12 ~ Notes from Day 116: Mother hubbard, fowl, rabbits & abundance
This week a sharp, windy cold and some come & go snow returned to the Driftless Area. In response, I cozied into the kitchen (like many of us in this corona time). I turned the last of my beautiful, large hubbard squashes into a pie (rolled the crust from some whole wheat flour still extant in the larder and my last stick of store-bought butter). I breakfasted on cornmeal pancakes with birch syrup, and roasted an organic chicken I’d purchased last fall for the freezer, from nearby Seven Seeds Farm. My failsafe, go-to chicken recipe is from Ina Garten (a.k.a., the Barefoot Contessa), her Perfect Roast Chicken. Indeed.
I love the comforting abundance of a roast chicken, how it can feed me well for a week, spinning off chicken salad sandwiches, and soup - this week, chicken soup with wild rice, winter carrots, my last leek from the freezer, a large dandelion root I unearthed during some garden prep, and watercress from the spring.
And with the remaining baked hubbard squash that wouldn’t fit in the pie, I improvised a sort of squash fritter - mixed the squash with an egg, cornmeal, cumin, salt & pepper, browned it in the skillet, and topped it with garden salsa. Came out really well, even if it might not reach the standards of the Barefoot One. I call it Squid Squash, because it’s primitive and delicious.
As I continue on this endeavor, the question naturally arises, when will I return to a grocery store? What aria will the fat lady sing to alert me it’s time to give in, and roll a cart through the aisles of Woodman’s or Willy Street Co-op? My marker will be when I no longer have the resources to make a delicious, healthy meal. And today, after nearly four months (and with no pre-launch preparation), I find myself still a long way from that. In fact, I sense I’m eating better, on both the flavor and fitness scales, than at any other extended time in my life (at least during such a period when there’s no fresh produce from of the garden).
I’m pleased to report some recent, significant additions to the larder:
Chocolate! Swiss chocolate, at that. Came in an Easter package sent from Zürich by my girlfriend, Corina (alas, the replenishment was short-lived – already gone).
An early Thanksgiving turkey! A few mornings ago, my local State of Wisconsin conservation warden, David, pulled up to the house. He’s a good man, doing a difficult job. As we social-distanced in the driveway, he pulled from his truck a very large, very dead wild turkey, killed the night before out of season. He recovered the bird, and is still working an investigation to find its poacher. It was a hefty tom in beautiful condition, and given that David reads this blog, he offered it to me – with a request that I try to recover and identify the type of ammunition that killed it, for his investigation. I breasted it out - nearly 4 lbs (1.8 kg) of solid, beautiful breast meat into the freezer (and I discovered what killed it – copper-plated shotgun pellets).
I’ve also been replenished with olive oil. A great score (I can almost hear my sister’s exasperated sigh of relief). My neighbor up the road, Wendy, needed someone to get on her roof to scrub creosote from her stovepipe, and we traded chimney sweep services for olive oil. And my pal Greg swapped olive oil (and some more of his excellent venison summer sausage) for eggs from my hens and bit of birch syrup (actually, he and I don’t really make transactions – he just periodically gives me things he has in sufficiency or surfeit and thinks I’ll enjoy, and I do the same, in an informal, heart-of-gratitude reciprocation).
This endeavor would no longer be working, to my mind, if I needed to rely on charity to continue (charity absolutely has a place in society, just not in my undertaking). If I’m not embedded in reciprocation and exchange, with others and the world, it would become an exercise in surviving poverty, not in living in abundance and interdependence. Gautama Buddha insightfully defined poverty not as lacking money, but lacking anything to contribute to one’s community that the community values (this implies that the path to prosperity lies not in asking, ‘What do I want?’ but ’What can I contribute?’).
[Just to note: GB’s take doesn’t dismiss social maladies that foster poverty and inequality. On the contrary, if the dominant block in a society devalues and marginalizes the contributions of other members based, for example, on their race or gender, systemic poverty will be one result].
I also added two cottontail rabbits to the freezer, which I shot on Monday evening while in the woods collecting birch sap (the Wisconsin rabbit hunting season is now closed, but owners and occupants of land can take them anytime on that land). At least I waited until after Easter… I asked their forgiveness, gave them thanks, and killed them cleanly to the best of my ability.
Note that I didn’t “harvest” them. I killed them. Harvesting is for wheat and soybeans, but the term has crept into the language of hunting. We used to talk of the annual “deer kill” in Wisconsin, and now it’s the “deer harvest”. A photo of a happy successful hunter on the cover of the hunting regulations now comes with an inevitable caption about having “harvested” the deer. In my humble opinion, this disrespects the deer, in being a sanitization, an attempt to salve our conscience by denying what we’re really doing.
It’s also not ultimately not good for the human holding the gun or bow. The reality is that no human (and almost no other form of life, if any) can survive without being fed by the death of something else. Of course, there is grief in this circle of life (or should be), and the grief needs to be processed, and balanced with gratitude. Native Americans and nearly all other indigenous cultures understand this. The point is not to attempt an escape from this interdependence (impossible), or to deny it, but to move toward it, with our hearts pouring out the honey of our gratitude. In our world, gratitude beats denial every day of the week.
I’ll close these thoughts on interdependence and gratitude with a shout-out to my local café in wee Barneveld, Wisconsin, known as Cliff Cooks. It’s still functioning as a drive-thru & carry-out, and is nearly the only business in town still open – not that many are open in Barneveld in the best of times! Cliff and his Scottish wife Yvonne run the place. While on an errand a couple of weeks ago, I stopped for breakfast at the drive-thru. When I asked Yvonne how much I owed, she said, “Nothing.”
“Why nothing?” I asked.
“Because there’s now 30% unemployment in Iowa County. So until further notice, everything on our menu is free.”
Incredible. They are still at it - check out their story here:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/31/us/restaurant-giving-meals-for-free-trnd/index.html
This is yet another gift of connection, paradoxically yet beautifully, during this isolation of the pandemic.
Yvonne dispensing goodwill and breakfast from the drive-thru window.
I’ve run low on one thing that, other than water, is the only edible provision necessary for the health, and in fact the life, of humans, and something that is hard for most of us to procure independently: salt. I’ll share some notes on this essential of life, with an anecdote from Laos, in an upcoming post.
What I’m reading and can recommend:
Migration: New & Selected Poems, by W.S. Merwin (2005)
The depth and breadth of Merwin’s work, as displayed in this volume, are remarkable. In fact, at 538 pages of rich, thought-provoking eloquence, I’ve been making my way through this collection for years, and have not reached the end. Alas, Merwin died a year ago; but at age 91, not a tragedy. It may have been time for him to rest. I’ll leave you with one from his collection - about something that perhaps this sheltering slow-down gives us all a chance to listen for:
Utterance (1988)
Sitting over words
very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing
not far
like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark
the echo of everything that has ever
been spoken
still spinning its one syllable
between the earth and silence