Raven Jake Dawes

La Copine - New Restaurant in Flamingo Heights

 

Folks, there comes a time when camp food jut ain't gettin' it any more and you've got a hankerin' for something fancy. perhaps this impulse follows a soundbath at the Integratron. You don't know when it's going to hit. So if you're in the desert, but feeling like a gourmet Americana kind of meal is where it's at, Nikki Hill and Claire Wadsworth's new venture La Copine (Girlfriend) is it. Check out those vittles:

That eggplant parmesan is excellent, as is the tartine au saumon.  Save some room for dessert too. 

They tend to keep the hours they want to (a venerable desert tradition) and that includes a few months off for summer and the holidays, so check before you trek. It's also usually packed there and they don't take reservations. But once you make the journey, choice vittles await.

 

La Copine

848 Old Woman Springs Rd, Yucca Valley, CA 92284

(760) 289-8537

NOW OPEN: WED-SUN 2-7 pm

(walk-in only)

 

 

 

 

Reseasoning My Crusty Cast Iron

Y'all, I'm in the middle of a move and let me tell you, it's a rich voyage of discovery. Like King Tut's Tomb. Now I don't want to move anything that's going to go into go into another "maybe I'll fix this up someday..." pile. Time to roll up the old shirt sleeves and get to work. Here's some cast iron cookware I inherited that's pretty darned rusted (don't worry - no piece of cast iron is irredeemable. In certain quarters, it's a mark of shame if your iron's rusty, because it shows you ain't used it enough, but with some harsh chemicals and hard scrubbin' ANY piece of iron is salvageable. 

Seasoning iron is a Zen activity at best and a hot, tedious, stinky, time-consuming chore at worst. If you've got to do it anyway, might as well fill up that oven. Gather up all your iron, it ain't possible to over-season your pans.

Over there is your secret weapon - flax oil. 

The common wisdom, and what I've been doing all my life, is to wipe your new pan down with some canola oil and throw it in a 400 degree oven for an hour or so. Good to go. 

THIS IS COMPLETELY WRONG. I have seen the light, and I've got to thank Sheryl Canter, for setting me right.

After getting your cookware as clean and rust-free as humanly possible, put it in a 200 degree oven to get thoroughly dry and "open the pores" of the metal to better absorb the oil.

Flax oil. Flax oil only.

Rub a thin layer all over the pan, put it face-down in the oven and crank it up to 500 degrees. Cook it for an hour, then turn off the heat, and let it cool down in the oven. 

YOU DO THIS SIX (6) MORE TIMES

And your house smells like you're  frying fish.

Don't try putting on a thick layer, it will just be a gooey mess.

Seven times all up. Gonna take days.

But it's worth it. The final product turns out perfectly non-stick with a lovely shiny coffee brown polymerized hard-as-nails surface.

Note the difference in that fajita pan - just a black mirror (and a long ways from its scabby beginnings.) All of it looks better than new. Like I said, if you have to do the work anyways, git all your irons in the fire! 

 I haven't had a steak in a long while, but this recipe using a cast iron

pan on the stove has me thinkin' about it. Comes highly recommended.

In the meantime, I think I've found my perfect pan for grillin' veggies.

Cambria also did this experiment, and found that one of Sheryl's commentators had some more sound advice:

"The final thing I do for skillets after seasoning is to cook some "throw-away" eggs in olive oil. Scrape them around the entire bottom of the skillet with a good stainless steel spatula. I use a Dexters (which are collectables in their own right and made in the USA!). The eggs will stick at first. Scour the skillet with kosher salt and oil. Repeat two or three more times. After that you’ll find the eggs slide around like Teflon."  

So I'll be giving that a shot too, and see what happens. Bon Appétit, y'all.

Joshua Tree Pods - Edible or Not?

Alright, I've been hearing this persistant rumor that the seed pods of the Joshua Tree, Yucca brevifolia, are edible. Not just in the sense of "it won't kill you," but like something you might actually want to eat. I'm talkin' about stuff like this:

The stems can be baked, and the blossoms, minus the bitter centers, can be cooked and eaten. The young flower stalks are edible. The flowers are edible raw or cooked as a potherb. Check them for insects before cooking or eating them. The seed pods and seeds are edible when they are young, raw or baked in ashes. They can be sliced, dried, and stored. They taste similar to banana.

Similar to the most bitter, alkaline bananas you can imagine, I guess...

Fruit of the Joshua Tree

• The greenish-brown fruit of the Joshua Tree is oval and somewhat fleshy. The 2- to 4-inch-long fruit grows in clusters and is edible. According to "The Oxford Companion to Food," mature pods can be roasted and have a sweet, candy-like flavor. Each fruit contains many flat seeds, which are released on the ground when a fruit dries on the tree and falls to the ground in late spring.

Flowers and Pollination

• The flowers of the Joshua tree are bell-shaped, slightly longer than an inch and have six creamy, yellowish-green sepals. The flowers are grouped into clusters, have an unpleasant odor and blossom mostly in the spring. The Joshua Tree, like most yuccas, relies on a single species, the female pronuba moth, for pollination. No other animal transfers the tree's pollen. The moth lays her eggs in the flowers and the hatched larvae feed on the seeds contained in the fruit.

Maybe it'd be better to just eat the moth...

And finally -

Edible Parts: Flowers; Fruit;  Root; Seed; Seedpod.

Flowers - cooked. The flower buds, before opening, can be parboiled in salt water to remove the bitterness, drained and then cooked again and served like cauliflower. The opened flowers are rich in sugar and can be roasted and eaten as candy. Fruit - cooked. The fruits can be roasted then formed into cakes and dried for later use. Root - raw, boiled or roasted. Seed. Gathered and eaten by the local Indians. No further details are given, but it is probably ground into a powder and mixed with cornmeal or other flours and used for making bread, cakes etc. Immature seedpod. No more details given. [this is credited as Joshua Tree, but might actually be generic yucca]

If I were one of the locals; Cahuilla, Chemhuevi, Serrano et al, I'd tell the settlers to eat one just for a laugh.

Couple o' things: this has been one of the best years ever for Joshua Tree blooms, although now most of the bloomin' is over and they're poding up. Edibility? So far, so gross. So some kids have been hospitalized for eating a spoonful of cinnamon on a dare? So what? Doesn't even compare to the dreaded yucca pod. So if any of y'all actually have a recipe for Joshua Somethin'-or-Other I'd love to hear about it, 'cause it sure don't taste like banana!

 

Heirloom Tomatoes

Got the first tomatoes  of the season here, some heirloom classics.  Brandywine,  Green Zebra  - the usual suspects. Jane assures me they're delicious - I'm not a big raw tomato fan myself. Well, growin' them is almost as good as eatin' them. Had a couple of Japanese  eggplants too (the black beauties are lagging just a bit), and they were terrific.  Ha ha squirrels, here are four you're not getting...

New Website

Alright everybody, some of you have been around long enough to know that I've got an alter ego, a character if you will, called Jeryd Pojawa. I thought him up years ago, and he's had a pretty decent career out there in Hollywood.

Anyway, it was getting to be time to blow the dust off the old scrapbooks and reassess the beauty / functionality / money / time continuum of this summer and well, that kind of thing can lead to more of the same.

So to that end, Jane spent some time scanning and coding and uploading and widgeting and all that kind of thing and put together this website. Probably won't ever be "done"  - but it's got a pretty comprehensive scope of the careers of Jeryd Pojawa and Raven Jake Dawes.

Check it out - you're sure to find something you like whether it's Han Solo's keychain or my portrayal of a creepy serial killer/photographer in a cop show. Maybe you like freak cards (I sure do) or movies about stuff exploding. Or trade show booths. Like I said, something for everybody. There's even a song on there, if you can find it.

So big thanks to my lovely wife for gettin' on it, and hopefully you'll find something up there that puts a smile on your face.

www.jerydpojawa.com

I call it maize

Folks, the ground squirrels are truly the bane of my existence, well them and grasshoppers, and yet it isn't all bad news. Case in point: corn. We ate two of the tastiest little cobs ever last night and it almost made up for all the squash and cucumbers we aren't getting. So here's week 14 - it's all about the corn (plus the eggplant are finally starting to catch up!)

Garden 2012: Week 8

Gettin' into week 8 now. Rodent predation is way down; still having some leaf-eating bug issues. They've been decimating the tomatillos pretty regularly, and the salsa verde forcast is looking grim. We ate two little teeny crookneck squash yesterday and a couple of green onions, so it ain't just the ground squirrels who are eating good. Actually, I think I may have ended their reign of terror permanently, but we'll see - in a garden things are changin' all the time. For example - the corn's starting to tassel and the cucumbers are really coming along. And using discarded carpet as a ground cover is the best idea ever, so big thanks to Mel Bartholomew and Square Foot Gardening for that one.

Rodent Jihad

That's right, folks - due to recent terrorist activity, I've been forced to declare a holy war against yard rodents, specifically ground squirrels. Here we are at week six and three of the corn plants were sucked underground, some of the beans have been decimated and all of the young squash have been chewed right off the vine. The tomatilos are recovering from the grasshopper predation, the radishes are coming along nicely and there are lots of tomato blossoms, but no little tomatoesyet. In the meantime, ground squirrels have overrun the yard, setting up a base of operation under the woodpile. While we were sitting out by the garden the other afternoon, a rat ran out of the garage and along the fence.

Now I've got no great love of rats, but they freak Jane right out. She sees them as scuttling plague vectors, so it doesn't take much to get her goin'. Ironically, we were reading Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitantsby Robert Sullivan at the time. It's quite a page-turner. I thought Jane might be a little too fragile to handle a whole book about rats, but she seems to be coping nicely. On the other hand, those rats better watch out. Same with the gophers and the ground squirrels. Y'all mind your own business, and we'll get along fine. Mess with my garden, and suffer primate wrath.

Garden 2012, week 2

Well folks, I promised regular reports and here's week 2 of the garden!

See? Everything's just a little bigger.  Some horrible insect chewed the leaves on the tomatillos, cutworms got a couple of the cucumbers, and birds have been getting into the sunflower/bean row. No serious damage done, though, and the radishes are starting to come up. I love radishes, but Jane says they taste like dirt only more bitter. Whatever. We got a bunch of rain in the last couple o' days, which is especially welcome.

Garden 2012: The journey begins

Folks, here's Day 1 of the new garden. Which was Sunday, actually. We didn't get one in last year, and the 2010 garden was pretty well gophered out of existence. No matter: it's the dawning of a new day.

We decided to re-read "Square Foot Gardening," get some pointers and came up with this modified plan of attack. One tip we took to heart was using an old carpet as a weed cloth / mulch. That seemed crazy enough to work, and when Jane found a couple off on the side of the road, it seemed like a Sign.

Now Jane's one of those people who don't think you can have too many tomatoes. My opinion is that a raw tomato is the most disgusting thing you could possibly put in your mouth. It's a point of contention. We also went for sunflowers, cucumbers, corn, Brussels sprouts,  zuccini, acorn squash, crookneck (wasn't my pick), eggplant, cilantro, nasturtiums, salad greens, onions and tomatillos. Later we'll add pumpkins, maybe some beans and chard and a whole lot of peppers.

For good or ill, I'll be keepin' you posted on Garden 2012!