Man Bites Blog: Max Alexander's Blog

Good-Time Charlie · 1019 days ago

I woke up this morning to a phone call with the crushing news that my friend Charles Rocket had taken his own life on Thursday night. I’d known Charlie since the late 1970s when I lived in Rhode Island and he was a legendary graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design. Back then I lived with a succession of roommates who had been in bands with Charlie—notably in a group called the Motels, which was a precursor to the Young Adults, a group that had a huge influence on the proto-New Wave scene in New York despite its own lack of national fame.

Charlie had moved on by the time I arrived on the RISD scene—he was working as a news anchor in Nashville, under the name Charles Kennedy—but he would come back to town every now and then (his wife Beth grew up in Rhode Island), and his returns were marked by the beatnik version of a welcoming parade: the all-night jam session.

Charlie played accordian, but not exactly like a Venetian gondolier. He had figured out how to amplify and distort his instrument like an electric guitar (I seem to recall much excitement over a wah-wah pedal at one point), and his songs ranged from eerily aching ballads to throbbing tunnels of noise.

As his instrument of choice suggests, Charlie was an absurdist. Everything he did seemed designed to prove that nothing should be taken seriously. At RISD he was famous for making street videos in which he would deflate self-important personages by pretending to be a self-important news reporter. Most “street theater” performers would be content to leave it at that. Not Charlie. That was only the first act. Then Charlie went on to actually become a genuine, self-important news reporter. Some people didn’t get the joke, including many of his employers.

In 1980, Charlie became famous (or infamous) as a member of the first replacement cast on Saturday Night Live. A year later, on a Saturday that was Valentine’s Day, I was in New York. I called Charlie, who was living in Hastings-on-Hudson, and asked if I could sit in the audience that night. “I don’t have any more tickets,” he said. “But if you come by before the show, you can watch it in my dressing room, then come to the cast party afterwards.”

Walking backstage on my way to Charlie’s dressing room, I almost bumped into Debbie Harry, who was the guest host that night. She was wearing a bright yellow ankle-length dress and was holding a brace of red roses—an image I’ll never forget. I knocked on Charlie’s door and walked in. He was talking to a very shy young black man, still a teenager, recently hired as a “featured player” on the show. His name was Eddie Murphy, and he was quietly sipping a can of beer.

A week later, in a closing segment that spoofed the “Who Shot J.R.?” hysteria on Dallas, Charlie said something like, “I just want to know who the fuck shot me.” In March he was fired.

Some websites claim Charlie said “fuck” deliberately, but he always swore to me that it was an accident; he was just ad-libbing, maybe not thinking.

The whole incident was silly and the response predictably Puritan, but for me it only reinforced my sense that SNL was never the right venue for Charlie’s anarchic sense of humor. Despite its reputation as being “edgy” TV, SNL had in fact (at least by the time Charlie came along) settled into tried-and-true formulas (news parodies, skit parodies) and Charlie was never one to follow the instructions on the chemistry set. In fact his best segments on SNL were the times he was turned loose in Manhattan with a camera.

Years later, when Charlie and Beth and Sarah and I were all living in Los Angeles, we became closer. Most successful people in LA live in houses, surrounded by manicured gardens. But Charlie and Beth, always out of the mainstream, lived in an industrial loft north of downtown, near the tracks. It was an amazing place and the scene of memorable parties and jam sessions—Charlie, as always, wrenching strange new sounds out of his accordian.

In recent years Charlie and Beth were living in rural Connecticut, renovating an old farmhouse—a subject with which I have some personal familiarity. It was there that Charlie, for reasons I cannot even begin to understand, took his life.

He was born Charles Claverie, here in Maine, and he used to brag that he never read a book his whole life. I don’t think that was true, but he did not discourage an image of himself as, if not an idiot savant, some kind of sauvage. It wasn’t an act: Charlie didn’t wait for permission from the experts. He was, I believe, cut from the cloth of “unschooled” artists like Picasso or Charlie Parker. I don’t mean to equate his achievements with those cultural icons, only to suggest he was one of those people whose very life is, in some sense, a work of art.

Now he has died, a suicide that I wish I could have stopped. As my friend Dan Gosch, another artist who was much closer to Charlie than I, said this morning: “His anguish must have been greater than the anguish he knew he would cause others” by doing this. I can’t picture Charlie resting in peace, exactly—he would turn the amp up—but assuming God gets it, his pain is over.

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A Stale Wind · 1056 days ago

What remained of Hurricane Katrina tailed over Maine last night, whipping our windows with warm rain and downing our daisies and sunflowers. It was briefly torrential, and briefly scary, if only for making us realize how terrifying the real thing must have been to people down South, who have much more to worry about than fallen flowers. Still, the twisted remains of garden beds came as a reminder, along with the new page on the calendar this morning, that another Maine summer is on its way out the door.

I always feel a sadness about impending fall, even though once it comes I enjoy the crisp air and fiery trees. Fall feels much more like death than does winter, when the moose and deer tracks around our farm bring constant reminders of life, and the bare trees pass in a blur as I ski through my woods. Winter feels fresh and fast. Last night’s Southern wind felt old, stagnant and mean.

This wind that peeled off the roof of the Superdome also seemed to strip away the protective coating that binds us in unwritten civility. This week, in both New Orleans and Baghdad, where almost 1,000 people died in a bridge stampede, we saw human nature cut to the bone. It was about as pretty as one of my skinned pigs hanging from a tree on slaughter day.

The looting in New Orleans—televisions, guns, drugs—brought the unsettling recognition that for a substantial part of the population, the only drawback to a life of crime is the probability of getting caught. In Baghdad, we saw throngs of panicked worshipers crushing children to death on a crowded bridge. In both places, in different ways, self-interest trumped concern for the common good.

And yet we also saw heroism and sacrifice in New Orleans and around the country. At no one’s urging, my ten-year-old donated $20 of his allowance savings to the hurricane relief effort; he is one of many. And in Baghdad, religious factions set aside their differences to comfort the victims.

Any reasonable observer of the human race would have to conclude the results are mixed.

Summer may be ending, but in the wake of the storm today dawned clear and dry, and everything feels new again. My ducks, geese, chickens and turkeys are cruising the lawn in search of fresh treats that came up with the rain. Out my window as I write, a tom turkey scurries past with an earthworm dangling from his beak. He is running to get away from the other turkeys, who see the worm and want their share.

Not likely. Once safely in front of the pack, he stops. A second later, the worm disappears down his throat.

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To Lose a Goose · 1057 days ago

We lost a goose last week, one of three Toulouse geese that we raised from hatchlings in July. We got the geese, our first, to raise as meat—planning to slaughter them in late fall and looking forward to roast goose as a change from our regular diet of ducks and chickens. But we fell in love with these imposing, graceful beasts, whose long probing necks always remind me of space aliens from a sci-fi movie. Although no final decision had been made, Sarah, the kids and I had started articulating our respect for the geese, and were considering keeping them to breed more. We also looked forward to cracking their sizable eggs into an omelet.

Then at dawn last Wednesday, as I was leaving for a three-hour drive to Boston, I noticed there were but two. They had been out the night before, along with our four layer ducks, four layer chickens, and five Royal Palm turkeys, on a night we had also been out—at a lakefront camp (that would be cottage to non-Mainers) of friends until after dark, which is rare for us. When we came home I closed up the gate to the poultry run and assumed they had all made their way back in. It was too dark to count. I went to bed.

The next morning brought the bad news.

I will never know exactly what happened, but I assume the coyotes got the third. Eastern coyotes are all around us. We hear them yapping maniacally at night, in the woods, and sometimes I see one or two lowering around the edge of my blueberry field, usually around dusk. They are larger and meaner than the Western coyotes I got to know years ago when I lived on a ranch near Tucson. Biologists speculate that as coyotes migrated east they interbred with wolves, which explains their ferocity.

Geese are difficult to sex, especially before maturity, which happens around a year. At that point you go by who’s mounting whom, who’s laying eggs, and also by general character: the males are louder and more aggressive, especially around dogs. I don’t know the sex of my remaining two geese. Maybe we have two females, in which case we will have lots of eggs. Maybe we have two males, in which case we will have loud, aggressive honkers that will soon find their way to the dinner table. Maybe we have one of each, in which case we will have eggs and goslings for years to come.

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Three Clafoutis · 1071 days ago

Clafoutis is one of those primeval French dishes, like potatoes Dauphin, that the French have been arguing over since Agincourt. De Gaulle famously crowed about his country’s 325 cheeses (in fact more than 500 are now commercially made), but surely there exist infinitely more versions of clafoutis. All, however, lay claim to being a cake-like custard studded with fresh fruit—usually cherries but often apricots or peaches or berries or everything at once.

You can see the trouble. “A cake-like custard” is by definition neither here nor there (is it a cake or a custard?) and the fuzzy array of fruits—whatever is ripe that day, presumably—further muddles the pie.

Obviously there is no single correct clafoutis, yet in France emotions run high on the subject. Some cooks insist that the secret to a good clafoutis is very little flour and high heat; others swear by lots of flour and low heat.

All of which is why I love clafoutis. I covet any dish that is loosely defined and encourages me to be the chef of my own life, but I am especially fond of one that incorporates blueberries in August. Some neighbors complained of poor pollination this spring, but the bees definitely found the tiny white flowers on my high-bush blueberries; I can’t recall a summer with so many berries, bursting off the bush. I froze two gallons’ worth, made so many blueberry pancakes that even my kids got tired of them, added blueberries to pan glazes and salads and pâté, made tarts and pies, and still I have blueberries to spare.

Why not a nice blueberry clafoutis?

Make that three. Skimming through my cookbooks looking for a good clafoutis recipe, I found so many competing versions that I could only narrow the most promising down to three. “Three clafoutis” had a nice ring to it, so out I went to pick berries.

Back in the kitchen, I began with a recipe in Susan Loomis’s French Farmhouse Cookbook, a popular book that has many simple recipes I use and adapt frequently, and others that never seem to measure up to her splendid recommendations. (Maybe they tasted better in the French farmhouse; I know everything tastes better to me when I’m in France.)

Loomis’s clafoutis is considerably more custard than cake, with less than a cup of sifted flour versus two cups of milk and three eggs. Because the batter is so thin, the blueberries (12 ounces worth) ended up all floating on the surface; the result after baking (at a sizzling 450) was an unattractive purple mess.

To be fair to Loomis, her basic recipe calls for halved apricots, which would undoubtedly look nicer than the blueberries—although she does say it can be made with other fruit including cherries. And everyone in my family loved the way it tasted, even if Sarah felt the custard was a bit heavy. (She has a weakness for flan, a true custard with no flour at all.) But I wouldn’t serve it for company.

The next effort came from another American expat in France—this time Patricia Wells, around whose name the word “doyenne” is rarely distant. I often use her classic book At Home in Provence, now in paperback. Wells’s clafoutis intrigued because it called for no flour at all, which held out hope that it would be more like a true custard. Like many of her recipes it included a generous dollop of creme, which made me happy, and instructions to partially cook the berries first, then drain them to avoid a lot of messy juice—solving the problem in the Loomis recipe. Then came a tantalizing finish that involved dusting the cooked surface with confectioner’s sugar and then running it under the broiler to caramelize—like a crème brulée.

It sounded great, but I had to wonder about her call for two full pounds of berries; that’s a lot of fruit in a recipe with no flour and only 12 tablespoons total of milk and creme plus two eggs.

My worries turned out to be justified. Despite cooking and draining the berries, the sheer volume of fruit overpowered the limited dairy ingredients. What remained after baking in a medium (375) oven was an inedible blue sludge, which I may turn into muffins tomorrow morning. I found it hard to believe that a respected pro like Wells could recommend such a dud; I kept poring over the recipe to see if I had missed any ingredients (like flour!). Nope. I seriously wonder if there’s a typo—but given that this was a major hardcover, you’d think any glitches would have been caught by the new paperback edition I was using.

Clafoutis Number Three came from a more obscure 2003 book by French-born Los Angeles chef Jean François Méteigner called Cuisine Naturelle. The recipe is his mother’s, and he relates how it was difficult to coax accurate measurements out of her as she never measures anything. I don’t know about the cuisine of Jean François, having never dined in his restaurant during the four years I lived in L.A., but I liked mère Méteigner already.

Her recipe definitely leaned toward the cake side of the cake-custard scale, with a full cup of flour. Most intriguing was her use of yeast, which is proofed briefly in sweetened milk, giving it enough oomph to lift the batter and providing a yeasty flavor. Because the batter was thick (like pancake batter), the berries were distributed evenly throughout, so the baked surface looked attractive and caky. It was everyone’s favorite, with Sarah commenting how light it tasted. (Paradoxically, this was by far the fattiest recipe, with a full stick of butter.)

I still like the custardy texture of Loomis’s clafoutis, and I may try to come up with some variations that give it a better appearance. That may have to wait until next August; my blueberry bushes are almost bare.

Blueberry Clafoutis

Adapted from Cuisine Naturelle by Jean François Méteigner

1/2 cup milk
1/4 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon dry yeast
2 eggs
2/3 cup sugar
1/2 cup butter, melted
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup flour
1 quart blueberries
Confectioner’s sugar for dusting

Butter and flour a pie dish. Combine warm milk, sugar and yeast, and let the yeast proof for a few minutes. It will be bubbling when ready. Using a whick or electric mixer, beat eggs and sugar and thick, a few minutes. Beat in the melted butter and flour, then the yeast mixture. Stir in the vanilla extract. The mixture should be the consistency of pancake batter. Fold in the blueberries, tranfer to the dish and bake in a 350-degree oven for about an hour. Serve at room temperature, dusted with confectioner’s sugar.

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Duck Breast, Simplified · 1072 days ago

I read recently that the French place second, after Americans, at per capita meat consumption. You’re as likely to find a good ribeye steak in Paris (where it’s called entrecôte) as in Phoenix, and it will be served considerably bloodier. But when many French think of slabs of red meat, they think of duck breast.

Me too. I try to eat only meat that I have raised on my farm—and since I don’t raise cattle, ducks are the closest I usually get to a juicy homegrown steak. (I do raise pigs, but pork is a different experience.) And it doesn’t get any better or easier than a duck breast steak, or magret.

I cook duck breast the way they do in France—a quick searing to medium rare in a pan, or under the broiler, sliced on the diagonal like a London broil, dusted with kosher salt and cracked pepper, and attacked with knife and fork. For a side dish, I roast some diced or new potatoes (depending on the season) in duck fat. (Use four tablespoons fat and two pounds potatoes; roast in a 500-degree oven for about half an hour, turning occasionally. Add chopped garlic and rosemary about halfway through, if you like.) A tomato salad from my garden with a garlicky vinaigrette is the final element.

Details, details: Each breast (meaning one-half of the total breast meat on a duck) serves one person. Duck breasts have a tendency to “seize up” when they hit a hot pan; an overnight dry marinade in kosher salt helps keep the meat tender. First I score the skin with a sharp knife (which helps render out the fat), then I rub salt and pepper all over and refrigerate for at least 12 hours. You can get creative with these rubs—adding more interesting flavors with black pepper, thyme, crushed bay leaves, parsley, finely chopped garlic and shallots, and so on. I suppose you could try more exotic (non-French) spices, but I am never tempted beyond these basics.

Whatever the rub, rinse it off before cooking, then dry the breasts thoroughly. Get a skillet blisteringly hot over maximum heat (cast iron is best)—so hot you can’t hold your hand an inch above it for more than a few seconds. Open a window. Then lay the breasts skin side down in the skillet. They will smoke to beat the band for a minute or two, and you can probably turn down the heat a little bit, but not too much. A considerable amount of fat will render out. After five or six minutes you can turn them over, before the skin starts to burn. Cook the meat side for only about a minute more, then remove to a cutting board.

You can pinch the meat to gauge doneness. You’re going for rare to medium rare; the meat should still have some give but not be totally flabby. Better to be underdone because you can always throw it back in the pan. It will cook a bit more while it rests on the cutting board anyway, which it should do for about five minutes, so the juices get re-absorbed. Remove the long thin “filet” from the meat side, which is attached at just one end. (It can be eaten separately.) Then take a sharp knife—sharp means not dull—and slice the breast on the diagonal. Fan out the slices on plates, and dig in.

I know, it’s too easy. It needs more, right? Really it doesn’t—but I confess, there are times when I succumb to complexity and add the ultimate reduction sauce, a traditional, restaurant-style demi-glace. I can get away with that, even on weeknights, because I make duck demi-glace in advance and freeze it in ice cube trays. Stay tuned.

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Nothing But the Blues · 1073 days ago

What’s for dessert? In August here in Maine, the answer is blueberries. On our farm we grow both types of blueberries—several acres of the small, wild type also known as “low-bush” for their low, spreading habit, and another plot of the domesticated “high-bush” berries, which are larger and grow on shrub like plants. All ripen in August, when we spend a considerable amount of time finding ways to consume, freeze, dry, sell and otherwise deal with blueberries. So let’s take a break from ducks and enjoy some berries.

The French say myrtilles
But in Québec they disagree.
Despite debate from vielle Marseille,
Canucks will always say bluets.
I hope these nations see it straight
Before the berries all get ate.

Blueberries are not dainty. Unlike the fragile raspberry, which comes at the same time, they hold their shape even when completely ripe. You can pick lots of them before your fingers turn blue, and you can pile them into containers, dump them into the sink, sort through them vigorously and still have them roll across the floor in one piece when you spill an entire bucket. Dogs love them.

Wild blueberries—the low-bush variety and their cousin, the huckleberry—are biennials, which means you get fruit every other year. Traditionally in Maine, the fields were burned after the harvest or the following spring, to control weeds and promote vigorous growth. Increasingly, commercial farmers use herbicide sprays from a helicopter instead of the time-consuming (and potentially dangerous) burn method. We don’t spray anything on our food, and we only burn every few years, instead controlling growth by simply cutting the field every other year.

Low-bush berries are too small and close to the ground to pick by hand; you harvest them with a handheld blueberry rake, which is a metal scoop that ends in a row of sharp spines. Pulling the rake through the matted undergrowth strips the berries off the bushes and collects them in the scoop. But it also collects lots of tiny leaves and stems, which need to removed in a winnower.

Winnowing is the process of removing unwanted stuff (like the chaff from wheat) through the action of wind. In primitive cultures, crops are winnowed by hand—often by simply tossing them in the air on a windy day. A mechanical winnower relies on some type of fan and conveyor system. My blueberry winnower, about the size of a motorcycle, has a drum fan and a series of incredibly dangerous whirling pulleys and belts powered by a 1/2-horse Briggs & Stratton engine. The blueberries get dumped in a hopper at the top, then move along a conveyor that drops them past the drum fan, which blows away the leaves and stems before the clean berries fall into a container. It works great and never fails to impress city visitors, even ones inclined to consider it “an insurance nightmare.”

It’s painted blue. All blueberry winnowers are painted blue.

But this is the “off-year” for my low-bush berries, so the winnower gathers dust in the shed. Fortunately we have a bumper crop of high-bush berries, which come every year. Each day this month brings a new blueberry cooking challenge. In the last week we’ve had blueberry pancakes, blueberry tarts (with fresh berries), blueberry pies (cooked berries), duck with blueberry sauce, blueberries on salads, blueberry & duck liver pâté. Tonight, if Sarah remembers to get butter at the store, I may make a blueberry clafoutis, the rustic French cross between a custard and a tart. (That’s clafoutis aux myrtilles to them.) We also make blueberry ice cream.

When I don’t feel like cooking dessert we just have fresh blueberries and crème fraîche with a spoonful of our homemade maple syrup. You could use regular creme, of course, but crème fraîche adds richness and a tang that balances the sweet berries. If you live in a state where you can get unpasteurized dairy products (sorry, California), try to find raw creme, which makes the best crème fraîche. Here in Maine we can buy local raw milk and creme in stores, usually found in health food stores like the Belfast Co-Op in Belfast or Good Tern in Rockland. In some states you can only buy it off the farm; others, inspired by overly zealous and misinformed health departments, prohibit the sale of raw milk and creme altogether. In that case, at least look for creme that has not been ultra-pasteurized.

To make crème fraîche, add about a tablespoon of buttermilk to each quart or so of creme. Let it sit at room temperature for 12-24 hours, then refrigerate. That’s it. For subsequent batches you don’t even need the buttermilk, so long as you remember to reserve a few spoonfuls of the last batch to add to the new creme. Once the good bacteria that causes the souring process gets established, you can keep it going indefinitely. In August on a blueberry farm, this can only be a good thing.

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A Slurry of Chicken or Fish Tissue · 1076 days ago

An article in yesterday’s New York Times reports on the latest strange food science. Processed food companies, always looking for new ways to sell more of their unhealthy and unpalatable mush, are coming up with new chemicals to reduce fat and add fiber and other “healthy” ingredients without actually making the stuff taste like hippie food. Their quixotic task is akin to sprinkling salt on the ocean, as the food they have processed into oblivion was perfectly tasty and healthy before the chemists got their hands on it. Yet our uncritical acceptance of technology and general ignorance of where food comes from leads to worshipful prose like the following excerpt. Although the article is fairly well-balanced and includes dissent by nutritionists, the Times reporter cannot help but be in awe of the Captain Nemo piloting this cruise. (Emphases are mine.)

On a recent summer morning, [scientist Stephen Kelleher] hovered over a whirling assembly line as a waterfall of gray liquid cascaded over slabs of breaded chicken. Then the magic began.

During the bath in the liquid solution, which consisted of water and protein molecules extracted from a slurry of chicken or fish tissue, a thin, imperceptible shield formed around the meat. When the chicken was submerged in oil, the coating blocked fat from being absorbed from the fryer.

Voilà! The chicken contained 50 percent less fat than a typical piece of fried chicken.

If I were a typical piece of fried chicken, I’d be calling my lawyer right now. Nevermind that if prepared properly in fresh, searingly hot oil, fried chicken should not taste greasy at all. For someone wishing to cut back on fat (not me), wouldn’t a piece of broiled chicken make more sense? Have we become such helpless morons that we need scientists to concoct a chemical slurry of fish tissue when common sense calls for pulling the skin off a chicken breast? No wonder half the world hates us!

I don’t fault the processed food companies for trying to rake in buffet-style piles of cash—that’s why they exist. If only they would be honest about it. They are not trying to help us get healthy! They are not saving us money! They are not the chef of your life.

You are the chef of your own life. Let’s get back to the stove. Or as the scientists say around the fish slurry assembly line, “Voilà!”

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Why a Duck? · 1079 days ago

The popularity of duck breasts among chefs has earned this most elemental food a reputation as a “gourmet” item, which is a shame. In Europe and Asia, normal people have been eating duck for centuries. In southwest France, duck is classic peasant food—the legs put up in jars of fat (confit) to be consumed in soups and salads later, and the breasts simply grilled like a steak and served with nothing more than coarse salt and a grinding of pepper. What could be simpler?

Here in America, the fact that ducks cost more than chickens is partly due to those vexing economic rules of scale: because ducks aren’t so popular (or are considered “gourmet”), fewer people buy them, so they cost more to produce by specialty growers, which makes them more expensive, which keeps them a “gourmet” item, and on and on.

I raise my own ducks and pay dearly for the pleasure. A day-old duckling costs me $3.45, compared to a mere $0.75 for a broiler-type chicken. Ouch. I pay again at slaughter time (unless I do it myself)—forking over $5.00 per duck, versus $2.25 per chicken. And I have to drive them further, because my local slaughterhouse won’t do ducks. Like most Americans, they don’t “get” ducks.

The first mistake Americans make with ducks is to roast them. The resulting bird, swimming in fat and embalmed in sticky “l’orange” sauce (it’s gourmet!), looks like something unwrapped from King Tut’s tomb, and tastes like candied shoe leather. Unless you have your heart set on making Peking duck (an elaborate all-day procedure involving bicycle pumps, hair dryers and other nonsense contrary to the spirit of this forum), please do NOT roast a duck.

Instead, as they do in France, you must cut up your duck into two separate, and very different, meals—the legs and the breasts. At this point you may be wondering how a family of four can get two meals out of one duck. Well, you can’t. That’s why you should always buy (or slaughter) two ducks at once. That gives you one meal of four legs (one leg per person) and another meal of four breasts. Of course, if you are only feeding two people, one duck will do.

Cutting up the duck also allows you to remove much of the delicious fat, which can be rendered (more on this later), frozen and used in stir-fries, or for roasting potatoes or anything else. That’s why the French can eat so many ducks and not get fat. (Well, okay, they also don’t snack between meals, and walk to the corner store.)

How to Cut Up a Duck

I learned how to cut up a duck from Paula Wolfert’s seminal book The Cooking of South-West France, which is a bible that any duck lover must own. First published in 1983, it is now available in a newly updated paperback for $24.75 on Amazon. You might also check out Wolfert’s website, which has a lot of recipes and information although currently nothing about ducks.

Wolfert’s book includes illustrations on the duck dismembering process, but it’s pretty straightforward; here is my interpretation of her instructions, having cut up more ducks than I can count over the years. You’ll need a very sharp boning knife and a cleaver.

1. Remove the wings from the breast by cutting carefully with the point of the knife around the joint where the wing meets the breast. You can twist the wing in one hand and cut with the other. At some point you’ll cut the tendon that really holds it all together, and the wing will just about fall off.

2. Remove the wishbone, again using the tip of the knife to carefully cut around the bone, taking care not to remove too much breast meat along with it. Note that a duck’s wishbone is different from a chicken’s—shaped more like a horseshoe with no protruding spine.

3. Remove the breasts, one side at a time, by carefully slicing down along the breastplate. Keep the knife tight against the bone as you gradually pull the breast away from the carcass and ribs.

4. Remove the thigh-and-leg section by inserting the knife between the thigh and the carcass and cutting away, all the time keeping the knife against the carcass. As you reach the socket where the thigh joins the body, pull the leg downward to snap the joint, then cut it free.

Now you have two breasts, two legs, two wings and a carcass including the wishbone. Let’s deal further with each of these parts.

5. Turn each breast fat side down and remove any slippery membranes and loose pieces of fat on the bottom. Then trim the thick layer of attached fat so that it is slightly smaller than the breast itself. You can do this by pushing the breast meat aside, then cutting along the edge of the fat. Reserve all fat and refrigerate the breasts.

6. Do the same on the legs—removing membranes and trimming back the fat to leave a neat presentation. Do not remove all the fatty skin! It will baste the meat during cooking and keep it from drying out, after which you can choose not to eat it. Add the trimmed fat to the reserve and refrigerate the legs.

7. Using a cleaver or poultry shears, remove the long tip off each wing and set aside for stock. Cut the remaining wing sections in two at the joint. You can use the wing pieces (except the tip), which have good meat, in a braised dish along with the legs. Or you can save up enough in the freezer to make roasted or grilled duck wings, which is what I do. Or you can add them to the stock pile.

8. Trim any fat you can find on the carcass and add it to the reserved fat. Take your cleaver and chop the carcass into twenty or so pieces. This makes it a manageable size to fit into your freezer (if you don’t plan on making stock right away) and also opens up the bones for a richer stock. Combine the chopped carcass, wishbone, wing tips, necks and gizzards and freeze or refrigerate to make stock later. Trim fat and membranes from the livers, then soak them in milk overnight.

9. Render the reserved fat by heating it, along with a tablespoon or so of water, in a heavy pan over very low heat for several hours. You don’t want to brown or sear the fat, which will hinder the rendering process. I use a crock-pot slow cooker set on low, and let it run overnight, covered. After the fat is largely rendered out (small pieces of the remaining skin will be floating in the melted fat), strain it and cool, uncovered. (The remaining pieces of “connective tissue” can be tossed into a frying pan and browned, then salted, for delicious, crispy cracklings—excellent on a salad or as a snack.) Refrigerate the chilled fat overnight. The next day, invert it from the container and remove the jelled liquid on the bottom; reserve the liquid for broth recipes, then transfer the fat to the freezer where it will keep indefinitely—at least a year.

If you have followed this process for two ducks, you now have:

—One meal of four duck breasts

—One meal of four duck legs, plus four wings

—Carcasses, trimmings and gizzards for stock

—Milky pale livers for a quick sauté appetizer

—Several cups of velvety duck fat

—Cracklings

Amazing! And you’re not even a chef. Of course, you are the chef of your own life, and why anyone who likes good food does not cut up two to four ducks at least once a month is beyond me. Next we’ll figure out how to cook these meals.

Comment [1]

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It Starts With an Egg · 1087 days ago

I bit down on a chewy pickled duck egg and heard a loud quack out my kitchen window. My live ducks, 23 of them, were awake in the back of the pickup truck, which I had parked in the shade of my house the afternoon before to keep them cool. I was downing a quick breakfast before driving an hour and a half to the only slaughterhouse in the state that handles ducks, which are harder to pluck than chickens. Normally I slaughter my own ducks, but a busy summer, and the prospect of spending one of its few short weekends covered in feathers, convinced me to hire out the job this year.

I was hungry but the ducks weren’t, even though they had finished their last meal the day before. Birds have crops that hold ingested food for a day or so before it proceeds to their stomach; it’s a matter of survival for animals whose best defense is flight, allowing them to literally eat and run. Feeding birds on slaughter day provides no nutrition but merely fills their crops, wasting grain—expensive if you feed organic as I do. In fact it takes about ten dollars worth of organic feed to raise a single duck from hatchling to slaughter weight of seven or eight pounds (the dressed duckling will weigh about five pounds). You tend to be careful with your feed.

The teapot whined and I tipped the gurgling water over coffee grounds. It was five in the morning in mid-July on a farm in Maine, and the sun had already topped the maple trees beyond my fields. Time to go.

What follows is an attempt to chronicle the pursuit and preparation of real food, from someone who grows and raises most of his own, for people who are not afraid.

Not afraid of what?

Not afraid of using their hands to toss a salad, or measuring salt with their fingers, to be sure. Not afraid they can’t cook as well as a chef. (You are the chef of your own life.)

But in a much larger sense, which I hope to convey and encourage in this forum, I really mean not being afraid of living. That means not being afraid to do something without permission from the experts, from cooking to gardening to earnig a paycheck. It means not being afraid to eat wild food so long as you’re not stupid about it. And while we’re not being stupid, let’s not lead lives of fearful conformity, which throughout history has always opened the door to militant and destructive behavior. We shall stoop to gather chanterelles, but not to live.

What better place to find ourselves than the primeval hearth? You are the chef of your own life. Let’s get cooking.

PICKLED DUCK (OR OTHER) EGGS

A good place to start, and not just because it always starts with an egg. Pickled duck eggs beg the question of substitutions that harass (usually in the form of editors) every cookbook author. Most recipe writers (to use the less elevated but more accurate term) would prefer no substitutions, hoping every reader follows their instructions to the letter. But publishers always want to make their books accessible to as many people as possible and usually demand some substitution for crème fraîche or Vietnamese pandanus leaves or scallop roe, so readers who shop at IGA are not completely frustrated.

Because this forum believes you are the chef of your own life, substitutions are not a problem. Your dish will taste differently than mine, which is fine. What’s important is doing it yourself.

So yes, you can substitute chicken eggs, even from a store although I highly recommend you encourage your chickens to lay their own. Personally I would never buy eggs to pickle them. The concept comes strictly from necessity—that is to say, during times when my birds are laying more eggs than my family can eat or give away, prompting preservation. I did not invent this idea.

That said, I have fond memories of commercially produced jars of pickled eggs kept behind the bar at Leo’s, a sadly defunct restaurant and cultural oasis in Providence, Rhode Island where I worked during the late 1970s and early ’80s. I was a bartender at Leo’s, and when customers ordered a fifty-cent pickled egg, usually in concert with a Rolling Rock and a shot of cheap whiskey, I scooped one out with a slotted spoon into a small bowl, then set it up with a salt shaker and a bottle of Tabasco. It was the cheapest lunch special in town—cheaper than the beer and whiskey, an important point to many of our clients. I seem to recall the eggs were bottled by residents of a New England mental hospital, which suggested a John Waters movie.

You can find countless pickled egg recipes, mostly spiced with copious helpings of jalapeños and frat house jollity, on the Internet. These are Super Bowl party type recipes, not at all about homesteading. Some of the more amusing are at www.admin.mtu.edu/alumni/pickledeggs.html, an ostensibly educational website under the banner of Michigan Technical University. “WARNING,” advises a recipe from Jim, “This recipe may make your house smell like crap.” Could there be mitigating variables, I wondered?

My favorite, from Theresa, is a kitchen-sink recipe for “3 or 4 dozen” pickled eggs, with everything from dill seed to alum. (“Not real sure what this is for,” she admits; neither am I since alum, a crystalline aluminum sulfate, is sometimes used to keep pickled cucumbers crunchy—not an issue with pickled eggs.) Her recipe calls for a jar each of sliced jalapeños and super-hot habañeros, including the liquid, although she doesn’t say how big a jar; the Sam’s Club version? This would be a potent brew simmering away on the stove, even without the vinegar that Theresa neglects to list as the chief ingredient, and here’s my favorite part of her instructions: “Trick spouse, children, friends, pets into smelling the concoction while it’s boiling. Laugh loudly.”

Way to go, Theresa! Unschooled in basic crystalline chemistry, non-specific in measure, prone to major omissions, she cannot surely represent Michigan Tech’s finest. But she sounds like a lot of fun at a Super Bowl party.

I have a theory that the more recipes in existence for any particular dish, the more basic and simple the primeval dish must be. Simplicity seems to beg adornment, at least from people for whom the adornment gene is strong, which explains two jars of hot peppers per batch of pickled eggs, or why my apartment in Brooklyn many years ago had so many layers of trim paint that the cove moulding looked like it was sculpted by a child out of Cheese Whiz.

The primeval version of pickled eggs is this: Vinegar and sugar. That’s it.

Okay, okay. Boil a quart of vinegar with 1/2 cup sugar. Cider vinegar, preferably organic, works well; I use homemade maple vinegar from my trees, more of which in a later posting. Don’t use distilled white vinegar, which tastes nasty and, as far as I’m concerned, is strictly for window washing. Add a dozen peeled, hard-boiled eggs, some salt and pepper. Cool, cover and refrigerate for about a month, at which point the vinegar-and-sugar mixture will have penetrated the eggs. At that point you’ll have another couple months to eat them, assuming you’re not a stupid person. (If it smells foul, it is.)

Adornments, anyone? Try coriander seeds, mustard seeds, cumin seeds, a little ground cinnamon and mace, perhaps a few small hot peppers such as Thai bird chiles—which by the way can be easily started from seed (try www.fedcoseeds.com ) and grown in a 10-inch pot on a windowsill; one plant will produce enough peppers, frozen in a zip-loc bag, to last you until next summer. Why every cook doesn’t grow a Thai chile plant is beyond me. In truth I find these additions mostly make for an interesting presentation in the bottle; the eggs don’t seem to absorb much of the flavor. If you want your pickled egg spicy (and I do), serve it with a bottle of hot sauce on the side.

If you can find duck eggs at a local farmer’s market, give them a try. Carla Emery (in “The Encyclopedia of Country Living”) describes duck eggs as having a “ducky taste.” I’d say the difference is more textural. Duck eggs (hard-boiled) are, as indicated in the first sentence, chewier than a chicken egg. Raw, the whites are much more viscous — snot-like, you could say, which makes them a little harder to separate but worth the trouble, because the yolks are larger and richer with more fat — excellent for custards and ice cream. But more on that later. The next posting will deal with ducks themselves—how (and how not) to prepare and eat them.

Comment [4]

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Faraway Farm, Maine The homestead of Max Alexander and Sarah Baldwin
Home Max Man Bites Log Reviews Sarah Nurturing Children and Families Sample Chapter Reviews Writings Links Contact Us	Man Bites Blog: Max Alexander's Blog Search Browse RSS / Atom Good-Time Charlie · 1019 days ago I woke up this morning to a phone call with the crushing news that my friend Charles Rocket had taken his own life on Thursday night. I’d known Charlie since the late 1970s when I lived in Rhode Island and he was a legendary graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design. Back then I lived with a succession of roommates who had been in bands with Charlie—notably in a group called the Motels, which was a precursor to the Young Adults, a group that had a huge influence on the proto-New Wave scene in New York despite its own lack of national fame. Charlie had moved on by the time I arrived on the RISD scene—he was working as a news anchor in Nashville, under the name Charles Kennedy—but he would come back to town every now and then (his wife Beth grew up in Rhode Island), and his returns were marked by the beatnik version of a welcoming parade: the all-night jam session. Charlie played accordian, but not exactly like a Venetian gondolier. He had figured out how to amplify and distort his instrument like an electric guitar (I seem to recall much excitement over a wah-wah pedal at one point), and his songs ranged from eerily aching ballads to throbbing tunnels of noise. As his instrument of choice suggests, Charlie was an absurdist. Everything he did seemed designed to prove that nothing should be taken seriously. At RISD he was famous for making street videos in which he would deflate self-important personages by pretending to be a self-important news reporter. Most “street theater” performers would be content to leave it at that. Not Charlie. That was only the first act. Then Charlie went on to actually become a genuine, self-important news reporter. Some people didn’t get the joke, including many of his employers. In 1980, Charlie became famous (or infamous) as a member of the first replacement cast on Saturday Night Live. A year later, on a Saturday that was Valentine’s Day, I was in New York. I called Charlie, who was living in Hastings-on-Hudson, and asked if I could sit in the audience that night. “I don’t have any more tickets,” he said. “But if you come by before the show, you can watch it in my dressing room, then come to the cast party afterwards.” Walking backstage on my way to Charlie’s dressing room, I almost bumped into Debbie Harry, who was the guest host that night. She was wearing a bright yellow ankle-length dress and was holding a brace of red roses—an image I’ll never forget. I knocked on Charlie’s door and walked in. He was talking to a very shy young black man, still a teenager, recently hired as a “featured player” on the show. His name was Eddie Murphy, and he was quietly sipping a can of beer. A week later, in a closing segment that spoofed the “Who Shot J.R.?” hysteria on Dallas, Charlie said something like, “I just want to know who the fuck shot me.” In March he was fired. Some websites claim Charlie said “fuck” deliberately, but he always swore to me that it was an accident; he was just ad-libbing, maybe not thinking. The whole incident was silly and the response predictably Puritan, but for me it only reinforced my sense that SNL was never the right venue for Charlie’s anarchic sense of humor. Despite its reputation as being “edgy” TV, SNL had in fact (at least by the time Charlie came along) settled into tried-and-true formulas (news parodies, skit parodies) and Charlie was never one to follow the instructions on the chemistry set. In fact his best segments on SNL were the times he was turned loose in Manhattan with a camera. Years later, when Charlie and Beth and Sarah and I were all living in Los Angeles, we became closer. Most successful people in LA live in houses, surrounded by manicured gardens. But Charlie and Beth, always out of the mainstream, lived in an industrial loft north of downtown, near the tracks. It was an amazing place and the scene of memorable parties and jam sessions—Charlie, as always, wrenching strange new sounds out of his accordian. In recent years Charlie and Beth were living in rural Connecticut, renovating an old farmhouse—a subject with which I have some personal familiarity. It was there that Charlie, for reasons I cannot even begin to understand, took his life. He was born Charles Claverie, here in Maine, and he used to brag that he never read a book his whole life. I don’t think that was true, but he did not discourage an image of himself as, if not an idiot savant, some kind of sauvage. It wasn’t an act: Charlie didn’t wait for permission from the experts. He was, I believe, cut from the cloth of “unschooled” artists like Picasso or Charlie Parker. I don’t mean to equate his achievements with those cultural icons, only to suggest he was one of those people whose very life is, in some sense, a work of art. Now he has died, a suicide that I wish I could have stopped. As my friend Dan Gosch, another artist who was much closer to Charlie than I, said this morning: “His anguish must have been greater than the anguish he knew he would cause others” by doing this. I can’t picture Charlie resting in peace, exactly—he would turn the amp up—but assuming God gets it, his pain is over. Comment [6] * * * A Stale Wind · 1056 days ago What remained of Hurricane Katrina tailed over Maine last night, whipping our windows with warm rain and downing our daisies and sunflowers. It was briefly torrential, and briefly scary, if only for making us realize how terrifying the real thing must have been to people down South, who have much more to worry about than fallen flowers. Still, the twisted remains of garden beds came as a reminder, along with the new page on the calendar this morning, that another Maine summer is on its way out the door. I always feel a sadness about impending fall, even though once it comes I enjoy the crisp air and fiery trees. Fall feels much more like death than does winter, when the moose and deer tracks around our farm bring constant reminders of life, and the bare trees pass in a blur as I ski through my woods. Winter feels fresh and fast. Last night’s Southern wind felt old, stagnant and mean. This wind that peeled off the roof of the Superdome also seemed to strip away the protective coating that binds us in unwritten civility. This week, in both New Orleans and Baghdad, where almost 1,000 people died in a bridge stampede, we saw human nature cut to the bone. It was about as pretty as one of my skinned pigs hanging from a tree on slaughter day. The looting in New Orleans—televisions, guns, drugs—brought the unsettling recognition that for a substantial part of the population, the only drawback to a life of crime is the probability of getting caught. In Baghdad, we saw throngs of panicked worshipers crushing children to death on a crowded bridge. In both places, in different ways, self-interest trumped concern for the common good. And yet we also saw heroism and sacrifice in New Orleans and around the country. At no one’s urging, my ten-year-old donated $20 of his allowance savings to the hurricane relief effort; he is one of many. And in Baghdad, religious factions set aside their differences to comfort the victims. Any reasonable observer of the human race would have to conclude the results are mixed. Summer may be ending, but in the wake of the storm today dawned clear and dry, and everything feels new again. My ducks, geese, chickens and turkeys are cruising the lawn in search of fresh treats that came up with the rain. Out my window as I write, a tom turkey scurries past with an earthworm dangling from his beak. He is running to get away from the other turkeys, who see the worm and want their share. Not likely. Once safely in front of the pack, he stops. A second later, the worm disappears down his throat. Comment [1] * * * To Lose a Goose · 1057 days ago We lost a goose last week, one of three Toulouse geese that we raised from hatchlings in July. We got the geese, our first, to raise as meat—planning to slaughter them in late fall and looking forward to roast goose as a change from our regular diet of ducks and chickens. But we fell in love with these imposing, graceful beasts, whose long probing necks always remind me of space aliens from a sci-fi movie. Although no final decision had been made, Sarah, the kids and I had started articulating our respect for the geese, and were considering keeping them to breed more. We also looked forward to cracking their sizable eggs into an omelet. Then at dawn last Wednesday, as I was leaving for a three-hour drive to Boston, I noticed there were but two. They had been out the night before, along with our four layer ducks, four layer chickens, and five Royal Palm turkeys, on a night we had also been out—at a lakefront camp (that would be cottage to non-Mainers) of friends until after dark, which is rare for us. When we came home I closed up the gate to the poultry run and assumed they had all made their way back in. It was too dark to count. I went to bed. The next morning brought the bad news. I will never know exactly what happened, but I assume the coyotes got the third. Eastern coyotes are all around us. We hear them yapping maniacally at night, in the woods, and sometimes I see one or two lowering around the edge of my blueberry field, usually around dusk. They are larger and meaner than the Western coyotes I got to know years ago when I lived on a ranch near Tucson. Biologists speculate that as coyotes migrated east they interbred with wolves, which explains their ferocity. Geese are difficult to sex, especially before maturity, which happens around a year. At that point you go by who’s mounting whom, who’s laying eggs, and also by general character: the males are louder and more aggressive, especially around dogs. I don’t know the sex of my remaining two geese. Maybe we have two females, in which case we will have lots of eggs. Maybe we have two males, in which case we will have loud, aggressive honkers that will soon find their way to the dinner table. Maybe we have one of each, in which case we will have eggs and goslings for years to come. Comment [298] * * * Three Clafoutis · 1071 days ago Clafoutis is one of those primeval French dishes, like potatoes Dauphin, that the French have been arguing over since Agincourt. De Gaulle famously crowed about his country’s 325 cheeses (in fact more than 500 are now commercially made), but surely there exist infinitely more versions of clafoutis. All, however, lay claim to being a cake-like custard studded with fresh fruit—usually cherries but often apricots or peaches or berries or everything at once. You can see the trouble. “A cake-like custard” is by definition neither here nor there (is it a cake or a custard?) and the fuzzy array of fruits—whatever is ripe that day, presumably—further muddles the pie. Obviously there is no single correct clafoutis, yet in France emotions run high on the subject. Some cooks insist that the secret to a good clafoutis is very little flour and high heat; others swear by lots of flour and low heat. All of which is why I love clafoutis. I covet any dish that is loosely defined and encourages me to be the chef of my own life, but I am especially fond of one that incorporates blueberries in August. Some neighbors complained of poor pollination this spring, but the bees definitely found the tiny white flowers on my high-bush blueberries; I can’t recall a summer with so many berries, bursting off the bush. I froze two gallons’ worth, made so many blueberry pancakes that even my kids got tired of them, added blueberries to pan glazes and salads and pâté, made tarts and pies, and still I have blueberries to spare. Why not a nice blueberry clafoutis? Make that three. Skimming through my cookbooks looking for a good clafoutis recipe, I found so many competing versions that I could only narrow the most promising down to three. “Three clafoutis” had a nice ring to it, so out I went to pick berries. Back in the kitchen, I began with a recipe in Susan Loomis’s French Farmhouse Cookbook, a popular book that has many simple recipes I use and adapt frequently, and others that never seem to measure up to her splendid recommendations. (Maybe they tasted better in the French farmhouse; I know everything tastes better to me when I’m in France.) Loomis’s clafoutis is considerably more custard than cake, with less than a cup of sifted flour versus two cups of milk and three eggs. Because the batter is so thin, the blueberries (12 ounces worth) ended up all floating on the surface; the result after baking (at a sizzling 450) was an unattractive purple mess. To be fair to Loomis, her basic recipe calls for halved apricots, which would undoubtedly look nicer than the blueberries—although she does say it can be made with other fruit including cherries. And everyone in my family loved the way it tasted, even if Sarah felt the custard was a bit heavy. (She has a weakness for flan, a true custard with no flour at all.) But I wouldn’t serve it for company. The next effort came from another American expat in France—this time Patricia Wells, around whose name the word “doyenne” is rarely distant. I often use her classic book At Home in Provence, now in paperback. Wells’s clafoutis intrigued because it called for no flour at all, which held out hope that it would be more like a true custard. Like many of her recipes it included a generous dollop of creme, which made me happy, and instructions to partially cook the berries first, then drain them to avoid a lot of messy juice—solving the problem in the Loomis recipe. Then came a tantalizing finish that involved dusting the cooked surface with confectioner’s sugar and then running it under the broiler to caramelize—like a crème brulée. It sounded great, but I had to wonder about her call for two full pounds of berries; that’s a lot of fruit in a recipe with no flour and only 12 tablespoons total of milk and creme plus two eggs. My worries turned out to be justified. Despite cooking and draining the berries, the sheer volume of fruit overpowered the limited dairy ingredients. What remained after baking in a medium (375) oven was an inedible blue sludge, which I may turn into muffins tomorrow morning. I found it hard to believe that a respected pro like Wells could recommend such a dud; I kept poring over the recipe to see if I had missed any ingredients (like flour!). Nope. I seriously wonder if there’s a typo—but given that this was a major hardcover, you’d think any glitches would have been caught by the new paperback edition I was using. Clafoutis Number Three came from a more obscure 2003 book by French-born Los Angeles chef Jean François Méteigner called Cuisine Naturelle. The recipe is his mother’s, and he relates how it was difficult to coax accurate measurements out of her as she never measures anything. I don’t know about the cuisine of Jean François, having never dined in his restaurant during the four years I lived in L.A., but I liked mère Méteigner already. Her recipe definitely leaned toward the cake side of the cake-custard scale, with a full cup of flour. Most intriguing was her use of yeast, which is proofed briefly in sweetened milk, giving it enough oomph to lift the batter and providing a yeasty flavor. Because the batter was thick (like pancake batter), the berries were distributed evenly throughout, so the baked surface looked attractive and caky. It was everyone’s favorite, with Sarah commenting how light it tasted. (Paradoxically, this was by far the fattiest recipe, with a full stick of butter.) I still like the custardy texture of Loomis’s clafoutis, and I may try to come up with some variations that give it a better appearance. That may have to wait until next August; my blueberry bushes are almost bare. Blueberry Clafoutis Adapted from Cuisine Naturelle by Jean François Méteigner 1/2 cup milk 1/4 teaspoon sugar 1/2 teaspoon dry yeast 2 eggs 2/3 cup sugar 1/2 cup butter, melted 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 1 cup flour 1 quart blueberries Confectioner’s sugar for dusting Butter and flour a pie dish. Combine warm milk, sugar and yeast, and let the yeast proof for a few minutes. It will be bubbling when ready. Using a whick or electric mixer, beat eggs and sugar and thick, a few minutes. Beat in the melted butter and flour, then the yeast mixture. Stir in the vanilla extract. The mixture should be the consistency of pancake batter. Fold in the blueberries, tranfer to the dish and bake in a 350-degree oven for about an hour. Serve at room temperature, dusted with confectioner’s sugar. Comment [2] * * * Duck Breast, Simplified · 1072 days ago I read recently that the French place second, after Americans, at per capita meat consumption. You’re as likely to find a good ribeye steak in Paris (where it’s called entrecôte) as in Phoenix, and it will be served considerably bloodier. But when many French think of slabs of red meat, they think of duck breast. Me too. I try to eat only meat that I have raised on my farm—and since I don’t raise cattle, ducks are the closest I usually get to a juicy homegrown steak. (I do raise pigs, but pork is a different experience.) And it doesn’t get any better or easier than a duck breast steak, or magret. I cook duck breast the way they do in France—a quick searing to medium rare in a pan, or under the broiler, sliced on the diagonal like a London broil, dusted with kosher salt and cracked pepper, and attacked with knife and fork. For a side dish, I roast some diced or new potatoes (depending on the season) in duck fat. (Use four tablespoons fat and two pounds potatoes; roast in a 500-degree oven for about half an hour, turning occasionally. Add chopped garlic and rosemary about halfway through, if you like.) A tomato salad from my garden with a garlicky vinaigrette is the final element. Details, details: Each breast (meaning one-half of the total breast meat on a duck) serves one person. Duck breasts have a tendency to “seize up” when they hit a hot pan; an overnight dry marinade in kosher salt helps keep the meat tender. First I score the skin with a sharp knife (which helps render out the fat), then I rub salt and pepper all over and refrigerate for at least 12 hours. You can get creative with these rubs—adding more interesting flavors with black pepper, thyme, crushed bay leaves, parsley, finely chopped garlic and shallots, and so on. I suppose you could try more exotic (non-French) spices, but I am never tempted beyond these basics. Whatever the rub, rinse it off before cooking, then dry the breasts thoroughly. Get a skillet blisteringly hot over maximum heat (cast iron is best)—so hot you can’t hold your hand an inch above it for more than a few seconds. Open a window. Then lay the breasts skin side down in the skillet. They will smoke to beat the band for a minute or two, and you can probably turn down the heat a little bit, but not too much. A considerable amount of fat will render out. After five or six minutes you can turn them over, before the skin starts to burn. Cook the meat side for only about a minute more, then remove to a cutting board. You can pinch the meat to gauge doneness. You’re going for rare to medium rare; the meat should still have some give but not be totally flabby. Better to be underdone because you can always throw it back in the pan. It will cook a bit more while it rests on the cutting board anyway, which it should do for about five minutes, so the juices get re-absorbed. Remove the long thin “filet” from the meat side, which is attached at just one end. (It can be eaten separately.) Then take a sharp knife—sharp means not dull—and slice the breast on the diagonal. Fan out the slices on plates, and dig in. I know, it’s too easy. It needs more, right? Really it doesn’t—but I confess, there are times when I succumb to complexity and add the ultimate reduction sauce, a traditional, restaurant-style demi-glace. I can get away with that, even on weeknights, because I make duck demi-glace in advance and freeze it in ice cube trays. Stay tuned. Comment [1] * * * Nothing But the Blues · 1073 days ago What’s for dessert? In August here in Maine, the answer is blueberries. On our farm we grow both types of blueberries—several acres of the small, wild type also known as “low-bush” for their low, spreading habit, and another plot of the domesticated “high-bush” berries, which are larger and grow on shrub like plants. All ripen in August, when we spend a considerable amount of time finding ways to consume, freeze, dry, sell and otherwise deal with blueberries. So let’s take a break from ducks and enjoy some berries. The French say myrtilles But in Québec they disagree. Despite debate from vielle Marseille, Canucks will always say bluets. I hope these nations see it straight Before the berries all get ate. Blueberries are not dainty. Unlike the fragile raspberry, which comes at the same time, they hold their shape even when completely ripe. You can pick lots of them before your fingers turn blue, and you can pile them into containers, dump them into the sink, sort through them vigorously and still have them roll across the floor in one piece when you spill an entire bucket. Dogs love them. Wild blueberries—the low-bush variety and their cousin, the huckleberry—are biennials, which means you get fruit every other year. Traditionally in Maine, the fields were burned after the harvest or the following spring, to control weeds and promote vigorous growth. Increasingly, commercial farmers use herbicide sprays from a helicopter instead of the time-consuming (and potentially dangerous) burn method. We don’t spray anything on our food, and we only burn every few years, instead controlling growth by simply cutting the field every other year. Low-bush berries are too small and close to the ground to pick by hand; you harvest them with a handheld blueberry rake, which is a metal scoop that ends in a row of sharp spines. Pulling the rake through the matted undergrowth strips the berries off the bushes and collects them in the scoop. But it also collects lots of tiny leaves and stems, which need to removed in a winnower. Winnowing is the process of removing unwanted stuff (like the chaff from wheat) through the action of wind. In primitive cultures, crops are winnowed by hand—often by simply tossing them in the air on a windy day. A mechanical winnower relies on some type of fan and conveyor system. My blueberry winnower, about the size of a motorcycle, has a drum fan and a series of incredibly dangerous whirling pulleys and belts powered by a 1/2-horse Briggs & Stratton engine. The blueberries get dumped in a hopper at the top, then move along a conveyor that drops them past the drum fan, which blows away the leaves and stems before the clean berries fall into a container. It works great and never fails to impress city visitors, even ones inclined to consider it “an insurance nightmare.” It’s painted blue. All blueberry winnowers are painted blue. But this is the “off-year” for my low-bush berries, so the winnower gathers dust in the shed. Fortunately we have a bumper crop of high-bush berries, which come every year. Each day this month brings a new blueberry cooking challenge. In the last week we’ve had blueberry pancakes, blueberry tarts (with fresh berries), blueberry pies (cooked berries), duck with blueberry sauce, blueberries on salads, blueberry & duck liver pâté. Tonight, if Sarah remembers to get butter at the store, I may make a blueberry clafoutis, the rustic French cross between a custard and a tart. (That’s clafoutis aux myrtilles to them.) We also make blueberry ice cream. When I don’t feel like cooking dessert we just have fresh blueberries and crème fraîche with a spoonful of our homemade maple syrup. You could use regular creme, of course, but crème fraîche adds richness and a tang that balances the sweet berries. If you live in a state where you can get unpasteurized dairy products (sorry, California), try to find raw creme, which makes the best crème fraîche. Here in Maine we can buy local raw milk and creme in stores, usually found in health food stores like the Belfast Co-Op in Belfast or Good Tern in Rockland. In some states you can only buy it off the farm; others, inspired by overly zealous and misinformed health departments, prohibit the sale of raw milk and creme altogether. In that case, at least look for creme that has not been ultra-pasteurized. To make crème fraîche, add about a tablespoon of buttermilk to each quart or so of creme. Let it sit at room temperature for 12-24 hours, then refrigerate. That’s it. For subsequent batches you don’t even need the buttermilk, so long as you remember to reserve a few spoonfuls of the last batch to add to the new creme. Once the good bacteria that causes the souring process gets established, you can keep it going indefinitely. In August on a blueberry farm, this can only be a good thing. Comment [1] * * * A Slurry of Chicken or Fish Tissue · 1076 days ago An article in yesterday’s New York Times reports on the latest strange food science. Processed food companies, always looking for new ways to sell more of their unhealthy and unpalatable mush, are coming up with new chemicals to reduce fat and add fiber and other “healthy” ingredients without actually making the stuff taste like hippie food. Their quixotic task is akin to sprinkling salt on the ocean, as the food they have processed into oblivion was perfectly tasty and healthy before the chemists got their hands on it. Yet our uncritical acceptance of technology and general ignorance of where food comes from leads to worshipful prose like the following excerpt. Although the article is fairly well-balanced and includes dissent by nutritionists, the Times reporter cannot help but be in awe of the Captain Nemo piloting this cruise. (Emphases are mine.) On a recent summer morning, [scientist Stephen Kelleher] hovered over a whirling assembly line as a waterfall of gray liquid cascaded over slabs of breaded chicken. Then the magic began. During the bath in the liquid solution, which consisted of water and protein molecules extracted from a slurry of chicken or fish tissue, a thin, imperceptible shield formed around the meat. When the chicken was submerged in oil, the coating blocked fat from being absorbed from the fryer. Voilà! The chicken contained 50 percent less fat than a typical piece of fried chicken. If I were a typical piece of fried chicken, I’d be calling my lawyer right now. Nevermind that if prepared properly in fresh, searingly hot oil, fried chicken should not taste greasy at all. For someone wishing to cut back on fat (not me), wouldn’t a piece of broiled chicken make more sense? Have we become such helpless morons that we need scientists to concoct a chemical slurry of fish tissue when common sense calls for pulling the skin off a chicken breast? No wonder half the world hates us! I don’t fault the processed food companies for trying to rake in buffet-style piles of cash—that’s why they exist. If only they would be honest about it. They are not trying to help us get healthy! They are not saving us money! They are not the chef of your life. You are the chef of your own life. Let’s get back to the stove. Or as the scientists say around the fish slurry assembly line, “Voilà!” Comment [1] * * * Why a Duck? · 1079 days ago The popularity of duck breasts among chefs has earned this most elemental food a reputation as a “gourmet” item, which is a shame. In Europe and Asia, normal people have been eating duck for centuries. In southwest France, duck is classic peasant food—the legs put up in jars of fat (confit) to be consumed in soups and salads later, and the breasts simply grilled like a steak and served with nothing more than coarse salt and a grinding of pepper. What could be simpler? Here in America, the fact that ducks cost more than chickens is partly due to those vexing economic rules of scale: because ducks aren’t so popular (or are considered “gourmet”), fewer people buy them, so they cost more to produce by specialty growers, which makes them more expensive, which keeps them a “gourmet” item, and on and on. I raise my own ducks and pay dearly for the pleasure. A day-old duckling costs me $3.45, compared to a mere $0.75 for a broiler-type chicken. Ouch. I pay again at slaughter time (unless I do it myself)—forking over $5.00 per duck, versus $2.25 per chicken. And I have to drive them further, because my local slaughterhouse won’t do ducks. Like most Americans, they don’t “get” ducks. The first mistake Americans make with ducks is to roast them. The resulting bird, swimming in fat and embalmed in sticky “l’orange” sauce (it’s gourmet!), looks like something unwrapped from King Tut’s tomb, and tastes like candied shoe leather. Unless you have your heart set on making Peking duck (an elaborate all-day procedure involving bicycle pumps, hair dryers and other nonsense contrary to the spirit of this forum), please do NOT roast a duck. Instead, as they do in France, you must cut up your duck into two separate, and very different, meals—the legs and the breasts. At this point you may be wondering how a family of four can get two meals out of one duck. Well, you can’t. That’s why you should always buy (or slaughter) two ducks at once. That gives you one meal of four legs (one leg per person) and another meal of four breasts. Of course, if you are only feeding two people, one duck will do. Cutting up the duck also allows you to remove much of the delicious fat, which can be rendered (more on this later), frozen and used in stir-fries, or for roasting potatoes or anything else. That’s why the French can eat so many ducks and not get fat. (Well, okay, they also don’t snack between meals, and walk to the corner store.) How to Cut Up a Duck I learned how to cut up a duck from Paula Wolfert’s seminal book The Cooking of South-West France, which is a bible that any duck lover must own. First published in 1983, it is now available in a newly updated paperback for $24.75 on Amazon. You might also check out Wolfert’s website, which has a lot of recipes and information although currently nothing about ducks. Wolfert’s book includes illustrations on the duck dismembering process, but it’s pretty straightforward; here is my interpretation of her instructions, having cut up more ducks than I can count over the years. You’ll need a very sharp boning knife and a cleaver. 1. Remove the wings from the breast by cutting carefully with the point of the knife around the joint where the wing meets the breast. You can twist the wing in one hand and cut with the other. At some point you’ll cut the tendon that really holds it all together, and the wing will just about fall off. 2. Remove the wishbone, again using the tip of the knife to carefully cut around the bone, taking care not to remove too much breast meat along with it. Note that a duck’s wishbone is different from a chicken’s—shaped more like a horseshoe with no protruding spine. 3. Remove the breasts, one side at a time, by carefully slicing down along the breastplate. Keep the knife tight against the bone as you gradually pull the breast away from the carcass and ribs. 4. Remove the thigh-and-leg section by inserting the knife between the thigh and the carcass and cutting away, all the time keeping the knife against the carcass. As you reach the socket where the thigh joins the body, pull the leg downward to snap the joint, then cut it free. Now you have two breasts, two legs, two wings and a carcass including the wishbone. Let’s deal further with each of these parts. 5. Turn each breast fat side down and remove any slippery membranes and loose pieces of fat on the bottom. Then trim the thick layer of attached fat so that it is slightly smaller than the breast itself. You can do this by pushing the breast meat aside, then cutting along the edge of the fat. Reserve all fat and refrigerate the breasts. 6. Do the same on the legs—removing membranes and trimming back the fat to leave a neat presentation. Do not remove all the fatty skin! It will baste the meat during cooking and keep it from drying out, after which you can choose not to eat it. Add the trimmed fat to the reserve and refrigerate the legs. 7. Using a cleaver or poultry shears, remove the long tip off each wing and set aside for stock. Cut the remaining wing sections in two at the joint. You can use the wing pieces (except the tip), which have good meat, in a braised dish along with the legs. Or you can save up enough in the freezer to make roasted or grilled duck wings, which is what I do. Or you can add them to the stock pile. 8. Trim any fat you can find on the carcass and add it to the reserved fat. Take your cleaver and chop the carcass into twenty or so pieces. This makes it a manageable size to fit into your freezer (if you don’t plan on making stock right away) and also opens up the bones for a richer stock. Combine the chopped carcass, wishbone, wing tips, necks and gizzards and freeze or refrigerate to make stock later. Trim fat and membranes from the livers, then soak them in milk overnight. 9. Render the reserved fat by heating it, along with a tablespoon or so of water, in a heavy pan over very low heat for several hours. You don’t want to brown or sear the fat, which will hinder the rendering process. I use a crock-pot slow cooker set on low, and let it run overnight, covered. After the fat is largely rendered out (small pieces of the remaining skin will be floating in the melted fat), strain it and cool, uncovered. (The remaining pieces of “connective tissue” can be tossed into a frying pan and browned, then salted, for delicious, crispy cracklings—excellent on a salad or as a snack.) Refrigerate the chilled fat overnight. The next day, invert it from the container and remove the jelled liquid on the bottom; reserve the liquid for broth recipes, then transfer the fat to the freezer where it will keep indefinitely—at least a year. If you have followed this process for two ducks, you now have: —One meal of four duck breasts —One meal of four duck legs, plus four wings —Carcasses, trimmings and gizzards for stock —Milky pale livers for a quick sauté appetizer —Several cups of velvety duck fat —Cracklings Amazing! And you’re not even a chef. Of course, you are the chef of your own life, and why anyone who likes good food does not cut up two to four ducks at least once a month is beyond me. Next we’ll figure out how to cook these meals. Comment [1] * * * It Starts With an Egg · 1087 days ago I bit down on a chewy pickled duck egg and heard a loud quack out my kitchen window. My live ducks, 23 of them, were awake in the back of the pickup truck, which I had parked in the shade of my house the afternoon before to keep them cool. I was downing a quick breakfast before driving an hour and a half to the only slaughterhouse in the state that handles ducks, which are harder to pluck than chickens. Normally I slaughter my own ducks, but a busy summer, and the prospect of spending one of its few short weekends covered in feathers, convinced me to hire out the job this year. I was hungry but the ducks weren’t, even though they had finished their last meal the day before. Birds have crops that hold ingested food for a day or so before it proceeds to their stomach; it’s a matter of survival for animals whose best defense is flight, allowing them to literally eat and run. Feeding birds on slaughter day provides no nutrition but merely fills their crops, wasting grain—expensive if you feed organic as I do. In fact it takes about ten dollars worth of organic feed to raise a single duck from hatchling to slaughter weight of seven or eight pounds (the dressed duckling will weigh about five pounds). You tend to be careful with your feed. The teapot whined and I tipped the gurgling water over coffee grounds. It was five in the morning in mid-July on a farm in Maine, and the sun had already topped the maple trees beyond my fields. Time to go. What follows is an attempt to chronicle the pursuit and preparation of real food, from someone who grows and raises most of his own, for people who are not afraid. Not afraid of what? Not afraid of using their hands to toss a salad, or measuring salt with their fingers, to be sure. Not afraid they can’t cook as well as a chef. (You are the chef of your own life.) But in a much larger sense, which I hope to convey and encourage in this forum, I really mean not being afraid of living. That means not being afraid to do something without permission from the experts, from cooking to gardening to earnig a paycheck. It means not being afraid to eat wild food so long as you’re not stupid about it. And while we’re not being stupid, let’s not lead lives of fearful conformity, which throughout history has always opened the door to militant and destructive behavior. We shall stoop to gather chanterelles, but not to live. What better place to find ourselves than the primeval hearth? You are the chef of your own life. Let’s get cooking. PICKLED DUCK (OR OTHER) EGGS A good place to start, and not just because it always starts with an egg. Pickled duck eggs beg the question of substitutions that harass (usually in the form of editors) every cookbook author. Most recipe writers (to use the less elevated but more accurate term) would prefer no substitutions, hoping every reader follows their instructions to the letter. But publishers always want to make their books accessible to as many people as possible and usually demand some substitution for crème fraîche or Vietnamese pandanus leaves or scallop roe, so readers who shop at IGA are not completely frustrated. Because this forum believes you are the chef of your own life, substitutions are not a problem. Your dish will taste differently than mine, which is fine. What’s important is doing it yourself. So yes, you can substitute chicken eggs, even from a store although I highly recommend you encourage your chickens to lay their own. Personally I would never buy eggs to pickle them. The concept comes strictly from necessity—that is to say, during times when my birds are laying more eggs than my family can eat or give away, prompting preservation. I did not invent this idea. That said, I have fond memories of commercially produced jars of pickled eggs kept behind the bar at Leo’s, a sadly defunct restaurant and cultural oasis in Providence, Rhode Island where I worked during the late 1970s and early ’80s. I was a bartender at Leo’s, and when customers ordered a fifty-cent pickled egg, usually in concert with a Rolling Rock and a shot of cheap whiskey, I scooped one out with a slotted spoon into a small bowl, then set it up with a salt shaker and a bottle of Tabasco. It was the cheapest lunch special in town—cheaper than the beer and whiskey, an important point to many of our clients. I seem to recall the eggs were bottled by residents of a New England mental hospital, which suggested a John Waters movie. You can find countless pickled egg recipes, mostly spiced with copious helpings of jalapeños and frat house jollity, on the Internet. These are Super Bowl party type recipes, not at all about homesteading. Some of the more amusing are at www.admin.mtu.edu/alumni/pickledeggs.html, an ostensibly educational website under the banner of Michigan Technical University. “WARNING,” advises a recipe from Jim, “This recipe may make your house smell like crap.” Could there be mitigating variables, I wondered? My favorite, from Theresa, is a kitchen-sink recipe for “3 or 4 dozen” pickled eggs, with everything from dill seed to alum. (“Not real sure what this is for,” she admits; neither am I since alum, a crystalline aluminum sulfate, is sometimes used to keep pickled cucumbers crunchy—not an issue with pickled eggs.) Her recipe calls for a jar each of sliced jalapeños and super-hot habañeros, including the liquid, although she doesn’t say how big a jar; the Sam’s Club version? This would be a potent brew simmering away on the stove, even without the vinegar that Theresa neglects to list as the chief ingredient, and here’s my favorite part of her instructions: “Trick spouse, children, friends, pets into smelling the concoction while it’s boiling. Laugh loudly.” Way to go, Theresa! Unschooled in basic crystalline chemistry, non-specific in measure, prone to major omissions, she cannot surely represent Michigan Tech’s finest. But she sounds like a lot of fun at a Super Bowl party. I have a theory that the more recipes in existence for any particular dish, the more basic and simple the primeval dish must be. Simplicity seems to beg adornment, at least from people for whom the adornment gene is strong, which explains two jars of hot peppers per batch of pickled eggs, or why my apartment in Brooklyn many years ago had so many layers of trim paint that the cove moulding looked like it was sculpted by a child out of Cheese Whiz. The primeval version of pickled eggs is this: Vinegar and sugar. That’s it. Okay, okay. Boil a quart of vinegar with 1/2 cup sugar. Cider vinegar, preferably organic, works well; I use homemade maple vinegar from my trees, more of which in a later posting. Don’t use distilled white vinegar, which tastes nasty and, as far as I’m concerned, is strictly for window washing. Add a dozen peeled, hard-boiled eggs, some salt and pepper. Cool, cover and refrigerate for about a month, at which point the vinegar-and-sugar mixture will have penetrated the eggs. At that point you’ll have another couple months to eat them, assuming you’re not a stupid person. (If it smells foul, it is.) Adornments, anyone? Try coriander seeds, mustard seeds, cumin seeds, a little ground cinnamon and mace, perhaps a few small hot peppers such as Thai bird chiles—which by the way can be easily started from seed (try www.fedcoseeds.com ) and grown in a 10-inch pot on a windowsill; one plant will produce enough peppers, frozen in a zip-loc bag, to last you until next summer. Why every cook doesn’t grow a Thai chile plant is beyond me. In truth I find these additions mostly make for an interesting presentation in the bottle; the eggs don’t seem to absorb much of the flavor. If you want your pickled egg spicy (and I do), serve it with a bottle of hot sauce on the side. If you can find duck eggs at a local farmer’s market, give them a try. Carla Emery (in “The Encyclopedia of Country Living”) describes duck eggs as having a “ducky taste.” I’d say the difference is more textural. Duck eggs (hard-boiled) are, as indicated in the first sentence, chewier than a chicken egg. Raw, the whites are much more viscous — snot-like, you could say, which makes them a little harder to separate but worth the trouble, because the yolks are larger and richer with more fat — excellent for custards and ice cream. But more on that later. The next posting will deal with ducks themselves—how (and how not) to prepare and eat them. Comment [4] * * * Copyright © 2004, 2005 Max Alexander and Sarah Baldwin	If you dream of a life in the country where you can get half a day’s work done while most people are still driving to work, this site is for you.

Faraway Farm, Maine

The homestead of Max Alexander and Sarah Baldwin

Man Bites Blog: Max Alexander's Blog

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