For the new issue, we’ve expanded the Fish & Game Quarterly and given it its own site. We have also invited some estimable talents to contribute, in several genres besides culinary reportage: fiction, photo essay, and memoir. Future editions will expand further, into art, music, dance, poetry and random works of sui generis genius. It will mostly have somewhat to do with food, but may also not. Enjoy.
Category: Awesomeness
The new Fish & Game newsletter is out today, and it includes a profile of Hirotake Ooka, one of the four extraordinary natural winemakers I visited last month during a quick trip to France.
Apart from a couple of gloriously warm days, winter’s death throes have been pretty assertively shitty. On Monday, the first day of sugaring, the sun felt warm enough that I was able to work outside for a few hours as I tended the fire and kept an eye on the sap’s progress so Danny could mix a record inside. The fire needs stoking every twenty minutes to maintain a rolling boil; that’s not a long enough interval for him to sink into his magic studio reverie, but it’s easy for me to get up from the laptop and throw a few logs in between sentences. And I obviously have my author photo taken care of, so there’s that.
Despite the fact that it looks fairly glacial around these parts, signs of the impending thaw can be seen everywhere. Actual bare ground is visible at the edges of roads, where the plow scraped wide and the sun-warmed asphalt shares the love with a slightly broader margin every day. Even a winter as mighty as this one can’t fight the light; it’s reaching spots that haven’t felt it since around Columbus Day. The upside to these arctic days we’ve been saddled with has been the cleanest, clearest air on the planet: cloudless, endless azure framing a sun that gets higher and warmer every day.
The new Fish & Game newsletter is hot off the virtual presses, and particularly timely in that there’s nary a hint of spring to be found anywhere. We’re on track to have the book out by fall, so watch this space for news as that time draws nearer.
The Fish & Game fall newsletter is out today. I spent a pretty rewarding October on several short trips to gather images and information for this, and by extension for the book: a short flight up the river to Hudson at between 500 and 1500 feet for some foliage shots, an overnight jaunt to Ithaca for the grain piece, and a lovely three days in Portland, Maine meeting and photographing some shellfish farmers and the wholesaler who provides the restaurant with such sterling seafood.
Just in time for fall, a look back at the summer’s activities at everyone’s favorite scrappy underdog restaurant.
At long last, the piece about Dancing Ewe Farm that I wrote and shot for Edible Manhattan is out in the new issue.
That’s pork belly braised in the last of the maple sap with pho spices, then removed and the liquid strained and reduced to somewhere in the happy medium between stock and syrup. Underneath, freshly dug parsnips—early spring’s great treat, and maple’s perfect partner—steamed with yogurt whey and then puréed in it underneath, and alongside kale sautéed with some of last summer’s mirepoix from the freezer and a vibrant pesto of escarole and sunflower seeds. Chervil,…
Going back to 2008, I have made 10-course extravaganzas for Thanksgiving: balls-out, unfettered freestyling wherein my imagination runs wild and my skills try their best to realize the perfervid visions and tie it all together. They’re all documented here on the blog, including the one that won me a trip to France. I have enjoyed cooking every one of them. But this year I wasn’t feeling it, so I took it easy. No manic list-making, no frantic days of prep beforehand, no careful curation of the trajectory from course to course. I bought a goose, and I used the homegrown produce on hand to round it out into a meal.