1968: Utah to Kentucky by Automobile

I love to travel and one of my first experiences of extended travel happened while I was age 11 and in sixth grade at Lowell School in Salt Lake City. I wrote the following about 20 years ago:

"Dad, Grandfather and Grandmother Cannon and I drove back east to pick up [my brother] Mike from his mission. We drove on I-80 through Wyoming and stayed our first night in Ogallala, Nebraska. We continued on through Lincoln (home of the Nebraska Cornhuskers, a very good football team) to Omaha (I was very impressed with how clean the city looked) and then through Des Moines, Iowa. We traveled through Illinois and up to Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, where Dad visited a client named Leo Rothe. We traveled on Highway 12 southeast from Fort Atkinson through the toll booths in Chicago and then around the edge of Lake Michigan and northeast to South Bend, Indiana where we stayed Friday and Saturday nights. While in South Bend, we drove north to cross the Michigan state line so that I could say I had been there (I was counting the number of states I visited).

            On Saturday, November 9, 1968, Dad and I went to the Notre Dame vs. Pittsburgh football game at Notre Dame Stadium in South Bend. Dad bought the tickets in the hotel lobby. I watched tape replays of the Notre Dame games every Sunday morning on television, so I knew the team well: Ara Parseghian was coach, Terry Hanratty was quarterback, Coley O’Brien and Bob Gladieux were halfbacks, Ron Dushney was fullback, All-American Jim Seymour was split-end and other names I knew well were right tackle George Kunz and linebacker Bob Kuechenberg. I was disappointed when we got to the game to find that Terry Hanratty was injured and would not play. Joe Thiesmann, in his first start at Notre Dame was his replacement (Thiesmann went on to have a distinguished career in the NFL). Notre Dame won 49-0. I still have the ticket stubs: we were in Section 6, Row 38, Seats 16 and 17 on the northeast side of the stadium near the goal line. I have the Official Program which cost $.50 and a large green and white “Kiss Me I’m Irish” button. 

            The next day we traveled south on Highway 31 to Indianapolis and then south on I-65. Dad knew that one of my favorite players was Jim Seymour, so Dad stopped for lunch in Seymour, Indiana at the Holiday Inn. I had fried chicken.

            We continued south and ultimately crossed the Ohio River into Louisville, Kentucky. There we stopped at the Mission Home and learned that Mike was at Church. We got directions and walked into Church just as Mike was speaking. He was surprised and got teary as he mentioned each of us by name as we sat down in the congregation. 

            Mike mentioned that one of the elders in the Mission Home would do all kinds of crazy thinks in his sleep at night. The next morning when we picked him up, Mike told us the elder stood up during the night and said, “Elder Cannon, I’ll defend you,” and started punching the wall. The next morning the Elder was rubbing his knuckles and wondering why they hurt so much.

            As we drove through Kentucky, Mike described the large amount of tobacco harvested locally. He had several animal skin caps, a fox and a skunk, which I really liked. We found them for sale, but they were very expensive, about $35 or $40. When we drove by a sign for Paducah, Mike referred to the “Duke of Paducah” (I have no idea why I remember that). I was introduced to “Mountain Dew” for the first time (a vending machine at a gas station) and really liked it (I did not discover until years later that it is highly caffeinated).

             On the drive back to Utah, Mike, Dad and I shared a hotel room (Grandmother and Grandfather got one of their own) and we always had two beds. Dad and Mike would fight over which one of them had to sleep with me because I was such a restless sleeper (I kicked and rolled around and talked a lot). They never arrived at the obvious solution which was to let me sleep alone in one bed and they could sleep together!

            We drove through St. Louis, Missouri where we saw the Gateway Arch near the Mississippi River (the St. Louis Cardinals were my favorite professional baseball team and I liked the St. Louis Cardinals football team which had Larry Wilson as the all-pro safety, a University of Utah graduate). We stayed in a ramshackle pre-built motel on the west side of St. Louis.

            We traveled the I-40 to Kansas City, where we stopped in the suburbs of Independence (and took a guided tour of the RLDS Tabernacle) and Liberty (where we saw the prison Joseph Smith was held captive in for 6 months). From Kansas City we took the I-70 across Kansas. It was flat as far as the eye could see. We got into a terrible rainstorm that terrified me. Dad had the windshield wipers going full bore and still could hardly see the road. The wind was buffeting the car terribly. When we passed large semi trucks, the buffeting and visibility got worse. I was very afraid. We ultimately made it to Denver, Colorado, where we stayed the night in a Day’s Inn. That night, our car was broken into and Dad’s camera, among other things, was stolen. Later that day, Dad turned in front of a speeding on-coming car on the outskirts of Denver and we our car was hit broadside. We dealt with police two different times that morning and I decided I would never go to Denver or stay in a Day’s Inn again." 

We visited 12 states, including my home state on that trip [Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, Kentucky, Missouri and Kansas], and note that my father drove me to Michigan just so I could say I'd been there. Now, 46 years later, I think I've been back to Denver and Colorado eight years in a row and I'm still counting states. The more things change the more things stay the same. 

Beaver Tail and Bacon Baked Beans

I cooked beaver tail once before and found it quite unappetizing. However, I've been thinking about ways to prepare it differently to make it more palatable and even enjoyable. The biggest draw-back to beaver tail is the weird Styrofoam-like texture, and that without any real flavor.   

I decided to try and remedy those problems in several ways. First, instead of boiling the beaver tail, I would cut it into small pieces and fry it with bacon and added smoked salt. The hope was that frying it would break down the texture, even melt it a bit, into something that felt less artificial. Second, the smoky salt and bacon fat would infuse the beaver tail with flavor. And third, I would add it to some baked beans with the intent of making the beaver tail a secondary ingredient instead of the main event. 

Beaver tail on a grill.

This beaver tail was a little smaller than the one I had last time. I heated up our outdoor gas grill to high and put the tail on the grill right above the fire. I let the outer layer bubble up on both sides, but should have left it on a little longer. Portions of the outer tail peeled off, but other portions were tough to separate and I had to resort to kitchen shears and some scraping with a sharp knife to get the inner meat (fat) off. With a longer cooking time, the tail separates more easily. 

The tail has started to bubble and curl. 

Some portions of the outer tail came off easily.

Some portions of the outer layer were difficult to remove.

Pieces of the inner tail meatt had to be scraped off with a knife, like that above.

Using kitchen shears the inner tail meat was cut into small pieces. The tail bone that extends into the tail was difficult to trim meat away from, so I ultimately put it into the pot with the cut up meat. 

Much of the core around the tail bone (bottom) was too difficult to access with kitchen shears or knife. 

Chunks of tail meat. These ultimately were cut into even smaller pieces. 

I diced a yellow onion and put it with a half-pound of apple wood bacon and the sliced up beaver meat into a pot. The stove was on medium heat so that it would not get too hot too fast. I put a little bit of olive oil in initially to provide some lubrication and added bonfire salt. 

Tail meat/fat, bacon and onions.

I cooked it quite awhile, wanting the beaver meat to break-down and crisp-up while at the same time getting it infused with the flavor of the bacon and salt. The melted, crispy pieces of beaver meat were much more enjoyable and this was a big improvement.

Cooked until quite crispy.

Some crispy little pieces we sampled.

The addition of the baked beans was also a positive. Baked beans traditionally have pieces of meat in them anyway and this just adds a little bit more. The sweet of the brown sugar in the baked beans complemented the smoky, fatty taste and it was very good. The Styrofoam-texture was gone, although the texture was still a little crisp and the size reduced. 

A nice bowl of baked beans, bacon and beaver tail meat.

Beaver tail is very fun to cook because it is so unusual. This preparation allows the final product to be edible and less in-your-face because it melds into the texture of the baked beans. 

A breakfast of two over-easy eggs and baked beaver tail beans.

Emu

The emu is the second largest bird in the world by height, after the ostrich, reaching up to 6.2 feet and can weigh up to 132 pounds. And like the ostrich, it is flightless. The emu has long legs and can run as fast as 31 miles per hour. 

Emu at Fossil Rim Wildlife Center

It is found in large parts of Australia, generally absent only from areas of heavy population, dense forest and arid areas. The neck is pale blue and shows through the feathers. New feathers are almost black, and the shafts and tips stay that way, but the sun fades the rest of each feather to a gray/brown. 

The emu's pale blue neck and reddish/brown eye.

We saw emus at Fossil Rim Wildlife Center in Glen Rose, Texas. We spent some time stopped along the side of the road feeding several and feeling the peck of their bills against our hands holding feeding pellets. We also were able to caress their necks and feel the loose fitting feathers and underlying skin. The emus were substantially shorter than the ostriches we saw and their pecks against our hands much softer. 

Feeding an emu through the car window.

Feeling the course, fluffy feathers of the neck.

Staring into its eyes and hoping it will not peck anything other than the food pellet in the hand. 

Barbary Sheep or Audad

The barbary sheep, also known as the audad, is native to the North African countries of Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, northern Chad, northern Mali and Sudan. They were found in rugged and mountainous terrain and even in open forests. They are now very rare in their original range. There is an estimated population in Morocco of 800 to 2,000, several thousand in Algeria, and 4,200 in Niger. However, they have been introduced to southeastern Spain and the southwestern U.S. where they have become quite common in certain areas. 

Barbary sheep or audad

The barbary sheep has distinctive shaggy hair on the throat which extends down to the chest in males. The horns curve outwards, backwards and then inwards. 

When we visited Fossil Rim Wildlife Center in Glen Rose, Texas we encountered a number of them clumped together near a cross-road on a hill. They were quite aggressive in coming to our open windows for food. 

Beaver Stew Meat - Sous Vide

For quite awhile I've been eating different kinds of meats with the primary goal of seeing what they taste like. I've not wanted to put in too many ingredients in cooking them that would mask the real taste. Now that I've had a fairly extensive exposure to many types of game meat, and with Judy's Christmas gift to me of a sous vide cooker, I'm branching out and starting to focus more on cooking game meat in ways that will enhance the taste and eating experience. 

I recently got some beaver stew meat from Exotic Meat Market. I've now eaten beaver several times: grilled beaver leg, roasted beaver leg and beaver tail. I decided to liven this beaver meat up a bit. We were having the missionaries over for dinner and my friend, Jerry, who is always open to game meat, and Judy was planning on making a chocolate cherry bundt cake. It occurred to me that a rich cherry taste would go well with beaver.  I looked up cherry on-line to see what other ingredients pair well with cherry. Pistachios, thyme and goat cheese kind of stood out for me. 

On a recent trip to Texas we bought a bottle of cherry balsamic vinegar from Stockyards Oil Company. The stuff is divine and strong. What a great pairing with beaver which is a rich dark meat. With time in the sous vide it would really infuse the meat with that deep, rich, sweet taste. I decided to add Craisins which are dried cranberries, also quite strong, and figured those would also lend some sweetness. We had some roasted pistachios, so I un-shelled 20 of them and ground them with a rolling pin. Finally, we had some goat cheese. I envisioned heating up the goat cheese when the meat was cooked and mixing it together with the meat.

The flavored balsamic vinegars are fantastic.

Roasted pistachios

Crushed roasted pistachios

The beaver stew meat was fairly fatty. I coated it with canola oil on both sides using a brush and salted and peppered it liberally on both sides with Himalayan pink sea salt and ground pepper. Then I heated up a pan very hot, put in some canola oil and seared the meat for about 30 seconds to a minute on each side. The searing firmed up the fat and put a nice caramelized texture on the meat. 

Raw beaver stew meat - quite fatty

Seared in a frying pan has firmed it up.

After letting the meat cool down a bit, I added a nice drizzle of cherry balsamic vinegar, straight from the bottle, putting down several lines over the meat. Then I added a handful of Craisins and sprinkled the ground pistachios and some ground thyme over the meat. 

Drizzle of balsamic vinegar and crushed pistachios and Craisins.

Then I shoveled the meat and added ingredients into a sous vide vacuum sealed bag and put it into the cooker at 60 centigrade for 4 1/2 hours. 

In the sous vide bag after cooking.

When it came out of the bag I had a taste and it was marvelous. It was very rich with a subtle sweetness. The ground nuts added some nice texture. I decided not to go with the added goat cheese because the taste was already fantastic and I didn't want the goat meat to mask any of it. 

Out of the sous vide bag and onto a plate. Still nicely coated with pistachio.

I did heat up some goat cheese and tried it with a few bites, and it was good, but I liked it without it better. 

This was one of my favorite combinations. I think the different types of balsamic vinegars will be real allies in sous vide cooking of game meats. I'm starting to think of other vinegars and other kinds of meats that might pair well together. 

In a serving bowl.

On a plate with salad with mandarin orange balsamic vinegar, mandarin orange sections and avocado. Great flavor combinations. 

Red Grouse - Brined and Sous Vide

The red grouse is found in heather moorland in Great Britain and Ireland. It is sometimes considered its own separate species but usually considered a subspecies of the willow ptarmigan. Exotic Meat Market had some wild-shot red grouse from Scotland available and I decided it would be fun to try it. I've previously encountered white-tailed ptarmigan in the high mountains of Colorado and wondered what they would taste like. The red grouse would be somewhat similar.

Red grouse

Wild-shot grouse from Scotland.

The Exotic Meat Market website indicates that the "flesh is dark in color and due to the diet being around 95% heather, the grouse has an exceptionally rich flavor and is an acquired taste." That is a nice way of saying it is very gamy. A post I found on sharptail grouse called the meat "distinctive, unique - and strong tasting. It is not to everyone's taste...[S]harpies have dark meat like ducks or doves, and that meat is decidedly gamey. Almost funky. You have to either embrace it or run screaming...[T]hose of us who like our meat to taste like something can linger over the beguiling taste of this bird...The flavor is acquired, but addicting." The gamiest meat I've ever eaten is pronghorn antelope which feeds on sagebrush and I assume the sharptail grouse probably feeds it on it as well. I also assume heather is a close approximation to it. Plus my experience is that dark-colored flesh tends to mean gamy. Recently we had wood pigeon wild-shot from Scotland and it was dark and very gamy, so much so that we did not eat it all. The Exotic Meat Market site called it "deep crimson in color, and...a great depth of flavor...[A] rich taste..." 

Reddish/purple color of the grouse. 

I eat a fair amount of exotic meat and have acquired quite a large range of acceptable tastes, so when I don't really like the taste of something I assume most people would feel the same way. So given this advance warning from the sources above, I decided to do something different so that it was not another wood pigeon experience. First, I decided to brine the meat. A Field and Stream article on brining venison states that "A brine penetrates deep into meat - and carries flavor with it. The salt solution also prevents the meat fibers from toughening up as much and helps the meat retain moisture." Another benefit of brining is that it helps remove blood from the meat, particularly helpful with wild-shot game, which helps to reduce the gamy taste. I also had a couple of venison steaks that I wanted to brine, so I made a batch big enough to use for it as well. I followed the directions for brining venison at ehow.com. The article notes that it is not the contact of the brine, but the "diffusion and osmosis, or the absorption and exchange of liquid." 

First I put a ratio of water to kosher salt of 16 to 1 in a pot, which is one cup of salt for each gallon of water. I put it on the stove and added some aromatic ingredients, including several bay leaves, a few black peppercorns, celery seed, mustard seed, hot pepper seed, some dried garlic and some dried onion. I looked for some juniper berries but couldn't find them. After it boiled for a bit I pulled it off the stove and allowed it to cool. 

Brining ingredients in a pot.

The brining ingredients after they've boiled. 

After the brine reached about room temperature, I put it over the grouse in an airtight Tupperware container and put it in the refrigerator. The instructions were to brine it for two to three hours per pound and not to exceed 24 hours. Because I really wanted to impact the gamy taste I decided to brine it quite awhile, realizing that the longer it brined the saltier it would get. I brined it about 20 hours. 

The grouse in the brine in a Tupperware container.

The brine solution after 20 hours is very red, illustrating how much blood has been removed from the meat.

After it was brined, I patted the grouse dry with a paper towel and discarded the brine. I then left the grouse uncovered in the refrigerator for 24 hours. The article states that the "sodium in the meat equalizes during the rest period." 

After brining, the little pinfeathers were easier to remove.

I cut the grouse in half with kitchen shears to help it cook more evenly sous vide.

Based on the sharptail grouse post above, I decided to use smoked salt on the grouse and cook it sous vide as a way of infusing the meat with a smoky flavor. In the sharpie recipe, he used 1 tablespoon of Maine apple smoked salt for two grouse. Because I had brined the bird and only had one, I used less than a half tablespoon of bonfire salt which has a very smoky flavor which I rubbed on the bird after rubbing it with olive oil. I cooked it at 59 Centigrade (138 Fahrenheit) for one hour and 43 minutes. 

The cooked grouse after sous vide. 

The finished grouse was moist and had a nice texture. It was very smoky and quite salty, but the gaminess was mostly gone. 

The grouse was very moist and cut quite easily.

I prepared a salad with butter lettuce, a tomato, grated carrot, an avocado, brined feta cheese and two boiled eggs and added one of the grouse halves to it, cut up into thin slices. It was the perfect accompaniment, kind of like anchovies to a Caesar salad. It provided a very distinctive and good taste that stood out in the salad. 

Part of the grouse went into a salad and it added a wonderful flavor. 

If I do grouse again, I will follow the same type of recipe but reduce the brining significantly so that it is not as salty. I would probably do the brining for three to five hours. The smoky salt in the sous vide was perfect. 

Sable Antelope

The sable antelope is found in portions of East Africa and northern southern Africa and a small portion of Angola. There are an estimated 75,000 with 50% of those on protected land and 25% on private land. A subspecies with larger horns, known as the giant sable, lives in Angola and there are only an estimated 200 to 400 of them left (they were particularly devastated by the Angolan civil war). 

A beautiful black male sable antelope.

A female in a similar pose is much lighter in color.

The sable antelope has a thick neck and tough skin, a well-developed and upright mane on the neck and a short mane on the throat. Females and young sable are chestnut to dark brown in color and males darken and turn black after three years. Some southern populations of females also turn black. They are white on belly, cheek and chin and have a black stripe down the muzzle. Both sexes have ringed horns that arch backwards that are larger in males. They look very similar to the roan antelope, particularly the females and young, but tend to be darker in color and have slightly different face markings. 

Some younger sable antelope with short horns mix with some adults.

I was very excited to see sable antelope at Fossil Rim Wildlife Center in Glen Rose, Texas. I was really hoping to see them in Kenya when we visited last year, but unfortunately did not. At Fossil Rim they were congregated in several large groups and we were not able to get any close to our car windows to feed them. 

This sable antelope was near our car but not interested in our food as it had a huge stack of hay to concentrate on.