July 15–21, 2016

D2 @EpochTaste

www.EpochTaste.com

YOU-AIN’T-GOIN’-TO-BELIEVE-THIS STRAWBERRY BALSAMIC PIEPrep & Cooking Time: 2 hours, 40 minutesMakes: One 9-inch pie

• 3 large eggs• 1/2 cup heavy cream• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract• 1 cup plus 1 tablespoon sugar • 3 tablespoons cornstarch• 1/2 cup light brown sugar• 1/2 stick butter, melted• 3 tablespoons balsamic vinegar • 1 cup water• 1 cup strawberries (thawed if frozen),

cut into bite-sized pieces• 1 baked piecrust 

DIRECTIONSIn a small bowl, whisk together the eggs, cream, vanilla, 1/4 cup of the sugar, and the cornstarch. Set aside.

In a medium saucepan, combine 3/4 cup of

the sugar, the brown sugar, butter, vinegar, and water. Cook over high heat until the mixture comes to a boil, stirring occasionally. Remove from the heat and let sit for 3 minutes.

Very slowly whisk the egg mixture into the saucepan. Return the saucepan to medium-low heat. Continue cooking for about 5 minutes, stirring constantly, until the mixture thickens almost to a pudding. Let the mixture cool to warm.

Meanwhile, mix the strawberries and the remaining 1 tablespoon of sugar in a small bowl.

Drain any moisture from the strawberries and stir into the pie mixture.

Scrape the mixture into the baked piecrust. Serve the pie warm or at room temperature, or chill it for at least 2 hours before serving. My father-in-law prefers the pie warm, but I like it chilled.

Recipe from “A Taste of Cowboy: Ranch Recipes and Tales From the Trail” by Kent Rollins and Shannon Keller Rollins (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015)

RECIPE

(Clockwise from L) Kent Rollins cooks out of his chuck wagon;

You-Ain’t-Goin’-to-Believe-This Strawberry Balsamic Pie;

“Ice Cream” Pound Cake With Mixed Berries, a dish Rollins created when he

appeared on “Chopped: Grill Masters”; Green Pepper Frito Pie.

I tell folks I have the best view in the world out my kitchen window.Kent Rollins, cowboy cook

SAMIRA BOUAOU/EPOCH TIMES

SAMIRA BOUAOU/EPOCH TIMES

Cowboy Cookin’

CANICULA

/SHUTTER

STOCK (ILLU

STRATIO

NS)

COURTESY OF SHANNON KELLER ROLLINS COURTESY OF SHANNON KELLER ROLLINS

Cowboys continued from D1

“Are there still cowboys?” asked a friend of ours in all seriousness when she heard about them.

When we told Rollins about it over the phone, he laughed and said, “The cowboy will always be here as long as there’s cattle somewhere.

“I’ve been in places so remote, cooking on ranches that weren’t on a map and that you sure wouldn’t be able to find on GPS.”

No matter where he is, his kitchen is always outdoors.

“I tell folks I have the best view in the world out my kitchen window. Mother Nature gives me everything, but she can also take it away from me pretty quick,” he said.

Rollins has cooked in storms, in 70-mile-per-hour winds, and in 107-degree heat, standing by an open fire to cook.

“It can be miserable sometimes,” he said, “but in a way there’s a great deal of satisfac-tion in knowing that whatever Mother Nature threw at you, you still were able to do the job, because there’s 12 to 13 people on the crew that were counting on you.”

HistoryGrim were the days before the cowboy cook. The man who changed this was the famed cattle rancher Charles Goodnight, who, after serving as a Texas Ranger and fighting in the Civil War, hit the trail and invented something that immortalized him in cowboy song: the chuck wagon.

“Chuck” means food in cowboy slang.

According to Don Edwards, a cowboy singer and folklorist inducted into the Western Music Association Hall of Fame, the average meal before the days of Goodnight was whatever cowboys could fit in a sack or their saddle pockets. “They’d travel lightly and just have what they needed to eat,” he said.

Goodnight built the first chuck wagon out of an old military wagon, Edwards said. Along with the chuck wagon arose the more poetic side of cowboy life, as they gained some extra storage space for a fiddle or a banjo.

“They’d get together and play a little music in the evening after supper was over,” Edwards said. “That part of the culture is what people thought of as the romantic part of it.”

Many of the old cowboy songs, which Edwards dedicated much of his career to gathering, tell of the rambling lifestyle of the cowboy, the satisfaction of hardship, and the beauty of the open plains.

Much as city commuters might chat about traffic, conversations turn to the day’s events, like a wayward cow that went off track, for example. “There’s always something funny in the bunch,” Rollins said.

According to Waddie Mitchell, co-founder of the Cowboy Poetry Association who worked professionally as a cowboy for 26 years, the cowboy life hasn’t changed much since the old days, and in his experience, the food has always “totally depended on the cook.”

Some of the cooks served lots of spaghetti; others served Wonder Bread in place of bis-cuits. And here and there, they’d get a cook who made mealtime an experience to be savored.

“There was a cook we called Big-Nosed Jim, and he was an old casino cook,” Mitchell said. Big-Nosed Jim had a drinking problem, had to get out of town, and then found himself on the trail with the cowboys. As his name sug-gests, he had a “big ol’ nose” that, when he’d been drinking, “was kind of this big red knob on his face,” Mitchell said.

“But he could cook,” Mitchell said, noting Jim’s sourdough pancakes.

Cowboy CookingThe heart of cowboy cooking lies in its simple ingredients. Forget about fancy microgreens.

As for Rollins, he said he doesn’t need all that much to make a meal happen—with a can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, jala-peños, garlic, onion, salt, and pepper as his flavorings, he’s set.

There is, for sure, a heaping dose of inge-nuity. Canned beans, when doctored prop-erly, turn into a lip-smacking, smoky, hearty dish. Raspberry Jell-O provides tartness to an apple crumble.

In his cast iron Dutch oven, Rollins churns out dishes that are downright comforting. He shares his recipes in a cookbook written with his wife, Shannon, “A Taste of Cowboy: Ranch Recipes and Tales From the Trail” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015).

The book includes recipes for sourdough cinnamon rolls with brown sugar icing for breakfast, Green Pepper Frito Pie for dinner,

Wagon-Wheel Steak for supper, and lots of cowboy wisdom in between.

Speaking of the Green Pepper Frito Pie, it’s a dish for which ground beef, onions, and green peppers are simmered in red enchilada sauce (from a can), and then layered with shred-ded cheddar cheese, which acts as glue for the Fritos on top. When we made it at home, it was met with friends’ cries of “Amazing!” in between sighs of nostalgia.

But Rollins’s most requested recipe is actu-ally for his coffee. He wakes up before eve-ryone else, as early as 3 a.m., to get Bertha—which he sometimes calls “a hunk of burnin’ love”—stoked and going, so he can have coffee ready and breakfast on the table around 4 a.m.

He recounts in his book how a self-pro-claimed coffee snob, after downing several cups, asked him the provenance of his deli-cious coffee. “I knew it was going to break the poor feller’s heart when I told him Wal-Mart, and that I always serve Folgers,” he wrote.

Rollins’s secret is to boil the coffee grounds. It gets rid of the acidity and results in a smooth coffee.

It was a technique we put to the test at home recently. In a moment of desperation, we had bought one of the cheapest bags of cof-fee available from our nearby drugstore. Lo, after a few minutes of boiling the grounds, the coffee was an entirely different creature than we’d expected: silky and eminently quaffable.

Rollins has even more coffee tricks up his sleeve. By looking at the bubbles inside the cup as the coffee is poured, he can predict fair or rainy weather. During a cooking class, he peered into a cup and predicted a storm. The next day, everyone was running for shelter from the pouring rain. There really should be an expression like “storm in a coffee cup.”

Don’t Mess With the CookRegardless of the cook, however, mealtime for a cowboy is a very civilized endeavor. Mitch-ell said that when cowboys set up camp, they also set up a table “and everyone eats half-dignified.”

There is a pecking order in the seating arrangement, and cowboys keep to the eti-quette of a well-cultured home. While the men would often put their arms down on the supper table and “gobble it up,” Mitchell said, “I never saw bad manners.” He added, “You never sit in another man’s place, and you never reach in front of another man—you’d get a fork in your wrist.”

According to Rollins, the cowboys “respect each other, but they respect the cook even more, because when they come to the wagon to eat, that is my territory; that is my house, my home.”

There are rules of camp that all hands abide by. For example, don’t ride into camp, or you’ll kick up dust around the cook and the food; and don’t walk through the hallowed ground between the fire and the chuck box—only the cook can go there, according to Rollins.

Given the rules of camp, you’d figure no one would be foolhardy enough to challenge a cook like Rollins on his home turf—unless that