… I would serve a dish of duxelles, a French term referring to a mince of mushrooms, onions, herbs and black pepper which is then reduced to a paste. I’d add cream and a dash of madeira. I would serve this as a two- to three-inch smear over sliced breast of duck. I’d call it …
Dux’ and Quackers
[Patrons will kindly stop throwing bottles at the stage.]
Our second morning at our Kapalua condo we decided the odd mix of “general store” and “deli counter” at the Honolua Store #89 which we had seen our first night going to dinner bore further scrutiny. For one, eating muffins two consecutive days for breakfast held no appeal. Two, I needed that coffee as explained in my Kona coffee post. Three, eating purple pancakes had “yes, you have to do this” written all over it. They’re purple because of ube, a species of yam––I can’t remember why the syrup is purple:
While waiting for my purple pancakes I saw a display card for something I didn’t want to have:
After breakfast we purchased numerous supplies such as chocolates, coffee, more beer, and other fixin’s and such to encourage us to mostly just stay in place and stare at the ocean.
Since our hotel suite had a small range, pots/pans, and dishes, after our morning walk on the first day, we visited the downtown Hilo KTA Super Store, a funky grocery that reminded me of rural groceries which need to be a little bit more of everything for their customers. A guy at breakfast had described getting to a grocery, but I think I didn’t understand him because a flashy new Safeway and a much spiffier version of a KTA existed a similar distance to the southwest…but we went northwest, and I was glad we did. We dodged the raindrops which had threatened all morning, and as we shopped, I saw many products I’d never seen before, including….
Today, for reasons opaque, I look at onions:
Sweet by any name: Because a ubiquitous marketing campaign has proved once again that Marketing Is Everything, many folk here in the eastern United States don’t realize the Vidalia onions of Georgia aren’t the only sweet onions, and they aren’t the progenitor of (most) of the others. Quoting from Oregon Live, a website for The Oregonian, “The Vidalia sweet onion was first grown, completely by accident, in 1930 by a farmer named Mose Coleman.” In contrast, the Walla Walla sweet onion came into being when Peter Pieri immigrated to the United States from Corsica in the late 1800’s, bringing “a bunch of onion seeds from Corsica” when he did so. Sweet onions aren’t any sweeter than ‘regular’ onions, but they have only half the pyruvic acid of the typical mild onion, the yellow. Sweet onions thus have less bite (by half!). They’re planted in the fall in low-sulfur volcanic soil–hence another celebrated sweet onion, Maui Sweets. Because sweet onions are juicier, i.e., they contain a lot more water, they’re softer which means they have to be picked and processed by hand, and their shelf-life is short.
I’ve never had a Maui sweet onion, but I’ve had both Walla Walla’s (hey, they’re grown only 160 miles from my boyhood home) and Vidalia’s, and I prefer the former. The Vidalia’s just don’t seem as sweet to me. The linked article in the previous paragraph notes the Walla Walla’s hit the palate with sweetness first followed by pungency, whereas the Vidalia do the opposite. Maybe that’s it. All I know, is I know how to caramelize an onion thanks to Vivian Howard’s book This Will Make It Taste Good which emphasizes the lengthy period of time necessary to caramelize them, and the need to overload the skillet to use the moisture in the onions to steam them as they caramelize.
A final onion note (a thoroughly intended pun): here’s a great onion novelty song from 1966, the year I left elementary school. May your tears be of joy or at least may they promise a tasty near-future.
I shop produce first, even when the store doesn’t shunt me there with its layout. Friday, barely into the nearest Whole Foods, I spotted this heirloom tomato, all 2.25 pounds of it. I wandered the store getting things for the list, but couldn’t shake the idea of thing. I texted my wife and a couple friends about it, and they said, “buy it!” For scale, I can just comfortably get one hand around each half; it takes two hands to hold it. It looks like conjoined twins–I guess it’s offensive now to use the older, more common name. A bit hard–we’ll give it a few days to ripen up and then what? My wife’s vote is for stuffing it. I was thinking a stupendous, feeds-a-family-of-four Caprese salad.
At the risk of offending multiple food groups (in the sense of those of us who eat food), let me offer up one of the more satisfying meals I’ve made in the past year. About six weeks ago I purchased Welcome To The Buttermilk Kitchen a cookbook by Suzanne Vizethann who operates a restaurant in the Atlanta area called Buttermilk Kitchen. The above photo is of a Southern staple: sawmill gravy over biscuits, i.e., “biscuits and gravy.” The gravy can be of several varieties, but the most common is a béchamel-type base with sausage in it.
It works like this: take five frozen sticks of European butter (the kind with a higher fat content than American butter); grate it coarsely. Whisk flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and then fold in the grated butter “until mixture resembles sand.” My patience level has never achieved this standard. Add 2.75 cups (1.33 pints) of “high quality, full-fat” buttermilk. Drop them on baking sheet with a 4-inch ice cream scoop and bake.
I use Michael Ruhlman’ From Scratch to make my own breakfast sausage. (If you’re into cooking, I heartily recommend this book. It takes 10 basic meals and riffs off of them with dozens of recipes for each one. For example, the sausage recipe–ridiculously simple–is in Chapter 2 which is “The Omelet”.) The Sawmill Gravy recipe starts off like a basic béchamel, veers this way: 5 cups of chicken stock and 2 cups of heavy cream. The “4 dashes of Tabasco” is perhaps not in your béchamel either. The rest is obvious. Split a biscuit. Ladle gravy over it. Sprinkle with parsley if you’ve got it. Eat. Retire to porch/living room/deck. Loosen pants. Snooze.
Repeat as necessary.
American football has ended its seeming stranglehold on the domestic sports scene. A surprisingly close game last night between the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs kept me up to the end. That’s pretty unusual. I quit watching football decades ago. My interest diminished with the demise of an old version of the Seattle Seahawks, the one with Jim Zorn and Steve Largent. Or perhaps it diminished with my renewed interest in baseball. Whatever.
For a baseball fan, football feels about as welcome as your ex showing up at your next wedding. Baseball has just introduced itself at the beginning of April when the National Football League holds it’s draft. When the season gets going and the annual draft of new baseball talent occurs in early June, the NFL starts rattling its sabers about pre-camp workouts. Baseball gets some clarity as good teams rise to the top, bad teams falter, and the 2024 trade deadline approaches–and the NFL opens its training camps! All of these boorish events pale to this: baseball heads into its final month to determine the postseason, a five-week celebration of near-daily baseball games ending in the World Championship, and the NFL opens its season. In a pragmatic but depressing capitulation to reality, MLB mostly avoids holding postseason games on Sundays when most NFL games occur.
(And why do we call it football? Players’ feet only intentionally touch the ball to punt the ball away or kick the ball through the goalposts. This likely reflects my ignorance, but go with me here: players hand off, run, pass, and catch the ball. Now that European née global sport has appropriately called itself football!)
Ah, but for a few glorious weeks baseball reigns supreme. Football retires from the stage and lets the sport-formerly-known-as-America’s-sport, baseball, back into into the leading role it once occupied. Collegiate basketball intrudes, true, during March Madness, but it displays the genteel manners one would expect from amateur athletics. Baseball spring training games occur in the afternoon; NCAA games occur primarily in the evening. It crowns a champion during the first week of the baseball season, turning in that assignment a week late just as college students will, and bows itself from the stage. And the professionals in the NBA? Who cares? Their interminable playoff schedule will just be starting in mid-April, a two-month slog that ends in the middle of June.
Baseball and football play nice once each year. Football crowns a champ just prior to the start of baseball’s spring training. For six weeks all baseball fans think one of two things:
Hope springs, regardless. Thank you, Super Bowl; thank you, Spring.
I know more cold weather remains a very real possibility. By the weekend we will see temperatures at or below freezing. Yet the ephemeral forecasts from various sources promise me I’ll see more early spring temps than I will not, and that’s something. Very soon the star magnolia will bloom, daring the other trees to follow suit. Judging by last year, we’re running a bit late. Here’s a photo from February 10th last year:
Perhaps you can tell from the photo that the star magnolia (all magnolias?) blossoms prior to putting out leaves. Our purple magnolia does this too. Those little buds appear in the fall, winter like a butterfly’s chrysalis, and then get a bit fuzzier and bigger as their imminent bursting approaches. Most pop out together, but some appear late. March sees only a few:
Like the Star of Bethlehem in Christian scripture, the star magnolia signals the rebirth of our plant world around the small plot of land we manage.
Tomorrow goes by Shrove Tuesday, Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday and some German name which I can’t pronounce or spell and which means Doughnut Day. All of them imply, “hey, we need to party and indulge, because tomorrow begins Lent.” Unfortunately (kind of) Ash Wednesday coincides with Valentine’s Day. We’ve decided our party tomorrow will stand in for Valentine’s Day. While we nibble on a few berries, nuts, maybe a piece or two of cheese, I will prepare calas or rice beignets using this recipe. I’m looking forward to it. I love involved, authentic-in-spirit recipes, and this Anson Mills recipe promises all of that. I’ve not purchased their rice or pastry flour; we’ll hope the expensive Carolina rice I did purchase will suffice. Dinner, which we’ll start working on after our late morning calas in at least a desultory way, will be Anson Mills’ Roasted Stuffed Quail for Two with Madeira Sauce. We did not spring for the mail-order quail when we first planned this as a New Year’s Eve meal. Our local grocer carried them. Nor do we have madeira, let alone a 5-year one, and I’m not buying one for 3 tablespoons of recipe use! Some marsala and sherry will suffice. We’ll set some simply prepared asparagus next to the quail and toast our near-30-year relationship.
As lovely as that may (or may not) sound, it’s Lent which occupies my mind today and for the past few. One needs to prepare for Lent. Arriving to Ash Wednesday, opening one’s bleary, I-partied-too-much eyes, and arbitrarily picking something to give up for Lent represents a knee-jerk response to the liturgical meaning of Lent which undercuts it. Sure, you can give up caffeine or alcohol or that favorite candy or whatever because, “that’s what I always do”–and Lent will mean about as much as the thought you put into it. One’s spiritual life basically runs on cruise control (at whatever speed you’ve set) if this represents your approach.
Alternatively, a person in touch with one’s relationship to the Presence which animated this Universe–which created life (a scientifically provable proposition which I will address in a future post), which appears to have imbued all of us with a portion of Its spirit, and which in a way not describable to me, appears to care about us–seeks with initiative and purpose to pledge oneself to one or more practices during Lent, then that person approaches the mystery of Easter with (hopefully) a clearer insight to understanding that mystery. If nothing else, they approach in a better ‘spiritual plane’ which even the non-religious believe to be a good thing.
I have for more than a decade attempted to set one practice each for the physical, the mental, and the spiritual/emotional. (I know, I know. Let’s debate the conflation of “spiritual/emotional” some other time.) This year my practices do not need to be hidden, as they sometimes do to be authentic. I plan to…
Lent means more than Advent to me. Perhaps the focus on penance/introspection? I can definitively say there are days which anchor me to my spiritual pursuits. Ash Wednesday and its implication of Lent is one.
“…FIVE TA-A-A-AH-COS!” Okay, there are only three in the photo but I had five last night after wa-a-a-ay too much beer, and they were delightful.
Thanksgiving for me begins with a way-too-early uncorking of some fine grain-based beverage. Lately this has meant something from Belgium or at the very least inspired by that country’s take on beer. Thank goodness Costco always seems to offer up Chimay Blue at a reduced price (though still expensive). Chimay Blue is dark, offering up the darker fruit tastes (currents, raisins) with an undercurrent of chocolate. Being Belgian, it has a surprisingly dry finish. Sure, it’s 9.0% ABV. Isn’t that what it’s all about on a holiday?
This holiday I hope to kindle our first fire in the fireplace. It predicts to be 38 at dawn, rising to ‘only’ 59 on a sunny day here in Raleigh, NC. That might qualify, especially if I leave the nearby door open to the outside deck–our cats will certainly want to enjoy the holiday sunshine.
Though we had thought, “hey, let’s do something different,” and purchased a couple brace of quail, the pull of tradition grabbed us. We’ve shelved those quail plans for another day, and in just moments we will plan our menu for the day, knowing it will revolve around a slow-roasted turkey in the oven. Our theme will still be Southern style: the brined shrimp will provide the midday sustenance needed to get to the main meal which will feature either cornbread or grits. A nod to the North will likely occur also. My wife introduced me to the concept of mashed rutabagas (or turnips) instead of potatoes. And the already-planned butternut squash pie still looks like a go. Licking my lips already…..
A Roman recipe from An Alphabet for Gourmets by M. F. K. Fisher from a collection of her works entitled The Art of Eating:
GARUM (400 B.C.)
Place in a vessel all the insides of fish, both large fish and small. Salt them well. Expose them to the air until they are completely rotted. Drain off the liquid that comes from them, and it is the sauce garum.
Kennedy Fisher, Mary Frances . The Art of Eating: 50th Anniversary Edition (p. 901). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.
Or perhaps it is the cesspool of death that it appears to be…
all the voices in my head 