charcuterie-o-rama au quebec

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intensement ENRAGE!!!!!

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1/2 kilo of regis herves' famous lamb creton from my engagement dinner

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real bread, herves' lamb creton, fresh coriander seeds

beer pate was ultra tasty

pork belly, liver sausage, unbelievable ham

strongolino-wine cured dry sausage- amazing complexity

this is where I oozed into a puddle

it's not what it looks like- this is a suisse sausage: pork, bacon and emmenthaler that has been smoked until a charred look is composed. grilled and served on ultra fresh real french baguette with sweet-spicy mustard. this is a texas love letter.

fresh sausages to-go:

suisse

knackwurst

merguez petite

tourguez

provencale

agneau souvlaki

les saveurs oubliées

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Last weekend was the best weekend in the Universe, ever. I was 6 hours deep into Quebec, deliquescing in a Chateau in La Malbaie overlooking the St. Lawrence Seaway. I got up, slipped into the car and began leisurely meandering through the sublimely neon gold/evergreen coastal mountains, dotted with circa 1700’s French farm houses, barns, moose and trout emboldened lakes. Scenically stoned, I had reached the boat launch, already primed/sated. Of the boats cruising around the fjord and seaway, the one with the five big golden hearts and an arrow going through them arrived shortly thereafter. I knew this was my boat. Forty minutes later, the boat was surrounded by seals and minke whales. Next, the second largest animals on the planet, the fin whales, appeared, twisting, smiling and showing their bellies. And then the largest and most conscious animals on our planet, the blue whales came popping up around the boat. It was at this point that I became we, for this was the moment that I proposed to my fiancé.




That evening we left the Richelieu and headed into the landscape for dinner. Racing through the Charlevoix twilight, we curiously imbued ourselves into the French insignia’d countryside and pulled up to the two silos. As we got out of the car and headed towards the farmhouse restaurant with wine bottles in hand, we heard “baaaaa” several times, confirming that we were going to have some very fresh lamb.

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This establishment was the creation of Chef Régis Hervé. Fresh. Fresh. Local. Ancient tradition. Fresh. Reality. His institution is called Les Saveurs Oubliées, “the forgotten taste”. He was the first in North America to create a provincial brand for his lamb, bearing its regional status from the land it was raised on, like France, Italy and Spain have been doing with their unique cheeses, hams and wine for centuries. The designation that comes from his farm is known as Charlevoix lamb.

I wanted ultra romance for my engagement dinner. I didn’t want to pay $400 for ideas tonight. I didn’t want to imagine anything. I just wanted grandma essence grounded in love. I wanted to experience the soul food completeness that my grandma gave me in her café 30 years ago. I wanted to taste the offsprings of Mother Earth and Father Sky, our planet and sunshine, photosynthesis and aliveness, salinity and terrior. Not in search of, but found. Not what’s next out there, but what’s eternal in here. Cuisine that holds you in its arms and whispers to you that you’re home. We came to the perfect place.

To sprinkle more romance on the evening, no one spoke English. Parts of the menu and everything said around us was mostly shrouded in that mysterious curiosity. It was all about leaving one of the senses behind, communicating in another gear and letting it all go. And what serendipitously emerged from the lingual fog, came the best meal I’ve had in five years.

First came the bread. The crusty caramelized array of country bread. It arrived with a tour of fresh butter, mint-late harvest white wine gelee, pepper-pear sweet & sour compote and the creton. Creton is a country style pate that is coarse and spreadable. It’s usually made entirely from pork and pork fat. You might as well call the person you buy it from your dealer, because this stuff is straight up French crack. Although, the first bite of this version sent me reeling down another canal of ecstasy. This my friend, was fresh lamb creton. To sum it up in early 80’s vernacular: Word.

I didn’t take pictures of the meal because I didn’t dare encroach on anything that would unplug me from my omnipotent juiciness of unison called my engagement dinner. But this is what was on the menu and nourishing our cells:


pan seared farm lamb’s liver
farm lamb merguez, onion confit, cranberry conserve

foie gras torchon
toasted pumpkin-anise brioche, violet-chablis gelee,

spiced black salt, calvados

onion-tomato soup
duck and chicken renderings, chervil

crispy duck breast
cassis-pear gastrique

farm lamb chops grilled with farm herbs
pear-cardamom chutney

fresh farm goat’s cheese cake
farm raspberry glaze, farm blackberries

warm orchard apple pie
flakiest crust on the planet, farm cape gooseberries, warm anglaise

We were the last ones to leave the restaurant and I asked if there was any way that I could purchase some of the chef’s ayahuasca hallucination style lamb creton. After a few communication vollies with the chef, he reappeared and asked if I wanted a kilo of it. I knew right then and there it was officially a drug. I opted to go halvsies with him. A few moments later, I left the restaurant with my fiancé, a big ass smile and a demi-kilo of lamb creton.

Fin.

whiteface mountain goat cheese

I loves me some cheese, hence another nicknomer of mine, Queso. Lately, I’ve been fondly swayed by a delicious local fromage which bolsters a ton of flavor. We all know that in America, we’re giving a handicap with having to pasteurize our cheeses, proffering a cheese that has the wildness spanked out of it. Luckily, artisan cheese makers are taking every step to entice the original spirit despite our inspection system.





Asgaard Dairy, down the street from our house, has come through with a soft ripened goat cheese channeled straight from France’s Loire Valley. Much like the Sainte Maure cylinders produced in Touraine, sans the straw running through the center, this cheese is aged to create a beautiful complexity.

Asgaard uses Alpine and Nubian goats on their farm, which garner a high butterfat content. As the cheese ages, it forms a brie like skin with a fine grey-blue dusting of edible mold. Once you cut into it, the textural circus reveals itself. You have the thin natural rind with a walnutty essence, enveloping a ring of runny, buttery, succulence surrounding a core of smooth tasting crumbly youngness that adds a touch of tartness. This is the best thing to happen to my hood in a while.

I tried not to overpower the cheese with companions. Fruit and floral tones were all that could be added, as to honor this champ.

whiteface mountain goat cheese
lavender laced rosé reduction
thai basil buds

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Although, I am giddily anticipating the hitting up of numerous cheese markets in Quebec City and Montreal in the near future, to once again, happily plunge myself into unpasteurized heaven. .

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what's next?

Celebrate. You get to choose your next thought! Will it be happiness or grievance?

jalapeno umami

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ancient.
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simple.
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take these.

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make this.

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yummy.
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freak out (optional).
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steak & yard lobster

I’m proud to say that I’ve got Hypomyces. Well it’s actually something called Hypomyces lactifluorum. I’ve got a good case of the lobster mushrooms. And they’re growing in my front yard, over by the mint.

Lobster mushrooms are actually a parasite that overtakes a Russula or Lactarius shroom, converting it like that aqueous liquid metal persuasion found in such flicks as The Matrix or T2. Sans evil metallic properties, this conversion is prodigiously more blessed and most delicious.

When you sauté them in olive oil, the oil turns lobster color as well, making a vegetarian lobster oil. Deeply hued of burnt umber and meaty tasting from caramelizing the fungus, this is a byproduct that should not be left to fall between the cracks.

When one thinks lobster, up springs one 50’s style flashback scenario; the luxurious iconic duo of steak and lobster. It falls back on that era of Rat Pack svelte-ness. Adding steak for that hip, savory buzz. This time, the steak is all grilled ribeye, that’s been dehydrated and crushed.

The white powder is not a Rat Pack follow through. It’s that coconut imbued chicken fat from the previous post, gone to powder land. It adds a melting fat texture to the mouth where the steak juiciness is no longer.

As I look out across my paddock at this time of the year…I can truly say, I likes my yard.

lobster mushrooms
dehydrated beef ribeye
chicken fat powder
fig foam
mustard green blossoms
lobster mushroom oil

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fried chicken and watermelon

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Placing your awareness on the names fried chicken and watermelon brings forth the absolute. Completeness. In that, I don’t need to slobber or wax wordzy about two perfect gifts that have been bestowed upon this good Earth.



Git to the point: Chicken skin, coconut milk, fish sauce and sambal went sous vide’ing at 58C for 6 hours.

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Looks like a rough evening, but this is truly a new goddess of the larder. Chicken skin which has surrendered it’s renderings to the coconut milk, chiles and garlic. One fingertip embossing of this stuff, touching your tasting mechanism, leaves you totally emotional and helpless. The possibilities for this are mind melting.

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The skin, it was dehydrated and then deep fried, making a crackling, scented with coconut milk, umami and chiles. The watermelon orb is a throwback to Adria and the lineage, yet the addition of a jalapeno slice made it all so brand new and shiny to me. Served spoon style, the crispy/bursty textures couldn’t be more circus-like on the spectrum. Taste wise…it’s all…fried chicken and watermelon.

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coconut-sambal chicken crackling

watermelon-jalapeno burst
thai basil

coconut powder

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chanterelles

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The woods are alive with the sound of fungus. Since April, it’s been unseasonably cool and rained 94% of those days. In fact, we’ve only had 5 days of summer, which, just so happened to be the last 5 days.

In this moist mesh of fertility comes inspirational bursts of sun that call forth the spore nation. Shrooms unfold their microscopic selves upward from the humus and begin fruiting. Once visible, the hustle is on, swaying the fungiholics from their dens. Bounty hunters hunting bounty. Symbionts harvesting symbionts.

My new mycologist, Linda blessed me with her front yard findings on Silver Lake. Happiness comes in the form of fungus that doesn’t kill you and smacks of apricot and spicy tones, reminiscent in plants such as arugula and nasturtiums. So here’s to you L, and your yard, for being so good to me. We’ll see you in mine in a few days.




With pure flavor of the woods, you don’t want to wrastle or dominate it with a thousand textures or components. To swing with the peppery notes of the chanterelles, I sautéed them in a euphorically spiced Ethiopian butter called nit’ir qibe. Which is not only a post in itself, but a book should be devoted to honor its gustatory exotica. This is complemented with toddler arugula and arugula blossoms. It’s these kinds of moments that allow you to relinquish to nowness.

yard chanterelles

nit'ir qibe

toddler arugula

arugula blossoms

jalapeno umami salt

when are you?

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You’re pretty sure of who you are. You know you’re this and you’re definitely not that stuff. You wear this and you bring home this much, which determines who you are. If you tell me I’m something else other than what I THINK I am, you better be sure I’m going to defend my thinkings. We all defend our appearance, or I should say apparent’s. Because we are a society of we only believe what we see. We cling to things that are only apparent to our eyes, and this, leaves us extremely short sighted.

We depend upon our eyes to believe. Yet eyes are only interpreters of reality. They’re shotty interpreters at best. They see a very small sliver of the light spectrum. You can’t see in the dark, infrared, radio waves, electricity, microwaves, etc. And as we get older we need glasses and sometimes loose our sense of “eyes” all together. So why do we keep trusting in them so much that we determine our reality from them?

If you take a powerful enough microscope, you can see atoms. With more power you see that those atoms are not made of solid stuff like we were told in school. There is more than 95% emptiness in atoms. And the “solid” parts inside are made of tiny particles with space in between them. These particles are not really stuff. They blink in and out of existence thousands of times a second. And nobody has been able to find out where they go and why they come back. Because you can’t see this with your all knowing naked eyes, doesn’t mean it’s not happening…always.

Today, for a few seconds or maybe five, be aware that it’s not so much what you are, but when you are. There are more atoms in an average cell than stars in our Milky Way. We are composed of 70 trillion cells. Each one of us is made of 70 trillion Milky Ways, blinking in and out of existence, thousands of times a second, billions of times a day. In reality, you are being recreated billions of times a day. So the next time someone asks you “What’s up?”, smile and ask them, "When?"

umami at your fingertips

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The most common theme to “aha” moments and revelations is always distilled into the holiness of simplicity. That thing in your hands, right now. That ever familiar thing you see that you just haven’t “seen” yet.

I’ve been making flavored salts for almost 20 years, and the one that has eluded me is the most palpable. I’ve used this ingredient as a steady flavoroid in many salt concoctions. I’ve used its cousin, MSG for my own musings in such guttural things like making “The Original Recipe”. But why not use a cleaner, tastier version without the tongue torque of uber-glutamating. Enter, salt imbued with fish sauce. If I’m not using salt, I’m using fish sauce. How obvious.

Now I can’t keep my hands out of it. It has reached the Grail level in my spice trove. Add fish sauce to salt, toss, dehydrate, and “Behold (lot’s of shiny stuff and rays of light are bursting in all directions) …sel de nam pla”!!! I’ve always been scared of interventions. But the Divine ones can always have their way with me.

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