Food in "Close Range"
A great idea for a get-together. Maybe in Seattle?
Links to the recipies are in the main articles page:
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/flavor/article/0,2792,DRMN_26356_5633496,00.html------------------------------------
Eats meet WestReadin', ridin' and rustlin' up some grub with Annie Proulx and the Fort chefs By Marty Meitus & Patti Thorn, Rocky Mountain News
July 17, 2007
(Ellen Jaskol © The Rocky) Rocky Mountain News food and books editors bring you food for thought: a recommended book, discussion ideas and recipes worth trying for your next gathering. Above, a triple-cherry cast-iron cobbler.OK, book-club groupies, Marty and I know what you're thinking: You'd love a breezy summer book, the literary equivalent of a cold, refreshing Popsicle. Something with humor, quirky characters, a plot you can race through faster than a jack rabbit with a fox at its tail.
That would be fun.
But, sorry, that's not the book we have in mind this time around.
Instead of a crazed jack rabbit, think of our new choice as a finely bred quarter horse: a book with muscled prose, tall aims and intense purpose in every stride. In other words, it's a ride you'll remember long after that other summer read disappears behind your own page-turning cloud of dust.
Our latest selection is Annie Proulx's amazing book of short stories Close Range: Wyoming Stories. In this shimmering collection, Proulx offers 11 pieces - including Brokeback Mountain, the story the movie was taken from - each detailing life in the flint-hard West. You won't find sentimental myths of wholesome cowboys, their teeth sparkling as if in Pepsodent ads, in these pages. This is life as Proulx finds it, often as unyielding and punishing as the land itself. Her modern cowboys drink too much, fight too much and plow the tracks to their own ruin, often dragging their women along with them. If they live on expansive land under sweeping, swirling skies, the insult is that their hedge-fund neighbors, buying up land for the mere convenience of tax shelters, do too.
Happy endings are beside the point as Proulx's characters' fates come upon them with the violence, and often the whimsy, of a midsummer twister.
So why did we choose this for a summer read? Because in a season when many set out to experience the Western outdoors, Proulx meticulously details the view, down to its "indigo jags of mountain, grassy plain everlasting, tumbled stones like fallen cities" and "flaring roll of sky."
Because it provokes us to think about how we, as humans, fit into that landscape.
But more important, because the writing is so crystalline, so clearheaded, so economical in its word choices that it will make your jaw drop. And that's something you won't find in your breezy summer read.
Now cowboy up and get started. We promise you won't regret it.
- Patti Thorn
The book Close Range: Wyoming Stories By Annie Proulx (Scribner, 288 pages, $13)
Discussion questions: • How does Prouix use the landscape to further her stories?
• What is Prouix's vision of the modern West?
• How accurately do you think these stories portray ranch life?
• How do these stories differ from past stories you've read about the West, and the West that's often portrayed in movies and TV?
Reality chuck With the invention ofchuck wagons, the range became a much more hospitable environment for cowboys and cooks. You can get a taste of the West from authentic chuck wagon crews at Cheyenne Frontier Days, which opens Friday and runs through July 29.
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What: chuck wagon demonstrations and championship cook-off
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When: demos, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. July 25 to 28; championship cook-off, noon July 28. Championship buckles will be awarded during the finals rodeo July 29.
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Where: between the Indian Village and Wild Horse Gulch, south of the museum, at Frontier Park (at the intersection of Interstates 25 and 80)
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Info: cfdrodeo.com
Roughin' it You've probably heard about using an eggshell to clarify the impurities in cowboy coffee, but the cooks had their own special touches. According to Arbuckles: The Coffee That Won the West (Francis Fugate, Texas Western Press), one of them was: "Take twopounds of Arbuckles, put in 'nough water to wet it down, boil fortwo hours, and then throw in a hoss shoe. If the hoss shoe sinks, she ain't ready."
The food Annie Proulx's short stories yield food nuggets in keeping with her lean, spare prose. In The Governors of Wyoming: "I'll have some a that soup, couple pieces of toast. Whatever you got. We'll be goin out tonight. You want a drink?"In many of the stories, ranchers are fighting decades of loss as the cattle industry withstands the vagaries of weather, the economy and current sensibilities: In Paira Spurs, the ranchers join forces to erect an "Eat Beef" roadside sign "to counteract the anti-meat forces."
Nevertheless, the poetry of life on the range endures. Hollywood or no, there's something nostalgicabout a cowboy tending a crackling campfire, sipping his coffeeagainst the backdrop of the darkening skies.For our Rocky Book Club, we've chosen to keep the romance alive. We enlisted The Fort restaurant in Morrison and executive chef Trevor Dierolf and sous-chef Geoffrey Groditski to help rustle up some grub that will evoke life on the range, without the host or hostess having to tend a hot fire all day.
Menu:
• Salsa and Chips
• Salad in a Jar
• Pumpkin Walnut Muffins
• Buffalo Burgers With Roasted Green Chiles
• Black Bean and Corn Salad
• Cherry Cobbler
• Mason jars can be used in a variety of ways. Serve drinks in them or use for salad containers: Layer salad ingredients in each jar; use another jar to shake and hold the dressing.
• Check out Western stores like Sheplers for accents, such as Western salt-and-pepper shakers (one set is a guitar and a saddle, another is a pair of boots) and Western-themed plates.
• The Trade Lodge at the restaurant sells the blue speckled coffee pot pictured at far left and other memorabilia; purchase price goes to the nonprofitTesoro Foundation. Also look for cowboy-related items at antiques stores.
• For centerpieces: Use a cowboy coffeepot to hold flowers for a centerpiece, or place flowers in old-fashioned colored glass medicine bottles. Fill Mason jars with multicolored beans. Line the inside of a cowboy hat and fill it with a potted plant. Label and fill burlap bags with rice, beans and coffee; tie with ribbon and arrange on table. Or fill a burlap bag with multicolored beans and let the contents spill out in the center of the table like a cornucopia.
- Marty Meitus
