Tuffy P made hot muffins tonight. I don’t just mean they were hot out of the oven. No no no. These were savoury muffins, made with cheese and hot chiles. You may remember that I dried a batch of scotch bonnets the other day and ground them up in a coffee grinder. Tuffy P added a teaspoon of these babies to the muffins. Most interesting. On first bite the cheese mitigates the effects of the chiles but somewhere into bite #2, whammo, the chiles hit a home run, over the bleachers and out into the parking lot. Those puppies are hot and delicious.
Here’s a video of a guy who tests the heat of chiles by the unscientific method of videotaping himself eating them. This is the scotch bonnet video (he has several others). It’s interesting to watch how long it takes for the heat to really seriously kick in.
The Daily Dose is continuing with another song by U. Utah Phillips, the Golden Voice of the Great Southwest. This tune is called The Goodnight Loving Trail. I first heard it on an Ian Tyson record.
It’s sort of a cowboy song. The title refers to a cattle driving trail from the 1860s, named after cattle ranchers Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving. However, it’s really a song about getting old. The “Old Woman” referred to in the song is the cowboy who is too old to wrangle or ride on the swing. Instead, he drives the chuck wagon. He’s the cook and he’s the doctor and he manages camp. Here are the lyrics:
Too old to wrangle or ride on the swing,
You beat the triangle and you curse everything.
If dirt was a kingdom, they you'd be the king.
On the Goodnight Trail, on the Loving Trail,
Our Old Woman's lonesome tonight.
Your French harp blows like the low bawling calf.
It's a wonder the wind don't tear off your skin.
Get in there and blow out the light.
With your snake oil and herbs and your liniments, too,
You can do anything that a doctor can do,
Except find a cure for your own god damned stew
CHORUS
The campfire's gone out and the coffee's all gone,
The boys are all up and they're raising the dawn.
You're still sitting there, lost in a song.
CHORUS
I know that some day I'll be just the same,
Wearing an apron instead of a name.
There's nothing can change it, there's no one to blame
For the desert's a book writ in lizards and sage,
Easy to look like an old torn out page,
Faded and cracked with the colors of age.
CHORUS
I love this tune. It's lovely and sad. "I know that some day
I'll be just the same." So true.
Let's listen to some other versions.
Joe Ely does a great job of it...
Some of you may be surprised that Tom Waits recorded it.
And one more. this is Sara Grey and Kieron Means
http://youtu.be/ezPbES_tgMI
I know what you’re thinking…..he’s posting too much music. Bring back Mister Anchovy. Yeah, well that bum hasn’t even called. Tonight we have a second Daily Dose. I hope you can adjust. This one is an earworm. I’ve had some of Utah Phillips songs on the brain lately, and I recalled Rosalie Sorrels’ stunning version of Starlight on the Rails. If you haven’t heard this, you’re in for a treat.
One more version. Here’s Ross Altman, who also tells one of Utah’s best stories.
Gentle readers, I confess I may have exaggerated a wee bit when I declared that there were no edible mushrooms outside of grocery stores in Southern Ontario.
While out for a stroll in a small woods with Tuffy P this afternoon, we kept our eyes open for the possibility of a mushroom or two after all the rain we recently enjoyed. It was Tuffy who spotted the Bear’s Head Tooth. I think there were three of them in the same area, all growing from beech trees, not far from the ground. The one in the picture was nice and fresh, and we harvested it for the table.
These are really unusual-looking fungi and very distinctive. Although I have been foraging for a few years, and have gone out of my way to look for Bear’s Head Tooth on a few occasions, this was the first time I found and collected any in the woods. I’m looking forward to dinner tomorrow.
As always when I write about collecting mushrooms I must caution you to be very careful eating any wild mushroom. If you are not completely certain of the ID, leave it be. There are mushrooms in Ontario woods that will kill you if you ingest them. Admittedly, the Bear’s Head Tooth is very distinctive but still… Be careful please.
Somewhere along the way, Tuffy P and I developed a tolerance and love of hot foods. At a certain point we found we could not buy ground chiles that were hot enough to give us that spicy jolt we were looking for, so we began taking a do-it-yourself approach. When we get close to running out, I buy the nicest looking scotch bonnets I can find, slice them in half, and dry them. To do this, I use the handy dehydrator I have on hand for mushrooms. Once they’re totally dried, I grind them up in a coffee grinder. The first time I tried it, I used a food processor to grind them and that was a big mistake. A food processor doesn’t seal in the fumes the way a coffee grinder does, and I ended up with a coughing fit from these hot chiles. Yesterday I saw some beautiful looking all orange scotch bonnets in a local grocery, so I bought a bag. The cashier said to me, “How on earth are you going to eat all these. You know how hot these things are?”
27th Street 