Dim Sum: Reverse Galactic Double Unkosher, but a Formidable Craving Nonetheless

Har gau still to face the steamer.

It’s true what they say about Christmas and Jews and Chinese food. Actually, I’m not sure where my obsession came from, since my family went to upstate New York to celebrate Christmas each year with my Catholic grandmother. I think I probably heard about it on television and seized the chance to legitimize what is a consistent craving all year long. If I wrote poems other than limericks, they would probably be, by and large, odes to dumplings.

A har gau’s a poem, so poised, on a plate
With delicate shrimpies Oh how I love bait—

It’s for everyone’s benefit that I don’t write poetry. In Boston, of course, you can get dim-sum-type offerings day and night. Here in Madison, I have to wait until Sunday, and I’ve heard—let it not be true—that I must go to Chicago if I want any decent dim sum. I could not wait that long, so W. and I made our own last night.

Road-trip reminiscence: Slab City, Salvation Mountain, and chorizo with eggs.

If you’ve been following Madison Forager, you’ll remember the several-weeks’ silence last month during which I was driving from San Francisco to Madison via Yuma, Ariz., so as not to hit snow. I never did tell you, like certain people I know, about all the things I found to eat, on account of my hard drive having eaten everything I photographed. But now that there’s little to forage in Madison save slush, I’m developing a richer mental life.

First of all, I should mention that if you happen to stop in Niland, Calif., you will find some excellent chorizo and eggs at the Mexican restaurant there. I wish I could have eaten two orders to prolong the experience. Also, my breakfast burrito came with complementary chips and salsa, even at eight in the morning, and—another mark of an enlightened establishment—it was assumed that I would be drinking coffee. That is also where I met Leonard.

Perhaps you do not know about Slab City. A nomadic artist fellow in Oakland told me about it. It is an old military base reduced to concrete slabs in the desert, reborn as the last place people can live for free and avoid having to follow any laws other than Respect.

Best last-minute Christmas gift for the Midwest-locavore lush in your life

The only problem with recommending a colorless, flavorless liquor is that it’s hard to take that terroir argument very far. You can, I think, argue that it didn’t have to travel very far in petroleum-fueled vehicles to get it to your favorite ethical Wisconsin-resident lush.

The only other problem is that I can’t tell you if it’s good, because I’m a vodka Philistine. It’s good with grapefruit juice and a lemon peel, I can tell you that much. That’s why the bottle is empty.

Midwest Vodka. Grain-distilled at a family-run distillery in New Richmond, Wisc., says the label.

Waiter, there’s tetrachloroethylene in my water … should I be worried?—On the toxic industrial chemicals in Madison’s public water

Leaky.

Each morning a nasty white precipitate appears in my coffee water. I’m too cheap to filter it, and I know it’s just harmless minerals. But would that filter even work on the tetrachloroethylene?

As part of its Toxic Waters series, the New York Times has posted Environmental Working Group contaminant data for lots of public water systems. A lot of places post this data online for the public. But as someone who’s sifted through these kinds of records many times for stories on water issues, I can tell you they’re tough to translate — so this is a major public service.

The upshot is that American drinking water standards are outdated, and millions of people’s tap water is legal but still unhealthy. Here’s the NYT’s full page on Madison; or, if you live somewhere else, search for your water data here.

Madison’s water system

Q. Why did Jesus walk on water? A. To get some delicious bait.

Time to stock up on bourbon and worms. This weekend, while stumbling through the snow looking for beer — a hash is a grand drunken ritual of foraging, isn’t it? — I saw the insane people out trying to walk on water at Monona Bay. The ice looked translucently unsafe by Mendenhall Lake, Juneau, standards. But there they were, Madison fishermen and their shacks and buckets all little dots in the distance. It almost made me want to detour from beer-hunting to see if they’d caught anything yet.

Ice-fishing: a major reason I was OK with moving to Madison. I’ve heard it’s not everyone’s mug of beer, but I can’t understand why. Meditative solitude, fresh air, free fish!

Free petite fish, that is (flip to 2:20 for the “big, giant bluegill”). I’m going to give the lake a couple more cold days like today. And then I’ll be mooching an auger, drinking beer, and pulling up tiny little live baits with the best of ‘em. Also I’m going to have to flip a coin with W. to see whose tent we’re going to cut a fish-hole in.

I have much to learn. What is the proper ice-fishing lure or bait? The best ice-fishing drink? Appropriate reading material? Please advise. On my list for the moment: Fish heads, coffee with bourbon, and, of course, the New Yorker. I’m waiting for their Winter Fishing Issue.

Recipe: Raccoon goulash

Paprika-spicy and tender meat in a rich, dark-red broth. Ozpörkölt. Ish. Serves at least eight.

Now chilled and gelled, coon goulash leftovers.

Ingredients:
1 small (10 lbs.) raccoon
4 slices bacon

Raccoon report: On the edibility of one Procyon lotor

Vegetarians and the squeamish, stop here.

Me and the coon, prepping for the pressure pot. Photo by Mike Q.

For a week I was nervous about the coon in my fridge. Nervousness manifests in me as indecision. Moroccan tagine? A star-anisey Chinese braise? Coon au vin? The raccoon itself upped the ante on Thursday with the appearance of its own black foot. Still attached to the carcass, that foot seemed to wave the coon’s bizarre-meat status in my face.

Alimentary underbellies: Prison shrimp—Donut sludge—What Mexican drug cartels have in common with Norwegian cooks

Today, three delightfully sordid food stories worth sharing:

1. The Wall Street Journal reports Bernie Madoff is adjusting well to prison. The lede is hidden way down, though: “There are gangs and a thriving black market for smuggled luxuries, a current inmate says, such as liquor, shrimp, chicken and cigarettes, which can fetch $10 apiece.”

Shrimp? What kind of shrimp, and how and where does it get cooked? The news that matters is never what they report.

2. Slate.com on donut sludge. (They say “doughnut.” Must we?) Fairfax County sued KK for $2 million, and settled for $750k: KK was fouling up the sewer lines with “excessive quantities of highly corrosive wastes, doughnut grease and other pollutants.” KK includes it in direct operating expenses, as though paying to dump the grease down the drain is just part of the biz.

A subject of deep interest to me ever since I reported on Juneau’s bowels earlier this year. (“What not to flush: A magical mystery tour — and cautionary tale — of Juneau’s sewer lines.”) You just never know what people are going to put into those tubes we all share. At one time, inmates and juvenile offenders in Juneau were flushing sheets and towels that clogged the tubes downstream. The sewer guys found out because they were labeled, LCC — Lemon Creek Correctional. The problem was fixed by installing some sort of machinery on the user end that would cause the toilet to instantly and catastrophically overflow if you stuffed it with something inappropriate. Somewhere out there must be an analogous solution for errant grease-dumpers.

3. Lye: an easy way to dissolve those pesky bodies laying around. For slate.com’s Explainer, Brian Palmer follows up on the NYT’s story: the time commitment is about the same as making a pot of posole — but does not mention that the same substance used to dissolve (“digest,” alternately) bodies is what turns cod into lutefisk. Again, serious holes in the story. What is the difference between the lye solution fish soaks in and that used on bodies? Does a body, before dissolving into a golden oil, go through a lutefisk-like stage?

I know. I’m sorry. What with the coon foot, this blog is no longer passing the breakfast test. Tomorrow: unicorns and teddy bears, all in pastel, I promise.

Coon cookery: A slightly shocking footnote

I was wrong when I said my raccoon just looked like a piece of meat. So wrong. Revision: On closer inspection — as I removed its bag to start brining it for tomorrow’s Coon Fest — it looks like a piece of meat with a black foot attached.

The Detroit News enlightens me—I should call this post Why I Love the Internet, just for answering this urgent question—on Why does my coon have just one foot?

“The paw is old school,” says Glemie Dean Beasley, a Detroit raccoon hunter and meat salesman. “It lets the customers know it’s not a cat or dog.”

Excellent article, by the way … by the one and only Charlie LeDuff.

He believes coon meat tastes something like mutton or pork, but to the uneducated palate, it has the aroma and texture of opossum.

How you know it's really a coon.

Highbush cranberries: redeemed?—Recipe: Chipotle-cranberry barbeque sauce

In my vision, the highbush cranberry sauce crosses the River Styx. Or the River Yahara, maybe. Anubis places its bitter heart on one side of the scale, and weighs it against a sugar cube. If the cranberry falls, it goes to hell and the compost bin. The sugar falls, and we all go pick more cranberries in the Elysian Fields, which, the Egyptian mythmasters forgot to mention, is full of cranberry bushes. Just like Madison.

I’m the lone taster so far, but I think the highbush cranberry is redeemed (See previous post: “Theory: If the highbush cranberry were any good, it would have been eaten by now.”) I offer you all this recipe to illustrate my experiment, not as the last word on the berries. Lacking a sieve, my straining method is primitive and laughable, my return on cranberry goop meager.

Recipe: Chipotle-cranberry barbeque sauce.
Makes a little more than one pint. You could easily improve that yield.

3 cups highbush cranberries
1/2 cup chopped onions
bit of oil
1/2 cup champagne vinegar (I’d use cider vinegar if I had it.)
1 cup brown sugar
1 dried chipotle pepper
pinch cloves
pinch allspice
several pinches cinnamon
pinch white pepper
salt to taste

1. Start hydrating that leathery old chipotle pepper in hot water.

A pox on the seeds, even if they do make more berries.

2. Cook cranberries in water until they’re soft.

3. Meanwhile, saute the onions in a bit of oil. (Other recipes say to boil the onions with the berries. But then they clog the strainer—and you don’t get the lovely Maillard flavors.)

4. Strain the berries. I forced the berry goop through my bowl-shaped strainer, and for Pete’s sake, you ought to be able to do better. Pureeing in the blender is a terrible shortcut, let me tell you. The highbush cranberry has a single large seed that just kills the party whenever it is encountered.

Highbush cranberry goop.

4. Add the onions. Puree the result in the blender.

5. Add everything else. Cook it down for a half-hour or more. The flavors meld, and it turns from a pinkish red to a lovely golden brown.

A variation: Cook it less, and leave out the chipotle, and you’d get an interesting, bitter-edged ketchup.

There you go. I imagine it would go well on pork or, if you don’t eat pork, raccoon.