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!

recipe

Recently one of my favorite stores added a new product, "sunflower butter". A little experimentation and an adaptation of another recipe resulted in the following:

Sunflower cookies
(

1/2 c rolled oats
2 c all purpose flower
1t baking powder
1t baking soda
1t salt

Stir above together in bowl.

2 sticks (1c) butter, softened
1 c granulated sugar
1 c firmly packed brown sugar
2 t vanilla

3/4 c sunflower butter
2 large eggs
6oz shelled, roasted, & salted sunflower seeds

In a large bowl, cream butter & both sugars until light and fluffy. Stir in sunflower butter and vanilla. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Gradually beat in flour mixture. Add sunflower seeds, beating until just combined.

Optional (and good) 6 oz dried snipped apricots, added with the sunflower seeds.

Chill dough, 2 hours to overnight.
Bake at 325 F for 15 minutes, or until pale golden.

dogblog

Big sticks are more fun to fetch:



Weight training for the next goose retrieve:

quote

"...I've found that if you have a certain kind of inner peace (and no kids) you can buy things you want but can't afford and feel okay about it."

John Gierach "Another Lousy Day in Paradise"

blogroll

Via The Suburban Bushwacker, I learn that Chad Love of Field and Stream's "Fieldnotes" blog has started up a personal blog for his own amusement. It looks pretty good so far and promises "random esoterica from writer Chad Love celebrating the joys of fishing, hunting, books, music, literature, travel, guns, gundogs, photography, lonely places, wildness, history, art, misanthropy, beer and the never-ending absurdity of life."

seasonal

Something for readers unfamiliar with the desert Southwest.

The last few days have turned cool and cloudy and we've been getting some unusual (for the time of year) rain. Nonetheless, it has warmed up enough for me to engage in that uniquely Southwestern ritual- filling and servicing the swamp cooler. "Swamp coolers" or, more accurately, "evaporative coolers" are the most common way of cooling houses out here.

One friend jokes that you should get your cooler set up by the Fourth of July and drain it by Halloween, but more realistically we typically have a hot spell in early June and you don't want the cooler, or more accurately the tubing bringing water to the cooler, to freeze while full of water which is a definite risk by mid to late October.

These are really simple devices, basically a box with a pan of water, a pump to run that water through some screens of damp material, and a blower to pump air through the damp screens and into your house. With our low humidity, a swamp cooler will cool most houses pretty well. In addition, at night when it drops down into the 60s or 70s you can just run the fan to move air through your house. Maintenance is easy and operating costs fairly low.

Here it is:



Here's the inside:




A squirrel-cage fan:




Run by an electric motor:



A water pump:





That pumps water from the tray it rests in up through the blue tube and then through the black tubes at the top of previous photo. From the black tubes on top the water runs into these channels and flows through the pads and screens:






I prefer natural pads, which are made from aspen wood which is shaved into fine strips:



The smell of the fresh pads as they get wet always brings to mind coolness and gives a hint of the aspen groves they came from. Besides, they're biodegradable and easily renewable. You have to replace them every year, but they're inexpensive, which cannot really be said for the plastic alternatives.

So, hook up the water, sweep any old scale (left by our hard water evaporating) and dirt out of the cooler, replace the pads, fill the cooler, check for leaks, make sure the pump and fan are running ok (and grease the bearings on the squirrel cage) and you're ready for the heat.

talking rot

"But you have a feeling of happiness about action to come?"

"Yes," said Wilson, "There's that. Doesn't do to talk too much about all this. Talk the whole thing away. No pleasure in anything if you mouth it up too much."

"You're both talking rot," said Margot.

Ernest Hemingway "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber"

(Best short story, ever, in my opinion.)

Fish not for dinner

Apart from speckled trout and redfish, time spent on the Laguna Madre will usually yield encounters with some other species. This last trip was notable for hookups with some unpalatable but fun fish, such as a few crevalle jacks, which are occasional visitors to the bay:



One of the Spanish nicknames for Jack Crevalle is "toro", a tribute to their strength. These ran right at ten pounds, which is about as big a jackfish as you want to tangle with on light gear. Much bigger than that and they'll just tear you up.

One day we spent nearly the whole time throwing topwater plugs and getting into the occasional trout as well as large numbers of skipjacks, or, to use the less local name, ladyfish:



While lots of fun to catch, they take a toll in gear. Sharp gill plates and abrasive mouths lead to cut-offs, even with a bite tippet. Poor man's tarpon, they jump off the hook about half the time, which is perfect- exciting strike and jump and no lost plugs.

More unusually, A got a hit on a topwater plug that led to a strong, fast run and stubborn fight. It turned out to be about the largest needlefish I've ever seen in the bay:



It's rare to hook one of these fellows, given their bony jaws and impressive dentition:



Note, too, that huge eye- the better to see you with, my dear- to be followed shortly by employment of all those teeth. Most the times, the needlefish you see back in the bay are about half this size.

One of the great things about fishing salt water is that you never know exactly what might turn up on the end of your line.

dinner post

First you catch a fish:



Spotted seatrout:



fresh fillets:







Can't hold a candle to fresh fillets fried medium.
Fishing, not blogging. Irregular connectivity for a while.

modern life

"Earlier that summer, I ran into an old poet friend I hadn't seen in over a year. I said, 'How are you, Jack?' and he said 'Busy. Busyness is endemic now, you know?'
I thought, if a seventy-year-old poet is too busy, what hope is there for me?"
....
"It's become an epidemic. People drive angrily, even through this pretty foothills country, because they're too busy to slow down and enjoy the ride. They eat the worst kind of food because they're too busy to even think about eating well, let alone take the time to do it. Even recreation has gotten loud, frantic, and competitive because no one has what you can honestly call free time anymore. Fun has become a desperate business where you have to enjoy yourself in a precious few hours or die trying."

John Gierach, "At the Grave of the Unknown Fisherman"