Left Coast Cowboys

Photo by Flickrite Kelly Sue DeConnick

If you are familiar with this San Francisco favorite, you know there is no definitive recipe other than starting with the catch of the day — whatever that may be. And tomatoes. Then you could add sausage. Or not. And serve it on rice. Or spaghetti. Or as a soup. In other words, Cioppino is a grab-bag, just like this post. I’m hoping, if I throw in all the bits and pieces, nuggets and chunks I’ve been collecting over the past few days, it will all turn out beautiful and tasty. We’ll see.

First up: I’m having a blast with the Wine Country Wildflowers field guide I told you about in yesterday’s post. That’s the one that wisely categorizes things by color. I see a blue flower and I just flip to the blue chapter and scan through the glossy pictures until I find a match. The book also wisely puts the common name in big bold letters and the Latin names in little subordinate italics. Don’t get me wrong, I love Latin. Took years of it. But it just seems to take the fun out of flowers. Say I told you I had some nice stands of Liliacae, Mimmulus guttatus and Cynoglossum grande. You might yawn. If I told you they were Diogenes Lantern, Sticky Monkey Flower and Hound’s Tongue. Well, now you’ve got the picture.

Behold the Hound's Tongue. Named, I'm assuming, for the leaves.

See the resemblance?

Yes, I’m forming a Chapter of The Campaign for Real Plant Names. And I’m appointing myself President. Consider Henderson’s Shooting Star. I don’t know who Henderson is, but I love his flower. Apparently so did California Natives. They roasted the leaves and roots for dinner.

My wildflower book calls this "a perky little charmer". Its other name is just as descriptive: Mosquito Bills.

Thus ends the teaching portion of our program and we move to the question period. Where I ask the questions and, hopefully, you give me answers. You’ve probably guessed that the topic is going to be my misadventures with vegetables. So Question One: how do you tell when carrots are ready for harvest? Do I dig them up to check? If they aren’t ready, do I replant them? How do carrots feel about this?

I uncovered a little bit just for a peek. They aren't very orange. Not ready?

Similar question with Fava Beans, which I’m growing, not for beans, but as a nitrogen fixer and green manure. All my gardening books say they’ve “fixed” when the nodules on the roots turn pink. So, I pulled one up. Not ready.

I quickly replanted it, but I think my Fava will like this as little as the carrot did. There must be a better way.

Next question: how does anyone grow bulbs outdoors? Mine are dug up and chomped down by varmints as soon as I put them in the ground. That’s with a fenced raised bed covered with netting. And two terriers on patrol.

The remains of the feast.

Okay, bored with showing my ignorance. How about a quick check of this week’s highlights at Two Terrier Vineyards?

John the Baptist found the tracks of a Bobcat and a baby Bobcat. So I guess Bob the Bobcat will have to be rechristened Roberta. I rushed to take a picture of the track, but two terriers stomped all over the site before I could focus.

Cats walk with retracted claws. So I think this is the right print. It was the only one without toenail marks.

The Barn Swallows are getting set to build nests in the eaves of the barn. One little bird dude decided there was an evil interloper living in my wing mirrors.

I had to park 100 yards away before this little guy decided we were out of his personal space.

On a culinary note, I finally tried the American Bison meat that Sonoma Market has been pushing. Yeah, yeah, lower cholesterol, less fat. But what got me to buy was their great new slogan. And I’m always a sucker for a good tagline.

Buffalo: The Meat Americans were meant to eat.

The verdict: delicious! Especially when served with Sonoma produce (obviously not my own.)

So that’s it. Everything’s in the pot and hopefully coalesced into some sort of post.

Now be vewy, vewy quiet. We're hunting varmints.

Cousin John, as you’ll remember from this post, is a purist. He makes wine, but spurning our carefully crafted and specially raised UC Davis yeasts, Cousin John uses whatever is floating in the air. In fact, Cousin John only uses au natural techniques and ingredients to make wine. He’s been known to wander the byways of Sonoma picking wild fruit for fermentation. I’ve even accused him, although I have no hard evidence, of trying to make wine out of roadkill. It’s only a matter of time.

So it’s been great fun to have Cousin John make some of his wine from our grapes using his Stone Age methods. Call it the ultimate control group. Since the Cabernet pressing, which Cousin John did with our old basket press, our two Cabernets have been fermenting side by side — ours in oak barrels, Cousin John’s in glass carboys.

This past weekend, it was time for Cousin John to do another racking of his wine, which made the perfect opportunity for a side-by-side tasting. So who is winning? Our college boy yeasts or Cousin John’s juvenile delinquent yeasts? The jury is still out, but both are tasting quite good. However, I still think a college education, even for wine, gives the edge.

Watching Cousin John rack wine the old fashioned way. With tubes, muscles and carboys. No, I'm not nostalgic for THOSE days.

"Terrier" is a unit of measure around here. After racking, Cousin John has two terriers of Cabernet. Appropriate.

Our first tasting was our Rose, the first Rose we’ve ever made.

The verdict: almost all the residual sugars are gone and it's tasting very, very good.

Then we tapped our Cabernet from the barrels.

Compared with Cousin John’s, ours had fermented out more completely. And the oak of the barrel is adding interesting notes. John’s is still a tiny bit fizzy as residual yeast keeps struggling to the last. But the good fruit is holding up in both.

The verdicts on our other barrels are more mixed. Our predominantly Grenache blend and predominantly Mourvedre blends are tasting very good indeed. But last year’s Mourvedre, which is fermenting on its own, is troubling. Andy was ready to pour it out. It’s been reprieved at the last minute and will have a few more months to redeem itself.

All that "tasting" can really add up. So we took off on a hike to the redwoods to burn off the alcohol.

We saw some mushrooms that looked so toxic, even John, the ultimate forager, wasn't tempted to pick them.

He concentrated instead on trying to determine what animal teeth marks we were seeing on some scattered bones.

Obviously, the thought that a large predator was hanging around, caused me not to get the above picture in very good focus.

But I later did get an in-focus picture of the stump of petrified redwood that John the Baptist found in the creek.

And I managed to do that "fuzzy water" photography technique.

All in all, a successful day of winemaking. I’d say we and our college boy yeasts are ahead at this point. But it’s probably not wise to bet against Cousin John.

As buccolic as I make Sonoma out to be, I’m not trying to say it doesn’t have crime or problems. It just seems we have a different kind of crime than the gritty urban crime I’m used to reading about in San Francisco and Oakland. Maybe I’m not clued in to the seamy underbelly of Sonoma, although I do try to keep up. The Crime Report in the Sonoma Index-Tribune is one of the first sections I turn to. That’s where I find gems like the big Saturday night crime spree we had a few months ago when a local deejay showed up drunk and/or high at Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack, proceeded to get into an argument with the owner, smashed one thousand dollars worth of turntables, then ran down the street to Sonoma’s only sushi restaurant and, for good measure, punched the owner in the face. We were all talking about that one for weeks. Last Friday night, three taggers were caught in the act of defacing the feedstore and, in Tuesday’s edition, the crime was still being hashed out on the front page.

Nearly a week after the "crime", this incident is still making the front page of The Sonoma Index-Tribune.

Yes, we have our own brand of crime. It seems to be largely victimless, mostly alcohol-fueled and quickly nipped in the bud by the excellent Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department. When I say we have a Sheriff’s Department, I really mean it. These guys are cast much more in the Wyatt Earp mold than they conform to any donut-eating stereotype. Years ago, before we had fencing, we had an ATV stolen. Within days, the Sheriffs had rounded up the usual suspects, recovered the vehicle, gotten a confession, led them in front of the Hangin’ Judge and organized restitution. You don’t mess with Western Justice.

So it was shocking and saddening to find out early this morning that we’d been hit by criminals. Although, thankfully, it seemed to be The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. Since we wrapped up the harvest and got all our wines in barrels, I’ve been in San Francisco most of the time between Thanksgiving and New Years. That’s too many nights with lights out and, I guess, too much of a temptation.

Hey Evil Doers, don't you know this place is guarded by Attack Terriers?

Not to mention the Mountain Lion who hangs out just behind the building you burgled.

Apparently, about dawn the perps crept over from the nearby State Park and started jimmying open the windows to the garage/workroom. What they didn’t count on were John the Baptist and his right-hand man Louis. Especially as we race to get the drains and hillsides ready for our torrential winter rains, John and Louis are up here most days. And despite their Saintly names, you don’t want to meet John or Louis if you are wrong-doing. As near as we can tell, the two of them came roaring through the gate in John’s old muscle car, blasting Johnny Cash, just as the perps had wriggled their way into the garage. Apparently that was frightening enough that the perps threw themselves back out the window after doing not much more than tipping over some cans of paint.

It was probably the Johnny Cash that did it.

Although Louis says he and John had the windows down and were engaged in their usual trash talking. As John the Baptist says: “We’re not Librarians.”

In any case, the perps fled down the trail under the Mountain Lion’s sometime lair. Which could have been the cause of some beautiful Instant Karma. However, Joaquin (or Joaquinetta, as John, who’s seen her, claims she’s female) wasn’t in da house at this moment. Pity.

Although it seemed the crime-in-progress was thwarted, I drove up from San Francisco to survey the damage. Reaching back to everything I’ve learned from devotion to three franchises of Law & Order, I determined that the criminals were a disorganized pack of punks. They clearly weren’t competent enough to mount a quick, efficient operation that nabbed items of the most value in the shortest amount of time. Of course, that would assume that there HAD been anything of value for them to grab. Other than an old Ford truck with two flat tires and one dead battery, the garage mostly holds Andy’s large collection of bits and pieces of lumber. Judging from the way he hoards it and won’t let a bit of it be discarded, burned or used, he thinks it’s worth its weight in gold. I’m not sure what it would actually fetch on the open market. Or how, indeed, you would get it down a trail and past a Mountain Lion.

So I’m giving a sigh of relief that everything is intact and we don’t seem to have been targeted by Master Criminals. But that isn’t stopping John and Louis from debating whether they should stockpile weapons and spend a few nights up here. Fair warning: their trigger fingers are itchy.

I don't think you want to be looking at John and Louis down the barrel of a rifle, do ya PUNK?

Let’s just hope, for the sake of Criminal Sonoma, that they don’t deputize the Mountain Lion.

UPDATE

We just found out one of the criminals signed his name in the dust on the garage door.

File this under: Too Stupid for Words

Careful Fool. My posse -- Louis, Juan and John the Baptist -- are looking for you.

I’m not someone who can lie around a beach for too long. After a few days, I need to get out and explore the country. I’m a veteran of a few Belizean jungle trips. They are never exactly easy or comfortable, but you can’t leave the country without doing it. So I signed myself up with Searious Adventures for a day trip to the Mayan ruins at Lamanai, notable as the only Mayan city state that was still in operation when the Spanish showed up, probably due to its strategic location on a navigable freshwater river. Of course, the Spanish immediately built a church here, which the Maya burned, then forcing the padres to watch a mock Eucharist using corn tortillas, after which they roughed them up and sent them packing. Disease later devastated even these Maya, the British chased out the remaining groups in order to clear for sugar cane and Lamanai was taken over by jungle. That’s largely how you’ll see it now. Unlike Tikal, which has been extensively cleared and gives you a good idea how a Maya city originally looked, Lamanai is mostly overgrown. You travel from excavated building to building through narrow jungle paths. Suddenly, you come out to a clearing and a temple. Since this is not the well traveled site that Tikal is, we were the only visitors save for a group of archeologists working on some of the giant stone heads. It was a dreamy, somewhat eery Indiana Jones sort of experience. We even had a surprise appearance by the elusive and endangered Gibnut, a terrier sized guinea pig.

At overgrown Lamanai, you travel through narrow jungle passages between temples. We didn't even know it was pouring until we came out from under the canopy.

Braver souls than me climbed all the way to the top. A heavy camera bag and slick wet steps made me stop at halfway.

Stylized jaguar head on the Jaguar Temple.

But getting there is half the adventure and takes you through the full spectrum of Belize topography and society — at least if you start from one of the Cayes. It helps to have a great tour operation. And we did. We started with two cute and personable Creoles, Andre and Wayne. The boat trip over to the mainland, Andre assured us, would be “Sixty Belize Minutes”, which I guess meant those sixty minutes would be stretched to however long we wanted it to be. We made it in about that time, even though Andre made sure to take us by every site of interest including Caye Caulker, which served as a boat yard from pirate times, but now is largely a reserve, to a privately-owned caye that boasts an airstrip and a full golf course. Their commentary included not just historical information, but often colorful descriptions of Belizean life (perhaps making this not a tour for young children.)

Wayne and Andre kept up a running and hilarious commentary for the whole trip. Loved their matching do-rags.

We entered the Belize River which is just north of the country’s biggest population center, Belize City. You’d never know it. Less than a half mile up the river, we were cruising through jungle and mangrove swamps, without a building, person or floating styrofoam container in sight. (In fact, unlike most of the Caribbean, Belize is remarkably clean and litter free. The Belizeans take great pride, and derive a lot of income from Eco-tourism, so they actively protect their environment.)

We traveled up the sugar cane highway Belizean style.

The next stage of the journey was a switch to a bus for a ride up the New Highway, which largely serves as a conduit for the sugar cane traffic. The part of the group that was going cave tubing and zip lining got into air conditioned minivans. Those of us heading for our Mayan adventure took more traditional transportation.

Far upcountry in sugar cane country, we switched to a small river skiff at The New River which is actually the ancient waterway the Maya used. Eddie, our pilot, is a part Maya mestizo who knew all the birds of Belize and could seemingly spot them from a hundred yards. We pulled up close to dozens of birds, iguanas, and even a troop of playful monkeys.

The boldest of a troop of monkeys we saw swinging from the trees.

It's iguana mating season when the males, like this one, turn bright red. The smaller green females are considered good eating and are called "bamboo chicken".

As a veteran of several of these kinds of jungle trips, I have to warn that they aren’t always comfortable. But perhaps that’s half the charm of them. We had a few bucketing rain storms that lasted for a few minutes, then cleared. This became even more of a Belizean experience when the Bimini top on the boat snapped in the wind. This could have been a nightmare with a whiny group. But in the face of Wayne and Eddie’s enthusiasm, everyone got into the spirit of the thing. Besides, we really got a sense of what it was like to be a Maya paddling up the jungle river to Lamanai.

Every Belizean will remind you that the Maya never left. About 11% of Belizeans are full blooded Maya, many living traditionally.

A Mayan fisherman shows us his catch which he got using just a string and a piece of bait.

The long journey back could have been boring, but was another kind of experience with Wayne mixing excellent (and very strong) rum punches on the boat and the bus. All while teaching us Criol phrases and keeping up a running commentary on Belize, local customs, politics and his love life — every sentence punctuated with “ya Mon”. Back at the Belize River, we joined the other group and Andre took the wheel, setting what must have been a new record for the Belize City to Ambergris run.

So all in all, a jungle and ruins trip is highly recommended, even if you are on a beach vacation. It’s probably not for the kids. You might want to take them to Altun Ha which is a closer shorter tour. But to really get a Mayan experience, you couldn’t do better than the excellent Searious Adventures. Did I mention the food? A Belizean breakfast and lunch are included and were some of the best meals I’ve had this vacation. But then again, Wayne was pouring those rum punches. Ya Mon!

More pictures of the trip here. However, they aren’t my best. Between bouncing around in boats and buses and shielding my camera from intermittent showers, I only took quick snaps.

Today was spent on Belize’s reef, specifically at the Hol Chan Marine Reserve. In this one shallow area of the reef, near a cut that leads out to the wider ocean, are a variety of ecosytems, from coral forests to sea grass fields. The result is a congregation on any given day of at least 80% of the acquatic species native to the Caribbean. Compared to Australia’s Barrier Reef, which is suffering from a starfish invasion and coral bleaching, the reef here is in prime health.

But rather than tell you, let me show you. Hang in there to the end of the video to see Andy holding and petting a friendly nurse shark!

At Hol Chan Marine Reserve