On Naming a Cat "John Day"

As an Oregonian, certain town names ring out as specifically distinctive to our landscape and history. John Day is one of those places.

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This central Oregon town known for Fossil Beds, was named after a fur trapper who spanned the continent as part of the Astor Party. He was once  a contemporary of Daniel Boone and noted as a vital and healthy man…that is until his venture to Oregon. Legend has it that John Day went insane during the trip.

While he was an experienced trapper, the people he travelled with had no clue of what they were doing. The party ran out of food, members drowned in rivers, basically everything that could go wrong on a venture to Astoria, the eastern outpost of the era, could go wrong. This apparently drove him over the edge. He attempted suicide, became violently mentally unstable, was given provisions by the Native Americans of the area to survive. Some accounts say he was robbed by the natives of everything. He even wrecked his canoes and lost all his gear. Basically, he had a really bad time.

Needless to say, his hard luck exploits became legend and so they named a town and a river after this failed adventurer.

He ranks up there with the likes of  other icons of the Pacific Northwest such as David Douglass, famous horticulturalist of whom we named the Douglass fir, who died in Hawai'i after falling into a pit trap and was crushed by a bull. Or maybe Tanya Harding…Who is still alive but had a failed venture in figure skating due to an inept husband.

Oregon is filled with lovable losers.

Found Objects: Seeing Eye Cat

Within my new home was a box of old magazine and newspaper clippings. Basically collage fodder for future craft projects. But this one clipping caught my attention.

Needless to say, it was a ridiculously cute story and one that verifies that the "cat meme" stretches long before the advent of the internet.

Oh, and I will finally be getting a kitten of my own. I'm thinking of naming him or her Melville. After one of Billings more colorful historical figures.

More ephemera to come in the next few days...

As I Prepare for More Regular Posts...

Just a simple word of advice from out friendly vintage advertisers of eons ago…

Yes, the Wonderful World of Clutter will be back up in running soon and in full swing. But in the meantime, don't you wish we had more advertisements like this in our magazines?

So much fun...

Return of the Wonderful World of Clutter! Announcements, Questions, and Seafood Lovers in YOU!

Dear Readers,

For some unforeseen circumstances, the Wonderful World of Clutter had been on an extremely long hiatus for the past six months. But that is hopefully ending now. Why now? Well, why not now.

Let's start a bulleted list:

• The Wonderful World of Clutter now has a new home in Billings, Montana. And before you gasp, I am here to say that BILLINGS ROCKS!!! Yes, Rimrocks in fact. But that is a different story. I will present a sub-bulletted list of why Billings is Awesome:
• It has a candy store that sells Moxie, which even in Portland is hard to find.
• People are friendlier than in Bozeman.
• There is an Indian Restaurant with a lunch buffet.
• The next major point deserves its own category so I will give a bullet to it all of its own.
• Billings has a RED LOBSTER! That's right, ALL YOU CAN EAT SHRIMPS BABY. You see, I have this plan…When I meet that nice left-leaning rancher's daughter out here in Montana, I'm gonna take her to Red Lobster and buy her a Mai Tai and tell her she can have all the shrimps she wants. Because that's how you treat the ladies nice in Billings…with endless shrimps. I've eaten at this Red Lobster and the cheesy biscuits are damned awesome and when you've spent ten hours driving through the state, which is what you end up doing in Montana on occasion, you want to treat yourself to some fine fresh-frozen seafood. Bozeman doesn't have a Red Lobster…And it breaks my heart that Missoula doesn't have one. But because Billings does, BILLINGS ROCKS!
• Nightly Karaoke and the Crystal…BILLINGS ROCKS.
• Someplace in Billings is payed me to move here…BILLINGS Definitely ROCKS.

So there is my short list of why Billings Montana is awesome. I still love Missoula, and it will be the home away from home in this state. And my heart will always yearn to be back in PDX. But right now, I am discovering the Billings scene. 

So onto blog news. I doubt many people read this thing any more, but I am planning a new video portion of the Wonderful World of Clutter entitled, "Adequate Answers for Everyday Questions." This relies on you the reader to contribute. If you have a common question that no one can answer, I want to help. Feel free to post your questions to this blog, and I will try to come up with some type of adequate response. By no means to I guarantee accuracy, I just guarantee adequacy. 

I will try to respond within a few days of questions being received. 

The Wonderful World of Clutter appreciates your patronage…

Thank you for continuing to read.

Seal Rock You Like A Hurricane.

One of my absolute road signs in Oregon is in the coastal town of Seal Rock. With little more to say about it I present a picture of me standing in front of that sign...Please note, I have been sick and also refuse to look amused in photographs.

Merry Christmas from Prison Camp

Given the Wonderful World of Clutter has been in form of self-imposed exile for a period of time, I decided to pull out the most appropriate holiday card from my collection that I could find.

The tattered image bellow is of the water tower at the War Relocation Authority's Camp Granada, affectionately known as Amache. As mentioned numerous time on this blog, Amache was the home of close to ten-thousand Japanese Americans illegally detained during World War II. Here they spent a number of harsh winter, Christmases and New Years, birthdays and other landmarks of their lives.

My father was born here.

The card itself comes from my Grandparents' collection of ephemera from the camp--loose items and stray contraband photographs of their life in exile.

As much as I bitch about the state of things these days, I always have to reflect to my family's time during this era. Amache was a time of struggle. The same can be said for those who lived at any of the other camps dotted across of America. And yet, they tried to maintain some sense of normalcy. A holiday card showing the tallest landmark of the region, for hundreds of miles around, was the best Christmas symbol they could present.

 

Merry Christmas everybody…

It doesn't necessarily get better. It just get's different.

In Case You Didn't Know...

Well, ummmmmm...

That is about all I have for now...

Museums of Montana: The World Mining Museum

In Butte, Montana, mining was once king. The city was once known as the "Richest Hill In the World," and the Berkely Pit was the source of the majority of the nation's copper ore. The World Mining Museum is an homage to this history. But aside from the typical ore cars and pictures of blasting tunnels, it holds an amazing doll house collection.

These images are of a replica of 221B Baker Street, Sherlock Holmes London abode. 

 

 

The musuem also hosts a collection of abandoned buildings brought over from the original mining camp. You can walk through an anacronistic replica of what this Butte would have looked like a century ago.

 

There are other walk-though museums in Montana. Nevada City, just south of Virginia City is a dot of the map of similar abandoned buildings arranged to look like an old Boom Town of the gold rush. 

One must wonder though if we will have similar museusm like this honoring Williston, ND, or other Oil Boom Towns now dotting the Plains States. Imagine a future museum where you wak only through row after row of single wide trailers, parked RVs, and toothless tweakers trying to score work…Could be awesome. 

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This Could Be Interesting Recipe Night: Braised Pork Belly with Mustard Wine Sauce…or…The Five Hour Sandwich

Hi Everybody, I proudly celebrate the return of the Wonderful World of Clutter with a new semi-not-so-regular feature of personally recipes that will be called This Could Be Interesting Recipe Night.  The premise is simple. I try making something without a cookbook and I then post my recipe to you the readers. 

I never really use measurements when I cook, so some of these are guesses. But here we go..

The first post in this is my Braised Pork Belly with Mustard Wine Sauce.

• 2 pounds fatty pork belly
• 1 head of garlic
• 5 large sprigs of rosemary (or at whole bunch bought from the grocery store)
• Olive Oil
• 3 large tablespoons of whole peppercorns
• 1 tablespoon of coarse salt
• 2 heads of fennel with tops
• 12 shallots
• 1 bunch of cilantro
• 1 bottle of white wine that you don't mind using for cooking
• Stone ground Dijon mustard
• 1 stick of butter

Preparing the herb rub:

1. Crush the peppercorns to they are roughly ground. I don't use a grinder for this. In fact I use a large rock. This rock, was something I found at the river and looks like a rock that might have once been used for actually grinding up nuts and other goodies. Or it could have been used for an anchor…Or it was just an oddly formed rock. But a mallet works just as well. Basically, you want the pepper to be very coarse and chunky for this, essentially just cracked.

2. Remove the rosemary from the main sprig and chop up until relatively fine. Place into a bowl with the pepper.

3. Mince the entire head of garlic combine and combine with other ingredients.

4. Add salt and 2-3 tablespoons of olive oil until you make a paste. Don't make it too runny. Mix well and set aside for a little while.

Preparing the Pork Belly:

The belly should come from your butcher in a giant slab, kind of like a giant uncooked piece of bacon. And, well, that is what pork belly is, uncured bacon, uncooked bacon. The first thing to do is to cut the slab into 2.5 inch long chunks. You should end up with 4, 1/2 lb. strips of belly. Take a sharp knife and score the fatty side of the belly about a 1/4-1/2 inch into in a checker board pattern. This will allow the rub to get into the fat.

Take the rub and mix it up again and smear it onto all sides of the the pork belly slabs. Let the belly rest for a bit in the rub. Just because, well, you know…This of it like going to the spa and getting a fancy salt scrub or something. It just feels good. 

Cooking:

In a large dutch oven, heat up some olive oil to coat the pan on medium heat. Once the pan is hot place the pork belly fat side down on the in in the pan and brown. Do this for all sides of the pork. The rub is going to fall off at this point, but that's cool. It will brown up and add flavor. You can add a couple of slabs of belly in at at a time but don't let the dutch oven cool down too much.

Once all the sides are browned up, add the shallots which have been cut in half, and the green tops of the fennel to the pot. Cover the the meet and vegetables with white wine, about 3/4 of the bottle. Cover the pot and place into an oven at 225F. Cook fat side up in the oven.Then go do something for the next four hours.

So what do you do during this time? Lots of thing…You can study for board exams, maybe drink the rest of that bottle of wine, call a loved one, go for  a walk, who knows. Basically, you want to let that belly cook slow and low until it is fork tender. If needed add some extra liquid to the pot.

Once it is tender and cooked through, take out of the oven. The fennel greens get tossed. Take the bellies and shallots out and place onto a cooking sheet. Place the dutch oven onto a large burner on medium-high heat.

Return the pork, fat side up, to the oven under the broiler and watch carefully. At this point we want the  fat to brown and crisp up but not burn. It should get nice and bubbly, and turn a golden brown. Leave the door open to the oven and broiler to make sure you don't burn your meat at this point--broilers are tricky machines to navigate. 

Once the braising liquid starts to boil, add 3 large heaping tablespoons of coarse ground Dijon mustard to the liquid and begin stirring to mix throughout. Then add one stick of butter to the liquid and continue to stir, reduce the heat to low and let the sauce simmer. It will slowly begin to thicken. Add salt to taste.

Basically you're done at this point. I typically make a sandwich out of the pork using a nice crusty bread. I slice up fennel and use a lot of cilantro as my greens for the mix. I then pour the mustard wine sauce over the meat and greens. 

So yeah, it took five hours to make a sandwich but damn, it was a mighty fine sandwich…a mighty, mighty fine sandwich.

Let me know if you try this or any future recipes.

Delays in Updating...

Dear Readers:

My sincerest apologies for not updating the Wonderful World of Clutter sooner than this time, but I have been exceptionally busy. Busy with what, you might ask? Well, I am about to finish my BSRN and make progress toward being the most awesome nurse with a mustache ever…actually probably second in line to the  ER nurse who looked like Kurt Vonnegut at St. Patrick's Hospital in Missoula, but we can strive.

So basically, in seven days, I add one more degree to my academic belt…Start prepping for boards, and then return home.

That is all.

Sincerely,
Wonderful World of Clutter