Langdon Cook's Blog, page 28

Salad Days

The salad days are here again. Now is the time to take advantage of all the fresh new growth bursting with the sun's energy. If you're in California, the salad days have been on for a while; in the Great Lakes region you're just off the block. Wherever you are, enjoy those early greens. They were important—sometimes life-saving—for our ancestors and should be just as revered by modern Homo

Bass Master

Going native is a time-honored tradition. What's more fun—traveling as a tourist or blending in with the locals? I choose the latter.Which is why a sweltering spring morning in Goshen, Arkansas, found me hanging around on the limestone banks of the White River with a bunch of good ol' boys and even more first generation immigrants, a cheap spinning rod in my hand. I was there to go bassin'.Middle

A Misnomer

I'm in Arkansas for spring break visiting the inlaws and loving the 70-degree weather down here. This place is a forager's paradise. I'll have more to say about that in future posts, but in the meantime I had a post about eating your weedies queued up minus the photos. Turns out all the shots are safe and sound in my camera...back in Seattle. So without further ado, Plan B.See that weed at top,

No Ordinary Fish

Rainbow trout first captured my imagination in sixth grade when I filled an aquarium at school with a few dozen fingerlings. Most of them went belly up, but the hardiest survived to become silver streaks of excitement for Middle School boys with their faces pushed up against the glass.Here in Washington State on the dry, eastern side of the Cascade Mountains, we have a species of trout variously

Gobo Mojo

Got a tip on a burdock patch in Seattle the other day. Burdock (Arctium sp.) is a Eurasian weed now common across much of North America. It's a biennial and can grow to immense size, with two-foot leaves and flower stalks up to nine feet tall. Like stinging nettles and poison ivy, many of us have memories of encountering burdock as kids—a sweater covered in burrs, say, or the chore of taking a

Green Gold: Miner's Lettuce

The Forty-Niners put San Francisco on the map and explored north into much of California and the Oregon Territory. Most of them didn't strike it rich. Instead they left their mark in the form of claims, place names, settlements—and in some cases environmental degradation that is still with us today. Life was hard for a gold miner. You had to have your wits about you to survive. One of the many

Target Practice

The clay pigeons of the world are mostly safe.Last night I made my first trip to the shooting range. The range, located north of Seattle, looked as though it had been hanging on in this once-rural neighborhood for years only to have ticky-tacky suburban sprawl grow up around it like unchecked blackberry brambles. We parked in a gravel lot and piled into the clubhouse through an unmarked door

Go for the Gold

This past Sunday I was faced with a tough choice: miss the last two periods of the gold-medal hockey game between the U.S. and Canada or go for the golden razor clam. I went for the gold. It's almost always better to be a participant rather than an observer, don't you think? Unless we're talking about alligator rasslin' or something.So far this season I had been shut out of razor clam openings

Hunters Ed

I've been schlepping up to Bothell on the north shore of Lake Washington all week to attend my first Hunters Education class. The day of the first session I called ahead to make sure the minimum 10 students had signed up and the class was a go. Toni, one of the instructors, gave a little chuckle and said yes, we were a go. Well, fifty other students of different ages, ethnicities, and gender

Nettle Pesto Pops

I found a frozen packet of nettles from last year's harvest in the freezer the other day. With all the fresh nettles we've been eating lately this seemed like an opportune time to see how a year-old hunk of frozen nettles tasted in comparison. I'm happy to report my dinner companions up the street didn't blink. Not for a second did they wonder whether my potluck contribution of Cream of Stinging