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"

The Old San Juan

While I've mentioned fishing the San Juan river in northwestern New Mexico a couple of times before, I haven't been over there much in recent years. When I first started fishing the river and figuring that fishing out, it was one of my primary destinations and I'd spend ten or more weekends up there every winter. I quickly learned that I preferred to fish winter and early spring when cold temperatures and higher flows, respectively, keep the crowds down. In recent years the spring flows have been low and some of the winter flows really low, down to 250 cfs, rather than a more-normal 500 cfs, so I've stayed off the river. However, the last couple of years have benefited from more normal flows, so the fishery should be in a little better shape.

I can't say that the fishing has exactly palled, but it has changed a bit for me. Ten years ago, if you'd have told me that I'd go over a year without spending a weekend on the San Juan I'd have thought you were kidding. Guys that I talked to in the fly shop that "just don't get up there any more" struck me as oddly spoiled- not go spend a weekend catching two pound trout? Now I'm one of those guys. The river is still worth a trip.

The fishery on the San Juan below Navajo Dam is pretty famous. The water flows at a constant 42 degrees F, thanks to the bottom-draw dam and deep reservoir behind it.




The constant water temperature results in year round growth of aquatic insects and the trout that feed on them. Because the water is quite cold, there isn't a great variety of insects (at least from a fly fishers perspective), mostly midges and annelids. However, cloudy days in the colder months will frequently see a blue winged olive hatch, particularly about halfway down the catch and release section, so you can get some dry fly fishing every now and again.




While there is only limited natural reproduction in the river, the New Mexico Dept. of Game and Fish stocks fry and the population is quite dense, with the average trout caught running about fifteen inches and over a pound. The upper portion of the river is also primarily a catch and release fishery, with the limit being one fish over twenty inches and the culture strongly against keeping that.






Because of the large numbers of big trout, the river sees incredible pressure. Fishermen from around the country and around the world travel to the San Juan. All those fishermen result in a crowded situation and you have to adjust your concept of personal space a bit and not get offended if someone comes fairly close to you, much closer than you would be happy about if on a more remote river. One way to get away from others is to fish the high spring flows. Once the river gets above 2000 cfs, the number of people fishing it goes down substantially. At 5000 cfs, you can have decent stretches all to yourself and the fish have a lot of current to beat you with. Of course, you also have to wade very carefully and generally stick to edges and backwaters. The wading up there is complicated by a very healthy growth of bug-feeding moss, which renders the cobbles and especially the occasional sandstone stretches quite slippery. Don't walk on the black-colored moss- if you do you'll almost certainly fall and that cold water just about requires a trip back to the truck for dry clothes.

I think that a five-weight is about the lightest rod you should use up there. Some of the really fast, high end rods rated as four-weights would also be fine, but a five or a six is generally better. Because it is a catch and release fishery that sees tremendous pressure, it is imperative to get the fish in quickly, in the best shape possible, and release it with as little harm as you can. If you get a fairly hot fish, there's no way you are going to muscle it on a three or four weight. Of course, the other limitation is you tippet. I try to fish top quality 5x, which lets you put quite a bit of pressure on your gear. With flies smaller than size 20, I have to go to 6x. I'd rather break a few fish off getting them in quickly than leave a wake of doomed trout behind me, so I lose quite a few more flies with 6x. I know of guys who use 7x or finer, but I won't do that up there.

The basic rig is a nine-foot leader, to which you tie a dropper and point. For a 5x leader, I use a surgeon's knot to tie a sixteen inch length of 5x material to the end of the leader. You want the tag end of that added length to be about four inches long, but no more than that. You tie a San Juan Worm up there, and the short length keeps it from tangling too badly. Down on the point end, you tie a small nymph imitation, something size 18 or smaller. A couple of inches above the knot, crimp on a split shot, then, about a foot down the leader from your fly line, attach the strike indicator of your choice. You'll end up changing the shot quite a bit, adding or taking it off, as you want the flies to dead drift in the current just above the bottom. They should hang up every third or fourth drift. If you never hang up, you aren't fishing deep enough and you're missing a lot of fish.

You can do pretty well on the river with a pretty basic fly box. The one fly that I've most consistently caught fish on up there is the Chenille San Juan Worm in a dull orange color. Tied on a #14 nymph hook with no weight, you cover the hook shank with red thread (6/0), then cut a piece of ultra chenille about 1 1/4 inches long, which is tied in at the back of the shank (keep the tie in narrow), the thread spiraled up to a bit behind the eye of the hook, then tied in again. You whip finish under the chenille, then use a match or lighter to melt the ends of the chenille to points. You need a lot of these flies, as the chenille becomes floppy with use and once it starts folding back on itself the fish don't like it much.

For days when they just don't want a chenille worm, you can try TJ's Sparkle Worm, in orange or red.

For smaller stuff, it's pretty hard to beat a foam wing emerger. You want to tie them in chocolate brown, black, and grey and in sizes 18 and 20, perhaps 22. Personally, I think a tail of two or three evenly spaced muskrat guard hairs is important to this pattern, as it helps the fly maintain a natural orientation in the water.

Small thread-body nymphs are also good, try wrapping the thread body with a single layer of clear flashabou on a few and use a single turn of peacock herl or a tiny bit of dubbing for the head. Tie them in 20 and 22.

Last, you also want a few size 8 to 12 black woolly buggers or rabbit hair leaches. Some days they don't want the worms, or the water is a bit off color, and the buggers or leaches do really well.

Still scenic, especially during the months with fewer people:



The latest edition (available in pdf) of the New Mexico Wildlife Federation's journal reports recent problems with the San Juan, which they link to the vast increase in oil and gas drilling since the days I was spending a lot of time on the river.

a couple of links

First, and continuing with the book theme, from the Tor publishing website: author Jo Walton has a series of essays that are worthwhile on Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series, which have won half a dozen Hugo and Nebula Awards and set the bar for space opera. Those essays are capped by an author interview. For a taste of Bujold's writing, check this out at the Baen Free Library.

Next, a new addition to the blog roll- hunting, fishing, thoughts on gear and more, with pictures, from way up north.

Last, in the "demons ordering snowcones" department, I read via SaysUncle the news that a federal circuit court of appeals has handed down a ruling on the subject of whether the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms applies against state and local governments, a question of some significance after last year's Heller decision from the Supreme Court. The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit concludes that the Second does in fact apply to the states.

Skimming the opinion, it is interesting for a few things. First, it illustrates how the law-review influenced practice of footnotes is getting out of hand in legal opinions. While frequent footnotes may cause an opinion to look more like a law review article, and thus scholarly, they make interrupt the flow of logic and make it harder to read. Any footnote more than a sentence long, or which is other than truly tangential, should be incorporated into the text. Then again, perhaps I'm just a fan of incorporation.

Next, the first section of the opinion is, footnotes aside, a fairly clearly written primer on just what a mess the doctrine of incorporation (of the Bill of Rights as to state governments) is in today's law. I agree with the view that the "privileges and immunities" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment should have prevented this debate. Maybe someday we'll have a Supreme Court that reads the whole of the Constitution into effect. Maybe we're even headed that way.

Which leads to the last point, and that is the slippery slope effect of legal arguments. Once the Supreme Court addressed the Second Amendment and its underpinnings in Heller, something which it had largely avoided, then it opened the door to the right to keep and bear arms being addressed just as other rights enshrined in the Constitution. For example, and from the opinion:
"Heller reveals evidence similar to that on which Duncan relied to conclude that the Due Process Clause incorporated the right to a jury in criminal cases. Heller began with the 1689 English Declaration of Right (which became the English Bill of Rights), just as Duncan did. Compare Heller, 128 S. Ct. at 2798 (noting that the Declaration of Right included the right to bear arms), with Duncan, 391 U.S. at 151 (noting that the Declaration of Right included the right to a jury trial). Thus the right to keep and bear arms shares ancestry with a right already deemed fundamental. Cf. Resweber, 329 U.S. at 463 (plurality opinion) (relying solely on the presence of a prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments in the English Bill of Rights for the conclusion that it is incorporated into the Due Process Clause)."

Last, I reprint footnote 18 of the decision whole, as I find it obvious, a nice turn of phrase, refreshing coming from a Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, and amazing coming from the Ninth Circuit:
"18
The County and its amici point out that, however universal its earlier support, the right to keep and bear arms has now become controversial. See generally Sanford Levinson, The Embarrassing Second Amendment, 99 Yale L.J. 637 (1989). But we do not measure the protection the Constitution affords a right by the values of our own times. If contemporary desuetude sufficed to read rights out of the Constitution, then there would be little benefit to a written statement of them. Some may disagree with the decision of the Founders to enshrine a given right in the Constitution. If so, then the people can amend the document. But such amendments are not for the courts to ordain."

In the end perhaps the denizens of hell aren't looking for a jacket after all. The court upheld an Alameda County ordinance forbidding possession of firearms or ammunition on county property and thus closing a popular gunshow held on the fairgrounds, concluding "The Ordinance falls on the lawful side of the division, familiar from other areas of substantive due process doctrine, between unconstitutional interference with individual rights and permissible government nonfacilitation of their exercise. Finally, prohibiting firearm possession on municipal property fits within the exception from the Second Amendment for 'sensitive places' that Heller recognized." Prohibition=nonfacilitation and the exceptions will overwhelm the rule by the time Second Amendment jurisprudence settles out.

recent reading

Quite some time back I posted a request for reading suggestions and got a bunch of good ones. One of those suggestions, from Rebecca K. O'Connor, was for Jim Butcher's "Dresden Files". Butcher has just published another installment of the series and I encourage anyone who's not fantasy-adverse to check them out (that last link has sample chapters). The protagonist, Harry Dresden, is a private investigator very much of the Jim Rockford school and the books are nicely plotted detective procedurals with good character development and a good series story arc as you get farther into it.

Another good recent read is Guy de la Valdene's "Red Stag". I'm a big fan of Valdene's "For a Handful of Feathers" and his mention in an interview (about a tarpon film) of "writing a book every ten years to justify [his] existence" and the link below that interview to Amazon led to my ordering the novel, which is silly cheap. The novel is set in Normandy in the 1950s and has shooting, poaching, dogs, guns, romance and all sorts of other good things.

Since the last call for suggestions was so successful (and so long ago), what are you all reading that's good?