COOKING WILD AND WONDERFUL by L.J. MARTIN

Most of what our Wolfpack Ranch kitchen is about is simple food, but with flair, more often than not with an original twist. We shop in a country market, and exotic ingredients are not available unless we go to town or order over the internet. So don’t expect me calling for caviar or callaloo or even cassava unless I suggest a readily available substitute.

Cooking chores usually land with me because I'm lucky to be married to a beautiful, loving lady, Kat Martin, who just happens to also be productive and talented, an internationally known writer of women's romantic suspense and historical romance. She has only one fault and that's working too hard, so the kitchen is usually my domain—not that Kat's not a great cook in her own right. If I don't have background music of Willie Nelson lamenting some western woes in four-four time, I cook to the cadence of a word processor being pounded, sounds echoing from down our long hall to the office wing of the ranch house. In our house everything radiates off the kitchen.

I, too, am a writer and novelist, but when folks ask “Does your wife write also?” I always answer, “No, she writes. I write also.” She’s a driven lady, and her international success is a result.

Cooking is now an avocation of mine, but has been a vocation. I cooked my way through college as the only fry cook, working three 30” x 6’ grills—eighteen feet demanding my intense concentration—serving 1,600 for lunch every day; and later I camp cooked, off-loading a mule string miles from the nearest road to do so; and even later owned my own beef restaurant. My ‘office’ at college was a bank of three six-foot-long grills half-dozen feet in front of a bank of twenty deep-fryers. Not exactly gourmet cooking, but generally nutritious and hopefully delicious. However, it was God-help the student who stuck his head around the corner and said, “My pork chop was too done.” After all, I was armed with a spatula with an eighteen inch blade. I’ve mellowed over the years, and my cooking has more than likely improved. If you can cook in a rough camp twenty miles from the nearest road, the rest of it is easy. Now I’m spoiled by a beautiful modern kitchen and, even when camp cooking, spoiled by fancy outdoor equipment that makes life a lot easier than when the tools were only a wire grill or a piece of sheet iron badly balanced on a ring of rocks.

Like most chores it's a lot more fun doing it just for the fun of it, and I now do—not that I don't occasionally feed dozens if not hundreds.

One of the most enjoyable results of a reputation for some cooking expertise is our

ability to donate the occasional five or six course dinner to the many worthy causes that have been born in Montana, and as a result to help raise some needed financing. Lately we've donated in support of the International Wildlife Film Festival and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. Worthy causes both, as the Film Festival supports film makers who bring critical wildlife and environmental issues before the public, and the Elk Foundation not only propagates America’s most magnificent antlered creature, the elk, throughout the U.S., but acquires critical habitat and migration routes protecting literally millions of acres not only for the elk but for all wildlife, and for man.

To tell the truth these donations of ours are not totally altruistic as a wonderful side benefit is making new friends who join us at a bountiful table —most of whom share similar interests and sympathies.

Our most recent dinner/donation auctioned for $1,000.00 dollars for six to join Kat and me at Wolfpack Ranch for a six course gourmet feed. When someone lays out ten crisp Franklins for a meal, over one hundred sixty bucks a plate, they expect and deserve to be well fed...not only well, but memorably.

How does one offer up a meal worth that kind of money?

And here's just one menu to accomplish that:

Remember most of my cooking is simple, but once in a while, particularly if it's for a good cause, I like to show off. So I spent a little time with the curry comb to make this tall horse pretty. I'm going to break this menu into courses, otherwise it'll be way too long:








GOURMET SUPPER FOR EIGHT

Appetizers:

Served with Champagne
Crab artichoke dip or tapanade
Crunchy Parmesan Onion Squares
Bruchettas:
Mushroom
Tomato
Zucchini

Soup:

Shellfish in clear bullion

Salad:

Lobster, avocado, fresh grapefruit on butter lettuce

Fish Course:

Salmon and asparagus in parchment (en pappette)

Citrus Sorbet

Beef Course:

Tenderloin strip basted in simple sauce (see recipe)
Mushroom Gravy
Port wine reduction
Red & Yukon Gold potatoes, boiled and braised

Dessert:

Berry mélange in phyllo cups with Cointreau whipped cream

After dinner: Coffee, liquors, and a great single malt


An old cowhand once advised me, “If there’s a hill to climb, waitin’ won’t make it smaller.”

Here’s how to get it done…

Appetizers

Crunchy Parmesan Onion Squares

• 4 slices 7 grain bread, dark wheat, or dark rye, but a hardy seven grain with lots of nut and grain solids really makes this dish.
• 1 cup grated or packaged finely-shredded Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
• ½ cup mayonnaise
• tblsp minced scallion or white or yellow onion
• 1 tsp sage
• Paprika to sprinkle
• 1/8 tsp (generous 1/8 teaspoon) cayenne pepper

Trim crusts and cut bread slices into six or eight 1.5 inch squares per slice (or if you want to be fancy, cut to your favorite shape with a cookie cutter). Arrange on a baking sheet and place on the upper rack of a 400 degree preheated oven, cook 3 to 4 minutes until golden (or if you’re lazy like me, pop them in the toaster before trimming, and don’t brother with further browning of the toast until topped with the mixture). Remove to top with mixture. Leave oven on.

Mix together cheese, minced onion, cayenne, sage, and mayonnaise.

Top each square with a rounded amount (about 1 scant tablespoon) of mix and return to baking sheet. Place back in oven for six minutes or until cheese is browning, remove, cool slightly, dust with paprika, and serve. If you want to get real fancy, top each one with a few bay shrimp, but don’t brown too much if you use the tender shrimp.

Bruschetta

For all these Bruschettas begin with a nice baguette, sliced about 3/8” thick. I always cut on an angle as they’re more interesting and a little longer and slimmer if you do. Toast under oven broiler until brown, turn and toast the other side. If you love garlic like I do, peel a couple of fat cloves, cut them in half, and rub the top side of the toasted bread to impart a thin layer. Brush on a thin coat of extra virgin olive oil. Using a slotted spoon top with one or more of the following, or better yet, serve the toppings in small bowls and let your guests top their own with a slotted spoon:

Mushroom

• ½ dozen two inch round button mushrooms
• 1 tblsps soy sauce
• 1 tsp sesame oil
• ¼ stick butter
• ½ fresh lemon
• ¼ cup fresh oregano leaves
• 2 tablespoons fresh Italian parsley
• Garlic salt
• Lemon Pepper

Clean mushrooms well and dice to ¼ inch (or slice very thin). Chop parsley fine. Leave oregano leafs whole. Sautee mushrooms quickly in a couple of pads of butter and sesame oil. Add oregano. Sprinkle in a teaspoon of soy sauce, a ½ teaspoon of garlic salt, a ½ teaspoon of lemon pepper. Add parsley and squeeze in the juice of a medium lemon. Mix well the pull it off the fire. Don’t overcook! This should do to top six to eight rounds from the baguette, maybe more depending upon the size of the mushrooms.

Tomato

• 4 medium tomatoes, dead ripe if possible
• 2 tblsp soy sauce
• ½ tsp garlic salt.
• ½ tsp cumin
• 1 tsp white balsamic vinegar or ½ teaspoon of wine vinegar
• 2 tblsp of chopped chives or green onion tops
• 1 tsp extra virgin olive oil
• 1 2.25 oz. can of sliced olives, drain well
• 2 heaping tblsps fresh basil leafs if available.
• salt (sea salt if you have it) and fresh ground pepper to taste

Blanch ripe tomatoes in boiling water until the skin loosens, put under cold water, peel and cool. Many cooks like to seed the tomatoes, but I like the flavor and believe in the nutritional value of tomato seeds. There are over 10,000 compounds in a tomato and no one knows how much good they are for your health—I think they’re very, very good. Use your own discretion. Core any green stem and discard. Dice tomatoes ¼ to ½ inch and put in a small mixing bowl. Stir in all ingredients then salt and pepper to taste. Serve this with 1/8 inch slices of mozzarella sized to fit baguette rounds if you want to get fancy and imitate a capreseinsalata.

Zucchini

2 six inch long zucs.
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
1 tablespoon capers
1 tblsp olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste
A full head of roasted garlic

Cut the tops off a large head or two of garlic and place in a 350 degree oven for 45 minutes until it squeezes out of each clove like toothpaste. Chop zucs into 1/8 to ¼ inch cubes and drop into a small frying pan on medium heat, soften in olive oil. Add balsamic, salt and pepper to taste, and add capers to warm just before removing from heat. Spread a thin layer of roasted garlic on each toasted baguette, top with mixture.

Crab/artichoke tapenade or dip

1 cup good quality mayonnaise
6-8 oz of crab
¼ cup grated onion
1 teaspoon curry
1 14 oz can of artichoke hearts

Clean crab and make sure there’s no shell and separate strands so it will spread easily. Trim artichokes to make sure there are no tough leaves, then chop into ½ to ¾ inch lengths. Mix all ingredients in a small baking dish and place in a 350 degree oven until slightly browned on top, about 25 minutes. Serve this with baguette rounds as above, or with chips to dip.

Serve Champagne with appetizers.

For more great recipes COOKING WILD AND WONDERFUL can be purchased here in Kindle and pring:
http://www.amazon.com/Cooking-Wild-Wonderful-gourmets-ebook/dp/B004UICW36/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1357881958&sr=1-1&keywords=cooking+wild+and+wonderful

COOKING WILD AND WONDERFUL by L.J. MARTIN

Cinch him up, spur hard, and let him buck…”


Outside my kitchen window a pair of wild Merriam turkeys with a clutch of chicks investigate my flower beds to see what my bird feeders have spilled.
They're my clean-up crew.

On the distant hillside a whitetail doe cautiously leads a spindly legged spotted fawn down to our north pasture. As I stroll along the long gravel driveway an osprey, the fish eagle, wings overhead on his way to beat the fly-fishermen to a breakfast of rainbow, brown, or native cutthroat trout from Wolfpack Ranch’s gurgling neighbor, one of the world's most pristine fly fishing streams. While I'm at the mailbox, after my leisurely morning stroll, a pickup passes pulling a float boat and carrying a local fishing guide and a couple of eager clients, and I wave and get a smile and wave in return—It's the country way, even if you don’t know the passersby, and I wouldn't live anywhere else.

Slipping the paper out of its yellow plastic container next to our oversized mailbox, I see our local paper—the Missoulian from over twenty five miles distant—sporting headlines GLACIER PARK HIGHWAY OPEN. Good news graces the front page. The horrors of the rest of the country and world are relegated to the second page or deeper in the paper’s bowel, where they well belong.

Ours is a good news type of place.

And we love it here.

At Wolfpack Ranch, in the shadow of Montana's beautiful Sapphire Mountains, we're all about good news, good times, good folks, and, of course, great food and country cooking. What country depends upon what's in the pantry on a particular day.

Although we love it here more than anywhere we've been we feel blessed to continue to travel and gain wonderful new friends, to collect great memories, and to gather hundreds of wonderful recipes. We always try to take smiles, open minds, and open hearts, and as a result traveling has been a joy.

And every country we’ve visited offers exciting, enticing, exhilarating flavors and foods.

Most of the cooking at Wolfpack is up to me and I've been told I'm a fair hand at the art of the spatula, and the chore is fine by me as I love nothing more than bringing loving friends and family around the table to enjoy a great meal, a decent wine, and most of all, each other. In fact if you love a thing, it’s not a chore at all. And yeah, yeah, I can cook wild game or fresh caught trout over an open fire and am adept with cast iron including a venison stew or done-to-a-turn perfect cobbler in a Dutch oven, but that’s a small part of cooking with the Montana mystique.

Here's a great Dutch oven recipe given to me by my good friend Trapper Badovinac, I love it, his camp hunters love it, and so will you. Learn more about Trapper at www.shootingstarpublications.com

Dutch Oven Oat Dinner Rolls

2 1/3rd Cups water
1 Cup oats
2/3rd Cup brown sugar
3 Tbl butter
1 ½ Tsp salt
2 Pkg (4 ½ tsp) yeast
5-6 Cups flour

In a saucepan bring water to a boil, add oats. Reduce heat and simmer for 1-2 minutes. Stir in brown sugar, butter, and salt. Transfer to a mixing bowl and let cool to between 90 – 115 degrees F. Stir in yeast, then 3 cups of flour. Turn out onto a floured surface and knead and add flour until the dough is no longer sticky. Put in an oiled bowl, cover, and let rise until doubled. Punch down and knead again on a floured surface. Then form balls and place in the bottom of a greased 12" standard Dutch oven. Let rise until rolls are 1 -2" from top. Place 11 briquettes under and 19 on top of Dutch oven. Bake for 30 minutes.

Don't lose your breath will all the pats on the back you'll be getting.

See you soon for more from The Kitchen at Wolfpack Ranch and Cooking Wild & Wonderful.

Here's a peek at our neighbors at Wolfpack Ranch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTxFcxOP9xk

COOKING WILD AND WONDERFUL--LARRY J. MARTIN

I'm looking forward to talking cooking with y'all and hope you'll shoot me some of your favorite recipes from time to time.

I've been a cook all my life, starting, believe it or not when I was the ripe old age of eight, if you can call mixing up a box cake cooking, which was my first chore. My mom, a single parent, worked hard and had a thirty-mile drive, a long ways in 1947, and came home dog tired. My older brother, at twelve, decided we were going to have supper awaiting her, and we did from then on. I cooked my way through college, the only fry cook for 1,600 at lunch, and owned and cooked in a couple of restaurants. I've camp cooked since I packed and wrangled for a boy's camp at seventeen, and for lots of hunting camps since…including this year, fifty-five years later, with nine hunters in two sidewall tents.

And I've loved most of it, and here's why:
Somewhere close behind air and water is the need for food.

It’s a basic requirement of life, and when that requirement is met, then and only then, does art enter the equation.

A gruel of oats can satiate hunger, while a delicately wrought oatmeal cookie laced with walnuts and elusive chocolate chips can not only accomplish the same but also please the palate, the eye, the nose, the finger tips…and human curiosity. Sometimes, even an emotional need.

So great cooking, unlike all other art forms, fulfills not only the most basic needs and requirements, but also becomes art when it tantalizes and teases with smell, sight, taste, touch, and yes, sound that entices, entertains, even exhilarates.

And unlike all other art forms, it accomplishes all those things—but unlike most other arts, it’s transitory, and needs to be repeated over and over, in short order. Consequently the very repetition of the effort lends itself to becoming mundane. A menu repeating itself over and over, no matter how delightful at first, is soon boring. The trick is to tease and titillate and entice with new and exciting combinations and discoveries. There’s no need to bore yourself or friends and family…after all, there are hundreds if not thousands of ways to prepare even the humble potato.

There are many masters of the art of fine cooking all over the world, from every culture and country, from every race and religion, from every economic level. Great cooking is not a result of exotic and expensive ingredients, but more of sometimes delicate, sometimes rough, sometimes intricate, sometimes simple, combinations of flavors, textures, colors, and bouquets. The French have become internationally renowned for their cuisine, and it’s not because of expensive ingredients or elaborate preparation. It’s because of a respect for some basics.

There’s a time for all things, and all things in their time is probably the number one basic of good cooking. Spring is the time of awakening, the time for fresh asparagus, for fish fresh from streams and lakes newly reborn from winters ice, of lamb so tender it makes you want to weep and shout for joy simultaneously; Summer is rich, ripe tomato time, it’s earthy mushrooms from meadows recently kissed by warm rain, of seeds and nuts of hundreds of varieties; Fall is a celebration of stone fruit, of grapes, and sweet corn on the cob, and game from the hills and high mountains; and Winter is the time of the root and other late developing healthy, hardy vegetables—cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower—of meat from the smoker, and of warming stews and pot roasts.

Yes, even here in Montana we can get a tomato in January, probably with a sticker extolling its birth in Peru or Mexico, but its been picked green as the proverbial gourd and will never develop that wonderful mesmerizing flavor of the vine ripened fruit. The fruit from Peru, like you after a many thousand mile journey, will be tired. Not like the one you’ve watched mature on a vine in your garden while guarding against horn worms which value it almost as much as you, or even one from your local farmers market picked ripe that morning.

Thoughtful and respectful menu planning is probably number two in the roster of basics of good cooking. A meal composed of sharp tastes from beginning to end is not particularly pleasing to the palate. A spicy soup, salad, entré, and desert does not give the palate time to recover, to relax, to prepare for the next gastronomic pleasure. Rather a mild soup, a sharp flavored Caesar salad tickled by crushed anchovy, a slice of medium rare roast beef smothered in brown gravy accompanied by asparagus lightly poached in butter and wine and a crusty bread lathered with creamery butter on the side, all followed by a rich cream brulee with a beautifully browned, tenderly torched, cinnamon kissed top, is the pace of a great yet relatively simple menu—and a pace respected by the wonderful cooks of Provence, of much of Italy, and of many other places across this fascinating world of ours.

Looking forward to our next visit. Here's a great little recipe for you if you love a GREAT steak. This is a marinade, applied to the meat just before you take it off the BBQ. Lather it on one side, flip it and lather it on the other, flip it so the fire hits it for twenty seconds, and take it off. You'll love the flavor, and your guests will have no idea why that fillet tastes so damn good.

Simple Sauce (the best for red meat)

Note: I originally got this simple recipe from a place I frequented for steaks when I was just a pup. Oft times the very best is the simplest, and this is one of those times.

• 1 cube butter
• ½ cup soy sauce
• 2 beef bullion cubes

Heat until cubes are dissolved. I use this on steaks and chops, basting them just before I take them off the fire, and if the fire flames up, all the better. I occasionally add garlic powder, lemon pepper, or other spices, depending upon my mood.

See you soon for more from The Kitchen at Wolfpack Ranch and Cooking Wild & Wonderful.