Category West

Burning Beast 2019

“Welcome to the world’s best feast in a field!” Held annually at Smoke Farm in Arlington, Washington, and organized by chef Tamara Murphy, Burning Beast celebrates all things carnivore, inviting chefs to compete with one another for the title of Ultimate Beastmaster glory and a plaque with a skull on it. Each chef is assigned a protein, but it’s up to them how to prepare it to stand out from their peers and win the accolades of the 500 hungry attendees. 

This was the first year I was able to get my hands on tickets (they typically sell out in minutes and though I purchased my tickets in a harried frenzy, this year they appeared to still be available on the date of the event itself), and I was eager to experience the beefy bacchanal for myself. The chefs generally arrive the previous day, camping at the site and preparing for the event. Ticketholders are invited in at 3pm, with the dinner bell ringing at 5pm or thereabouts. As ticketholders arrive, they’re handed a menu for the evening and a station at which to start.

The lineup:

  • Chicken, Jack Timmons of Jack’s BBQ
  • Beef, Michelle Pegues of Carnivore
  • Rabbit, Jesse Smith of Smith & Coleburn
  • Octopus, Tana Mielke of Votano Hellenic Tavern
  • Goat, Tamara Murphy of Terra Plata
  • Filipino Pinakbet, Melissa Miranda of Musang
  • Turkey Tails, Dylan Giordan of Piatti
  • Catfish, Dana Neely of Girls Gone BBQ
  • Beef Tongue, Mike Easton of Il Nido
  • Pig, Adam Hoffman of Adam’s Northwest Bistro & Brewery
  • Duck, Robert Killam of Bread and Circuses
  • Grilled Corn & Eggplant, Mutsuko Soma of Kamonegi
  • Ram & Ewe, John Sundstrom & Rosie Cisneros of Lark
  • Salmon, Sadie White of Staple & Fancy
  • Lamb, Tristan Chalker & Mollie Turner of Salish Lodge

 

We arrived around 3pm and spent some time wandering the grounds: walking to the river, checking out the creative ways chefs were preparing their dishes: roasted on a spit, buried underground, strapped to a rack above a cinder block pit with a vintage chrome car grill mounted to the front. Above it all loomed The Beast, a giant plywood coyote that would be set ablaze at the end of the day’s festivities. 

Our chairs were parked near some Burning Beast veterans (whom we’d both worked with indirectly at some point in the past: games are a 135B industry with a teeny-tiny social circle) who’d helpfully explained to us how it was all going to go down. All too soon, the bell rang. I was to start at the salmon, and Jason with the lamb. I had seen the salmon cooking on posts, the accompanying bread grilling on a grate over hot logs and I was definitely ready to put it in my mouth. The sole dish that I knew I would not be queuing up for was the octopus, as I personally feel it’s unethical to eat them (too smart, no bargain with humanity), but that left me with a whopping 14 other dishes to try. 

The lines were huge but moved snappily, and once you’ve visited your starter station, you’re free to select a line at will, with many people choosing to eat the dish they got from the previous chef while waiting in the next line. I personally found the food to be a mixed bag. The salmon was sadly unremarkable, nigh-flavorless and wetly lumped on a piece of bread so hard and cracker-like it was difficult to bite through. While cleansing my palate with the lamb dish, I then entered the line for the rabbit tinga tostada, but when I got to the front of the line and saw that the dish was cilantro city, with a cilantro tortilla and a cilantro queso fresco, I passed owing to my passionate distaste for the herb that tastes like chewing on soapy tinfoil and declared it was duck season instead.

The duck wings were deboned and stuffed with a mixture of chicken and pork along with what appeared to be glass noodles and served with a side of pickled veggies and were excellent, one of the standouts of the day. 

“Who wants a rib?” I eagerly volunteered, accepting what I thought would be a pretty special morsel that turned out to be…not, when the meat on the bone was slippery and chewy, but not chewable. 

The catfish was perfect, flaky and crisp and somehow fried on a barbeque grill, because Dana Neely is a chef, and I suspect, a wizard. The catfish got my vote for Best of the Beast: it was just that magical.

I also tried the turkey tails, which is a part of the turkey that I had never eaten nor heard of before. It turns out to be a gland that attaches the turkey tail to the body and is filled with oil that the bird uses to preen itself: fatty, delicious, and the USA mainly exports theirs to the Pacific Islands. Dylan Giordan cooked his turkey tails on cast iron skillets above the fire until they were crisp and golden and delightful.

While watching the chefs cook, I did occasionally wonder how the amount of food they were cooking was intended to feed 500 people, but assumed the chefs knew better how to dial in the correct amount so that everyone would get to try everything. This assumption was incorrect and items that ran out early included the tuscan beef, the pinakbet, and the corn, that last which, unlike having to slice off 1/500th of a side of meat, seems countable. I was only able to try seven dishes before I tapped out, and maybe chefs take stomach capacity into their calculations, too,  but running out of food early makes ticketholders have to play a game of weighing what they think will be most popular so they don’t have an option taken from them and/or encourages them to pound down their food as fast as possible. It feels both in-line and out of line for the event: it’s first and foremost a feast, primal, meat and flame, but so many chefs cook with a nose-to-tail mentality and with sustainability in mind that eating as much as you can as fast as you can feels like it runs counter to that ethos.

Still: stomachs were filled, votes were cast, the circle was cleared, and the beast set afire, howling smoke and then jets of fire at the sky, finally collapsing into a flaming pile as people danced and digested and the sun set. 

I’ll give you $10 for the lightbulb hut.

Mmm, Beast Butter. 

Salmon

Ram & Ewe

Goat

Tuscan beef

Chicken by Jack Timmons. Last year he took the trophy with his brisket and told me that if you win, next year you get assigned chicken. His chicken was bathed in mole for tacos, with a small snowy mountain of cheese.

Catfish 

Turkey tails


An Introduction to Mounted Archery

Even before I bought Navani, I knew that I wanted to get into playing mounted games, and having had some practice at and aptitude for archery, it felt like an ideal place to start. I signed up for a two day intensive clinic with Heart Horse Industries in southern Washington, and resolved to become a good enough rider by the time it rolled around. 

June came so, so fast. In the intervening 8 month period between signing up for the clinic and driving to the clinic, I had come to learn that owning a horse and riding your horse are two distinct hobbies. I also fell off Navani in late December (my first fall since returning to riding) which did a number on my body and my confidence. It was hard to practice riding when I felt anxious about falling and hurting myself again and being anxious on the back of a horse is essentially asking to fall or be tossed off, as they are a half ton of empathetic nerve endings waiting to fire. A horse takes its cues from its rider, and if you’re afraid, they will also be afraid, and if they’re afraid, you’re going to have a bad ride which isn’t going to help your confidence any. It’s a feedback loop of fear and inadequacy*. So I’ve had to do a lot of mental and emotional work since then to deal with my anxiety and build my bond with Navani to help me get my confidence back. Unfortunately, that meant that I hadn’t made nearly as much riding progress as I had anticipated, and I was concerned that I wouldn’t even be allowed to take part in the riding portion of the clinic when my inexperience came to light. As there was nothing I could do about that, I determined my best course of action was to go in as confident as possible, and to that end, I borrowed the mare on which I’d learned to ride and rode her easy trot hands-free up and down the arena, turning my torso left and right and pantomiming drawing a bow. It must have helped, because I had a couple of good rides on Navani after that, and managed to stay aboard when she was startled on our most recent ride by that noted danger to horses and public menace, a butterfly.

It’s a three hour drive from my neighborhood to Brush Prairie, give or take, and so I elected to spend the weekend in nearby Vancouver at an Airbnb in the Hough neighborhood in order to be fresh for class and fresh for the drive both ways. The drive from my accommodations to the clinic wound past all manner of homes–mansions with great lawns situated across the road from run down trailer parks surrounded by debris. Several homes in a row had signs advertising the potency of their CBD oil (“with 0% THC!”), one behind a chainlink fence with a pointy Doberman stalking the yard. Almost everywhere had horses grazing nearby.

Our group of learners was small: four women. We took some time to discuss our riding and archery backgrounds and how we came to be interested in this fusion of two highly specialized sports, and it all essentially boiled down to wanting to be horseback riding warrior women, to claim power and space for ourselves. “I’m just tired of women being diminished,” said the woman seated next to me, and that is how I came to know and admire Kim, because I feel very inch of that sentiment. My other classmates were Kristi and Magalyn, two fierce women whom I also came to admire over the course of the weekend.

Introductions made, we were each issued a hip quiver, the side effects of which include at least 50% additional swagger in one’s step, and a heightened sense of both competence and coolness. We were introduced to the principles of loading, drawing, pulling, and releasing on the bows, and I learned that the technique is very different from the recurve three-finger archery I learned at Next Step Archery. In mounted archery, the arrow goes to the outside of the bow, you twist your draw arm to stabilize the arrow, you thumb release, and the arrow rides over the thumb of the bow hand. I also learned firsthand that you can crack your arm with the bow string if you hyper-extend the elbow in either form of the discipline. 

After we learned the basics, we started playing shooting games, like walking at a consistent pace on a track around a beam on the ground, loading your arrows without looking at them (because your eyes should always be seeking targets), and shooting at the targets as you walk by. We also practiced shooting at moving targets (rounds of duct-taped sound board rolled across the arena). After we broke for lunch, it was time to mount up. Magalyn and Kristi rode Ronan and Columbia, both Lipizzaners, and Kim and I rode Tuffy and Tommy, both American Quarter Horses. Our position in the lineup also reflects our horse’s status within the herd: nobody likes Tommy. Maybe, and I’m just spitballing here, it’s because Tommy is kind of an old curmudgeonly jerk, and I mean that in the most loving way possible. When we would wait in lineups, Tommy would constantly be trying to fidget with Tuffy, rubbing his face on Tuffy’s hindquarters, wanting to just groom and be in Tuffy’s space. On our way into the outdoor track, Tommy tried to take a bite out of Columbia’s butt, and on the second day when Ronan was watching from the sidelines, he made it clear that he would love nothing more than to take a chunk out of Tommy. Tommy was also the only horse who necessitated the wearing and use of spurs, something I have never worn or done before. With those spurs jingling on the back of my boots and the hip quiver combined, my swagger became almost unbearable, because every time I walked, I felt like I was off for a showdown at the O.K. corral. 

Tommy knew I was bluffing, however. He could feel my reticence to use those spurs and took full advantage of it, attempting to cut through the track and crack my knee into walls and other objects and this continued until I finally did bump him with the spurs on the second day, because I had tried and tried and tried to ask him with a strong leg and no spur and treat him like a fragile egg and he told me again and again that he wouldn’t unless I got more assertive.

I also had some struggles with the saddle on the first day–the stirrups had been adjusted as short as they could go, and still my left foot kept sliding out which makes it difficult to impossible to be in the 2-point position, where you’re standing in the stirrups, because with one foot out, it’s more of a wobbly 1-point-I’m-gonna-fall-off-this-horse-in-front-of-everyone-and-either-I’ll-die-or-I’ll-wish-I-had position. I’m sure it was also challenging for me because I’ve not yet learned to post the trot, which is the thing that I think marks me most as a very beginner rider. Posting involves rising from a seated position into a 2-point and settling back down in time with the horse’s gait to compensate for the bounciness of the trot. Going from not having that piece of the puzzle at all to having to learn to do it in front of an audience while clapping my hands overhead and/or juggling a heavy ball hand to hand, combined with my need to be immediately good at something despite never having done it before was almost too much for me. It was one of those times where I manufactured pressure for myself, and that self-generated pressure was making it harder for me to be successful. Another negative feedback loop. Thankfully I recognized it and self-corrected. 

At the end of day one, I was exhausted from four hours of drawing a 25lb bow and three hours of riding with strong leg cues while also drawing a 25lb bow. Exhausted. It was 5pm, and I drove back to my Airbnb, walked to the nearby Vancouver Pizza Co where I guzzled ice water on their patio and devoured half of a calzone stuffed with mozzarella, spicy Italian sausage, goat cheese, and cashews, served with a creamy garlic sauce, and I maintain that this meal had just barely enough fat and protein in it to keep me alive as all I’d eaten that day was a croissant. The other half of the calzone I saved for my lunch on day two, and I decided that a successful day of riding a horse I didn’t know hands-free while juggling a ball at a trot deserved some ice cream, so I walked down the street to Ice Cream Renaissance. It was a hot day and they were jammin’. I ordered a scoop of lemon raspberry cheesecake in a waffle cone and brought it outside to enjoy, but ultimately ended up discarding it after two bites, the second bite to confirm that it was oddly gritty-icy-crumbly and not worth the effort it would take to eat it. That is how tired I was. After binning the ice cream, I walked back to my Airbnb, took a cool shower, and immediately went to bed. 

I was surprisingly not sore when I awoke the following morning. Not very sore, anyway. Aside from the sunburn I’d gotten and the hand-sized bruise blooming on my forearm, I mean. 

We started off the morning again with stretches and a series of archery games and exercises, my favorites being launching arrows 50 meters downfield at a Hungarian target which required you to use every inch of draw, and a supremely fun game called “Battle Bows” wherein two people stand inside of a hula hoop across from one another at a distance, you’re armed with arrows with big soft foam heads, and you shoot at one another’s knees.  You can’t leave the hoop but you are otherwise allowed to dodge. If you strike your opponent, you win. If they catch your arrow out of the air, you lose. If they touch the arrow but fail to catch it, you win. Any arrow that lands within reach of the hoop can be reused. This game ramps up your adrenaline in a major way and really forces you to keep your eyes on target–you can’t risk looking at your arrow to nock it, because that lapse in attention could make you an easier target for your opponent. I struck two hits on Kim and managed to escape Battle Bows unscathed…this time.

Magalyn departed at lunch to attend a Portland Thorns FC game, and the rest of us were put into a friendly competition with one another. Of course, all it takes is the word “competition” for me to get in my head and start biffing things, and the teacher, Lisa, came over and spoke with us about her technique of dealing with pressure by treating it as a wave: something that can pass over you and beyond instead of carrying you away. Breathe, allow it to pass, and move on. She also encouraged me to engage with more intensity, ferocity, aggression and that’s an entirely different way of being for me but it feels freeing. We had several rounds of competitive shooting on the ground, and then we mounted up. As Magalyn was gone, I got to use her saddle instead, and found it much easier to sit properly and keep my feet seated in the stirrups.

We did a couple of laps around the outdoor track shooting at a walk, then we practiced shooting at the trot (a first for everyone), and finally we had a few rounds of free-for-all shooting at myriad targets including styrofoam heads and a half buried small green target worth fifty points. You could shoot at any target you liked, but the points only counted if you were trotting. You could enter the track with your first arrow loaded, and it was wise to do so as that fifty pointer was on the first stretch and you don’t want to be fumbling with an arrow instead of drawing on it. Immediately after the entrance was a larger yellow twenty-five pointer, and I committed to shooting at them both on every lap. This meant that the arrow I had loaded upon entering the track was dedicated to the twenty five point target, and I had about a third of the track to draw, load, aim, and fire on the fifty pointer, at a trot. I didn’t hit either one of them on any of my attempts, but my misses were close, and hearing Lisa compliment my gutsiness for going for those targets was all the reward I needed. Plus I nailed a couple of bullseyes off of the back of a moving horse when just a day earlier I wasn’t sure I was ready for that kind of riding.  Kristi brought home the championship golden arrow keychain, and I brought home a confidence boost to end all confidence boosts.


 

 

 

*Feedback Loop of Fear and Inadequacy would make an excellent title for my memoirs.

A closer look at 2018: An Oregon Weekend

As I’ve talked about before, Navani is from Eugene, Oregon, which meant a road trip to meet her to decide if I wanted to buy her and another when it was time to bring her home. Jason had already gone with me on a couple of trips to meet horses I didn’t buy, and so he elected not to come this time. I could’ve done it in a one day there-and-back trip, but I also didn’t have the kind of time pressure that would make that exhausting round trip necessary. Instead, I drove to Portland the night before which was its own ordeal (driving Seattle to Portland on a Friday afternoon: just don’t do it) and stayed in my favorite hotel for immediate highway access: the Red Lion on the River Jantzen Beach. The hotel itself is fine,  but really it’s that ability to immediately launch myself onto the highway from, essentially, the parking lot that makes it my go-to for this kind of waypoint trip. 

I left early enough in the morning to allow for a couple of stops along the way and still be on time, ideally a bit early. One of the horse-buying tips I learned from the more seasoned people in my circle is that you should try to be early enough that the seller can’t hide or otherwise mask the horse’s behavior. Very high-tempered horses might be worked hard beforehand or even administered a sedative. Horses that are hard to catch in the pasture or are cinchy are already brought in and saddled up. Turning up a little early gives you a better opportunity to observe more about the horse. Hence, blasting straight out of the hotel parking lot onto the highway instead of grabbing breakfast at some amazing Portland restaurant. 

Instead, my first stop was to Sesame Donuts in Sherwood, where I purchased their namesake donut plus a pumpkin spice donut, and a fancy latte that was definitely seasonally flavored, I just cannot remember exactly what those flavors were. The sesame seeds did impart an interesting nuttiness to their cake donut base and really helps fill in that gap in the breakfast spectrum where you aren’t in the mood for a bagel but you still want to get a bunch of sesame seeds stuck in your teeth.

My other pre-Navani stop was at Grove of the States, located off French Prairie Rest area near Wilsonville. Here, they have (or had) the state tree of every tree in the United States along with a plaque featuring the state and the tree name. The grove was initially planted in the mid 1960s to honor Lady Bird Johnson’s Highway Beautification Act (which I got to learn a bit more about at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center when I visited there last spring),  and its creation involved a visit from the attorney general of every state in the nation. Unfortunately, it was planted “in symbolic geographical locations” (I presume in the shape of the United States) without accounting for the long term space and light needs of these non native specimen trees and as a result many of the original plantings have failed over the ensuing fifty years.  

To ensure that the symbolic project lives on for future generations to enjoy, a grove restoration project began in 2016.  Now, new saplings strive upward among the beautiful mature trees of Grove of the States. It’s wonderful to have such a fine place to stretch your legs at a rest stop. I hadn’t known before that several states share the same tree as their state tree–I don’t know why I assumed that each state had to choose a unique state tree and if their favorite was drafted already, too bad, Vermont. Maple is taken.  

I see now that my home state of Wisconsin has taken the initiative of designating a state pastry, which sounds exactly like something my people would do. I can only hope the rest of the states follow suit and then I’ll be able to go to Bakery of the States. That’s how America is going to achieve unity: every single state pastry mashed together in my stomach like the mighty globe of fat, carbohydrates, and sugar I knew it could be.

After meeting Navani and calling everyone to tell them about the horse I was going to buy, I was wiped out, so I drove back to my convenient highway side hotel, ate the other half of the sandwich I’d bought on the harrowing drive there the night before, and passed out.  The next morning, I immediately headed over to Ken’s Artisan Bakery, where the line was already out the door at 8:30am.

I wasn’t bothered by the existence of a line itself but rather people’s shocking behavior in the line, specifically the family behind me, the adult members of which said and did nothing when their 6 or 7ish year old son pressed his face and hands against the glass and then smeared himself like human butter across the entirety of the case, in the style of a Japanese novel, right to left, shoving past me and several other people to make certain he got it all, because nothing makes a pastry look more appetizing than through a film of oily secretions. This child then attempted to scale the structure because surely nothing is more loadbearing than the thin glass on the front of a pastry case, it’s probably the same kind of glass you can stand out on over the Grand Canyon, or that they use to contain the more venomous snakes. It was at this point the dad took decisive action, by picking up his coughing baby and hoisting her completely over the glass barrier, presumably because the glass was no longer serving its function as a clear window to the food beyond. A little known fact is that this glass performs a secondary sanitary role, acting as a physical barrier between the mouth  of the customer (and/or sack of crap strapped to its waist) and unpackaged food so as to reduce the risk of contamination. It cannot provide this function when you lift your baby over the glass to cough directly on the bread. Why not just cough into my open mouth, save us some time? 

I made my selections away from where the coughing action went down and ended up with a couple of marionberry croissants, a maple pecan croissant, and two canneles, since I knew I’d be home by afternoon to share with Jason. Of those items, the marionberry croissants were a standout, the fat juicy berries studding the flaky pastry and making it a luscious pie-like experience.  Plus anything sprinkled with pearl sugar earns bonus points in my book. 

A thick fog blanketed the road near Sauvie Island  that morning, and when I saw a sign advertising a pumpkin patch, I had to pull off to check out what a field of pumpkins looked like in that much atmosphere. 

I don’t know how this ATM works, I assume you tell the witches your pin number and then money shoots up into the cauldron. 

Everything looks super spooky in this much fog. Everything including this cow train, which felt like a Twilight Zone episode where you’d find out that these are the cars the cows, who are now in charge of society, use to cart humans to the abattoir.  Bovine University.

From Sauvie Island, I drove to St Helens, also known as Halloweentown. Halloweentown festivities were in full swing, and I had a blast getting my photo taken in the upside down photo studio, checking out all of the awesome vintage Halloween stuff at the 2CS vendor mall, and catching up with my friend Kat while I went ham buying fancy candles and chocolates at Woodland Cottage Handpicked

From St. Helens, I drove to Longview, the place where I’d once attempted to eat the largest cinnamon roll in the world (with help!). Longview has a series of squirrel bridges up throughout town  to help prevent car and squirrel related accidents. The first was called the Nutty Narrows and it was installed in 1963 for the cost of a thousand dollars.  Every time I have occasion to come through town, I find my way to at least one squirrel bridge to see if I can observe it in action and each time I have been disappointed by no-show squirrels. What I’d really love to see are some webcams monitoring the comings and goings of the bridge, which seems like it’d be even easier than booking Cherry Poppin’ Daddies for their annual SquirrelFest which is in fact a real thing and not something I just made up, where you can “Enjoy: no car/squirrel fatalities!” Thanks, will do!

I walked alongside Lake Sacajawea, enjoying the sunshine, petting dogs, and playing Pokemon until my cell phone battery got low enough that it threatened my ability to listen to Spotify the entire way home, as in their wisdom, Google’s decision to remove the aux jack and route sound through the USB port means that I cannot charge my phone and listen to music at the same time.  All these phone manufacturers arbitrarily removing the aux jack really jacked up my road trip flow, where I want to use battery-heavy GPS and listen to music or podcasts for hours at a time. I like to keep the phone plugged in to a charging source so that I don’t have to worry about the state of the battery and, in the event of some kind of incident, I know that I have a full charge regardless of my location. That’s a thing I can’t do with my Pixel 2.  I can listen to music in my car now if I have a usb-c to aux adaptor (they’re so easy to lose, I asked Santa for three, he brought me one, and I’ve lost it already) and an aux cable, but now that phone aux jacks are going away, they’re going away in newer models of cars, too. The last loaner I had from MINI, I couldn’t connect my phone and the car physically at all, and I don’t feel great about allowing a rental car access to my phone. 

You know what else isn’t a joke? Facing a road trip with no music. #bringbacktheauxjack