The season

Howdy all! It's the season for lavish meals, fatty meats, and great company. With the economy on crutches, we here at Feast are concerned with eking the most out of holiday leftovers. To procrastinate real work, we'll be posting a few gems of leftover love. Also, bad ideas to avoid. Enjoy!

Indulgence in a shitty economy

It's a rough economy, people. As a grad student, I'm counting my blessings, and battening down the financial hatches. This week I went with my roommate, Josh, to Little Tokyo. He was going for Ramen with friends, and I hitched the ride to get out of the house, and get origami paper.

I should write about our favorite Ramen houses. Coming soon.

In the Ninja Market, Rachel and I went bananas. She admitted she only joined bf Will to buy candy at the Japanese market. So on the shelves I discovered, to my glee, some inexplicable canned fishes.

Many of us in the interweb generation connect with Beat litterature in different ways. I've always harbored impractically romantic feelings toward canned fishes. I don't mean the kind of minced tuna you feed to cats or stir with mayonnaise. I mean anchovies, sardines. Little fish lined in a can, which cartoon characters taught me to open with some kind of magical key.

Imagine my disappointment to discover that these miracle meals of the destitute cost upwards of 4 dollars, come in a rainbow of flavors, and, most disappointingly, taste like ass. I can't have breath like that unless I actually am in a boxcar.

Flash forward to Ninja Market. Same size cans. Pop top. Japanese writing and photos of sensually sweetened fish fillets. Bright colors. I found a sign in english declaring some of the cans to be yellowtail. So I bought a few cans. Josh guessed the other I bought might be eel.

Tonight I got home late, walked Gilligan, and set some eggs to boil for my camping trip this weekend. I peeled open a can of yellowtail and a beer.

The fish is a solid fillet, with bones and varied shades of muscle. It's rich and complex, without any fishiness in the flavor. Nothing like canned tuna or salmon. The sauce was just right- sweet but not insane. Around 240 calories, and half of those from protein, half from fat. I'll add pictures soon so you can find your own. These will definitely be my favorite camping lunch this weekend- and a good reason to get a car running so I can get to Little Tokyo more.

At $1:30 a piece, they're cheaper than a cup of coffee. Full consideration of sustainability is pending, but my dog loved the left-overs more than her enviro-sin Little Ceasars. Double bonus.

Coming soon: camp-out cook-offs, toaster oven lovin, best-spent sweet bucks, and budget cheeses for the poor and classy.

Shark Harbor: Outreach Sausages

I love outreach work. It's a thing we do.

On the kick-off night of my last hurah campout on the backside of Catalina Island, we met a gaggle of workers from another of the island's non-prof outfits. We invited them over for dinner but most were pretty shy, and they didn't want to take our food.

The next night two guys were back, installing trail signs. After a careful inventory of our stores, I convinced my friends that we had enough food to share and still eat well. We had nine sausages, three portabellas, a tuna steak or two, and tons of veggies. With english muffins for breakfast, and plans to leave before lunch, I wagered we could share.















Alex and Emily were very doubtful, but agreed. Jade and Andy joined us for dinner. They were surprisingly polite, ate less than I'd calculated, and helped cook too. It was a huge success.


















Alex prepped foil packets with tuna, chicken sausage, and veggies. I filled the skillet with brauts and veggies, and the pork casings from the chicken sausages (Emily doesn't eat pig.)

Emily master-minded some biscuits on the skillet.

I snapped the portabella stems for inclusion in the braut mix. I filled each cap with worcheshire sauce. I added the olive oil (with spices and lemon) from the jar that held dolmas. The dolmas I'd paired with light beer on the beach all afternoon, and one or the other was addling my brain enough to make cooking dinner a little extra hap-hazard.

We did the braut skillet first, then placed the portabellas on the rack, the foil packs on the coals, and the biscuits in the pan. We left the shrooms on the longest, and they came out really well. The biscuits were problematic because we'd get distracted an let them burn. Just a sign that the conversations were great. It takes people to feast, after all. And those guys deserved it. Look at the sign they put up! They were hauling fifty pound bags of concrete while I was sleeping in a lounge chair in the surf. Thanks guys!

High Desert Burritos

I returned to the mainland and spent two days in the city, before departing for another camping trip. A three-day expedition across the Owen's Valley and White Mountains, the trip was both an introduction to California geology, and a social event for my cohort of first year grad students. Our guides, two veteran doctoral students, planned the whole thing really well, and packed all the frills.















The old-school pump-action camping stove was finiky. Plamen cleverly quelled a disconcerting fire lit on the spicket of the canister, by pouring sand onto the outlet. The photo shows the thing functioning normally. Ish.

Whitney organized an assembly line; students chopping veggies, imitation chicken, real chicken, etc. I use the word chopping liberally. There was a lot of slicing, due to a derth of good knives. People did well with plastic and pocket. They packed really well, but it's a good general note to self for future camping trips. You can NEVER have enough knives. Bring as many knives as you have people. I ran into the same problem on my Catalina excursion the previous weekend. I didn't do much for the main meal, but I did augment the beans with my favorite mixture of minced garlic, onion, and bell pepper. Oh, and I added some Corona to the chicken which I think helped a lot. Whitney prepped it in a large stainless fry pan with onions and garlic. It came out great.

The result of all this labor was the perfect high desert burrito. I'm going to love grad school.

Lunch in Shark Harbor

When I get hungry I don't like to think.

I don't want to plan, scheme, clean, or focus. I want to eat.
When cooking for guests, I begin far before I am hungry. Or else I eat ingredients before they hit the pan, and I never enjoy the final product.










After breakfast, and a morning spent laying on the beach reading magazines, my friends weren't very hungry. I almost ate a can of salmon alone, without decoration. That would be feeding, not feasting. This camping trip was planned in part as a food adventure, and it just seemed wrong to gorge when I had such a spectacular field kitchen, and so much time. Graduate school would start as soon as I reached the mainland. Forcing myself to relax, I agreed to wait a few minutes while I dressed up my salmon.

Green onion chive, clove of garlic, minced.
Tossed in the skillet used the night before
(veggies and braughtworst, no sauces).
Left over a fire for a while.
Served on a cracker.

A good snack. Very healthy. Felt more like a meal. Good for camping; no utensils.







Alex had some salmon too, and suddenly we declared it lunch time. I inventoried the bread products and settled on an english muffin. Originally I had a salmon melt in mind, but I had to eat the salmon. No patience.

Placated with protein, I waited for three thin slices of gouda to relax themselves onto my toasting english muffin. The driftwood fire I built was still strong, and we had plenty of store-bought pine for the evening. At the very end I added a couple leaves of spinach and one of Alex's cherry tomatoes.

This might be my favorite new lunch, even when I'm off the sand.

Emily, carefully pondering her quesadilla, stands in the background.

Welcome.

This is a blog about food.

Food that is cheap, excessive, beautiful and tasty.

I cook haphazardly, with great passion. I'll share what works, what bombs, and what I learned.

Cheers!