Eulogy for My Mother

My mother died yesterday. We all miss her terribly, but are glad that she is no longer suffering. I am putting down a few thoughts as they come to me:

Now, as Kimmie and I get to travel Europe in search of new venues for our music, and as we sample the foods and cultures of each place we are in, I think back to my mother’s insistent drumbeat- travel is good, food is worthwhile, new experiences will make you a better person. I would simply not be who I am had she not been there to weave that into the base fabric of my being.

I would not be writing now, for the same reasons. "English is a beautiful language and writing an art that is worthwhile. Reading is fun but it is also a learned skill and one that will repay you a thousand ways. Intelligent people read newspapers and books and learn from them, and never stop. A writer is as much an artist as a painter or a violinist or a dancer." I didn’t just make those things up; she taught me those things, over and over.

I like to tease her friends by saying my mother was a closet liberal, but there is a kernel of truth to this; we were raised to have respect for other cultures and races and languages. I learned from her to despise racial and cultural bigotry . I learned the story of the Jews and the terrible history of the African-Americans. I learned to respect and tolerate other opinions as long as they were morally acceptable. There were no closed minds in my home. Everything was open to discussion and debate and sometimes opinions were changed. We even managed to get through my Vietnam marching and long hair and dropping out of the fraternity, somehow. She hummed along to my Beatles records and drove me to Dallas to get my first bass guitar at the Sears there, and drove me to get my first radio job (but only because that’s how Tommy Vandergriff started). She cussed the liberal media but loved Walter Cronkite, and was proud of me when I started writing for the Austin Statesman, even if it was a column about rock & roll music, and thought it was funny when my father’s friend Walter Caven said “Joe, our kids would be fine if we could just knock some of these damned principles out of 'em”.

She guided us in ways overt and subvert. She offered good advice when my brother was casting about for a good career path. She kept her own counsel when we would make bad choices, most of the time. She tolerated my wild lifestyle, perhaps knowing that I might just grow out of it someday. She sat by my bed for months when I fought cancer at 27 at MD Anderson, and called her friend there to get me a good doctor when I needed it badly.

She took us to the library and the bookmobile religiously, long before there was anything called a Summer Reading Program. She bought us Glen Miller records and broadway musicals and took us to Casa Manana and the symphony and to the Louvre in Paris, and got us into chic restaurants in New York so we would know what really good food was and be citizens of the wider world. She set us up so that we could take off from where she had to stop, and wished us well. She gave us the tools to live these amazing lives we now have, and she did it on purpose, too. I can’t take a step now without thanking her for it. And now, in her passing, she is ours forever. She lives on, very alive in our hearts and minds and actions. God Bless Maryann.

Dangerous Beauty

Mushrooms are fascinating; there is something mysterious, even frightening about them. They can make you sick, or kill you, or make you high, or fill you with pleasure. They have a strange, fleshy texture and they can taste like meat or seafood. To me, there is no aroma any more compelling than that of dried cepes. I keep them on hand and throw them into all sorts of braises, stocks, and the odd dish just for the little jolt of richness and beefy gravity they introduce. 

They also make a huge difference in a regular cream of mushroom soup. We ran across some beautiful portabellos in the market and decided to work on our mushroom soup recipe. I have never done a side-by-side tasting of portabellos and regular white button mushrooms, but the brown color makes them look like they have more flavor to me, so I use them or crimini. 

I suppose their are two choices when making a cream of mushroom soup. It needs to be thickened, which means either a roux of oil and flour or an addition of an egg yolk and cream liaison. For this version I used a roux, some stock, whole milk, and just a soupçon of cream at the end. I also used another one of my secret weapons, a dash of black truffle oil.

Cream of Mushroom Soup

1 oz. dried cepes

2 c. chicken stock

1 yellow onion, coarsely chopped

4 fresh portabello mushrooms, stems removed & reserved

4 T. butter

4 T. flour

2 c. whole milk

1/2 c. heavy cream

1/2 t. black truffle oil

s & p

Heat the chicken stock until warm, add the cepes and let them hydrate for ten minutes. Remove and reserve the cepes. Add the onion and the cleaned stems to the stock and simmer for 30 minutes. Meanwhile, roughly chop the portabello caps and the cepes together and sauté in a mixture of olive oil and butter until they are browned and give up their liquid. Remove and reserve the mushrooms. Heat the butter until bubbling and add the flour, whisking, for just a minute or so. Add the cold milk and strain the stock into the pan and stir. Add salt & pepper, mushrooms, and the dash of truffle oil. Simmer for 30 minutes and taste for seasoning. Now use a food processor or immersion blender to puree the soup. Add the cream and gently reheat to a simmer and serve.    Should make 4 one-cup servings. 

Sources:

D'Artagnan

Oregon Mushrooms

Various

Chef Paul's Tomate-Suppe

One of the good things about being a traveling musician is you meet people along the way and some of them become good friends. As a result of this, we now have “close” friends scattered from Belfast to Prague. The flip side is, sometimes you lose track and it is very hard to locate them. One of our best buddies along the way was Chef Paul Bumgartner, who ran a little hotel and restaurant in Buchs, Switzerland. Paul loved music, and musicians, and the chapter in our lives spent in his hotel jamming all night with Gypsies, eating his great cooking, and soaking up the culture is one of our fondest memories. His recipes pepper our cookbook, The Amazing Afterlife of Zimmerman Fees, and the war stories from those days are never far from being retold. However, Chef Paul disappeared years ago and we never could find him. We haven’t been back to Buchs, or played any of those gigs, in years. That’s just the way it is with our kind of business. Scenes open up to you, you run with it, and then they close and go away.

We were playing a show in Switzerland last year not far from Zurich, but a long way from Buchs, and we wondered idly where Paul had disappeared to. That night, somebody came up behind Kimmie and tapped her on the shoulder and there he was, The Paul Himself, back in our lives again. At last I was able to find out the secret of the Spargel-Suppe! (It was an egg and cream laison.)

Since I am currently confined to a liquid diet, soups are the obvious answer for a gourmand yearning for real flavor. We were just in the Dallas Farmer’s Market, on our way home to Austin, and bought a ton of ripe tomatoes. One of Chef Paul’s good soups was a cream of tomato, and he told us how he did it. This one stood the test of time very well; we make it all the time, liquid diet or no:

 

Chef Paul’s Tomato-Bacon Soup

1 yellow onion, chopped

3 slices smoked bacon

1 oz unsalted butter

1 24 oz canned peeled tomatoes  with juice

2 cups chicken stock

sea salt, freshly ground pepper

1/2 c. cream

Makes about 6 one-cup servings

 

Gently sauté the bacon until the fat renders out. Remove bacon. Add an ounce of butter if needed. Add the onions and sauté them for about 20 minutes until soft. Add the tomatoes and juice and 2 cups of stock. Simmer for 20 minutes. Add the bacon and puree the mixture completely. Adjust the salt & pepper. To serve, drizzle some of the cream over the top of the bowl of soup, or whip it and add a spoonful to the soup as a garnish.