the same and it’s the fat that gives each animal it’s characteristic taste and smell (and that there is a molecule in pork that also gives coconut it’s characteristic taste, no wonder I find bacon irresistible).
I learned that the amount of use and the type of use each muscle (and therefore each cut of meat) withstood over an animal’s lifetime determined its tenderness or toughness.
And I learned that juiciness in meat occurs for two different reasons. The first is when tender meat is cooked to the perfect temperature where it just starts to release the water stored between its muscle fibers, as in a steak cooked rare. The second is when meat is slowly raised in temperature past the point when the collagen between the bundles of muscle fibers breaks down into gelatin creating a soft, chewable, and succulent structure, as in falling-off-the-bone lamb shanks.
But most importantly, I learned how to use my newfound knowledge to perfectly cook grass-fed meat.
I was most interested in perfecting the cooking of tender cuts of meat on the grill. These are Jon’s favorites and include chops, breasts, sirloin, t-bone and tenderloin. According to McGee, the key is to aim for an internal temperature of no more than 140F when the meat is served, without completely overcooking the outside (140F is the temperature where the muscle fibers give up all their moisture, resulting in that dreaded dried out $20 steak).
This is easier said than done. You want to brown the meat with high heat to produce a plethora of aromatic compounds that only happen when the meat is browned, but you don’t want to heat it so much that the internal temperature gets too high and squeezes out all the moisture. You also need to remember that meat will continue to cook after it’s removed from the heat. How much it continues to cook depends on the thickness, the fat content, the starting temperature and the surface treatment.
There are several ways to wrangle all of these variables into the perfectly cooked steak. Starting with a piece of meat that is at least at room temperature minimizes the length of time it takes the interior to reach 140F and minimized the chance of overcooking the outside.
Another trick is to cook the meat at two different temperatures. Place the meat on hot coals to start but make sure there is a section of your grill that is cooler. Flip the meat after a minute or so, just to brown it well on both sides, then move it to the cooler location. Continue to flip it regularly and check for doneness by touch. Brushing the meat with a water based marinade can also help keep the outside cool through evaporation.
A rare piece of meat, when poked with your finger, feels like the muscle between your thumb and forefinger when your fingers are slightly stretched apart (now you know if you are ever at our house and Jon directs me to go poke the meat it’s not some sexually deviant behavior). To me, this is meat at its most perfect, but if you like your meat medium rare, your poke should feel like that thumb muscle when your thumb and finger are squeezed together. When your poke feels right, by all means, take it off the grill immediately. Meat can go from perfect to well-done in a blink of an eye. And if you are in doubt, it will not ruin the meat to cut in and take a look inside.
Dealing with tougher cuts of meat requires a whole different approach. To create moist, tender meat from the cuts that saw the most exercise in their animal form requires slow cooking past 160F. This is the temperature when the collagen begins to convert to gelatin and the muscle fibers begin to separate. It’s also past the point where the muscles give up their moisture making it much more likely that it will be dry if not cooked right.
The slower the meat is brought up to temperature the more tender it will be. Adding moisture to replace the moisture lost from the muscle itself keeps the meat juicy. Several cooking methods help to achieve these two goals. Traditional barbeque, where the meat is cooked all day with indirect heat that never gets above 250F and is slathered in sauce the whole time is a perfect example. Roasts that are cooked in a 250F or lower oven for hours come out quite tasty especially if they are basted occasionally. Cooking the meat slowly in some type of liquid by such methods as braising, poaching or stewing infused the meat not only with moisture but with the flavor of the cooking liquid. All of these slow cooking methods benefit from a quick browning before they start their slow journey to tenderness, not because it seals in the juices as we’ve all been led to believe at one time or another, but to bring out those browning aromas that only occur at high temperatures. Letting the meat “rest” and come down to 120F will actually increase the moistness of the meat and improve the texture. This can take up to an hour and is not optional if you want to serve up perfection.
We’ve been applying all this new knowledge to grilling but haven’t yet tried it out with slow cooking. I’ve got a brisket thawing for this weekend to see if I can make my mom’s brisket recipe as good as she does. I’ll keep you posted.


Mom’s Brisket
serves 4 with lots of leftovers

2 tbls oil
1 brisket (4-5lb)
1 onion, sliced
3 carrots, cut into 1 inch pieces
1+ cup Ketchup (I like to use enough to cover the meat)
1 cup Red Wine (or more if needed)
Salt and Pepper to taste

Rinse off the brisket and pat dry. In a large pot with a lid, heat the oil over high heat. Quickly brown the meat on all sides. Remove the pot from the heat and add the remaining ingredients. Place the pot over very low heat and cover. Cook for at least two hours or until the internal temperature reaches 120F, turning occasionally. Raise the temperature to medium low, so that the liquids are barely simmering and continue cooking and turning for another hour. If the moisture evaporates, add more wine or water. After the additional hour, start checking for doneness every half hour. The meat is done when a fork pierces it easily. Remove from heat and allow it to cool to 120F. Remove the meat, slice it across the grain, and return it to the pot. Serve immediately.