About

Welcome to FoodIowa

Welcome to my blog on food in Iowa, where I’ve lived and tried to eat well since 1993. I believe it is a buddhist belief that one ought to treasure every meal, because of their finite number. I subscribe to this belief, and my blog in this sense is an effort to help others find ways to make every meal count in Iowa. It is a rich and ever more diverse culinary landscape–and still one of the best places in the world to grow or find food (in a hunter-gatherer sense). And in the past decade, there is a growing availability of ingredients from around the world, both in local supermarkets (even in a small town like Grinnell), and in the numerous ethnic markets that have sprung up everywhere to serve the new waves of immigrants who have made Iowa their home.

Foraging in the Heartland

I’ve been foraging since I was in the 3rd or 4th grade, as I grew up in Helena, Montana. We hiked and roamed Mt. Helena, a beautiful mountain that rises two blocks away from my old elementary school. We found and ate serviceberry and wild asparagus (brought in by Chinese immigrants who followed the gold rush), black and orange currants, and in the 6th grade I began to do research, reading books like Stalking the Wild Asparagus by Euell Gibbon. And I’ve never stopped. Over the years, in Montana and in places I’ve lived since (including the west coast, the midwest, and Eastern Europe), I’ve gathered wild mushrooms, caught and smoked trout, shot ducks and geese, picked huckleberries, hunted partridge, grouse, and pheasant.

I was excited when I got a job at Grinnell College, and about the move to Grinnell, a small town in rural Iowa, a region famous for its pheasants, and I wasn’t disappointed in that regard, and in the early days saw more rooster pheasants in a day than I’d see in a season in Montana, where I grew up hunting for the bird in the deep ravines and thick brush in eastern Montana. And Iowa introduced me to venison as well. Deer feed on corn and soy, Iowa’s two crops, which makes for some of the best tasting venison I’ve ever experienced (though maybe not as wild or organic as I’ve also thought, given the use of pesticides in this state). A friend who culls the herd on his prairie leaves a buck or doe on my back stoop almost every November–one of the perks of small-town living, that kind of generosity.  That kind of foraging fills a freezer, as does buying local beef, pork, lamb, and chickens. I’ve helped raise chickens the past few years–a real food in Iowa experience.

Given that I live in a rural town with limited access to variety in terms of food, I count as foraging as well my many trips to Marshalltown, Des Moines, Iowa City, Cedar Rapids, Waterloo, Cedar Falls, and Pella to the ethnic food markets around the state–Mexican, Bosnian, Indian, Korean, Chinese, Italian, Czech, Russian, and more. These stores, some small and modest, others quite developed and high-volume, offer chart the arrival of recent immigrants in culinary terms.  I am always on the look-out for new ingredients–which inspire my cooking, which is driven more by what’s available, than by a particular recipe. The fresher and more local (though with the caveat that some things just aren’t produced in Iowa or the U.S.), the better. And then there is the garden–a source of food I’ve come to treasure more and more as I move towards a more vegetarian and even vegan diet.

I began to garden in graduate school in the Slavic department at The Ohio State University, where I lived in married student housing. I had a good friend in the graduate program in French, and he helped me in my first plot, which was one of about 30 or so gardens for the residents of Buckeye Village, which was about 75% international students and their families. I learned a lot from my garden-plot neighbors–like the importance of trellising vegetables to conserve space, the incredible diversity of what is grown around the world, and innovative ways to fertilize. I’ve put in a garden almost every year since I moved to Grinnell, Iowa, and I grow just about everything that does well in this climate, which is a lot. In a recent year, for example, I grew, in no particular order, tomatoes (50 bushes, 15 or so varieties), peppers (hot, sweet, red, orange, yellow; 30 plants), eggplant (purple, fauve, white, long, round), green and yellow beans, beets, carrots, cucumbers, chives, garlic chives, arugula, basil, cilantro, sorrel, pumpkins, squash, gourds, lettuce, parsley, rosemary, thyme, oregano, sage, mint, lavender… I used to have an Italian plum tree (used for a trellis, now), and I have several kinds of currant and gooseberry bushes, and a burgeoning new raspberry patch. And asparagus–which I’ve also foraged for on roadsides around Grinnell, scouting out spots by the telltale bright orange-yellow dried out stalks and fronds, an import that stands out from the Iowa color palette. Right now (in late March), the first rhubarb is coming in, and I’m looking forward to making jelly, and freezing or canning it for the winter. In March 2020, now more than ever does growing food seems important and even essential. When it looked like the political situation in Russia was deteriorating in 2014, our Russian language assistant at the College told me her mother was digging up flowers to plant potatoes. That same kind of urgency about food has affected us all, I suspect, and I have big plans to expand my garden, and put my canning operation into high gear.

As for cooking, I’ve been doing that for a long time. I grew up in a food-oriented family (the topic at mealtime when we get together is often about things eaten or plans for the next meal). My first job was in a restaurant called the Suds Hut, a fried chicken and steak joint in Helena, Montana, and since then, I’ve often paid the bills with my cooking in restaurants like the Acapulco Mexican Family Restaurant in Missoula, Montana (no longer in business), or the Trawler in Eugene, Oregon (also no longer in business). The place that influenced my cooking the most, though, was the Mountain Sky Guest Ranch,  in Paradise Valley in Montana, north of Yellowstone Park. I spent five summers there in the decade from 1982-1992, and in that time, the place went from a rustic dude ranch, to a world class resort (now owned by Home Depot owner Arthur Blank). I was hired by a chef from Staten Island, Stephen Pedalino, who taught me how to run a kitchen from dawn to dusk, and how to cook for a crowd. My friendship with Stephen and my lessons in cooking have stayed with me to this day–and that has meant that I usually cook in ranch-size quantities, as my family and friends will tell you! A secret dream has always been to open my own restaurant–or a food truck. But I have a pretty good day job, where we recently opened a teaching kitchen–so I get to combine my passion for Russian culture with my passion for food. Meanwhile, I continue to find a lot of joy in my kitchen, even–or especially–as I self-isolate during the COVID-19 pandemic. And I try to make every meal one worthy of a buddhist, and share them when I can with family, friends, and strangers.  I’ll hope you enjoy reading my blog, and seeing how I cook. And for those of you whom I meet in person in the near or distant future, I hope we can cook and share a meal together.

–Todd Armstrong