Maggie's Farm

Like a raccoon dragging off some hunk of good garbage, my brother grabbed one of the two turkey carcasses last night while helping with clean-up. Naturally, he took the grilled and semi-smoked carcass which has a richer flavor (enhanced by my injecting it throughout with cider before cooking). We did not have any meat left over from two 18-pounders, but plenty of cornbread-sausage stuffing, which to me is as good as meat. (Next year, maybe we'll do three - or get two ginormous ones which I do not like because they take too long to cook).

His Mrs. commented: "I see I'll be eating turkey soup for the next four days."

I'll freeze the other carcass for my next round of Jus Gibier.

I have always felt that the leftovers are the best part. Nine Ways to Use Leftover Turkey

"Cape Cod Turkey" is, as any Cape Codder knows, dried salt Cod. Brined, then dried in the sun until hard as stone.

The pics above are of drying cod "flakes" near Commercial Wharf, Provincetown. More pics and details here.

The starving Pilgrims would have dined well on Cod, had they known how to catch them. They were weak on survival skills (half died the first winter), but they, as you recall, had never meant to end up in the Massachusetts woods. They were headed for the Hudson River, somewhere near the Dutch city of New Amsterdam. Some reports say they were headed to what was termed "Virginia," the vast area claimed by English investors running south down the coast from New Amsterdam).

European fishermen were harvesting and drying Cod on the coast of eastern Canada 100 years before the Pilgrims arrived, and the Portuguese and Spanish (and eventually, the Italians too) figured out how to cook this wood-like substance, which they call baccala or bacala or bacalao, in interesting ways.

Here's Thoreau's amusing take on the Cape Cod cod industry. (Link fixed - well, maybe not. No time to mess with it right now)

I have never had bad grits, but some afficionados get fussy about their grits.

Come to think of it. friends gave us a big bag of stone ground grits a while ago. They were very good.

How tasty does this look? These are the $12 lunches at Republic on Union Square, NYC. We love Asian rice-noodle soups and dumpling soups at Maggie's. We like Union Square too. I could tell you stories about what it used to be like, back when I lived for a while on University Place in the Village (just across from Dylan's old hang-out, the Cedar Tavern). It was really bad. The cops would pull dead guys out of the bushes and off the benches when making their morning rounds. ODs, some stabbings too. That was back, before Giuliani, when the pundits said that NYC could not be governed.

You should see it now. A bar and cafe with live music in the small park, a dog park, great restaurants all around. Two off-Broadway theaters. Park guys picking up litter, and even an unobtrusive police presence - on foot. Not in patrol cars. Putting cops back on the neighborhood beat has worked very well in NYC. Patrol cars should be only for back-up and rapid-response, in urban areas.

Sometimes a fellow just wants a big bowl of Bob Evans sausage gravy dumped on top of a pile of good biscuits.

Many doctors claim the gravy smooths your arterial linings, thus extending life. The biscuits provide serenity and peace of mind in this troubled world, and many peer-reviewed studies confirm this. It is settled science.

I love to have excuses to travel to places where you can get good biscuits and gravy for breakfast, but I have too few opportunities to do so.

What's your favorite way to dine on this treat? Crumble the biscuit? Split the biscuit? Dump it on top of an intact biscuit? Such details matter in life.

Beers range between around 3% to around 9% alcohol by volume. I prefer the lower numbers because it is pleasant to enjoy a few brews without really feeling it.

You can look up your favorite beer's alcohol content (and calories) here.

Bake a split Butternut Squash until cooked but with the meat firm - not mushy.

Sautee some chopped onions with garlic, butter, and olive oil. Then toss in 1-2" cubes of the peeled squash, with salt and pepper, a teaspoon or two of sugar, and chopped sage, and sautee it all together for a little while, but don't let the squash cubes disintegrate. Add more butter and oil, and a little water, if it gets too dry.

Some people like to add hunks of turkey sausage, and some like to add a splash of brandy.

I think this sauce works best with a chunky pasta like Farfalle.

As I remind people, always stir pasta with the sauce in the sautee pan before serving. That's why they make big sautee pans - to mix the sauce with the pasta. Sauce plopped on top is not the right way to do it.

Top with a sprinkling of parmesan and some pignolis.

Butternut squash or Acorn Squash, halved lengthwise and a wide shallow groove cut out of the meat, with butter, maple syrup, salt and pepper. Brown sugar would substitute for maple syrup. Good simple Yankee food. I think the Indians ate the same thing - without the butter. I would happily eat all of these.

If one is not being proper, a spoon works well.

Some form of cutlivation of the Eastern (or American) Oyster has been going on for 150 years on Cape Cod, especially in Wellfleet. At first, this just consisted of importing wild oysters from elsewhere in their Atlantic or Gulf coast range, and giving them a while to absorb that special Wellfleet flavor.

There is no way that one small harbor could support the nationwide demand for naturally-produced Wellfleet Oysters.

As we sat on the deck watched the oystermen at work on their cages at low tide, we wondered where they buy the baby oysters.

I found out how the whole system works (link has great photos). The laboratory-bred spat from the hatcheries are bought by nurseries, then they are sold to the watermen who do the "grow-out" of the seed oysters. It is quite remarkable. No wonder they aren't cheap.

Photo on top: large scale commercial oyster grow-out in the southern US
Photo on bottom: oystermen tending their oyster cages in Wellfleet at low tide. Production is limited by town regulations, so there is no industrial-scale production and all are beach-bottom cultured instead of being grown on rafts, slowing their growth but making them tastier.

The prix fixe 3 course lunches at Jean Georges, on Columbus Circle (1 Central Park West). $26/person. We ate in the "informal" section before going to the Freud-CS Lewis play down the street yesterday.

I have had lots of good food lately, but this is as good as it gets. Menu isn't all seafood, but plenty of it. I had the Tuna Tartare on avocado with radish and some kind of incredible tangy sauce, the broiled Cod with tomato-herb sauce, and the famous tiny molten chocolate cake. All perfect. Here are some reviews. Forgot my camera, but found the pic of his Bluefin Tartare on the web.

After the play, we took a little stroll through Central Park, which looks immaculate and is full of cheerful people. Despite Bloomberg's obnoxious nannyism, NYC is doing something right these days.

Don't pass it up on your next visit to NYC. Trust your Editor Bird Dog on this. If you try it and disagree, I'll pay for the lunch.

Oktoberfest decolletage collage via Theo. Nice dirndls:

Regular readers know that we love turtles here at Maggie's Farm. All sorts of 'em - turtles, tortoises, sea turtles. We think that turtles are cute, cuddly, witty critters, created by a humorous, inventive God to feed, amuse, charm, and fascinate us.

I do not know whether Arnaud's exists post-Katrina (which Bush and Rove caused, don't forget), but they made a fine Green Turtle soup. I had a clear Turtle Soup once, and I would not boycott it (what good would that dumb, self-congratulatory, pointless thing do?), and it was good - but not so good that I would kill a turtle for it. Mock Turtle Soup is at least as good, if not better. Turtle Soup can be clear, like consomme, or full of stuff.

In addition, turtles can teach us a lesson about the economics of conservation, especially sea turtles.

One of our favorite blogs, Brussels Journal, took the time to post this piece on turtle conservation, about how some conservation methods can endanger species, which begins thus:

If people were not allowed to own chickens and if chicken eggs and meat could not be legally sold, how many chickens would there be? The reason chickens, cattle, catfish, and goldfish are not endangered is because they are owned by private parties, bred and raised in captivity, and sold for commercial profit – hence there are billions of these animals. The poor sea turtle is endangered precisely because the global environmental lobby refuses to let sea turtles be commercially farmed and marketed.

Four decades ago, you might well have bet that Cayman would eventually be known best for its turtle farms, rather than as a tourist destination and one of the world’s largest financial centers, but economically ignorant environmentalists, who tell us they love sea turtles, have ensured there will be fewer of them.

Image: A Green Sea Turtle - a species we would far rather see than eat. But we would eat them, without hesitation, if presented to us at table. We like a nice light red with turtle.

2-3 large garlic cloves
1/2 cup virgin olive oil
1/2 cup wine vinegar
4 heaping tablespoons of fresh-grated Parmesan
Juice of 1/2 lemon
1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
4-5 anchovies
salt and pepper to taste

Throw it all into the blender and mix at low/med. speed.

In the London Review of Books.

I must say that I enjoy French haute cuisine enormously, but that might be because I indulge in it so infrequently. There are two or three restaurants in the vicinity who do it up grand. Pricey. $50. entrees, etc.

My 3-star French chef hunting buddy has cooked for me and friends a few times. He can make anything, but his favorite things to make are peasant foods - rabbit rillette, wild duck terrines, a wild game broth consomme with woodcock ravioli and black truffles, cassoulets, tarte tatin, and things like that. His favorite food to eat is indeed a Big Mac and fries.

Thanks, Opie, for these photos with the data, which came in over the transom. I cannot source it, but kudos to whoever put this together. It is interesting not only to see the different sorts of families (extended, nuclear, large, small, desert, middle-class) but to see what they typically eat in a week.

Germany: The Melander family of Bargteheide. Food expenditure for one week: 375.39 Euros or $500.07. (I guess that included the wine and beer) 

We promised that we would bring the Dylanologist, who is stationed in Rome for the summer, a supply of peanut butter. I guess the Italians don't have it. It's their loss. You would think the southern Italians would get sick of tomato sauce. I am, for sure. They would quickly learn to appreciate a PB&J on white.

Fortunately, they do not use much pasta or really any tomato sauce in northern Italy where I am headed tomorrow.

Despite the glories of Italian (non-pasta) cuisine, sometimes a fellow just needs some peanut butter - and not the unpleasant organic kind. Skippy's ultra-chunky always hits the spot. I will squeeze two large things of it into my bag for the guy.

Hope Italian Customs doesn't give me a hard time for this act of smuggling. After all, it would be easy to suffocate somebody with a face full of Skippy's Creamy.

Wellfleet Oysters and Wellfleet Littlenecks. My cocktail behind them is a Cape Cod Marguerita (cranberry juice added). Refreshing and healthily salt-restoring.

I have Wellfleet architecture in the pipeline, but my photos don't want to upload to the site right now.