Maggie's Farm

Got any Woodock left in the freezer?

The USA is unusual because wild game meat can not be sold in stores. All "game" meat sold in the US is farm-raised, whether venison, quail, pheasant, duck, or whatever.

That is the correct and righteous legacy of the devastating, 12 month/year market hunting of the past which devastated the seemingly endlessly abundant American wildlife populations.

There is no bird as special for the table as Woodcock, but you have to get out and shoot them yourself. One way to do justice to this diminutive bird (smaller than the European Woodcock) is a ravioli dish I learned from my Cordon Bleu chef friend.

Take a few Woodcock, and cut all of the meat off them - breast, thighs, etc. Chop the meat into roughly 1/2" pieces. Throw in a bowl and mix with a bit of sauteed very finely-chopped shallots and carrots, salt, pepper, a bit of fresh thyme and parsley and a little bit of truffle oil.

Take some wonton squares and brush some whisked egg on the edges as glue. Put a teaspoon or two of the mixture inside, then seal the squares tightly to eliminate any air inside, and place carefully into gently boiling water until done. It only takes a few minutes.

Serve two or three raviolis drizzled with somewhat reduced gibier sauce, with a few shavings of black truffle on top.

Can't be beat.

This is a re-post:

Here's the menu for the sort of 1890's-style dinner our Ducks Unlimited commitee serves annually. Our Chef for this special annual Game Dinner was making Rillete de Lapin since he was a kid in France. Yes, it is generally Black Tie out of respect for the chef and/or the host.

What's the deal? Our Ducks Unlimited Committee sells this dinner for twelve for significant bucks (usually $10-20,000 - and worth every penny) in our charity auction, provides the game, helps the Chef, and serves. When lucky, we're invited to join the dinner table. Otherwise, Chef and his sous chef feed us well in the kitchen, and we help consume the wines.

All the host has to do is to light the fire, and buy the wine and ceegars. With all of the loins and breasts, this is one sexy menu, and mighty filling:

Cocktail hour hors d'oevres:

Game terrine, grainy home-made mustard, gherkin slices, and toast

Rillette de lapin, capers, toast

Pate of Wild Duck Liver with cognac, toast

Dinner:

Roast Country Pigeon with green and white asparagus, mache salad, truffle vinaigrette

Woodcock ravioli with celeriac flan and wild mushroom sauce, with Black Truffle garni

Pheasant breast, braised red cabbage, lardons, with cognac jus

Satueed breast of Redhead or Canvasback with wild rice and roast figs, jus de gibier

Port and juniper berry sorbet with Rosemary garni

Roasted rabbit loin, homemade tagliatelle, basic cream sauce, and crispy shiitake mushrooms

Marinated loin of venison with roasted parsnip and salsify,  fondante potato and huckleberry jus

Dessert

Pear Trio: Pear Almond Tarte, Poached Pear, and Pear William Sorbet

Cheese

Imported cheese board, dried fruits, nuts, assorted homemade breads

The wines to accompany the courses:

De Meric Cuvee Catherine de Medicis Brut Champaigne 1996

Voignier La Place 2004

Chateau Margaux 1991

Barolo Bartolo Mascarello 1970

Chateau D'Yquem 1997

Port, Cognac, and cigars in the library for the gentlemen

There are two edible parts of a duck, whether wild or farm raised: the breast, and the leg and thigh.

Some people like to roast the whole bird, but I prefer just to remove the breast and the leg, and then use the carcass for gibier or duck stock.

Duck breasts, generally, are cooked by scoring then searing the skin side in a hot skillet for a few minutes, sizzling the meat side briefly, then roasting at 400 for 5-10 minutes. It should be rare-medium rare. (I once ate a whole raw, warmed Bluebill. Sushi. Wasn't too bad, but a bit fishy. I wanted to take "rare" to the limit.)

Then comes the sauce. Here are a few of my favorite ideas:

1. I like a cherry sauce, like this one (which was meant for venison), or this one. Here's a fancy Sweet Cherry Sauce.

2. This pomegranite sauce would be good for venison too.

3. Caramelized figs are a classic with duck breast.

4. Emeril does a simple pan roast. Trouble with that for me is the danger of overcooking.

5. I also like a sauce made with a gibier base, with some halved cherry tomatoes and chopped Italian olives and a little vinegar.

Duck legs are another matter, because they are tough and stringy like pheasant legs. Both do very well for confit, if you want to take the trouble. An alternative is to braise the legs. Some ideas:

Wine-braised duck legs

Braised Duck Legs for idiots

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.

WS, Richard II

I wasn't able to join Mrs. BD and friends to hear the great Yale and NYU Prof Harold Bloom talk about Shakespeare Monday night at the Classic Stage Company (a theater company she loves and supports) just off Union Square.

She reported a few random things Bloom said, paraphrased:

"Lear is Shakespeare's greatest work. I don't know how a human could have written it."

"I am not a Shakespeare scholar. I give no credence to any Shakespeare scholar."

"Shakespeare used a 22,000 word vocabulary in his writing. No other writer has ever come close to that. And he probably invented 1000 words, many of them now part of ordinary English."

"He wrote Othello, Macbeth, and Lear within 14 months. How could that be done?"

"He may have died of Syphilis."

Mrs. and Co. had supper at the Blue Water Grill. With the Union Square Cafe, The Gotham Bar and Grill,  the Blue Water Grill, and Toqueville (which my daughter loves), Union Square has come a long way since I sort-of lived on University Place. Back then, the cops would stop by to pull dead guys out of the bushes in the morning. ODs, mostly.

Now it has a dog park and an open air bar with live music, and I guess most of the old addicts and drunks are dead.

Went to a very enjoyable and festive Chinese New Year party last night. It's the Year of the Bunny Rabbit, I was told.

The special cocktail of the evening was the Lychee Martini. I don't think I had ever had a Lychee before, much less a Lychee Martini. Delicious and refreshing.

Lychees are tasty fruits, flavor somewhere between a pear and a grape.

Some call it Red Flannel Hash. With two eggs sunny-side up on top, and some ketchup or some hot sauce, it can't be beat for a winter breakfast.

This recipe is good, if a bit too complicated. Here's a simpler Southern version, with gravy of course (in the South, they even put gravy on top of gravy).

I don't mind the canned version at all, fried first in butter. Yes, it smells (and looks) a bit like canned dog food, but I am part dog.

Ethnic dining? A bit of England in New York City: Tea & Sympathy.

A re-post - not snowing here today.

Cold, snowy day up here. It makes you want mashed potatoes and meat and stuff.

I have some nice big white onions left over from making my onion pies this weekend. Some onion fritters would be good with last night's left-over roast. It's really sort of like a spidery mess of onion rings.

I never bother with the deep oil frying, though, for fritters. I just fry them in some canola oil, and it works fine. Best if you sautee the onions lightly first (with some chopped garlic) before mixing the onions with the batter. That way, they are certain to be sweet.

It's nice to have a little dipping sauce for them. A chili-garlic-soy sort of thing with chopped chives is good. Lime, as pictured, is interesting too.

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.