Minneapolis / St. Paul Food Blog

​Hey, one of them's even called Hot Dish! Minnesota tourism site Explore Minnesota has compiled a list of eight local award-winning wines as its top Minnesota wines for 2009. According to Explore Minnesota's Chuck Lennon Minnesota currently has more than 20 wineries (plus at least five "on the drawing board") in addition to more than 600 vineyards statewide.

The wine that shares our name, Hot Dish Red, is from Alexandria's Carlos Creek Winery, and has won several awards in the last few years. It's also reasonably priced at $18/bottle. Here's how the winery describes it:

Our best-selling and most award-winning wine is also our sweetest red. The bold taste of Valiant comes through with hints of zesty blackberry that perfectly balance the sweetness. Perfect with Tator Tot Hot Dish, it also drinks well with leftovers!

Here's a breakdown of the others:

Rochdale products photo courtesy of www.wedge.coop

​New product alert: The Wedge recently started carrying hand-rolled butter--that lumpy looking thing on the right-hand side of the photo.

The new Rochdale Farms butter and cheeses use milk from a collective of small-herd Amish dairy farmers in Minnesota and Wisconsin who hand-milk and pasture their cows. The butter is produced at a third-generation family run creamery in Richland Center, Wisconsin and made fresh to order in small batches.

While measuring may be slightly less convenient with butter that's formed into misshapen, paper-wrapped logs, there's something reassuringly nostalgic about it--you feel one step closer to the age-old process of churning liquid cream into solid. The butter has a consistent texture and a bold, buttery flavor that was similar to the Organic Valley brand I had in the fridge, but the Rochdale has a slightly stronger tang due to the whey cream that's added as a culture. In any case, it's comparably priced at $4.69/16 oz. and worth checking out for holiday baking.

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​France 44's got some videography chops. Who knew? In its latest newsletter, the Edina wine shop directs us to a short video it made about the locally-sourced Crop Vodka. It's worth watching, if not for its interesting historical tidbits and information about the organic vodka then for the slight discomfort in the narrator's tone when describing "oh so trendy" cucumber martinis and cucumber tonics. Oh, the video also clues you in to a deal on the vodka. We won't give away the secret.

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​Tour de Farm has put together a great eight-minute video recap of the recent dinner it put on at the Walker Art Center, the second in a series of dinners by the Scott Pampuch-fueled org. The July 30 event brought together some serious culinary superpower to make a multi-course meal for over 100 guests under threatening clouds on the museum lawn.

The video's got some great shots of, among other things, the long dinner table on the museum lawn from the museum kitchen above, hands shaking across the table, and the close-up efforts and camaraderie of some of our best local chefs. It's the feelgood promotional food vid of the year.

Tour de Farm's blog also has a three-part recap -- with some kickass photos -- of the event. See what local personalities you can pick out of the crowd.

Video after the jump.

Photo courtesy Bob Guthrie

Mini kiwis! We can't wait to get our hands on these.

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We can't wait to try one of these little guys! The Pi Press reports that a smaller breed of kiwi, one suited to growth in cold temperatures is being introduced to Minnesota growers:

"They're the size of a large grape, no fuzz on the skin, so you can just pop them in your mouth," said Jim Luby, a fruit-breeding specialist with the University of Minnesota. The taste, he added, "is a little more sprightly."

If you can't wait for the kiwis to show up at your farmers market, Luby will be guiding a tour of two area kiwi orchards later this month with grower Eric Theship-Rosales and U of M's kiwi curator (um, best. title. ever.) Bob Guthrie.

Kiwi tour lowdown after the jump:

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A couple new vineyards are joining the ranks of Minnesota wineries in upcoming months. Sounds good to us! The Mankato Free Press (we love you Mankato!) reports that Indian Island Winery in Janesville will open up shop early next year.

The family-run vineyard is growing about a dozen kinds of grapes, the Press reports, including some developed by the U of M. "The (grape) market has been just as strong as ever as more and more wineries come on line," the article quotes Ray Winter saying. "Even though there are more and more vineyards there's still good demand."

The article says another winery, Chankaska Creek Ranch, is slated to open in the next couple of years years between Mankato and St. Peter. There are about 30 licensed wineries in Minnesota it says.

Photo by Lee Prohofsky

Oh so serious! A Guinness "adjudicator" deems a 150-pound Minnesota-made cupcake the world's biggest.

A 150+ pound cupcake presented at the Mall of America for SpongeBob SquarePants' 10th birthday won top honors from the Guinness Book of World Records this past weekend as the world's biggest. According to cakes.com, the cupcake's Anoka-based baker, the monstrosity included 15 pounds of fudge filling (like two newborn babies) and 60 pounds of yellow icing (about like, oh, say, an adult Labrador).

And what deserving soup kitchen got to distribute the cake to its hungry customers? Why it wasn't a soup kitchen at all, but a pig farm! Out of concerns that too many people would only get plain cake in their serving, the company elected to let a bunch of hogs get in on the celebration. As a consolation, cakes.com gave away 4,000 individual cupcakes to mall patrons.

Um, Happy Birthday SpongeBob.

I had exactly three dollars left at the farmers market this weekend and was about to leave but got curious about a mini-clutch of people near the back. It was the Swede Lake Farms table, and off to one side, they had a giant basket of garlic scapes -- the crazy-looking giant chive-like tops of garlic bulbs -- selling for $3/bundle. Sold!

We'd ask that all Hot Dish readers eschew the epic environmental catastrophe that is bottled water and drink tap water instead. But while we're weaning ourselves off the habit, we hope that Boxed Water is Better, a Grand Rapids, MI, company that packages Minnesota water in boxes, a less resource-intensive packaging choice, will start distributing its product here.

Happy 100th to Pearson's Candy, makers of the iconic nut goodie, mint patties, the salted nut roll (my fave), and more. Kathie Jenkins has a nice article in the Pi Press this week about Pearson's history--it's now the 28th largest candy company in America. Though Pearson's is dwarfed by companies like Mars, Hershey's, and Nestle, which produce 90% of the candy in the US, it will always hold a special place in Minnesotans' hearts.

Lent's over, but if you're still hankering for Friday fish fry, I came across this great Wash Post article about one of the Midwest's best-loved swimmers, the smelt. If the article makes you hungry, they're always on the menu at Red Stag, plus I think they sometimes have 'em at Sea Salt or can pick some up at Coastal and make 'em at home.

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Ten thousand may be my favorite hyperbolic modifier for spicing up conversations ("she hates him with the fire of ten thousand suns," "she wants to have 10K babies with him") which is why the name of the new FireLake house wine, Ten Thousand Vines, created especially for the hotel eatery by Morgan Creek Vineyards in New Ulm, makes me even more excited to try it.

Hot Dish mentioned 10K Vines when the wine was first released, but I'm blogging about it again because now FireLake is offering a $9 flight comprised of Ten Thousand Vines, a French Pinot Noir, and a Spanish Grenache blend, to see if guests can pick out the Minnesota-made wine, a blend of Minnesota's three most notable cold-hardy wine grapes: LaCrescent, Frontenac, and the brand new Marquette. (FireLake also sells Ten Thousand Vines by the glass for $9.00 or by the bottle for $29.00.) Also, having visited Morgan Creek Vineyard, I wanted to mention that it makes for a great road trip--the vineyard is scenic, plus they have a beautiful tasting room that hosts jazz nights and other events.

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New Ulm-based Morgan Creek Vineyards last week released a new red wine, exclusively through Minneapolis's FireLake Grill House, featuring the Marquette grape developed by the University of Minnesota.

Ten Thousand Vines is a blend of Frontenac and LaCrescent grapes with the specially-developed Marquette. It sells at the restaurat for $9/glass and $29/bottle. FireLake bought the vineyard's entire 2007 vintage.

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Time to dust off your tapping spouts, Minnesotans. It's maple syrup season!

courtesy of the Golden Gopher Bar

The lush interior conjures memories of Minnesota.

The new issue of Newsweek features a fascinating article about a Kogi, a Korean taco truck in L.A.

What makes Kogi interesting is that it is the world's first "viral restaurant"--and that's not nearly as scary as it sounds.

And it just happened to be parked outside a bar with a distinctly Minnesota name: the Golden Gopher bar.

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Back in the 80s, when surburban high school kids spent their Saturdays taking the bus to Uptown to peruse the cassettes at Oarfolkjokeopus, the Hennepin-Lake McDonald's was a neighborhood icon.

Ever wondered who came up with the Laughing Cow, Aunt Jemima, or the Gerber Baby? Or which company thought it was going to sell canned peas with a grumpy gray gnome in a scruffy bearskin?

Beer and Totino's anyone?

Pasties originated in Europe, but became regional fare in the Upper Peninsula.(Photo courtesy of Justhungry.com)

Minnesota foods? Think fast! Okay, we've got hot dish, sweet corn, wild rice, - and if you're from the Iron Range, you would probably add pasty to the list. If you've met anyone who has grown up on pasties or who has family members who have, you know what I'm talking about. For pasty-lovers, the connection runs deep. It's more than just a food, it's a cultural identifier.

Ahhh yes, Christmas. Have you had your æbleskiver and gløgg?

Strange, but true: People have been known to polish furniture with Spam. Apparently the fatty gel does wonders to shine up wood. (Not recommended for households with kids or pets, unless you want teethmarks on the coffee table.) Here our our top 5 uses for Spam that have nothing to do with ingesting it:

The classic Monty Python skit