No critter, not even an Aussie Shepherd, likes chicken livers as much as I do. Fried, and with ketchup, are good, but pâté is supreme. Here’s how I make it, which means simplicity, along with some fire, is better.
Ingredients
1 tablespoon Butter
1/4 pound Chicken Livers
Salt
A handful of Porcini Mushrooms–I rehydrate dried ones
1 clove chopped Garlic
Enough Brandy to set the house on fire (that’s a joke)
A few drops of Heavy Cream
Heat the butter at medium heat, and fry the livers with a pinch of salt–they don’t need much. Throw in the diced Porcini when almost cooked, add the garlic, and prepare for the conflagration.
Pour in the brandy and light her up. Poof! There is nothing as good as a kitchen fire, unless it is a sure enough grease fire. A good hot fire is the last step in the cooking.
After things cool off, pour the livers and mushrooms into a food processor. MJ and I had to step up to the plate and buy a French made Robot Coupé machine, which is advertised as “Three Robots in One.” That company did invent the things.
Add the cream–NOT TOO MUCH–to make the stuff even richer than it already is, and let the robot go to work. I leave some texture to the meat, as I didn’t like baby food even when I was a baby. Put it into a terrine/custard cup and refrigernator it. From this point, get as Frenchified as you want–I love this with a crostini, a cornichon, and nothing else. There is nothing like this kind of food to make life worth living.
Centuries of Technology have produced These Three Containers
Time to cut straight to the issue–the oil content of three of the most common drying oils. This information comes from the scholarly text Painting Materials.
Walnut Oil–63-65%
Sunflower Seed Oil–50%
Linseed Oil–35-40%
And yet Linseed Oil is the most commonly used. Why?
Linseed Oil
To answer the question–tradition and availability. All these oils have a single molecular bond, which means they dry into a polymer when oxidized–i.e., when they are exposed to air (O2). Of the natural oils, only Tung oil has a double molecular bond, which makes it the most waterproof natural finish.
However, when heated for a long period of time, these natural oils form a double molecular bind, which means they dry faster, and become a durable polymerized surface. Heated linseed oil is often sold as “Danish” oil, which is a meaningless term that is used for all kinds of oil finishes.
Raw Linseed oil is a trendy diet item as well, sold as flaxseed oil. This has a very short shelf life, so treat it accordingly. You could just boil it and put it on your dining room table.
“Boiled” Linseed oil is just cheap Linseed oil with a bunch of toxic chemical dryers added. It makes a nice enough finish, and makes a very good base for an exterior paint, which is what I use it for. I don’t use it in any living area, but that could just be overly fastidious me.
Linseed oil , or Stand oil, sold to the art crowd (to make oil paint) is extremely high quality thickened oil, and is very expensive. No wonder a Van Gogh costs so much.
Sunflower Seed Oil
This is on my old Oak dining room table, which belonged to my grandmother, so the table has been around for awhile–she was born in the nineteenth century. This oil is cheap, durable, and dries fast. In fact, it is barely a fraction of the cost of a high quality Linseed oil. If you want to spend more for Linseed oil, just think that it is only money.
Walnut Oil
I loves me some Walnut oil. Expensive, yes, but it smells great and also tastes great. I keep mine in the frigernator to make it last longer. It also makes a superior base for a wax finish. It was also allegedly the secret ingredient for many of the old master painters
Making a Drying Oil
Any of these oils can be thickened using the old “stand” method of drying oils, which is leaving them out in the summer sun. In short, they stand out in the sun, which is quite intense here in the South. The danger is having the oil turn rancid, which could also explain the popularity of Linseed oil–less oil content means a lower chance of spoilage.
Which brings me to all the woodworking folks on the internet who insist that all natural oils turn rancid. These are drying oils, dopes. Olive oil isn’t, as with many cooking oils. The reason that the Louvre and the Uffizi galleries don’t stink is that the paintings were made with drying oils. More than a few were painted with tempera paint, which was often made with eggs as well. See how tough a dried egg yolk is sometimes.
Just because many people are saying something stupid doesn’t make it true. The great English woodworker Robin Wood (magnificent name, btw) pointed out that buying an expensive synthetic finish is illogical, when natural finishes are traditional, abundant, and less expensive–not to mention food safe and totally non-toxic. However, if someone admires the skull and cross-bones on the label, they should go for it. See who turns rancid first.
Those immortal words came from my favorite writer, the German Bertolt Brecht. In German it is
“Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral”
Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera
Brecht was apparently right at the top of the list of people Hitler wanted to be killed. He fled Nazi Germany, and then the Republican US–but not before exposing the fools on the US House Un-American Affairs Committee (HUAC). There is actually an audio tape of his testimony, which is so funny that I only listen to it on my birthday, and we happen to have the same birthday, February 10.
Anyway, here is the poem for today.
Long I have Looked for the Truth
1
Long I have looked for the truth about the life of people together
That life is crisscrossed, tangled, difficult to understand.
I have worked hard to understand it and when I had done so
I told the truth as I found it.
2
When I had told the truth that was so difficult to find
It was a common truth, which many told
(And not everyone had such difficulty in finding.)
3
Soon after that people arrived in vast masses with pistols given to them
And blindly shot around them at all those too poor to wear hats
And all those who told the truth about them and their employers
They drove out of the country in the fourteenth year of our semi-republic.
4
From me they took my little house and car
Which I had earned by hard work.
(I was able to save my furniture.)
5
When I crossed the frontier I thought:
More than my house I need the truth.
But I need my house too. And since then
Truth for me has been like a house and car.
And they took them.
Bertolt Brecht
Thanks to the Brits and Methuen publishers for this translation. Food, house, and car first, indeed.
Yes, I forgot to write about the second low workbench, but that way there can be a flashback about it, as if this was a modernist novel. This latest bench is no modernist–it is based on a Roman wall tile image from 79 AD. The accompanying three legged stool is my design, which is pseudo-scandahoovian.
Have a Seat
The finish on the stool is the Walnut Oil Wax finish I made on my workbench. I will use the same on the Roman style workbench.
Proton Torpedoes Fully Operational, Captain
This is it with the peg/workholding 3/4″ holes drilled, which make this thing ready for work. I will use it mostly for carving, though anything else is game as well. At 6′ 7″ long, it will handle some large pieces.
I need to make four more legs, so it will have eight legs like the original from Herculaneum, which was buried in ash by Mt. Vesuvius, and which is why this design survived. Old school really is the only school.
CNN daily headlines always have at least one that shows that their editor(s) don’t really know English that well. Here is the most recent howler. ”A Tennessee jury orders Cracker Barrel to pay man $9.4 million after he was served glass filled with a chemical.” All glasses are filled with a chemical, even an empty one–it’s called oxygen. You could even say that chemicals R us.
Which brings me to the great Di-Hydrogen Oxide scare of a few years ago. I got all sorts of mileage out of this in my writing classes, as very few students figured out the whole thing was a hoax. Here are some of the dangers of H2O.
–It will kill you if it fills up your lungs
–it can swamp your car
–It can submerge all of the plants in your yard or garden
–It can sweep your house away
–If you don’t get enough of it, it can kill you as well
Water is almost as dangerous as oxygen. Too bad we can’t live without either. Alas, education in this semi-literate country. It can kill you as well. That must be why I prefer my H2O to be flavored with some alcohol.
Thomas Jefferson ignored the Supreme Court whenever he felt like it, especially when the rulings were made by Arch-Federalist John Marshall. In his old age he summed up his feelings about the aristocratic status that judges had acquired.
At the establishment of our constitutions, the judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government. Experience, however, soon showed in what way they were to become the most dangerous; that the insufficiency of the means provided for their removal gave them a freehold and irresponsibility in office.
Thomas Jefferson
Naturally, he always pointed to the fact that there are actually supposed to be three co-equal branches of the government, as mandated by the US Constitution–none is supposed to have carte blanche over the others. What a concept–democracy.
Now we have six unelected, Ivy League pseudo-educated religious bigots, deciding what the law is and is not. King George the Third looks like a little league dude compared to this arrogant bunch of buffoons, and the amount of power that they have usurped..
We have yet another Voltaire moment imposed on us, Voltaire being the writer whose bust just happens to be in the main hall at Monticello. We must cultivate our own gardens, and not recognize the corporate lackeys that have been installed as judges. I no longer shop at Wal-Mart and other equally repulsive big box stores, and I have never even considered having any dealings with a travesty like FarceBook. Take their money away, and watch them collapse.
We may very well lose the right to have majority rule, if we haven’t already. We can still always vote with our feet.
Anyone who reads this blog with any regularity will know what Hoya! means. It’s the stuff you don’t want to step in whilst in the Horse barn, or any other barn, for that matter. These days, I can’t even look at the news media on the interwebs without having a bushel of Hoya! chunked at me.
My two favorites–empty shelves and hyper-inflation. I have actually seen one empty shelf at the supermarket, but that was a year ago when all the toilet paper hoarding was going on. Even then, it wasn’t completely empty–some brands remained in stock. As I am not a a fan of any particular kind of this sanitary product, I grabbed some and left. No harm and no foul.
Gas prices? They have gone up, but buy a Prius like ours, and you won’t notice or care. We still have to buy a tank of gas every couple of months, but it is usually in the twenty buck range. Stop driving your Ford Extinction, and get over the worries.
And then there is the all-time world champion, the fate of the un-vaccinated. They are in fact dying like flies, but if you live with the intelligence of a fly, you are probably going to die like one. The CDC can issue all the mask guidelines it wants, but as the cliche goes, you can’t cure stupid. As my hero Forrest Gump said, “Stupid is as stupid does.”
In short, I am going to have to go back to one of my favorite writers, the nineteenth century American philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce. He devised the most famous definition of the formation of a hypothesis, a procedure he named “abduction.” An astute person applies a general rule to a particular problem, and acts according, though the general rule MUST BE BASED ON FACTS AND REALITY, if it is to be useful. Four vaccinations later (three Covid and one flu), and I have not grown a single crocodile scale, or truthfully, even had a single noticeable side effect.
Maybe that is just me, but as HD Thoreau said, I don’t know anyone else nearly as well as myself.
This is a simple enough project, melting wax in oil, to make a wax finish, which is not to be confused with a wax polish. I used the best smelling oil for this, walnut, which also has the highest oil content of any drying oil.
Ingredients
4 oz Walnut Oil
1 oz Beeswax
1/4 oz Carnuaba wax
I cook these with a Trangia alcohol stove, in a pan of water. This assembly is so safe I make this right on top of my wood Sjobergs workbench. Just keep an eye on the water level, as it boils out quickly.
Three Legs are Better than Two
My three legged Cedar stool had only a finish of cheap Linseed oil, and this wax finish brought it back to life. The next project is finishing my low workbench #3, which is a full 6′ 7″ long. I may need to cook some more finish for that.
I was formerly suspicious of people who had clean workshops, probably because of my own slovenly habits. I get busy and forget to clean up all the shavings, as I produce gallons of them regularly. And please, don’t even mention the sawdust, which I am currently trying to transform into mushroom spawn–a new project.
Then my wife Melanie Jane, who should be up for beatification for putting up with all this grunge for years, bought me a copy of a French woodworking book, Le Bois. That just means wood, but the subject of the book is actually Swedish treen, aka kitchenware, though there is also a chapter on making Afro combs–seriously. I wasn’t aware that the French were into that.
Although the book was written by two Frenchmen, it was first published in Swedish. It must have done well, as barely a year later the French edition appeared, which is a good thing, because I read very little Swedish. It is an excellent book, with excellent photography. And then, there it is–a picture of almost the same workbench that I have.
Sjobergs!
That bench is a bit longer than mine, but otherwise identical. I assume it is a standard issue Swedish schoolhouse workroom bench-every school has to have one room full of these, and every student has to learn slojd–that’s crafts. They certainly turned out a winner with this young woman.
The very tidy workbench belongs to Moa Brännström Ott, who is a noted young Swedish woodcarver of the Willie Sundqvist variety. Judging from the few shavings at the base of her bench, I doubt that she is turning out pieces of this magnitude:
Work Bar
This 8 1/2′ long piece of Eastern Red Cedar was meant to be a workbench, but turned out looking a lot like a bar–hence our name for it is “work bar.” I’ll put it to work tonight cheering on the Crimson Tide, and cursing the despised SEC refs. They would call a ten yard penalty on their own mothers for holding a baby.
Win or lose, tomorrow will be the same as today–round stuff needs to be flattened, flat stuff needs to be rounded, and raw stuff needs to be cooked. That’s how we keep going on.
Yes, winter in the age of climate disruption. Technically this was late late last fall, but with temps in the mid 70’s, it might as well have been late late spring. In this situation, the only thing to do is light up the brick oven, and eat some pizza outside.
Our pizza sauce has evolved over the years, and I will simply list the secret ingredients, soon to be secret no more. Here it goes:
Balsamic Vinegar
Garlic Paste
Italian Tomato Paste in a Tube (like the Garlic Paste)
Homemade Pesto, frozen in an ice cube tray
Home canned local Tomatoes
It is possible to screw up the sauce even with these ingredients, but it can only be accomplished with some difficulty. Go easy on the vinegar and the paste, and all’s well that eats well.
I will resist the temptation to make another bad joke about Al Fresco. I could hurt his feelings.
Southern Fusion Cooking 