A Chinese red- cooking braise– good for any shanks, but you need strong tasty almost tough meat. What you should end up with is a kind of Chinese osso bucco with more than a hint of chile– restaurant good & fork tender. Mine but owes much to Fuchsia Dunlop… Preheat the oven to a pretty …
Tag: Food
Cat and Matt in the Big Easy
Another check-mark on my Blogger Meet-up Bucket List! Cheers from New Orleans! An unexpected and very welcome note from fellow blogger Cat Urbigkit, who was on her way to Louisiana: “I’m about to head to New Orleans for a long weekend (attending the American Library Association convention) – I can’t believe how hot it is …
Riches
Yumm. On Friday, husband Jim had to make a run to Farson for some small hay bales to use to make a den for a pregnant livestock guardian dog (we feed big bales to the sheep). Our friend and beekeeper Jim Hodder made us a great trade – one of my wolf books for a …
The Fragrance of Grass
Guy de la Valdene’s new memoir The Fragrance of Grass (title from a line in a Jim Harrison poem) is out, and it is wonderful, even better than his earlier good books I think. It is an unusual combination of almost Proustian (but rural) memoir and sporting reminiscence, perhaps with echoes of Turgenev’s “notebooks” as …
Visitors
Tom Russell would be too modest to say so but he might just be the best and most lasting singer- songwriter of my generation; while some annoyingly typecast him as a western or cowboy or border balladeer he is in all ways an American bard, a living link between cowboys and the beats and all …
Cepe Success!
The ‘shrooms have arrived or, as Peculiar wrote, channeling Chaucer (“…had he lived in the Southern Rockies and been more interested in fungi than relics”): “Whan that August with his shoures sootethe droghte of June hath perced to the roote,and bathed every veyne in swich parfoumof which vertu engendred is the shroum…. “…thanne longen southwestryn …
Rifles and Recipes
My old Montana friends John Barsness and Eileen Clarke, who run the site Rifles and Recipes, have two new projects worth your attention. John, who may be one of the best gun writers in the world– what other former poet is also a world- class gunsmith?– has started an online mag called “Rifle Loony.” It …
Of Mutton and Saws- Alls
Our friend Pieter Ditmars raises grass- fed meat sheep on Dunhill Ranch in the western foothills of the Magdalenas, using livestock guard dogs (Pyrenees) and border collies as assistants. We always buy a lamb from him. But we had found him a lot of new customers, and this year he offered us a 5 year- …
Food links and catching up…
A few catchup things before New Year’s blogging commences… First, a food manifesto I can get behind, at least as an ideal. But foraging can be dangerous if you don’t know what you are doing– if you are not conscientious or at least CONSCIOUS. Here is a harrowing first- person account by someone who ate …
Elk Shanks
Yesterday, I thawed a package of elk that Rudy the butcher had marked “stew and bones”, figuring on meat for Rio and bones for the dogs. To my surprise it disclosed six perfect round elk shanks with marrowbones in the center, rather like the veal shanks used in osso bucco. I looked at various shank …