It has been a hard week. I'm down to the last supper before my surgery at 5am. Today the doctors laid out all the different things they are going to cut and splice and paste out, onto, and into me. I still feel eminently lucky to be here at this amazing hospital and am thankful for the dedication and ability of  these people, but I am a little scared as I get closer to the reality of the thing. 

I have learned a lot about dining out in Houston this week- Houston has become a much better food town in the past few years and we have had some truly memorable meals here in preparation for a month of taking food in through a little plastic tube that will run into my nose and down to my stomach. 

Today a nurse wrote on my skin "this side" so they would cut me on the correct side of my neck. I was reminded of thirty years ago when I had big red squares on each side of my jaw to aim the radiation machines at, and when Stevie Ray Vaughn and Bobby Earl Smith saw me, they went upstairs at the Rome Inn and got red markers and drew big red boxes on their faces in solidarity with me after some asshole at the bar made fun of me.  I loved Stevie, he had a large, sweet heart. 

And, as Paul Bumgartner would always say, "And so we go..."

See you on the other side!

Peace and Love,

Joe Gracey, Jr.

What, Again?

Joe in Lyon, France with chicken liver salade, happy

I figure it’s time to talk to my friends and readers who may be interested in what I’ve been up to lately. The quick answer is I learned that I have cancer. Again. After thirty joyous years of being a proud “survivor” I’m back being a “patient” again.

As I have written about here in the past, my first experiences with cancer and recovery actually led to some good things, like my intense interest and pleasure in food and wine and “life its own self”, to quote the sainted Dan Jenkins. Most of my cooking and eating experiences since 1979 are the outgrowth of those battles with cancer and the aftermath in which I began to reprioritize my new life.

Since then my wife and I wrote a quirky little cookbook/novella, “The Amazing Afterlife of Zimmerman Fees”. We teach cooking classes at Central Market in Austin and we have been known to cook for parties and dinners for money, and to be serious about it. I have written for Saveur magazine and others. We cook for our own pleasure and the pleasure of our friends and family and guests, as another expression of our artistic personalities. Cooking is fun, is expression, is life, family, reunion, reinforcement. And, as one of my writer heroes Jim Harrison says, “Eat or Die!”

So, to find out I have cancer now is rather unnerving. I have a small cancerous area on the inside of my gums, next to my jaw. Nobody knows yet just how large or deep it may be. I plunged into fear- fear that I would lose the ability to eat at all, much less slowly and laboriously as it is now. That I would lose my lower jaw, that I would lose my face, or my life. When you learn something like this your imagination runs as wild as a pet chimp let loose in a mall of horrors. What if this? What if that? What will they do to me? How much pain? Horror? Misery? Blood? The human mind is capable of both soaring sweetness and mindless blundering fear.

However, there is a vast beaming City on a Hill (a hill of hope only, since Houston is so flat the gutters don’t flow) called M.D. Anderson. On going there last week I met a team of brilliant doctors and speech pathologists and nurses and beaming staff, smiles and kindness at every turn. Capability everywhere brought to an acute point- you realize you are in the place where the best people are doing the most advanced and specialized things.

Instead of sadness and despair, people are undergoing treatment with hopeful eyes and confident faces. Treatments that out there in the world look sci-fi. Chemo, radical surgeries, skin and tissue grafts, skin radiated until it is literally glowing red. Out there we are great oddities and people stare at us uncontrollably (more on that later, I have thought about that a good deal over the last 30 years) but inside MDA we are all just people being worked on, no big deal.

In a week I went from runaway terror to runaway giddiness after I finally got a dose of reality. A brilliant lady surgeon who made me feel a hundred times better within an hour. A chemo specialist whose intelligence and sense of humour were like a cool drink of water on a West Texas summer day when the grasshoppers are louder than the oil derricks. I am apparently to be surrounded by a team of doctors and researchers all of whom would be considered the best in their fields in any hospital in the world. An oncological dentist whose mind, while examining me, begins to fly through vast expanses of possibilities and then quickly draw up tentative plans and ideas to make me better, almost whole, again. We ask her what she is going to do and her answer is “I’m going to think!” And when she thinks, big stuff happens.

I like being in the care of women. It reassures me. There is nothing in the world more competent than a woman who has triumphed in a man’s world, as this Western medical world surely has been for hundreds of years . As I observed to Kimmie afterwards at late lunch at our favorite Houston bistro, Café Rabelais, you can bet that any girl who makes it this far would have been able to kick the classroom-ass of any guy in school, both because she is really, really sharp, and because she has had to work harder to prove it.

And, now, as the final, wild, impossible cherry on top of this sudden Gulf Coast Good News Sundae, the women (again) in speech pathology say I should be able to speak again. Uh-huh. I, in my sternest fashion, say that I come here with very little hope of that possibility. Jodi the speech pathologist is not fazed by my fatherly gravity. She sneaks up on me and jams a little white tube up my nose and down my throat and tells me to loosen up and quit whining. When she has it halfway to China, she tells me to breathe in and when I breathe out, say “One, Two, Three”. Ok. I breathe in, open my mouth which I haven’t used to speak a word in exactly thirty years, and out comes a gurgling, deep “one, two, three” and it is me, talking quite clearly. I look over and Kimmie has tears coming out of the corners of her eyes and down her sweet cheeks and she says “that is the first thing I ever heard him say”. I laugh and say I sound like one of those movie swamp monsters. They ask me if I want to say anything else and instead of saying “I love you” to Kimmie like I, played by Russell Crowe, will say when they make this movie, I just raise my hands in claws and gurgle “AAAaaaaarrrrghhhhh” like a swamp monster. It gets a big laugh but I notice the other speech lady also has tears and she has to leave. My nose-tube taskmaster Jodi tells me about this patient she has who is in exactly the same shape I am in- no larynx, no tongue, but he is, like me, shaped correctly to be able to use this method to “speak” and has been now for six years. She will put me in touch with him so I can get it from the horse’s mouth, via email.

Yikes. As of today, I’m still walking around this one, kicking the tires and wondering if I can drive this baby or not. It is the Porsche Cayenne of my dreams, as Rodney said later. I am imagining the comic possibilities of this new toy, saying ridiculous things, cursing, singing in a monotone in a voice like Tom Waits. Let me at it, I can’t wait to try this out. Surgery, smurgery. Pain? Gimme morphine for my pain and red wine for my brain. The memory of pain is short. Me talking again? The crazed wonder of it is carrying me away on a river of impossible happiness.

So, that’s what I been doing while school was out. Wish me luck and wait for the audio file of me singing “Picture in a Frame” to appear soon in this space.

Peace and Love,

Joe Gracey, Jr.

A Pig’s Foot and a Bottle of Beer

"Gimme A Pig's Foot and A Bottle of Beer..."

I love pig. I love all of the pig that is remotely edible. Tail to snout, the pig is a most noble food-providing animal. It is slightly disconcerting to eat an animal that is as intelligent as a pig; it is kind of like eating a dolphin, or a dog- it discomfits me a little, but not enough to make me stop.

I had one of those life-jarring moments involving pig, the kind where your whole direction gets jolted over a degree or two and you are not the same afterwards. It was in Switzerland, where we were living in a little town called Buchs on the road into Lichtenstien and going out from there to play shows. At our hotel we kept ordering this little Pinot Noir from the nearby village of Flasch. Flascher was delicious, bright, fresh and fruity as only a Pinot can be. To find this in Switzerland at $6.00 a bottle, with a soft drink cap on it, was damn fine. So one day we got in our car and decided to drive down there and look around the town.

When we got to the center of the village we could see a balcony and people eating lunch and we wanted something to eat so we started to look for the entrance but of course by the time we sat down lunch was over, as it is in all civilized places after 2pm. It was a balmy, sunny day and we were overlooking a vineyard right smack in the center of town. We ordered a bottle of the little Pinot and a basket of bread and cheese and made do. One table over, a tiny old man watched as the waitress set down a huge roasted joint of some kind, steaming and fragrant. I asked her what it was and if I could get one, but no. It was a hog shank, but not the little wimpy ones you see here smoked and withered under plastic at the store. It was as big as a football and still had all the skin and fat and melted connective tissue. He grinned and stuck his napkin in his shirt and commenced to tackle that baby and I wanted one of my very own. I have been on a determined search for good pork shank ever since, to little avail. And, feet of course.

Pork Trotter at Pied de Cochon, Paris

Pork feet, or trotters as they are called in Britain and Ireland, can be had in the stores here, but always cut up if you are in a typical grocery store and whole if you are in a Mexican grocery, but even there they automatically cut them in half or into pieces if you don’t stop them fast. However, these trotters have had the shank portion removed, so there is very little meat on them and if you cook them you are doing it for the skin, which is delicious, and the bits of meat here and there and the fat and melted connective stuff. I love to eat at Pied de Cochon in Paris, where they gently simmer them, then roll them in bread crumbs and brown them all over and serve them with béarnaise sauce.

But this is about a different idea, one that I initially came across in Thomas Keller's Bouchon cookbook. This grabbed me and I tried making it his way with good result, but I have modified it and it has evolved as I had other versions, notably one at Chapter One in Dublin, our favorite spot there. At Le Bistro de Lyon they served it on a "pasta flan", a bed of fettucini mixed with egg yolk and heated in a ring mold. I think I finally have it under control now and here’s my version:

Saucisse de Pied de Porc

To make the saucisse mixture:

- Pork feet, about two pounds

- 1 yellow onion, coarsely chopped

- 1 Celery stalk, coarsely chopped

- 1 carrot

- 1 t. good dried thyme, or handful fresh

- 1 bay leaf

- 1 handful flat leaf parsley

- 3 cloves garlic, coarsely chopped

- 1 T. peppercorns

- 1 t. whole cloves

- water to cover

- sheet of heavy foil, or doubled regular foil, about 15” square

To Serve:

- Flour

- Dijon mustard

- bread crumbs

- Bread rounds, crusts removed, toasted

- or, cooked fettucini mixed with egg yolk and heated in a small circular egg mold

Place the mixture ingredients into a heavy pot and simmer gently for at least 3 hours (or crockpot overnight) until meat and skin are falling off the bone. Remove all of the feet from the broth and reserve both. Strain the broth for a different use (demiglace!) Remove all bones carefully; there are very small ones that are easy to miss. Hand chop the meat and skin and fat together very fine. Place in a mixing bowl and mix in 1 teaspoon of the mustard, a pinch of sea salt, and some freshly ground pepper. Do not add any of the broth; it will make the “sausage” too loose and fall apart. Mix thoroughly and spread the mixture on the foil sheet on the end nearest you. Now roll the foil up over the mixture and roll it over several times. Twist the ends of the foil until they cause the mixture to be compacted. Put this in the refrigerator overnight.

To cook the saucisse, slice into 1/2” rounds. Roll in flour, dip into mustard to cover, and roll in breadcrumbs. Sauté relatively quickly in butter, turning gently to brown. (Gently, or they will fall apart on you.) Place on a bread round or a pasta flan, sprinkle with coarse fleur de sel and fresh pepper and serve it forth! (At this point you could also put mustard on the table, or sauce béarnaise, or sauce gribiche.)