Foraging for Dinner

Though I love to cook, I can’t approach the kinds of things Brett Laidlaw does in his extraordinary cookbook.
by Charlie Leck

Do you like to cook and do unique things with food?
There are hundreds and hundreds of places to go on the web to find extraordinary information about cooking. I’ve culled through many of them. For uniqueness, one blog stands out among the crowd for me. I’ve recommended it before and I’m recommending it again. It is Trout n’ Caviar.

Brett Laidlaw is the blogger there and Brett loves to cook. He can bake French bread as well as the French, but that’s only the beginning. This guy is extraordinary because he loves to go out into the countryside to forage for natural items and turn them into delectable masterpieces.

Sometime ago, Brett came out with a book in conjunction with the Minnesota Historical Society. It’s called Trout Caviar (Recipes from a Northern Forager). I should have told you about it months ago. It is great fun. It is, I guess, only for the adventurous cook who wants to climb to places he/she hasn’t been before. You can find out about the book in the right margin of Brett’s blog or you can go here.

For instance, if you want to find out about cooking pork belly, here is an extraordinary blog by Brett:

“Prior to the era of nose-to-tail/free-range/locally sourced/compassionate carnivorism, before this time of intense scrutiny of all things ingestible, when it seems as if there's a semi-professional charcuterie in every other pantry, pork belly was basically just the punchline in a hoary old Midwestern gag. ‘Pork belly futures up a quarter,’ in the daily radio report from the mercantile exchange (on WCCO-AM eight-three-oh), epitomized all things quaint and farmy, and a way of life which, to the residents of the burgeoning metropolis, was about as relevant as covered wagon days.”

That paragraph alone shows you just how good Brett is with words. Try him – you’ll like him!

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