Traveling Feast

I have a backlog of blog posts going back into May that include experiences in New England and New York as well as in some of my favorite spots in the Northwest: Oregon’s Williamette Valley, Portland, and Seattle.  Yet moving to the front of the line last night was my first taste of frog.

Snails are old hat.  Ate them.  Like them.

But frog legs are in a culinary corner all their own and far from ubiquitous on menus in the Northwest… or anywhere else I’ve been in the last few years including China.  I associate them almost exclusively with high French cuisine, but they appeared unexpectedly in among the appetizers at Syringa in Coeur d’Alene last night.

Not that Viljo Basso is your typical chef/owner of a Japanese restaurant.  His name alone is hardly what you’d expect for the proprietor of an Asian establishment, and the truth is that his culinary training is both in classical French and Japanese cooking.  This might explain another appetizer on Syringa’s menu: beef tongue.  Like the frog legs, tongue is not normally a headliner for a Japanese restaurant… at least in this country.   Neither are frog legs, but there they were just above the potstickers, poké, and tempura.

Some combination of curiosity and bravado spurred me to order them.  Our server, Sara, said “They taste like chicken.”

Not so much.  The texture of the meat is certainly reminiscent of stringy chicken, but the flavor of those we tried last night is almost all fish.  Blythe Thimsen, my editor at Spokane Coeur d’Alene Living, announced that “they taste like cod” and declined the offer of a second leg.  I don’t blame her; the curious texture/flavor disconnect is a bit disconcerting.

I worked my way through three, partly just to prove I could, but don’t feel the need to order them again anytime soon.  Much of this is mental: in addition to the texture/flavor issue there is also the visual effect.

Frog legs look like chicken legs stretched out on some medieval torture device, and they somehow give the impression of being more like the parts of an animal that they are and less like something we recognize as food.  This reaction would most likely go away if frog legs were served more often, but they’re not.  And, as such, they will probably remain little more than a Francophile favorite for quite some time to come.

How best to describe Winona?  LaDuke in a Native American leader and, as such, it it hard not to collect the title “activist” as well but rather than refine a rant and hit the speaking circuit, she seems to have instead put her passion into doing a great deal to help her tribe and quite a few other along the way.  I had the chance to hear her describe some of what she has done through Native Harvest last night.

Convinced that the huge issues facing us all in the coming years will be food security and energy security she had committed the last several decades of her life to creating capacity for both on her reservation in Minnesota.  There is the heritage maple syrup operation with 5000 taps, a wild rice mill, a farm, restaurant, and organic coffee roaster.

She is pushing for wood stoves to be returned to homes of families that have had to fight to keep their power on through the winter.  She has begun to buy up used wind turbines and install them on farms on the reservation.  With a wry grin she notes: “Have you noticed that Indian land has some of the highest winds around?  I consider this an opportunity.”

In her spare time she has also started a school, day care, reintroduced sturgeon to a local lake, and received FCC approval for a radio station.

She observes that short term thinking seems to have produced as many problems as progress and that the Native cyclical worldview could be a huge gift in helping us reclaim a good life not defined by over-consumption.  The call, she says, is to make decisions with seven generations in mind rather than just the profits for the next quarter.  Think of it, she suggests as “positive window shopping for your future” and uses a very broad definition of ‘your’ future to include your children and your children’s children and your children’s children’s children out to the seventh generation.

Two of the top growth industries in our country right now are waste management and prison system.  Both suggest we are currently living in a throw away culture where both things and people are tossed aside when broken.  It is so common now to hear the phrase: “Just throw it away.”  LaDuke asks the question: “Where is ‘away’?”

Thanks Winona for challenging me to think.  I grew up on a reservation too, and was only too happy to leave.  I may need to go back and learn a few things.

Alexa Wilson and her team at the Wild Sage bistro on 2nd Avenue in Spokane skip the typical bread platter in favor of their signature popovers.  This in itself is a gift, but combine it with their current sweet fennel and citrus butter and there is good reason for you to drop what you are doing this moment and race down for a few bites of bliss.