Month: October 2016 (Page 1 of 5)

I have made broth many times. Plop a chicken in the pot with onion, carrots, celery, salt, a few whole cloves and a bunch of water, simmer it for a couple of hours, strain out the chunks and it’s a good base for soups and sauces. Or, roast some meaty beef bones in the oven, add them to a pot of water with onions, carrots, celery, salt and a bay leaf, and simmer and strain. Easy. I don’t even look in my cookbook anymore. I may not be Julia Child, but it’s just broth.

My husband’s recent health issues required him to be on a liquid diet, so I wanted whatever he drank to be as healthy and nutritious as possible. The day before he was coming home from the hospital, I decided to take broth more seriously and make bone broth. I went to the store to collect the ingredients for this elixir of the good life, knowing that “sipping on bone broth” has become the preferred health insurance of the hipster-paleo eaters I see on Facebook.

This was not a Safeway trip. I went instead to Andronico’s, the high-end grocery store nearby, in search of meaty bones from pasture-raised, grass-fed-and-finished, antibiotic-free, ethically-raised cows, or a cage-free, free-run, hormone-free, grain-only, ethically-raised chicken. Only the best bones for this bone broth.

Andronico’s had chicken that met my broth standards, but nothing that would work for the beef broth. I crossed the street to a little shop called The Local Butcher. It’s great–I have been there before, and love their quality and ethical sourcing. They buy whole animals from small, organic farms and their products are the best. It’s the perfect place to get good bones.

This time, I was following a recipe so I could get the broth just right, and it called for four pounds of bones. I asked for that at the counter, and the butcher brought out a big tub full of chunks of white bones with beautiful red meat clinging to them. They were really nice soup bones. She piled them on the scale, wrapped them up and asked if I would like anything else. I picked out a few more things–some ground beef, sausage and a dog treat–and took my purchases to the register.

I tried not to let my expression change when the total was much higher than I expected. I was just getting some bones, hamburger and hotdogs. “How much are the soup bones per pound?” I asked casually. They were more per pound than pure chunks of meat at Safeway. Or Andronico’s.

I took them home, carefully roasted them, lovingly transfered them to a large pot, nestled organic vegetables around them, and added the water. I poured in a few cups more water than the recipe called for, hoping to stretch the goodness a little.

When all was cooked and cooled and strained, I ended up with seven cups of rich, glorious broth. This was precious liquid. I hoped it would have all the wonderful, healing properties associated with bone broth in concentrated form, because there probably wasn’t going to be any more of it.

I told a friend about my pricey soup bones, and she gasped. “No, don’t get them THERE,” she said. She is a bone-broth sipper. She shared her source with me, another local butcher who apparently hasn’t caught on to the bone-broth craze and realized what he could charge.

My husband is finally better, and I can’t say for sure if the bone broth made any difference in his healing.  Making it–and even spending so much on it–was healing for me, though. When life feels out of control, at least I can make sure that every last drop of bone broth is as perfect as I can possibly make it.

I don’t really care much about fishing. I like the idea of it, and I’m happy to have people around me doing it, but I don’t get my hands dirty very often. My husband grew up fishing, and it is a part of his life that he enjoys. He has made it a part of our family life.

In one famous bit of family lore, he and a friend went on a backpacking trip in the Sierra when they were teens. The plan was to catch and eat fish the whole time so they wouldn’t have to carry food for the long trip. They caught plenty of trout, but after ten days, they had more than their fill of fish.  When they got back to the trailhead, they had a little money with them, so they bought as much candy they could in the camp store and devoured it while they waited for their ride home.

His taste for trout came back, and one summer before we had kids we stayed with friends at their cabin in the mountains. On a hike, the guys found a little pool in the stream where some brook trout had gotten trapped. They caught them with their hands by cornering them and flipping them out onto the sandy shore. I’m pretty sure that is frowned upon by the forest service, but we grilled and ate the evidence–it was delicious.

My husband was excited to teach our kids how to fish, so we took our young daughters–four and two–to a place called Trout Haven in Estes Park, Colorado while we were vacationing there one summer. It had a little pond stocked full of fish. Catching fish was guaranteed.

They outfitted the girls with kid-sized poles and provided the bait. Our oldest daughter, wearing her Beauty and the Beast outfit, and the younger one in purple patterned leggings and matching flowered top, danced with excitement while dad put bait on the hooks and showed them how to cast the line into the pond. Our third daughter, who was one, was in a backpack on his back, craning her neck to see everything, her cheeks rosy with excitement.

When they felt a tug that meant a fish had taken the bait, the girls called loudly for dad, who scooped the fish into a net and helped them plop the slippery, shiny, wriggling trout into a bucket of water. After they caught a few, the fish were measured–they charged by the inch–and taken to the on site restaurant where they cleaned and cooked them for us. We ate the fish we had just caught at a table overlooking the pond.

Another summer years later, at a beautiful mountain lake near Tahoe, our 6-year-old daughter was perched on a rock with her line in the water when she got a nibble. She stood up, yelled for someone to help her with the net, and flopped into the water. Whether it was a very big fish or the excitement of catching something that made her lose her balance, we don’t know. We pulled her out, sputtering and embarrassed, from the shallow, cold water.

My husband took up fly fishing for a while, inspired by inheriting his great grandfather’s old bamboo fly rods and hand-tied flies. On camping trips, he left the kids and me sleeping in the camper while he ventured out before dawn to fish. I don’t know if he caught much, but being out in the middle of a quiet, scenic river was the most of the enjoyment anyway.

One time in Yellowstone, he waded into the cold water on a late afternoon to fish, and when he got back to camp, he took off his wet cutoffs and hung them outside. The next morning, we found them frozen stiff; when we took them off the line they stood up on their own, looking like they had frozen where he stepped out of them.

For the last several years, Pinecrest Lake has been the site of the Men’s Fishing Trip over Memorial Day Weekend. The Hanawalt men tie our red three-man canoe on top of the car, stop by Safeway for provisions, and take to the hills for the long weekend. Sometimes they catch enough to bring trout home for the women folk, but even on low-catch years, there are tales of bravado: finding a secret fishing hole with the big ones–the lunkers–in it, paddling furiously across the lake in wind and rain to get back before dark, and of course, the story of the one that got away.

The girls and I sometimes plan our own weekend activities since we aren’t  included in the fishing and stogie trip. This year we went wine-tasting in Sonoma. I don’t think they would bar us from coming if we wanted to; the early enthusiasm the girls showed for fishing has waned, though, and they’d rather spend the weekend doing something else.

After fishing with a friend on a backpacking trip recently, our youngest son complained that his friend knew how to fish, but he wasn’t a fisherman–he threw the line in, didn’t get anything, and gave up. Stocked ponds aside, that’s not how it works.

The mark of someone who fishes isn’t how many he’s caught, but how many hours he’s willing to wait around for that little tug on the line. Maybe the reason fishing  holds appeal for some and not others is the pace of it. Fishing slows you down; it’s a sport that is more about the company and the surroundings than the action. That’s the part of it that I resonate with, and I can share those benefits by just going along for the ride.

Water is always the center of attention. Whether it’s a backyard fountain, a hot tub on the deck, a mountain lake or the ocean, the chairs face toward the water. On its course between Switzerland and The Netherlands, the Rhine River is no exception; it is the focal point wherever it flows as it passes through Germany and France on its way to the North Sea. A couple of years ago, we sailed up the Rhine on a river cruise.

It was the summer of our 30th wedding anniversary. We started planning the trip over a year ahead with longtime friends who were celebrating their 25th anniversary. We studied itineraries, looked up cruise-line reviews, watched Rick Steves videos, checked out books from the library on the places we would be visiting, navigated with Google Earth to get a virtual look at our destinations and discussed travel wardrobes.

The preparation was an event of its own, requiring hours of eating, drinking and laughing with our traveling companions, and we took it very seriously. Our monthly planning sessions made the trip an epic voyage.

All of our planning ignored the river itself, though. Cruising on the Rhine is traveling in the wake of the countless voyages made by settlers, travelers and traders dating back to the earliest inhabitants of the area. Everyone came either by the river or to the river, clustering and thriving along its banks like trees and vegetation seeking water.

The remnants of ancient inhabitants along the riverbanks are intriguing, inspiring romantic visions of castles, knights and princesses, or chilling thoughts of river pirates and invading hordes. There are quaint villages with winding cobblestone streets, fairy-tale houses and market squares around steepled churches, all in the shadow of imposing but crumbling castles. There are walled fortresses along the banks, built to defend from attack or to stop traffic and impose tolls on all who navigated the river. Gnarled vineyards cling to the steep, sunny banks, taking advantage of the proximity to the water to irrigate the grapes and ship the wine.

The river was a source of defense and income. It was a dividing line, defining the barbarians and the civilized. It was a lifeline, carrying goods and services to the buyers and sellers long before trucks and trains. The ways of doing business and monitoring the river have changed, but it is by no means just a tourist site or an outdoor museum. It’s teeming with life.

The Rhine we saw aboard our river cruise ship had plenty of modern shipping and manufacturing along its shore, interspersed with the remnants of medieval history.  We didn’t see those parts of the river advertised in the travel books, and we probably slipped past much more than we knew while we were tucked away in our cabins for the night. It’s a modern waterway, and unlike many of the cathedrals and tourist attractions we visited, is still in constant use.

Our cabin was on the lowest deck, so it was riding down in the water. It wasn’t noticeable, except that our window was high on the cabin wall. We woke up one night to the sound of gushing water underneath us. Were we sinking? No alarms were sounding. It was dark, so we couldn’t see what was going on by peering on tippy-toe out our river-level window . The next day we realized that we had been going through a lock.

As we made our way upriver, we needed several locks to make the climb. We went through some during the day, and we were able to watch the process. The captain steered our ship into the narrow lock compartment, which was almost exactly the width of our boat. We were inches from the sides. When the door was closed, the compartment filled with water until our boat came up to the level of the next  part of the river. That was the rushing sound below us. From inside the boat, it felt like emerging from a tomb. We had new respect for our captain after seeing him steer our boat, leaning out over the side to see the clearance, into the narrow compartment.

We loved the ports where we disembarked–the tours and the history, the unique regional foods and drinks (read: beer) and the people we met. The time on the river itself, though, was a huge part of the trip. Morning coffee or afternoon wine on the outdoor deck chairs, watching the boat traffic and the scenery go by, or even just reading or napping, lulled by the gentle motion of the boat on the river, was the perfect balance to our land excursions.

Along the way, we  sailed by families camping in tents along the shore, swimmers and picnickers playing on the beach, and fisherman on the banks or in smaller boats. We passed loaded barges and other cruise ships. We shared the river with them as people have been doing forever. Floating through the region on the river connected us to the life of the place in a deeper way than our tours and history lessons could. We were part of  the timeless flow of the River Rhine.