Travel on the Gravel

Here's the follow-up on the fish story posted a couple weeks ago. For giggles, I sent the paperwork in to register the bass as a North Dakota Whopper with the Department of Game & Fish. This brought me a certificate and a little patch (shown at right). We ate one big filet grilled, and the other one this evening, which is the follow-up story at hand. Early this morning, while dragging some brush around, I found a lovely cluster of shelf mushrooms. This reminded me of a recipe I had seen in (don't laugh) the Sons of Norway magazine, so I thawed out the bass filet. Putting it briefly, the dish involved layering sliced potatoes, asparagus, sautéed wild mushrooms, green garden onions, diced tomatoes, and the filet, braised in bacon fat. Over the stack in the casserole we drizzled chicken broth and dry sherry. I think maybe I can improve on the recipe with some fresh herbs (tarragon, sorrel) from the garden, but what we had was terrific. The mushrooms were the star of the show.

There's been a long lapse in this weblog, as the workload of spring term became overwhelming, but it's time to return to a more reasonable pace. The past couple of weeks I've played hooky now and then. Last Saturday Old John wanted to shoot gophers, and so we went out shooting in a coulee at Verona. Pretty windy for shooting, but it was fun, anyway, to watch the weasel that was hunting ahead of us. Another afternoon I drove over to the Sheyenne to bring home a channel cat for supper. And yesterday evening ZZ and I drove over to Brewer Lake to cast for bass. Most of them were small, but one wasn't--that's the 5lb4oz largemouth here pictured. It was fun, too, hearing the catbirds in the caragana, and watching the thunderstorms roll in from the west.