Muffin de semen
Jul. 17th, 2007 04:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fr_defenestratoSorry, that should be "Ma fin de semaine"... the author of the titles has just been sacked.
It wasn't clear until last Wednesday morning that I was going to be able to go to Gourmet Camping this year, despite having purchased bus tix and made other necessary arrangements—including extensive email planning, with la capa della cucina e un'altra assistente of a vast Italian dinner on Saturday night. Since when I was sitting at Splatcom Inc., thumbs a-twirl, waiting for a proposal to "drop" as they say: it would seem the U.S. Navy is consolidating multiple contracts for human resources-related IT services—record-keeping, training, education, and more arcane stuff like "portfolio management" and "capital planning"—into a single contract. As often happens with gubmt acquisitions, the request for proposals (RFP) was expected "any day now" for many, many days on end. Splatcom would/will be subcontracting to Booze Hunden Allentown (betcha can't guess!), who were planning to convene a proposal development conference in Pensacola, Fla., at "RFP+4." (It was never clear whether the "4" was business days or calendar days.) The RFP finally came out last Tuesday, and it was latish Tuesday night before BHA informed Splatcom and their other subs that their presence was required in the Sunshine State at 9 a.m. sharp on Monday morning, 16 July. Woohoo! Weekend free! Maybe. Then: Yes, the Prez of Splatcom decides that airfare with no lead time is too expensive and so he will be the only one going to Florida, and furthermore I won't been needed to assist with anything critical until Monday at the earliest.
But a non-critical thing I did want to do was join a conference call at 10 a.m. Thursday, at which hour I'd be on a Greyhound bus from New York City to Boston. So I consulted![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
maestro_live re Blewtooth for my Mot-asshola Raisin Phone. (Sorry, I guess they don't really have to be coy here: Motorola Razr phones SUCK. Verizon Wireless SUCKS. That is all.) Maestro advised re Bluetooth v. wired. I decided to shop. I had stood at home Wednesday, to multitask and pack and to get to Cheeselords early for auditions; mid-afternoon I Metro'd to Pentagon City and did that thing I said I'd never again do: I set foot in Worst Buy. (Addendum: Best Buy SUCKS.) But it was a simple purchase of a low-level no-tricks Bluetooth doodad, and I was off. While there, shopped Marshalls for new Teva-style sandals; nothing doing, but they did have a pair of nice, perfectly fitting boat shoes for cheap. Decided to check for a piece of luggage in which to lug my tent, air mattress/pump, and other items (as opposed to the nightmare of having each piece separate under four Greyhound buses all weekend). Found a brilliant, gorgeous, orange Ralph Lauren duffel-style (but practically steamer trunk-sized) bag for half off. Score!
Home, packing a bit, then off for Cheese Lord rehearsal. Auditioned two new basses but the scheduled first tenor canceled; said he couldn't commit after all. The audition committee determined that a bass we had already heard, and who was scheduled to join us for singing tonight (a "phase two" whole-group audition) was still our favorite. Scooted home, finished packing, cabbed to the bus station. Both buses—DC to NYC, NYC to Boston—were absolutely full, and I would have been, well, rather put outhad I not gotten onto one of them (bought my tix on June 8, arrived more than an hour early for each bus to join already enormous lines). But all was well until my cell phone gave up the ghost an hour before the conference call I had promised to be on. Ugh. So much for Bluetooth. It's not like I'm going to walk the world over with a nasty thing like that on my ear.
Cab from South Station to North Station in Boston; I just have time for a vat of iced joe from Dunkin' Donuts, then on a commuter train to Gloucester (more properly in terms of local pronunciation, Glosta), where my friend Chick picked me up. At Chick & Ellen's place I helped haul stuff and pack their van, and we were off to Maine.
GC had been held at a different location by necessity for the last two years: a disused, personally owned ski lodge in Granville, Vermont, where there was much more indoor sleeping capacity but also much more traffic noise—the erstwhile Newton's Christmas Tree Inn sits right on state route 100, which is fairly sparsely traveled at night but wongo-busy during the day. So it was nice to get back to the Youngs' spread on Ironbound Pond in West Athens, Maine: its driveway comes off a dirt road that veers off from another dirt road that's a left turn from the road that turned to pavement to gravel a few miles back... Apart from people coming HERE or to the nearest neighbors' place, there's just no traffic to speak of. The tradeoff is that there's no electricity here, so a generator is needed to provide light for cooking and to power the water hears and the pump for running water. Typically the generator is left on from dinner prep-time/dusk until folks have begun to drift to bed and there's no call for in-house light anymore. The fire pit is kept healthily burning the same amount of time, or later.
Music happens all the time. Afternoon and evening hours particularly are spent sitting around songs circles in camp and patio chairs in the shade of easy-up canopies, trading off songs, trying to remember songs, suggesting songs for somebody else to play or figure out on guitar, and—a game that's popular everywhere, it seems—coming up with the most annoying, awful songs from the 1970s and 1980s. And now: New and improved with hateful 1990s nostalgia! Much of the music is folky, but there's plenty of pop and rock and blues to go around.
Chick Marston is, in essence, the reason I know all these people, starting with his wife Ellen, whom I've grown enormously fond of and close to over the years. It was Chick's ragtime-sounding guitar that drew me over from Camp Smegma to the Glosta folks' camp at the Philadelphia Folk Fest in, I think, 1996. Chick was sitting in the shade of their tarp one afternoon playing stuff like "The Titanic" (Leadbelly song) and "Greenland Whale Fisheries" and "The Cuckoo" and all kindsa old-timey stuff. Over the last 11 years I've visited Chick & Ellen in Glosta a dozen or so times, often for the music parties that they host every other month, and a couple times in their new (since 2004) place in Lutz, Fla. (north of Tampa). Through them I've met lots of talented musical folks and food-making folks, the greatest concentration of which convenes once or twice a year for Gourmet Camping. (The main event has been in July for 20+ years, but last fall some folks started up a second annual event; it may be that July GC is always Maine and October GC is always Vermont, but the jury's still debating.)
I was a little embarrassed to have, really, no new songs to bust out at the campfire or between sets during the Saturday night electric stage session (where I have gotten a reputation for being "the Michael Cooney of Gourmet Camping")... But folks were plenty happy to hear "The 3-Minute Godfather" and "I'm My Own Grandpa" and suchlike—and it was especially OK to sing favorites since many of the audience were local Mainers who hadn't been to GC since 2004. In fact, it was just wonderful to see and perform for some of these folks again, especially our hosts, Timmy and Bobby Young, whose property we camp and party on
(Timmy's brother Steve was one of the small batch of original GCers who, in the mid '80s, "hiked for an hour to the wide mossy brink of a pristine 40’ waterfall deep in the heart of the Delaware River Gap and partook of chilled martinis and caviar served on silver trays while sending a rousing chorus of 'Shenandoah' echoing down the valley," according to text, probably authored by Steve himself, that's been recycled in GC invitations for at least the last 7 years. Steve has been the core of the "festival committee" ever since, joined by a number of other organizers.)
Alas, Timmy was recently injured on the job and had to have some pretty serious back surgery, so he was really not too mobile. He could stand for short spells and walk short distances, slowly (though his doctors really wanted him in bed or in his recliner all the time)... but Timmy is this guy with boundless energy who was always helping out at GC, and it was quite obviously a pain, in addition to the back pain, for him to just sit around and watch everything happen. Timmy and Bobby have been slowly working on a new house on their property since 2005, and the results are wonderful and almost done... the Saturday night stage show happened inside the "great room" with audience both in the house and on the deck...
For the last couple of years of GC in Maine the whole group was getting spoiled. Timmy and family were friends with a caterer on whom we came to rely more and more to provide the "gourmet" part of the weekend. By 2004 every single dinner meal was completely catered and none of the campers lifted a finger. It was nice but lazy, and the food results—chock full of super-fresh Maine seafood—were yummy but not particularly inspired. It took the impetus of two years of Vermont exile to get the campers' tastes back to appropriately gourmet: the inn in Granville has a terrific (big, well-stocked) kitchen capable of feeding lots of people, and especially without an immediate catering option to tempt us, we made great use of that kitchen, preparing big dinners and brunches (and smaller munchy courses throughout the day) from Thursday evening till Sunday noon. In particular, Chick and Ellen were just learning to cook Indian food, and so made a staggering array of yummy dishes for the Thursday night meal in 2005—upping the gourmet ante considerably in one swell foop.
So now we're back in Maine and there's no question of catering again. Everybody's psyched to put on the most faboo meal they can... So when my friend Sari volunteered to captain an Italian feast, I immediately offered my services as sous-chef and volunteered a particular dish I learned from the chef at Peppers Restaurant (no longer in operation) in "Dupont East" in D.C.: she called it "Chicken Capri" but it is not. There is indeed a recipe called chicken Capri, and this ain't it. But what this is is one of the best sauces in the world, and whileperegrin8 may well be right in thinking that putting tofu in it would be unfathomably disgusting, portobellos are certainly a viable option, one which I exercised for the one strict vegetarian in attendance. Anyway, I renamed it Baudolino sauce only because I was reading Eco's novel Baudolino when I volunteered. It's a citrus-spiked cream sauce (trust me, it's awesome even if that sounds weird) with kalamata olives, marinated artichoke hearts, sun-dried tomatoes, capers, and mushrooms. OMGYUM. The rest of the feast was splendid too, with my friend Tom contributing a thin but extremely tasty tomato sauce made from tomatoes he grew himself, and Ellen contributing homemade spinach linguine. Sari handled most everything else, including the appetizers and the production of the other major sauce, of chopped tomatoes and garlic and capers, barely cooked, but doused with very hot olive oil just before serving.
I could go on for days, I'm sure, but fuck it. It was a great weekend amongst lovely people who play and sing tons of great music and I can harmonize to and who feed me delicious foodstuffs all the livelong day, and all in a rustic settings where the quiet and dark are profound at night, save for the insects singing and an occasional ethereal cry from one of a family of loons that live on the pond. Take it from a frequent folk-fester: There's just no substitute for this kinda festing.
----
Folks interested in more info, pictures, etc., can go to the Yahoo! group I created to share photos, recipes, memories, etc.
All photos c. Greta Bagshaw unless otherwise noted.
It wasn't clear until last Wednesday morning that I was going to be able to go to Gourmet Camping this year, despite having purchased bus tix and made other necessary arrangements—including extensive email planning, with la capa della cucina e un'altra assistente of a vast Italian dinner on Saturday night. Since when I was sitting at Splatcom Inc., thumbs a-twirl, waiting for a proposal to "drop" as they say: it would seem the U.S. Navy is consolidating multiple contracts for human resources-related IT services—record-keeping, training, education, and more arcane stuff like "portfolio management" and "capital planning"—into a single contract. As often happens with gubmt acquisitions, the request for proposals (RFP) was expected "any day now" for many, many days on end. Splatcom would/will be subcontracting to Booze Hunden Allentown (betcha can't guess!), who were planning to convene a proposal development conference in Pensacola, Fla., at "RFP+4." (It was never clear whether the "4" was business days or calendar days.) The RFP finally came out last Tuesday, and it was latish Tuesday night before BHA informed Splatcom and their other subs that their presence was required in the Sunshine State at 9 a.m. sharp on Monday morning, 16 July. Woohoo! Weekend free! Maybe. Then: Yes, the Prez of Splatcom decides that airfare with no lead time is too expensive and so he will be the only one going to Florida, and furthermore I won't been needed to assist with anything critical until Monday at the earliest.
But a non-critical thing I did want to do was join a conference call at 10 a.m. Thursday, at which hour I'd be on a Greyhound bus from New York City to Boston. So I consulted
maestro_live re Blewtooth for my Mot-asshola Raisin Phone. (Sorry, I guess they don't really have to be coy here: Motorola Razr phones SUCK. Verizon Wireless SUCKS. That is all.) Maestro advised re Bluetooth v. wired. I decided to shop. I had stood at home Wednesday, to multitask and pack and to get to Cheeselords early for auditions; mid-afternoon I Metro'd to Pentagon City and did that thing I said I'd never again do: I set foot in Worst Buy. (Addendum: Best Buy SUCKS.) But it was a simple purchase of a low-level no-tricks Bluetooth doodad, and I was off. While there, shopped Marshalls for new Teva-style sandals; nothing doing, but they did have a pair of nice, perfectly fitting boat shoes for cheap. Decided to check for a piece of luggage in which to lug my tent, air mattress/pump, and other items (as opposed to the nightmare of having each piece separate under four Greyhound buses all weekend). Found a brilliant, gorgeous, orange Ralph Lauren duffel-style (but practically steamer trunk-sized) bag for half off. Score!Home, packing a bit, then off for Cheese Lord rehearsal. Auditioned two new basses but the scheduled first tenor canceled; said he couldn't commit after all. The audition committee determined that a bass we had already heard, and who was scheduled to join us for singing tonight (a "phase two" whole-group audition) was still our favorite. Scooted home, finished packing, cabbed to the bus station. Both buses—DC to NYC, NYC to Boston—were absolutely full, and I would have been, well, rather put outhad I not gotten onto one of them (bought my tix on June 8, arrived more than an hour early for each bus to join already enormous lines). But all was well until my cell phone gave up the ghost an hour before the conference call I had promised to be on. Ugh. So much for Bluetooth. It's not like I'm going to walk the world over with a nasty thing like that on my ear.
Cab from South Station to North Station in Boston; I just have time for a vat of iced joe from Dunkin' Donuts, then on a commuter train to Gloucester (more properly in terms of local pronunciation, Glosta), where my friend Chick picked me up. At Chick & Ellen's place I helped haul stuff and pack their van, and we were off to Maine.
GC had been held at a different location by necessity for the last two years: a disused, personally owned ski lodge in Granville, Vermont, where there was much more indoor sleeping capacity but also much more traffic noise—the erstwhile Newton's Christmas Tree Inn sits right on state route 100, which is fairly sparsely traveled at night but wongo-busy during the day. So it was nice to get back to the Youngs' spread on Ironbound Pond in West Athens, Maine: its driveway comes off a dirt road that veers off from another dirt road that's a left turn from the road that turned to pavement to gravel a few miles back... Apart from people coming HERE or to the nearest neighbors' place, there's just no traffic to speak of. The tradeoff is that there's no electricity here, so a generator is needed to provide light for cooking and to power the water hears and the pump for running water. Typically the generator is left on from dinner prep-time/dusk until folks have begun to drift to bed and there's no call for in-house light anymore. The fire pit is kept healthily burning the same amount of time, or later.
 Ironbound Pond at sunset (this photo, which I took in 2001, also hangs in my apartment's bathroom) |
 The pond and the edge of the camping area, early in the weekend (2007) |
Music happens all the time. Afternoon and evening hours particularly are spent sitting around songs circles in camp and patio chairs in the shade of easy-up canopies, trading off songs, trying to remember songs, suggesting songs for somebody else to play or figure out on guitar, and—a game that's popular everywhere, it seems—coming up with the most annoying, awful songs from the 1970s and 1980s. And now: New and improved with hateful 1990s nostalgia! Much of the music is folky, but there's plenty of pop and rock and blues to go around.
Chick Marston is, in essence, the reason I know all these people, starting with his wife Ellen, whom I've grown enormously fond of and close to over the years. It was Chick's ragtime-sounding guitar that drew me over from Camp Smegma to the Glosta folks' camp at the Philadelphia Folk Fest in, I think, 1996. Chick was sitting in the shade of their tarp one afternoon playing stuff like "The Titanic" (Leadbelly song) and "Greenland Whale Fisheries" and "The Cuckoo" and all kindsa old-timey stuff. Over the last 11 years I've visited Chick & Ellen in Glosta a dozen or so times, often for the music parties that they host every other month, and a couple times in their new (since 2004) place in Lutz, Fla. (north of Tampa). Through them I've met lots of talented musical folks and food-making folks, the greatest concentration of which convenes once or twice a year for Gourmet Camping. (The main event has been in July for 20+ years, but last fall some folks started up a second annual event; it may be that July GC is always Maine and October GC is always Vermont, but the jury's still debating.)
 Ellen and Chick helping with the Italian feast prep-work |
 Sari and I on-task for the antipasti. The blurriness might have been the camera, or it might have been us. |
I was a little embarrassed to have, really, no new songs to bust out at the campfire or between sets during the Saturday night electric stage session (where I have gotten a reputation for being "the Michael Cooney of Gourmet Camping")... But folks were plenty happy to hear "The 3-Minute Godfather" and "I'm My Own Grandpa" and suchlike—and it was especially OK to sing favorites since many of the audience were local Mainers who hadn't been to GC since 2004. In fact, it was just wonderful to see and perform for some of these folks again, especially our hosts, Timmy and Bobby Young, whose property we camp and party on
(Timmy's brother Steve was one of the small batch of original GCers who, in the mid '80s, "hiked for an hour to the wide mossy brink of a pristine 40’ waterfall deep in the heart of the Delaware River Gap and partook of chilled martinis and caviar served on silver trays while sending a rousing chorus of 'Shenandoah' echoing down the valley," according to text, probably authored by Steve himself, that's been recycled in GC invitations for at least the last 7 years. Steve has been the core of the "festival committee" ever since, joined by a number of other organizers.)
Alas, Timmy was recently injured on the job and had to have some pretty serious back surgery, so he was really not too mobile. He could stand for short spells and walk short distances, slowly (though his doctors really wanted him in bed or in his recliner all the time)... but Timmy is this guy with boundless energy who was always helping out at GC, and it was quite obviously a pain, in addition to the back pain, for him to just sit around and watch everything happen. Timmy and Bobby have been slowly working on a new house on their property since 2005, and the results are wonderful and almost done... the Saturday night stage show happened inside the "great room" with audience both in the house and on the deck...
 The new Young house. The "great room" is at right. |
 Our wonderful and generous hosts, Timmy and Bobby Young |
For the last couple of years of GC in Maine the whole group was getting spoiled. Timmy and family were friends with a caterer on whom we came to rely more and more to provide the "gourmet" part of the weekend. By 2004 every single dinner meal was completely catered and none of the campers lifted a finger. It was nice but lazy, and the food results—chock full of super-fresh Maine seafood—were yummy but not particularly inspired. It took the impetus of two years of Vermont exile to get the campers' tastes back to appropriately gourmet: the inn in Granville has a terrific (big, well-stocked) kitchen capable of feeding lots of people, and especially without an immediate catering option to tempt us, we made great use of that kitchen, preparing big dinners and brunches (and smaller munchy courses throughout the day) from Thursday evening till Sunday noon. In particular, Chick and Ellen were just learning to cook Indian food, and so made a staggering array of yummy dishes for the Thursday night meal in 2005—upping the gourmet ante considerably in one swell foop.
So now we're back in Maine and there's no question of catering again. Everybody's psyched to put on the most faboo meal they can... So when my friend Sari volunteered to captain an Italian feast, I immediately offered my services as sous-chef and volunteered a particular dish I learned from the chef at Peppers Restaurant (no longer in operation) in "Dupont East" in D.C.: she called it "Chicken Capri" but it is not. There is indeed a recipe called chicken Capri, and this ain't it. But what this is is one of the best sauces in the world, and while
peregrin8 may well be right in thinking that putting tofu in it would be unfathomably disgusting, portobellos are certainly a viable option, one which I exercised for the one strict vegetarian in attendance. Anyway, I renamed it Baudolino sauce only because I was reading Eco's novel Baudolino when I volunteered. It's a citrus-spiked cream sauce (trust me, it's awesome even if that sounds weird) with kalamata olives, marinated artichoke hearts, sun-dried tomatoes, capers, and mushrooms. OMGYUM. The rest of the feast was splendid too, with my friend Tom contributing a thin but extremely tasty tomato sauce made from tomatoes he grew himself, and Ellen contributing homemade spinach linguine. Sari handled most everything else, including the appetizers and the production of the other major sauce, of chopped tomatoes and garlic and capers, barely cooked, but doused with very hot olive oil just before serving.I could go on for days, I'm sure, but fuck it. It was a great weekend amongst lovely people who play and sing tons of great music and I can harmonize to and who feed me delicious foodstuffs all the livelong day, and all in a rustic settings where the quiet and dark are profound at night, save for the insects singing and an occasional ethereal cry from one of a family of loons that live on the pond. Take it from a frequent folk-fester: There's just no substitute for this kinda festing.
----
Folks interested in more info, pictures, etc., can go to the Yahoo! group I created to share photos, recipes, memories, etc.
All photos c. Greta Bagshaw unless otherwise noted.
