Letter From Graceyland

Dangerous Beauty

2009-07-12T13:57:00.017-05:00

Mushrooms are fascinating; there is something mysterious, even frightening about them. They can make you sick, or kill you, or make you high, or fill you with pleasure. They have a strange, fleshy texture and they can taste like meat or seafood. To me, there is no aroma any more compelling than that of dried cepes. I keep them on hand and throw them into all sorts of braises, stocks, and the odd dish just for the little jolt of richness and beefy gravity they introduce.

They also make a huge difference in a regular cream of mushroom soup. We ran across some beautiful portabellos in the market and decided to work on our mushroom soup recipe. I have never done a side-by-side tasting of portabellos and regular white button mushrooms, but the brown color makes them look like they have more flavor to me, so I use them or crimini.

I suppose their are two choices when making a cream of mushroom soup. It needs to be thickened, which means either a roux of oil and flour or an addition of an egg yolk and cream liaison. For this version I used a roux, some stock, whole milk, and just a soupçon of cream at the end. I also used another one of my secret weapons, a dash of black truffle oil.

Cream of Mushroom Soup

1 oz. dried cepes

2 c. chicken stock

1 yellow onion, coarsely chopped

4 fresh portabello mushrooms, stems removed & reserved

4 T. butter

4 T. flour

2 c. whole milk

1/2 c. heavy cream

1/2 t. black truffle oil

s & p

Heat the chicken stock until warm, add the cepes and let them hydrate for ten minutes. Remove and reserve the cepes. Add the onion and the cleaned stems to the stock and simmer for 30 minutes. Meanwhile, roughly chop the portabello caps and the cepes together and sauté in a mixture of olive oil and butter until they are browned and give up their liquid. Remove and reserve the mushrooms. Heat the butter until bubbling and add the flour, whisking, for just a minute or so. Add the cold milk and strain the stock into the pan and stir. Add salt & pepper, mushrooms, and the dash of truffle oil. Simmer for 30 minutes and taste for seasoning. Now use a food processor or immersion blender to puree the soup. Add the cream and gently reheat to a simmer and serve. Should make 4 one-cup servings.

Sources:

D'Artagnan

Oregon Mushrooms

Various

Chef Paul's Tomate-Suppe

2009-07-01T13:48:00.009-05:00

One of the good things about being a traveling musician is you meet people along the way and some of them become good friends. As a result of this, we now have “close” friends scattered from Belfast to Prague. The flip side is, sometimes you lose track and it is very hard to locate them. One of our best buddies along the way was Chef Paul Bumgartner, who ran a little hotel and restaurant in Buchs, Switzerland. Paul loved music, and musicians, and the chapter in our lives spent in his hotel jamming all night with Gypsies, eating his great cooking, and soaking up the culture is one of our fondest memories. His recipes pepper our cookbook, The Amazing Afterlife of Zimmerman Fees, and the war stories from those days are never far from being retold. However, Chef Paul disappeared years ago and we never could find him. We haven’t been back to Buchs, or played any of those gigs, in years. That’s just the way it is with our kind of business. Scenes open up to you, you run with it, and then they close and go away.

We were playing a show in Switzerland last year not far from Zurich, but a long way from Buchs, and we wondered idly where Paul had disappeared to. That night, somebody came up behind Kimmie and tapped her on the shoulder and there he was, The Paul Himself, back in our lives again. At last I was able to find out the secret of the Spargel-Suppe! (It was an egg and cream laison.)

Since I am currently confined to a liquid diet, soups are the obvious answer for a gourmand yearning for real flavor. We were just in the Dallas Farmer’s Market, on our way home to Austin, and bought a ton of ripe tomatoes. One of Chef Paul’s good soups was a cream of tomato, and he told us how he did it. This one stood the test of time very well; we make it all the time, liquid diet or no:

Chef Paul’s Tomato-Bacon Soup

1 yellow onion, chopped

3 slices smoked bacon

1 oz unsalted butter

1 24 oz canned peeled tomatoes with juice

2 cups chicken stock

sea salt, freshly ground pepper

1/2 c. cream

Makes about 6 one-cup servings

Gently sauté the bacon until the fat renders out. Remove bacon. Add an ounce of butter if needed. Add the onions and sauté them for about 20 minutes until soft. Add the tomatoes and juice and 2 cups of stock. Simmer for 20 minutes. Add the bacon and puree the mixture completely. Adjust the salt & pepper. To serve, drizzle some of the cream over the top of the bowl of soup, or whip it and add a spoonful to the soup as a garnish.

2009-06-22T12:44:00.006-05:00

Joe Gracey’s Texas Chili Non Carne

If you were a Native Texan 400 years ago and you had a mess of peppers and onions and beans and garlic and corn and handful of herbs like oregano and comino, well, your first idea would be to throw them all in a pot and stew them together. All of these things grow wild in Texas and Mexico so the cooks of the bunch developed this soup/stew ten thousand years ago.

When Cattle Culture became paramount in Texas and Northern Mexico, this stew came to be called “chilis con carne” since beef was easier to come by and meat was less of a delicacy.

Texas kids in the 50’s grew up eating Chili Con Carne and Beans & Cornbread once a week or so, and every cook in Texas has her own unique interpretation of the dishes. Little of the “chili” made north, west, or east of Texas is what a Texan would recognize as a Bowl of Red. Additions such as pasta, kidney beans, tomatoes, turkey (!!!) etc. have caused considerable confusion and panic amongst the people, but here I attempt to set the record straight.

With the modern-day interest in non-carnivorous eating, it is but a short step back to the aboriginal intent of this dish and so I present my version to you here. The only bean that has the correct flavor for this stew is the Texas Pinto Bean. It cannot be a white bean, or a kidney bean, or a black bean. They all have their place in the pantheon of bean dishes, but only the Pinto will do. Nothing else has the earthy but delicate assertiveness required. If you are desperate, try what Americans call “red” beans, or try the Italian “borlotti” bean. The flavor of this dish depends on the presence of the “poblano” pepper, which is called the “ancho” chili in its dried state, or the dried powder of this pepper which makes up most of the “chili powder” sold in Texas. You can get this online from Penzey’s. Please note that there are no tomatoes of any kind in this dish. The characteristic deep red-brown color and flavor of Chili does not rest in any way upon tomatoes; it derives from ancho chilis.

And so, with those caveats, I give you this dish:

1 pound Pinto Beans, soaked overnight, water discarded

2 yellow onions, peeled, chopped and lightly sauteed in oil

3 cloves garlic, peeled, chopped

6 ancho chilis (simmered and processed or chopped, or 6 tablespoons of Texas chili powder)

Kernels from 3 ears of corn

1 tablespoon of cumin (or more, to taste- careful, there is a delayed reaction with each addition)

1 teaspoon of Mexican Oregano, dried

salt and pepper

vegetable stock to cover

fine cornmeal

Drain the beans. Cover with stock, add the vegetables (except the corn) and the herbs and salt and pepper. Use the chili pepper simmering water as part of the stock. Simmer until the beans are done. Add the corn and simmer for another half hour or so. Add cornmeal as needed to thicken.

Adjust salt and pepper, and serve it forth!

Serve with ice-cold beer, Iced Tea, corn and flour tortillas, and garnish with chopped white onions and grated Monterrey Jack or Queso Chihuahua cheese.

2009-06-20T12:23:00.006-05:00

Some of my friends have asked for a medical update. Although I generally shy away from this type of blogging (I'd rather be writing about other things), I will give you the short answer: I just got back from MD Anderson. I am still cancer-free, as would be expected.

They tried to insert a TEP prosthesis and for various reasons, it had to be removed. I am going back in late July to try again. Try googling TEP and listen to the people using them, it is rather amazing. Not entirely new, but only about ten years old now and really good.

One of my doctors recommended that I not do the TEP but I think he was wrong and I am proceeding, based on the advice of the rest of my team there.

As for food, I am still on a liquid diet- i.e. soup, diet supplement drinks, and red wine. I am slightly dejected because it will be November or December before I can eat food again. Having built such a large part of my existence on cooking and eating and writing about food, you may imagine how miserable this makes me. However, soup is a good thing and I am trying to accept what has been handed to me and perhaps I will write a soup book or something. I started out in that direction when it hadn't really sunk in that it would last so long, so I am in the process of attitude adjustment now.

As I tell people, soup is just fine as long as it is not your only option three times a day, when it begins to pale. Going to a grocery store brings its own little agony every time I spot something and think "oh I'll do that tonight!" and then remember I can't eat it even if I do cook it. Some normal dishes actually do go into the food processsor and become soup, even if it is mildly ridiculous, but any foxhole in a fight, right?

Last night we had a tomato soup that we learned from Chef Paul Baumgartner in Buchs, Switzerland. Soon as I write it all down clearly, I'll post it here.

Ripe Fruit

2009-05-04T14:05:00.007-05:00

Peaches on the tree in the back yard. I'm still all stove up from surgery but I am determined to pick as many of them as I can reach, standing precariously on a chair, fighting the yellowjackets for them. This tree rises from the middle of a giant rosemary bush, so as I plunge clumsy below trying to get to the ripe ones, the scent of rosemary swirls around me. A mockingbird sings the dove's song goofily. Ripe peaches have a scent too, and these have none of the melony aspect that the supermarket varieties have, thank a loving God. I find myself doing something very human, cartoon-like, old as ancestors - I grab a branch and bring it down to me so I can reach the big ripe ones that hang against the sky above me. Some of them are already too ripe, too fed-upon by birds and hungry creatures, and they fall to the ground under the rosemary and I find myself thinking "the gods' share, of course" like a Greek pouring out the first tip of the wine to the gods, or a priest placing a bone wrapped in fat upon the altar so that the aroma might rise to meet Them/Him/Her/It and they be pleased. You cannot get every peach - the gods will have theirs, too! I expect a farmer learns this pretty fast. Peach ice cream soup tonight!

What better way to be reminded to love life, and love the earth, and love a ripe Texas peach? With sight, smells, sounds, tastes? To love my wife with a love like an ache, who "like a fruitful vine" planted this tree long ago with a vision in her heart that is now real, here, now?

I'm very, very grateful.

2009-04-27T11:06:00.017-05:00

Since I’m confined to a liquid diet for the immediate future, I figure when life hands you the proverbial citrus fruits you turn them into margaritas. Soups it is, then.

Since it is now springtime in Austin, the sweet corn is starting to come in and the Gulf Shrimp is on sale, both glorious flavors that go together so well. To me, the important thing with this idea is to maintain the lightness and freshness of it while grabbing as much flavor as you can, too.

Joe in the Minervois

I realize this may bear no resemblance to a classic bisque, but I care not. Although I do think it is important to learn to do things the "right" way, whether it be music or painting or cooking, before you start to experiment, I have made classic bisques, so those dues are paid. Serves 4

Joe's Shrimp and Corn Bisque

1 lb shrimp, medium or small, peeled, with shells reserved. Heads-on adds flavor, if you can find them that way

4 ears fresh sweet corn, kernels cut from the cob and cobs scraped. Reserve kernels and juice. Reserve scraped cobs

4 cups seafood broth (see below)

1 cup heavy cream

4 T. finely chopped shallot

*secret ingredient below

Broth

1 carrot, roughly chopped

1 celery stalk, roughly chopped

1 yellow onion, roughly chopped

Parsley

Bay leaf

Thyme- a teaspoon or so dried, a sprig fresh. Go easy. Or omit.

Reserved corn cobs

To make the broth, peel the shrimp and place peels into a pot with 5 cups of cold water. Add celery, carrot, onion, parsley, thyme, bay, corn cobs. Simmer for half an hour or so until the broth takes on some flavor. Taste it! No arbitrary time limit is a substitute for tasting. Strain and reduce to about four cups.

For the Bisque

Put the chopped shallot in a pot with a knob of butter and a splash of good olive oil. Sauté until shallots are softened, just a few minutes on medium heat. Do not brown. Add broth and corn kernels and juice scraped from cobs and simmer for 20 minutes. Add shrimp and simmer for 3 minutes. Add cream and bring to a simmer. Serve. You could sprinkle some finely chopped parsley over the top or a little pinch of smoked Spanish pimiento, or both, for color.

*Secret Ingredient: If you wanted to get really racy you could sauté a few minced pieces of good fat pork in with the shallots, too, just for added funk. In the South, we would.

2009-04-20T13:46:00.007-05:00

I’m impatient. I want my full sense of taste back. I want the swelling to go down and go away so I can see what I am going to look like now. I want a new dental setup so I can chew real food again. I want my leg to stop feeling weird and numb and weak.

I feel slightly ashamed of this, because I should be grateful and gleeful. After all, a few short weeks ago I was climbing the walls of a deep dark place in my mind, fearing terrible new ordeals and trials. Cancer had returned. I was facing more long, serious surgery and reconstruction. My thirty-year journey through the desert toward this new promised land was ending, with no idea what I would face when I reached my new destination.

And then, when the Promised Land did show up, it was beautiful. No serious after-effects from the surgery. No involvement with the jawbone, and thus no awful complications. The plastic surgeon did amazing things with his part of the surgery, making my breathing much better, getting rid of some old scar tissue and making me look and feel better for the next thirty years. Making my eating and swallowing better with a tissue implant into the floor of my mouth. No involvement in the lymph nodes or surrounding tissue. All clean, all done, all healed. Nothing left but to rest, heal, and go back for followup stuff.

Next stop, a way to perhaps speak again…

So, why am I not happy and gay, to quote W.C. Fields? I am, but I am having to get used to the concept. After gearing up, girding myself, setting my muscles and my mind for a blow, the blow went past and nothing happened and here I am sipping coffee in my little sweet office at my beautiful home tapping out my thoughts like any old guy.

It is sort of like when they tell you a tornado is coming, and you do all the stuff you are supposed to do, the candles and foodstuffs and blankets and flashlights and battery radios and a good bottle of cognac and you run down into the wine cellar and the guy says “oops, already past, never mind”. Ok. Well, then. Let’s see, what were we going to make for supper?

Or in football where you see the middle linebacker coming at you to smash your brains out and you duck and weave just in time for him to miss you…

I think some people are wired to be positive and to go to the higher place every time. I seem to be wired to go to the place I am in and then whine about it. I am not proud of that, it is just an observation. It drives the positive types crazy. I have tried all my life to change this, and get better about it, but it is a little bit like trying to stop being Woody Allen; good luck. I am one of the few human beings who could have his life, his face, his voice, and his sense of taste handed back to him after a close shave and then whine because I have a swollen place on my leg. And then whine about being such a whiner.

Another peculiarity about being this me is that almost nothing of what I say is really true. I seem to have several “me’s” and the one I describe above is only one of them. I also have the tough-as-nails me that can do anything required and not give a damn, and just did. I have the completely happy me that is in fact out walking in the rain right now in the Texas Hill Country and so grateful and joyful that it would make a puppy sick. The whiner me is just one facet of the total boy, but one that I must address as I rotate around to the next me in the circle. I have the happy, positive, laughing me that is ready for the next stage of what has turned out to be a rather remarkable life after worrying for years that I would be just average and not turn out well. I have the guy who goes out to a restaurant to celebrate with friends over a good bottle of Rasteau and is deeply grateful for every moment of life, of friendship, of happiness that comes his way.

Are we all built this way? Probably. I guess the trick lies in being able to choose the one that will lift you, take you up instead of down, do some good for somebody else along the way.

Although the thought just occurred to me that I may be experiencing the curse of the actor, who is equally adept at “feeling” all sorts of ways but sometimes doesn’t know which one is real, or even if there ever is a real one. Am I an actor who is able to sort his personality into distinct types and then inhabit any one of them at will? This could explain a lot of things. Hmmm…

Home Again

2009-04-16T13:30:00.004-05:00

Home is nice…stuff is where you expect it to be, the food is fabulous (Kimmie is making great soups for me now), and Miss Liliana the Golden Retriever and Mama Kitty are offering full support, no questions asked.

My emotions seem to be lined up in order, though- I should be dancing around the rooms in ecstasy, but instead I am apparently going to be forced to experience all of the old fear and sadness and then after I do that, I get to feel all happy. Stupid lizard mind….

I still can't eat anything solid, or even semi-solid, yet. So, soup it is.

I think we will make an asparagus soup tonight. It is asparagus season, after all. Easy as pie, too. Easier, actually.

Asparagus Soup

1 lb white asparagus, or green, snapped in two, blossom ends chopped into one-inch pieces

1 yellow onion, roughly chopped

4 cups broth or cold water

1 cup heavy cream or whole milk

Good salt, freshly ground pepper

4 egg yolks

More heavy cream or milk

Makes 4 servings

Cut or break the tender ends of the asparagus stalks and reserve them. One good way to find the spot in the stalk where tenderness begins is to hold the ends of the stalk in each hand and bend it until it snaps. The root end will be too tough to eat pleasantly. Put the root ends and the onion into the broth and simmer for twenty minutes. Strain, reserving the broth, and put the blossom ends into the broth and cook until just tender, about ten minutes. Turn off the heat, add the cream or milk, salt and pepper. Put the egg yolks into a measuring cup and add an equal amount of milk or cream to them and stir well. This is called a “liaison” and is a wonderful way to thicken a soup or sauce, but do not turn on high heat after you add, or it will turn into scrambled eggs. Add this liaison to the soup and stir. If necessary, turn on a very low heat until soup is just heated through, stirring, and serve.

Flee! He's Coming Out!

2009-04-13T15:46:00.003-05:00

Wow, sitting in the cafe at the hotel. Biopsies all clear, tubes out, stitches out, real clothes on, a Shiner Bock in front of me. Wow. What a llovely day!!

MMMmmmm, live it, boys and girls, live it while you got it...

Thanks for all the prayers, thoughts, wishes, and dreams.

Peace and Love,

Joe Gracey

It's Alive!

2009-04-10T16:06:00.021-05:00

think I can cram cassoulet down this tube?

(For all of you who have asked for an update on my situation here at MD Anderson in Houston. Thanks for all the "Good Thoughts", 'Sláinte!', and "Hook 'em Horns", - they seem to be working like a charm, so to speak.)

Dear Friends,

I'm out of the hospital recovering at a nearby hotel (the ZaZa, which Kimmie dubbed the "Zaspital") thanks to their special "MD Anderson" rate, and Monday I go back for a last series of tests and pokes and prods, after which I may get to go home. Some observations:

- Surgery is now much easier on the patient than it was thirty years ago. Last time I was in an operating theatre for eight hours the after-effects of the anesthetic were almost as bad as from the surgery itself, and waking up in intensive care was miserable in every way. This time, the after-effects were almost zero. Amazing.

- No more cancer. Brilliant Lady Surgeon removed the cancer tissue and this time a brilliant zen master plastic surgeon took a hunk of unused muscle and tissue from my thigh and used it to fill in the gap. No cancer in the jawbone. None of my fears came true. No bone removal, bone grafts, mutilation, nada. If I can pass the swallowing test on Monday, I can get this plastic feeding tube out of my nose and make a beeline for my favorite Houston restaurants (Feast, Café Rabelais) and start inhaling soup in a serious fashion. And, as a nice present, the plastic surgeon miracle guy gave me a neck-lift!

As for the philosophical stuff, I must confess that one lingering effect of the anesthesia combined with the opiates (for pain) has been a rather dull mind this week, but a few random thoughts straggled to the surface after ten days of post-op recovery with a feeding tube and no food or drink by mouth allowed:

- Never, ever drink a glass of cold ice water again without stopping to enjoy it. I would scalp you and eat your eyeballs raw right now for a glass of ice water.

- Same goes for an ice-cold cerveza frosting the sides of a glass, foam dancing on top. I won't take this for granted again.

- This is much like my previous epiphany only more basic; a cool glass of water, a spoonful of warm soup, the aroma of red wine as you tip the glass to your mouth. I'm being whipsawed by longing and gratitude in equal measure. Is it possible to regard such mundane things with tenderness? I am now. I bet I continue to, too.

- One of the larger ironies of this whole thing is that had I not had cancer again and come to this hospital for treatment, I might not have learned that I was a candidate for speech after thirty years of not speaking. Not pretty speech, or particularly easy to understand. But what the hell? Am I complaining? Do I look like such a putz?

- It is humbling and touching to be told "we are praying for you" or "we are sending good thoughts your way" or "our prayer group prayed for you today". While I remain a grumpy old skeptic, my heart is made tender by this constant inpouring of sweetness and faith directed into the aether on my behalf. Thank you all. I accept it gratefully.

- this has all happened so fast that it is almost impossible for (my) mind to process. From cancer diagnosis with its plunging primitive fear to "cured and healing" in a few weeks is as mind-blowing as any trip I've been on so far. I'm still way back there trying to deal with the past and already the future is crowding it out.

- TV news has it's place, and it is valuable, but unless you take the time and mental muscle to read a good newspaper you still won't know what is actually going on in the world. I am now an expert on TV cable news, having just watched it 18 hours a day for the past twenty days or so. There is a lot of repetition of content, bloviation, and a lot of really dumb viewer input. I understand why; it is a matter of economics, ratings, viewer interest. Still doesn't alter the fact that TV is mostly eye-candy in bite-size bits, repeated as necessary to fill time. MSNBC does excellent night-time programming; CNN also, but less skewed towards my biases, and Fox should be hosed off the field into a swamp of their own bilge. Yeesh, what nonsense they peddle. Is there anything more amazing than the self-satisfaction of the know-nothing? Or worse, the professional pretend to know-nothing?

- Nurses rule. Literally. They make the rules on the ground. We need more and the job finally pays good money, so think about it. Thanks to you all for your dedication, knowledge, and aid to the sick and helpless.

I shall return!

Joe Gracey, Jr.

2009-03-30T16:57:00.002-05:00

It has been a hard week. I'm down to the last supper before my surgery at 5am. Today the doctors laid out all the different things they are going to cut and splice and paste out, onto, and into me. I still feel eminently lucky to be here at this amazing hospital and am thankful for the dedication and ability of these people, but I am a little scared as I get closer to the reality of the thing.

I have learned a lot about dining out in Houston this week- Houston has become a much better food town in the past few years and we have had some truly memorable meals here in preparation for a month of taking food in through a little plastic tube that will run into my nose and down to my stomach.

Today a nurse wrote on my skin "this side" so they would cut me on the correct side of my neck. I was reminded of thirty years ago when I had big red squares on each side of my jaw to aim the radiation machines at, and when Stevie Ray Vaughn and Bobby Earl Smith saw me, they went upstairs at the Rome Inn and got red markers and drew big red boxes on their faces in solidarity with me after some asshole at the bar made fun of me. I loved Stevie, he had a large, sweet heart.

And, as Paul Bumgartner would always say, "And so we go..."

See you on the other side!

Peace and Love,

Joe Gracey, Jr.

What, Again?

2009-03-20T12:08:00.019-05:00

Joe in Lyon, France with chicken liver salade, happy

I figure it’s time to talk to my friends and readers who may be interested in what I’ve been up to lately. The quick answer is I learned that I have cancer. Again. After thirty joyous years of being a proud “survivor” I’m back being a “patient” again.

As I have written about here in the past, my first experiences with cancer and recovery actually led to some good things, like my intense interest and pleasure in food and wine and “life its own self”, to quote the sainted Dan Jenkins. Most of my cooking and eating experiences since 1979 are the outgrowth of those battles with cancer and the aftermath in which I began to reprioritize my new life.

Since then my wife and I wrote a quirky little cookbook/novella, “The Amazing Afterlife of Zimmerman Fees”. We teach cooking classes at Central Market in Austin and we have been known to cook for parties and dinners for money, and to be serious about it. I have written for Saveur magazine and others. We cook for our own pleasure and the pleasure of our friends and family and guests, as another expression of our artistic personalities. Cooking is fun, is expression, is life, family, reunion, reinforcement. And, as one of my writer heroes Jim Harrison says, “Eat or Die!”

So, to find out I have cancer now is rather unnerving. I have a small cancerous area on the inside of my gums, next to my jaw. Nobody knows yet just how large or deep it may be. I plunged into fear- fear that I would lose the ability to eat at all, much less slowly and laboriously as it is now. That I would lose my lower jaw, that I would lose my face, or my life. When you learn something like this your imagination runs as wild as a pet chimp let loose in a mall of horrors. What if this? What if that? What will they do to me? How much pain? Horror? Misery? Blood? The human mind is capable of both soaring sweetness and mindless blundering fear.

However, there is a vast beaming City on a Hill (a hill of hope only, since Houston is so flat the gutters don’t flow) called M.D. Anderson. On going there last week I met a team of brilliant doctors and speech pathologists and nurses and beaming staff, smiles and kindness at every turn. Capability everywhere brought to an acute point- you realize you are in the place where the best people are doing the most advanced and specialized things.

Instead of sadness and despair, people are undergoing treatment with hopeful eyes and confident faces. Treatments that out there in the world look sci-fi. Chemo, radical surgeries, skin and tissue grafts, skin radiated until it is literally glowing red. Out there we are great oddities and people stare at us uncontrollably (more on that later, I have thought about that a good deal over the last 30 years) but inside MDA we are all just people being worked on, no big deal.

In a week I went from runaway terror to runaway giddiness after I finally got a dose of reality. A brilliant lady surgeon who made me feel a hundred times better within an hour. A chemo specialist whose intelligence and sense of humour were like a cool drink of water on a West Texas summer day when the grasshoppers are louder than the oil derricks. I am apparently to be surrounded by a team of doctors and researchers all of whom would be considered the best in their fields in any hospital in the world. An oncological dentist whose mind, while examining me, begins to fly through vast expanses of possibilities and then quickly draw up tentative plans and ideas to make me better, almost whole, again. We ask her what she is going to do and her answer is “I’m going to think!” And when she thinks, big stuff happens.

I like being in the care of women. It reassures me. There is nothing in the world more competent than a woman who has triumphed in a man’s world, as this Western medical world surely has been for hundreds of years . As I observed to Kimmie afterwards at late lunch at our favorite Houston bistro, Café Rabelais, you can bet that any girl who makes it this far would have been able to kick the classroom-ass of any guy in school, both because she is really, really sharp, and because she has had to work harder to prove it.

And, now, as the final, wild, impossible cherry on top of this sudden Gulf Coast Good News Sundae, the women (again) in speech pathology say I should be able to speak again. Uh-huh. I, in my sternest fashion, say that I come here with very little hope of that possibility. Jodi the speech pathologist is not fazed by my fatherly gravity. She sneaks up on me and jams a little white tube up my nose and down my throat and tells me to loosen up and quit whining. When she has it halfway to China, she tells me to breathe in and when I breathe out, say “One, Two, Three”. Ok. I breathe in, open my mouth which I haven’t used to speak a word in exactly thirty years, and out comes a gurgling, deep “one, two, three” and it is me, talking quite clearly. I look over and Kimmie has tears coming out of the corners of her eyes and down her sweet cheeks and she says “that is the first thing I ever heard him say”. I laugh and say I sound like one of those movie swamp monsters. They ask me if I want to say anything else and instead of saying “I love you” to Kimmie like I, played by Russell Crowe, will say when they make this movie, I just raise my hands in claws and gurgle “AAAaaaaarrrrghhhhh” like a swamp monster. It gets a big laugh but I notice the other speech lady also has tears and she has to leave. My nose-tube taskmaster Jodi tells me about this patient she has who is in exactly the same shape I am in- no larynx, no tongue, but he is, like me, shaped correctly to be able to use this method to “speak” and has been now for six years. She will put me in touch with him so I can get it from the horse’s mouth, via email.

Yikes. As of today, I’m still walking around this one, kicking the tires and wondering if I can drive this baby or not. It is the Porsche Cayenne of my dreams, as Rodney said later. I am imagining the comic possibilities of this new toy, saying ridiculous things, cursing, singing in a monotone in a voice like Tom Waits. Let me at it, I can’t wait to try this out. Surgery, smurgery. Pain? Gimme morphine for my pain and red wine for my brain. The memory of pain is short. Me talking again? The crazed wonder of it is carrying me away on a river of impossible happiness.

So, that’s what I been doing while school was out. Wish me luck and wait for the audio file of me singing “Picture in a Frame” to appear soon in this space.

Peace and Love,

Joe Gracey, Jr.

A Pig’s Foot and a Bottle of Beer

2009-02-09T18:08:00.012-06:00

"Gimme A Pig's Foot and A Bottle of Beer..."

I love pig. I love all of the pig that is remotely edible. Tail to snout, the pig is a most noble food-providing animal. It is slightly disconcerting to eat an animal that is as intelligent as a pig; it is kind of like eating a dolphin, or a dog- it discomfits me a little, but not enough to make me stop.

I had one of those life-jarring moments involving pig, the kind where your whole direction gets jolted over a degree or two and you are not the same afterwards. It was in Switzerland, where we were living in a little town called Buchs on the road into Lichtenstien and going out from there to play shows. At our hotel we kept ordering this little Pinot Noir from the nearby village of Flasch. Flascher was delicious, bright, fresh and fruity as only a Pinot can be. To find this in Switzerland at $6.00 a bottle, with a soft drink cap on it, was damn fine. So one day we got in our car and decided to drive down there and look around the town.

When we got to the center of the village we could see a balcony and people eating lunch and we wanted something to eat so we started to look for the entrance but of course by the time we sat down lunch was over, as it is in all civilized places after 2pm. It was a balmy, sunny day and we were overlooking a vineyard right smack in the center of town. We ordered a bottle of the little Pinot and a basket of bread and cheese and made do. One table over, a tiny old man watched as the waitress set down a huge roasted joint of some kind, steaming and fragrant. I asked her what it was and if I could get one, but no. It was a hog shank, but not the little wimpy ones you see here smoked and withered under plastic at the store. It was as big as a football and still had all the skin and fat and melted connective tissue. He grinned and stuck his napkin in his shirt and commenced to tackle that baby and I wanted one of my very own. I have been on a determined search for good pork shank ever since, to little avail. And, feet of course.

Pork Trotter at Pied de Cochon, Paris

Pork feet, or trotters as they are called in Britain and Ireland, can be had in the stores here, but always cut up if you are in a typical grocery store and whole if you are in a Mexican grocery, but even there they automatically cut them in half or into pieces if you don’t stop them fast. However, these trotters have had the shank portion removed, so there is very little meat on them and if you cook them you are doing it for the skin, which is delicious, and the bits of meat here and there and the fat and melted connective stuff. I love to eat at Pied de Cochon in Paris, where they gently simmer them, then roll them in bread crumbs and brown them all over and serve them with béarnaise sauce.

But this is about a different idea, one that I initially came across in Thomas Keller's Bouchon cookbook. This grabbed me and I tried making it his way with good result, but I have modified it and it has evolved as I had other versions, notably one at Chapter One in Dublin, our favorite spot there. At Le Bistro de Lyon they served it on a "pasta flan", a bed of fettucini mixed with egg yolk and heated in a ring mold. I think I finally have it under control now and here’s my version:

Saucisse de Pied de Porc

To make the saucisse mixture:

- Pork feet, about two pounds

- 1 yellow onion, coarsely chopped

- 1 Celery stalk, coarsely chopped

- 1 carrot

- 1 t. good dried thyme, or handful fresh

- 1 bay leaf

- 1 handful flat leaf parsley

- 3 cloves garlic, coarsely chopped

- 1 T. peppercorns

- 1 t. whole cloves

- water to cover

- sheet of heavy foil, or doubled regular foil, about 15” square

To Serve:

- Flour

- Dijon mustard

- bread crumbs

- Bread rounds, crusts removed, toasted

- or, cooked fettucini mixed with egg yolk and heated in a small circular egg mold

Place the mixture ingredients into a heavy pot and simmer gently for at least 3 hours (or crockpot overnight) until meat and skin are falling off the bone. Remove all of the feet from the broth and reserve both. Strain the broth for a different use (demiglace!) Remove all bones carefully; there are very small ones that are easy to miss. Hand chop the meat and skin and fat together very fine. Place in a mixing bowl and mix in 1 teaspoon of the mustard, a pinch of sea salt, and some freshly ground pepper. Do not add any of the broth; it will make the “sausage” too loose and fall apart. Mix thoroughly and spread the mixture on the foil sheet on the end nearest you. Now roll the foil up over the mixture and roll it over several times. Twist the ends of the foil until they cause the mixture to be compacted. Put this in the refrigerator overnight.

To cook the saucisse, slice into 1/2” rounds. Roll in flour, dip into mustard to cover, and roll in breadcrumbs. Sauté relatively quickly in butter, turning gently to brown. (Gently, or they will fall apart on you.) Place on a bread round or a pasta flan, sprinkle with coarse fleur de sel and fresh pepper and serve it forth! (At this point you could also put mustard on the table, or sauce béarnaise, or sauce gribiche.)

Joe's Fonky Crepes

2009-02-03T15:22:00.006-06:00

I made crepes last night because everybody is talking about it being Candlemas, or La Chandeleur and in France that means crepes. I eat crepes in France for an inexpensive quick meal, or a snack, but I usually forget to make them at home.

I don't pretend that this is a classic recipe, or even that I know what I am doing. I just wanted to toss this out there as an idea and write it down so I don't forget to do it more often. And, I want to make it clear that this is no big deal to make and lots of fun to boot. By adding a bechamel I am probably committing several sins, but I care not.

I remembered that the batter becomes better if it sits in the fridge for awhile, but I didn't have time, and they turned out well anyway.

For the batter:

1 cup flour

1 egg

enough cold water to make it the consistency of heavy cream

fat pinch of sea salt

Whisk until smooth and somewhere between too watery and too thick, nice and pourable.

Heat a tablespoon of butter in a non-stick pan until frothy, add about 3/4 c. of the batter. Watch for the center to become very close to done; you can see it change in texture, about 2 minutes. Flip (this is the fun part). Finish, about a minute. Add more butter as needed to just coat the pan.

This made 5 relatively large crepes, would have made 6 if I had paid attention and made them smaller. The first one is never quite right, but it is edible anyway. Next time I would make double this amount and reserve half of it for some dessert crepes.

For the fillings, I took some leftover smoked ham I had saved from Christmas and chopped it fine. I lightly wilted some green chard leaves (reserving the stems for a gratin!!!), chopped them fine. I mixed these two ingredients with salt and pepper. Then in a new bowl I took some nice lump crabmeat and mixed some of the chard leaves in with that and some pepper. I tossed some corn kernels into both bowls just for fun.

Then I made a classic bechamel and put in plenty of freshly ground nutmeg. I rolled the crepes around about 3 tablespoons of filling, one ham and one crab for each small gratin dish, then poured the bechamel over the crepes and grated a tablespoon or so of Gruyere over the top. A sprinkling of corn kernels for nice crunch (drat you, Tina Fey!), and into the oven at 400 for about 25 minutes until the tops were deep brown and bubbly, and serve it forth!

Joe Gracey’s Texas Chili (non) Carne

2009-02-02T16:58:00.006-06:00

If you were a Native Texan 400 years ago and you had a mess of peppers and onions and beans and garlic and squashes and corn and handful of herbs like oregano and comino (cumin, not to be confused with what the Europeans call “cumin” which is something else), well, your first idea would be to throw them all in a pot and stew them together. All of these things grow wild in Texas and Mexico so the cooks of the bunch developed this soup/stew and when there was any meat to be had, fresh or dried, it was of course added.

Later when the Cattle Culture became paramount in Texas and Northern Mexico, this stew came to be called “chili con carne” since beef was easier to come by, but in fact it could be made with pork or lamb or jackalope or whatever carne you had at hand. It was still a stew of meat and peppers and herbs.

With the modern-day interest in non-carnivorous eating, I figure it is but a short step back to the original intent of this dish and so I present my version to you here.

The only bean that has the correct flavor for this stew is the Texas Pinto Bean. It absolutely cannot be a white bean, or a kidney bean, or a black bean. Please. They all have their place in the pantheon of bean dishes, but only the Pinto (or better still, the Anasazi) will do. Nothing else has the earthy but light assertiveness required. In a pinch, try what we Americans call “red” beans, or the Italian “borlotti” bean.

Again, I am sorry to insist on ingredients which may be esoteric or are hard to locate, but the flavor of the dish depends on the presence of the dried “poblano” pepper, which is called the “ancho” chili in its dried state, or the dried powder of this pepper which makes up most of the “chili powder” sold by commercial suppliers in Texas. Pepper lovers know that each variety has its own unique flavor, and substitutions are usually unsuccessful. If this pepper is impossible to locate, use sweet paprika and cayenne powders to taste.

Please notice that there are no tomatoes of any kind in this dish. The characteristic color and flavor of chili does not rest in any way upon tomatoes, contrary to popular belief.

And so, with those caveats, I give you this dish:

1 pound Pinto Beans, soaked overnight, water discarded

2 yellow onions, chopped and browned in oil

3 cloves garlic, chopped

6 ancho chilis (de-seeded, simmered and blendered or chopped, or 6 tablespoons of Texas chili powder)

kernels from 3 ears of corn

1 tablespoon of cumin powder (or until it tastes good and strong)

salt and pepper

vegetable stock to cover

fine cornmeal

1 teaspoon of strong Mexican Oregano leaves, dried

Drain the beans. Cover with stock, add the vegetables (except the corn) and the cumin and the salt and pepper. Use the chili pepper simmering water as part of the stock. Simmer until the beans are done. Add the oregano and corn and simmer for another half hour or so. Add cornmeal as needed to thicken.

Adjust salt and pepper, and serve it forth!

Food is Life

2009-02-01T14:09:00.013-06:00

When I had cancer at 27, part of what I got was a message one day from the doctors. They told me that after my impending surgery, I would never be able to taste food or drink again and to prepare myself for that fact.

So, I did. It made me sad, of course, because I was a big Texas food man- chicken fried steak, enchiladas,

Lyon, a plateful of chicken liver salade, and a glass of wine. Happiness!

Gulf seafood, barbecue, good Bohemian and German sausage and potato salad, my grandmother’s eye-popping fried chicken and gravy, my mother’s chili that she and her pals swapped recipes on one year and used us as lab rats. I had made a minor career in Austin out of writing and talking about Texas food, Cajun food, Mexican food, cowboy food. But, as I had found already in that long, scary year in the hospital, a human being can do anything, literally, that it has to. That is why you see people in the most horrific, impossible situations continue to live, somehow.

After the surgery to remove my tongue (and half of my neck, but that is another story) I waited a long time before I was recovered enough to actually attempt a meal. Solid food. A group of us, I think it was my family, went out to eat at a Mexican food place. (The word “Tex-Mex” never crossed our lips in those days- it was Mexican food both to the purveyors and to us, because they felt that they were cooking the food of their people and they were Mexican Texans, after all.) I ordered a plate of cheese enchiladas with red chili sauce and rice and beans, the touchstone of Mexican food joints all over Texas. Half way through the first bite I realized that it tasted just like it always had- the complex flavors of comino, chilis, corn tortilla, mild cheese, onion, garlic.* I wish I could say that I got up and danced around the room, because I should have, but I was very, very surprised and very, very happy to have this gift handed to me by fate.

“You don’ miss your water ‘til your well runs dry” will do here. When something you love is taken from you, that’s the time when you find out how much or how little you really cared about that thing. Now take that thing away, mourn its loss by the hour and the days, and then have it restored to you. There are very few days in my life, or moments I should say, when I have been as flabbergasted and happy as the moment I found out I could still taste food.

That was also the moment I vowed- honest, I swear this is not hindsight- that I would never waste another meal or another mouthful or another day, squander another precious second with bad food or wasteful living. People ask me when I learned to cook, or when I learned about wine and food. That was the second it really began, because I understood that I had only begun the voyage into a world of flavor and ingredients and techniques that has carried on to this day. There is no time to waste, and every time you cram some crummy triviality into your craw you are sinning against life just as surely as if you had spent the day watching soap operas. Hie thee to a grocery, grab something real, get out a good cookbook, learn to turn ingredients into art, open an eight-dollar bottle of French wine and sit down to it while you remember how to live again.

Selfish? Yes, but are we not a hungering self? I’d say we owe ourselves a life lived fully as well as a measure of service and care of others. Even Jesus loved a good meal and a good joke with friends and a glass of wine, regardless of what the fundamentalists absurdly claim. My point here, however, is really about awareness, or what my Buddhist friends call mindfulness. When we become complacent about simple everyday things we are losing something important. In having “food” jerked out of my mouth and then given back to me, I got more than a sense of taste back- I got a jolt of gratitude and awareness of the preciousness of existence that I am still aware of thirty years later. Drink up! We have nothing to fear...

*”Flavor” is almost all aroma, and perceived in the brain as a result of the aroma of food in our mouths and as we swallow. Only sweet, salty, sour and bitter are perceived by taste buds on the tongue. I found that my sense of flavor was undiminished and that I even had residual taste buds in other locations in my mouth besides my much-mourned tongue. God-dammit and thanks God...

Random Thoughts on a cold January day...

2009-01-07T12:49:00.007-06:00

This Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip is just yet another installment of a very difficult situation. I mean difficult for me to sort out; I realize that people on each side of the issue see it as clear-cut but I find that the truth is usually not so neat.

Sometimes I find myself cursing Hamas for their cowardice and violence and willingness to hurt innocent humans. Sometimes I curse the Israelis for their seeming inability to realize that the long term results of these kinds of wars are not positive and that a year from now, nothing concrete will have changed, most likely, except that there will be more embittered Palestinians willing to join Hamas and throw more rockets into Israeli homes as the only way they can feel power and salve their resentment.

But then if you ask “Ok, then what’s the answer?” I find that the more I explore it, the less I seem to understand, or when I do figure something out, the less hopeful I am. Hamas apparently gets most of its funding and weapons and support from Iran and I believe Syria. Ok, then if Iran would stop supporting them this would probably end, more or less. But how to do that? If we pull the plug on Iran via sanctions, won’t Russia and China fill the gaps? Gladly? Gleefully? When I follow this line of thought, what I eventually come to is the thought that a lot of men are in fact evil, that much of humankind is either evil or greedy enough to do evil things, or pissed off enough at least. If this is the case, how can you keep angry putzes from lobbing crude missiles over the fence at some neighbor they profess to hate? I think maybe you can’t, is the answer.

It is very terrible, all of it.

I am not a professing Christian, or anything else for that matter. But having grown up hearing the words of Jesus, the country Rabbi from Nazareth, I cannot help but go back to his admonition to turn the other cheek, else you beastially poke out each other’s eyes for eternity like vicious bobbleheads. I can’t help but think that if aggrieved people, Israel for example, could grit their teeth and curb to their desire for revenge, then eventually the hatred on the other side would run out of gas. Problem is, it would take years and years, maybe a hundred, and we humans are not built that way, most of us. And, when the murder is state-sponsored, as the crummy little rockets of Hamas are, then it becomes more abstract and more revenge-worthy. But who loses? The people. Who wins? Nobody, damn nobody. Except the big-time bastards, the Arafat’s and Cheney’s of this world who enjoy it, who feed off it like gore-besmirched devil hyenas and grin with our blood dripping from their slit-eyed faces while we wail in agony. If anybody needs a rocket up the ass, those kinds of guys do, but they are usually the last to go, sitting in deep insulated bunkers watching the death on a screen. I would mention Bush, but he is so stupid and careless that I don’t even know how to think about him anymore, like you stop worrying about a cyst on your foot after a few years. His evil is the evil of self-absorption. See this week’s Frank Rich in the NYT for some serious thinking about that little butthole.

Meanwhile, the killing continues all around this beautiful planet…

The Mayor of Port de la Selva

2008-01-10T17:27:00.001-06:00

all photos c. Lluis Sala

Genís Pinart, the mayor of the little Catalan fishing village of Port de la Selva, stands on a steep scrub-covered hillside overlooking an impossibly azure Mediterranean bay. Mountains rise around us in a bowl shape, creating a natural barrier to the tramuntana wind, weather, and men. The village below us, and the sea, face outward to the world. He points to a huge triangular carved flat stone at our feet, placed on top of three supporting perpendicular stones, and says, “The prehistoric people of this region built this ten thousand years ago as a tomb. It is older than Stonehenge.” Nobody knows now what the carvings mean.

this photo only:c.Pere Gali

He is actor-handsome with short gray hair, an honest smile, and the tanned lined face of an outdoorsman and I realize that one day, a long time ago, another man who carried those same genes in his own blood stood here on this spot and ordered the lifting and placing of this massive stone dolmen by his fellow tribesmen. He had to have vision, and charisma, and strength to be able to get people to follow him and organize around his ideas. Now this mayor’s hand sweeps the hillsides, which are terraced with hand-built rock walls at narrow intervals to hold the soil up, and tells me that when he was a boy here, they were covered in grapevines and olive groves. Hundreds of hectares then, but now only a few vines are left. First the phyloxera killed most of them, then the changing times kept them from being replanted even after the Texas wild vine rootstocks came to save the winegrowing industry of Europe. “Young people don’t drink wine anymore. We drank wine with every meal, as a normal thing. Now they drink whiskey, and beer, and try to be modern.”

After the grapes went away, the hillsides went fallow and fishing was the only way left to make money. Then as the primary assistant to the previous mayor, Pinart realized that the village was in inevitable decline unless something was done. He saw that tourists were beginning to arrive, slowly at first, but in ever-increasing numbers from places that were rainy and cold like Britain and Germany and Holland, to this Costa Brava area of Catalonia between Barcelona and the French border. He saw the way. As a builder himself, he could have pushed for unlimited building codes the way most places did, resulting in tacky, sprawling overdevelopment along the coast, turning the beautiful hills into an uninspiring parade of boxes-as-housing, concrete, and desultory little cafes and souvenir shops for miles. Instead, he did something seemingly contrary to type, and pushed for local building codes that closely regulated the type and placement of construction, and limiting the height that anything could be placed on the bowl of mountains around their town. This vision meant lower initial profits for men like him, but now that Port de la Selva has remained beautiful and unspoiled, the steady flow of money and visitors into the village has turned it prosperous and beautiful, a fine destination indeed. He says he is ready to turn over his office to a new person, but he worries that inexperienced people will succumb to the enormous new pressures that large corporations are putting on places like his town, to allow all sorts of unaesthetic structures to be thrown up. He says, “I may be a liberal, but I am not stupid; I know how to push back, hard. I worry that a new person may not be tough enough.”

As we look at the little white village, I suddenly notice that, unlike most of Mediterranean Europe, nearly everything in the town is new. He points at the north shore of the bay, saying, “Just over that mountain there is France. During the Spanish Civil War the leftists were bringing munitions and supplies into our village. Hitler found out about it and sent his planes to bomb us. They bombed every building in the village to the ground, and later they came back and did it again just to underline the point. Then the army came in and took control of the port. When the war was over, they lined up the last 25 young men in the village and shot them all dead and left.” So, Port de la Selva has been literally and figuratively rebuilt from scratch, a tribute to a people who, along with their prehistoric, Celtic, Greek, Roman, Visigoth, Arab and Frankish ancestors, have had the kind of spirit and determination to raise everything from huge stone tombs on high hillsides to thriving, artfully conceived vacation destinations on those same brown and gold hills and somehow never bow to the pressures of the elements, or war, or diseases of the body or the vine. Port de la Selva is the story of Catalonia, of the Mediterranean spirit, of European ingenuity and gentle understanding in the face of horror, of mankind.

As my friend and photographer Lluis Sala and I climb back into the Land Rover the Mayor says “I have something for you” and gives me a clear unlabeled bottle of pure green virgin olive oil from his thousand-year-old grove, and bottles of deep red wine from his vines. We tour the vines and olive groves that lie between the mountains and the flat lower lands. They are dotted with little stone huts made without mortar, stacked into circles of ever-

decreasing diameter until they meet in a dome overhead. It was refreshingly cool inside the hut, even on a warm spring day, a place of refuge from the hot afternoon sun after working in the vineyards and the olives. The stone that covers the final hole in the center of the roof can be removed, he says, to let smoke out, for a fire in winter. Some long-forgotten genius, a self-taught architect and construction wizard, did this and many more like it scattered around the slopes.

Nobody knows how to do it now. An eighty-two-year old man tends the vines, the vineyards planted in old-style field blends of red and rosé and white grapes with names like “Lledoner" and "Macaveo” that are the local dialect names for the ancient Greek and Roman varieties that throve here, Carignagne, Grenache Noir, Pedro Jimenez, Muscat, Picpoul, some of them lost to the rest of the world but preserved here in the hidden places in the hills, varieties that will one day be suddenly recognized as wonderful “new” wines, merely thousands of years old in truth. He has crusaded to save these old vines and odd varieties, and planted them in his and in the village’s own new vineyards in a cleft in the hills where the soil is just deep enough and the water just present enough for the grapes to thrive there. He has campaigned for twelve years now to revive the wine and olive culture before they disappear, as they nearly did, and slowly, the ancient stone hillside terraces have begun to bloom with green grapevines again and the dark black of the olive trunks amidst the cork oaks and juniper trees and cactus. The terraces are so narrow that only a mule or a tiny little special tractor can negotiate them. They will return, just like Port de la Selva, and the brown scrub and the golden wildflowers will give way to color and life again here. It takes people with vision, and heart and leadership to make things like this happen, as a grower coaxes a plant from the ground.

Men and women have always turned to natural leaders in times of turmoil for hope and intelligent direction and it is with special urgency that I write these thoughts in the midst of the U.S. presidential elections. I can only hope that this once-great nation can at last select a person who can do those things once again for us, and with us. ¡Visca Catalunya!

My Dad Was a Hero

2007-11-01T13:26:00.000-05:00

“Well hello there, my it’s been a long, long time…” Thanks, Willie, for giving me a nice lead-in today. I’ve been away from this space doing the final mixes for Kimmie Rhodes’ next CD “Walls Fall Down” and I finally got it mastered and in the mail to the pressing plant this morning, so it is time to hit the keyboards again.

Whilst I was off in Musicland, I have been thinking about a lot of different things. We watched all of the Ken Burns series on WWII, which I thought was riveting and brilliantly done, and it set me to thinking about my father. He fought in that war, so the PBS series was very personal for me. When I was a kid I became very interested in war, in guns and tanks and ships and planes. I read Sergeant Rock comics and built models of all the WWII ships and planes and was really just all ate up with it, I know not why. I still am, I guess, and have several large sections of my bookshelves lined with books about it.

I used to ask my father about the war, not being old enough to realize that it might be painful for him, but he would tell me about his experiences in a low-key manner, never exaggerating or playing the hero. He was a gunnery officer in the U.S. Navy on the destroyer USS Helm. When war broke out, he realized he was about to be drafted and, not wanting to crawl through the mud holding a rifle, being shot at like many of his buddies already were, he opted to join the Navy instead, and being a recent college grad, they made him an officer. When they found out he was an avid hunter and a great shot, they sent him to gunnery school at Notre Dame. There he learned the ranges, types, and various abilities of the guns aboard the U.S. ships, and how to man the gunnery tower on a large ship, which coordinated targeting and set the ranges on the ship’s weapons.

This little enclosed perch, like a gun turret, sat on top of the central tower of the ship, over the bridge, and was the topmost thing. It rotated 360 degrees and contained the Gunnery Officer and his sights and rangefinders. The anti-aircraft weapons were literally hooked up to him, so they all fired in unison at the same target. He also calculated the ranges and angles for the big guns that lobbed heavy shells, some as big as a small car, into enemy targets many miles away. This made him a very important part of the ship’s ability to shoot, and so all of the enemy planes would aim for him and his little rotating box.
The USS Helm underway. You can see Joe Gracey, Sr. perched on the roof of his Gunnery Turret, inside of which were his sights and rangefinders. You can also see the depth charges sitting on the rear deck, ready to be rolled into the sea.

He shipped out of San Diego for the Pacific and was assigned to the destroyer USS Helm. He would spend the next three years fighting in every major battle from Coral Sea to Okinawa under Admiral Chester Nimitz (a Fredericksburg Texas German). A destroyer, relatively small and fast and lightly armed with only 5-inch cannons and 40-millimeter antiaircraft repeaters, had several duties in the fleet; one was protecting the outer perimeter of a battle group, headed by a cruiser or battleship, and usually containing at least one carrier. Enemy subs were always prowling around the groups, like giant silent steel sharks, looking for a way in to sink a carrier, so they had their sonar on looking for subs all the time. Several times, he told me, they thought they had a sub detected. A sub which thinks it has been located would generally dive to the bottom and sit there, engines off, silent, hoping the stalker will move on. The Helm had 60 gallon oil drums filled with TNT and a depth sensor on it, so they would set the depth sensor to go off at the depth they thought the sub was at. They’d roll these things over the side of the ship, where they would sink silently through the cold and when they reached the programmed pressure, the dynamite would blow. He told me that several times they did this and soon after, bits of flotsam floated to the surface, along with pieces of human beings, usually lung tissue because it floated. He said it made him feel sorry for the men down there who died. They pulled in some bodies, too, and had to bury the Japanese submariners at sea. They did this many times with American boys too. When a man was buried at sea, they strapped the body to a 5-inch gun shell for ballast and slid him over the side into the icy sea. I never heard my father utter words of hatred for the men he had to fight and kill. I heard him express sadness at their deaths. I don’t think he was particularly fond of the Japanese, or their prewar culture, but then most Americans of that era felt the same way, for good enough reasons. But he didn’t go to war out of hatred but rather out of desperation, literally to save his homeland from evil.

He said that towards the shank end of the war, the Japanese were sending out Kamikazi planes, dedicated suicide pilots, who would make of themselves a flying manned bomb and fly into the decks of our ships. Twice he managed to

Kamikazi plane attacking the Helm

cripple a Kamakazi plane and the pilot attempted one last dying crash into his tower perch, but the planes sailed mere feet away, over the deck, and into the sea. He could see the look on the pilot’s face as he went by, just kids really. He was only 22 himself.

He was there all the way to the end, when they went ashore in Okinawa harbor. He brought back a Japanese officer's sword and a liking for Aussie mutton, and a disdain for shipboard cooking. He and his mates said that “chicken soup” on the menu "meant hot water that the cooks had let a chicken run through once…"

I realized years later that my father suffered from depression, related no doubt to post-traumatic stress disorder, but nobody called it that in those days and he just suffered and we all suffered too. But, he was a hero. A genuine, no-bullshit hero, who just had a terrible job he had to do and he went and did it. He often took us bird hunting and fishing and he was an ace shot because he had such good hand-eye coordination, which I seem to have inherited. Sometimes he comes to me in dreams to tell me things and I know now how much he really loved and admired me, even though he was too frozen to ever say it to me. He was a good man, and a good father, and I wish I had managed to tell him I thought so before he died. I guess this is me telling him now, wherever he is.

So, a toast to Lieutenant Junior Grade Joe Gracey Sr., and Walter Caven and Bostelman and Crimp!, and all of the men who went off to fight in the most honorable war this country has known, if there is such a thing. They were just boys, but heroic boys, and they paid a terrible price that nobody else ever truly understood. Good men all, may you Rest in Peace at last.

2007-08-10T11:58:00.001-05:00

A Number Two Dinner

With this post, you now have all the proper fixins (yes, Texans say "fixins" in everyday speech, meaning "ingredients". We also say "I'm fixin' to...", meaning "getting ready to", which bowled them over in Ireland for some reason.) for an authentic Tex-Mex Number Two Dinner, just like it would be at Matt's El Rancho or Casita Jorge's. Two enchiladas, rice and beans. All you need is the chips and salsa and a cold Negra Modelo, if you are a guy, and a tall glass of beaded, sweating iced tea, if you are a girl. I do not know why this is, but it is a valid generalization. Maybe because women, being smarter than men, realize that alcohol makes a person fat, stupid, and subject to ED, except that isn't really a problem for most of them. Guys don't usually care if they become fat, stupid, etc. I know I don't.

Texans Bobby Earl Smith, Joe Gracey, Willie Nelson, and Colman Andrews, editor of Modern Lounging Magazine, before drinking too many Negra Modelos

Kimmie and I are going off to cook 100 meals for my mother and freeze them for her so that she can have good food and not have to rely on frozen store-bought garbage or the kindness of friends so much. It is an interesting exercise and one that I shall probably write about here, so I will not be posting here for a few days, most likely. These Tex-Mex recipes should keep you busy until my return. A drum roll, please:

Frijoles Refritos

If you were a Native Texan 400 years ago and you had a mess of beans and vegetables, then your first idea would be to throw them all in a pot and stew them together. Most of these things grow wild in Texas and Mexico so the cooks of the bunch developed this soup/stew. Earthenware is still the best type of pot to cook this dish in, just as it was ten thousand years ago.

1 pound (about 2 1/4 cups) Pinto or Anasazi Beans, soaked overnight, water discarded
2 yellow onions, chopped
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1 tomato, chopped, or a small can of diced tomatoes
salt and pepper (careful, the pork adds salt)
Salt Pork, blanched and cubed, or a handful of bacon, chopped up, or a smoked ham hock
Lard, preferably unhydrogenated, or bacon fat, Canola Oil or Corn Oil

Drain the beans. Cover with water plus a few inches, add the vegetables and the salt and pepper and pork. Simmer partially covered until the beans are done, about two hours. (Anasazis cook faster than Pintos, so check often or they fall apart.) Check frequently and put more water in if needed. Taste for salt and pepper. In an iron skillet heat 1 tablespoon of oil for each cup of beans and "fry" them, mashing with a fork, adding bean liquid until a smooth puree is formed. Makes 10 small servings.

2007-08-08T14:05:00.000-05:00

Arroz Rojo

Here in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, the mountain air is clean and light and our appetites are happy. Lourdes, our miracle-working housekeeper and cook, offers to teach us to cook her way and of course I say “si, señora, por favor!” after having devoured her amazing Huevos Rancheros in the mornings and her pear strudel for dessert. I ask her to make rice and she replies “blanco o rojo?” and I opt for red, since for me that resonates with the rice dish that has been made in Lousiana and Texas for centuries and was always called “Red Rice” there, too. I watch and take notes and try to stay out of the way, and Lourdes

Lupe and Lil, our San Miguel parakeets

puts a fresh white onion, two ripe romas, and a clove of purple garlic into the blender and purees it to a liquid. She fries the rice in vegetable oil (manteca? I ask and she points to my stomach, which has been iffy, and smiles, “no, Senor José”), adds the puree, cooks it down rapidly until it is fragrant, then adds chicken broth and some cooked fresh English peas. She adds salt, covers, and cooks this slowly until done, no set time. When it is fluffy, separate, and a perfect texture, not mushy, she corrects the salt and will not allow me to add pepper and it is done. It is delicious, and by making the puree she avoids the problem that I have sometimes encountered when I make the onion pieces too large and I crunch down on one, which I really dislike in rice, and there are no pesky tomato skins or chunks of tomato disturbing the texture of the dish. All in all, it is a rather marvelous way to cook rice, and the color is great with the bright green peas making it a complete protein.

Heavy-bottomed saucepan with tight-fitting lid
2 T vegetable oil, olive oil, or manteca (lard)
1 c. Texmati or Basmati long-grain rice
1 3/4 c. good chicken broth
1 clove purple garlic, peeled
2 ripe roma tomatoes
1 white onion, peeled, chopped, root end removed

Sauté the onion gently until softened, 3 to 5 minutes. Puree the vegetables. Gently sauté the rice in the oil in a saucepan, stirring, and when it becomes milky-white, about five minutes, add the puree. Sauté until the liquid is evaporated then add the broth, cover tightly, and turn the heat down to the lowest setting, or a low simmer. Simmer for 15 minutes and remove from heat, leaving covered, for five more minutes. Uncover, fluff with a fork (never use a spoon to fluff rice, it mashes the grains), and serve at once, or later at room temperature. In fact, rice fanatics in Spain, where this dish originated as paella, insist that room temperature is best of all for serving rice. This is the perfect accompaniment to Texas Enchiladas, tacos, fajitas, or wrapped up in a tortilla with some pinto beans and sprinkling of good cheese. Serves 4 to 6

San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

2007-08-05T17:34:00.000-05:00

Texas Enchiladas

Joe's enchiladas

Enchiladas are the King of the tortilla dish family. They are a part of all Mexican regional cooking, but each area’s enchiladas are different, with different peppers, sauces, and fillings determined by local custom, climate, and produce. The Texas enchilada (in spite of Diana Kennedy's ill-considered opinion that Tex-Mex is terrible and somehow faux, Texas does have its own unique, valid form of "Mexican" food, for historical reasons obvious to anybody who can read, or think, or taste. Don't get me wrong- I admire her books and have read everything, but on this one she made a very sad mistake) is a corn tortilla wrapped around a cheese or meat filling and heated in a red chili sauce. Unfortunately over the years it has tended to devolve into what I call the "truck stop enchilada", which usually means corn tortillas stuffed with ground beef and covered in canned beef chili and tons of yellow cheddar cheese from Wisconsin. I love Wisconsin cheddar and I also make my own fabulous Texas Chili Con Carne, which I will give you someday, but to put them into an enchilada dish is to misuse both with unfortunate results, both culinarily and digestively. I remember when in my DJ days in the early 70's Ry Cooder came to Austin to do a concert on the UT campus and I took him out to eat Tex-Mex at one of the 50's style joints in town. He got one of those big ol' giant platefuls of Truck Stop Enchiladas with rice and refried beans and it was all he could do to go onstage that night for the massive stone lump in his stomach.

Truck stop enchilada

A good, "real" Texas Enchilada uses a light flavored, decent white Mexican cheese or a Monterrey Jack, and not a whole lot of it, and a red pepper chili sauce with no meat in it. Filling, yes, but also digestible.

It is time-consuming, multi-step, special occasion cooking, but one of its advantages is that it is an excellent way to use leftovers in a new and appealing incarnation. Plan on about two hours from start to finish once you have mastered all of the steps below.

The first step in making enchiladas is to create the sauce. Along the Texas border the pepper of choice for a chili dish has always been the ancho, which is the dried red poblano. This recipe makes 12 enchiladas.

1.5 c. broth or water
3 large dried chili anchos or 3 T. red chili powder (6 if you like it very hot)
1 yellow onion-chopped & sauteéd in 1 T. oil until soft & translucent. (save a raw handfull for the topping)
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 T. cumin powder
1 tsp. dried Mexican oregano
Freshly ground pepper & sea salt
2 T unbleached white flour
Corn oil or lard

Filling: 3/4 pound of grated white cheese (Monterrey Jack, Cheddar, or Queso Blanco), 3 cups shredded chicken meat, shredded pork, scrambled eggs, etc.

For the topping:
1/4 pound grated white cheese
Handfull of raw, finely-chopped white onion

Simmer broth or water in a saucepan. Tear the tops of the chilis off and take out as many of the seeds as possible. Rinse the dust off the chilis and add to the simmering liquid. After 10 minutes, the peppers should be rehydrated and soft. With a slotted spoon, remove the peppers to a blender and add only enough of the pepper liquid to cover them. Add the sauteéd onions and the garlic. Blend to a pureé. (Start on “low” speed or you’ll spew boiling hot pepper napalm all over the kitchen.) In a 12” skillet, sauteé 2 T. of flour in 2 T. of oil until the flour is just cooked. Pour the pepper pureé into the skillet. Use the rest of the liquid to rinse out the blender, put this liquid into the skillet, and add the rest of the ingredients. Simmer for at least 1/2 hour or more, until the flavors marry. Keep the sauce warm. If it gets too thick, add more broth or water. (At this point, if I am making chicken or meat enchiladas, I like to add the shredded or chopped meat to the sauce, to be heated and covered by it. I think it makes a better, less dry filling, especially with white chicken meat.)

Heat 1/4 inch of oil in an iron skillet until almost smoking. With tongs, dip a tortilla into the hot oil for 5 seconds, turn it over for 5 more, lift it and let the oil drip back into the pan. Dip the tortilla into the warm sauce until covered, then remove to a greased baking dish. Put two tablespoons of filling on the tortilla, roll it up, and place it seam side down in the dish. Repeat this sequence 11 more times. Now pour the remaining sauce over the enchiladas, top with grated cheese and finely chopped raw onion, and heat in a 400 degree oven for 10 minutes or until the top is melted and the dish is bubbling. Don’t leave it in too long or the enchiladas will turn to mush or dry out. Serve immediately, two per plate (or three, but they are filling), with pinto beans, whole or refried, and a tomato-flavored "red" rice. Serves 4 to 6.

not an enchilada, not nohow, not no way...

2007-08-03T13:31:00.000-05:00

he is what he ate

Coupon Culture

I like to take a reading on the Sunday newspaper coupons a couple of times a year because they are a handy guide to the current state of American Culture. Sort of like divining bird’s entrails, or digging through Dylan’s trash. Today’s reading tells me:

1)Americans still wistfully believe that you can lose weight by drinking canned substances rather than exercising. These canned substances consist mainly of water, sugar, milk, vitamins, and something to make you speed, like caffeine or a pseudoephedrine. This is of course nonsense, as no human being in the history of earth has ever lost weight this way and stayed at that artificially lowered weight for more than half an hour, but it apparently makes people feel that they are doing something about their weight problem and it is much easier than thinking. If one were to think about the problem, it would be obvious that a person could use portion control and exercise to lose weight, thus at least being able to eat small amounts of real food. However, a further examination of the coupon glossies reveals this:

2)Americans have ceased to eat real food, thus cans of flavored sugared milk with vitamins aren’t so awful as they might seem. We now eat things like “Croissant Pockets” filled with pizza (?), “Crescent Dogs” (refrigerated dough that tastes like newspaper wrapped around your imitation “frankfurter” of choice), artificial butter-flavored popcorn (God only knows what that is), frozen one-dish meals with the meat and gravy and everything included so you pry it out into a pan and “cook” it yourself in twenty minutes (the exact amount of time it would take to make scratch rice, brocolli, and sauteed chicken breast with a sauce), coffee in styrofoam cups that tastes just like the cup it comes in, orange-flavored sugar water that “tastes just like orange juice” (so why not just drink orange juice?), pretzels (which are supposed to be slimming, but covered in fudge and chocolate, so you can pretend to be not getting fatter as you gorge), and frozen hamburgers (this is interesting- never in the history of the universe has there been anything easier or faster to make than a real hamburger). All of these items presumably can be nuked of course. And should be.

Erstwhile President Gerald R. Ford attempts to eat a tamale, shuck and all, to the horror of the natives at the World's Fair, San Antonio. He was not subsequently elected (either) as he was not considered bright enough to be President after this. It is unknown if he swallowed the shuck as he was wrestled to the ground by mystified Texans and shielded from the Press, the lying dogs.

3)Tex-Mex items have entered mainstream culture with a vengeance. We have Denny’s advertising flour tortilla breakfast tacos, coupons for Pace salsa and Mission flour tortillas with recipes for ground beef tacos, and a coupon for canned corn with another recipe for “Cheesy Corn Quesadillas” with salsa and hot peppers. This is somehow endearing, but it probably doesn’t taste much like Tex-Mex, more pretends to be than is. It’s kind of a shame to see a great cuisine be all screwed up by marketers again, and again, and again…

tortilla soup (real Tex-Mex)

weird frozen mystery ingredient enchichangadita thingies (not real Tex-Mex)

4) Americans are also eating a variety of foods that was unthinkable in the 50’s of my childhood. Mango and Guava juices, yogurt, bagels, croissants, Nutella (hazelnut and chocolate spread seen only in Europe before yesterday), balsamic vinegar, olive oil, garlic, and sun-dried tomatoes in our bottled salad dressing, frozen fish with “garlic & herb” coatings, “natural” whole grain breads (what the hell does “natural” mean, anyway? I would say exactly nothing), organic cereals, and of course pizza. Ethnic foods have permeated the old boundaries; New Yorkers are making quesadillas and Texans are eating bagels. Words like “organic” and “natural” are showing up in mass marketing now, surely at least a good sign.

what passed for food in 1955- most Americans ate the plastic, too

5)Modern babies have a lot better selection of diapers than I did. They can choose from swim pants (instead of the horror of a water-soaked, drag-ass cloth one), diapers with built-in “rash guard”, diapers that are like little pants they can pull off and run around naked afterwards. My diapers were big, heavy, cloth things that were decidedly inelegant. This is one area (so to speak) where life has definitely improved. Remember the diaper bucket in the bathroom?

6) PT Barnum lives. Apparently there are people out there who will buy literally anything they lay eyes on. Ridiculous hocum “magic” rings, little “Biker” and “Eskimo” dolls, absurd psuedo-Indian pocketknives, copper things (some imbedded with magic crystals) that will cure anything that ails you, cheap looking Christmas and Easter knick-knackery, diet pills that “melt away fat without exercise”, horrible side-of-the-road plates comemorating dubious events or concepts or Country Western stars, funky girdles and clothes in shocking pastels. If you can think it up, somebody out there is waiting to buy it in three easy installments.

Magic healing crystal shaman Dr. Larry C. Moe at work

Is this a great country or what?

2007-07-31T14:49:00.000-05:00

Songwriter Lawton Williams, 85, dies

His country smash 'Fraulein' also was a pop hit in 1957

By BEVERLY KEEL Staff Writer
Published: Saturday, 07/28/07

Songwriter Lawton Williams, known for the 1957 song of the year "Fraulein," as well as "Geisha Girl" and "Color of the Blues," died of a respiratory illness Thursday in Fort Worth, Texas. He turned 85 on Tuesday.

Country singer George Jones said, "He was always very, very nice and a real talent. He finished up 'Color of the Blues' with me, and wrote one of my all-time favorite songs, 'Fraulein.' '' About every third album, Jones wants to recut that song, which he once covered.

"He was pushing all the right country music buttons for that era," said songwriter/producer Bobby Braddock. "He was writing songs that were unique and original and that were hard country at a time when so much country was being influenced by rock and roll and rockabilly. He was a great songwriter and he certainly was an influence on the country part of me."

Born in Troy, Tenn., the fiddler's son was stationed in Houston during World War II. There he learned songwriting from Floyd Tillman.

Mr. Williams enjoyed his first cuts by artists such as Cliff Bruner and Laura Lee McBride and performed on radio stations. He began recording for Sultan and Fortune labels in the late 1940s, and later signed with Four Star, Coral and Imperial.

Songs fit post-war era

Hank Locklin hit No. 4 with "Geisha Girl" and Bobby Helms took "Fraulein" to No. 1 in 1957. This year marks the 50th anniversary of "Fraulein," which was Country Song of the Year at the 1957 Billboard and Cashbox Awards. It spent 52 weeks on the country charts and became a No. 16 pop hit. "They called the song the Texas national anthem because it was such a great two-step song," Braddock said. "The people who had been overseas after World War II and stationed in Germany and dated German girls identified with that song. He did the same thing for those who had been stationed in Japan with 'Geisha Girl.' " Jim Reeves cut "Senor Santa Claus," Gene Watson and Joe Nichols recorded "Farewell Party" and Bobby Bare released "Shame on Me." Mr. Williams, who recorded for Mercury and MCA, once said, "As long as country music fans want to hear traditional country music, that's what I'll be writing and recording." Copyright © 2007, tennessean.com. All rights reserved.

KXOL Radio

I worked for Lawton Williams in the late 60's in Ft Worth radio. It was my second radio job and my first "real" radio gig at a serious station, KXOL. One of the DJs there was a young George Carlin and one of the news guys was Bob Schieffer before he went up to CBS. I was just a teenager with a deep voice and no idea what I was doing, who thought country music was dumb, but I wanted to be in radio so bad that I was willing to play literally anything just to get a gig. My mother, bless her heart, had to

Joe 1969

drive me to my first week on the job because I didn't have my driver's license yet. I had three different radio names as a DJ on the FM station, a Newsman, and as an AM DJ on the weekends. This is where I learned the country music canon and the difference between Willie Nelson, who was obviously very, very hip, and, say, Bill Anderson, who seemed like a cornball, whether he really was or not. Later I learned that even the cornballs in Nashville were usually pretty sharp operators who were a lot hipper than they let on. You don't break into the Bigs by being a dumbass, and even if you do, you sure don't stay there long. One time I was interviewing Willie for an Armadillo Texas Tour after he moved back to Texas and he was doing his outlaw thing and none of the hippies knew who he was yet and I asked him if anybody in Nashville smoked dope (this was how we distinguished the hipsters from the squares) and his reply was "everybody in Nashville smokes dope". He was of course only half serious, but he was also making a point. Nashville was never as square as the face it tried to put on itself for the benefit of the audience, and if those square Moms and Pops from Indiana who were making pilgrimages to the Opry to see all those clean, nice young people sing those clean, nice songs, knew what kind of hanky panky was going on backstage and on the buses and at some of those parties, they'd have had their minds blown. Hell, the cleanest, squarest person on the Opry stage was probably a cross-dressing farm-animal fetishist in his spare time.

Lawton was also the announcer at Big D Jamboree at the Dallas Sportatorium on Saturday nights over KRLD-TV and had that kind of smooth old-style radio voice like Grant Turner at the Opry. The Jamboree came on television every Saturday along with the Panther Hall preview show "Cowtown Jamboree,"(the acts who were playing on Saturday night at the dance hall would do a couple of songs on TV to promo it),The Ernest Tubb Show, The Wilburn Brothers (I would later spend a memorable, alcohol-fueled day with Doyle when we escaped the clutches of FanFare and went to a bar instead) and the goofy local Cowboy Weaver Show, who had a Saturday Night Country Music Review in his front yard or something. He was awful, like watching a car wreck. The prototype for Roadhog. Bill Anderson had a TV show too, and he was so worried about his weak voice that he called himself "Whispering Bill" and he used a really expensive Neumann U67 studio microphone and had them put a ton of reverb on it, which nobody else did at the time. TV sound was, in those days, an afterthought and almost uniformly lousy, so I noticed that stuff. On a lot of those shows you couldn't really even hear the band because they were using only one mic, on the singer, and letting the band bleed into it, just like the old radio show days. The Roadhog records parody that kind of thing when you hear him ask somebody in the band a question and they answer from 'way off-mic across the room. The steel player would take a solo and you'd barely hear him, and the drummer might as well have not even showed up.

Working for Lawton was a trip since I had grown up seeing him on TV. He was a Nashville insider and big-timer, of course, and he'd throw names around like "Chet" and "Willie" all the time, and he was putting in a new country format at KXOL-FM (this was when FM radio wasn't listened to; nobody had FM receivers and it was where all the experiments took place) that Chet was urging him to try out, playing a lot of country music with strings like Chet's "Countrypolitan" Nashville sound. It was around then that Ray Price and Eddy Arnold took off their overalls and silly hats and put on tuxedos and added strings and harps and stuff to their records and tried to appeal more to women working at home and less to redneck male barflies listening to jukeboxes in little joints. Our format was really revolutionary because it presaged the whole movement of country music away from its male, middle-aged, low-income, rural and transplanted-country-folks-in-the-city-beginnings to a more female, middle-class, urban, younger audience. Chet Atkins started it and it never stopped moving in that direction, because that's where the money is, and Chet was tired of a big country hit being 10,000 45's sold primarily to jukeboxes when pop acts were selling a million LPs. Even Willie tried to do it Chet's way, putting on turtleneck sweaters and wearing sharkskin suits and beatle boots and singing real jazzy and slick with zero vibrato ("The Party's Over" had a whole string section on it, and it was a great arrangement, too) and combing his hair real nice.

When Lawton would talk to you, it would sound like an old-time country person. He'd say "mil-yone" for "million" and he'd try to say "I" in a more "refined" fashion than a hayseed "ah" and it would come out "Aaaeee" sort of long, and goofy. I think being around him was very eye-opening because it caused me to realize that the big time wasn't actually out of reach for a kid from Ft. Worth, that it was something very real and very there for the taking if you were smart and tough and lucky and talented. He wore a stetson sort of cocked in a jaunty angle, bigger than the Open Road style that LBJ wore. He would soon leave for another job, I think perhaps at KCUL where Bill Mack and some of those guys worked, and I never saw him again.

2007-07-25T14:01:00.000-05:00

Pépère and Louie stuffing boudin

Making Boudin

I decided I just had to have some fresh real boudin yesterday, so I made the pilgrimage to Fiesta Grocery (the only place in Austin I have been able to find pork liver so far) and HEB (for pork trimmings and pork shoulder roast). I used my boudin recipe (see my July 9 '07 post) as best I could- I ran one cup short of rice but it doesn't matter, just means a meatier sausage- and it was great fun, if rather an all-day sucker.

I got to use my new (very old) Enterprise sausage stuffer for the first time and once I had all the parts in the right places, that baby put out six pounds of boudin in about ten minutes, unlike the little stuffer attachment I had been using with my big pro mixer. My grandson Louie helped, learning some actual (as opposed to some phony-ass hypocrite politician's) family values along the way...

I also made up a batch of Toulouse sausage and some venison sausage. Our wonderful new next-door neighbors, Denis and Page, brought us some really superb Axis deer meat that they had hunted recently. He also informed me that he had killed a feral hog and was having it dressed and butchered, which gave me chills of anticipation just thinking about the things I could do with some of that wild pork meat. If there is in fact a merciful God, I think he just proved it to me again.

I cut and seasoned the sausage meats and put them in the fridge to cure overnight, so that the salts and seasonings could actually enter into the intersticial tissues of the meat and fat before I grind them today.

I have Kimmie's grandfather's sausage grinder, a very old one that he used to make sausage out of everything from armadillo to deer to possum. He'd make wine from wild Texas Mustang grapes and from the Italian grapes he had planted too. We'd have gotten along just fine. I like to try to imagine the farm housewife who owned that Enterprise, and all the fruit and sausage and lard (it is also a basket press) and wine she used it to put up. It gives me a deep-down pleasure to use old things, especially if they belonged to an ancestor. I have my grandmother Alene's cast-iron skillet and Revere saucepans and my Grandfather Cecil's 30-30 saddle carbine and a rose bush taken from my other grandfather, Tobe's, garden. Tobe was a cowboy who grew up herding Texas Longhorns on his father's ranch, then became a gasoline plant super, but who grew roses with his thick cowboy hands. I like that. Grandmama Alene was French and the best fried-chicken cook in Stephens County and she too was known to make her own breakfast pan-sausage, redolent of sage, because she knew hers was better than that old store-bought stuff any day...

Breckinridge, Main Street, 1920, Stephens County, Texas

So today I will grind the meat in old Mijo's hand-cranked machine and then press the sausage mixture through the old Enterprise black beauty into the pork gut and freeze it, ready to be made into Cassoulet and Choucroute Garni. The venison/pork mixture will be spicier, with plenty of cayenne, garlic, and coriander seed, sage, thyme, and of course lots of salt. I will then smoke it at around 200 degrees for many hours in my big backyard smoker with the firebox off to the side so the flames never see the meat at all, just the hot smoky air as it passes over it on the way up the chimney at the other end. That sausage will be mahogany-colored, smoky, and assertive, like Texans have learned to make from our German and Czech immigrants.

Toulouse sausage is a fresh, coarsely ground pork link with nothing in it but salt, pepper, and a hint of nutmeg, which makes it interesting. We have had sausages much like it all across southern Europe, from Venice to Aix to the Basque coast on the Atlantic ocean as it washes the beaches of Spain. Many of them have nothing in them but salt and pepper, period. Some of them have Quatre Epices, especially the "white" ones like Bratwurst or Boudin Blanc. It took some getting used to years ago, when I thought all sausage was garlicky, smoked, and very much like a Kielbasa-type. However, now I would be horrified to find one of those smoked babies in my Cassoulet or my Fagioli con la salsiccia. Gumbo, now that's another story...

Here's a great sausage dish I learned in the little Jura village of Morteau, famous for its Sausage of Jesus, which is traditional in the French Reveille Christmas celebration:

Smoked Pork Sausages Morteau

At the Boulangerie Jeannot in the French village of Morteau, Jean sells his version of the renowned Le Jesus de Morteau sausage. This is a lightly smoked coarsely ground pork sausage with no garlic. One of the wonderful things about talking to a real butcher is that Jean will also advise you on the ideal way to cook the products he sells.

A golden, smoked Le Jesus de Morteau and a foot stuffed with the same sausage meat.

Homestyle Saucisse au Vin Blanc:

1 lb lightly smoked pork sausage, preferably without garlic seasoning. A fresh pork sausage will also work.
1 T. butter
1 lb. Small new potatoes
1 med yellow onion, chopped fine
2 cloves garlic chopped
1 bottle light white wine- Alsatian or other inexpensive dry Reisling
1 T. Tomato paste
Handful of fresh Thyme or 1/4 t. dried
1 bay leaf
fresh minced parsley

Jean

In an earthenware casserole, heat the butter over medium heat and brown the sausage. Add the onion and cook five more minutes. Add the remaining ingredients and bring to a boil. Lower the heat, cover, leaving the covering slightly ajar to permit steam to escape. Cook at a slow simmer for 40 minutes, or until potatoes are cooked. Serves 4.