meezenplace

This piece originally appeared at Exit133 as part of my Mise En Place series there.  I am reprinting here with the sad news that my garden at Kandle Park has been basically ruined by an attempt to “improve” the space, an attempt that was doomed to failure by incompetence, inattention and apathy of park administrators.  Fill dirt used to (unnecessarily) rebuilt the garden was hardpan and it holds water like a ceramic bowl. The result is a plot of muck with a nice wrought-iron fence around it. 

Re-reading, I am pleased that the piece generally stands up.  It is painful to report that the garden itself was not so lucky.   

A Garden Plot

“My name is Max Yasgur and I’m a farmer.”

OK, I’m not Max Yasgur and I didn’t allow my property to be used to host a half-million half-naked hippies at the Woodstock Music and Art Festival.

But I am a farmer. And like Max, I don’t know how to speak to twenty people at one time, let alone a crowd like this.

Maybe “farmer” is stretching the definition of the term. Last winter I applied for a community garden plot through the Metro Parks garden program and through sheer luck was able to score a plot in my first year. I first put my name on the list in December, but was originally wait-listed with a discouraging number of names before me. Based on my place and predictably low turnover, I expected it might be 2-3 years before I could get a plot. But, just before the season started, several people in front of me pulled out and I was in!

My first choice for a garden was at the highly visible 21st and Proctor lot, which is just blocks from my house. As luck would have it that garden was well filled and I was instead offered a plot atKandlePark, which is on North 26th near Orchard, not that far, but certainly driving vs. walking distance. I say “as luck would have it” with intention. As it turned out, Kandle is where I really wanted to be after all.

My plot at Kandle is about 7 feet wide by 42 feet long, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you are weeding it’s a vast acreage. Last year my crop included green beans, snow peas, snap peas, tomatillos, basil, cilantro, arugula, beets, and carrots. Chard and lettuces did well early and late. That’s what grew. Aborted attempts included broccoli, cauliflower, and Brussels sprouts. Hey, cold weather crops didn’t do so well last summer. Previous experiences with blight discouraged me from even trying tomatoes.

Fortunately, I was able to convince my friend Barb to farm-partner with me. While I’ve gardened a bit before, Barb is a farm girl from outside Ellensburg whose life experience proved invaluable to the success of our plot. Part of that experience is the ability to commandeer youth assistance when the weeding gets tough.

As a “food enthusiast,” having truly fresh produce from my own garden was beyond wonderful. I’m especially proud of the bumper crop of tomatillos we produced, which have resulted in many meals of pork braised in roasted tomatillo verde sauce (kudos to Rick Bayless for his peerless verde recipe). In addition to meals upon meals of fresh green beans (garlic, lemon, salt), we put up a dozen quarts of spicy pickled beans between us. As Greg Brown sings, there’s nothing like a “taste of the summer (grandma put it all in jars)”. We had carrots coming out our ears and greens akimbo.

While the food from my plot was splendid, there were other equal pleasures. At Kandle, most of my gardener mates are Russian or Ukrainian. Some of them speak a little English, some not hardly any at all. Turns out growing food though is a universal language. When my beets were a bit too prolific, my neighbor, an older gent with a terrific gold dental grill showed me by hand how to thin them (for the record, you need three fingers between each beet). He was puzzled that I saved the baby beet greens though, which are outstanding with a Meyer lemon vinaigrette. More mature beet greens are excellent braised with garlic and served with grilled steak. My Russian friends are more focused on borscht than salad, but that’s them. This summer I learned an old Russian saying, “there are as many recipes for borscht as there are Russian women.” This I believe to be true.

Early on, my garden was a little, shall we say, haphazard. Guilted by my more learned eastern bloc comrades, Barb and I gradually cleaned up our act, thinning, weeding, and getting our “mise” in place as the French would say. I take it as a personal triumph that one of my neighboring farmers, a middle aged Russian woman, commented one balmy evening that “you have nice garden.” She was mystified by my patch of tomatillos and befuddled by my Brussels sprouts, but her compliment made me do a silent fist pump when she wasn’t looking.

If there is one thing that beats watering your crop at sunset on a warm summer evening with your Ukrainian acquaintances, it’s being the only one on-site in the early morning. Kandle, with its wide open spaces, affords me the “two birds/one stone” opportunity of tossing the ball for Roy in the early a.m. before Animal Control gets on the job, as well as doing some weeding and watering. I wish I was writer enough to render just how peaceful it is to stand in a garden of your own planting in the cool of the morning, a cup of coffee in your hand and a pantingLabradorjust outside gate, watching your garden grow. There are birds and butterflies, and the far-off sounds of a city waking up.

One of my wishes for us as a city is that we be the best at something, anything. Selling ourselves (and a bit of our souls in the process) asAmerica’s #1WiredCitywas a joke I don’t care to repeat. However, I do think it’s possible that we could aspire to beAmerica’s Urban Garden Spot. If there’s one thing we have in spades, it’s undeveloped land in our immediate urban core. Developing garden plots is about the least expensive thing we could do with our spare property and something with tremendous up-side quality of life potential. With virtually no promotion we already have waiting lists for existing plots. Just think what we could do if we did a little marketing and education. Think of it asVictoryGardensfor the 21st Century. I’m convinced that if we increased our community garden plots by tenfold, we’d improve our quality of life by multiples of that in process.

Today I received my plot renewal notice from Metro Parks. If you are on the waiting list for a garden, I’m sorry to inform you that my renewal check is already in the mail. But maybe you’ll get lucky. If not, swing byKandleParksome summer evening, I’m sure to have some tomatillos to spare.

Rick Bayless’ Pork Roast Braised in Roasted Garden Fresh Tomatillo Sauce

One pork “picnic” roast
One dozen tomatillos
One jalapeno pepper
One medium white onion, diced
3 garlic cloves (or more) chopped
1/3rd cup chopped cilantro
10 small red-skinned potatoes, quartered

Brown the pork roast on all sides in a dutch oven. Remove pork but reserve any rendered fat in oven.

Roast the tomatillos and jalapeno on a baking sheet on both sides until they are darkly roasted and blistered with black spots. Cool, then transfer everything (including released juices) to a food processor. Puree until smooth.

Set pork browning pot over medium heat. Add onion and cook until golden. Stir in garlic and cook a minute longer. Add the tomatillo puree all at once to hot pan and stir until noticeably darker and very thick, maybe 3-4 minutes. Add a bit of water and the cilantro and salt to taste. You might be surprised at how much salt you can add to offset the acidity of the tomatillos.

Nestle the pork roast into the tomatillo sauce and cook in an oven at 325 degrees.

Cook the potatoes in salted water until half-done and then transfer to the pork/tomatillo mixture for the last half hour of cooking. A large bone-in roast could stand to be cooked for 2-3 hours, while a boneless loin might only cook for 45-60 mins.

Originally appeared at www.Exit133.com, February 2010.

I hate medicine.

Then again who doesn’t?  Medicine, like K-Mart, sucks.  When I was a kid it seemed like I was sick constantly, no surprise if you grow up chin deep in Minnesota winters.  Mom sends you outside to play, and five months of the year it is 3 degrees and you are “playing” in three feet of snow.  The price you end up paying is that you end up practically living on cough syrup.

I hated cough syrup.   I mean I really hated it.  My grandpa Lec was a delightful guy, but the one thing he did that annoyed crap out of me was how he teased me for my distaste for cough syrup.  I’d gag.  I’d sip.  I’d screw up my face and stomp my feet.  I’d beg for leniency, a stay of execution.  Apparently this was all very funny, as it entertained my Grandpa no end.   Thank god the Droid had not yet been invented or he would have recorded my antics and posted them to youtube, with the result being a viral sensation rivaling David After Dentist.

So you can only imagine the nose-hair curling horror I experienced the other day while watching television.  It was just another Saturday morning and I had settled down with a steaming bowl of breakfast ramen noodles, a 10 cent Top Ramen package doctored with fresh infused ginger, onion, jalapeno slices, cilantro and a generous squirt of sriracha. Settling in to watch the next episode of Men of a Certain Age, I found out the show was canceled.   WTH?!

Surfing for something else acceptable to watch like a fishing show or Brazilian Butt Workout, I somehow got stuck on a PBS food show by one Dr. Amen.  Now, if there is anything I like more than a food show (Giada Everyday?  You bet!) it’s an evangelical preacherman.  There’s nothing like vintage Jimmy Swaggart.  A mashup of those genres seemed as though it might hold some promise.  Amen Brother!

Not so fast.  Turns out Dr. Amen has nothing at all to do with peddling Jezzus.  He is a neurologist/nutritionist who has come up with a Brain Diet, i.e. he advocates a way of eating that is good for your brain.

OK, my bowl of doctored ramen notwithstanding, I am down with this brain eating.  In fact, the diet he was pre/de-scribing sounded a lot like that what I eat on any given day.  Lean (OK, lean-ish) protein, whole grains, fruits, veggies, nuts.  In short, food that looks like real food.

But then he went and did it.  If you have kids in the room, this would be a good time to cover their ears.

“Food,” he said, “should be thought of as medicine.”

Gaaaaaahhhh.  Kubrick-esque images of over-sized tablespoons of Robitusin being jammed down my throat flooded my cerebral cortex.  A perfectly fine diet plan and there he goes ruining it with perhaps the worst marketing line invented in the history of Madison Avenue.

Of course when it comes to prescribing diets, this should come as no surprise.  Even my idol Anthony Bourdain gets it wrong in this regard.  Tony recently went on-line with the notion of making a healthy diet somehow a matter of patriotism, that we won’t be able to defend our borders if we are too fat.  Say wha?  That dog won’t hunt Tony.

Look, it doesn’t take a marketing genius or behavioral scientist to see that Americans (and ever-increasing populations around the globe) resist logical appeals to eat a healthy diet.  While this issue seems to confound policy-makers and nutritionists alike, the reason is simple:  when it comes to food, our stomach over rules logic.  Nobody wants to be told what to do, much less eat.  When somebody tells you to approach food “like medicine” or that it’s somehow a matter of patriotic duty, people are just going to run away.  It is a basic tenet of human consciousness.

So, as Tolstoy said, What must we do?  As for me, I take a look at people that do have healthy and sustainable diets and steal from them.  What do they have in common?  Two things jump out at me.  Generations of caloric scarcity that have forced them to be creative and imaginative for one.  Applying the basic powers of the artistic sensibility to gastronomy is a no-brainer.  Second, all these cultures celebrate food.  Ever seen a Spaniard eat lunch?  Believe me, there’s a reason they take a four hour siesta.  Lunch in Spain is at once exhausting and invigorating.  That and I think there is sex involved.  Boy, do I love Spain.

Even in this country we used to eat with much more creativity, intention and imagination – as recently as dates even in my memory.  Burgers came from a real butcher and the grill in the backyard, not a through a window at an ersatz amusement park populated by a fake clown.  You didn’t buy potato salad from a tub at SuperMegaFoods, your Mom made it (mine makes it best).  Grandma made her own cookies and put up her own jam from the raspberry bushes in the backyard.  Grandpa churned ice-cream.  Families ate together every day and the TV got turned off.  At least, that’s what happened at my house.

But something started to happen in the 1960’s.  It picked up steam in the 70’s and reached Usain Bolt speed by the 90’s.  We not only industrialized the production of food, we mechanized our style of eating.  Put the blame on whomever you want – the Evil Empire Food Giants like Monsanto and Cargill and ADM and Syngenta and ConAgra (somebody stop me!) is a plenty good place to start.  That these despicable companies and the sinister CEO’s who run them are shitsuckers to the tenth power is indisputable.  They are simultaneously fouling our food supply and eviscerating what remains of our natural environs.  That they do this cloaked in the guise of trying to “feed the world” is particularly despicable.  They are trying to make money and are compromising our very humanity in the process.

These industrial bastards notwithstanding, I (like Pogo) have met the enemy…and it pains me to admit it, but he is us.  We, the people are the ones who one-by-one make the decision to get our food handed to us by a clown through a window and eat it in transit while steering with our knees and texting with our toes.   Strangely, I find a certain comfort in our individual culpability.  If we are sinning one Whopper at a time, then we also retain the power to resurrect our tradition the same way we lost it, one eater at a time.

A concern is that when we make eating a political/corporate issue, when we affix blame to a conglomerate, when we reduce our sustenance to a math equation, a nutri-system, or even worse, as mere medicine to be gagged down with our noses held, we strip the joy and imagination from our most primary element of living.  Eating should be nothing less than a religious experience.  It should send our collective spirits soaring.

I’m not going to tell you to quit eating at the Clown, to go organic, shop the farmers markets or go full-on locavore.  I won’t advocate for Amen, Atkins, Jenny, or any other system.    Because face it…like me, you are going to do what you want.

But I will invite you to join the party.

Tempted though I am to prescribe the liturgical structure of a celebratory food culture, I am just barely smart enough to know that doing so would utterly defeat the purpose.  The deal is, it’s all about finding it for yourself.  In my own experience I need only to invoke the memory of Lechard Carl Johan Idstrom, the aforementioned grandfather.  His Food Church involved a heaping, gelatinous platter of reconstituted lye-soaked cod – aka lutefisk.  Nothing put me off my feed like this culinary abomination, but Lec loved him some lutefisk.  Put a plateful in front of him and he would assume a state of blessed Swedish contentment.  Hey, whatever works.

As for me, while I have become gustatory adventurer, I am at heart a country bumpkin.  Come Sunday, give me a perfectly roasted chicken – its skin crisped golden brown, seasoned cavity stuffed with aromatic herbs, meat both white and dark still juicy and delicious – and I am a man approaching perfect contentment.  There is nothing at all complicated about roasting a chicken – anybody can do it.  Still, it’s alarmingly easy to screw the poulet.  Lacking intention and/or attention, you can easily end up with gluey skin, wooden breasts and leaden thighs.   But done right?  A simple bird, priced at 79 cents a pound on sale can be turned into a religious experience.

So, my advice is simply to go for it.  Indulge your culinary fantasies and pay attention to your gastronomic intuition.  While your brain will often steer you wrong, your stomach seldom fails.

Got some real soul food?  Let me hear about it.

Perfect Roast Chicken

Preheat oven to 450 degrees.  That’s right, 4-Five-Oh.  Crank it up.

Take a whole chicken and let it sit out for about an hour.  A cold chicken straight out of the fridge won’t cook evenly.  Rinse and dry the cavity and then season liberally with salt and pepper.  Loosely stuff the bird with aromatic herbs and veggies, whatever you have on hand – onions, carrots, garlic rosemary, leaks, lemons chunks, celery, it’s all good.  Not too tight though, just a loose pack.  Make a coiled snake from a long strip of aluminum foil and put it in the bottom of a heavy roasting pan.  This will keep the bird off the bottom of the pan and will prevent it from poaching in its own juices.

After stuffing, truss the bird with butcher’s string.  This critical step helps keeps the bird compacted and helps to retain juices.  Lay a 30 inch length of string over the top of the breast of the bird, cross the string ends in back and bring the ends up around the legs, drawing them together as you tie off the ends.  Or, just tuck the wing tips and tie the legs together.  Either way, you want a nice compact bird, as opposed to a wanton hen, all spread-eagle.  Take about 2 tablespoons of soft butter, rub between clean hands and then massage the butter into the bird while making like a 300 pound East German shot-putter.  Season the outside liberally with more salt and pepper.

Put the buttered bird on the coiled aluminum snake and pop it in the hot oven for 20 minutes, at which time the skin should already be turning crisp and golden brown.  Turn down the heat to 375 and cook until done another 45-60 minutes depending on the size of the bird.  Remove from the oven and let rest at least 10 minutes before carving.  Voila, perfect roast chicken.

Eat well.

In a recent blog post, I mentioned how I actually learned to fly at one time in my life – not in a plane, or even a hang-glider, but just on my own, completely self-propelled.  One gentle reader asked if I would tell that story.  It’s a tough one for me to get my head around, not unlike nailing jello to the wall.  And the events surrounding it defy not only gravity, but any effort to formulate them into conflict, crisis and resolution.  But it’s a golden moment worth the attempt, so here goes…

It started with a note on the kitchen table.  Well not really, but sometimes you have to start the story in the middle, this middle being December 1980.  It was freaking frigid out there in Minnesota, with snow already piled up in huge mounds on the streets, both in Minneapolis where I was going to school and in Owatonna, where I still called it home.  The note on the table said “Call Bill McChesney” and there was a 451-xxxx number.  An Owatonna exchange. 

 Yeah right.  This was no doubt another in a long string of practical jokes perpetrated by the pater familias, my father.  This was the guy that fooled me into thinking the tuft of antelope mane in his overcoat pocket was in fact my Christmas guinea pig; the guy you had to watch like a hawk on April Fool’s Day because he would cook toilet paper in your pancakes.   

Except this time it wasn’t a practical joke. It was true. 

Now you may not know who Bill McChesney was, but in December 1980 I sure did.  And that he was waiting for my call at an Owatonna landline required a remarkable confluence of events.  Just six months previous, Bill had run an insanely bold and brave 5000 meter Olympic Trials race to make the ill-fated, Ruskie-boycotting U.S.Olympic team.  With a mile to go and time running out, he had stormed the field with a power surge that electrified his Hayward Field homeys into a frenzy in Eugene, where he was both a red-shirt junior Duck and a hometown hero, being a product of South Eugene High School.  Spent by his surge, he was overtaken down the stretch by legends Matt Centrowitz and Dick Buerkle, but Bill hung on gamely, lunging at the last moment for the third and final slot on the team.  The crowd, as they say, went wild. 

Oh, I knew Bill McChesney alright.

Or at least I knew of him.  Over the next two weeks we ran together twice a day, cruising in the crushing cold and crunching snow of Minnesota, developing a bond that would last until a dark, dank day in October 1992. 

It’s at this point of the story I need to backtrack a bit.  In December 1980 I was, as the saying goes, at the end of my rope.  Having accepted a scholarship to run track and cross-country at theUniversity of Minnesota, my days as a Golden Gopher had been particularly undistinguished, gold-plated at best.  I’d shown a few flashes of semi-brilliance, but by mid-way through my junior year I was bogged down in what could only be described as mediocrity.  Or worse.  My first race of the 1980 cross-country season, (held in a heatwave in Wichita in early September) saw me collapsing, blacked-out and puking in a heap with a serious case of heat exhaustion.  That debacle unhinged me and made something go horribly wrong, not just physically but mentally.  I was a psychic mess.  Once at least a decent enough runner who could hang with the leaders and score a few single digit points for my team, I turned overnight into an also-ran, pulling up the rear and falling off the back of the truck.  For somebody who had dedicated and defined himself by his running prowess since he was sixteen, I was embarrassed.  Embarrassed and, quite frankly, humiliated.  

So when I approached Bill for our first morning run, I did so with a double dose of humility.  Introverted by nature anyway, I didn’t say much our first few outings.  Bill on the other hand was chatterbox of the first degree, weaving yarns of European racing and Oregon life, exotic experiences to my Midwestern ears.  How the guy could keep up the patter the way he did while we carved out 10 mile runs through the southern Minnesota countryside was a wonder.  As for Bill, he couldn’t believe we ran in such conditions regularly.  “You mean it’s like this all winter long?” he would say shaking his head.  “I could never do it! Nobody on my team could do it…Well, maybe Alberto.”  Slugging me in the shoulder he’d shout “You are TOUGH, man.  One tough hombre.”  And he wasn’t above being cheesy, telling stupid jokes, or stories about skinny-dipping with nymphets on the beach in Nice, France.  One of his favorite things to do was to adopt an overblown television sports announcer’s voice (think Cris Collinsworth) and provide color commentary on our run as though we were duking it out down the backstretch of the track at Bislett Stadium in Oslo.  He would egg me on until finally, transported, I would bolt around the curve with McChesney in hot pursuit, the Norwegians going crazy as we drove in a mad sprint the final meters to a World Record time. 

Bill was in my little town down by the river because he had fallen madly in love.  About a year previous, broken down himself by injury and scraping the bottom of his own barrel, he had one night been lured out by his brother to a local Eugene watering hole for a 1950’s dance contest.  His hair slicked back and collar popped, he was struck by lightning.    Lightning by the name of one Nanci Westerlund, a blonde bombshell from (you guessed it)Owatonna who was attending theUniversity of Oregon as a grad student studying modern dance.  Captivated by Bill’s “unique” dance moves, Nanci paired up with Bill on the dance floor.  They won the contest and immediately fell for each other.  The electricity was such that it is amazing anyone in the building lived to tell. 

Which explains how he found himself stuck in frozen Owatonna,Minnesota in December when just a few months prior he was speeding around the great tracks of Europe, captivating crowds there with his infectious energy and fearless front-running.

One day, after a week and a half of running together, Bill and I finished up the last half-mile of a long run with an all-out sprint, one that saw him barely inch in front of me at the end.  Exhaling huge steam clouds and panting with our hands on our knees, Bill put a hand on my shoulder and looked up at me.  “Tell me,” he said between breaths.  “What happened?” 

Breathless, I paused a moment.  “What do you mean?” 

“For ten days you have been taking me to the limit in every run.  I just gave you everything I had and you stayed with me stride for stride.  But I never even heard of you before I came here.  What gives?” 

So, I told Bill my story of heat exhausted woe, of how no matter how hard I tried, how tough I was, something just happened to me now when I got in races.  How I’d get a mile in and suddenly my legs would turn to oatmeal.  How I was worried I would never be the same, let alone any better.

Bill looked up at me.  By now we had recovered some of our breath.  “That happened to me too,” he panted, going on to tell me how he too had suffered from heat exhaustion and struggled mightily for months after.  “It goes away, man,” he said.  “Don’t worry, you are going to be alright.”  He put his hands on my shoulders and looked me in the eye, his face just inches away from mine.  “You are going to be more than alright.  You are going to be great.  You know how I know that?”  I shook my head. 

“Now you know the secret.  Your body won’t let you kill it.  You are so damn tough, you can run yourself straight into the ground.  But now you know that even though you can run until you black out, you aren’t going to die.  Your body won’t allow it, it won’t let you”  He paused a moment.  “You can pull the ripcord, you can let it all hang out.  You can run free.  And you’ll be OK.  Not just OK, you are going to be great.” 

And with that, he pulled my sweat-soaked stocking cap off my head and threw it in a snowdrift.  “C’mon champ, let’s get some tea. It’s fucking freezing out here.”

We ran a few more days after that and then it was time for Bill and Nanci to head back west, back to Eugene where Bill was at home in the drip and drab of his Eugene. 

As for me, learning to fly didn’t happen overnight.  Bill flipped a switch for me, but the toggle took awhile to fully take effect.  Things got better for me almost right away, but I still had some serious uphill sections of road in front of me.  But I was better.  And I started to feel at ease.  Little by little I let it go.  And the more I let it go, the more free and easy it got.

Then, finally, it happened.  It happened like Scott Fitzgerald went bankrupt – that is, gradually and then all at once. 

On May 22, 1982, I woke up in the morning and I could fly.  Not metaphorically, literally.  As in, I could propel myself through space with virtually no effort, my feet not touching the ground.   OK, it looked like my feet were touching the ground, but they weren’t, not really. 

That morning I cut my shakeout run short after just two miles, worried that my newfound ability would disappear as quickly as it had come.  But it didn’t.  Later that afternoon, I knocked a minute and a half off my previous best 10,000 meter time and almost effortlessly beat a field of excellent runners for the Big Ten Championship.  The next day, I doubled back in the 5000 and again lopped dozens of seconds off my previous personal best, being beaten in the process only by Jim Spivey and Tim Hacker, two men who would go on to distinguish themselves as Olympians and international stars.  Two weeks later I was an All-American. 

After that, I was on my way.  To be sure, not every day was one where I could fully take flight, but I had more good days than anyone deserves to have.  Some of those days were even great.  Some days, I even flew.  Many days in fact, and the memory of being able to do that lives on in my body and in my bones to this moment.   For a thick-legged kid from the flatlands, I did reasonably well.  Not the best, not by any stretch, but I did well enough to rank in the second fifty runners in the world in my event. Top 100 doesn’t sound like much, but it meant something to me then, as it does now. 

As for Bill, he had his share of good and great days as well.  Man, when that guy was on, he didn’t just fly, he was a fighter jet.  There were few people in the world that could stay with him.  Ultimately, he hammered out a 5000 meters in 13:14, which at the time stood as the U.S. Collegiate Record and was agonizingly close to the World Record.  At least three times he was ranked among the top five in the world at 5000 meters.  His time still stands as the UO school record, which is no slouch given Oregon schooled the likes of Alberto Salazar and Steve Prefontaine, among many other champions.

As with all champions, Bill had his own Achilles heel, which ironically in his case was actually his Achilles heel.  Born with fragile tendons, Bill nevertheless flew close to the sun and then, when inevitably his wings melted, he crashed.  Mortals like us can play with the Gods only so long, but eventually we are fucked.  On a rainy afternoon in late October 1992, his running career prematurely cut short and now long over, Bill’s small pick-up truck hydroplaned (ironically flying again I suppose, but in a very bad kind of way) on a busy coastal highway and he spun out into an oncoming semi-truck. 

Bill was just 33 when he saw the black lights.  That the world is a little bit less for me without Bill McChesney in it bears mention.  If you never saw him run, you missed something pretty special – the sight of a human being in full flight.

Here is a video of Bill with some great clips of him flying.  At first glance, it looks like he is running like normal mortals, but if you look really close, you can see that his feet don’t actually touch the ground.  He’s flying…

bill_mcchesney_jr.html

Now I am getting old and I can’t fly any more.  Still, I have my memory and my imagination, and on a crisp fall day with the sun slanting low, memory serves.   

Bill’s Granola

It seems odd to wrap up this story with a recipe, but that’s the format of this column and I’m sticking to it.  This recipe actually came from Bill’s mother-in-law, Nanci’s mom Mary Lou Westerlund.  Or at least that’s where I think it came from.  I remember Bill loved it and we had it every morning after we ran together.  I still make this regularly and the recipe is in my card box with the title “Bill’s Granola.” If you start levitating after eating this, don’t worry – it’s natural.

3 cups whole oats

1 cup chopped nuts

1/4 cup honey

1/4 cup melted butter

1.5 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp salt

2/3rds cup raisins

Mix all ingredients except raisins and bake in an ungreased baking pan @ 350 degrees for 25-30 minutes, until well toasted.  Add raisins and mix well. 

Fly.  Bon Appetite.

What do you really need?

The question came up this week when my friend Chef Gordon Naccarato posted a question on his award-winning Pacific Grill Blog (http://blog.pacificgrilltacoma.com/)  about sweet potato casserole with marshmallows:  Necessity or abomination? 

It got me to thinking about Thanksgiving necessities. For example, I’d be delighted with a large stuffed salmon over a turkey, especially accompanied by a largish platter of Penn Cove Selects as an appetizer.  Pecan pie, cherry, or key lime could sub in for punkin and I’d be fine with that.  Stuffing?  Make mine bread, cornbread, oyster…it’s all good to me.  Veggies?  Brussels sprouts are the tradition around my home, but I’m good with lots of options there. Sufferin’ succotash anyone?

If you’re like me (and I know I am), it’s all good.  Still, there is one Thanksgiving dish upon which there can be no discussion, no compromise, no negotiation.  One dish so modest it barely merits mention in most cook books, glossy periodicals or televised food porn.  You’ll find no featured centerfold in Gastronomica. 

That’s right, mashed potatoes and gravy. 

If you aren’t planning on serving this dish on Thanksgiving, don’t bother inviting me over.  Not even opening that bottle of Chateau d’Yquem could make up for such a glaring omission. 

Ample opportunities for trial and error have helped me develop what I think to be the optimal method of preparation for this dish, which (while humble) can soar on wings of ospreys and/or eagles if you do it right.   “Sure,” you are now saying.  “Anybody can make mashed potatoes and gravy.  EVERYbody makes those.”  And it’s true, everybody can make them and seldom are they really bad, unless the potatoes came out of a box and the gravy from a packet or can. 

Still, like many things in life, a little planning and care can transform the prosaic into poetry.  In this case, poetry on a plate. 

Here goes:

Mashed potatoes

As with everything, it starts with the ingredients.  You need good potatoes.  That 10 lb. bag of moldering russets on the basement stairs that cost 10 cents a pound isn’t going to cut it.  I like Yukon Golds or Yellow Finns best, but am also fond of large reds.  Either peel them or leave the skins on, whatever you prefer.  I happen to like the reds with skin-on andYukons peeled, but that’s me.  Cut into chunks and place in a pot big enough so that you can get a couple of inches of water over the potatoes, no crowding.  Fill the pot with cold water.  Notice how cloudy the water gets?  Now drain it, that’s nasty starch you don’t want.  Refill with cold water and salt very liberally.  Be bold.  Some say salt it enough that the water tastes like seawater, but I don’t go that far.  I use kosher salt, but then that is all I have in the house. 

Bring the potatoes to a hard boil and cook them until they are well done and very soft.  A fork should easily pierce them without resistance.  Once fully cooked, drain the potatoes in a colander (reserving at least 1-2 cups of the cooking water) and return potatoes back to their pot.  Put the pot over medium heat and cook dry for a minute or two.  Don’t scorch.  This is a step that I omitted for decades, but it is key.  You need to get every bit of the liquid you can out of those guys. 

Once they are dry, its time for the mashing.  Some are steadfast in their belief in the ricer as theOne True Way, but I believe there is more than one route to salvation.  Personally, I am good with an old fashioned potato masher.  I don’t like my taters too creamy or uniform and the masher performs admirably in this regard.  Growing up, we used a Sunbeam electric beater and while I am generally disallowed from casting aspersions on my mother’s cooking, we part ways on this particular technique. 

Now that you have your potatoes cooked and mashed, it’s time for imagination and the artistic impulse to take over.  You could add some milk and butter and call it a day, but that would be the Readers Digest version of mashed potatoes.  Sour cream (neither lite nor fat-free, this is not the time for healthy options) is a traditional option, but this is Thanksgiving after all and time to go for broke.  If not now, when? 

For me, going for broke means sautéing some chopped garlic in butter and then adding a largish splash of heavy whipping cream.  Warm that mixture and then put it into the mashed potatoes and mix thoroughly. 

If this concoction is insufficiently slutty for you, you can tart it up even further.  Chives are good, but I prefer a handful of chopped Italian parsley.  Once I added some nubbins of sautéed lobster mushrooms.  This, I highly recommend.  Chanterelles, now in season, work nearly as well. 

So, let’s review.  Good potatoes, salt the water, cook thoroughly, mash roughly, add liquid, accessorize to taste.  Easy peasey.  Now we’re cookin’.

Gravy

This is an area where my tread needs to be light.  As it turns out, my mother is very sensitive about culinary criticisms contained in my little essays here, regardless of whether the slight is real or merely perceived.  So, before I fire up the gravy train, I am required by family law to make the following declaration:  my darling mother makes the world’s best rhubarb pie, potato salad and snickerdoodles.  Hands down no question. 

Now that we have that out of the way, she makes gravy wrong.  If you make gravy by mixing some flour with water, stock or other liquid and adding the raw slurry to pan drippings you are making your gravy incorrectly.  Sorry Mom. 

To make a perfect, velvety, rich gravy you need to roux.  Here are the basics:

4 cups turkey or chicken stock (preferably homemade)

4 tbs skimmed turkey fat, butter or combination

Quarter cup flour

Warm the stock.  Put the turkey/butter fat into a saucepan large enough to hold all the gravy and warm to medium.  Stir in the flour and cook on low, stirring regularly while the roux foams until it becomes a nutty brown, probably 10-15 minutes.  Add the warm stock and some of the reserved potato water.  Whisk vigorously to remove any lumps until the gravy thickens.  Season expertly and you have the perfect gravy. 

If you are cooking a turkey, you can add any carving juice that comes out of the bird.  Also, scrape up the caramelized brown bits from the bottom of your roasting pan with some white wine and add that as well.  The result is virtually fool-proof and magically delicious. 

It’s true, you can’t always get what you want.  But if you serve mashed potatoes and gravy, you’ve got … ah, hit it Mick…

Happy Thanksgiving.  Now go for a walk.

Gillette, Wyoming might well be the worst town in America, its sole redeeming virtue that you can buy a fifth of cheap Canadian from a liquor store with a drive up window.  Because God Knows, the last thing you want to do in Gillette is to get out of your car to buy your booze.

Gillette has gas.  Literally.  One of the main industries in the area is drilling for methane, which is an industry that stinks.  Again literally. As a result of drilling, the methane in Gillette leaks into residential wells in sufficient quantities that you don’t want to light a match while you are sitting on the commode, so the story goes. 

No lie.  I can’t make this stuff up. 

A while back I actually spent the night in Gillette in what was perhaps the worst motel in town, a dump so nasty it gives landfills a bad name.  Let’s take a second to review.  The worst motel in the worst town in America.  You do the math. 

So you might understand when I say I woke up the next morning a tad grumpy.   The Mustang Motel, I should have known better.  My first room had not even been touched by housekeeping.  The wastebasket next to the lumpy (and unmade) full-size bed contained half a dozen used condoms and there was a half-rack of crushed Pabst cans on the side table.  Party on Wayne.

When I went back to the office (where the clerk sat behind bullet-proof glass), and asked for a new room, the guy rolled his eyes as though I had just asked for Egyptian linens and a humidor packed with Cuban cigars.   

Damn high maintenance tourists. 

The night previous I had stayed in Livingston, Montana.  In comparison to Livingston, Gillette might as well be on the dark side of the moon.  At Livingston’s Murray Hotel, a mere block from the Yellowstone River, I slept deep and dreamless on a fluffed featherbed with a deep down comforter and watched pay-per-view on a large flat-screen TV.  Dinner was at artist Russell Chatham’s Livingston Bar and Grill (now shuttered, sad to say) and included a dozen Kumamoto oysters and a monster lamb shank (braised until falling off the bone) that was nestled cleverly into a bed of creamy polenta.  Dinner was finished with warm pear crisp.  The oysters were washed down with a couple of glasses of steely Loire Valley Muscadet, the lamb with a bottle of St. Innocent Pinot Noir from Oregon.  With dessert there was scotch, a splendid and smoky single malt from the Isle of Islay. 

In Gillette, not so much on the food front.  Unable to find an open restaurant at 9:00 pm, dinner was a greasy bag of Burger King slop (have it your way my ass), washed down with the afore mentioned Canadian mixed into a super-sized Diet Coke.  As if matters could get any worse, the game on TV found the Raiders being beaten by the Patriots on the infamous/bogus “tuck rule” call that magically transformed a Tom Brady fumble into a meaningless incompletion.  Upon further review, instant replay sucks. 

Needless to say, I was out of sorts. 

The next morning I got up early and went for a run to try to shake off the slag.  Two steps out the door of the Mustang, I knew there was trouble.  A biting wind blew out of what could only have been the north and angry dark gray clouds scudded at barely rooftop.  Clouds with an attitude.  Clouds that had just been paid and were fixin’ for a bar fight.  It was January, which in Gillette can only mean bad things.  Believe me when I tell you I was not in the mood to be snowed in and stranded in Gillette, Wyoming. 

After being nearly eaten by an unleashed pit bull protecting the turf around his double-wide, I snapped the run off short, threw my bag in the car without a shower (as if) and hustled Roy, my trusty yellow Labrador, into the back of the Outback.  Pulling out of the Mustang parking lot, I thanked heaven for all-wheel drive.

We boogied out down the arterial past a couple of depressing unoccupied strip malls without so much as a Styrofoam cup of Folger’s Mountain Grown.  A few weeks previous I had lost a crap job and in the process several other things of far greater value.  I was in no mood, believe me. 

Roy and I drove straight past the Interstate entrance ramp and in a quarter mile came to a T in the road.  Frozen snow spit on the windshield while the intermittent wipers smeared the freeze.  Roy groaned once and laid down on his cedar chip bed in the back, chagrined no doubt by the absence of a morning tennis ball toss. 

Stopped at the intersection, we idled.  Across the way, an impossibly long freight train clattered past in front of us, coal cars dusted with snow.  I looked right and saw nothing.  Looked left and saw more of the same.  Had there been tears in my eyes I would not have been embarrassed.   But I was bone dry. 

Then, this song came up on the shuffle, completely by chance. 

Roy and I sat at that intersection stopped with my foot on the brake and listened all the way through.  Four minutes give or take.  At the end of the song I looked at Roy in the rearview mirror.  “Well, boy” I said through tight lips, “whaddya think?  Which way?”  The dog said nothing, his brown eyes staring back calmly, without emotion. 

We turned right and left Gillette in the rearview mirror. 

Lamb Shanks Braised in Red Wine

Rub lamb shanks liberally with a mixture of fresh chopped rosemary, minced garlic, paprika, salt and pepper.  Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight. 

In a deep pot (I use a large Creuset enameled cast iron beast) brown the shanks in hot olive oil turning until they are well browned.  Remove from pot. 

Add chopped onion, leek, carrot garlic, and celery (in French this is called a mirepoix) to the pot and cook until softened.  Add about 2 Tbs tomato paste to mirepoix and cook until it gets clumpy, about 2 minutes.  Add red wine (at least a half bottle) and scrap up brown bits from the shanks.  Replace lamb shanks in the pot and add more red wine (and perhaps some good beef stock) until the shanks are at least half covered with liquid. 

Cover and place in 300 degree oven for 3 hours. 

Serve with creamy polenta or garlic mashed potatoes and sautéed spinach. 

(Author’s Note:  You will never find this dish in Gillette, Wyoming)

Bon Appetite.