Slumdog Salmon

Curried Salmon with Dhal

I knew I wanted to get rid of that last piece of salmon in the freezer, but I also knew I didn't have all the ingredients for the poached salmon recipe as it was written. Hmm.

For some reason I also had dhal on the brain. Now "dhal" means "split" in Sanskrit, and refers to any dried pulse that has been split in preparation or as consequence of drying. So dhal can be anything from chick pears to limas. In our household dhal generally means a 2-1 mix of masroor dhal (red lentils) to chana dhal (yellow split peas), with various seasonings. You're also supposed to add two raw green chilis, but not everyone can have the intestinal fortitude of those on the subcontinent and besides I thought too much heat would clobber the salmon. Two green chilis is a lot for two cups of anything.

So what ties together the Frenchy fish poaching fetish and the subcontinent savor? The answer is butter. Both cuisines literally drink the stuff. In this case, there is butter in the finishing sauce for the poaching liquid and butter added to the dhal just before serving. With some adjustments to the poaching recipe, the poached fish dish can be safely wed to the dhal.

In a convenients-sized pot, put 1/2 cup masroor dhal, 1/4 cup chana dhal, 1 tsp garlic, 1 tsp ginger, 1.5 tsp tumeric, and 2 tsp chicken soup base with 2 cups water. Bring to a boil, then park it on low heat and lid with convenient lid-like device. Everyone makes fun of me for using plates as lids, but truthfully they form a tighter seal than most lids that come with the cookware, and they double as serving vessels later, which goes along with my "less dishes=more fun" school of cookery.

Eyeball your salmon and figure out how many slices of onion you'll need to hold them off the surface of your frypan. What you're trying to do is create an elevated bed for the salmon to lay on so it's not sitting in poaching liquid. Arrange the oniony salmon bed in the frypan, then add enough white wine (I used cheap pinot, which was so acid I did not need to add lemon) to come halfway up the sides of the sliced onions. To the liquid add 1/2 tsp garam masala (plain jane supermarket curry powder is fine here), 2 chopped scallions, 2 chopped baby carrots (they were handy), and 1 chopped stalk of celery. Make sure the poaching liquid does not come near the tops of the onion. Your onion bed should be safely above the surface of the liquid.

Bring the poaching liquid to boil on high heat, then bring to low, place salmon skin-side down on the onions, ensuring the fish is above the liquid, and tightly cover the poaching vessel. Leave it for 10 minutes, enough time for me to make a confession.

I confess that I botched the poaching on the first pass. I was using processed Wal Mart salmon filets, which have no skin or much of anything else really. Sad skinny little suckers. Eleven minutes was far too long for such a fish, and the salmon was overdone. Thick, nice skin-on filets should take approximately 10 minutes, but for Wally World salmon or otherwise scrawny specimens next time I'll tune that down to about five minutes or less. In any case cook until the sides of the filet are opaque but the center is still translucent, and an instant-read thermometer reads 125 degrees when inserted in the thickest part of the fish. Using a spatula, remove the fish and onions to a plate and tent with foil.

Crank the heat up to medium-high and reduce the cooking liquid until it is almost dry, sort of a wet paste. Reduce the heat to medium or so and add 1 tblsp butter, swirling the butter until incorporated with the paste. Test the sauce and adjust flavorings, if necessary. If the wine you used isn't ridiculously tart like my bargain pinot was, add a splash of lemon juice for acidity. Something I might add to the sauce when I make this dish again is a little dollop of plain yogurt, I just think it'd be tasty with the salmon.

Check your dhal for doneness, then swirl in a tablespoon or two of butter and a few teaspoons of chopped cilantro or parsley. Discard onions, plate salmon topped with sauce and surround with dhal.

Dot the plate here and there with mint chutney, if you have any handy, or whatever Indian condiment you might have on hand. Speaking for me personally, I'm sort of addicted to the mysterious Swad "Punjabi mixed pickle". What is in there? It's a mystery. I honestly can't identify any of the objects in there, which as far as I'm concerned adds to the flavor. You never taste anything so hard as when you don't know what it is.

Why Did the Chicken Salad Cross the Border?

Some days it's hard to get food requests out of people. After a bit of pondering and poking at the supplies, we finally had something. "How about some sort of southwest chicken salad?" Oh yeah, I could do that. I love chicken salad and I love mexican- why can't the two get together and have kids? It'd be like a burrito at a Jewish Delicatessen. "Oy vai- ai-ai-ai-ai!"

Dissassemble one baked chicken into a big non-reactive bowl. Store-bought rotisserie chicken works for this too.

Chop up an onion, a big handful of cilantro, 2 seeded chipotles. Toss in the bowl.

Grab a can of black beans, drain, put beans in bowl with 1/3 cup olive oil and 1/3 cup lime juice. I like sour things, so you might want less lime.

Core and cube 2 avocados, put in bowl, toss so that the acid in the lime covers the avocado or else they'll turn all brown and nasty.

Chop up a little bag of Fritos and toss in the bowl.

Salt to taste. Serve with lettuce of your choice. It would also be good in wraps or in some savory corn cake type object, like sopes.

Curry from Story

A long time ago, my wife-then-girlfriend Monica asked if I knew of a green curry that had lima beans in it. She had eaten such a curry during a trip to Washington DC and loved it immensely. I was stumped. I knew that the Thais make a green curry. The color in a green curry- the Thai one, anyway- comes from cilantro, sometimes basil, and raw green chiles, making it arguably the hottest of the thai curries, at least the coconut-based ones. The Thais, though, generally do not have legume based-curries. The Indian curries do, but search as I may I could not find a green Indian curry. What if I made a Thai green curry based on lima beans? I shuttled various ingredients around and made a green curry with cashews and basil, centered around the lima beans and around raw red bell peppers added at the last moment. "How is it?" I asked. "It's good," Monica reported. "It's nothing like what I had in D.C., but it's good". Since the lima bean curry has become an institution in our household.

Splash of oil
8 garlic cloves
Thumb-sized knob of ginger
Juice of 1 lime
1/4 cup white wine
1 tblsp fish sauce
1 can coconut milk
.25-.5 can green curry
4 oz cashew halves
12 oz baby green lima beans
1 red bell pepper, chopped
Bunch basil leaves, chopped
Bunch cilantro leaves, chopped
Jasmine rice

A word about canned curry paste. I have no idea what the name of the brand is that I usually buy, but it has a tiny picture of a slightly forbidding looking oriental matron on the label. If you buy this brand and make it according to the directions on the can you will die. Well, maybe not die, but you will have a hard time eating the stuff unless you're from the same hell-planet that Madame Heat comes from. Half a can is the maximum for me, and most will probably be comfortable with .25 of a can for this recipe.

Get your jasmine rice going according to the package directions.

Heat the splash of oil in a wok until almost smoking. Saute the garlic and ginger until fragrant. Add the wine, lime juice, and fish sauce. Cook until reduced to the consistency of thick porridge. Crank the heat down to medium. Add the coconut milk, then dissolve the curry paste into the hot mixture. Reduce this until it is very thick. Add limas and allow to thaw if frozen, or to heat through if not. Add bell pepper and let it soften just a bit. Before serving, kill the heat and stir in the cilantro, basil, and cashews.

Serve with the jasmine rice.

Hot Purple Sandwiches

One of our regular dinner guests is lactose-intolerant and does not eat red meat or pork. A lot of cooks I've known would resent this, but then again, a lot of technical folks I know also resent being challenged and/or working.

The said guest is now also trying to cut down on the amount of meat, period. A fresh challenge!

I just couldn't make myself do another Thai curry, so, well, my mind wandered. How about eggplant and roasted bell peppers? My wife hates grilled eggplant, so that means frying. This was starting to sound like a really good sandwich, but it needs a creamy component, which I intended to supply via melted manchego and softened creamed garlic. Baguette could serve double duty: sliced on the bias and broiled with olive oil and bruscetta for appetizer; sliced lengthwise and lightly toasted for serving with the sandwich stack ingredients. For the side dish I couldn't get my mind off the roasted broccoli I made from America's Test Kitchen:
http://www.slashfood.com/2008/12/13/americas-test-kitchens-method-for-roasted-broccoli/
I made this brocc a couple of days ago with zero expectations. It turned out to be the best single method of broccoli preparation I've seen. The vegetable does not actually need any seasoning with this method- the natural browning of the veg, with the salt and lemon, provides more than enough depth of flavor.

Anyway, eggplant sandwiches:

Put two big handfuls of whole garlic cloves in a pan with some oil or butter, put on low heat. Every time it looks like it's getting too brown, put in some white wine, stir, deglaze, let simmer again. Eventually the garlic will have the consistency of boiled potatoes and have a nutty, slightly sweet flavor. I imagined smashing them into a creamy spread but they looked so pretty that I served them as they were.

Grab a red bell pepper. Run the tip of your knife around the stem, then make a longitudinal cut all the way around. Split the sides, pull out the seed core, clean the insides of any hanging seeds or white rib matter. Halve the sides so you have quarters. Put on an oiled baking sheed cut side down and roast in a 350 degree oven until very soft.

Peel one medium-sized eggplant and slice 1/2" thick. You'll only be using slices wide enough to fit the width of your baguette. Too wide is A-OK. Salt both sides of the eggplant slices with coarse salt, put in bowl. The salt is going to draw off a lot of moisture, you'll be surprised by the amount that accumulates.

Slice the baguette lengthwise, then, using the heel of your hand, flatten the baguette. Cut it into pieces long enough to serve as rolls for the eggplant slices.

Slice some manchego cheese into some pieces that will melt well on your eggplant patties.

Prepare the fry prep line: one plate of flour, one bowl of beaten egg, one plate of bread crumbs. Dry the eggplant with paper towls, then flour-egg-breadcrumb the lot. Reserve on an elevated rack or on paper towels.

In a nice heavy pan, heat some olive oil on medium until shimmering. Fry the eggplant until golden brown on both sides. When frying the second side, put down the manchego so it gets just a little melty, barely translucent.

Toast your flattened baguette slices.

Plating: put down two slices toasted bread. On one side, stack roasted bell pepper and some fresh basil leaves. On the other side, put an eggplant/manchego patty. Put roasted broccoli in the middle, top with softened garlic cloves.

Considerations:
>>Chevre might be better on this than manchego. If you use chevre, don't try melting it on top of the eggplant or it'll turn into a runny mess. Apply it to the eggplant at plating time.
>>I didn't measure anything here because franky I didn't have a recipe. Sorry about that. If you have extra fried eggplant slices, freeze them for later or - I love this- smother in caper butter and serve as another appetizer with lemon slices.

The Fishy Fishy Taste

Sort Of Anchoiade

The recipe for today is not one that everyone will be happy with. It might make some people run to the bathroom, just reading about it. For me, though, it's a pretty magical thing.

I'm fond of strong flavors. I like subtlety, yes, and well-thought out combinations. Chilled pea soup with mint. Vichysoisse with toasted leeks. Bernaise. These are fine things and I love cooking and eating them. Speaking for myself, though, I prefer the nuclear options, and anchoiade is one of them.

Chop 1 can anchovies with 5 cloves garlic, put in tiny bowl. Add 1 tsp lemon juice, 1 teaspoon red chili flakes, and enough extra-virgin olive oil to form into a paste. Mix it up. Let sit.

Cut half a thin banguette into slices approximately .25-.5" thick. Brush both sides with olive oil, then put on foil-lined baking sheet and broil until toasted. Turn the bread slices and repeat with the other side. Keep an eye on them because toasty brown turns to char very fast under a hot broiler.

Put .5 tsp anchovy mixture on each baguette slice. Use more anchovy mixture per slice depending on the design tolerances of your guests' taste buds.

To provide some relief, alternate this with another topping like bruschetta, chevre, or pseudorissa.

Pseudorissa

For a middle-Eastern themed dinner, with hummus, tsatsiki, smoked lamb, and baklava, I served something I called harissa which ultimately turned out to be nothing like harissa at all. Why did I call it that? The planners of the event (or someone close to them) asked for something involving roasted bell peppers, and after an internet search of "recipe red bell peppers roasted middle eastern", I got a recipe for something called red bell pepper harissa. Unfortunately for my middle eastern street cred, real harissa is made from roasted chiles and is beyond spicy. It's not something you eat by itself. I had no idea at the time how far off base I was, but though mild, my pseudorissa turned out quite good. In the words of Ian Tattersall, "Goodness, you've taken harissa and made it into something almost civilized". The pseudorissa has since become incredibly popular, and makes a regular appearance when I'm entertaining. It has the side benefit of being dirt simple.

4 red bell peppers
1 medium egggplant
1 tbls red pepper flakes
1 lemon
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
A few squirts liquid smoke
A teensy bit of paprika
Extra extra virgin olive oil for lube
1 tbls salt

I'm not going to give a big lecture on picking out product here. Just one sentence: pick out only mid-size eggplants with green stems and taut skins.

Line two baking sheets with foil and generously lube with some extra virgin olive oil.

Cut a circle around the stems of the red bell peppers, then slice in half. Knock out the seed cores and any seeds sticking to the insides. Pull out the white ribs. Place the red bell pepper halves, cut side down, on one of the lined baking sheets.

Peel and slice the eggplant into 1/2" slices. Arrange on other baking sheet. If there's too much for one baking sheet, fit them in with the red bell peppers as best as you can.

Put both sheets in a 350 degree oven until the peppers are soft and the eggplant is shrunken and somewhat caramelized. If the peppers have a lot of char on them, pull the skins off, then put the roasted flesh in the bowl of a largish food processor. The eggplant will probably stick to the foil- gently scrape the eggplant into the bowl of the food processor. Add red pepper flakes, juice of 1 lemon, salt, squirts liquid smoke, and whir until smooth.

Pour out the puree into a bowl and add 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil. Stir until incorporated. We don't brutalize extra virgin olive oil in the food processor because the whirring sharp metal turns it bitter. Add a teensy bit of paprika if it's too orange- you'll need to do that if the red bell peppers weren't ripe enough. Chill the resulting concoction overnight. Remove, taste, and correct seasoning. It probably isn't salty enough. Salty flavors are muted when chilled.

Serve with the usual middle eastern suspects: falafel, pita, hummus, etc. It's not bad as a bruschetta topping, either.

Provisioning the Lone Male: Opa!

Continuing to provision the lone male, but this time greek style. I didn't feed myself pita, but went all out on the tsatsiki. Fats are not automatically metabolized into fat tissue when you eat them before sleeping. I remember some meathead telling me, "Carbs and protein in the morning, protein and fats in the evening". Now if only I could get ahold of some of them steroids!

Chicken Souvlaki

3 tablespoons (or more) lemon juice
1 teaspoon dried oregano
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon garlic power
1 teaspoon black pepper
1 teaspoon salt or chicken bouillon
Chicken breast
tsatsiki sauce, chopped feta, tomatoes, onions, pita

Put everything but the chicken in a zip-lock bag and smoosh it around to mix thoroughly. Put in chicken, get as much air out of the bag as you can, then smoosh around to make sure the marinade has good contact with the meat. Let sit for at least an hour, optimally overnight. Grill or broil. Preferably grill. Eat.

If you're being fancy, serve with tsatsiki sauce, chopped feta cheese, tomatoes, onions, and good pita.

Tsatsiki Sauce

Cucumber
16 oz sour cream
2-4 cloves garlic, mashed (I use a garlic press)
¼ cup olive oil
Salt and pepper (about a teaspoon each)

In a perfect universe we’d use Turkish or Greek style plain yogurt instead of sour cream. Greek yogurt is basically plain yogurt with a lot of the moisture pressed out of it, but since you’d have to drive to, I don’t know, Kazakhstan to get some, we’ll use sour cream instead, which works fine.

Chop the cucumber into a couple of chunks. In food processor, whir cuke chunks until pureed. Drain cucumber mush in fine wire sieve or strainer, or use kitchen towels. Try and get as much water out of it as you can. Put strained cuke with the rest of ingredients in big bowl and mix until smooth. You can eat it now, but it gets better after a few hours in the fridge. Actually, it just continues to get better and better in the fridge.

This stuff can be eaten with just about anything from steak to falafel. It’s also a surprisingly good dip for potato chips.

Cheddar at Kursk

This fondue started as an attempt on my part to break up the monotony of fondue. That's Fondue Neuchatel, the traditional mixture of swiss, gruyere, and kirsch that makes up the vast majority of fondue I cook and serve to others in my never-ending battle to make everyone around me obese. Now, let's get this straight, I love the Neuchatel formula, I think it's pretty much perfect, but for this occasion- Byron's birthday- I thought I should highlight his Southern heritage and make fondue more a la Americaine. Besides, his wife Carine's French and I honestly felt a little unsure of myself cooking the traditional Swiss mixture. I decided to go with a cheddar-beer fondue. A little bit of searching and I found the right proportions for a cheddar-stout mixture. Recipe in hand, I dropped by a convenient gourmet store on my way to Byron's house- European Gourmet, actually, off Brandon Blvd.

After selecting some choice weisswurst and some really tasty little dried sausages, I moved on to the cheddar. They had a seven-year old reserve Irish cheddar, of which I grabbed a pound. The English clerk/butcher/proprietress bobbed about in a wonderful blonde blur of Englishness. I actually could smell the moment she sank her knife into the grim white block. She did wonder what the hell I was using a pound of the stuff for.
"I'm making cheddar-stout fondue, actually"
"Have you the stout?"
"Er, no. Do you have Guinness?"
She snorted a little bit, as I had just asked for a Steel Reserve. Apparently, I was in for a stern correction.
After a brief bustle across the store, she offered me a clay vessel covered in cruel-looking Cyrillic lettering. Heavy steel clamps held a rubber stopper against its unadorned neck, as if in containment of radiation or djinn. Whoever made this thing had not seen fit to put a single word of English on any part of it. This was what a bottle of beer looked like in Mordor.
"Why doncha try this one, love?"
"What the hell is it?", I asked.
"Oh, it's beer. It's very nice. Imperial Stout."
I was beginning to suffer from what is commonly called consumption overload, stunned by all the wonderful things that were going in my big box. I didn't really examine the decision to take ownership of the dire stout. Certainly it must be nice, coming from the nice English lady, I thought dazedly. As I left the premises they offered to grill me some sausages. I've selectively deleted from my memory exactly how much money I spent in there that day.

At my friend's house I started assembling the fondue. The group in the dining room could talk to me over the counter, and I could join in the conversation. I always liked those counter things between kitchen and dining room for exactly this reason. I cut some cheddar, sampled it. "Dear God in heaven," I said to no one in particular. It was overwhelming. The stuff had more cheddar flavor in it than the combined yearly output of all Cheetos plants in North America. Somewhere Chester Cheetah was tapping a vein in anticipation. I hoped that the apple juice concentrate would mute some of that, or else it would just be too much. Somewhat tentatively, I opened the stout and poured out the amount needed for the fondue. In the glass the black liquid appeared completely opaque.
"Is that Worcestershire sauce?", Steve asked.
"Er. No. It's supposedly beer," I said, looking dubious. I held it up to a powerful track light. It became no less opaque. "It's from Russia," I tried to explain. I'm no great beer fan but I decided to try a taste. Urk. There's a reason I don't like beer. I handed it off to Steve, who is a genuine aficionado.
"Malt, " he said. "Chocolate. Something berry like. Complex. Mnh. Very dark."
"Dark as Stalin's soul. Does anyone have a laser pointer?" I wanted to check just how opaque it was, or if the light beam bent in its presence, which did not seem out of the question.
"What's it called?"
"I have no earthly clue" I passed him the bottle. Steve cackled. For all we knew, that bottle of stout was unique. Perhaps it was. Perhaps we had released Stalin's soul, liquified, bottled by Kruschev, as it were, to be delivered into our cheesy pot. I put my ear to the simmering mixture to see if I could hear show trials.

The final product was a desperate land war in the middle of Asia, a trenchline five thousand miles long. "It's like the Eastern Front in my mouth", I remember saying. The stout and the cheddar were just barely at violent, genocidal stalemate, broken only by hints of flavor from the substance dipped into it. Even the spicy dried sausages submerged themselves in this epic conflict. They were even Hungarian sausages, which made the metaphor a bit eerie. We all agreed that it was delicious, but had quite enough after a half dozen bites.

I've replaced the dipping substances in this recipe with the ones I liked the best. It was originally served with dried sausage, black bread, cauliflower, and apples.

Cheddar-Stout Fondue

lots of cauliflower florets
lots of broccolli florets

1 pound very good cheddar, aged at least 3 years, shredded. A food processor's shedder attachment is fondue's best friend.
2 1/2 tablespoons all purpose flour
3/4 cup good dark stout
6 tablespoons frozen apple juice concentrate, thawed
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
1 green onion, sliced on the bias

Prepare veggies by boiling/steaming/roasting etc.

Toss shredded cheese with flour in large bowl. Heat stout, juice, and mustard until steaming. Gradually add cheese mixture, stirring constantly, until cheese is melted and the flour has thickened the mixture. Scatter green onions on surface of cheese to break up that brown color. Put pot on hot pad in the middle of the table. Dip veg in cheese and eat.

Provisioning the Lone Male: Lentil Pots

The wife is out for a week and it is time to cook. It's always time to cook, though, because I have chosen the role of cook in our household, but when the wife is not around the rules of the kitchen change significantly. This is primarily because the sink can only hold so many dirty dishes. It's a common design flaw of modern kitchens. Also, cooking for myself, I don't particularly care how balanced the dish is, whether it looks nice, or if I made it already this week. All that fru-fru goes right out the window. It has to taste OK, go together without too much thought, and by-and-large go by a few simple rules:

1) Will it make me a fat bastard? More to the point, will it make me more of a fat bastard than I already am? Since I lift big metal things recreationally, I should take in approximately 1.5 grams of protein per pound of body weight per day. I'll aim for seventy grams per meal. The meal should also avoid crap carbs like potatoes and rice, and crap fats like shortening and margarine. It shouldn't have too much of either fats or carbs, no matter how high-quality, and preferably not too much of both at the same time. A lot of both at the same time is also known as a biscuit, or as I fondly call them, obesity tablets.

2) Can it be prepared and eaten using one item of cookware? Preferably a piece of cookware that is also simple to eat out of? This is to avoid covering every horizontal surface with dirty dishes that have to be maniacally cleaned in the last two hours before said wife's return. In the heat of the moment, I had once considered renting a pressure washer for this, but I know that if I did, the temptation would be too great to turn its formidable nozzle on every other soiled surface in the house: toilets, bathtub, litterbox, linens, etc. The results would take some explaining, a lot of flowers, possibly a lawyer and body armor.

3) Does it cost more than gas? I spend about five bucks a day on my commute, so that rules might not go for people that, say, bike.

Once you say "no" to all these questions, one of the perfect foods left is lentils. Fast cooking, tasty, macronutrients evenly split between protein, fiber, and carbs, there's nothing they can't do. We won't be seeing a lot of that today. Sorry to be such a tease. If you want to see saged lentil burgers on homemade brioche with chiles and chevre, you'll have to wait a bit. It's a good dish but it's not what we're after right now. For today, if you want to see cheap and easy lentil pots, you're set.

Sausage and Lentil Pot

½ package Jenny-O turkey breakfast sausage, diced.
½ cup lentils
1 onion, chopped
1 can chopped tomatoes
1 tsp sage
1 tsp cumin
1 cup broth, bouillon, or other seasoned liquid
1 tablespoon olive oil

A word about the turkey sausage. Jenny-O turkey sausage comes in tubes from Wal-mart for something like a buck fifty a pound. It’s easier to dice it while frozen. Wal-Mart has a random selection of ground turkey products that are usually pretty good, including this "italian flavor ground turkey product" that's pretty good and is a buck a pound. Strangely, the "italian flavor ground turkey product" is incredibly fiery- I mean thai hot- while the "mexican flavor ground turkey product" is fairly mild (and also tasy and, like its italian cousin, also a buck a pount, but totally unsuited to this recipe).

Brown the sausage in the olive oil until brown. Add onions, cook until translucent. Add everything else. Cover tightly, cook on low heat for an hour. Eat out of pot while reading Garth Ennis' Preacher.

Chicken and Lentil Pot

½ cup lentils
1 onion, chopped
1 chicken breast or chicken parts (approximately 14 oz)
1 tablespoon garam masala or other curry powder
1 carrot, chopped
1 cup cauliflower, chopped. Frozen is OK
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 cup broth, bouillon, or other seasoned liquid
1 tablespoon ghee or butter

Melt ghee in pot. Brown chicken in butter. It's OK if it's frozen. You just want the flavors from the browning, and the chicken will cook through while the lentils are cooking. Add onions and carrots, cook until onions are translucent. Add everything else. Cover and cook on low heat for 1 hour. Eat out of pot over Grant Morrison's Invisibles.

Fashionable Beef

As is commonly pointed out, 'a la mode' means "fashionable". What is not pointed out is, fashionable where? Sometimes an archaic 'a la mode' recipe will add a place name and a date, so you get a recipe that, when translated, is something like "Chicken that was really fashionable around 1832 in Amiens, you know, just in case you were interested".

Boeuf a la mode, aka French Pot Roast, is one of these animals, but is such a ubiquity that absolutely no French chef- no matter how megalomaniacal- can lay definitive claim to this particular marriage of beef and wine. The first time some guy called this particular pot roast 'a la mode' was around 1732, but this dish probably predates that date by a little bit. Not by too much, though, as pots and stoves were pretty rare things before the late Renaissance.

I call my boeuf a la mode "pot roast", because that's what it is, although I call it by its frenchy name when discussing with relatives and especially gramma. Households can be defensive about their signature pot roast. Telling a family member you are making pot roast is analagous to approaching the main heavy in a kung-fu movie and saying his kicking style looks pretty gay. If you say you're making Fashionable Beef, it makes it sort of funny and non-competitive, which is what food should be all about, like Aikido.

The recipe is an amalgamation of pressure cooker techniques, the recipe from Cook's Illustrated, and bits I've picked up from Alton Brown's Good Eats program. As a side note, Cook's Illustrated Best of 2008 is an incredible resource of cooking knowledge. Some parts- some very, very, small parts- should be discarded by the careful chef, such as peppering meat before browning (I've learned through experience that pepper burns too much at high heat), but by and large there is a lot of good information in there.

3-4 lb bone-in chuck roast. Try and find a chuck roast called "seven bone roast", if you can. The bone in it is shaped like a seven, hence the name.
1 onion, chopped
1 stalk celery, chopped
1 carrot, chopped
4 cloves garlic, coarsely chopped
Handful each of thyme, parsley, and a stick of rosemary
3 slices bacon
1.5 cups Malbec or Shiraz
1 8 oz package mushrooms, sliced (I was very lazy and got the pre-washed, pre-sliced ones)
1 tbls vinegar of your choice (I like balsamic)
1 tbls butter
1 tbls flour
Kosher salt
Black pepper

How much do you like fat? Figure out how much you want to cut from the roast and trim away. When you're done with your trimming, sprinkle the roast on all sides with some coarse-grained kosher salt. Let the meat sit at room temperature for an hour.

Brown the bacon in the pot of the pressure cooker. I'm using the pressure cooker for this recipe, but if you have a dutch oven that will work fine too. Even a big oven proof pan will work, so long as you have a nice tight fitting lid, which you can make out of some aluminum foil. Or you can use one of those roasting bag things, which I although I haven't used, I do have a friend who is quite fond of them and uses them to good effect.

Once your bacon has rendered out most of its fat, remove it and reserve. Working in batches if necessary, brown the beef on all sides in the delicious bacon fat, about 2 minutes per side. Reserve the browned beef on a convenient plate.

Throw in the onion, celery, carrot, and garlic. Fry until the carrot is thinking about getting soft and the onions are translucent. Try not to let the garlic burn.

Dump in the wine, the reserved bacon, and herbage. Stir to remove the caramelization from the bottom of the pan. I always mean to tie the herbs in twine or kitchen cord before doing this but somehow never do. Don't fret if you don't, you can always fish out the woody bits later. But twine helps a lot, because then you can just pull out the bundle when you're done instead of picking at the sauce with a fork and cursing.

Add the reserved meat and any liquids that might have dripped out while it was sitting. Lid the vessel and set on high pressure for 45 minutes. Yes, that's a long time, but we're going for spoon tender here. If you're going with the dutch oven, lid the vessel and put in a 300 degree oven for 3 hours. Now, this temperature/time combination depends a lot on your oven and the vessel you're using. You could also simmer it on the stovetop, I suppose. When cooking is complete, pull the meat out as carefully as you can (it's going to want to come to bits), put on a platter and tent with foil. You know the meat is done when a probe can be inserted and removed from the meat with little or no resistance. Alternatively, get your finger around that little bone and see if it moves around easily inside the meat. Either way, if the answer is yes, your meat is cooked.

Time to contemplate the sauce liquid. Fish out the sorry remains of your herbage bundle. Put in the mushrooms and let it boil gently to cook the fungi and force them to release their liquid into the sauce. Taste the sauce. Ponder the sauce. Reach out with your feelings. This is a big part of the dish and it might need some tuning. In my case, I always over-salt things. I oversalted the roast when browning it, so the liquid was excessively salty, and this was even after the mushroom brigade made its entrance. Alright, no need to panic. Saltiness can be corrected with sweetness, to a certain extent. I added sugar teaspoon by teaspoon until the saltiness was negated, or at least translated into an oniony savor. The pressure cooker had taken the acid components right the hell out of the wine in the cooking liquid, so I added a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar to freshen it up a bit. Once the flavors were right, I let it continue to gently boil and concentrate its flavors while I worked on thickeners.

It's roux time. In a decent-sized saucepan (enough for the liquid), melt the butter over low-medium heat, add the flour, and fry the resulting paste until light yellow in color. Slowly ladle the liquid into the roux. The liquid should thicken almost immediately. Stir until it's got a nice, gravy-like consistency. Taste and correct seasoning, if necessary. Pour the thickened sauce over the meat on its platter. Now is also a nice time to scatter some chopped parsley on the whole kit and kaboodle. It looks nice and adds some green-y flavor.

Traditionally this dish is served with boiled egg noodles, but in our household mashed potatoes and peas are awfully popular.

Love My Goat

Not too long ago, I entertained a group with a box of NY Strip steaks, a big bowl of salad, and some good baguette. We're not going to discuss grilling steaks here, because it's something much better cooks than I have addressed maybe a zillion times, and besides, a grilled NY Strip steak possibly has the highest gastronomic reward/work ratio of any food product and so should be made as often as possible. I mean, come on: apply coarse salt to both sides of a 1" strip steak, put 4" away from fire for 4-5 minutes per side, put on plate, eat. It's dirt simple but is one of the best things in the world. Compare this with something like ratatouille, which is a very good thing but is also three hours of your life spent frying vegetables. Anyway, meat. Mmm. The salad was a bit more interesting, but is so second nature that I forget it might not be second nature to other people.

It's rich enough to serve with the baguette by itself, but it also complements the steak nicely. The name for the recipe comes from a totally unrelated sweet red table wine that has a cartoon goat on the front of it, advising the shopper to "Love my goat". We're not sure why.

Goaty Love Salad

6 oz chevre (soft goat cheese)
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
3/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
1 small red bell pepper, diced
1/2 yellow onion, sliced
1 teaspoon powdered chicken bouillon
1 teaspoon black pepper
A fairly large amount of prepared baby salad greens- you can get a big bin of the stuff at Sam's for five bucks or so. Maybe about 20 oz or so.

Combine the first 8 ingredients in the biggest salad bowl you have. Stir until it makes a tangy-smelling, thick brown mixture, with the chevre well-incorporated. Add the greens, and toss carefully. Mix the salad in with your hands. Those baby greens are way to delicate to go stirring with a big hard fork and spoon, and your hands can tell you more about the final texture of the dressed salad than a fork could.

You could add some bacon bits to this but it's not really necessary. If you do, though, omit the chicken bouillon, otherwise it's too salty, and I like salt.

Pad, Thai and Tempting

It took me a while to get my pad thai recipe down, largely because there is no such thing as a pad thai recipe. The reason why is a bit complicated, and it has to do with how the thai got into the pad.

Back in the beginning, the way I heard it, ethnic Thais did not even have noodles (aka pad), and continued to generally not have them until the late nineteenth century. That's about when a wave of ethnic Han refugees came flooding in from China, fleeing from something called the Taiping Rebellion, the biggest war you've never heard of. It's sort of off topic, but let's just say China had seventy million less mouths to feed at the end of it, some of whom were doubtless refugees bringing noodles to Thailand.

The Han Chinese have this gift of going to random foreign countries and managing to cook for local tastes while still using traditional Han ingredients. Witness General Tso's Chicken. The same thing happened in Thailand. Here's this poor Han refugee with his fistful of rice noodles, and before he opens up his first food stand – here's the part I really admire about the Han- he looks methodically around him at what all the weird jungle people around him are eating.

As far as he can tell it's mostly chili, limes, fermented fish, and whatever crustacean is clinging to the nets but is too small to sell. And some weird jungle fruit thing, and probably more chili because that seems to be the way these Thai people roll. Ingeniously and undoubtedly quite a bit imperfectly at first, our Han refugee seasons his noodles to match the local palate. It's a trial and error thing, but it's also a negotiation. The Chinese guy figures out how to deliver the classic Thai flavors, but the Thai people also get accustomed to things like rice noodles and cabbage pickle. Accustomed is the key word here. Pad Thai was not really a big thing, at least not until The Big Thing, that is, World War II.

Outside of the monasteries and hill country (where Chinese/Buddhist cultural influence predominated), noodle dishes do not get widespread reception until rice rationing in the lead up to the Japanese takeover. That preventative rationing was a pretty amazing thing in itself; the Thai have been gifted with some very cunning and slightly clairvoyant heads of state. Seeing that 1) Japan would soon be commandeering the economy, 2) rice noodles dramatically stretched out the rice needed per person per day compared to the natural product, and 3) starving your people is bad- which is not a foregone conclusion when talking about leadership during WW2- PM Phibunsongkhram pursued an aggressive and if possible pronounceable Pad Thai program. The government distributed leaflets and noodle cart starter kits, recipe books, print shops for the recipe books, workshops for grannies to make rice noodles, even subsidizing entrepreneurs willing to bring this bastard culinary child to the masses, and bring it they did. It's eaten in Thailand the same way Americans wolf down hamburgers today, and for perhaps the same reason is a hard culinary rabbit to catch. It's just not restaurant food. Still not following? Imagine a Japanese businessman walking up to you and asking for "the definitive hamburger recipe", and you've got an idea.

The version posted here is more Thai style than what I usually get in the restaurants here, much drier and fluffier, less heavy. I'm not bragging on this, because it's not always a good thing. Dinner guests expect pad thai to be a loot gooier, a lot more red, sweeter perhaps, and I'm not sure how to do that without unbalancing the flavors and breaking the dish. Since I just figured out how to make the damn thing I'm loathe to break it.

The only trick I'm still working on is getting the noodles done just right. Timing the rehydration of rice noodles is tricky, like when I was first learning how to work with phyllo. Yeah. That. Tricky. Bitch.

All things considered, Pad Thai is probably one of my favorite foods: sour, salty, spicy, fishy, with just enough sweet to not suffer third degree chili burn. This recipe makes two portions. It's important to cook only one or two portions at a time- otherwise the noodles don't get stir fried evenly and it turns to pad thai gloop. If you're feeding more people, cook no more than two portions at a time, which is not-so-coincidentally what the below recipe makes up.

¼ cup sugar

¼ cup Nam Pla (AKA Fish Sauce, which unfortunately is not vegetarian, but you can substitute light soy sauce. It changes the flavor pretty substantially, though. Be prepared for "sort of Pad Thai" on the palate. Of course, it's sort of going to taste that way anyway, because it's your pad thai and not your local thai restaurant's. So whatever.)

¼ cup Tamarind concentrate (Available from Oriental food stores, this stuff is basically ready to roll. Otherwise you have to do all kind of stuff with the blocks of tamarind stuff: soaking, straining, boiling, human sacrifice, etc.)

2 garlic cloves, chopped

1-3 tablespoons red chili flakes

8 oz rice noodles (available from your friendly neighborhood oriental market, or, hell, Wal-Mart has them now.)

8 oz tofu, cut into 1/2 " chunks

2 eggs, scrambled

2 cups bean sprouts or brocco-slaw(I like this one) or thinly sliced cabbage (I like a lot of crunch in the pad thai, and the more vegetables, the less carb-guilt)

4 green onions, chopped

6 tablespoons chopped peanuts

1 lime, cut up

Peanut oil

Mix up the first five ingredients. This is your basic pad thai sauce. Adjust flavors to your taste: fish sauce for salt, tamarind for sour/bitter, sugar for sweet, chili for fire. Keep in mind that sweet is hard to correct for later- you can always add sweet later, tableside even. Thai street vendors often have a big sugar shaker right there for you to sweeten your noodles.

Put rice stick noodles into hot tap water. Let them sit for ten minutes or until they have just become pliable. Don't let them sit until al dente or you will end up with pad thai stew. It's better for them to be too hard than for them to be too soft, because if they're too hard now you can let them sit in the wok longer later on. Once they're at the right consistency, drain and toss with oil.

Make sure everything is chopped, scrambled, sliced, soaked, and/or otherwise ready to rock. Pad thai happens fast once the food hits the wok because the wok is so damn hot. You'll be busy stirring once the food hits the pan, believe me.

Heat some oil in the wok until it's rocket hot. Put in the tofu, stir fry until it gets brown around the edges. Push the tofu up the sides of the wok, out of the way.

Add the egg in the center area you've just cleared of tofu, stir fry until the egg is good and scrambled.

Dump the noodles in the wok, followed by the sauce. Be quick with this because those eggs are going to scorch. In fact, depend on some scorching- from what I've heard, the scorch is actually an essential part of wok cooking. But not too much. Just enough. It's very Eastern. Dude.

Add more oil if you need to. Stir to mix everything up. Add bean sprouts/cabbage/vegetable crunchies. All this mass will drop the heat in the wok a bit so the noodles can soften without burning, if you took them out of the water too crunchy. Stir. If the noodles are still not quite done add some fluid or more sauce if you have it, keep stirring until the noodles get soft enough for you.

 Throw in the peanuts and green onions, stir until mixed. Plate it up and serve with lime wedges. Eat.

Chupacabra Chipotle!

Chupacabra Chipotle

Chipotle Chicken Rollups

These crisp little numbers are spicy, smoky, beany and just about everything else that you could want in a quick Mexican fix. They are also rumored to cure hangovers. If they do not, they will make you happy to call in sick and lay in front of the TV watching Venture Brothers.

Ingredients:
2 chicken breasts
2 onions
4 cloves garlic
4 Chipotle chilis
1 can black beans
1 can diced tomatoes
1 tablespoon chicken bullion
Handful cilantro
4 big flour tortillas
8 oz cheddar cheese
A fair amount of olive oil
Sour cream

If you're like me and never plan anything, you probably only have frozen chicken breasts to work with. That's OK. Heat some oil in a giant skillet on medium heat and throw the frozen breasts in there. This way they can thaw enough for you to slice them, and you won't lose any chickeny flavors in the sink or in the microwave.
While the chicken negotiates with that heat, it's a good time to mince your onions and garlic.
As soon as the chicken's thawed enough to slice without a table saw, take your somewhat-thawed chicken breasts and cube them, slicing lengthwise, then crosswise, until you have approximately .75" cubes. Sprinkle them with salt. Splash a little more oil into the pan if necessary, then put the cubed chicken in the pan, toss with the oil, cooking until lightly browned.
While the chicken cubes are a-brownin', it's a good time to seed the chipotles: slice those buggers lengthwise and scrape the seeds from their soft little insides with the back side of your knife. Once seeded, chop them fine and keep them handy. They're going in that pan soon enough. Cans of "chipotles con adobo" can be found in the Mexican section of your local megamart. You'll likely have some left over from this recipe, but that's OK because they keep pretty much forever once tupperwared and refridgerated. No microorganism is quite brave enough to set foot in there; any foolishly transgressing bacterium would be found beaten and drugged in the bed of a Tijuana prostitute with its kidneys missing.
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.
Remove the browned chicken from the pan and reserve; we'll be seeing it again in a moment. Put the pan back on the fire, hit it with oil as needed, then put in the onions and garlic, frying until translucent. A little brown on the garlic is OK, it's hard to cook onion and garlic together without the garlic taking on a bit more color than the onion.
Open up your can o' black beans and your can o' tomatoes, dump in the pan with the seeded chopped chipotles and the chicken bullion. No need to drain anything, the liquids from the canned beans and the 'maters will add a lot of flavor. If you like it hot, add some of the adobo sauce the chilis came canned in. Be careful. That stuff is pretty fiery but is full of chipotle smoky goodness.
All that liquid will loosen some of the caramellization you've got going on the bottom of the pan. Stir to dissolve this yummy stuff- fancy folks call it the "fond"- into the sauce. Cook this mess on medium until the fluid is cooked down and it has the consistency of, oh, baked beans or similar. Remove from heat.
Get your big ol' food processor ready. Dump in the bean/tomato/chipotle mixture, then add your handful of cilantro, then whir until the mixture is rendered into a creamy paste. Slice up the cheese into 1/4" slices.
To assemble: get two cookie sheets. Line them with foil, because who likes cleaning things? Splash both pans with oil. Slap- not too enthusiastically, unless you want to cover yourself in oil- a tortilla in the pan, and move it around so the bottom of the tortilla is coated in oil. Lay down 1/4 of the bean mixture across the middle of the tortilla, then a 1/4 of the chicken, a 1/4 of the cheese slices, and roll up as tight as you can without tearing the tortilla shell. Put it in the second pan. Repeat until you have four roll ups ready to bake. Wash your oily tortilla hands.
Put the roll ups in the oven for, oh, something like ten minutes, depending on your oven, where the rack is, what type of oil you're using, phase of the moon, etc. It's done when the roll-ups have spots of brown on top. This indicates that the top has crisped and the bottom is at a very hearty state of crunch. The cheesy bean stuff will have melted out of the fore and aft of each burrito, but with a little deft spatula work you can scrape up the spill and smear it over the top of the burrito before plating it up. Serve with a tub of sour cream. Eat. Fall asleep.

Now I sing a song of pressure

So, pressure cookers. I haven't been this excited about a kitchen gadget since I discovered the food processor. Wonderful but hellishly tedious dishes, bon femme, are now minutes rather than hours away: feijoada, ropa vieja, cassoulet, pot au feu, braised shanks, coq au vin. Food that is maybe a little longish to cook becomes lightning quick, like jambalaya, lentils, and split peas. Here's the latest from the magical land of pressure:

Chicken Jambalaya

I make chicken jambalaya because shrimp makes my feet hurt from the gout. You can add shrimp to the pot for maybe a minute before serving and you'll have shrimp jambalaya, although I am now a marked man in bayou country just for saying that, hunted down by five thousand genetically perfected clones of Justin Wilson. "YOU'LL BURN IN HELL FOR MESSIN UP MY JAMBALAYA, BOY, I GAY-RUN-TEE"

Slice up a rib of celery, a bell pepper, an onion, a carrot, and four roma tomatoes. Fry 2-4 slices of bacon and 1/2 cup good pork breakfast sausage in the pressure cooker on its "brown" setting. Remove the bacon and sausage when it starts to get some color and/or when there's enough fat rendered out to cook with. Brown a chicken thigh in the pork fat on all sides, remove to a patter, then brown another chicken thigh in the pork fat, remove to a platter. Fry the celery, pepper, onion, and carrot in the pork/chicken grease until the onion is translucent and the carrot is just beginning to get tender. Add the tomatoes, Add a teaspoon of salt. Chop up 4 cloves garlic, add to the mess frying in the cooker. Season the frying mess with 1/2 teaspoon cayenne (to taste), a teaspoon of paprika, a teaspoon of thyme, a teaspoon of oregano. Add in 1 cup white rice, 1 cup chicken stock or bouillon, stir until boiling. Place reserved chicken on top, put the lid on the pressure cooker and cook on high pressure for 8 minutes. Remove pressure and eat.

Hoppin John

I wasn't going to post this but I've just had a bowl of it and it's so dicking good, which is a complete and utter surprise since I originally set out to make this as a way of humoring my mother.

The story was that Mom wanted her new years meal of "hoppin john"- i.e., black eye peas and hog jowls-, and I didn't want her to set her kitchen on fire. So I brought my pressure cooker and went to work, this time without a recipe, which always makes me a little nervous, especially with a new piece of cookware that may explode at any time. But lo and behold this stuff was mighty tasty.

Brown two slices bacon and 1/4 cup breakfast sausage in the pressure cooker on its "brown" setting. Slice up two carrots, an onion, a bell pepper, four roma tomatoes (sound familiar yet?), and four cloves garlic. Remove the pork meats, fry four chorizos in the pork grease. If they're good chorizos, make sure you puncture them before browning unless you want expoding sausages injecting hot grease and cayenne into your eyeballs. Once they're brown, reserve the chorizos with the other meats, then fry the carrots, onion, and bell pepper in the grease. As they get soft, add the tomatoes. Dump in 1 lb black eye peas, 6 cups water, the bacon and sausage, and stir. Make a well in this mess and insert the hog jowl. Cover and cook on high pressure 45 minutes. Dump the pressure and eat. I suppose it should be served with cornbread but I say: screw that.

Mighty tasty, of course, maybe it's just that anything involving legumes, pork grease, and cayenne is mighty tasty. Oh yes. Oh my poor arteries.

Keep Your Damn Monkeys

Stop me if you've heard this one:

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Once upon a time in a village, a man appeared and announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for $10 each. The villagers seeing that there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest and started catching them. The man bought thousands at $10 and, as supply started to diminish, the villagers stopped their effort. He further announced that he would now buy monkeys at $20 each. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again.

Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms. The offer increased to $25 each and the supply of monkeys became so scarce it was an effort to even find a monkey, let alone catch it! The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at $50 each! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would now buy on behalf of him.

In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers. “Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has already collected. I will sell them to you at $35 and when the man returns from the city, you can sell them to him for $50 each.” The villagers rounded up with all their savings and bought all the monkeys.

Then they never saw the man nor his assistant again, and had only a great deal of monkeys.
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OK, interesting story, but it sounds fishy. Using my less-than-stellar grasp of economics, I plugged in some numbers. In period 1, let's say the villagers grab 100 monkeys, because there are a lot of monkeys and are habituated to humans. The villagers get 1000 bucks in period 1. Period 2, the monkeys are more canny, and the villagers only grab 50, but due to the constriction in supply, they still net 1000 big ones. Things start turning south in period 3, because the price increases are not keeping pace with the reduction in supply- the villagers only net 500 for 20 monkeys. So far the village has 2500 bucks, which means they need to supply 3450 of their own money to buy back 170 monkeys at 35 bucks each. That is a lot of savings, especially for this village. That's where the smell of fish was coming from.

If this village thought that it was worth dropping everything to grab monkeys at 10 dollars each, things weren't so hot to begin with. Given a weekly monkey catch, the ten dollar monkey brings 5200 income per year. To make people stop subsistence economic activity (low return but safe), I'd say you have to double their income, so they were probably making yearly somewhere around 2500 before the arrival of the monkey merchants. How in the world did they save enough to make the payment on the $35 monkeys?

There's two answers here. One is that they've been saving for years and years- decades, or even centuries. This means the monkey merchants will have to make a big circle of the world every time they do their thing, or else the villagers will simply not be able to pay for the $35 monkeys. So in this case the monkeys are sold from saved money, i.e., money from the past.

The alternative is that the villagers go into debt to buy these monkeys, or buy them with money from the future, which, given the low level of native economy in this village, is a lot of future. This can go badly in a lot of ways, but saved money can go badly in a lot of ways too, and those ways are called inflation. No need to bring that up right now.

In any case, both of these options are totally acceptable- spending from the past and spending from the future- if there were any use for the monkeys. Big capitalizations are great, and they don't happen without savings or debt. They got us to the moon, built the internet, split the atom. But a big capitalization for monkeys? The tragedy of the entire scenario could be cured if buyers and sellers both asked the question, "why am I buying monkeys?".

Queen Prawn Spawns

I am not sure where I first heard about the micronesian or Pacific Proa. I blame it on Wikipedia's article of the day. They had something about the spread of austronesian peoples across the unspeakable vastness of the Pacific, and I had to wonder: what the hell do you use to do that when you haven't yet smelted bronze?

From there I found Tim Andersen's webpage (http://www.mit.edu/people/robot/). Tim Andersen is a hapless adventurer, competent inventor, and loveable junkhound whose utter lack of any sense of personal safety somehow resonated with me. Read his stories if you get a chance; he's a brilliant and very funny writer. I sent Tim's stories of Yucatan proa misadventure to my then-girlfriend Monica. "So this prawn thing is just a really efficient way to drown your girlfriend". Well, from then on I was sold, and the hull had a name: Queen Prawn.

The pacific proa is not appealing because it is dangerous to loved ones but because it is so elegant in concept. It has dynamic lateral balance, which is precisely the axis that a sailboat encounters dynamic force. It makes an awful lot of sense. Besides, if I'm going to build and sail something that looks like a wrecked fleamarket stall, why not make a really fast, weird-looking fleamarket stall?

Once I was finished enjoying myself with Tim Andersen, I moved along to serious thinkers. Gary Dierking seems to have the best handle on hull design, and I grabbed a plan based off his Tarawa hull but executed in plywood, as described here. Sixteen feet (or so) length, twenty-two inches wide and something like twelve inches of draft with three hundred and fifty pounds displacement. Long, skinny, and deep. Aggressive asymmetry to counter leeway and to mayhaps provide a bit of windward creep to help in holding a course when beating. Two chines, about the easiest layout to build. The single outrigger is a somewhat streamlined PVC pipe with the ends clamped shut and epoxied, with about two hundred pounds of displacement, give or take; enough to not sink too quickly when you step on it. Aluminum tubing connects the outrigger to the main hull, and can take five hundred pounds of torque in the middle, which is handy when the wind picks up you, your wife, the outrigger, and whatever cargo is handy before flinging them all into the Gulf of Mexico. "Flying proa" means "effing terrified" in Malaysian.

The various traditional-type proa sail rigs sounded frankly like trouble. The aboriginal crab claw is a great rig for a family of fifteen, which seems to be the minimum crew for safe handling. The Dierking-Gibbons rig involves an awfully big sail flying up over the heads of the crew for several suspenseful, and I suspect mostly tragic, seconds. It also has lots and lots of continuous loop rigging running uninterrupted around the vessel. Interrupt one and you capsize, or, amusingly, take flight. Probably both. I thought the winner was the double sticker used in Mbuli (www.clcboats.com/shop/sailboats/proa/), also known in proa circles as the schooner. This rig, although involving two of everything- two mains, two masts, two sets of rigging- and a substantial decrease in performance, allows the sailor to adjust the center of effort as needed. It also allows the sails to luff, depowered, while I futz with various homemade gizmos and recover family members treading water. I was also interested in the idea of basic steering being done by trimming the mainsails. Sheet in the rear sail to head up, sheet out the rear sail to bear away.

Why did that sound appealing in particular? Well, proa are sort of rudder-challenged, due to the fact that they have no fore and no aft. Since it switches sides every tack, you need to carry a rudder from one side to the other or make all sort of kick up rudder thingies in various places around the boat. With two sails you can mostly steer with the sheets. In theory, anyway. As an alternate I'll program a monster bullhorn to scream "I HAVE NO STEERAGE" at thirty second intervals, and carry enough water to make Texas.

With these loose guidelines in place, I started cutting. The sides began taking shape. It soon became apparent that the last four inches from each side fore and aft was going to be lopped off because I was using two 4x8' panels per side. Whoops.

The sides and the frames are fastened sort of loosely in these pictures. I just put enough tacks in to make it solid enough to move around, which is to say, not very solid at all.
It almost looks okay from this angle.
So much for river cruising. Seen from the lee side, you can see the Queen Prawn is going to draw a lot of water.
Very, very crooked. Have I mentioned how floopsy the structure is? Rails, fiberglass, and addition of the bottom plank will hopefully straighten out the cambers in her sides.

Around Lake Okeechobee

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Saturday, February 16, 2008
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My homemade panniers decompiled themselves for the first time as I steered the bike down the dike near Buckhead Ridge. I had only been in the saddle for twenty minutes, which somehow included 1) a harrowing crossing of the Kissimmee River, 2) the end of paved trail for the foreseeable future, and 3) the first inroads of broiling sun into my brain. I had aimed the front wheel of the bike towards the picnic table and its blessed shade canopy, started going down the dike, then started to realize I was going down the dike way too fast. The brakes had too much grass in them and were useless. I got up on peddles as the poor frame bounced over dandelions and armadillo holes. My panniers (six dollars worth of Rubbermade and clothesline from Wal-Mart) broke their lashings and burst, like pinatas filled with mildew and jerky. The ground did a good imitation of kids with sticks. I parked the bike at the picnic shelter and went to pick up my litter.

Mostly I was stopping to get some breath after crossing the Kissimmee. Canal crossings turned out to be uphill adrenaline fests spent peddling madly in a two foot shoulder that you share with semi drivers and their bottles of tiny little pills. There were going to be a lot of such crossings, one for each of the waterways that fed or drained the big lake. They made me nervous, if you can read "nervous" as "effing terrified".

My packing method was similarly ridiculous: rubbermade bins and clothesline, with a chopped up piece of bamboo to provide poles for my tent. My tent usually sets up with trekking poles and sticks, but a) I didn’t need trekking poles on a bicycle, and b) the LOST has no trees and hence no sticks. The bamboo did make many locals think I was some sort of fishing hobo, which worked well. I recommend that any traveller in these parts carry some sort of fishing-related item. It makes it easier to talk to people.

Reflecting on this trip at Buckhead Ridge, it all seemed a bit hopeless. The canal crossings, my general ineptitude at this bicycling thing, the late hour, and general misery made me seriously consider turning the bike around, getting a room in Okeechobee town, repacking, installing slam shifters, and heading out the next day. I then seriously considered what would really happen if I got a room, namely, television and vodka.

I retied the panniers, walked the bike up the dike and kept heading south-southwest, on the northwest arc of Lake Okeechobee, towards the Indian Prairie Canal. It was 3:30PM.

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In July of 2007 a bunch of scientific types took advantage of record-low water to scrape some muck from the exposed lake bottom. They found some mud, some archeological items, and a whole lot of poison. The beating heart of southwest Florida's fresh water system was filled with arsenic and a toxicological zoo, which even chronic Republicans agreed was probably a bad idea. They got dump trucks and started hoovering up the lethal muck, only to find that there was no place on earth that would allow the bottom of Lake Okeechobee to be deposited on their land. It was too poisonous. Eventually they just plopped the stuff back on the shores of the lake to create parking lots and airboat ramps. Of course, a word like "shore" is itself dubious in this context.

At roughly half of its historical size, the lake is not visible from the western “shore”. The area technically occupied by the lake is a vast prairie cut with piles of rock and straight canals that run off into the horizon, sort of like the Everglades but with more trees. It's odd, but you would think that one of the defining traits of a lake is that it doesn't have a forest in it.

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It was still very pretty, and very quiet, when I wasn't polluting the silence with grindings and clanking and the occasional clunk of a pannier part falling off. There was a canal on either side of the dike, one following the theoretical shore of the lake and another separating the dike from the mainland. The dike was always the same, a treeless, flawlessly mowed thirty foot mound topped by a path. I always had the lakeside to my left and the canalside to my right.

RV parks and stodgy communities of fish-addled retirees lined the canal from Buckhead Ridge to Moores Head, motoring out religiously in pontoon vessels and bassboats. The lakeside was populated mostly by osprey, with the textbook sharp black coloration and peaked crests, unlike the washed out and undersize brownish osprey that live in my backyard. I watched one snatch a fish out of the water. I got knocked around by rocks.

I had just started the longest unpaved stretch of the Lake Okeechobee Scenic Trail, from Buckhead Ridge to Moores Head. The Trek 7000 that faithfully served my 8 mile town commute was not terribly pleased with the prospect of limestone and gravel for so many miles and with so much extra weight on the rear wheel. It communicated this to me by tossing my panniers off the dike every few miles. With the sun touching the tops of the tallest palms on the canalside, I espied the picnic table and shelter of a backcountry campsite. I parked the bike and went down to the table with my trusty backpack, ahead of schedule.

The breeze was not so bad and came from the NNW, which explains how I was able to make so many miles so late in the day on an unpaved road. The campsite was pleasant but there was no way I was going to drink canal water. I finished up my water from the Kissimmee boat ramp bathroom and contemplated my map. I raised my head to see a lone backpacker loping up. The old banter came back like a native language.
"Where you coming from today?"
"Key West"
"Wow. Florida Trail?"
"Eastern Continental Divide, finishing up."
"Lots of roadwalking in the Keys, I bet."
He made a sour expression. "Oh yeah."
I noted his Granite Gear Nimbus. "Hey, Granite Gear. I got an Ozone 2003, my AT (Appalachian Trail) pack."
He just beamed, his whole face just lit up. "Hey, what year you do the trail?"
"2006. My trail name was Mash."
“Just Kevin.” We shake hands. He’s a “Just”, which is what happens to people when they insist on using their real name on the Appalachian Trail. You become a “Just -”. "Wow, it's probably still fresh for you, isn't it? I must have done it, oh, three times. PCT twice. Last time I was on the AT I went on the International Appalachian Trail, up to Brunswick. Figured I'd finish up the Eastern Divide trail with the Florida Trail, then up the Piwoti connector. ."
Holy crap, I thought, I'm talking with one of those old Appalachian Trail celebrities lost on the shores of Lake Okeechobee. We talked a lot and agreed on the general awesomeness of backpacking and how I really have to do the PCT someday. I took his picture. "You know," he said, "backpackers are the best people on earth. That's the real truth."
"I know," I said. I climbed up the dike, back on my bike, and pedaled away.

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The sun was minutes from setting, and the glittering rocks in the path had taken on a sort of greenish color. Later, when I saw the glitter in normal light, I realized that the green existed only in my mind. With too much orange light, my optic nerve spun the color wheel a bit so that everything would stay in some sort of balance. You can try this yourself at home with a red LED lamp, or, alternatively, stare into the setting sun for thirty minutes.

The sun was just about to go down right before I got to the tiny hamlet of Lakeport, with something that looked like a motel. As a former Appalachian Trail through-hiker, I can detect cheap motels from miles off, and this one looked like a doozy. I took a snapshot of the sunset and pedaled off the dike towards the bridge spanning Harney Pond canal.

It was, unfortunately, an incredibly badly staffed doozy. Though the rooms were all dark, with not a car in the lot, the office had a prominently displayed "NO VACANCY" sign in the window. An immensely fat lady in a mumu glared at me from inside the office over a spread of fried chicken parts. That's OK, I thought. This is why I have a tent.

I grabbed some water at the boat ramp bathroom and crossed Harney Pond canal while there was still light. Without electric lights on the bike frame, I did not trust locals to completely avoid me if I biked on the roadside after dusk. Even if they did see me, I am not sure I would have trusted them to avoid me. It's paranoid, but there's only one thrown beer bottle between being an outdoorsman and being a guy in a dumpster that drools a lot.

If I could go back and change one thing about this trip, I would do a lot more of my biking at night. It was gorgeous. The lights of Lakeport came on as I went, and the glow from the other towns made you look out over the lake and wonder which towns they were. True, I almost creamed myself on some extra-large gravel, and I had to stay a bit more alert to spot the campsite in the dark, but it was great all the same. I eventually saw the site and pitched my tent in the dark without any problem. There was a low one-man tent of the Hubba type off to one side of the campsite, containing what sounded like a very satisfied snorer. More power to him, I thought, as I settled down to my book, some cheese, and some almonds.

Airboaters in this area prefer to go up the ramp with their engines, which are unmuffled small block Chevies with airplane propellers, usually dual counter rotating props that keep the engine torque from spinning the hull like a top. When a bunch of them come in and pull up the ramp, it sounds like an athletic orgy of B-17s. They pull in and go out all hours of the night. Now I know and you know too.

When I packed out next morning the tent and snorer were still there. I marvelled at how he could have slept so soundly through the blitz last night. Probably booze, and lots of it.

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Sunday, February 17, 2008
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There are two important things in bicycling: wind direction, and ass. Wind direction I thought was important but I had no idea just how important it was. When there is enough of it going the wrong way it cuts your mileage worse than an uphill does. Ass is something I did not appreciate. It's why you never see bicyclists with backpacks. Backpacks add to ass. Ass adds to pain. A backpacker has his load elegantly distributed across several points on his body. A cyclist has his ass.

Another important part of cycling is being lost. The first sign I had that I was lost was when I started seeing houses on the lake side of the dike. I was used to not seeing water, but houses on the lakeside? Surely this was illegal, or at least litigiously stupid? The dike was built in response to the second-deadliest natural disaster in United States History, as long as you just sort of stop corpse counting from Katrina, which has worked out pretty well so far. Anyway, what gives? I biked on. The trail got rougher. I lost the canals, and there was a prancing herd of . . antelope . . on my left, behind many hundreds of yards of barbed wire fencing. Yep, definitely antelope. Springbok, actually. I must have taken the off-ramp to Kenya. I went to take their picture but the camera was also apparently DOA, definitely an omen that I was way off course. Feeling stupid, I turned around to get back to Fisheating Creek. By the time I rejoined the trail, I had gone eleven miles out of the way, the wind had slewed around to the SSE, and I was biking right into it.

It went well at first. I got my head in the game and started hauling along. Unfortunately, the trail conditions disintegrated, turning to lumps of limestone hummocked with thick crabgrass. The bike frame began taking big hits, and the panniers, which hitherto had only suffered damage to the lashings, started cracking along their length where they impacted the luggage rack. As I neared the Chokoloskee sunburn was becoming an issue, and the wind kicked up to seven knots. Ass could only think about the trail after Moores Head, where I would rejoin pavement. I had big hopes for that pavement. I was hoping for Pahokee tonight, but in a pinch I could do Belle Glade. Then town happened.

I didn't take a stove or pot with me this trip, thinking cheese, jerky, and nuts would be fine for a few days. Staring up at the bridge over the Chokoloskee, feeling the wind kick up, I figured, hey, I can charge my cell phone and chat with Monica, let my new wife know that I'm alive. I can get a roast chicken, cross the bridge, eat my chicken, read my book, the sun will be a bit lower and maybe- just maybe- the wind will slew a bit more south. Sure, it could happen. Mr. Mogilewsky, have you met denial? Why yes, hello denial, haven't seen you in a bit.

The picnic area on the other side of the bridge was just about perfect, with a big roomy sheltered area, vast if not terribly clean bathrooms, and all the fresh water I could drink. Going over the big Chokoloskee bridge was pretty gorgeous, and Moores Head proved friendly, their non-chain grocery store sporting a beautiful array of barbecue. One of the big problems with the Appalachian Trail, I always felt, was that it left serious barbecue country way too soon. I ate a chicken, read, promptly fell asleep, woke up, peed, fell asleep again, played around with denial, then invited it home and gave it a guest bedroom.

When I finally kicked out the freeloading bastard it was 4:30 PM Sunday afternoon. The wind on the dike had stepped up to twenty knots from the SE, exactly my direction of travel. I had gone less than halfway around Lake Okeechobee. It was time to go.

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I downshifted to some ridiculously low gear, but occasionally a crosswind would gust and knock me down. The gusts always came from the same direction, SSW, so I kept the wheels closer to the grass on the lee side of the dike so I would tumble on grass instead of on asphalt.

In any crosswind, the lee side of the path had some turbulence from the windward side lofting all that air into the sky. That turbulent zone was a bit easier to ride in, at least when the crosswind would blow. I could tell when the crosswind was gusting because tiny birds would appear flying over the dike, tumbling utterly out of control until the wind deposited them in the grass on the lee slope of the dike. Poor little buggers.

Otherwise it was just more headwind, more air holding me back. This town Trek doesn't have narrow low bars like a road bike does, so I bent low and grabbed the forks to try and shrink into the wind. My thighs rammed my belly, making me feel especially fat and useless.

A crosswind spilled me, and the panniers finally gave up the ghost. A gazillion little plastic bits smooshed under the bicycle. I contemplated an ancient brick pump house for some minutes, listening to pulleys clang on masts set above the pump house dock. There might not be a soul alive that knows what that tackle was originally built for. The pump house itself looked like it was about ready to follow the rotting dock into the canal, to join the rest of the decay in the water. There but for God go I.

OK, I thought. This needs to change. I'm a better-than-average long-distance backpacker but a pretty crappy cyclist. Time to roll with our strengths, the gloves are coming off, etc., etc. I packed the backpack as if I were carrying it, duct taped the remnants of the panniers with the gear I would not be using again, secured it to the frame, and moved on. The reduced profile sped me up, and not having great big plastic things swinging around probably made me a bit more stable. Increased ass load from the pack, but ass in this case falls under wind in the org chart. Another brilliant sunset biking the shores of Okeechobee.

Is it common for people to never find their real strength until they want to die? I think it is.

After I imagined my totem animal dropping by and having a frank chat with me I found it much easier to pedal, but harder to keep my brain working in normal places. My thoughts wandered.

The entire south end of the lake, from Moore's Head to Belle Glade, is lined with sugar cane on the canal side. The cane smelled bad. I've walked through just about every kind of agricultural land between Atlanta and Bangor and I have never smelt a crop that reeks like this. It's nice enough to look at, but it has to sit in clean water all day and all night just to grow. It gets wild clean water squirted into it from underground and poisoned water gets squirted into the lake. It's like a public health program in reverse: the dike takes your tax money and then injects you with arsenic.

Of course, said the crazy little man that lives in my brain. It all comes down to Hoover.

Oh, god, not this again, I said to the crazy little man

Wild water is feminine; it's the domain of the moon. Hoover's a name that hates wild water. J. Edgar and mansex and all that. This is a Hoover place; it is a place that hates untamed water. So Hoover dressed up his man things, his straight canals and straight dams and straight rocks, he dresses them in wild water and goes and dances with the president! Right in front of everyone's noses! This place is so totally J. Edgar!

Shut up crazy little man, I say.

After a while I was pedaling under a half moon and getting some cover from the wind: a gigantic forest of melaleuca, the biggest stand of the stuff I've ever seen. They've perfected the art of growing up and immediately falling down, like Beirut. Melaleuca shades out native cover but its greatest weapon is its water sucking ability. It's a weapon aimed directly at developers, since this one tree could easily squeeze a lot of residents out of the state by squeezing the water supply. There's something sort of endearing about an invasive tree planted by developers causing developers problems. It would be endearing, anyway, except that those developers have the resources to move on to something else, and we don't.

Back home there was a guy who moved into Lakewood Ranch who- God forbid!- obeyed the county laws governing watering restrictions. His yard turned brown. His homeowner association started fining him for having a brown yard. He started watering again because the homeowner association fined more than the county. Somehow the homeowner association was never, you know, approached by law enforcement for breaking the law. People put too much authority in uniforms. If a cop runs over a hobo and tells you nothing happened, and you say nothing, you're still breaking the law. Of course, if the homeowner association is perceived as being more effective in maintaining quality of life, you might just decide you have another set of laws right there. I could see Lakewood Ranch having a hobo-murdering clause in their CC&R, for example.

Clouds began to blot out the moon, and the night got dark quickly. I could see the lights of Clewiston ahead. It was decision time. If I stayed the night in Clewiston I would have a sixty-seven mile ride tomorrow to my car. If the wind was with me it was possible. If the wind was against me I didn't think it was. I needed weather data and food, and I would have to pass through Clewiston anyway to get over Industrial Canal. A restaurant stop sounded nice. I dropped off the dike, stopped in at a Hungry Howie's and grabbed a spicy something salad and giant diet soda. The staff was kindly enough to tune in the Weather Channel for me. Luckily the NASCAR race just ended.

I was one happy hobo.

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The weather channel had spoken. Southwest winds all day Monday, shifting to south in the afternoon, then calm with thunderstorms later. For once I would have perfect winds, pavement virtually the whole day, and I felt pretty good. I made my way to the Relax Inn I saw from the dike, thanking the Hungry Howie people again for letting me watch the weather.

"Two beds, only sleep in one", said the clerk.
"Sorry?" I said.
"Two beds in room," said the clerk, a bit piqued,"You sleep in one."
I tried to smile but I think my face made more of a sneery sort of grimace. I call it my Cheney smile. If I ditched Rajneesh’s Rude Relaxation Inn right here I would have to make a bridge crossing over the Industrial Canal at night, and I’d been trying to avoid the canal bridges at night. The moon was still hidden, which made biking on the dike a bit more difficult. I was sorely tempted to pedal off and let him sell my room to some Haitian prostitot. Still: water, bed, electricity, phone Monica, sleep. Toilet!
"Okay," I said.
"No pack on other bed."
"You bet!" I said, a little too enthusiastically. I gave him a double thumbs up and a crazy smile.
No other words passed between us, which was probably for the best.
I went to my room and tuned in Black Hawk Down on the television, trying to write off the horrible service I always get in motels like the Relax Inn of 820 E Sugarland Hwy in Clewiston, FL.

I ditched my bamboo tent poles and the broken pannier. Camping equipment went into the intact pannier, which was duct-taped behind the seat until it was firmly integrated into the frame. Wouldn't be needing the tent, sleeping bag, or tent poles again. The rear wheel had picked up a bit of a wobble, which I initially thought was axle imbalance, but with a bit more tinkering proved to be bent spokes. Oh heck. Thirty miles of gravel too many. Plus all those miles I was lost back at Fisheating Creek.

The Black Hawk on the television just ate an RPG with its tail rotor. I watched the tail rotor spin on its off-center axle, the rotation whipping around until it sawed off its own nacelle. "Lost rear rotor. Super Six Four going down. Going down hard." Somehow I fell asleep listening to a minigun's chainsaw roar, thinking about the rear wheel on my bicycle.

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Monday, February 18, 2008
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The alarm went off at 6 and I was on the dike by 6:45. Clewiston is "the sweetest town in Florida" due to the sugar industry here. The locals were torn about Big Sugar: on the one hand they like economic activity, but on the other hand they love fishing and potable water.

I rode at a good clip, with no wind of any kind so early in the morning. The sun began peeking between the horizon and the same low clouds that had trapped the moonlight last night. The cane fields were pretty if foul-smelling. As the sun came up the wind started kicking, south out of my starboard fore, but then I started the big turn north outside of Belle Glade, putting most of the wind behind me. Rear wheel began to pick up some noticeable lateral movement. I stopped at a rest area to check it out, but there was nothing I could do with spokes. The rear wheel was going to have to just tough it out.

I was sort of enjoying the relative isolation of the southern shore. Not an RV park in sight, and I could see towns from more than five miles off. At the same time, I was wondering if I was going to have to get a ride soon, with the rear wheel going all over the place, or worse, if it was going to spill me at ten miles an hour. A lot of people would get some cheap laughs if I break an arm going on a paved bike path around a perfectly flat lake.

I grabbed some water from the rest stop and pushed on to Pahokee.

After fifty some miles on the LOST I caught my first sight of Lake Okeechobee, the water part of it anyway. It looked like the Gulf. There was no sign of land anywhere but for the shore I rode on. I wondered at the double-red channel markers. You're supposed to keep the green on your right when leaving harbor, and the red on your right when coming back to harbor, hence the boater's lullaby of "green-going-right-red-returning". Double red could mean many things, I thought, all of them bad. I closed enough to see shoal water underneath the double red markers. They were hazard markers, then. There were a lot of shoal hazards in this lake, perhaps not unsurprising for a body of water that's been losing a foot a year.

I rode past a sketchy little skydiving airport. "SKYDIVE USA" said the sign. Something I'd like to try eventually, if I ever get comfortable with the idea of blowing a couple of hundred dollars on a couple of hour's entertainment. It's also hard to get comfortable with the idea of jumping out of a perfectly good airplane.

I rode into Pahokee at 9:39, marking twenty three miles made in three hours, minus a twenty minute break. The possibility I might actually get through sixty-some miles today became a bit more real. Breakfast in Pahokee was huevos rancheros from the coffee shop. Delicious. The parents to my right annoyed me. Slapping your three year old for picking up a fork is not going to make her stronger or smarter. How about explaining the fork, since that's obviously why she's picking it up? Mom and dad use shiny spiky thing, perhaps I will try to use shiny spiky thing. WHACK! Oh well guess not.

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Pahokee was pretty charming anyway, but I was beginning to notice that the towns progressively became more and more charming the more tired I got, regardless of their actual charm content. I watched sailboats bob on their moorings to my left. I cameled up at the Pahokee boat ramp bathroom, filled up my reserve water bag, every water container I had, actually; this would be the last potable water until I got back to my car at the town of Okeechobee, forty-five miles off, almost directly across the east axis of the lake. Lowgeared up the dike and I was northbound on the east shore at 10:45. Then a sign:

TRAIL CLOSED. FOR MORE INFORMATION CALL XXX-XXX-XXXX

I stopped, cursed sincerely, dug out my cell, and called the number:
"DOO DEE DOO. WE'RE SORRY, THE NUMBER YOU HAVE CALLED IS. ."
"Fiddlesticks," I said as I powered off the phone. This stretch was going to be the last unpaved section, from Pahokee to Port Mayaca. According to the map the only alternate route was northbound US 441, which paralleled the trail. Hopefully I could hop back on the dike at Port Mayaca. I started north on the shoulder of the highway.

There were a lot of trucks. Big trucks, small trucks, middlin trucks, all carrying loads of citrus and dirt. I wished I had a harpoon, but skiing behind a semi at fifty-five miles an hour on a worn out commuter bike with a bad rear wheel would probably not score high on the Smart-O-Meter. Not to mention the problematic operation of such a device. Firing a weapon capable of punching five millimeters of mild steel is not a task you’d want to do from the back of a bicycle; the recoil would send you halfway to Miami.

The shoulder got very small, and then there was construction and one-lane traffic. Kindly Mexican signalmen stopped traffic both ways for me, which they really didn’t have to do, but I always got the feeling that Mexicans get a kick out of gringos on bikes, especially worn-out looking sun burnt gringos with a Clampett assortment of plastic and duct tape on their luggage racks. I thanked them profusely.

Other times I wasn’t so lucky, and had to scamper like a rabbit to get from one shoulder to the next before the shoulder disappeared and I was creamed by a dirt truck carrying toxic sludge from one place to another. Feel that adrenaline! Thanks to my body’s integrated emergency response system and the brisk tailwind, I covered the twelve miles between Pahokee and Port Mayaca in half an hour.

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Up and over the St. Lucie canal near Port Mayaca, I thought about the cemetery near here, where most of the victims of the 1928 storm were buried: sixteen hundred dead, most from exposure after they were washed out into the Everglades. Swamps are one of the hardest survival environments, which is strange when you look at them. Tons of water, tons of critters, should be easy to live off the land . . but you can’t walk far, you can't get dry, the water’s lethal with pathogens, and a lot of the critters that live there are well-equipped to snack on you rather than the reverse. It takes tough, desperate, somewhat scary people to survive in swamps. Pick up any early history of Florida and you’ll see what I mean.

Not too far outside of Port Mayaca I could see the Treasure Island water tower, which I knew was not too far from Okeechobee. The end was sort of in sight. The lake had begun to generate a seabreeze, which was not optimal, but it only managed to slew the wind around just a bit to port, mostly aft. It was going to really bite when I went around the bend towards Okeechobee. I stopped at a picnic shelter near the Henry Creek lock and sucked up some shade. The sun on my head was transitioning from innocent sunburn to hazard. It felt like my forehead was sloughing off. I’m not sure what strange madness caused me to not get a hat for this trip, but it’s another lesson learned.

After Nublin Creek lock the wind unexpectedly shifted to WSW. I was biking square into the wind again, but thankfully Aeolus did not send quite the force he did yesterday. The rear wheel probably appreciated the abatement of velocity; the touring speed today had given the wheel a decidedly dangerous-looking, even third world kind of wobble. The trail remained unchanged. Mound, lake, canal, treeless grass and water. I got to the “official” LOST trailhead, three miles short of my car, at 2 PM, sixty some miles in just over eight hours.

The official trailhead was so incredibly ghetto I couldn’t believe that anyone would brave the trail behind it. The canal crossing of Taylor Creek was the worst on the trail, with absolutely no shoulder, forcing cars to beep and curse at pedestrians. Only the certifiable would try to bike across this. To get to the actual trailhead, you weave through a mostly drunk RV park and put your car between a propane tank farm and an airboat repair yard. I saw a carful of Japanese tourists drive hopefully up to the trailhead, look around politely, then promptly drive back the way they came. No bathrooms, no water, the land itself a sort of watery Mordor. I got back on the dike and lowgeared into a headwind until I saw the US 441 parking lot, so much nicer than the “official” trailhead that I was glad I’d ignored the driving instructions on the LOST website. I coasted down the dike, right up to my car, ending my cycling trip around Lake Okeechobee. It was 3:30 PM.

I walked out on the birdwalk, called Monica, and relaxed, letting my skin spit out some of the heat it had been bombed with. The east shore was awesome. Paved the whole way, relatively undeveloped, and you can actually see the lake. It would be perfect for anyone training in an endurance event. No distractions, flat ground, just go. Tents really aren’t necessary, you can get a bed at regular intervals, and that cuts down loads to almost nothing. The lack of water and bathrooms is a problem anywhere on the LOST. Biking, I could carry a ton of water, but runners wouldn’t have that luxury. Guys can stealth pee on a lonely side of the dike, but if I were a girl I’d have been a little put off by all that open space behind my butt.

All things considered, a decent weekend. In a few weeks I might even be able to sit normally again.

PCT Talk!

There is a conversation that takes place in the household of former Appalachian Trail through-hikers. It doesn't always go the same way, but it's always something like this:

AT Hiker: "You know, the re-supply points aren't as remote as PCT through-hikers always made them sound."
Spouse: "Uh huh"
AT Hiker: "I mean really, I've been reading the PCT journals and the worst stretch is the Sierras. Outside of that, you got roads every sixty or a hundred miles or so, and it's a twenty-mile hitch, max. PCTers I met on the AT were all like, 'oh, you have to bury food caches' and 'there are no hostels' and all this crap. There's stores and kickass hostels, they were just being pompous bastards. Whatever, most of those PCT people dropped out in Virginia mumbling profanities about rocks and trail maintenance."
Spouse: "You've been reading the trail journals?"
AT Hiker: "Yeah, but it's not like I'm, y'know, planning to through hike the PCT or anything."
Spouse: "Uh-huh."
AT Hiker: "Yeah, anyway, it sounds like the hitches are a lot easier, too. Some of the campgrounds sound pretty sketchy, but there were some sketchy people near the AT, too."
Spouse: "So when are you going?"
AT Hiker: "No, I'm not going to through hike. Not for another, like, ten years. Maybe longer!"
Spouse: "Uh-huh"

I'm not saying that anything like this conversation ever happened in my household. I am, after all, not planning on through-hiking the PCT. As part of my not-planning, a couple of observations about the PCT, the 2,650 mile western sister of the Appalachian Trail

>>The cold is colder, the hot is hotter, the highs are higher, and the lows are lower- physically and psychologically. The Sierra- the most gorgeous stretch of the PCT, by all accounts- is a psychological low for a lot of PCT hikers. Chalk it up to a devil's mixture of altitude sickness and isolation. I can sympathize with the latter. 200 miles is a long way between towns.
>>The wets aren't wetter, though. It's a very dry trail until near the end, and an eight-liter water load is standard. Rule of thumb: when you hit water, act as if it's the last water you're ever going to see. Guzzle a couple of liters, cook supper, fill your bottles- do everything that needs water- then move on. Don't be afraid to dry camp. It's a race and thirst is the timer.
>>The water you do find is awful. We can be honest here: a good thirty percent of AT through-hikers don't treat their water. I was pretty lax about water treatment myself. This is not an option on the PCT. Water sources are, more often than not, lakes that have no outlet and have been hiked and camped on for hundreds of years. Water-borne sickness fells a larger proportion of PCT through-hikers than it does AT through hikers.
>>In spite of its vertical scale, the PCT is suprisingly mild in grade, rarely exceeding 5%. It's also missing the boulder scrambles that slow down AT hikers below the dreaded 2 MPH marker. The PCT was designed for pack animals, God bless them, and you can see it when you pan over the trail in Google Earth- the path actually tries to follow contour lines, as opposed to going up and over every piece of high ground it can find. Because of this, the PCT, although longer, generally takes less time than the AT.
>>The southern section needs special tactics to make miles in unshaded desert. Pack umbrellas are very cool, as long as their locking system can stand the wind. Desert walkers should siesta in a shady spot during the heat of the day (I did this myself on the AT in PA), and consider night hiking when the moon is out (with no rocks, it's not as dangerous as it was in Maine).
>>As always, ultralight wins the day, because it makes room for more water. I'm already pretty close to bottom on the pack scale, but there's room for improvement. A lighter pack like the Mariposa could take off another 30 ounces or so. Replacing raingear and shelter with a poncho tarptent shaves off 15 ounces. Swapping out the sleeping bag with a lighter model, a very expensive 15 ounces. I can ditch a lot of gear in the desert, and mail the cold weather gear to myself before the high Sierras. It seems sort of unfair that the coldest stretch is also the longest between resupplies, sticking you with a ten day food load along with your cold weather gear and your bloody freakin' ice axe.
>>The bears are not really bigger. You don't cross grizzly territory. You do need a kevlar bear cannister, though, not because the bears are more ferocious but because there are not many trees to hang a bear bag from. Everyone cautions about Yosemite bears, which are canny and persistent. They've learned to manipulate friction locks on bear cannisters and unlocked car doors. They'd probably have cell phones if they could find a provider with coverage, but who needs pizza delivery when all these crazy hikers keep bringing food for free?

Anyway, definitely not planning to through-hike the PCT! There's still the Superior Hiking Trail, with all its views of Lake Superior and its adorable Fargo accents. And its quaint three hundred mile length.