Marinated Mushrooms with Vermouth and Garlic from The Basque Book
It is a miracle, my friends, that I am still standing. Finishing out a school year is hard work. But standing I am. In an abrupt transition, let's just say I am big fan of Basque Country, if only because of Ernest Hemingway. When I was in college, I took a literary criticism course with a reading list of precisely one book: The Sun Also Rises , which for years I knew of as Fiesta , the title under which this book is published in Europe. We read and wrote about this book under a feminist lens, a Marxist viewpoint, a Formalist approach, a Structuralist lens, and a Psychoanalytic approach. People, I know this book really well. And in this book, Jake and his buddy Bill do some fishing in a little town, Burguete in the Navarre region of Spain, on the Irati River. But on their way, they ride in a crowded bus filled with Basque people. Jake, Bill, and these strangers pass around and share their wine, and Jake learns the proper way to drink wine from a wineskin. The...