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Cutting edge locavore? Or just batshit crazy?

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eridani Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed May-11-11 04:28 AM
Original message
Cutting edge locavore? Or just batshit crazy?
For foodies who have done absolutely EVERYTHING else.

http://www.seattleweekly.com/2011-04-06/food/eat-lou-kohl/

The hirsute, wiry Kohl, who resembles the musician Dan Bejar (Destroyer, New Pornographers), inhales a line of 100-percent-pure cocaine—grown in his backyard—and walks outside. The bull has moved to within 20 feet of him. It's not the bull that charges Kohl, but Kohl who charges the bull. Employing a jiu-jitsu tactic, Kohl snaps one off of the bull's horns and then throws an uppercut to its face. The bull is dazed, and Kohl is ruthless. He puts his brass fists to the bull's testicles in rapid succession, rupturing them. He then grabs a hunting knife from his belt and cuts an incision in the bull's chest. Blood and guts come rushing out. Kohl reaches into the bull and pulls out its heart. He takes a gigantic bite, then feeds the rest to a flock of rare Peruvian hens.

.............

Kohl's 60-mile rule represents a tremendous concession. Everything Kohl serves at his restaurant or uses in his home is produced within roughly a football field's length of the property. Kohl hates labels, but nonetheless refers to this as "the 100-yard diet," an unveiled dig at the 100-mile diet craze that's permeated the Pacific Northwest in recent years. Kohl says 100-mile diets "are for slackers," and that any chef who doesn't grow, raise, and kill his own food—all of it—is "a coward."

..............

After his early-morning bull kill—a ritual Kohl mockingly refers to as "brass-fed beef"—he fetches his mobile butchering unit and quarters the animal where it lies. Nothing goes to waste, not even the bullshit, which is used to fertilize a garden in which mustard greens, edible flowers, and coca are grown.

Kohl harvests the bull's organs and takes them into his enormous kitchen, which doubles as his restaurant's kitchen, just as his dining room doubles as the restaurant's dining room. He pan-sears the animal's eyeballs and vacuum-seals its pancreas in a marinade of housemade pickle juice and dark rum. (Kohl distills his own liquor onsite. In fact, every ingredient Kohl uses in every dish is produced onsite, with no exceptions.)

...............

For supper, Kohl serves a menu of braised duck intestine with a cedar-sap reduction, black bear belly infused with opium and frog plasma, catfish sashimi, beer-battered blue jay brains with a raspberry demiglaze, potbellied pig heads stuffed with snap peas and maple yogurt, and candied ladybugs for dessert.

............


Pollan wakes up an hour later, half-drunk yet fully refreshed, to find Kohl suffocating a 9-year-old thoroughbred named Gumbo Ricky. After choking the life out of the horse and harvesting his innards, Kohl has Pollan assist him in threading a metal rod through Gumbo Ricky, so as to cook him rotisserie-style over a fire pit. Before starting the fire, Kohl instructs Pollan to remove the horse's teeth with a set of pliers, as well as season its entire corpse with a rub consisting of cumin, butterscotch, peat moss, and salt brine.


Once the horse begins slow-roasting, Kohl leads Pollan into the kitchen, designates the author as his sous, and reveals the night's menu: poached seagull served on a bed of cottage cheese, fried emu wings mounted on a foundation of chicken-liver paté, sautéed rattlesnake brushed with tarragon and pear moonshine, and, of course, the horse, which guests will be required to self-quarter in the spit while standing shoeless on scalding embers.




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The empressof all Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed May-11-11 09:57 AM
Response to Original message
1. ROFL That's hysterical!
:thumbsup:
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Denninmi Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed May-11-11 03:09 PM
Response to Reply #1
3. I don't know what is better.
The piece, obviously tongue in cheek satire, or the comments posted by a number of readers who thought it was real.

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eridani Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed May-11-11 06:30 PM
Response to Reply #3
5. The cocaine ought to be a tipoff n/t
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Warpy Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed May-11-11 02:59 PM
Response to Original message
2. These people are so much fun to poke fun at
Years ago (80s?) there was a cartoon book out called "Bean and Beluga" satirizing the Dean and DeLuca "gourmands." One image that stuck with me was the overdressed matron leaving the store with a crate of smoked weasels.

I always have to laugh at them for feeding offal to the rich and famous while we peasants dine on all the finer muscle meats.

However, locovores have a great time on the Pacific coast. I think they'd find it a hell of a lot more challenging here in the high desert in NM or even in most parts of the northeast corridor. While you can grow an astonishing amount of food in a suburban back yard (if it hasn't been contaminated by 50 years of lead paint), you will not be able to grow enough to live on. That takes amber waves of grain, fishermen, and farmers who grow meat animals.
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Arkansas Granny Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu May-12-11 08:34 AM
Response to Reply #2
6. I used to have a similar book titles "More Items From Our Catalog" which satarized
L. L. Bean.



I had the first one, "Items From Our Catalog", but can't find a decent image of it.
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Warpy Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu May-12-11 12:32 PM
Response to Reply #6
7. "Is Martha Stewart Living?"
was another good one, especially the "how to make your own condoms" bit.

If it hadn't been for that crate of smoked weasels, I'd probably have forgotten "Bean and Beluga."
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Arkansas Granny Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri May-13-11 07:45 AM
Response to Reply #7
8. I just found that on Amazon. I think my daughter would enjoy that
as a little gag gift (after I've read it, of course).
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Phentex Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed May-11-11 04:40 PM
Response to Original message
4. It's frighteningly close to reality!...
All the right buzzwords. It sounds like something I'd read in the food section of the paper!

:rofl:
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