January 25, 2010

Chupacabra or Macabre?

Grading it for scale against the grass beside it, and by the large handful it would have made had I picked it up, this chicken scaled about two pounds live weight, more or less. Despite its outsized comb, common to a rooster, the lack of leg spurs indicates a hen. It spent close company with other birds during its early life, as evidenced by its clipped beak. Its long, curled talons (some of them broken) suggest it never touched the ground during its adult life.

Two more like it huddled near the edge of a road in a woods I squirrel hunted last Friday. They were alive, but not looking healthy or happy. The woods was across the road from an egg farm near Croton, Ohio.

This is a spent hen, of such a breed and description as I have never seen in poultry catalogues, nor ever imagined. Apparently she and her cell mates were being rotated out, loaded onto transportation for their ride to some Noodle Soup/Potpie/Dogfood Company when a few of them got mishandled and broke jail. That's the story as evidence suggests it happened.

Evidence also reveals she lived in a cage so small that it wore the ends of her feathers off. Along with thousands of others rowed up in identical conditions, she was fed a high-protein diet while the lights burned 24-7, spurring her to maximum egg production.

How to explain feathers that resemble tree limbs without leaves? Bottom line economics suggest she would have been dusted or fogged before feather mites almost ate her bald and reduced production. Since she wouldn’t require feathering for warmth in a temperature-controlled environment, it’s more likely they became absorbed in an energy script that said eggs, USDA Grade A Large.

Imagine eggs pushed through a body this size almost daily. Could she be other than close to laying herself to death when she was ushered out the door? And there the very same circumstances that my chickens prosper under--grass, scratch and the freedom to wander and choose a diet--proved toxic to her.

Buy your meat and vegetables from a local farmer if you can’t do for yourself. Stop where you see chickens running loose and inquire after them. Find eggs whose yolk remnants require you to scrape them off your plate with a putty knife and 00 steel wool. Refuse to eat Industrial Poison no matter how cheap they make it. Food, real food, was never meant to be cheap. Nor make you fat. Nor kill you early.

It’s not chupacabras, Bigfoots, Shadow People, alien abductors, werewolves, or vampires that should give us the heebie jeebies. Phantasy horrors only divert us from the assorted grotesques, deviants and aberrations we’ve created in our midst that go cloaked in human, plant and animal form.

January 2, 2010

Commemorating Coffee

The vacuum coffee maker that came up from the basement with me last week, where it’s collected dust for some 40 years, has changed the way I talk to coffee. It must be 70 years old, and was likely used in the restaurant my parents owned and ran. It required a cloth filter wrapped around a coiled spring that is lost to it. I thought the unit was incomplete and non-functioning without it, and that’s why I never resurrected it before now. It stirred old memories while I carried it up to the kitchen.

Coffee is large in my life, and has been almost since I can remember. Thoreau wished for nothing more intoxicating in the morning than a glass of water. I’ve come to prefer mine brown, of a certain temperature, and of a pleasant flavor and aroma, at any time of the day—even moments before plopping my head down for a deep night’s sleep.

I grew up in a small town twelve miles from the Greek immigrant community in Wheeling, West Viriginia. Greek social and spiritual life centered upon the Greek Orthodox Church located there. When I was a small boy, a particular spinster parishioner sat in the front pew of the church, always. She was buxom, tall, wore bright prints and had long, thick, black-rooted hair which she dyed a reddish orange color. She moved with calm authority, and her features—an angular chin, a sharp nose and proud cheekbones—seemed to cut and clear her path.

She laid enough powder on her face and rouge on her cheeks that I almost couldn’t avoid staring at her. She inhabited the edges of assembled Greek women, many of whom, including my mother, wore the widow's traditional black mourning weeds. And she looked past them as to some distant distraction, even when she offered something to their conversation.

But once, in my aunt Voula’s parlor, the women gathered around the spinster as she finished her demitasse of Greek coffee and turned it upside down on its saucer. They crowded in close, waiting, until she returned it, peered into it at the slurry of grounds running down its sides, and spoke of things that made them nod, or smile, or clutch tightly at their black scarves.

After the women rose from the silver tray with the empty painted cups, I examined the magical cup, trying to divine what she saw that my eyes couldn't see. I only saw questions, and they flooded me.

My mother loved coffee, and I can still picture her sitting with a cup at our breakfast nook table, surveying her garden through the window. She brewed it in a saucepan, Greek briki style, and strained it into her cup through a sieve.

As a boy, I had kouloura toast and coffee for breakfast almost every morning of the school year. I insisted on it despite the rumors that caffeine stunted growth, and against my mother’s wishes to feed me substance. I did it because coffee was a grown-up’s drink, and with my father gone, coffee conferred stature. But I also did it because I loved the aroma, the taste, and the mystery of coffee.

Our coffee came in vacuum-sealed quart jars. My mother brought it home from our family restaurant, which my father named The Hudson Restaurant in tribute to the river that welcomed him to America’s shores. It came in a twelve-count cardboard box, and it featured a mountain on the label, with the word PARAMOUNT arced across its snowy peak. Occasionally, for old time’s sake, when I want only one cup of coffee late in the evening, I forego the marimba or the enameled briki, and brew coffee in a saucepan, straining it through an old, battered sieve not too different from hers.

My lifelong affair with coffee has led me to brew it every available way, and to even pioneer a few techniques of my own, which included custom-made infusion chambers of hand-thrown pottery. I’ve never roasted beans, never sought out exotic or expensive blends, but I love the aura of coffee, from sampling roasts and grinds to exploring brewing methods. I even judge a restaurant experience by the quality of the after-dinner cup they serve, finding it an accurate indicator of the preceding meal. Yes, I love the spectrum of coffee, from cowboy to latte, and I can down a perfunctory cup as indiscriminately as I can savor a chocolate cappuccino.

When I went to the basement after the vacuum pot, I went determined to rig some approximation of the cloth filter as I remembered it in order to put the unit back in service. I don't know where the glass filter rod came from that I found stored with it, but I’m glad it was there. When I saw the rod, I understood its purpose immediately, and could barely contain my excitement.

Pressure from expanding air in the heated glass bowl forces hot water up the stainless stem into the upper chamber where it steeps the coffee grounds at 190-195º F. When the bottom chamber cools, the resulting vacuum sucks the brew back past the filter rod. Paper filters remove the flavorful oils that give coffee dimension, but the rod permits passage of the full coffee infusion while effectively detaining the grounds. Moreover, the vacuum water temperature never gets hot enough to release bitter oils from the grounds. The consequence is the most robust, complex, aromatic, and flavorful coffee I've ever sipped.

As much as the coffee it brews, I love the old technology evident in this pot. Like the cast aluminum pressure canners and the cast iron nut crackers of the same era, you can understand the mind that conceived it and admire the hand that built it. From the pliable rubber gasket to the seamless weld on the stainless steel stem, the resolve to endure and excel shines through. And what of these modern coffee appliances, built upon the premise of convenience and short-term profit, pieced out and snapped together by digital code, detouring briefly through our kitchens on their way to the scrap heap? Are you drinking that?

December 29, 2009

Mixed Bag

I happened to have camera in hand, so I was quick to record a rare occurrence. During today’s squirrel hunt, Jay Overholt stopped walking for a moment. Not only that, but his son Nate, who strides as purposefully through the woods, stopped alongside him. I caught them both. It was almost like a lens shot of two ivory-billed woodpeckers.

I’m no slouch for an old man keeping up a pace, but when I start loading down my game bag with squirrels and coon, and then set off across snow-covered, chisel-plowed cornfields on a day fit best for pulling fence posts, it gets rough keeping up with a robust twenty-something encumbered only by a hoody, and a father who hasn’t lost a step.

But what’s to do when Digger retrieves the squirrels to me, even the squirrels that Jay’s dog trees, and I’m too proud to pitch them toward Jay, who’s casting dogs ahead as soon as the meat hits the ground? And what's to do when Digger trees a daytime coon, Nate shoots it out, crawls into the briar patch where it fell to retrieve it, and then has to wrestle for the coon because Digger doesn’t want to give it up but can’t carry it out? That was a courtesy, and thoughtful as well to help me stuff the coon into my pouch, past the rifle slung across my shoulders and the squirrels already stretching the pouch taut, before hurrying off after his father and the cornfield in our destiny.

On the drive home, I amused myself thinking Jay would be skinning critters long after I was kenneled, debooted and caffeinated. I also fantasized training Tricks to carry dead game to companions.

December 28, 2009

Lentil Soup

Last night I ate lentils so delicious that sometime around the noon lunch hour today, as the remaining spoonsful disappear, salt tears will season the soup bowl. 

When I wrote about Ostrander Lights here several months ago, folks sent envelopes containing money to bargain for insights into the recipe, money that went a long way toward resolving the ambivalence I felt divulging their secrets. I’ve anticipated similar interest in my lentil soup recipe, so I’ve supplied an ingredients list and detailed the cooking process, but with some stipulations.

If the gesture overwhelms you with gratitude and you must send money again, please send it to someone else somewhere else. I made quite enough changing the way America considers pancakes.

Also, since every man should require of himself a sober appraisal of choices before starting down paths that will shape his life (insofar as that’s possible), I’m asking you to reflect upon these words scratched into a weathered board pinned with a bent nail to a beech tree at the end of our driveway:

The lands of TORGES.
Harkee, stranger, you tread upon dark and dangerous ground.
Return to your home.
Seek no further.

Two cups lentils
6 cups chicken broth
2 cups consommé
1 TB EVOO
Salt
Cayenne pepper

Chop:
2 carrots
1 med onion
½ bell pepper
3 cloves garlic
6 rashers hickory-smoked bacon or bacon ends

Lay a film of olive oil in a saucepan, add the bacon and begin sautéing. Add the carrots, onion, and bell pepper as you chop them. Add salt and a pinch of cayenne. Lid and sweat the mixture.

Rinse the lentils and sort for stones or off-colored seeds.

When the vegetables look good, add the broth, the consommé and the lentils. Simmer. Before the lentils become tender, add the garlic.

Adjust seasoning. Grate some Parmigiano Reggiano over individual servings. Buckle up.

December 21-22, 2009

The Squirrel Rut

A blanket of snow came three days ago. Squirrels feel exposed during the first snow or two. Yesterday Joe Wedding and I walked to 20 some den trees for three squirrels. They weren't comfortable treeing on the outside. Tracks revealed that most of them moved early or late.

An hour into yesterday’s hunt, Digger burned a ‘yote out of the squirrel woods and took it a mile across country. He never said a word, and he wasn’t gone an abnormal length of time before checking back in. I would have never suspected off game except that the Garmin gps on his dog collar transmitted the race to my hand-held receiver, and the snow recorded the event.

I knew he was either after a coyote or a deer. Fox don’t run straight-away across open fields like that. I doubted it was a deer because I’ve seen him ignore them when they’ve jumped up from their beds while he coursed through the woods. But you never say never with a hunting dog.

My moment of fright came as I monitored him back-tracking himself. He’d crossed a fairly busy highway in a hurry on the way out, and I hoped for the best as I watched his icon approach it on the return trip. It stopped moving at the highway. I watched and waited for movement. Fifteen, twenty seconds, maybe more. Nothing. I called out to Joe, “Digger got flattened on 41. I’m driving around to pick him up.” I thought he’d been hit for certain.

But the next time I looked down at the receiver, he was only 400 yds out and closing the gap fast. With great relief I loaded him into the truck and drove to a new woods.

On the way, we traveled Hwy 41 to the location where the gps tracking system indicated he’d crossed the road. Sure enough, ‘yote tracks belonging to a large male laced in with his where they raced across a stubble bean field. And in the berm, Joe found scratched up grass and urination, explaining why Digger tarried on the way back—he wanted to leave dominant sign behind warning the ‘yote to stay clear of his squirrel woods. It made me laugh the way a father laughs when his boy does something foolish, but does it well—I didn’t let him see me.

We hunted Digger and his son Copper, Joe’s 11 month old dog, yesterday and today. Tricks is far enough into a heat cycle that I had to leave her kenneled.

Today was a productive day. The squirrels made their peace with the snow, gave in to the urgency of the first stages of the rut, and moved all day long. Hunting from 9:30 to 2, Joe and I got our limit. We only shot one squirrel from each tree, and we left another dozen up for the next time.

Copper shows improvement every time out. He’s a young dog with a great foundation and all the tools—sense, nose, tracking ability, desire to please and a strong treeing instinct. Today was a good day for him to build on experience.

Digger was on fire. Tracks and evidence showed he was retrieving a squirrel he caught on the ground when he dropped it to tree two more in a nearby tree. After I shot one of them out, he retrieved it, went over to the squirrel he caught, and retrieved it, too. It was that kind of day.

December 14-16, 2009

Hunting With George

My nephew, George Cozzarin, spent his boyhood summers in Ostrander, hunting, fishing, milking goats, hanging with his Uncle Dean, and making memories. A glorious time for him and me, too, and we relive them when he comes for a hunting visit, as he did last week.

We hunted with Joe Wedding the first day and checked out the turnip patch next to his house during an afternoon break. The turnips looked good and felt firm to the touch, raising hopes that we could still gather more for the root cellar, but several sub-freezing nights, one of them measuring 18º F., left them fibrous and tasteless.

The dogs put on a show. After a summer lay-up and a slow start this season, Tricks has been making rapid improvement. She hunts out on a steady trot, and as far as she needs to if the squirrels aren’t moving. She’s always been independent, intent on doing her own work and finding her own squirrels rather than following the lead of an older dog, and experience has strengthened her self-confidence.

Near the end of the second day, Tricks treed deep into a second woods. We were a long time getting to her, but she held her tree and showed great enthusiasm. Often a pat on the head and a voice expressing encouragement sufficiently reward a dog for a job well done, but at times when a dog improves its performance beyond its history, reinforcement rewards are in order. Such was the occasion.

George had been shooting lights out with the CZ American—single shot head shots at every opportunity. In fact, he’d been shooting so well I left the tricked-out Ruger 10/22 in the truck. Those had been routine squirrels. This was a special squirrel for Tricks.

It was in a small tree and it was nervous, so I yelled to George, “Make sure the first shot counts. I don’t want this squirrel timbering and getting away.” Fox squirrels that timber (flee through the tree tops) almost never stop until they reach the sanctuary of a den tree, and this one was a candidate for such flight.

Five shots later, the squirrel, untouched, had sought the upper reaches of an adjoining tree rather than bail. I tried my hand with the rifle and missed two shots as well before I opted for a body slammer and he toppled out. All’s well that ends well, and Tricks got the bonus of watching the squirrel move about in the tree, further stimulating her treeing instinct.

Trick’s treeing style is completely different from Digger’s. He’ll stand up on the tree, chew bark, tug at nearby saplings, and sometimes yo-yo up and down the trunk, barking and carrying on. Tricks chops steadily until you come into the tree, and then she shuts up and stares, looking for any sign of the squirrel. Frankly, I like her style just fine. It suits the modern woods where houses are never far from a woodlot, too many of them occupied by refugees from the big city who resent hunters, want to command all they survey, and think dogs howling, especially at night, were loosed upon them by the Baskervilles.

I haven’t done much coon hunting this winter because the price of furs has plummeted, and only extra-large, prime pelts have any value, but George and I managed a hunt after dark for old time’s sake. It was Trick’s first coon hunt. She acquitted herself well. We shot a few, left a few for another time, and quit at 3 in the morning so we could squirrel hunt after daybreak with Joe.

We ate some memorable meals during George’s stay, one of them a linguine carbonara featuring yardbird eggs and home-smoked bacon. It was a great time. George went home with a pile of squirrel parts, and I slept 14 of the next 24 hours. As I’ve explained to Mary many times, hunting’s hard on a man.

December 9, 2009

Yogurt in a Thermos

John Millard wrote to suggest using a Thermos bottle to incubate yogurt culture. He preheats his for the job with a rinse of warm water. It seemed smart, so I ran a batch through a large 1.8 L (1/2 gal) Nissan, and made good yogurt.

On the downside, retrieving the contents means shaking them loose through a small portal and destroying the texture, almost obligating you to make strained Greek-style yogurt with the results. However, the simplicity and the economy of what seems to be a fail-safe method makes strained yogurt very attractive.

November 14, 2009

Homemade Yogurt

Want to make yogurt? It’s easy. Heat milk to 180º F. Cool it to 110º. Stir in culture. Incubate.

Thassit.

You can take the results further and make Greek style yogurt by straining the curd through cloth to remove the whey.

Thassit.

I grew up with yogurt. My mother made it regularly. Each time she mixed a batch she’d warn my brother John and me that all running and carousing was over for the night while the yogurt incubated.

Her process was simple. First she’d scald the milk. No thermometer. Just watch the pot. Then she’d cool it to the correct temperature, determined by placing the little finger of her left hand in the milk and counting to twelve. She’d explain that if she couldn’t stand to leave her finger in longer than that, the temperature was right. She insisted on her left pinky because it was more sensitive than her right. When the temp felt right, she stirred in a spoonful of starter yogurt from her old batch, placed the brew on the porcelain burner cover of her gas Tappan range to keep it warm, and draped a dishcloth over it to tent the warmth.

The pilot light to the burners kept the brew at just the right temperature. By morning she had yogurt. Sometimes she strained it and sometimes she didn’t.

I don’t care what Dannon says in its advertisements, theirs ain’t 100% yogurt. It’s got gelatin or something similar in it, and it has a grainy, coarse feel in the mouth. The tartness is wrong, too. Small wonder Dannon adds sweetened fruits. But no need for me to explain. You’ll find out for yourself when you taste your first homemade yogurt. No need for me to disparage Dannon, or Yoplait or any of the commercial brands, either. You’ll do that yourself soon enough.

Step 1. Heat milk to 180º F. You can do this any one of several ways. In a heatproof glass Corning or Pyrex bowl in the microwave, with a temp probe in it. On a stovetop kettle with a thermometer in it. In the oven with a temp probe in it.

Step 2. Uncover and cool to 110º.

Step 3. Scoop a tablespoon of yogurt starter from a previous batch, or from a small container of Stoneybrook or Dannon, plain, and mix it with some of the heated 110º milk in a clean cup. Don't use more than a TB of starter or it could sour the final result. After you’ve dissolved the starter, stir it thoroughly into the warm milk.

Step 4. Find a place where you can keep the milk warm through the night. Our oven has a proofing function. I can set the temp for 110º, put the cultured yogurt into the oven, and forget it. Before that, I would heat our old oven to 175º (that's as low as it would go), turn it off when the yogurt was mixed into the milk, lid the container, put it into the oven, and then drape about three thick bath towels over it to help it retain its heat. Then I'd close the oven door and wait 'til morning. Residual oven heat kept it warm, but before going to bed, I’d turn the oven back on for a few minutes, just long enough to replenish the oven’s heat, but not long enough to kill the starter.

You can find what works for you. You might try replacing the ovenproof lightbulb with a 75 or 100 watt bulb and leaving it on for the duration. Something, anything, to keep the culture bathed in modest heat. Near a wood-burning stove, perhaps.

Remember, yogurt forming cannot stand jostling or other kind of movement. Don't run through the house and don't bang around on the stove top if you are incubating in the oven.

Come morning or the passage of 12 hours, you will uncover the bowl to arrive at a delightful, sweet aroma. Move the bowl to the fridge. You can begin eating it immediately if you wish. The whey will leach out while the yogurt chills, so you can spoon it off as you spoon out helpings. Or you can make Greek yogurt out of the whole batch.

To make Greek yogurt, chill the yogurt for 8 hours. With a smooth dish towel or a piece of light-weight cotton cloth, line the inside of a colander, place the colander in the sink and spoon in all the curd and whey. Set the colander back in the kettle and refrigerate for 8 hrs. Pour off the whey as it seeps through the colander and scrape the curd down the side of the cloth as it reduces in size.

You will end up in 12 to 24 hrs with yogurt the consistency of very thick sour cream, the longer the thicker. Delicious. Better than anything you can purchase, and cheaper, too.

Before government regulations ran the small dairy farmer out of business, we made our yogurt from the raw milk dipped from our neighbor Bobby Crago’s bulk tank, and before that from our own goats. The flavor of Bobby’s milk, forgotten, was reawakened during our trip to Bavaria 6 years ago when we had milk and cheeses made from cows that lived not too differently from Bobby’s. The falling off happened unnoticed. If you are lucky enough to have access to raw milk, don’t fail to use it.

Since the Bavarian reawakening, we’ve been buying only organic milk, for taste as much as health, but you can make yogurt with any milk, at any butterfat content. We use 1% for yogurt. Homemade yogurt is thick and creamy and works just as well with skim milk. I even remember making yogurt with Carnation powdered milk back in college. Maybe I used it only as a thickener, hoping it would sop up and utilize the whey. That’s likely, but I'm foggy. I can’t remember more than that powdered milk went into my yogurt several times and it was very cheap.

Sometimes we’ll stir in a little honey after the yogurt has been in the fridge for a while and begins turning tart. My first encounter with flavored yogurt happened in 1955. I was a high school freshman on summer vacation visiting my older brother Nick in Jamaica, New York, and saw it for sale in a deli. I shook my head and thought to myself that they’d spoiled a good thing, that it would never sell.

You will like this yogurt. If you want to fold flavorings in after it's done, that's the time to do it. Jams, jellies, or honey. Or maybe after your first taste of homemade you’ll shake your head, wondering why anyone would do such a thing.

October 29, 2009

Turnip Patch

A cold snap, heavy rains and strong winds have brought the nut crop and the leaves down in a hurry. It’s squirrel and deer season now. Spent Wednesday evening in a tree stand and watched a young buck running a doe. The whitetail rut is ready to burst forth, and the best squirrel hunting lies straight ahead.

Squirrel hunted with Joe Wedding most of the day today. We took Digger and two of his pups, Tricks and Copper. Copper is Joe’s young dog. He’s just now putting things together in the squirrel woods, hunting out and treeing on his own. He’s a beautiful copper brindle, and put up as nicely as you’d want a cur—strong and athletic with a deep chest, good running legs, bright, intelligent eyes, and a head broad enough to contain good sense.

The squirrel woods were good to us, but the highlight of the day took place in the turnip patch. We grabbed several hands full to take hunting with us, and after the hunt, I hauled out a burlap feed sack to take home.

Joe and his brother have three plantings of turnips totaling maybe 8 acres. That’s a lot of turnips, and his neighbors and friends are happy for it. This year’s crop is mild, meaty, sweet and delicious. I’ve been snacking on them raw in the evenings, pan frying a few for lunch, and cooking them in stews. In fact, I’ve taken Joe’s lead and consider them a healthful, starch-free substitute for potatoes.

October 17, 2009

Hickory

Dendrologists distinguish among some 20 species of hickory trees in the genus Carya, or so I once read. Maybe, maybe not. Torges taxonomy can identify four (shagbark, mockernut, pignut, shellbark) and assumes, probably incorrectly, that a fifth, bitternut, is the same as pignut. But I’m like a squirrel in that my real interest lies in the differences within the species rather than in the different species.

Have you noticed that squirrels often target one shagbark within a woodlot containing 20 Carya Ovata, pound it more than all the others, scatter chewed nut shells under it, and carry nuts from it until there’s hardly a morsel left? If a squirrel can make such fine distinctions based upon the nut alone, then squirrel taxonomy must begin where scientific taxonomy ends.

I’ve worked hickory extensively during my 30 years as a self-employed cabinetmaker, designing and building a great variety of chairs and dining room tables from the wood. It’s a plentiful and undervalued hardwood. Strong, stable and versatile, I used it to explore and refine chair design, to see how much I could build with how little. Following grain direction, and employing locked joints and flowing, steamed bends, I pared full-sized chairs to their elements. They came in weighing 8 pounds and should see my great grandchildren grow old using them.

I also built tool handles of hickory and wooden bows of hickory. I’ve backed osage bows with hickory, and dowelled arrows from hickory, both pignut and shagbark, and when I was shooting bows drawing in excess of 80 lbs, I preferred hickory arrows above all others for hunting. I use hickory for smoking meat, and have large quantities of hickory split and dried in the woodshed for winter burning. And when the kids were living at home, they even gathered hickory pignuts to help feed out the occasional hog that we slopped. Hickory and I are longtime, familiar friends, but like my totem animal the squirrel, hickory delights me most for its edible nut.

Tom Smith, one of my squirrel hunting buddies, brings a handful of acorns out of the woods when we go hunting and plants them when he gets home. A cancer survivor, he does it to memorialize the hunt. I usually bring out hickory nut samples from at least one tree and crack them when I get home. I do it because there isn’t a finer nutmeat on God’s Green Earth, and I’m looking for the perfect hickory nut.

It’s been a longtime diversion of mine finding one that has a pecan’s thin shell, a large nutmeat, and that still tastes exactly like a hickory nut. Horticulturalists took a different path to the same goal, hybridizing pecan and hickory to give us the hican. I considered planting some here until I sampled the results. They are not Nature’s offerings, like black walnut or paw-paw cultivars, results of her own experiments that remain true to the species. They result from human shortcuts, and, as such, prove an unsatisfactory compromise. Horticulturalists can continue toiling in the direction of this curiosity, but they can’t get where we both want to go. I’ll continue looking for the hickory nut worthy of becoming a cultivar.

Which brings me to yesterday’s find. Based upon the six-nut sample I brought home from a squirrel hunt with Joe Wedding, I went back to the squirrel woods and gathered up four gallons under one tree, doing a hands and knees search from the base of the tree in a widening spiral, as greedy as a sourdough miner picking nuggets off a sand bar.

I may not be there yet, but I haven’t been this excited over a hickory nut since I found mockernuts many years ago in the woods immediately north of our home. Mistaking them for giant shagbark hickories, twice the size of any I’d ever seen, the excitement died as soon as I set one to a hammer. Its shell was thicker than a walnut’s, and its meat the size of a shagbark half its size. Perfect name, that—mockernut.

Lacking the gastronomical sophistication of a squirrel, I take my cues from him. One shagbark hickory nut tastes like another to me, so I’m looking for size when I pick up a few nuts, and consider it a squirrel’s endorsement when I find cuttings under the same tree. The shagbark bordering Leroy Moore’s woodlot satisfied these two conditions, and as a bonus, the tree grew in an area that Leroy mowed, so I didn’t have to fight weeds and leaves to find nuts.

While I was crawling and picking, halfway through filling the second basket, a nearby squirrel barked briefly. He didn’t scold. He acknowledged.

Time will tell more. The nuts need a month or longer to dry and reach full flavor. I have them hung to air in the shop, in a large mesh sack beside another such sack gathered from favorite trees on our own property. Later this winter, with a CE Potter cradled in my lap, a nutpick in one hand, a bowl of hickory nuts to the side, a fire in the woodstove and a good football game on TV, I’ll find out just how close I’ve come.

October 13, 2009

'Tis the Season

A month ago I watched the first yellow walnut leaves flutter to the ground. They signaled the start of the fall rush. Animal and fish activity has increased so much since then that I barely have time to reflect on events, let alone log them to the website, and the pace only gets more frenetic for the next month.

Except for a bothersome, leaking skylight, all of my urgent duties and chores are out of the way. So, some days I fish, some days I hunt. The days I can’t do either are likely spent preparing tackle and gear—fletching arrows, tying night-crawler harnesses, pouring lead-headed jigs, re-sighting squirrel rifle scopes, and so forth.

I put off roof repair all summer, but now with the rainy season, the skylight leak needs to be fixed. Since rain seems probable for the next three days, and since a roof can’t be opened under such conditions, I’ll likely be forced to fish, or hunt, or "and so forth."

Today I fished Indian Lake for saugeye (a sauger/walleye hybrid) from daybreak until early afternoon with John Stalling. After cleaning fish and a short nap, I squirrel hunted the balance of the day. Found a promising acorn set-up for deer while knocking a few squirrels out to Tricks and Digger. It was a full day.

Saugeye are delicious. Mild, sweet, flaky meat, more resembling yellow perch than walleye. Good pan-fried or deep-fried, they are also excellent gilled, gutted, blotted dry, sprayed with Pam or rubbed with olive oil, and then roasted under the oven’s broiler element or over charcoal on the Weber until the skin browns uniformly and the dorsal fin pulls easily.

The skin peels off and the top filet comes loose by working a fork or butter knife along the skeleton. All bones remain with the skeleton, which in turn lifts free of the bottom filet.

I monitored the fish while Mary steamed Swiss chard and pan-fried sliced zucchini that she’d picked from the garden that afternoon.

October 8, 2009

Horseradish

Horse radish is more easily made with a food processor or a blender than it is with an old-fashioned washboard style grater. Wendell Calhoun gave us a start for our garden patch long before we had electrified means for processing the root, and that’s why we didn’t make it too often then.

Horseradish isn’t as popular as it once was, perhaps because Mexican peppers of one sort and another have found their way into American kitchens. I like the peppers, (we planted several dozen jalapeno plants this spring), but what’s life like without horseradish sauce for roasted meat, or cocktail sauce for shrimp and fish, especially sauces made to your own tastes with fresh horseradish?

Horseradish root, unwashed, keeps for a long time in the refrigerator in a vacuum bag, but it deteriorates quickly once you pulverize or grate it, lasting only a month or two lidded and refrigerated. So I dig some when the ground is soft enough in the fall, vacuum-package enough roots to last the winter in small packets, and then process it when the need arises.

We’ve been eating a lot of fish recently, and I ran out of dug root before the rains had softened the ground enough for deep spade work. I thought a bulb planter might circle the root and extract it. However, the root does not grow like a carrot, vertically. It takes off in unpredictable directions. The bulb planter buried deep and sheared off too much of the lower root. That’s not a long-term problem since the plant regenerates from its tuberous root. Nevertheless, the bulb planter proved a good idea with less than desirable results. It’s better to wait for soft ground, dig deep, and then toss the smaller roots and the trimmed tops back into the ground.

Here’s what’s important to know about processing horseradish:

1. Pulverizing or shredding it sets off the enzyme action that gives the root its unique flavor and heat.
2. After you’ve washed and peeled the root (or scrubbed it white with a stiff vegetable brush), shred it in sufficient water for the job in either a food processor or blender. It’s important to use water rather than vinegar as a vehicle.
3. After you’ve shredded it, lift the lid away from you and stand back. The release of fumes will knock you over if your eyes and nose are investigating the results. But rather than believe me, try it.
4. Let the pulverized root sit for a few minutes to breathe and develop. Drain the water if it is excessive, then add vinegar to cover by several inches, stir, and leave sit to saturate the root. This will stabilize the horseradish, keeping it from deteriorating rapidly. If you process the root with any combination of vinegar and water, it will not achieve full flavor and aroma.
5. Drain and keep the horseradish in a lidded glass jar, refrigerated, until it’s time to make sauce. It’s good as long as it stays white.

Horse radish, much like asparagus, keeps on giving. Our patch is at least 30 years growing. A patch requires no care and minimal nourishment.

August 24, 2009

Hail to the Chief

During the week that was, the week of hyperactivity, two days after the Torges Family Reunion, Chief came down from Michigan to work on selfbows. He brings curiosity, intensity, desire, humor and a sense of wonder to everything we do, whether we're coon hunting, chasing pigs, gigging frogs, hunting deer, shooting bows, driving to a hunt, working in the kitchen, shaving bowwood, or simply hanging out. A humble man of accomplishment is a rare man indeed.

Tuesday evening, Chief fixed a prize-winning salmon entrée that was so fine, it left Mary stultified, suffering acute Stendhal Syndrome. To cap the meal, I went for the espresso coffee maker, but wedged it between shelves trying to remove it from the cabinet. When I called to Mary for help, she remained seated, gazing in my direction with a flushed, beatific smile. Her resemblance to the Mona Lisa at that moment astonished me. Having once read of the Stendhal symptoms as reactions to works of great art and beauty, I recognized them in her condition and worked to extricate the machine myself. My quick appraisal and reaction would have allowed her to go unnoticed, to recover without embarrassment, had I not called attention to her condition.

The name of the dish is Salmon Prudhoe Bay, conceived by Mr. Tim Ryan, current President of The Culinary Institute of America, Hyde Park and Napa Valley schools, but at the time of its creation Chief's colleague as a member of the USA's five-man culinary competition team. Created and refined while the team was flexing muscle, warming up to the Culinary Olympics (the common name for the Olympiade der Köche, a quadrennial culinary competition held in Germany), it won first place in a Luxemburg contest as a prelude to the German contest. They came to the Culinary Olympics, the most prestigious of all culinary competitions, kicked butt, earned international respect, and defended their title four years later with another victory.

The team served its first iteration at the Waldorf in NY, where Chief made for it a caviar sauce with beluga and salmon roe, similar to the beurre blanc sauce he served with it here where, described briefly, it consisted of marinated salmon encased in a shrimp forcemeat and wrapped in buttered filo leaves, dusted with panko, convection baked, and served with a classic butter sauce.

My nephew Dr. John Pappas just days before brought to our reunion a bottle of natural white, sulfite free, organic California wine. What luck. It proved the salmon's perfect companion. That and a cup of espresso to finish off the evening.

I'm no gastronome. I pursue simple pleasures and am a little put off by pretentious talk about wine and food, but let me tell you as plainly as I can that the first few bites of that salmon filled up my palate, surprising me with an awareness of places within it I didn't know existed. How else to describe the richness of the experience, and of the wine beside it, which spread Salmon Prudhoe Bay throughout the universe, like a glowing sunburst? It was almost ethereal, an awareness of myself experiencing myself, a delight of the senses that for a moment transcended the senses.

I've never been able to shake my first impression of the Mona Lisa—a positive life force acquainted with the dinner table. Linking her expression to another beautiful woman's leads me to wonder if I haven't stumbled onto a corroborative insight into her famous smile.

August 22, 2009

Smoking Chickens

Kitchen cooks don't confuse braising with broiling, frying with poaching, or baking with roasting. Each term carries precise meaning. But outdoor cooks are quite casual with labels for their methods, speaking of bbqing when they mean grilling, or of smoking when they are bbqing. Slurring labels likely results from the natural tendency to imbibe during the outdoor cooking experience, but that still doesn't make it right.

Smoking almost always involves cured meat because it happens in oxygen-deprived temperature ranges conducive to the growth of bacteria. Common ranges are from 110° to 165° F., the high end marking the temperature at which fat begins to melt. Internal temps reach a minimum of 142° F., except for bacon, which finishes out around 128° internal and requires additional cooking. Sausages, poultry and most hams are done within this range, and the meat takes on its distinctive pink color from the food-blend sodium nitrite used to protect it. Cold Smoking is an older and slower method, occurring in temps up to 110°. Fish, cheeses, jerky and some specialty hams happen in this range. True Barbecue occurs around 250°, give or take. Ribs, briskets and butts—those cuts full of collagen and connective tissue—are best done at these temps. Some barbecue can climb past 300°, but when you are approaching and surpassing 350°, you are Grilling. Tender or tenderized meat, such as raw sausages, burgers, chickens and steaks, require hot temperatures.

I like smoked chicken. Or grilled or rotisseried. Barbecued chicken skin resembles vulcanized rubber, and bbq does not improve the flesh. To my mind, only the convenience of cooking in quantity recommends it. Chicken needs cooked hot, or low and slow, not in between. There's no better time to slow cook (i.e., smoke) chickens than when they're fresh. Fresh ones accept a cure and  smokewood flavor better than frozen ones, and since the slow smoking process by its nature tends to dry out meat, smoking fresh chickens yields a moister product.

I may be out on a hickory limb here, but I've come to conclude that quality smoking comes not from the smoke itself, but from the flavor the wood imparts as it burns without flame, and then only when the "condition" of the meat is right. The term "smoked meat" is therefore misleading. Contrary to common perception, even among those who smoke their own meat, the best results do not emerge from meats immersed in smoke.

Put another way, the smoke itself is not what's desirable about smoking meat, and volumes of smoke poured through the smokehouse can overpower the product and even turn it bitter. Smoke is a residue of smoldering wood, of wood deprived of sufficient oxygen to flame. Since it is the visible component in chacuterie, it gets the credit.

All hardwood smoke is pretty much the same in smell, and all condensed smoke tastes equally bitter. So what's to recommend smoke? Very little. What magical transformation does it undergo that makes it desirable? None. Seriously now, is there a nose so discriminating that it can smell two campfire T-shirts and determine the one worn while tending an applewood fire? What palate can mouth a flake of creosote, or taste a piece of meat that had smokehouse condensation (creosote) drip on it and not shudder?

Smoke is an unavoidable residue of smoldering wood, and it disappears altogether once the smokewood has turned to cooking embers. A light smoking on meat pleases the nose, but it is the embers or coals in their smokeless state that provide smoked meat complexity and depth, printing its taste with the identity of the smokewood of choice. The embers are the invisible workhorse cooks that bring smoked meat to its highest accomplishment, quiet in the kitchen through the night, toiling on tirelessly for the duration, through the smoke and long after it is gone for however long it takes. Though the amount of smoke aroma is a matter of preference, you can get too much smoke, so that it becomes overpowering to any palate. You can't get too much wood flavor.

Herein lie the differences between home-smoked meats and commercial stuff, which merely resemble honest smoking. Commercial smokehouses don't have the time to form a pellicle right, so they inject steam into the smokehouse to prevent the meat shriveling, shrinking and drying. They can't mess around with embers, so to approximate the taste, they meter liquid smoke into the brine, which is often pressured or injected into the meat to save time and assure uniformity. The only process resembling honest work is the least important one of the equation, the matter of smoke itself. Commercial operations introduce smoke via smoldering sawdust, either in commercially available biscuits fed by machine, or with the loose stuff itself. Even here, at the bottom of the effort to produce smoked meat, shortcuts. It's all done with smoke and mirror appearances.

I've corresponded with smokehouse guys and read chacuterie literature enough to know that the ideas I've set forth here differ from orthodox teaching. They represent the opinions in progress of this solitary hunter, derived from trusting my own experiences, from following learned lessons, and they fairly represent what I currently think and do. As such, they are subject to change after reflection upon the methods and the results of the next smoke.

But this I can say with certainty. Build you a smokehouse, son. Learn to tend it. Nourish your family with the smoked chicken and the bacon it produces. Go catch fish for it. You can't buy your way into this world and this life.

August 20, 2009

Fresh Chicken

Since we butcher once a year, we don't take fresh chicken for granted. Frozen chicken loses natural juices during thawing. That alone warrants giving a fresh one our best attention. Also, freezing breaks down muscle cells, preventing a thawed chicken from absorbing a brine as well as a fresh one. I soak ours overnight in a sugar/salt solution infused with a few aromatics. Indeed, a fresh bird, brined, from an honest background, with its natural juices intact, justifies doing things the hard way when it’s the right way.

In the week following butchering, we cooked two for home use, smoked six, and turned five on rotisserie spits for our annual Torges family reunion, which this year followed the butchering date by two days. We gave several dozen to lucky friends and relatives and froze the balance.

It's been a busy week, what with the reunion, butchering and the garden coming flush. In the span of seven days, Mary and I processed 24 pints of chicken gizzards and hearts, 54 pints of pole beans, 50 qts of tomatoes, and four qts of cased fresh bratwurst left over from the reunion. Along with the brats, I canned a qt of venison stew chunks and a qt of chicken livers, thawed from '08 packages and intended for use as catfish bait, but more than I needed for the moment.

The week also included the birth of a new grandson several nights ago, so let me pause long enough to welcome newborn baby Henry to what I hope proves a glorious, long and healthful life, governed by curiosity, fueled by passion, and directed by generosity. Henry, I saw your grandmother onto a plane for Fargo this morning with a dozen 3-ply cloth diapers in her carry-on, bound to welcome you in person. Time passes swiftly, and soon you'll be spending part of your summers here, hunting, fishing and shooting a bow. I look forward to your education. Until then, step with confidence, love the sunshine, and delight in every surprise. Now please pardon your Papou as he turns his attention once more to chickens.

A whole chicken, and especially a rotisserie chicken, requires trussing to keep its body parts in close so it cooks as a unit. Chief (Chef Dan Hugelier) once showed me a quick and effective trussing method. I took sequence photos of the process, but a computer meltdown and corresponding memory loss forced me to find my own way. Before Chief, I tied chickens to the spit with a zeal that sometimes required multiple swipes of Alexander's own sword to remove one to the dinner table. My current method, developed after a morning spent wrestling with a length of cotton string and a well-massaged chicken, tucks thighs, legs, wings and neck tight to the body. I can do it quickly, the bird stays on the spit without wobbling, and it thereby cooks uniformly.

cont'd.

August 14, 2009

Life and Death Among the Chickens

Our first box of chicks arrived USPS from Sears and Roebuck forty years ago. Since then, we've raised ducks, geese, goats, guineas, banties, beef and milk calves, pigs, and rabbits. Except for an interregnum following the year we raised 350 broilers, chickens have been a barnyard constant here. That summer we butchered them one by one down the family line, Mary and each daughter tending to a task after I bled and scalded them. 350 seemed like a good idea when they were peeps because they were free, the extras from a chick give-away promotion at the Ostrander feed mill. Time passed before anyone mentioned raising chickens again.

We've raised a hundred broilers every year since then. Family and friends cart them off in plastic bags and Mary and I still end up with more than we can eat, but I enjoy having them here. We mix in some dual-purpose chicks as required, which we keep for egg laying. Next year I think we'll fold some White Pekin ducks in with the broiler chicks. Roast duckling is delicious, and I'd like to try smoking a few, too. Then again, we had 30 chickens in the locker from last year, until I played Santa Claus through Ostrander with a feed sack of frozen chickens to make room for the new batch. Maybe it's time to cut back a little.

Chickens (broilers in particular) that range on grass and eat supplemental grain are altogether different from chickens raised in confinement and fed grain exclusively. The bones of commercial chickens are grayish in color, soft in texture, and the meat is flaccid, often characterized by dark blood reservoirs around the thigh and leg joints of the cooked bird, the result of joint disorders peculiar to the modern strain of fast-growing Cornish crosses and a circulatory system powerless to completely drain the slaughtered chicken.

Free-range, grass-fed chickens grow livers and gizzards twice the size of their captive brothers. Their bones cook up yellowish-white and brittle, the cartilage glistens and the flesh combines texture and flavor. The fat is a deep, shiny yellow, prized by cooks and chefs when rendered (my mother-in-law preferred it in cookies), and the heart is three times the size of a captive bird's. These nurtured differences between birds of similar genetic stock take dramatic shape within their seven-week lifespan.

I have various grains mixed at a local feed mill, the last survivor in a locality where there were recently five. The mill follows a custom formula that contains no hormones or antibiotics. I'm forced to buy it in 500 pound mixes, though, because it's come to that now that most small-farm animal feed is trucked to retail stores in labeled sacks where it's sold by merchants.

Nevertheless, I limit-feed the grain, supplying only what's consumed by early afternoon. The chickens are forced to forage thereafter. They feed on grass that has never seen chemical fertilizers, herbicides or insecticides. To encourage them to leave their grain, I place their waterers outside the henhouse.

Dual-purpose chickens need no such encouragements. They like to wander, to scratch, chase bugs and forage after a variety of leaves and grasses. The Cornish cross broilers, on the other hand, often eat sitting down. Only with effort do they go to their water. They require a high-protein diet, too. Left to their own appetites, these genetically developed meat strains can put on weight so fast that their leg joints fail to support them.

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A word of acknowledgment. It wouldn't be possible, living in a small clearing in the woods, to raise chickens after this method if we did not have a good dog patrolling the property, keeping predators at bay. We've had a succession of them preceding Digger, including Dixie, and before her Radar and Tripper, going clear back to Inch. Digger is the only one that helped herd stragglers into the henhouse to roost in the evening, and he doubles as a companion and the best coon and squirrel dog I ever had.

July 24, 2009

St. Clairsville, Ohio, 50 Year Class Reunion

My classmates and I celebrated our 50th high school graduation anniversary with a reunion and formal dinner at the St. Clairsville Country Club this summer. We laughed, renewed acquaintances, and reminisced about our time. I gave the following address.
____

When Alice Sue asked me to speak tonight, I wondered what I could do to amuse and entertain everyone. I didn't go searching for something zany or off the wall, and I didn't way back when, either, even though some of the things I did turned out that way. I just couldn't help myself. Do you remember? "Did you hear what Deno did with his homework in Mr. Hill's class?" "Did you hear what Deno said to Mrs. Harris?" "Did you hear what Mr. Moore did to Deno?" Apparently, he couldn't help himself either.

Nevertheless, while sifting through some ideas the other night, my imagination wandered, and I fantasized waving a magic wand and turning us all back into teenagers. Here I'd be, with thick, black hair and skinny as a rail. And all of you would turn around big-eyed, look at each other and say, "Damn. Look what Deno did this time!"

That'd be a good one, but it ain't gonna happen. I can do something else though, something similar. I can remind us of a regenerative truth, one that's fundamental to our lives, yet often overlooked.

Ours was a special generation, unlike any other in America before or since. Unique. By every standard and in every matter of importance, we grew up innocent.

We were sexual innocents. Most of us graduated high school as virgins. I blame the girls in our class for that. But look, we invented rock and roll so we could talk to each other about sex in code. Some of us got it, and some of us took longer. When Fats Domino found his thrill on Blueberry Hill, I wondered if he kissed her, or if he just held her hand. Our parents got it.

We were political innocents as well. America was the land of the free and the home of the brave. The communists were the bad guys. They lived in poverty and meant to kill us. They were godless. America loved God and God loved America. The two were twined together, so we did what America told us to do, and we punished doubters and Pinkos. If we had a political thought, we borrowed it. It was that simple.

We were social innocents, too. What did we know of racial injustice? Little Rock, Birmingham, Montgomery, Rosa Parks, and Emmitt Till's battered body, displayed in an open-casket funeral, after he'd been bound up with barbed wire, shot in the head and thrown into the Tallahatchie River—that was all very distant from St. Clairsville. Because our own racism was subtle, it didn't exist.

We were intellectually naïve. We accepted the information our teachers gave us. Most of them were dedicated in their duties. I can still diagram a sentence. But learning meant memorizing. We were socialized more than we were educated. Which of them challenged us to think, to question, to doubt, to wonder why, to ask What if? Two of the teachers we remember most fondly, Elizabeth Craft and Tiger Flowers, demanded absolute, unquestioning obedience. And our principal and the boss of everything and everyone, Mr. Moore? His mission in life was to usher us all toward the unexamined life, single file, no talking.

And we were spiritual innocents. When we went to church and prayed, God was in His Heaven, and all was right with St. Clairsville and the world. It was nice of Jesus to die for our sins even if we weren't quite sure what they were. We had dominion over everything, just like God intended. Our streams ran orange with sulphur, and the Ohio River was an open sewer, but the God we prayed to didn't mind. We were making progress.

We trusted our elders, we followed directions and we colored within the lines. There were a few rebels, but we watched them from a distance, and we remained spectators. It was an idyllic time in an idyllic setting here in St. Clairsville. We were a small community like many others across small-town America, and we all knew each other, grew up together, and from this background, from this peace and prosperity, from our shared faith in the American Way as we knew it, we graduated and went our various ways.

And what did we do? What happened? All hell broke loose. The Viet Nam War and a government that lied to us. The assassinations of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and later Bobby Kennedy. Campus riots, Woodstock, marijuana, don't trust anyone over 30. Watts, Kent State and Watergate. Yes, all hell broke loose, and our generation was at the frontline with pickets and protests, boycotts and sit-ins. And lives lost.

I left St. Clairsville and became Dean Torges. Alice Sue stayed near home and became Alice. Some of us changed our names, some of us changed our lives, but all of us changed America and the world.

It's been a helluva ride, from Ozzie and Harriet to Ozzy Osborne, and it all happened during our watch, right in the middle of our power years. Regardless of whether we inhaled or didn't, whether we became conservatives or liberals, whether we starched our shirts or tie-dyed them, this truth remains constant—we changed our world profoundly and forever.

Though I can't restore our youth with a magic wand, tonight old memories will come alive. And tonight those memories will remind us that beneath the name changes, the career decisions, the ambitions, the misadventures and accidents that shaped our lives, beyond the superficial appearances, past the years flashing by and all the changes they brought, that way down deep inside we all just stay the same.

Tonight, I'm Deno again.

God bless us, one and all.

June 15, 2009

Day Old Chicks

102 Rock x Cornish straight run (mixed pullets and cockerels) for meat, 3 New Hampshire, 3 Welsummer, 9 Gold and Silver Laced Wyandotte pullets for eggs, and 2 Welsummer cockerels for their beautiful plumage.

June 7, 2009

Ostrander Lights

I have no secrets. I had one until recently—the recipe for Ostrander Lights. Everything from building furniture to making archery equipment, to smoking meat, everything I have ever struggled to learn on my own that helped me find my way through the world, I have shared with anyone who wanted to know.

It goes beyond that. I'm incapable of keeping secrets. That's why Mary won't tell me anything that requires discretion. Sometimes she'll want to share a private thought. "If I tell you something, would you promise not to say anything to….". She usually doesn't get very far into that proposition before I express annoyance with her for putting me in an impossible situation, or she remembers she's talking to me and we both start laughing.

In the face of this shortcoming, I needed to show the world and myself that I could exercise restraint in the face of temptation. So when I stumbled upon the secret ingredients for Ostrander Lights, the recipe grew to fill that need. Lash me to the mast, I would keep it for myself. That may seem like a token gesture in the direction of self-respect, but let me tell you, everyone who has ever eaten at a Torges breakfast featuring Ostrander Lights surrounded by homemade bacon, local Maple syrup, and yardbird eggs would have changed his religion on the spot for a glimpse at that secret recipe.

As guests from our table traveled through the world, they went as emissaries with the word and the news, and the reputation of Ostrander Lights grew. There is no record of anyone ever referring to them as pancakes or griddle cakes or anything else that mundane, and in all their reverent writings and correspondences on the subject, only one person ever referred to them as Ostrander Lites. The cognoscenti immediately shunned him, and within two winters he was dropped from all party lists. Christmas cards quit coming, and classmates no longer mentioned his name at high school reunions.

Let me say that I came to enjoy the attention, that I encouraged the fawning and the superlatives that people employed as tactics to separate me from my recipe. I remained intractable and sometimes in a show of resolve bragged that people would mourn my death long after I had gone. I'd even mock supplicants by speculating on the form of their lament. "I can't believe he took the recipe with him. It would have meant much to my family if we could have gathered around Ostrander Lights at family weddings, or 50th anniversaries, or memorial services for our departed parents. It was like being surprised by a brief glimpse of God and then longing ever after for a fuller view. Our lives were never again the same. We hoped that somewhere he'd written it down, but it's gone now and there's no record beyond the memories. Torges was otherwise a very good man, the sumbitch."

All that's buttermilk under the bridge now, cake flour in the wind. I gave the recipe to two Cajuns because they pleaded for it during their visit here. I thought about it long and hard before swearing them to secrecy, as I owed them nothing more than kindness. I caved to entreaties no more passionate than I'd heard a thousand times before and mailed them the specifications a week after they returned home.

It's not the same now as when I was the only guardian. It's out. They're cooking them in Louisiana today. Pretty soon Arkansas, Connecticut and Texas. I won't be surprised before I die to see a copycat version appear on www.topsecretrecipes.com. Nobody can keep a secret. Not even me when I needed to.

June 2, 2009

I couldn't Pen Henny

Much of our hens' flightiness resulted from the maulings they took from young dogs and pups that I brought onto the property. Seems they'd no sooner settle down near the henhouse after a feather pruning from one menace than another came along to prune the flock itself. And in this manner, over the course of two summers, eight hens and a rooster dwindled to three wary birds inclined to shun even the hand that fed them.

Turning our yard birds into jail birds was a solution that protected both garden and bird, but not the ideal one, and the regrets began soon after I scooped out their first trough of laying mash—their dinner destiny for the next 4 months.

I had a partial roll of 2' wide poultry netting that I'd used to surround my mother's garden a dozen years ago to keep the groundhogs and rabbits at bay. So I purchased a 150' roll to add to it and ran a perimeter fence around the electric fence. Of course, this brought on complications.

On their first day of liberty, the hens hopped the fence for a good dusting between the potato rows just as I hoped they wouldn't. I pinioned them that night. However, pinioning means that when a dog or wild critter gets after one of them, the clipped right-wing primary feathers will turn her dodge clockwise as she flaps to escape and make her easy pickings.

The poultry mesh also means that I've made the garden vulnerable to deer. They'll likely walk up to it and hop over it, missing the nearby electric altogether. I had no room to run the netting inside the electric fence and still push a cultivator through the rows. Besides, would I really want a deer landing on an electric fence inside my garden? I wasn't about to take everything down and start over, especially since I figured I'd have to move the electric fence well outside the netting so deer would contact it before they gathered themselves to jump the netting.

The resident deer are familiar with the electric fence guarding the garden, and like cattle, they stay clear of it even when it's turned off. That will buy me time. Maybe a month or more. I've already ordered replacement layers with the new batch of broilers, due here the 15th, so at the first hint of a deer problem, the poultry netting comes down and the hens are gone.

Last night I brought in a new rooster (and his hen) to govern the flock, one that's old and lazy, on the chance that he can influence the hens to stay near the henhouse. If that doesn't work, I'll get rid of all five soon enough and wait for their replacements to begin laying. There are no pups on the horizon and Tricks now understands without question that chickens are off limits, so as they grow they'll never have reason to cross the pond and thereby find the garden.

Life doesn't get simpler; it gets shorter and turns in smaller circles.

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