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United States, North Carolina, Carrboro, English, Paul, Male, 56-60, All Music, All Food.

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Saturday, November 09, 2002

Liz's friend Joanie came all the way down here from Michigan this weekend. The purpose of the trip was a concert, seems her daughter is hooked up with a bluegrass musician and the band was playing at the Carrboro ArtsCenter. So a whole bunch of us went. About halfway into the set, Elaine's beau Mark took the mike for a vocal. Then my ears perked right up. The song is called "Say Darlin' Say" and I had heard it before. It's a variation on the old "Papa's Gonna Buy You A Mockingbird" song, but Mark's version slowly goes over the edge until he's gonna buy you a pickup truck. I'd heard this on Back Porch Music one night and it had cracked me up. He sings it straight, so it doesn't slap you in the face and say "this is supposed to be funny". It gets there incrementally. Amazing to me that I'd been planning to go to this concert for a couple of months, not even knowing the name of the band, yet I'd heard a an impressive cut written and sung by the very guy we were going to hear. Now I know the group is Stillhouse Bottom Band. "Say Darlin' Say" is on Volume 5 of the Best Of Back Porch Music and you can hear a bit of it on the sample at the WUNC website above. It's also on Bustin' It Up, the groups latest CD which I'd purchased before the concert.  A very pleasant set of coincidences. 11:37:21 PM    comment []

The persimmons are giving up their juice reluctantly in the Mehu-Liisa. I've resorted to a technique mentioned in the manual for extracting tomato juice - pouring the extracted hot juice over the remaining pulp to soften it for the next round of steam extraction. I've done this three times now and the quart or so of juice is beginning to take on a persimmon color. Usually, an hour to 90 minutes is enough to get the juice out of fruit, but the persimmons are going to take 2 and a half hours. 1:17:26 PM    comment []

I got some quinces Cost a buck fifty cents is Thanks, Senor Wences S'awright? S'okay! Wellspring (now officially Whole Foods Market) came through for me. I got 6, seemed about right, at $1.49 each. A little expensive, but the persimmons (11 of those) were free. I drove out of the way to Pope's True Value Hardware, an old-fashioned place that always has canning supplies, and picked up a case of Ball Quilted Crystal Jelly Jars. Wellspring also had McCann's Steel Cut Irish Oatmeal, which will come in handy if I ever take "Dae yir ain at hame" to heart and make haggis.But that's a project for the future (maybe January 25), today it's quince-persimmon jelly (with honey and lemon) and a few pounds of assorted smoked fish. (Yes, I know haiku isn't supposed to rhyme, but quinces made me think of Senor Wences and it wasn't enough to inspire a sonnet) 9:57:46 AM    comment []

Saturday, early breakfast. The one day to have a nice glass of wine with a morning meal. I'm having some Pannekoeken with some homemade apple-cinnamon conserve. I really look forward to this weekly escape from the routine. 2:48:17 AM    comment []

Here is the brining recipe for smoked fish that was in a pamphlet with the first smoker I used, from The Sausagemaker. The following is a fish brine formula for 1 gallon of water: 3 ozs. of prague powder #1, 1 1 oz. of brown sugar, 3 ozs. of salt, 1 oz. of crushed black pepper, 1 oz. of bay leaves. 3 ozs. of liquid smoke can be added to this formula. This formula can-handle up to 10 lbs. of fish fillets. After a few trials, I cut the amount of both salt and Prague powder in half because it made smoked salmon a bit salty. If you're buying the bay leaves (which I am, until my bay laurel tree matures), you'll find yourself holding back a little on the whole ounce too - even if you can get them wholesale. They can be cut to a quarter ounce if you grind them with the pepper in a coffee mill/spice grinder. You can leave out the liquid smoke too if you're going to smoke them anyway. Like many people, I have a jar of liquid smoke in my pantry but can't remember the last time I used it. It doesn't add the incremental layers of smoke flavor from the outside in that the process of smoking does. It is useless, I'm going to throw my bottle in the trash right now... 1:56:25 AM    comment []