A Message in a Bottle

I found a message in a bottle tonight.  A green glass bottle stuffed with tokens and messages.    One of the notes was even tied in a cylinder with a pretty purple bow.  Naturally, I was intrigued, but I hesitated to open the bottle.  I certainly wasn't expecting to find a message in a bottle when I stepped into the river with only forty five minutes of the last vestiges of daylight left.  I set the bottle up on the gravel riverbank to mark my trail through the willows and stomped and slipped my way up the edge of the Stink Hole.  I had come to the river, not to receive anonymous messages passively drifted in the currents, but rather to send a message to bright summer steelhead: "eat my fly..."

Sometimes, when you have been fishing for long enough, you know when a little magic is about to happen. Tonight, I had already found a bottle with intact messages inside.  That certainly doesn't happen every day.  The Stink Hole isn't the most glamorous steelhead run on the Clearwater, but it is popular.  Only tonight, with thunderstorms rolling through the valley, I had the river all to myself.  With the hissing of cars on a rain soaked highway behind me, and the constant drone of the machinery of the paper mill in front of me, this part of the river does have a certain charm, but it certainly isn't the same as some wilderness reach of the John Day, Salmon, or Deschutes.  Tonight though, flashes of lightning streaked from cloud to cloud off in the distance and the sunset glowed something near the color of peach flesh beneath a dark wall of storm clouds.  A constant drip of big, warm summer rain drops eventually drove me to pull up my hood.  This was a fishy night.

The previous passage might lead you to believe that I was about to have an epic evening.  Forty five minutes of grab after grab after grip after grin.  Well, not exactly, but about half the way down the run, and about half way through the wide swing of my fly, I felt the line stop and get tight.  Then it started again, and then it stopped once more and started to throb.  Fish on; big smile on my face.  Haha!  All those dudes with fancy plastic clothes didn't want to get their new truck muddy (more likely, they thought better of testing the ability of a 13 foot graphite rod to conduct static electricity).  The most popular early -season hole on the whole river all to myself, and a fish on.  I had given my little boy a good night hug only 20 minutes before.  Bliss.

It wasn't meant to last.  After a brief minute of battle, the fish gave me one great thrash on the river's surface in the middle of the current to let me know I really was connected with a steelhead, then he made one good run and threw the hook.  Pop Pop would have definitely said "better to have hooked and lost than to have never have hooked at all."  That sentiment couldn't be truer for steelhead.  All those casts, all those steps, mends, and all that time... and what is the thing you fantasize about the most?  That moment you feel that grab, the second your line stops, the instant spey casting for steelhead goes from the most meditative and relaxing sport on the planet, to one of the most exciting.  That said, nobody likes to lose a fish.  I cursed and slapped my line back down on the water in front of me, but I was smiling the whole time.  I certainly don't want losing fish to become a habit, but you never can be angry when a steelhead gives you a taste of their addictive tug drug.

So I finished out the run.  No second chances, only more rain and darkness so complete it was getting harder and harder to know the anchor for my cast was in the right place.  Best call it then so as to not put a #6 salmon hook in my eye.

My finish line was a green bottle, neck decorated in gold foil, glass full of notes and trinkets.  I reeled in, stowed the fly, and grabbed the bottle before I slogged back to my pickup truck.

I didn't open the bottle until I was in dry clothes and sitting at my kitchen table.  The first note that fell out said the following:

"Dear Char, I wish we could have seen you before you left.  I'm happy that your not in pain anymore.  I can't wait to reunite when I come to Heaven.  I bet it will be lots brighter with you there!  Thanks for lighting up this world with your cheerfulness, Char.  Rest in peace.  I love you.  ~Lacey~"

More beautiful words have rarely been said about the loss of a friend.  The rest of the notes I could extract had the same tone of fond memories and a catharsis of grieving.  Each had their own poetry and came from all of Char's family, including the very youngest members of the pack.  I've no idea the full
symbolism of the trinkets in the bottle - a length of parachute cord, a handful of bone shaped candies, a stick of cinnamon gum, a little lock of golden hair - but weren't meant for me, they were keepsakes for Char.

It occurs to me that maybe I hadn't hooked a steelhead tonight.  Maybe it was Char's spirit trying to tell me the gifts in the bottle weren't meant for me.  Maybe Char was reminding me the best things in life, including love (and the tug of a big fish), aren't to be taken for granted, because they don't last forever (except, perhaps, in a heaven made brighter by the presence of our friends).

So out of respect for the river spirit that got away from me tonight, I am going to kiss my sleeping baby on the head, then take that green glass bottle, messages and trinkets stowed safely back inside, and return it to the river.  Before I do, I am going to make one small addition to the bottle's contents: One size 6 Spawning Purple steelhead fly, which on this very night may or may not have briefly ensnared a Char and not a steelhead.

Cursed by Steelhead

Ok, let's just say, for argument's sake, that every cast, every drift or swing takes half a minute.  From setup to cast to mend, to drift, to setting up again.  In some cases a minute may result in three drifts, or four swings, but this is argument's sake.  Now, let's just say we are fishing really hard.  On the water and bouncing from hole to hole for ten hours straight, and we are making casts and drifts six out of ten of those hours.  The other four hours, we are driving or floating, hiking or rock hopping, tying on tippet or flies, eating our lunch and drinking our beer.  Sixty minutes an hour for six hours a day.  Two casts per minute over 360 minutes... 720 casts.  Over two and a half days, that's 1800 casts.  I have heard steelhead described as the fish of a thousand casts.  How about no fish in 1800 casts.  That is what steelhead will do to you, especially when you are my primary fishing partner, Pop Pop.

Pop Pop is a helluva good fisherman.  He doesn't adhere to some bullshit new fishing fad, just because some guide who thinks he is a rock star got his photograph taken, and it went into an Orvis catalog.  Pop Pop just catches fish.  He wears his vest until the seams disintegrate, and he just catches fish.  He fishes his double taper lines until the cracks no longer shoot through the guides, and he just catches fish.  He fishes harder than anybody I have ever met, and he is good.  He is a good caster, he reads water, and he catches fish.  He also appreciates every fish he catches, much more than most people do.  Catching an eight-inch cutthroat on a muddler minnow is cause for boisterous celebration.  Why? Because that cutthroat was native, and he hooked it on a muddler, by far his favorite fly.  Pop Pop lets that fish go then smacks his fly back near the bank.  He wants to catch another, and he will.  Big fish and small fish.  Again and again.  Fish after fish after fish.

Pop Pop with a fat Yellowstone Cut, and a sunburn.

But there is something metaphysical about Pop Pop's relationship with steelhead.  When it comes to steelhead, he does not catch fish.  Eighteen hundred casts and no fish.  Fifteen hard hours and no fish.  Two and a half days in the wind and rain and cold and snow.  No fish.  What's more, he has done it two years in a row now.  Thirty six hundred casts and no fish.  I say his relationship with steelhead is metaphysical because the only way he could fish that hard, with steelhead in the river, and not catch a single fish, is that he is cursed.  He knows how to drift an egg pattern, to swing a wet fly.  He knows how to read the water and know where the fish will be.  What he did to warrant such a curse, who can say.  It sure doesn't seem like he deserves it.

One of 3600, but at least it is in God's Country

Ok, so the fishing wasn't stellar.  Nobody on our trip landed more than one steelhead, and we all fished hard.  Maybe it was just that Pop Pop was the odd man out and the chances of such a thing were pretty high, given the overall catch rates of a group of reasonably good anglers. But, there is a larger history here.  Pop Pop is legendary among his peers for a 17-year steelhead drought.  Ok, so he didn't make thousands upon thousands of casts a year for 17 years, but he went fishing.  He went fishing with folks who knew what they were doing with ultra-effective bait-and-hardware approaches that might be a little closer to commercial fishing than angling.  He didn't catch fish.  The drought had been broken, but over the last two years, he is 15 hours and 3600 casts on his way to a new record.

I am an optimist, and I am fast becoming a steelhead enthusiast.  I have developed that enthusiasm because I have had enough success in my short steelheading career to make me really, really excited about it.  I want to share that excitement with Pop Pop.  Steelhead are thrilling.  There is a reason there is a legion of dedicated "metalheads" out there.  Even though steelhead are a fish of a thousand casts, you have to know you will get one eventually.  If a fish every thousand casts is an average, you would sure like to believe Pop Pop is due, and due in a big way.  The law of averages generally reflects some shaky statistical reasoning, but so is a belief in a metaphysical relationship between a man and a bunch of semelparous fish.

A run with cover, and hope

Fishing isn't a world of reason and statistics, it is a world of superstition, myth, and circumstance (it is a bit like baseball, isn't it?).  There is a lot that has to go right in the riverine universe for fly and fish to end up in the right place, right time, and right mood to trigger a strike, particularly from steelhead, yet somehow, we will it into being.  I believe Pop Pop is due.  I believe that the next time he goes out he will experience a fishing story that will last him the rest of his life.  A story about a lightning fast fish, taking him into his backing, coming to hand only after being bested by an angler of Pop Pop's ability.  Maybe that story includes multiple hook ups, only a couple hundred casts apart.  I believe this will happen because Pop Pop is the purest and most beautiful fisherman I know.  He has the drive of a young angler and the knowledge of a sage.  Some of his fishing buddies say he won't catch steelhead because he doesn't have the patience, because he gets the funk when he doesn't catch fish.  Let me be the first to say, nobody has the patience of Pop Pop.  I don't know many who could put up with 3600 casts and nary a tug.  Drift after perfect drift through the best bucket in the run.  Pop Pop put up with 3600 tugless casts to see elk and deer grazing the steep ranges of the canyon, to stand in a river still held back by winter's cold hand, to spend 50 hours fishing with and sharing the hard won successes of his son.

So yeah, Pop Pop is gonna catch steelhead.  He is gonna catch lots of them, because he deserves it.  Pop Pop is due.

Hope that a new fly will bring new luck

Pho Nai!!! (Vietnamese style noodle soup with deer?)

One more reason to save bones from wild game.

I love to tell others about the benefits to home cooking of saving long bones from the wild ungulates we hunt.  When we add store-bought stock to our dishes, I always feel as though we are about to consume some industrialized byproduct of the big meat business.  While I doubt there is truly much difference in cooking processes, other than scale, homemade stock looks, smells, tastes, and feels more wholesome.  Usually, I go to the effort of making stocks so that I can use them in snotty French sauces, but not this time.  This time they are going in the southeast asian comfort food, pho.  I suppose it makes some sense that bones are making appearances in French and Vietnamese cooking... those two cultures do share substantial colonial history....

Emily and I fell in love with pho at the Vietnam Noodle Bowl Restaurant in Missoula, Montana.  Admittedly, that establishment has little in the way of atmosphere, but what it lacks in atmosphere it more than makes up for in flavor and service.  I would rather eat great food in a strip mall than help some pretentious restaurateur pay off the mortgage on his granite pillars and back-lit liquor shelves any day.  Have I mentioned I hate back-lit liquor shelves?  Rarely does the deliciousness of food live up to any price paid for atmosphere.

Back to the soup.... Pho is a Vietnamese noodle soup whose broth is a stock built from the bones up specifically for the dish.  Pho is definitely comfort food, as the flavorful and nourishing broth warms from the inside out.  Soft noodles and savory chunks of beef are garnished with cilantro, bean sprouts, lime juice, hot pepper, and maybe a dash or two of fish sauce.  Some like to mix in hoisin, but I don't prefer it this way.  Usually, beef or chicken are used, but why shouldn't venison and elk be right at home?  Let's bring a little of the flavor of South East Asia to the mountains of Idaho.

Like all of my favorite dishes to cook, pho is all about cool techniques.  First, to reduce the bones to a manageable size, I have come up with a pretty nifty approach that doesn't require an expensive meat saw.  Go out into your garage and find a crosscut or similar saw and your hammer.  Make sure they are clean of nasty petroleum oils, paints, or other chemicals.  I don't worry too much about bacteria on the tools... the bones are handled frozen and are about to be boiled, simmered, then the stock will be boiled again.  Score the bones with the saw (this is easiest to do when the bones are frozen), then flip them over and whack the spot opposite the scoring with a hammer.  The bone should break off fairly neatly.  I broke my bones down into 2-4 inch pieces, which not only makes them easier to deal with and submerge, but it also gives the young stock more access to a greater surface area of bone, meat, tendon, and marrow, all of which give body and flavor to the finished product.

Mmmm... Elk Knuckles

The second nifty pho technique is that the ginger and onion should be charred over an open flame before they are pealed and put in the stock.  This was certainly the first time I ever through a big chunk of ginger root on my Weber.  When I pealed said ginger to put it in the stock, oh, what an aroma filled the kitchen!

The third and final nifty technique is that the soup is largely cooked as it is being served.  In many soups, the ingredients are simmered together in broth. for most of the cooking process.  Not pho.  For pho, you bring your finished (strained) and delicious stock to a boil, but only after you assemble bowls with a layers of noodles, thinly sliced onion, green onion, chunks of tender meat and tendon from the stock making process, cilantro, and very thinly sliced raw meat.  We used a nice piece of mule deer steak for this component.  We partially froze the steak which facilitates paper thin slicing.  Once the bowls are assembled, you ladle boiling, steaming stock over the whole kit and caboodle.  Your meat and other ingredients are cooking literally as you set the bowl down in front of your dinner guests.  Pho always has a nice plate of garnishes to go with it.  Ours were cilantro, basil, jalapeno, bean sprouts, and green onion, and (importantly) lime.

From raw to cooked as it goes to the table.  Don't forget to pick the savory bits of meat and tendon from the bones before you give them to your chickens.  They are tender and delicious!

Somehow, this mixture of ingredients does magical things.  Comfort food that makes you sweat.  Pho is always a go-to when somebody in the family has a bad cold.  Hot, steaming, nourishing broth that is infused with herbs and jalapeno heat.  It clears your sinuses out in a hurry while at the same time satisfying your belly with warm comfort.  Not many foods can do that.

So there you have it... one more fantastic reason to save game bones and make stock.  Truly, this is one of my favorite uses yet.  And yes, it really was if we had gone to the Vietnam Noodle Bowl Restaurant.  It really was that good.

I didn't make up my own recipe... I essentially mixed and matched from these two, and I definitely didn't use any beef:
http://www.flashinthepan.net/?p=992
http://www.vietworldkitchen.com/blog/2008/10/pho-beef-noodle-soup.html

Goose Confit: What the heck is it, anyway?

For several days, I took photos of piles of duck and goose fat, salted goose legs, and cooked goose meat sitting at the bottom of a vat of fat and oil.  I posted these photos on the HHMM Facebook page, alluding to the dish that would be the prize at the end of that journey: confit.  The few comments I did get were mostly along the lines of "ok, gross, what the heck is it anyway?"  I'll be the first to admit I had no idea what confit was a couple of years ago, but I stumbled across it in a search for what to do with the piles of duck legs I had after a successful hunting outing.  So what the heck is it, anyway?

Confit is, at it's core, a food preservation process.  It is also a way to get more mileage out of the ducks we harvest. Essentially one renders the fat from a duck or goose, then very, very slowly poaches the legs from that same duck or goose in that same fat, completely submerged, for many hours (like 10).  Really, this is only the beginning of the process.  Then the whole kettle o'duck is chilled, such that the legs are sealed in the congealed fat.  In my 'research' on the subject, The time the meat sits sealed away is the time that full flavor develops.  Makes sense; the meat is cured before the cooking process.  This cure subsequently flavors and salts the fat in which the meat is cooking.  After a few weeks of resting, it is easy to imagine flavors balancing and evening out in the dish.  Apparently, the dish is ready after a week or two of resting, but it can be preserved for months this way.  As another stroke of gourmet genius, the fat used to cook the initial batch of legs can be used over and over again to confit subsequent batches.  This stuff is at the pinnacles of rustic haute cuisine and practicality at the same time.

 

 

Let's back up a few weeks.  Pop Pop and I were several hours into what was already one of our most memorable and successful hunts on the Clark Fork Delta.  Between us, we had harvested nine ducks, and whilst I had been on a walkabout, Pop Pop had managed to scratch a goose from a low flying flock.  Now that I was back in the blind the wind had picked up and riled up lots of flocks, and a few came within range.  On one occasion a flock few by closer than the rest.  I picked out the closest and unluckiest bird, swung through and kept swinging and pulled the trigger.  The big bird folded and hit the water hard.  Jocko waited for the command to retrieve the bird but not patiently.  He powered out, expecting to find another pint sized bufflehead.  You could see he was a little taken aback by the size of the bird as he neared it, but the dog has heart and he clamped onto a leg, made the long swim back, and delivered the bird to hand.  Not bad for a pocket sized lab.  It was an awesome moment.  We don't normally kill a lot of ducks, and we rarely get a shot at geese, let alone hit them.  Something special was going to need to be done to commemorate our great hunt, and it seemed that a batch of confit would be just the thing.  Now I had both the inspiration and raw material to conduct this experiment.

 

Classically, confit de canard is made from the same ducks that give up their inflated livers for fois gras.  As a means of getting more product for their effort, duck farmers made confit.  When a duck is fed such that its fatted liver has exquisite flavor, one might assume that the rest of the bird, including the fat would have the same quality.  Not surprisingly, duck fat is all the rage as a cooking medium these days.  It is easy enough to buy duck fat (and confit, for that matter) from several online purveyors, but I wanted local flavor.

 

My raw material differs a little from theirs.  I saved fat and skin from one of the geese and most of the buffleheads and rendered it.  This is a simple process.  Put the fat and skin in a heavy sauce pan, add a small quantity of water, a cook on low heat for several hours.  Apparently, if it boils, it is bad news, so go slow.  Turns out you can render a pretty good quantity of fat from a limit of buffleheads and a goose, but it isn't quite enough for the four goose legs I saved.  I made up the remainder needed to cover the legs in the bottom of a cast iron dutch oven with olive oil, which is considered by some cooks to be an appropriate substitute for the duck fat.  Ten hours of cooking and two weeks of storage later, we pulled two legs from the fat, put them on a drip pan, and roasted them in a hot oven until the skin started to crisp.

 

 

 

Perhaps I didn't roast the skin crispy enough, but we did without it in the end.  The flavor of that component alone was subpar.   Everything else was spectacular.  Rich is certainly a word that should be applied to wild goose confit, but it doesn't end there.  It is fork tender meat, and it has all of the flavor that makes waterfowl delicious and unique, but with none of the harsh liver flavor.  Only this was special.  The cure penetrated evenly to the bone and corned beef was slightly in the back of my mind, but it was moist, never too salty, and really like nothing I had tasted before.  Succulent.  Really, really good, and worth the effort.  And remember, I made it with bufflehead and Canada goose fat.  The fat was in no way flavorless, but it sure wasn't nasty, either.  Bottom line, I'll be saving that treasure trove of blended goose, bufflehead, and olive fat for the slow poaching and preservation duck legs next season.

 

And now the party is over...

...but it sure was a good one.  I had much anticipation for the holidays this year.  I knew they would be focused around the celebration of family and a wonderfully stocked larder.  Sausage making and duck hunting with Pop Pop, helping the Mini-HHMM reel little perch through an icy hole at his feet, and even some duck hunting.  We had a joyous new year party where we shared a multitude of laughs and hugs with extended family in Missoula, which I do consider to be the center of the Western Universe.

This time of year is always a little tough for me.  Days are short and the weather is often dreary.  If I am going to get out on more duck hunts, I know at this point how many there will be and I know it isn't more than one.  The end of duck season signals the end of the hunting year for me, and I can't help but be a little melancholy about it.  My bride is in charge of the vegetable portion of our locavore diet, and I am in charge of the meat portion. My job is done for a while.  While I am highly satisfied that our freezers are full of wild meat, I will miss chasing those critters in the canyons, mountains, farms, and rivers of my beloved Idaho... at least for a few months :)

To celebrate the pending end of the hunting year, I will tell a story in pictures of what has to be the best sporting fall of my life.  There were many firsts... First spey cast, first steelhead on a spey cast, first Idaho mule deer buck, first elk with a muzzleloader.  Emily killed her first Idaho deer and first deer while hunting solo.  Jocko retrieved his first goose.  I do try to avoid turning HHMM into a brag board, and I try to remember to write a guide of sorts for others to follow, but, hey, I have a beautiful family, live in a spectacular place, and do unbelievably cool things.  Once in a while you gotta let go... and crow....