Nathalie Bouffe

Utah's White Mesa Willy Wonkas

“This is Hubert, our VP of sales and marketing,” says Lickity Split Chocolates CEO Andrew Dayish, of a ten-year-old boy wearing a Grim Reaper Halloween mask.  “I am not. I’m a dead guy!” retorts Hubert, before running off for another piece of cake, a cape flapping in his wake. 

All of Lickity Split’s owner-operators straddle corporate titles and Halloween costumes, paperwork and cake equally comfortably.  The fifteen children managing the tiny chocolate factory at the edges of Blanding, Utah are a boisterous mix of the rural community’s Navajo, Mormon, Mexican and Anglo populations.  Although set deeply within one of the nation’s largest and poorest counties, the only one in Utah with a Native American majority, where thirty percent of people live below the poverty line and less than 1% of the businesses are Native-owned, Lickity Split’s children, nicknamed in one article the “White Mesa Wonkas,” have sold nearly $30,000 during their three years in business. 

Arizona's Cutest Toothless River Restorer

As a boy, Alabama-born army brat Fred Phillips dreamed of moving west and becoming a cowboy.  Today, he’s a restoration practitioner and musician but, as he proceeds to point out, he didn’t miss the mark by much.  The job descriptions do end up having quite a bit in common.

A failing landscape-architecture student at Purdue, Fred floundered around looking for inspiration until a friend gave him the telephone number of Dennis Patch, leader of the AhaKhav tribal preserve near Yuma, Arizona, who’d indicated he might have a park-design project for someone bored and idealistic.  Fred claims he knew the phone call would change his life, and when Patch suggested he meander down for the summer, Fred and his then-girlfriend drove across the country for a look. 

What he found was ‘dire,’ ‘stagnant,’ and ‘disastrous’: an ecosystem completely upended by serial damming, the subsequent invasion of exotic plants that choked out native species, and landscape ill-treated by decades of human use as a dump.  Every drop of the Colorado River (considered the most threatened in the United States) had been allocated and diverted: to Los Angeles, Phoenix, Las Vegas and other desert cities desperately thirsty for water, not to mention the two million acres of agriculture reliant on the river for irrigation.  Indeed, the river manifestly vanishes at the Mexican border, failing to reach the Sea of Cortez; sections of the river where 300,000 cubic feet of water per second had once flowed now only trickled at levels of three to five thousand. 

don't mind the work-in-progress map below, i'm experimenting.  more on the project later.

Meeting Heroes: Madness and Cheese

Irish cheesemakers are a funny, gnarled breed of fighters.  Those who’ve made West Cork their home have chosen an area of undeniable beauty; rolling green hills that tumble into a lapping, tender sea.  The rough-cut landscape of westernmost West Cork carves peninsulas that stretch out of Ireland like fingers, and these cheesemakers live on the green and rocky tassels of what is already the fringe, making cheeses that taste incontestably of the sea.  They have banded together to fight any adversity that dares head their way: funky bacteria, unreasonable laws, ignorant auditors.  Over the thirty years of their struggle, they have become some of the most well-informed, highly organized, voluble, eloquent and compelling of the cheesemakers in the British Isles. 

Because West Cork is wet, most of them make washed-rind cheeses.  Washed-rinds are generally recognizable as pinky-brown, sticky, squidgy, stinky wheels covered more in moist bacteria than dry, powdery mold (like a Camembert or Brie might), although if it’s been a while since its last washing, the cheese might feel dry to the touch and look brown, like an Appenzeller or Comte (both of which are technically washed-rind cheeses that just don’t get washed very often—towards the end of their maturation they are dry-salted instead, so the outside gets crusty and hard).  The bacteria known as B. linens (the name we’ve given to the sticky pink stuff) thrives in humid environments and by the sea, which explains the prevalence—and excellence—of the many West Cork washed-rinds.  Indeed, Veronica Steele of Milleens, one of the first cheesemakers in this area of then-undiscovered terroir, tried at first to make a hard, cheddar-style cheese, but as it kept being colonized by B. linens, she eventually gave in to the stuff and ever since has been proud to make some of the loveliest, pinkest, stinkiest literalizations of West Cork’s terrain and sea air. 

http://cabbagesandkings.typepad.com ...

...is where you should go for anything nathaliebouffe, until i figure out what to do next.

Despite Adversity She Continues To Bouffe

Since the blog has been hijacked, there seems to be little point in carrying on, as I’d been pretty shit about updating in the past several months anyway, and the bastard pirates who pulled the rug out from under me won’t listen to offers under, like, a thousand dollars for nathaliebouffe.com.  But tonight’s manifested itself as a chance, quiet pause in my Irish saga—literally the first moment in two weeks I’ve even had a computer to look at—and I thought, because I certainly wouldn’t want to use it to do anything even mildly productive, that I might tell you what I’ve been cooking and eating this month.