Food Truck Gathering (and why I wound up eating at Max's Empanadas instead)

Last night's food truck rally was, by most accounts, a big success - especially if you were one of the many food trucks that showed up to non-stop patrons drooling over burritos (Curbside Café - Twitter: @Curbside_Cafe), cupcakes (my favorite: Iced Gems Baking - Twitter: @icedgemsbaking), crepes (Creperie Breizh - Twitter: @creperiebreizh), lobster rolls and pulled pork (Silver Platter), haute Southern (Miss Shirley's - Twitter: @missshirleys) and so much more. If you were a food truck operator, you got a LOT of revenue and publicity last night.

You also probably got a lot of people early on that you had to send away because you ran out of food. This was the one failing of the Food Truck Gathering, and it was a big one. The event was supposed to last from 5 to 10pm, so understandably many people - myself included - came at a more leisurely pace, say 7ish, when we found this:


As popular as food trucks are, I have to say the sheer volume of patrons did, in fact, surprise me. What did not go through my head at the time I snapped that photo was, "Gee, I hope they don't run out before I can get something to eat!" But as I stood in the line for Creperie Breizh, exactly that happened: in line for 45 minutes, the woman in the window let the group of women right in front of me know that they had just run out of batter for their crepes. This was about 8:30.

So near, and yet soooooooo far...

Needless to say, I was frustrated. But I knew there was no reason to take this out on them or on anyone, for that matter. It wasn't the food trucks' fault, nor the patrons, nor even the organizers: nobody could have foreseen just how big this was going to be. And please note that Creperie Breizh was one of the later food trucks to run out of food - a few had run out by 7, only two hours into the event! Plus, the few remaining lines of still-functioning trucks, such as the Gypsy Queen Café (Twitter: @thegypsytruck) and Dangerously Delicious Pies trucks, had experienced a massive growth in their lines just as I found out that I had waited in line for nothing.

So instead, I cut my losses and tapped the massive array of restaurants awaiting me in Little Italy. Thanks to my new Android phone, which now has this Urbanspoon app, I was able to price some restaurants and just how well liked they were if I wasn't familiar. I walked right into the priciest part of Little Italy - Sabatino's and Aldo's? Love them but cannot afford them right now. But then I saw Max's Empanadas, an Argentinian restaurant, grocery and wine store in the heart of the neighborhood (Argentina has a sizable Italian population anyway, so in a way Max's is, technically, sort of Italian). So I figured I would think outside the box and head in there instead.

Not a food truck.

Max's is small and brightly lit, but with warm earthy colors in its dining area. Its big thing is empanadas, and they have a wide variety, from chicken to beef to ham & cheese, from chorizo to the delicious sweet beef empanada that I eventually bought as part of a $10 combo with a second chorizo empanada (your choice of empanadas, though a few special ones cost 40 cents extra) and Argentinian potato salad, with parsley, olive oil and lemon juice. If you get a chance, please stop in Max's and get some empanadas. You can buy them individually, take them with you, eat in their dining area - and mine came out fast, before I even sat down. With the thirst-quenching Quilmes cerveza (about $4 or $5), it was a filling meal. And I was so appreciative of the fact that I actually got to eat last night, too!


As an addendum to the Food Truck Gathering: they have to do this differently next time. Though I was fortunate in that the experience forced me to find a new place to eat in Little Italy, it shouldn't have come to that. And again, nobody could have foreseen the sheer volume of patrons, lest most of the food trucks wouldn't have run out of food by 8:30 (or well before in some cases). So some thoughts to make sure that most if not all of the food truck aficionados get to eat next time (both from me and from other things I have read on Twitter):

1. For the organizers: Put it in a larger place if you can, to alleviate the ridiculously large and often confusing lines (this was some advice a Twitter user wrote to Richard Gorelick at the Sun). Some cities - Los Angeles, Washington - often experience a lunch rush where literally a dozen food trucks will be lined up over a long stretch. Portland, Oregon, has a dedicated space just for food trucks! As for Baltimore: I am not quite sure where this could happen. Perhaps the Inner Harbor? Under the Jones Falls? It should be somewhere downtown or near there, so as many people can access this as possible.

2. Also for the organizers: Shorten the time, so that latecomers who show up three hours before the event is supposed to end (or only two hours after it started) will actually be able to find food. Waiting for almost an hour to leave empty handed is not fun.

3. For the patrons: Come early if you are eating, and expect lines.

4. For the food trucks: This may be easier said than done, since I have never run a food truck, but bring more than you expect to sell! Again, most of the food trucks had completely run out of food well before the event ended, which led to some very apologetic vendors. Now that we all know just how big the next one is going to be, you know how much to bring now!

Here is hoping that I get something to eat next time this happens!

Tidbits: Early July Edition

A few things I've been eating lately:

* I have been playing a lot of soccer lately - both pickup and league, and my shins hurt like hell (note to self: find something to make these shinguards more, er, comfortable to wear while running around for one or two hours). Last night after one such pickup game down in DC (where I did pretty well, considering my lack of experience), I headed to Adams Morgan for a quick beer and bite before making the long slog home. I ended up at the cozy L'Enfant Cafe & Bar where I ordered a delicious savory crepe of salmon & boursin cheese ($13). It was a bargain, though the refreshing cherry beer I ordered, normally served with ice, clocked in at $10! That kind of took me by surprise (note to self: ask how much the damn beer costs).

* Whenever I eat Indian, I often gravitate to one or two recipes that are tried and true favorites: chicken tikka masala, saag gosht (lamb with spinach), murgh makhani (butter chicken), etc. At Mughal Garden the other night I settled on something somewhat different: their lamb methi ($14), which is lamb in a fenugreek sauce (hence the methi, which is fenugreek). It's not a taste I can easily describe, because I don't have a reference point. It's a very mellow dish, a lovely one with a lot of sauce you can soak up with much of your garlic naan. I recommend it.

* I haven't been to Rocket 2 Venus lately. I did go last week, and could not get over how quickly I was seated... and how my waiter just completely forgot about me (very irritated about that). Fortunately after about ten minutes of tapping my fingers and checking my email, a waiter did come by to find out if I was being helped (nope), and my service was quite fast after that. R2V is a place with such an eclectic menu that you can spend a good long while trying to figure out what to order - maybe that was a plus for waiting while people seated after me ended up ordering first. After all the classic American, Southern, Western, Chesapeake, Cajun and Korean offerings, I ordered the bulgogi plate with fried rice ball, mashed potatoes & kimchi ($13). It was a very satisfying experience, with the soft bulgogi, kimchi and potatoes providing a flavorful contrast against each other. Plus, my food came out much faster than I had anticipated.

* Alas, all the area Super Fresh stores are now history, excepting for the one downtown on N. Charles Street. Some of them are already slated to become something else (like the one in Hampden, for example). The rest are just sitting around, twiddling their thumbs. I hope a Harris Teeter or something moves into the one on Putty Hill.

* I realized the other day: sometimes you want a nice, hearty breakfast of pancakes, sausage, bacon, etc., just like Mom used to make. And other times, all you want is a bowl of kimchi flavored noodles (second kimchi reference in this post, by the way).

* Find out in a few weeks what happened to this little guy that I got at the Maine Avenue Fish Market in Washington, DC, for all of $7 a pound:


* Soda update: I have been sticking to about 2 cans a day. With Dad in the hospital and the occasional late long drive back from DC I have allowed myself a little more of the stuff. But on the contrary, I have also found myself just normally drinking less. It's been a long time since I have ordered it in the restaurant, preferring beer, tea or water (I did order a soda at Lou's City Bar after a game the other day, to give me a shot of caffeine - which worked). But overall I have been going through a good bit less of it lately.

* And finally: I know he is moving out soon (er, being forced out by our landlord), but could my idiot neighbor please stop putting all his crap out by the side of the road for the trash and recycling people to just leave there!?!? It's bad enough he used to go through my recycling bin for cans, and the only reason he doesn't seem to do this anymore is because I have started putting it in a place where he is too lazy to look.

Ouch, did I just let all that pour out? Maybe I should smack him with one of my shinguards?

Because it's the Fourth of July

Er, well this is definitely a different take on our national birthday! Courtesy of RuPaul's Drag Race and one of our favorite drag queens, Manila Luzon.

Tags: Gay Video & Lesbian Movies, Logo: Fierce TV

Food Truck Rally in Baltimore!

Get ready to rrrrrrrrrrresauraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaant!

(Okay that was stupid. Anywho...)

Charm City is finally hitting the foodie big leagues, as several of her food trucks are clamoring together in Harbor East on Friday, July 8 (that's this Friday, y'all) for a Food Truck Rally. It will be at the more-than-occasional venue of the Silver Platter truck (421 Central Avenue). Attendees so far, according to the above-linked page at the Baltimore Sun website, should include:

* GrrChe (Twitter: @grrche - gourmet grilled cheeses)
* Gypsy Queen (Twitter: @thegypsytruck - As their website says, they join "inventive cuisine with cheeky-smart ass street food". Smart ass food sounds enticing to me.)
* Iced Gems (Twitter: @icedgemsbaking - The gourmet cupcake truck and bakery that I have oft raved about here and on Twitter)
* Miss Shirley's (Twitter: @missshirleys - I didn't realize one of the city's favorite brunch locales now comes to you!)
* Souper Freak (Twitter: @souperfreaky - delicious soups and sandwiches. Oh sweet Jesus, I caught myself almost saying "sammies")

I assume the Silver Platter truck, with its blue crab tostadas, buttermilk calamari and New England lobster rolls, will be there too, but I saw no word in the Sun. One can hope. I haven't gotten a chance to try it yet.

Snacking State-by-State: Kansas I - BREAD!!!

I am soon leaving the Midwest, but first taking a detour, finally, into the Great Plains, land of amber waves of grain, sunflowers, corn and so on. Before anything else, however, I have to figure out just what constitutes the cuisine of the "Great Plains" in the first place.

Official Name: State of Kansas
State Nicknames: The Sunflower State; The Wheat State; The Breadbasket of the World
Admission to the US: January 29, 1861 (#34)
Capital: Topeka (4th largest city)
Other Important Cities: Wichita (largest city); Overland Park (2nd largest); Kansas City (no, the one in Kansas: 3rd largest)
Region: Midwest, Great Plains; East North Central (US Census)
RAFT Nations: Bison
Bordered by: Nebraska (north); Missouri (east); Oklahoma (south); Colorado (west)
Official State Foods and Edible Things: buffalo (animal); wild native sunflower (flower & flower emblem); honeybee (insect - its honey is what is edible)
Some Famous & Typical Foods: prairie foods, including Native American and pioneer foods; wheat, wheat and more wheat; sunflowers; honey; did I mention wheat?

In her cookbook Prairie Home Cooking, Judith M. Fertig discusses her reaction as a girl to moving to Kansas in the 1980's - an exciting expanse of prairie, as European immigrants discovered a century beforehand. Today, the prairies are a mixture of culinary traditions from Europe and Native North America, as seen in their festivals, which "[celebrate] cultures as diverse as Czech, Norse, Russian Mennonite, and Sioux" (Fertig 1999: xi). The foods of the prairies are part and parcel the foods of the Midwest, and Fertig describes them as a culinary oral history of sorts, connecting the past to the haute present:

Although Sunday dinner at grandma's is but a memory for many far-flung families, foods that say "comfort," "family," and "farm" are returning to favor. They get a lot of play in food magazines and they are being reinterpreted by well-known chefs in major cities [Fertig 1999: xii]

She mentions noodles and dumplings, relish trays and homemade pickles, bread - homemade - and beef, potatoes and wheat beers as major parts of prairie life. I hear her on the beer.

Kansas, specifically, is a major exporter of wheat, as the Kansas Wheat Commission points out: Kansas is "on average" the country's leading producer and storer of wheat, producing about 20% of the nation's wheat (Kansas Wheat Commission, 2011). I can't even begin to grasp the different varieties of wheat they grow there.

Since wheat is so important to the "Breadbasket of the World", a loaf of bread made sense for my first recipe. But in the spirit of Kansas, I sought out a recipe that also included some of the other very important ingredients from the state: sunflowers (the state flower) - harvested by native peoples for many generations before Kansas even existed, and honey - produced by the state insect, the honeybee. I was surprised at the sheer number of recipes for "Honey Sunflower Bread". King Arthur Flour has an excellent recipe that they even call "Kansas Sunflower Bread" featuring both hand-kneaded and bread maker versions. Plus the Baked Bree blog has a lovely honey wheat sunflower bread recipe where the author, Bree Hester, kneads it in the bread maker and then bakes it in the oven. But in the end, I went with the one straight off the Kansas Wheat Commission's website.

The recipe: (Honey) Sunflower Wheat Bread

To make this thoroughly Kansan bread you will need the following (measurements can be found in the Kansas Wheat Commission's recipe):


* whole wheat flour and bread flour (I had just enough leftover bread flour that I didn't need the extra $3.50 bag I bought just in case; I had plenty of whole wheat flour)
* milk (skim but all I had was whole)
* honey
* cracked wheat (I have no experience with this stuff and have never used it before. I bought bulgur wheat in bulk)
* sunflower seeds (salted, though I ended up getting unsalted, also in bulk)
* butter, salt, turmeric (had them all)
* orange juice and orange rind (I forgot to add this last part after accidentally adding a little extra dash of orange juice)
* active dry yeast (one packet - this I ran out of)


Unlike most bread recipes I have followed, this one featured a simple first step: cook the bulgur wheat in just enough water until it boils out, about five minutes or so but watch it so it doesn't burn.


Next add the ingredients in the order you normally would for your bread maker. Since I had a newly-purchased second hand bread maker - the Zojirushi BBCC Q10 at the Goodwill for all of $8 - I had to figure out just what order I needed to add the ingredients. I ended up adding the liquids first, then the flours and solids, and then finally the yeast.

Usually one puts it in the middle of the pile of ingredients.

Now for the really hard part: set your bread maker for the "whole grain" setting. On my new bread maker, that's about 4 hours.

Here it is at the onset - 4 hours and 10 minutes to be exact.

At the 3:45 mark

And after all the kneading you get here, ready to bake, around 54 minutes left

Four hours later you get this:


The one thing I found disappointing was the fact that the flavor was not very honey-like. I couldn't taste it at all, really. It's still a nice, light bread, with nice specks of bulgur and sunflower poking out from all over. And it is an easy bread, even with the cracked wheat (which, again, I have little experience using). All in all, a good use of Kansas' best ingredients. Again, however, I would have to add a tablespoon more of honey. hopefully for a more honeyed taste.


It slices nicely too.

Sources:

Fertig, Judith M. Prairie Home Cooking: 400 Recipes That Celebrate the Bountiful Harvests, Creative Cooks, and Comforting Foods of the American Heartland. The Harvard Common Press: Boston, 1999. Also partly available on Google Books.

Hester, Bree (BakedBree). "Honey Wheat Sunflower Bread Recipe". Published August 24, 2010.

Kansas Wheat Commission. Facts About Kansas Wheat. Kansas Wheat, copyright 2009.

Kansas Wheat Commission. "Sunflower Wheat Bread". Kansas Wheat, copyright 2011.

King Arthur Flour. "Kansas Sunflower Bread". King Arthur Flour, copyright 2011.

Some information also obtained from Wikipedia's "Kansas" page and other pages, and the Food Timeline State Foods link to "Kansas".

I'm gonna rock yer body til Canada Day

I'll stick with Orange Julius because poutine is in very short supply down here.



Happy Canada Day, eh!

Snacking State-by-State Mashup 4: Huckleberry-Bacon Cheese Tarts with Nutella Powder

For my next mash-up, I had to figure out a way to use up leftover ricotta, sour cream, huckleberry jam and "never-fail" pie crust a la Marcia Adams' Heartland cookbook. Since I didn't have enough pie dough or huckleberry jam to make an actual pie I settled for several smaller tarts. And then I added bacon.

The mashup recipe: Huckleberry-Bacon Cheese Tarts with Nutella Powder


With other mashup recipes, I may look up similar recipes to figure out logistical things: how long to fry the lumpia, how to wrap the maki roll. This time, I more or less followed another recipe - not for tarts but for cheesecake. The recipe comes from Sorrento Cheese's Ricotta Cheese Dessert Recipes (available in a fully searchable PDF). Scroll down to page 4 and you will see the recipe for "New York Style Cheesecake with Strawberries". How to use this recipe to make tarts? I followed the cheesecake portion of the recipe, with some modifications - adding an ingredient here or there, but specifically cutting down the quantities by about a third.

Makes 6 to 8 tarts

Ingredients (state flag indicates State-by-State post where ingredient was featured. Ingredients with no flag were not specifically used for any one post):

Tarts:

leftover pie crust dough (enough for 6 to 8 tarts)

3 pieces bacon, cooked to crispy

2 to 3 tablespoons huckleberry jam (or blueberry jam if you must, due to the limited availability of huckleberry jam outside the Northwest)

5 ounces ricotta cheese

1/4 cup sour cream

whipping cream (whipped, for topping)

1/4 cup soft cream cheese

1/2 cup sugar, plus extra for sweetening the whipping cream

dash vanilla

flour (for rolling out the dough)

1 egg

1 teaspoon lemon zest

juice of lemon

dash salt

Nutella Powder Topping:

25 grams tapioca maltodextrin (measured out on digital scale)

75 grams nutella (measured out on digital scale)

You will also need 6 to 8 small tart tins (I got mine for 60 cents each at the Bed Bath and Beyond), and oil for the insides of the tarts


First, roll out the pie dough. I was using dough left over from the sugar cream pie I made from Marcia Adams' Heartland cookbook. I had just enough dough for six tarts, so that's how many I made. Oil up the sides of the tart tins and lay the dough in them. If and when they break, just patch them up with little pieces of dough. Poke the bottoms and sides several times with a fork.


For the cheese tart filling, measure out your ricotta (I had the digital scale, so I might as well have used it).

Mix together the ricotta, sour cream and cream cheese, stirring for a minute, and then add the sugar, egg, vanilla and lemon.

Action shot!

Assemble your tarts thusly:


First add some of the cheese filling - it will be somewhat thin.


Next, drop a small dollop of huckleberry jam in the center of each tart


And then sprinkle bacon pieces atop each tart.


Bake in the oven for 15 to 20 minutes at 350 degrees, and let cool.

You could just eat them like this, but you don't want to do that, do you? I chose to flex my nascent molecular gastronomy muscles yet again, hoping to get something more powder-like than the olive oil powder that I had made a while back. By following the video that Will Goldfarb filmed for Gourmet magazine on how to make nutella powder - and yes, this is more or less his recipe and procedure, so credit where it is due - I actually did this time.

For the nutella powder (or "soil" as Goldfarb calls it), measure out your nutella and tapioca maltodextrin exactly.


I was surprised at how much smaller 75 grams of nutella were...


...than 25 grams of tapioca maltodextrin.

Here's where I made my mistake before, I think. I used a hand whisk, which was correct, but whisked the olive oil and tapioca maltodextrin very quickly. What Goldfarb does is whisk it sloooooowly.


Yes, it still clumped inside the whisk at first, but it did so in the video, so I decided to be patient this time and keep at it.


In just a few short minutes, the clump broke itself down, and I got a wet sand sort of powder. Patience - not one of my virtues - paid off this time.


If you want whipped cream as an additional garnish, whip it up and sweeten it, and put it on the side, or top the tart first with the whipped cream and then the nutella powder.

The tarts were not terribly sweet, which was a nice way to let the sweetness of the huckleberry and the nutella come out. I don't know if cooks in the Northwest combine bacon and huckleberry very often, but in this recipe they went together very well. I imagine the same could be said for the closely-related blueberry, but that's for me to try another time.

In the pipeline...

Of course, blogging has been light due to the recent family emergency. However, some things are indeed in the works:

* Find out in a few weeks why I went all the way to Starbucks just to get a straw. And how this relates to the sheer overload of mint I have in my garden.

* Gas prices have finally gotten below $3.50. Hanover, Elkridge and Linthicum await my next trip Back to the Beltway.

* They sell alligator meat at Lexington Market, don't they?

* With Dad in the hospital, it's time to examine another local hospital's cafeteria and its food offerings: cheap for what you are getting, but worth that equally cheap price.

Flying Green Tomatoes

Yesterday's installment of NPR's Fresh Air featured Barry Estabrook, author of Tomatoland, which investigates just why our plump and beautiful supermarket tomatoes also taste like soggy styrofoam. In short, they are bred for weight and aesthetics, not for taste, because the farmers get paid by the pound, not by the "Mmmm":

"For the last 50 or more years, tomato breeders have concentrated essentially on one thing and that is yield — they want plants that yield as many or as much as possible," writer Barry Estabrook tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "They also want those fruits to be able to stand up to being harvested, packed, artificially turned orange [with ethylene gas] and then shipped away and still be holding together in the supermarket a week or 10 days later." [NPR 2011]

His opening vignette with Gross discusses how a few of these mutant Florida green tomatoes flew off a truck near his car while he was driving down the road. They almost broke his window. But what he later saw was not damaged tomatoes, but still perfectly formed and firm green tomatoes on their way to have whatever it is Big Ag does with that ethylene gas to them to turn them red extra fast.

Click on the link at the beginning to go to the podcast page.

Snacking State-by-State: Iowa II - It just ain't salad without bacon grease

This project would have been so much more difficult without the insights and travel experience of Jane and Michael Stern, whose Roadfood books have been cited and utilized various times throughout this State-by-State round-up. I turn again to the semi-regular guests of NPR's Splendid Table for the lowdown on a few more Iowa curiosities.

Official Name: State of Iowa
State Nicknames: The Hawkeye State
Admission to the US: December 28, 1846 (#29)
Capital: Des Moines (largest city)
Other Important Cities: Cedar Rapids (2nd largest), Davenport (3rd largest), Sioux City (4th largest)
Region: Midwest; East North Central (US Census)
RAFT Nations: Cornbread & BBQ, Bison
Bordered by: Minnesota (north); North Dakota, Nebraska (west); Missouri (south); Illinois, Wisconsin & the Mississippi River (east)
Official State Foods and Edible Things: none
Some Famous & Typical Foods: again, typical Midwestern foods, especially corn; Native American and pioneer foods; soybeans; Red Delicious and "Hawkeye" apples; Dutch, German, Amish and Scandinavian foods

One dish that specifically caught my attention speaks to Iowa's notable Dutch-American community, this time in and around central Iowa. When the Sterns described the dish that Sully and Pella residents refer to as Dutch lettuce, my mind went back to my visit to Amsterdam a few years ago, where I sampled so many wonderful things. And then I sampled Dutch food. Don't get me wrong: the stroopwafels and pannenkoeken were lovely. The other Dutch curiosities were, well, niet lekker. Let's just say I won't be eating hutspot again.

That said, I know I should not pan a whole cuisine. This last month, I learned that in my exploration of Midwestern food. This time, I better give Dutch food another chance. And I will do that with the dish that the Sterns describe as a combo of, at least, "hard-boiled eggs, bacon, sweet-and-sour dressing, and, of course, lettuce" (Stern and Stern 2009: 241). This time I figured I would give Roadfood a rest, and try to find another recipe for Dutch lettuce. I was successful, finding a recipe on the website for the Pella Historical Village. Their Dutch recipe section features a slew - er, a slaw - of Dutch recipes for breads, desserts, soups and salads. Did I mention their recipe for "Dutch Mess"? It's the Stern recipe, but with potatoes.

The recipe: Dutch Lettuce with Potatoes (Slaw met Aardappels, or Dutch Mess)


For this version of Dutch lettuce, originally given to the Pella Historical Village by Jo Harmeling & Jenny Messer (of Pella, I assume), you will need:

* lettuce (well duhhhhh. Fortunately the lettuce in my garden is literally exploding right now. I had lettuce. Lots of it).
* potatoes (had them. This does not seem to be a common thread running through all Dutch lettuce recipes)
* green onion or sweet onion, chopped (the Sterns' recipe calls for sweet onion; PHV's needs scallions instead. I picked up a bunch for a few bucks).
* hard boiled eggs (had them)
* bacon (both the bacon itself and the grease, which you will need below. Yes, I actually ran out of bacon, so I needed to buy some - $5 for a package at Harris Teeter)
* the dressing that you will make from the following: the aforementioned bacon grease, plus apple cider vinegar, one raw egg (yes, in addition to all the hard boiled ones), sugar, flour and butter (had them all)


Before making the dressing, prep your other components.


Wash the lettuce and chop or rip it up into medium or small pieces. The Sterns suggest a crispy lettuce like iceberg, but I settled for what was growing in my garden (which tastes better than iceberg lettuce anyway). Boil the potatoes till soft. You will smash them a little, or at least chop them up. It doesn't have to look perfect. Also boil your eggs so you will have them ready to put in your salad.

Next, make the sweet-and-sour dressing. This is actually the most tedious part, and I don't think I got it quite right.


First, melt the butter, and blend in a little flour, and then some water.


As you bring that to a boil, mix in a separate bowl your raw egg, sugar and apple cider vinegar. Add this to the pot and let it come back to a boil.


Next, fry (or cheat like I did and microwave) up the bacon. The recipe suggests you cut up the bacon before cooking it. Save the bacon grease. You will end up adding it to the dressing. I put all of mine into the pot, since I didn't really get that much bacon grease. Stir occasionally and keep it heated on the stove.

And it may or may not look like this.

Now to assemble the Dutch lettuce.


Start with a layer of potatoes.


Next, add some of your lettuce.


Then some sliced hard-boiled egg...


...some of the bacon...


...and a good amount of your dressing.


Finish it off with the rest of the potatoes, lettuce, eggs and bacon.

You are supposed to serve this up while the dressing is hot, though for leftovers, I just ate it all cold.


I have to say, my expectations were not very high for this salad. However, I was pleasantly surprised by it. The flavors and textures together made for an extremely hearty salad. This is no side salad we're talking about. With the eggs, potatoes, bacon and dressing over all that lettuce, this is a meal unto itself. It lasted me for several days. Though the dressing is, again, tedious to make, this is one salad I would be willing to try again. Dutch food is again redeemed!

We're not quite out of the Midwest yet. Somewhere nearby, just south of Nebraska, just west of Missouri, lies Kansas with its prairies, wheat fields and twisters. And I don't even have to go over any rainbows to get there. Y'hear me, Auntie Em? I'm comin' for you, express-style.

Sources:

Pella Historical Village. "Old Dutch Recipes - Pella Tulip Time". Copyright 2011 Pella Historical Village.

Stern, Jane, and Michael Stern. 500 Things to Eat Before It's Too Late. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: Boston, 2009.

Some information also obtained from Wikipedia's "Iowa" page and other pages, and the Food Timeline State Foods link to "Iowa".