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Melt
James Cotton RIP
Here at home we have a photo by the great Memphis photographer Ernest Withers of the Howlin Wolf Band pretending to pick cotton in Arkansas. There’s a young James Cotton in that photo sporting a big grin. 
RIP
Bird is the Word
Two starlings stopped by the feeders today. They’re so pushy and rude and they don’t like to share. We also had a mourning dove enjoying seeds spilled on the ground by the starlings. 
Some of the sparrow colony stayed inside the condo today, enjoying some shelter from the cold winds.
Rod Bernard and that Swamp-Pop Sound
Here’s a nice little 2 part film: Rod Bernard and Cajun Rock ‘n’ Roll….
Here’s Rod Bernard’s breakthrough swamp-pop tune, This Should Go on Forever.
And Part II of the documentary…
Allons Danser Colinda featured Johnny and Edgar Winter!
Shake Rattle & Roll. The fantastic accordion on this cut is none other than Zydeco King Clifton Chenier…
To hear more Rod Bernard, check out YouTube – or if you can find it, I recommend Boogie in Black & White by Rod Bernard and Clifton Chenier.
Snow Birds
The snow is coming down pretty good around here but the local birds are quite active. I dropped Tuffy P at the GO Station this morning and when I returned home I took a few minutes to refill a couple of the backyard feeders. They’ve been getting loads of visitors all morning.
Aftermath – the final Lazy Allen story
The latest – and final – Lazy Allen story is up. I’d like to thank the folks who supported this project and also everyone who clicked over to the stories page and read one of more of these pieces. There are 17 stories in all. I published the first one on October 19, 2015 so the whole project was about a year and a half in the making.
If this is the first you’ve heard of these little stories, I hope I can encourage you to check them out. There is a menu at the top of the stories page with links to each of the 17 stories in the order I posted them.
At this point I don’t know what’s next on the writing front. I’d like to write more stories and I like the serialized format on the web, so maybe there will be another series on the horizon. Or maybe I’ll take another shot at writing a novel. I don’t know. I’ll have to chew on some ideas for a while. Stay tuned.
Deep Run Roots by Vivian Howard
There have always been cookbooks around our home. My mom had quite a collection of them. In fact, I even had an uncle, Harold Knapik, who wrote one. Back in 1971, Harold, who was an excellent amateur French style chef, came out with Haute Cuisine without Help. I enjoy cooking very much but the thing is that with a few exceptions I don’t actually read cookbooks. I flip through them, check out how different things are made. I’m not usually interested in details like measurements so much as an understanding of the preparation of a dish. These days if I need to learn about how to go about making something I’ll consult YouTube and channels like Food Wishes.
I’ve recently watched a few episodes of A Chef’s Life on PBS and found it very compelling. I liked the way it combined the business of running a restaurant with family pressures and at the same time looked at ingredients important to chef Vivian Howard by featuring the producers of those ingredients.
Today we live in a processed world in which everything comes to us packaged up and ready to consume. I think of the U. Utah Phillips song, Daddy What’s a Train. Kids don’t even know milk comes from a cow. Rings true, doesn’t it?
I’ve always liked to know the why and how of things, where they came from, why they are this way and not that. A Chef’s Life showcases a chef who has left the hustle and bustle of New York and gone back home to, against all odds, open a restaurant and at the same time come to terms with her roots in rural North Carolina. In the show, she mentions that she took time away from the two restaurants her and her husband operate to write a cookbook. I thought, this is a book I’d enjoy reading.
Deep Run Roots is a big cookbook with lots of pictures and recipes, but really it’s a book of stories about Vivian Howard rediscovering the place she grew up, rediscovering then reinventing the food traditions she grew up with. Most of what I know about North Carolina is about the old time music traditions, about Doc Watson, who lived in Deep Gap and others like Tommy Jarrell and Fred Cockerham and the other legends of Round Peak music from Surry County. I’ve only been there once, and that was to go to Merlefest, which is of course a music festival.
Today we can pop over to the local grocery and find just about anything we might want and at any time of the year. Many of the food traditions Vivian Howard writes about came about due to the seasonality of some foods and the need to preserve them for winter. Hence you have smoked and cured seasoning meats and concoctions like the fermented Collard Kraut.
Deep Run Roots is a big book but a fast read. I gobbled it up in a couple days. Along the way I’ll try some of the recipes (to the extent I’m capable of following a recipe). Even though I’m usually the first to say I’m sick to death of celebrity chefs, I like Vivian Howard’s story and I like her approach to food and ingredients and cooking. I see Deep Run Roots as a memoir disguised as a cookbook. It’s a beautiful book and it would also make a great gift for the foodie in your life. Recommended.
Back in Black
The red-winged blackbirds are back. Over the past few days they’ve been making an appearance in the back yard, bullying the smaller birds from the feeder. 
Inside, the cats watch them intently. We call it bird TV. They watch out the windows for hours. There is no love lost between the red-winged black birds and the cats, especially the red-cats, Jack Shadbolt and Jacques.
The reds have been “outdoor cats” since kitten-hood, unlike the tabbies and the ladybug, who stay in, and the old man, who goes out to the catnip patch in the summer, gets stoned, and staggers back in for a nap. The red-winged blackbirds loudly announce the location of the cats and when I can hear them screaming, I know one of the reds is underfoot.
Sometimes the reds come along on the dog walks and there have been some days when I’ve seen one or two red-cats, one or two humans, a couple Newfs, and a flock of red-winged blackbirds all on the walk together, the birds taking turns dive-bombing the cats (who ignore them as if they didn’t exist).
Newf Wrestling at 27th Street
Eggs and Sausage another way
There is a dish called Shakshuka in which eggs are poached in a spicy tomato pepper sauce. I’ve been thinking about making this for some time. Meanwhile, I’ve been reading Vivian Howard’s wonderful book Deep Run Roots and noticed she has a recipe for Stewed Tomato Shirred Eggs with Ham Chips, which looks very much like Shakshuka except without the North African spices. Same idea though, in which you drop raw eggs into stewed tomatoes and poach them in the oven. She makes Ham Chips to serve in her version dish, and I thought about doing that. However, it occurred to me that this would be an interesting way to make different sort of eggs and sausage dish.
I started by cooking up some onions, jalapenos, chunks of chorizo sausage and some mushrooms in a big cast iron pan. When the onions started nicely carmelizing, I added some diced tomatoes from a can. If this was only summer, I’d use fresh tomatoes for this. Once the tomatoes were in, I gently cooked it for a half hour or so, and toward the end added half a cup of bread crumbs to thicken things up a bit.
I made divets in my sauce and added the eggs, one to each divet. I don’t think you’re supposed to let any of the yolks break like the one in the picture, but I’m going to pretend that didn’t happen. I put it in the oven for 10 or 12 minutes. You can let the eggs cook as much or as little as you want, but keep in mind they will keep cooking in the hot sauce after you take them off the heat. 
The eggs in this picture are just a tiny bit runny. While the concoction was in the oven, I quickly fried up what I guess amount to hushpuppies. These were awesome for sopping up the tasty sauce.
This isn’t quite Shakshuka, but it’s not quite Vivian Howard’s dish either. That’s the way it goes around here. I don’t follow recipes very closely and usually change things around to my liking.
27th Street 