Joseph V Coniglio Skin Side Down: the Search for Roubideau in the American Culinary Outback First edition

Welcome to the first edition of Skin Side Down, The Search for Roubideau in the American Culinary Outback. I?ve been keeping journals for over 30 years and discovered I possessed many recipes and food stories that were personally important to me. I wanted a venue to share them. Skin Side Down when sautéing a piece of fish or duck. I?m a man who once sought Roubideau ?a missing ghost town. The Search for Roubideau, is also the search for the collective soul of good food. It is a memoir and travelogue that contains my world class recipes. Food is an engram that appears and disappears and re-appears like a mountain in the fog. Do you remember food and drink you?ve never had? I know that sounds strange; fun foods like Clams Casino and all those bygone martini?s that are getting brought back by popular demand? How can you still taste one if you never had one? These elements are from times gone by, yet you exist now and they are making new appearances. Metaphorically Roubideau, is also physically four miles down river from my former farm in an oasis in the Sonoran class desert of Western Colorado. We were always trying to pin it, but Roubideau remained untame and elusive. The locals weren?t completely sure where it was. It was a cattle station town like the kind that exists in Australia. It grew up containing brothels, a school and a post office. Roubideau was near an eerily silent pink sandy clay canyon that bears its name and still contains wild mountain goats, mountain lions with 18 inch craniums, big horn sheep and lots of Antilope. Roubideau, was swept away on the bend of the Gunnison river after a 100 year flood. It was scrubbed off the Colorado state maps by 1922. Large river bends on the flat basin offered native grass to cattle. To me, in our inevitably short, variable subjective lives, with a shared desire to reacquaint ourselves with great emotional food stuffs, a magic place like Roubideau floated in and out of reality. In and out of our collective consciousness. In and out of those mountain bends on the road in deep country France with hidden treasures like perfect trout, tiny cheeses and sips of wine from bottles without labels. In and out of my very own farmhouse with mud on my boots and dogs at my feet while I made dinner. This novel is about making Roubideau solid and informative for a little while longer ? before it disappears for good in the vanishing world we reside in. Striking a happy chord, since this book is a collection of stories with recipes, I decided to produce it?s imagery in text. Adjusting for inflation Roubideau costs as much as a saucy late 1930?s 10 cent novel. You?ll soon realize that what I want to share with you is a bit more intellectual and less on a visceral titillating level. Exquisite books and blogs gushing photos are easily had, so much more now than ever, like contagions. Do I want to devour the smiling woman or that bowl of pasta in her hand? Ideally both! I love photos, blogs and video clips when I don?t have to think and want to self medicate which is a lot of the time. The places in the brain that process pictures and interprets text and reading are entirely different. In order to read, many different areas of the brain need to work together. Yet our photo feed is Reptilian.