Noisy Balloonist Blog is the apprentice

It’s 7:30am and I’m chefspotting. Cal-Med czar Mark Peel of Campanile is scouting fennel. New-French fabulist Josiah Citrin, chef/owner of Mélisse, is writing today’s carte blanche menu in his mind, inspired by flowering broccoli, crenellated morels the color of 70% dark chocolate and frais du bois. Alain Giraud, whose Anisette Brasserie cooks under the market food tent once a month, appears to be on a family outing as he shepherds children among the stalls. Brigades of prep cooks negotiate over crates of first-pick produce that the public will never touch unless they’re behind a restaurant fork. I theorize the existence of a parallel farmers market with items only chefs can see. Perhaps if I slip between those two vans and drop a coin in that parking meter flashing FAIL a doorway will open, and like Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley, I’ll access the food wizards’ secret midway.

At 8:30am Los Angeles’ mother-market opens to the rank and file, a five-block cruciform of fruit, vegetables, flowers and the occasional half-primal of grass-fed bison direct from the soil to your reusable bag. Citrus, dates and avocados arrive from San Diego County. Staples like onions, garlic, lettuce, tomatoes and sweet corn are trucked over the Grapevine from the Central Valley. Tehachapi’s Weiser Farms delivers potatoes, crinkly spinach and enough polychromatic carrots to fill a 64-count Crayola box. From the micro-climes of the Central Coast come berries and Coleman Farm’s eclectic greens like amaranth, nettle and lamb’s quarter.

I have oysters at two bucks a slurp from Carlsbad Aqua Farm. The Luna tastes like cucumber and melon, brine and snow. It’s so cold. Sensory mechanisms decouple, buffers overflow and a feral smile opens my face. It’s only 9am and I’m not prepared. When I manage a glance at the man next to me, his head is thrown back and his eyes are closed. There’s a spent oyster shell in his hand. No cup of coffee can do this.

By 10:30am the market is packed. Cars stack up five deep outside public lots that were full an hour ago. Shoppers browse for organic Fujis from Ha’s Apple Farm, Schaner’s coop-fresh eggs (in shades of speckled blue and rose!) and artichokes the size of medieval truncheons. For DIY brunch I collect a loaf of bread from sourdough evangelist Bezian Bakery, a wedge of raw-milk gouda from Winchester Cheese Company and a ripe tomato. At 11 the throngs are peaking so I shelter in place under the City of Santa Monica tent at the intersection of 2nd and Arizona. My Leatherman yields a crude but savory tomato-and-cheese sandwich. I make a mental note to bring mustard.

For most Southern Californians seasons exist only on the Weather Channel, but at the market our tilting planet wields supreme influence. Lovers of food grown in the ground in rhythm with nature anticipate joy, then sorrow, as items come and go. Winter brings hardy squash, blood oranges and Hachiya persimmons oozing honeyed syrup. Fava beans are huge in spring, heaped unprocessed atop vendors’ tables still in their woolen pods. Summer is for stone fruit and the heirloom tomato—too dense, variegated globes, their ravishing sweetness fixed by the sun and best appreciated with nothing more than olive oil and a drift of salt. Finally, after the first autumn storms strike the Western Sierra, mushroom people emerge with wild porcini, I presume in briefcases handcuffed to their wrists. Any bolete that smells like leaf matter after rain and tastes like peat crossed with dry-aged beef is bound to inspire a certain cock-eyed adulation, and passerby approach David West’s mushroom stand just to sniff in tribute.

At 1:30pm the Wednesday Santa Monica Farmers Market, which celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2011, shuts down. The streets open to traffic and the urban drone returns. The chefs have been behind prep lines since mid-morning, while the foodies and hippies and retirees have melted back into the city. The farmers crave only sleep. I keep an ice chest in the trunk of my car. It’s great for camping, the rare bass fishing excursion out of Port Hueneme, and market Wednesdays. I drive home and process the day’s take.

Truth in advertising spotted at The Winehouse, West Los Angeles.

Once there was an egg. Two eggs to be precise, and a jigger of cream, three tablespoons of butter (one clarified), olive oil, minced shallot, fresh sage and tarragon and chive, Savennieres white wine, two kinds of salt, cracked pepper, a handful of whole sage for frying, Capricho de Cabra (whim of the goat) cheese, some baguette and the nucleus of all this French fussiness, wild-caught chanterelle mushrooms. Trim any discolored or woody stems and reserve for another use; prayer comes to mind.

Omelette mise en place. Baguette, olive oil and butter are MIA.

Sage pairs exceedingly well with mushrooms.

This formula is the result of numerous two-egg experiments, roughly the tenth iteration of something informally called the Provençal Omelette. Such a generic name indicates more of a paradigm than a specific recipe: some veggie—summer squash, blanched spinach or mushrooms are perfect—sautéed with shallot and herbs and filed away within a golden envelope of egg. For classification purposes then, I’ll call this a Chanterelle Omelette, Omelette Gusteau or possibly the Expense Account Omelette.

Chanterelle omelette with grilled bread and fried sage.

Dressing the garnish with grey salt.

The finished dish was so richly lubricated I could have slid the entire thing down my throat without swallowing, like an anaconda. Classical French egg preparations demand fat because a properly cooked egg is a barely cooked egg. Silken, pale yellow and absolutely tender, the protein is only coaxed toward doneness; it’s more a suggestion of cooking than the actual application of heat. Butter and cream enhance mouthfeel and preserve moisture while insulating the egg from the heat of the pan. Were a technique invented, likely involving a super-conducting supercollider, to keep egg liquid while maintaining a desired shape, chefs from Calvados to Aix-en-Provence would trade their Escoffier to possess it.

Your basic button mushroom will do wonderfully with egg, but the chanterelle is an accessible luxury-class mushie, dense and rich with a flavor like roasted duck. This savory pleasure can be had at modest expense compared to rarefied shrooms like morels, porcini, matsutake and the god-emperor of fungi, the truffle. Mute and invisible to all but the most reverent hunters, wild mushrooms are the monks of the culinary landscape. They are ascribed divine properties in and out of the kitchen. Watch the mushroom tent at any farmers’ market. Some passerby only stare; their unwillingness to approach acknowledges the presence of the remarkable. The mycophiles, on the other hand, can’t help but caress the product and raise it to their nostrils, breathing greedily as the vendor shoots them a canny smile. It’s like making contact.

Foraged chanterelles.

Stewed in butter.

Decadent package.

You will never appreciate clean underwear more than after you reckon the stench emanating from a three-day-old pair after a 12-mile hike nearly seven days into a summer camping trip. It spikes the nose and addles the mind, like heatstroke or reality TV. There was a grocery bag in my car that I called the The Bag of Incomprehensible Funk, where especially noxious apparel went to outgas before returning to my pack. Then there is the thrill of stripping those brined undergarments off for a campground shower. Undisguised grunts of pleasure escape from the neighboring stalls, ohhhhhhhhs and aaahhnghs and sharp, contented exhales. So mesmerized are you by the sensation of shedding filthy skin that you don’t notice you’re making identical noises. But it hardly matters—vanity has no place in the wilderness and you have hot water for less than 25 cents a minute. Which highlights this universal axiom of camp cleansing: Always shut the tap yourself. Being caught unawares, dripping and quarterless, in a coin-op shower when the water clicks off is an awakening nearly as rude as birth.

In late August/early September I took a two-week solo camping trip, looping around California, penetrating its vacant northeastern corner and straying briefly into Oregon and Nevada. The journey included Mendocino County, Humboldt County, Redwoods National Park, Crater Lake National Park, Lava Beds National Monument, Lassen Volcanic National Park and Yosemite. I kept detailed notes; I’m not sure why it’s taken me so long to post, nor why the post has been so agonizing to write. Prematurely then, I turn this travelogue over to you. Some portions have been obsessively rewritten, some have been stolen verbatim from my journal and some have been dashed off to maintain the narrative. Other bits have been omitted entirely, and at this late stage I am only ambivalent about their absence. A viewer’s note: The photo gallery below includes a few snaps from a prior trip to Death Valley in January 2008. This is a little underhanded, but I like the photos and DV was on the original California Loop itinerary. After two weeks of camping, I was simply too wasted to confront the heat. The trip was romantic and restorative and often lonely, and I saw a lot of volcanoes. It was a conscious assault on the mediated existence of urban life, and in that respect it was a direct hit.

Los Angeles to Hopland, 509 miles

It’s a little glib to compare good times in Mendocino to good booze. Fine palliatives are always on the itinerary, and during my travels I sampled 17 wines, 11 beers, 11 brandies, two mezcals and one stupendous absinthe [the links will take you to my top selections], but time in this real Northern California enriches the soul as well as the blood. Maybe good times in Mendocino are like good dreams—vivid during, hazy after and utterly rejuvenating. One evening, Kumar, Sunny and I dined on foot-long Golden Slipper oysters from the Mendocino coast. These monster bivalves could consume an oyster knife whole, so we set them over charcoal until the shells just cracked and pried them open by hand. The flesh within was lobed and wet like a toddler’s liver, speckled with grit and as big as my palm. We carved them into chunks, basted them with Tapatio and lemon and slurped them down.

With friends the next day, we tasted at Navarro Vineyards and Roederer Estate, where Trina insisted the willowy blonde behind the bar was hitting on me. I gave her Pod Chocolates and she gave me a fat discount on two bottles of wine. Technically, this means she has my phone number. There’s a photo of me leaping about 12 feet from a rock into the Navarro River that you will not find in the gallery above, since my silhouette resembles The Penguin from Batman Returns (it does no longer; thank you Wii Fit). On our way home we stopped at the Anderson Valley Brewing Company for craft brew and jars of coveted spicy mustard. The AVBC staff were kind enough to let me collect hops directly from the vines suspended over the beer garden. I thanked them with chocolate, which they double-reverse-thanked with a free pint. Outside, a circle of shower-deprived Mendofolk were smoking bowls off a bud the size of a perfecto cigar in plain view of the daytrippers. I was exquisitely happy. Remind me to tell you about the $350, 22-year old Germain-Robin Anno Domini brandy.

Hopland to Mottole Beach, 171 miles

Up the 101 into Humboldt County, the sticky kind heart of the ganja galaxy, a broken down, exceedingly rural landscape of hills and valleys where cattle meander in the road and one can drive for miles without seeing any evidence of a legitimate economy. The town of Honeydew, as it were, consisted of a few ramshackle farm buildings and a hybrid post office-general store with wood plank floors. The locals toasted my arrival with Miller High Life, which they sucked down from the hoods of their pick-ups moored in the dirt out front. I’m not making this up to enhance the story. A strip of Dymo label-maker label was stuck to a nearby outhouse: Shake more than twice and its playing with yourself.

The Mottole River drifts into the sea about 35 miles south of Eureka along Humboldt County’s Lost Coast. A rustic 10-site campground huddles behind some dunes away from the beach, seeking respite from the ceaseless wind. After my first night in the tent—fly off, stars scattered across the black dome of sky—I took a morning hike towards the Punta Gorda lighthouse three miles to the south across deep, ankle-shanking sands. The Lost Coast delivers on its name: foreboding, vacant, indifferent to the travails of life, and wildly beautiful. The ocean is a frigid gray-green and massive waves wheel over and break directly on the beach. The body count included three dead sea lions, a turret of feathers and bone that was likely a pelican and a decomposing gray whale. In life it must have been 40 feet long; in death its perforated vertebrae were the size of dinner plates, and gulls pecked its flanks for scraps of putrid carrion.

Mottole Beach to Redwoods National Park, 108 miles

Next stop Redwoods NP, a UNESCO World Heritage site, hermitage for devotees of the forest and home of the world’s tallest trees, whose location is a closely guarded secret . I was told much later by a geologist I met in Lava Beds—who knew the whereabouts of the hidden grove but politely declined to reveal them—that the world’s tallest tree is now the world’s second tallest tree, thanks to a recent storm that sheared 12 feet off its canopy. I logged 16 miles of hiking beneath the silent arbor, the most trekking I did anywhere. I found a walking stick abandoned at my campsite. It was stamped with the words Lassen N.P., likely a souvenir from an NPS gift shop. I claimed it and prodded the logs in my dinner fire, planning to deliver it to Lassen for someone else to find. From my journal:

8/29/08
I started leaving a spare container in the tent at night so I didn’t have to leave to go to the bathroom. You can get away with a lot when you camp solo, like pissing into a jug labeled “Simply Lemonade.” My tent has glow-in-the-dark zips, which personally I think is really cool. There is this tendency among some of the retired set to show up at camp and simply reconstruct their living rooms around the fire pit. Chairs, lamps, the morning paper, everything. Not bad necessarily, just… comical.

Redwoods National Park to Crater Lake National Park, 210 miles

Crossed the mouth of the Klamath with it scimitar-shaped sandbar, detoured to the Safeway in Crescent City for moleskin and cola and then pointed northwest along route 199, otherwise known as the Smith River Scenic Byway. The moment I left the coastal winds behind, a savage heat gripped the road and the air smelled like tinder. It seemed the mildest provocation might incite the forest to explode. When I stopped in Grants Pass to review my map it was 106 degrees and the air was as still as a mortician’s shroud. The combination of heat, wheezing AC from the cars queued at the Burger King where I was parked and the chatter of overfed drivers ordering double-bacon this and king-cheesy that made me ill.

The alpine caldera of Crater Lake offered respite from the heat, a ravishing volcanic bathtub 1953 feet deep, five miles wide and, having neither inlet nor outlet, caching some of the world’s purest water. I hiked to the peak of Mt. Watchman for a retina-peeling panoramic view of the Lake and the surrounding forest. Mt. Shasta was visible 100 miles to the south, the Three Sisters 90 miles north. I hiked the ruinous dirt escalator called Cleetwood Cove Trail down to the water’s edge. You can see rocks protruding from an underwater shelf 40 feet below before the cabochon light is consumed by blue, then fathomless black. I absolutely love Crater Lake.

Crater Lake National Park to Klamath Falls, 69 miles

I re-provisioned in Klamath Falls, about 20 miles north of California border, where I stayed the night at the Quality Inn (high quality), watched The Hills on MTV for the first and last time (low quality) and breakfasted with a busload of Korean tourists (medium quality) who had followed me from LA to Crater Lake. Miraculously, I’d managed to slip back into civilization directly between the Democratic and Republican conventions. That morning I stupidly asked the hotel clerk where the falls where. “There are no falls,” she replied, “but there’s a park across the street.”

Klamath Falls to Lassen Volcanic National Park via Lava Beds National Monument, 217 miles

From my journal in Lassen:

9/2/08
Bumpass Hell is Bumpass Cool! Or hot, rather. I ran into a California Conservation Corps group on the trail. Mostly they were hammering small stones into even smaller stones and pushing boulders around a rocky incline in a wheelbarrow. I’m not sure what they were conserving, but it seemed like a lot of work. Tonight I started an excellent fire! With nothing but downed wood, newspaper and a lighter. Tonight I am a man. Or a fireman.

I debated leaving the walking stick in the gravel at the Mt. Lassen trailhead but was unable to part with it.

Lassen Volcanic National Park to Yosemite National Park, 318 miles

Crossing back into California from Nevada, I stopped at the agricultural inspection station south of Topaz Lake. I declared my Oregonian apple and tomatoes. The woman eyeballed me xenophobically. “Can I see the apple?” she enquired.

“Uh sure, it’s in the trunk. You know, it passed ag check back when I crossed over from Oregon.” This was true.

“Oh. Well… ok.” She dismissed me, seemingly relieved to have been spared the mundane business of interrogating yet another piece of fruit.

In Tuolumne Meadows I tried night photography and Jetboil omelettes and sort of vaulted up the south face of Lembert Dome. Showed you, trailhead.

Yosemite National Park to Los Angeles, 366 miles

I was erratic and emotional on the drive back to LA. I didn’t know where I would feel more alone—at home or in the forest. Regardless, I’d been drifting southward like flotsam in a river ever since Lava Beds, and in my eagerness I vetoed a side-trip to the Bristlecone Pine Forest in the White Mountains, one of the many ranges that border Death Valley. I glimpsed a coil of smoke idling over the peaks as I drove past, not an uncommon site in the inferno of summer. Turns out that was the BPF visitor center burning down. It had sparked that morning and burned to the foundations. A cause was never determined.

In the town of Mojave, known to most Angelenos as that dusty toilet where you take a piss on the way to Mammoth, I stopped for a snack: my last contraband apple and some granola. There was a wild old man— bearded, cooked by the desert, with a pinched Hannibal Lechter face and a battered baby carriage overflowing with garbage and Made in China American flags—nosing through the McDonalds parking lot for cans. Periodically he would stop and play a tune to no one in particular on a pink toy guitar strung across his chest. The Lassen walking stick was his, of course; I knew this. I fished it out of the car and offered it to him. He took it immediately and without thanks, as if I was late for the exchange. Then words hemorrhaged out of his face at an incomprehensible rate something about deaddogsundera houseunder andthecitydidno thinga nddidyouseethis articleinthetimesthisman isveryrichthatguyov ertherebeatshisdogsiknowand people beat mewhenisleepand no wihavea weapon! I’m not sure but I think he was referring to the walking stick. He had a ring of ballpoint pens tucked into the neck of his shirt like a Masai necklace . I understood his urgent need to speak; I’d been alone for a while too. When I drove into LA that evening the city was a different color. No visual information was gained or lost; rather my brain, recoded by wilderness, rendered a shifted spectrum.

Total miles driven: 2222.5
Total miles hiked: 38.7
Ratio of miles driven to miles hiked: 57.4 to 1

There is a whole other post stewing on Noisy Balloonist somewhere lampooning the art of food porn and publications that use terminology like foodways, so it is with some hesitation that I relate the following, which so nakedly embraces that which I pretend to criticize. Just open any issue of Saveur magazine, where meals are never neat. They are pictured oozing, spilling over, split and smeared, buffed with crumbs like spunk on décolletage—a sensational eros of food that make you want to eat and eat and eat with Roman abandon. This will be a departure from NB’s usual Pod Chocolates fare, but to be frank, any post around here is a departure from the usual. Great things are happening in chocolate and there’s more news to come. [Special to food publicist Nancy: I know the Pod website is shite. I had no intention of going live until all the commerce bits were in place, but an angry mob descended on me last Christmas demanding blood and also HTML, so there you go. However, I'm thrilled you enjoy this blog!]

I fixated on steak. Specifically dry-aged prime ribeye steak, buried deep within the rib primal of the steer, shielded from exertion and thus yielding the supple ellipsoid of flesh called the eye that makes it the most desirable of traditional steak preparations. A proper ribeye steak weighs about a pound and is uniformly two inches thick. Any thinner and it becomes difficult to adequately char the exterior while keeping the interior rare. This poor runt steak, this consolation steak reserved for punters like me who step up to the meat counter and demand “the smallest steak you got” was eight ounces and maybe an inch-and-a-quarter thick. It still cost 15 bucks.

Ribeye, modestly appointed. With marjoram and chives (chives excluded from the final dish).

Marbled like an Italian quarry.

Nevertheless it was a magnificent cut, mellow and sweet, deeply marbled and fringed with concentrated, mahogany protein that is the stamp of good dry-aging. I deliberated on how to cook it. Putting meat of this quality under a home broiler is more an insult than a cooking method. Grilling would vaporize all the juices, a foolish sacrifice. I opted for a version of the pan fry, using a furiously hot cast iron pan to sear the flesh steakhouse-style and develop a rich brown char to insulate the flesh within. Cooking this way in my poorly ventilated kitchen is tantamount to lighting a bonfire in my living room. I turned on all the fans, opened all the windows, disabled the smoke detector and dropped the steak into the pan.

Four minutes on the presentation side to achieve a Hemingway-class mantle. A scant 60 seconds on the reverse to finish.

Shitake mushrooms and farmers’ market fingerling potatoes were glazed in the pan sauce that resulted and the dish was paired with a modest South African red. Hybrid, medium-bodied, experimental. The sunny, mineral clip of the Shiraz in the blend parried good-naturedly with the richness of the steak. I have bigger guns in the wine closet, but this was, after all, a meal for one.

Plated. Dry-aged prime ribeye steak with shitake mushrooms and rainbow fingerlings in a pan glaze.

Complete mise en place. Clockwise from the pepper mill: pepper, sea salt with marjoram sprig, marjoram, Italian parsley, shallot, grapeseed oil, shitake soaking liquid for the deglaze, homemade brown stock, ribeye, roasted fingerling potatoes, torn shitake.

Delheim 2004 Cabernet Sauvignon Shiraz (60%/40%), Stellenbosch, South Africa.

Sated.

Forensics of the home abattoir.