by Jared Stone
I walk over to the registry book in front of the emergency hut at the top of America. I sign my name and dedicate my trip to my wife, Summer, my son, Declan, and my daughter, Nora.
Silently, I resolve to focus on what matters. And to hell with the rest of it.
Steak Frites
Time: About 90 minutes
Serves 4
Coming down from the mountain, I wanted nothing more than a big steak—and a little bit of comfort. Steak frites is both.
The traditional cut for this bistro dish is the hanger steak. It’s tender and wildly flavorful, perfect for standing up to rich frites and a gorgeous pan sauce. The frites—French for “French fries”—are fried twice in duck fat. These will ruin your taste for all other fries.
1 (1- to 1½-pound) hanger steak
1 russet potato
2 cups rendered duck fat (many fine supermarkets carry it in their deli sections)
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 shallots, thinly sliced
1 cup red wine (Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot are good choices)
1. Trim your hanger steak and set aside. The steak has a lot of connective tissue that has to go away. First, trim the fat band of elastin that runs down the center (if your butcher hasn’t already done so), to separate the cut into two pieces that look something like tenderloins. Then, carefully trim the silverskin off the outside of the cut as necessary.
2. Slice the potato into spears about 3/8 inch thick using either a mandoline or mad knife skills. Soak the cut potato in cold water until you’re ready to cook. The water bath washes starch off the surface of the spuds, keeping them from browning too quickly. You are frying them twice, after all.
3. Melt the duck fat in a large skillet and heat it to 325°F on a deep-fry thermometer.
4. As the fat comes to temp, remove the potatoes from the water and pat them dry to remove any excess moisture. Don’t skip this step! If the fries are wet when they hit the hot oil, the water will evaporate instantly, throwing oil everywhere: on your counter, on you, and possibly onto the flames of your burner, starting a fire. Dry those fries.
5. Working in batches so as not to overcrowd the pan, fry the potato spears until they just begin to color. (The point of this first fry is to cook the fries through—not to crisp them. The fries should be soft and slightly blond when you pull them from the heat.) Set aside on a plate or baking sheet lined with paper towels.
6. Slide the skillet to a back burner, but don’t empty it—you’ll be using it again shortly.
7. In a new skillet, melt 2 tablespoons of the butter over medium-high heat. Season the meat with salt and pepper, then gently lay it in the pan. Sear the first side of the meat for about 2 minutes, until the surface is appropriately brown. Flip and cook for an additional 2 minutes, or until the internal temperature reaches 125 to 130°F. (Do not overcook. Check the internal temp with an instant-read probe thermometer.) Remove the meat and set aside to rest, uncovered, on a cutting board.
8. Working quickly, add the shallots to the meat pan and cook until crisp—1 minute at most. Add the wine to deglaze, scraping up the browned bits stuck to the bottom of the pan. When the sauce has reduced by about two-thirds, after 3 to 5 minutes, remove from the heat and whisk in the remaining butter.
9. At the same time, reheat the duck fat to 375°F. When the duck fat is at temp, fry the frites a second time, just until they reach the appropriate level of golden brown and crisp. The frites are already cooked through; this is just to make them pretty and delicious. Remove them to a fresh plate or baking sheet lined with paper towels and sprinkle them with salt.
10. Now, slice the steak very thinly against the grain. Fan across a plate and pile a stack of frites alongside. Drizzle a stripe of the pan sauce across the meat.
11. Enjoy. Pair it with a big pale ale and a shower.
12
Bones
OFF THE MOUNTAIN. ALL GOOD. Send.
I sit in my car at Whitney Portal, thumbs poised over the virtual keyboard of my phone. Slowly, I crack a grin.
MADE SUMMIT. CHASED OFF A BEAR. SEE YOU SOON. Send.
A second later, my phone chirps and displays a message: WHAT?!
I chuckle and toss the phone into my glove box. I don’t touch it for several days.
* * *
Back at home, I put my feet up on the coffee table. Unlike last time, I’m not sore in the slightest. But I don’t smell any better. Odors rustic and unassuming in the high wild places acquire a distinct and noteworthy pungency in a suburban living room. My wife is a woman of endless patience.
“I’m so glad you’re home.… We missed you,” she says.
I smile, remembering her parting words. “Yeah, likewise. I’d like to take you and the kids to the mountain sometime. You’d love it.”
“Maybe,” she replies, before changing subjects. “So, I was thinking about what we talked about.”
Summer cranes her neck to look out the window to our kids, playing in the backyard. Then back to me. “And?”
As a result of my new job, my schedule has become more manageable and I’m less subject to the whims of remote meetings and anonymous edicts. Now, however, Summer and I are considering a more dramatic change. “I think I want to do it,” she says.
“It’s completely your call,” I say. “It’ll present some challenges. But if you want to try it, I’m on board.”
She nods, considering. “We’ll have to stick to a budget.”
“Sure. I’m not a bad cook now. I think I can keep us fed.”
“We could grow more vegetables, if you want.”
“Makes sense.”
We both sit for a moment, silent. “It’s a big change,” Summer says.
“Yeah,” I say. “If we do it, I just don’t want you to regret it. To feel like you got left behind in your career, or whatever. I’m fine with anything you decide.” I pause a beat. “It’s your job. Only leave if you want to. I don’t want you to feel like you missed out.”
She smiles a little. “I appreciate that.”
Just then, the door bursts open and Declan leaps into the room. “I need string!” he shouts, before disappearing back down the hallway to his room. In his wake, moving as fast as she can toddle, is Nora. She’s nearly a year old now, and walking is a very new, very exciting experience for her. She beams at us as she passes.
Summer laughs and turns back to me. “I don’t think I’ll miss out.”
* * *
Together, Summer and I resolve to make our lives more livable. After she leaves her job, the kids come out of day care and stay home with her. This arrangement presents its own challenges, but we work through them. We’re losing her income, but we’re also losing the expense of two kids in day care. And in this case, less is more.
We’re gaining immeasurably in time with the wee ones. Summer is with them both all day, and I’m around as much as I can be. My new position, in addition to being more family-friendly in general, is a chance to start fresh—a moment where everything is mutable, and we can step back and decide which routines we really want to keep and which we can let fall away.
Back at sea level, I do my best to retain the lessons I’ve been learning for the past few years that suddenly became abundantly clear on the mountain. The aspects of life that are actually important aren’t necessarily the ones cultivated by the workaday experience of career and commute and grind and striving to get through another day. Even that phrasing—to get through another day—is asinine. Who wants to get through another day? Who wants to trudge another twenty-four hours toward decrepitude and the grave without taking a little time to drink in the glory and wonder of another few hours on planet Earth?
I want to go play for a while.
“Dec,” I say one morning as he’s coloring in his room. “Let’s go for a hike.” Nora is with Summer, out running errands.
“Can we find a waterfall?” he asks. He really likes waterf
alls.
“Absolutely.” Basil lopes in and sees her leash in my hand. She dances back and forth excitedly. I grab some water and a few supplies, and the three of us set out.
I’ve heard of a stream in the Santa Monica Mountains on the edge of town that eventually cascades off a cliff of volcanic rock. And I almost know how to get to it. We spend the better part of an afternoon—hell, the best part—wandering through the mountains in search of it. Eventually we find that waterfall and stop to rest beside a pool at its base.
I reach into my pack. “Dec, would you like a piece of jerky?”
“What is it?” he asks. Despite seeing me make it, he’s never actually had it before.
“It’s outdoor food.” I reach into the bag and offer him a tiny piece. And one for Basil as well.
Declan slips it into his mouth. “It’s chewy,” he notes. “But I like it.”
“Me, too.” Together the three of us sit in the fine mist erupting from the base of the waterfall and watch the droplets glitter like jewels in the afternoon sun.
* * *
As months roll on, I reclaim my commute. Rather than creeping in lockstep ten feet at a time along a concrete ribbon, I get loose. Leave early. Grab a book on tape and a back road and point my automobile vaguely workward, but see where the path less taken takes me. I make it a goal to discover something new on each trip between home and the office. A just opened Himalayan restaurant. A store that specializes only in fly-fishing. An ancient velodrome and a park with a cricket pitch where teams from the far reaches of the commonwealth battle ferociously according to rules I find incomprehensible. But I want to learn. Los Angeles is a varied and glorious place if one has the temerity to explore.
I mean, there’s a Thai joint staffed with Elvis impersonators, for Pete’s sake. Our morgue has a gift shop. Come on.
On the weekends, we eschew cars altogether. Odds are that a Saturday without a car ride is a pretty darn lovely Saturday. Instead, we load up my enormous longtail cargo bike, pile the kids on the back, and turn mundane errands into adventures. On a bike, a trip to the grocery store becomes a story out of myth—The Saga of the Broken Streetlight. The Bicyclist Who Brought Home Ice Cream in August. The Stone Clan Versus the Market of Doom. And like myths, they turn our days into manageable tribulations—and a chance to grow stronger together in their negotiation. Bereft of a tank full of burning dinosaur bones, bikes trawl the world at a more human pace. In the world, rather than barreling, isolated, through it. Much as it must have been done before cars, One Step Back.
The beef in our backyard has forced us to slow down a little. And in doing so, I’ve had a chance to see what I’d been missing. I’m not completely able to disengage from my particular productivity compulsions, but I’m getting better. Breathing deeper. And I like it.
I try to take an hour a day to do absolutely nothing.
Finally, I make a fresh appointment with my doctor. It’s been a few years since my last one, and without putting my health in order, every other change is moot. When my blood work comes back, my fasting blood glucose level is completely normal. For now, at least, inclination toward diabetes has receded. That isn’t to say it won’t ever come back. But for today, at least, all is well. And that’s enough.
When the Machine starts to tug at my mental sleeves, I try to remember that I am in all likelihood becoming stressed out over nothing, really. I’m not going to starve. I’m not going to die. There are no bears here. I am in absolutely no existential danger whatsoever. The problems I’m facing are not by any stretch of the imagination actual dangers. In fact, by historical standards, Americans live in a world of almost unfathomable abundance. So I tell myself to shut the hell up and breathe. An inhalation. An exhalation. A realization that odds are very good that everything’s going to be just fine. And then, often as not, I head into the kitchen.
It is on one of those days that I find myself standing at my counter, staring at a four-pound package wrapped in white butcher paper. The label indicates “knuckle bones.”
My first thought: Hey, cows have knuckles! Something I did not know.
Second thought: What can I do with it?
I amble over to my cookbooks. My collection has grown from a stack to a shelf to an entire section of a bookcase, heavy with enormous tomes of tiny text. Knuckle bones, it seems, are primarily used in stock. I haven’t yet made a stand-alone stock in this project, though I did use these bones to make that pretty killer pho. I have no idea why stock has evaded me, but it’s time to rectify that situation.
Stock should be the easiest thing in the world. It used to be a much more common preparation in home kitchens than it is now. It is a process born of frugality; when you’re trying to make the most of every molecule of food from a given animal, stock is an excellent way to wring some utility from a skeleton and sinew and bits otherwise inedible. A person boils some bones. Perhaps a few veggies. Then leaves time and chemistry to do the work.
Generally speaking, there are a couple of ways to approach stock—white and brown. For white stocks, you blanch the bones, boiling them in water to remove impurities, and then discard the water of the initial boil. For brown stocks you instead roast the bones, adding a layer of toasty flavors from the Maillard reaction to the finished product and coagulating the proteins so they don’t cloud the final result.
After consulting with Nourishing Traditions, the Larousse Gastronomique, the Internet, the CIA (the Culinary Institute of America, not the spy agency), and a half dozen other cookbooks great and small, I decide on a brown stock. I enjoy those Maillard flavors. I toss some bones, both knuckle and marrow, into a roasting pan with a mirepoix and some garlic and shove them into a hot oven to roast.
Familiar now with the rhythms of the kitchen, I take a seat just outside the door with a book. Faced with a time frame too long to loiter but too short to shoo away, I take a position where I can keep an eye on the application without obsessing. If something goes wrong, I’ll see it. Or smell it. It’ll be fine.
Basil, not as content to pass the time with a book, walks over to me and nuzzles my hand, whining in the way she does when she’s hungry. I know this behavior—it will not end until Basil puts something in her stomach, be it kibble or banana or stick of butter or nearly anything else that will hold still long enough for her to wolf down. Knowing this, I amble over to the fridge and pull out a raw chicken quarter, drop it into her bowl, and place it in the backyard. She grabs the poultry in her jaws, settles down, and gets to work as I return to my book.
A half hour later, I stash the bones and veggies in my trusty twelve-quart stockpot. I splash some water into the hot roasting pan and scrape to deglaze it, adding the resultant liquid to the stockpot as well. There’s gold in that water—the bits stuck at the bottom of the pan, when scraped and dissolved into the liquid, are glorious stuff—and if I omitted them, my stock would be much the poorer for it.
I stab a finger into my phone and Mike Doughty’s “I Hear the Bells” pours out of speakers hanging on the wall of my kitchen as I grab my knife. I chop some parsley and add it to the pot. A little fresh thyme. Bay leaves. Some whole peppercorns. I head out into my backyard for a fresh lemon. Dear God, it’s beautiful out today.
Back inside, I juice the lemon into the pot and cover the bones with cold water, bring the pot to a boil, knock the heat back to something in the neighborhood of low, and let the pot simmer, bubbling once every second or so.
And that’s it. There’s no time limit. I need to simmer this for as long as I can stand to. In this case, I’ll probably let it bubble along on the back of my stove for six hours or so. I can’t ignore it, though. I’ll swing by every fifteen minutes or so with the biggest, flattest spoon in the house to skim off the scum that rises to the surface of the simmering liquid.
Late in the evening, I strain the stock through a fine-meshed strainer lined with cheesecloth and stash the pot in a sink filled with ice to cool to room temperature. Finally, I pour the stock into ice cube trays
to divide it into easily used portions.
Now I have stock for months.
And I use it. In braises. Sauces. Soups and stews. In almost any preparation that calls for water, I can substitute my homemade beef stock for superior results. It may be the single greatest improvement to my culinary game that I’ve made as a result of this experiment. Why haven’t I done this sooner? Correction: How haven’t I done this sooner? It couldn’t be simpler. Water. Heat. Bones. Time. And the wherewithal to look closely at the process, concentrate all the good things that go into it, and discard all the crap that would otherwise make it less than wonderful.
I’m trying to perform the same feat of concentration and eradication with life outside the kitchen. This journey started out with some basic questions about the food I eat: How do I make the most out of the very stuff that becomes “me”? But that question has led me to a slightly different one: How do I make the most of what that food actually becomes—how do I make the most out of the life this beef enables?
The elements of my life that I’d like to concentrate and enhance aren’t novel and aren’t complicated. Time spent with family and friends. Pleasant meals and good conversations. Time to appreciate beauty, wherever I happen to find it—interspersed with bursts of unstructured, adrenaline-fueled mayhem and mad fits of laughter. These don’t fit especially well with the Machine, because the Machine runs on a ticking clock and a fear of the future. It runs on the anxiety that, somehow, we aren’t doing enough. We aren’t preparing adequately for some half-glimpsed future that we’re told could turn out to be very, very bad. We aren’t ready for what lies ahead, and time is rapidly running out.
That ticking clock, used forever to sell convenience foods and brushless shaving cream and countless time-saving industrial widgets, is largely fiction. There’s only one clock that matters.