Crawdads Part 2

It seems cliché to talk about the weather, especially when it’s bad, but when it’s this bad it’s impossible not to. It would be like walking about with an arrow sticking out of your chest, and not mentioning it in conversation.

We went down the creek on the farm to try our hand at crawdads there. We actually found more than we found in the Bourbouse, and they were a bit bigger. That is to say, some of them were. Most of them looked more akin to crickets than to seafood. But we still collected enough to make a small meal.

Everything on the farm was unbearably hot. It was hard to touch a metal gate long enough to open it. I thought I’d try some jug fishing for catfish, and when I went to pick up some scrap iron to use as anchors I could barely handle the metal. And we had to splash water on the boat at the pond to cool it down enough to sit on it.

Dad had warned me that when he tried jug fishing, all he caught were turtles. I had the same luck, catching one turtle in a short time with two jugs. I cut the line and let him go. He looked a little sad and pathetic with a big hook piercing his lip, but really no worse than those kids that hang around outside of the mall.

So we returned to Columbia right after lunch with potatoes, crawdads and blackberries in hand, not a ton of any, but enough to get by. Not bad for a 24-hour visit.

Potatoes, crawdads, blackberries

It was high time the boys and I pursued some more wild edibles, and they had just finished summer school, so we went to the farm and left Ann at home so she could focus on her job.

When we arrived at the farm, it was about 10 a.m., and my Dad was ready to set in on our potato harvest before it got too hot. You might question me referring to potatoes as wild edibles, but the way we raise them they are. We don’t really garden them, we just set them free. We planted them during one of trout fishing trips back in March, my Dad strawed them soon after, and we hadn’t seen them since.

The little patch of ground we had fenced off from the cattle and pony behind the Quonset building was certainly growing something, but we were hard pressed to find a potato. The most plentiful plant was the cocklebur. But when we dove in, we were able to find a few old, dried up vines, and a couple that were still a little green. The potatoes were all close to the surface, and the red ones were bigger than the white. We dug a little more than a five-gallon bucketful.  I’m sure there a few more there, but it wasn’t worth more exploratory digging.

After lunch my sister Christy took us to the Bourbuese River near Highgate to catch crawdads. The boys used Oliver’s tiny dip net from his aquarium and a lid from a coffee can to capture several. While we were catching them we heard something bleating like a goat. I went up the river bank to check it out, and found a young deer caught in a fence. It was caught between wires at the haunches, and it’s hind legs were hanging above it. I was able to get it out without too much trouble. It seemed alert and active, but it’s back legs were stiff. I’m hoping that once it got it circulation back to its legs it was able to fully use them again.

Even standing in the river, the heat quickly drove us back to the house. We took a swim in a neighbor’s pool after dinner, and then followed my sister’s tip to some blackberries on my cousin’s farm. With everything running so early this year, and the heat, and the drought, we were afraid we’d missed blackberries for the season. But my cousin’s farm got a good rain that my father’s didn’t, and it had blackberries and green pastures to show for it. A lot of the berries were still red, and the ripe ones were small and sparse, but Dad, the boys and I did gather enough for a few recipes. Not bad for less than a day on the farm. More to come on the next day.

Morel Lover's Creamed Morels, pages 188-189

Dehydrated morels cooking in the water they were reconstituted in.
I bet the dish is best with dried mushrooms rather that fresh.

Tonight I made the last of the morel recipes with the last of the dried morels that our kind blog reader from St. Louis sent us. It's morels sauted with shallots in a cream  and marsala wine sauce, basically.

I'm shaking my head in astonishment trying to come up with words on how good this dish is, knowing that whatever I say won't begin to do justice to it.

How about this. Last Saturday while helping my friend sell cheese at the Farmer's Market, I fellow tried a sample and then exclaimed a religous expletive at how fantastic the cheese was. He didn't even realize what he'd shouted. Well, my reaction to this dish is kind of like that. You've got to make this recipe! You hear me out there? Do it! Do it! Do it!

The recipe calls for dish with good bread to soak up the sauce. I poached 1/2 a chicken and served that as well as wide, thick noodles to soak up the sauce. We had a lovely baguette from Uprise bakery and a tossed salad as well.

This is the sort of meal that you just can't get at a restuarant. The flavors were unbelievable. The richness of the cream sauce was cut by the cleanliness of the chicken and salad so you didn't feel too bogged down afterward. We ate and ate and ate 'til we couldn't eat no more (Henry had something like five servings, for exampe). This is the sort of meal that makes life rich.

Although poached chicken was excellent with the morel dish and noodles worked well to absorb the sauce, I think there could be other lovely combinations as well. Right now, though, I'm having a hard time convincing myself of that! It's going down as one of my favorite meals from the book.

The creamed morels are so yummy.  Make the dish for your self, your family, or your friends. Just make it. It's not a diffult or time consuming dish. And, you'll make someone's day.

Thanks again for the dried morels. We couldn't have done it without you!!

Oh, Nuts!

Earlier in the year I signed up to host my book club for June. But, man, was I not feeling well now. I went from thinking I could just make smoothies to thinking even that was too much work. How about a chocolate cake? That seemed like more that I wanted to take on as well. What's a person supposed to do in this situation? Call your momma of course. Mom suggested I just get in some cheese and crackers and call it good-no baking when you are sick and it's 100 outside. So, that's what I did. But, still, I wanted to make something for my friends. That's when I remembered the picante pecans out of the Cooking Wild in MO book. I've made them once and boy are they tasty. They mix up in a jiffy and you only have to run the oven for 5-8 minutes to bake them.

The pecans were the hit of the show. Several ladies asked for the recipe and the bowl of nuts was licked clean by the end of the evening.

I love these nuts. We used rosemary from our garden, and the fennel, lavendar, and red pepper we already had in. The little bit of maple syrup the recipe calls for we had in, too, from harvesting the sap this winter from our trees. And, the nuts were from the pecan orchard near Rockbridge Elementary school.

Yea. What a successful way to make something simple from wild ingredients to share with your friends. I didn't take a photo this time but you can see them on the 12/11/2012 blog post.

Goodbye Boat

We recently said good-bye to a long standing fishing partner: our Basstracker boat.

There are two reasons people give for selling boats:

1. I’m just not using it enough.
2. I want to upgrade to a bigger boat.

Paradoxically, we had both reasons. First some background. The boat was generously given to us by Ann’s parents about 14 years ago, due to reason number one. I thought they would continue to use it while we had it, but that never happened. At the time everything in and on the boat worked perfectly, and it was the perfect size for the two of us. It was about 13 years old, but looked like new.

When we lived in Hannibal we used the boat on Mark Twain Lake, and it worked fine there, so long as you steered clear of the main channel when there was a breeze. When we moved to Columbia, we weren’t sure where to go. At first we feared the mighty Missouri in our little boat, so we stuck to Perche Creek. That was pretty fun, and in the spring time you could run up it a good ways. Eventually we mustered up the courage to nose the end of our boat out into the Missouri. The current quickly grabbed us and let us know that we weren’t on a creek anymore. But the little 25 h.p. Mercury would motor the boat upstream just fine, albeit not too quickly.

The last launch.

We had some fun excursions on the Missouri, especially when we made it to the islands. I a few years ago Henry and I camped on a island down one night, where we watched the trains pass by the bluffs on the other side of the river. The next morning when I woke up the boat was much closer to the tent then where I had left it the night before. A quick glance revealed the island had gotten much smaller in the night. I quickly broke camp as the island continued to dwindle in size. As we motored away, it was obvious that the island would be no more before long. I hadn’t fully taken into account how local weather has nothing to do with the level of the Missouri River.

But lately we had made little use of the boat. I think this is primarily because we are a social lot. We enjoy spending time with friends, and the boys’ friends’ parents are our friends as well. But the four of us fill the boat up on our own, so we could never bring anyone along our outings. Hence, the need for a bigger boat. It’s hard to spend money to upgrade something you only use twice a year, but maybe with a bigger boat we would use it more.

An enormous stray cat made himself comfortable on the boat at Stockton Lake.

So we sold the boat, and are casually shopping for a replacement. I check Craigslist everyday, maybe more than once sometimes. It might take a while to find a boat that meets our criteria. First, it needs to fit in the garage, which is 23 ½ feet long, only 6 foot 3 inches high at the center support beam, and has 8 foot wide doors. And we would like the boat to be able to handle eight people when called upon to do so. I’m thinking an 18 – 20 ft. semi-v John boat with about 75 h.p. and a break-away trailer tongue might work. There’s also a bunch of open bow fish and ski’s that might fit the bill, although I like being able to beach a boat on the Missouri River islands, and that’s probably not a good idea with a fiberglass boat with an inboard motor.

We’re not in a hurry to buy. Our remaining water-borne prey that we need to pursue for Cooking Wild recipes are crawfish and catfish. I think we’ll pursue both locally, probably at the farm, no boat required. I really don’t want to buy another boat yet anyway, because in August we’re set for our annual family get-together on Mark Twain, and without a boat in the garage, nothing will be stopping me from renting a big ol’ pontoon.

Walleye encrusted with breadcrumbs and almonds, page 85

I was speaking with Kevin Lohraff, the gentleman who gave us the paddlefish and turkey, about the remaining wild ingredients we have left to find. You might recall that one of them is walleye. We went to Stockton Lake on my birthday in niave hopes of catching one and . . .well, didn't. But guess what Kevin said? He mentioned that at a certain time of year Hy-Vee carries wild, fresh walleye. So, down I went to fish department and sure enough there on the ice were large slabs of fish with a innocent little 'walleye' sign on them. Could it be this easy?

Then, I got sick. For several days I wanted to rally and go cook up that Hy-Vee walleye before it was too late, but I was feverish and couldn't stomach the thought of it. Slightly before I should have,  I went ahead and purchased the fish. I was still sick but got frustrated with the lack of progress on our project and afraid my chance to get walleye would allude me.

I say slightly before I should have, because my sense of taste was still affected by my cold, as was my energy level. Therefore I thought the recipe was . . . mild. But, Fred said the taste of mustard in the almond/breadcrumb topping was very strong. In fact, it was a bit too powerful for the boys and they had to take the crust off. I couldn't taste any mustard at all, which tells me I wasn't tasting up to snuff. So, I would take my review of this recipe with not just a grain of salt, but perhaps one of those funnily shaped salt barns. I really should have been making chicken noodle soup out of a can, not assembling an encrusted walleye dinner.

We did serve the walleye with boiled new potatoes and peas and a sauce of yogurt, dill and lemon. The dinner was pretty, I can say that for it. And, it was the first solid meal I'd made in several days so that was pleasant also.

Now the one walleye recipe is done and we are at least making forward progress again.

Time Out

I’ve been neglecting the blog lately. Fortunately Ann’s done more than her share at keeping things going, not just by writing but also by cooking some great meals so that she has something to write about.

We just take things as they come with the blog, not really planning any posts in advance, other than Ann needing to plan meals about a week out when she goes to the grocery store or farmers market. As for the writing, we just each write whenever we feel like it. At times it’s been pretty even, as I was writing about our outings to get the ingredients, and Ann was writing about the cooking end of things.

We don’t push or limit each other. Only once, in the beginning, I asked Ann to change a post about some nasty rice I made because I felt it gave our readers an inaccurate portrayal of my overall ability as a rice maker, and  a cook in general. And once Ann asked me to change a post, because as written it probably would have gotten our blog a Mature Content –Adults Only rating due to extreme graphic violence against squirrels. She had to remind me that women do read the blog.

But now I need to catch up. About three weeks ago we made a trip down to the farm, and although our time there was very short, we made time in the evening to go down to the pond and get out the little boat with both the boys. We weren’t out there long, but Ann brought in a really nice bass before it got dark.

 I cleaned it that night and put it in the fridge. The next day, Memorial Day, we headed down to Elephant Rocks. Henry had been there with a friend once, but it was Oliver’s first time. We then moved on to Johnson Shutins for some swimming. There was a big Memorial Day crowd there, but it was still fun, and we couldn’t drive past it without giving Oliver a chance to experience it. We finally ended up at Pulltite Campground, a National Park Service campground on the current river.

The next day we floated from Akers Ferry back to Pulltite. We had brought fishing gear with us, but with the four of us in one canoe we decided to keep it simple and not fish during the float trip. We did see several trout, hog mollies, and more small groups of gar than I had ever seen in my life. Not to mention a few families of baby ducks, muskrats, a mink, deer, turkey and just about anything else you can think of that you might see in the Ozarks.

Although the campout and float trip didn’t contribute anything to the Cooking Wild project, it was a great family outing, and something we look forward to doing more of.

Upon my return, I came down with a wicked summer cold that had me in shaking under multiple blankets on 85 degree days. It took a couple weeks to get over it, and during that time I was also in the middle of my busiest time of year at work.

But I’m all better now, and beginning to get caught up at work, so I’m looking forward to getting back at it. Our remaining to-do list for wild edibles is starting to get short.