I’ve had the good fortune to work with Rachel Sherwood, Minneapolis food stylist extraordinaire, on a handful of projects over the past year – my Rest Stop Gourmet and Ice Fishing Gourmet among them. Earlier this summer she emailed me about a personal project she and her friend and colleague Anna Kevile Joyce were working on, inspired by various farm-to-table dinners sweeping the nation these days. Rachel and Anna had an event of their own in mind, and wondered if I would be interested in documenting it. Are you kidding?? I said.
The oppressive temperatures were defeated by Rachel and Anna’s chilled dishes: fried polenta squares with savory tomato relish and onion straw, peach and tomato salad, raw corn chowder, basil and lime sorbet, chilled pork roast with arugula and mustard sauce, chocolate truffle cake – topped off with a homemade limoncello. All delicious, and beautiful wildflowers and place settings to compliment the rustic backdrop. Great times, and beautiful and delicious food.
Ahhh, summer! Thanks so much to Rachel and Anna for including me in the good times and artistry.
It’s been a few years now since a friend and I took up home brewing, and I’d recommend it as a hobby if you fit in to one of these categories:
You like to cook.
Chemistry holds some appeal.
You’re pretty sure drinking beer is fun.
Find a friend with overlapping interests, and you’re in business.
Conor Lawrence and the gang at 514 Studios/Callahan & Co. have been brewing for longer than I have, and for years they’ve been brewing up a house recipe – Dirty Larry Brown – giving bottles away to clients and friends. When Conor told me the story of Dirty Larry Brown over coffee recently, I thought it would make for a fun photo shoot, documenting the making of a signature calling card of their business, while at the same time giving a sense of 514 Studios as a place. And a project was born.
If you’re unfamiliar with the beer brewing process, it’s a pretty simple deal. The alcohol is created by taking the sugars from roasted and dried barley and other grains, boiling them in water for an hour or so with hops for bitterness and floral taste and smell characteristics, then cooling it down to room temperature and storing it for a while with some special yeast. The yeast eats the sugar and releases alcohol. Voila!
Of course there are countless variations of grains, hop varieties, and yeast strains to choose from – not to mention enough gear to keep any guy with his face in a Northern Brewer catalog for hours at a time. And for the OCD crowd, there’s the lingering danger that one small bacteria could get by your fastidious cleaning routine and skunk the whole 5 gallon batch. Ask any home brewer about any one of these nuances and you’re liable to be roped in to an hour and a half conversation. With any luck you’ll get a beer or two out of the deal, but just be warned.
In the brew pot the day I swung by was a recipe by the name of Ferocious, modeled after a certain aggressive local IPA favorite. The beer called for what some might consider a ridiculous number of hops, which Conor models in a few photos in the gallery. But the fun – and my favorite photos from the shoot, from a brewer’s perspective – came when it was time to transfer the wort (the raw liquid that will be beer after it ferments for a while) from the boil kettle to the carboy. Since there are always hops and other things in the wort, the boil kettle has a screen over the spigot to keep the non-liquids out of the carboy. But our boy Ferocious had so many hops that it clogged the screen and wouldn’t let any liquid through. Problems. So then Conor and his friend Dave tried bypassing the spigot and pouring through a strainer and in to a funnel. Then that clogged! Finally, other options defeated, the rest of the whole hoppy stew was poured straight in to the carboy.
And you know what? It’ll be delicious.
Thanks to Conor and Dave for sharing space, time, and brews. Looking forward to bottling.
Sometimes the search for good times and original images leads you to some unexpected places. Last Sunday, the search took me and a hearty band of food lovers to an interstate rest stop one hour northwest of Minneapolis. Why? Well, have you ever seen photos of gourmet food mere yards from an interstate? I hadn’t either, so I thought I’d fill that gaping void.
None of this would have happened if not for the involvement of Asher Miller, Executive Chef, Wolfgang Puck’s 20.21 Restaurant. The challenge I posed to Asher was to come up with twists on traditional road trip dishes and prepare them on the road – practically on the roadway itself, as it turned out. To my continued amazement, he accepted the challenge, and invited some friends and family along for the ride. So what did he come up with?
Watermelon cubes with feta crumbles & balsamic
Deviled eggs
Local cheese plate, featuring blueberry & raspberry cheddars and aged gouda
Tuna carpaccio atop crostini with citrus greens
Mini burgers on homemade buns
Grilled quail
Potato salad
Assorted Surly beers
The food was incredible, the weather perfect. Judging by the smiles in the photos, I think the lesson is that a well-crafted piece of food can drown out quite a bit of road noise.
One more thanks to pass on, and that goes to Rachel Sherwood, food stylist extraordinaire, for her invaluable help wrangling props and making Asher’s delicious food look its best.
I’ll be posting my first behind the scenes video from the shoot in the days (weeks?) to come, so stay tuned!
A few months back I shot a story for Food Management Magazine profiling Jean Ronnei, the Director of Nutrition and Commercial Services for St. Paul Public Schools. I met Jean at one of the public schools some portraits, then I stuck around to photograph a {gulp} lunch hour. Yes, it was a melee.
When I think of school lunches I remember back to some pretty bland, mediocre stuff: the most basic of dishes, with the bare minimum of fruits and vegetables. So I was surprised and heartened to learn more about what Jean’s got going in St. Paul.
Menus have expanded to offer dishes representative of St. Paul’s diverse population. Efforts are made to source ingredients locally. Student helpers scrape food waste into compost bins prior to sending the trays to the dishwasher. As I don’t have kids myself I’m not really up on the state of school food programs in general, but what they’ve done in St. Paul gives me hope.
When I first met Stefan Meyer it was late Spring and he was a few weeks away from kicking off the inaugural season of Growing Lots, a pretty unique urban farm located in my South Minneapolis neighborhood. Back then, Stefan told me the general premise of the farm – take an abandoned and unwanted parking lot in an industrial part of town and turn it in to a farm selling produce to local markets and restaurants, and CSA shares to neighborhood residents – and I knew I needed to photograph his progress. As often happens to start up businesses, Growing Lots has worked through some tweaks to their original idea in order to get the process rolling, but the result is a place that’s even more interesting that I had expected it to be, which is a testament to Stefan’s creativity and dedication to the concepts of urban farming.
I’d definitely recommend checking out the Growing Lots Blog for all the details about what Stefan is up to. It’s inspiring. The general gist goes like this: you hear ‘farm’ and ‘abandoned parking lot’ and you assume that the black top has been ripped out, right? Nope. Stefan is creating beds right over the top. The original concept of covering the whole plot with soil in one swoop didn’t work out, so he’s been going little by little, adding on to the main bed as he’s ready to plant more seedlings. He’s also experimenting with these ingenious planters (made of tomato cages, straw, and soil clocking in at about $1.75 each to construct) that hold an incredible number of plants for such a small footprint.
Mostly by chance, I stopped by on the morning of the farm’s first CSA share pick up day. Here’s Stefan harvesting some kale for one of the CSA boxes.
Hopefully I’ll have a chance to stop by in a month to check the farm’s progress. As the early season greens are harvested, late season things like brassicas and melons are just sprouting up, and I’m excited to see what the farm will look like as Stefan finds more ways to innovate and pull food from the urban landscape.
