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Whether you're a homeowner creating your dream space or a pro managing multiple projects, discover a new way to shop at Ferguson Home, where great ideas become stunning spaces. Visit FergusonHome.com to explore the best selection of bath, kitchen, and lighting products. Or book an appointment at one of our showrooms where you can experience products firsthand and get personalized expert support every step of the way. Bring your vision to Ferguson Home where it all comes together. Shop top brands like La Cornew or find your local showroom at Ferguson Home.com.
This episode is brought to you by Cabot Creamery, celebrating 100 years of being a dairy farm family owned cooperative. Learn more at Cabot Cheese.coop. That's cabotcheese.co P. This week on Meet and Three, it's our season four finale, and we're sharing some of our greatest kitchen joys. Maybe most people consider making it too much work or too messy, but this is the food that's worth the work and worth the wait.
You always know where the thing is because you put it away the right way the first time. You just sort of stand there and find, you know, with your hand on your hip and one leg outstretched, less of wine in your hand, staring into the refrigerator going, okay, speak to me. Oh, yeah, what are you doing with the celery tonight? I am making a simple syrup for a gin cocktail with the celery. And I also found a recipe for a celery soup that's gonna use up the celery and the potatoes and some of that dill that we still have hanging out in there.
Tune in and be inspired to find the joy in your kitchen. And don't forget to subscribe to Meet and Three wherever you listen to podcasts. This time not my fault, though, not any of our faults, really. Just a miscommunication. We thought there was some people, Matt, in the booth.
Yes. Thought there's gonna be no show today. Other people thought that there was a show. From Robertus Pizzeria and Bushwick! Showing as usual with Nastasia de Hammer Lopez and Matthew in the booth.
What's going on? Are you guys not officially making shows this week? Oh no, we are this week. This is a weird thing where because there are two sets of holidays this fall. Uh Labor Day, you take off a Sunday, Monday.
Uh Thanksgiving take off a Wednesday, Thursday, so a Tuesday had to fall somewhere. Last year they chose to make it this one. Oh. Wait, a Tuesday what? You gotta skip a Tuesday somewhere.
What what? Wait, explain this to me so that I so that a moron like me can understand. What there's a holiday on Monday, so you have to skip a Tuesday? Over the course of this year, we've got or this season, we've got a Sunday, a Monday, a Wednesday, and a Thursday off. That's almost an entire week.
So those Tuesday shows would randomly have one extra week, so the easiest move is to just skip one. Oh. Yeah, but we skipped the last like million. Well, that is true. Yeah.
Uh right, because and also we're not here next week because next week I will be doing my yearly trip to uh Harvard and then out to Los Angeles where Nastasia is getting us ready for the Houdini Party. Nastasia, you want to describe the Houdini party? Why don't you describe it and I will talk about other things after. We need other things to talk about what's what it's for MoFad. Okay so here's what happens.
Nastasia Lopez and the boondoggler Rebecca Rebecca the Boondoggler, our PR person, who doesn't like to be called a flack when you meet her, do not call her a flack. Apparently this is an insensitive term to use for public relations professionals, true? Yeah. Why? You already call her a boondoggler.
Anyway, go on. You call her the boondog don't place it all on me. Boondoggler is a term of endearment. Endearment. It's term of endearment, but I'll notice how Nastasia now like gives up.
I like calling right, yes. I said this is a boondoggle you said that made her upset. Then you and I both started calling her the boondogger, let's be honest. No Dave, you came up with it. But go on.
Okay, so we're going to LA. We're going to LA Nastasia, first of all Nastasia and R Rebecca are just obsessed with Los Angeles in general. I why I don't know. No we're not okay, sure. But anyway, so like they're like we're gonna throw this party in Los Angeles.
It soon spiraled out of control into this like giant McGilla kind of like all this cool stuff. Like Nastasia's like we can't just go have a party because the first party we threw was so terrible that it was known as the subpar tea first party we threw. That's when the circulator was on the floor when there was the pirate in the dress cooking your meat. Yeah, when Nastasia managed to like do everything in a way specifically, seemingly designed to like flip every switch to have me blow my stack instantly, had me fly in literally as the party was starting. Anyway, go on.
So anyway, so that was the sub party, right? We had it at a place that had no internet access and no one could get to the place. It was like great house, though. Anyway. So to make up for it, Nastasi's like, and Rebecca are like, we're gonna rent.
No, then we did Appleheads. And that was good. That was an event, yeah. But not but you wanted to throw a party. That was at a bar.
That was a uh a pop-up at a bar. Nastasia does may or may not believe that Harvard and Stone. You're the one that just said it! You said it first! No, you said it first.
You just said it on the microphone. Matt, Matt. I don't even know what you guys are flipping out about now. I missed it. Who on the microphone just said drug front?
Real low. Who is that? That was Nastasia. I'm gonna assume it was Nastasia because I didn't hear it, and I normally hear what Dave says. But it doesn't even make any sense.
What? No, that has to stay in because we don't believe it. It's not true. We'll discuss later. Yeah.
Uh anyways, so they're like, Nastasia's like, do you know that there's a Harry Houdini house in uh in Los Angeles? And then Austin, who we work with, Austin Hennelly, who's at Major Domo, who we work with out in Los Angeles a lot, was like, my brother's a magician. So it just started kind of spiraling out of control from there. And then we realized that all of this stuff's gonna cost a lot of money and be kind of like bigger than we can just kind of pay for. So we decided to, we're like, we're gonna do it as a fundraiser for MoFan.
So Purnault Ricard got on board somehow. We have Dan the Automator on board, somehow is coming in to spin at this party. Yeah, yeah, you know, Jeremiah Stone and Fabian Vahoski from Contra Wild Air and the Pizza and all this stuff. They're gonna be there cooking food. But the best part We have hold on.
We have we have uh Jack Shram from Existing Conditions, uh Austin Hennelly from Major Domo, and I think Nick Bennett, maybe from Porch Light, is gonna they're gonna be there slinging slinging booze. Ariel Johnson, you know, is now the is now Alton Brown's science advisor on uh Good Eats, is gonna be there, and some Nastasia is convinced, and you can call in and let us know that it's better if we all dress in costumes. So she is trying to rent, get this. She is trying to rent a Zoltar. So Zoltar is the fortune teller in a in a in a glass box.
So she's trying to rent a Zoltar outfit for Harold McGee, who's gonna be at the party. So uh Harold McGee's gonna be at the party there, Ariel Johnson, uh, what were the other costumes uh bearded lady? She's gonna be a little bit. Yeah, Ariel Johnson decides she wanted to be the bearded lady. This is a low quality top hat, Nastasia.
I'm gonna get you a better one. That one's mine. Uh this is an I can't put it over my thing, but I Dave and I are gonna be uh this Nastasia's Nastasia's top hat is made out of it's made out of panty hose. Squish it. Uh I hope you know that I I only deal in real fur-felt hats.
This is a this is a we can't. This is a this is a, as we say, garbage hat. Please tell me you guys have a themed couple's costume. Well, no, we are the we are the ringleader. Let me see.
I'm gonna take my earphones off and put on the hat here. See, it's not bad. It's terrible quality hat. No, you look great. Yeah, from far away.
Yeah, from far away. So we're gonna come close to you. Oh, and then we have the monster Maker from Universal Studios coming and bringing a life-size Houdini ghoul. Uh, that uh is is uh are we gonna spout wine out of this thing's mouth? No, you won't allow us to do that, but Nastasia's gonna try to uh contract this person to make us a wine zombie.
Anyway, so uh oh anyway, so we have five tickets. Most of the people coming are celebrities, food people friends of ours. We can't it's for Mofad. We can't we can't invite friends of ours because it's for MoFed. Like influential people, no.
Alright. So anyway, so fundraiser for Mofad. There will be an auction uh at the uh at the event proper as well. Uh should be uh loads of fun. And that party will be next Thursday.
So if you want to attend, and we only have five tickets, uh, you can bid on those tickets at 32auctions.com slash Houdini. And 32 is the number 32 auctions.com slash houdini. Dave will tweet it later. Who? You will tweet it.
Who? You will tweet it. You will tweet it later and you will Instagram it later. But we only have five tickets. By the way, Houdini.
They start at $500. Houdini was a bi coastal fellow. It's gonna be fine. Did you know that? No.
He like uh his other residence is here in New York City, so we should try to rent out his uh Upper East Side uh townhouse at some point. Yeah, do a Houdini thing there. So Austin's brother will be there doing some sort of magic. I don't really understand everything that's gonna happen because Nastasia is making it all happen uh along with the Boondogger. There will be Apple Headed Dolls.
By the way, oh yeah, it turns out, Nastasia, uh, I don't know if there's anyone out there. If you're out there. So it turns out that the internet's a marvelous thing. And uh Flowrida's song Low, you can get uh an a cappella version on the internet. Like you can just go on YouTube and search Flowrider Low Acapella and you can get just the vocals and then you can get the instrumental tracks.
I don't think I'm gonna have time because I'm preparing not only for the party but for the Harvard lecture next week. Uh so it's the 10th anniversary, I think, of the Harvard class, so it's a big kind of it's a big kind of public lecture situation with like Harold and the gang and all that up at Harvard. If you happen to be in Boston next Monday, we'll be doing the public lecture, anyone can attend. Um I don't really know how to look that up, go to like Harvard SES SEAS uh, you know, cooking class and look it up. Anyway, uh so you can get this, and so it would take only a small amount of time if you knew how to do it right in engineering knowledge to change the vocals to have them just say apple headed doll instead of apple bottom jeans, and then we can just play that clip apple headed doll in the boots with the fur, and if we could do that with the fur, we would like then we can make one of our because there will be apple heads.
There will be. I have twenty the apple heads. Now listen, we all know that there is a vicious stereotype out there. I made everybody do it this weekend. There is a stereotype out there of like people who grew up in like SoCal who are half Mexican, half Ukrainian, Russian, right, sitting in their apartments in uh in Hell's Kitchen alone carving apple heads.
We know this is a stereotype. Vicious stereotype. Vicious. Vicious stereotype. So Nastasia is not one of those applehead ladies.
P.S., speaking of appleheads, for those of you that I don't know, have never listened to us before. Explain what an apple head is. Applehead, oh my God. We were supposed to do Drina Dotson as classic in the fields today, but we didn't. So Drina Dotson is the undisputed queen of the Applehead.
We can do it in LA when we tape in LA. Alright. Drina Dotson, undisputed queen of the Applehead. Her Applehead book is like the rarest of all of the three Applehead books that you can get. Explain what an Applehead is.
Applehead made me the oldest of all dolls. So Drina Dotson in her introduction to Applehead dolls. Yeah, Adam and Eve time, she's like, listen, if they had apple trees and the apples shrunk, that was basically an applehead doll. So right up there with the, you know, right up there with prostitution was Applehead dolls in terms of early cultural achievements. So like Applehead dolls are like, to Drina are the the oor, the oor apple, the oor doll is the applehead doll.
Uh and we also, in peak cooking issues fashion, looked up all of the references to doll making that Drina Dotson mentioned in her 1967, I think? Yeah. 67 classic Applehead doll. What's the book named? Applehead dolls for fun and profit or something like this?
For fun and profit. For fun and profit. Uh so what you do is is you take this applehead, and applehead dolls were a thing for like a week and a half in the late 60s, early 70s, so much so that uh was it Hasbro? For Pleasure and Profit. Was it Hasbro?
Yeah. I think so. Hasbro came out with the Vincent Price shrunken head maker. Now, shrunken heads, of course, refers to the actual uh like Amazonian, like Ecuadorian, Peruvian, Amazonian um practice of shrinking human heads, which is it's there's too much to get into on the actual technology of how to shrink an actual human head. Spoiler, you you cut the skin off the head from the back, uh boil the skin in a tanning preservative solution, pack it with hot sand, and keep the features in rough shape as it shrinks down into something that's only the size of a like a little bit bigger than a human fist.
So that's a traditional kind of shrunken head uh manufacturing. And by the way, uh you used to be able to it's har terrific, actually, used to be able to go buy actual shrunken heads in South America, so much so that they started killing people specifically to sell to uh Europeans and Americans shrunken heads, and it's it's a whole nightmare story, whole bad thing. Uh the process was uh the trade was made illegal like a long time ago, like a long time ago. Anyways, so Vincent Price somehow got roped into uh saying that these apple head dolls were shrunken heads, and because he was a horror star back in the day, you might know Vincent Price as the laughing uh the laughter at the end of Thriller. Not that we listen to Thriller or anybody, I don't want to get into it, but uh Vincent Price, well-known horror uh actor and like you know, all around kind of character actor that you remember from the from the you know middle part of the um 1900s.
Anyway, so he was the face of this apple head. What's his face saying on the box of the apple head to it looks like it's saying I'm gonna shrink your head. And so it's a it's a thing that fits over an incandescent light bulb and allows you to make your own apple heads. And we got it in the mail app. We got it, we own it.
So you take an apple, you you you treat it in salt and or lemon juice, and then you cut it into a kind of a rough face and then you shrink it down. I use an excalibur dehydrator, and then Nastasi and I use it for uh cocktail garnishes. But and why do we do Appleheads, Dave? Uh, because Nastasi and I had a meeting once with uh a meeting with the partners of Booker and Dax where we were talking about contract disputes, and somehow Nastasi and I had started reading about Applehead dolls because we're stupid, and uh they were saying that Nastasi and I couldn't have a business together other than Booker and Dax, and I just like I went from like zero to explosion instantly, and I said, if Nastasi and I want to start an applehead business, or you were to tell me I can't! Like that, right?
And then like they were like, Nastasi was like, I want to start an applehead business. Right there. And that was it, right? Isn't that how it went? Yes.
Like, damn, that's what I want to do. So that's what we're doing. Yeah. So come, so bid. Yeah.
So back to uh back to other things. So Nastasi and I have all been in interesting places while we've been away. The past uh almost two weeks, I've been in Iceland, so we could talk a little bit about uh food and whatnot in Iceland. By the way, Iceland, like amazing place to visit, so expensive. So oh, shout out to Apatech.
We got uh Jonas, I saw in the wild a copy of Liquid Intelligence on the bar, and then saw uh one of their bartenders, Yonas on the street, and he's like, Yeah, yeah, I like liquid intelligence, so shout out to Iceland. Although buying liquor in Iceland's so expensive, their taxes are so high. So you should go to Apatech and enjoy their cocktails. By the way, you can go to a glacier. Uh you can go to many glaciers, because like Iceland has so many glaciers and they're melting so fast that you'd think that that climate change would cause the like you know the sea level to rise in Iceland, but their glaciers are melting so quickly that it's actually reducing the weight of Iceland such that Iceland is rising out of the ocean.
That's how messed up it is. Anyway, um so they have this glacier lagoon that's only been around for like 50 something years because as the glacier's been melting back, it formed this glacier lagoon, and icebergs, like honest to god, icebergs break off and float into this glacier lagoon and then out onto this beach called Diamond Beach and out into the ocean, and you can go walk walk around near these icebergs. They're like, Don't walk up, don't ever, because you can kayak, don't ever walk on the icebergs. They could flip over at any moment. It's like the one thing they tell you, don't walk on the icebergs.
So Dax and I were like, hey, hey, are we allowed to walk on these icebergs? Come on. Anyway, so the icebergs, you like chunks of them come off and float right up to the shore where you can pick up, like, you know, like a basketball-sized like iceberg chunk that's perfectly clear because it's from the inside of an old glacier. So if you go to a volcanic glacier in Iceland, it's full, full of ash. Because like every 10 seconds, this giant volcano cotla, every 50 years would erupt and spray tons of black ash everywhere.
So the glacier's like ice ash, ice ash, ice ash, ash. And then as it melts, it turns into j giant piles of black ash. But in this other glacier over on the on the eastern side, there's a lot of clear ice, and so you could pick it up. I was like, you should sell this stuff to cocktail nerds, like like like like guests from America and Europe who come to the bars, and he's like, Well, yeah, I don't know that people would pay a lot extra, but I think if you had a tourist going to a bar in Reykjavik that they would pay extra for an iceberg piece of ice in their cocktail. What do you think, Stuff?
Yeah, it was a good idea. Yeah. You know what the guy said? He's like, well, in the old days, the glacier was so close to the highway that fisher, you know, the the people who are fishing would drive their trucks, back them right into the glacier, and then just chainsaw giant chunks of ice and chill their fish with it. But he's like, the glacier has melted back so far that they no longer uh they no longer do that.
I was offered whale many times, did not want to eat whale, didn't have whale. I wanted to eat puffins because I'll eat the hell out of a puffin, but they're actually dwindling in numbers, and so I didn't see any puffing on the menu. I did have Icelandic split lamb's head, which is one of the things that they're kind of known for. And there's geothermal everywhere in Iceland. Everywhere.
I mean, not everywhere, many places. So there's lots of places where the ground is at cooking temperature, and they have this um kind of cultural thing where you make this brown bread, which they call root broth or whatever they call it, however you pronounce it. Icelandic, impossible to pronounce, don't even try. And uh they bake it underground in in a pot for like 12 to 24 hours, and they make these underground geothermal steam breads, which are also known as thunderbread because apparently if you eat too much of it, you get a little bit of thunder down under, you know what I mean? It kind of runs straight through you.
But they're they're almost a dead ringer when they're fresh out of the ground. They're they're sweeter and and and moister, but they're almost a dead ringer for New England canned bread. New England canned brown bread. But these have obviously a much higher rye content in them because they're made with rye bread. So that was some of the interesting stuff uh I had there in Iceland.
And then the week before that, in uh Taipei, I had all sorts of cool stuff. So uh there's a uh there's a nut that one of my old interns, Eng Su, who is from Singapore kept on trying to get me in um New York and it's got various different names uh devil's pod uh water caltrop or uh the technical name is trapa bicornis but it looks like a bat like a bat nut and so they've always been described as a water chestnut and I've never had one so we're in the night market in Taipei and I see this guy who looks like the human equivalent of a bullfrog like he's got like his eyes are kind of huge and he's just sitting there and he's not moving like he's on a lily pad just not moving for like an hour we're sitting there eating stinky tofu and all this other stuff he's not moving and then I'm like notice he's all he's selling is like these bat nuts and no one's buying anything from him and so we go over there and he tells you know Eva who is you know uh taking us around he's like Westerners don't much buy these things so it's not it's not something that that you get outside a lot but I'm here to tell you they're very good and they taste much closer when they're kind of steamed or roasted and served on the street to a regular old fashioned chestnut than to a water chestnut. So if you're ever in the area uh get one however I will note uh you must cook them because they have uh they're fresh water and they have parasites that grow in them and the parasites will do nasty things to you if you do not cook them and there's nothing Nastasia uh loves more than a parasite another interesting food uh Taiwan Taipei uh specifically that you don't get elsewhere is called Ayu Ayu jelly and it's not that it's delicious but it's very interesting I mean it's good it's very interesting for this property so it's not related to Ayu the freshwater fish that I think makes excellent sauces in Japan. It's uh Ayu is the name of this fig product. So what they do is there's a thing called a creeping fig, right?
And you can they I don't know if there's American creeping figs, but I don't know if they if they work the same way. But um you take this creeping fig, you take the fruit, you cut it open, and this is relatively recent, only the past I think hundred, 150 years they've been doing this. You turn it inside out so all the little seeds from the fig are sticking out, and then you dry it. You then massage these seeds in cold water. Now remember, in Taiwan, I looked this up, and this will become important in a minute.
They have more much more calcium in their water in Taiwan than we have in New York City, which is a very kind of soft water. So you massage it, you massage the sack. It's called washing the ayu, and you put it in like little kind of like almost like cheesecloth tea bags, and you do it, and then you pull out the tea bag, and in like 30 minutes it sets to a solid thermo heat irreversible, so you can heat it gel. Uh, and it's really cool. And they serve it as kind of a thirst-quenching summer thing because it is freaking hot in Taipei in August.
It is freaking hot. So, anyway, so uh I looked it up and it turns out that it's a rare uh kind of uh it's a rare occurrence in nature of a completely native, easily, easy to extract, low methoxy pectin gel. And so I brought some home and I'm gonna try to uh experiment. The other one, you like this term. Ready for this, Nastasia?
It's called Big Intestine in Small Intestine. This is this was one of my favorite things that I had there. They take a they take a like a large intestine and they stuff it with rice and they steam it like a sticky rice, and then they slice that like sausage, that rice sausage, just rice, down the middle and put like pickle cucumber and a sm and an uh a regular sausage made with small intestine on the inside, and those suckers on point. On point. One of my favorite things I had.
Nastasia's now wearing her garbage top hat. Uh had many other good foods in uh in Taiwan, but that's the kind of the stuff I wanted to um I wanted to tell you about. Uh what do you have in uh Italy slash uh France? Any good food? Uh no, in France we went vegan.
What? I sent you that photo. I thought that was just one time. Yeah, no, we that was the one time. We ate fine stuff in France.
Um, but in Italy. Everyone's closed in France, right? Is August still was uh France still closed when you know it was it was Ferragosto, so it was like the last week of anything. Before everyone just goes on vacation? Where does France go?
I don't know. I don't know. Egypt? Because Bobby Murphy from the bar was in France like the week after you, and he's like, there's nobody here. Yeah, yeah.
Did you just say Egypt? Yeah. Really? Mm-hmm. Huh.
All right. Good to know Egyptian tourism stuff. Then I went to Massimo Batoro's restaurant in Italy. And you correct me if I'm wrong, how how was it? Great.
You said you were with someone that that like was not a food person, though. How'd that go? I was with someone who's not a food person. Uh it went fine. You said that she was like, ah, it's taking so long.
Oh, yeah, let's say. You imagine you get to go to like a three-star Michelin restaurant like Massimo Batura. It's like beautiful, like everything's beautiful. Like people wait their whole how many tables they have in that restaurant? Three.
Three tables. So you're taking one of three tables. So it's like this is a hot commodity, this table. And like, oh my god. All this food.
Jeez Louise. Oh no, no. Uh and then we went on a truffle hunt. Uh yeah? Yeah.
It's uh not the right time of year for truffles. Way to put 'em back. What? Way to put them back. Yeah, but it's that's not the right time of year.
I know. But they're a little right now. Yeah, so like does it does it kill them to take them out and put them back? No. So says the person, like, they don't s how do you even hunt for them if they don't have their characteristic smell because it's the wrong time of year.
They still smell. They smell. Or the dog found them, and yeah. Yeah. So now you and I have both been on truffle hunts.
You know, I I tried to train my labrador major to truffle hunt, and he you need to start with truffles to teach them to truffle hunt, don't you? So what you do is you train them if you're cheap like me, you train them on truffle oil. So what you do is is you get truffle oil, and you the first thing you do is you train them in the house, like with like you put a little bit on it, and then when they you put it down, and when they go, you first you just give them the scent and you start feeding them treats. So they associate the fent the scent of truffle with treats. Then you put the thing down somewhere close and you you give us a term like I was I used uh search, right?
And so then when Major would go over to the thing, I would be like, and like shove treats in his face, right? Then you hide it in another room. And then if they go to it, then treats in their face. Then you go from that to taking a Q tip, putting a little bit on it, and then going out into a yard and putting it like you know, a half acre away and being like, search, and then when the dog finds it, you're like, oh my god, you're attacking that treats right in the face. You know what I mean?
So did you do this? Yeah, so Major could find a Q tip with a little bit of truffle oil on it, like across an entire lawn, like easily. But the problem is is that you know, the the truffle experts we were talking to in Oregon at the time were sure that there was some form of truffle, you know, on the I used to have property in Connecticut on this property in Connecticut based on the that kind of tree cover that I had. And but Major never sm smelled anything underground. He was able to consistently find uh like a truffle oil scent anywhere I put it, but was never able when you just gave him search out in the woods any time of year to find anything in my neighborhood.
But Major is too big of a dog to take out to Oregon and like put him with you know one of their trained truffle dogs and see whether or not um you know he could do it. But I guarantee you in Italy, Major could Major could bust out some truffles. Maybe not anymore. He's a lot lazier now than he was like, you know, four years ago. But you know, it's hard to teach an old dog to dig truffles.
But he was pretty old at the time. He was like three or four, and now he's like seven. He doesn't care anymore. Um so what else? What else with the truffle hunt?
Did like why did you go truffle hunting in the summer? Because it wasn't for for summer truffles. You were hunting for real truffles. Right, yeah, we found white truffles, they were small, we put them back. Who told you it wouldn't kill the truffle?
The guy who you were paying to the truffle guy. Okay. Yeah. All right. Did he plant them there as like a as like a I went to Italy once and hunted pheasant with big quotes around it that tell you about this?
Yes. And like, because they were they it was for a TV shoot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it was for a TV shoot where we were supposed to be like really like learning how to do things. I really did, I forget how to do it, learn how to split a sheep's head from an old school Italian butcher with nothing but a knife, no saws, no nothing.
And you know, like do it really well. And I've since forgotten it. They the trick is you gotta put your fingers in the eye sockets. That's the trick. Anyway, by the way, the sheep's head they served in Iceland, they removed the brain.
Yeah, I don't eat brains anymore, but I thought they'd still serve it with the brain. They also didn't crisp it at all, and they served it with the skin on, which is not how I'm used to it. Anyway, uh back to this. So, like we're supposed to shoot a pheasant. So we're out there, uh, it was Johnny Azzini and I.
We're out there, and they're the only reason they did it was they wanted to train their dogs. So they they they just they stun a pheasant and put him in a bush, and then they try to get the dog to run after him to flush the pheasant out so that you can shoot it. It's really not hunting at all, it's pathetic. You know what I mean? And the dog was too stupid because they hadn't trained it properly yet, it was ignorant, let's say.
And it wouldn't run after the pheasant. And so they were like, you know, they're like, you know, whatever they say in Italian, what do they say? Andiambo. They're like, hey, yeah, hey, go. You know what I mean?
And like, and the dog wouldn't go, so eventually they they they had to sit there and like toss sticks at the pheasant to get it to fly. It's pathetic. I I still feel I don't feel bad about it because I ate the pheasant, but it's not sporting. Yeah. You know, if I wasn't eating the pheasant, it would have been a horrible travesty.
Yeah. Anyway. Um, we should do this thing. What? What thing?
Alright, let me answer a question first. Alright. Alright, answer a question. Andrew writes in about stabilizing peanut butter. I love nut butter.
Nut butter is a gross word, right? You made it, you made a gross word face, nut butter. You the crinkling's tape is quite loud. Uh I love nut butter, but hate when it separates, and yes, I'm very lazy. Uh I would buy no stir peanut butter, but it always contains added sugar, and I have to watch my sugar sugar intake pretty closely.
I'm curious, is the sugar actually necessary to hold the emulsion? Uh emulsion. I think it's just kind of anyway. Uh I know they also add palm oil, which I would believe uh helps keep the fat solidified, but presumably since sugar is so ubiquitous, it also serves some rolls. What is it?
Would it be feasible to use other stabilizers to keep peanut butter smooth and not separating? I just want to avoid the sugar. Interested in either commercially available products or something I can mix into store bought at home. Thanks for the advice, and by the way, I love existing conditions. Okay.
So uh I think the reason that the like uh so if you look at uh let's say Skippy, uh the ingredients in Skippy are roasted peanuts, corn syrup solids, which is very important, corn syrup solids, sugar, uh soy protein concentrate, salt, hydrogenated vegetable oil, uh, and it says literally to prevent uh separation. Mono and diglycerides, those are their uh I don't know why, I guess those are helping to emulsify it, uh, and maybe also for other purposes, and vitamins. So if you look at that, it's really the sugar is there for flavor. I'm almost 100% sure because when I I don't I wasn't able to find any data on uh you know, I did a quick uh search uh and I wasn't able to find anything on sugar being stabilizing. And in fact, the opposite is true from my experience.
When you want to vastly increase the yield of nut oil out of uh ground nuts, add sugar. Uh or if you want to break your grinder, add a lot of that, you know, not like a like a you know how when you're blending nuts, you'll add uh like sugar, like powdered sugar with starch to like uh stop it from clumping. Uh if you grind it in like an actual like plate grinder and you add sugar to it, it will turn into such a thick paste that it will clog and almost destroy your your grinder. Um so I don't really know why. Like sugar affects it so much, but I always add sugar, true, with a little bit of water in the form of simple syrup, but I add a little bit of sugar to it and it breaks, it breaks it and causes the oil to come out very, very, very, very much more so.
Now I don't know whether it's because the sugar is actually adding moisture to it, and that's what causes it to weep oil so much faster. That might be the case, because if you uh look at peanut butter, it's got less than 2% moisture in it. That's the that's the number you should really be looking at. So I I would guess that um sugar, if anything, is gonna probably make it less stable. But that's just that's just my guess.
Um so but I think the reason that people who add stabilizers also add sugar is because 99% of the people prefer the taste of peanut butter with sugar in it, and they're selling to the 99% of people who want sugar in their peanut butter. Uh what you really want to add is I think it's the mono and diglycerides and the palm oil that's doing it. And so you can look at uh and you can get the abstract of it. The functionality of palm oil is a stabilizer in peanut butter uh by Kay Ariana, 2006. Uh, and you know, they they they talk about it uh and the effect of stabilizing with this, so you could probably get some sort of a high melting point fat like palm oil and some mono and diglycerides, which are sold by the Ferron Adria Corporation as Gliss or through Modernist Pantry, you can also buy mono and diglycerides and kind of melt those into your palm oil, stir it in, and that should help uh stabilize it.
Uh, I don't know the numbers, but uh I don't think it's gonna be a problem. What do you think? Oh, by the way, the internet had an interesting solution for this. It's been posted over the last year where they're like uh just turn your jar upside down. So if you store your jar upside down, the oil is gonna go towards the bottom of the jar, and if you keep doing that back and forth, apparently you can stop it from fully separating out.
I have not tested it. That is just what these folks do. Another thing that I would have assumed is that like light nuking of the peanut butter could help just by heating it, making it a little more uh fluid so you can mix it. But it turns out that microwaving, especially chunky peanut butter in the microwave, is very problematic because uh because there's so little moisture in it, uh you tend to get very localized uh areas of the peanut butter heating up drastically, and then those can go black, and once they go black or brown, or if the microwaves get absorbed into, like for instance, the chunky part of the peanut butter, preferentially over the rest, those will scorch and turn into char nuggets on the inside of the peanut butter. So if you are gonna nuke your peanut butter short bursts, make sure you stir it in between bursts and realize that it could be extremely uh problematic.
But that was an interesting, an interesting microwave problem with uh peanut butter. All right, now what do you want to talk about next? We got um we have we have some chocolate liqueur that one of our radio listeners made. All right. Josh.
Do you have a glass? We can use these. So we're drinking a chocolate liqueur out of water cups. It's a hundred uh what is that? I can I I don't know, you're the one with eyeballs.
I hope this this is uh from uh Josh to Nestas. He sent back his Sears all shirt because it's a gilding. This is the guy who hate who does not like gilding shirts. So apparently we are we are low quality, well, we know we're low quality individuals, but our t shirts are not of a high enough standard. Uhsi, I hope this finds you well.
Here's the Searzol shirt as well as some chocolate liqueur I made. Um it is 100% neutral grain spirits cooked in a circulator at 56 uh Celsius with Valrona cocoa. Milkwashed using a spinzall TM. I like the TM, thank you, Josh. And cut sweetened with turbinado cisnerp.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Approximate ABV and bricks. Oh, it's 25. Okay. Uh it's quite good in a brandy Alexander if you're into that sort of thing.
Uh should be enough to share or not. Enjoy Josh. All right, Josh. Well, even though you do not appreciate uh Nastasi's choice. And uh she's like he's like, what kind of t-shirts?
Gildan, oh no. Oh no, no. Oh no, no, not a guildan. What's the issue with Gildens? They're rough, I guess.
Rough. By the way, if you like a fancy Josh, if you can hear this, what are your thoughts on Bluffworks t-shirts? I think they're quite nice. By the way, uh Ministry of Supply sent like sent me, they're out of Massachusetts. They do kind of high-tech kind of like uh like mountain to boardroom kind of clothes, and they sent me uh like a suit that I wore in Taipei so you can rumple it up into a ball, then wash it off in your shower and it dries in a couple of minutes.
So I I did that. But they sent me these pants and I took them out on a glacier. And the guy, the glacier guy, was like, you need rain pants. It's raining and you're on a glacier. This glacier I went on was like so like everything's melting constantly because it's a summer.
But like we were literally doing uh what's a push-ups into the glacier. All of us were doing push-ups into it and just drinking out of the streams of melt water coming off this glacier. We're like, drop down, give me glacier. So we're doing that, but like he was like, those pants are not waterproof. I was like, suck it.
And they were. Josh just said, uh, the man who made this stuff. Bluffworks is cool. Gildens are boxy. Well, as a boxy man myself.
That's fine. Show. Their fit model is Dave's body. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is quite good, actually.
I like it. What do you think, Sad? It's good. Yeah, good product, Josh. Good product.
There's a slight fruitiness to it. What is that? Think it's just an Evelrona? Hmm. I don't know.
It's good. I'm gonna give that a good. I appreciate it. Okay. That's the highest compliment that you can give.
That's true. What do you mean? Oh, another thing in Iceland. They it's hard for them to grow things there because it's hard for them to grow things there, right? So they eat a lot of fish, they port a lot of the stuff they grow.
But you know what's growing wild everywhere? Angelica. Angelica, you know, Angelica? It's good for um PMS and female issues. Is that true?
Mm-hmm. Is that your new show? Female issues? Yeah. Is what was the name of uh of uh John Waters' famous uh film?
Is that female problems? I don't know. Anyway, um so they have Angelica growing wild everywhere, and uh so I bought home, they sell the seeds, which you rarely get, like the kind of green, not dried seeds, and they make a tea out of it. So I'm trying to work with that and seeing whether or not they make me some, maybe I'd be in a better mood. I don't know whether the world is ready for Anastasia Lopez that's in a good mood.
You know what my mom said when she was here? What? When she went to the bar, she was like, You're not really like how you are on your Instagram. I wish you would show the world how nice you are. What?
Yeah. She said I didn't raise you to be like this. But you say that she did raise you to be like this. No, she said I used to be very sweet, and I am my mom. Well, that's what people also say about me.
So clearly, like you and I working together has been terrible for the vote. I uh the FCI? Nope. Yeah, ask anybody. Before I had to start working with other people, I was the nicest, most patient guy.
And then as soon as I had to start working with other people, I realized that the world is terrible. What does it mean to be patient when you don't interact with other human beings? It's like this. It's like like people who okay, so like people think I'm gonna lose their mind, I'm gonna lose my mind on them, but I don't. If I don't respect them.
It's not true that I don't respect them. I don't have any expectations, right? So if I don't have any expectations for what you should already know or already be able to do, I'm mellow, right? Because my assumption is why should anyone why should anyone know about my weird, like, you know, ticks and proclivities and problems and like all the weird stuff that I demand like out of what I make or what's being made around me, right? Why should anyone know that?
So because it's a waste of your time. No, I'm happy to teach people, but why should someone know that, right? So there's the there's no there's no blame. It's like blame, it's like blaming like it's like blaming the wind for blowing. You know what I mean?
Like what it there's no point in it. But it's like when you've been working with someone for years, for years, and they do the same thing over and over again, it's like it's like people say, Dave, you you you you know, you you go from zero to a hundred instantly. I'm like, no, I'm always at 99, and when you but my 99 is real mellow. Like my 99 is like normal. Like, you know, I can contain it until I hit a hundred, but it only takes that one drop to put me into a hundred mode when it's when it's the same stuff over and over again.
You know what I mean? So, like back when everything was my you know, everything was my own fault, I would get mad at myself, but no one would notice that. You know what I mean? I still get mad at myself. Yeah.
Is there anyone I get madder at than myself? No, and that's why you and I get along. Because, yeah. Yeah. I am my worst critic.
Well, except for some things. You think you're good at darts, you're terrible. Sure. I like that you okay. Eddie Vanel writes in about acid OJ.
We've just started playing uh with it at home, and it's uh tons of fun so far, besides the Dr. J, which is you know an orange julius variant with milkwashed uh uh rum. From your book, what other classic cocktails do you think work well swapping in acid adjusted orange for lemon or lime? Uh we made amazing whiskey sours the first day, of course. Uh Eddie Dennel.
Well, really anything. I think you know, it's just fun to have around and to play with. But let me tell you something else. And you can acid adjust. Uh we did a I did an acid-adjusted uh what was it the other day?
We did a bunch of acid adjusted stuff. I can't remember whether I acid adjusted it. I think I did. We did a cumquat syrup that was crazy. So if any of you have had the Coursera, which is Moroccan preserved lemon, lime, uh tequila, and simple syrup.
We I did a cumquat version with uh a 50-50 OJ cumquat acid adjusted split base lime, and it was r uh ridiculous. But the thing is you don't want to get too much, you need to get enough solids out of the cumquat uh to have it be portable, but not so much that it's clear because then you lose the the thing. So it's a a medium clarification. So it's one of those situations where you don't want to fully clarify. Same thing with uh preserved lemon juice.
Um, can I say something? Sure. I beat Robert at Bananagrams and now. Okay, why don't you explain who Robert is so that people have some reference if they're not friends with ours? Okay, Robert, who was on the show, bar guy, well known bananagrams champion.
And I said, if I ever beat him, I'm gonna retire my playing of banana grams. And he attributes his bananagram skills to his homeschooling. Yeah. And to like the fact that they were fiercely competitive at home. Yes.
Yeah. Anyway, so I beat him yesterday. So does that mean you're never gonna play again? Yeah. That's bull crap.
This is like trying to find a loophole. This is like Karen was also in on the game. Yeah, but you shouldn't make statements like that. That's why that's why you're never gonna see Billy Joel live in concert. I know.
It's ridiculous. Go see Billy Joel live in concert while he's still okay. I can't. You can. Screwed it up.
It doesn't mean you have it. It doesn't mean you have to live. It doesn't have to be a punishment. You don't have to punish yourself for skipping out, buying tickets too far in advance, and not putting in your calendar and forgetting to go to the concert. And working a vegan event with you.
Yes, working a vegan event with me does not mean that you are doomed to a Billy Joelist life where you never get to see him at the garden. It's just not, Matt, back me up on this. Uh no, yeah, you should go. Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Cabot Creamery.
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They do. They really do have nice trees there. Don't care. My precious treasures. Precious cheese.
Dave, are we doing the chicken cannon? Yeah, yeah, but listen. So uh I gotta answer the question. I can't believe I was actually about to answer a question without going on a tangent, and you were you're like, hey hey, what about the chicken cannon? So listen, there's a lot of water soluble flavors in uh smoke.
So if you smoke it beforehand, just expect that the bag juices are gonna leach a lot of that stuff off. Now, if it's real smoky, it's not gonna matter, but you are gonna get some leaching off of the of the flavor. Um a lot of people I know, and I don't have a lot of experience with post smoking, but a lot of people post smoke. A lot of people also really do like liquid smoke. I don't have that much experience with it, and I've never had the really good stuff.
The only stuff I've ever bought is the supermarket stuff, and I'm gonna give it a firm nah, right? But liquid smoke is real smoke, right? It's just been um, it's just been an extract of real smoke, so it's not all of the things in real smoke, and sometimes, as I like to say, it could be a bit of a one note Nancy, but you can get very good liquid smokes now. Uh spray dried smoke powder is good. You have to be careful with it because over application makes it acrid and nobody likes kind of uh acrid smoke.
So you could try any one of those things. But I would do a brief brief, but uh relatively heavy after low temp smoke, and if you let it cool sufficiently before you put it in and use a thick enough cut, I don't think it's gonna overcook that much, but that's just what I would recommend, not having done uh too many experiments. Matt, who apparent not you, Matt. Matt, who apparently asked you about nixtimalized apple head dolls. What does that even mean?
It says, I'm the person who messaged you about nystamalized apple head dolls. How do you nyxtimalize applehead dolls? I don't know if it's a DM or an email. But you can't what does that even mean to nickstamilize an apple? Nixtimalizing is something you do to the seed coats specifically of corn, but can be done to other things.
What does niximalization have to do with apple heads? Hold on. So anyway, here's the question I sent in. Uh look forward to the show returning, and I hope Italy is nice. Recently I saw Dave eating dim sum on Jack's Instagram.
That's when I was in Taipei. As a dim sum lover myself, it got me thinking, I have some questions. Please forgive a three-part question. But one, what is your favorite go to dim sum dish? You know, I don't really have I I'm kind of a bad person.
I don't really have a favorite. Do you have a favorite style? Do you like going to dim sum? No. Why not?
Do you not like all the. It's not your thing? No. Wow. Do you not like things on carts?
Do you not like ordering lots of little things? I don't know. I just don't go. Oh, there's this place in LA that's gonna reopen that's shaped like a pagoda. Did you know I thought I was Chinese growing up?
This is sounds terrible. Please never say this again. No, it's true. Why? Who did someone say that you had to be?
My grandmother would always go to Chinatown in Los Angeles, and it was such a treat because I would get a Shirley Temple and Joey would get a Roy Rogers. So what does this have to do with the channel? She would speak Chinese. She actually spoke Chinese. What little she could, like menu Chinese or like restaurant Chinese with the waiters, and I was like, I think I'm Chinese.
Like, how is she able? Because it was so foreign to be at these places. Yeah, but this is like this is terrible. This is why you're this is one of the this is kind of like you're heading into terrible territory. It wasn't basically looked heavily on this.
Help me out on this. I'll allow it. Alright, you'll allow it. Alright, listen. I just never want to discuss it again.
But I'm glad you enjoyed your trips to Chinatown as a child. Um on the spectrum of things that have come up that we should definitely never ever discuss again. This isn't that. That's not that far along. What?
Sassy doesn't even not even self-aware. Never mind. Yeah. We do have one other question from the chat. You want to get it?
Sure. What kind of skewers does Dave use with his tandoor? I don't have a tandoor, but I'm really liking the quarter inch plus thick square skewers for ground meat kebabs. I lay them straight on the kettle grill over charcoal, no great. So he wants to know what kind of skewers you use on your tandoor.
Alright, so skewers for a tandoor is an interesting problem because in fact it's very hard to keep uh certain kinds of products on skewers because as they cook, they loosen and slide down. Other products get firmer and uh are stay on the skewer easier. So like certain meats uh like they seize up when you put them in the tandoor and those stay on really well. Like you're never gonna get a shrimp falling off of a skewer, right? And this brings me to there's there's two funds, there's there's two choices.
There's three. There's shape, there is uh uh like dimension, the how big around it is, and there is uh material. So if you have things that want to slide, then you want to use uh black steel or you know, iron, iron-like black steel skewers because they're rougher, and so they're gonna have better grip. If you're gonna do stuff that's gonna seize on, it's gonna shred when you take it off the skewer. You want to get that look more kind of cold-rolled, stainless kind of kind of skewers.
Um square ones for certain things can be better in terms of being able to rotate without them uh turning on the skewer, but it it really depends on getting the the weight right. So the heavier the thing you put on the skewer, the more you're gonna have to do double skewering and the more you're gonna have to kind of weave in and out, especially if you're actually doing hashtag vertical grilling in a tandoor. As soon as you're going in a kettle and you're going horizontal, almost none of this matters. If you want to maintain things in very delicate shapes, then you can do the kind of old school Japanese fanned out three thin skewer thing to maintain shapes and then like flip the fan, which is quite quite easy. Um I am such a lazy weasel bastard that I actually uh, you know, towards the end of when I had my giant cowboy grills, instead of doing skewers, I would just get the kind of large clamshell opening, um, like flat spring-loaded grill baskets that were like lay flat, and then I would just put infinite, infinite on them and then squeeze them shut, and then it's just like wham wham, and you can fit a lot on it and you don't have to skewer them as much.
It doesn't work in a tandoor, right? Because it's hard to suspend that, but it does work on a flat, uh a flat grilling surface. You just have to make sure you get one that doesn't have a lot of plastic because the plastic can melt if you get the handles kind of um too close to it. But they're very easy to pick up, they never spin like a like a skewer does, and stuff never falls off. If you are using it in a vertical grilling situation, you have to make sure that whatever you're doing uh won't slide off, and a lot of what people say doesn't work.
So like jamming an onion on the end of it doesn't work. As soon as the onion heats up, it's gonna start falling off of the skewer and it's a nightmare. The other thing that they don't tell you when you're working with tandoors, is that you need that the last thing on that skewer is gonna get burnt to hell. Burnt to hell. Because it's the closest and there's more radiant heat down there.
So you want to put some stuff on the end of it that is uh going to kind of be that you can kind of either want it more overcooked or you can kind of pitch, or else keep your stuff way further up this uh up the skewer. Do not attempt to have the stuff go all the way down anywhere close to the bottom of the skewer if you don't want to have some real real sunburny, like over-grilled action on the on the bottom of it. Uh, what I really wanted to invent was like uh a little like for like weasels like me who want to do things that you shouldn't do, i.e. overload a skewer and put stuff that's too heavy on it. I wanted to just make a little uh like a like a like a skewer clip that just went on the end of it that was like easy on, easy off, but uh I never did it, and there might be problems with overheating it and losing spring temper uh at the bottom of a grill, but that's kind of what I always wanted to do.
I just never bothered getting uh uh around around to doing it. But that's my feeling on uh on skewers. Now, uh a large square skewer, if you're doing vegetables, it'll wreak havoc, it'll shatter a vegetable. So that's when you need a thinner skewer, right? Or even sometimes a flat skewer.
Uh, you know, if you're doing uh, you know, in before they're cooking, unless you par cook them. So if you're doing something like potatoes and you want to get a little bit of that stuff in, if if you just shove a big skewer through them, sometimes you'll crack them, especially if they're smaller, right? Smaller potatoes, but if you par cook them, then you can shove one right through it, then I would go with something thicker, but realize that the potato doesn't have a lot of structure at that point, unless it's just a light par cooking. By the way, I had a lightly cooked uh sweet potato uh salad that was actually okay. The potatoes still had a they were they were just at the point where they were starting to feel they hadn't gone to mush, but they were just cooked to be almost like a potato and a potato salad, and I was surprised because I thought I was gonna hate it.
Also had that in Iceland. I wouldn't have bought it, but I couldn't translate the word sweet potato inside the store because I didn't have internet service. It just said something cartoful salat, and but I didn't know that anyway. So surprising. Anyway, that's my feeling on skewers.
By the way, I gotta finish this god dang question. Oh my god. Oh my god, what? Uh so my favorite go to one thing that I do like I really like steamed buns. I really, really, really like steamed buns.
Uh my favorite steamed bun is the molten lava steamed bun that's like made with salted uh duck eggs. And one of the things I really like about it is that uh it's all you almost never get one that's very good, but when you do, they're amazing. So a lot of times the inner coating is too grainy and it or it doesn't sag right, but if you get well molten lava one that's on point, it's really good. Where are you going? Just turning this off.
You you're already cold? Yeah. Before you're like, I'm sweating my joinies off yeah, and now you're like too cold? Anyway, alright. The best or underrated or uncommon dim sun dish to look for.
Hmm, I don't know. And the best dish to uh uh assess the overall quality of a place. I don't know. He cares a lot more about like he he's gonna be a lot more. When next time we have Jack Shram on, he'll get about it.
But Matt from Winnipeg said uh that he's hoping for duck feet uh as the answer. I do like I do like duck feet and chicken feet, and I had some really on point uh chicken. What about duck tongues? Have you ever had remember when Nils used to make duck tongues all the time? I really like duck tongues.
Do you like duck tongues? I don't think I've had them. When you have chicken feet, do you like them gooey? I've not had chicken feet either. You've never had chicken feet?
So me asking you whether you liked them gooey or crispy is like I imagine crispy. So crispy, it's like you know, the new style where you pressure cook them, make the bones edible, and then you deep fry them. That's on point. That's on point. But you like to take the nails off, you think?
Would you like it with the nails on or the nails off? Off, I think. Off? Yeah. Yeah.
Okay, outstanding in the field, Dave. It's not called outstanding in the field. You don't even know what it's called for real? For real? Classics in the field.
There you go. Classics in the field! Alright, so for this week, uh, I was supposed to be, and I'm too stupid because Nastasia and LA. We'll do it in LA. We'll do it in LA.
I have scanned the entire Drina Dotson. Tell me what you think. Everybody. It's only a 16-page book, right? It's a classic in the field.
The classic in the field. I have it fully scanned. I think Nastasi's like, people are gonna take it away from us. It won't be our thing anymore. I'm like, everyone in the world should have free access.
We have made zero profit off of it, and I bet you somebody will. Uh we are no one is gonna make profit off of the applehead dolls. I wanna hear from the internet on uh the cooking issues uh listeners. I wanna hear, like, do you think we should make Drina Dotson's uh whole book available on my Instagram account or not? And it w before we go to classics in the field, didn't you say you wanted to talk about chicken gun?
We're gonna do it like after after the Houdini party. We just need to get the shoot ready. We're gonna do the chicken gun people. I wasn't lying about it. It's in Nastasia's place and it's filling up her entire place.
And threw it away. It's not possible to unassemble it. It's glued. No, he started to take the wood. He touched it.
Did he touch it? I saw him going for it and I said, Stop. He did not. Did he touch it? No.
I need to know if we're saying that. He did not touch it. Every one of those bolts is exactly torqued to a certain number of foot knocks. Why would he do it? Because he was cleaning up my house.
And he was like, what? What about the air compressor? The air compressor's fine, it's there. Everything's there. Everything's there.
Nobody's, but I'm telling you, we got to get it. It is a huge safety problem if anyone touched those bolts. Nobody touched the bolt. Like it's already a huge safety problem because PVC shouldn't be pressurized with air. For those of you that are building like any form of air cannon, PVC is a bad material because of the way it shatters, especially when there's compressed air in it.
I need to know am I still as safe as I was before. Son of a gun. Which sounds very safe, by the way. Just as someone not involved. Yeah, right?
You know what? It's like, I just want to make it through. I just want to make it through this next couple of years, like physically intact. You know what I'm saying? A noble goal.
You know? It's like I have a couple of goals in life. Like I don't want to catch fire again. I'd prefer to never catch fire again. I don't want to get shocked.
It's not even near the same. Getting shocked doesn't hurt you nine times out of ten. You know how many projects have been ruined because Nastasia, even when there's no electricity involved, when I tell her to hold something, thinks she's gonna get shocked and just drops it and walks away? Even when it's not connected to electricity. I enter a piece of wood, hold this.
It's gonna shock me. She'll stop it. Static could have built up. Every time I can build up static, I shock her with it. Back when we used to test uh Ikajime, which is the Japanese, you know, fish killing techniques.
I received as a gift from uh uh a fish, a fish and anesthesia corporation, a muscle tester, which is basically a little it's a little electrode that you can put on freshly killed fish muscle to see if it still twitches, i.e., does it still react to electricity? Is there still ATP in it? And Nastasia would not for any amount of money let me shock her with it. She just was losing her mind over it. How hard did you go?
It's not that it's it's weak. It's a nice one. I'm at a moment of money. Did you ever play the that uh that like uh that game that Dax had? No, that game that where you have to hold it and then and the last person who pushed it.
No, no, no, no, no. But I was around when that was around, no. You would never play no, no, no, no. It's weird. I don't like heights.
So I guess maybe it's the same thing. I don't like heights. Yeah. But it that's not actually gonna hurt you. Get catching on fire is in fact bad for you.
For your skin. For me, for your whole catching on fire is a bad idea. Oh my goodness. Today's classic in the field is uh now. This is one that you know a lot of you are you're already gonna know this, but uh I felt I was looking through my books this morning and just seeing like a group of things that I hadn't talked about in a while, and what popped out at me was stalking the wild asparagus by Yule Gibbon.
Now, Yule Gibbons. So Yule Gibbons was born in uh 1911, uh, and he lived uh until 1975. So he died relatively young. He died in his in his 60s, but I guess in the 70s that that wasn't so bad. But he grew up like very poor.
Uh even before the Dust Bowl, his family was poor. So they moved around a lot, and his mom taught him at a very early age how to forage for uh wild things. And he had a crazy, he had a kind of crazy life. They moved all over the country. Uh he worked for a while as a circus bindlestick.
Uh he worked as a in a circus. He worked, he was a hobo. He just went everywhere. Um then, you know, he originally uh when he was young, he was a communist, uh like you know, active, you know, activist, and then till World War II with Soviet aggression and in, I think in Poland, he's like, no, and he like renounced his kind of so he's did everywhere, did all this kind of stuff. And in the 60s, he was trying to write a novel, and he ended up instead, uh, because his literary literary agent said you know all the stuff about wild food, he ended up writing about wild food.
And he wrote the very first, I think, really famous uh book on foraging called Stalking the Wild Asparagus in 1962. He followed it up with Stalking the Blue-Eyed Scallop in 1964, and then he wrote a book which I thought was amazing, uh, which was the uh you know you know what outward bound is, Nastasia? It's like where kids go and they they go out and they have to fend for themselves. He actually wrote a manual for outward bound for these islands that I used to visit off in Maine. So he's writing about wild foods at a time when no one else was writing about wild foods, and he just kind of loves the subject.
And so I think these books, even though they're somewhat outdated, um, you know, both I guess in the style of writing and and in what he's saying, uh, are kind of I think kind of magical reads because this is a guy who's just excited about doing what he's doing. Even though he made like he would, in other words, he wasn't a survival guy. He would go out, he would forage for stuff and bring it home and cook it, often with terrible recipes, often with a lot of other weird canned stuff. I mean, it was the 60s in America after all. So, like, you know, the food he was making wasn't necessarily the best best, but for sheer love of what he was doing, it was kind of amazing.
In the 70s, right before he died, he became immensely popular because he did a series of grape nuts ads. So did you like grape nuts growing up? No. I hated them. Did anyone like grape nuts growing up?
All the people. Matthew, did you like grape nuts? Absolutely not. Have you tried them recently? Uh I have tried them.
Somebody was using them as a as a descriptor for beer at one point. That's dumb. What do you mean back? What for beer? What beer tastes like grape nuts?
Uh Belgian double. What? Grape nuts is more of a texture. It's like little pieces of gravel. I didn't like grape nuts because the box was so dang small and they were so heavy and they were gritty, and like I didn't get the whole thing.
They weren't sweet enough. I was a kid that dumped sugar all over my cereal. I don't know about you, Nastasi. Like I love Cheerios because I would dump sugar all over them. And then you get that sugar milk.
That sugar milk at the bottom. That's all important. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So anyway, so Yule Gibbons started doing all these grape nut grape nuts commercials, and you can look them up on the video. The most famous, he's most famous for one that maybe never even happened because uh it was parodied so much.
But he would say, I'm Yule Gibbons, many parts of the pine tree are edible, and I like grape nuts. So he like does his stuff, and so like many parts of the pine tree are edible became a thing. Like Johnny Carson made fun of him, Carol Burnett, which is how I learned about him when I was a kid. Carol Burnett made fun of him. I first started reading him when I was in my in my twenties.
Um but you can actually look him up and he's like, Cattails can be eaten, but you're not going to, so eat grape nuts. And he already be like, I'm out foraging for part of my breakfast. Here's a high bush cranberry bush. This goes good on grape nuts. And so he would just go on and on.
So he became kind of like a little bit of a like a joke character because of his like because of his shilling out for grape nuts. I mean, I would chill out for grape nuts. If anyone wanted to pay Nastasi and I to shill out, by the way. Like, we're game. Let us know.
Let us know. It's like we just know, you know, no one's ever uh 2020 is the year to be happy. That's our year. Really? No, it's probably gonna be the year after at this point, let's be honest.
We're gonna have to push it. There's no way that China's gonna build the next product in time. Like we're we're hosed. We're never gonna be happy. Well, you know what product we can build and build in time for 2020.
No. Oh, geez, Louise. Okay, so anyway, so stalking the wild asparagus and stalking the so the stalking the wild asparagus is about plants. He also did stalking the helpful herbs, which I don't have that much of a memory of. But um, they're both about foraging, uh, and they aren't region specific.
So you're not gonna be able to do everything. Now, a lot of it is East Co-centric because he spent the last half of his life on the East Coast in Pennsylvania, but a lot of it's not. So he talks in in Stalking the Blue-Eyed Scallop about um uh foraging for uh gooey ducks, uh, although some people disagree with his methods of gooey duck foraging, uh, about abalone back when you could do that. So it's really just books about the love of going outside. And I'm gonna read a little bit from the uh titular uh chapter, Stalking the Wild Aspagus.
When I was about 12 years old, we lived near the Rio Grande in New Mexico. At that age, I didn't mind school so badly when the winter weather made it disagreeable to be outdoors. But when the first warm days of spring arrived, I only existed through the five days each week in order to really live on Saturdays. I would be off early every Saturday morning to the river, the woods, or the surrounding hills to see what nature was doing about bringing the earth back to life and to revel in all the changes that had taken place in the week before. On one such uh Saturday morning in spring, I was walking along the bank of an irrigation ditch, headed for a reservoir where I hoped to catch some fish.
Happening to look down, I spied a clump of asparagus growing in the ditch bank with a half a dozen fat little spears that were just the right size to be at their best. By the way, asparagus should be fat, Nastasia, not those thin, garbage, lignified, stringy, nonsense asparagus things that you bought at the farmer's market. The worst everybody knows asparagus should be fat. That was Jack. Okay.
Uh fat little spears that were just the right size to be at their best. The idea of reaping where I did not sow has fascinated me all my life. I took out my pocket knife, cut the tender tips, and dropped them into the pail in which I intended to carry home any fish I might catch. Even while I was cutting this cluster, I saw another with several more perfect little sprouts. Alerted, I kept my eyes open and soon found another clump and then another.
So he ends up not fishing that day. He's just getting he's just getting uh uh asparagus. Um the the important part about it is is he goes, about this time I noticed that an old dry last year's stalk stood alone above every clump of new asparagus tips. If I could learn to distinguish these old asparagus stalks from the surrounding dried debris, then I would be able to locate the hidden clusters of green spears from a distant distance. Despite my impatience to be off seeking more of these tender spears, I sat down on the ditch bank and for five minutes I did nothing but just look, which is great advice, at one uh at one old dried asparagus stalk.
It looked very much like the dead weeds and plants that surrounded it, and yet there were differences. After getting the size, color, and form thoroughly in mind, I stood up and looked along the ditch bank. Instantly, I saw a dozen old dead asparagus stalks that I had missed. So he learned then to look at a distance and see anywhere at the right time of year, whether or not he was gonna be able to get asparagus. And this is what he's trying to teach you how to do, to observe so that year after year you can become more a part of the world around you and glean from it what what you what you can get.
Uh before another spring, he talks about unfortunately, uh, right after this happens to him as a kid. Before another spring, my parents had moved to a high, dry plateau further west, and I was a middle-aged man again before I saw wild asparagus again. The next time I saw those familiar dead stocks that had beckoned uh for me to come and pick the green treasure at their bases was one spring when I was driving along a country road in Pennsylvania, shortly after moving to the Commonwealth Wealth where I now make my home. And so then, like years later, he has this uh this memory and he comes back and he does it more and more. And he ends by saying, I suppose this wild vegetable is really no better than the cultivated kind, but because of the memories it evokes, it always tastes better to me.
It is exactly the same species as the cultivated varieties. Birds long ago scattered the seeds from domestic plants, and now all over the eastern states and in irrigated sections of the west, wild asparagus grows in fence corners and hedgerows. Um my neighbors often smile when they see me by the roadside with my asparagus knife and pail. They think it is much simpler to merely buy the asparagus one wants at the supermarket. But I have a secret they don't know about.
When I'm out along the hedgerows and waysides gathering wild asparagus, I am 12 years old again, and all the world is new and wonderful as the spring sun quickens the green things into life after a winter's dormancy. Now do you know why I love wild asparagus? Cooking issues! Thanks for listening to Heritage Radio Network. Food radio supported by you.
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