we’re getting creative over here

We ran out of drinking water about three weeks ago. Typically, we haul it in, in five gallon jugs, but this winter the snow has uncharacteristically refused to melt for weeks on end, and the drifts over our long country driveway have in places reached over three feet.

For weeks we drank maple sap. It’s sugaring season, after all, and we have no shortage—more than we can handle, for casual boiling. And we’re still drinking it, and eating a lot of new syrup, and frankly it’s getting a little old.

So I just set a pork belly to curing for bacon, and I had a little pile of trimmings I figured I’d cook with the other night, seasoned with salt and smoked Spanish paprika. And I had a bag of chicken wings needing to be eat. So I threw it all in the Dutch oven to brown, let it cool, threw in some onions to caramelize, set some Arborio rice to risottoing, and realized that with all that inherent sweetness (pork and onions, friends) I didn’t want to make that risotto with maple sap.

So, I used beer. Some weak lager someone left from a party months ago, the most neutral liquid in the house. (Yeah, we’ve gone through all the stock in the freezer, too.) The bitterness, I was hoping, would help balance the sweet of the pork and onions. Also, the radicchio I set with the sauce to caramelizing.

It was a fairly intense thing to eat. But good. Needed something bright and crisp to balance it though, like lightly grilled asparagus maybe with lemon juice—or maybe I should have kept that radicchio more discreet. We drank it with a light, sharp wine (an Austrian Zweigelt) and that helped, it being also a refreshing alternative to more sap.

Of course, close readers of this blog will remember that my wife for her health avoids eating gluten, and will know that beer is glutenous. My wife reminded me of that second fact, several bites in, when I explained to her my clever technique.

What’s the name of this blog again?

green soup

Spinach soup, made with an immersion blender. I don’t use them, for some reasons, philosophical and otherwise, but the other cook does. Great color. Those other things are tiny souffles, or you could call them gluten-free popovers gone wrong. More like dumplings, actually, because that’s how we ate them, and the next morning as crusty custard, with butter and jam.

buy wine I like

Because I’ve been asked, by three of the four people who actually read this blog, and because those three or four people occasionally have me for dinner, (and so it’s in my interest to influence their taste)—for these reasons, I’ve written this primer for buying wine. It’s biased, but it’s all true.

1. Buying wine without knowledge of the individual producer is gambling. You read the label as best you can for clues as to what kind of wine it’s going to be and whether you’re going to like it, and then you bet the bottle-price that you’re right. Sometimes you lose, sometimes you win big. The more you know, the better your odds.

2. There are tricks that help narrow the odds fast, like knowing the rules of a card game. It is good to know the rules of poker before you put money down, say.

3. The first rule is that place of origin trumps grape. This is less a factor of climate than of culture: Californians tend to make one style of wine, Burgundians another. However, it is also true that most non-Europeans tend to make similar wines. This is because they have no tradition, and so follow fashion: they make what sells.

4. The fashion currently is for big, viscous, jammy, fruity, high-alcohol, often vanilla-flavored (oaky) wines, which are made to be drunk like cocktails and usually detract from a meal. These wines are friendly to palates used to syrupy soft drinks, and to people who need to be smacked to be impressed enough by a wine to spend money on it. Rule: non-European wine from an unknown producer will usually be made in this style.

5. European wine is vastly more interesting, more varied, more difficult, and more likely to improve and improve with the taste of good food. Every region makes several wines in styles altogether distinct from every neighboring region. Many people find this intimidating, and try to cling to grape varieties, which are used to roughly designate style in New-World wines. This method is doomed. Rule one again: place of origin trumps grape.

6. You don’t have to be familiar with (it’s a cliché) every hamlet in France to consistently buy good wine at a good price. There are tricks.

Trick #1: Choose a region (a country will do) and only drink wines from that region until you get a sense of it. Then, choose another.

Trick #2: Forget regions, buy by importer.

7. A bottle’s importer is usually listed on its back label. Some importers are huge, follow fashion, and are only out to make a buck. Others are boutique operations with two employees who only sell wine they believe in, aesthetically, politically, spiritually. Each importer has its own palate and its own politics, and may or may not have distribution where you live. The trick for you is to find a few you agree with. Once you do, you’re golden: buy everything they import that you can afford; they will rarely lead you astray.

Appendix I—Miscellaneous advice that didn’t fit anywhere else: Wines from famous places are usually overpriced. Wines with over 13.5% alcohol tend to be more viscous and less versatile with food than lighter ones. Beyond this fact, don’t sweat food-pairings. Forget any prejudice you may have against pink wine, or red or white for that matter. It’s silly. Don’t sweat whether a wine is “good” or not. It’s a drink, after all, not a class marker. That said, one in maybe ten bottles sealed with natural cork is “corked,” and will taste a little like mildew or wet cardboard. A reasonable wine-seller will refund you for these, with a receipt.

peg-legged bossy

From The Cattle of the World by Alvin Howard Sanders. (Washington: The National Geographic Society, 1926.)

I Hate Recipes, and a recipe for Famous Fake Mac.

I can’t learn from recipes. I have no interest whatsoever in recipe books, 95% of cookbooks. I use them sometimes, but tellingly, I only follow recipes for things I originally learned to make from recipes—in other words, things I never learned how to make, and still don’t know how to make, even after I’ve made them dozens of times. This is what recipes do to me, they make me stupid and keep me dependent. Occasionally I find the time to take a recipe I use and make something I can use out of it. For example, my mother’s “famous macaroni,” as written on the back of a Christmas card stored in the back of my 70′s Joy:

Famous Macaroni

cook (1 pound) macaronis
Toast {1 c. nutrit. yeast
{1/2 c. flour
Add 2/3 c. oil, stir while it bubbles
(coconutoil)(refined)
Add 3 c. water. stir & whisk until thickened
Add 4 tbsp. tamari
1 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp pepper
(1/2 tsp. chopped garlic)<--optional

First, let me say that this is actually good. Good, solid comfort food, that I make about twice a month—something friends always love, though I am sometimes reticent about what it's made of until after they admit as much. It is a museum piece of my cultural heritage, though it only dates back to about 1970. Not that, of course, I ever make it as written: I use much more garlic, measure poorly, and season to taste. And I'm tired of having to look it up every time I want to make such a simple sauce. So I took it apart and gave it a little thought, and here it is again like I might write it down:

Fake Mac Sauce

toast yeast and flour (2/1)
oil til smooth
water to texture
tamari, salt, pepper, garlic.

And having made the recipe into something I can understand, what it looks like in my own head:

Fake Mac = 2/1.

I think I can remember that.