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Anyone who still contends that Americans don’t like lamb has not been paying attention to the American Lamb Board’s Lamb Jam Tour, at least its reception in DC.  Sold-out for the second year in a row, this year aficionados of succulent lamb packed a more egalitarian venue, the capital’s venerated and recently restored Eastern Market North Hall.

Eighteen DC chefs presented a decent variety of dishes intended to showcase American-raised lamb, from pupusas to ravioli and rillettes. Two of last year’s winners were repeats: Chef John Critchley of Urbana Restaurant & Wine Bar and Chef Nick Stefanelli of Bibiana.

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Stare down a stalking puma at 30 feet? Childs does.

In another life, I want to come back as Craig Childs. In another life, I want to know the universe of wilderness and wild creatures as intimately as he does.

It’s not for nothing that Childs has been called “one of the finest nature writers at work in America today.”  His prose in The Animal Dialogues educates, thrills and sings of the beauty, mystery and majesty of the natural world. More compelling, he incites a desire to pierce the veil, with gentle reminders of how little we perceive.

I have made clear my weakness for big cats, their power, beauty, purity of instinct.  So Childs’ encounter with a mountain lion at an Arizona desert watering hole was a riveting adrenalin rush.

As the cat quickly closes the distance between them with a stalking stare and twitching tail, Childs, armed with a five-inch knife, masters a viscerally overwhelming flight impulse: “What I do, instead, is not move…

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Wandering the streets of my dear Paris this week, I rediscovered the enchanting combination of  gourmandise and art that the City of Light reveals on a regular basis!

Looking for a snack for the movies near Pompidou, I happened upon La Pistacherie, specialist in “fruits de la coque,” literally “fruits of the shell” or, for the less poetically inclined, “nuts.”  Founded by Charles Sakr, a well-known Italian antiques dealer of Lebanese extraction, La Pistacherie should surely improve the standing of vegetable-based proteins in France, where, noted one reviewer, “they have never managed to be labeled anything other than canary food.”

Belying its name, La Pistacherie is not simply full of pistachios, though they are there, studding classic Middle Eastern sweets that always make me weak in the knees.  They are joined by walnuts stuffed in dried figs, cashews, dried Turkish strawberries and a delicious tangy Ecuadoran fruit called physalis that the young salesman called “golden berries” among many other fruit and nut mixes.

On rue St. Anne near Opera, I discovered Epices Roellinger, a spice merchant hailing from St. Malo and Cancale, in Brittany.  Its window display, with bundles of cinnamon sticks and jungle photos, was intriguing, but I started to pass it by, until I glimpsed a model ship in the middle of the store.  Closer inspection took my breath away.  The meter-long sailing ship was made entirely of whole cloves, even down to the little men on the ship.  ”It comes from the Moluccan Islands, and dates to 1840,” said the sales clerk.  After sating my fascination, I toured the shop’s many intriguing spices: grains of paradise from the Congo, a cross between ginger and pepper, saffron from Quercy, France (!), and vanilla from 10 different countries, from Uganda to Madagascar.  I even got to sniff several! You can smell the differences.

Antique model clove ships, dried seed pod arrangements…all just part of the seductive Parisian art of marketing gourmandise!

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….or almost!

Of course, ma gourmandise has little to do with protecting wildlife or wild spaces, but having just been seduced by yet another fantastic French macaron from Versailles patissier Philippe Pele’, I am moved to declare publicly what I already knew:  His macarons are as good or better than the iconic Parisian macarons of Laduree.

Laduree is a fixture among tourists, with its carts at the airport, but Mr. Pele’ is a wonderful innovator of macaron flavors you are not likely to find at Laduree.

I must have been a bee in another life, as I adore just about every flower flavor I’ve ever tasted, particularly rose and jasmine. (I’m addicted to jasmine tea, for example.)  I had already fallen for Mr. Pele”s rose-lychee combination, but today was another revelation. Upon buying a little sack, the salesgirl asked if I cared to try their new lily of the valley (muguet)-apricot version.

Wow. Even before tasting the tart-sweet apricot jam sandwiched between soft orange pillows, its heady lily of the valley perfume made me stop for a moment and imagine myself winged with fuzzy legs.  I’m not alone: I heard a guy today, waiting outside with his dog and cigarette, ask plaintively of his friends inside “don’t they have any violet-cassis ones left?”

But if you’re not into eating flowers, don’t despair.  Their vanilla is succulent (and is part of an orchid, in case you didn’t know).  Or try their caramel au fleur de sel (salted caramel). Its buttery, deep burnt-sugar mouthful will make you swoon.

Vive la France! 

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It’s time for China to modernize.

Time for lab-grown "seahorse"...

Maybe that sounds a little weird.  China has modernized, you say.

Yeah, maybe for the trivial stuff like telecommunications and transportation.  I’m looking for an honest-to-goodness 21st-century transformation.

I mean, it’s just downright silly for such a powerhouse as China to continue insisting that tiger [ahem] or rhino horn is as good as

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When I read in the most recent issue of Men’s Journal that my birth state of Texas holds more tigers in captivity than live in the wilds of India, I could not stop laughing.

Ever the rebel...

I could just imagine the attitude of a typical Texan (think Rick Perry) raising tigers for sale.  “Kinda figures, dudn’ it, ma’am?  I mean, just where else in the world would’jya find people brave enough to breed tie-gahs!?  We’re just savin’ ‘em from dyin’ out over there in India!  They’ll be comin’ over to Texas to buy ‘em back, ‘fore long!” 

No state or federal agency tracks the number of tigers and other exotic “pets” in private hands.  But experts like Richard Farinato, a senior advisor at the Humane Society of the US, says Texas likely has the largest tiger population in the country, of at least 3,000 animals. Others say 4,000.  A billion-dollar business, they’ve got, breeding tigers for domestic and international markets.  ”It’s unreal, the number of people breeding these

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Move over, Randy Newman!  Ok, ok, so he sang about short people and I mean small farms.  But it fits…!

If the tip rubs off, it's good to go!

Anyway, as I alluded in my last post, not everybodythinks the only way to feed the planet is through Monsanto’s product catalog.

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A Seattle butcher sounds the rallying cry....

With Thanksgiving feasts looming next week, a “conversation” held this week between celebrity chef Dan Barber, energy expert Dan Yergin and former EPA administrator Carol Browner recalled my long-time obsession with the need to break down the industrial agriculture system that has so ravaged this country’s ecosystems and public health.

During the panel sponsored by the New America Foundation and The New Yorker Magazine, Barber persistently advanced his vision that local, sustainable, organic farming can feed the world’s growing population despite fewer and more expensive ecological resources—energy, water and stable weather—that have been standard for decades.  He told of presenting his vision at a conference in Europe where Bill Gates also presented his vision, one that relied heavily on technologies such as genetically modified seeds, to feed the world…

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It looked just like an on Obama for America 2008 rally–all ages, all races, and LOTS of under-40s.  The crowd included folks my age, many of whom I am certain, like me, spent countless weeks and months working to elect Barack Obama to the White House.  And the rally even featured one of his paid youth organizers who, without anger, said she had simply come to remind him that we were the ones who put him there, and of the promises he made about trying to slow the effects of climate change.

WIth chants of “HEY, O-bama, we don’t want no climate drama!” and “Stop the Pipeline, yes we can”, the thousands-strong group filed out in groups behind colored flags to surround the White House and the Executive Office Building. I went around! to the side to see when the lines came together. We did, and then some!  The inflatable pipeline, carried around and around the whole area, kept everyone’s spirits high.

There was a time I would have imagined that such a demonstration meant that certainly Obama would refuse the project.  Guess I’ve just matured in my political calculus, and I now believe that with the pressures of a near-jobless recovery, unless Barack can determine that the numbers around Keystone are false, he will be hard-pressed to refuse TransCanada,  Unless, of course, he thinks that particularly the young people in the western states like Nebraska and Colorado that are key to his reelection will abandon him in droves if he does allow it…Knowing my president, he will attempt some King Solomon-esque solution to split the baby…

At the rally, Naomi Klein, well-known progressive activist and Canadian, suggested that this protest was just the first of others that would shut down any pipeline Transcanada attempts to build for carbon-heavy tar sands oil.  I would like to believe that is true, as I do hate this endless destruction of the Earth to wring every last drop of fossil fuel!

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For those of you who have forgotten some of the truly questionable pop tunes, the Captain and Tenille’s “Muskrat Love” was resuscitated yesterday in a letter to the editor of the Washington Post by a swamp rat fan.

To Exterminate or Not to Exterminate? That is the question!

Asking the perfectly legitimate question, “who are we to exterminate swamp rats?”, Dan Wittenberg points out that we, too, are an invasive species, a point I cannot deny.  He contends that we destroy far more Chesapeake Bay watershed than colonies of the orange-fanged, hyper-prolific rodents ever could.

But that is not why he says we should leave them alone.  No, Dan was seduced, in classic Disney fashion, by a “muskrat love” courtship ritual.  After watching two “roly-poly, beaver-sized mammals…walking shoulder to shoulder while giving each other gentle little pecks and nuzzles on their chubby, whiskered cheeks,” Wittenberg heard strains of “Muskrat Love” in his head and declared he could never condone eliminating such “utterly adorable” creatures.

Despite the fact that nutria are not muskrats, I might well have been swayed, too.

But I still believe that where we have screwed up the natural order, we should try to right the wrong.  Then again, there’s always the possibility that we just muck it up even further…!