Pardus and Livert Discover Gold on the Shores of the Delaware

Just checking in during the busy summer. This weekend was spent with David Livert and his wife at their house on the banks of the Delaware River. Despite beautiful weather for canoeing on Saturday, the rest of the weekend was a series of down pours and fog reminscent of the 1985 floods in Northern California. This reminded me that , contrary to what you may hear about foraging several days after the rains subside, chaterelles do not mind popping their golden heads up in the midst of a deluge.

So, donning shoes we were sure to soak through and attitudes sure not to, we took walk- about, culminating in the discovery of one of the richest chanterelle veins I’ve ever seen in my life. We spent about 45 minutes on our hands and kness in the same spot, filling 4 grocery bags before deciding that – since we couldn’t carry more, we should stop.

Returning to the house for a celebratory libation, we finished the hunt by cleaning and then cooking all of the mushrooms – my logic went like this “What the F are we going to do with all of these? They suck when you dry them and they’re too wet to last very long as they are….I got it!….saute in olive oil and butter, reduce resulting liquid, cool and freeze them in portion sized bags for convenient later use”.

It’s been a wet summer – get out doors and make the most of it!

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Free Range Chicken Family

Left to their own devices, chickens will act like wild birds, build nests in fields, lay eggs and, when they hatch teach the young ones to forage and, I suppose, cultivate their chicken identity. We don’t have a lot of chickens on the farm (maybe a dozen) and all of them live out in the open like these. The picture is not great but if you squint you can see 4-5 chicks scratching around at the base of the tree.

Now, because the chickens live outside almost full time, they get taken down by predators pretty regularly. You’d suppose that given the dangers of living in the open air, they would choose to spend more time in the barn. But they don’t. There’s feed at the barn too, but they don’t spend much time on it in the summer when the fields are full of juicy bugs. And it’s a good thing for us that they do, because those bugs get translated by chicken guts into really great tasting eggs -when you can find them. See, true free range chickens like these hide their eggs all over the place and it sometimes takes a hour just to pick up a half dozen.
Too bad we can’t train them to roll them by their beaks down to the barn.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Vegetarain bones make easy cracking

Cannibals who prefer that their livestock abstain from meat eating apparently know what they are doing.

A joint Australian-Vietnamese study of links between the bones and diet of more than 2,700 people found that vegetarians had bones five percent less dense than meat-eaters

Surely the weaker bones of vegetarians makes it much easier for the anthropophage to extract the marrow.

Vegetarian diet ‘weakens bones’ – Yahoo! News

Thanks to Tags for sending this to us.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Iowa-sciutto

Sky Full of Bacon 10: Prosciutto di Iowa from Michael Gebert on Vimeo.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Ratio, A Brief Exegesis

In Ratio, Michael Ruhlman’s latest book and in many of his promotional posts and media appearances he makes an assertion that has raised a lot of objections among reviewers of the book and, to a lesser degree, the cooking public. What he says, in essence, is that if one understands that most fundamental preparations of western cookery can be reduced to simple expressions of the relative weight of two to four primary ingredients (ratios), over time one should be able to move away from dependence upon recipes.

If I am paraphrasing him correctly, I think that it’s a bit optimistic to assume that anyone who is used to working with recipes is going to abandon the practice in favor of a reductive approach that involves weighing a set of principal ingredients and then seasoning them with a little of this and a dash of that.

As a matter of fact and practice it’d be really stupid for professional cooks -especially those involved in producing large quantities of food- to abandon the use of recipes. The need to produce the same product in a consistent manner at a known cost demands it.

But as I found while I was helping him work through some of the material for the book, there is tremendous value in at least thinking about the foods we construct in the very simple terms of proportions of one ingredient to another. For one thing, it compels you to think about what is actually essential to a recipe and what can be substituted with another ingredient or eliminated entirely. And for me, at least, a logical consequence of spending so much time breaking down recipes into simple expressions of a few principle ingredients, was a renewed appreciation for the tremendous redundancy seen in the world of cookbook publishing.

Another benefit of reducing recipes to ratios of principal ingredients is that it causes you to focus so intently on a few key ingredients, that you cannot help but begin to ask lots of questions about what those ingredients are and how they behave when they cook. In other words, reducing recipes to ratios can be heuristic if you let your mind go that way.

So while Ratio might not cause you to throw all of your cookbooks and recipe cards into the nearest dumpster, its central proposition, that every recipe contains ingredients that are essential to its nature (as well as those that are not) and that these ingredients can be thought of as simple proportions might renew your appreciation for the power of reductive logic.

Frankly, I think the book is pretty radical for a “cookbook.” I can’t imagine there are too many authors who can pull off something like this and get paid for it.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Chicken Salad

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Nation of Dunces?

Are enough people stupid enough to cause a decline in pork sales because they are afraid becoming infected with swine flu? Apparently so, which is why American swineherds have lobbied federal officials to refer to the epidemic as an outbreak if H1N1 virus instead of swine flu.

U.S. officials want ‘swine’ out of flu name

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Balducci’s is like, gone!

I don’t really care that the pretentious overpriced gourmet bloat mart that Balducci’s had become by birth of the naught-naughts is going the way of the passenger pigeon. But it is worth noting that at one time it was a really cool place to buy stuff that you could not get at your local farm stand or Stop & Shop.

So say goodbye to Balducci’s and count the seconds until someone buys the brand and opens an online store…

Balducci’s Makes a Quiet Exit From Manhattan Times

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

A Light Snack

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Valentines Day Agitprop

Each year during the build up to Valentines Day food writers drag out the same old crap about foods that are alleged to turn us into priapic goats and silt laden venusian rills.

Aspargus and oysters, chocolate and eels, and blah and blah are yanked out of their normal context as ordinary stuff to eat and pushed out into the morass that is the dialectic between the media and a public. A public I aver, that is mostly so besotted from the effects of just getting through the day, that we rarely raise an objection to this lame, half-hearted attempt to work us up over the idea that something as ordinary as a banana might be all that the train needs to guide it through the venerian frontier.

Well, enough is enough. There is no such thing as a food that will turn an indifferent friend into a lover -unless, of course, it is served in a context that causes them to think that what they might eat is something more than a meal.

But you knew that.

The Foods of Love – “In the Mood” Foods

The best sauce in the world is hunger.