Good Junk by Ed Kovacs

Cliff St James is about as tough an ex-cop private investigator as there ever was. He’d have to be to have survived Ed  Kovac’s debut novel, Storm Damage, about post Katrina mayhem in the Big Easy. But survive he did, in fact, considering that the first book found him broke and nearly homeless, he’s come up a long ways, owning an admirable array of guns, spy gadgets, a rolling arsenal or two and a nice set of digs with a fancy sub-zero refrigerator in it. Not to mention that he owns his own mixed martial arts dojo. Yes, St. James may be off the New Orleans force and scrounging up cases on his own, but he’s not down on his luck. Except that when you’re as tough as he is, the wounds that cut the deepest are the self inflicted ones, like not being able to forgive yourself for killing a sparring partner by accident.

Which is the problem that’s haunting St. James when the story opens. Miserable, off his timing, and afraid to put his weight behind a punch, St. James is hiding out from shadows, his and everyone else’s. When his almost girlfriend and sometime NOPD partner Detective Honey Baybee,  who more than lives up to the name, drops a double homicide in his lap, he knows it’s her idea of therapy, but he’s smart enough to know it’s a good idea.

St. James may be off his game, but one look at the crime scene; a white Mercedes worth 100 grand, two very pretty guys in very nice clothes, one with his skull splattered over the car’s interior, the other a few feet away, tells him that this isn’t a lover’s tryst gone wrong, but that it’s been set up to look that way. The location, the scuffed heels on pretty guy number two, even the gun – good but not flashy enough for this pair – all add up to a deal gone bad, or a setup gone right.

The chief of police is trying to hang onto his job, and needs some righteous busts to do it, which is why Honey has a letter from him confirming St. James as a consultant for the department, a nice bit of irony considering he’d axed our boy from the force for getting in his way. We suspect some arm twisting from Honey, but this is the Big Easy, and everything seems possible, especially as the city scrambles to restore itself after Katrina, when money is flooding into the streets that water covered all too recently, and quickly becomes as dirty as the septic tide it replaced.

Del Breaux, the older of the two victims, worked at NASA’s The Michoud Assembly Facility as a consultant, the feather in a long career of work on classified projects. Parks, the thirtyish guy in the car, was a shipping manager there as well, and yes they were lovers, the head of security confirms in a very uncomfortable interview in which our team isn’t as impressed by words like “Top Secret” and “compartmentalized.” Oh, and if the NOPD finds Del Breaux’s laptop, they’d really like it back.

Allow me two quick asides here. First, it’s unsurprising that Ed Kovacs gets so much right about the underside of things, from the intelligence community to the world of mixed martial arts and the third world vibe that comes off New Orleans. In science fiction, you’ll occasionally find a physicist turning to the written page to get his ideas out to a broader public. In covert ops, you’ll find someone like Kovacs. Besides spending two and a half years setting up a security company in Post Katrina New Orleans, he divides his time between security contracts on several continents and lives, sometimes, in “a hanger in a Southern California airport.” We’d tell you which one, but you don’t have a need to know. Second, among the other facts that hold up, NASA’s Michoud facility, where they built shuttle tanks before and now run a variety of projects for other agencies, weathered Katrina better than most of the city, thanks in part to geography, but in part to the staff that stayed through the storm to maintain the pumping stations, and to whom NASA gave its Exceptional Bravery Medal. New Orleans, Kovacs makes clear is an uneven muddle of people putting their lives on the line to make things better; from church volunteers coming down after the flood to cops coming together to solve a case, coupled with a loose appreciation of right and wrong all around. It’s an interesting town.

Top Secret contracting for the government may pay well, but everyone in New Orleans has something on the side, and by the time Honey reaches the offices of “Breaux Enterprises” swankly located on the 49th floor in the high price district. Following the trail back to the victims home she finds that a “cleaning” crew has been there hours before. New computers and fax machines and not a scrap of paper make it clear this isn’t a case of the boys just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Fortunately for our team, when they reach the house, it’s been unmolested. Not unvisited, but the first floor is apartments, and the renters didn’t take kindly to a crew showing up with vans and FBI credentials at four in the morning. Evidently the cleaners didn’t want to stick around for the police to show up. When St. James shows up and starts poking around, he comes up with the missing laptop in an upstairs bathroom and, considering the way things have been disappearing, decides to let it stay missing until he can get his own specialist to take a look at it.

Hmmm. That’s a lot of detail, and the story is just getting started. Soon we’ll have three government agencies, Chinese spies, an ex spook who lives in a crypt and at the bottom of a bottle of absinthe, a high tech arms auction with high level backing, mysterious containers in a scrap yard, and a lot more going on. If St. James was on top of his game, he’d take less damage as the case unravels, but fortunately he can take quite a bit, because it’s coming his way.

The story is fast, violent, and twisty all the way to the end and my hats off to Ed Kovacs for putting it all together in a package that feels very real on a lot of levels. Throughout the action St. James struggles to make sense of his feelings, both about the man he killed in his dojo and about Honey, and what hers are for him.

At the end, a lot of water has passed by the levee, but he’s still standing, or will be after he heals up, and his character has gained some interesting new depths, which we’re looking forward to exploring in Burnt Black, due out this year.

Podvarak – Serbian Chicken and Sauerkraut

Our friends at Wikipedia tell us that Podvarak is ” is a Serbian dish made of finely chopped sauerkraut, onions and meat, usually pork roast or chicken, which are combined and baked in an oven,” which is the sort of description that explains why you’ve never heard of it…and why you’re not suddenly overcome with the desire to try some. To me, it conjures up memories of the amazing dish that my friend Audrey used to cook up on a regular basis and the inevitability of the rest of the Aquino clan clamoring for the recipe to try their own hand at it.

It’s one of those dishes that transcends its components to become something wonderful on its own. I strongly suspect that it’s one of the dishes that have a strong element of umami, the taste added to the litany of sweet, sour, salty, and bitter proposed by Kikunae Ikeda proposed in 1908.  Unami, which is hard to pin down, is a “pleasant savory taste,” which food scientists weren’t quite sure whether to admit to being an actual flavor until late in the century, but I’m pretty certain that its the flavor that takes stews and soups from good to great. The sort of edge that a beautifully crafted savory broth has makes you cock your head to one side and savor the moment.

On the other hand, I like sauerkraut just fine.

The Cooking Of Vienna’s Empire – Foods Of The World (1968)
Contents: Chapter I In the Days of the Old Empire. Chapter II Austrian Cooking Today. Chapter III In Austria’s Provinces. Chapter IV The Food of Hungary. Chapter V The Influence of Czechoslovakia. VI The Cooking of Yugoslavia. VII The Pastry Paradise.

Audrey found her recipe for Podvarak in a Time-Life Foods of the World  cookbook, though I’m not sure which one, back in the 1970s. Audrey, born in California, had lived in Iran for a number of years before returning to the US with my friend Mike, an Italian/Jewish/American boy who smuggled her out of the middle east, so she was no stranger to world flavors. Were she around, she’d probably tell you she taught me how to cook, and I’ll agree that she and Mike expanded my worldview on food and many other things considerably, but well, let’s just say that I got my first omelet pan when I was in elementary school.

A little Googling makes it seem likely that her original recipe came out of The Cooking Of Vienna’s Empire (1968), but all of Audrey’s recipes got quickly marked up with notes on how she’d expanded the dish to suit her.

I may have a copy of her notes somewhere. I remember tussling with her neighbor Karen after Audrey died over the cookbooks…but I think Karen won. I may have gotten photocopies though. At the time, I thought recipes were really important, these days, less so. In fact, I think recipes very nearly serve to convince people they can’t cook, and it can take a long time to get over that.

A few days ago, when my gal asked me to cook up some chicken thighs we had frozen away, a little light popped on in my head saying that this would be a great time to make up a batch of Podvarak. I haven’t made it since Audrey died, and that was decades ago, but I remembered the steps, standing at their kitchen sink looking out at the Ramapo Mountains to the north as I rinsed the sauerkraut and browned up the chicken. It’s dead easy, though this version may not match the one in the book, I’m pretty sure it would have passed Audrey’s muster.

Podvarak

  • 4 chicken thighs (skin on)
  • 1 medium to large onion, chopped
  • 1 package sauerkraut (12oz or so) I used the fresh stuff from the meat case, but canned would probably be fine.
  • 3 cloves garlic, minced
  • 1/2 teaspoon caraway seeds
  • 1 can chicken stock
  • Crushed Red Pepper – a dash or a few, depending on you
  • Salt, Pepper, Olive oil as needed

Fill a large pot with water dump the sauerkraut in. We’ll return to this in a bit.

Now, brown the chicken on both sides over medium heat in a large skillet with a splash of olive oil for about 5 minutes on each side, but be sure you get some nice color. Remove the chicken (it’s not cooked through yet, btw), and add the garlic to the pan to cook. Give the garlic a few minutes head start until it starts to soften up, then add the onions and cook them for five minutes, until they soften up too.

Strain the sauerkraut from the water, and press out excess water from it. This isn’t all that critical, but you don’t want to swamp the onions just yet. Add to the onions and garlic. Add the caraway seeds, cook for five minutes and then add the chicken stock. Add salt at this point if it needs it. Grind some pepper in and give it a few shakes of the crushed red pepper for zest.

Now, take the chicken and mush it into the mix, leaving the skin side uncovered. Cover with a lid and simmer for half an hour.

That’s pretty much it. French bread is always a good idea, as there will be some pretty tasty broth in the pan, and a Sauvignon Blanc went nicely with it. Beer works too.

Like many things, this gets better if made the day before and reheated.

Note: My friend Myron, who is as I recall of Yugoslavian extraction, says his mom used to make this all the time, but no caraway seeds. I’m not surprised, but I’m still voting for the caraway.

Myron also sent me his mother’s recipe, written in Croatian, and I ran it through Google Translate to see what came out. Enough so that the idea is pretty clear, and I can just hear his mother saying not to bother adding fat because the meat has enough already.

Myron’s Mom’s Podvarak

  • 1 kg of dry meat (or can be used 2kg pork or p iletine with bones)
  • 2 head cabbage (about 2kg)
  • 2 an onion
  • 1 head of garlic
  • 3 teaspoons red pepper
  • 1-2 teaspoons of vegeta
  • 1 bay leaf
  • 20-odd grains of black pepper
  • some oil
  • pinch of salt
  • 200g bacon, izsjecena (to taste)

Wash sauerkraut under cold water and cut into thin ga. Put a little oil in a pot and put the cabbage is cooked. Add finely chopped onion, garlic, a little red pepper. If desired, you can put one bay leaf. If you do not brine the cabbage salty enough. Pour in water and add the peppercorns. Cook until cabbage is not omekani and while almost all liquid has evaporated.

Meanwhile, pork or chicken, nasoliti, cut the parts and put in the pan to bake. Do not put grease than just add some water, because Why would they let their fat meat. When it is cooked, and ruddy skin, remove the meat, add the bacon and izdinstajte.

In saft and fat that is left from the roasting and bacon agree stewed cabbage, and then over roasted meat.

Put it all in the oven in the oven for about 35 minutes.

 

Morning Light – Closet

Sitting on the edge of my bed looking at the light coming in through the window, I was compelled to grab my cell phone and shoot the closet.

I shot a closet in my pajamas this morning. What it was doing in my pajamas, I have no idea.

Sometimes I wonder why I own all that camera gear if I’m going to shoot with a phone.

Annual DC Craft Show Outing

Three Rice Bowls by Jim and Renee Engebretson

While we never miss the Alexandria art fair which winds up and down King Street each year, we’ve never made it to the much bigger DC Craft Fair, though we’ve heard good things about it, and both of us love this sort of art.

This Sunday 11/18 EJ and I are planning on a trip in to DC to grab brunch near the convention center and do some craft browsing. We’re not making a formal group outing of this, but anyone who wants to come and join us is more than welcome. We should be showing up just about noon on Sunday.

Hopefully they’ll let me bring my camera, so even if you can’t join us you can see some cool stuff.

25th Annual Washington Craft Show
November 16, 17, 18, 2012
Walter E. Washington Convention Center
(Admission: $15)