Sporting Road

Commercial Fly Tying
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Commercial Fly Tying

I recently found my old letter from 1984 from Bryan Peterson of Western States Fly Tying, Custom and Commercial, from Littleton, Colorado promising me a job commercial fly tying at $2.75 per dozen plus a bonus at the end of summer. He illustrated that at 40 dozen per week, I'd make $440.00 per month or at $20 dozen per week I could make half of that, which was a fortune for a fourteen year old boy. I met Mr. Peterson while he was doing our deck and fencing, another business of his, but he said fly tying was his real passion and he had many teenagers, retirees, and prisoners working for his company. He taught me to tie Adams flies for a summer. I remember him giving me a Model A vise and all the requisite equipment to tie size 14 Adams, together with many hours of lessons. I tied my heart out for a week with the 100 hooks he gave me. He promptly came over to inspect my progress. "Those look like a great start," he said, as he pointed out the too thick hackling and too thin hackling, too short tails, too long tails, too fat bodies and too thin bodies. He mused about the cement in the eyes and other comments designed to improve my tying, as he threw them all in the trash. He said, "Here's another box of 100 hooks, call me when you are done." I said, "Wait what about my money?" He said, "Oh, I could never sell those, but call me when you are done with these, you are getting there." The same story repeated on the next 100. By the third week, I was done with my

By Sporting Road|November 13th, 2011|Categories: Fly Tying|Comments Off

40 Years of Chez Panise

From Chez Panise "France changed my life forever. I knew I wanted to live the way my French friend did. These were people who thought of good food as an indispensable part of live, for whom each day was punctuated by food-related decisions. It went without saying that one had to get to the bakery early, to get a fresh, hot baguette; naturally one spent an hour or so in the afternoon in a café with one's friends; and of course one only brought produce in season because that when it was least expensive and tasted best. Eating together was the most important daily ritual in their lives, a critical and nonnegotiable time when the flavors and smells of roasted chickens and sizzling garlic, the crunch of crusty bread, and the taste of local wine drew out everyone's most passionate ideas and feelings." The same is true at the château where "friends are always coming over for dinner and we are cooking our way collections of recipes from all kinds of people. As with Chez Panisse, we also found that the people who were obsessive about growing the best-tasting produce were also concerned about the health of the soil, the welfare of beneficial insects and other animals, and the clarity of the water running off their fields. They were interested in rediscovering older varieties that were harder to grow, and less prolific, but much tastier, and which brought a sense of continuity with the past to both their fields and our tables. At dinners with good friends, we talked easily and at length about--everything! The kitchen was a platonic ideal of a kitchen: a fireplace in the corner, stacks of post, and marble

By Sporting Road|October 23rd, 2011|Categories: Book Reviews, Cuisine|Comments Off

What is Instinctive Shooting?

Some of our friends who haven't been wingshooting with us ask what is Instinctive Shooting? Attached is an article from our side-by-side shooting instructor, Buz Fawcett, appropriately entitled "What is Instinctive Shooting?" http://wingshootingworkshop.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/what-is-instinctive-shooting-by-buz-fawcett.pdf

By Sporting Road|October 20th, 2011|Categories: Wingshooting|Comments Off

Trout Country: Reflections on Rivers, Fly Fishing & Related Addictions

Bob Saile, Trout Country: Reflections on Rivers, Fly Fishing & Related Addictions. Pruett Publishing Co., Boulder, Colorado 1999. My favorite quotes or summaries are as follows: Aside from the Brassie, the most important contribution to the fly boxes of American anglers to come from South Platte lore is the RS-2 —an all-purpose nymph pattern that, depending on size, can resemble the aquatic stages of a midge, a mayfly, or even a caddis. RS-2 stands for “Rim’s Semblance, Style 2.” It was born in the tying vice of Rim Chung of Denver, a self-taught fly fisherman who began as a frustrated spin-fisherman. When Chung came to Colorado from Seoul, South Korea, in 1968, he had a strong desire to catch Colorado trout but only the weakest clues on how to go about it. He began to fish with spinning tackle but rarely caught anything when he encountered the selective trout of the Platte and other waters. Two years later, he was ready to give up. Then a friend suggested he take up fly-fishing. “What the hell is fly-fishing?” Chung asked his friend. Chung then began to fish with dry flies, but it was still frustratingly unproductive or, at best, inconsistent. Finally he met someone who offered to take him nymph fishing. “What the hell is nymph fishing?” Chung asked. His progression to becoming a successful trout fisherman was fairly swift after that. Chung developed his nymphing skills and learned to tie flies. He decided to try to develop a nymph pattern that was a general suggestion—a semblance—of almost any hatching aquatic insect, depending on size. What emerged was a pattern that is constructed with a Tiemco 101 hook that has a straight eye, in sizes as big as 14

By Sporting Road|October 12th, 2011|Categories: Fishing, Fly Tying, Rim Chung, RS2|Comments Off

Check out the new recipe pages

We have added recipes from our favorite travels, near and a far, on the Sporting Road. As the Sporting Road is too vast to feature only French cooking, we have added some our favorite recipes discovered along the Sporting Road, from various cuisines. Please check out our new pages: Argentine Recipes Asian Recipes Hungarian Recipes Moroccan Recipes Spanish Recipes

By Sporting Road|October 11th, 2011|Categories: Cuisine, Recipes, Travel|Comments Off

Buy Local Honey

Alright so the jury is still out on whether local honey can cure mild, seasonal allergies, but no one can deny that it tastes better than filtered honey available at the supermarket. So why not pick up a pint of local honey, it helps your local economies, and it just might be a magic tonic for mild and seasonal dust, mold and pollen allergies. We think it is, but the scientific evidence is still out.

By Sporting Road|October 11th, 2011|Categories: Cuisine, Sweets|Comments Off

International Adventures in Cuisine Along the Sporting Road

Recipes sometimes have as much to do with imagination as it is with flavor. A dish is more than a collection of ingredients. Ingredients come from food and food comes from somewhere. That somewhere may be in the snow or the sun may be a sign of a particular season, and more often than not that somewhere may show through in the final dish. Yet, with my cooking, as everything in life, I make comparisons and find it difficult to settle for second best. I like dishes that are the best—or, at least the best of what that dish can be. Hence, my life-long quest for adventures to find the best recipes and to replicate them in the kitchen, after days spent on the Sporting Road. Because ultimately, no one cares where the ingredients come from, whether they are flown half-way round the world or grown in your own back yard, it simply comes down to this—do I like this or not? Our friend in Paris pointed this out to me one time as I started to debate French pinot noirs with Californian ones. I was arguing that the French ones are better and pointing out the balance of fruitiness, acidity and chalkiness that the French traditionally strive for in Bordeaux wines, while American wine makers often emphasize only the fruitiness. He said he didn’t know enough about Californian Pinot Noirs to say. And, he said, “There is no argument, when it comes to matters of taste. Either you like it or you don’t? It doesn’t matter if you can explain why, it doesn’t make it taste any better.” Like with wine, food stuffs are affected by seasons, growing conditions, harvest times, the amount of water, the terroir,

By Sporting Road|October 9th, 2011|Categories: Cuisine, Recipes, Travel|Comments Off

Standing in a River Waving a Stick

Standing in a River Waving a Stick, New York: Simon & Schuster (1999) by John Gierach. Many years ago now, I arranged for Rim and I met up with John Gierach and A.K. Best for a short time of fishing the Middle St. Vrain Creek, which is a very small creek near Ward, Colorado, in Arapaho National Forest. It's a beautiful mountain stream with opportunities for fly fishing for rainbow, brown, and cutthroat trout. However, these creeks near Lyons are smaller than you would imagine, as are the fish. Anyway, it was Gierach's home water and they fished as you would expect, mostly with dry flies and cane rods. The original Trout Bums were Gierach, Ed Engle, and Mike Clark. Clark is a self-taught bamboo rod builder, out of Lyons Colorado, where he has had South Creek Anglers for over 30 years now. A.K. Best was a famous fly tier who also, at Gierach's urging, became a writer as well, of several fly tying books. Gierach briefly worked as a fly-tier at a Boulder fly shop along with A.K. Best. He wrote for local papers and national hook and bullet magazines. Ultimately, he wrote an outdoor column in the New York Times and regularly for The Wall Street Journal, which called him, "the voice of the common angler." My favorite quotes or summaries from this book are: This business of changing fly patterns, looking for the right one, is central to the sport. All of us, secretly or otherwise, believe it’s the fly that makes the difference, although we’ll admit that even the right fly has to be cast accurately and drifted properly to work. Still, when someone is catching more fish

By Sporting Road|October 9th, 2011|Categories: Book Reviews, Fishing, Fly Tying|Comments Off

Hunt, Gather, Cook

Hank Shaw is an award-winning journalist and makes his debut from his blogger's guide to a book on foraging, fishing, hunting, simply entitled Hunt, Gather Cook--and makes the most of the fruits of a day spent gathering food in the field. His blog, Hunter Angler Gardener Cook, has developed an avid following among outdoor people and foodies alike. Hank Shaw's blog, Hunter Angler Gardener Cook, and which is more impressive than the book, can be found at: http://honest-food.net/ His poacher's blog, which is also worthy of mention, despite his bad-form tactics, can be found at: http://huntergathercook.typepad.com/

By Sporting Road|October 8th, 2011|Categories: Book Reviews, Cuisine, Fishing, Recipes, Wingshooting|Comments Off

Not All Lambs Are the Same

Excepted from an Interview with Nick de Toldi at www.gourmetfly.com There is only the need to buy the most prime and expensive cut of lamb for the sort of dishes such as Rack of Lamb or the famous "Baron d'agneau de Pauillac", a roast including the 2 legs and the "saddle" typically served at the prestige dinners of the wine chateaux beatween Margaux and Pauillac. But, I explained to Nick that in Colorado, we frequently encounter Basque sheepherders while hunting Dusky Grouse and Sharptailed Grouse here in September. And, their sheep are eating nearly a pure diet of sage brush, which is very strong-tasting. The mule deer that come from the mountains are very strong and gamey as a result of this same sage brush diet, as compared to our white-tailed deer which feed off of the farmer's grains of the plains. I compared this to our farrier who raises a special breed of lamb for the table and sells them by the whole or half. They are pricey, around $300 to have a whole one butchered and packed. He feeds them a special diet to have them fattened and the best tasting, and they are harvested while they are very young. He reiterated that for the slow braised dishes, you want the heartier and older lambs, while for the quickly cooked chops, you want the young corn-fed or grass-fed varieties. ______________________________________________________________ Basque herders in Colorado predominantly tended Rambouillet and Merino sheep. While the actual Latxa (the native dairy sheep from the Basque Country) is famous for Idiazábal cheese in Europe, American ranchers, including historical Basque settlers like Jean Urruty, transitioned to rugged, fine-wool breeds that thrived on Western open ranges. A breakdown of the sheep breeds historically and currently associated with Basque herders in Colorado: 1. Rambouillet Background: Often called the "French Merino," this is

By Sporting Road|October 8th, 2011|Categories: Cuisine, Recipes|Comments Off

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