Category Archives: Convivial Life

Hunting Chanterelles

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Not chanterelles

I have no sooner put the dogs out after my siesta than I call them back inside. Thunder rumbles in the west as the winds swirl through the treetops. The dogs hate thunder. In a valley such as ours that is perhaps a half-mile from ridge to ridge, it is often a guessing game to determine the direction and size of an incoming storm. It lurks behind the opposing ridge before springing a surprise. Sound as often as sight is our guide to the weather.

After a couple of weeks of rain and hot humid afternoons, excellent conditions for mushrooms and ideal for chanterelles, I head sans dogs into the backwoods, walking stick, wicker basket, and a lit cigar the tools of my trade. The less I need for an activity, the more satisfaction I derive from the effort and result. Hunting mushrooms is as simple as gathering wild blackberries: first you find ‘em and then you pick ‘em.

By the time I cross the triangle field and move into the woods, the skies have turned an ominous charcoal to the north, west, and south. Thunder rolls from one end of the sky to the other, and images of battling giants are not hard to conjure. The winds pause briefly as I cross the now-dry wet-weather creek and climb a slight rise. Just thirty feet into the forest, the area already looks as if a blanket has been tossed over the treetops. Detail on the darkened ground is tricky to make out, yet in front of me, glowing like gold, impossible to miss, is a scattering of the cup-shaped mushrooms I have come to find, chanterelles.

I walk and smoke my cigar, stooping and gathering from time to time, one here, five over there. The winds pick up, the thunder becomes a constant backdrop, and a nearby lightning strike causes me to jerk and crouch instinctively. I don’t want to exit the safety of the woods and risk walking across the pasture back to the house, so I continue adding to my plunder. This foraging adventure is proving to be epic.

Coming across a fallen oak, I seat myself upon it and perch for a few minutes … until a fawn nestled ten feet away rises from a long rest to stretch and starts with fright at the sight of me. It had better develop much keener hearing, I think, if it wants to survive hunting season in a year or two. The fawn bounds away into the shadows of the forest. The storm has really intensified, and a branch from time to time is wrenched from its parent tree and crashes to the floor.

I find yet another batch of chanterelles, my wicker basket close to full. This flush runs twenty feet up a ravine into the embracing roots of an old red oak. The last mushroom I pick is plucked next to a box turtle, who gives me a baleful glare for taking his dinner. The rain is falling, but little reaches the ground under the dense canopy where I sit on another fallen tree while finishing my cigar.

Back at the woods’ edge I wait another twenty minutes for the storm to pass, then, walking at almost a jog, I head toward the house, still feeling more than a little exposed. Cindy has afternoon coffee ready, and I put down my full basket—a little over two pounds of chanterelles—grab my cup, and join her on the porch.

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Reading this week: I’ve polished off a couple of novels by Robert Fabbri on the emperor Vespasian. As a companion to those two I read the chapter on Vespasian in Suetonius: Lives of the 12 Caesars. And I’m just about finished with the biblio-memoir, Books (L. McMurtry). Any of these come with my stamp of approval, for what that is worth. All the usual trigger warnings apply for the sensitive (Even, surprisingly, with McMurtry).

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UPDATE: My book, Kayaking with Lambs, will be available October 1.

Making Squirrel Cassoulet: Part Two

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A few of my cabbages in the garden are no more. Which might beg the question, why am I making a confit out of squirrel instead of rabbit? Because the rabbits in the vegetable patch dine on the efforts of my hard work at night. On those occasions when they allow themselves to be seen cavorting in daylight, I am carrying a hoe, not a shotgun. Meanwhile squirrels (unfortunately for them) expose themselves to all manner of unlucky timings that shorten their mortality, from being indecisive road-crossers to standing on a limb barking while the hunter nearby is relieving himself. So, alas, no rabbit for my dinner, only squirrel … but only for now, sweet bunny, only for now.

Why confit and cassoulet? Let’s start with the obvious. They are each beautiful French words that we love saying for the reason that we can actually pronounce them. Indeed, being linguistically challenged myself in all languages, including my native, this may be the main reason that I fixed this dish: the recipe provided me the confidence to roll both words off the tongue and into a conversation. They also are intended to sound, in their Frenchiness, highly palatable and highly desirable (which also leads to highly priced surcharges at whatever froufrou bistro you land in for your date night). Hiding plain foods under clever foreign names that often translate essentially to the same dishes as their American counterparts is a time-honored sport of our restaurateurs to inflate their bottom line.

Think about it: Does simply uttering the word pâté not encourage more guests to sample my efforts than if I had called it what James Villas does, Pork Jowl and Liver Pudding? Would some of you not be reading this (if anyone is indeed reading it) if I had called my dish Salted Squirrel in Bean Stew?

So now let’s reduce the two words — confit and cassoulet — to their essentials. A confit is an ingredient (and a process) made by curing a piece of meat in salt, then cooking it in a fat for long hours, before eventually storing it submerged in the same. It keeps for months until needed. Meat, salt, fat. What could be simpler (and taste better)? The one-dish cassoulet is your average Monday night bean dinner, except it contains multiple versions of salt and fatted proteins, all combined to take you on a supercharged highway to a coronarial destination both blissful and corpulent. (Though, the French are all reported to be skinny, so better take up cigarettes.)

As a personal philosophy of cooking, I don’t hold much truck with theories of cultural appropriation, but I do believe strongly that one should try to cook with local ingredients. Adapt any recipe to what you grow and what is in your larder. Don’t you be buying no champagne vinegar when what you have on hand is a perfectly good pear vinegar that you brewed. The beans you harvested this summer in your garden (in my case butter beans) will do just fine. Need salt pork? How about that freshly cured jowl under the stairs. Link sausages? Well, thanks to the deer hunting acumen of a favorite nephew coupled with the curing skills of a local Mennonite butcher, both in South Louisiana, I have them by the coils.

Will the resulting dish be a traditional Toulouse cassoulet? Certainement pas. Just as the French settlers in Louisiana made their beloved boudin with ingredients found at hand, good cooking in East Tennessee also reflects place. Food should never be confined to a straightjacket, with one exception … my chicken sausage gumbo. (Perfection is not to be trifled with.) But truly, all that really matters in the end is that you cook your meals with love for friends and family.

Ms. Ronni “I declare” Lundy, in her well-written cookbook Victuals, an Appalachian journey with recipes, is the source for the cassoulet that I cooked. With many modifications, of course. She is also the author of the instructional injunction to not let your “fat get frisky” when cooking the confit. Those are words to live by.

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Reading this weekend: A Factotum in the Book Trade (M. Kociejowski), a dense, yet delightful read about a life spent in the antiquarian book trade in London. Written from the perspective of an employee, not an owner. And, The Reactionary Mind (M. Davis), a distributist stand against modernity.

Country Wines and the Top Ten List

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Over the years I have written a variety of annual series on different topics: the farm breviary, the farmer’s alphabet, and a farm toolbox spring most readily to mind. There have also been a few aborted series, possibly to be returned to later. And, in all honesty, most have been done simply to help me with the process of filling out the fifty-two posts each year. Although I do hope they give value.

Fall wines: perry and crabapple.

This coming year and next I’m starting a new series on country wines. There will be twelve posts this year on using ingredients from the farm or field to create a wine (parsnip sherry, anyone?) And then next year there will be a short post each month on tasting the previous year’s creation and answering important questions. Such as, just how did that parsley wine hold up? And what should one serve with their carrot wine?

Of course, there will be the usual weekly posts on whatever else strikes my fancy or has a burr under my saddle. But please, for now, contain your excitement. Because today is my somewhat annual top ten summary of posts from last year.

This little blog, in 2020, garnered a little over 10,000 views, with 341 of those posts written over the years being reread at least once. Which, as I sit at my desk with a rooster crowing outside the window, is encouraging in that annoying Sally Fields type of fashion.

About the South Roane Agrarian and the Farm Breviary remain the top two viewed posts. But since they are separate pages on the site, I’ll discard them from the top ten.

This year’s top ten list contains a few older posts (although, God only knows, why “beef cheek pastrami” keeps showing up). But the rest are from this year.

Top ten posts from 2020

  1. Unsolicited Advice to a Nephew on Starting a Farm (2020)
  2. Neither Past Nor Future (2020)
  3. A Farm Toolbox: the pocketknife (2014)
  4. Using the Odd-bits: beef cheek pastrami (2016)
  5. A Great Divide (2017)
  6. What the Sunrise Will Show (2020)
  7. When It All Falls Away (2020)
  8. Waiting On the Egg Man (2020)
  9. Fatigue (2020)
  10. Hurricane Laura, Eight Weeks Later (2020)

And, an honorable mention, just because I’m delighted this one still shows up on the list.

  1. The Steen’s Syrup Republic (2017)

Next week? I try my hand at making a fig and muscadine raisin wine!

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Reading this weekend: Convivial Dickens: the drinks of Dickens and his times (Hewett and Axton). And, Durable Trades: family-centered economies that have stood the test of time (R. Groves). The latter was published by Front Porch Republic.

Fig Nation Endures

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the gifted figs

These are tough times for Fig Nation, with social distancing mandates and other stresses. But yesterday as some fellow farmers “donated” some extra onion sets and we “gifted” them a used seeder/fertilizer spreader, it struck home that the seeds of cooperation are still there. We just need to work harder to keep them watered during this most unusual crisis. Here is the original post from the archives. Join today!

You just never know when good luck will turn on her high beams and hit you with some gifted produce or a home-brewed beer. We’ve been hard at what is best described as a homestead weekend on the farm. We’ve planted figs and blueberries, transitioned the summer to a fall garden, made mead and apple jelly, fed the bees…. Later today friends are coming over to donate an afternoon of converting logs to lumber.

Which makes me think of Fig Nation. A couple of years back, an elderly Slavic émigré visited the farm to buy a lamb for his freezer. A long conversation ensued (which seems to happen more often than not), during which he and I shared some of my homemade pear brandy (which also seems to happen more often than not). We walked about the fig orchard and got to talking about fig love and the joys and struggles of growing figs in the upper South. He mentioned a cold-hardy variety that he had had success growing in Blount County. The conversation and afternoon then drifted on to other topics.

A couple of weeks later, a mystery package arrived from an out-of-state nursery. It contained six small rootstocks of figs, a gift from the farm visitor. Since that time we’ve nurtured them along, first in pots in the house, then in the rich soil of the hoop-house. Finally, yesterday morning I dug them up and divided the rootstock of each into new plants. Two of each went into the orchard. The remaining figs were gifted to two more friends in the valley.

What took place here is an example of what I call “Fig Nation,” an informal farm economy and community based on producing, sharing, and enjoying. The concept of Fig Nation is simple: A few weeks back, my nephew and I harvested five pounds of elderberries. We cleaned, bagged, and tossed them in the freezer. Yesterday I pulled them out and combined them with water and honey to make an elderberry mead. Come winter, I’ll enjoy the mead with guests. Welcome to Fig Nation, where sharing brings pleasure and automatic membership.

Those friends coming over to help with the sawmill? While here, they also plan to use our cider mill for some perry from their pear crop. After milling lumber and pears, we will conclude the day with a glass or two of my newly bottled raspberry wine — members in good standing in Fig Nation must be prepared to produce, converse, work, and sip.

So you see, Fig Nation, in concept and in practice, isn’t difficult at all. Now, you may find the founding premise a bit too anarchistic, this making and giving and receiving. And, if you don’t comprehend, I’m not allowed to explain it in detail — except to say, it is not a bad way to spend your days and evenings and life.

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Reading this weekend: Farmer’s Glory (A.G. Street)

A Peace and Ponce Christmas

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The annual Winged Elm holiday gathering was last night, and the event was notable for its complete lack of politics. Nary a divisive comment heard nor nasty post tweeted. Progress. Even the field of plate-and-bottle debris was modest when compared to years past. Still, like a glacial moraine deposited across a Vermont landscape, the remains could last for eons, all depending on our energy level in the coming day.

The spread of food was fairly pork centered. Among the evening’s meaty delights, a mound of home-cured ham (prosciutto), slices of ponce (a stuffed and smoked pork stomach), various salamis (some home-cured, some store bought), prosciutto-wrapped dates and cream cheese, a homemade potted ham (pâté), and a tray of boudin that lay forgotten in the refrigerator (ignored in the pre-party rush). There were also platters of cheese and cheese balls, relish trays, endless homemade dips, cookies enough to induce a diabetic coma for the entire valley, and, to provide the merest illusion of balance, fresh veggies (with the ubiquitous ranch dressing).

To wash down the massive amounts of food presented, our nearly 40 guests imbibed a proportionally massive quantity of wine, beer, hot mulled cider, soft drinks…. (Fortunately, my gifts from a guest — two bottles of outstanding home-distilled products, one a grape brandy aged in French oak and the other a corn whiskey aged in American oak — survived the evening intact and undetected in their hiding place.)

At the gathering was to be found a good mix of farmers and gardeners, beekeepers, horse people, and cattlewomen, small farm and small town, rural and urban. Halfway through the evening, a fellow farmer caught my eye across the room. Her arm extended and a grimace on her face, she twinkled her fingers as if searching for something. A mislaid lamb, perhaps. An earnest group of listeners surrounded her, all nodding. “I’ve been there,” I imagined them saying, but I couldn’t hear anything over the din.

The beekeepers took over the kitchen at one point, confabbing, I suspect, over the latest method of treating varroa mites. Although it may simply have been the homemade cinnamon ice cream one of them doled out parsimoniously that kept the colony near. Or, maybe it was their hive instinct that caused them to remain clustered on a cold East Tennessee evening.

In the front room, our Charlie Brown Christmas tree was on display. A scraggly cedar cut from the farm, then dressed up with special ornaments acquired over the years, it anchored the corner next to the crowded deacon’s bench. Underneath, among assorted presents, were jars of freshly rendered lard, gifts for our departing guests. Each one sported a label designed by Cindy, with the tagline, “Good lard, it’s tasty!”

The evening came to a close past our usual bedtime, but not before a late-night trek by guests to the hoop-house for bouquets of turnip greens for the deserving. We tidied up (It really wasn’t that bad considering the number of guests, food, and drink) and retired upstairs to read for a while before enjoying some well-earned rest. I dreamed of a breakfast of fresh scones with double cream and lemon curd left for us by a friend, and slept soundly.