yodelicious
one night in estes park, we moseyed out to the lazy b ranch for an evening of cowboy fun. the festivities began with a slide show about the history of cowboy music. you may not know this about me, but i enjoy a good yodel. dad used to wake paul and me on weekend mornings by cranking up the volume on marty robbins and the sons of the pioneers. to this day i love the music. the slide show focuses on the singing cowboys of the movies. who knew i could feel nostalgic for something i never even experienced?
"put...the gun...down, roy. it's not too late to end this thing peacefully."
after the slide show we went into the chow shed, or whatever a cowboy would have called a big barn with long picnic tables and a stage. a wandering minstrel cowboy attempted to teach mom a few fancy cowboy rope tricks.
the cowboy finger
it's hard to lasso and yodel at the same time
ready to rope up the dogies
now, the lazy b offers chuckwagon suppers as part of the package, but after last year's meal there (when betty accidentally sampled "the bite of the chicken that you hope you never get"), we were taking no chances: we packed our own sandwiches.
why? well, here's what we were served, slopped into a metal pie pan, cowboy-style:
- cowboy beans. open can. dump in pot. heat. spice liberally with several witty fart jokes from the cowboy waiters.
- cowboy biscuit. a dry white hockey puck that immediately siphoned off every bit of saliva my poor beleaguered glands could make. i didn't check, but i wouldn't be surprised if, in true chuckwagon fashion, it carried a weevil or two as passengers on the long drive across the prairie.
- cowboy baked potato. the potato wasn't awful if you applied seven or eight tiny tubs of "country-style butter-flavored spread." that is, until you realize you've just chewed the bite of the potato that you hope you never get. (this was only the second time in my life ever to see my mother spit out a mouthful of food.)
- cowboy beef or cowboy chicken. last year betty and i had the chicken. this year, having learned a terrible lesson, i declined the meat entirely. ("vegetarian!" yodeled a kitchen cowboy, and offered me another biscuit. no. but thanks. really.) betty and mom tried the cowboy beef. i believe it was actually called "sliced beef in cowboy sauce." what could be more appetizing than cowboy sauce, for heaven's sake? well, just about anything, according to mom and betty.
- cowboy spice cake. "i'm going to eat it," mom said resolutely, even after sampling the meal's many other horrors. "how could they mess up spice cake?" well you might wonder...and yet somehow they managed.
- cowboy peach. this was the least objectionable item in the entire meal, a single canned peach half, innocently nestled among the carnage of the rest of the cowboy meal.
- cowboy coffee, cowboy lemonade, or cowboy water. on a program we saw later in the trip about coffee, we learned that on the range they often boiled up their coffee using an old sock as a filter. boiled cowboy foot-sweat coffee. what, only half a cup?!
happily we had the sandwiches as a palate cleanser.
the music, though, made the grueling culinary ordeal worthwhile. four musicians in cowboy drag played and yodeled for about an hour, belting out some lovely harmonies (and some abysmal jokes). not quite riders in the sky, but very entertaining and totally professional. the taste of the cowboy biscuit lingered on for hours, but the pleasure of the cowboy music stuck in my head for days.
Comments
That sounds like a Cowboylicious meal! I wonder if anything else tasts good when you add "Cowboy" to it. Cowboy Wellington, Cowboy Poboy, Cowboy Crawfish! I think that David and Thomas could be enticed to eat old shoes if you put that Cowboy on the front of it (or Marine).
Posted by: Tim | September 15, 2003 11:30 AM
just think of the possibilities when it comes to feeding kids...cowboy carrots, cowboy broccoli, and the all-time favorite cowboy nuggets!
Posted by: terry | September 15, 2003 12:49 PM
All made with real cowboy
Posted by: paul | September 15, 2003 01:21 PM
your hair is all short!
mrih
Posted by: the other tim | September 15, 2003 03:24 PM
i have unleashed my inner butch!
the time when you saw it was the anomaly, actually -- it's been short for the vast majority of my life. no rapunzel, i.
Posted by: julie | September 15, 2003 03:53 PM
If you are ever in Kansas you must visit the Prairie Rose for a very very tasty chuckwagon supper as well as singing cowboys. I am not a big singing cowboy fan, but the music was very nice and the smoked brisket was the equal of Pearson's, which is high praise indeed.
Posted by: Cori | September 16, 2003 11:01 AM
julie, we may need to rethink our next vacation. instead of going to quilt shops all over the country, we could go to chuckwagon suppers, and then write a guide for the rest of the country. that way we could write off the trip...think of the posse-bilities
Posted by: auntb | September 16, 2003 12:23 PM
if you think i'm willing to chance having that bite ever again, you're just so very wrong.
Posted by: julie | September 16, 2003 03:12 PM
I am now imagining the triumverate of julie, betty, and mom as a posse akin to leonardo dicaprio, tobey maguire, and whoever it is they hang out with, raising hell at hogs and heifers and, frankly, i'm laughing my ass off.
Posted by: terry | September 16, 2003 04:31 PM