Spring has finally — finally, finally — arrived in Minnesota. If you look hard, you can still find a patch of snow here and there (not to mention the giant glaciers of snow that were created by all the plowing and will probably melt sometime in July). Also, it’s supposed to snow this weekend. The little frosty snowflake icon is back on my weather forecast. And that’s not great.

For now, though, it’s spring, and the weather is conducive to all kinds of frolicking. The produce aisle, however, has yet to really get the memo. You’d think it was still the very depths of winter if you looked at the sad array of fruits and veg that I saw when I went grocery shopping last week (no farmer’s markets for us here in the upper midwest, not yet).

The one high point of the shopping trip was strawberries. Strawberries prominently featured, strawberries hugely on sale. Strawberries that were probably hugely on sale because, unsurprisingly, they were hugely flavorless. Big gobs of pink-colored water, is what they were. And you know, I knew they would be when I bought them, but I still couldn’t resist, because, hey, it’s spring!

And then, when I got home from the grocery store, what was waiting for me but Super Natural Every Day, the latest Heidi Swanson joint, that I preordered from Amazon (oh, the shame) however many moons ago. It’s so breathtakingly gorgeous, people — I sat down and flipped through it before I even put my perishables away, and that is saying something. I mean, stunning.

And then, to make it even better, smack dab in her “Accompaniments” section, what else but a recipe for Roasted Strawberries. I love it when life, every so once in a while, hands you a little help like that.

I’ve never thought of roasting strawberries, but it turns out to be the perfect way to deal with these irresistible yet inevitably disappointing hunks o’ berry that come out at the start of the season. And, it turns out that Heidi couldn’t agree more — she chose this recipe as her favorite from the book (the whole beautiful book!) when she was featured on Design*Sponge (another favorite blog of mine) last week.

These berries came out just grand. And the aroma while they cook will fast forward you straight to summer. We ate these straight from the bowl, along with a chocolatey chocolatey cookie. In the future, I would probably use them more sparingly, on a biscuit or muffin like Heidi suggests. They are potent. That or you could tone them down a bit by foregoing the port and balsamic at the end.

Roasted Strawberries

Adapted from Heidi Swanson’s Super Natural Every Day

Makes about ½ cup

Ingredients

-       8 oz. strawberries

-       2 Tbsp. maple syrup, grade B

-       1 Tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil

-       ¼ tsp. fine-grain sea salt

-       1 Tbsp. port wine

-       a few drops balsamic vinegar

1. Preheat oven to 350º F.
2. Line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper (important that it be rimmed, so there isn’t sugar all over your oven, and also important that there be parchment paper, so there isn’t sugar all over your baking sheet). You can also use a baking dish; it may require a little scrubbing afterward.
3. Prepare strawberries: Hull them (take the tops off). If they’re small to medium sized, cut them in half. If they’re the monolith strawberries, cut them into quarters.
4. Go ahead and toss this all right on the baking sheet: Strawberries, maple syrup, olive oil, salt. Make sure berries are coated, and shake them so they fall in a single layer.
5. Roast for about 40 minutes, beginning to check after 30. The berry juices should be thick and darkened, and the berries should be roasty looking (smaller, denser, darker), but not burned.
6. Remove from oven and let cool for a few minutes (the sugar is hot!). Once cool enough to handle (but still warm), scoop into a small bowl. Add port and balsamic and stir gently to combine.
7. You can use immediately or store in the fridge for up to a week (to eat cold, room temp, or heated up).

I’ve been a wee bit stressed lately. It’s that time in the semester, that time of the year (the school year). All kinds of little life things seem to be cropping up that unavoidably have to be dealt with, and that take more time and mental energy than they should. And, while it seems to maybe finally be sunny outside today, winter has just gone on for way too long.

So, we’re going to have a short post today, but a winning one. For how much I love cocktails, there aren’t too many on this site. Typically, I drink a fair number of Manhattans, some whiskey on the rocks, and a few martinis here and there. When I’m in a restaurant, I’ll order something a little more elaborate, but I’m not usually well enough stocked at home to really create a true cocktail (a Manhattan and a martini are basically mixed drinks, in the end). Nor do I usually have the investment to take the extra couple minutes. When a Manhattan tastes so good, why go to the bother?

But sometimes a drink comes along that doesn’t take much longer and that uses ingredients you probably have on hand. That drink is the Rattlesnake, a slightly tangier, slightly frothier version of the Manhattan. Very quaffable, and makes a nice change, especially as we move out of the darkest days of winter.

I was introduced to this drink at a friend’s apartment just around the corner from the restaurant Beretta, an haute pizza place in San Francisco. The recipe comes from there, with one slight change: Beretta’s version calls for Peychaud’s bitters, but I’ve had no luck finding anything besides Angostura anywhere in the Twin Cities. So, mine calls for Angostura. Also, when the beauty of the cocktail is that you don’t need to go out and buy anything, substitutes are welcome. Oh, and I love that Beretta uses Wild Turkey in their Rattlesnake. Mine are even classier, usually with Evan Williams.

The Rattlesnake

Makes 1 cocktail

The recipe used to be available here, but doesn’t appear to be now. I found it again here.

Ingredients

- 2 oz. rye whiskey (Beretta uses Wild Turkey; I use Evan Williams)

- 1 oz. lemon juice

- 1/2 oz. Grade B maple syrup

- 2 dashes bitters (Beretta uses Peychaud’s; I use Angostura)

- 1/2 oz. egg white (I’m not sure how you are supposed to measure this; I just used 1 egg white)

1. Shake all ingredients with ice in a cocktail shaker (shaking is preferable to stirring to get the egg white nice and frothy). Serve in a cocktail glass.

Citius, altius, fortius, eh?

Good morning sports fans, and merry belated Winter Olympics. Weren’t they great, these past few weeks? Rushing home after work to catch some sweet biathlon footage only to find… really? More ice dancing? Okay, seriously, how many rounds of this are there? But in spite of tape delays, ice dancers and Apolo Ono’s soul patch, there was as always a lot to love about the Winter Olympics. I know that the image of a crowded late-night sports bar with half a dozen massive flat screens turned to a curling match is one I will cherish for years to come.

The host of these past games, Canada, is a surprisingly large country located somewhere north of Seattle, and as the photo above clearly shows, its chief exports include hockey players, beer, and maple syrup. Okay, so there’s no maple syrup in the photo (and honestly one of those silver bullets looks suspiciously like a Coors Lite), but I have it on good authority that the amber stuff is a treasured national resource. Brown gold. Canada-C. You know, like Texas Tea? Oh forget it. Tonight, as a tribute to our hockey overlords north of the border, and as part of Food Junta’s ongoing wall-to-wall Olympics coverage, I present to you: bourbon maple syrup. Swifter, higher, stronger! Sweeter, tipsier, earlier!

Times have changed since Nick Charles woke up and asked for “a drop of something to cut the phlegm” in Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man, and nowadays whiskey in the morning may not seem like the breakfast of champions, but bourbon and maple syrup are a natural combination of flavors. I had never mixed the two over breakfast before, but the pairing is by no means original: big-name distillers Evan Williams and Jim Beam have their own brands of pancake syrup, while on the bartending side maple syrup has become a popular ingredient at whiskey joints. And in Michigan one chef’s brand of maple syrup, aged in bourbon casks, has earned the closest thing America has to a royal warrant: “it’s one of Oprah’s favorites.”

Yet despite the great taste, the marketing, and all the Oprah-atic fervor, finding a recipe to make bourbon maple syrup at home proved to be a challenge, an emotional voyage, a journey of redemption; indeed, it would take heart, passion, spirit and determination, along with grit and an almost superhuman will to succeed, in order to endure all of the Google searches necessary to reach that one proud, golden, magic moment where –

What? Sorry, I’ve watched too much Bob Costas lately. Anyway I ultimately triumphed over adversity and found two recipes, one with a little liquor, one with a lot. The first proposed flaming vanilla beams (sliced open, seeds scraped out) in 2 tablespoons of whiskey, with the remnants being poured into 1 cup of syrup. Problem was, most of the liquid evaporated in the flames, leaving only a very (very) subtle vanilla flavor. Maple syrup is pretty damn good by itself, and this recipe just doesn’t add enough to be worthwhile. As long as I’m quoting literary booze-hounds in this post, Henry Chinaski famously said, “If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise don’t even start.” I assume he was talking about spiking maple syrup, and so today’s recipe, as if you even had to ask, is the one with a lot of booze. It is delicious.

This recipe is very simple, with two pretty obvious main ingredients. First, the booze: I know that bourbon is from Kentucky, not Canada, and I know that there’s even a brand of whiskey called Canadian Club, which really would’ve fit better into the whole narrative of this year’s Olympics. But Canadian whiskey is rye whiskey. Bourbon is sweeter and has a stronger taste, and for our maple-flavoring purposes it seemed like the best choice. So now it’s a NAFTA recipe, sue me.

On to ingredient #2: maple syrup, like ice dancing, has been plagued by scoring controversies. In your average supermarket’s maple syrup aisle (hey, a guy can dream right?), Grade A maple seems like the obvious choice. But be warned, syrup grades are based on purity, not quality. Grade A wins its high marks for being sweeter and lighter colored because it’s been filtered more – because there’s less maple in it. If I just wanted sweetness from my syrup I’d save money and boil sugar cubes. Don’t take the maple out of our syrup! Buy the darker, more flavorful Grade B!

But uh… angry mobs aside, all maple syrup is pretty delicious. And here, arguably, is how to make it better:

Bourbon Maple Syrup

Adapted, oddly enough, from this kosher butternut squash bisque recipe.

1 cup bourbon

½ cup brown sugar

½ cup maple syrup

Optional: 2 vanilla beans (de-seeded) or a drop of vanilla extract

Stir brown sugar into bourbon over low heat until the mixture is thickened, reduced by half. Add maple syrup, simmer for 3 to 5 minutes and let cool to room temperature. I might also suggest adding a couple of vanilla beans (surprisingly expensive) or a drop of vanilla extract during the simmering – adding the one highlight of the first recipe to the strong caramel, maple and bourbon flavors of the second.

Naturally you’ll need some sort of syrup delivery device at this point. Kevin’s Johnny cakes recipe from a couple weeks ago would be an obvious choice. Vanilla ice cream, it turns out, is another perfect match. But I, as usual, fell back on my Dad’s pancakes. This recipe, one of the first things I ever learned to cook, makes pancakes that are a little smaller, denser, and more flavorful than your average fat, fluffy diner flapjacks.

Dad’s Pancakes

Serves 2

Dry:

1 cup flour

1 tsp baking powder

½ tsp salt

1 Tbsp sugar

Wet:

1 cup liquid

1 egg

1 Tbsp oil

• Flour: I use 1/3 all purpose flour, 1/3 cornmeal, 1/3 white whole wheat flower. Collecting all those different flours may sound like a pain, but the flavor is well worth the effort and certainly got me hooked – I remember one morning years ago I woke up and discovered my parents were out of cornmeal flour, and I was so fixated on these pancakes that I decided it was worth my while spending 30 minutes using a mortar and pestle to grind polenta (which we did have)  into flour.

• Liquid: I use buttermilk for pancakes, regular milk for waffles. Double the oil for waffles. And if you really get wrapped up in the spirit (ugh, unintentional pun) of your boozy breakfast, go ahead and add a tablespoon of whiskey to the batter too. It’ll add a slight flavor and aroma to the finished product.

When the syrup was mixed, the pancakes fried, and the waffles… ironed?… I invited a handful of hungry friends over, and with Pat, a real, honest-to-Gretzky citizen of Canada, presiding over the festivities, we sat down to ponder whether maple syrup could really be improved. Now I love the stuff at least as much as the next guy, and I still don’t know if today’s recipe is really an improvement. But it is delicious, and it is different: slightly more liquidy, and with a rich caramel flavor. As Kevin mentioned in his Johnny cakes post, even old favorites can use a new twist some times, and it’s always worth experimenting with booze in your food.

Remember the Olympic motto, folks: The most important thing is not to win but to take part. I’m Bob Costas. Good night, America.

A few weeks ago I made a vinaigrette with lemon juice instead of vinegar and some maple syrup as a sweetener, and I immediately fell in love with the combination.

Apparently, I am not the only one: Just a week later, I found myself at Back Forty – a terrific joint – eating brussels sprouts with lemon and maple syrup.

“Hey!,” I said to myself, you can do this. So I did.

Lemons, where have you been all my life? I can’t believe it has taken me this long to realize how terrific fresh citrus is. I’ve used fresh lemon or lime juice in plenty of recipes, but that vinaigrette just blew me away. I won’t try to quantify the magic of citrus, just take me at my word and try to use more of it.

I believe that the brussels sprouts at Back Forty were oven-roasted, but I decided to do mine on the stove top for no reason in particular. I was pleased with the result, but I’d like to try it in the oven at some point as well for comparison’s sake. The trick here is to caramelize the sprouts as much as possible without burning them

Brussels Sprouts with Lemon and Maple Syrup

Trim any excess stem from the brussels sprouts, halve them and remove any loose or brown leaves.

Steam them until they are fork tender. You basically want them to be done cooking at this point. This could take anywhere from five to ten minutes depending on the size of the sprouts and how you are steaming them. If you’ve got a steamer, great. If not, just put the sprouts in a covered sauce pan with about an inch of water and keep an eye on them to be sure all the water doesn’t boil off. Drain them when they’re done.

Over medium-high heat, coat a skillet (cast iron is great if you’ve got it) in a thin layer of olive oil or butter. Add sprouts, shake them to spread them out, and then leave them the hell alone. You want them to get a nice brown crust, and this won’t happen if you are constantly stirring or shaking. Give them a minute or two and then check on how the caramelizing is going.

Once the sprouts are brown, add in lemon juice and maple syrup. The ratio here is up to you, but I’d recommend 1 tablespoon of maple syrup and the juice of half a lemon for each pound. Now you can toss and stir to your heart’s delight, until the sauce thickens and becomes more of a glaze.

Serve. Eat. Enjoy.