Coq au Vin

I've made coq au vin several times in the past but decided to up my game a little tonight and do things a bit more properly. I looked at a couple recipes including one from the great Julia Child and went to work.

Leslie bought a giant combo pack of drumstick/thigh sections at Frazier Farms yesterday. Hmm, the Le Creuset stockpot or the dutch oven? I went with the latter. It is a little heavier and heats and sears a bit better.

First thing I did is cut up five bacon strips from Hemplers, our favorite, and cooked them at the bottom of the dutch oven until almost crispy.

I pulled them out and reserved them to a paper towel covered plate for later. 

I then browned and seared the seasoned chicken in the bacon fat, finally pulling them out and putting them on a platter to sit too.

I added a splash of marsala and deglazed the bottom of the blackened bits, not having any cognac readily on hand. 

We don't do onion but I added onion powder and then six cloves of garlic. 

Thirty second cook down.

Chopped up three carrots and put them aside for later too. 

I added three cups of cabernet sauvignon and three cups of chicken bone broth. 

I also added thyme, balsamic vinegar, a touch of sugar, salt, pepper, tomato paste and a bay leaf and brought it all to a boil.

While it was simmering I sautéed mushrooms in a skillet and reserved them as well.

I added my chicken and carrots back to the pot to simmer and started on the beurre manié. 

This is a traditional french sauce thickener made by combining flour and warmed butter and making a mash with it.

I pulled the chicken and carrots out one more time and slowly stirred in the beurre manié. 

I then strained the entire sauce into a mixing bowl so that I could get a clear reduction. 

This is the step I usually skip.

My chef friend Melissa guilted me into doing it the right way for once.

Thanks Missy!

I added the chicken back in and let it simmer. 

Leslie came home and made polenta. 

Right before I plated I added the bacon and mushrooms back into the mix and it was time to eat.

Wish I had fresh thyme but I did not.

Leslie absolutely loved the meal, all the praise I require.

Lot of work, lots of extra dishes to clean but worth it.

Barona Speedway

Jim Ramsey and I went out to the Antique Drag Races at Barona Speedway yesterday. It is an annual affair and our friend Harry was running his 53 Studebaker.

What a great day, breezy, not too hot, the coolest cars and people you could imagine. 

I am just starting to process my pictures, hopefully got some decent shots. 

Haven't shot cars in a long time. 

Very rusty.

I will continue to post as developed.

Hawks feeding

After about sixteen years of freely taking pictures of the red tailed hawks nest, the birds got sneaky and put leaf curtains up this time. I had no idea what was going on in the nest or how many hawklings had been born.

I saw them feeding the other day, answer is two.

When I have time I will bring the great lens and tripod over and try to get some better shots.

Nina Hagen

 

Harrier hovering

 

Wasn't born to follow

Generation Wuss

Big Dave sent something interesting over; Scientists confirm adults raised in the 60s and 70s possess a resilience that is nearly extinct today. They grew up without safety nets or screens and emerged mentally tougher. Psychologists now warn this specific resilience is vanishing.

A specific tension has emerged in developmental psychology: children who grew up during the economic instability and social upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s appear to have cultivated a form of psychological endurance that is significantly less prevalent in younger generations today. According to a recent analysis of longitudinal life-course studies, the adaptive mechanisms forged by facing material scarcity and family disruption during those decades created a durable resilience that contemporary safety nets and digital comforts may have inadvertently eroded.

The foundational evidence for this claim resides in archival research from the Institute of Human Development at the University of California, Berkeley. Studies that began tracking individuals born in the 1920s through the Great Depression and World War II, and later their children navigating the 1960s and 1970s, reveal a counterintuitive pattern.

Men and women from families who experienced significant economic deprivation during the 1930s often fared better in midlife self-esteem and career stability compared to their more privileged counterparts. This trajectory established a baseline of adaptability that characterized the parenting and cultural values of the subsequent two decades.

The psychological resilience observed in those raised during the 1960s and 1970s is not a matter of nostalgia but a documented outcome of specific environmental pressures. Longitudinal data from the Oakland Growth Study and Berkeley Guidance Study demonstrate that families during hard times operated as fluid family economies. When household resources contracted, children and mothers entered the workforce, roles shifted, and adolescents gained early exposure to problem-solving and responsibility. This dynamic forced the development of executive function and emotional regulation in real-world settings rather than in structured extracurricular environments.

Well, I hate to say it but this rings true for me. I am amazed at the lack of psychological strength found among the post boomer alphabet generations. I know that economic conditions are different but the amount of thirty and forty year olds still living with their parents is astounding to me.

I was functionally independent at 13, hit the road hitchhiking around the country without a penny or care in the world at 16, came back and got an apartment in Encinitas at 17, worked good jobs and shitty jobs my whole life. Did what I had to do. Ditto my wife, Leslie had an apartment in Detroit at 15, her first job was at a roach clip factory.

We got beat up plenty. Got up, dusted ourself off and tried something else. Like our parents did. We believed in ourselves, knew that we could get through near anything.

Interesting that people who experienced economic deprivation earlier in life developed better self esteem and career stability later.

It rings with my theory that people that have truly never had the possibility of falling, crashing and failing never amount to shit. We have overprotected children and they have grown up spineless, overmedicated and without self worth.

Wonder how they will right their ship?

The Other Side

I am not a fan of the current government of Israel. I think they have objectified and dehumanized their neighbors and engaged in disproportionate retaliation in both Gaza and Lebanon. Firing at Medical units responding to Israeli bombing in Lebanon is plainly obscene. The government's obeisance to the far right evangelical settler movement that has terrorized Palestinian inhabitants has destroyed any real hope for peace. Their use and manipulation of Trump against Iran has caused a huge fracture towards Israel in the global Jewish community.

Still, when I hear about the pain of Israeli response without mention of the unprovoked attacks of October 7 it makes me both angry and nauseous. A summary of October 7 from Wikipedia:

The October 7 attacks were a series of coordinated armed incursions from the blockaded Gaza Strip into the Gaza envelope of southern Israel, carried out by Hamas and several other Palestinian militant groups in 2023, during the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah. The attacks, which began the ongoing Gaza war, were the first large-scale invasion of Israeli territory since the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. In response, Israel launched a large-scale military operation in Gaza.

The attacks began with a barrage of at least 4,300 rockets launched into Israel and vehicle-transported and powered paraglider incursions into Israel. Hamas militants breached the Gaza–Israel barrier, attacking military bases and massacring civilians in 21 communities, including Be'eri, Kfar Aza, Nir Oz, Netiv Haasara, and Alumim. According to an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) report that revised the estimate on the number of attackers, 6,000 Gazans breached the border in 119 locations into Israel, including 3,800 from the elite Nukhba forces and 2,200 civilians and other militants. Additionally, the IDF report estimated 1,000 Gazans fired rockets from the Gaza Strip, bringing the total number of participants on Hamas's side to 7,000.

In total, 1,195 people were killed by the attacks:at least 828 civilians including 36 children and 71 foreign nationals and at least 367 members of the security forces. 364 civilians were killed while they were attending the Nova music festival and many more wounded. At least 14 Israeli civilians were killed by the IDF's use of the Hannibal Directive. About 250 Israeli and non-Israeli civilians and soldiers were taken as hostages to the Gaza Strip. Dozens of cases of rape and sexual assault reportedly occurred, but Hamas officials denied the involvement of their fighters.

The militants killed unarmed kids at a rock concert, babies and the elderly among others. Tapes exist of militants bragging to their families about killing jews. They raped and sexually assaulted. Israel responded in a horrid fashion, killing many innocent people in the most unhygienic way, but their response did not occur in a vacuum.

I have mentioned before that my father was born in Palestine, his father is buried there. I have family all over the country, with a large chunk less than twenty miles from the massacre site, at Revivim.

I have lived in Israel during two periods of conflict, both in 1976 and practically the entirety of Desert Storm, arriving three days after the start of the war, to fulfill a promise to my late brother. People like to talk about war who have never lived through it. 

I have.

I lived less than three miles from the Lebanese border, at Gesher Haziv. North of Nahariya. We would have to grade the earth around the kibbutz at night, so that the army could find terrorists who slipped through during the night, which happened on occasion. We had three tanks permanently on the kibbutz, pointed towards Lebanon, near the factory.

Militants would aim for Nahariya to our south and hit our communal farm. The kibbutzniks would plant trees in the craters.

Not long after I arrived there, I had a katyusha rocket fragment come through the wall of the small room in which I lived. I made the mistake of touching the shrapnel, which was red hot, and burned my hand. My roommate was a big burly guy from Australia. He was on the next plane out of the country. 

I stayed. Many nights of rockets and machine gun fire in the air.

Later I came back for Desert Storm. As I have recounted before, I was in a scud missile attack within one hour of landing in Tel Aviv, on a bus of soldiers making their way to the north. I was thankfully unharmed, but went through a multitude of missile attacks and slept in a sealed room and bomb shelter for six weeks. 

Still have the decorated box for my oxygen mask and atropine injection kit, which was handed to me when I got off the plane.

I looked up Gesher Haziv the other day. Someone else there took a rocket in their home, much like I had fifty years ago.

My old home is now the newfound de facto northern border.

GESHER HAZIV – This Western Galilee kibbutz, traditionally a popular stop for visitors headed to destinations farther north, is now the final stop immediately before the evacuated zone and sits on the very edge of what’s become Israel’s de facto northern border.

Since October 8, when Hezbollah began attacking Israel, with the terror group saying it is doing so to support Gaza amid the war there, the Israeli government has evacuated almost the entire civilian population from the area close to the border with Lebanon, about 61,000 people. The kibbutz is about 5.1 kilometers (3.1 miles) from the northern border, and only 100 meters (.06 miles) south of the evacuation zone.

The people of Gesher Haziv and Revivim have a right to live in peace as well. Please don't mention the evil Israelis without considering what it is like to live with their neighbors, people who murder young kids at a rave and also bomb indiscriminately and are taught that their ultimate goal is the destruction of Israel practically from the cradle.

The middle east is a great big clusterfuck and it is extremely difficult to find any semblance of virtue anywhere. Blood is on all hands there. How would you respond to violence if you lived there?

You set the scene

Amie

I had to take some paintings to my restorer in Imperial Beach today. 

Stopped by Cecilia and Chips first and we had a great lunch at a Michoacán restaurant in the barrio, a favorite of his. 

I drove down and dropped the paintings off and then drove to Home of Peace, the Jewish Cemetery on Imperial Ave. where my little sister and grandmother are buried and a place I might be plopped some day if I can afford a plot.

I brought some roses and a rock for both gravestones, which I had purloined at the car wash.

Amie would have been 58 if she was alive, she was fifteen when she died in a car accident. 

Ten years and one day younger than I, tomorrow marks the forty third anniversary of her death.

Hard to believe how much time has passed. 

Worst pain I ever felt.

She was so young, so bright, so vital.

I have lost both parents and three siblings. 

For me the immense pain of the loss of my siblings was infinitely greater.

Worst I have ever felt in fact.

We lit a yahrtzeit candle in her honor tonight.

I ask you to join me in a prayer for her memory and eternal well being.

Yitgadal v'yitkadash sh'mei raba b'alma di-v'ra chirutei, v'yamlich malchutei b'chayeichon uvyomeichon uvchayei d'chol beit yisrael, ba'agala uvizman kariv, v'im'ru: "amen."

Soy honey glazed duck breast with cherries and gnocchi

Leslie was a bit hungry post surgery on Tuesday and we stopped at the La Jolla Whole Foods to grab her a salad and buy some provisions. We thought we had picked up duck leg confit but when we went to make it tonight realized that we had bought duck breast instead.

I asked her if I could cook the duck and she assented. 

I started by making a soy honey glaze with minced garlic. Leslie whisked in a little chili oil.

I patted the duck breast dry, salt and peppered and then made a series of sharp cuts in the skin side in both directions, but not far enough down to cut into the meat. This would help the duck render the large amount of fat under the skin.

One of the important things to know when you cook duck breast is that you have to start with a cold pan to render properly. A hot pan seals the fat in. No oil is used, pan needs to be dry for crispy skin, it generates enough fat on its own.

I used my trusty and ever present Le Creuset enameled skillet. I glazed the duck with a pastry brush.

We had some dried cherries that we added to the skillet for flavor. Thought about adding port wine or madera for the reduction but in the end used no alcohol tonight. 

I cooked it for six minutes skin side down and then two minutes skin side up at medium heat.

I then poured the rest of the marinade over the breasts and plopped the whole affair in the oven at 325° for about eight minutes, until the breasts internal temperature registered 140°. 

We let them rest for about ten minutes while Leslie made gnochhi.

She plated the dishes and then grated fresh parmesan over the gnocchi.

The meal was wonderful, the duck perfectly cooked.  

Her breast was smaller, a little more well done, probably could have pulled it at six minutes.

Leslie wasn't sure how the cherries worked with the garlic, we might even omit garlic next time, but honestly I liked it a lot.

We will definitely cook this again.