Parisian Loaf Pizza

Who are we kidding this is just french bread pizza. Just because you're a food blogger does it mean you have to be some swanky haute cuisine endorsing fool?


At the same rate when we do something we do it right. This nice snack was a callabro with our like minded foodie amigo "The DMB."

Nice crusty loaf rubbed with garlic and oil, sweet sweet caramelized super star onions, extra sharp cheddar, crispy buffalo chicken sausage rounds, drizzled with home made buttery buffalo sauce and pepper jack ranch.

Paired well with a refreshing, easy drinking Allagash White to numb the heat.

Disgustingly good.

Apple Celery Tomato Soup!

Hello there lovely, loyal TSC fanatics.

I am currently on tour right now, and I am writing the bulk of this blog from our van driving across Ohio.I made this soup before I left, and I really wish I hada bowl of it right now (but most of it is in my freezer waiting for me to get home).


This Apple Celery Tomato soup has a light, refreshing taste that makes it a killer side dish or first course. Its notsubstantial enough to satisfy on its own, if you're hungry like a Lumberjack. Like most of my soups, it's pureed which automatically makes it soup-erior.


Ingredients

4 Tbs butter

4 ribs chopped celery

2 chopped granny smith apples with skins

2 large plum tomatoes

1 medium white onion

4 c water

1/2 tsp nutmeg

1 large piece of parchment paper, cut to fit just inside the pot

Heat butter over medium heat, and sweat out the onion. Then add chopped celery, apple and tomato and nutmeg. Allow these to cook for a few minutes and get a nice coat of butter. Add water, and turn heat down. Place parchment over simmering soup and leave on low heat for about an hour.

Blend soup in small batches. Now comes time to strain out all the bullshit: those celery stringsand apple seeds really can ruin your day.

Note: You want a sieve with the smallest holes imaginable, a regular wire sieve didn't do the trick for me on the first pass through. I used my yogurt strainer and it worked perfectly. I suppose lining your wire sieve with some cheese cloth or somethingwould be cool too.


I hope you enjoy this one, I love the light flavor, and I seemingly always have these three ingredients in my house...

-T, T.S.Q

New England Real Ale Exhibition 2008

Cask conditioned beer is real beer.


Cask beer is unfiltered and unpasteurised, secondary fermentation is done directly in the fermenting vessel. These style beers are served in the 55 degree range and have much smoother carbonation due to the secondary fermentation period. CO2 and Nitrogen are not added to draft these beers, handpumps and gravity spigots are used.

I was lucky enough to make it in the door at the 12th annual New England Real Ale Exhibition. I was actually the last person let in, the thirsty mob behind me was kind enough not to attack me. Inside the small hall offered some of the worlds finest cask beers available to you for a mere $5.00 door entry, refundable $5.00 glass fee (our take the loss and keep the glass.) Tasting prices were as follows: pint $5.00, 1/2 pint $2.50, 1/4 pint $1.50.


Some highlights included:

Wachusett Brewing Co: Ryde
Very smooth, extremely drinkable or session-able as they call it, this beer is also flaked with rye for a slight rye flavor. Very nice.

Rogue Ales: Brutal Bitter
refreshing, floral, hoppy.

Moat Mountain: Spruce Tip Brown
This was the most unique of the day, a malty brown ale which was dry hopped with SPRUCE TIPS. It wasn't overpowering like pine sol, it was strange but did work well.

Gwynt y Ddraig: Haymaker medium cider
This was my favorite of the day. I am a huge cider fan and this was the best farmhouse style cider I've ever had in my life period. Oak conditioned, such a ripe, fresh, apple taste, not overwhelmingly sweet, almost herbal undertones. I went back for seconds and was proud to say I got the last one.
Incredible.


Put down the bud light and drink a real ale.

Rogue Sap

Rogue Sap, this is my new favorite roadside refreshment.

Straight from the maple tree the sap drips into the bucket waiting to be boiled down into nice amber syrup.

Clear, just sweet enough and slightly sticky to the lips. I’ve never heard of anyone drinking straight sap before but I’m not one to ever turn down tradition. It was tasty and refreshing; it honestly tasted like simple syrup. You want to be careful though as I was told that raw sap should only be consumed in small quantities otherwise you may give your self an upset stomach.

Maple sap is better used to make maple syrup as it takes 40 gallons of maple sap to make just one gallon of maple syrup. A single tap can produce around a gallon of sap in a day during optimal weather conditions.

The Salted Cod does not condone stealing any hard dripped sap from maple farmers. Luckily I was in “Wheeler” county where they have the rule of the land.

Leaving Behind the Trucker Hat

The New York Times ran an excellent article yesterday on the young farmers movement. The Times interviewed the two young farmers who left life behind in Brooklyn to start the The Hearty Roots Community Farm in upstate New York. I found this article to be quite inspiring as I've thought about doing this myself for some time.

It's nice to see some of my peers finding success in this field...

Click here to continue to the New York Times article.

Happy Johnny Appleseed day

Johnny Appleseed was a very well liked man. The apple variety he planted generally grew fruit that was too sour for eating and baking. Most of his apples were turned to hard cider. Therefore people were excited to see him because he was the guy bringing the booze. He was one of our country's leading conservationist responsible for many plantings and he was born in Leominster MA.

In celebration of this special day I’ve posted the lyrics for all of you to sing the “apple picking song.”

"Picking apples, picking apples,'Til we're done, 'til we're done, Picking all the apples, Picking all the apples,'Til we're done, 'til we're done.

Climb a ladder, climb a ladder,In a tree, in a tree, Hello everybody; Hello everybody, Look at me, look at me.

Making applesauce, making applesauce swish, swish, swish, swish, swish, swish
Pouring the applesauce, pouring the applesauce in a dish, in a dish.

Eating applesauce, eating applesauce,Yum, yum, yum; yum, yum, yum. Eating all the applesauce, eating all the applesauce. Now we're done, now we're done."

Artist unkown

You could also visit an orchard to celebrate…

Norway’s Doomsday Vault

NORWAY DOOMSDAY VAULT
Originally uploaded by a1e2000

This week Norway has opened the "doomsday" seed vault built to protect millions of food crops from climate change, wars and natural disasters. The vault has been built deep within an Arctic mountain in the remote Norwegian island of Svalbard which lies only 600 miles from the North Pole.

The International Herald Tribune has a great in depth article on this.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/28/europe/seed.php?page=1