Year of the Cow (34 page)

“Can we find a waterfall?” he asks. He really likes waterfalls.

“Absolutely.” Basil lopes in and sees her leash in my hand. She dances back and forth excitedly. I grab some water and a few supplies, and the three of us set out.

I've heard of a stream in the Santa Monica Mountains on the edge of town that eventually cascades off a cliff of volcanic rock. And I almost know how to get to it. We spend the better part of an afternoon—hell, the best part—wandering through the mountains in search of it. Eventually we find that waterfall and stop to rest beside a pool at its base.

I reach into my pack. “Dec, would you like a piece of jerky?”

“What is it?” he asks. Despite seeing me make it, he's never actually had it before.

“It's outdoor food.” I reach into the bag and offer him a tiny piece. And one for Basil as well.

Declan slips it into his mouth. “It's chewy,” he notes. “But I like it.”

“Me, too.” Together the three of us sit in the fine mist erupting from the base of the waterfall and watch the droplets glitter like jewels in the afternoon sun.

*   *   *

As months roll on, I reclaim my commute. Rather than creeping in lockstep ten feet at a time along a concrete ribbon, I get loose. Leave early. Grab a book on tape and a back road and point my automobile vaguely workward, but see where the path less taken takes me. I make it a goal to discover something new on each trip between home and the office. A just opened Himalayan restaurant. A store that specializes only in fly-fishing. An ancient velodrome and a park with a cricket pitch where teams from the far reaches of the commonwealth battle ferociously according to rules I find incomprehensible. But I want to learn. Los Angeles is a varied and glorious place if one has the temerity to explore.

I mean, there's a Thai joint staffed with Elvis impersonators, for Pete's sake. Our morgue has a gift shop. Come on.

On the weekends, we eschew cars altogether. Odds are that a Saturday without a car ride is a pretty darn lovely Saturday. Instead, we load up my enormous longtail cargo bike, pile the kids on the back, and turn mundane errands into adventures. On a bike, a trip to the grocery store becomes a story out of myth—The Saga of the Broken Streetlight. The Bicyclist Who Brought Home Ice Cream in August. The Stone Clan Versus the Market of Doom. And like myths, they turn our days into manageable tribulations—and a chance to grow stronger together in their negotiation. Bereft of a tank full of burning dinosaur bones, bikes trawl the world at a more human pace. In the world, rather than barreling, isolated, through it. Much as it must have been done before cars, One Step Back.

The beef in our backyard has forced us to slow down a little. And in doing so, I've had a chance to see what I'd been missing. I'm not completely able to disengage from my particular productivity compulsions, but I'm getting better. Breathing deeper. And I like it.

I try to take an hour a day to do absolutely nothing.

Finally, I make a fresh appointment with my doctor. It's been a few years since my last one, and without putting my health in order, every other change is moot. When my blood work comes back, my fasting blood glucose level is completely normal. For now, at least, inclination toward diabetes has receded. That isn't to say it won't ever come back. But for today, at least, all is well. And that's enough.

When the Machine starts to tug at my mental sleeves, I try to remember that I am in all likelihood becoming stressed out over nothing, really. I'm not going to starve. I'm not going to die. There are no bears here. I am in absolutely no existential danger whatsoever. The problems I'm facing are not by any stretch of the imagination actual dangers. In fact, by historical standards, Americans live in a world of almost unfathomable abundance. So I tell myself to shut the hell up and breathe. An inhalation. An exhalation. A realization that odds are very good that everything's going to be just fine. And then, often as not, I head into the kitchen.

It is on one of those days that I find myself standing at my counter, staring at a four-pound package wrapped in white butcher paper. The label indicates “knuckle bones.”

My first thought: Hey, cows have knuckles! Something I did not know.

Second thought: What can I do with it?

I amble over to my cookbooks. My collection has grown from a stack to a shelf to an entire section of a bookcase, heavy with enormous tomes of tiny text. Knuckle bones, it seems, are primarily used in stock. I haven't yet made a stand-alone stock in this project, though I did use these bones to make that pretty killer pho. I have no idea why stock has evaded me, but it's time to rectify that situation.

Stock should be the easiest thing in the world. It used to be a much more common preparation in home kitchens than it is now. It is a process born of frugality; when you're trying to make the most of every molecule of food from a given animal, stock is an excellent way to wring some utility from a skeleton and sinew and bits otherwise inedible. A person boils some bones. Perhaps a few veggies. Then leaves time and chemistry to do the work.

Generally speaking, there are a couple of ways to approach stock—white and brown. For white stocks, you blanch the bones, boiling them in water to remove impurities, and then discard the water of the initial boil. For brown stocks you instead roast the bones, adding a layer of toasty flavors from the Maillard reaction to the finished product and coagulating the proteins so they don't cloud the final result.

After consulting with
Nourishing Traditions,
the
Larousse Gastronomique,
the Internet, the CIA (the Culinary Institute of America, not the spy agency), and a half dozen other cookbooks great and small, I decide on a brown stock. I enjoy those Maillard flavors. I toss some bones, both knuckle and marrow, into a roasting pan with a mirepoix and some garlic and shove them into a hot oven to roast.

Familiar now with the rhythms of the kitchen, I take a seat just outside the door with a book. Faced with a time frame too long to loiter but too short to shoo away, I take a position where I can keep an eye on the application without obsessing. If something goes wrong, I'll see it. Or smell it. It'll be fine.

Basil, not as content to pass the time with a book, walks over to me and nuzzles my hand, whining in the way she does when she's hungry. I know this behavior—it will not end until Basil puts something in her stomach, be it kibble or banana or stick of butter or nearly anything else that will hold still long enough for her to wolf down. Knowing this, I amble over to the fridge and pull out a raw chicken quarter, drop it into her bowl, and place it in the backyard. She grabs the poultry in her jaws, settles down, and gets to work as I return to my book.

A half hour later, I stash the bones and veggies in my trusty twelve-quart stockpot. I splash some water into the hot roasting pan and scrape to deglaze it, adding the resultant liquid to the stockpot as well. There's gold in that water—the bits stuck at the bottom of the pan, when scraped and dissolved into the liquid, are glorious stuff—and if I omitted them, my stock would be much the poorer for it.

I stab a finger into my phone and Mike Doughty's “I Hear the Bells” pours out of speakers hanging on the wall of my kitchen as I grab my knife. I chop some parsley and add it to the pot. A little fresh thyme. Bay leaves. Some whole peppercorns. I head out into my backyard for a fresh lemon. Dear God, it's beautiful out today.

Back inside, I juice the lemon into the pot and cover the bones with cold water, bring the pot to a boil, knock the heat back to something in the neighborhood of low, and let the pot simmer, bubbling once every second or so.

And that's it. There's no time limit. I need to simmer this for as long as I can stand to. In this case, I'll probably let it bubble along on the back of my stove for six hours or so. I can't ignore it, though. I'll swing by every fifteen minutes or so with the biggest, flattest spoon in the house to skim off the scum that rises to the surface of the simmering liquid.

Late in the evening, I strain the stock through a fine-meshed strainer lined with cheesecloth and stash the pot in a sink filled with ice to cool to room temperature. Finally, I pour the stock into ice cube trays to divide it into easily used portions.

Now I have stock for months.

And I use it. In braises. Sauces. Soups and stews. In almost any preparation that calls for water, I can substitute my homemade beef stock for superior results. It may be the single greatest improvement to my culinary game that I've made as a result of this experiment. Why haven't I done this sooner? Correction:
How
haven't I done this sooner? It couldn't be simpler. Water. Heat. Bones. Time. And the wherewithal to look closely at the process, concentrate all the good things that go into it, and discard all the crap that would otherwise make it less than wonderful.

I'm trying to perform the same feat of concentration and eradication with life outside the kitchen. This journey started out with some basic questions about the food I eat: How do I make the most out of the very stuff that becomes “me”? But that question has led me to a slightly different one: How do I make the most of what that food actually becomes—how do I make the most out of the life this beef enables?

The elements of my life that I'd like to concentrate and enhance aren't novel and aren't complicated. Time spent with family and friends. Pleasant meals and good conversations. Time to appreciate beauty, wherever I happen to find it—interspersed with bursts of unstructured, adrenaline-fueled mayhem and mad fits of laughter. These don't fit especially well with the Machine, because the Machine runs on a ticking clock and a fear of the future. It runs on the anxiety that, somehow, we aren't doing enough. We aren't preparing adequately for some half-glimpsed future that we're told could turn out to be very, very bad. We aren't ready for what lies ahead, and time is rapidly running out.

That ticking clock, used forever to sell convenience foods and brushless shaving cream and countless time-saving industrial widgets, is largely fiction. There's only one clock that matters.

The white-hot singularity at the core of the Machine is—ultimately—a fear of death. It's the inevitability of journey's end and the threat of a question nobody can honestly answer: What does it mean to make the most of a life? How can you tell that you've spent your time well? There is no metric, no answer key at the back of the book. It's a question that I think everyone has to answer for themselves and hold tight to that answer with both hands. But that's hard.

Through the proxy of this steer, in some tiny way, I've interviewed death. I wanted to make the most of a life that died to support my own. In doing so, I've had to ask what it even means to make the most of a life. And although I haven't yet found a definitive answer to this ultimate question, it's led to other, smaller ones, dealing with how I spend my days and what I hope to gain from them. I've learned, above all, that it's okay to slow down. It's okay to remain taskless for a time. It's okay to not want something—to not have a plan. Sometimes, it's okay to just sit. To inhabit the moment, smile, and let the future be whatever the hell it's going to be. As a result, I'm no longer completely willing to sacrifice the present to an imagined future. I want to live in present tense.

Some years ago, a steer from a small herd in Northern California walked into a nondescript building and, in an instant, lost consciousness, never to regain it. As a direct result, my family gained years of quality meals, lovingly prepared, shared, laughed over, celebrated, and deeply appreciated. We gained better health, new skills, and myriad opportunities to come together as a family and enjoy the simple pleasures of one another's company.

In making the most of this steer's death, I've accidentally made more of my own life. And I'm indescribably grateful for it.

*   *   *

It's a bright summer day. I'm sitting in my backyard, reading a book and smoking a pastrami in my kettle grill. Like people do.

“Daddy…” A tiny voice calls out from behind me. I turn, to find my daughter, Nora, standing barefoot holding one of her dolls. Gold ringlets frame her face, just like they sometimes frame Summer's after a long day in the sun.

“What's up, sweetie?”

“Daddy. Can we go on an adventure?”

Yes, my dear. Yes, we can.

 

Stock

Time: 7 to 8 hours

Makes about 3 quarts

Stock makes every good thing better. It's kitchen alchemy, a simple, borderline-magical way to turn humble ingredients and culinary detritus into something approaching the divine.

This isn't the only way to make stock, but it's a good one.

3 to 4 pounds beef knuckle bones

3 to 4 pounds beef marrow bones (or some combination thereof)

Olive oil

4 carrots, peeled and chopped

4 ribs celery, chopped

1 head garlic, separated into cloves and lightly smashed but unpeeled

2 white or yellow onions, peeled and quartered

½ bunch fresh flat-leaf parsley

4 sprigs fresh thyme

2 bay leaves

¼ teaspoon whole black peppercorns

Juice of 1 lemon

  
1.
Preheat the oven to 400°F.

  
2.
Rub the bones with oil, put on a sheet pan, and roast for 30 minutes.

  
3.
Toss the carrots, celery, garlic, and onion in oil and place on another sheet pan. Roast along with the bones for another 20 to 30 minutes, until the bones are appropriately golden brown and lovely.

  
4.
Transfer the bones and vegetables to a large stockpot in the 12-quart-capacity range. Deglaze the roasting pan with ½ cup water, scraping to dislodge the bits stuck to the bottom, and add this water to the pot as well.