Nom de Plume

Yes, I cooked the tongue.

It looked like a tongue when I threw it in the pot and simmered it for a couple of hours. It looked like a tongue after I took it out and sliced the base off to give to the chickens (they didn’t care). It looked like a tongue when I peeled the tough tough membrane off it, which was totally weird; it just sort of peeled off in these almost plasticky sheets. And it looked like a tongue after it was peeled and placed in a backing dish with some mustard, apples, and onions. There were still taste buds on the inner membrane. We cooked it, and it still looked like a tongue when we put it on the table and sliced it.

But when you cut into it, the meat looks like beef, and it was tender and delicious. I personally felt the need to peel the inner membrane off entirely because I just couldn’t get over the taste buds. If you didn’t know it was tongue, you’d have no idea. Well, except for Geoff, who came over for dinner and not only raved about how much he liked tongue, but snagged the tip. “It’s the tenderest bit,” he explained.

So will I do it again? Yes. But I think I would bake it using a different recipe. I had assumed we had horseradish, because who doesn’t have a jar hanging out in the back of the fridge? We didn’t. So it was a little bland.

And there you have it.

We’ve really stepped up buying local/sustainable this year. Part of this has entailed going to Bob’s Quality Meats, a local butcher in Columbia City that features all local, pastured meats. I swear, their whole chickens are the most delicious things ever. A few weeks ago, I was perusing the freezer and came across a beef tongue. I was feeling daring that day–and thinking about eating “nose to tail”–and thus the tongue found its way into my basket and into our freezer at home.

Now my grandmother used to cook tongue all the time. I remember it as being very tender and tasty. I never really thought about it that much, probably because it generally appeared on my plate already sliced and smeared with horseradish. But this … this hunk of tongue. Any recipe entails boiling it and then peeling the skin off it. It’s been taunting me from the freezer.

Well.

Last night, I pulled it out out the freezer and stuck it in the fridge This morning, Steve took the Pyrex dish out of the fridge and onto the counter because it wasn’t thawed. We stared at it wordlessly. Finally, he broke the silence. “I’ll eat anything,” he said. “But I have to tell you. I’m not really looking forward to dinner tonight.”

The thing is, a tongue is a tongue is a tongue. It doesn’t matter whether it’s from a pig, a cow, or a human. They all look the same. (Except of course for size, which led to some fairly ribald comments as we were contemplating it.) But I tell myself: How is it any worse to eat tongue when we eat other meat? The only difference is that it’s more easily recognizable for what it is. When I was 10 or 11, I went out to a fancy dinner with some relatives and ordered sweetbreads off the menu. To be totally honest, all that was going through my head was, “WOW! I like this place–you can have COFFEE CAKE or DONUTS as DINNER!” So yeah, I pretty disappointed when I got some meat in a buttery sauce. It was pretty good. But it wasn’t CAKE. Later on, my great aunt told me what sweetbreads really were. I just shrugged. It was okay.

I’m hoping the tongue is like that.

So here I go ….

Sometimes I wonder whether cookbooks are becoming obsolete. I mean, I have cookbooks–and nothing is a better quick kitchen reference than The Joy of Cooking–but I find myself going online to find recipes far more often than looking through cookbooks. (I actually posed this question recently at a small dinner gathering; one guy said that he thought books in general were becoming obsolete. Yikes. Perish the thought.)

Anyway, one of the perils of researching recipes online is the fact that one gets easily sidetracked. For instance, I went online this morning to get the proportions of beef bones to water to make stock. And before you know it, there I am on a page on how to make butter.

Well.

Why not?

Here’s the page (complete with an explanantion of why you shouldn’t feel guilty eating butter). His directions are nice and lucid, and include complete pictures. Should you not feel like clicking, the process of making butter is as simple as throwing heavy cream into a KitchenAid and whipping it until the fat sticks together

So here we are at the buttermilk whooshing out of the butter stage.

We just happen to have an antique butter mold and paddle.

With a nice little pattern inside the mold.

Pressed it in

And now it’s resting in the fridge, waiting to be unmolded.

*Update: It behooves one to read up on how to use a butter mold before one actually uses it. To wit: Apparently, you are supposed to soak it in water for 30 minutes before using it. Otherwise, the butter won’t pop out. Sigh.

So it’s been about a year since I started bellydancing classes, and I’m more in love with it than ever. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been bad about getting to class, but good about practicing–and as part of that, I dug up the DVDs I bought last summer. And the whole purpose of this post is to tell you that if you’re in the market for bellydance DVDs, stay away from Veena and Neena.

You may have heard about these people. Dubbed the “belly twins,” they are undeniably thin and gorgeous. But I think they’re automatons; they have no soul; they’re like little bellydancing robots. Actually, I remember doing this a couple of times last summer and being bored out of my skull. Like they’ll do snake arms on one side for 30 full seconds. Then the other. Then both. Yawn.

But when I dug it out again and did it, I realized something. I’ve had this rotary cuff thing going on for a few months, and blamed it on my obsessive two miles a day in the pool habit of my twenties. NOW I realize that it has nothing to do with a repetitive crawl, and more to do with the fact that I’d been doing the shoulder shimmies and snake arms they way they did. Which they do with a snapping movement that’s almost violent. (I finally broke free of this habit not so long ago–basically letting the shoulder blade do the pulling rather than the shoulder itself–and lo and behold, no more pain.)

In other words, they have no soul AND they’ll damage your body. So what’s left? Not much. I would give this DVD away, but you know, I really think they’re a hazard.

Barnevelder chickens. They are amazingly pretty and lay dark brown eggs. Great photos here. I’ve been dreaming about doing this for a long time, and figured why now now? I ordered the hatching eggs yesterday. Carrie, on the corner, offered up one of her broody hens to hatch a few of them, and is lending me her hatching apparatus for the rest. (Barnevelders are big birds, and her broody hen is quite small.)

I’m setting up the coop on Geoff’s lower stretch. Haven’t started building it, but I figure this will get me motivated in terms of deadline. I even have a scheme: What I am going to do is get a plan, get all the materials, and then start putting it together. Steve will come over to see what I’m doing. He will then pronounce my efforts an abortion, and help. I’m really hoping that he’ll just take over building it, but we’ll see.

Which was the only book I loved more than Pat the Bunny when I was a wee little thing. So imagine my delight when I opened up Google this morning to see this:

Just got home from a meeting, and found this:

If you can believe it, I actually got up this morning when Steve did–at 4:30. He does it because he has to (though apparently he “slept in” a little); I did it because I fell asleep last night at 8. Which is completely weird. Also weird were the dreams I had, in which all the soap in my drawer of soaply delights melted into a gooey, unsalvageable mess while I went from door to door trying to peddle the stuff. Considering all the oddness, it felt completely natural to wake up to an unseasonal snowfall.

Oh caffeine! My Caffeine! Our love affair is done, the stress you cause does me rack,
Though greeted with the sun. The drip is near, espresso I hear, the adrenaline once exulting
While follow eyes the steady reel, the liquid black and daring; But O heart! Heart! Heart!
O the bitter brew of brown, Where in my cup my decaf lies, a drink flat and dead.
O Caffeine! My Caffeine! I wish I could drink you. I wish—but you cause panic—but
you make me jangle.

(with abject apologies to Walt Whitman)

I just listened to an On Point podcast with Sylvia Earl, talking about how you can now go into the oceans with Google Earth. Great show–as always–but I was dismayed to learn that while fish oil is great for YOU, it’s not great for fish populations. Actually, it’s terrible for fish populations. Luckily, there’s an alternative: Oil derived from algae. Supposedly, all the fish omega threes come from algae anyway. So I guess I’ll finish out my current bottle and then switch.