KCCE Week, Day 3: Trout a la Papa

Day Three of Kill It, Catch It, Cultivate It, Eat It Week featured the fruits of our most recent trip.  Last week, we met Mrs. Scampwalker's dad and his wife in South Fork, Colorado, along with the cousins.  It was a great time, and part of the fun included some trout fishing in mountain lakes.  The action wasn't furious -- it was pretty warm and we surmised the trout were deep -- but it was still productive.

We wound up with a decent sized school of rainbow, cutthroat, and brown trout, and the recipe we used came straight from my father in law, known as Papa by the kids.  Here's Trout a la Papa:

Splay out cleaned trout onto an oiled rack of the Big Chief smoker, and let it smoke (I use apple wood chips) for one pan (about 45 minutes or so).  While they're smoking, melt 3-4 tablespoons of butter in a large, ovenproof pan.  Saute a clove or two of garlic until soft, add enough white wine to cover the bottom of the pan, and juice from half a lemon.  When the trout are done smoking, remove the skin and discard.  Gently place the trout in the pan and roast in a 325 degree oven for 15 or 20 minutes.  Serve whole and spoon wine and butter sauce over the top.

The trout were accompanied by the Homesick Texan's phenomenal Tex-Mex squash casserole -- Jack loathes squash, and even he likes this.  A couple of homegrown tomatoes with feta cheese and balsamic vinegar rounded out the meal.

For breakfast, it was canteloupe from the garden, and leftover grilled pizza, and a Missouri peach for a mid-afternoon snack.

So far, so good!

Back From Paradise

Pardon my absence from the blogosphere, but I've got good reason.  Mrs. Scampwalker and I celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary recently in Belize.  And what a terrific place it is.  The people are friendly, the weather is sunny, and the scenery is exceedingly beautiful.

We based out of the Xanadu Resort on Ambergris Caye.  They were excellent accommodations, and Ambergris was developed, yet still had a rustic charm.  The tallest building on the island was two stories, so it's definitely less glitzy and obnoxious than many Caribbean destinations.

We ate fresh seafood nonstop -- including spiny lobster, which had just come into season.

We also swam with the seafood, including these rather sizeable (yet ostensibly harmless) nurse sharks.  The Belize Barrier Reef is about a mile off the coast of Ambergris Caye, and at 185 miles long, it's the second largest reef in the world.  And that makes for some truly breathtaking snorkeling.

The fishing ain't bad either.  Not being much of a fly fisherman, I opted to take Mrs. S on an evening fishing excursion among the mangroves.  We tore up the snapper, grouper, and jack crevalle.  I swear our guide Armando was the prototype for Hemingway's Santiago in Old Man and the Sea.

And while we didn't do battle with a marlin, I won't soon forget the brief after-sundown battle my wife waged against a 60-pound tarpon. The beast tail-danced just like I've always read about, and it was an amazing sight reflecting off the full moon's glow.

Not a bad way to celebrate with a woman who's put up with the likes of me for 20 years!

Gulf Coast Fishing Trip

Last week, I spent a few days down off the coast of Galveston on a fishing trip. Born and raised in the middle of the country, I'm always amazed at the new sights, sounds, and smells I encounter on the coast.

You can read all about my fishing exploits here and here in a pictoral I did for the company blog. It was a spectacular day or two on the water, and I can't wait to do it again.

Typically, on these TV trips, we practice catch-and-release whenever possible. Part of it is to set an example for viewers, but I suspect most of it has to do with the fact that we don't usually have the means to ice down our bounty and keep it cold for the trip home. That wasn't entirely true this time -- I packed a collapsable cooler in my luggage.

Although we did release the fish we caught, Captain Bill led me to Golden Seafood, an archetypical seafood shack located in Seabrook, Texas. Virtually every type of fresh fish and shellfish was there for the picking... and damn, was it cheap! I scored colossal shrimp for $5.49 a pound, and beautiful red snapper fillets for $3.49 a pound. The shrimp were wrapped in small strips of bacon with a jalapeno spear -- classic Gulf Coast style. The snapper I improvised by rolling in some homemade "blackened" cajun seasoning, and then broiling it. It turned out really well, and eliminated some of the greasyness that I sometimes get when I blacken things the old-school way.

I'll be back to the coast again soon... and this time, I'll bring a bigger cooler!

Garden & Gun: Get It

Here's a mashup for you...

Take equal parts of Southern Living, Texas Monthly, Gray's Sporting Journal, and a chicken-fried version of the New Yorker, and what do you get? You get Garden and Gun, one of the few magazines I look forward to reading cover to cover, every single month that I've been fortunate enough to receive it.

To the uninitiated (or uncouth), it seems like an unlikely combo... I get laughs when people see it proudly layed out on my desk. But once they crack it open (hoping to mock me), they begin to understand that this little book is not about begonias and .44 magnums.

It's a "lifestyle" magazine, to be sure. But I invariably cringe at that word... I mean, what asshat out there describes himself as leading a "southern lifestyle" -- or ANY lifestyle?!?!? That's a word for no-talent, just-out-of-school marketing punks that have no, well, lifestyle of their own. Anyhoo, I digress.

Back to Garden and Gun. Please tell me what other magazine you know of that has the editorial stable of Sid Evans (EIC) and David DiBenedetto (ED), along with contributing editors like Roy Blount, Jr., Pat Conroy, Rick Bragg, and Winston Groom? (If you don't know them, shame on you. Google them first (see?) then buy the damned magazine already.) Add to that some of the best outdoor writers plying their trade on a freelance basis (see Phil Bourjaily and Eddie Nickens) and this magazine is a sure bet.

Of course, no magazine is a sure bet these days. In fact, thanks, to the recession and corporate ad slashing, most mags are thinner than double-ply asswipe these days. G&G is hanging in there, and you need to know about it. Get a subscription. Buy it on a newsstand or during a layover. At the very least, visit their blogs. Trust me, pal... this day and age, we could all use some old-school southern sense.

An Embarrassment of Riches

Every once in awhile, an evening comes together. I had one of those over MemDay weekend. My parents visited, and the weekend was full of wine (OK, some Spanish tempranillo, plus gin and Sailor Jerry rum), women (OK, my mom, my wife, and my daughter) and song (OK, most of it was typical Scampwalker family trading of stories).

At any rate, on Saturday night, after a rousing game of ladderball (in which the boys won, thank you very much), I put together a pretty damned fine menu, if I do say so myself. Here's the deets:

• Axis Venison Chops, marinated in pomegranate juice, olive oil, garlic, and fresh herbs. Like the t-bones before them, they kicked ass. They were less tender, but the flavor was the same - earthy, but not gamey. I seared them again on the grill, served rare (natch).
  
• Brown Rice with Dried Cherries, Toasted Pine Nuts, and Tarragon. This was a little ditty I threw together on the fly... it turned out better than it should have. Mrs. Scampwalker prepared our usual brown rice in the Neuro Fuzzy, and I threw in the rest, along with a couple of pats of brown butter. It complemented the beefiness of the venison beautifully.
  
• Split & Grilled Artichokes. This was one I learned at a place in SoCal (Seal Beach?)with GrandBetty & RonDad, and we make it often. Parboil the 'chokes, split them, and grill them split side down. Serve with mayo, worcestershire sauce, lemon, and a dash of Tabasco. In season, and cheap.
• White Crappie Ceviche on Organic Leaf Lettuce. This little riff was the pièce de résistance, in my opinion. Also the most expensive, at over $60/lb. If you know ceviche, then you know it's all about freshness. This fish was 18 hours from hook and line to plate and fork (actually, a scallop shell). Served on a bed of Scampwalker's own tender leaf lettuce and arugula.

The point of this is that it all (ok, most of it) came naturally to us. The family cameraderie, the fun, and the meal. The venison is documented here, the artichokes were in season (common sense prevents us from buying $4.00 vegetables in dead winter, and rice we got from the local Asian market), but a $225 10-hour crappie trip is totally copasetic.
That's where the kids come in. I've taken them fishing plenty, but I really wanted them to experience it from a boat and really tear it up. I called Brent Frazee, the KC Star's outdoor editor, and he pointed me to Chatt Martin, crappie assassin extroidinaire. In fact, I didn't know the lake we were fishing until the day before -- Chatt is so plugged in that he gets on-demand reports from every credible crappie pro in the Sunflower State, and Melvern was hot last Friday.
And so we went. A long, hot, windless day later, we cranked in about 100 slabs... and Jack, the nine-year-old wunderkind, was responsible for an estimated 60% of them. Of the 100 we caught, we probably took 25 home that were over the 10-inch size restriction. Of the 75 we threw back, 60 were within a half inch of getting filleted.
An embarrassment of riches indeed. I'm a lucky man.

Seriously???

I'm not sure whether this little snippet, sent to me by a hunting buddy, is bona-fide or not... and I'm sorta hoping it isn't. If it is real, it unequivocally confirms what I've contended for years: there's a real element of society that actually thinks their cow, fish, fowl or pig are spontaneously generated on a styrofoam plate in some sterile lab. Thank God it doesn't have to be that way.

Not long ago, I stumbled across Hunter Angler Gardener Cook, an "honest food" blog that explains my ethos on food much better than I could. Take a look... I have a feeling I'll be expounding on food and critter killin' a lot in the future.