The Pastry Pirate Sails Forth

We Have Come To Journey's End

2008-09-30T19:02:00.005-06:00

This will be my last post. I'm not taking down the blog, in part because it's important to me to have Wiley's memorial out there in cyberspace. But, quite frankly, blogging is just not fun anymore.

I loved writing about the adventures Wiley and I had, but it's not the same now that he's gone. I can't write about the kitchen. When I weigh in on a political matter that's important to me, I attract random know-it-alls who post tedious comments based on the title of a post rather than its content. Where's the fun in that? And I don't want to have one of those whiny, Facebook-esque much a-blog about nothing exercises in navel-gazing.

Plus, hiking season is just about over, so I doubt I'll be taking anymore exciting solo sojourns into the wild. That's why I'm ending with this one: my hike to Lone Eagle Peak.

Ever since I moved here and bought a book detailing local hikes, I've been obsessed with hiking to Crater Lake and Lone Eagle Peak. The photo of the latter in the book had me entranced.

Work and weather made it tough to find the right two-day break to do it, but Jerry my hiking referant at work warned me the window of opportunity was about to close for the season.

So yesterday I set off, starting at the Monarch Lake trailhead at about 8,300 feet above sea level, where the fall colors are at their peak:

The trail itself has the same rating as Byers Peak in my book: difficult. But the first half was a lovely walk in the woods, with consistent but gentle elevation gain and a few exciting "primitive" bridges over rushing streams:

The trail follows Cascade Creek for much of its 7.5 miles (one-way, to Crater Lake. With side trips I'd estimate my total mileage for the two days was about 17 miles). Paralleling the aptly-named creek, I passed many waterfalls:

The second half of the trail, and especially the last third, is much rockier and steeper, but quite frankly not as heart attack-inducing as Byers Peak. My guess is the two trails merit the same rating because Byers is short but steep and relentless while Lone Eagle is longer and still has about a 2,000 foot elevation gain.

In any case, here's a view of Lone Eagle Peak. To the right of the spire-like monster, along the ridge, is the remnants of Peck Glacier. To the left of the peak is Fair Glacier, barely visible through the trees.

I set up camp at the edge of Crater Lake, right at the foot of Lone Eagle Peak, pleased to have the place to myself. At dusk, as I was drifting off to sleep (I tend to rise and to sleep according to the sun when I'm in the wild), I was startled by the sound of Large Animals. There were two, possibly more, Things all around the outside of my tent. I peeked out through a small window and saw a moose walking past about ten feet away.

No, I didn't take any pictures. There were signs at the trailhead warning that moose were in "the rut" and would be aggressive, and that anyone who happened upon them should leave the area immediately.

Since they had happened upon me, I was just staying put and not venturing out of my tent. Eventually, after they drank from the lake and one of them apparently vomited (at least that's what it sounded like) they moved on.

As the full and total darkness of the wild descended around my tent, I realized I'd never camped alone in a place with real predators... Iceland, southern Chile, the Faroe Islands, Norway... these are not places known for hosting many apex predators. I'm not saying a moose is technically an apex predator, but there are black bears and mountain lions in the area I was and, well, an aggressive 1,000-pound moose on the loose might as well be considered capable of kicking my ass.

In the dead of night, probably around 0200 I'm guessing, I awoke with a start (I sleep much lighter in the wild, too). I was immediately aware of something walking outside the tent. It half-circled, then retreated (possibly when it heard me sit up and grab my trekking poles, which I planned to use to defend myself double-saber-style). Then it came back and made a full circle. Eventually the sound of paws in dry grass faded.

I'm sure it wasn't a bear or a moose, since its tread seemed too light and it was utterly silent but for the grass rustling. I'm guessing it was a fox or coyote, though I wouldn't rule out the possibility of it being a mountain lion. In any case, it didn't smell anything appetizing in my tent, so I was spared the drama of having to go all kung fu on an animal who was, after all, just doing what animals do.

I woke at dawn to find a thin, glossy coat of ice on the outside of my tent, even though I'd been toasty warm inside, swathed in layers of flannel and fleece. (The elevation for my campsite was around 10,350 ft.)

After investigating the environs of Crater Lake for a bit, I hid in my tent while the moose passed through again and then packed up and set off the way I'd come.

Here's another shot of Lone Eagle Peak, on the right, with the incredible wall of cliffs to its north, crowned by rock formations that look like cathedrals. My book pointed out that these cliffs inexplicably have never been named... I propose, with a nod to the great Waterboys song, "Church Not Made With Hands."

So there it is: Lone Eagle Peak, crossed off my to-do list. Despite how much I was looking forward to this trek, I have to say I didn't enjoy it. The trail was pleasant enough, and well-maintained, and the weather was near-perfect for hiking (sunny and in the 60s... though personally I prefer hiking in the 50s), and the scenery was gob-smackingly gorgeous, from the yellow stands of aspen to the magnificent cliffs and glaciers, as well as the imposing Lone Eagle Peak itself.

Maybe it was because I was wearing a full-on backpack for the first time in a long time (I'd been using a day pack on the shorter hikes Wiley and I took) and, oddly enough, the difference in weight between my pack ready for an overnight and ready for a two-week international jaunt is only a couple pounds (the difference being food).

Maybe it was because, of a dozen people I met on the trail, nearly all of them were with their dogs, which made me miss my little buddy even more.

Or maybe it's because I've got a lot of stuff going on now, things I haven't been blogging about but find very stressful. In any case, the hike was a trudge, a slog, a put-one-foot-in-front-of-the-other-and-get-it-done march. It was on the trail that I decided this blog has run its course. Thanks to all who read along, posted comments or e-mailed me. I've appreciated you sailing along, but now it's time to disembark. Take care.

Sarah Palin Wants Polar Bears To Die

2008-09-22T20:24:00.003-06:00

I knew that already, but if you are at all concerned about animals, please check out the first-ever endorsement of a presidential candidate by the Humane Society Legislative Fund (hint: they're not backing McCain). In addition to an objective run-down of both the prez and VP candidates' records on animal welfare, the link features a rather awkward photo of Barack Obama holding a poodle. Neither one looks very comfortable, but that's beside the point.

Props to my bro for sending the link.

Thank You

2008-09-20T00:03:00.003-06:00

I just wanted to thank everyone who has posted a comment, and so many others who have emailed me, offering support and happy memories of Wiley. I know there will be a day when I can remember all our great adventures together and the unconditional happiness he gave me for so many years, but it is not today.

Probably won't be tomorrow, either.

In any case, I gave Wiley's remaining treats to my favorite line cook Jerry, who has two dogs of his own, and will be giving his bedding and bowls to Bridget and Brian. This morning I also made a donation in his memory to Best Friends Animal Society. I told them to use the money where it's needed most but, all things being equal, it would mean a lot to me if they could use it to support one of their programs helping stray animals overseas. They do a lot of work helping people in poor countries or anti-pet countries establish shelters, and they've also gotten pets and strays alike out of war zones and disaster areas. I like to think that another feral street puppy in some dumpy country somewhere might get the chance at a better life in Wiley's name.

This morning I woke up early, as usual, and not knowing what else to do took myself for a walkies. At work, I had the opportunity (a few times, actually) to yell at my assistant for truly careless mistakes, and I learned that it is not possible to cry and have a Gordon Ramsay moment at the same time.

I opted for the Gordon Ramsay moment.

The retired Swiss chef who comes in on the weekends to do prep work told me about a dog he'd lost, and how for weeks after the dog had died, he would still go to the door every morning with leash in hand, waiting to put on his pet's collar until he remembered. He told me it will take time to get over Wiley, which I know, and to let myself mourn him. Everything else can wait, he said.

Then he told me to go home and have a drink.

Well, I'm drinking... Aveda's "soothing" herbal tea, to be exact, and listening to Sigur Ros, which always fills me with peace.

When I was at the kennel on Thursday morning, Bridget gave me a print-out of The Rainbow Bridge poem. I didn't want to say it, but I thought "oh, no." Most of you know how much I hate poetry, especially the gooey, sentimental sort, and those of you familiar with the poem know it's definitely in that category. I've read it before, but hadn't seen this version, which claimed to be "inspired by a Norse legend."

Suddenly the poem seemed less lame to me, though I had to research the connection. (Okay, I googled it.) Turns out they're stretching the inspiration for Rainbow Bridge to be Bifrost, the bridge separating Midgard (our world) from Asgard (kinda like heaven, only with more drinking), and it's apparently the same bridge the warriors judged worthy of Valhalla cross on their merry way.

That amused me, because one of Wiley's early names, and one he occasionally deserved when sufficiently crazied-up, was Fenrir.

If you love the Rainbow Bridge poem and take comfort in it, hey, God bless. Me, I'm sitting here listening to my elegiac Icelandic "post-rock" and imagining Wiley running amok on Bifrost, barking his "bacon bark" until Heimdall finally relents and throws him a piece of roast beast.

And that thought makes me smile.

Wiley in Pictures, Part Three

2008-09-18T22:15:00.013-06:00

December 2007, Mills Mansion grounds, NY: Wiley really loved going walkies here, with all the different trails and the deer and squirrels, which he loved to chase... and which sometimes chased him back. A few of the deer seemed to think his charge was part of a game and answered in kind, startling him more than once.

January 2006, Milwaukee shore of Lake Michigan: Wiley was often camera-shy, so I love any photo that got him looking into the lens.

Autumn 2007, Dutchess County, NY: Did someone say salmon? When it comes to my cooking, Wiley was my greatest fan.

December 2007, Mills Mansion grounds, NY: Dr. Virago actually took this photo when she came to visit me for graduation. I love it because it captures Wiley in his "crazied-up" state, when he would bark for no reason. I'm sure he had a reason, we just couldn't understand him.

Wiley in Pictures, Part Two

2008-09-18T22:15:00.009-06:00

December 2007, Mills Mansion grounds, NY: The above is one of my favorite photos of Wiley. I took it as he was recovering from a bad kidney illness and my vet and I weren't sure he was going to make it. I just like the trees, his pawprints in the snow and the calmness of the photo.

October 2005, Milwaukee, WI: Yes, I bought Wiley a Darth Vader costume. He seemed to enjoy wearing it much more than the rather lame pirate outfit I'd bought the year before. He liked the cloak in particular, and sometimes I'd put it on him just to go walkies, as it seemed to make him feel like more of a badass.

April 1995, Moscow, Russia: Still recovering from mange (you can see some raw spots on his paws) but no longer green.

April 2007, Rustbelt: This is another favorite shot of mine, taken in Dr. Virago and Bullock's home, where Wiley lived for a couple months while I worked in Las Vegas. This really is the dog Wiley was: alert and happy.

Summer 2007, Dutchess County, NY: Wiley and Dash play hide and seek.

Wiley In Photos, Part One

2008-09-18T22:15:00.006-06:00

April, 2008, Four Corners: Barking in four states at once.

Autumn 1997, Orange County, NY: Bark loudly and carry a big stick.

AAutumn 2007, Rhinebeck, NY: The Buster Block, one of Wiley's favorite toys.

August 2008: the last two photos taken of Wiley. Above, with me at the 14,000-foot-plus summit of Mt. Evans. Below, looking west from the summit, perhaps spying his next adventure.

In Memoriam: Wiley, 1995-2008

2008-09-18T22:15:00.003-06:00

Wiley passed away unexpectedly just after 8 a.m. mountain time on Thursday. He was thirteen and a half years old.

Although I was not present at his death, he was cared for and comforted by Brian and Bridget of Four Paws Animal Resort, and for that I am deeply grateful. When I arrived minutes after his passing, they told me how quick and apparently peaceful the event had been. I take heart that he did not die alone while I was at work, and that he did not suffer greatly.

Wiley was born in Moscow, Russia, on a cold winter's day in early 1995. His parentage, like his earliest days, remains a mystery. He was found by a colleague of mine begging outside the American embassy. He was about four to six weeks old, hairless and green. Mange had claimed his fur and someone, either as a prank on a hapless street puppy or as some kind of homegrown anti-mange treatment, had painted him green.

My colleague took him home, intending him to be a friend to her fully grown dog... which was terrified of Wiley, then a feral monster that enjoyed biting anything he could sink his teeth into.

Unwilling to return him to the streets, she asked if I would take him. As it turned out, my Rhodesian Ridgeback Kosmo, then a strapping two-year-old, was the only thing Wiley feared. For a while. Kosmo was exceptionally patient with Wiley using him as a chew toy, and Katya, the young Russian woman I hired as a dog nanny, was able to quickly housetrain and semi-domesticate him.

Wiley's original name was not Wiley. It was Dodger, after the street ruffian in Oliver Twist. He didn't take to the name, however, so it was soon changed to reflect his uncanny resemblance to a certain cartoon coyote. It also began a long tradition of nicknames for him, including Mr. Kittenheads, Smalls, Plush Mammal, Wilbur, AdventureDog and many, many more.

From the first day I knew him, I realized Wiley was an exceptionally intelligent dog, able to understand a number of words in both English and Russian. He was a great communicator all-around, with several variations on his bark to indicate what he wanted, whether it was the percussive, incessant warning he needed to go outside or the seal-like yelpy bark that said "bacon! I smell bacon! Gimme bacon NOW!"

Wiley grew into a healthy Siberian Laika, a Russian breed of dog related to the Finnish Spitz. I had always assumed he was just a mutt, but several Russians pointed out that only purebred Laikas have a black cross shape on their tail. Whether he was a Laika or not, as soon as his mange was cured, Wiley grew an impressive five-layered coat.

He may be gone, breaking my heart, but his fur will be with me forever, as well as in the carpet and car seats of any place he's been.

When we returned to the States, Wiley quickly learned to acclimate to his new country. True to his Russian street puppy roots, however, his favorite food remained fish skin. In Moscow, vendors used to sell whole fish on a stick, like a kebab. People would toss the stick, bones and skin on the street after eating, and I'm assuming their cast-offs formed a large part of his early diet.

Wiley had his first known brush with death while living in Madison, WI, when he mixed it up with a badger who unceremoniously slashed an artery on his muzzle. It would be just one of several meetings with the emergency vet.

After a year in Orange County, NY, we moved back to Wisconsin, this time to Milwaukee, in 1998. A frequent rabble-rouser at the dog park on the northwest side, Wiley loved to start something with a bigger, aggressive dog and then run and hide behind Kosmo, who reluctantly settled the confrontation with a deep-chested woof or two.

We moved to the south side of Milwaukee, known as Bay View, in 2000, and Wiley and Kosmo quickly made themselves at home in a spacious house, a park bordering Lake Michigan and Seminary Woods, an area of forest untouched by development. It was here that Wiley scored his only two recorded kills, both rabbits, though he would probably insist he also got a possum and a squirrel.

While I underwent chemotherapy for cancer, Wiley and Kosmo were my dearest supports, never complaining if I spent hours immobile on the couch instead of taking them walkies, or forgot to feed them because I had lost my own appetite.

It was living in Bay View where Wiley had his second brush with death... an 18-pound tumor growing in his spleen turned out fortunately to be benign, but the sheer size of it required risky surgery. He pulled through like the little scrapper he always was, and even tried to pick a fight, still wobbly from anaesthesia, with a golden retriever in the waiting room.

Wiley was an extremely emotional and sensitive dog. He would show shame when Kosmo had an accident (his own mishaps were rare), for example, or tune into whenever I'd had a bad day at work and follow me around the house, staring in concern with his big dark eyes.

One of my most poignant memories of Wiley is what he did a few days after Kosmo passed away at the ripe age of 12 back in 2005.

For years, Wiley had loved to steal Kosmo's rawhides, amassing a great pile on the rug in the dining room and then laying on them while Kosmo barked pitifully for them to be returned. In the last few days of Kosmo's life, both dogs ignored their rawhides and soon they littered the house. One day, shortly after Kosmo died, Wiley very purposefully gathered all the rawhides in a pile on the rug in the dining room, looked at them for a long time and then looked at me as if to say "it's not fun anymore" and then walked away.

In the years we had together as a duo, rather than a trio, Wiley grew into his own. He could be walked without a leash, loved to go hiking and perfected his "lemme back this thing up" butt rub dance. While he got along with few other canids, discriminating on a dog-by-dog basis, he loved people, and one of his best friends was a neighbor's cat named Dash.

We met Dash when we moved back to New York in 2006. While I missed Lake Michigan, we quickly found hiking paths all over the Hudson Valley, and I would like to think that, though I spent many hours at school away from him, Wiley enjoyed his daily walkies deep into the woods.

In late 2006, when I went off to Vegas to learn fancy cookin' techniques, Wiley moved in with Dr. Virago and Bullock, where he was spoiled rotten. I approved. He and I were reunited in April of 2007 and, while I don't think he recognized me at first, we quickly fell back into our buddy routine.

Even more than Kosmo, who was sweet but dumb, Wiley became my best friend, understanding much of what I said to him (or at least playing along) and always sensitive to my mood.

One of Wiley's favorite things to do was go buh-byes, or ride in the car. For the last year or so of his life, he had to be helped up onto the seat, but once aboard he'd proudly stand with his head and shoulders out the window, ears perked and bright eyes alert for interesting things to bark at. In the past few months, he often sat with his chin on the door frame and just his nose out of the window. Looking in my sideview mirror and not seeing that little black nose is something I will never get over.

A brief but serious kidney illness in late 2007, as well as advancing arthritis, were signs of things to come. But despite his age, Wiley was still active, hiking and making friends with neighborhood dogs more readily than he had earlier in life. He even made it to the top of a fourteener less than a month before his death.

Although briefly ill earlier this month, Wiley appeared to have made a full recovery when I headed out of town for a couple days and left him in the care of Bridget and Brian. There was no indication that he was ill, which made his death on Thursday that much more sorrowful.

When I had to put Kosmo down, my vet at the time said something to me that really resonated. Dr. Rosene said: "If they didn't give us so much in life, it wouldn't hurt so much to lose them." Kosmo's breeder, when I gave her the news, also told me "I'm glad he was in your life, and that you were in his."

Both of those sentiments have given me some comfort. Wiley gave me so much, especially in his later years and especially after we moved here, away from friends and most diversions. I always said he was the best thing to come out of Moscow. I'm glad I was able to save him from the streets. I'm glad he was my friend, my hiking partner, my bed warmer and my li'l buddy for so many years.

I hope wherever he is now that he knows he always was, and always will be, a very good boy.

Gallery of Regrettable Food

2008-09-16T21:32:00.001-06:00

I know I'm a little late to this, but for those of you who haven't checked out the Gallery of Regrettable Food, here is a good place to start.

Derision 2008: Brilliant

2008-09-14T21:28:00.002-06:00

I have been a Tina Fey fan for a long time (Amy Poehler, t00) and if you haven't seen it, their pitch-perfect send-up of Palin and Clinton is flawless. Enjoy.

SleepingBanshee Hath A Blog...

2008-09-14T10:02:00.002-06:00

Please join me in welcoming my pal SleepingBanshee to Blogistan via the most excellently titled Chocolate on My Trousers. Check out the wicked cool headboard she made...

I covet.

A Final Un-Neighborly Note

2008-09-10T20:23:00.003-06:00

My landlords, who live about three hours away on the other side of the Divide, came to the building today, in part to apologize profusely to me for the unauthorized showing and for the apparent theft of my laundry money, and to tell me that they had fired the listing agent because she was given my lease and contact information way back in June and, in addition, was apparently a royal bee-yotch to them when they called her after getting my angry message.

They also said they're going to pay me back for the missing money. So there's that.

But more than anything, they came to deal with the aftermath of Mr. Absentia and Glub.

And wow. What an aftermath.

Warning: reading one part of this may make you physically sick. That's what happened to me when I found out Mr. Absentia and Glub were not only jackasses, they were evil.

One of my landlords was nearly in tears when she said in only two months they had completely destroyed the place. I surmised as much, but I wasn't expecting her to say "they left everything. Their kitchen stuff. Their furniture. Their checkbooks."

Checkbooks? That's kinda weird.

But it makes sick sense when you hear what she said next (this is the part that made me nauseous):

"They not only left their kitchen appliances, they left them plugged in and turned on."

Yes. Turned on, including a coffeemaker with an empty pot. Turned on and left that way for nearly two weeks.

I guess it's a testament to the quality of their appliances that nothing caught fire, but I am sick to think that for nearly a fortnight, as I slept, left Wiley alone for hours while I was at work and went on with my life, there was a massive fire hazard above my head.

My first thought was that idiot Glub must have been in charge of turning things off, but then I realized something... if you wanted to burn a place down and make it look like you didn't mean to, why not leave things like your checkbook?

That's right. I think those scum-sucking bastards intentionally set a fire trap assuming the place would burn down and somehow cover their thick-legged tracks.

That's when I got really sick to my stomach.

My landlords said they're going to pursue them for the rent, for the damages and so on. Good luck. Who leaves behind a checkbook unless it's a fake or stolen identity? I'm just sayin'. Both of them moved to Colorado about the time I did. They didn't have any friends or family in the area. I wouldn't be surprised if "Chris" and "Danny," as they called themselves, are grifters. At least "Chris," aka Mr. Absentia. I don't think Danny is capable of anything other than figuring out where his next meal/cigarette is coming from.

When I got home tonight, still a little quesy to think those worthless monsters had set a fire trap above my head, I saw all the stuff my landlords had removed. Pretty much an entire apartment of furniture and super-tacky art, crappy appliances and, ooh, look! some cookie cutters!

Yeah, I took the cookie cutters since they were sitting high on other stuff and not actually in the dumpster, though I may not keep them. As I was sanitizing them, I kept thinking over and over how they nearly burned down the apartment and could have killed Wiley (I feel pretty secure about me waking up and being able to get out if the smoke detector went off, and to take Wiley and my laptop with me, but what if he was home alone when the fire broke out??).

Then I fretted about "Chris" being an IT guy for one of the local resorts (not the one I work at, thankfully). I've been using a Verizon WiFi card on my laptop to do all my banking. What if he hacked into it and has stolen my identity and ruined my credit?

I know it's a long shot and I sound kind of paranoid, but I'd rather be a nutball than someone with ruined credit. I'm calling my bank tomorrow morning to see what they suggest I do.

Of course, I'm also worried about their dogs. I know it may sound stupid, but if they had so little regard for possible loss of life setting a fire trap in a fully-occupied apartment building (well, occupied except for their unit), how can they possibly treat their animals humanely?

I'll probably toss the cookie cutters so that I'm not reminded of those two khoi every time I use them. Or maybe I'll wind up keeping them... as a reminder to trust no one.

By the way, all the drama and stress of the past few days, from Wiley being sick to Mr. Absentia and Glub's attempted arson, have led me to the conclusion that Fortuna is waaaaaay too interested in my life right now. So I'm going to lay low and not post for a while and hopefully slip off her radar, because the difference between a pit bull and a hockey mom and Fortuna is that Fortuna devours the other two whole and spits out the bones with a grin, you know?

Since I don't want to end on a down note, check out this awesome Cake Wrecks blog my homey Laura sent me. And no, none of my stuff is on there!

Sheep Wranglers I Have Known...

2008-09-09T21:49:00.004-06:00

After spending my day off yesterday at the vet (Wiley is on antibiotics and doing much better though is still a bit fatigued) and getting my tail light bulb replaced and the check engine signal looked at and other less-than-exciting errands, today I decided we'd go on a road trip.

I had in my plans the Flat Tops Trail Scenic Byway, an 82-mile or so mostly dirt and gravel road that winds its way through the Flat Top Mountains, a range to the north and west of the Continental Divide and Rockies proper. Probably the most notable thing about the mountains is that they include Trapper's Lake, an area of allegedly pristine wild beauty that is said to have inspired the National Wilderness Act. It was a 20-mile detour on a road undergoing grading or some other kind of construction, so I skipped it.

The Flat Tops also boast an apparently wicked hike-along-a-knife-edge-ridge called The Devil's Causeway, but with a recuperating Wiley in tow I didn't even attempt it.

On the road to the byway, itself pretty scenic, we passed a rock formation that made me think aha, this is what the Devil's Towelette should have looked like up close!

The Flat Tops themselves aren't that impressive, especially when one lives in the shadow of both the Divide and Byer's Peak.

Here's about the most interesting shot I could manage on a gray and overcast day, with some of the not-so-flat Flat Tops in the background:

By far the highlight of the day was running into (not literally, fortunately) a herd of sheep tended by Actual Cowboy, or at least Actual Sheep Wrangler, Gabriel.

Gabriel spoke no English, but my Spanish clicked on and we chatted for a couple minutes until the Iron Curtain came down. It's like my brain has a meter whenever I try to speak German or Spanish. After two minutes, the synapses reroute themselves and I hear an internal voice say "nu, davai... tolko po-russki." My entire vocabulary and thought process switches to Russian and, like being trapped in a Siberian gulag, I can't get out. It's awful. I think Gabriel thought I was choking as I tried to form words en espanol but could get out only halting Russian.

Damn you, Putin! (totally not his fault, of course, but he's my favorite kozyol otpushcheniya... it's funny what Russian words are ever present in my head, such as how to say "scapegoat," "you are difficult to believe," "go to hell, jerk" and "we won the cold war.")

Anyway, Gabriel was adorable, as you can see in this photo:

He just may be my second favorite Sheep Wrangler ever, after the wry guy Loki whom I met back in May. And, quite frankly, Gabriel had the more impressive entourage, with not three but five sheepdogs. Two wily, wiry little border collie-lookin' dogs and then three... uhm... not sure. They were not the gigantic Anatolian Shepherds that Loki had, but they were dang-all big.

Looking at the photo above now, I think that they were some kind of Anatolian Shepherd-Golden Lab mix. You know, like an Anatoodle or something. (And yes, I know "Anatoodle" implies an Anatolian-Poodle mix, but it's just more fun to say than an Anador Sheptriever.)

Derision 2008

2008-09-09T08:46:00.004-06:00

If you haven't read this article on "rednecks" from the BBC, you need to. I can't guarantee you'll enjoy it, but you need to read it for a number of reasons.

- First, a big spanking to the BBC (though those Brits would probably enjoy that) for continuing to search out people and events that make America look like the land of the nutball and/or obnoxious cowboy dolt.

- I found the author's belief that the "liberal media elite" doesn't use the word "redneck" to "protect" rednecks' feelings to be very interesting. For starters, it's my understanding that the term "redneck" is just like the terms "queer" and the "n-word," which I dare not type lest the PC Police shut down my blog. Although the terms can be used within a community as identifiers or even affectionately, when those words are used outside the community to describe individuals inside the community, or the community itself, they are pejoratives (ooh, big word! Sorry, y'all!).

And, speaking from personal experience, there is another reason the "liberal media elite" does not use the word "redneck." When I was a music journalist a few years back, I reviewed a Green Day concert during the heyday of their song "American Idiot," which references "rednecks" in a pejorativ- oops, sorry, in a real mean way, them uppity sumsabitches. If you know anything about print journalism, you know the writer rarely writes the headlines, just the body of the article, and we rarely see the hed until it's in print. Well, when writing the headline, a well-meaning copy editor (the folks who write the headlines, among other things, like fact-checking and trimming) decided to toss in the word "redneck."

For the next week, I got very little work done because of the deluge of calls, e-mails, letters, death threats, local talk radio attacks on me, etc. When I said hey, I didn't write the headline, and I didn't see it till the next morning, when it was in the paper, and what's more I wouldn't have used that word, the attacks only got worse because I was then "a lying coward" and a "pandering liberal elite."

So I believe the "liberal media elite" shies from using the word "redneck" because it wants to get some work done and not spend its time fending off attacks from, well, angry rednecks.

- I find it interesting that, according to the author, rednecks are "suspicious of authority." Really. Perhaps being a little more suspicious of authority's lameass claim that Iraq had weapons of destruction mighta done them a li'l more good 'n' gotten a few less of their boys 'n' gals killed or maimed or messed up in th' head over there in eye-rack.

- Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the BBC story to me is that it's true... I'm not talking about the tiresome, sweeping generalizations or tedious attacks on the "liberal media elite" (zzzzzzz...). I'm talking about it pointing out Sarah Palin's appeal to a large number of Americans. Because, and this is where my heart breaks, I believe the lasting legacy of the Bush Administration has been to demonize the intelligent and the educated and make intellectual curiosity a crime against patriotism.

Seriously.

What's wrong with being smart, or working to be smarter? With going to the best schools your hard-working family can sacrifice to send you to? With working your ass off to learn and absorb as much knowledge as possible, to embrace Marie Curie's suggestion that "nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood"? Where's the crime in learning from history and developing the ability to reason?

You could hear it in every speech at the RNC, and in the tone of McCain's campaign... as an aside, I was going to vote for McCain back in 2000 and believe, had he actually been elected back then, the country would have been in better shape all the way around. But now that he's sold his soul, he can kiss my highly-educated vote good-bye.

And, for the record, I am not an Obamamaniac. I'm not wooed by his eloquence, though I do like the idea of having a president who can pronounce the word "nuclear" correctly. I don't think he'll get 20% of his agenda accomplished, and since, for me, plagiarism should be punishable by death, I'm not a fan of Biden, either (Obama's lifting of a friend's speech a while back is a lesser crime).

Once again, this November, I will be voting for the lesser of two evils.

But this is all on my mind because yesterday I registered to vote. That was interesting in itself. I went to the county courthouse with my form, printed from Colorado's state website, my passport, my Social Security Card and my Nevada driver's license, which I still have because it's still valid (I hate changing licences every time I move, which gets expensive) and because it is the Best. ID. Photo. Ever. I look like a model.

I give the clerk my application and ask "do you need to see my passport or Social Security Card?" She says no.

She reads over the application and hands it off to someone I can't see behind a cubicle wall. Then, suddenly, words are said and she comes tearing back around the corner.

"You're gettin' your Colorado ID today, right?" she asks, her tone suddenly anxious.

"You mean a Colorado driver's license?"

"Yeah. You're gonna get that done now, right?"

I say no, because there's nothing online that says I need one to vote, and on the application itself, it asks for your Colorado driver's license number or the last four digits of your Social Security number (I provided the latter).

This is, by the way, the same friendly clerk I met in February when I went to get my CO license plates. Now she was suddenly Regan (not the president... the chick in "The Exorcist".)

"You are committing a felony trying to register to vote without a Colorado ID!" she shrieks at me.

WTF?

I wait for red lights to start flashing and alarms to go off and to be dragged off by armed thugs. Instead, the matronly chick behind the cubicle comes out, arms folded over her chest, and glares at me.

I say there is nothing on the website that says I need a Colorado driver's license to vote, that I have been living in Colorado since February.

"If you attempt to vote without a Colorado ID you will be committing a felony and face imprisonment," interrupts the Chick From Behind the Cubicle. She actually sneered at this point and added "That's right on the website."

Now, I actually read the damn voter registration info and didn't see anything about needing a driver's license. I thought there must be something I'm missing here, so I tried one more time, talking over her when she tried to interrupt me again.

"I just want to clarify that in order to vote, I need to have a Colorado driver's license. Is that correct, yes or no?"

"You need a Colorado ID!" they shriek in freakish unison.

"Ok... is there anything other than a Colorado driver's license that qualifies as a Colorado ID?" I ask, thinking that not everyone in Colorado drives.

Cubicle Harpy thinks it over and then says "Well, if you had something like a passport, you could use that."

Well, shucks, I don't have "something like a passport," I have an actual freakin' passport, which has been sitting on the counter in full view the entire time I'm having this conversation.

I hold it up and ask "so this is okay, even though it's issued merely by the federal government and not the state of Colorado?"

Yes, by then I was irked.

"Is it valid?" Cubicle Harpy snaps.

I told her it was, and could barely contain myself from adding that it was full of entry stamps and visas not only to socialist countries, but even a few Islamist countries and countries with real funny letterin' that just don' look right.

"Fine," she snaps and retreats to her cubicle with my registration form. How much do you want to bet she threw it out? We'll see come November. If I'm denied the right to vote when I go to the polls, the gods help her.

Well, At Least My Rage Now Has a Focus (And I Don't Mean a Spiffy Economy-Sized Car)

2008-09-08T08:41:00.004-06:00

There's a new chapter in the Not-Quite-Breaking-and-Entering saga that began yesterday.

No one so far has called me back, except for the realtor who left his card on my kitchen counter. He left a voicemail in what I call TalkRadio tone... you know it... aggressive, patronizing, self-righteous and bulldozery.

Here's the transcript:

"Look, I don't owe you any advance notice to show the place. You gotta sort that out with [the listing agency]. That's not my problem. And we didn't take your quarters. We didn't even go into the place. I opened the door and saw the dog and that you're not keeping it up and it doesn't show well so we didn't even go in. I just left my card on your counter to let you know I opened the door. We didn't take your quarters."

Click.

For the record, my voicemail to him was concerned and somewhat terse, but not obnoxious.

Also for the record, my quarters were on a small glass plate immediately next to the door, and he had to walk about twelve feet, past Wiley, to put his card on the counter. So yeah, it would have been easy for his client to swipe the quarters, literally without setting foot in my unit.

I also don't appreciate his accusation that I'm not keeping up the place... It's actually much neater and cleaner than most places I've been shown.

I wasn't expecting a "gosh, sorry my client is a klepto, let me pay you back" but I also was not expecting him to come out swinging.

Then again, this is Colorado, the land where citizens are comfortable in their belief that they are entitled to do as they please and everyone else is wrong. And just look at his picture:

Hmm... he doesn't show well, does he?

(Disclaimer: business card posted above for entertainment purposes only. I know that none of you would be so petty and immature as to take the information displayed and sign him up for annoying e-newletters, magazine subscriptions and telemarketing-driven cruise sweepstakes. Just like you wouldn't call him from a public phone and, when he answers, just happen to trigger the air horn you keep in your pocket ... and why do you keep that thing in your pocket, anyway?)

Won't You Not Be My Neighbor?

2008-09-07T20:04:00.003-06:00

First, the reason that steam is actually coming out of my ears (metaphorically, of course, because "literally" would be really odd and probably mean my brain was on fire and I was incapable of basic brain stem function, nevermind typing a rant).

My apartment building is for sale (it was before I even moved in). My apartment unit has a lockbox. My lease states that my landlord must give me 24 hours' advance notice before entering for repairs or just to see how I'm keeping the place, and that any realtor showing the place must make "every reasonable effort to contact me" at least 24 hours in advance orally or in writing.

Well, Wiley has been sick with the poops the past couple days, so I've been keeping him barricaded in the kitchen while I'm at work. I get home tonight and he is cowering in a corner (granted, he may just be feeling lousy, but...). There is some realtor's business card on my kitchen counter and all my laundry money is gone. I keep it on a small glass plate by my door. There was five or six bucks last I looked, when I did laundry a couple days ago. Today? Empty.

Yeah, my unit was shown with no advance notice whatsoever. Nothing in writing. No phone calls. And the jackasses who traipsed through my place stole money from me and stressed out my sick dog. If I were to learn that they physically hurt him (he was not his usual happy self, though again that could be from being sick) I would personally draw and quarter them. With a dull blade, so that it hurt more.

Speaking of quarters, it's not the amount, it's the freaking principle.

After checking to see that nothing else was missing, far as I could tell (and noticing that the jerks left my bathroom light on), I called my landlord's cell and home, the listing agent's cell and office and the number of the guy who showed the place.

Of course, this being Sunday night, no one answered, leaving me to stew in silence.

Have you ever experienced this? I know I may sound like I'm overreacting to not getting advance notice, but the fact that they stole from me and may have treated Wiley badly really presses my buttons. A stranger enters without permission and without notice and steals personal property... that's burglary, no?

Doesn't this incident violate the terms of my lease? Anyone who's had a similar experience or has some knowledge of the legal implications of this, please let me know. If you don't want to comment here, email me.

Now, deep breath, Pirate. Take another deep breath. There will be no running through of anyone with your sabers, however badly you long to hear steel sing through bone and flesh.

Let's take a third nice, big, deep breath and remember that, while you can't do laundry tonight, after a little walkies Wiley did pick up the fuzzy pink Barbie slipper that the Dread Pirate Iron Bluebird gave him and initiate some playtime, so whatever happened earlier he is apparently not too traumatized...

Okay.

A little better.

In more scintillating, less infuriating neighborhood news, Glub and Mr. Absentia, my upstairs neighbors, are gone.

It's quite a juicy tale, actually. A couple weeks ago, as I was coming back from a walkies with Wiley, Glub, wandering the yard aimlessly like someone institutionalized either for dementia or extreme lack of ambition, approached us.

"We're movin'," Glub announced with typical eloquence.

I asked where to and he claimed Mr. Absentia's mom, in Georgia, had worked out some business deal to sell her homeopathy practice. She could get $200,000 for the thing as-is, or $400,000 if Glub and Mr. Absentia did a couple weeks' worth of organizing and painting, so they were quitting their jobs (well, Mr. Absentia was... I never saw Glub do anything other than be, well, glubbish, at home) and heading south.

(By the way, no, Glub and Mr. Absentia are apparently not a couple... both are divorced and speak frequently of girlfriends... whom I never see... hmm, maybe they are a couple. When the thought crossed my mind, I was interested that the next thought loping across the sun-kissed meadows of my mind was that their relationship would make more sense if there were a couple, because Glub is the passive, do-nothing glub and Mr. Absentia is the glib jackass who treats him like crap, which makes more sense in the context of an unhealthy relationship than of two single guys living together as friends or even just roommates... that was followed by another thought sashaying across the faded vaudevillian theater of my mind, which was wow, how appalling that the second thought should even lope across the sun-kissed meadows of my mind and how even more disturbing that further contemplation should lead me to the conclusion that yes, people in bad relationships put up with a lot more crap than most will take from a mere friend or roommate, and doesn't that bite the wax tadpole?)

And no, no rum is involved in this post.

Anyway... Glub's entire purpose for telling me they were moving, aside from gloating over the prospect of an easy $200,000 in his cargo shorts pocket (though I wonder how much Mr. Absentia really will give him, if anything), was to attempt to sell me Mr. Absentia's king-size waterbed or his own "normal" king-size bed.

Uhm, no.

I asked Glub what the landlord had said and he told me they weren't going to tell him. Nice. I said "you're going to lose your security deposit," and he shrugged, noting "the dogs destroyed the place, anyway."

Gee, thanks. From the bottom of my responsible-dog-owner-who-has-t0-jump-through-hoops-every-time-she-rents-and-pay-exorbitant-nonrefundable-pet-deposits heart, thanks for being a jackass and ruining it for the rest of us pet owners.

The next weekend, they had a little U-Haul trailer in the parking lot, one which couldn't fit much more than a king-size waterbed and which was, by the time I saw it, already full of clothing and Mr. Absentia's endless array of sporting goods (they had his three kayaks strapped to the roof of his Suburban). No waterbed, or "normal" bed, visible.

Then they were gone.

Both of their grills are still on the balcony above me, as well as the igloo-style doghouse. They did apparently take the dogs, but who knows? I hope the dogs are okay, because, despite their idiot owners, they were sweet animals.

Here's where it gets really juicy...

About a day and a half after they left, I went out just before dawn because Wiley heard the call of nature. As I stepped out of my building, I saw a strange car parked in the lot (it's not really a lot, just six spaces) with the motor running and a guy in the passenger seat scowling at me.

As I stood there with one eye on him and one eye on Wiley doing his business, I heard someone come thudding down the stairs from the second floor... a guy came out of the building and stomped past me, ignoring my "hello."

You know how some people just look mean? He was a tall, skinny, grizzled carny-lookin' guy with a rattail mullet, filthy, un-ironic trucker hat and deep smoker's lines on either side of his face.

When he opened the driver's side door of the car, he said to the other guy in a tight-jawed growl "the fuckers are gone!" then got in and drove off.

Interesting.

Whatever that was about, and why Glub and Mr. Absentia left in such a rush, I don't know. I just know, whatever they were up to, I'm glad they didn't burn down the building or in some other way wreck my life, such as break into my apartment and steal my laundry money.

Oh, wait a minute...

We Live in an Exponential World

2008-09-06T21:49:00.002-06:00

Mad props to The Queen for sending me the link to this fascinating compilation of statistics about the world we live in, and the world we are entering.

I think Bill and Ted said it best when they said: "Whoa, dude!"

The Devil's Moist Towelette

2008-09-01T21:24:00.003-06:00

Here's a shot of The Devil's Towelette taken on a rainy day recently. This is pretty much how it looks from most places in the valley, a view far more impressive than seeing it up close was.

It's the thumb-like rock sticking up from the left side of the saddle of the ridge, roughly in the center of the photo:

And here, just 'cuz, is yet another shot of Byers Peak as rainy, snowy clouds rolled in this evening:

What's In a Name?

2008-08-30T08:11:00.003-06:00

Check out this fascinating site, which I found through BBC News. The site, Public Profiler, tracks more than 10 million surnames throughout 26 countries (it has a Western European/American focus, though Japan, India, Argentina and a few others are included).

It just launched and is getting a lot of traffic, so it may be super-slow or even give you a runtime error, but it's pretty neat (and free!).

For example, I got a shock... while I've found historical evidence to suggest German, Scottish and/or Irish origins for my last name, it actually occurs by far most frequently in... Poland.

Huh.

The Devil's Towelette

2008-08-26T18:28:00.004-06:00

Another day off, another item checked off my to-do list.

I did a seven-mile hike (round-trip, so nothing crazy) entirely above timberline to a geologic feature right on the Continental Divide. It's sort of a miniature version of Devil's Tower in Wyoming, and I meant to type The Devil's Towerette for the title of the post, but I found the typo so amusing I left it as is.

Wiley, by the way, was a little stiff this morning so after a brief walkies up to the rodeo grounds I left him snoozing on his bed.

The trailhead was at the former site of Corona, a hotel that once stood at the spot where the old railroad came over the Divide. The road that leads up to it now is based on the old railroad grade, and traveling it in my Ford Focus, dodging potholes the size of Wiley and even bigger rocks, cringeing every time I scraped bottom, I couldn't stop thinking about the men who built and maintained the thing (until they realized hey, maybe we should just bore a big-ass tunnel straight through the mountain).

I mean, winter brought snow up to 30 feet deep, and here, winter is October through June!

The Corona hotel and other buildings are long gone, but here's a shot of the approach to the trailhead, with the Divide I'd be walking along looming in the background:

From the trail itself, here's a shot looking west into the valley where I live and work. My apartment is roughly in the center of the photo, though no amount of "embiggening" would let you see any detail. On the near horizon, that big mountain on the left that's taller than all the others is Byers Peak, the 12,804-footer I climbed a couple weeks ago:

One nice thing about The Devil's Towelette hike was that it started at 11,664 feet and ended at 12,235 feet, so there wasn't much elevation gain, and most of it was right at the beginning, up a series of steep switchbacks. From there it was relatively level walking along the Divide itself, which tickled me silly.

Here's a shot of the trail heading north:

I knew from my guidebook and from people at work who've done the hike that there wouldn't be much of a payoff. Although The Devil's Towelette can be seen from nearly anywhere in the valley and looks rather imposing, from the Divide it blends into the cliffs behind it, as shown below:

In case you're going "Towelette? What Towelette? I don't see no stinkin' towelette!" here's the same photo with it outlined in red:

To be able to see it without the cliffs behind it, you have to go all the way down the saddle and get almost to its base. Quite frankly, I see it (from a distance) every morning from my bedroom window, and thunderclouds were moving in, so I decided to turn back without getting a better shot.

While I was on The Devil's Towelette Trail, the real fun of the hike for me was not the destination but being above timberline without having killed myself to get there (like the Byers climb) so I could actually appreciate its beauty without gasping for breath. Also very cool: seeing the pikas. Usually I just hear them squeaking to each other around the rocks, but today I saw a few of them with their mouths stuffed full of vegetation for winter (just around the corner!). They are adorable.

I also saw what I think were northern pocket gophers and a long-tailed weasel... I'm not too sure about the weasel, because I didn't think they hung out above treeline, but it was too skinny and fast to be a yellow belly marmot and too, well, weaselly lookin' to be anything else I know. Whatever it was, like the gophers and the pikas it was frantically gathering food. By this time next month, the trail likely will be impassable with snow.

Peak-Baggin', My Way

2008-08-25T20:51:00.003-06:00

Wiley and I summited the 14,258-foot Mount Evans today. That's right, we bagged a 14er as the locals say. Without even breaking a sweat.

Because we drove all but the last quarter-mile.

Mount Evans is, as far as I know, the only 14er that has a summit you can get within shouting distance of in your car. The road that leads to the Summit Parking Lot is billed as the highest paved road in North America, not to be confused with Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park, the highest continuously paved road in North America (though it tops out at less than 13,000 feet, you can drive Trail Ridge all the way through the park and over the Divide).

In any case, the Mount Evans road is a bleepin' high road, one of the most precarious I've been on because it's narrow with no rails and a lot of hairpins and blind curves and inattentive tourists.

It had been on my list of to-dos for a few months now, but only last night did I look at my guidebook and notice it closes for the year on Labor Day because of the snow. Yikes! That's next week!

So off we went early this morning in hopes of getting back in time for a physical with my new doctor (now that I have health insurance again... yay America for its universal health care! Oh, wait a minute... Let me put my reality boots back on so I'm firmly anchored to the ground.)

Here's the summit marker:

And if you think I'm developing an obsession with photos of the US Geological Survey markers yes, yes you are correct. By the way, I uploaded all superlarge files that you should be able to "embiggen" by clicking on the photo... please let me know if you can't, as it's been an issue in the past.

Here is a view from the summit looking north. Summit Lake, which interestingly enough is more than a thousand feet below the summit, is in the foreground. The mountains in the background are, I believe, the string of peaks on the Divide that loom over the valley where I live. If you are able to embiggen the photo and get really really close to your monitor and squint, you may be able to see the mountains of Rocky Mountain National Park in the very distance, on the right.

Below is my favorite view from the summit, looking west towards what I believe is the Mosquito Range.

Yeah, the shot below is essentially of the western view again, but when Smalls crowded into my camera's view to stare intently at some ravens circling around the snowfield, I just really liked the way his ears lined up with all the peaks.

And finally, here's a view looking south. In the foreground is what's billed as the world's highest observatory (I thought the ones in Hawaii and Chile were higher up, but I don't go around with a tape measure). Just in front of it, you may be able to make out a structure that blends in well with the landscape. It's the remnants of what was once "the world's highest snack bar" but exploded in 1979 due to either a faulty propane tank or one hell of a bad burrito reaction... They preserved as much of the rubble as they could and turned it into an observation platform.

And again, if you embiggen the photo and squint, that mountain on the far right, far horizon is Pike's Peak. This was the last shot I got before the skies darkened and it started to hail. Wiley and I made it down the 130-foot elevation gain to the parking lot, which I'm sure is billed as "the world's highest paved parking lot," and made it back to our side of the Divide just in time for my physical.

Re: the physical, it was the first I've ever had by a doctor dressed in denim shorts, sandals and a t-shirt (it's a different world out here). It was also the first physical that included checking my blood oxygen saturation level to make sure I'm not hypoxic or anything because of living in this altitude.

Huh.

On another altitude-related note, yes, I know it was only a quarter-mile each way, with a mere 130-foot elevation gain, but both Wiley and I virtually jogged up the trail from the parking lot to the summit, passing tourists left and right as they bent over gasping for air. I thought it was cool to see how living at 8550 feet above sea level has granted us some semblance of superpowers when heading upward from the world's highest paved parking lot.

Rocky Mountain Randoms: The Mamma Mia! Edition

2008-08-24T22:00:00.003-06:00

I'll get to why I need therapy in a minute, but first:

- I wasn't able to get a good picture of Elk Mountain from a distance when Wiley and I hiked it last week because I approached it from the northeast. Today I happened to be driving toward it from the south and was able to snap the photo below, which gives you a better idea of its size and shape... it's the big lump in the middle of the background:

- As many of you know, not only am I not a fan of eating chocolate, but it's also not my favorite thing to work with. While I eventually got confident about tempering it in Vegas and at school, my tempering tries here have been hit-or-miss, largely because the kitchen is comparatively small and gets so hot that to get it tempered I have to go in and out of the walk-in.

That said, on Friday I got out my chocolate mold and tried tempering in the morning, when only one oven is on and the line cooks aren't around yet. I also tried putting the bowl on top of ice for a few seconds at a time to get it cool enough. And behold!! While the strawberries I dipped in the same exact chocolate at the right temp bloomed within minutes (dang it!) the dark chocolate caramels I made with the mold came out beautifully and didn't bloom or lose their sexy sheen or leak or anything:

(Tempering chocolate, for those of you who complain I use too many fancy-pants pastry terms without defining them, is simply the process of controlling the size and shape of the fat crystals in the chocolate so that it has a lush sheen, sets quickly and can set thinly and then break with a clean snap. Chocolate that doesn't set, gets dull and/or looks moldy isn't tempered... the mold is just "bloom," when the fat separates from the rest of the matter. It's fine to eat.)

I'm most proud of getting a good temper because none of the chocolate we have in the restaurant is good for seeding... due to the heat of the kitchen, it's all bloomed.

- Here's another dessert I'm working on to add to the menu instead of my strawberry-basil creation (the season is really over for strawberries). It's Grand Marnier frozen souffle with local raspberries, chocolate tuile and hot fudge sauce that the customer can pour on top of the souffle.

While I like the plating, I recognize that the tuile is too fragile and cumbersome for the pantry cook to deal with in the middle of service, and two of the line cooks who saw me tinkering with it said they thought the plate was too white (empty). So I'm thinking of changing the tuile shape and adding a sauce to the plate, though I still like the idea of the hot fudge in a cruet (as long as I don't have to eat it!)

- Now, to the meat of the matter... I drove an hour and a half to go to the movies today, because I've been really wanting to see, yes, Mamma Mia! for the sole reason that it stars both Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgard.

Well, uhm...

I should have known it was not the movie for me when I arrived in the theater and sat down in the first row of stadium seating and the chubby middle-aged woman with hair down to her butt, sitting at the opposite end of the row, shrieked "I'm saving this row! Those seats are saved!"

Nevermind that she and I were two of about a dozen people in the entire theater. I sat down on the end and told her my legs are too long to be comfortable elsewhere (which is actually true). She gave me the lazer stare of death. Whatev, sistah.

She was joined by several other chubby, long-haired, rather intense women (who, by the way, didn't fill up the row. So there.), all of whom had clearly seen the movie many, many times.

I got a little anxious because hey, I'm chubby and long-haired (tho' not that long-haired) and I really hope I don't look like that much of a stereotypical spinster. But these women, well, they reminded me of the rabid Barry Manilow and Josh Groban fans I used to have to deal with when I was a music journalist. Scary.

The string of trailers deepened my unease. They were all for movies I had no intention of ever seeing, even if trapped on a plane with a chatty seatmate.

The movie starts. Yes, I knew there'd be singing. I mean, it is a musical. But it soon became apparent: I was watching a foreign film. You know how sometimes you watch a foreign film that's been dubbed, so it's in English but you don't understand the culture the produced it, the pace is different than you're used to in American movies and you start to feel dumb for not "getting it"? Yeah, well, that's what I mean.

Don't get me wrong... Colin Firth did his usual charmingly uptight Englishman thing, and the scene where he plays guitar was the sweetest bit of puppy-dog-eyed-hottie-strumming since I saw Mike Huckabee rocking out on bass during the primaries.

And Stellan was of course great, and seemed wildly amused to be singing and dancing, as if he was just tickled silly to have hoodwinked fans of his Serious Work in to see a movie based on Sweden's other great export.

Don't get me wrong on that, either... I like ABBA's dancy songs (not the ballads), and rank them up near Stellan, IKEA and Prinsesstarta in the reasons to be glad Sweden so thoroughly resisted falling under Nazi occupation*.

(*Sorry, kind of an in-joke with myself... when I went to the Norwegian Nazi Resistance Museum in Oslo, the guy staffing the desk joked that next time I was in Stockholm I should check out the Swedish Nazi Resistance Museum... there isn't one. The Norwegians are pretty proud of their anti-Nazi efforts, and rightly so... if you're ever in Oslo, you have to visit the museum. It's one of the best-designed and most intelligent I've ever been to. Stockholm, to its credit, does have an awesome sewer exhibit in one of its natural history museums, or at least it did when I was there a few times in the mid-90s.)

Anyway... despite the calming, charming and reassuring presence of Firth and Skarsgard, the rest of the movie frightened me. Way too much perkiness, and vamping, and kissing, and improbably good-looking pan-ethnic people on a remote Greek island despite clearly not being Greek. Why was the mom on that island 20 years ago to begin with? Why was the mom in her 60s and the kid just 20? If she had sex with three men over a month-span, surely she could have figured out which one was the father, no? I mean, was she that stupid? If it was set in present-day, why were all the flashbacks of 20 years ago to the mid-70s?

Aside from being confused by the plot, scared of the manaically aggressive cheeriness of the film (do we really need to see Meryl Streep, or anyone, for that matter, jumping up and down on her bed in soft-focus, slow motion? Why? Why??) and disconcerted by the Spinster Brigade beside me singing along and laughing way, way too loud over the lame slapstick humor, I just really felt out of place.

I desperately wanted someone to get beheaded (onscreen or in the row beside me would be fine), or to be sent off on a doomed mission, preferably on horseback, or for something, anything to explode in a massive fireball. That would have put me at ease.

Instead it was two hours of candy-colored fluff and farce (the brainless kind) that I just didn't connect with. Apparently I was the only one in the theater who felt that way, as much merriment was had by all the rest. Part of me wanted to stand up and shout "hey! I like romantic stuff! The Princess Bride is my all-time favorite movie! I love Pride and Prejudice! The book and all the screen adaptations, dammit!" But the rest of me just slid lower in my stadium seating chair.

If you do go to see Mamma Mia! (the movie) and find yourself having the same reaction, please take my advice and leave before the end credits. Because at the end, (spoiler) all the leads come out in full spandex, spangles and platform boots that Liberace would have found vulgar to dance and sing one more time.

I could have gone to my grave remembering Colin Firth as the utterly perfect Mr. Darcy and Stellan Skarsgard as the deliciously low-key bad guy Cerdic or somberly sexy Father Merrin or even the doomed sub captain Tupolev... instead the image of them cavorting clumsily in red sequins and spandex is burned indelibly into my mind.

Shudder.

On the drive home I listened to Alice in Chains. I felt a little better.

Must-See Feel-Good Movie of the Year!

2008-08-22T08:36:00.002-06:00

Mad props to my pal Laura for e-mailing me "How To Sing Puppies To Sleep." Make sure your sound is on!

A Day Slightly More Exciting Than Necessary

2008-08-20T20:45:00.003-06:00

Yesterday (Tuesday) Wiley and I headed up to the Troublesome Valley area, adjacent to the Never Summer Wilderness, which gives me the opportunity to use two awesome placenames in one sentence.

We drove there because I was determined to check another summit off my to-do list: Elk Mountain, 11,332 feet above sea level.

I followed the driving directions in my guide to hiking in the area, which hasn't let me down. Until Tuesday.

After turning off the paved county road onto a recreational road the book described as "a good dirt road," I had to check how recently the book was published (2006). It took me more than an hour to go ten miles over rock, mud, puddles of unknown depth, more rock, and some stretches of rock between the rock. I had to get out several times to move rocks (and one fallen tree) that were simply beyond the abilities of my already-straining Focus.

Oh, and did I mention the road was a steady, steep rise with several hairpin turns?

I kept arguing with myself to turn around, no no, it will get better around the next turn, turn back, etc. I reached a point where it was simply too narrow, with a dropoff to one side, to turn around safely, so I forged ahead.

It was then that the engine light lit up the dashboard.

I was hoping it was just my car's recurring problem of "running too lean." The engine light has come on a few times in the last two years, and three different mechanics in three different states ran diagnostics and reported the engine was running too lean, which essentially meant I was getting better gas mileage than I should, or at least that's how they explained it. I did go almost 200 miles on five gallons of gas the day before.

Anyway, I was also aware that, at nearly nine years old with 105,000 miles on it, my car is reaching that age where Bad Things Happen.

I decided to press on, since cell phone reception, should I need a tow, would be better higher up instead of on the side of a mountain.

14.7 miles later, I got to the turn-off for a logging road described by my guide as, you guessed it, "a good dirt road." Perhaps it had been, in about 1984, but I doubted any vehicle had been on it since the Reagan administration. It was overgrown and deeply rutted, so I decided to park my car and continue the 1.5 miles to the trailhead on foot.

On the walk uphill along the alleged "good dirt road," it was still morning so we were in shade. But not for long. And once out of the trees and up through a steep meadow to timberline, there was nowhere for us to hide from an unexpectedly strong sun in a cloudless sky.

Wiley started breathing really heavily and licking his lips, so I gave him water. Then I gave him some more. I decided, as the creature that was physiologically younger and did not have a kidney problem, I could handle being dehydrated but I didn't want to risk him dying on me on the trail. So I wound up giving him all the water I'd brought, two quarts parsed out over what would be a six mile hike, most of it in the sun.

On the way up, we discovered, I guess, why it's called Elk Mountain:

The hike from the trailhead to the summit has just about a 800 foot elevation gain (not counting probably another 600 feet along the logging road we walked) but it's all in a short, steep climb at the beginning.

We were just shy of timberline in the meadow (trees on either side of it but nowhere near us for shade) when I really thought I should turn back. Of course, you know me, I pressed on, Wiley doggedly following behind and stopping to lay down now and then.

The summit at last!! Here's the official marker:

And here is one of my all-time favorite photos of AdventureDog, looking quite adventurous. I always tell him I buy him IAMS Active Maturity dog food for "his mature yet active lifestyle" and I think this photo is proof that the ground-up baby seals or whatever they put in that purple bag works.

Not bad for a dog who will be 14 in February, eh? Behind him in the distance are the peaks of Rocky Mountain National Park.

Here's another shot from the summit, looking north toward the Never Summer Range:

According to my guidebook, which was losing credibility with me by the minute, from the summit we were to follow the ridgeline down into forest, past a plaque dedicated to a 19th century rancher/hunter captured (and released) by the local Utes.

Uhm, ok. Down along the ridgeline we went, into the forest. No plaque. No trail. The guide had warned "the trail appears and disappears" but there was nothing. I don't fancy myself some awesome tracker, but I have followed trails all over the world, and let me tell you, there was nothing to follow.

As an aside, I think the terrible road conditions and the disappeared trail are largely because Elk Mountain is not one of the popular peaks, and it's probably gotten neglected by a budget-strapped National Parks Service, what with RoMo (Rocky Mountain National Park) and other star attractions so close and vying for the same limited funds.

Of course, its very obscurity was one of the things that attracted me to Elk Mountain.

Finally, just as I was considering going back up to the summit and retracing my steps back down through the meadow (to be honest, I was thinking of just rolling down the hill...), I saw an overgrown trail on the far side of a tangle of fallen trees. A little further on, I saw two bright blue slashes of paint on trees framing the trail.

Eventually, the trail opened up to this... look! another tertiary igneous dike! It's kinda hard to see in the photo, but it's there, trust me (the rocks lining the draw have fallen down from it). The trail took us along its top for a while before we arrived at a second meadow.

Here, my guidebook instructed me to walk 50 paces along the ridge, then turn right and go across the meadow, back into the trees where I'd see the trail, follow it for some ways and eventually pick up an old logging road back to the trailhead.

I walked the 50 paces, turned and headed for the trees. I saw blue slashes and the overgrown trail ahead of me, but I stopped.

And this is where it gets weird. I just had a really bad feeling about the trail. Like it was not right, and I shouldn't follow the blue slashes or my guidebook. I can't explain it, but I was suddenly very creeped out (medical diagnosis: dehydration was making me all nutty in the head again).

I've had similar experiences when hiking and I always listen to my gut, so I decided instead to make a sharp turn into another clearing almost in the opposite direction of where the blue slashes were leading me. I'm actually really good at landnav on an instinctual level that I can't explain, other than being able to "smell" the right direction. It's weird, I know, and interestingly, it doesn't work in the Southern Hemisphere, where I am hopelessly dependent on my compass. But here and now, I followed my nose.

After about a hundred paces through the brush, I found ruts in the ground and realized I was on another logging road. I followed it for a little over a mile, watching to see if it intersected with any other roads or trails. It didn't. Then, ahead of me, I saw the trailhead gate where I'd started.

That's what I don't understand. I ended up where I was supposed to be, but only by walking in the opposite direction advised by both my guidebook and the mysterious blue slashes that I thought marked the trail. Part of me figures the marks were randomly left behind by loggers and the trail was so overgrown in general that I just didn't see my way and the guidebook's way were one and the same.

But another part of me wonders where the hell I would have wound up if I'd followed those blue slash marks...

In any case, Wiley and I made it back safely to the car and I opted for the "alternate" driving directions in my guidebook, heading west instead of returning over the rocky road. The other road took me about 30 miles out of my way, but it was used by ranchers and was, by every measure, "a good dirt road."

After drinking copious amounts of water, we're both fine. The engine light is still on, but my car has not exploded. And I have checked off another summit on my to-do list.

Elk-tastic!

2008-08-18T21:54:00.007-06:00

Yesterday, with snow hanging around the higher elevations and the trails/backroads on the muddy side, Wiley and I went on a road trip.

We drove up to North Park (but not all the way to Wyoming this time) and then turned east, onto the Cache la Poudre Scenic Byway... Cache la Poudre is the name of a river that has its headwaters near those of the Colorado River, only it heads east instead of west.

I believe "Cache la Poudre" is French for "Hide the Pudding!" but perhaps I am mistaken.

In any case, the views were spectacular, including of the Never Summer Mountains, the only volcanic range in the Rockies and recipients of the best mountain range name ever. Here's a shot of a few of them, the spiky ones on the left being my faves:

Once on the east side of the range, the scenery changed dramatically to dry and rocky and reminiscent of the Capitol Reef area in Utah. Eventually, the road led to Fort Collins, a dry, dusty, somewhat downtrodden college town that really didn't impress me, although its over-gentrified cutesy downtown strip of trendy eateries and boutiquey spots was ridiculously crowded. In the early afternoon on a Monday? Really?

I drove south and picked up Route 34 to head back over the mountains via Rocky Mountain National Park:

I figured that, by the time I got to the park, it would be nearing dusk and a good time to spot an animal or two.

And hey! Whaddya know! Here's an elk:

Yes, that's the road he's standing right next to (photo taken without zoom). I saw a couple dozen of them, usually one bull and three or four... uh... ewes? does? bitches? whatever... elkettes in a unit grazing right by the road. Not as big as moose, but pretty dang huge, and beautiful.

Needless to say, the tourists were acting like paparazzi who've just spotted Brangelina having a food fight. I snapped the photo of the bull above while I was stopped in my car while the ranger ahead of me argued with a guy in an SUV with Texas plates about why he needed to get himself and his kid back in the car and stop trying to pet the elk.

I mean, really.

Up above timberline, on Trail Ridge Road (full disclosure: the last couple times I've mentioned TRR, I've screwed up the name, calling it Timber Line or Timber Ridge or Trail Line. But it's definitely Trail Ridge Road. I know because I bought a cool t-shirt on clearance at the gift shop and that's what it says...), things were looking a little dramatic with the setting sun and low clouds:

I like it.

I'm not sure which particular mountain the above is a shot of, but I took it from near the highest point of the road before descending back to my neck of the roads and letting Wiley, who spent the entire day with his head out the window, take a much-needed snooze on his bed.

Sightseeing is exhausting!

Recent Fussings-About

2008-08-16T22:04:00.003-06:00

In the past few weeks I've tried a few new (and I think exciting) flavors of frozen stuff, including iris sorbet and a Breckenridge Vanilla Porter ice cream (using, well duh, a locally brewed vanilla porter), but since scoops of ice cream aren't exactly photogenic, you'll just have to believe me.

I also came up with a new plated dessert, peach panna cotta with blueberry sauce and coriander sable (sah-BLAY... a very delicate, crumbly cookie; adding coriander was my idea but I think it works). I was looking for a simple plating that the pantry cook could manage without too much stress:

I also got a wicked new silicon mold and used it for my interpretation of strawberry shortcake: pound cake base, strawberry mousse exterior and a basil custard insert that, I gotta say, was delish.

I'm still working on the plating (shown above with a balsamic syrup) but for now I'm very happy (for once!) with the balance of flavors.

Here's a cross-section of the little guy showing the custard insert:

It's still a work in progress, but for now I'm just tickled pink, no pun intended, over my new molds. Hey, it's a tax-deductible work expense!

Cake-o-rama

2008-08-16T21:39:00.003-06:00

Ooh, somebody bought herself some cheap tiny flower-shaped cookie cutters!

I've done three cakes in the past two days, which is a record for me, though nothing compared with the output of an actual cake decorator... keep in mind how many other things I have to do on a daily basis, though.

Anyway, even though my piping skills continue to be my weakest area, I've been working on them. Really. Here are a couple photos of what I've been up to:

The above cake says "Good Luck Trish" and looked much better in person. The chocolate-on-chocolate piping doesn't show up so well on camera, which is a shame because I'd say that's the best piping I've ever done on a cake.

Figures.

What's special about the cake, though, is that I made it for a staffer leaving to go to college... she's vegan, and so is the cake. I did my vegan devil's food cake with some adjustments for high-altitude and, because I couldn't find vegan margarine anywhere around here, made up a recipe for vegan frosting (for the filling and seal coat) and then did a vegan quasi-opera glaze. All the decor is marzipan.

Trish seemed really thrilled with it and everyone who tried it raved about it... somehow, it's always more satisfying to make a vegan happy. I mean, those people live without cheese.

Here's a cake I did for a customer request... it's chocolate buttermilk cake with chocolate chip buttercream frosting and shortbread cookies. Considering how bad I am at piping, I thought this came out pretty cute and at least as good visually as a supermarket cake. The taste was superior though (not bragging, jus' sayin'), so much so that the party told their server (who told me) it was one of the best cakes they'd ever tasted.

Okay, so I'm not bragging about how the cake below looks, but it is an important cake for me for a couple reasons... it's my first stab at an original recipe entremet (on-truh-MAY). Entremet is, basically, at least as I've been taught, some kind of fancy mousse cake with various inserts. I did a couple at school but haven't been anywhere near an entremet mold since.

Last week, I went online and ordered a couple silicon molds I've been really yearning for. I noticed they had entremet molds for only $15, so I bought one just to tinker about.

Yesterday, after slamming through all my to-dos, I made mousse faster than I've ever done it before and banged out an entremet. I call it "strawberry-covered chocolate" because the strawberry mousse exterior hides gooey rich chocolate ganache.

Well, I had no intention of serving it and was planning, after unmolding it today, to give it to my highly appreciative buddies working the line. Just as I was about to cut into it to see how the layers came out, however, the events coordinator got an email about guests who wanted some kind of "chocolate and fruit" cake for four people for dinner that night.

Well, I had the entremet ready to go, so... it went.

I'm bummed I didn't get to cut into it and see how it came out, but there will be other entremet in my life, I'm sure, and I thought it was pretty dang fortuitous to have a cake ready to go.

So here it is, garnished on the fly with macerated strawberries that are weeping a little. Not the most beautiful cake ever by a long shot, but hey, it got the job done.

When Jerry the line cook saw it, he asked if I could make him one for his birthday. Awwww...

Thundersnow Aftermath

2008-08-16T21:31:00.002-06:00

About 12 hours after my post about dismal morning weather, I took these shots on the way home from work...

Recognize the mountain below? Yeah, it's Byers Peak, the same behemoth I climbed on Tuesday, now buried in a foot of snow!

Here's a shot of clouds clinging to the newly snow-dusted mountains along the Divide. While it's beautiful, really achingly beautiful, I'm still dismayed that I won't be able to hike on my days off (Monday and Tuesday) because of lingering snow and mud. Grr.

And finally, here's a shot from the employee parking lot of the Place I Work, looking at another view of the Divide with all the stable horsies enjoying an evening snack.

When I got home tonight, by the way, even though I had filled it before leaving for work, the hummingbird feeder was empty. Jeez.

The Weather Outside is Frightful

2008-08-16T08:42:00.002-06:00

...or at least Wiley thinks so. The poor, old, arthritic little guy crawled under my bed yesterday evening and stayed there, coaxed out only by the promise of a poached egg this morning. Then he went right back into his lair.

Why is Wiley so riled?

THUNDERSNOW!

Yes, on the 16th of August, we've got thundersnow (I still say one of the best potential band names ever... powerful and ominous, yet fluffy.) The clouds rumbled and growled and bellowed all night right over our heads (at least it feels that way when you're nearly 10,000 feet closer to them than at sea level), followed by hail at dawn.

When I woke there was a light dusting of snow and hail everywhere (it started to rain in the last hour, so it's gone now).

There was also a melee on my porch.

My hummingbird feeder was low last night but I thought there was enough to get them through till morning. I was wrong. It was bone-dry and there were eight hummingbirds zipping around it, fighting each other even though they all seemed to know it was empty.

I really wish I'd had my camera, but I left it at work as I'm doing some experiments that hopefully will come to fruition today or tomorrow.

Anyway... I refilled the feeder, feeling bad the poor things were hungry, and all hell broke loose. It was like the Crips and the Bloods in a street war, with the bigger red birds and the smaller blue-green ones harassing each other, divebombing, etc. Jeez. Who knew a little organic sugar in water could turn my porch into Hummingbird South Central??

And I'm as ornery as the birds. It poured rain all yesterday and looks to do the same today. The locals say they've never seen such a wet fall (yes, we're in autumn up here... I've felt the chil in the air and people have been piling firewood up in their yards for the past two weeks) and think we're going to have an early winter with a lot of snow.

They're delighted (the area makes most of its money from skiiing/snowboarding). I'm inconsolable. Even though there won't be snow yet at the lower elevations, the trails are going to be hella muddy, and as for the higher elevations, well... Byers Peak, which I hiked last week, was forecast to get a foot of snow today.

Grr.

Fish Skins, Fish Skins, Eat Them Up, Yum

2008-08-15T21:36:00.003-06:00

There was an abundance of leftover trout after a banquet tonight at work so I got to take a couple pieces home. They were the kind of fillets with skin on one side, which Wiley enjoyed mightily (he got his own whole portion and devoured it in a nanosecond) but I peeled off.

For more than half my life, I would get freaked out by the sight of a piece of fish with, you know, skin on it. Eeew! Then I started to travel a lot in Scandinavia and quickly learned that it's eat fish with skin on it or go hungry.

I still don't eat the skin (I tried it a couple times but just don't like the taste or texture) even though fish is my main source of protein (along with Quorn and unseemly amounts of cheese). But now I find whenever I'm peeling it off, or watching the cooks fabricate the whole wild fish that we get in at work into neat portions, I'm sort of transfixed by the skin. I start to think about the water the fish swam in... was it cold? warm? murky? clear? and whether it was on its own or in one of those enormous schools, how shiny and sleek it looked in the water.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not having some ethical quandry about eating fish, especially the wild, sustainably caught varieties I seek out (or the sustainable farm-raised sorts like tilapia... jeez, remember when the only thing you had to think about going grocery shopping was what you were out of??). Heck, they're the only animal I don't feel guilty about eating. (Except for octopus... I don't like the taste or texture, and ever since reading this I feel obliged to pass on it entirely. Not that octopi are fish, taxonically speaking, but they live in the water. You get the idea.)

I guess there's just something tantalizing and otherworldly about the sleek, shiny, almost metallic skin, the way it's still attached to the flesh, something that doesn't happen with beef or lamb (and, let's face it, chicken and pigskin aren't exactly eye-catching at any point), that invites my imagination to take wing.

Or fin, as the case may be.

"My Syrup Brings All the Birds to the Yard...

2008-08-14T07:52:00.005-06:00

...Damn right, it's better than yours/Damn right, it's better than yours/I could teach you, but I'd have to charge..."

Sorry, but I sing my special version of Kelis' "Milkshake" every morning because...

Well, let me back up a bit. When I moved to my current apartment, exactly two months ago today, I put up a hummingbird feeder with homemade syrup (75% water, 25% organic sugar). For a while, I got no takers. Then one or two birds would zip up to it, have a taste and zip away.

Eventually I developed a steady customer base (I suppose, in a way, this is my first "business"). The feeder holds 12 oz. of syrup, and I had to refill it on a weekly basis.

Then, a couple weeks ago, suddenly I was refilling it twice a week.

For the past three days, I've had to refill it every damn morning.

I've checked for leaks (none). And the shape of it is designed expressly for hummingbirds, so all the crows and magpies around couldn't get at it if they tried.

I have several theories about why the feeder on my porch is suddenly the hottest joint in town:

- I'm just that good. (kidding)

- With winter approaching (it's already chilly at night and in the morning), the hummingbirds are, er, fattening themselves up. Which doesn't make that much sense to me in an animal evolved to be as light as possible and which uses a fast-acting form of energy. But I'm not up on birdology like I am on the study of sharks, bears or lemurs, so perhaps someone can enlighten me.

- A lot of people put up hummingbird feeders in late spring, but I'm wondering if they've been refilling them as regularly as I. Much as I forgot to water my herb garden and everything died, maybe they've let the feeders go empty and the birds have moved on. On a related note, the stores around here were selling ready-made syrup (with red food coloring... eww) but it seems to be a seasonal item and they're now stocking snow shovels, so maybe people too lazy to make their own (uh, guys, there's a reason it's called simple syrup) have just taken down their feeders.

In any case, despite buzzing around me fearlessly when I go out to refill the feeder, the birds get shy as soon as I bring out my camera. But this morning I finally got a couple shots (through my porch door, on the fast action setting with zoom) of one of the hungry, hungry hippobirds (on the right of the feeder):

This guy is one of the larger, red-breasted varieties. There are also smaller, prettier blue-green ones that are faster but always getting bullied by the big reds. Good luck to me trying to get a photo of the little ones, which speed past in turquoise blur.

They really are amazing little creatures, and I feel good that at least my customers are getting an organic, artificial color-free meal or two. Or three...

Byers Peak, Part Three: The Descent

2008-08-12T21:38:00.002-06:00

For maximum entertainment, please begin at the beginning.

If you need more evidence the thin air was messing with my mind, witness the "I'm King of the World!" photo below, taken at the summit with the aid of my awesome Gorillapod.

Aside: if you tend to do interesting things alone, like hike mountains way out of your league, you should get a Gorillapod. The shots of myself I took on the summit were in a strong wind, but I just wrapped the Gorillapod's legs around a rock and nothing short of a direct lightning strike would move it.

Another aside: no, I am not pregnant and have not gained 40 pounds. I brought a sweatshirt to put on over my hiking shirt and above timber line found I really needed it. The wind is helping to emphasize the boxy, shapeless cut of my ensemble.

After resting for a while and eating a Cherry Bumblebar (Best. Energy. Snack. Ever... and no weird crap in it... gluten-free, too! Hey Bumblebar people, if you need a spokesperson, I am totally there for you. No charge, even. Just throw me a couple Chai and Cherry bars every month and we're good), I started back down.

After passing two or maybe five of the false summits, I thought the altitude was messing with my brain again because I looked up ahead from the trail and thought "why is that rock staring at me?"

Yeah, I had that instinctual "something is watching me" hairs up at the back of the neck thing.

Then the rock moved, and I realized it was not yet another white rock (many of the rocks about halfway up to the summit were white). It was a mountain goat mama, with her juvenile!! Look for them in the center foreground of the photo below... and in the background, that lump of mountain taller than the others is Long's Peak, a 14er in Rocky Mountain National Park.

I so totally have no desire to climb it.

Mama Goat and Sproutlicious (is it wrong that I name the baby wildlife I happen across?) ambled on ahead of me on the trail, at my pace, and then stopped to nibble some apparently extra-tasty grass/lichen/wildflowers just off the trail.

They were aware of me but not spooked... I guess the mama saw how slow I was going and thought "fat hobbit is so totally not a threat." The photo below was taken without a zoom, by the way.

Can you stand how adorable Sproutlicious is? As for Mama Goat, she was having a bad hair day, molting or blowing her coat or whatever it's called with mountain goats. And, while I was feeling a little bad that the only three other hikers making the ascent today blew past me and were coming down while I was still going up, I do think that if I had been as fast, I never would have seen these two, a highlight of my hike.

Nearly back to timber line, here's a shot of some Krummholz, the stunted, crooked, wind-ravaged dwarf conifer that grows in lower alpine tundra zones. You can't tell from the photo, but it's only a couple feet high.

Not that that was a particularly exciting shot or anything, but I enjoy saying the word "Krummholz"* aloud so I included it.

(German for "crooked wood.")

And finally, instead of retracing my steps, once below the timber line I took an alternate route through a gorgeous, lush, Lothlorien-like forest to Bottle Pass, where I took the photo below, looking back on where I'd been. That's Bill's Peak on the right, and massive, enormo Byers Peak on the right, with all its false summits.

So, Byers.... is that all you got?

Byers Peak, Part Two: The (False?) Summit

2008-08-12T21:22:00.004-06:00

To appreciate the story fully, begin at the beginning.

So...

This is about where I lost the trail. It was perhaps the penultimate false summit and was extremely rocky. Eventually I just climbed up the rock, throwing my trekking poles ahead of me, until I found the trail again. But first I snapped the photo of this rather self-important boulder. What you can't see is that beyond it is about a 500 foot drop.

After the third or maybe the ninth or maybe the fifteenth false summit, I started thinking to myself you know, I could just take a picture here and tell people oh yeah, this is me summiting Byers and only someone who's done it (none, to my knowledge, of my regular readers) would know.

Of course, if you know me, you know that's not how I roll. So here instead is yet another photo of another dang false summit.

At last!! To prove I didn't wimp out at a false summit and turn 'round, here is a shot of the US Geologic Survey marker at the actual summit:

Oh, and to prove I didn't pay off another hiker to take a picture of the summit marker for me, here's a shot of me crouching over the rock the marker is on (I didn't realize till I got home that you can't see it from this angle, but trust me, it's there).

Actually, I really like this photo of me because I think I look completely insane, like I've been in the thin air for too long (well...). As Douglas Adams describes Ford Prefect in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, my smile is just a little too big to be normal.

But I did it! I made the summit! No one is more surprised than me, believe me, especially when I started thinking, at false summit #10 or so, "you know, I could just stretch out on the rock for a nap and die of exposure... no fighting, no pain, no more damn steep grades..."

Here's a view from the summit of Bill's Peak on the right, an unnamed peak in the foreground and, in the distance, the Gore Range and Continental Divide.

But wait, there's more...

Peak-Baggin', Part One: The Ascent

2008-08-12T20:53:00.003-06:00

"Bagging peaks" is a big thing in Colorado... the state has loads of "14ers" (as in mountains topping out at more than 14,000 feet) and bagging them, or reaching the summit, seems to be a major hobby for the ultrafit and smug.

Well, just as I do triathlons but have no interest in doing an Ironman (because those people are crazy), I like to hike but not get too high up there. That said, today I set out to conquer the scariest of the hikes on the to-do list I have stuck to my refrigerator door. Other hikes on my list are longer, but this one, Byers Peak, has the greatest elevation gain (and over the shortest distance, comparatively!) and just in general makes me anxious.

It doesn't help that I see Byers Peak every day on morning walkies with Wiley:

Yeah, that's it, the big brute in the middle, towering over other middling mountains and cows and pretty much everything around it (keep in mind that it's more than ten miles away in the photo). Unlike the mountains along the Continental Divide, which tend to form a wall of Big Rock but not stand out as individuals, Byers is on its own, not part of the Divide.

Also, you can drive nearly up to many of the mountains on the Divide, getting 12- or 13,000 feet up in your car and then doing the last thousand feet on foot. Not so with Byers.

I fell in love with Byers the first time I saw it because it stands out like that, and also because to me it's the Lord of the Ringsiest of the mountains around here. It just has presence.

Of course, once I decided to climb it I felt it was out there saying "You wanna piece o' me? Come and get it."

My response: "Is that all you got?"

(Of course, it's easy to say that now that I'm back at home with my feet up!)

Byers Peak is 12,804 feet at its summit. Not a 14er, not even a 13er, but, as far as I'm concerned, an official Big-Ass Mountain. The trailhead was at 9,809 feet, meaning an elevation gain of about 3,000 feet over about four miles. It would also be the first hike I did that started below timber line (around 11,400 feet) and ended above it.

Criminy! Why can't I learn to enjoy playing video games like everyone else??

Anyway, the first mile or so was along an old logging road before the trail got steeper, ascending through lodgepole pine forest. The smell was fantastic.

Here's a shot (below) as the trail emerged above timberline, with the first of many false summits ahead of me.

An aside... at the trailhead, there was a sign that said "MANY FALSE SUMMITS ON MOUNTAIN. IF DUBIOUS TURN BACK. MANY LIGHTNING STRIKES ON MOUNTAIN. IF LEERY GET OFF THE MOUNTAIN."

I should have taken a picture, but didn't think the lighting was good. In any case, up much of the increasingly steep trail, I asked myself "are we dubious and leery yet?"

Does the shot below convey how freakin' steep the damn trail was above timberline? Good.

Below, one of many, many false summits (I stopped counting after five). If memory serves, this was the false summit where, upon reaching it, I sat down on a rock and exclaimed aloud "if this is a false summit, then I'm false-climbing it."

It was just below here, at about 12,000 feet, where I had something odd happen to me. I don't think it was altitude sickness, but I was getting dizzy and disoriented and doing dumb things. Like when I noticed I was carrying both my trekking poles in one hand (instead of, er, actually using them on the steep grade), or when I became convinced I had lost my camera even though I felt it in my back pocket.

I noticed right at about 12,000 feet that I was having real problems breathing, too, and at first thought it was just trying to haul my jiggly ass up the damn mountain. I had those same problems descending, though, which makes me think it was the altitude. Once I got below 10,000 feet on the way back (sort of "my zone," since I live and work at 8500 feet above sea level), I was fine. Weird.

To be continued...

Two Down, A Zillion To Go...

2008-08-11T22:39:00.003-06:00

Wiley and I managed two short hikes today in between an appointment with the vet (for him, to get his vaccinations up to date) and another with the doctor (for me, to get my Avulsed Thumb checked out...we both got the, er, thumbs up).

Not that I'm an overachiever or anything, but I can already feel the crisp chill of autumn in the air (really!) and co-workers who are fellow hikers have warned me that snow will make some trails impassable as early as mid-September. With a long list of places where I want to leave my bootprints around here, I figure I need to get crackin'.

First was to my obsession, The Wall. Last time I tried to hike it, the stream swollen with snowmelt proved too deep, but this time, however, the water was low enough to ford easily.

Here's a shot from the southwest of the base of the thing:

And another from the southeast:

Alas, actually climbing beside the thing was impossible due to all the rocks (make that tough for me, impossible for Sir Smalls, who gave it his best). We climbed for a while through the forest paralleling it, but the way was too steep and the view less than worth it, so after about 45 minutes I turned around.

It was then that, perhaps envious that I had two trekking poles and he had none, Wiley decided he wanted to play tug of war with a stick. He slipped and the stick went tumbling down the mountainside, but before that happened I got this shot:

After our appointments, we drove north to the Never Summer Wilderness Area and climbed Apiatan Mountain. Topping out at around 10,240 feet, it's not a big deal mountain around here by any means, but it was a nice three mile hike out-and-back that Wiley could manage.

Here's a shot of him looking rather the part of AdventureDog at the summit, with the Porphyry Peaks in the background:

Right as we got to the top, the sky darkened and rain started, but I did manage to get this shot of what I think are cool clouds over Rocky Mountain National Park, just to the east:

The More Things Change...

2008-08-10T09:04:00.002-06:00

It's Sunday morning and I find myself in a reflective mood as I eat my palak paneer (yes, I eat palak paneer for breakfast) and catch up with BBC News and various blogs before heading off to work.

Thanks to a tip from Dr. Virago, I've been following a fascinating and sometimes hilarious discussion about summing up the Medieval World in Seven Words or Less over at Got Medieval. A recent post mentioned a 13th century scholarly dude named Michael the Scot, and cited his travels and translations of important manuscripts as underappreciated contributions to history.

It made me think of Ibn Battuta and other Arab merchants and scholars who saw the world and recorded much of it, of Vikings who found employment in Istanbul, and founded Russia in their free time, of Mongols who showed up in Syria and Egypt and then decided eh, too hot, we're going home (ah, would that the Crusaders had felt the same way!). I was always taught in school that, pretty much until the Industrial Revolution, nearly everyone lived their little lives in the same little village where they were born and were ignorant of the outside world unless invaded.

At the same time, we like to think oh, we're so much more advanced and aware and world-savvy than they were in olden days of yore! We have cheap plane travel (ok, we have... plane travel)! We have the Internet! We have educational systems that stress diversity!

And yet, on the BBC Olympics Blog I checked out right before going over to Got Medieval, assorted mooks and blokes and other "learned" 21st century folks had hijacked a post about a Georgian bronze medal winner in pistol to gripe about which players from their beloved football/soccer/sport you don't use your hands for/Beckhamball were or were not at the Games.

So, contrary to what many of us were taught and what many of us like to think, back in the day when fuel was wind and hay*, a fair number of people traveled and knew more of the world than many moderne folke, who have the Internet but use it to follow their favorite sports team and who might go to Cancun or Ibiza (to vacation at an English-speaking resort, of course, and drink the imported beer of their native country... I still think of the American I met on the train to Gatwick once complaining about how he had to pay $12 for a can of Budweiser at his hotel... you're in England and you're drinking Budweiser??? I wanted to make a citizen's arrest and revoke his passport, but I digress.), but sit in the same metaphorical village where they were raised.

Jus' sayin'.

(*my inner rapper tends to come out when I am feeling both reflective and annoyed with society. Which is almost always.)

Five-Ring Rant

2008-08-09T20:46:00.002-06:00

I'm not ashamed to admit that, every two years, one of my favorite things to do is watch the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, specifically the Parade of Nations.

As an aside, I love the Winter Olympics more than the Summer in general, in part because of the higher prevalence of Nordic types, more stunning locales (mountains, snow, etc.) and crazier sports (how and why running developed into a sport I understand... but the ski jump?!), but also because the costumes at the PoN tend to be wilder, too.

Without a tv at the moment, I thought no problem, I'll just watch it online. I watched a few fuzzy "Free Tibet" videos at YouTube masquerading as PoN coverage, but the only "official" and actual PoN video I found demanded that I register with my tv subscription number before I could view it. Yes, as in cable or satellite tv.

If I had a cable or satellite tv subscription, that would suggest that I had a tv, in which case I wouldn't need to watch coverage via my laptop.

I mean, really.

So I tried to settle for reading a "best and worst" review of the PoN outfits at the official NBC site. About half a sentence into the dreadfully dull and forced story, it was clear to me that some editor had told this guy to review the PoN fashions on deadline and to be funny about it, and the guy, gritting his teeth over having to do a "girl" story when he could have been writing about something manly like wrestling, banged out some copy whilst all the while muttering "I could have been the next Bob Costas."

I finally found a slideshow titled "Parade of Nations" on the NBC site and foolishly, I clicked on it.

Here's a photo of the American contingent!

Here's a close-up of that American Tae Kwon Do family!

Here's a shot of some random American athletes, and we don't know who the hell they are, but we're going to show it to you!

Here's a shot of President Bush clapping! Yay President Bush!

Excuse me... uhm... but doesn't "Parade of Nations" imply more than one goddamned nation parading????

I want to see the Kazakh team, the Cambodian runner who had to train in rush hour traffic and smog, all those brave little breakaway republics that Russia is bombing right now* because Putin figures we're all too enthralled with rhythmic gymnastics to bother with anything going on outside of Beijing.

(*and I don't care who started it. I'm rooting against the Russians.)

Ugh.

Ugh!

That's another reason I love the Winter Olympics so much more than the Summer. Because the US isn't so obnoxiously over-represented, and because one can only do so many "gosh isn't curling quirky?" stories, commentators have to cover, you know, the actual games, and not just fawn over various American athletes or those who make their living as professional athletes in America.

I mean, really, if you're limited to 20 shots in a slideshow, do you have to use up more than half on NBA players?

Okay, I'll stop now. And if anyone by any chance taped the PoN or recorded it on disc, I'm willing to trade chocolate products for a copy. Jus' sayin'.

My New Theme Song?

2008-08-06T21:38:00.002-06:00

Discuss.

And yes, I'm joking. Though not entirely. And it is a kicky tune.

Lake of the Lost

2008-08-06T20:06:00.003-06:00

Yesterday, another day off, I took Wiley on a short hike (1.2 miles out-and-back) to a place called Lost Lake. Despite much of the hike through dense, mossy forest, the lake itself wasn't nearly as cool or creepy as the name implies.

Here's Wiley saying, I'm pretty sure, "we climbed all this way just so I could get a drink of water? What's wrong with the bottled water you have in the car?"

The only eventful, er, event came on the walk back down, when a very curious Lesser Chipmunk hung out on a log watching Wiley with great interest:

Sir Smalls got within three feet of him, completely oblivious to the chipmunk. At this point the chipmunk wisely decided to scurry away. Still no reaction from Wiley, who was smelling a blade of grass with interest. Thirty seconds later, he stuck his nose where the chipmunk had been and went nuts, barking and making a great show of "searching" for his prey.

Yeah.

It reminded me of the time he and the late great Kosmo stumbled on a rabbit cowering in the long grass. They both sniffed all around it with great interest as the rabbit crouched motionless but for its quivering nose. After following several "hot leads," both dogs returned to the rabbit, sniffed at it and then peed on it.

I still wonder what that poor bunny told his kin when he got home to the warren that night.

The Day After...

2008-08-04T18:18:00.008-06:00

You may be wondering, what does a normal person do the day after finishing a triathlon she didn't train for?

Well, I wouldn't know.

But what I did was wake up early to beat the clouds and drag my jiggly ass and arthritic, elderly dog on a six-miles-plus hike that topped out at more than 11,000 feet above sea level.

Wiley did so well. I am so proud of him. Whether it was meeting new dogs on the trail (he was very polite) or climbing up a boulder field or walking through a swamp on the planks and logs meant for biped, Sir Smalls comported himself with grace and style.

He only got stuck at one point, when I scrambled up a steep bit of rock and he tried to follow but couldn't get up. Here he is (foreground center) with an expression that suggests "if I had an opposable thumb, I'd shank you."

Eventually, I climbed back down and helped to hoist him up. Considering the trail was 2.87 miles one-way, not counting several side trips, with an elevation gain of more than 1,000 feet, Mr. Kittenheads did remarkably well.

He is so totally zonked out on his bed right now.

In any case, here's a shot on the way up of the view to come:

About midway on the trail, I really fell in love with this view.

As you may recall, I am working on a sequel to The War's End, a (hopefully) short novel called The Guardian. I love this shot because, yes, while it is a lone tree in the center of the photo, clinging to the rock, the shape of it made it seem almost human, which happens to fit beautifully with a scene in the working draft of, well, the guardian overlooking a kingdom of rock and mountain.

The payoff for the three mile hikeup was Columbine Lake with sexy Mt. Neva in the background. I just like mountains that look like they mean business, and Neva is that.

Tri or Tri Not, There is No Try

2008-08-03T20:33:00.004-06:00

(Aside: I really want to get that as a bumpersticker or t-shirt, but I don't know that there are enough tri people who are also big enough Star Wars geeks to get it...)

I'm back from the Tri for the Cure in Denver in one piece and with my fourth finisher's medal. Wiley is happily snoozing on his bed. Looking out my patio doors as the last of the sun turns the sky deep red and purple, I can see massive thunderheads catching on the Divide and preparing to dump on the Mile High City.

All is right with the world.

I liked Tri for the Cure much better than the Denver Danskin for a number of reasons. First, they kept spectators and random dogwalkers/stroller-pushers out of the transition area! Huzzah!! There were a couple non-participant cyclists on the course, but I guess that's just the whole Colorado "I do what I want, when I want" attitude. In any event, they stayed out of my way so I won't complain too much.

I also liked the course layout much better. Yes, the bike was an out-and-back in kind of a Y shape, but with the exception of a bobsled-wide chute of a start, the route was pretty wide. The run was a U-shaped out-and-back as well, all uphill the first mile, then level, then all downhill the last mile, but again it was wide enough that everyone had room to do their thing.

My one quibble with the course was the clockwise direction of the swim (a triangular course). For the first third of the course, we were swimming directly into the rising sun (my wave went off at 7:04 a.m.) and I just couldn't see anything.

Here's a shot of the swim start about ten minutes before the race began:

And here's my mise en place (ha!) for my transition area... ("mise en place," (MEEZ en PLAHS) is the fancy French term cooks and chefs use for "getting your crap together." It's the whole be prepared, a place for everything and everything in its place, etc., which is why my bike shoes and super cool new bike socks -- they have tricycles on them! How appropriate for me, the world's slowest cyclist! -- are on the outside, because I'll use them first, and my running shoes are on the inside with the bibb I'll wear for the running portion):

Anyway, I was in the Survivor wave right behind the Elite athlete wave. Aside from starting headed right into the sun, I got kicked in the head twice right off the bat. The first time it was just the rush of people to start swimming after trying not to fall on a slippery concrete boat ramp that was covered with algae or snot or something gooey. The second time, the woman who kicked me knocked off my nose clip (yes, I wear a nose clip. Not for fashion, oh believe you me, but because I gotta. That's all there is to it.). I wasn't too upset because she was bald and bloaty-faced from chemo and really struggling, and it was extremely unintentional. I just thought hey, you're out here, doing this when I know how lousy you feel, so you just do what you're doing and I'll swim around.

Fortunately, knowing I would be up the creek without a paddle, so to speak, without my nose clip, I had a spare in the nifty back pocket of my tri suit, but it took me a few seconds to get it, put it on and get back into the groove.

Either because of the sun or the nose clip incident, I felt I never really got a good rhythm. The water was also kind of warm, which grosses me out. And, I'll be honest... I'd slept poorly the night before, in part because the History Channel had a fascinating series on Paleo-Indians and Mammalian Megafauna (and you know how I love my megafauna!). But also, I know this is lame, I was worried about my thumb.

It wasn't until I'd turned the lights off the night before that I thought about those people you hear about now and then who had to have all their limbs amputated because they caught the flesh-eating bacteria through a simple paper cut or something. And here I was about to go swimming in a rather murky reservoir with the tip of my thumb freshly severed. Hmmm...

I'd put an allegedly waterproof dressing on in the morning, and right before the swim I wrapped several layers of duct tape around it, but it was still on my mind.

In any case, I felt like I took forever in the swim. The whole way I felt sluggish and off-pace, so I was surprised to find out that I did it in 26 minutes. Not lightning-fast, but also not bad for someone who hasn't gotten in the water since, er, her last tri in June, and my best leg overall for this tri.

Ironically, since it is my nemesis, it was the bike leg that I enjoyed the most in this tri (must be my badass tricycle socks!!). It was mostly flat and wide enough that people didn't get surly, and much to my delight I passed five people, which for me is a major achievement. It was during the bike leg that I also had my scariest/proudest moment. There was one pretty big, long hill about two-thirds of the way through. At the very top, the road turned to the west and all of a sudden I saw the Rockies, bright in the morning sun, spread before me. It was a gorgeous view. So gorgeous that I didn't see the enormous pothole.

Cerdic, my long-suffering two-wheeled Saxon warhorse, plowed into it full-speed. I went one way, Cerdic went another, both my feet went off the pedals and all I could think was "I'm going to wipe out spectacularly and when my maimed thumb hits the pavement, the force is going to push the flesh-eating bacteria even deeper into the wound."

Somehow, I stayed on the bike, did sort of a midair Pete Townshend circa 1978 jump and got my feet back on the pedals.

Just as I was thinking "whew... I hope no one saw that," one of the speed demon women who actually train for these things and know what they're doing came flying past on my left and shouted "That was a nice recovery!"

Why, thank you. Yeah, I do this all the time. Me and my bike, we're like one. Yep.

I did the bike leg in 55 minutes, which, while in no danger of breaking any Olympic records, is my personal bike best. Must be the socks.

The run, or ralk, leg was a killer because of the heat. It was more than 100 degrees F by then, with no breeze I could detect and no shade for the entire 3.1 miles. We started up a gradual but relentless incline that nearly everyone was walking. Volunteers had hoses out but I felt like that just made me hotter. Even after the route levelled off, the heat sapped my energy.

That said, as I passed one woman jogging, she said "oh, how embarrassing to be passed by you."

"What's that supposed to mean?" I snapped, hot and cranky.

"You're walking," she said.

Yeah, I was walking, but I do walk faster than I can jog and it doesn't hurt. That said, I was in pain because I'd put the strap for the timing chip on too tight on my ankle, and my foot was swelling with the heat. The strap, the same plastic bands they use for hospitals, was cutting into my foot and making me bleed all over my tricycle sock. It was also, not surprisingly, annoying the hell out of me.

My thumb was also feeling icky and wet and hot, so I pulled the duct tape off and the dressing came with it. It actually felt good to let it get some air.

In the end, I did the 5k in 46 minutes, at exactly 15 mph. No, I won't be winning any marathons at that speed, but given the heat and my, er, less than impressive training regimen, I'll take it.

Here's an unflattering hot and sweaty photo of me beside Cerdic, with my medal, my soon-to-be-necrotic thumb and the Team Pastry Pirate roster I put on my bike, as promised. Thanks again to everyone who donated!

And finally, you know, I debated putting this photo up, because for most of my life the last thing in the world I'd want would be to appear in public in my bathing suit, especially, the gods forbid, doing something athleticky where people would look and point and whisper about how slow or ungainly or jiggly I was. Or, if they were my elementary school gym teacher Mr. Bianchi, they'd just shout it to the world.

In the end, I decided to post yet another photo of me in, yes, essentially my bathing suit. In public. Hot, sweaty and anything but speedy. Why? Because I finished my fourth triathlon this morning. Kiss my jiggly ass, Mr. Bianchi.

Go Team Pastry Pirate!

2008-08-01T21:35:00.002-06:00

Tomorrow morning I'll be taking Wiley to "the spa" and heading down to Denver to do the Tri for the Cure, my fourth triathlon overall and second this summer. The race itself is Sunday morning, but I have to pick up my timing chip, race tank and precious free water bottles the day before.

I just wanted to thank everyone who contributed to Team Pastry Pirate's Plunder for the Cure. Even though I didn't make my goal of raising $500, the folks who did donate were super-generous and I appreciate their support. I appreciate your support, too, even if it's just to roll your eyes and say to yourself "I really wish she'd train for these things."

Not only will I be doing this tri without training for it... I'm doing it against doctor's orders! How exciting! You see, yesterday, chopping rhubarb, I cut off the tip of my thumb. Not the whole joint or anything, but I sliced right through the nail and deep into, er, the meat, severing the tip completely.

At least I know my knives are sharp.

I was told to go to the clinic today because it wouldn't stop bleeding. I asked the doctor for a waterproof dressing since I'd be doing a triathlon in less than 48 hours and he said I couldn't swim with my avulsion injury. Pish posh. How could I miss the opportunity to leave a blood slick wake behind me?

I may put rum in my free water bottles to self-medicate the pain (it actually doesn't hurt that much, prolly 'cause I severed the nerve endings), but heck, once a pirate commits to plundering for the cure, damn straight she follows through.

'Tis but a flesh wound.

Scenes from Living the High Life, Part Two

2008-07-30T19:51:00.004-06:00

Thanks to a tip from Jerry the line cook, Wiley and I set off from the Avalanche Warning sign, at about 10,600 feet above sea level, directly through a beautiful montane forest rich in the heady scents of pine, juniper and flowers.

The forest opened up into meadows and semi-tundra at about 11,400 feet. That's the Continental Divide in the background, and AdventureDog in the foreground:

The further up we went (the trail was entirely uphill, not too steep but relentless), the more trees we saw like this one. Struck by lightning? Diseased? Just worn down to a nub by the elements? Who knows, but I love the eerie shape of it.

Another shot from the trail... today, when thanking Jerry for the tip, I learned that he skis down that ridge (in background) in winter. Awesome cook, sweet guy, gorgeous hair, but clearly not quite right in the head.

Here's another shot of the cirque (background) that Jerry calls his winter playground. In the foreground, you can see an old, unused aqueduct that used to bring the water from the mountains down to the plains. If you've got a good eye, you can see the aqueduct continuing along the bottom of the cirque, roughly in the middle of the photo (at that distance it looks almost like tire tracks from a car):

And finally, a close-up of some flowers beside a rushing stream. Awwwww:

Scenes From Living the High Life, Part One

2008-07-30T19:35:00.003-06:00

My first two-day weekend (Monday and Tuesday) in a bit, and on the first day it poured rain the entire day! This in the land of "we never get rain!" Arrgh! The good news is it forced me to stay inside which led me, finally, to unpacking and organizing my kitchen. Now I just have the living room and den to unpack.

Tuesday was gorgeous, which led to this rash (ouch!) of photo-taking:

These horses hang out in the mornings in the paddock at the end of our street, where small town gives way to ranchland and the wild. The trail Wiley and I take on an almost daily basis runs right past them. On the first day, one of them was laying on its side and Wiley started barking at it. The horse rolled to its feet, towering over Sir Smalls, who wisely shut up and hasn't made a peep at them since.

These birds are all over the place here, along with both ravens and crows. After I described them to him, my brother said they were just run of the mill magpies, but I think they're quite beautiful, and much more well-mannered than the magpies of Moscow... well, everything is better-mannered outside 'scow.

This rodeo is a half-mile walk up a dirt road from my apartment... yes, you may recall, when I was living in the submarine-like studio apartment, that I lived next door to a rodeo. I did. This is a different rodeo, with, quite frankly, a better sign. I really mean to make it to one before the end of the season, but they're on Saturday nights which tend to be my busiest (and latest) at work.

I've been meaning to take a photo of this sign for a while because it cracks me up. I live in a place where official anti-avalanche dudes regularly fire Howitzers at mountains. How awesome is that? The sign also happens to mark the trailhead for a spot Jerry, my fave line cook at work, clued me into.

Jolly Coppers

2008-07-29T17:47:00.006-06:00

I'm not the only one who has interesting interactions with local law enforcement (the Sardinian trooper set to give me a ticket for doing, er, twice the speed limit but who instead gave me a smile and a wave because I attempted to speak Italian, the Tunisian cops who tried to pick me up, the Turkish cops who flanked me as "escorts" after I clocked a guy who grabbed me, my near-daily confrontations with Moscow's finest... and let's not forget the time LLQool and I were mistaken for terrorists in Scotland and detained. Actually, we were detained not once but twice on that trip. Good times.).

Dr. Virago, immersed in scholarly pursuits in Merry Olde England, land of the extra "e," just posted a particularly entertaining recap of her exploits running amok in Windsor Castle. Just reading it made me all warm and fuzzy remembering trips to one of my favorite islands. And jealous. Soooooo terribly jealous.

Uh-oh. I already have my Iceland hives (yes, I get hives on my neck when my need to travel to Iceland reaches critical mass). Now I'm probably going to get my London rash.

Sigh.

Panna Cotta Pandemonium

2008-07-28T11:59:00.005-06:00

Recently I had to make a plated panna cotta dessert for a cast of thousands. Ok, not thousands, but about a hundred people.

For those of you saying "panna whatta??" don't feel bad. I didn't know what it was until I went to Cookin' School. I believe it translates from the Italian as "cooked cream," to distinguish it from "ricotta," which means "recycled cream" and Ray Liotta, which means "pretty eyes." But I don't speak Italian beyond "limoncello," so I'm not sure.

I do know panna cotta is essentially heated cream, a flavor base, usually something acidic like buttermilk and also gelatin. Yes, sorry veggie friends, as scrumptious as panna cotta is (made right, it's creamy but light and seems to float on the tongue), it does involve The Hoof. Or at least collagen sucked out of dead cows and/or pigs. I want to try to create a vegan version involving rice milk and agar agar, but keep forgetting to buy the agar.

Anyway, when I worked in Vegas, we made a lotta panna cotta for banquets. We would cook up a huge vat of it and portion it into silicon molds, cool it and freeze it. Because of the gelatin in it, you typically serve panna cotta as a stand-alone component, rather than in a glass or bowl, because it usually has enough structure (imagine a slightly firmer flan and you'll get the idea).

One trick I learned in Vegas was that, to make zillions of little panna cottas easier to transport and arrange on platters, you put a little piece of joconde* on the bottom of the frozen panna cotta while it's molded, so when you flip it out right-side up, you have a little base for it already in place.

(*"oh no, first she started with the fancy Italian words and now she's using obscure French terms! Let me ess-plain: jocone is just a classic kind of cakey thing, a very thin layer of nut-based cake often used for roulades (think of a giant version of a Swiss Roll or Yodel) or other desserts calling for, well, a very thin nut-based cakey thing.)

Because the only silicon molds I have at work are the two little financier* molds I own that I brought in, I made the panna cotta in sheet pans with the idea to flip it out of the pans and then cut it.

(* crap! More French!! Calm down. Financiers are just very traditional nut-based cakey cookie things, usually made with fruit inside.)

All was well with step one, the making and molding, such as it was, of the panna cotta, as well as step two, the freezing. The joconde started out beautifully. I was using a new brand of almond flour that I thought felt really moist as I was measuring it out, but it baked so nicely that any concerns I had disappeared. For a time.

When it came time to flip the joconde upsdide down onto parchment sprinkled with sugar (so it wouldn't stick) and peel off the paper I'd baked it on, the nightmare began. The joconde was super, super moist. Even fully baked, it was not the dry spongey cake I knew. It was a wet, soppy sponge that clung to the parchment, to my fingers, to my spatula. It was everywhere, in pieces ranging from the size of a dollar bill to a single crumblet.

Mon dieux! Merde! Zut alors!*

(* Crap!!)

I had too many other things to do and no time to remake it, so I took the panna cotta sheets out of the freezer, dropped the joconde crumbs on top of them, sprayed a piece of parchment paper heavily with cooking spray, covered the joconde mess with that and then grabbed "the Persuader"* and rolled it flat using as much pressure as I dared to without hurting the panna cotta.

(* Darth Chocolate, one of my favorite chefs at school, called the french pin The Persuader, which still amuses me to this day. And a french pin is just the kind of rolling pin that looks like a plain dowel with no curved ends or handles.)

And it worked. The joconde flattened out and took to the panna cotta. All was well. Crisis averted. Here's a shot of my panna cotta army, or at least about a third of it, as they were being taken out by the servers:

And here's a closeup of one of them... I'm particularly happy with my blueberry sauce, which I made on the fly with no recipe and a determination to use neither cornstarch nor gelatin. It was a gorgeous deep, deep purple-black color that reminded me of a shade I once dyed my hair in college... "Midnight Eggplant," as I recall.

These Are A Few Of My Favorite Things...

2008-07-26T22:01:00.003-06:00

Anything with lime in it. Anything with ginger in it. Rum. Specifically Gosling's Black Seal Black Rum, which has been getting assorted pirates, rakehells and British sailors drunk for more than 200 years.

As some of you may well know, it's ginger (ginger beer), black rum and fresh lime juice that combine to make a Dark and Stormy, incidentally my favorite drink.

Tonight I made a DnS using super easy homemade ginger beer and I don't want to sound too pleased with myself or anything, but I do believe I acheived the Platonic Ideal of the cocktail.

Or at least the Piratical Ideal.

If you like ginger, you've got to try brewing your own ginger beer. Grate about 2 to 2.5 cups of fresh ginger (don't peel it!), put in a pot, add two cups sugar (I used organic 100% cane) and six cups water. Stir, bring to a boil and then keep it at a simmer for a couple hours until it's dark and syrupy. Store in fridge and strain the next day (I used a strainer and two folds of cheesecloth.) Store in fridge.

When ready to experience rum-laced beverage heaven, get a pint glass, fill with rum to taste (fellow pirates: not all the way!), add about a third of a cup of syrup and top off with club soda and a squeeze of fresh lime.

Then sit back, put up your feet and savor. While I think that next time I'm going to make the syrup with even more ginger (because I really like the bite of it), I have to say the clean, fresh taste of the ginger syrup was miles better than most commercially sold stuff, and was also less sweet.

So drink up, me hearties, yo ho!

Everyone's A Critic... Especially Me

2008-07-24T08:48:00.005-06:00

Since I'm working on some writing projects again, my Inner Genghis-Khan-as-Editor has reared its ugly head and bad spelling and/or writing irk me even more than usual. (I'm not saying I'm perfect... I know I have errors in this blog, for example, but I don't present it as professional writing, either. And I think I do okay given its "stream-of-conscience," as I've seen it (mis)spelled, nature.)

As I was scanning the online reviews of the new X-Files movie (because yes, I Want To Believe), I found this little nugget, written, ostensibly, by a professional reviewer:

Superbly made with an edge of the seat tension that lingers, X-Files fans will be more than satisfied as the credible and incredible sit side by side in an explosive melee.

Nevermind that, as the sentence is constructed, the implication is that X-Files fans are superbly made.

Nevermind the unpleasant image of lingering edge of the seat tension (makes me think of hemorrhoids).

I just want to know... can anything "sit" in a melee, nevermind an explosive melee?!

Yeah, I'm being persnickety. If I were back in the newsroom, I'd stomp around muttering for a few minutes to get it out of my system, but as I am in my pajamas eating my fish curry (yes, I eat fish, and curry, for breakfast) and Wiley doesn't feel my pain, I needed to vent.

Great Culinary Adventures in, Uh, Weirdness

2008-07-22T22:45:00.003-06:00

A couple months back, LLQool sent me a photo she took of a poster in a convenience store down South advertising the Budweiser Chelada... a heady mix of Bud, salt, lime and Clamato juice.

Yes, folks, you read right.

Clamato juice.

The thought of combining all that in a can and marketing it as something you'd want to drink both horrified and intrigued us. I can see a bunch of frat boys mixing it up at a kegger trying to make a signature cocktail (I mean, I know people who drink Red Bull with Jager and not only live to tell about it, but claim to enjoy it). But for one of the country's biggest brewers to market it nationally?

Huh.

I saw it a couple weeks ago at the local supermarket, sold in singles. I had to try it. I opted for the Bud Light version because I didn't want to waste the calories, assuming I didn't spit it out.

"This any good?" asked the cashier, wrinkling her nose at the word Clamato splashed prominently across the can.

"I don't know, but it sounds disgusting."

She nodded, then gave me a look: "So why you buyin' it?"

Ah, my dear cashier friend, that would take too much explaining. Just put the Beermato can in my canvas Trader Joe's bag* and send me on my way.

(Aside: I picked up most of my canvas grocery bags over the years at Trader Joe's in Nevada, Illinois and New York, and was horrified to learn the nearest TJ's to here is eight hours away in Albuquerque (I know it's eight hours because I checked, thinking it might be worth a drive one weekend). I just assumed there'd be one in Denver or Boulder. In all seriousness, had I known the nearest TJ's was eight hours south and the nearest Ikea was eight hours west (near Salt Lake City) and there is no H&M for miles and miles in any direction, well, I might not have moved here. And, apparently, I am not alone in my yearning for cheap high-quality olive oil, affordable RGBH-free Gorgonzola, 100% pure Italian Blood Orange juice for a song and basement-priced pumpkin butter. Several times since moving here, as I carry my TJ bags around the store, I have been accosted by strangers who run up to me with a wild look in their eyes and ask, in the same desperate yet hopeful tone: "Is there a Trader Joe's around here?!" I say no, the bags are old and from elsewhere, and receive crestfallen silence in reply. I feel their pain.)

(Another aside: I don't drink Bud or Bud Light. Actually, I don't drink beer much at all, and when I do have something in that general category it's a Newcastle or Guinness or something else I can't see through. From my dim recollection of trying beers in college when I was attempting to be cool, all mass-produced American beers taste kinda like, well, lightly-carbonated pasta water mixed with the yellow Triaminic cough syrup.)

As you can see, the Chelada has a kind of eerie glow to it. I liked the look of it, actually, and thought it would be cool to serve at Halloween in a punch bowl with those plastic ice cubes you can get that light up inside.

(No, my glass is not dirty... I took a sip before I took the picture, so the bits on the rim are, uh, lime bits and residual Clamato. I guess.)

The taste... well... if you drained a can of tomatoes, took the liquid and lightly carbonated it, you would approximate a Chelada. No obvious beer taste (no pasta water or yellow Triaminic). Thank the gods no clamminess. Just kind of watery, slightly salty tomato-ish fizz.

Actually... I kinda liked it.

I'm not saying I'll trade in my black rum and Dark N Stormies anytime soon. Or my blood orange sage martinis. Or my Nutty Bushmen (Frangelico and Amarula... try it and thank me later). Or my Newcastles. Or my damn cheap red wine with cheetahs on the bottle.

But, well, offer me a ladleful from a glowing bowl at Halloween and yeah, I'd drink it.

Add some fresh tomatoes, garlic and onions and you've got a decent gazpacho too, I'm guessing. Freeze it into a granita and serve it with some chilled shrimp. Poach some tilapia in it and serve warm or chilled on a green salad with some good olives.

Uh-oh. I'm coming up with recipe ideas. I may... have to buy more.

Girl and Dog

2008-07-22T22:38:00.002-06:00

I will say this: I live in a beautiful place. I've lived in some scenic places (downstate New York, Moscow, if you remove the Russians, New York City...), but this is probably the most gorgeous place I've ever lived, aside from Newfoundland (because nothing can compare with icebergs and 500-foot-tall fog banks).

I mean, this is what I see when I drive the 150 miles (round-trip) to the nearest Target:

Me: Isn't it spectacular, Wiley?

Wiley: Yeah, whatever... ooh! Is that deer poop? Yummy!

God Works In Mysterious Ways... and Meats

2008-07-22T22:03:00.003-06:00

Jesus appears on a potato chip, his mom turns up on toast... but don't think American Christians are the only ones to witness the divine in the delicious.

No, now Muslims in Nigeria are getting in on the act. Read about it here.

I can't decide if my favorite part is that the apparent expert in divine meat products is a vet, or that local scholars allegedly see the boiled and fried meat as proof "Islam is the only true religion for mankind." One would hope the scholars will have a back-up justification for Islam's righteousness once the meat starts to rot.

Dr. Virago: given your recent ruminations on transubstantiation (yes, I'm reading the blog... I just don't feel smart enough to post a comment on it!), I ask you and your learned peeps to weigh in on this, er, meaty topic.

The Transcendent Power of Metallica

2008-07-18T08:22:00.002-06:00

Don't worry, non-metal friends, this post isn't really about Metallica, though Jaymz and the boys do play an important role in this guy's epiphany.

For those of you too scared or too lazy (hey, I understand) to click on the link without a better sell, there's a Capuchin monk in Italy (and not a young one) who, after attending a Metallica concert, embraced heavy metal and eventually formed his own band.

Yes, he is still a Capuchin monk, venturing out of his cloisters (if that's the right term... Dr. Virago, where are you when I need you?) only to, you know, warm up the crowd at the Monsters of Rock Festival.

I am not making this up.

From the clips on the BBC segment about him (link above), he sounds pretty good, and he certainly has the devil horn hand gesture down.

I just love that the Vatican is apparently letting him do this (mad props to you, Pope Benny!). I love that his music is apparently not a callow attempt to get youngsters to church more. He just seems to dig the metal.

As the guitarist for Monster Magnet once said as we stood together watching a fireworks show at a music festival, "Dude. That's awwwwwesome. Duuude!"

Indeed.

Must See Video

2008-07-14T09:28:00.003-06:00

I know I said I'd be posting less, but you have got to see this. It's apparently all over the Net, but I found it through my iPal Tommy over at Macerating Shallots. Thanks, Tommy.

Here's the YouTube link, or watch it over at Tommy's site. As for me, I haven't figured out how to post direct links to YouTube videos, but it's worth the extra click or two for you to get there.

You can also see it at the guy's own website if you have Flash9 (click on Dancing 2008).

Not to be too embarassing, but the first time I saw it, I cried (in a good way). I am a sucker for that kind of music, but also seeing so many of the places I've been, from Dublin to Munich to the Ala Archa Gorge (yes! he went to Kyrgyzstan!) made me really nostalgic. The whole thing is filled with such guileless joy that it made me want to get up and dance.

Don't let me crying stop you from checking it out...

Rocky Mountain Randoms - The Clafoutis Triumphant Edition

2008-07-13T21:32:00.004-06:00

Victory, my friends. Victory at last.

We've been trying to put a rhubarb clafoutis* on the menu for a couple months now, with experiment results ranging from disastrous to frustrating.

(*Clafoutis, kluh-FOO-tee, is kind of a rustic mating of a baked custard fruit tart and a souffle. They're delicious just out of the oven, with a tender, puffy custard and tons of fruit, usually cherries, served in a ramekin or a tart shell.)

Lumpy and I must have made a dozen batches over the past several weeks, trying Chef's recipe, my recipe, baking at higher temps, baking at lower temps, with a water bath, without one, letting the batter sit, using it right away.

Every time, the batter either souffled magnificently and then collapsed like a Giuliani bid for the Oval Office or simply sank into itself and became a hard, eggy disc of disgustingness.

Argh.

Damn altitude.

Finally, Witless of all people brought in a clafoutis recipe from one of her books that intrigued me immediately. There were no ground almonds as in several of the other recipes, and the proportion of flour to liquid was higher. It also called for kirschwasser, and I feel any recipe demanding the inclusion of alcohol is worth trying.

So, earlier this week, I sauteed some rhubarb, par-baked some pate sablee shells (pate sablee, or "sandy dough," is flaky but sturdy, something between a pie crust and a shell made of cookie dough... I like using it for tarts because it can take a lot of abuse and still taste elegant), whisked together the batter, at the last minute decided to add an extra egg, poured it in and held my breath...

And it worked.

Holy crap, it worked! The clafoutis didn't souffle up quite as much as at sea level, but after baking they didn't sink, either, and they had none of the nasty texture or taste of raw flour that the others had. When der ErlkonigRedux asked for the recipe, I knew I'd achieved the unachievable. Whoo hoo!

I actually took a victory lap around the kitchen, but subtly enough that I don't think anyone noticed.

Today I reheated one of them to see how the texture/taste might suffer, dusted it with confectioner's sugar and paired it with a walnut brown butter ice cream I'd made earlier in the day. Chef liked it enough that it's going on the menu next week, which both thrills me and fills me with terror... what if it was a fluke? What if the planets were in alignment just for that one batch? What if I go to bake off more next week only to have them turn into inedible hockey pucks of chewy egg matter??

St. Honore, watch over my clafoutis and keep them safe from the thin air...

In other news:

- I rode my bike to work for the second time this week yesterday. The ride to the ranch wasn't too horrible, though I still think of it as my own personal Bataan Death March, only on wheels. The ride heading home started out actually kind of positively. I made it up a big hill without having to stop and walk, and I felt pretty good about it. Then I turned onto the main highway that runs along an area of the valley called "the flats." Flat, paved highway good, right? Au contraire. I was cycling into a ridiculous headwind the entire time. I mean, crazy wind. It took me almost twice as long to bike the three miles of flats as it did to cover the three miles of hilly gravel and dirt road. Grr. I have a bruise on the bottom of one foot from slamming the pedal down so hard in an attempt to move forward against the wind.

Why do I do it? Because I hate it so much, I guess. Like Darcy says in that classic scene from the BBC adaptation of "Pride and Prejudice": I will conquer this.

Whether it's clafoutis or finding a way to cycle without wanting to run myself over and end it all, yeah, I will conquer this.

- Some of you have expressed concern that I appear to hate living in Colorado, so I just want to clarify: there are a lot of things I really like about it here, and on the scale of places I've lived, Ski Podunk ranks higher than anywhere I've lived in New Jersey, higher than Warwick (NY), Virginia or Las Vegas. It goes without saying that it's way higher on the list than 'scow, though if I could separate Russia's rich archeological landscape from, you know, the actual Russians, it might get higher than Vegas on my list.

But I digress.

I'd say this place is tied with Madison (WI), though it falls short of Munich, Rhinebeck (NY), Milwaukee or New York City.

I am a lot happier now that I'm in a two-bedroom apartment with views of the Divide from my bedroom window, with all my stuff out of storage (and all over the new place as I've yet to organize it). It's nice getting direct sunlight and not having to listen to the boilers bump and grind all night (my studio apartment that I just vacated faced north, under a heavy overhang, and was above the boiler room so it was always dark and hot and noisy... come to think of it, it was like living in a submarine.) Wiley seems a lot happier, too, and we both enjoy finding new places to go walkies.

The hiking opportunities and the scenery here really are amazing, and I've already gone on at length about the wildlife sightings and cool geological formations.

(Best wildlife sighting so far happened while my laptop was dead... it happened on my birthday, actually, when Chef came over to me working at my station and said, in typical deadpan style, "there's a bear outside." I expected to see a tiny black speck on the other side of the meadow, like when people got all excited about a moose a couple weeks ago. Instead, I went outside and sure enough there was a black bear, an enormous black bear, loping around our driveway between the restaurant entrance and the dumpster. The maintenance guys were in pickups and golf carts trying to shoo it away. Eventually it barrelled off into the woods and sat behind a tree, scratching its ear and looking annoyed at the crowd of us standing there watching it.)

That said, the cost of living here is higher than I'd figured, especially for stuff like fresh produce. And as I've posted before, I'm whelmed by Coloradans' manners. Take my neighbors. I live in a four-plex apartment, with all guys in the other units. All four of them (two live alone, the guy above me has a roommate) watched me move in, carrying boxes for hours at a time over a week-long period (one of the supernice, superstrong maintenance guys at work moved my furniture for me, God love him... including my seven-foot-tall Ikea bookcases, which he carried single-handedly!).

Not one of my neighbors offered to help, or even said hello. One closed the door in my face as I labored with a heavy box (damn National Geographic collection!). Another actually stood hiding behind his truck (I saw his shadow behind me) trying to avoid making eye contact lest I ask for help. I mean, I wouldn't ask for help, but Jesus, is the thought of being neighborly so frickin' odious that a grown man needs to hide behind his truck??

My neighbors upstairs take the cake, though. One guy is very slick and chatty and never home. I've gathered that the lease is in his name (the landlord seems to think only one guy lives there... one guy with a Samoyed, which is what he told him). In any case, Mr. Absentia has not one Samoyed but rather two Great Pyrenese puppies around a year old. Mr. Absentia was away when I moved in, "visiting his ex-wife in Washington" according to his roommate, whom I'll call Glub because it suits him. Glub does not appear to groom, or even wash regularly, and moves at a rate that would make a snail roll its eyes. It appears to me that car salesman-y Mr. Absentia found Glub drinking in a bar or downing Chalupas at the nearby Taco Bell Express and said "hey man! let's be roomies!" and then saddled Glub with perpetual dog-sitting. (Mr. Absentia, for the record, is currently in Hawaii for two weeks, or so he told me before disappearing again.)

Glub, it would seem, not only doesn't like dogs, but doesn't know what to do with them. When I moved in, he was keeping the dogs out all day on the balcony, without shelter. Dogs being dogs, especially puppies, they pooped and peed when they felt like it. And all their poopage and peeage dripped down onto my deck, directly below. Not only did it stink to high heaven, but before I realized what was happening, some of my boxes and my bike pump got dumped on. Ugh.

Nothing was ruined, but as someone who tries to be a responsible dog owner, I got really wrapped around the axle. I went upstairs and yelled at Glub, who was apologetic but also seemed genuinely surprised that the dogs would poop and pee if left out all day.

Then Glub tried leaving the dogs in the poorly fenced yard behind our building all day. Several times I or another neighbor wound up running around trying to wrangle the dogs back after they jumped the fence or simply pushed through one of the gaping holes in it.

Again, Glub seemed shocked, shocked I tell you, that the dogs had gotten loose. Repeatedly. Several days in a row.

Glub has been keeping the dogs inside since then, but three times this week, now that Mr. Absentia is away again, when I got home and opened the hallway door, it stank so badly of poop and pee that I nearly passed out. I know it's not Wiley, so I think Glub is now letting the dogs do their business in the hall or something. Or maybe he's the one peeing and pooping. From the look of him, I wouldn't be surprised.

It's too bad, because they're nice dogs and I like them, even though their main leisure activity seems to be rolling a bowling ball around over my head and barking, for hours on end, when Glub goes wherever he goes at night for a cold one and a Chalupa.

Then there's Keith, my next-door neighbor, a portly trucker in his 50s who swaggered his way over John Wayne-style my third day here and announced "You better clean up after your dog. I've already had a few go-rounds dealing with them," waving his hand in the general direction of Glub and Mr. Absentia's unit.

I said "Yeah? Well, you haven't dealt with me yet. Hi, my name is [Pirate]. Nice to meet you, neighbor. And, by the way, what did you say your name was?"

He got all defensive and puffy in the way bullies get when someone slaps them upside the head and tells them "hey, you're kind of a jackass."

Anyway, rambling though they are, I think the above anecdotes illustrate why I'm not charmed by the locals. Some are nice - the librarian, as I mentioned in an earlier comment, was friendly and offered to help me fix my computer, and the chick who finally did fix it was also nice. But by and large, I'd say New Yorkers are a friendlier, more considerate bunch.

Yeah, that's right. Noo f'n Yawkers.

I like most of the people at work, but we don't share many interests beyond the kitchen. That's why your emails and blog comments and postcards and boxes o' booty have meant even more than usual. So thanks.

- A big plus of living here, and a big fascination for me, has been the hummingbirds. I've never lived anywhere where there were so many. I put up a hummingbird feeder on my now pee-free deck in hopes of luring them the way they're lured to the feeders all around the ranch. The first couple days, I got nothin'. Then I had one of the big red ones come and stick his beak on one of the feeding holes and dash away as if I'd put rat poison in there, leading me to run out onto my deck and shout after him "come on! It's organic simple syrup fer crissakes! That's not good enough for you?!"

For a while I had a complex that the 25% organic sugar, 75% water mix I'd made based on what I'd read was wrong, that they didn't like the taste or that it wasn't red like the commercial syrups you can buy to fill your feeder. Over the past week, however, I've been getting several repeat customers at dawn and again at twilight. They buzz past and around like tiny Apache 'copters, fighting each other for the syrup. Hey, it's organic, little birdie. Tell your friends.

We Are Living In the End Times

2008-07-10T20:45:00.003-06:00

This is completely off the subject of baking, pastry and even triathlons, but I had the most disturbing conversation today with Witless. We'd finished our work for the day, had set up mignardises for the night and cleaned our area, when we sat down in Chef's office (he was in a meeting).

Witless and I were mulling over ideas she has for her "dessert of the day" (every intern who does a rotation with me, lucky devils, has to present Chef and me with a plated dessert to serve as a special the last day of their time under my thumb... I mean, under my tutelage.). She actually has some good ideas and is thinking about seasonality and food cost, something none of the other interns did. She's still trying to use warm butter to make flaky pie crust, but that's another matter. I'm proud of the thought process she's got going on for her dessert.

Anyway...

She mentioned she was having a terrible time completing her extern manual because she's never done "freewriting."

Wha-huh?

"I learned to write using the Jane Schaffer Method."

The wha'?

"Haven't you heard of it? They're using it in schools all across the country."

Witless proceeds to enlighten me about this "method." Every paragraph has eight sentences. The first is a topic sentence. Then the next sentence provides a concrete detail. Then the next two sentences are comments, followed by another concrete detail...

She went on, in frightening detail that took me back to reading "Animal Farm," when the residents list the rules to the newcomer.

"So, what if you wanted a paragraph to be just one sentence, emphasizing a point or creating dramatic tension?" I asked.

Witless looked at me blankly. "You can't do that."

Oh. Sweet. Baby. Jesus.

She was struggling with her extern manual because no topic sentence was provided for her.

Let me explain, because she's got the same damn extern manual I had a year ago. Each week of your externship you're supposed to do a different module in your manual. The modules are numbered, titled "Food Cost Analysis," "Marketing Strategies" and so on, and at the top of each module is, dare I say, something of a topic sentence, such as "Discuss your extern site's marketing strategies, both internally and externally."

Answering these all-but-handed-to-her questions was apparently too much for the youngling.

Wow.

Wow.

I felt so sorry for Witless then. At some point, early in her young life, it was clear that some no doubt well-intentioned teacher had embraced the Jane Schaffer method like the Taleban embraced fundamentalism, and had beaten out of her any spark of creativity or independent thought.

I was so upset by her comments that after work I went online and did some research on this method. Thank the gods I went to school in the 20th century. Thank the gods I don't have kids. I swear I'd homeschool them. I may kidnap my friends' kids and homeschool them. Just a warning, guys.

I shudder to think about the millions of students out there learning to "write" based on a formula that demands mind-numbing conformity for conformity's sake. I weep for the millions who apparently will never know the pleasure of constructing a water-tight argument with a rhythm and pace of their own design.

I mourn those who will never dare to write a single-sentence paragraph for fear of being misconstrued.

On a related note, a couple weeks ago when Lumpy was still working for me (I haven't killed him... he's on garde manger at night now, switching spots with Witless), I told him to double a recipe. I can't remember which it was, but I know it was frightfully easy, no more than five ingredients, all of them in grams for gods' sakes. He reached immediately for my calculator.

"You don't need that. Just double it."

"Okay," he said, punching numbers into my calculator.

"Do it in your head. Just double it."

"Uh-huh," he said, still using the keypad.

I took the calculator away from him and said he wasn't allowed to use it to double a simple recipe, and as punishment he had to go do something tedious (I can't remember what... it might have been dipping petit fours in pate a glacer for a couple hours) and I would make the damn recipe. I mean, honestly.

I understand better now -- and I don't think I'm stretching too far on this -- how most of the country accepted the Bush administration's rationale for going into Iraq, why people seem content to have the media cover Paris Hilton's latest exploits and why, when I made what I thought was a brilliant reference to Djibouti while rapping for Keanu the line cook, I received a roomful of blank stares.

People, at least most of the people around me, especially the younger ones, seem to have lost or never developed the capacity to think. I'm not talking about intelligence, about people being smart or stupid, or having curiosity about the world. I'm talking about cognitive organizational and reasoning skills. You know, like "the burners shoot fire. Fire hot. I should not touch the burners." They've achieved that level, most of them, but moved no further on.

It's disheartening, to say the least.

Uh-oh, yet another single-sentence paragraph. I'd better log off now before my WiFi signal is traced and the Jane Schaffer Police come and break down my door with their jackboots and drag me off to a cell where I am forced to read US Weekly until I am capable of no thought more complex than coveting Kate Hudson's designer hobo bag.

(And by the way, the pro-Schaffer people I found online, and they are legion, seem to take the side that students are not capable of developing on their own as writers. That smacks partly of patronizing gibberish and partly of lazy-ass teachers who don't want to invest the time and effort into, er, teaching (most of Schaffer's biggest fans appear to be teachers). I'm sure it's easier to grade a paper based on whether the second sentence of every paragraph is a concrete detail, and I can understand underpaid and overworked teachers looking for an easy way out, but there has got to be another way. I think of Dr. Virago and all the effort she puts into teaching her students. I think of a handful of teachers/quasi-mentors I had at all levels who encouraged me to think outside the box and challenge myself to be a better writer. We need to encourage logic and reasoning and independent thought, now more than ever. Do they ever the Schaffer Method in New Zealand? No? Then I'm totally emigrating.)

Rocky Mountain Randoms - The "HA! Girl can cook!" Edition

2008-07-09T20:46:00.003-06:00

So, here's a wee tidbit of updates until I get my blogging groove back, post-laptop crash:

- In an attempt to train for my next tri, I rode my bike to and from work today. It's a six-mile trip (each way, for a round-trip of 12 miles, the distance for bikes in a sprint triathlon), half on paved highway frequented by cyclists and perfectly flat (but windy). The other three miles are half paved hilly road and half hilly dirt and gravel road.

Every meter of it is hell. Even the flat bits.

I am the world's worst cyclist. As I told someone recently, the only thing thing Lance Armstrong and I have in common is surviving cancer. I'm trying, I really am, but I am slow and weaving and unsteady and miserable the entire time. I need an enthusiastic but patient cyclist to explain shifting to me, to reveal how one can stand up on the pedals without falling over, or let go of the handlebars to grab a water bottle or pick the bugs out of one's teeth, also without falling over. Sigh. I finally checked my times from the Danskin Triathlon. As expected, I was good in the swim, slow but not horrid in the run and only ten people from being dead last in the bike portion.

Ugh!

- On my Spectrum of Grossly Over-Generalized Opinions of People Based On Geographic Location, Coloradans rank only slightly higher than Las Vegans, mostly because the people here at least know how to drive. Coloradans generally interpret the "independent pioneer spirit" as meaning they'll do what they want, when they want. Case in point: the Denver Danskin Triathlon I did last week. Spectators were roaming around the transition area (closed, theoretically, to everyone but athletes) with dogs and strollers and not caring one jot whether they were in the way of a woman trying to rack her bike and put on her running shoes to finish her race. There were even several spectators who simply joined their wives/girlfriends/whatevers on the race course, clogging up an already narrow path. One guy biking the cycle course (clearly neither a participant nor volunteer) shot back at someone who told him to quit: "It's a public road!"

The women in the race also displayed more "mememe" attitude than other Danskins I've done. People were more surly about passing aggressively on the bike course (granted, like the run, it was a too-narrow out-and-back rather than a roomy loop, but still.). One woman wouldn't move over to the right when a faster cyclist was trying to pass. The faster biker was just shouting "on your left! ON YOUR LEFT! MOVE IT!!" until the slower (much slower) woman shouted back "I'm in this race too!"

Not at your speed, honey.

The triathlon got me thinking, in fact, about a recent book I started reading about, then stopped because I knew it would only irk me. The author cherrypicked stats and data to "prove" Republicans are nicer, more charitable and generally more decent humans than Democrats. Now, I subscribe to the position that jackasses come in all stripes and colors and political persuasions, but after the Denver tri, I'm not so sure... Colorado is, after all, the reddest state I've done a tri in by far. If anything, the people I encountered at the tri were more selfish, less considerate of others and generally crankier than in either Massachusetts or Wisconsin. Go figure.

Despite the less-than-wonderful experience at last week's tri, by the way, my enthusiasm for appearing in front of thousands in my swimsuit in exchange for free water bottles has not ebbed. I'll do one again. In fact, I am doing one again, at the start of August, back in Denver. Coloradans, it's a chance to redeem yourselves in my eyes and prevent you from sinking, as a group, to the level of Russian cops and urban Tunisian men on my Spectrum of Grossly Over-Generalized Opinions of People Based On Geographic Location.

And trust me, you really don't want to be stuck with the urban Tunisian men.

- Wiley is doing his best to adjust to our new apartment, which is in a town just south of Bullwinkle Ranch. We live in a bit of a white trash 'hood, with lots of trailers and half-assembled trucks in the yard, but it's quieter than our old place and much roomier, with plenty of walkie opportunities. But there are the dogs. Everyone here it seems has at least one dog, usually two or three or four, and, well, with the exception of a miniature Schnauzer with a Napoleon complex, Wiley, at 75 pounds, is the smallest dog in the 'hood. There are Labs and big mutts and many, many Malamute-type behemoths. Few are on leashes. Poor Plush Smalls was extremely anxious about going outside the first several days, but has slowly gotten used to three or four or six dogs running up to him all at once to sniff his butt. He's even made a few friends in the 'hood, which is heartening. But he's also developed an adorable morning ritual: every morning, he tentatively sniffs the air as I open the door and then sticks his head out cautiously. If he sees another dog, he slinks back inside. If the coast is clear, he jumps out, puffs out his chest and gives the 'hood a good, solid "WOOFWOOFWOOFWOOFWOOF!"

- We have family meal, like many kitchens, every night about an hour before service starts. One of the cooks, almost always Keanu, throws together the scraps, the random bits of things we're trying to get rid of and serves them up to the cooks and servers. Last week, I had to make a lot of pizza dough for an event. Chef told me to make a couple extra half-sheets for Keanu to use as family meal. I asked if I could make it instead, and whipped up a Central Asian style pizza.... spinach, garlic, onions and a lot of meat from the "mixed meat" container of all the ground scraps, heavily seasoned with cumin and curry and cinnamon and other secret spices, all the flavors I experienced traveling in the 'stans and to a lesser extent Turkey and the Middle East and, dare I say it, Russia.

While Keanu is an awesome cook, he never makes stuff like that; his family meals are always either Mexican or cheese pizza. The cooks kept drifting by as I worked, lured by the exotic scents. When I finally took it out of the oven, they descended on it with such fury that very few of the servers even got to try it. I saw a few of the cooks wolfing down four pieces each.

I asked Jerry, my favorite line cook, if he liked it and he was ecstatic. "Ha! Girl can cook, huh?" I said, much to his merriment. "Yeah, finally you made something worth eating!" he laughed... he, the guy who devours all my scraps and actually lingers around my station when I'm cutting brownies, knowing I'll give him the end pieces.

The Long Road Out Of My Own Private Gulag

2008-07-08T21:46:00.005-06:00

At last!! Today I was able to find someone in the Valley to recover my lost data files, after which I was able to restore my hard drive to the lean, mean, slightly unstable machine it is. I still don't have a tv, and haven't unpacked my stereo from whichever box it's in, but being back online is itself a delight.

I still have to re-load a bunch of plug-ins for this battle station to be fully operational, so you'll have to wait a couple days for a full update in the long, tedious detail you've come to expect, but in the meantime:

Here's a brief pictorial of my latest adventures, in the kitchen and beyond, accompanied by my loyal, panting yet pantless sidekick, AdventureDog:

I did dessert trios for a fancy-pantsed function a few weeks ago entirely on my own. The shot below is of the last few plates to go out. I'd already plated 60.

Here's me and Cerdic, my trusty Saxon warhorse (or, er, my bicycle) at the Danskin Triathlon in Denver at the end of June. I know my tri-suit is not the most flattering piece of clothing I own, but you know what? That thing on the green ribbon around my neck is a finisher's medal. Dat's right, homes, I finished my third triathlon, one I didn't train for aside from checking the air in Cerdic's tires that morning.

Today, on a day off (yay!) Sir Smalls and I drove to Rollins Pass, elevation 11,660 ft., where they used to drive cattle over the Rockies to their summer grazing spots, and walked a little ways on The Continental Divide Trail. Not to give too much information, but when nature called I debated whether to answer on the Atlantic or Pacific side of the watershed (the trail runs right along the Divide). This shot has a rather Sound of Music quality to it, doesn't it?

Much more soon, now that I'm back online! Whoo hoo!

The Pastry Pirate Returns... sorta

2008-07-03T18:59:00.002-06:00

Just a quick post to all who've been wondering where I am. I am in the library, using the computer like a commoner. Shudder.

I haven't been posting partly because, in the past three weeks, I moved to a new apartment closer to work, completed my third triathlon (and, even though I didn't train for it, I did spend an awful lot of time thinking "gee, I should train for that thing.") and, tragically, my laptop died. First I was getting the blue screen of death with a stop error code, but now I get the even more frightening, otherworldly white screen with gray font, prompting me for a password to my hard drive that I never had.

It's going to take some time to fix, if it ever can be revived, but thanks again for all the good wishes, e-mails, posts and ponderings "where the hell are you?" I hope to have things shipshape sooner rather than later, and to post at length about the tri, things pastry and my latest hiking adventures.

Till then, here's a line I love from an email the Dread Pirate Iron Bluebird sent, forwarding the e-newsletter from the guys who came up with Talk Like A Pirate Day:

You never really know if you can fly if you don’t throw yourself off a cliff from time to time.

Rocky Mountain Randoms - The Finally Summer Edition

2008-06-09T21:05:00.003-06:00

Things I have experienced for the first time since moving here to live in the shadow of the Continental Divide:

- Cows stretched on the grass, grooming themselves like cats. Really.

- The weather phenomenon called "virga," defined as snowfall that evaporates before it hits the ground (defined here not by Wikipedia, but by Bill the server when I asked him "what's this virga thing I keep hearing about?" one day at the restaurant. Chef overheard us and, the next day, told me to hurry up onto the deck. "Look! That's virga!" he said excitedly, pointing at some mist hanging between us and the Divide. "I dunno. It looks like mist to me." "No, no, it's virga." "How can you tell?" "I know virga." "It looks like mist to me." "It's virga.").

- Guys wearing cowboy hats and boots standing in line at the local supermarket in pairs, each guy pushing or pulling a cart piled high with frozen pizzas, beer and canned goods. After eavesdropping on a few of them, I realized they were actual cowboys stocking up on provisions to take back to the summer ranch now that the herds had relocated for the warmer months.

And I still say "Actual Cowboy" is an excellent name for a band.

- Driving in bright sunshine and 70 degrees, noticing a car coming toward you covered in snow, a hint of what's about two miles ahead.

- Rain and hail storms that last about 30 seconds but, as they track eastward, catch on the tips of the mountains and gather over Boulder and Denver, just on the other side. I've been trying to capture this with my camera, because it is So. Cool. The storm clouds bunch up and turn black right on top of the mountains, while where I am, it's cloudless and bright sun, even though it's only a couple miles away. It's like being in Minas Tirith and looking across the fields of Pelennor to Mordor.

- Swimming in the indoor pool of the Y of the Rockies, where the wall nearest the lap swim lane is solid glass, and being able to look out the window and see nothing but clouds that are noticeably closer than they are at sea level. It's like swimming in the indoor pool of the Y of Bespin.

- Swimming anywhere at 8500 feet above sea level is it's own special experience. When you come up for air, your lungs fill, but not with anything useful. It's like thinking you're drinking heavy cream but instead you get a mouthful of skim milk, only instead of butterfat you're missing it's oxygen.

- Planning a hike up around the cool igneous tertiary dyke rock formation I found a couple months ago, I was thwarted by a rushing stream between me and the rock. It was too deep and too swift not just for me, but definitely for AdventureDog. So instead we wandered off into the woods of the Never Summer Wilderness Area, found an old, old logging road (so old that the saplings springing up between the wheel ruts were twice as tall as me) and, after following moose and mountain lion tracks, found another, more eroded igneous dyke caused by a lava flow (the Never Summer Mountains are the only volcanic range in the Rockies).

Pretty cool.

A shot of my geologic obsession (torrent of snowmelt at its feet not visible):

The second wall we found:

AdventureDog, with the wall in the background. His hindquarters are wet because he fell into a stream while drinking water and couldn't get out. Good thing I was wearing my waterproof pants, because I had to go in to get him out. But he still seemed to enjoy himself.

Post(s) of The Month... and they ain't even mine!

2008-06-07T21:28:00.002-06:00

Dr. Virago has been going gangbusters the past few weeks digging up hilarious YouTube videos. First she dug up a brilliant spoof of one of my favorite songs, "O Fortuna." I will spare you the many in-jokes she and I have about the song and just say that, if you know what's good for you, you'll go to her post and experience it for yourself.

Then yesterday she posted both the original and a bizarre cover of "Wuthering Heights." She and I have a long history with that song, too, but even if you've never heard of Kate Bush, I urge you to indulge in watching both videos, as well as a related Monty Python clip. When you're watching the original Kate Bush video, just remember that she was on a major record label at the time... then ask yourself if that song, and especially that video, would ever see the light of day in today's music industry.

In any case, "Wuthering Heights" remains one of the creepiest pop songs ever, and I just wish that Rammstein would cover it with Bjork on guest vocals. I really believe that would work.

Oh, and also, I decided long ago that if I were ever kidnapped I would feign a breakdown and sing "Wuthering Heights" over and over until my captors couldn't take it anymore and let me go. I think about these things a lot.

Also, if anyone ever forced me to karaoke, that's the song I'd pick. I'd have the bar emptied in seconds.

Enjoy the posts.

Rocky Mountain High

2008-06-02T23:34:00.003-06:00

Wiley and I took the long way to the Boulder Target today... usually it's a two-hour drive (each way), but this time we made a bigger loop by driving through Rocky Mountain National Park... its famous Timber Line Road, the highest continuously paved road in North America, was finally open. It cuts across the Divide topping out at more than 12,000 feet, and although it opened officially for the season on Memorial Day weekend, it was closed soon after.

"We've got blowing snow, hurricane-force winds and visibility of less than 20 feet," said the friendly ranger when I called last Monday to see if the road was open.

Today, however, the only obstacles between us and Timber Line were the carloads of other tourists who freaked out at the sight of a moose 100 yards off the road and slammed on their brakes to take pictures and gawk. Sigh.

I did get to see my first elk up close. He was lounging by the side of the road, in shade under a tree, apparently camouflaged from most of the tourist traffic, since I was the only one who slowed down as I passed (slowed, not stopped to take pictures and gawk... I was more concerned that he would get up and dart in front of my car).

Wiley had his own wildlife experience... While we were stopped at a scenic overlook, three very sassy Lesser Chipmunks (actual name) came up to get a closer look at him. One was particularly cheeky and had a bit of a staring contest with Smalls.

Here's a shot of my long-suffering Focus, Kali, parked near the highest point of Timber Line Road with the Never Summer Mountains (my favorite mountain range name ever) in the background. You may also notice the tall pole behind my car... They're stuck all over the side of the road and parking lots to guide the plows clearing the road for the summer season because yes, the snow does get that high. Up to 35 feet, I've heard.

Right about at the highest point of Timber Line Road... Look at that tundra! Pretty dang cool. Literally. It was very windy and about 40 degrees cooler than it would be in Boulder a couple hours later.

More tundra (foreground), more mountains (background, the Gore Range, I believe)... there's something exhilarating about looking across to mountain tops instead of up at them, you know?

Beep Beep

2008-06-02T23:11:00.002-06:00

I thought of titling this post with the more obvious "Who Do You Love?" but, since "Roadrunner" was always my favorite Bo Diddley song, and it seems like a proper send-off for the guitar great, I'm going with the "Beep Beep" instead.

Hearing today that Diddley had died wasn't surprising (the last time I saw him was years, years ago, and he looked a little shaky then), but it put me in a reflective mood. I first learned of Bo Diddley reading an interview with Joe Strummer, who cited him as a big influence. A little later, I got a double live album of Diddley (yes, vinyl... this really was back in the day) from my brother as a birthday gift, if memory serves. Or maybe I just stole it from him, like I stole his London Calling album. Remembering the specifics of ownership are a little fuzzy in my middle-aged head, but my reaction to hearing those primal, perfect guitar riffs was not. Wow.

"Roadrunner" was one of the first songs I learned to play on the guitar by ear. Unfortunately, it was also a song I attempted to sing, and I'm sure the neighborhood dogs' ears never recovered from a teenaged girl's shriek of "I'm a roooooooadrunnah, babeee! Beep beep!"

In any case, I don't mean to sound old, but thinking back on Strummer's comments leading me to discover Diddley made me feel that most kids today are getting cheated. With all the interviews I've read in the last decade, I can't think of many rock stars and rappers and pop idols who really reach back and reference someone as an influence, unless that individual is appearing on their new album, has just died or is on the same label and said interviewee has been told to shill for them. It's unfortunate to think about all the great music being lost because its maker doesn't have a Facebook page.

So thanks, Joe. Introducing me to Bo Diddley is something else I have to thank you for. And thanks, Bo, for your music. Maybe you and Joe are jamming together up there in that Great Gig in the Sky along with Layne Staley, Syd Barret, Pete Farndon, James Honeyman-Scott and Keith Moon. Oh, wait a minute. That would sound horrible. But wherever you are, I owe you one.

The Laminator's Secret Weapon - Rugelach!

2008-05-25T22:56:00.004-06:00

It was a busy week at Bullwinkle Ranch, and after working six days straight, I'm glad to have a couple days off. On Thursday, the fancy-pantsed restaurant reopened - with my dessert menu. I had to demo how to plate each dish, then let the servers try it so they could recommend it to guests, etc. Chef said he was very happy with it, so I'm happy with it, too, though there are always things I want to tweak and fuss with.

Friday was a rehearsal dinner for about 100, with bread pudding and caramel ice cream to plate with help from Chef and Dopey, my assistant for the week (thought I think Chef's nickname for him is more appropriate... Lumpy).

Saturday was another rehearsal dinner for another 100 people, featuring a buffet of cookies and brownies. Not complicated, but it was all leading in to Sunday, with a dessert buffet for 120 people with five different items. (All these days, I'm also prepping the desserts and mignardises for the dining room, plus doing the coffee shop items, etc.)

Here's a shot of the latest mignardises, including a petit four made of cake scraps, berry jam and marzipan, and a mini-lemon tart about the size of a quarter that I made from left-over puff pastry and extra lemon curd - I love it when I find a use for scraps!

To complicate things, on Saturday, two of the bridesmaids for Sunday's wedding asked to speak with me. Turns out the wedding cake they brought in from God knows where (we don't do wedding cakes on site because we don't have the space, a fact that secretly delights me as they're probably my least favorite thing to do) was a mess.

The chick they got it from gave it to them on a cheap black plastic tray with no means of transferring it without wrecking the border, a moot point since the border itself had melted and crumbled. They asked if I could do anything with it. Chef and I looked at the cake and I have to say, by the power of St. Honore, I was pissed. I was really angry that someone would sell such a crappy cake. Nevermind the frosting was that heinous powdered sugar and shortening crap. The sides were crooked, the border crumbled off and uneven where it was intact, and the whole thing was lopsided.

Here is a shot that doesn't do justice to the cake's craptastic heinousness:

I suggested replacing the crumbling borders with ganache since I couldn't replicate the gross frosting's color or texture. They also gave me some of the flowers used in the table centerpieces. And, I might add, a nice tip.

Fifteen minutes later, voila:

I'm not saying it's great. In truth, my borders aren't even, either, but they covered most of the border areas' sins and, I think, improved the overall look of the cake. The flowers helped a lot, too.

I left before the cake-cutting ceremony on Sunday, but I'm hoping my repair work was enough that no one noticed anything about the cake other then it going into the bride and groom's mouths.

Meanwhile, about a month ago I did a conference call with the events coordinator and the bride about the dessert buffet. She asked what I could do and I said the usual, cream puffs, fruit tarts, yadda yadda yah. Then she asked if I could do rugelach.

"Arugula?" asked the events coordinator, confused.

"No, rugelach," I said, then added I would be happy to, and what flavor did she want.

A couple weeks went by as I waited to hear her final selection of buffet items. Then, one day, Chef came over and asked if I'd ever heard of something called "rugala."

"Rugelach? Yeah, of course. I think I'm making it for one of the weddings at the end of the month, but I'm waiting to hear back from the bride."

Chef nodded thoughtfully, waiting for me to say more. Then, a little impatiently, he said "So what is it?"

Really?

I told him it was a pretty traditional Jewish baked good, a semi-laminated, enriched dough filled usually with fruit such as apricot or prune, or nuts, and folded similar to a croissant.

"Well, I never heard of it," he said.

A couple days later, I heard him asking someone else if they'd ever heard of "rugala."

"Arugula?"

Right up until the wedding, I was amazed at the degree of rugelach ignorance in the kitchen. I guess growing up in the greater New York area, where rugelach are as common as doughnuts, I just took for granted that everyone knew the flaky, addictive treat.

Time after time, as I baked off test batches with different fillings (I had to make the filling from scratch, with no recipe), the conversation went:

"What are you making?"

"Rugelach."

"Arugula?"

"No, rugelach."

"I've never heard of that. What is it?"

Only the woman who runs the coffee house, who lived for years in the Milwaukee area, didn't miss a beat when I offered her some of my test batch.

"Oh, yummy! I love rugelach! I like making it, too."

I don't mean to sound like a snob. I just think little cultural disconnects are funny.

Saturday, the bride came into the kitchen asking if she could look at the room where the ceremony would take place. I offered her some of the rugelach, and she said it was perfect. But the best compliment I got about my "arugula" has come over the past few days, from Chef himself.

"So. That's what it is. It's good."

"I really like that rugelach."

"The rugelach is good."

"I like the rugelach."

Then, the ultimate huzzah... he took some home to his wife.

Meanwhile, as I banged out ten dozen of them Sunday afternoon in about an hour, I found myself thinking, with some irony, how much I enjoy laminating, and how relaxing I find it. I say "ironic" because lamination was always stressful and I never had a feel for it.

Then came that hellish breads class right before graduation, when I was The Laminator. I never want to work the 0200-1200 shift again, but I think doing all that danish lamination alone in the middle of the night, not quite awake, in silence, in the semi-darkened bakeshop somehow caused the act of lamination to sink into the fibers of my being in such a way that it's now like a meditative exercise.

I don't have to think about it - I can't think about it. When I've tried to show the interns and explain what I'm doing, I screw it up. But left on my own with dough and a French pin, I might as well be sitting in lotus position and chanting "om."

And yes, I semi-laminate my rugelach dough. Not everyone does, I know, but I think it really improves the flakiness. After making the dough using a basic 1:1:1 ratio of butter, cream cheese and flour, I chill it well, then roll it out keeping it cold and give it a couple folds.

And apparently, it works.

One of several trays of my magically delicious rugelach:

The bride ended up choosing apricot rugelach, chocolate cupcakes, chocolate flourless cakes with raspberries, cream puffs and fruit tarts for the buffet. Here's a shot of one of several platters I sent out Sunday with the help of the intern Delilah, on her last day before returning to school:

Moose on the Loose

2008-05-19T22:23:00.003-06:00

When the weather is good here, it's outrageously wonderful. Such was today, so I skipped cleaning my thumbnail-sized apartment and doing laundry in favor of taking Sir Smalls on a car ride and a couple hikes.

I had hoped to get up to a reservoir that's at 10,000 feet, almost right on the Divide, but alas the last five miles of road was snow, mud and potholes that might have swallowed whole my much-abused Focus.

On the plus side, as I was doing a 90-point U-turn on the steep, narrow, muddy road, I saw Something Big just to the side. It was a moose...

I saw three moose idling by the side of the road driving home from work last week, but they were girls and calves and just not as impressive as Big Boy over here. After driving a safe distance back down the mountain, I took Wiley for a walkies along a logging road where we saw plenty of evidence of other mooses... meese... moosi in the area. Keep in mind that I have big hands for a girl due to my height... I wear a men's large glove.

Then we drove to the Indian Peaks Wilderness and were able to walk along an old mining road that, last time we visited, was covered with six feet of snow.

Wiley was, as usual, doggedly keeping up with me though I think he was hot and tired and sore. No complaints from the old little scrapper. And the view at the end was worth it:

A New Hallmark Greeting?

2008-05-19T00:42:00.005-06:00

A couple days ago, in the final hours of prepping for the huge black-tie affair Bullwinkle Ranch hosted on Saturday, I was scrambling to finish six different things and Chef was helping Keanu strain 80 quarts of venison stock. He looked up and said: "[Pirate], I would totally be in the shit without you."

Uhm, ok. I can see the greeting card... cover: pastel soft-focus flowers with gold script, "Just a Note to Say" and inside, in same font, "I would totally be in the shit without you." I can't believe Hallmark hasn't thought of that yet.

Anyway, I'm not one to need constant reassurance, but it felt really good to get some acknowledgement of how hard I worked on the dessert buffet... nine different kinds of desserts for 400 people. Plus I made 24 pounds of puff pastry (by hand, no sheeter) and baked it off in sheets for savory tarts, plus I made four pans of jalapeno-cheddar cornbread, plus I made 200 mini-cinnamon rolls for a "breakfast bites" buffet in the other restaurant...

Even though I had prepped and organized and planned for Saturday, when it came down to it, there wasn't much time for photo-taking. I was feeling a little down going into it, because, in my experience, women in fancy gowns and men in fitted tuxedos, there to see and be seen, never eat, especially a dessert. I remember in Vegas, when I worked the ice cream station at the annual board meeting for the hotel and had exactly one customer in four hours, and how the chef in charge was nearly in tears at the end of the night because no one had touched his gorgeous sushi set-up, with fish flown in that morning from all over the world.

So I was feeling kind of "I did all this work for nothing." Well, was I surprised. The people pounced on the desserts like hyenas on a downed zebra. I swear I don't know what got into them. The servers were bringing back empty platters faster than we could refill them. For a couple hours, it was madness.

Here's as much of a photo recap as I could manage:

I was happiest with my mini-tart tatins, literally bite-size. I poached the apples in cider, Calvados, cinnamon and rose water. As for "rose water?? what were you thinking??" I do believe apples are related to roses, and besides, shaddup, it worked.

Anyway, here's a shot of the platters in progress before the hyenas arrived. As a bonus, it's also a surreptitious shot of Chef, refilling the coffee machine. One of the things I really respect about him is his work ethic. He'll wash dishes, peel parsnips, take out the linen and get down on his hands and knees to clean the ovens (and refill the coffee machine) if it needs to be done.

A close-up of one of the platters. From left to right, flourless chocolate cakes with raspberries and cream, cream puffs, my freakin' adorable tart tatins, lemon bars, carrot cake with apple cumin butter and cream cheese frosting, financiers soaked in Amaretto, filled with ganache and capped with a candied pecan, more lemon bars and tart tatins and, finally, opera torte mini-slices:

And one more shot for good measure... on the far right is a row of coffee truffles. They were such a nightmare to make. The kitchen was so hot with all the ovens and burners going that my chocolate kept going out of temper and the coffee ganache balls kept liquefying. Like most of the items, I wound up finishing them in the walk-in. And I'm proud to say, 200 coffee truffles later, my chocolate Did. Not. Bloom. Hell yeah.

In addition, I also did plates with bite-size poundcake pieces layered with fresh berries and bruleed sabayon that servers brought to people sitting at tables. I didn't get a picture of that in all the chaos, but you get the idea.

Whew.

The Chronicles of Adventure Dog

2008-05-19T00:35:00.002-06:00

Just a couple quick photos of our hike today through Gore Canyon... Wiley was such a trooper, even scrambling over a spot in the trail that had been washed out. He slept well on the ride back home.

Heading up into the canyon...

Getting Wiley to stand still and pose is never easy... but there's something about this shot that works for me.

Just Wondering...

2008-05-18T23:48:00.002-06:00

Driving over the gorgeous Ute Pass this evening, trying to avoid the deer and the spot in the road where a flash flood had created a five foot deep, twenty feet long sinkhole (a nice guy in a pick-up told me I could detour through a ranch, which he had just done), I happened to tune into a Christian rock station, briefly.

The lyrics of the song went something like "for those who work, heed the call of the father and you will work no more..."

Uhm. Is it me, or is that a really un-Christian concept? Isn't idleness the devil's playground or something? And what if the listener understood the context of "those who work" as "those who have their act together"? Just wondering...

Part of me wanted to hear what other hijinks resulted from heeding the call of the father, but the rest of me just couldn't stand the bad production and nasal, overearnest vocals.

So I put my Kid Rock tape back on.

Yes, I have a cassette player in my car. Them CDs and new-fangled iPod-things are for you youngsters.

You May Refer To Me As Teng Kai Mao

2008-05-18T11:27:00.003-06:00

I just visited a special pre-Olympics page on Chinese ettiquette and whatnot, where you can get your Chinese name (for entertainment purposes only) and find out your Chinese Zodiac. I was a little disappointed that my previously cool Zodiac sign, the Year of the Rooster, is now apparently known as the Year of the Chicken (not nearly as, er, cock-sure), but I found the name amusing.

Apparently, in Chinese I would be known as Teng Kai Mao, which means (this is the best part) "thick, lush, dense and talented."

Indeed.

Go here to get yours.

Rocky Mountain Randoms: The Bread and Circuses Edition

2008-05-12T19:42:00.004-06:00

A long post, but hopefully something for everyone.

Yesterday, I accidentally went to Wyoming. It's not as carbon footprint-shameful as it sounds... the state line is closer to me than Denver is, after all.

I had a day off, it was a gorgeous day, and I decided to head to North Park. As an aside, "park" here in Colorado, at least regionally-speaking, means a valley in the mountains, a relic from the French word used by, well, French trappers back in the day. I live, technically, in Middle Park, and North Park is just over the Continental Divide from me, while South Park, to the, duh, south, is the setting for the Cartoon Network show of the same name.

So, anyway, I headed to North Park, which reminded me of Central Asia -- miles and miles of high steppe with snow-capped mountains glistening on all horizons. I really liked it, and kept seeing interesting rock formations and such until, next thing I knew, I saw this sign:

Wiley and I hiked a bit in Routt National Forest, right on the state line, where Sir Smalls decided to chase a marmot nearly over a cliff:

In other news, training for my triathlons this summer has begun in semi-earnest. I went swimming at the Y for the second time in a week today. I would go cycling and hit the trails on foot, but we keep getting snow! Another foot is expected in the next 36 hours. Anyway, today at the pool I learned an interesting fact: the lifeguard told me I couldn't wear my flip-flops from locker room to pool because everyone had to be barefoot. I said I wasn't willing to risk athlete's foot and he said "I know, I felt the same way when I moved here from Indiana, but I found out that no one gets athlete's foot here. The stuff that causes it can't survive at this altitude."

You learn something new every day.

In the little victories department, a couple weeks ago I asked Chef if we could get organic, cage-free eggs. He shrugged it off, but then, last week, when we got our food order in, I discovered that we had new eggs... from an organic, cage-free purveyor. Huzzah!

And finally...

Bread, as you may know, is probably the most scientific discipline in the baking and pastry world. At school, I was taught to calculate things like desired dough temperature based on room temperature, humidity, flour and water temp and even the "mixer friction" - the amount of heat generated by the actual mixing of the dough. My bread chefs were constantly tinkering with formulas (bread recipes aren't even called recipes... they're formulas!) to take into account new shipments of bread flour, the time of year, the phase of the moon, etc.

At Bullwinkle Ranch, I mentioned to Chef a while back that I'd like to start trying to do breads, because he currently buys them all par-baked and just finishes them in the oven for service. He shrugged.

Last week, a 50-pound bag of bread flour mysteriously arrived in house.

And Friday afternoon, Chef casually mentioned that he'd forgotten to order bread for the Saturday wedding so could I make dinner rolls for 150 people!!

Sure, out of the blue, with no time to tinker and take into account altitude, equipment and so forth, I'll just whip up 450 rolls...

Sigh.

The best breads are made with a preferment, such as a poolish or biga, which is essentially flour and water and a little yeast mixed 24 hours or more before you make the actual dough. This gives the bread better, more complex flavor and also a more desirable crumb, or interior. So I started by making a poolish for the next day, then tried to make a couple doughs that didn't require a preferment.

First, I took der Brotmeister's Sunflower Seed Roll recipe and scaled it down to fit our lone 20-quart mixer. To give you an idea of the scale, I'm used to making bread in a 40-, 60- or even 80-quart spiral mixer made specifically for bread production. Our mixer is a general, jack of all trades mixer with a low speed that's about the same as a high speed on a real bread mixer.

Sigh.

Also, we didn't have sunflower seeds, so I substituted pumpkin seeds and walnuts. The dough never rose like I wanted it to in the jerry-rigged proofer I made out of a hotbox and hotel pan of hot water, and it baked crazyfast (damn altitude!). At sea level, the rolls bake for 18 minutes at 440F... I had them in for 11 minutes at 400F and they nearly burned.

Sigh.

I also took a recipe for Zopfe (essentially, gentile Challah) and scaled it down and made individual Kaiser rolls instead of braided loaves. The rise was okay (I suspect a mathematical error converting the fresh yeast called for in the formula to the dry yeast we had on hand was the undoing of the Pumpkin Seed Rolls), but even lowering the oven to 375, the rolls baked too fast and got a thick crust before taking on color.

Sigh.

Saturday morning, I arrived at work to find my poolish had died. Because of the altitude, yeast's life cycle is accelerated, and I had no time to experiment to find the right time frame. I used it anyway, and it actually made a nice lean dough... but not a baguette dough. (By the way, "lean dough" just means it's flour, water, yeast and salt, as opposed to an "enriched dough," such as challah or brioche, which contain butter and/or eggs, sugar, etc.)

It was supposed to be a baguette dough, but I could tell it was too soft. God knows why. It could have been an error converting the formula, meant for an 80-quart mixer, to one that would fit in a 20-quart, it could have been the altitude, it could have been the mixer friction or the phase of the moon or seismic activity in Fiji... who knows.

I took the wet dough and made mini-Ciabatta out of it. Here's a shot of the ill-fated bread basket, my first attempt at baking bread at 8500 feet above sea level:

At least they looked kinda cute.

Sigh.

The Wine Chronicles: Bottle Two

2008-05-12T19:36:00.002-06:00

Stormhoek Pinotage, South Africa, 2006, $12: served with a spinach salad with goat cheese and garlickey pinto beans. I had high hopes for this wine, since it was the first straight, non-blended pinotage I'd be trying after enjoying the Sebeka and Herding Cats blends. It was jammy and very berry-ish, but had a touch more puckery tannin than the other South African wines I've tried. I know many serious red wine drinkers like tannins, but I don't. Also, coincidence or not, but I got a splitting headache every night I drank this (I worked my way through the bottle over three nights). So my verdict is: eh. It was okay, but I wouldn't buy it again, especially since, for the same price, I can get two bottles of Sebeka!

What Have I Done Now?

2008-05-07T23:47:00.002-06:00

Several weeks ago, I signed up to do the Denver Danskin Triathlon, slated for the last weekend in June, even though my training so far has consisted of getting Cerdic my bike out of the storage unit I rent and purchasing a trisuit from REI (I had a coupon!).

Tonight I learned there is another women-only sprint triathlon in Denver in August, this one for Tri for the Cure, an offshoot of the Race for the Cure behemoth. I decided to do it, and when registering they gave me the option of creating my own personal fundraising page.

I did it, mostly because I was tickled with the idea of adding "The Pastry Pirate" to the list of do-gooders displayed on the Tri for the Cure page.

If you want to make a donation to Team Pastry Pirate (motto: "fueled by rum and rage, though not necessarily in that order"), or if you just want to check the page out, here's the link.

And thanks for your support, even if it's only muttering "Christ on a crutch, I hope she at least gets her bike tuned up and remembers to stretch before the event."

My New Job

2008-05-07T17:41:00.002-06:00

Check this out... hmmm, I already have experience baking at high-altitude. Okay, not that high, but still...

In the Interest of Research...

2008-05-06T22:13:00.002-06:00

I'm starting a new semi-regular thang here on the blog. Today I drove to Boulder to use my member's coupon at REI. I bought an inflatable kayak, because dammit, I needed one, plus I scored a deal on buying a paddle at the same time. Alas, the kayak was on sale, so I couldn't use my coupon on it... so I had to find something at full-price to buy. I bought more Superfeet High Volume insoles, the same ones I have in my hiking boots, for my kitchen shoes. I highly recommend them for anyone who spends a lot of time on their feet (the green ones only, though... those are the High Volume ones).

The Superfeet insoles were also on sale, as was the Gorillapod flexible tripod I got for my camera (Coolest. Thing. Ever.). I wound up buying some maximum compression leggings and a triathlon suit so, you know, I could take advantage of that 20% coupon.

In any case, while in Boulder, I also stopped at the storied LiquorMart. They had unbelievable prices (my Sebeka cheetah wine for seven bucks!) and an incredible selection. One of the salesdudes kind of followed me around and kept asking if he could help, and I finally said yes.

I was interested in trying some of the Spanish albarino I keep reading about (there should be a tilde over the n, but I can't figure out how to get that character), so he steered me to a couple choices. He also kept asking me about my preferences and seemed knowledgeable but not snobby, so I let him recommend another pinotage from South Africa that does not have cheetahs on the bottle and a few other Spanish wines.

I asked him about my weird reaction to some red wines (the flushing, the shortness of breath and feeling that Andre the Giant is sitting on my chest) and how I haven't had that when drinking the South African wines. He said it was because they had no added sulfites and were produced "the old way." I dunno about that, but he recommended an organic, sulfite-free merlot and cab blend from California and, for eight bucks, I decided to give it a try.

I left LiquorMart with a dozen bottles, most of them brand new to me and less than $10 (the most I spent per bottle was on the two albarinos, which were $15 and $16). And I feel my research should not be kept to myself. So, every time I open a bottle, I'm going to tell you about it.

Tonight's bottle, served with Korean-style cabbage and green onion pancakes, was a $7 Riesling. I bought it as a lark, mostly for the name: Funf (which just means "five" auf Deutsch, but is a fun word to say). There should be an umlaut over the u, but I can't figure out those whacky foreign characters on Blogger.

So:

Funf, German Riesling, $7. Essentially white grape juice. Not syrupy sweet but definitely not on the dry side. Much like Keanu, the line cook I adore, it's uncomplicated but pleasant. No exciting (or appalling) notes. I know I'm supposed to say something like "citrus on the nose" or whatnot, but it really wasn't complex enough. Drinkable, certainly, but not something to try to impress anyone over 22 with. Probably worth the seven bucks, though I wouldn't buy it again unless the only other Riesling available was Mondavi (shudder).

Stay tuned as I drink my way through my LiquorMart purchase, sitting in my inflatable kayak wearing my tri suit. It's a dirty job, but some pirate's gotta do it.

Sheep Swarm!

2008-05-06T11:09:00.004-06:00

Yesterday Wiley and I drove out to Dinosaur National Monument, in the very northwest corner of the state (the monument itself straddles Utah and Colorado). It was a nice drive, first through the mountains and Steamboat Springs and then into ranchin' land. I suspect it's the emptiest corner of Colorado, though I haven't been to the southeast yet... there was nothin' for nowhere for miles.

We stopped for a walkies in the town of Craig, where the local park was full of wooden sculptures. The style of several of them reminded me of an illustrated (and probably bootlegged) version I had of The Hobbit in Russian. Others were just odd:

I guess it's supposed to say something like "we hold the lives of the unborn in our hands" but between the flames at the bottom and the aggressive, to my eye, hand posture, I call it "Fetal Fist of Fury."

Anyway, Dinosaur National Monument itself started out as a bust. There are two roads in. The first one, which leads to a scenic canyon drive, was closed due to mud and snow. I'd checked the website the night before and it said which roads were closed - that wasn't one of them. Humph.

The visitor center for that entrance was also closed, but reading the notice board I saw that there had been a recent mountain lion "encounter" with a hiker and also that rabbits were testing positive for tularemia, poor things.

I drove to the second entrance, which is actually in Jensen, Utah, but the Temporary Visitor Center was already closed for the day. The actual Visitor Center, the one with all the fossils and cool stuff, has been closed indefinitely because of structural safety issues, which I knew from the website.

I decided we'd take a little drive and see whatever we could see, then head back home. I had the tent in the trunk, but the one campground that was open was full of RVs and river rafting groups. Yuck.

It was late afternoon and I was thinking "oh well, at least I saw the place and Wiley got to pee somewhere new."

Then it happened.

Near a private ranch that's smack dab in the middle of the monument, we encountered a sheep swarm.

A rancher's pickup (ahead on the road in photo above) just plowed through the sheep, and they moved aside, but I decided to turn around, since there wasn't anything that exciting to see ahead and I didn't want to risk running over any sheep.

I was just about to start backing up when all hell broke loose. Wiley had been staring intently but silently at the sheep (interesting note... he doesn't make a peep when he encounters livestock or deer, so something in his little head must identify them as non-dogs and non-squirrels). All of a sudden he went crazy barking...

...and so did the sheepdogs. Three of them, not little slinky border collies but big, brawny Anatolian shepherd-types (I don't know that they were Anatolians, but that's what they looked like... they were not as large as the dreaded Kavkazki Ovcharki, the bear-sized thugs I encountered in Russia). You know, the dogs bred over centuries to have a bony plate at the base of their skulls to fend off wolf attacks?

The three big shepherds surrounded the car, barking furiously. My first instinct was to roll up the windows in case Captain Adventure decided to do anything really stupid, like launch himself out of the car in a fit of deluded bad-assedness. I left mine rolled down because the dogs were not interested at all in me... it was the wolf-like berserker in my car that they wanted to get their paws on. (The shot below was through the window... sorry about the bird poop.)

I was trying to slowly do a U-turn without hitting any dogs or sheep when I heard a neigh.

Coming up behind me was an actual cowboy! Okay, technically not a cowboy, but sheepboy doesn't sound right. As soon as he arrived on the scene, the dogs sauntered off back to the herd.

He apologized for their menacing, saying "they're just doing their jobs." I said I knew, and I wasn't upset by them, it was the faux-savage dingbat barking in my backseat that I was worried about.

The light was really cool and the sheep wrangler just looked so cool on his horse, the canyons in the background, that I asked if I could take his picture. He said sure, and I said "smile!" to which he replied "it's really the horse that should smile."

I tried to get his name, but with Wiley still all crazied up (I imagine his side of the conversation was: "Lemme at 'em! I could take all three of them!"), the dialog went like this:

BARKBARKBARKBARKBARK

"What's your name?"

BARKBARKBARK

"-just like hokey-"

BARKBARKBARK

"What?"

BARKBARKBARK

"-work at Chew Ranch [actual name of private ranch]-"

BARKBARKBARK

"What? What was your name?"

BARKBARKBARK

"-rhymes with okey-dokey-"

BARKBARKBARK

I didn't want to keep asking, because there comes a time when it seems almost rude to do so, plus he had mentioned when apologizing (unnecessarily) for his dogs that they were just tired after a long day and I didn't want to hold them up. So I waved good-bye and thanked him and he shouted "drive safe" and mosied on.

The whole way back I was reminded of that Seinfeld episode where he can't remember a girl's name, only that it rhymes with a slang word, but not which slang word. In my head I was thinking "Pokey? Mokey? Gokey? Like Michael Gokey, a kid I went to grade school with who turned into a pot head and wouldn't it be funny if that was, after all these years and miles, Michael Gokey?"

In the end I could think of only one possible name, and even though it made no sense, I really liked it. So here's my shot of Loki the sheep wrangler:

Someone's in the Kitchen with Pirate

2008-05-06T00:33:00.003-06:00

Mud season is upon us at Bullwinkle Ranch. Instead of being at or near full capacity, the hotel has had one or two rooms -- or none -- booked the last couple weeks, aside from a few small conferences. It's deathly quiet, and the Fancy-Pantsed restaurant, as well as the coffee shop, is closed till the middle of the month.

While I've had to take a few three- and four-day weekends (unpaid) so Chef can keep his labor costs down, when I have been at work, I've been prepping a huge county-wide black-tie event later this month (dessert buffet with nine items for 400 people done entirely by yours truly!).

I've also been working on the new menu. Chef wants to completely revise the desserts at Fancy-Pants, and has pretty much given me free reign. Yesterday, I plated a couple ideas for him (we were the only two in the kitchen most of the day):

This is the one I'm happiest with: Chocolate-Hazelnut Molten Cake with cinnamon ice cream, hazelnut cookie and cappuccino ganache. I think visually it's the most complete, the flavors are good and it's got nice textural variety. One thing I like about my molten cake, stolen with some adaptations from one I made in Vegas, is that it's not raw in the center. It's liquid, yes, but that's because when I pipe in the batter, I insert a ganache disc that's hard at room temperature but perfectly gooey right out of the oven.

From a service perspective (something Chef is rightly concerned about), it takes seven minutes from the time the ticket comes in to plate up. The trickiest part is scooping the ice cream so it's on the plate but not melting when the cake comes out of the oven.

I'm still tinkering with this recipe. It's a Lavender Cheesecake with lemon reduction and strawberries macerated with St. Germaine, an elderflower liqueur that both Chef and the Food and Beverage manager are crazy for. Personally, I find it too sweet (which is saying something!) but hey, I know who signs my paychecks, so I'm trying to find uses for it. The problems with this dish as I see it are the viscosity of the lemon reduction (I'm trying to avoid using gelatin, but I need to add it to this to make it less runny), the berries (next time I'm quartering them, or even leaving them whole, and standing them up to avoid the "pile of slop" look) and the intensity of the lavender flavor of the cheesecake. I was worried it would be too strong, so I backed off the lavender when making it, but it turned out to be barely discernible.

All that said, look at that quenelle!! I was practicing my quenelles when Chef came over and asked what I was doing. I told him my dirty secret: I suck at quenelles. He said he did too, then proceeded to take my spoon and whipped cream and try his hand. And you know, it wasn't perfect. It wasn't as pretty as mine... though this is about the 2oth one I did.

I will say that watching a leftie quenelle (Chef is also sinister) helped me visualize the right motion and mine improved after his impromptu demo.

Quick tip to the quenelle-challenged... Anyone can quenelle with two spoons, or quenelle something stiff like a forced meat (possibly the least appetizing food category name I know). But if you want to quenelle one-handed something soft like whipped cream, put your spoon in hot water and semi-freeze the whipped cream. Don't freeze it really, just get it as cold as possible. As you quenelle, drop each one onto a Silpat-lined sheet pan or parchment-lined plate or cake pan. If you screw up, just scrape it off with a spatula and start again. Then put them in the freezer. Again, don't actually freeze them, but let them chill just long enough that they get a bit stiff. Then using two offset spatulas, transfer them onto the cheesecake or plate or wherever they're going and voila, you'll look like you can quenelle perfectly everytime.

That's what I do.

And finally, here's Carrot Cake with cream cheese frosting, apple-cumin butter, ginger ice cream and pineapple chip. Chef didn't like the plating... he wants it on a square plate because the cake itself is round, which I understand. But other than that, he liked it. In an earlier version, I had the apple cumin butter inside the cake, but a few test subjects freaked at having cumin in a dessert, so I decided to move it onto the plate. Chef disagreed, saying he liked the apple-cumin butter, but I talked him out of it, reminding him that he and I loved, loved, loved the fennel ice cream I made... and no one else would go near it, so the two of us wound up eating it. A dessert that doesn't sell because it frightens customers isn't much of a dessert, you know?

He liked the other two as well, and another one that I didn't get a photo of because I'm still working on certain aspects... it's a doozy, though. Chef said it would be a "rock star" on the menu, but you'll just have to wait to hear what it is. Two words: whisky sabayon. And that's just the start of it.

Just Because...

2008-04-30T21:43:00.002-06:00

I was shopping for a pet flotation vest for Wiley at CampMor (why? Maybe he needs one... that's all I'll say at this juncture) when I saw this photo for a product that was on sale.

Am I the only one who finds it hilarious that CampMor felt compelled to note "dog not included"?

Colorado Geologic Survey Rocks!

2008-04-30T21:15:00.002-06:00

I'm sure you've also been losing sleep over my obsession with the rock formation I saw a couple days ago.

I emailed the Colorado Geologic Survey and sent the photos, not really expecting to hear back because I only had the general e-ddress for them. To my delight, I got a reply today... and not just a form letter, but an actual reply from an actual geologist who gave me props! Whoo hoo!

Here is his answer (in my original email, I had mentioned my theory that the formation was a tertiary igneous dike):

[Pirate], good observation. That is a "radial dike," just like at the Spanish Peaks. Magma feeding a volcano filled in fissures that spread radially out from the throat of the volcano. The solidified rock is much more resistant to erosion than the surrounding material so becomes preserved. Those were some great photos, with the snow. I have photographed that feature several times and I never got a photo as good as those. Maybe I can use those sometime (with permission and with credit provided.)

Jim Burnell
Minerals Geologist
Colorado Geological Survey

Yee hah! I don't know if it means my life is so lame that getting a reply about a rock formation can make my day, but I'll take it.

And now I can rest easier know it's just a radial dike and not a portal to a fourth dimension kingdom run by flying monkeys. Because, you know, the thought had crossed my mind.

A Celebrity Chef to Celebrate

2008-04-29T23:58:00.002-06:00

By now you've probably heard about (and seen) Christopher Walken's video of how to roast a chicken with pears on ImCooked.com ... if not, check it out here.

I'd watch his cooking show any day.

Chris, if you need an assistant/guest pastry chef, call me.

My New Obsession

2008-04-28T22:00:00.003-06:00

On a paved but lonely county road along the Divide, driving just because it was a nice early evening after work and I wanted to let Wiley stick his head out the window a bit, I saw the most fascinating rock formation.

Here it is shot from the southwest:

Here it is from the south:

Here it is from the southeast:

I don't know how much you can tell from the photos, but it is a perfectly straight rock wall that goes all the way up the mountain, perfectly perpendicular to the ground. There was no continuation on the other side of the road, but around a bend I was able to see tips of it continuing north, not as fully eroded.

It was so intriguing, its engineering perfection, the sudden end of it on the south but going on for who knows how long to the north.

I went online and could find zero information on it, which made it all the more intriguing. I did waste half an hour of my life on Google Earth zooming in and out to see how far the ridge continues (Google Earth, by the way, may be the deadliest timesucker ever invented... that's why I'm not including the link. Save yourself. It's too late for me. Ooh! Let's zoom in and out on Ute Mountain and then zip over to Grand Mesa, the world's largest flat-top mountain!)

Anyway, I drove up to Rocky Mountain National Park to see if a ranger up there who's answered all my pesky questions in the past could help. He knew exactly what I was talking about, but not what it was. We paged through a couple geology books in the store but the closest thing we could find was a photo of a similar, though less dramatic formation, labeled as "tertiary igneous dikes" near a mountain in the San Juans.

I emailed the Colorado Geologic Survey but haven't heard back yet. What is it?? I must know!

Okay, back to pastry...

A Few More Photos

2008-04-28T21:41:00.003-06:00

Here are a couple more shots of our trip to Four Corners...

Ever vigiliant Wiley looks toward Ute Mountain while guarding the new tent.

We camped at Hovenweep National Monument, which apparently isn't visited as often as Mesa Verde, even though it's only an hour or so away. Hovenweep is surrounded by the Canyons of the Ancients Monument, an area that allegedly includes more than 6,000 known archeological sites. The canyon near the campground apparently has the largest concentration of these sites, mostly from the 11th-13th century, built around the same time as the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde.

I say "apparently" and "allegedly" because there was something odd about the whole area. Aside from the aforementioned canyon, which was well-marked and right beside the visitor's center, it was really hard to find any maps or brochures or online information or road signs to the other sites. Part of it is that Hovenweep itself is part of the National Park Service, but the rest of the area is under the Bureau of Land Management. I don't know if the BLM is as unorganized as I've heard, but this didn't help their image in my eyes.

I also felt, I dunno, that things are kept intentionally vague because "de Arkies" would rather people go to the carefully controlled Mesa Verde than wander around the desert near where cannibal sites have been found.

In any case, here's a shot of "Hovenweep Castle," one of the larger sites within the main canyon:

And here's a look at another portion of the canyon to give you an idea of how closely the sites are clustered. Check out the "Boulder House" in the left-center of the shot, below the rim. It's actually a house built into a partly-collapsed boulder lodged precipitously on a ledge. Oh yeah, I would have had more than one sleepless night living in that thing!

Especially knowing there were cannibals nearby...

Cannibalism Alert

2008-04-25T21:52:00.002-06:00

The lovely and talented Dr. Virago recently questioned Ranger Craig's claims of cannibalism among Chaco culture outlier sites, pointing out in a comment to the post, and rightfully so, that tour guides are not always to be trusted.

I should know. I've been a tour guide and oh, the tales I've told. Not only that, but when she and I went hiking on the Isle of Man, we did have a couple of tour guides at medieval sites who excelled in truthiness.

So I did a little research. If, like me, your interest in Mormon chick hair and making homemade skyr is bested only by a deep fascination with cannibalism, here's some, er, food for thought that supports Ranger Craig's statements.

Mormons, Kivas, but Not Nearly Enough Cannibals

2008-04-22T21:26:00.003-06:00

Here are some shots from the Mesa Verde trip mentioned in a post on Tuesday from the middle of nowhere! I would have posted them that night, but my laptop battery decided that 10 p.m. was lights out time. As with the previous shots of Wiley, you should be able to click on each image to enlarge it, if you so choose.

This is the Cliff Palace, the largest of the Ancient Puebloan (Pueblan?) cliff dwelling complexes and the only one of the ranger-guided tour ones open this time of year.

I was really surprised by how much both the general landscape and architecture reminded me of similar dwellings I've seen on Sardinia... one major difference is the number of people. I had the Sardinian sites to myself, but here, even on a weekday in mid-April, there were about two dozen people on the tour. And the ranger said it was nice to have such a small group. In summer, he said the "tsunami" arrives and 60 people go down every half-hour all day. Yikes.

I really liked our ranger, Craig, but for the first half of the tour I was trying to figure him out. He had blue eyes and red hair and a lot of sun damage, very Anglo, but he had that great cadence and enunciation that a lot of Native Americans have. As an aside, that's one of my favorite American accents, if it can be considered that (or is it its own dialect?). There's something very appealing about it. And yes, Ranger Craig is the guy who told me I looked like I knew what I was doing.

Anyway, eventually he started mentioning his "people" and his "clan" and said at the end of the tour that he was Zuni, with "some Scottish and Irish somewhere along the way." Nice guy, but after that all I could think of was how much it had to have sucked being a fair-skinned redhead growing up in the Four Corners without sunscreen. Ouch.

Sure, this is a shot of a kiva, the ceremonial underground chamber that had an ingenious ventilation system... or is it?? It's also a shot of the Mormon not-quite-fundamental family on the tour with us. They also had Gramps and Granny in tow, though Gramps stayed in the minivan for the tour. I ran into him on a trail later in the day and said hello and he just glared at me. Maybe his daughter or daughter-in-law or whatever told him I had been staring at her hair for much of the tour. It wasn't quite as lush as the Texas compound Mormon chicks, but it was close. I do believe, however, there were styling products involved.

Would Jesus Use Mousse?

In any case, I took this photo as Ranger Craig was informing us, complete with hand gestures, about how the Pueblo culture regarded the earth as mother and womb and female and the sky as male and the spring rain as consummation. I can only guess what they were thinking.

Here's a shot of the ladders and general trail getting in and out of the site. Really not that big a deal, and nothing compared to some of the stuff I've encountered hiking. Remember, the Mormon chick did it too, in a skirt, with 20 or so kids clinging to her. I was dying to see how she went up the ladder modestly in a skirt, but I wound up talking to the ranger and a bunch of old people got ahead of me, so I missed it. But I'm sure it was chastely.

Another view of the Cliff Palace, taken from the Sun Temple, giving you a little more context to the site. Craig the Ranger dismissed Sun Temple as "one of those Chaco sites," a tribe he seemed to pawn off all the nastier bits of history on. He mentioned one intriguing nearby site... there is a mountain called The Sleeping Ute, because it kinda, if you really use your imagination and don't have cable, looks like a sleeping man (Ute is one of the regional tribes, or nations... not quite sure of the correct terminology). Archeologists (or "de Arkies," as Ranger Craig called them) found a site in the "toe" of the Sleeping Ute that had human bones that had been split with axes, cut up and also "stirred in a pot." Ranger Craig swore that science had proven conclusively that the bones had been stirred in a pot, though I would love to know how they figured that one out.

Anyway, the ever-thorough Arkies went one step further and analyzed feces found in the site's fire pit and concluded it was not only human poop, but that the human poop had human proteins in it that could only have come from eating other humans.

Ranger Craig emphasized that the Toe site had nothing to do with "his people" and that it was an outlier site of Chaco culture. Of course. There's apparently a whole gory book on the site, but I don't know the name. "Toe of Death" comes to mind as an obvious choice.

I asked later at a tourist info center on the road to Four Corners how I could get to the "toe" because I'd heard there were some interesting archeological sites there, but the women behind the counter blanched and told me it was on Ute land and off-limits to outsiders.

"They found bones that had been, you know, cannibalized there!" one said breathlessly.

Yes, and stirred in a pot!

Wiley Goes Camping

2008-04-22T21:17:00.003-06:00

I didn't resize either of these photos so you should be able to click on them to enlarge 'em.

This is one of my favorite photos of Wiley ever, taken at Four Corners Monument:

Barking in four states at once. That's living the dream. (I'm not surprised I got him to bark on cue... this is Wiley we're talking about, after all, but I am delighted that I got him to stand right on the actual Four Corners.)

Here he is in the new Kelty Grand Mesa tent I ordered from Camp-Mor in New Jersey... only days before learning Kelty was based in Boulder, about 15 miles from me as the crow flies (but on the other side of the Front Range, so it's a two-hour drive each way):

"Hmmm... comfy... but I wonder where the human will sleep?"

Can You Read Me Now?

2008-04-22T20:30:00.002-06:00

Ok, I am officially impressed.

I am stretched out in my sleeping bag, beside a very smelly (great night to have gas, Wiley), very tired dog who is managing to take up about 2/3 of the small two-person tent I recently bought to replace my coffin-sized (really) Tomb Tent. We are in the Hovenweep National Monument Campground, about 80 miles from anything else in any direction, on the Colorado-Utah border.

And I, my friends, am online.

I brought my laptop and nifty Verizon wireless card just to see how good the network was and, whaddya know, that geeky guy with the glasses apparently did come out here to check if it would work.

I have a couple days off from work because of the notoriously slow Mud Season, so I came down here to the Four Corners area to visit Hovenweep, known for its 13th century stone Puebloan towers, Four Corners itself and Mesa Verde National Park, famous for its cliff dwellings.

I have photos to post, but for now just let me say I was paid the ultimate compliment this morning while taking the ranger-led tour of The Cliff Palace, the largest of the complexes.

After explaining to the group that the trail involved tight squeezes, uneven surfaces and ladders, the ranger opened the gate down into the site and said he'd stand there to take tickets and then bring up the rear.

No one moved. Eager to avoid fanny packs in my photos, I started heading for the gate. The ranger smiled as he took my ticket and said "I'm glad you're going first. You look like you know what you're doing."

Hell yeah!

Two other people were right behind me and the three of us made it down to the site about five minutes ahead of everyone else (and it's a short climb down). As we stood around taking pictures for each other and talking, I learned the woman was from Dusseldorf and the guy, also traveling alone, was from Tokyo.

Not to stereotype or anything but... the Japanese, the German and the Pirate. I think we all knew what we were doing.

Now I'll post some pictures if I can do so without disturbing Wiley, whose nose is almost in the USB port.

I Saw A Mountain Lion! I Saw A Mountain Lion! Maybe.

2008-04-19T22:50:00.003-06:00

I took today off because the sun was shining, business is slow and I just needed to get out of the valley.

As Wiley and I were heading to Denver, nearing the start of the incline up and over the pass that gets us out of the valley, the pick-up driver ahead of us hit his brakes. Just at that moment, from the corner of my eye I saw movement at the side of the road (I'm guessing he did, too).

I looked just in time to see an enormous tawny haunch disappearing into the trees. The leg was too thick to be that of a deer. I saw it just for a moment, but if it wasn't a mountain lion, than it had to be a tiger dressed as a mountain lion.

One thing I do know that we saw... bighorn sheep, grazing right on the shoulder of I-70 on the way home. It was amazing to see them so close, but I also worried that one of them would get itself killed so near the road. Wiley stared intently but didn't bark like he usually does. I'm guessing the horns freaked him out.

In other wildlife news, the bears are coming out of hibernation. No sightings yet, but I'm looking forward to it.

Anyway, we went to Denver for a couple reasons. First, I wanted to check out the site of the Denver Danskin Triathlon. Yes, I signed up for another one. Like I need more free water bottles.

I was a little apprehensive about it because I thought hmm, a tri in Denver? I imagined swimming across an icy glacial lake, biking up and down mountains and then running through bear and moose-infested woods. But the tri is actually on the southeast side of Denver, out in the nearly flat prairie lands. Whoo hoo!

Here's a shot of the reservoir I'll be swimming across and the blissfully mountain-free terrain I'll be biking and running over.

I also wanted to stop at the nearest Cost Plus World Market to buy my French Roast coffee in bulk, but most of all I wanted to experience H Mart. Ghostdog had told me about it... it's a Korean super grocery store with terrific produce and fish. I stocked up on baby bok choi and thick fresh noodles and fish balls (I'm a big fan. Really.), but I also tried a few new things, including tiny "indian eggplant" and these "indian bitter melons."

They're supposed to be a cure for diabetes (not a concern for me) and for "a failing appetite" (also not an issue!), but I'm just intrigued with the alien look of them. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, ogle the Zopfe I made (essentially, Swiss Challah) with whole wheat.

How The West Was Named

2008-04-19T22:47:00.002-06:00

Growing up in the East, I thought all towns and places had to have dull names like Patterson and Edison and Brooklyn. Why does the West have such better names? Like the hamlet of Troublesome, in the shadow of the Never Summer Mountains. How much cooler is that than, say, Hoboken?

Meet My Weather Pixie!

2008-04-18T22:53:00.002-06:00

How cool is this?

Go to WeatherPixie to get your own weather pixie, weather goth or even weather geisha to reflect the weather conditions of wherever you live!

Now, if only I could figure out how to put my pixie in the sidebar... I've tried a bunch of different things on the Blogger Dashboard, but nothing worked. Any tips?

I Skyr! You Skyr! We All Skyr... Oh, Nevermind. It doesn't work.

2008-04-16T20:03:00.000-06:00

I know my foodie friends are familiar with creme fraiche, but for the uninitiated, imagine the most creamy, luxurious dairy product possible. It's cultured cream and I love the stuff, but it's expensive to buy, nevermind hell on your arteries.

I make a cheater's version that approximates the real thing: pour a pint of heavy cream into a container (I like to use glass) and stir in a few tablespoons plain yogurt. I like a tangier creme fraiche, so I use more yogurt. Cover the container and let it sit out overnight at room temperature until it is thick and luxurious and makes you want to roll around in it. Or maybe that's just me. In any case, once it sets, stick it in the fridge and it's yours to use with fresh strawberries, in omelets, on fresh-baked bread, straight from the fridge with a spoon...

Ahem.

Anyway, aware of the trans-fat-palooza creme fraiche offers, earlier this week I tried to make a healthier, or at least less evil, version, using fat-free yogurt, half and half and reduced fat milk (as an aside, I always use fat-free yogurt, as it's all I ever have on hand). It wouldn't set, so after 24 hours at room temperature, I stuck it in a 175F oven for a couple hours. It got thick and delicious, but a day later, after resting in the fridge, the top also turned green and black. I scraped that off and have been eating it without dire consequences, but it's not as creamy or delicious.

My semi-failed experiment got me thinking about my favorite food: skyr. It's an Icelandic thing, and essentially, it tastes like creme fraiche only it's really low in fat. All the goodness, none of the guilt. I eat embarrassing amounts of it whenver I visit that wonderful little pile of rocks and sheep in the North Atlantic.

As neither my budget nor work schedule will allow a trip to Leif Eriksen International Airport anytime soon, I did some research and decided I'm going to make my own damn skyr.

Step one: get my hands on some rennet. I ordered two kinds from a Vermont cheesemaking company, both animal-based and vegan, because quite frankly when I think about what traditional animal-based rennet is, I get a little grossed out. And I'm thinking, since I've got the rennet, I might as well explore cheesemaking, which quite frankly is a little like a crystal meth addict deciding to set up a home lab.

So look for posts in the coming weeks about adventures in skyr- and cheese-making!

Unless, of course, I succumb to the bacteria rampant in my low-rent, low-fat creme semi-fraiche.

So, I've Been Wondering...

2008-04-15T22:41:00.001-06:00

This is totally off-topic, but I know I'm not the only one who's noticed that all the women/older girls at that polygamist sect compound in Texas look like Nellie Olsen. I've been kind of obsessed by it... that hair, especially. If I joined their whacky Talibanesque cult, uhm, excuse me, totally legitimate sect, would I also have thick luxurious tresses that I could sculpt into massive old-timey pouf-braids?

In any case, if, like me, you are fascinated by the fashion coming out of that compound, check this out. If you have somehow missed it, YahooNews has a great slideshow. It's like the spring collection at Milan, only not.

Tomorrow: polygamy-free news about creme fraiche and an intern cook-off! (No, sadly, we did not cook the interns. They cooked for us, which wasn't nearly as exciting.)

First the Stick, Now the Carrot

2008-04-11T20:53:00.000-06:00

I'm still waiting for The Consequences of My Actions from my Ramsay Moment yesterday, but so far no one has said anything. If nothing else, Chef was unusually solicitous of my mood and well-being today, and offered to loan me some murder-mysteries his wife is reading.

Having gotten the Despotic Baker Tirade out of my system yesterday, and having seen that the cinnamon rolls were properly baked this morning, I felt freer to work with the intern currently assigned to me and also try out a few new menu ideas.

A sidenote: in addition to live target practice with pastry yesterday, I also made a killer sorbet out of random things I found in the kitchen. I realize that sounds totally full-of-myself to say, but kitchen survey says it's a winner. Someone left frozen mixed berries thawing overnight but never claimed them, so I mixed them with simple syrup, candied Meyer lemon peel and a splash of raspberry vodka, spun it in the machine and wound up with a sexy deep burgundy sorbet that tasted like berries soaked in love and sunshine. One of the line cooks who tried it said "berry sorbet" didn't do it justice and we should call it "Magic Mountain Berry." So we did.

Today, in addition to showing Bubba* some bread braiding techniques, I worked on a carrot cake dessert.

*Bubba is the intern currently working with me, a good ol' Southern boy who claims to have no talent in the baking and pastry arena (shades of Honorephobia!) yet has put in terrific effort. He hasn't had to remake a single thing once, and his piping is nearly as good as mine.

The carrot cake is still in play, but so far it consists of layers of a moist cake with carrots, of course, raisins and spice, apple cumin butter and a cream cheese frosting I actually like -- I hate the kind made with confectioner's sugar, but the one I came up with is creamy-cheesy yet light. There are egg whites involved. Chef suggested adding grilled pineapple and a spicy ice cream, so tomorrow I'll be experimenting with Sichuan pepper ice cream.

Why? Because I can.

My Ramsay Moment

2008-04-10T22:42:00.000-06:00

It was going to happen sooner or later. This morning I had a Gordon Ramsay moment, on par (nearly) with his infamous brow-beating of a line cook by getting in his face and endlessly repeating "do you know how to cook an artichoke?!"

Background: despite my best efforts, I've been frustrated with the quality of the baked products served in our coffee shop. I (and sometimes my temporary minions) make the scones and cinnamon rolls and then freeze them and send them to the other kitchen, which does breakfast service and therefore has staff on hand to bake the items off at six in the morning. Day after day, the croissants are overproofed and underbaked, or the cinnamon rolls sloppily glazed, or the scones overbaked. The sous chef who runs that kitchen, known as LouReed on this blog, has Issues With The World and cannot be reasoned with. He has a whole passive aggressive thing about baking and pastry in particular, and dumps the coffee shop products off on the nearest hapless (and often clueless) intern with no instruction. I've tried arguing, pleading, ratting on him to Chef and nothing works. Sigh.

Today, when I dropped off the second delivery of baked goods (the ones I not only make but also finish, the brownies, cream puffs, cookies and eclairs), the woman who runs the coffee shop showed me the morning's cinnamon rolls and asked if I thought they should be sold.

Ho. Ly. Crap.

They were burned. I don't mean overbaked. I mean actually charred.

Anyone standing near me that moment might have heard the actual snap of my last straw regarding the AM bake-off. I took the rolls from her, marched over to the other kitchen and demanded to know who'd baked them. LouReed wasn't in, as luck would have it, but an intern (from my own alma mater Cookin' School, no less!) copped to the deed. I haven't worked closely with her yet, but my general observation is that she is cute and pretty and uses that to her advantage, and also that she thinks she knows everything, and anyone who disagrees with her simply hasn't noticed how cute and pretty she is.

This did not help matters.

I won't go into the specifics, but let's just say that the 15 minutes that followed included me pelting her with one cinnamon roll after another while roaring "do you think we can actually sell this?! Did you notice it was charred when you took it out of the oven?! How about this one? Were you making Cajun blackened cinnamon rolls?" I repeated this with each individual roll, noting that they were rock-hard enough that, if I threw with serious force and directed it at her head instead of her shoulder, I would actually give her a concussion.

She got defensive. Not hands-up-shielding-her-cute-and-pretty-face defensive, but "I'm not a baker!" defensive, which only made me lose it more. I don't expect the cooks, especially the students, to know about gluten development or starch gelatinization, but Christ on a crutch a learning-challenged lower primate would have noticed the product was suffering from third-degree burns. The rolls were black! I also snapped that when Chef has told me to plate a salad course or make bernaise sauce, I don't whine "I'm not a cook!" I do it and, if I don't know how, I ask so that I can do it.

Ugh.

Ugh!

When the carny-dishwasher with multiple piercings in his face stops what he's doing to come over and watch the drama, you know you've stepped over the line.

Anyway, I had Delilah with me because, in addition to my smackdown of the unrepentant non-baker, we were there to steal stuff. So after I dealt with Britni (not her real name, but it fits), we took all their ramekins (I had a creme brulee order for a party) and platters (we had to plate-up for a conference luncheon). Out of pure spite I also stole a dozen of their half sheet trays.

And I'm not sorry. I'm also not sorry for throwing blackened cinnamon rolls at Britni in front of all the other line cooks and aforementioned dishwasher, either. It felt good to wipe that cute and pretty arrogance off her face and replace it with alarm.

The only fallout was from Fredo, the sous chef I like, who came up from that kitchen in the afternoon to tell me "you've got a psycho-bone in you."

He said it approvingly.

Friends Don't Let Friends Drink and Sephora

2008-04-10T20:45:00.002-06:00

After two months of attempting to use the "free wifi"* in my building, I abandoned all hope.

(*Technically, the resort/condos complex where I live offers free wi-fi in the lobby, but I discovered that my laptop can only get a signal when I sit on the floor beside the reception area and log on before noon on a weekday before all the kids with more powerful laptops log on and stream videos non-stop.)

I bought a Verizon Internet Access acount, essentially a cell phone for my laptop, on Wednesday.

The good news is that I can now get online anytime from the comfort of my sofa, so both my blogs and emails should be more frequent.

The bad news is that, after opening a bottle of Herding Cats Merlot/Pinotage to celebrate my newfound online freedom, I wandered back to my old addiction, Sephora, and quickly ordered all sorts of sexy fragrance, lipstick and eyeliner that I really have no need for, considering my life consists of: wake up, put on snow boots, walk Wiley, drive to work, put on baggy pants and baggy jacket and non-skid clogs and pull hair up to affect appearance that is as sexy as a cafeteria hash-slinger, clock out, put on snow boots, drive home, walk dog and squander evening watching back-to-back episodes of Law and Order: SVU and Law and Order:CI on the USA network.

In the spirit of total disclosure, I also visited Aveda to order their Intensive Hydrating Masque, which I've found to be, without question, the best remedy for bad oven burns (even though it's intended as a facial for sensitive and/or sunburned skins). This week, I needed it.

Yesterday, Delilah, one of the interns, was trying to bake the goat cheese tarts needed for starters for a wedding dinner. After expressing uncertainty to me over whether the tarts were done (I told her no), she attracted Chef's attention. He came over and, made some whitheringly sarcastic comments. Delilah became upset. Upset enough that, as I was defending her, she threw the oven doors open and returned the questionably baked tarts to the oven.

Unfortunately, I was standing beside her, and my forearm took the full force of the oven doors. After just a couple hours, a dollar-bill-sized spot on my arm was blistering nicely. Delilah felt terrible about it and offered to leave work early to buy me some natural, homeopathic burn cream at a co-op ten miles away (she and I share the same appreciation for overpriced "natural" remedies), but I knew all I needed was Aveda. And a bottle of Herding Cats.

My Life In Six Words

2008-04-02T16:31:00.000-06:00

My pal Dr. Virago threw down the gauntlet, or at least let a mitten drop gently to the floor, earlier today with her post on writing a six word memoir. After devising her own, she suggested that I would not be able to fit my life into a mere six words (whether that suggests I've led an interesting life or am hopelessly wordy, I don't know).

Oh yeah?

As I commented on her blog, the perfect six word memoir for me already has been written (by Tolkien):

Not all who wander are lost.

What? I can't have my six word memoir ghostwritten, as it were, by one of the greatest authors in the English language, who also gifted to me my enjoyable Boromir/Faramir/Eomer/Witchking crushes? (Oh yeah... Witchking? Totally hot. Like Darth Vader but medievally.)

Well, okay. Then here it is, in my own (six) words:

It seemed like a good idea.

Of Frustrations and Flowerpots

2008-04-01T09:57:00.001-06:00

Aside from the wedding for 120-odd Lebkuchen-loving guests, this week was a pretty quiet one at Bullwinkle Ranch, so I had some time to play. And I remembered my camera!

But first...

I’ve mentioned in previous posts that the interns get to work with me for a couple weeks. My first minion was Delilah, the southern girl who was very anxious about baking but, by the end of our time together, seemed to really warm to it.

My current henchcook is a guy I’ll call Ghostdog (yes, after the underappreciated Forest Whitaker character). He’s very cute, and smart, and quiet, and decent, an ex-military dude who served in Iraq and grew up on a farm but has been working in restaurants for most of his life. And I like him (no, not that way... I like him as a person, and as a henchcook).

But wow, this has been a frustrating week.

He knows his way around the kitchen. He has a good work ethic. He is a bright guy with a particular interest in the chemistry behind cooking.

But sadly, Ghostdog suffers from Honorephobia (ON-a-ray-FO-bi-a).

That’s the term I’ve just coined to explain the condition I have witnessed among many, if not most, cooks. In some, it presents as a mild anxiety, such as my fave line cooks Jerry and Keanu (named for their respective resemblances to Jerry Cantrell and Keanu Reeves), who wander past my station frequently, looking for (and getting) scraps, declaring their love for me and my pastry wizardry (I know they want me only for my brownies), and then... pausing a moment to watch me pipe or knead or whatever I’m doing, saying nervously “I could never do that. I don’t have the patience.”

In others, such as Delilah, Honorephobia is a moderately debilitating but treatable anxiety disorder where the simple act of removing a cheesecake from its springform pan causes trembling and audible wincing.

Poor Ghostdog has full-blown, severe Honorephobia, symptoms of which include a complete loss of basic knife skills and common sense. I asked him to supreme oranges for my cardamom and roasted orange creme brulee that sold out (hell yeah!) and he gave me a pint of segments full of membranes and pith. When he was making a batch of cookie dough for the third time, having improperly mixed the first batch and erroneously scaled the second, I peeked in the bowl and asked if that was all the sugar.

“Yep,” he said, re-reading the recipe aloud.

“Is that really six cups of brown sugar?” I prodded.

Ghostdog looked in the bowl for a long moment. “Uh, no. I guess I forgot five cups. Good catch.”

Good catch?!

Thing is, I know he’s not doing it intentionally. I know he’s not trying to sabotage our damn cookie dough or make some kind of statement about working as the Pastry Pirate’s lackey for a fortnight. Just like I know he knows how to supreme a freakin' orange (he has excellent knife skills when cooking). It’s the Honorephobia. When many cooks I’ve met have to do anything baking or pastry related, they freeze. They lose half their IQ points. Their hands shake, they sweat. They make ice cream but forget the cream, or confuse the salt with the sugar.

I’ll set aside the why of it, because I don’t understand that (I mean, when Chef asked me to do the salad course or whip up some bernaise sauce, I did. Nothing in the kitchen is rocket science.). But what I do know is that, as the sole pastry person here at the ranch, I need to figure out how to deal with Honorephobes*.

(*St. Honore is the patron saint of bakers and pastry chefs. Naming the condition after him just felt right.)

With Delilah, a nurturing, “hey I made mistakes too, but eventually I got it right” big sister approach worked, but Ghostdog’s more severe case bedevils me. I tried the big sister approach. I tried the demanding “do it again until it’s right” chef strategy. I tried the scowl-and-silent treatment. I even tried to be a therapist (actual words: “so, when you started making the dough, how did you feel? What was going through your head?”). Nothing seems to work.

It bugs me because if he were one of those swaggering grill jockeys or simply a moron, I could just write him off, but he seems to be a good guy with talent (at least in cooking) and an interest in learning.

It’s vexing, terribly vexing. I’m terribly vexed.

On a lighter note, here are some photos of what I’ve been up to the past few days:

In addition to our signature petit fours with the ranch’s brand piped on it, rumballs, shortbread and chocolate-covered dried apricots, this weekend I added mini-flowerpots (below) to our after-dinner treat selection. Why? Because I can, dammit! Bwaa ha ha ha ha!

For a sense of scale, it’s 1.5" tall and yes, I got them to stand on their own. It’s a simple matter of cake batter, pate a glacer and Frangelico, some of which went into the cakes.

I mentioned Delilah earlier, and for her dessert, she did a cheesecake that turned into something of a disaster.

(For the time I have them, I make the interns create a plated dessert over the course of a week that we put on the menu as a special. I tell them “I’ll be the midwife, but you’ve got to do the pushing,” because I personally find the most challenging part of creating a dessert to be reigning in my ideas and narrowing down the flavor profile, the neat techniques I could use and what the dessert is really supposed to be, in a Platonic ideal kinda way, if that doesn’t sound too pretentious. I want them to have the same experience of figuring out what fits together and what should be left off the plate, because any monkey can make a mousse. It’s how you flavor the mousse and what you put with it that separates the good from the ugly.)

It’s a long story behind Delilah’s cheesecake, but let’s just say that, at the end of the day, she’d made two five-inch tall, enormo cheesecakes with a thick chocolate poundcake base but utterly no flavor. She wound up glazing one with raspberries and selling some of it, but the second was sitting naked in the freezer.

Monday afternoon, Fredo, who now runs the more casual restaurant onsite, asked Ghostdog to do a dessert of the day. Under the weather physically and worn down mentally by his Honorephobia, he told me he’d really rather not. So I offered to do it.

I didn’t have a lot of time, but I did have that big ass frozen, tasteless cheesecake.

It was round, but I cut it into 2.5x2.5x5 towers, poked vertical holes in it with a chopstick and piped in soft caramel, then glazed it with chocolate and drizzled more caramel on top. A little caramel on the plate with some candied hazelnuts and voila... recycled cheesecake gets an extreme makeover.

The angle doesn’t quite show it’s Tower of Power-like quality, but judging from the lustful looks I got carrying it to the restaurant, it’s gonna be popular. I’m just glad I was able to do something with JumboCake instead of letting it sit in the freezer.

On a related note, I really want a cheesecake on the fancy-pants restaurant menu, but since Chef and I still have not had our meeting about silicone molds he will buy me, I’m at a severe equipment disadvantage. I tried baking a rose-and-orange blossom cheesecake I came up with (yes, shades of my infamous kenefeh obsession!) using a pistachio crust in little square forms the cooks use for risotto. It souffled and collapsed ridiculously (damn altitude!) and the butter in the crust leaked out from the bottom.

Sigh.

Round two was more successful... I call it “Pistachio and Orange Blossom Cheesecake Napoleon with Rose Sorbet and Saffron Gelee.” Why? Because I can:

I left it in the freezer for Chef, who’s been on vacation the past few days, to sample.

He got some Meyer lemons in last week and told me to do something with them, so it seemed the right time to make a dessert I’ve been thinking of for a while... My Darling Lemon-Thyme. Ha! Ha ha ha!

It’s Meyer Lemon panna cotta, thyme custard, lemon reduction and a few dots of raspberry sauce for color. In my original “vision” it started out as a tart, but I think those mini-flowerpots put me over the edge and I went a little cute-crazy. Wheeeeee!

Originally I wanted a bottom layer of pecan joconde (a thin, nut-based cake), and decided to put a candied pecan on top to bring the flavor profile together, but when it came time to assemble the thing, the joconde didn’t seem to fit, so I scraped it off. But I left the candied pecan. It doesn’t fit, and I should practice what I preach and reign myself in, but gosh it’s so cute!

I don’t know if either will make the menu, but it was nice to have time to play around with a couple ideas I had in my head.

And finally... we got another foot of snow Monday, though to be honest I don’t even notice it anymore. What’s more white on top of white, anyway? But I did take a little longer driving home because it was so damn beautiful. The photo doesn’t do it justice, but low clouds just above me were backlit pink and lavender against the dark and ominous snow clouds moving in. Again.

Wine and Cheetah

2008-03-26T13:58:00.000-06:00

I’ve been searching for some time for a red wine I like and can enjoy without getting heartburn (a problem for me only when I drink red wine) or a skull-splitting headache (another red wine side effect, and we’re talking after only one or two glasses). Then there’s also my mysterious allergic-like reaction to some red wines. I can’t pinpoint the grape or the style, but at some tastings, most recently when my brother and I checked out Napa Valley in January, I'll get a sudden tightening in my chest, flush and feel light-headed. It passes after a couple minutes and no, it’s not that I’m getting tanked.

In any case, while part of me is happy to stick with my beloved Rieslings, the off-dry and the semi-sweet but not the syrupy, and the occasional bottle of mead, I feel given my profession I need to understand reds better (a side note: I can drink port without any of the aforementioned problems, and suffer no ill effects from tempranillo, though I don’t really like the taste). So the search... journey... quest... thing has continued.

Until now.

From now on, I will only drink reds that have a cheetah on the bottle.

Last week, I stopped by one of the bigger liquor stores (as you might imagine in Ski Podunk, where I live, there are many of them) that offers a discount to employees of Bullwinkle Ranch and other locals. I like them for the discount, but also because they carry my rum (Gosling’s Black Seal Black Rum) and silly girly drink (South Africa’s Amarula... like Bailey’s only better) for reasonable prices.

I was buying a bottle of Dr. Loosen Riesling when another bottle caught my eye. I’ll admit it was the name that first lured me: Herding Cats. Is that a reference to the act of herding cats or to cats that herd? I wondered. For $8.99, I decided I’d try it, mostly because it was a Merlot/Pinotage blend, which I had never tried, and it was a wine from South Africa, which I’d also never tried.

It was delish, and I was able to drink it over the course of a week without a moment of agitas or slipping into momentary anaphylactic shock.

When I made my weekly stop yesterday at Rocky Mountain Moonshine (real name), I saw they had another brand from South Africa, also featuring cheetahs on the label and costing less than $10, even before discount. So I tried Sebeka’s Shiraz/Pinotage “Cape Blend” and liked it even more.

Both wines tasted, to me, anyway, medium-bodied in a good way, and very, very jammy, especially with blackberry. Sebeka had a little more body to it, but Herding Cats was in no way watery. And, a big thing for me, neither had that nasty tannin mouthfeel that I equate with sucking on wallpaper paste or eating shoe polish.

So, while I don’t claim to be a wine afficionado by any means, and some have dismissed my preferences as pedestrian (including some close friends! You know who you are!), The Pastry Pirate officially endorses West Cape cheetah reds for enjoyable drinking with no nasty side effects.

And if either Sebeka or Herding Cats wants to send me a case to help spread the word, well, that’s fine, too.