The Rake Magazine

Mondays tend to be planning days, right? Well I just want y'all to get this one on your radar...Next week marks Broders' 25th Anniversary, and they're doing it up.

Sunday kicks it off with a multi-course wine dinner. Sign up NOW as the dinner benefits the Slow Food MN Educational Fund and space will surely fill up.

And then it's a week full of love from Tom and Molly Broder at the Cucina Italiana and the Pasta Bar. On special days you'll find 25% off salumi, fresh pastas, olive oils, Tuscan chickens, and their stunning array of imported cheeses. Enter to win great prizes, like a grocery bar full of cheese and crackers, or take in a cooking class, like one in which you learn to create a fresh pasta rotolo.

On Saturday the 12th, their actual Anniversario D'Argento, stop in for some free cake and a generous public tasting: From 10am-2pm the pasta bar will be open for you to sample comparative tastes of wines, cheese, olive oils, salumi, you name it.

This is an amazing gift from the Broders who have been advocates of freshness and high-quality food for longer than most people have been expecting it. A quarter of a century is a HUGE life span for any restuarant and they show no signs of slowing down ... that is something to celebrate. Any of you young culinarians who have yet to sample the Broders' wares, you're missing a measurable piece of local food history. Get there.

ramps, my dears, ramps!

It looks like a nice weekend for a drive, no? Choose wisely and head down to the historic LeDuc Mansion in Hastings for a little food festival sponsored by the Northern Heartland Food and Wine Learning Center.

Check out wine and cheese pairings with Nan Bailly of Alexis Bailly Vineyards and Patrick the Cheeseguy (he's funny). Get into the kick of Spring by sampling some local wild edibles (I'm thinking ramps and morels), maple syrup, duck eggs, honey, herb plants and more. Saturday from 1pm - 4pm.

If you're going to stay metro, you can at least rejoice that it's an open weekend for both the Mpls and St. Paul Farmers Markets. Even if you're only buying flowers, at least you can start the season off right with freshly squeezed lemonade and a Polish for breakfast.

I plan to muck around the yard this weekend. I stopped by Lucia's Take Home the other day, and the fresh bread of the day happened to be the Aztec loaf: slightly laced with chili spice and dotted with nubs of dark chocolate. It's that earthy/spicy chocolate and heat combination that I love. Two loaves please.

The first, I turned into a bread pudding. Not too sweet, just custardy and dusky enough to hit the spot. If you lean on the sweeter side you can either add more sugar or pair it with freshly whipped cream touched with Kahlua. It may not seem Springy, but thankfully there is no season for bread. The second loaf is destined to become Sunday morning's French toast.

Aztec Bread Pudding
1 loaf Lucia's Aztec loaf, ripped into 1 inch pieces
5 eggs
2 cups milk
1 1/2 cups cream
1 tsp vanilla
1 T Penzey's pie spice
1/4 cup sugar
sprinkling of brown sugar

Butter a 13x9 baking dish, pre-heat oven to 350.
Rip or cut bread into hunks and set aside in a big, big bowl.
In a medium bowl, whisk together eggs, milk, cream, vanilla, spices, and sugar. Dump over the bread hunks and mix thoroughly, bread should soak up much of the liquid and look plump and squidgy. Pour into pan, cover and refrigerate for a couple hours. Uncover, sprinkle with brown sugar, and cook for about an hour or until the custard is set and the top looks crunchy.

pimp your Snickers

Maybe I'll be a food stylist. There's clearly a mastery to that.

Maybe I'll open a giant snack store.

Don't want to be a sushi platter...but I might be a wonton origamist.

Somehow, I have to find a gig that let's me mmmmmmmmm my way around the world...

For now, maybe I'll just concentrate on launching my Cake-in-a-Jar empire.

where can a brother get some ribs?

Sunday ended up with a rainy jaunt to the Albertville Outlets. With four kids to clothe in cargo shorts and ridiculously expensive paper-thin tees, I need all the break I can get, so northward we trip.

I'm not a crowd-shopper, I reach my patience limit quickly. Needless to say, having been just a touch hung over from the Fri./Sat. night activities, my fuse might have been even shorter. So, as we finished our rounds and the nuggets complained of hunger, it was all about turning into the first parking lot.

That lot turned out to be Space Aliens Grill & Bar. I know.

Yes, it's everything you think: brightly painted with planets, cheesy black light "magic" on the ceiling, spacey movie posters all around, an alien diorama on every flat surface, and an arcade. It's brilliant.

The kids were WOWED and we laughed as we named all the little dudes and the movies in which they lived. They ran off and spent a little cash and more energy in the arcade playing various things and winning tickets redeemable for prizes. There were ten whole minutes when no one asked me a question.

But most importantly, the food didn't suck. In fact, it was good.

Now, let's remember context: I wasn't looking for any butter-poached lobster or a truffled cheesebuger. Hell, I would have been happy with a Diet Coke for lunch at that point.

Instead, I ordered Martian Munchies, which despite the lame name, are a great idea: seasoned and slowly smoked strips of pork which come to the table like curled little fingers. They are crispy to the bite while remaining tender on the inside, and are snacky addictive.

Their BBQ is a big feature for the menu, and at every chance they'll tout their award for America's Best Ribs from the National BBQ Convention Cook-off in Memphis. Looking around almost every adult was eating ribs.

Kids were happy with chicken fingers, burgers, "fire-roasted" pizza (I just hate that term, roasted pizza, it's just not right) and the like. But it was the fries that killed them: an order of the Outer Space Fries is served in a cone-shaped holder with choice of two dipping sauces. Not just ketchup mind you, there's ranch dressing, nacho cheese, buffalo wing suace, taco sauce, sweet & sour and more to choose from.

Sure it's schticky and gimmicky, the menu has a few too many trademarked silly names (Cosmic Coleslaw TM), but at least they're actually putting some thought into the food. Apparently there's one about to open in Blaine, and rumors of another opening somewhere in the Western Metro in the near future. I have a feeling the invasion will be successful....

the barn at gale woods farm ...

There's a lot of yummy stuff happening this weekend.

It's the weekend of our Restaurant Week, so if you're going to go out, why not choose a place that benefits our cities? Seriously, there are so many great choices: Cafe Twenty-Eight, The Sample Room, the new Spill the Wine, and Luci Ancora are all cool date locations.

Tonight I can't hit RW because it is my friend Kevin's 40th birthday and we're doing it up sexy at the Graves. Of course I'm planning to sneak away from the soiree to check out some snacks at Cosmos, which I loved loved loved under Mr. Daugherty, but have yet to fully experience under Mr. Trojhan. I'll report back next week on that one.

Saturday is busy. I'm getting to the Seward Co-op early to check out their annual CSA fair. Surely it will be packed, which is a beautiful thing. This year they're bringing in some meat producers as well, so I'm seriously going to check out a bit of organic beef and meadow-raised pork. I'm a total kid with my CSA pick-up, it's like a Happy FoodDay present just for me.

After that, I'm headed out to Gale Woods Farm to teach my kids how to lick a tree. It's a working educational farm, so I'm hoping we can see some baby cows or pigs. This Saturday they are focusing on Earth Day, so we might plant some seeds, run through a scavenger hunt, or just sit and appreciate the ever-greening grass.

For the evening activities, we're cooking for twenty. I really wanted to do a lobster and clam bake, but have you seen the price of lobster lately? And then there's the whole digging a pit in my yard thing, for which I'm gung-ho, but apparently no one else is. I've done it stove-top before, but meh. But I think I can build a fire in the fire pit and maybe come up with a spit-roasting contraption. I'll let you know how this one turns out...

Sunday is Earth Day. My 14 year-old son and I will probably go Geocaching. Yes, because we are huge dorks. But along the way, we pick up trash, re-fuel at local coffee shops, and munch on a kicked-up version of trail mix (+ wasabi peas, dark chocolate chips...). A good day on the planet.