Food thoughts and food tv

Cooler weather turns the mind toward cooking. We're still enjoying some of the tag end of summer, with a couple of weeks of home-grown tomatoes to go and a few peaches still at the grower's market. However, fall is pretty much here, as evidenced by the really good apples also at the grower's market and chilly nights that have me eying the basil plants- they don't stand anything approaching a frost and so are destined to become pesto soon, thus preserved for the freezer but marking the end of pizza margherita. Getting the eyeball, too, are a couple of elk shanks left from last year are going to come out of the freezer and meet up with a bottle of cheap wine and a long stay in a slow oven, a dish that requires cool weather to really enjoy.

In the vein of thoughts on food, I went over to Ruhlman's blog for the first time in a while and, once there, found an essay on the movie "Jules and Julia", with links to a Michael Pollan essay inspired in part by the movie, and an older Bill Buford article on the changing style of food tv.

One thought running through that writing is the conundrum that Americans are still cooking less and less while paying more and more attention to food matters, as reflected by the changing style of cooking shows from the seminal example of Julia Child's "The French Chef" to popular competition cooking shows like "Top Chef" and just-plain-eating shows, where you watch some host travel around eating at restaurants. Separate from the subject of television, the theme of actually cooking vs. being "into food" appears to be current, Hank Shaw just announced his book project centered on "honest food" in which it looks like he'll detail his amazing energy and efforts in producing and processing intricate foods and dishes in part to try to inspire folks to take the same level of care with their ingredients and tackle some significant preparations.

In one of the above-mentioned articles, Buford's last lines are "Never in our history as a species have we been so ignorant about our food. And it is revealing about our culture that, in the face of such widespread ignorance about a human being’s most essential function—the ability to feed itself—there is now a network broadcasting into ninety million American homes, entertaining people with shows about making coleslaw." In another, Pollan asserts toward the end of his essay that "The question is, Can we ever put the genie back into the bottle? Once it has been destroyed, can a culture of everyday cooking be rebuilt? One in which men share equally in the work? One in which the cooking shows on television once again teach people how to cook from scratch and, as Julia Child once did, actually empower them to do it?"

Rulman, appropriately I think, takes some issue with the idea that people are cooking less, perhaps placing the nadir of American cooking a bit behind us and pointing to the food blogs as heirs to Julia Child-style information sharing. However, Pollan's essay makes a pretty convincing case that while millions of people are watching food shows and reading about food and are, perhaps, getting into more exotic ingredients, many aren't following up by going into the kitchen regularly and cooking themselves. It does seem very, very strange.


For some fun cooking stuff, check out the new addition to the blog roll.

Book reviews

The best reviewer of books with trees in them (and other books as well) is hitting the reviews.

In celebration, I reprint one of the all time greatest book reviews, by Ed Zern,

"Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterley's Lover has just been reissued by Grove Press, and this fictional account of the day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper is still of considerable interest to outdoorminded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways of controlling vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper. Unfortunately one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savor these sidelights on the management of a Midland shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion this book can not take the place of J. R. Miller's Practical Gamekeeping."

from "Hunting and Fishing from A to Zern".

Cohos

I didn't make it up to Alaska this year for the silver fishing, but I hear the guys that did had a good year. I'm glad they got into them.

Here's a video of my father and I messing around a bit last year, catching fish more or less at will:

Let's be careful out there

I'm cautious around snakes, but not particularly scared of them. Unless he crawls right across my boot, I pretty much always identify a snake, at least as to poisonous/non-poisonous and further than that if I can.

On the other hand, it is a little creepy how little a bush is needed to hide three feet (estimated) of rattler:



Sorry for the shaky and poorly framed video. That guy was nearly three inches across the back of his head and I was pretty distracted checking out all the other weeds in the near vicinity to make sure they didn't harbor another snake. We'd seen another rattler just a couple of hundred yards away, but he was more aggressive or threatened and didn't get his picture taken. Clearly a good evening for reptiles.



Edited to add: there's some interesting information about why & how rattlesnakes rattle in Rigor Vitae's archives.

watched pots

One thing about being gone for a week, you notice some things that have accumulated a bit more. It's now quite dark when the morning's alarm goes off. Another thing, A's garden decided to really put on during our absence. Bunches of tomatoes and nine pounds of green beans, the latter trimmed, blanched, and frozen to brighten up winter meals:







Fifty-five degrees F. this morning. Fall is just about here.

back from

There was water; this is the view from the porch:





The dark stuff in the foreground is turtlegrass, frequented by sea turtles that managed to escape photography.

Various aquatic crabs, including the hermit:



and land crabs by the thousand:



and fish:





So, given the fish, how was the fishing?

Slow, for us:







Fugu, anyone?

More seriously, it was a new place that required some scouting out. About the time we were starting to get some ideas, it was time to leave. We had some success:



Out island of the Bahamas- Long Island. It's really amazing where a long day's travel will take you.

Back from...

Large spiders:



Loud frogs:



Lotsa lizards:



and those critters that dispense with legs for locomotion:

Links

Just a couple. Light(er than the scanty normal) blogging now and for the next bit, I anticipate.


Article by Grant Aschatz on "diner envy", which details the difficulties he's found where diners at very high end restaurants see others getting extra courses and such. "Gee, we got the 97 course tasting menu but the table over there had an amuse bouche that we didn't. We were cheated! We'll never return!"


Forthcoming books by author/bloggers here and here. Either's a pretty safe bet as a great read.

Here's Labrat's review of a fun, fat, speedy-reading paperback, "Monster Hunter International", a first novel by gun-blogger Larry Corriea. I enjoyed the book and the review.

Here's a question I don't really think has an answer but which is fun to investigate anyway: Where to find the prettiest outdoor photos on the web: John Carlson's Prairie Ice, Cat Urbigkit's contributions to Querencia, or Russel Graves' blog?

Tons of fantastic images in each case that reflect not only artistic eyes and speedy reflexes but many hours outdoors.

character

"One old-timer I hunted with by the North Dakota border advised me to never, ever get hold of one of those Chesapeake dogs, because he'd had one back in the thirties that was so stubborn and ornery that it finally refused to get out of the back of the pickup one day during a sharptail expedition. My friend finally tried to lasso the dog and drag it out by main force-and almost got his hand bitten off for his trouble. It's an image that attacks me on the verge of sleep some nights: a leather-faced cowboy whirling a rope around his head on an empty prairie ridge, preparing to toss the loop at the head of a bull-necked Chesapeake Bay retriever braced sullenly in the back of an ancient Chevrolet pickup-probably at the same time another hunter, a couple of thousand miles to the southeast, ate a leisurely sandwich from the lunch box of a mule-drawn wagon, while his well-trained pointin' dogs searched for yet another covey of quail."

John Barsness, Western Skies (again)

Isn't it ironic

"The suburbanite's desire to hunt must be deeply instinctive if it isn't buried by a world according to Trump. But the corollary must be that when modern America decides to hunt, it wants a sure thing. A place where your dollar always buys satisfaction, where if you pay for three pheasants you by God kill three pheasants.

.... The modern urban American hunter wants something certain, and in modern America a few dollars searching for something can find it. That's the law of the marketplace, and the marketplace has created Natty Bumppo as comparison shopper."

John Barsness, Western Skies

(Irony; the sole Amazon review for this most excellent book states: "Just a pleasant read and not informative of where and how to put a hunt together. This appears to be the author's intent, however most of us are in the execution mode, not the live/read about other lives mode." In other words, "just tell me where to go and how to do it, don't waste my time with your stories or 'philosophy' and please, please don't make me read closely and draw some of my own lessons".)

classics

Lots of food on the blog lately, but not much in the way of outdoors or gear. Hmmm. Let's talk guns.

I believe a large part of the fascination for those of us who like guns is that they represent interesting and, frequently, very well made pieces of machinery. Ergonomics have been a concern of gunmakers from the very beginning and the tension between creating a weapon that can be easily handled and aimed and a mechanism which is strong, easy, and fast to use resulted in all kinds of interesting designs.

One of the thread of those designs is the pump or slide action shotgun.* Any article about pump shotguns will nearly invariably talk about how they're an American invention and mention market hunting and perhaps farm equipment, which they are said to invoke. I don't know about farm equipment; however, pump shotguns, particularly the older ones from when the designs were being ironed out, are fascinatingly mechanical. Whereas a double gun is (ideally) sleek and self contained, a lot is going on with a pump as the action works- bolt flying back and forth, shell popping out of the magazine tube and lifted- clicks and clacks and metal sliding on metal (all of which Hollywood uses most inappropriately).

Here's a good example (and bad photos) of the sort of old pump shotgun I'm thinking about:



30 inch barrel, full choke (before it was opened) lots of drop on the stock, complex milling of a steel billet to turn out that rather baroque receiver- check out all the angles:



square lug on the bolt fits into a cut on the top of the receiver:




a Stevens Model 525, built from a Browning design



This is the first variation of the design (sliding inertial release on the slide lock) and was probably made in the first decade or so of the twentieth century. It has been refinished, so it doesn't have any collector's value. However, it works just fine.

If a person chose to create a "collection" it'd be a fun project to take $1,000 and see how many different pre-war (WWII) pumpguns in decent shape he could get for that money. Of course, "decent shape" is unlikely to be anywhere near mint condition, since working guns they generally survive pretty battered. Lots of shotguns from that era. I'd pick up a Winchester Model 12 in 16 gauge (they sized the frames for each gauge). Then there are three Remington pumps: the Model 10, the Model 31 "The ball bearing repeater", and the Remington Model 17 (another John Browning design made only in 20 gauge that, with modifications, became the Ithaca 37). The Ithaca 37 is still, after some hiccups, in production today and early models are easy to find. Less common are the Marlin Models 17, 30, 31 and 43. In addition to the Winchester Models 93 and 97 (each begun in the 19th Century and correspondingly more expensive) I'm sure there are half a dozen others I haven't mentioned as well. While none of this collection would appreciate much as an investment, likely every single one could be pressed into service.

I'm not curmudgeon enough to claim old is necessarily better. Nonetheless, while few will call a pumpgun graceful, slender, corncob forearms and nice bluing create an attractive package to my eye and, with the exception of the current production Ithaca 37s they're not making anything like those old repeaters these days (geez, looking at "the best new shotguns for 2009" at the link all I can think is "not for me").

*That Wikipedia article linked here is wrong in one respect. John Browning did not invent the slide action shotgun, Christopher Spencer did. His shotgun came out in 1882, a decade before the Winchester Model 93, designed by Browning, was produced.

political

"If ever there was an opportunity for 'liberals' and 'conservatives' to come together it is with programs such as the CRP. The Right is right: incentives are preferable to government coercion in protecting the land, the water, land the wildlife. We've gone as far as we can go (perhaps too far) in forcing people to care for the natural world."

M.H. Salmon "Catfish as Metaphor"

for clarification, see "CRP"

Zucc

Growing up, zucchini squash was never much of a favorite. Toward the middle or end of summer, everyone had lots of the squash and it became a ubiquitous side dish. In aid of using the surplus we'd have it boiled (not great), fried (good) sauted (good), in chocolate cake (ok- lots of chocolate) and in bread (very good). It also appeared in soup, salads and on crudite platters. Back then, if anyone had told me I'd pay $.99/lb for zucchini, I never would have believed them.

As an adult, I'm much more fond of zucchini and eat it quite a bit. I haven't seen anything new to do with zucchini in a long time, barring its appearance in vegetarian lasagna, at least until perusing the below mentioned "River Cottage Cookbook". There, Fearnley-Whittingstall counsels to cook zucchini very slowly in a bit of olive oil and salt until the liquid has largely been cooked out and it is very soft. He then uses it as a base for soup, souffle, or pasta sauce. The latter is completed by adding a bit of cream and Parmesan cheese to the zucchini pulp. Having a couple of plants producing, we gave it a try.



It takes a long time to cook down, but you don't want to brown it:



A very little bit of cream and some grated cheese:



makes a very nice pasta sauce. The green, fresh flavor of the squash comes through nicely and the texture is creamy and rich, despite being largely vegetable. I'll bet you could feed this to almost any kid without complaint.

veg

"I think of fruits and herbs as essential luxuries: joyous ingredients that I would never be without. Whereas vegetables are luxurious essentials; the primary building blocks for most well-constructed meals that I could not be without. When vegetables take center stage, even meat may become a spice."

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall "The River Cottage Cookbook"

covers

Listening to music, one of my favorite things to discover is a well constructed cover of a song- one that manages to overtake the original version or, perhaps better still, to reimagine it. In searching the web for links to performances of a couple of my favorite examples, I came across an entire blog devoted to covers performed in the folk/acoustic style, a time sink of the very first water. Of course, the web being what it is, I then found a whole bunch of such blogs.

Buying a tribute album or other collection of covers is fraught with the danger of mediocre takes messing up favorite songs (or at least it used to be, before you could preview nearly any album on Amazon.com) so the best covers are generally those of songs that you're not all that fond of in their original version.

For example, having come into pop-music consciousness in the early 80's, I couldn't help but be aware of Prince, though I had little use for his music apart from conceding that he was good at writing pop songs. Those songs just didn't do much for me, whether performed by pretty girls or the guy who kind of looked like he wanted to be a pretty girl. Back then I was listening to more music from the non-psychedelic strain of 60's rock, with The Police, Elvis Costello, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers and a few others thrown in.

That aside, Prince's "When Doves Cry" (note the link is to the original video, in all it's overwrought and risque glory) was a pretty big hit and is a pretty good pop song. Compare, though, the Be Good Tanyas' version (and this link is to a place to listen to the song, music videos seeming to have largely passed from this earth, except for the homemade sort). It seems to me that this is as much an homage as a reworking of the song. A great bit and a favorite of mine.

Another Prince hit which I can take or leave (mostly, leave) in the original is "Kiss". However, Richard Thompson's driving solo acoustic version of this song is pretty amazing and another of my favorite covers. Incidentally, Thompson is not only a great songwriter in his own right, he isn't afraid of covers at all. Perhaps we should be afraid.

Another big name in the 80's that I've never been partial to is Bruce Springsteen. Apart from the moving and perfect album "Nebraska", I just don't care for Springsteen's bombast. However, he does write some good songs. He just needs someone else to sing and perform them. Someone like Cowboy Junkies. Margo Timmins is much nicer to listen to than Bruce, see this cover of "Thunder Road". Mostly, though, the songs are just better stripped down.

Incidentally, Cowboy Junkies play Santa Fe tonight.

follow up

The truffle benefactors also gifted us with some black morels. While you can read about morels and look at pictures of morels, any numbers of paeans to them don't really do justice to actually trying fresh morels in cream sauce, in this instance on a bit of pasta with some cold sliced leftover elk. Wow!



I know morels lurk in the mountains around here, so far I just haven't been able to figure out where. One of these days, though.

truffles

Friends recently visited Portland and hit the farmer's market there on their way out of town Saturday. Generously, they brought fresh Oregon white truffles down to NM.



We decided to use a couple in risotto. First, some stock from the freezer:





A couple of shallots:



Melt a bit of butter in some olive oil



then saute the shallots until clear



cook the rice in the oil a bit



then start adding liquid. First a cup or so of wine, then the now-hot stock, a cup at a time and the rice stirred until each addition of liquit is absorbed.



Once the last of the liquid is absorbed, add another knob of butter and let it rest a bit



Stir in the butter and a bit of freshly grated Parmesan cheese, then grate a couple of the truffles on top



Stir in the truffle and serve right away. In this case, accompanied by some fresh homemade bread



and some fresh asparagus steamed and then tossed with a bit of Meyer lemon oil from the BJ Cohn Winery.



The truffles add a spicy, earthy note that was subtle but very good. Something I'd never tried before. Thanks, M & Kt!

p.s. This book has the best directions for making risotto that I've found.

Tuna history

One of the books I grew up with, handed down from my father, was "Sea Boots" by Robert C. Du Soe, which told the story of a young boy, the orphaned son of a Mexican fisherman, who stows away on a tuna boat and the adventures on that boat's cruise as they make bait, repair engines and gear, and search for tuna. The boat in the story was set up for hook and line tuna fishing, where the crew stood on racks hanging off the sides of the boat and used stout bamboo poles and feathered jigs to hook schooling tuna and then yank them right onto the deck.

That was a favorite book and made better by the fact that my dad grew up in San Diego and had an uncle, gone before my time, who was a commercial fisherman and did just that sort of fishing. I was reminded of "Sea Boots" when one of the Field & Stream blogs (Honest Angler) recently put up a post featuring a great video from the 40's or 50's: color film of a San Diego tuna boat getting loaded to the gunwales with 1, 2, and even 3 pole tuna. Definitely something you want to check out.

James McMurtry

James McMurtry is going to be up in Santa Fe, at the Santa Fe Brewery on July 24 at the tail end of a tour through the Rockies. Other folks have blogged about him before, with good reason. He's a good songwriter with an excellent turn of phrase and he also puts on a really good show. Check out his website and, if he's in your area, give serious consideration to catching McMurtry and the Heartless Bastards.

What is this?

So, a couple of weeks ago we came across this odd plant up in the spruce/fir-aspen zone, around 8500 feet, in northern NM. It looks a bit like a a fleshy plant, a bit like a fungus. Still emerging from the duff, the stalks are about an inch and a half in diameter and perhaps seven inches tall. What is it?





Field guides having been of no help, I turn to the wealth of the 'net.

Edited to add- identified by Chas Clifton in the comments!