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.
That Little Boy is Me!
There aren’t any amusement parks in Humboldt County, so we have to make our fun. I found this picture a couple weeks ago while looking through some old photos. That little boy is me and the contraption I’m riding is called a “bucking barrel.” I figured my dad for a genius after he built it. The way it worked was two kids (or adults) would stand on either end and pull the ropes to make the barrel twist and buck. The ropes were attached to springs (or maybe bungee cords) near the barrel that gave the ride a nice bounce and made for hours and hours of potentially noggin-cracking, limb-busting fun. At the time, I was completely unaware that I would grow up to be a) a woman, or b) a woman who to this day is dwarfed by many 10-year olds. And yet I intended to make a career as a professional bull rider (or possibly a wide receiver in the NFL). My backup plan, which probably should have caused my parents even more concern, was to earn a living writing.
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.
Grandpa Would Have Loved the Web
My granddad was an early adopter way before that term ever entered the lexicon. As soon as a new tech product landed on the shelves, he had to have it. We’ve got all sorts of 8mm and Super8 films as well as audio recordings dating back more than sixty years. My mom recently gave me a cassette tape with an audio recording from a family reunion in Washington that Grandpa made back in the summer of 1946 using a phonograph that could record sound on blank discs. It’s so fascinating to hear the voices of long-departed relatives like my great grandparents and also how young my grandparents sound--not to mention my mom reciting Little Bo Peep at four years old. It is such a treasure. I tear up every time I listen to it, and it makes me wonder now that capturing memories like this is so easy if we’ll treasure them as much in another sixty years.
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Star Route, New York City
In a show of remarkable restraint (at least for me), I decided not to tell Pat about the dream I had a few days before we flew to New York last week for the East Coast premiere of my short film at the Rural Route Film Festival. There wasn’t a lot to this dream. Mostly just the image of an airplane with the front end torn off and the name of our air carrier painted on the side. I’m sure this was probably brought on by my deep fear of flying, but it took a lot of effort to rein in my superstitious nature, particularly when the flight out there was suddenly rerouted south due to bad weather and someone in the cockpit came on the radio to tell us we had to land in Richmond, Virginia, because we were about to run out of fuel. About five minutes later we hit the runway with a loud and somewhat surprising thud. All of these things sort of seemed like bad omens to me, and yet here I am. I guess it’s time to officially give up on my hopes for a career as a crime-fighting soothsayer.
The flight delay meant we would miss Homemade Hillbilly Jam and a shorts program we were planning to attend that night as part of the festival. Instead, we headed straight for the Tribeca Grand, where Pat had booked us a room. I can be kind of cheap and normally stay at Hotel 17 when I’m traveling solo, but Pat had his fill of shared bathrooms and twin beds during our backpacking days. I like to tease him about his pampered lifestyle, but secretly love it when I get to tag along in his chauffeur-driven Town Cars.
It turns out, though, that it’s not as easy as it looks. Checking into the hotel required a lot of decisions. Do we want synthetic or down bedding? What kind of breakfast do we prefer? Bose sound system or iPod? New York Times or USA Today? Goldfish or sans goldfish? I found myself wondering what demographic profile we fit based on our answers--especially since Pat filled out the first half of the form and then became so weary he asked me to finish it. It must have been the complimentary champagne (which I embarrassingly accepted a little too eagerly) that made me decide that a Jack and Coke paired with oysters in bed would be preferable to dinner in the neighborhood. Surprisingly, this combination worked out OK for me the next day.
On Saturday, we cabbed over to the American Museum of Natural History to check out the dinosaurs and then took a brief walk through Central Park before catching a documentary narrated by John Waters called Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea (when we got home, I saw this story about another massive tilapia die-off there). Later we saw Muskrat Lovely by Amy Nicholson about an almost too-good-to-be-true combination beauty pageant and muskrat-skinning competition in Maryland. That was followed by Women Who Hunt by Carol Wagner and Theresa Davidson, which featured the skinning and gutting of several critters and turned out to be a little much for the urban audience. There seemed to be a lot of snickering and gasping in the audience (at least near where we were sitting), and I even overheard one man saying to another as we left the theater, “That was totally offensive.” I thought to myself he should consider himself lucky he couldn’t smell it.
I guess people’s reactions shouldn’t have surprised me, but in the middle of the film I suddenly felt keenly aware of how different my two worlds are and even a little confused about which one I belong in more. My sister and I are probably the first of many, many generations of women in my family not to hunt, although I like to accompany my dad and help with the butchering. Sure, there were a couple things that bothered me in the film, such as the mother and daughter who go trophy hunting for buffalo on a private reserve (something akin to shooting a cow in a field with a high caliber rifle), but for the most part, the movie reflected a reality I’ve known most of my life. It made me a little sad for the New Yorkers that their cellophane-wrapped view of the food chain allows them to think their hands aren’t bloody. Unless, of course, they are vegetarians...then I just feel sorry for them for being masochists and attending the movie in the first place.
On Sunday, we caught the Cowboys and Aliens program that featured my short. It was fun to see Boot Camp in the context of the other wonderful films, and to see how differently the New York audience reacted to it compared to the cow folk out in Elko.
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!
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My Projects
- Web: TED's Translation Project
- DVD: How to make cowboy boots
- Book: My grandmother's life story
- Always: The House!
My Short Films
- What's a Nice Girl like You...
- Story Machines
- Boot Camp
- Moving Horses from Montana to Washington in 1903 (audio)
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The Blocksburg Book
