Food
It's in the Mix!
Another SoHum birthday party brought to you by Betty Ganja.
The Taste of Yo-Yos (and Apples and Chili)
Over the weekend I traveled with Evany to Chico, California, for the National Yo-Yo Championships and later that afternoon to Manton, California, home of the world’s greatest bootmaking teacher, for the Apple Festival. The day started around 5am when I AIM’d Evany to see if she was awake and felt like leaving early (since both of us seem to only require about 47 minutes of sleep a night anymore, this is a perfectly acceptable thing to do in our friendship). I soon learned, though, that she was way ahead of me and actually about to leave her house for mine.
After an uneventful but gorgeous early morning drive up the Sacramento Valley, where a nearly full moon in the west faced off against the rising sun in the east, we arrived in Chico early. We decided to stop by and pick up my aunt, who treated us to a morning meal at Sin of Cortez (terrible name, but super yummy breakfast menu, complete with an eggless savory dish, which, by the way, is a lot more elusive than it should be, in my opinion).
Then we were off to take a gander at the yo-yos. I confess my main memory of my own childhood toy is that sticking my tongue in it caused a tingling sensation. This, it turned out, was way more entertaining to me than actually playing with it--let alone learning “tricks.” When I told Evany this, she knowingly replied without any hesitation, “Yeah! Why did it make your tongue tingle? What was that stuff in there that did that?” And yet while attending the yo-yo happenings, we were both inexplicably compelled to purchase a series of self-published books about yo-yo physics by a superhero named Captain Yo--even though neither one of us knows anything about physics and our knowledge of yo-yos is limited to how they taste. I don’t think Captain Yo needed any special powers to discern this about us, but he happily sold us three full sets anyway.
We didn’t need these books, however, to figure out that attending a yo-yo competition isn’t for wussies. We meandered cautiously through the crowd of mostly boys and a handful of girls while projectiles on strings in every possible form imaginable whizzed in all directions. During the 4A String Unattached to Yo-Yo competition, several yo-yos even went flying right off the stage. After about two hours of deeply enthralling people- and yo-yo-watching, I was ready to move on to the Apple Festival in Manton. Evany, on the other hand, probably could have stayed all day. She has what seems to be an insatiable appetite for these sorts of things.
We didn’t arrive in Manton until about 2pm and there wasn’t an apple-related item left on the premises--save for an apple fritter I bought from some Jesus people. Lucky for us, my fellow bootmaking student and generous friend Glenn had been able to secure a dozen apple pies through Jack’s inside connections, pre-festival. Jack’s brother and friends were also in town and insisted Jack wear a “cattle buying hat” at his boot booth (he is prone to wearing berets and pink train engineer caps). After the festival, we went back to his place to drink some of that box o’ wine he likes so much (also pink) and listen to stories. While he made some delicious chili from a tri-tip he bought at the apple doin’s, Evany and I raided his garden and apple box.
Over the course of the night, I learned something about Evany Thomas that I didn’t know before. She accidentally let slip that not only does she know what a Ghillie suit is, but that she is also a regular reader of the Cabela’s catalog. If you don’t know what that is, let me explain: You are more likely to find a Cabela’s catalog in the homes of my people than a phone book or the Bible. It is filled with “3-D clothing” that comes in various odors, guns, knives, cute tops, giant fish pillows, and other miraculous objects. By the end of winter, many men I know (and apparently Evany) can recite the master catalog from front to back. Needless to say, Evany was a big hit in Manton.
More Mangia, Mangia!
The polenta feed was such a success in July that my family decided to make ravioli this month. Four generations of us came together at my grandma’s place for a couple days to make sauce, grind meat, roll pasta, and press out 53 dozen ravioli. We filled most with a traditional meat filling based on a recipe my aunt inherited from a friend, but Stacy and Shawnee also made a yummy salmon filling with a big fish my Grandpa Bill caught.
After nearly two full days of work, we sat down for dinner around 8 pm and stuffed ourselves on 13 dozen meat-filled pasta treats. We gave 10 dozen away to family and friends (my dad, who isn’t exactly known for his generosity when it comes to compliments, said they were the best ravioli he’d ever eaten). We packed up the rest for later feasts (unfortunately, we forgot to dust them with flour and many of mine stuck together after they were frozen). To finish the night, Shayln made strawberry shortcake for dessert, and then it was time to clean up our mess.
Anyway, in case you want to make your own, here is the recipe (as documented by Shayln) for what we ended up putting in the filling. I think I would go easier on the cheese next time, but other than that, I thought it was pretty good:
3 Italian Sausages
3-4 lbs. beef Tri-Tip
1_ lbs. lean ground round
1 pork chop
1 chicken breast
4 cloves garlic
2 onions (chopped)
_ C fresh chopped thyme (or 1T dry)
_ C fresh chopped oregano (or 1T dry)
_ C fresh chopped marjoram (or 1T dry)
2T of Italian Seasoning
1 bunch fresh chopped Italian parsley
1 bunch fresh chopped Swiss chard
Cook all the above ingredients and run through a food grinder. Add the binder and mix with your (clean) hands until fully mixed.
Binder:
6 beaten eggs
1_ C Parmesan cheese
1_ C seasoned bread crumbs.
The Pigs Are Always the Best Attraction
We spent yesterday with Dick and Frew ogling the circle of life from birth to deep-fried midway bliss at the California State Fair in Sacramento. Not only did we get to see a bug-eyed and somewhat embarrassed Holstein strain to have her calf right there in front of a live audience, but we also sampled chitterlings (that’s pork intestines with loads of hot sauce for the uninitiated) as well as several corndogs, a Krispy Kreme doughnut chicken sandwich, ice cream, lemonade, venison jerky, divinity, french fries, coleslaw, barbecue (in nearly all its varieties), deep-fried avocados and tomatoes, a mocharita (which we learned was neither boozy nor citrusy), and one beer (a Hefeweizen to be exact).
And of course there were many, many baby pigs (for petting, not eating--at least not yet) and a gazillion more goats than cows, which I’m sure my friend Melody the Goat Farmer will be happy to hear. We saw something called a “Turkey Stampede” that involved Butterballs-on-the-hoof chasing a remote-control pickup around an arena (oh, the spectacle). Then I made everyone go gaze at the Humboldt display in the county exhibition hall. I didn’t think it was as good as last year’s, but it did have this fake sea-farin’ man, which redeemed it slightly, at least in my eyes. Poor Pat was shamed again as Orange County failed to show up with any sort of exhibit. It’s so sad to see him wandering the halls, hoping this year might be the one.... Hey, OC! What’s up?
Frew spent the first few hours at the fair not-so-casually trying to size up who among us was dumb enough to go on vomit-inducing carnival rides with him (he has very fond memories of the year my childhood friend Stacy Ripple paid for him to accompany his wife Jenny on all the rides she wanted at the Fortuna Rodeo--good times!). Frew was able to talk Pat into one “spinny” ride, but neither Dick nor I were game for anything that spun or went upside down. I did, however, suck it up and go along with everyone on the ski lift despite nearly having a panic attack on it last year. As a final hurrah, we all climbed the “EuroSlide” and sped down on gunny sacks (I won the race, but I cheated). Since Dick is from Sweden, I figured he’d know what about the slide made it “Euro,” but he couldn’t tell me. That was disappointing because I’ve been wondering about that for a couple years now.
Birthday Celebrations
I have the cutest grandma ever, and I’ll beat anyone who says otherwise with the family polenta stick. I went north a couple weeks ago to spend my birthday with her, and much like many of the past thirty-seven years, we celebrated with a polenta dinner that took most of the day to prepare. We started our morning with a trip to the Ferndale Meat Company, where Grandma haggled with the butcher over the fat content of the stew meat, and although I could barely see a spec of white on the luscious red chunks, she still seemed uncertain after we paid that it would in fact be tender enough. After that, it was off to the grocery store to carefully inspect and select the remaining sauce ingredients. On the way home we stopped and picked up my niece, Shayln, to help with the prep work and then got to chopping.
The sauce simmered for a couple hours before we boiled the water for the polenta. Admittedly, I can be kind of lazy and usually choose instant polenta over the real thing, but Grandma is a purist. I am convinced she inherited special polenta-stirring muscles because her nearly ninety-year-old arms always seem to hold up much longer than mine (and I’m the kind of girl who likes doing push-ups). We used a wooden spoon to stir since the polenta stick--a broom handle cut short by my great grandfather and worn from decades of strain against the thick cornmeal mush--has become something of a family relic. We took turns, and although Shayln and I were ready to give up after about ten minutes, Grandma’s experience told her to press on. She claims her dad was so skilled with the stick that he could cook the polenta until it just folded away from the sides of the pot. Grandma has never been able to replicate this herself, but if you’ve ever tried cooking polenta, you probably already know that it sounds like a nearly impossible feat--and yet we continue to dream. Someday maybe the magic will happen for us, too.
We finally sat down to eat around 6 PM, and within a half hour the meal was over, but worth every second we spent preparing it. All of Grandma’s worry about the meat was for nothing. It was so tender it just fell apart in my mouth (almost no chewing required!). When I asked Shayln what she wanted for breakfast the next morning, she said, “Some of that sauce. Duh!”
Although this was the finest birthday dinner I had this year, I had several other yummy meals with family and friends: barbecue at T-Rex in Berkeley with Evany and Marco, Chinese with my mom and grandma in Fortuna, So-Hum cuisine in Redway with Mel, sushi in Berkeley with Pat, and Town Hall in San Francisco with Frew and Luke. Thanks, everybody!
Mighty Day of Many Meat Treats
I admit that I did sort of trick Pat into taking a side trip to Cle Elum on our way home from Lake Chelan, Washington, but any ill will he felt at being deceived was obliterated once he realized cookies and smoked meats were to be had. After locating my Italian great grandfather’s old tavern on the main drag, we walked across the street to Owens Meats. I tried a sample and immediately asked for a pound of their smoked Alaskan white salmon, but Pat, who is all too familiar with my various shortcomings, not the least of which is my grizzly-bear-like lack of self-control when it comes to cured fish, quickly doubled the order. I was easily upsold to Owens’ landjaeger, which, according to the kid behind the counter, is a German sausage with Swiss origins and popular with hunters and outdoorsmen throughout history because it doesn’t require refrigeration. He described the process Owens uses to make theirs, and it involves--if I remember correctly--grinding, pressing, seasoning, stuffing, smoking, and somewhere in there, fermenting. That’s the part that really got my attention--the fermenting. Why would anyone do that to meat unless it tasted really, really good? So I stepped right up and bought a sack, knowing full well that if I extended this line of logic I might find myself eagerly purchasing sausage packed in the butcher’s socks, if, by chance, they offered something like that for sale. Luckily, they didn’t appear to, but it’s not like I asked outright or anything.
We walked across the street to the Cle Elum Bakery, which opened in 1906 and reportedly hasn’t cooled its ovens once in over a hundred years. My own Grandma Katie bought torchiette cookies there as a young girl with her friends. She said they would sip milk through them like a straw. I decided I needed a sack of those, too, and they were just as tasty as Grandma remembered.
As we headed south, Pat dug out one of the Chelan apples to snack on while I sucked on SweeTARTS and--somewhat to his chagrin--carved off a piece of a sausage with my pocketknife. I asked him if he wanted some, but he just gave me a disgusted look. At first I thought he was annoyed I was eating it in the car, but then he muttered something about not knowing where my knife had been, which I have to admit made me stop and think for a moment. I quickly ran down in my head a list of the grosser scenarios that might require a pocket-sized tool that can cut, saw, dig, scrape, or poke, but determined that nothing I had done with my knife recently could be any worse than the fermenting that had happened to that sausage, and thus I resumed my lunch.
Somewhere past Shaniko, Oregon, the weather took a turn for the worse. I’m not sure if it was just that big wide open space capped by dark ominous clouds that tipped me off, but about five minutes after I uttered, “Pat, we gotta get out of here...,” it started raining so hard we lost sight of the road, and just when it seemed like it couldn’t get any worse, the rain turned to gravel-sized hail. We inched along with our hazard lights on until we finally found a wide spot in the road where other people had pulled off to wait out the storm. It finally let up after what seemed like several minutes, but the hail had made such a racket that we were both surprised to find the car unscathed.
When we got to Bend it was still early, so we decided to pass on mountain oysters at the Tumalo Feed Company, where Pat first sampled the delicacy that has inspired many a testicle festival across the West. Instead we continued south to Mount Shasta, where we arrived in time for homemade ravioli at the family-owned Piemont restaurant, where the food is so good that I once ate four dinners in a row here. The owner, Judy, told me she can make up to 160 dozen ravioli in a few hours using an ancient-looking machine to roll the dough. (I did some figuring and that’s roughly the same amount of Piemont ravioli I’ve eaten in my lifetime.) Our meal, complete with minestrone, antipasti, spumoni, and coffee was deeply satisfying and came to about $30 for the both of us. Where else can you get a homemade dinner for that price? If you know, tell me!
When we got home, I learned from my mom that the Owens Meat people are our distant cousins. I’m hoping they have some sort of family discount because, thanks to them, I’ve already developed a wicked landjaeger habit and will be looking to score some more fermented meat cheap in the very near future.
My Projects
My Short Films
- What's a Nice Girl like You...
- Story Machines
- Boot Camp
- Moving Horses from Montana to Washington in 1903 (audio)
My Tweets
My Photos
The Blocksburg Book
My Favorites at the Moment
- Luke's remix of his Peter and the Wolf remix
- These hand-tooled shoes and purses
- Gossip Girl
- Red Rock Rondo