56 ~ Thanksgiving afterglow
Hello, dear readers,
Here’s hoping you had a fine Thanksgiving (and Canadian friends the same last month), and it left in its wake additional stirrings of gratitude.
This was certainly the case here on the farm. Foremost, after the US re-opened our Covid-closed borders in early November, my Swiss girlfriend, Corina, was able to visit Wisconsin for the first time since Thanksgiving 2019. Last year, for Thanksgiving 2020, I cooked a goose by myself. This time Corina and I hosted, and shared food from the land here with some fine, soulful friends. There was a palpable sense of celebration in the gathering.
But first, the week started with deer hunting. Corina hails from a small village in the Swiss Alps (in the canton of Graubünden), and grew up immersed in a foraging and hunting culture. She loves it. On the Sunday afternoon before Thanksgiving, in the woods just behind the house, we were fortunate to kill a fat, healthy doe. I shot it in the neck, and the doe died near-instantly, with little suffering, and the shot left most of her meat undamaged. Corina and I were grateful for for both.
A few days later we dove into the butchering process. Corina’s particular area of expertise is skinning. We tend to be good at what we love, and she loves to do it.
The deerskinner at soul work.
Once the hide was off, and several hours of butchering work later, we put into the freezer 30 pounds (13.6 kg) of roasts, chops, steaks and cuts to be dried later as jerky, and sent off another 20 pounds (9 kg) to be turned into various types of sausage. We also collected a few pounds of deer suet for the birdfeeder, and we put the last scrappy bits of flesh and bone in the pasture as a Thanksgiving offering for the winter eagles (first putting into the trash anything that might carry a fragment of lead). We did our best to honor the gift of the deer’s life by using every part of it. Not much goes to waste around here.
Ready for winter (venison and wine - what more is needed??)
From venison, we turned our attention to Thanksgiving turkey and its accompaniments. Living mostly off the land as I do, Thanksgiving is, of course, a holiday with particular meaning in my annual calendar. I love it, as many of us seem to do.
But first, a full disclosure: prepping to host Thanksgiving dinner for seven did require a trip to the grocery store, although not for much (and let us just say Corina did the shopping…). We picked up a free-range bird from Willy Street Co-op in Madison, along with some sourdough bread for the stuffing and a few other odds n’ sods. Much of what we served still came from the gardens and woods here, or was foraged by Corina in her ‘backyard’ of the Alps.
Here’s the “Bird in the Bush” Thanksgiving menu for 2021. Only the items in italics were store bought. Note that following the sage (as it were) advice of Samin Nosrat in her wonderful book Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, we did our best to insert some balancing acidic notes into the otherwise ‘flat’ heaviness of the traditional Thanksgiving meal:
A starter of roasted pumpkin seeds – kitchen snack for the cooks and helpers!
Roast turkey and gravy (with garden sage and onion stuffing)
Salad of persimmons and pomegranate with balsamic vinegar
Parsnips roasted with birch syrup
Hubbard squash
Mashed potatoes, with sour cream made by my neighbors and their ‘girls’
Brussels sprouts roasted with Swiss chestnuts
Swiss wild mountain cranberry sauce
A can of jellied cranberry (tradition, tradition!)
Creamed pearl onions
Sweet potatoes with oranges
Greg’s grandmother’s recipe of baked beans
Pumpkin pie with black walnuts and sour cream
Five-berry pie (raspberry, wild blackberry, strawberry, blueberry, mulberry)
At the table, all except the photographer - Corina!
We had the pie by the fire, along with a second dessert - Russell’s profound, sublime poetry, read by the author (check out his marvelous collection, Witness).
It was a day of rich abundance, with much to be grateful for – to the land, and to friends and loved ones. I hope your Thanksgiving found some of the same.
