Salon.com > Felisa Rogers http://www.salon.com Tue, 21 May 2013 14:37:46 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Lessons of a reluctant hunter http://www.salon.com/2012/04/14/lessons_of_a_reluctant_hunter/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/14/lessons_of_a_reluctant_hunter/#comments Sat, 14 Apr 2012 14:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12860181 Jazmin is 27 years old and beautiful. She has the fierce, dark beauty of a Mexican Indian, but she’s tall, and when you see her move, you think Masai warrior or maybe ninja. And it’s true: She does have ninja skills. When I first met Jazmin, she’d just killed a pheasant. She was sitting on the deck talking with a friend when she spotted the bird at the edge of the yard, 20 feet away. She casually picked up a two-by-four and hurled it. The missile hit the pheasant in the head, a neat kill. Jazmin walked over and picked it up. “Dinner,” she said.

She says she doesn’t particularly like killing animals, but she does kill from time to time, if she has good reason. A deer invaded her garden and she killed it with a machete, and she sometimes nets fish in the surf near her home on the coast of Guerrero, Mexico. It’s a skill born from practice and necessity: She grew up rural and poor. Her father abandoned her family when she was 8, and her mother, Esperanza, had to find a way to support seven children. “We ate a lot of natural things,” she says. “Things from the forest.  My brother used to kill iguanas. I’ve got a good iguana recipe if you want it. It’s the best meat as far as I’m concerned. There are two types of iguana: green and black. The black is good to eat. The green is too beautiful to kill. Last winter I found a big black one in my house! Can you believe it? The way you kill them is you step lightly on their heads and then pull on the tail.”

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/14/lessons_of_a_reluctant_hunter/feed/ 28 When home-grown was apolitical http://www.salon.com/2012/03/17/when_home_grown_was_apolitical/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/17/when_home_grown_was_apolitical/#comments Sat, 17 Mar 2012 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12681121 In an argyle sweater, girlish gray corduroys and a pink hat embroidered with the phrase “Obey me!”, Carol looks as light as a husk. Despite her 80 years, her brown hair is just frosted with gray and her eyes are sparrow bright. She lives in Phoenix, Ariz., where she is faithful to her church (Catholic) and her party (Republican). Although she was once infamous for her sharp tongue and the rigidity of her beliefs, the past 10 years have mellowed her; her husband’s sudden death and her own health problems have changed her perception of what really matters. She doesn’t blink an eye at choices that once would have alarmed her: a grandson’s shaggy hair, another grandson’s Japanese wife, a gay nephew’s marriage. One thing that hasn’t changed in all these years is her attitude toward food, which remains staunchly old school.

Although she’s recovering from a serious fall, she still bakes. I sample a slice of moist, honey-tinged rye, and she plies me with sugar-crusted oatmeal cookies. As we talk, she peels parsnips at the kitchen sink. She says she doesn’t understand the modern obsession with doing everything fast. She thinks something is lost in the translation.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/03/17/when_home_grown_was_apolitical/feed/ 15 Our stubborn faith in aphrodisiacs http://www.salon.com/2012/02/14/our_stubborn_faith_in_aphrodisiacs/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/14/our_stubborn_faith_in_aphrodisiacs/#comments Tue, 14 Feb 2012 17:01:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12348231 From the Garden of Eden to the oyster cellar bordellos of old New York, food and sex are entwined. Although every food under the sun has been touted as an aphrodisiac at some point in time, humans tend to get turned on by three categories of food: extremely expensive food, food that is risky to acquire, and food that resembles genitalia.

Rare and exotic foods have favored positions in the canon of culinary aphrodisiacs. Consider the truffle, the piranha and the labor of harvesting a plate full of sparrow tongues. Foods from far-off lands have the spicy whisper of perilous adventure, and there’s nothing quite like a hint of mystery to stimulate the imagination. For example, Aztec concubines taught the conquistadors to drink hot chocolate; when the Spaniards carried the exotic substance across the sea to Europe, they brought with it the rumor that the drink was an aphrodisiac. And during the reign of Charles I, when rice was still a luxury in Europe, noble Casanovas swore by the improbable aphrodisiac of rice boiled in milk and flavored with cinnamon.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/14/our_stubborn_faith_in_aphrodisiacs/feed/ 6 Bridging the Irish-Italian divide http://www.salon.com/2012/02/11/bridging_the_irish_italian_divide/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/11/bridging_the_irish_italian_divide/#comments Sat, 11 Feb 2012 18:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12328491 You wouldn’t want to tangle with Tom Gannon. When I look at Tom, I end up imagining his ribcage, which must be massive, like the stays in the hull of a galleon. He has a wide chest and meaty arms scrolled with tattoos: on one arm, a full sleeve of roses against a black background; on the other arm, a giant Ganesh winks from a swirl of peacock feathers and smoke. Tom is tall and balding with a neatly shaved head, a red goatee dusted with white, and no-nonsense blue eyes. But in the end, his fortress-like demeanor stems not so much from his appearance as from his attitude.

Maybe it’s the Jersey. Tom’s dad was a New York cop, and his mom worked full-time as a nurse, yet somehow found the time to give four boys a good Catholic upbringing. “It was different in the city,” Tom remembers. “We were surrounded by family and other people who had tons of kids. Childcare was not an issue.” When Tom was 9 the family moved from the city to River Edge, N.J., where they lived in a close-knit neighborhood Tom describes as “very Irish and Italian, with some token Protestants.”

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/11/bridging_the_irish_italian_divide/feed/ 7 The recipe for security http://www.salon.com/2012/01/14/the_recipe_for_security/ http://www.salon.com/2012/01/14/the_recipe_for_security/#comments Sat, 14 Jan 2012 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12129361 The house is big and heavy-timbered, with log supports and ceiling beams hewn from trees that once grew nearby. Inside, there is chatter and light and the hiss of boiling grease; outside skeins of cloud settle over a dark winter forest.

Jan stands at the wooden kitchen island. She cuts neat circles from a rectangle of flattened dough. She is thin, with short graying hair and blue eyes that are at once friendly and shrewd. Her three granddaughters run screaming loops through the kitchen, and guests cluster around the bar inspecting the cocktail selection, but Jan seems unflustered by the crowd. She passes a platter of uncooked doughnuts to her son-in-law Lou, who mans a stock pot of bubbling oil.

As a general rule, I do not like doughnuts, but I make an exception once a winter. I’ve been attending the annual Kinney doughnut party since I was a kid. But it’s not just nostalgia that compels me to eat Kinney doughnuts -- the powdered confections are piping hot, with a texture that is at once pillowy and chewy. I wash down a chocolate-filled doughnut hole with a French75, and the winter months ahead seem to promise cozy cheer instead of dreary gloom. As Jan’s granddaughter Opal chases past me, I think of parties in this house when I was little, of eating doughnuts till I was sick, and of the year it actually snowed and a fantastic wooden toboggan materialized. I remember, as I often do, Jan’s son Japhy, who was two months older than me and a hero of my childhood.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/01/14/the_recipe_for_security/feed/ 6 Why Americans sing about food http://www.salon.com/2012/01/08/why_americans_sing_about_food/ http://www.salon.com/2012/01/08/why_americans_sing_about_food/#comments Sun, 08 Jan 2012 14:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=11917231 Elvis Presley once said, “Ambition is a dream with a V-8 engine.” At once a gentleman and a rebel, a down-home boy and a global conquistador, the King, who would have celebrated his 77th birthday on Sunday, was a powerful amalgamation of American obsessions. The King loved fast cars. The King loved rock 'n’ roll. The King loved fried food. And the King knew how to interpret America. Take food, for instance. Elvis was notoriously obsessed with food, and he sang quite a few songs about this favorite topic. But “Crawfish” and “Milk Cow Blues Boogie” say more about our culture than they say about the icon himself. After all, Elvis wasn’t a songwriter: He was drawing from a deep well. American music sizzles with barbecue grease and bubbles like red-eye gravy. Food is a metaphor for all things, from your baby’s biscuits to the King’s caviar.

What does our music say about us? When it comes to food, it says we have dirty minds. For example, Elvis cut “Milk Cow Blues Boogie” in 1955. It was his third record. Several country artists had already recorded the song, which is credited to a bootlegger and bluesman named Kokomo Arnold. “Milk Cow Blues” works perfectly as a blues, country and rock number, which illustrates how much the three types of music have in common when it comes to sentiment:

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/01/08/why_americans_sing_about_food/feed/ 20 Why we get wasted on New Year’s http://www.salon.com/2012/01/01/why_we_get_wasted_on_new_years/ http://www.salon.com/2012/01/01/why_we_get_wasted_on_new_years/#comments Sun, 01 Jan 2012 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10706861 Soccer balls bulge beneath the men’s polyester skirts and blouses to create exaggerated breasts and derrieres. Their masked faces are resplendent with rouge and eye shadow, wild like plumage. Trumpet, trombone and tuba players garbed in maroon polyester suits play rousing banda, and the men shake their tousled pink and blond wigs. Their dance is a lewd, thrusting affair, accompanied by the glad-handed twirling of tuxedoed dance partners dressed as evil businessmen, who leer at the crowd with sinister rubber masks.

Incongruous on the stately town square of Dolores Hidalgo, Guanajuato, the baile is but one of many unexpected mini-fiestas we’ve encountered as we travel through Mexico during the winter holidays. The grotesque dance is a far cry from the yuletide tableaus we’ve come to expect in the U.S., but perhaps no less bizarre: adult men dressed as women with huge asses versus adult men dressed as “Christmas elves”? Who’s to say? Although I never found out exactly what the dance in Dolores Hidalgo signified, it is likely a holdover from the wild holiday traditions of ancient Europe and Mexico.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/01/01/why_we_get_wasted_on_new_years/feed/ 26 The Republican in-laws I’ve come to love http://www.salon.com/2011/12/03/the_republican_in_laws_ive_come_to_love/ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/03/the_republican_in_laws_ive_come_to_love/#comments Sat, 03 Dec 2011 18:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10279686 Apart from passing acquaintances at school and work, I didn’t actually know any real Republicans until I married into a conservative Catholic family. Holiday conversations shifted from the familiar (meditation, magic and global warming), to the unfamiliar (guns, the evil legacy of Jimmy Carter, and the importance of building a better fence along the U.S.-Mexico border).

My parents raised me to see the right wing as an unpredictable and malignant species, entirely separate from my own people. In my family, we talked about Republicans in the same tone of voice your average American reserves for the Taliban. "Christian" was a damning epitaph, to be delivered in a dark and significant whisper. Getting to know my conservative in-laws was something of an education.

Right off the bat, I was shaken by several astonishing discoveries. For instance, some people actually revere Ronald Reagan! But perhaps even more surprising: I actually liked these people. I liked people who watched Fox News and blamed America’s problems on welfare and environmentalists. Not only did I like these people, but somehow I felt at home with them.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/12/03/the_republican_in_laws_ive_come_to_love/feed/ 49 The birth of America’s bastardized cuisine http://www.salon.com/2011/11/24/the_birth_of_americas_bastardized_cuisine/ http://www.salon.com/2011/11/24/the_birth_of_americas_bastardized_cuisine/#comments Thu, 24 Nov 2011 14:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10245616 America is a country originally settled by scoundrels and religious zealots -- thieves, embezzlers, prostitutes, arsonists; English Puritans, French Huguenots, German Amish, Czech Moravians and Russian Mennonites. The screwed-over Scotch-Irish, the shanghaied London street punk, the peace-loving, slave-owning Quaker, the enslaved Gullah. It is also the native land of the Ojibwa, the Zuni, the Makah, the Miwok and the Seneca. This alchemy of sinner and saint, “savage” and sophisticate is the source of our original cuisine: a stolen, borrowed, distorted culinaria that can pique the tongue, clog the arteries, fire the belly, or mellow the soul.

In keeping with American tendencies, Thanksgiving is a bastard holiday, cobbled together from homegrown traditions and the hokey imaginings of 19th century writers, along with actual historical facts. The facts are thus: The “first American Thanksgiving” was probably observed in the South, not at Plymouth, and it would have been a day devoted to prayer, not pie. As for the famous Plymouth pilgrims? The settlers that staggered off the Mayflower to strike up a miserable township on the rocky shore did not call themselves pilgrims. At the time, they were known by cagier names: separatists (religious idealists) and strangers (various dreamy and desperate characters the separatists had recruited in order to swell their meager ranks and coffers). The settlers wore colorful clothing and did not favor buckles, though they did sport the tall broad-brimmed hats, which you may remember from your elementary school days.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/11/24/the_birth_of_americas_bastardized_cuisine/feed/ 25 When the recession breeds kitchen creativity http://www.salon.com/2011/11/12/when_the_recession_breeds_kitchen_creativity/ http://www.salon.com/2011/11/12/when_the_recession_breeds_kitchen_creativity/#comments Sat, 12 Nov 2011 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10190866 Nicole’s appearance does nothing to dispel my fear. She’s lean and healthy-looking, and her intense blue eyes feed my suspicion that I’m in the clutches of a health fanatic. I contacted Nicole because I’d heard good things about her date chèvre truffles and her pork tamales. For some reason, it never occurred to me that truffles and tamales could be part of a health agenda; I’d already committed to sitting in on one of Nicole’s cooking lessons when I received an email informing me that, in addition to the dates, the class would focus on broccoli slaw as an alternative to pasta. I informed Nicole that I might have to leave early.

Low-fat and low-carb cooking do not fall into my sphere of interest. I suffer from an ancestral devotion to the fat-centric cooking of James Beard. Pasta is my refuge from the vagaries of life. My only nod to healthy eating is eschewing junk food, which makes me feel virtuous. In truth, I just prefer snacking on real food: bacon-wrapped dates, for instance.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/11/12/when_the_recession_breeds_kitchen_creativity/feed/ 15 The crepes that crossed the Atlantic http://www.salon.com/2011/11/05/the_crepes_that_crossed_the_atlantic/ http://www.salon.com/2011/11/05/the_crepes_that_crossed_the_atlantic/#comments Sat, 05 Nov 2011 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10161528 The blue schoolhouse has begun to slouch with age, to settle into itself. Four tall windows clouded in white lace curtains shine with autumn light. The house has an old smell to it, like parchment, or quilts kept in a trunk, or books, and today the air is tinged with wood smoke and butter, sizzling in a cast-iron frying pan.

Mary Lou Goertzen is making thin pancakes, a tradition in her family that dates back at least to the era of Catherine the Great, when her great-great-grandparents fled Germany.

“Catherine the Great offered my family freedom from religious persecution if they’d settle and farm in the Ukraine,” Mary Lou says, setting the heavy cast-iron pan on the round wooden table. “The Mennonites lived in Russia for over 100 years. This is a recipe from my great-great-grandparents, German Mennonites who settled in the Ukraine.”

One hundred and fifty years later, American descendants of Ukrainian farmers were still using the same crepe recipe. Mary Lou, who was born in Kansas in 1929, remembers crepes as a Sunday tradition. “We called them flinsen. When I grew up, we had these for Sunday supper. You went to church in the morning. When you got home from church you had Sunday roast. That was enough cooking for the day. So Sunday evening we’d have a simple light dinner of flinsen with rhubarb or sour cherry preserves.”

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/11/05/the_crepes_that_crossed_the_atlantic/feed/ 8 The twisted history of candy http://www.salon.com/2011/10/31/the_twisted_history_of_candy/ http://www.salon.com/2011/10/31/the_twisted_history_of_candy/#comments Mon, 31 Oct 2011 18:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10150827 As frost bites the air and plastic Halloween bunting unfurls in suburban yards, our thoughts turn to the simple delights of candy: the pastel snap of Necco wafers, the dubious rattle of a box of Good & Plenty. Half the candies we ate as kids weren’t actually good. Even at the time we suspected as much. But candy offered an undeniable pleasure: It was fantastic, it was unreasonable, it came in colors and shapes unrelated to actual food. And on Halloween, it was free.

Although tricks and treats have been part of Halloween tradition for ages, October 31st didn’t become a candy-centric holiday until the 1950s, when aggressive marketing campaigns began to tell Americans a different story about All Hallows’ Eve. And naturally, the story was about candy. Perhaps this is appropriate. Our larger story as a people is, in a sense, a story of candy.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/10/31/the_twisted_history_of_candy/feed/ 0 Would you eat this lamb’s heart? http://www.salon.com/2011/09/03/scavenger_hearts/ http://www.salon.com/2011/09/03/scavenger_hearts/#comments Sat, 03 Sep 2011 13:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/food/feature/2011/09/03/scavenger_hearts I've always thought it would be fun to eat a heart. As a kid, the beet was my favorite vegetable because biting into the firm garnet flesh allowed me to imagine I was eating a heart. I don't think my childhood relish stemmed from a deep-seated hatred of humanity or a serious interest in cannibalism, and, in my defense, a morbid fascination with the heart pervades all human cultures. In fact, I probably got the idea while touring Mayan and Aztec ruins; I was fascinated by the Bonampak frescoes: faded murals of heart sacrifice beneath a starry dawn sky.

Ten thousand years ago, Cro-Magnon hunters etched hearts in stone. Eight thousand years later, Egyptians would revere the heart as the cradle of intelligence, wisdom and memory, an organ that guarded or revealed moral shortcomings: After the deceased had crossed the dangerous country between the land of the living and the land of the dead, he or she entered the Hall of Two Truths, where the jackal god Anubis weighed the hearts of the dead. Anubis placed a heart on one side of a scale and an ostrich feather on the other. The feather symbolized truth, and only a heart of the same weight was worthy of the fields of heaven. (The jackal god tossed unworthy hearts to "the gobbler," a crocodilian monster that waited at the base of the scales.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/09/03/scavenger_hearts/feed/ 106 Gardening my way out of the doldrums http://www.salon.com/2011/08/27/scavenger_kale_crepes/ http://www.salon.com/2011/08/27/scavenger_kale_crepes/#comments Sat, 27 Aug 2011 13:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/food/feature/2011/08/27/scavenger_kale_crepes The morning has not been good so far. Insomnia has left me ghostlike, my husband and I have stumbled into a minor cold war, I'm feeling utterly uninspired on every possible level, and when I attempt to dust the dining room, I knock over a potted cactus. Dirt coats the surfaces I just cleaned.

I spent my teenage years deeply unhappy, but when I was 20 my dad's sudden death snapped me out of it. I realized that wallowing in the doldrums was a narcissistic waste of my time. Most days it's easy for me to remember that lesson: I haven't felt this familiar weight on my chest in a long time. I think about calling my friend Becky, my go-to person in moments of duress, but my listlessness is too severe. As I stand by the phone, it rings. I wait for the answering machine to pick up.

"Hey babylove, it's Michelle. I just wanted to call because I have my feet in a bucket of cherries and I'm stomping them, and I'm going to hold the phone down so you can hear the sound effects."

I laugh. The sound is exaggerated cartoonish squelching. She's making cherry wine. I pick up the receiver.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/08/27/scavenger_kale_crepes/feed/ 181 Kale-filled crepes recipe http://www.salon.com/2011/08/27/kale_crepes_recipe/ http://www.salon.com/2011/08/27/kale_crepes_recipe/#comments Sat, 27 Aug 2011 13:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/food/recipes/2011/08/27/kale_crepes_recipe

Ingredients

Kale filling

  • 1 tablespoon olive oil
  • ½ red onion (chopped)
  • ⅔ cup stock
  • 2 cloves garlic (chopped)
  • 1 cup kale (chopped)
  • 1 cup turnip greens (chopped)
  • 2 tablespoons fresh parsley (chopped)
  • 2 petite summer squash (chopped)
  • Salt to taste
  • 8-10 nasturtium blossoms

Salal Raspberry Syrup

  • ½ cup wild black raspberries
  • ½ cup salal berries
  • ½ cup water
  • 1 tablespoon butter
  • 4 tablespoons raw sugar

Crepes

  • 1 cup sifted white flour
  • ¼ teaspoon salt
  • ½ cup milk
  • ½ cup water
  • 3 tablespoons butter (melted)
  • Bacon grease

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/08/27/kale_crepes_recipe/feed/ 0 How to preserve the sweet taste of summer http://www.salon.com/2011/08/20/scavenger_thimbleberry_syrup/ http://www.salon.com/2011/08/20/scavenger_thimbleberry_syrup/#comments Sat, 20 Aug 2011 13:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/food/feature/2011/08/20/scavenger_thimbleberry_syrup The red is sumptuous, like a queen's boudoir or a bordello. The texture is soft as velvet ribbon. The plant itself -- deep red berries, delicate white flowers and broad fuzzy leaves, is pretty like the illustration in a children's book or the backdrop to a Strawberry Shortcake cartoon.

I'm happy thimbleberry bushes are so pretty, because they grow around my house in drifts, crowding my hydrangeas, obscuring our spindly roses, and popping up through the tops of the mammoth rhododendrons. In the spring, I put up a fight. I tore up root systems and amassed a brush pile the size of a car. My glory was short lived. Like their evil cousin, the thorny salmonberry, thimbleberry bushes spread from rhizomes deep underground. In the blink of an eye the bushes had returned, full-size and already sporting white flowers.

"We'll have to go after those things again," Rich said. He spoke too late. By this time in our lives, foraging was taking up a sizable chunk of my mind. When I looked at the white blossoms I saw food. "Let's wait till after they fruit," I said. Rich (the Bert to my Ernie, the Felix to my Oscar) sighed, no doubt mourning another battle lost to the combined creeping chaos of his wife and the Oregon woods.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/08/20/scavenger_thimbleberry_syrup/feed/ 17 Thimbleberry rosemary simple syrup http://www.salon.com/2011/08/20/thimbleberry_rosemary_simple_syrup_recipe/ http://www.salon.com/2011/08/20/thimbleberry_rosemary_simple_syrup_recipe/#comments Sat, 20 Aug 2011 13:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/food/recipes/2011/08/20/thimbleberry_rosemary_simple_syrup_recipe

Ingredients

  • ½ cup of honey
  • ½ cup of water
  • 1 cup of thimbleberries
  • 1 lime
  • Three sprigs of fresh rosemary (chopped)

Directions

  1. In a small saucepan, heat honey and water. When liquid comes to a boil, add berries. Stir. Remove from heat.
  2. Add lime juice and rosemary. Leave to steep for 3-4 hours.
  3. Strain. If necessary, press berry mash against strainer to release liquid.
  4. Chill and serve.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/08/20/thimbleberry_rosemary_simple_syrup_recipe/feed/ 0 Recession lessons from my backwater childhood http://www.salon.com/2011/08/13/scavenger_salmonberry_champagne_sauce/ http://www.salon.com/2011/08/13/scavenger_salmonberry_champagne_sauce/#comments Sat, 13 Aug 2011 13:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/food/feature/2011/08/13/scavenger_salmonberry_champagne_sauce We go camping and my mother sets up shop. She spreads swaths of flowered oilcloth on the mossy ground and hangs Mexican shopping bags from a fir tree. She pins signs to each item: Bags $7, Bracelets $10. A basketful of coin purses made out of recycled pop-tops is the centerpiece of our picnic table. This is my mom to the core. We traveled to the Umpqua National Forest for a family reunion, not a swap meet, but my mother can't resist the thought that some member of our group of 30 campers might be in dire need of a bright Mexican accessory. My mom has spent a good chunk of the last 40 years living on the cheap in Latin America, and she's developed some distinctly third-world traits: creative moneymaking skills and a certain disregard for regulations. (When I mention that it's probably illegal to set up a retail shop in a national forest, she pretends not to hear me.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/08/13/scavenger_salmonberry_champagne_sauce/feed/ 16 Wild berry champagne barbecue sauce http://www.salon.com/2011/08/13/wild_berry_champagne_barbecue_sauce/ http://www.salon.com/2011/08/13/wild_berry_champagne_barbecue_sauce/#comments Sat, 13 Aug 2011 13:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/food/recipes/2011/08/13/wild_berry_champagne_barbecue_sauce

Ingredients

  • ¼ cup of olive oil
  • 1 tablespoon of chopped garlic
  • 1 cup fresh huckleberries
  • 1 cup fresh salmonberries (thimbleberries or raspberries also work)
  • ¼ cup spumante champagne
  • 2 tablespoons of honey
  • 2 tablespoons of ketchup
  • ¼ teaspoon of salt
  • dash of Worcestershire

Directions

  1. In a saucepan, sauté garlic in olive oil.
  2. Add remaining ingredients.
  3. Bring to a boil.
  4. Reduce heat and simmer 15 minutes or until slightly thick.
  5. Remove from heat; cool.
  6. Place mixture in a blender; process until smooth.
  7. Use as sauce over pork, steaks or poultry.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/08/13/wild_berry_champagne_barbecue_sauce/feed/ 0 On the hunt for wild mussels http://www.salon.com/2011/08/06/scavenger_mussel_pasta/ http://www.salon.com/2011/08/06/scavenger_mussel_pasta/#comments Sat, 06 Aug 2011 13:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/food/feature/2011/08/06/scavenger_mussel_pasta The minus tide begins at 7 a.m. and we're on the road by 7:20, which is pretty good when you're traveling with Kamari and Abigail. Kamari has the slow truculence of a giant sloth, and Abigail flits around in circles like a flustered moth, but somehow the amount of time wasted usually comes out about even. This morning they are both unusually focused, probably because our expedition speaks to their guiding interests. In Kamari's case, the guiding interest is always free seafood. Abigail is a different story.

Abigail has straight brown hair and a slight British accent, but somehow she still reminds me a little of Dolly Parton. It's not just her rack (which is nice, but not quite of Dolly proportions), but her attitude. She calls everyone darlin' and honey, and she has a magpie's penchant for sparkly objects. The fuzzy pink seat cover of her '94 Honda Civic says "Princess," and somehow when Abigail's behind the wheel, the car does take on a regal air. In Abigail's mind her airstream trailer is a small palace and her Honda is actually a pristine pink Cadillac limousine.

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