5 ~ The lean time
About a week ago I met this listless, emaciated white-tailed deer along a road near the farmhouse. March is the lean time, when most of winter’s deprivation is behind us, but spring and new growth still lie ahead. After making it through the months of cold and snow, she looks tapped out, and I doubt she will live to see May, and probably not April. Her carcass might already be feeding new life as I write this.
Perhaps it was straight malnutrition that doomed her, or winter’s scarcity simply tipped her to the endgame of chronic wasting disease. In any case, in every winter in this part of the world deer eat down their food supply toward starvation. It’s just a matter of which arrives first - death, or the renewal of spring. March is a tipping-point for many of them.
For the rest of us, this is probably a particularly challenging time for the coronavirus to go global. March can already be a lean time for we humans as well, when dull skies and the drab vestiges of snow test the resilience of our spirits; these days when, as the song goes, “the sky won’t snow and the sun won’t shine”. And in March this year, we’re being tested even further.
So today I made cornbread. It’s time for small comforts where we can find them. I used my beautiful blue Mayan corn - at least what was left after the raccoons feasted last summer - stretched a bit with some yellow cornmeal.
Click here for the recipe, from Mary Stewart: cornbread.
It’s as much a treatise on cornbread as a recipe. The fine soul Mary Stewart made this cornbread to feed a crew I was part of several years ago in northern New Mexico.. She served it under the shade of a cottonwood during lunch breaks from putting a new coat of adobe on Martín Prechtel’s school hall (https://www.floweringmountain.com/). It’s the best cornbread I know, and I fancy myself a cornbread connoisseur (as a boy I remember that it didn’t sound like deprivation when reading about all the cornbread young Abe Lincoln had to eat in his Kentucky cabin).
I needed to jury-rig enough dairy for the recipe - a mix of some leftover milk for coffee that my brother left here, augmented with some coconut milk foraged from my shelves. I also experimented with hefting it up: After pouring half the batter into the skillet, I added a layer of drained salsa from the garden (with a bit of new maple syrup – yin for the yang), then poured the remaining batter on top of that. It came out well, and I think something like this could work again – an inside layer of canned tomatoes and canned venison, with some sautéed leeks, to make a one-pan cornbread meal (sure enough – I just googled and found multiple variations of “stuffed cornbread”).
I made another treat to go with it. There wasn’t much maple sap in today’s collection (recent nights being too mild), so instead of boiling the small amount of watery yet flavorful sap down for more syrup, I used it in place of water to make coffee. Sublime, and just enough to give chase to March blues and pandemic fears.
Keep calm, and make comfort food.