Pass the Garum - a blog exploring Roman cuisine. Sadly, it's not active, but it's still online with much of interest, some of which I would even consider eating.

How was your Thanksgiving?

Found....

....two splendid boletes, the consolation prize of a lousy season, in an undisclosed location in northern New Mexico. Nice big ones too! The larger one on the right had some wormy spots but was mostly good, while the one on the left was immaculate.

My kind of poem:

Please Sir, God of Death
Don’t make it my turn today,
not today
There’s fish curry for dinner.

-Bakibab Borkar

Via photographer Rajan Parrikar, who notes that the poem "captured the essence of what it means to be Goan".

If philosophers were cooks
I was always a lackluster philosophy student, so this is a challenge better suited to Odious' talents. I'll merely note that the, oh let's say, chile relleno greater than which no chile relleno can be conceived obviously exists, inasmuch as an existent relleno is clearly greater than a non-existent one.

Sailor eaten by Polynesian cannibal? As they say, worse things happen at sea, but we'll see how this shakes out.

HT: Adventure Blog.

The pig is a wonderful, magical animal! It gives us ham and bacon and pork chops, and can even turn into giant mushroom clouds of flame, a venerable tradition at certain nameless Idaho rafting companies:



Click to enlarge. This is why you don't put out kitchen grease fires with water, kids!

The sequential view:

Turmeric: what it cannot do?

God is a bad god because he makes bad food.

This is very difficult to refute convincingly.

It's an awfully long time since we've done recipe blogging. Let's remedy that. We've been eating a lot of this since receiving it from the Querencia crew. It's summery, really easy and works very well when prepared in advance. I don't know the provenance (though it's obviously an Eastern Mediterranean sort of thing); I received it handwritten in my mother's script. But I cannot recommend it too highly!

Eggplant with Pomegranate Sauce

[Recipe claims it serves six. Maybe with lots of other food. We're having it for two right now.]

1-1/2 to 2 lbs. Japanese eggplant (Long, narrow eggplants are best, not weighing over 3/4 lb. each)
Olive oil

Preheat oven to 425 F, lightly coat a baking sheet with olive oil.

Remove ends and slice eggplants on the bias into 1/2" thick ovals. Spread slices on baking sheet and brush w. olive oil [I find dipping in a bowl answers better]. Bake about 12 minutes [takes us longer] on each side until golden brown. Transfer to serving dish, overlapping slices slightly.

Pomegranate Sauce

2 tbsp. pomegranate molasses
1 tbsp. fresh lemon juice
1 clove [yeah, right!] garlic, peeled and crushed w. 1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. sugar
1-1/2 tbsp. olive oil
1/2 tsp salt
2-3 tbsp. fresh mint
1 tbsp. chopped flat-leaf parsley
2 tbsp fresh pomegranate seeds [If you got em, but don't hesitate to go for it without them. We've found dried powdered pomegranate is quite acceptable as well.]

Combine first 6 ingredients, blending well. Drizzle sauce over eggplant. Top w. mint, parsley and pomegranate seeds. Cover w. plastic wrap and let stand until ready to serve [preferably at least 45 minutes, in our experience, it does make it better]. Best at room temperature.

'Tis the Season

Whan that August with his shoures soote
the droghte of June hath perced to the roote,
and bathed every veyne in swich parfoum
of which vertu engendred is the shroum....

...thanne longen southwestryn folk to goon on pilgrimages. So might Chaucer have ywrote, had he lived in the Southern Rockies and been more interested in fungi than relics.


Everyone's doing it: Chas, Sometimes Far Afield, 14ers.com denizens, and we are not immune. A >12,000' summit plus boletes: that's what I call a successful day! And we even had time afterwards to head to the county fair and feast our eyes on prize-winning swine.





Can anyone identify these hideous alpine thistles, pendulous beneath the weight of their fecund efflorescence? (First shot is in the Pecos Wilderness, high above the mushrooms; below is a specimen up North Crestone Creek in the Colorado Sangres. Click to enlarge.)

Update: Think we've got a fairly positive ID: Cirsium eatonii var. eriocephalum. A big thanks to Al at the highly-recommended Southwest Colorado Wildflowers site for help with this one.

Strangely fascinating (how many posts do we begin that way?) reading:

A

TREATISE

ON

ADULTERATIONS OF FOOD,

AND CULINARY POISONS.

EXHIBITING

The Fraudulent Sophistications of

BREAD, BEER, WINE, SPIRITOUS LIQUORS, TEA, COFFEE, CREAM, CONFECTIONERY, VINEGAR, MUSTARD, PEPPER, CHEESE, OLIVE OIL, PICKLES,

AND OTHER ARTICLES EMPLOYED IN DOMESTIC ECONOMY.

AND

METHODS OF DETECTING THEM.

I had known about the carving of wooden nutmegs, but much of this was a revelation to me, particularly the dangers of Poisonous Cheese.

John Derbyshire eulogizes rhubarb, as well he might. I too fondly remember our patches in the Wyoming yard of my youth, dipping the ends in sugar. And rhubarb baked goods are noble things. But I was unaware of its historic renown:

Rhubarb has an interesting and exciting history. The Emperors of China used it as a diplomatic weapon, withholding exports of rhubarb to nations that had displeased them. See here:

The imperial commissioner Lin Zexu, who was sent to Canton in 1839 to put an end to the opium trade, wrote a letter to Queen Victoria pointing to the "fact" that the foreign barbarians surely would die if they could not obtain tea and rhubarb from China.

"In additional to the intellectual stimulation, you get more cream cheese, because there is slightly more surface area."

How to cut a bagel into linked halves.

Edit: Also, "Mobius Lox" would be a great name for a band.

Sundries

Outdoors: A situation very reminescent of Into the Wild resolves unhappily in Colorado. So many people view these situations asking, "Was he an uncompromising idealist or was he mentally ill?" as if it were an either/or question. I have a fair store of sympathy for these folks, and mental illness does not mean that they're idiots, devoid of self-awareness or free will. But these stories are very sad however you look at them.

Food: Michael Pollan is still worth reading, and you can read a lot of him here, on the paradoxical popularity of cooking shows and unpopularity of actual cooking.

Opera: La Traviata was excellent, hardly a surprise. Natalie Dessay is every bit as good as one could hope, and I also quited liked her husband Laurent Naouri's performance as Germont, a roll which can easily drag. Staging and costuming were interesting and creative without being at all extravagent or distracting. We may see if we can find standing room tickets for another round.

But I'm really looking forward to The Letter this Friday. Librettist Terry Teachout's latest take:

...the pressure is off. It seems clear--gratifyingly, gloriously clear--that
Paul and I have succeeded in writing a modern opera that goes over with
audiences in a big way, which is what we set out to do. From here on, I'm going
to sit back and enjoy myself.

Me too. That one sentence feat in the preceeding paragraph is no small achievement, not by a long shot. Everything I've heard about the piece sounds wonderful, and I can't wait. Here is more on how it feels to create a good opera.

Photography: I've emoted to this effect before, but I do love living somewhere when 24 hours after watching Natalie Dessay as Violetta, I can spend the night here, in the Chama River headwaters (Mrs. Peculiar providing scale):

I'm a sucker for kemence and bagpipes, so imagine my delight to stumble upon this very interesting post by Dumneazu on Laz ethnorock and the Pontic music scene generally. Plenty of interest here. I particularly like that these folks aren't running afoul of Turkish language laws because Lazuri is not written:

Laz literature, in fact, seems to have skipped the "written literature" phase altogether and gone straight to the "hit CD" level.

And speaking of YouTube, Dumneazu has the best apologie for Internet video I've yet seen:

Youtube lets you peek in on private after dinner parties where a bunch of greek speaking turkish muslims drink raki/ouzo and just let it all hang out.

Indeed. Based on a quick look at the archives, Dumneazu's mission in life seems to be to jaunt about Eastern Europe and the Levant in search of drunken musicians and sausages. Nice work! There are a lot pork products in those archives, as well as this gem:

Two YouTubes in a row: apologies. But some things cannot be passed up:

Thank you, Rigor Vitae!

A pretty good food meme: The Omnivore's 100, that is, 100 foods a self-respecting omnivore should try before he dies. Not all of them are commendable, which is as it should be.

I come in at a respectable 67%. But I agree with Rod Dreher that the real fun is to add five of your own picks to the list, especially as the original list is adventurous only in a rather predictable vein. My additions:

• Marmot boodog
• Olympia beer with lime
• Whole roast suckling pig
• Yellowtail sushi
• Morcilla

Odious? Querencia folk?

Update: Hmphhh... just realized that the list already has black pudding, which is essentially synonymous with morcilla. So strike that. Instead, let's go with morels.

...and some vaguely related good news: interest in backyard chickens is soaring. In Austin, at least. Once again, Mrs. P and I are riding the snout of culture.