MK10ART Tells Story of Pam Cafrtiz’s Grooming of 12-Year-Old Rhiannon for Raniere

Thanks NFW, here are a few of my cooking practices:

In my opinion, pre-bought charcoal is good for alleviating indigestion, but not cooking.

The key to starting a fire is not to use matches or fire starter but a spark [from stones or sticks rubbed together – it’s easy to learn] and not use paper or any manmade product as kindling.

I like to manage fires between yellow and orange flames depending on what I’m cooking and will achieve a blue flame for brief periods for finishing touches of certain meats to make it perfectly tender and well done such as meat high on the hog. Do this only for a few seconds.

You mentioned cakes; I will mention pies.

Pies should NOT be a low nutrition, high calorie, sugary desert. A pie is, of course, a meal.

I consider the crust [or “coffin”] like the oven or frying pan – the pie is what cooks inside the crust. Therefore, the thickness of the bottom and side crust is of importance, and whether there is an upper crust.

The upper crust regulates rising heat. The crust on the bottom regulates entry of heat.

I recently made Key lime pies with egg whites for an upper crust and wheat flour [with butter and water] for the lower and side crust. The purpose of a lemon or lime pie is to get the perfect sour taste.

A properly made Key lime pie will make your whole face pucker and combined with the contrasting sweetness of properly cooked eggs, wheat, butter, milk, honey and pungent cinnamon, and saltiness from sea salt will result in the best digestion of these staples imaginable.

Contrast this with the sickly-sweet lemon meringue or Key lime pies people eat today that make them fat, diabetic and nauseated.

Volumes could be written on how to prepare, combine, and heat various meats, cheeses, vegetables, fruits, nuts, legumes, herbs etc. as pies.

I normally use hot ashes, or hot stones for heat. I will use a stone or brick oven but can cook a pie with fire under the open sky, since my pies cook from inside the coffin. I never use aluminum foil or a crust protector.

The rising of heat within the coffin [crust] is the art of the pie. I do not let flames touch the crust.

The advantage of an oven, even one made in the outdoors with stones, is the cool-down period where the pie rests in gradually lowering heat, but I can compensate with the coffin or crust in open-air pie cooking and cooling. [The cooling is of utmost importance and I sometimes keep pies for days for cooling and fermenting.]

I never taste any food before I serve it, let alone a pie, for that ruins the art. I cook by smell, sound and sight. I save the taste for when I declare the food ready. This sharpens the instincts which makes the chef intuitive and increases the joy of the consumers of the pie which has been cooked and cooled with the elements, of water, air, fire, earth, and the mind.

To me, the best way for beef/root paste coffin [pastry] cooking is to combine the right roots with the right part of the cow. Don’t ruin beef with butter – including the paste. I use lard or beef tallow for the paste. Lard, especially if you like the innumerable health benefits, is superb. But I like tallow for beef-root combinations.

If I am slicing from the diaphragm of the cow I prefer onion, potato and turnips, like you do. If I cut from the rump, I like onions, potato and rutabaga. The difference is distinct. Of course the way the animal is slain and butchered is of extreme importance, as is whether it is a bull, an ox, or a cow. That’s another story.

For coffin cooked root/beef meals, I will once in a while use mountain thyme and basil, but usually just pepper and a little salt. The secret of the coffin is to make it just large and thick enough to allow steam inside to permeate the dark roots and the corpse into each other so the corpse tastes like roots and roots taste of the corpse.

I think there is a magic in using three roots to the corpse. The ratio of corpse to root is also important. I personally like 25 percent corpse. [I know most people like more corpse.] I do NOT peal potatoes but usually skin onions. I prefer yellow onions with rump. White with skirt. Do not care much for shallots.

The paste is thick, layered, larded or tallowed to be moist to be malleable. Store in cool, total darkness, and it becomes even better when cool. Never refrigerate.

Speaking of beef-root paste coffins with more beef – I like beef trotters with unskinned garlic in even ratio and I like beef tongue with carrot at 60 percent corpse.

Beef has to be consumed carefully and properly to get the benefits from it in my opinion otherwise it is poison and hampers digestion and lingers in the lower intestines defying gravity. This is why the roots are necessary, nutritious and strengthening and I rather think that people misunderstand the ratio of corpse to roots thinking more corpse is needed to gain maximum strength and endurance.

I personally prefer to eat paste-coffin cooked roots and beef at night, outside, under darkness, of moonlight or starlight by a fire. Inside with candlelight is also good. But eating under electric lights seems for me to lose all the magic of the merging of beef and roots, which is after all what all digestion is – the merging of various foods with oneself.

Thanks NFW– Brops/broths are, in my opinion, the best way to digest the skeleton, though I like scorching bones in dazzling white-hot fire for crunching with meat of fresh kill.

Pure water, red fire and earth [the kettle] and bones make the brop. Every big game kill should have brop and plenty of small game too. Digestion is key. Brop increases digestion immensely. I tend to think it is because it is hard to digest that which you waste and since bones are totally digestible it is improper to waste them.

I could write a volume on consuming bones and organ meats and how to prepare the intestines. Hooves, ears, hide. Nothing wasted. Eaten or worn. That’s the ideal.

It improves taste buds too.

Speaking of taste buds, once in the Ocala forest along the Saint John’s I bagged a vulture. I could almost taste the thrill of distinguishing the difference between carrion and live kill when I was eating the legs. How much better carrion is than live kill for those who can digest it – like my prey – with its delicious combination of assorted flies, blow flies and carrion flies, larvae, eggs, pupae, maggots, beetles, ants, the spectrum of bacteria, fungi, molds and yeast, and the breaking down of enzymes and desiccation all combining for that exquisite culinary taste – and smell to a buzzard.

Aged alligator meat – rotting in the sun – it could be timed to the day. When it was fresh, they did not come. But when the putrid odors wafted it was like for us the scent of fresh cooked chicken soup calling the vultures to dinner. My prey was a turkey vulture. The legs were moist from my dull red and cherry fire, kindled and maintained by soft pine, needles and branches; the juices dripping from the neatly cooked and digestible meat, grown on carrion.

As I ate it, I appreciated also the live kill for the bird; the shock of hormones rushing through the caught creature tenderizing for a tasty treat for the bird. But it can’t compare with aged carrion for a vulture and for us, aged beef. What we eat with aged beef to balance the intestines then is obviously of the greatest importance.