32 ~ Good eatings

I write with hopes that my kindred American friends had a fine, even if somewhat different, Thanksgiving holiday last week.  I was alone here at the farmhouse, but I didn’t let that stop me from a good meal. I connected through the ether with loved ones from northern California to Wisconsin, New York City, Switzerland and Italy, as I dove into cooking a solo Thanksgiving dinner. I’ve never found solitude sufficient reason to not celebrate life, reach for goodness, and give thanks.

My menu centered around a roast goose, something I love and which is becoming something of a specialty for me.  It’s also marginally less absurd than roasting a turkey for one person.  In the days leading up to Thanksgiving I phoned around to some neighbors looking for a goose (or failing that, a duck), but without success (I’m not a waterfowl hunter, so this wasn’t to be a wild goose; I left the moon on their wings undisturbed).  After some further calls I located a goose at Woodman’s - Madison’s massive, warehouse-type grocery store.  I think it’s larger than Pluto.

Now, when you’ve stayed away from grocery stores for almost a year, I don’t recommend as a point of re-entry a place like Woodman’s on the afternoon before Thanksgiving….  I mean, wow.  It’s ironic that Woodman’s almost killed this woodman. At least I was reminded of what I’m not missing.  Still, I managed to find a 12-pound frozen goose, grab some wine, coffee beans, seed for the wild birds, and ingredients for a fried deer heart recipe (see below), and fled, thankfully reaching my car with heart rate and blood pressure still within moderately safe levels.

Nearly everything for my meal but the goose would come from the harvest of my garden.  Thanksgiving the old fashioned way. I defrosted the grand bird overnight, went deer hunting the next morning in the crisp cold (successful only for the deer, in their avoidance), and spent much of the remainder of Thanksgiving day in the kitchen, a glass of Beaujolais Nouveau at hand, listening to the radio and video-conferencing with loved ones as I cooked.  Even in the pandemic, there are islands of contentment to be found.

I love the gentle, washed-out colors of the late afternoon sun in winter - life imitating watercolor. It was within this light that I finally settled down to my meal, with a place set at the table for the spirit of my late brother Jim. This was the menu (unless noted, everything but the goose produced at the farmhouse; no cans opened for this meal):

~Roast goose glazed with Corina’s Swiss quince jelly and Cointreau, stuffed with apples from a local orchard and my homemade sauerkraut, served with Swiss mountain cranberry preserves;

~Hubbard squash baked with homemade butter and birch syrup;

~Potimarron squash baked with homemade butter and maple syrup;

~Mashed potatoes, whisked with sour cream from up the road;

~Brussel sprouts, tossed with olive oil produced by my Italian nephew;

~Sour-cream-from-up-the-road pumpkin pie.

The meal fed not only Jim and myself, but others in the days that followed, as leftovers.  And as I write this, a pot of goose soup (made with some of the garden’s carrots, onions and leeks) is warming for my lunch, and I have a full jar of goose fat in the freezer, for future pies or stellar fried potatoes. 

The woods have also provided some stellar eating the last couple of weeks. Several days before Thanksgiving I killed an 8-point buck with my traditional recurve bow, and followed that last Sunday morning with a doe with my rifle.

My pal Greg and I had cottoned onto a recipe for “deviled deer heart”, and we gave it a try for Sunday lunch, after we returned from the woods with the doe (I’d procured some of the recipe’s ingredients in advance, during my foray for the goose).  We floured and fried to crispness slices of the doe heart, lay them onto toast, then smothered it all with a sauce made of shallots sautéed with smoked paprika, lemon juice, lemon zest, yellow mustard, whole grain mustard, a splash of sherry, a bit of honey and sour cream. 

Oh yeah, this is a recipe for the archives (and the ages) and future repeat performances (let me know in the Comments section if anyone would like more detail on how to make it; I’m sure it will work fine with meat other than deer heart!).

Both deer I killed tested negative for Chronic Wasting Disease, and I’ve now finished butchering both of them. They’ve already yielded some other wonderful meals, of medallions of tenderloin or backstrap cooked simply - seared in butter, brushed with birch syrup, and deglazed with a splash of red wine. Only once have I eaten better venison - and that was in September in fact, at a restaurant in the Swiss Alps with Corina, in her hometown.

I delivered most of the doe’s meat, the forequarters and hindquarters, to my wonderful neighbors Judy and Allen.  We’ve got a good gig going:  Each fall, God willing, I hunt and kill a doe (Judy insists on no gamey meat from a rut-exhausted buck), and they do a sublime job of canning the meat after browning cubes of it in a skillet, and we split the jars of output. 

The doe will feed more than Judy, Allen and me.  Its layer of solid white fat (1 inch thick in some places!) is now suet for the woodpeckers and nuthatches outside my kitchen window. The rest of the carcass, carefully cleared of any portions that might retain toxic traces of lead bullet fragments, feeds the winter scavengers, such as eagles. 

The doe died at my hands, but its life now feeds many lives, and it is remembered well and with gratitude.  It is upon that exchange of life-for-life that perpetuation of the world hinges, and much of its beauty, grief-tinged as all truly beautiful things are.  Even the most gorgeous sunset is a leaving, and the sunrise washes away the stars.  But for all of it, and the doe and the buck - and the goose - I give thanks.