Time Lapse Huskies

Miss Bula at 7 weeks:

Szia about the same age:

 All growed up.

Secret recipe for terrible homemade jerky

Want to make jerky at home? Sure you do.

Feel like trying a little different approach when preparing your jerky meat? Why not.

I heard from a chef that some marinades use Sprite, the carbonated beverage. Something about the sugars helping break down the meat to make it more tender.

I had some not-so-choice cuts of venison I wanted to make into jerky, so thought I'd give it a whirl. Whipped up different batches of marinade, with a normal version and two variations on the soda additive.

I don't really like Sprite, so I used 7-Up for one recipe and heard Coca-Cola can also be used, so I tried that too.

The use of a meat tenderizer mallet or whatever they're called was also suggested. I don't have one of those, but I am the proud owner of a framing hammer with a waffle head, and can vouch for its tenderizing capabilities from smashing my finger in the past. So I banged away on the strips of venison with that.

Here's maybe where I went wrong. I let the stuff marinate overnight and now suspect that may have been too long, because the the normal batch came out great. Loved it. Kind of spicy, little smoky. Just right.

The 7-Up and Coke versions, on the other hand, tasted like . . . what's the word? . . . shit.

They had the definite flavor of old, flat, crappy-tasting soda. Exactly what it soaked in. I'm not sure if there's a connection there.

I spit one out, gave the rest to Bula the Wonder Dog and she wasn't thrilled about it either.

I even re-marinated the stuff to try and wash that flat gross taste away. No go. Flat soda taste still clung to it like the residue on your floormats after spilling a carbonated beverage in your car months ago.

In related news, I'm now selling dog treats for owners who want to train their dogs to not beg for treats.

Nine-finger typing technique

And Furthermore column, Wallowa County Chieftain, October 2012

I’ve learned to not be surprised when I make bad decisions, but this last one was really kind of impressive. I had half a deer to finish cutting up to get in the freezer, not much time to do it and lots more to do before a Hells Canyon raft trip leaving early the next morning. But I took the time to really sharpen two special knives.

I inherited these and a honing steel from my grandpa, who used them in his butcher shop. The big knife looks like something a pirate would use to board another vessel. The other is small and handy. Perfect for butcher work.

I put an edge on both that made easy ribbons of the freezer paper I was using to test. Happy with the meticulous sharpening, I remembered this was a rush job so I got busy and in no time at all trimmed the very tip off my ring finger.

I had some time to reflect while waiting for the bleeding to stop. Butcher skills are not hereditary, apparently. Professional meatcutters are vital members of society. A chainmail glove from a shark suit might be a wise investment. I’m an idiot. And that thing sure is bleeding a lot. Those were the highlights of my thought process.

Some of the finished product.

Typing is no fun without the end of one finger. I can tell you that. I was just glad I didn’t have a piano recital or any fingertip pushups scheduled for that day. But I did need to row a gearboat and set up camps in Hells Canyon, which involves lots of contact between a finger and things that make you want to scream.

This trip was a joint production with local outfitter Winding Waters River Expeditions in Joseph and Plate & Pitchfork from Portland, run by Erika Polmar who organizes dinners at farms, orchards, ranches and so forth. You go see where your food comes from, meet the folks growing it, then a hotshot chef whips up a blowout meal right there with fancy tablecloths and all. Craig Nichols of 6 Ranch, just outside Enterprise, is also a river guide, so the guests saw Corriente cattle before and after a professional butcher had processed the meat while keeping their hand out of the way of the blade.

We ate well. Real well. Guest chefs were Leather Storrs and Joseph Hickey from the restaurant Noble Rot in Portland. I had a few questions for them about names. Noble Rot has something to do with wine grapes and Leather is on his birth certificate as his actual middle name. John is his first name and he figured there were plenty of Johns, not many Leathers, so he went that route. I’d probably do the same, except my given name is Jonathan Polyester Rombach.

One of the guests on the trip was Rick Steves, as in Rick Steves the travel guy who steers more visitors around Europe than all the cab drivers and train conductors combined, through his guide books, TV and radio programs.

Interview with Steves. Note the bandaged ring finger.

Paul and Penny Arentsen, owners of Winding Waters, met Steves in Europe a while ago and invited him and his girlfriend Trish out here to Wallowa County for this combo trip with primo food on a rafting adventure. It was a great trip and a perfect finish to the rafting season. Although I’m having trouble adjusting back to my own cooking after meals prepared by professional chefs. And I’ve completely lost my appetite for venison finger steaks.

Here’s a couple fun facts – Leather Storrs, the chef, is the son of the architect who designed the World Forestry Center building in Portland. I’m headed to that very place this week, where my dad, Jim Rombach, will be inducted into the Forestry Leadership Hall of Fame. I’m awful proud of him. Dad’s buddy, Bob Tokarczyk, is also becoming a Hall of Famer. I didn’t realize there was a Hall of Fame for forestry before this, but I’ve always wanted a baseball signed by a Hall of Famer and now it looks like I’ll get two autographs. Nice work you guys.

 Jon Rombach, a local columnist for the Chieftain, can type with nine fingers if he has to.

Close call

The sun went down today. Thought it was going to hit the Jeep but it landed behind the hill. Good thing, I just put the top back on that Jeep and would have been pissed.

Flock of Somethings

I was under a trailer trying to weld something but instead was getting red-hot embers in my ear hole, so I threw off the mask and looked up to see this squadron of largish bird creatures flying by.

Maybe they're vultures on their way to a guy crawling across a desert. But there were over 30 of them cruising together. I'm no ornithologist, I'll just admit that right off the bat. But the closest one looked hawkishy to me. Hawks don't fly in giant wads, do they?

This here is a zoomed in version and I messed with the contrast and whatever to try to get the silhouettes. Didn't do to great a job, but this was a camera phone.

Here's a zoomed out version showing most of the pack.

I'm not crawling across my lawn calling out for water until this matter is settled.

The physics of school time

Forgot to put this up last month. 

"And Furthermore" column, Wallowa County Chieftain, September 2012.

In line at the grocery store the other day, I was next to a dad and his daughter. She was maybe twelve years old and the checkout person smiled at her and asked, “Ready for school to start?”

There was a pause. A brief moment where you could see the girl check her first impulse and sift out the options on how she might answer. Her hesitation right there is the best example I’ve seen of what it is to be civilized. Because the genuine response from any kid asked by a smiling adult if they’re ready for summer to be over should be to immediately attack the adult taunting them. Just a wild shin-kicking, scratching assault to get across the message that, no, I’m not ready for school to start and here’s what you get for reminding me.

Instead, this well-mannered young girl thought it over. Her eye twitched a little. Then she forced a smile and said quietly, “I guess.” The checkout person smiled. The dad smiled. Even I smiled. I’m not sure what we were smiling about. What child is ever ready for summer to end? What kind of question is this? We don’t smile and ask prisoners who were just denied parole if they’re ready to go back in the slammer. Well, maybe we do. I’ve never served on a parole board so I could be wrong about that.

I think it’s a cruel practice to be asking students, and teachers for that matter, if they’re ready to go sit in that classroom for another whole year. But now that I think about it, we should rub it in more often. It makes a nice incentive for these kids to work toward graduation. I’m all for education, don’t get me wrong. School taught me to cherish the knowledge that I’ll never have to go to school again. And now I get to torment people who do have to sit in a classroom. That’s the real power of a diploma.

Kids, let’s get you started on your exciting new season of learning with a quick science lesson. You may be wondering, as I did when I was your age, what makes the hands of a clock in a classroom not move. Simple. But first, you have to understand the phenomenon of summertime moving faster than other times of the year. Let’s begin.

More sunbeams in the summer come through windows and land on calendars, which heats the molecules on the pages and causes them to speed up. So the days move faster. It’s pretty basic science. And because Ma Nature balances her checkbook, there’s an equal and opposite reaction through something called thermo-time dynamics which reduces the viscosity on the throwout bearings inside clocks during the colder months. This gets pretty technical, but just know that the basic forces at work here are beyond your control and it’s best if you try not to look at the clock. Another basic law of the universe is the Observer Effect, where the act of observation alters the thing you’re investigating. So basically, when you look at the clock in the classroom you stop time.

See, learning is fun. And after you grow up to be big and smart like all of us grownups asking if you’re ready to go back to school, you can apply these lessons to any field you want. Like brain research. You could do your doctoral thesis on the response of children who are asked if they’re ready for school to start. Measure how many pounds of resistance it takes for the child to not say what they’re really thinking, then divide that by how glad you are that summer is over, because now you’re all grown up and can’t wait for your own kids to be back in school.

So enjoy your time in the classroom. It isn’t so bad. You’ve got, uh . . . the holidays coming up. And there’s recess. Crayons. See, there’s lots of stuff to like about school. So learn a bunch and be nice to your teachers. And I’ll let you in on a secret – after you graduate and start working, you’ll find that office clocks don’t move any faster. If you don’t believe me just ask your teachers.

There Was a Crooked Shed

The thing about half-assing a job is that eventually somebody's going to have to fix that half-ass job with a half-ass repair, which makes it a quarter-ass production that holds for a while until it becomes an eighth and so on, until it just collapses.

What you see here is an intervention on the leaning woodshed of Pisa, which was listing severely to port and ready to go to ground in the next stiff breeze.

This edifice was constructed in the classical Wallowa County style of putting boards on a few random chunks of something hard, like an old brick or busted chunk of cinderblock, anchored with gravity and then called a "foundation." 

As an economy measure, they only drove one nail into the braces that might have kept things from shifting. Except one nail makes a nice pivot point where a couple more nails might have put up some resistance to this thing shrugging its way back to the earth.

One wall slid off the old brick & gravity foundation, so after creaking the whole affair more or less upright with some tow rope and a pickup truck – available at any hardware store – there was some fancy jacking with a Handyman and improvised post and beam made from semi-rotten 2x4s I can't believe didn't bust and crash down on my head.

Then, against every common sense safety guideline in the world due to the precarious jack situation holding up the building, it was a simple matter of coaxing the wall back into square using the truck, that chain drive hoist thingy and my rafting flip line.

Set it back down, add copious amounts of nails and a forest of additional bracing inside and, bingo, this shed is good to go for another I-don't-know-how long. Depends on the wind forecast.

Half-ass repair complete.