bison

With purple sauce! I invented that. My original idea was to add blueberries but when I went for the blueberries I saw the mangos, so mangos and blueberries it is. See how easily distracted I am?

For the sauce: butter in a sauce pot. Seasoned. Heated the seasoning through with the butter. This fat is what will carry the flavor throughout the sauce, otherwise it'll be discrete flavor patches, molecularly speaking. Add wine. Reduce by at least half. Add veal demi-glace. Oh God, I don't have any veal demi-glace. I don't even know what it is. I'm stuck. I don't know what to do. Kill myself.

BANG!

Kidding. Reduce beef stock to 1/3, or deglaze the pan that the bison was cooked in and reduce that. Use chicken stock, water, whatever you've got. Saki. Cool Aid. Pepsi. 7-Up. Fish tank water. Okay, maybe not that last one.

Toss in some mangos and blueberries, or whatever you have. Oranges sound nice. Mushrooms, tomato, peas, apple. I'd try anything and then claim I intended it. Blend with immersion blender. My original idea was to run it all through a fine mesh but the blender was so thorough that a sieve would have been superfluous, an unnecessary added step, it would be like to gild refined gold, to paint the lily, to throw a perfume on the violet, to smooth the ice, or add another hue unto the rainbow, or with a taper-light to seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish, is wasteful and ridiculous excess. Or something. As some guy once said. The Life and Death of King John, if memory serves, act IV, scene II, through the mouth of some guy named Salisbury, who was probably named after a steak, and you have to admit the guy who wrote all that sure did have a way with words.

Back to the sauce, finish with heavy whipping cream. The purple color is from the red wine and the blueberries. It's so good I want to drink the rest. I probably will.

Lookie, the bison is 96% lean. That's outrageous! I'm trying really hard not hold that against it. They do need to be fattened up a little, these bison. What are they doing to the poor things, starving them or what? I added olive oil. To hold in the oil, I also added my own sourdough bead crumbs. Then I go, "You know what? This is kind of like a meatloaf." So I added meat loaf things, egg, Worcestershire sauce. I ground up two bay leaves to powder along with about 25 peppercorns. (I fixed my coffee grinder with liquid nails, so now it works again for grinding) I noticed mint in the refrigerator so I used that too, along with all the remaining packaged fresh thyme. See? I'm clearing out the fridge and putting it all in my bison patties.

I browned diced onion so that it would shrink now and not later, along with garlic in all of the oil intended to enrich the bison.

The spinach is just frozen packaged but it was dolled up with extravagantly aged Balsamic, which wasn't the best choice -- insufficiently acidic.

Parmigiano flecks.

Whoever comes to my house becomes part of the experiment like this. When we're done with our damage we sit down and pick it all apart discussing our likes and dislikes, successes and failures, always with the aim of improvement. It's fun. If I had kids, they would totally participate. I used to have a dog who would sit there the whole time I was cooking something but she was mostly looking for a handout. She was interested in anything, even a grape. At first she just sniffed the grape, but then I put one between her teeth then gently clamped her muzzle on it so it smashed open and squirted in her mouth. Her eyes lit up like, "WOW!" After that, she loved eating grapes one at a time. She wasn't allowed in the kitchen so I'd roll one over to her and she'd sit there and wait for the grape to reach her. It was very amusing. I think grapes are bad for dogs, but I'm not sure. I do know that my dog loved being part of the whole cooking show even though all she could do was watch.