Last week we took an unusual call from a couple asking if they could be married at the ranch on the following day.   My first thoughts were questions about the nature of the wedding, but it turns out that our Siskiyou county court house simply does not perform weddings and they hoped to get married NOW!   Since I am licensed to perform marriages, and since I find good karma in doing such, I said "yes - come on down"

I don't charge for performing a marriage.  It seems somewhat blasphemous to go there, so I do it for free.  The ranch was in it's spring glory of flowering bulbs, and the lawns were somewhat long, but they wanted simple, natural, and quick.  They got all three.  Both sets of our family in-laws were visiting for Easter, so we even had a bit of a seated crowd.   Here is a shot of the couple's hands...no permission yet to show the glowing faces!   Oh,...my daughter sang a marvelous rendition of "the prayer"


Sometimes the Somes Bar Redundancy club of Somes Bar rears it's ugly head, and here I go again with the Doug montra:   I love my job.
I get to ride horses, shoot guns, and marry people.   Some times all on the same day.   I love my job!

What’s in the Fridge?
     Just as I expected the Orange Mustard Sauce is great on Salmon.  We even tried it on some steak the other night with grilled mushrooms and zucchini and liked that as well.  
     Yesterday I had to throw a batch of cookies together in about 30 minutes.  With St. Patrick’s Day just around the corner I wanted something with chocolate and mint.  I whipped up a batch of my favorite chocolate chip cookies found in our cookbook – Simply Good – and substituted one of the teaspoons of vanilla for 1 tsp. of mint extract and used giant milk chocolate chips.  They were yummy! If you have any recipes that you would like to have some new variations for please email me at guestranch@marblemountainranch.com.  See you in the kitchen soon.!  Heidi  

Spring has arrived at Marble Mountain Ranch!
     Even though mother nature is still in the snow mode (for which we are very grateful), the animals are moving on with spring.  New arrivals this week are a baby bunny named ‘Oreo’.  He is black and white all over and very cute as you can see from the picture.  We also have 12 new baby chicks and two mamma dogs who are due to have puppies within the next few weeks as well as a mamma cat that will have kittens sometime soon.  Whew!  That’s a lot of babies. Our children’s petting zoo is going to be busy this summer.

What’s in the Fridge Tonight?

Well, I didn't’t expect to be searching my fridge again quite so soon,  but today we had two delightful young women drop in from North Dakota who did not realize that March is COLD here on the mountain.  While  Doug took them on a horse ride during a brief break in the storms I madly searched for what to serve them for dinner.   When I cooked the chicken for last nights meal I had cooked 4 extra pieces, intending to use them in chicken salad for our ongoing diet.  I opened some jars of spaghetti sauce from our food storage and simmered it with onion, garlic, and basil.  I cut up the chicken in strips and added it to the sauce.  I served this over penne noodles with a green salad and some stir fried veggies along with a homemade loaf of French Bread.  They loved it, but the crowning jewel was the dessert I pulled together out of 3 very ripe pears and 1 cup of dried cherries that was in the pantry.  I am calling this one Pear Cherry Tart and it will definitely be showing up in the next version of my cookbook and on the dessert table this summer.  I think it will work great with some of our fresh raspberries from the garden in place of the cherries.  This one is company worthy!

Pear Cherry Tart

Crust:
1-2/3 cups all-purpose flour
2/3 cup sugar
2/3 cup cold butter
1/3 cup chopped pecans

Filling:
3 medium pears, peeled and thinly sliced
½ cup sugar
2 Tablespoons cornstarch
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
1 tsp. grated lemon peel
1 cup dried cherries
½ cup orange juice

Topping:

½ cup all-purpose flour
½ cup packed brown sugar
1 tsp. grated lemon peel
¼ cup cold butter
1/3 cup chopped pecans

1) Place 1 cup of dried cherries in small saucepan with enough orange juice to cover, approximately ½ cup.  Simmer for about 10 minutes until cherries plump up and are softened.  Drain off orange juice and set cherries aside to cool.

2) Crust:  Mix flour, sugar, and nuts together in medium bowl.  Cut butter into small pieces and work into flour mixture with your hands until it resembles coarse crumbs.  Press into the bottom and sides of an ungreased 11 in. fluted tart pan with removable bottom.  Be sure to build up sides of tart equal to thickness of bottom of tart.

3) Filling:  Combine pear, sugar, cornstarch, cooled and drained cherries, cinnamon, and lemon peel.  Toss gently.  Pour into crust. Bake at 425 degrees for 20 -25 minutes.

4) Topping:  In a small bowl, combine the flour, brown sugar, nuts, and lemon peel.  Cut in butter until crumbly.  Sprinkle over tart and continue to bake for about 15 minutes until topping is deep golden brown.  Cool on wire rack.  Remove sides of pan and place on serving platter.  Sprinkle lightly with powdered sugar if desired

.

     As co-owner and executive chef at Marble Mountain Guest Ranch for the past 15 years I often have guests ask me or my family “Do you eat like this all the time?”,  to which our children usually respond with “no, and thank goodness”.  They get tired of the fancy guest meals and long for winter comfort foods.  Living on the ranch through the winter presents many challenges, one of which is often the inability to get to the store due to severe weather, slides, and the 4 hour round trip.  For that reason I have often found myself asking “What’s in the cupboard tonight?”  While I’m sure all of you have found yourselves in the same situation, for me there is no possibility of just running to the store for a few missing items or ordering take out. Some of our favorite family meals have been created out of whatever was left in the refrigerator and on the pantry shelves.  Tonight was another such night and I have decided to start a New Blog Entry entitled “What’s in the Fridge tonight?”  In this blog I will share with you recipes that I create while scouring my kitchen.  I invite you to send me a list of some of the items that you most often find yourself left with in your own kitchen on nights such as this and I will attempt to create recipes with only those items.  No running to the store or borrowing from your neighbor!!

    To complicate the cooking for this evening, Doug, Cierra, and I are still attempting to loose those extra pounds we put on traveling this past fall, followed by a yummy holiday season.  Low Calorie, high value, and filling are my main goals for this month.   So tonight here’s what I found between my fridge, freezer, and cupboards.  Shopping day is Wednesday!!!

Leftover rice                                    Litehouse Cranberry Salad Dressing                  Celery
Cilantro                                           zucchini ( on it’s last leg)                                     onion
Canned black beans                       freeze dried basil                                                1 orange
Frozen Orange Juice                       3 chicken breasts                                               chili powder
Dijon Mustard                                 Guittards Champagne Dressing                           olive oil
Green Apple                                    fresh spinach                                                       Gorgonzola

Here’s what I created…

Winter Rice Salad

In a bowl mix 2 cups cooked rice, 8 Tablespoons ‘Litehouse’ Cranberry dressing, ¼ cup chopped celery, 3 Tbsp. minced Cilantro, ¼ cup peeled, diced zucchini, ½ cup black beans (drained and rinsed), ¼ cup minced onion, 1/3 cup diced apple, juice from one orange, 1 tsp. freeze dried basil, 1 cup cubed, cooked sweet potato, fresh ground pepper to taste!  Toss all together and place in the refrigerator while you prepare the chicken.  This made 5 cups.  172 calories per 1 cup serving





Orange Mustard Sauce for Chicken (I’m thinking this will be pretty good on Salmon as well)

1 cup reconstituted Orange Juice
2 Tbsp. minced onion
½ tsp. Chili powder
1 tsp. Dijon mustard
½ cup light Italian Dressing (I used Guittards Light Champagne)

     Place Orange Juice, onion, and chili powder in saucepan and simmer until it has reduced by half.  Stir in Mustard and dressing.  Set aside



Lemon Chicken

Place 1 chicken breast per person in hot pan coated with 1 – 2 Tablespoons Lite Olive Oil.  Sprinkle each piece with Lemon Pepper.  Brown lightly, Turn chicken and lightly sprinkle additional Lemon Pepper on other side.  Continue cooking until done.  Don’t overcook!!!  It will be dry.

To serve:

Place about 8 spinach leaves on dinner plate.  Put 1 cup of Winter Rice Salad on top of Spinach.  Place chicken on plate, spoon 1-2 Tablespoons of Orange Mustard Sauce over Chicken.  Place two slices of tomato on plate and sprinkle lightly with crumbled, Gorgonzola cheese and fresh ground black pepper.  Enjoy!  (Whole dinner is about 378 calories)

Talk to you again soon on “WHAT’S IN THE FRIDGE TONIGHT”

As I continue to espouse the virtues of the Somes Bar Liars Club to friends, family, fishermen, and telemarketers, I reflect back on the club's humble origins in the "Somes Bar Redundancy club located in Somes Bar on the Klamath River" and how it all started by repeatedly telling the same stories over and over again in endless reiteration .  Things like "liars clubs" and "redundancy clubs" are born when you have no where to go, and when you have eliminated mass media entertainment by throwing out all of your television sets (we kept the phones). 

So, while at church this last week, Heidi and I were chatting with a friend in the kitchen facilities, while I casually munched on little  fancy colored chocolate covered raisens.  Our friend was watching me as I popped hand-fulls of these little morsels into my mouth, and when I was asked where the colorful snacks came from, the ugly side of the Somes Bar Liars Club was irrepressibly manifest.

"These are a gift from the Easter Elk" ...and I popped a purple globule into my mouth. 

A pregnant pause followed, then a rather sick countenance fell across her face, and finally she erupted in violent and terminal laughter.  The problem I have with the Liars Club, is that I seem to have no sense of propriety.  None of us were later able to make eye contact in the chapel, at risk of spontaneous laughter mid-sermon. 

I continue to pay the price for this one, and now the Lord's Karma has fully cycled, calling me to repentance for disrupting the "spirit" in the House of the Lord.   Our local Klamath elk herd has now returned to the ranch with  mayhem and destruction as the agenda of force and their "sign" is not a pile of pretty colored delicacies.  50 elk in a herd can decimate a pasture in a day, trample the berm of our water canals, consume the gardens, and drive away the dogs.  The elk tactic to gain access to our horse pasture is to first assign a designated probe elk to walk through the hot-wire horse fence.  Once the breach is established, the remaining 49 casually meander in and evict the horses.  When the pasture is sufficiently clear, and residency is established, the party begins in earnest. 

Here  is a shot of one of their party games entitled "How Many Elk Can Fit Into A Horse Shelter?"


Notice the entrance breach  through the hot wire tape at the back of the picture. 

Let this be a lesson to the masses of un-schooled Liars Club minions:  twisted humor stays on the ranch.

Cheers, from a fully repentant Doug.

It's been far to long since I have posted an entry, and I blame LIFE!.  It certainly is not any reflection on ....me.. ahem.

So, here is a brief summary of some of our recent "ranch" life.  My second son, Adam got married, my youngest child Cierra did a foreign exchange to Germany, forest fires swept through the Klamath forest all last Summer and left us untouched and unharmed, and I survived a pretty remarkable horse wreck on a green-broke horse.   People tell us regularly that we need to write books about our life experiences here on the ranch, but I am afraid to scare the general public away with the magnitude of the events that are "normal" for us in this setting.   So, I tone it down a bit with comments like:  "That green-broke horse started frog-hoppin so I bailed-off to the side as she reared-up.  Yep, it was a good ride"  

This last week, my wife Heidi got too close to my chain saw as she tried to "help" with the work....she of course was injured, and is doing fine by the way, but here is a comment from our good friend Jeanne:  "Geez, Doug!  It was bad enough when you tried to take off your own leg, but now you are going after Heidi's extremeties!  Ranch life was never so exciting!  Sort of My Friend Flicka unites with Jason Krueger.  Maybe it's best the February get together was postponed.  Bob and I need time to prepare armor and brush up on our defensive skills.  Perhaps we should bring our own chainsaws, just in case. What do you think??"

With reactions like that from best friends, you can well imagine how those that are outside our close circle of family and friends might react to a phone call and short tale about my pushing my femur through the back of my pelvis under a 1200 pound horse!....So, we simply say "I had a good ride."  

Now that I have sufficiently scared ALL of you...please be aware that all of our family is doing great, that we still love each other, that we would not live anywhere else in the world, that we feel sorry for the rest of humanity living in climate controlled bubbles and that none of our guests ever ride a green-broke horse or run the 36" bar chain saw.    The fires are all out, the river is not flooding, the roads are still in place, and bigfoot has not been on the ranch,  recently ............ I hope all of you can join us as we share a good ride and taste some of the Western frontier  in 2009.

Life is in-your-face-large at the Marble Mountain Ranch.  During the dry Summer months we stage slash from tree trimmings, and ranch landscaping into a burn pile that grows to unbelievably large size during the course of the season.  It becomes a tricky endeavor not tipping over the tractor while ramping up the pile with a back-hoe loaded with cuttings.   The celebratory burn pile ignition has become a bit of a New Years Eve tradition, complete with projectile ignitions centered on critical mass fuel load cores saturated with highly flammable ignition exciters.  In other words, we make giant  smokey  fires that light up  the canyon on wet  Winter days. 

The "boys with big toys" game continues into the horse arena as we clean the corral and build equally giant compost piles with our endless supply of horse manure.   The game here, is to  NOT  ignite the pile, and to stop it from even thinking about spontaneous combustion.  The Maniacal Marble Mountain Manure Movers are county-wide recognized as the record holders for producing the single largest  equine  dung debris depot.  Take a look at this years entry into the record books:



Local organic gardeners are always on the doorstep awaiting news of this years fertilizer production schedule and the Orleans Forest Service Fire Crews usually make weekly compost inspections to ensure that core temperatures do not exceed combustion thresholds.  You see, I have a reputation as a bit of a fire builder. 

For those knowledgeable in equine manure production, the real concern is in the economics of the pile.  With current grass alfalfa selling at about $280/ton delivered, the production cost of this years manure pile is a rather depressing concept.   Thank goodness for the therapy of the tractor and the capacity to live and stack large as a means to find relief from the emotional burden of manure production costs and other hazards of ranch life.

Coming Next:  Therapy and soul corrections with ranch life!

Cheers, Doug

A frequently asked question from our guests is how we got into the "Dude Ranch" business.  I don't want to go into all the historical details at this point, except as it relates to my recently passed "Uncle Bud".  Uncle Bud (Calvin Cole) and Aunt Nola, were my first connection to ranches, farming, and horses.  My father, seen here with his brother Bud, would appear to have been interested in horses, based on this photo from his early childhood.  But this is the only image I have seen of my father even close enough to touch a horse.

As the two brothers made their life choices, Uncle Bud generally stuck to the simple ranch/ farm lifestyle while my father traveled the globe in the military, and in career paths that took him through several Western states.  My Uncle Bud and Aunt Nola's central Utah ranch home became my youthful summertime exposure to horses.

Aunt Nola's charitable, giving persona made her a natural for sharing her love of horses with the local 4-H clubs, and with me, the ignorant city nephew who just wanted to jump from  corral fence to horse back, and GO!


The horsemanship I gleaned from those early summer rides gave me more of a comfort zone around horses than a technically proficient riding skill.  A typical riding adventure for me often included a LONG walk home with my cousin Gordon, while watching the back side of our horse as it galloped home with it's saddle under it's belly.  Since I couldn't figure out how "old red" could have a snugly fit saddle at the barn, and a loose girth cinch away from home, I just resorted to riding bare-back.   Yes, I now know, horses can suck air to tighten up against the cinch and cleverly release the air once the ignorant rider (me) has mounted and cued the horse to move-out.

Nola and Bud were the epitome of loving, honest, good people.  Here are some select Bud and Nola mantras:

1.  "Remember Doug, Horses do Horse THINGS!"   yep, I have come to learn the truth of this one.

2.  "Ya know Doug, lots of folks know how to get up on a horse, but not too many people know when and how to get OFF a horse!"   and yep, I have come to learn the truth of this one too.

3.  "No riding today Doug, It's the Sabbath, and horses deserve a day of rest too".    Well, as a sometimes defiant youth, I must confess that there were a few Sundays when I didn't ride, but I did test the maximum distance I could jump from the corral fence while landing on the back of "old red".  Since the rides didn't generally last too long, I figured it was not necessarily a breach of the Sabbath.

Uncle Bud passed this last month, and has rejoined his loving wife Nola.  Uncle Bud and Aunt Nola were excited to come to help Heidi and I with the start-up of our stock program here in the first year of Marble Mountain Ranch, and my thoughts go to them on nearly every one of my rides.  Here is one last parting shot of a great mentor and friend, my Uncle Bud.  Bud and Nola took me to the basics, like learning how to return to the barn with the same number of horses the ride started with.   This is good stuff.



Till next ride, Doug

Many of our guests come from a life centered in a highly populated metropolitan or urban setting.  Some of the probing questions about conditions here are often quite entertaining and illustrate the dramaticly different lifestyle paradigms.  For example:

"Which off-ramp do I take off of the I-96?"   answer:   "There are no off-ramps, unless you consider an exiting spur-road to be an offramp."

"If there are no off-ramps, how will I get into Somes Bar from the highway?"   answer:  "Stop your car and open the door"

"But won't the Bears eat my children if I open the door?"  answer:  "uh....no.    Excuse me, I need to cough.   Hack, chortle, snort, snort, snort."

"Was that a bear I heard"   answser:  "no"

"Do you have insects there"  answer:  "yes"

"Really?  How many insects do you have?"  answer:  "lots" 

As you can see, if you start getting one word answers to your questions over the phone, this could be a red-flag indicator that you are a likely candidate to become fodder for the "Somes Bar Liars Club".    As president, CEO, Secretariate, and founder of the Somes Bar Liars Club, I take personal interest in persons appearing to be gullible, since I am always on the search to recruit an audience for a liars club story.   Here is where the fun really starts.

"In fact, we have species of insects in the Klamath Forest, that are a Klamath biome dependant single niche entity.   Take the 'Flying Scorpion" for example.   This is the only insect that is predator to the bald-faced hornet, a wasp that is so potent in it's sting that it has been determined to be the single most important reason for the decline in the Klamath Elk population.   Whole herds have been decimated by swarming bald faced hornets.  And as you know the bald faced hornet is also the most voracious predator to the yellow jacket.   The food chain is uniquely vertically structured here and is thankfully supportive of homonid populations residing near the top of the chain.  You may not realize this, but the flying scorpion is a symbiote to the human form, acting as silent protector and guardian to the species.  
  Since bald faced hornets consider the human pheromone profile to be the compass to a nutritious complex-fatty-acid meal source, they would quickly decimate our population as well, were it not for the interference of the defending swarms of flying scorpion.  It's really quite dramatic scene when viewed from horse-back.   The hornets in hot pursuit of a yellow jacket hive get distracted by the approaching scent of humans on horseback and we see the sudden change in flight path as they move in our direction.   Now, this is where it gets really interesting.

The increased wing-beat frequency rate of the excited bald faced hornet sends supersonic in-audible signals to the shy and often unseen flying scorpion hive that is called in to duty.  While zeroing in on the sound of the excited hornets, these little Stealth Bombers swoop down and grasp the hornet, paralyzing it with a sting from the scorpion tail, then biting off the head of the hornet.   This continues until the invading hornets are entirely exterminated and their head-less corpses are neatly piled in anticipation of the ceremonial hornet feast."

Usually, I am talking to the dull drone of a empty-line ring signal about this time....oh well, another sale is lost, and my angry family is beating my body with what ever kitchen appliance is close at hand. 

Where are the Scorpions when you really need them?

In closing, here is a picture of an elk family from last year.   Notice the perked ears and the anxious looks as they survey the horizon for the sound of the approaching hornet wing -beat.   Run!!!  Run away!!!

Cheers:   Doug