Roadfoodie

Posted By bbinns on July 3, 2009

Here in the Hudson Valley, we are having the sort of deluge that will only be amusing—and even then, only slightly—après. That it should be the first year of the huge, Four-Family Garden is inconvenient, if not heartbreaking. The other day, C took 14 slugs off of one cilantro plant. Long ago, I gave up attempting to find cheer in the words “Well, at least I don’t have to water.” The tomatoes have outgrown their cages already and, yes, there are many blossoms, but fruit set is scanty. You need sun for that.
In spite of the rain, we now turn our attention to the social whirl that results when an entire society emerges from five months of self-enforced lock-down. Since I choose not to be here during the winter (instead ranging the roads of more temperate locales), I can’t be sure how this plays out, but every spring I see people who have been here the whole time greet one another like long-lost friends. The pent-up entertaining imperative is frightening, and people squabble over Saturdays in July with the same cattiness of a sixth grade girls locker-room. Parties, benefits, and dinners are packed into the limited season like sardines. It was, thus, that the last week saw two social events of diametrically opposing style: one was my own idea, the other was that of a complete stranger. I cooked for them both.

Part 1. Gotta Dance

Sometimes, you just have to.

When the world is throwing multiple obstacles across the road you’d planned to travel, everyone you know has ratcheted down their career expectations by a couple of notches, and the idea of replacing a broken soufflé dish fills you with fear and loathing instead of the usual acquisitive bliss: You’ve gotta dance.

When the King of Pop dies, and suddenly we realize it’s ok to forgive him and concentrate on his talent instead of his twisted life: You’ve gotta dance.

Even though our culture evidently sees the arts as “optional,” and so we must all raise money any which way we can, to support them, sometimes the burden of paying $100 to attend a party with dancing starts to feel like too much. Because sometimes, we need a party in aid of nothing but us. Selfish? Maybe. Perhaps it was simply the need to return to a simpler time, an era when a keg, a gallon of Inglenook, and a decent stereo could spell a magical evening—when the problems of the world seemed like—Hell, they were—someone else’s.

Last Saturday, a group of people in Greene county pooled their not-inconsiderable natural resources to create a party about nothing but dancing. I christened it the Populist Barn Dance. There were no speeches, no brochures, no silent auction, and no holds barred. Jared donated his big old barn, and a team of ex-musketeers set about turning it into a magical fairyland. On the top floor, they discovered acres of white tulle, a gaggle of grass skirts, yards of glittery silver tassles, and posters from five decades of Broadway shows. There were countless strands of fairy lights, old chandeliers and less fashionable light fixtures; many of them still worked. Cords were strung, garlands were lit; outside, torches were filled with lamp oil. A cheerful Bob ranged the old wooden boards with a Shop-vac. His wife Virginia scoured the bathroom in the pool house of spider webs and dead moths. Old furniture was brushed off and arranged into a seating area, complete with a table lamp patched into the spider-web of extension cords that brought the barn to life. By the time they were done, I would happily have moved in to a place that had been home only to bees, birds, and rodents throughout its century of existence.

Yves and Amy, friends and recent transplants from New York—and principals of the band Nite-Time—amazingly had no paying event scheduled for the last Saturday in June. They volunteered their iPod and a sound system big enough to fill a basketball court. I vowed to bring in some finger food at rock bottom costs. One hundred people were invited; we anticipated, perhaps, sixty. It was going to happen for very, very little money, but In This Economy none of us felt comfortable footing the whole bill for food and drinks. There was some discussion of making the party pot-luck, but my catering background, and the potential for an untidy plethora of small and mysterious foil-covered dishes nudged us in the direction of a collection basket. We put out a big jar and suggested $7 a head, just to cover our out-of-pocket costs. It was truly to be a People’s Party.

The musical talent arrived with a special surprise: two huge stands of colored disco lights that would flicker in time with the back beat. I made 300 crostini bases, ie slices of baguette bathed with olive oil, seasoned with salt, pepper, and Greek oregano, and toasted. To spread upon them: Green Pea Pesto, redolent with parmesan, rich with ricotta, studded with roasted prosciutto; Smoked Trout Mousse, the luxe here contributed by cream cheese, the bright notes by orange zest and chives from the garden; and Tomato-Mozzarella-Basil, your basic bruschetta topping with plenty of garlic. I brought the cost in at $1.50/head. The remaining budget was sucked up by many boxes of jolly nice wine, a keg of beer, a veritable ocean of still and sparkling water, and oil for the many torches that now lined the long, gravel driveway to Jared’s barn.

At the hour appointed for the party, the skies cleared as if on cue. The acres of lawn glowed a luminous green, and shafts of setting sun flirted around the multitudes as they trickled in. Greene county is home to people of every possible age, sexual orientation, and background, and all of them were represented at the Populist Barn Dance: those who were born here, those who came “up the country” ten or fifteen years ago, and many who chose to leave the big city after 9/11, or even more recently. It is an organic community, an anti-Hamptons, a place where metal siding and overhead wires recede from your awareness because they are less important than the landscape beyond, and within.

Our dee-jays, for once able to dance to the music instead of play it, seemed to enter into a symbiotic relationship with the pulsating crowd, intuiting just before we did exactly the zetgeist that should come up next. Inside, people who were not dancing sipped, snacked, and watched the dancers. Outside, sheltering pines provided intimate meeting places away from the music. The turquoise water of the swimming pool glittered, but remained still, undisturbed beneath our cool, wet early summer air. As the hour grew later, the children disappeared. Now the dancers were serious, sweat-slicked, moving in a blood-deep syncopation that erased years, sometimes decades. The music flowed on from the sixties, seventies, eighties, and the exultant Michael Jackson tributes into funk, electronica, deep inside the sinews where the urge to move to rhythm lives until we let it out. Yves and Amy’s faces were intent, focussed, eerily lit by their two laptops, as they scrolled and mixed on the fly.
I could have danced all night, but in the absence of urban noise, sound will carry far across the fields, and country neighbors are less ephemeral than the city variety. As the evening had to do, it moved inexorably toward an end, I stood outside for a few minutes to catch my breath, and savor the success of an idea born of a desire to turn back time. Inside, framed by the huge open barn doors, an impromptu ballet was playing out to Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart. It was demonically choreographed by a tall, goateed man, lit by the flickering disco lights, and heart-breaking in its apropos symbolism. Again and again, a fairy-like sprite leapt impossibly high around the doomed lovers, one of whom sported a gingham dress, cowboy boots, and a riding crop.

The post-urban event symbolized everything we, and seemingly, others, are seeking here, so far from what was once known as civilization: A simpler life, but one with all the sensual magic, raucous humor, and streetwise savvy of Broadway, Christopher Street, or Venice Beach. Here in Greene, the luscious stage is set and the eclectic characters are met.

Next week: The tale of the Petit Dinner of the Bourgeoisie, featuring the re-purposing of the Populist crostini bases.

Category: 09, In the East | Write To Me
Tags: dance party, Greene county, pot-luck, refugees from the city, the simple life

Posted By bbinns on June 20, 2009

When I met my actor husband in 2001, the only tools he owned were nestled in a small leather kit inside a medicine chest. Imagine my alarm, then, when he climbs up a ladder with a screaming chainsaw under his arm.

You see, last winter in the upstate garden of a friend, a hundred-year-old apple tree fell down.

The buzz started immediately: “We can take it out….I’ve got my new chainsaw…it’ll take us an hour, max.” This dialogue took place in a round robin between New York City and Los Angeles between three good friends who, just three years ago, hadn’t even owned one power tool between them. If they could have hung a shelf evenly, I’d have been impressed. Then, these fifty-something men who had been in and of the theatre all their professional lives turned their substantial energies to creating less ephemeral productions. Like buildings.

Two summers ago, they built a pole-barn which, while it’s straight and in no danger of falling down, contains perhaps three times the number of nails necessary. Last year they moved on to decks and pergolas, designing and erecting several with only a few hiccups. My house is immeasureably improved by its new front deck with pergola and pitched-roof entryway. More pergolas are on the way for all three houses. What sounds like a three-acre deck is now slated for the back of my own.

In the far-off urban days of memory, our dinnertime conversation tended to the purely erudite. Now, it ranges from couture to manure, Plato to potatoes, actors to tractors, hay to Broadway.

When the lovely spring afternoon set aside for removal of the massive, fallen apple tree arrived, I turned up late. I have a sort of morbid love-hate fascination with watching these guys wield chainsaws. The first time they’d taken out a fallen tree, half the tree had been submerged in the pond of Bob Lupone (day job: Dean of the New School of Drama). I’d watched him standing thigh-deep in water waving around a chainsaw, then seen it come down a little too low and produce a burbling, Jacuzzi-like effect in the water (narrowly missing his leg). Bob’s wife Virginia and I just stood up and turned our beach chairs around to face the Hudson, i.e. available for a hospital run, but not willing to watch the macabre scene play out. When Bob’s little pickup truck failed to get enough traction to pull out the huge, now severed trunk, a passing local took pity and trundled up with his tractor to help.

In fact, many of the locals have expressed concern over the power-tool exploits of these three: Bob, my husband Casey (day job: actor, directing teacher at The New School, artistic director of the Greene Arts Foundation), and Jared (day job: owner/manager of Broadway’s preëminent costume house, Barbara Matera Ltd).

“Are they being careful?” I am constantly being asked.

“Um, I think so,” I can only respond helplessly (my badgering the guys to “Be Careful” having some time ago clearly become less than constructive).

Who am I to argue with the drive that builds up in these guys during the week? They must field impossible people, improbable deadlines, and the crushing weight of their messages and e-mails. They could collapse on the sofa and eat comfort food all weekend, but they don’t. And they get so much glee out of these baby-contractor-steps that I’d be a cad to deny them. So I simply pray a lot and look at the bright side: Hey, at least we all have good health insurance. And think of the money we’re saving. (Though, after you subtract the cost of equipment, it’s not as big a savings as you’d imagine—sort of like my home-grown tomatoes.)

In fact, up here we are surrounded by people who’ve spent most of their lives straddling an office chair and now drive bulldozers larger than a corner office. Over cocktails, they compare horse-power, add-on attachments, and narrowly-averted disasters the way Wall Street types used to discuss their trading day.

Arriving at the first big project of the season, the apple-tree dismemberment, I was impressed to see them working in graceful, ballet-like concert, all wearing earphones and matching hardhats. I waited by the pool on a bed-sized lounger (with a super-structure for hanging Moroccan-style curtains), that Jared had built all by himself over the winter. I gazed at their most recent pergola, which was 92% perfect. In less than an hour, the apple tree was in fireplace-sized pieces in the back of Casey’s pickup, destined to become fuel for my hearth cooking projects, and the lawn was completely clear of tree debris. In one of those transformations that you don’t notice until it’s complete, they’d suddenly become Really Capable Guys.

All winter long, they’d been chafing to get back outside to build, clear brush, cut down trees, and generally play around with an alarming number of expensive and very dangerous toys. Except that as I’d just—perhaps belatedly—realized, they’re not playing anymore. They’re building useful and beautiful things, increasing the value of their properties, and adding to the quality of the time we spend in these precious havens away from the city. But most importantly, these once soft-skinned men of the arts are exponentially improving their mental and physical health. And I am very, very proud of them.

As long as nobody gets hurt.

Category: 09, In the East | Write To Me
Tags: acting, do-it-yourself, life transformation, pastoral, weekend warriors

Posted By bbinns on May 28, 2009

After the irreverent early-May event that was the Duckathlon ‘09, I thought it might be nice to visit Ariane and Lily in their own lair, so last week I made my way to the Ironbound neighborhood of Newark (clearly, worth its own, separate visit). Half a block from the gates of D’Artagnan’s home base, as jets thundered by overhead so close I could see the rivets in their underbelly, I stopped for gas. When asked about the colorful area, the large-bellied proprietor of the filling station related that the Ironbound area “doesn’t have any them blacks, just Salvadorans, Brazilians, Venezuelans.” As I tried to make a hasty departure from his pig-ignorant, last-millennium camaraderie, he said “You goin’ to see them chicken people, huh?”

D’Artagnan—and its inspired founder Ariane Daguin—are far more than just chicken people. Back in 1983, when I smuggled an entire foie gras from London to Los Angeles in a Tampax box, Ariane saw a pressing need in this country, and fulfilled it. But foie was only the beginning. Now, D’Artagnan sources excellent meat and poultry products from all over the world and gets them to the people who want them. They are gateway and clearinghouse—thus the operation’s location, hard by the airport. In this large world of ours, those who would like to eat —and can pay for—delicacies like Wagyu beef, ventreche, duck sausage, and cuts of heritage-breed pork mostly live far, far away from those who have enough land and the know-how to produce them. If D’Artagnan didn’t put the two together, the farmers would have no market, and their products would likely cease to exist. What a sad, vanilla world that would be.

But the most surprising thing I found in the vaulting, hangar-sized warehouse as Lily Hodge and I wandered, wearing heavy coats, passing by fond friends from my food past and future, was not the suckling pig or the terrine of pure foie, but the non-meat produce. Who knew? (Well, I’m sure all the chefs know, but I didn’t.)

There are greens, like fiddlehead ferns, in brief and exclusive season, but most of the traffic is in mushrooms. Although there are cremini, oyster, shiitake, and portobello, most of the fungi are exotica beyond this pretty serious cook’s wildest imagination. D’Artagnan employs a specialist named Steve Perei—know as “the mushroom guy”—whose responsibility it is to follow each species around the world throughout its season, thereby extending availability and optimizing the cost from week to week—even day to day—across the months any particular variety can be found somewhere—anywhere—on the globe. Often, he’s more like a weatherman than a purveyor of fine foods.

I asked him to describe the trajectory of that prized harbinger of spring, that lurker under cream that turned my first adult visit to France (with my first husband, in the spring of 1984) into an epicurean epiphany: the fresh morel.

The very first morels appear in the mountains of Turkey around Easter. For restaurants and epicureans, this signals the start of Morel Madness. At first, the pickings are sparse; the price Steve has to pay, and, thus, to charge, reflects this. But within a week or so, the morels are coming in by the pallet-load, and the prices drop. Soon though, “production” of the morel (it is a wild thing, uncultivatable; all you can do is learn its habits) shifts to Eastern Europe: ie Bulgaria and Serbia. After four weeks or so, it’s time to start looking to California and the Pacific Northwest. Once the morels are available here, import duties and freight charges can’t be justified, so Steve buys local. Unless the local prices are too high for some reason, in which case Steve will keep sourcing out of Eastern Europe.

Here, the pickers are all freelancers. Their foraging is a largely solitary affair, and when they come down from the mountains with their haul, buyers await at base camp. Bids and offers are traded, and deals are struck on the fly. This is a very pure form of capitalism: the simple laws of supply and demand dictate the price on any given day. If a free-lancer picker can’t get a reasonable return from his or her fresh shrooms, they might decide to dry them instead. In fact, dried morels form a far larger percentage of total morel consumption in this country, and a few months of fresh morel foraging fuels a year’s worth of supply. But the freelancer’s drying methods can lack finesse (sheet-pan on a tree-stump, say), and Steve prefers morels that are dried by pros, to best preserve every bit of earthy-woodsy perfume. When the Idaho-Oregon-Washington harvests are finished, Steve follows the morel north all the way to Alaska—where the dark and shriveled cuties can be found as late as August—and freight costs again begin to rise. Some professional circuit-pickers follow the harvest for three months.

This year, the domestic harvest of morels was slim. The reason lies two years in the past: huge tracts of land burned in Montana (the Tripod fire) and Idaho. Morels live in symbiotic harmony with the roots of trees. But they are asleep in the winter, and don’t know until they emerge whether their tree is alive or dead. When they find out, panic sets in. The tendrils, or mycellium, that are the true living organism, throw out a fleshy body for the purpose of releasing spores (this fleshy body is what we love to eat). In a panic, huge numbers of spores are needed to move the entire colony to another location, ie a living tree. Thus, lots more morels. But this past year, there weren’t many forest fires, so the mycellium are content to stay put and there are fewer fleshy bodies headed to a risotto near you.

I am well aware that the pursuit of peripatetic fungi is at odds with the local and sustainable food movement. But lots of people want to eat wild mushrooms, and the migrant mushroom pickers require coffee in the morning for motivation, and vanilla ice cream at night before bed, as reward.

In spring, I will absolutely gather my lamb from nearby Earlton, and my asparagus from New Jersey, but would be loathe to forgo artichokes, which hail from my home state of California. And without citrus, might we see a return of scurvy?

Whence the lime for my margarita, in March?

Frankly, Scarlet…

Category: 09, In the East | Write To Me
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Posted By bbinns on May 19, 2009

This post’s title should be an oxymoron.
The lover of green things, the woman who yearns to bite into a fig from her own tree, courts heartbreak if she moves from place to place, never stopping long enough to allow the growth of deep and clinging roots. Gardening is by definition a pursuit for those who dream on the long term. Thomas Jefferson said “I may be an old man, but I am a young gardener.” The fruits of his labors can still be enjoyed at Monticello.

The first time I pressed a small green plant into the soil, and then dined on the results, was in England. At that sprawling Tudor house, my gardener did the hard work and I played the still-wet-behind-the-ears lady of the manor. There I learned the rhythms of gardening from my staid English mother-in-law—she of the turquoise suit and matching pillbox hat, the perpetual sad eyes and stern frown. Her wisdom stays with me today even though the last time we exchanged guarded words was twenty years ago. My second vegetable garden was in England, too, behind a fashionable row house near Parson’s Green, in Fulham. But that garden didn’t have much chance to produce; halfway through the first growing season, a life-quake took me unceremoniously, and broke, down to Spain’s Costa del Sol.

There, I coaxed mesclun, arugola, yellow pear tomatoes, and herbs of every flavor from a small plot of rocky soil, not because it was chic but because I couldn’t afford to buy them. I spent three years trying to germinate some contentment in that place. My first-ever fig tree was just beginning to bear enough fruits to pair with a platter-full of shaved Iberico ham, when the mascara-tinged tears trailing down my cheeks became a torrent of such force that it swept me back to the land of my birth, southern California.

My fourth vegetable garden was a solo affair. For once (if, only briefly) I was not married. In Mar Vista I ripped up the lawn behind a rented bungalow and raised a straggly bed of tomatoes. I learned the seasons for a third time: the zen of gardening in Los Angeles lay somewhere happily between England and Spain. After another three years came my fifth garden, the first of what would eventually be three Venice Beach gardens: a narrow patch of tomatoes and basil behind the redwood deck of my next little home, facing a massive bank of unruly bougainvillea. Just two years later, it was on to another Venice home, and another, much bigger garden. There, a landscaper built formidable raised beds of my own design, there was room for artichokes, and the huge bank of green that faced the garden was bamboo, not bougainvillea. Three years passed, punctuated—at least in the garden—only by the incineration of one of the four beds. (Around midnight, a spark smoldering since the afternoon pig-roast torched the bed and defenseless cucumbers within. The metaphor did not go unnoticed.) The clock had begun to tick on my remaining time in yet another garden.

Garden number seven, still in Venice Beach, was home-made but infinitely more lovely than its ritzy predecessor. I was now in the company of a man, C, who had silvery-green fingers and a heart—if not a wallet—big enough to nurture every possible flowering, budding, living thing. Including me. The raised beds were shallower, but produced vegetables and flowers of rare beauty. The symmetrically-arranged beds were surrounded by pale gravel and waving sea grasses, and on one side stood a Valentine’s Day gift: a fig tree. To the passing observer, it was a straggly adolescent; to me the fig was possessed of swagger and brio. I could have stayed in that garden, and for once reaped the sweet rewards of a mature fig tree, but life, again, intervened. Faced with the inexorably approaching financial crisis, my family of two-plus-dog chose to flee east, to a 28-acre defunct mushroom farm in the Hudson Valley, and there ride out the storm. There is no question in my mind that the Venice garden C and I had created from nothing caused a strange woman to throw caution to the wind. Unaccountably, she paid us an obscene amount of money for a 1400 square foot house on a postage stamp east of Lincoln Boulevard. It was a symbol of the lemming-like zeitgeist slowly overtaking our world. Whenever my heart skips a beat remembering that magical place, thinking about the money makes it better.
Kind of.

And so begins another weft in life’s rich tapestry. I find myself, this time far from alone, beginning my eighth vegetable garden. It is down the street, on the land of a great friend whose property is home to the ruins of a once-ambitious kitchen garden. Neglected for years, the only signs of productivity that remain are four espaliered pear trees, intent on escape from a once-imposed order. Last winter, when I was solo in Marfa, C and the garden’s owner, Jared, agreed, along with our friends the Lupones, that we would combine forces and finances to resurrect the sadly neglected garden.

It would be a monumental task.

The wire fence was buckled and too short to keep out the incessantly circling multitudes of deer. The wooden fence against which two of the pears were, in a manner of speaking, still espaliered, had been gnawed through at rabbit and woodchuck level. The old barn which formed one side of the garden was home to swarms of angry bees. The water line that fed the faucet was broken, somewhere deep within the enormous barn, so the closest source of water was a hundred feet away.

In far off Marfa, I heard about the communal garden plan, and was happy. Instead of feeling tired, and incapable of summoning the enthusiasm to start yet another kitchen garden, I hit the seed sites and began to dream. The rest of the garden gang churned on with their lives, striving to make ends meet and survive the long winter of our collective discontent. I ordered a propagator and a hundred dollars worth of seeds. In the interest of economy, I was resolved to raise the plants from seed rather than buying professionally-raised plants. Good thing I did. Because not a plant has gone in the ground yet, here in the endless pre-spring season of the Northeast, and we’ve already spent over a thousand dollars. Just now, the plot to save money by growing our own vegetables seems more of a joke. To spread out the initial cost, we invited in a fourth family (well, actually, just Steve). I have been coddling the seedlings for five weeks now, from the exciting first moments of germination to today, when I am keenly watching the temperature forecasts, trying to decide when it’s safe to set out the spindly little plants. Meanwhile, I move the seedlings around the house three times a day: In the morning, they are on the front porch, available for full sun (if it should ever come out). Afternoons, they move to the screened porch in the rear, for the air. At night, they come indoors.
Last night, the 18th of May, the temperature dropped to 37 degrees. Fig trees won’t grow in this climate.

T

Category: 09, In the East | Write To Me
Tags: communal gardens, gardening, organic, vegetable gardens

Posted By bbinns on May 11, 2009

Today, I hand Roadfoodie over to New American farmer (and Turkish kilim expert) Peter Davies. For the last nine years, he and his partner Mark Scherzer, an attorney specializing in health advocacy, have farmed 39 acres in Germantown, New York with the aid of one part-time employee. Both still have active non-farm careers; neither had any farming experience before they left Manhattan after 9/11, armed with only a bucolic vision. Their vision has not been unfulfilled, but the tough realities of farm life have, at times, been hard to bear. I have had the great good fortune to share in both their triumphs, and their tragedies. There, the cycles of birth, life, death, nature, and nurture are undisguised and unavoidable.

With 22 lambs capering in the Old Saw Mill meadow, four piglets rooting in the back pig compound, 120 turkey poults, forty goslings, thirty ducklings, and fifty meat chicks under heat lamps in the brooder houses, birth is very much in the air at Turkana Farms. But farm life, as we learned last weekend, is not just about birth but also death. Not every pregnancy results in life. And so many of the creatures that survive, we are fully aware, are ultimately intended for human consumption, There is a dark side to farming.

We had been anticipating the calving of our British White cattle for some time. Daisy, our youngest cow, we somehow assumed, would be the first. There were, however, signs late in her pregnancy that all was not going well—signs we should have recognized. She was separating from the herd, going off to hide in the bushes, limping slightly and looking thin. When a beautiful white calf appeared on the 27th I was initially sure that it was hers. One of the older cows, however, was standing over the calf, guarding it, and the herd was ringed around them. Daisy was nowhere to be found. Finally I located her in the bushes and drove her up to the herd and her presumed calf. I did this for a couple of days and then began to suspect that the calf was not hers, and that, given Daisy’s indifference, the cow that had seemed to adopt the calf  was, in fact the mother.

I left for a business appointment in the city, and Mark absented himself from his office to assume the farm responsibilities.

Mark Scherzer takes it from here:

I came up Thursday night and, Friday morning, noticed what I thought was imminent labor. It turns out I was probably right, but didn’t know enough to know it. I ultimately figured Daisy was just uncomfortable because it was late in her pregnancy.

Friday afternoon I saw part of the amniotic sac hanging under Daisy’s tail, and assumed this meant that she was really starting labor in earnest. In fact, I did not understand that it meant her water had broken. While I took down the electric line to give the cows more grazing area, she took the opportunity to high tail it into the woods. I went out to find her Saturday morning, and found her on her side, now more clearly in labor, but still just a bit of the amniotic sac showing. I called our vet, Elaine Tucker, who, once she had dealt with her office obligations, arrived at around 5 in the afternoon. We found the same story, no progress but now bigger contractions. Daisy clearly needed help.

Elaine reached into Daisy’s uterus to find that the calf had its head twisted down, away from the birth canal and one hoof lodged out of reach behind its ear. The normal birth position, of course, is for the calf to emerge hoofs first with the head centered between them, a kind of “diving position.” Daisy would occasionally let Elaine reach in to make adjustments to the calf’s position, but more often she walked away. At close to a thousand pounds, she was too strong for us to control. Elaine decided we needed to corral Daisy so that she could continue rearranging the calf, and left to go on two other emergency calls.  I unsuccessfully tried to get Daisy to return to the barn or corral, but she did rest in a corner of the field and I confined her by running an electric line across the corner.

Elaine returned around 10:30 pm, and we went out with a headlamp on. I held Daisy by the tail while Elaine again reached in and tried to adjust the position of the calf. She said that this was incredibly dangerous, as Daisy could kick back, but we had little choice. For about an hour I was pulling back on her tail with all my might and Elaine was pulling the leg of  the calf and trying to adjust the head. For a time, the electric line prevented Daisy from bolting, and we made real progress, but at one point Daisy was so uncomfortable she bolted through the electric line.
After following her around the field and managing about four more episodes of pulling on the leg of the calf, Elaine managed to get its head properly oriented, and hoped that would be enough for Daisy to do the
rest herself.  With Tommy. the bull, nearby in a protective mode we felt it prudent to stop. By then it was 12:30 am, and Elaine left to do emergency surgery on a rotweiler that had swallowed a stone.

The next morning around 7, I found that Daisy had made hardly any progress—the hoof was only centimeters further out. By now it was obvious that the calf was dead. Daisy was lying on her side heaving with contractions, and clearly having a bad time. Once again I set up an electric line corral around her to keep her confined, and the rest of the herd, especially the bull, away. Elaine arrived, and she and I were able to get the first hoof out to the foreleg, and the lower jaw of the calf, with its tongue pathetically extended, emerged. By now it was obvious that it was a very big calf for Daisy’s relatively small size. The emergence of  the calf, it became apparent, was also impeded by the internal swelling of Daisy’s uterus, the swelling of the head of the dead calf, and the weird position of the second leg.

Peter continues: Once more back at the farm, I answered Mark’s cell phone call and brought down a rope which we tied to the emerging hoof, and three of us spaced along the rope , tug of war style, pulled with all our strength but without success. We realized that Daisy was fast wearing herself down, and that, unless the calf was removed, she would not last much longer.  But we were running out of options.

I remembered a nearby neighbor, Don Van Wagner, who had experience with dairy cows, and who had told me that on on several occasions had pulled calves out using a chain and tractor. I called him, and he arrived with his four-wheel-drive pick-up truck. We attached the rope to the leg of the calf and the rear bumper of the truck, and Don eased the truck slowly forward. To our dismay, not only did the calf remain firmly lodged, but Daisy began to be dragged along behind the truck. Horrified at the trauma that Daisy was going through, we had to stop. The prognosis for Daisy’s survival did not look good.

At Don’s suggestion we called the nearby dairy farm, owned by the Kukon family, and asked whether one of the sons could come by to help. We knew that through managing a herd of over 100 cows, with scores of births each year, they would have had experience with something like Daisy’s predicament and could lend additional strength.  Jordan, the youngest son of the Kukons, arrived and immediately got to work.

The combination of Elaine’s excellent instincts and training, honed mostly on smaller animals but with great interest in ruminants, and Jordan’s practical experience of growing up on a dairy farm proved invaluable. While Elaine went to get surgical equipment, should the need arise, Jordan managed to push the entire calf back through the birth canal, enabling him to pull the second hoof around and to get the calf arranged into the “diving position”. We then attached the rope to the two hoofs and Jordan, Mark, and Elaine pulled with all their strength on the rope while Don and I tried to stretch open the vulva to let the head through. The head began to emerge a few centimeters but would not, despite all our efforts, come out. We could see the nose and mouth but could not get the head out as far as the eyes. Passing that point, the widest part of the head, would be the first crucial hurdle to getting the calf out—the next would be the shoulders. After repeated attempts and rests, meanwhile trying to keep poor Daisy calm, the five of us finally saw the head suddenly emerge and then, the second hurdle, the shoulders, and finally the entire calf, with Daisy’s bloody placenta trailing behind. It would have been a fine bull calf, about 60 pounds.

Poor Daisy by then hardly resembled herself. She looked emaciated, and had lost a lot of the hair on her hide. No one was confident about her chances of survival.  She was too weak to even turn herself over, to say nothing of standing up. She got something of a boost with an IV calcium and glucose combination, and we brought her water and hay.  But, as they say, only time would tell.

But by the next day Daisy was up and feebly walking around grazing, and had rejoined the herd. She gratefully received the scratching behind her ears that she favors. By Tuesday morning I was surprised and gratified to find Daisy snuggled up against her mother, who had her head and neck draped over Daisy, who was reciprocating by licking her. Daisy’s mother had resumed a relationship that had seemed to have ended with weaning. Hopefully her mother’s attentions and ours will see her through this. So while death is maybe not an appropriate theme for Mother’s Day, we hope this final scene is.  Mark & Peter

Category: 09, In the East | Write To Me
Tags: farm, life and death, motherhood, tragedy

Posted By bbinns on May 7, 2009

I apologize for the break in this instructional series—it was crucially important that I go and get crazy with a bunch of duck-quoting, foie-eating chefs in a cavernous room behind Chelsea Market. It’s a tough job.

But now, it’s back to fat-world: Once my lard has been strained and clarified, by removing the juices from the bottom (save for ethereal bean soup!), I am ready to make the confit itself. Most experts advise a little duck fat, to complement and round out the flavors, so I always keep a few tubs of D’Artagnan duck fat on hand. It is slightly yellower then my Ossabaw lard, and as I scoop in every last drop from the container, this new fat makes trails in the creamy white; it reminds me of whisking up a classic French genoise. At cooking school in England, I knew my genoise mixture was ready when I could write a “B” for Brigit with the foam trailing from my whisk. Only this isn’t a sugar-in-egg emulsion.

Rinsing the salt cure from the meat is a delicate process: I want to take away most—but not all—of the salt, but I don’t want to meat to absorb too much water. So I give each piece a quick massage under running water, then they’re onto a clean towel. Press another towel over the top, blot, press, and the meat is ready to go into the lard, which I’ve warmed to 200F on the stove. Now it’s into the oven, again at a starting point of 240F. Again, I adjust and maintain my barely-bubbling cauldron—oops, Le Creuset— at 200F for about two hours, which past efforts have shown me is the right amount of time for 3+ pounds of meat. The cubes should be pale (actually, rather grey-ish) and giving to the touch, not falling-apart-tender.

For tonight’s dinner, I pull off about one third of the meat. The rest of the sadly slim haul is divided between two bain-marie inserts, and completely covered with lard (once again, it must first be strained and clarified to prevent spoilage). These will age in the refrigerator anywhere from one week to two months, ie, for as long as I can hold myself back from eating them. During that time, the flavor will improve greatly. (It’s not ideal to serve any kind of confit right away, but I am impulsive, and hungry.) The meat juices obtained during the clarifying process are saved, too. In fact, the only thing I threw away in this process was the green paper. (The bone went into a bag in the freezer, for pork stock.)

Now the confit, which requires no additional seasoning at the point, can be either high-heat-roasted or broiled, so that the outer surface develops a golden, salty-fatty crust while the inside remains creamy, smooth, and giving to the tooth. I place the hot chunks reverently on top of a mustard-blessed and dressed salad of spring greens, and three of us sit down to sip subtly dry provencal rose, chew, and ruminate on the flu, the economy, and the inconvenient process of aging. The picture conjured by our words is not a pretty one, but these chunks of porcine perfection are just what my inner doctor ordered. The evening leaves us all with a rosy glow, and even better: no one awakens with Wine Flu.

Category: 09, In the East, Stella | Write To Me
Tags: confit, hudson valley, lard, pork, wine Flu

Posted By bbinns on May 5, 2009

Imagine my extreme pleasure at receiving an invitation to act as a judge in the super-secret, not-open-to-the-public, chefs-gone-wild event that preceded the serious business of Beard this past weekend.

Now in year five, D’Artagnan’s duck-in-cheek challenge pits teams from New York’s finest kitchens—Daniel, Le Cirque, Tribeca Grill, craft, Bar Boulud, to name just a few of the 26 slated to compete (Martha Stewart was supposed to field a team, but no one showed up)—in a series of challenges that range from the sublime to the absurd. (Later, I found out that Les Marthas did, if belatedly, show up.)

In the Sublime department: What Are We Fighting Foie? asked team members to identify which of five samples did NOT contain duck liver (one was turkey mousse). In the area of the Absurd, many choices jostle for attention like free-range chickens: So Long, Saucisson—a favorite on youtube—requires one team member to don a hooped petticoat and a large saucisson, which is attached to his or her belt buckle.

Team members can see underneath the skirt, but the skirt-and-saucisson-wearer can not. The object is to successfully dunk the saucisson inside an antique milk jug as many times as possible. Oh, and a bra must be worn on the exterior.

Team members are encouraged to bribe, flirt with, buy drinks for, and generally court the judges in any way they can think of, in an attempt to gain as many little plastic ducks as possible. At the end of the contest, teams are rated on a frightening array of qualities, from number of ducks to best outfit or best skit, to points gained at each of the challenges.
At the top of Hotel Gansevoort, where there is a lovely indoor/outdoor bar and swimming pool that must be nice when it is not rainy and grey as it was last Sunday, there is a rather disturbing challenge: It’s a Mad Mac World. This one involves the entire team: One team member pipes filling onto one half of a macaroon, the next sandwiches them together and hands it to a team member wearing boxing gloves, who then attempts to feed it to the final team member, who must eat as many macaroons as possible, all with his/her hands tied behind his back. No one barfed while I was there, but it was touch and go. Beer before and after seemed to help.

As I followed my map around the rainy city, I was alternately accompanied by various other judges, like Annemarie from Woman’s Day, who was preparing to shoot some video, and Jacqueline Church, of the excellent blog The Leather District Gourmet (www.JacuelineChurch.com). The judges are selected by some mysterious process known only to D’Artagnan, but most of us seemed to be from the world of food media or support. On my own at Craftsteak, I heard perhaps my favorite quote of the day: “Can I move my chorizo hand?” Meat Twister, of course!

Not all the challenges are bawdy, silly, or sophomoric (and what is wrong with any of these categories, I ask you!). Back inside Chelesea Market, where umbrellas needed not be juggled, Fungus Among Us asked team members to pair the correct LATIN name with each mushroom. Many of these were fungi I’d never before encountered, such as blue-foot, and getting the Latin right seemed pretty impossible. Yet many teams did pretty well.

In the lobster challenge, Just Beclaws, two team members must section and shell a lobster, keeping the pieces as perfect as possible, in the shortest time. Here’s where a movie would tell you that no harm was done to any animals in the filming of this sequence, but since the lobsters were already deceased at this point, my reassurance is this: all lobster meat shelled during this event was cycled into salads or soups at The Lobster Place of Chelsea Market, where the event took place.
Sadly, my camera battery ran out just after I captured the mooo-vers whose images open this post. But I will say this: the award-giving part of the event was appropriately French: somewhat haphazard, wine-soaked, silly, outrageous, and falling-down funny. Judges are allowed to take away ducks for bad behavior as well, and during the skit portion of one team—who will go nameless—Jane Sigal and I (she’s an ex Food and Wine staffer and current contributor) felt moved to withdraw three ducks from their pile for bad foie-gras-related singing. When I left, bodies were being passed along a seated conga line, evidently known as a Paquito. They started out with kids, but quickly progressed to full-sized folk. When I watched Ariane Daguin get passed along the Paquito, I realized that passee form is crucial in this sport: arms at sides, body stiff and legs pressed tightly together. Those that let it all hang loose were far more difficult to pass along. Allow me to never be passed along a Paquito, but I’ll be happy to attend any event these liver-lovin’ folk care to stage.

Vive La France! Vive La Foie!

Category: 09, In the East | Write To Me
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Posted By bbinns on May 4, 2009

Those of us who love pigs—alive and cooked—were feeling a little under the weather last week. The headlines from Egypt hurt me viscerally: 300,000 innocent pigs slain, not to feed the hungry, of which there are many on that vast continent, but out of sheer ignorance. I did my bit on Facebook to promote better understanding, but early on it became clear that the only thing that could possibly make me feel better was to get up to my elbows in smooth. creamy lard. So I hauled the last remaining 10-pound roast out of the freezer, from last years half-an-Ossabaw purchase, and softened a few of the many jars of lard I put up last fall. This very tasty breed of pig carries a massive fat cap, not unlike the latest porcine sweetheart-breed, Mangalitsa, and I am traditionally unwilling to waste anything remotely edible. So, last fall I spit-roasted the meat and rendered the fat into lard. Ideal advance preparation for a confit-making session.

In fact, when I unwrapped the roast I could see that this piece of meat would probably have enough of its own fat. From 10 pounds, I diced up seven pounds of pure white fat and 3 pounds of meat (this year, my friendly pig-farmers are crossing their two Ossabaw sows with a Tamworth hog, and we’ll certainly see a higher ratio of incredible meat to impeccable fat). The skin, which I will at a later date turn into tooth-challenging, salty-porky cracklings to scatter over a salad, are cut into domino shapes, placed between two pieces of plastic wrap, and frozen. The meat is cut into 1 1/2-inch chunks and rubbed with a mixture of Kosher salt (at 2 teaspoons/pound), dried French thyme, and a hint of nutmeg. It will cure for 24 hours in the fridge (I prefer a 36 to 48-hour cure, but company’s comin’ and I failed to start the process early enough). The fat heads into a 240F oven to begin rendering. I want the lard to remain between 200 and 205, but I find half an hour at 240F serves to begin the process, and then I must turn the heat down to 210 or so (please note that everyone’s oven is different, so don’t take this as gospel...). This takes 5 to 6 hours, and testing the temp every hour or so allows me to play the oven like an instrument, nudging up or down to maintain the ideal. Some recipes start with a little water in the pan, but I don’t see the point.

I have consulted four different experts before settling, more or less, on a standard hybrid of them all: Paula Wolfert, Judy Rodgers, Bruce Aidells, and Jennifer McLagan (for the crackling, her recipe rules!). Every time I confit, my notes from the last batch help with the refining process. After five confits and two rillettes, I’m starting to feel guardedly confident about the confit. (If you have enough actual pork—as opposed to fat—it’s a great time-saver to make both confit and rillettes at the same time. (In my house, this perennially popular French specialty has been Americanized into Pork Butter.)

Part Two of Comfort me with Confit, in which duck fat plays a supporting role, coming on Wednesday.

Category: 09, In the East | Write To Me
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Posted By bbinns on April 20, 2009

Roadfoodie is not a recipe kinda blog. Yes, food is most often its focus, and yet I also like to look beyond, to the personalities that populate the byways and foodways of my travels. But in a career that has spanned twenty-two published cookbooks, I’ve written an awful lot of really good recipes, both for myself (lots for Williams-Sonoma) and for a host of fabulous chefs and restaurants; it would seem churlish not to share a few of the really good ones here. And so it is that I turn my attention away from pork for a time, and alight on another of my beloved ingredients: cheese. (Some of you will begin to sense a fatty theme here. Yepper. Give me mouth-feel or give me death.) Many of the most wonderful cheeses in the lactic lexicon hail from the land of rolling hills, caressing sun, and free-flowing wine where, once upon a time, I spent care-free summer days shopping, chopping, laughing, sipping and chowing down on the fruits of field, stream, and sea.
During this spring of our discontent, when newspapers fall daily and publishing as I knew it seems destined for the remainder bin, those annual summer visits to Chianti seem like a far-off fairy tale. Instead, now, the cypress-dotted hills must come to me, preferably in the form of truffle-scented sheeps’ milk cheese. Although diners will not at first see the earthy, melty cheese hiding shyly underneath the tender greens, its sheepish perfume will herald the imminent arrival of something mouth-altering. As with all the recipes in my last book,
The Relaxed Kitchen: How to Entertain with Casual Elegance and Never Lose Your Mind, Incinerate the Souffle, or Murder the Gueststhis one nods deeply to the convenience of the cook. Amuse your friends! Amaze yourself! Get thee to a good cheesery!

Brigit’s Secret Salad
Mise-en-Place: Make the dressing, cut the cheese, and assemble all the ingredients and tools near the stove. Preheat the oven. Just after the cheese slabs go in, toss the salad. Guests should be seated before you serve for optimal cheese-a-licious effect..

2 tablespoons good balsamic vinegar
1 teaspoon red wine vinegar
1 large clove garlic, pushed through a press
Fine sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon Dijon or other interesting mustard; cassis mustard would be nice
1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons chicken or vegetable broth (canned is fine)
6 o 8 ounces truffled Pecorino cheese (Pecorino Tartufo)
4 cups loosely packed baby salad greens (about 4 ounces), preferably a spicy blend that includes arugula

In a mixing bowl, combine the two vinegars, garlic, ½ teaspoon salt, a generous grinding of pepper. mustard, olive oil, and broth. Whisk together vigorously until thickened and emulsified. Set aside until serving time (whisk again just before adding the greens to re-emulsify, if it has separated).
Preheat the oven to 350F. Assemble the plates, salad greens, and the bowl of dressing near the stove. You will also need a metal spatula to quickly transfer the melted cheese to the plates.

Cut the pecorino into 4 equal slabs and place them on an oiled baking sheet with at least 2 inches between each square. Place in the hot oven and watch closely; after about 5 minutes, the cheese will be nicely runny, but should not be totally liquid. While the cheese is melting, add the greens to the bowl of dressing and toss with tongs until evenly coated with the dressing (this takes more tossing than you might expect).
When the cheese reaches the ideal consistency, transfer one runny slab to each plate with the metal spatula and mound some of the salad on top, hiding the cheese. Serve at once.
(Serves 4; may be increased with impunity)

Category: 09, In the East | Write To Me
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Posted By bbinns on April 15, 2009

New York City. In the back of my mind a continuous loop displays a golden horizon bisected by a straight, lonely road. In the distance, I see a silver chariot (the Highlander) silently appear just where the road meets the sky in a shimmering heat haze, then make its way languidly toward my p.o.v. Hanging out the window with ears flapping in the hot breeze is a black and white dog….Screeech!
That was then, and this is now. It is cold, gray, and rainy in the city that never sleeps, and that’s all I want to do. I am here for the weekend to support C, but he’s teaching a class in the morning and then has both a matinee and an evening performance of Hamlet, so my support is of the non-contiguous variety. It’s now 11am and he won’t be back until 11pm. I’m tucked up on a dog-friendly sofa in the West Village home of a very generous friend, who is smart enough to be in Mexico right now, and I can’t shake the feeling that I came back to the east coast three weeks too early. It seems the winter of our economic and climactic discontent is not yet ready to loose its hold. In a perfect world, the West Village is a blissful place to while away a quiet Saturday, equidistant from any number of food meccas.
There is Chinatown, where I celebrated my first post-college Thanksgiving in a 5th-floor walk-up studio by serving goat couscous. And Bleecker Street (aka Pork and Cheese Central), where coils of broccoli raab-flecked sausage and lyrical sheep’s cheeses recline, just waiting for a visit from my generous upstate-provisioning cooler. Little Italy calls out with promises of cannoli and gelato. Even closer, in Soho, Joe’s Dairy makes the very best plain and salted mozzarella this city has to offer. Which is saying alot. (Once, on the way to Dean & Deluca, I walked past Joe’s at an hour when it wasn’t open. Inside the glass door of the diminutive shop, I could easily see a large man sitting on an upturned bucket, holding a mop straight upright in one hand. He was fast asleep.)
But on this day, the culinary riches of lower Manhattan seem wan and insubstantial. They beckon lamely, but I turn away. I am indoors with a warm dog, high definition television, and 800,000 good books to choose from. I am not budging.
Cut to 12 noon. On the dog-friendly coffee table—just next to where Stella is standing, looking at me quizzically—there is a stack of restaurant guides. My mind starts to wander, and I begin to think about pizza. I’ve heard about a new place called Co. that has reinvigorated the crust controversy upon which I am very opinionated. Maybe it’s close by, I fantasize, or close to a subway stop…The guides are, of course, already outdated, so I hit NY Magazine’s foolproof restaurant guide, and discover that Co. is not open for lunch. Now I start to muse upon the Crust King at Una Pizza Napoletana, where I have not yet been. It’s in the Village somewhere, right? Well, if you can consider 12th street in the EAST Village to be in the same neighborhood as Leroy Street and Hudson, I guess it’s not too far….but then the really serendipitous thing happens: I realize that Porchetta, the legendary storefront that purveys an estimable NY approximation of Tuscany’s most famous street food, is on 7th Street. Even closer!
I do not have rain boots. Our host has many, but we don’t share a shoe size. It is still raining, an endless dripping that is worse than a drizzle yet not a downpour. I pull on my trusty, 15-year-old once-suede cowboy boots, and hit the road to pork.
I walk up to Bleecker and turn right, then across sixth and over to Bowery, where I jog north half a block and then head east once more on 2nd Street. The long, crosstown blocks squelch by, and finally I am walking north on 1st Avenue. My left boot appears to have sprung a leak, and my long linen skirt is A. not enough protection from the elements and B. now soaked from mid-calf down. But there it suddenly is, on my right, a tiny storefront with only six stools in the window but, inside, a warm case displaying a religious vision: hunks of mahogany manna, crisscrossed with deep cuts that reveal the generosity of the toothsome fat. Eureka! And on this rotten weekend day, there are seats at the tiny counter. Immediately, I begin to ingratiate myself to the counter-woman, angling for an extra portion of crispy skin. But with a hint of speaking rote, she assures me that every dish receives its democratically-allocated portion. I’ll not be swaying her, I see. Choices are few, but all are fine. The “plate” comes with greens, but I have other pork plans for supper, and so opt for a sandwich, which comes on a Sullivan Street Bakery roll. (In true NY-is-a-tiny-town fashion, I note that the original motivation for me to get out on this rotten day, the new pizza joint, Co., is run by the same man as the bakery who made my roll.) While they slice in the back, I muse. Can this porchetta, which appears exceedingly promising, rival that offered by the porchetta truck at the Saturday market in Greve-in-Chianti? Back in the days that now seem like myth, we used to spend time there every summer, and my selfless provisioning for the group was always rewarded by a visit to the truck. There, skin-centric exhortations got me no discernable notice from the Italian girls in charge of slicing and portioning either; they’d seen it all before. I could have done handsprings in front of the truck and they’d still give me the same amount of skin, which is, in every situation involving pork skin, by definition never enough.
I know this much about the process: In Italy, an entire pig is boned out and stuffed with aggressively seasoned paste of salt and herbs. Here in the middle of NY, the proprietors of Porchetta have opted to simplify just slightly: they take the boned loin of a heritage pig and wrap it with a skin-on belly, insinuating the flavoring paste throughout. My sandwich is ready, and I grab a plastic cup and fill it with water from the crock on the counter, then squeeze myself into the corner with my dripping umbrella to commune with my porchetta. Immediately, I realize that it is as good as Greve’s. The bread is elastic, with nice irregular holes that trap any juices and fat that might be trying to escape, the meat is moist and flavorful, the occasional hits of salt and herbs counterpoint to the lush mouth-feel provided by the fat. And she has been true to her word. There is almost enough skin to satisfy even me. It’s tooth-shatteringly hard, and you run into little flecks here and there in the sandwich. But the crunchy brown fat that is attached to the skin is where I start to break down. This fat offers only token resistance to the tooth, and then you are through into the warm liquid center. Like some prehistoric dream of winter-banishing sustenance, it makes me forget the wind chill outside and the long, cold, and wet walk home.
The trudge home seems longer, perhaps because the soles of my boots are now saturated and my skirt whips wetly around my bare knees. I count off the blocks, blind to any charm that the village, east or west, may attempt to proffer. The streets are dirty and the people almost as gray as the sky. Easter is tomorrow, but neither lamb nor ham will grace my table because I’ll be on the road again, finally ferrying C to our upstate home. The cooler will be full of goodies, and eventually spring will come to the Hudson Valley. Meanwhile, once I get back to my warm dog and begin triage on my boots, I’ll sink into a blissful afternoon of warm dog and old movies. The discomforts of the longest, wettest walk will fade away, but memories of juicy-fatty-salty porchetta will linger in my drowsy, afternoon dreams.

Note: Roadfoodie is not usually a resource for recipes, but writing them is, actually, what I do for a living. In aid of those whose taste buds have been teased by endless porky ruminations on this site, I will post a recipe for wine-brined pork shoulder at the beginning of next week. The premise behind the much tested and tasted dish is that, if brining can make even supermarket pork tasty, then wine-brining should raise it to super-Tuscan porcine standards. And it does.

Category: 09, In the East, The Pork Tour | Write To Me
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