August: Hot, Buttered and Fun

So many good concerts happened in the Salt Lake area this August, most of them easy on the wallet. The free Saturday concerts at the Canyons continued, as did the Thursday night ones at the Gallivan Center. I dragged the kids to these and more, to the point that they started complaining, "not another festival!" How funny.


My favorite bluegrass band (well, newgrass, I should say) was in town this weekend for the first annual Intermountain Acoustic Music Association Folk and Bluegrass Fest at the Gallivan Center. HOT BUTTERED RUM. That's right, and the boys were in fine form. I liked it all, but standouts for me were a great jam on a song called Entangled and a fabulous Beatles cover: "I've Got a Feelin". SO good. They actually played two Beatles covers back-to-back, the first one being "I've Just Seen a Face," which I think is very much suited for bluegrass and reminded me a lot of the rendition on an album I picked up a few years back: The Charles River Valley Boys.

That album is more traditional bluegrass, and a little tough to listen to all the way through for my tastes, but definitely good for a lark. Anyway, Hot Buttered Rum was great even though they didn't play "Flask Alas," a song the kids and I listen to a bunch and one Gillian requested of the mandolin/fiddle player Eric just before their soundcheck got rolling. Sweet girl. Anyway, the kids had fun singing "Flask Alas, he was a butterless man!" in the car.

The weekend ended with a great day at Oktoberfest at Snowbird. It's not the cheapest thing around, but for $19 each, the kids had unlimited passes to do all the alpine sledding, sky trampolining, rock wall climbing and mechanical bull riding they could handle.

They had a blast with their friends, Daniel and Zosia. Plus, with heat around 96 degrees in the valley, and 20 short minutes up the canyon we were enjoying weather in the high 70s, it was a great way to enjoy a sunny day out of the heat.

Roast for One

My apologies in advance to the greatest of my vegetarian friends, Kevin and Misty, with whom I've experienced a genuine and totally unpretentious love of slow food.

Roasting a whole chicken has to be one of the easiest and economical ways to eat well and make yourself a week's worth of lunches in the process. I think that roasting a chicken and serving delicious sides like roasted garlic smashed red potatoes and haricots verts topped with caramelized plums is a great way to treat a dinner guest, but since there was no one around last weekend, I decided just to treat myself.

And this is a good thing (despite the crappy iPhone picture). My roast chicken is easy: 6 Tbs butter softened and mixed with a Tbs each of rosemary, thyme and sage, all of which are easy to grow in the back yard, along with some lemon thyme and the zest of one lemon. I rub this under the skin on both sides of the chicken and set it in my cast iron skillet in the oven for 90 minutes in a 400 degree oven. Voila. It's done. I throw in some garlic cloves for the last 45-60 minutes to get them roasted for the potatoes.

I pour off most of what's in the pan because it's largely chicken fat, but leave a few Tbs in as well as the dark stuff that sticks a bit--it's fond. I build the sauce on top of the fond by using 1 Tbs of the same butter mix I made (oh yeah--reserve a Tbs of that!) and a few Tbs of flour. This roux can cook on the stove under your watchful wooden spoon for a minute or two followed by a nice dose of white wine (a nice new liter bottle of a gruner vetliner, Austria's famous white, is available right now at the 300 West 1700 South wine store--it comes with a pop top like a beer bottle and is a pretty good, zippy little value). I add water to help achieve the right consistency and of course taste for salt and pepper. The lemon zest from the butter rub lends just the right amount of acidity to this pan sauce.


I would prefer to share with company (sharing food is a wonderful thing), but having at least four days' worth of leftovers that I can freeze in single servings is a nice consolation prize.

Pizza stands tall: "I'm not afraid of fruit"

Pizza. We love it, we eat it by the truckload. But have we stopped to wonder what it can handle? Do we push the envelope on pizza enough to determine it's own capacity for love? I sat down with pizza a while back and had a discussion.

M: So, pizza. You're pretty dependable--do you think that's your best trait?
P: Badda-boosh, you kiddin'? I'm so f-ing bored. I'm the food of the people, but the people have no imagination!
M: Um, we got a family-friendly show, here, pizza.
P: (grimacing in acceptance) Only in these fru-fru Wolfgang Puck, Mario Batali, gourmet establishments do chefs experiment. Meanwhile, I'm pepperoni and cheese 100,000-times a night across America.
M: Well, to be fair, you are pretty good with just pepperoni and cheese.
P: (blushing) True, true.
M: So what you're saying is that you don't mind if people experiment?
P: If I could slap-a-you upside the head, I'd do it-you kiddin'? Do you get up and put on the same thing everyday?
M: Good point.
P: Thank you, now take a bite of me before I slap-a-you.

To that end, I've taken pizza's advice. One of my favorites was a thinly-sliced raw salmon (which cooked perfectly in 7 min in my 530-degree oven), lemon, green onion, oil & vinegar with sparse feta and a touch of red sauce. Mmmm. The other night I added this one, which was an interesting change for pizza (he said so himself):


Top slice: It's the local ham, cubed and browned with the local canteloupe, chipotle powder, honey and a bit of balsamic. Fresh melting sheep's milk cheese and basil chiffonade on top after it comes out of the oven sealed the deal. Yummers.

Bottom slice: more traditional, apple-sage vegan sausage (Whole Foods), pine nuts, banana peppers. All good.

Red Rock Hot Club in a backyard

Salt Lake can be such an amazingly small place sometimes. Take last night for instance, after having a nice dinner with my friend Julie (wow, Cherokee Purple tomatoes are so damn good. Or "Turkey Purples" as Julie likes to call them. lol.), we went to one of her friend's houses for a party. I had no idea what it was until we arrived and there was a giant, well, you can use your imagination, hanging in the front doorway, through which you had to enter. Then Julie tells me, "Oh, yeah, it's a colonoscopy party." Oy. It was a hoot--they went all out, had exam gowns for everyone who came, served drinks in test tubes (gatorade and vodka meant took look like a urine sample-ugh), people in nurses' outfits, IV drip by the bar, etc.

Anyway, someone clues us in to the fact that a great local gypsy jazz band is playing at a backyard party not too far away. So, after a few hours we made our way over to hear a bunch of the members of Red Rock Hot Club play in the backyard of the guy who owns the Guitar Czar, Eric Sopanen. It was definitely hot.


Great jam session--a number of folks rotated in and out. Note the near-empty bottle of Jameson on the stage (backyard deck, actually). They played a bunch of gypsy jazz and moved into some Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. Very accomplished musicians--these are the guys who teach guitar to people around town.

The guy in the middle is one of the family who owns and runs Chanon Thai. He came up and played an amazing song that he wrote for the woman he loves. It was very technically challenging, melodic and just fun to listen to. I was really impressed. Afterwords, he told me that the song was an assignment from one of the other guys on stage who was his guitar teacher. Crazy.

Great night, great libations, great company. Thanks, Julie, for opening up that evening of fun.

Felt dolls at the market

Great morning at the Saturday Farmer's Market--lovely temp near 60 degrees! Can you believe it? What a nice break from the heat--feels just like fall, although we've got another month and a half of heat left in store. The 9-10:30 crowd at the market wasn't too packed, which was nice.


After getting a great Cherokee Purple tomato, a buck bag of basil, a Rosa Bianca eggplant from John Borski, a few yellow wax peppers for frying, a random 25-cent cucumber and a tavern ham from a hormone- and antibiotic-free pig farm in Cache Valley, I decided to stroll the crafts vendors.

There were some great porcelain pieces (birdhouses and some odd, lovely kitchen bowl-like vessels holding rock salt and peppercorns--way to sell to the farmers market crowd!) But what caught my imagination today was the work of a woman named Cathy Cartwright from Ogden (you can email her through that link).

She makes the most interesting felt dolls. She makes other things, too, like fused glass and jewelry, but I thought her dolls totally stole the show. Of course, I have a daughter who's 7 this year, and while I was talking to Cathy, a woman with a 7-year-old daughter came up and bought one of the dolls, so perhaps it's just that they're perfect for that demographic. In any case, Cathy explained to me how she hand-shapes the features on the dolls while working dry felting wool with a needle. The dolls are imbued with crazy personality, with evocative and exaggerated features. I can just imagine Cathy sitting down, needling in a little eye of newt and powdered unicorn horn, smiling as she brings a new character to life. It's straight out of a children's book.

So I think I found birthday gifts for the girls in my daughter's class this year. Nice to find something so unique and local. Thanks, Cathy.