A Literary Feast

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Goat

Posted on March 16th, 2012

Inside, two opposing principles create a marbling, an ebb and flow of grey area. One night I chose to move with a certain sobering moral, to flow with a particular darkness that resides in all creatures. Wavering, drained, I felt the darkness pull a sob from way down deep, as if the night mirrored my heart and my insides. Following the obscurity was meant to recollect ancestral ritual and perhaps with experience, it will. This first time, however, the black sky wrapped me in cold and ripped away the tension and adrenaline seething through my veins until I felt an unbearably heavy emptiness. There was nothing left in my hands but the weight of the gun. Her eyes had shone black before me; they…

Eating Icons

Posted on March 16th, 2012

About 12-years-ago my sister got married in a torrential downpour in a field in Maine. After a promising day of preparations under threatening skies, the heavens quit procrastinating and really let us have it. That did nothing to stop her from slogging down a torch-lined path through a cornfield in ankle-deep mud to get hitched on the banks of the Kennebec River. The guests, aside from my elderly grandparents, weren’t deterred either, washing along together down to the ceremony, then back to the rented tent for a country potluck like you read about. Kegs of homebrew stood stacked to the tent flaps and tables bowed under the weight of produce from friends’ farms and gardens, with a spit roasted lamb from my brother’s flock…

Stalking The Wild Hungarian Bitters

Posted on March 16th, 2012

In 1790, one Mr. Zwack, court physician to the Habsburgs, presented his latest medicinal concoction – a dark, herbaceous, and probably frightening bitters – to no less prestigious a drinker than Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor. Legend has it that after taking one sip, the Emperor said to the expectant Zwack, with superb Old World tact: “It’s very… unique.” (The Emperor died a month later. I imply nothing.) I’m paraphrasing, of course, but I think there’s no better way to translate the admittedly more dignifying “Das ist ein Unikum!” that named a living legend among digestifs. Unicum, the national drink and perhaps the national pastime of Hungary, is an acquired taste that even seasoned bitters-lovers might find themselves unwilling to acquire. For me it…

The Birthday Gift

Posted on March 16th, 2012

I had worked all day making hundreds of loaves of bread by hand. I was tired after driving four hours to Yosemite with overnight backpacks, cigarettes and enough food to last for two days. I was ready for some sleep. We got into our campsite at 11:30pm cranky, hungry and bickering. We rolled out of my pickup, donned our headlamps and set to constructing the tent. We were arguing about which pole should be inserted first (we did it wrong every time, no matter whose idea it was) when we heard a mighty “WHUMP”. We swung our headlamps over to the truck; “my backpack is gone!”. Of course it was MY pack; I carried the food on trips. And now this could only mean…

Big Buck Hunter Down Under

Posted on March 16th, 2012

A few years ago, I got to go to Cape Town South Africa to light a theater show. It was friggin great. Once the show was up and running, I had my entire day free to explore. On any one of these days I did everything from walking around the markets, to hiking around Table Mountain, to swimming with penguins on Boulder Beach. Food was only a small problem, as most places were only open for dinner after the show started. HOW WAS I GOING TO GET THE CHANCE TO EAT SOMETHING CRAZY? I was told to go to a very popular restaurant called “Mama Africa” on my day off where I was told I could sample some local cuisine…and local fauna. It was…

Sea Meat

Posted on March 16th, 2012

My favorite watermelon region is the stratum of tart, crisp, pale pink flesh that starts just above the rind and extends for about an inch. When I was nine I ate my watermelon with a paring knife. My mom would eat the sweet, gritty, seed-filled mouthfuls of the melon’s core and then donate the remains to me, her weird kid. With my trusty blade I would slice off thin strips and hold them up to admire their translucence before munching away on the marvelous texture. One time, a thought popped into my head and I said it out loud after preparing a delicate fillet– “Sea meat!” That was pretty much it. No one heard me and I was never asked to clarify the term…

Notable And Potable Vol. 18: This IS Your Mother’s Bone Luge

Posted on March 16th, 2012

Since becoming verbal at, may I say, a precociously early age, my daughter has thrown down an amazing amount of information as she’s explored her varied and sometimes offbeat interests in life. I’ve routinely served as a sounding board, sometimes an eager participant, and, on rare occasion, a victim. Looking back, I realize that while her interests have seemed to diverge, there is the common thread of experimentation in all of them. The gathered and infused herbs that consumed her in childhood and were often tested on me, regardless of actual need, evolved into the spun sugar tents and perfect crepes I and my dinner guests got to consume as she grew older. These passions have been neither fleeting nor in any way superficial,…

Hunting For A Woodless Veggie Burger

Posted on March 16th, 2012

Even if you’re not livin’ la vida vegetarian, it’s hard to go wrong with a veggie burger. Despite being invented in the 80s (the decade that brought us poprocks and fried mozzarella sticks), veggie burgers have successfully made the transition from food trend to…well, just food. I’d love to maintain foodie cred and say, breezily, that I have a fabulous from-scratch recipe that I make with ingredients plucked fresh from the garden. But while the mind is willing, the flesh is weak — and that weakness is named “Boca.” Up until recently, I was totally cool with frying up one of those frozen suckers in olive oil and dropping it on a bun with some ketchup, LT&O for the occasional instant dinner. So what…

Please Pass The Euphemism

Posted on March 16th, 2012

Raise a chicken – eat a chicken; catch a fish – eat a fish; culinary terminology seems simple enough, right? Kill the animal, eat the animal. Things get more complicated as the animals get larger. Raise a cow-eat a cow? Hunt a deer-eat a deer? Raise a pig-eat a pig? Concretely, the answer to the previous three questions is yes-but according to well-established vernacular the answer to each is no and beef, venison, and pork, respectively. It seems we frequently kill an animal and eat something else – linguistically, at least. Our culture disconnects the meat we eat from the actuality of the carcass it came from in many ways, and language plays an important role in that process. Let’s start at the beginning:…