Manhattan (Red) Clam Chowder

Manhattan (Red) Clam Chowder

 When it’s cold and rainy, like it is today, there is almost nothing more pleasing than a bowl of soup. Today, it’s clam chowder. I love all three versions: New England; Manhattan; and, Rhode Island. I’m doing the Manhattan version because it’s pretty simple to prepare, and because it tastes really good. It’s the kind of vision I can spend hours enjoying while riding my motorcycle and anticipating making camp at the end of the day. (See my previous blog to make more sense of this.)

I like to use fresh ingredients whenever I can, even though that’s a challenge on a lengthy motorcycle trip. I have managed to carry onions, potatoes, and even celery with reasonable success. The celery wilts a little, but hey, this is camping. If it won’t make you sick, it’s usable, right? For my chowder, these are the fresh ingredients, along with a fresh jalapeno pepper.

For cooking, I have a stainless steel, mess kit-style lidded pot, but I also have a stainless steel saucepan I picked up at a yard sale (great source of camping gear). My trusty knife has two blades. The thin one, I use for food preparation, and the heavier blade for everything else. I’ve tried all sorts of eating cutlery, but it’s hard to beat a real spoon, a decent fork, and a knife that isn’t going to slice my plate in half, like the one in the picture. Hey, what am I saying? I write murder mysteries; I should use an even bigger, sharper knife.

So, here’s the recipe.

1 small onion, diced.

1 small stalk of celery, including the leafy ends, diced.

1 jalapeno pepper, diced.

2-3 very small potatoes, chopped.

½ teaspoon mixed dried herbs (like Italian, or herbes de Provance)

1 can of diced tomatoes

1 can of chopped clams

Sauté the onion, celery and pepper in olive oil until softened a little, using your saucepan or pot. Add the herbs and salt and pepper to taste while sautéing the vegetables. When they start to soften, add the juice from the can of tomatoes and cook for another five minutes, Throw in a little white wine as well, if you have any. Then add the diced tomatoes and the clams, including the clam juice in the can. Cook at a simmer until the potatoes are tender, about twenty five to thirty minutes.I hope you enjoy it, if you give it a try. Love to have you share your recipes and experiences in the comments section, and thanks for visiting.

 

So, What's For Dinner?

So, What’s for Dinner?

I understand some people prepare a menu for an entire week, shop for the ingredients in one trip, and know what they are going to do for every meal. I’ve often thought that would be great. Really organized. Just not me. Not by a long shot.

At home, making good use of things in the freezer requires at least thinking about the evening meal that morning so you can take the meat, or whatever, out in time for it to thaw. I’ve never had much luck using the microwave for that task if I let it wait until the last minute. Sometimes I do manage to remember to take something out of the freezer early enough for it to thaw. I feel real proud of myself when I do. Usually I can do pretty well with things on hand and don’t need to make an emergency run to the store in order to fix dinner. Not always though.

So, how can a pantzer (seat of the pants writer who does not use extensive outlining) avoid mealtime disaster on a camping trip, such as a six-week cross-country motorcycle run? Well, there’s always accepting mealtime monotony. I’ve done that one. But another approach I’ve used is to get creative with what I carried in my pack and carefully plan out the next meal in the hours leading up to it. (You see, I’m actually somewhere between a pantzer and an outliner when I write my mysteries). When driving, I watch the road, but I think about other things too, and a few hunger pangs inspire a lot of cooking imagination.

You see, when I’m on my motorcycle, cooking is one of the things I like to think about. Writing is another. A cold, wet day can easily send visions of clam chowder coursing through my mind for hours ahead of time. I used to carry a tin of chopped clams. Now you can buy them in foil packages. I carry some fresh goods too, like a few small onions, a couple of jalapeno peppers, some small potatoes. A diced carrot, even if a bit limp, or a wilted celery stalk can still work well in a soup, stew, or chowder. Maybe I’d throw in a couple of sourdough biscuits for good measure.

I like to see what I can accomplish from scratch as much as possible. It’s part of why I like camping. It’s getting down to basics, or in today’s parlance I suppose I should say it’s getting down WITH basics. If I’m lucky I’ll even have one of those little cartons of wine to go with my meal. Basics plus a little class. And the hours I’ve spent in mental preparation only add to the expectation and enjoyment at the end of the day.

How do you handle meal planning when you’re camping? What kind of meals do you rely on, and how do you prepare for them ahead of time? Hope you’ll share some of your stories, and thanks for visiting my blog.

P.S. Next blog post will offer a recipe for clam chowder, road warrior style. Come check it out.

Glenn's Sourdough Funny Biscuits

Sourdough Funny Biscuits

Lesley called them “Glenn’s Funny Biscuits”, and the name sort of stuck. They came about as something of a challenge, and they’re a bit of a challenge to make. If you’re into using sourdough, I hope you’ll give them a try.

When I was on one of my extended motorcycle camping rode trips I needed to come up with a breakfast that was quick, easy to clean up and made good use of sourdough. I like to get in a hundred miles or so of travel before I stop and make breakfast. That means pulling into a rest stop, breaking out the cooking gear, making a hot breakfast, cleaning up and getting back on the road without taking an inordinate amount of time. Funny biscuits were the answer I came up with.

To mix the dough, pour some starter into a depression in the middle of your flour, right in the container. Carefully sprinkle a pinch of baking soda (I use this for any sourdough quickbread) and a pinch of salt over the starter, and stir the mixture with a fork so that it picks up flour and forms into a dough ball. This may take a little practice. Mix in too much flour and the dough won’t stick together. Too little, and you simply have a sticky mess.

When the dough is formed into a rough ball, reach into the container with you hand and knead the ball of dough a few times, turning it over so as to maintain a floured outer surface. When kneaded into the right consistency, pull the blob of dough into smaller balls as needed to make whatever size biscuits you want. I shape them by rotating the dough inside a circle made up of my thumb and middle finger, then pat them down to about a three-quarter inch thickness. Put them in a frying pan with a lid on it and cook them over low heat for fifteen to twenty minutes. Turn them over half way through the baking time so both sides get browned nicely.

It was a real treat to have fresh, hot biscuits for breakfast at a scenic rest area. They’re great with butter and jam, honey, peanut butter, or a slice of cheese if you have some handy. I served them with soft boiled eggs and a couple of cups of hot tea. Delicious.

What’s your favorite quick sourdough treat?

Sourdough Pancakes

Making Pancakes on the Road

I guess there are a lot of choices about camping gear, including cookware, but to me it has always seemed the gear I came up with was lacking. I’ve tried aluminum and stainless steel, thin gage ironware, and even porcelain cookware that reminded me of the blue enamelware plates my parents used on camping trips we took together when I was a kid.  The thing is, none of them seem suited to not burning food or ruining it because it all stuck to the bottom of the pan. Everything I’ve run across seems designed for lightness, which is necessary, especially for backpacking. The best pans I’ve used are cast iron. I’d hate to try carrying one of those backpacking. I’ve tried over and over to use those little Boy Scout type cook sets with a frying pan, deep dish, lidded pot, and coffee cup. Of course, the aluminum cup burns your mouth when you take a sip of any hot liquid, but the lidded pot works well. The handle on the frying pan needs to be long if you’re cooking over a campfire, but is way too heavy if you are cooking on a tiny backpacking stove, which I always carry on motorcycle trips, and the pan falls off the stove.

So, enough complaining. The reason for the above discussion is because I wanted to set myself up for a little sympathy, or shared misery, when I say I’ve burned more pancakes on camping trips than I’d like to admit. And, that’s the topic for this week’s blog post—sourdough pancakes. I learned to make pancakes early in life, cooking them on a wood stove. I learned to flip them as a kid too, whenever I wasn’t using a griddle big enough to cook half a dozen at a time (I had a big appetite). I took pride in being able to make good pancakes, so I found the burning, sticking, deforming frying pan experiences of camping cookware frustrating to say the least. But I am stubborn, and insisted on using sourdough on backpacking trips as well as motorcycle runs. Even the imperfect results I often produced were well worth the effort once on the tongue. I also figured out that I needed to hold the pan, not set it on the burner and turn to something else while my pancake cooked. That way, I could control the heat better and actually do a decent job of cooking the pancakes, not scorching them. Fortunately, I also dropped my eating quota down from eight or twelve pancakes to two or three.

Making sourdough pancakes still seems to me more technique than recipe. I like to keep my starter quite thick, and that effects the necessary technique. I plop about a half cup into a bowl holding an egg I’ve already beaten, and mix the two together. I then toss a couple of rounded tablespoons of flour and a heaping tablespoon of powdered milk on top of the mixture and sprinkle a pinch of baking soda (1/4 teaspoon) and a pinch of salt over that. I stir the ingredients together, adding as much water as needed to produce a nice pancake batter consistency. I love to add blueberries, if I have them, or banana if I happen to have one of those handy, although that’s not likely on a back packing or road trip. I fry the batter in clarified butter, which keeps pretty well when refrigeration is lacking. I often use honey as a sweetener instead of syrup because it can be used in other cooking as well. In spite of the difficulties and challenges, my mouth is watering at the memories. What are your tales of making pancakes over campfires or camp stoves? If sourdough is your thing, but camping is not, I hope you share your recipes and techniques as well. There are a lot of ways to “get-er-done”, and I hope to learn some new ones from you. P/S Thanks for visiting my blog.

Getting Started with Sourdough

Cooking with Sourdough

Cooking on the road can be murder. At the end of the day, it’s always later than you planned. You’re tired. It’s dark, cold, and threatening to rain. So that puts camping and cooking on the road in the same category as golf—I have no explanation at all for why I enjoy it, but I do.

I usually take homemade beef jerky with me on a road trip, and a couple of packages of something like Cajun red beans and rice, but I also take flour and the most important staple of all—sourdough starter. It’s a good thing I prefer a motorcycle to an airplane; I’d never get through security with my pack smelling like a winery. Sourdough gets pretty fragrant, especially in the heat. Keeping it from getting too hot can be a real challenge. I’ve used those little insulated lunch containers with a cup of ice picked up at a truck stop and thrown into a plastic baggie. You need the baggie, because the ice always melts to water…well, almost all of it melts. If I’m lucky at the end of the day there will be just enough ice left to cool down a cup of bourbon, (no room for highball glasses).

There seem to be two major approaches to maintaining, (feeding), sourdough starter: (1) sugar; and, (2) flour and water. I use the flour and water approach exclusively. I got my first inspiration for sourdough from my third grade teacher, who brought a slab of sourdough bread to class. She said it was a hundred years old. I never thought to ask at the time if she meant the starter or the slab of bread. I just sat in awe and said “Wow” like most of the other kids. Her grandfather had been a gold miner in Alaska, and cooked with sourdough. She explained the process, and the idea of doing something like that stuck with me. I knew even then than it was something I wanted to do—pan for gold and make sourdough. Actually, I have done both, although not in Alaska.

You can make an initial starter utilizing yeast present in the air pretty much everywhere. Or, you can use a packet of commercial yeast for the initial batch and focus your purity on maintaining and using your starter without any further commercial yeast infusions. Since your starter will be joined by the yeasts in the air wherever you happen to be, it’s all going to become uniquely yours anyway.

If you choose to begin the process with commercial yeast, a cup of all purpose flour, a packet of dry yeast, two cups of hot (but not boiling) water, and you’re in business. Let it sit in a lightly covered, glass or plastic container for a week, stirring it down if it threatens to leave the container, and pouring off any liquid that forms at the top. The liquid is alcohol, one of the two by-products of yeast fermentation. The other by-product is carbon dioxide, the gas bubbles that make your breads or muffins, etc. rise. After the culture has become well-established, a week to ten days, you can start using the starter for all sorts of goodies. Use it down to the last cup and then replenish your starter by adding flour and water in the same one-to-two ratio.

I’ve met a lot of other people who keep sourdough “pets”, although none yet who were crazy enough to carry it across country on a motorcycle. If you’re someone who is a sourdough devotee, I’d love to hear your sourdough story. I plan to talk more about using sourdough, and camp cooking, in future blogs. Love to have you join the discussion.

The Next Big Thing

The Next Big Thing

I was tagged by Lesley Diehl to participate in The Next Big Thing, a blog event asking writers to talk about their works in progress. 

I’m happy to talk about my newest project.

1.What is your working title of your book?

The working title for my book is When a Young Girl Dies

2. Where did the idea come from for the book?In 2011 I published my first novel, Murder on Route 66. This is a story about a Harley Rider, Bobby Navarro, who finds his boss’ body stabbed to death and dumped in a parking lot in Tucumcari, New Mexico, on old Route 66. Bobby promises the victim’s ten-year old son he’ll do everything he can to find the killer. This story is a intended as a sequel to the first novel and, as it turns out, concerns another murder on old Route 66.

3. What genre does your book fall under?
This is a traditional mystery.
4. Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Bobby Navarro is of mixed ancestry, Mexican-American and Native American. I would want the part played by someone who displays these characteristics. Bobby is a biker, who loves riding solo on an open road, but he’s not covered with ink and doesn’t look like someone who belongs to a biker gang. He can be sensitive, especially when it comes to children…the victim in the second story is a young girl. He’s believable, and not an action hero. Any suggestions?

5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Bobby Navarro doesn’t know if the eccentric, who told him he knew who killed the young girl really does, but he knows he cannot get her image out of his mind, and won’t give up on finding her killer.6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

While the uncompleted manuscript is not yet under contract, I do not plan to self-publish it when it is finished.

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

With significant interruptions from floods and home remodeling projects, the nearly completed first draft has taken me about a year at this point.8. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I think I had the old television series, Route 66, in mind when I wrote the first book of this series. My character rides alone, and on a Harley rather than in a Corvette, but there are similarities, and the spirit captured by that original series is alive and well among Route 66 aficionados to date. I can’t think of any authors I’ve read who are doing that, so I would have to compare my story to the old television series.
9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I ride, I love the southwest, and the adventures one can find as they meet others.

10. What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?

This is not a simple whodunit, or action adventure. It’s about a person who tries to find himself on open roads, and becomes involved in the lives—and deaths—of others along the way.

The Writer's Voice

Writing with Voice

I've read a lot of comments about the writer's voice, that intangible element in a writer's work that is a unique and defining quality of that writer. Everyone seems to agree, finding one's voice is essential, and a good voice is priceless. Trouble is, voice is hard to pin down when you’re trying to explain, or talk about it. A writer’s voice can reflect his or her use of tempo, style of dialogue, or narrative description. Voice is not one thing, it’s not even a compilation of several, it’s the over-all effect of the way a writer expresses herself, or himself. And more. It even reflects subconscious aspects of the writer’s personality, mood, etc.
I like to think of voice as being similar to a person’s handwriting. Everyone’s handwriting is unique. It identifies the owner, and tells something about them. It may indicate openness or suspicion, optimism or negativity, a strong or weak ego, and so on. It can change over time. I think it’s interesting to see documents I signed years ago and how my own signature has changed. I’m sure I’m not alone.
So, what makes up this unique stamp? With handwriting, it has to do with the shape given various letters, their slant, size and even the pressure used to inscribe them. I’m not talking about the conscious formation of letters and words, but the impact of subsconscious elements on the script.

The author of the book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain relates this phenomenon to artistic expression. We can all express ourselves, give indications of our mood, character and temperament in our handwriting. Without even trying. Even if we think we have no artistic talent. I think the same thing is at work in voice.
As writers we can, and should, make a conscious effort to craft our work. We need to be concerned with tempo, plot, description, dialogue, and all the elements of effective writing. But on top of all that we are told we need to find and develop our voice. That used to puzzle me. How can you develop something that is subconscious to begin with? Why do you need to develop something that occurs subsciously and without intent? Moreover, this so-called developmental process we were supposed to seek seemed to be largely a matter of write, write, write. It was all a big mystery.
In Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, the aspiring artist is offered various exercises which have the effect of loosening the “left-sidedness” of drawing and enabling control by the right side of the brain. Learning that made me think of things I had read regarding Zen exercises, which seemed focus on giving up conscious thought control and freeing up the flow of deeper energies. These analogies also make me think of golf. As a golfer, I know it is disasterous to focus on the pond you don’t want to hit into, or the line of trees you don’t want to claim your ball yet again. The hit ball tends to follow the flawed pattern you seek to avoid every time. Instead, one needs to feel and remember the desired golf swings. A good golfer knows when a swing feels right and is able to remember and repeat the components that produced the desired outcome.
With these analogies to drawing and asthetics and athleticism in mind, it now makes sense that ones voice is developed through mastering the craft of writing and recognizing and releasing the flow of feelings, etc. that produce one’s desired “signature” voice. The craft side of writing is a constant conscious effort. We take pains to re-read our manuscripts, fine-tune our sentences, and pick out the perfect words. We ask ourselves if the plot is moving, if the tempo flows properly, if there’s a better adjective or verb. That work is necessary. But there are also times when the dialogue flows so freely it seems like we are merely transcribing an actual conversation. There are editing instances when a needed deletion frees the action and makes the scene pop. There are times when a paragraph of description sets the pace of a scene and creates the desired mood for it. We feel it, and know that it works, and hopefully remember how to do it the next time we want to. That’s where I think the writer’s voice is at work. Not through conscious effort to produce it, but through shutting off mechanical effort and releasing one’s inner self into the writing moment.
These moments may be rare, or frequent, long or short, but when they occur everything simply flows and the experience can be a writer’s high. They are more likely to occur when the craft side has been developed to the point of not having to think about it so much. They are likely to last longer when our familiarity with the characters in our story is so deep that we simply understand how they react in the situation at hand, when we mentally experience a landscape with all our senses, when our own viscera respond to the threat, or loss, or gain in the action taking place. For the writer, I think these feelings make up much of the most treasured experience of writing. It’s what makes writing so great, so worth all the effort. But, does it make the writing better? Is there a payoff for the reader? Obviously, yes. But, not all the time.

A writer’s voice may change over time, gaining different character, becoming more, or less, pleasing to a given reader. The writer changes. The writer’s life changes. The writing cannot stay the same. It it effected by the different conscious involvements and concerns of the writer, and by the writer's altering subscious. I suspect the writer cannot remain the same over time and through many publications. Something will change. But the changes may be wonderful, too. When the craft is supurb, the writer’s interest intense, and the voice is flowing through the work like a stream of cosmic enery, the reader is treated to scenes that are transportative. The reader can become lost in the writer’s moment, the time, the place, the event. The reader doesn’t read about a conversation, or get it second hand. The reader is there, hearing it, feeling it, a part of it. A good voice is like a comfortable chair, we know we can imerse ourselves in a wonderful experience as soon as we settle in and start to read.