All Caution Thrown To The Wind

It has suddenly warmed up here in LA. Of course it's probably because Awards Season is upon us once again. Don't start thinking it's all part of the climate change thing, as we know full well here in Vanity City it's the heat from the rest of the world's gazing eyes toasting up the atmosphere in our little bubble. Living in greater Hollywood makes residents adept at avoiding traffic snarls that result from road closures for the events, but I did get caught in the Critic's Choice Awards mess around The Palladium last night since that one was not on my radar. In fact, I realize I am generally out of touch with that kind of buzz since I hardly watch broadcast TV and don't subscribe to cable. I do, however, watch movies and TV series of interest through Netflix. I get my industry news from friends, the newspapers online, and NPR. I do drive by The Kodak Theater and all along Hollywood Boulevard almost daily to make sure everything is ticking over nicely.

So the Awards Season is signal for me to "hunker down" and hide away, which I like to do anyway. I've cozied up to my own weekend Merchant Ivory DVD season (mixed in with Mad Men 2 and Reilly). I ran out and got a large tube of Winsor&Newton's Cadmium Red oil paint at Blick's sale, and, throwing all caution to the wind, a boneless leg of lamb which you see above all ready to season and pop in the oven.

Here it is again, studded with a head of garlic, rosemary sprigs from my own plant, crushed juniper berries and allspice, with pepper ground from my new Perfex grinder (a Christmas gift), and all laden in an oval roasting dish (also a Christmas gift). It's currently in the oven at 400f with potatoes, parsnips and carrots all cozying up to each other. I will let you know how it all turns out. Time to prep the shallots and stock for the gravy!

UPDATE:
Sadly I was so eating the results that I failed to capture a pic of it, but, I will tell you that it all came out well and there is plenty left over for a lamb curry. For the gravy I lightly browned finely chopped shallots and added a little clarified turkey stock to soften. Added a cup of medium flavored Douro and brought it to the boil. I poured off the oil from the baking pan after removing the roast to leave the thick black caramelized roasting juices.  I then added the boiled stock with wine and popped it back in the oven to liquefy the pan juices. Ten minutes later I brought the pan back out of the oven and strained it all through a simple sieve. Added micro-planed lemon peel into it and thickened it with a very little cornstarch. Coarsely chopped parsley followed. It made the richest most delicious black sauce drizzled over the meat and soaked over the hard crusted potatoes. The Yukon potatoes were roasted in their own dish, having been parboiled and then scored, and then halved and open face down in canola oil. The parsnips and carrots were roasted whole without oil in their own dish - what intense flavor! some fresh peas added to the veggies on serving.

Memory Lane

I'm sipping a very inexpensive Soave and remembering The Veneto. I think it's remarkable that a wine priced this affordably can be fragrant, complex and dry without losing impact. Forgive me, feeling pretty suave for it, while I watch Reilly, Ace of Spies Disk 2 which is just as engaging as it was on first run, and I'm thinking of far off places. I'm also enjoying Michael Krondl's book, The Taste of Conquest and have just finished the sparkly chapter on Venice. Krondl's style is spicy in itself, but I have yet to read about allspice, my current favorite addition to robust meat dishes of any kind. No mind, a glance ahead in the index says that it will be mentioned in the chapter on Lisbon. Krondl focuses on the principal middlemen in the game and the cities that prospered most from that effort, venice, Lisbon and Amsterdam, but it seems so far there is a constant background city in Istanbul, for it seems that all merchants had to either deal with or get around dealing with Istanbul and The Turks. It's a ripping yarn to be sure, and I recommend the book for it's clarity and general cheer.

I get my allspice from Nicole's in South Pasadena, a great source for raw spice here in LA. I crush it with a pan and add it early in the cooking so that the breakdown can occur, it being a robust, slow release of its flavor. Particularly good with roasting pork or beef, any stew from any ethnic cooking, including chile con carne or a bolognese ragu, benefit from its peppery, nutmeggy, faintly cinnamon-like flavors. With a little fresh sage and thyme, my little kitchen is in business tonight for roasted loin of pork with whole onions.

It's Really Hot!

We are tolerating record heat to the tune of 112ºf, after the mildest summer on record. It's a very dry heat reminiscent of my time in Tucson, Arizona. Challenge in this little kitchen is to not use the oven but do everything stovetop. Even better would be to use a barbecue but there isn't room to swing one on the back stoop. Tonight it's risotto, which keeps the flame on for quite a while but it's a small sacrifice for the luscious shrimp, firm but tender arborio rice fragrant with garlic and shallots, broccoli raab beside, and a nice chilled glass of a local Pinot Noir to meet the sweat. The kitchen is usually warm, but why not warm it up just a little more! Topsy Turvy on the DVD just to juggle things up. Stay cool!

The Dull Shine

I have a copper Ibrik that comes to a nice coral mirror finish after a bit of spit and polish (i.e. Brasso). After a month or so clouds seem to fall over its surface and the pink shine fades as if it had endured its own private rainstorm. If it had a voice or a soul it would be screaming forever "clean me, clean me or forget about me" until it was satisfied, as though it had a memory of brighter days. I am in one of those tarnished states right now where it is hard to see through the dross and appreciate anything that might possibly be fresh or "new" such as the predictably noisy wine bars and restaurants that have opened up around here recently. I guess I don't feel sparkly. Dull and drab easily recognizes it's own. perhaps it's time to put the ibrik to good use and make some Turkish coffee in it, that'll surely bring back the shine.

Letter From New Zealand #6

My friend Peter Huck, journalist and windswept adventurer, recently moved away from Los Angeles with his other half, the lovely Barbara Drake, to beautiful New Zealand. They are living in a tiny apartment in Auckland with a very, very small kitchen. Since their excellent and mostly vegetarian dinner parties were such a feature of my social life here, and sadly missed, I asked Peter to think about writing a monthly letter from down under as a kind of mirror to my own efforts and experiences here. This is the sixth letter.

One of the pluses that New Zealand boasts, from a carbon capture perspective, are its forests, which cover 7.5 million hectares, or almost 30% of the land area. We've spent the past week up on Two Caravan Hill, our Coromandel property, working with a local team to add a few hundred native trees to the national total, countering some of our carbon emissions as well as restoring biodiversity. After several days of heavy rain - up to 10 inches in one deluge that precipitated huge mudslides on the twisting road over the steep Coromandel Range to our east - we struck a dry window of clear, still, warm days, and bone-chillingly cold nights with temperatures near freezing, that made clamoring up steep banks (sometimes chain-sawing giant gorse plants to gain access) a little easier and less uncomfortable.

Having sourced our plants – native species that included totora, rewarewa, puriri, matai, pohutukawa, hebe, pittosporum, flax, ti kouka, akeake, karaka, kowhai, tanekaha, horoeka and nikau to give them their Maori names - from local nurseries and Project Crimson, a national group which supplies free plants, we stockpiled compost, mulch and stakes around the property and got stuck in .

The crucial thing when attempting to reconstruct a forest is where you plant. Thus certain trees – the rewarewa and totara for instance – like free-draining areas and work on slopes. Others, including many grasses – planted as part of our ongoing stream restoration - and the cabbage trees, can tolerate wet feet. Indeed, cabbage trees would seem to grow anywhere: I’ve seen them on high slopes in dry limestone country in Hawke’s Bay. Others, like karaka, handle wind, no mean consideration on Two Caravan Hill, where gusts routinely box the compass. Soft-leafed plants, pace the puriri, do best with some cover. We solicited advice from experts, walking around the landscape to site specimens, and frequently consulted books as we tried to imagine what plants would look like in three, five, ten or twenty years. Podocarps like matai, totora or kauri (which we’ll plant later) live for centuries. The trick is not to give into temptation and overplant, although in severe wind areas we massed fast growers like pittosporums to break up gusts.

This was our second large-scale planting – Barbara was in charge of the first last August, when it rained – and we’re starting to see more bird life (attracted by plants that provide food in the form of berries). Fantails fluttered around as we spread mulch, they often follow people as we disturb insects when brushing through bush; California quail burst from cover when we approached; tuis, famous for their repertoire of grunts, coughs and chortles, sang nearby, as did bellbirds and one afternoon I watched a kahu, or hawk, ghost silently over the tree fern glade beneath our bach, using its wings to back and hover, as it searched for prey. I didn’t hear the morepork this time.

Fish For The Landlocked

After a trip down to Angelino Heights this morning I scooted up through Echo Park to pick up the 2 freeway to Glendale for lunch at Fish King. Nestled in a green leaved, landlocked naeighborhood  on the edge of the foothills, it's hard to believe that some of the best fish in LA can be found here. I was first introduced to it verbally by a couple who would drive in from the west side to buy for the relevant course at their posh dinner parties. Fish King does have a couple of small tanks for shrimp and lobster, but if you want live, 99 Ranch (see sidebar)  on Valley Boulevard in Monterey Park has many huge tanks with more things than you can imagine swimming around in each. The big attraction at Fish King is the little restaurant adjoining it, with the most delicious platters cooked to order. I enjoyed deep fried oysters with coleslaw and fries, served with the usual cocktail and tartare sauces. If you need wasabes, sri rachas or hot sauces there is a condiment bar which would satisfy. Well worth a trip if you need to stop of at Whole Foods and Trader Joe's which are just a bit south on Glendale Boulevard and a block apart from each other.
      

Letter From New Zealand #5

My friend Peter Huck, journalist and windswept adventurer, recently moved away from Los Angeles with his other half, the lovely Barbara Drake, to beautiful New Zealand. They are living in a tiny apartment in Auckland with a very, very small kitchen. Since their excellent and mostly vegetarian dinner parties were such a feature of my social life here, and sadly missed, I asked Peter to think about writing a monthly letter from down under as a kind of mirror to my own efforts and experiences here. This is the fifth letter.

The drought has broken. The weather map is dominated by "squally thunderstorms," near tropical downpours that drown speech, accompanied by violent wind gusts. In between cloudbursts the weather is surprisingly warm, good news for our nascent Coromandel rainforest: water plus warmth means excellent plant growth, especially as our ten-month old natives have spent the dry summer getting their roots down. It helped that the showers were preceded by "gardener's rain," steady, gentle precipitation that made the soil moist so that subsequent water didn't just run off.

Streams have reappeared, tricking through nurseries of tiny, vividly green native plants nurtured amid dead tree fern fronds in the crepuscular light beneath the canopy. Three weeks from the shortest day, the epic skies above Two Caravan Hill are a racing pageant of blue skies and massive cloud formations as squalls sweep in from the Tasman Sea.

Periodically, they engulf the steep, forested slopes of Coromandel Range, which looms to our east. Right behind us is the Tokotea Kapanaga block, headwaters of Driving Creek, our water source all summer. Charles Ring found gold there in 1852 and now the government wants more, fingering the block as a possible bonanza and triggering growing opposition both in New Zealand and abroad. Last week over 33,000 public submissions were handed into Parliament. One, from London Zoo, expressed concern about Archey's frog. The Zoological Society of London describes this rare creature from the dinosaur era, as "the most evolutionary distinct and globally endangered amphibian on the planet.”

Whether Archey’s frog – plus Hochstetter’s frog and the brown kiwi, both found in the range - would survive renewed mining in Coromandel, still recovering from the 19th century onslaught, is moot. New Zealand’s government continues to play its cards close to its chest. Originally, 467,000 hectares [1.15 million acres] of Schedule 4 conservation land were tabled as potential mining prospects. This shrank to 7000 hectares, then 3,500. The public outcry suggests the government has miscalculated and may seek a compromise.

Curiously, the US mining giant Newmont, which runs the Martha open pit gold mine at Waihi, sent in a submission opposing further mining on Schedule 4 land in the Coromandel - at least for now. Newmont’s operations include Kalgoorlie’s “Super Pit,” a vast 3.6km long by 1.6km wide and 650m deep open-cut gold mine in Western Australia.

The mining question is overlapping sniping about New Zealand's Emissions Trading Scheme, due to take effect in July. Critics blast the EMS, which is meant to reduce emissions 10-20% below 1990 levels by 2020, as either ineffective - agriculture, the country's biggest export earner and a major emitter of methane, a greenhouse gas, does not fully enter the scheme until 2015 - or a craven surrender to environmentalists. New Zealand projects a schizophrenic attitude towards climate change, prepared to enact the EMS even as it explores marine oil and gas deposits, the very fossil fuels that feed climate change.

Maybe the Gulf of Mexico spill, and US moves towards a moratorium on more off-shore drilling, given its inability to halt the environmental catastrophe, will dampen such efforts, although New Zealand has awarded an exploration permit to the Brazilian oil giant Petrobras, infamous for a 2001 disaster when the world’s biggest floating oil platform sank in 1,300 metres off Brazil, killing nine.  Any spill off the North Island’s East coast in the Raukumara Basin exploration area, which dives to 3,000 metres [BP’s well is at 1,500 metres], could prove far worse.