Cape Native

Smelts: Ketchup and Grease, not catch and release

          I really do like to get my own food. Hunt, trap, hook, net, grow, gather, and pick - I dig it. It's nothing new for many Cape Codders, myself included. We grew up stealing fresh carrots out of the dirt while my mom was looking the other way, not that she would have minded, but somehow the thievery made the healthy snack more enjoyable - a belly crawl through rows of green beans makes anything more fun. And Dad, of course, brought home an incredible variety of fish that varied with the season and the year. We had extended periods of scallops on the table, or flounder, or blues. My mom pan-fried cod cheeks in butter and olive oil. I would have traded a hamburger for a chicken nugget, but I rarely dissed the fish - I don't remember any of the kids doing so.

          While there was plenty of do-it-yourself food procurement going on in our home, we also benefitted from living amongst others who enjoyed similar pursuits. Surplus vegetables, usually green beans, rhubarb, or zucchini, were dispensed up and down the road. We had venison in the freezer from a hunter friend who'd come back from Maine with a glut of red meat. Smoked bluefish and mackerel found their way into the fridge from one of those sweet, smokey, old Chatham guys. After talking in the driveway about serious fisheries issues and telling a couple of funny stories punctuated by strong, manly laughter, someone in a dusty old Fix Or Repair Daily type of truck would pull a loosely wrapped butcher paper package from the cab and hand my father shad roe.  

          Being on the giving end of locally produced food is proud and priceless, but taking a turn at the receiving end is a beautiful thing, even if we're always thinking, "I'll get you back, just wait." Recently, I've been basking in the glory of being a part of a wider web of food gathering. A friend returned to the Cape from his lodge in Maine with a gift of very fresh smelt and we enjoyed it immensely.

          Smelt is an anadromous fish, which means it migrates from saltwater environs to spawn in fresh water. (Catadromous fish, like eels, move from fresh water to spawn in the salty sea.) The New England hotspot for smelt sport fishing is Maine, although I have heard reports of moderate takes from northeastern Massachusetts. American, or rainbow, smelt occur from New Jersey all the way to Labrador, but I've never heard of a smelt run on Cape Cod. There are landlocked smelt populations, and I have caught smelt in minnow traps while trying to snare pond shiners, but that pond will remain nameless.

          The smelt sport fishery in Maine is popular, and smelting shacks are erected over frozen tributaries. Smelt run at night, so the smelt shack party usually gets going when the sun goes down. There are some pelagic stragglers, so those with little kids or an aversion to late-night action can get a respectable catch during the daylight hours. Regulations prohibit 'dipping' or netting smelts in many of these tributaries, so hook and line is used, as well as spears in some cases. Dipping remains fairly popular along the Atlantic shores outside these tributaries, where the practice is permitted. Wading around in frigid water, at night, to gather 7-inch long fish is not for the faint of heart, but there seem to be plenty of Mainers who delight in the experience.

        The smelt we ate this year were some of the fattest smelt I've ever seen. They weren't overly long, but they were round in the middle. We fried up a mess of smelts after soaking them in milk and dredging them in flour seasoned with salt and pepper. Some folks add cornmeal to the flour, but we didn't have any, so we kept it simple. People who want to keep it really simple skip the milk, but I tend to think it makes the flour adhere better to the fish.

         The closest we get to smelt in my town is silversides, which I wrote about a long time ago here, and I have to say - I prefer the silversides, or whitebait. If I'm being honest, which is tough with a gift fish, the smelt were too fat for frying.  I have a nice batch frozen and I'm looking forward to brining and smoking them, now that we have some nice weather for a day-long outdoor smoke.

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Signs of Spring

           I have packets and packets of seeds burning a hole in the file box they call home until planting time. Everything is here, except for the nut trees, the fruit tree, the garlic, onions and leeks. And the new bees. And the dinner chickens. And the goat kids. And, of course, the striped bass! March 17 is the traditional Cape Cod pea-planting date, to ensure peas with your salmon on the Fourth of July. In the past decade, I have put my peas in on St. Patty's once or twice, but more often it's closer to the end of March and sometimes even early April. Whenever I get too eager, I remember the famed April Fool's Day blizzard of 1997, when somewhere around 20 inches of snow blanketed the Cape. That's a bit too much snow, even for snow peas.

          We are doubling the size of the lower vegetable garden to 2,000 square feet this year, so there will be plenty of room to sew all those seeds. I have 100 square feet of garlic in wood-sided raised beds around the property. That garlic was planted last fall and is already up and almost six inches tall. I built another 50 sq ft raised bed last fall for growing more. I will add another permanent bed this size to the yard this spring. The upper garden is 800 sq ft, and last year provided the winter squash. I think I may move all the tomatoes up there to avoid over-wintered blight - and to keep rotating the crops. The similar-sized front garden will be allowed to rest this season after years of supporting heavy feeders, usually potatoes.

          Rounding out the edible landscape are apple trees, blueberry bushes, strawberry beds, hops, horseradish, rhubarb, blackberries, black raspberries, an oak-log shiitake farm down by the swamp and tons of perennial herbs. The herbs are my favorites - the thyme and sage can be picked outside all winter and the rosemary and parsley are brought indoors to flavor our food through the cold months. When the weather warms, I'll put in as many warm-weather herbs as I possibly can, including plenty of medicinals, for preserving throughout the season.

           While it is a bit early to declare spring officially 'sprung', we have some early arrivals. Daffodils, hostas, crocuses and snowdrops are getting started. In livestock news, the white goat, who was supposed to have been freshened a month later than the Tog, is quite obviously ready to drop. One of the bucks must have jumped from the buck pen into the doe paddock and made a go of it. (They are quite randy goers, nudge, nudge...) Not knowing when a doe is freshened is not recommended, because they tend to have their kids in the darnedest of places, during the damnedest of weather. It's nice to know when to start watching very closely. So, we are starting now.

          Camille and I sprung a surprise on the boys and, after a few hours with the circular saw and drill, put the brooder house back together and put ducks inside it! The six unsexed ducks are of unknown breed, but one is obviously a white crested and two or three are probably white Muscovy's. Apparently the name Muscovy has nothing to do with Moscow, as the breed originated in South America, but has more to do with the heavy fragrance they emit - therefore, musk duck. I'm looking forward to that. As a tree-roosting breed, like wood ducks, they have claws. Another thing to look forward to. I will have fun building them some permanent housing with a pool in the next couple of weeks, weather permitting.

            The brooder house was a little cold yesterday, so the ducklings were moved into the sunroom at the manse. I don't usually order baby fowl this early in the year, as I've had some difficulty in the past controlling the temperature under the brooders when the weather is very cold. Chicks have a tendency to pile-up when they're cold and they smother the ones on the bottom. Our dinner birds will arrive the week of April 5, and we'll hopefully have emerged from the coldest weather by then. We have also been victims of awful heat waves at the end of June and beginning of July for the last couple of years, which can be devastating to big dinner birds nearing the butchering date, so we have to try to squeeze them in at the right time - and have all the heat bulbs, fans, and blocks of ice ready.

           I shot a little footage of Luna laboriously making her way toward me in the main pen. She is normally a very 'bucky' doe, a fitting description, as she is the progeny of an incredibly bucky buck, Buckley Buckerson, who used to rile our neighbors by jumping the high fence and going for wild excursions through the neighborhood. She rolls her head, raises her hackles, puts her floppy Nubianesque ears out like propellors and generally head-butts a lot and runs around like a maniac. Pregnancy has finally slowed her down - and brought out her sweet side. I am crossing my fingers that she does okay with the final stage of pregnancy and the delivery. This is one of the most dangerous times for does.

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Of Eggs and Angels

           Is a chicken fated to lay a predetermined number of eggs? I remember the Islamists saying the angels wrote your story on you while you floated in your mother's womb. In that mythology, does a little chicken-angel write inside the eggs, listing the number of eggs the chicken will lay, what kind of life she will have and when she will become dinner?      

          I used to bother an Egyptian friend - a Sunni - about hijab and jihad, Ayisha and Khadija, halal and haram. As frustrating and circuitous as those conversations could be, there were also colorful stories of customs, traditions and superstitions that stirred the imagination. To an outsider, it seemed the daily practices were enough to make anyone mad, or paranoid, at the very least. Most of these habits were not from the Koran, but from the Sunnah, the collected observations of Prophet Mohammed's behaviors and stated preferences.

          The list went on and on. If you see a black dog in your dream, don't talk about this dream to anyone, as this is devil coming to you in your sleep. If there is someone in your town who envies you, for your beauty, wealth or children, for example, they might make something bad occur in your life. If you if happen to cross paths; uttering three times the equivalent of "get thee behind me Satan" - awotho belahe men al shaytan al rajeem - can help dispel the effects of the 'evil eye.' Never spit to your right or in front of you, but you can spit to your left. Enter the bathroom with your left foot and leave with your right. Sleep on your left side. The devil sleeps on his stomach, so never sleep in that position. And you thought fishermen were superstitious.

          The tale about the angel and the unborn is also a hadith, or narration from the Prophet Mohammed, recorded in the Sunnah. It says that a person is put together in the womb for forty days. After that, he becomes a 'thick clot of blood' for forty days, and then he becomes a 'piece of flesh' for another forty days. 'Then Allah sends an angel who is ordered to write four things: the new creature's deeds, livelihood, date of death and whether he will be blessed or wretched. He will do whatever is written for him.' ( Bukhari:V4B54N430)

          Now, I can't recall meeting a chicken that was particularly blessed or wretched, by human standards. Once, we ordered Freedom Rangers chickens, the same breed that is used in France to produce the tightly controlled Label Rouge brand. One of these girls was found sort of crushed in the broiler house at about four weeks old. We babied her and she rallied, but she spent the rest of her days listing to port like an overloaded clam boat. She hopped and flopped and shuffled and rolled. We called her Roly Poly, and when her flock was butchered she was spared. We added her in with the layers, where she was among the most loved of all our chickens, and she bathed in our friendship and admiration right up until the day something got the hen house door open and the coyotes sealed her fate, along with another 20 or so of her feathered friends. Somehow her story doesn't seem 'wretched', but rather 'heroic'. 'Olympian', even. She did look wretched, though. All she needed was a babushka and a cane and an eye patch to be the perfect little nightmare hen, but how we loved her.

          We now employ a trio of roosters, and, as is usually the case with a bunch of co-habiting roosters, one is the Big Boss, and he might be 'wretched' if he wasn't so darn handsome. I named him JimBob Duggar, no relation to those Duggars, and he is a perfectly mean and dangerous rooster - which is exactly what the job description calls for as a harem-head with a lot of hens and eggs and chicks to protect. He rules over the other two roosters, Poof Head and Boy George, and keeps the hens safe from hawks. He does threaten to gouge out my eyes on occasion, but I have plans for his hackles if he doesn't chill out, I'm just waiting for the saddle feathers to get longer.

          I started pondering the 'how many eggs' question while gazing out the window at the hen house, watching the hens jump up onto their roosts at night. This is the first winter we've had hens in the 'new' house and it has much less insulation than the old digs, so I opted to keep a single heat lamp running on the coldest nights. Chickens need around 14 hours of light each day to lay as many eggs as possible, and the heat bulb doubles as a light source. It also seems to effectively prevent late-laid eggs from freezing overnight, as the nest boxes are against the outside wall in this new configuration and at risk for getting very cold.

          Our hens, Black Australorps, Golden Comets and New Hampshire Reds, have shown no signs of reduced laying through the coldest weather this winter, but they are also only nine months old. If there was a predetermined number of eggs a hen will lay in her lifetime, do artificially lit and heated surroundings mean that she will lay heavily in her younger years and cut back precipitously as she rounds the bend to old age? Is that a silly question? Well, what do you want for February egg-washing-while-gazing-out-the-window-at-the-hen-house queries?

          Which brings me to an important announcement: I do not wash our own eggs. I only wash eggs I sell to friends and give to family, but I do have some of my family and friends converted. According to my many poultry-raising manuals, eggs have a natural coating that prevents the porous eggshell from absorbing nasty things from the environment. When you consider that chickens poo, pee and lay their eggs from the same hole, the cloaca, you might understand why the egg would want to protect its contents from the underside of the hen who sits on it. The manuals state that an unwashed egg will stay 'good' for nearly twice as long as its washed counterparts. As those statistics deal with eggs older than a couple of months, I have no personal experience with this data. Our little protein powerhouses have lent their flavor to omelettes long before that date. But I figure if the egg's surface has a protective barrier, I'm not going to mess with it. Very, very dirty eggs get tossed, and the rest are washed just before they're cracked. So if you're ever over my house and reach into the fridge for an egg or two, don't be alarmed if it has muddy chicken footprints on it, or hay stuck to it, or other things you don't usually see at the market. And besides, if you forget to wash it and your breakfast shot of raw egg introduces you to a visit from sal, just remember, it was all written on you as your story, way back in the watery days before your birth. There, that feels better, doesn't it?

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Keeping the Home Fires Burning

          Did you ever start something you just couldn't stop? Have you found yourself fueled by some cocktail of determination, stubbornness and refusal to retreat? With Valentine's Day in the forecast, thoughts of terribly captivating crushes from the past that I should have backed away from at the sight of those pesky red flags spring to mind. I was thinking of something more along the lines of hearth-warming than heart-warming, but if home is where the heart is, part of my heart is blazing with heat while other areas shudder with chill. Not to worry, most of those cold spots feature cozy down comforters.

         I shut off the thermostats two Februarys ago and haven't looked back, even on those windy nights with temps in the teens when the house just seems to seep its heat and refuses to be fully warmed. I still have to feed the oil tank with home heating oil or diesel, as the water heater is powered by the oil burner. While I do have a South-facing roof and would love to try solar hot water, that expenditure is not in the cards for us at the moment, so we pour fuel down the spout and try to conserve as much as possible.

         Wind makes a marked difference in our ability to effectively heat the house, and it has been a very windy year. Generally, if the temperature outside remains above 30 degrees, the house is toasty. Temperatures above 20 degrees allow for a comfortable indoor environment with some cool spots near the doors, windows and outer rooms. Once temps slip below 20 degrees, some rooms become invigorating, as we New Englanders like to say about brisk conditions.

          We are heating approximately 2,000 square feet with our Irish Waterford Ironfounders woodstove, which was a gift from a friend. The first floor of the house features a bedroom, bath and classroom, and the kitchen, dining area and living room are arranged in an open floor plan with a cathedral ceiling that allows heat to spread to the two bedrooms, bathroom and loft upstairs. A large central ceiling fan helps circulate and return some of the heat to the lower level. The coldest rooms are the first floor bedroom and bath, which are around a corner and down a hall away from the stove, which is located at the far end of the living room.

          During one of those recent windy cold snaps, I noticed some pockets of cold in the morning and decided to take a few readings with the homebrew fermentation bucket thermometer (which measures the air temp around the beer bucket to explain why it is gurgling like a boiling broth or barely making a peep.) The temperature at the kitchen bay window was 40 degrees, which might explain why I can't keep spoiled-rotten greenhouse-bred indoor plants alive over there. The headboard of the downstairs bed read 42 degrees, which partially explains why the 2-year-old demands my company. Those temperatures were recorded after cranking up the stove for three hours.

         By contrast, the living room was 56 degrees, the loft was 58 degrees, and the upstairs bedrooms were both 55 degrees, toasty by our standards. Wait, what is "room temp" supposed to be, 68 degrees?! That sounds like a beach day to me, but that is how the human body adjusts to its environment. We heat the house all day, but at a reduced burn-rate. Spending plenty of time outside each day allows us to come in calibrated to the outdoor environment. We enter the house, sweat in the blast of 50 degree temps, and promptly strip off extra layers.

          Adjusting to heating with only wood has not been difficult. Sure, there are mornings when socks are a must and exiting the shower can be, well, invigorating, but I've also noticed some unexpected benefits to the temperature differences in the home. Discovering that a bunch of people can snuggle under a down comforter and create enormous heat is a delightful and liberating experience. If it were very cold, a heavy wool cover would help trap that heat even more, but we haven't ever been that cold. Overall, I think we've had some of the coziest winters I can remember.

          Last month, our egg refrigerator in the garage suffered a meltdown, and I moved the eggs to the basement, which has consistently remained around 40 degrees. I left the oblong package wrapped in garbage bags in the freezer section of that fridge, thinking it was the leftover shiitake spawn and was unpleasantly surprised to find out that it was actually 25 lbs of squid from last summer. It must have been a premature senior moment, as the shiitake spawn was exactly where it should have been - in the fridge, not the freezer. But figuring out that the basement is a huge refrigerator was a lucky realization. Also, as the giant chest freezer is located in the basement, the cold environment means it does not have to run as often as it would if it were in a warmer room.

           We haven't bought any firewood yet. We rely on trees felled from our land and wood squirreled away from any and every tree-cutting in town that we can get in on. Last summer we rented a big splitter and put it to work over three days on about five cords of wood. After that adventure, someone indefinitely lent us a big splitter with a Honda engine, and we split the rest of what we had cut at the time.

          We started the winter with six and a half cords - enough, I thought, to last two winters. I was basing that opinion on my experience growing up with a woodstove, when we would pretty reliably go through three cords a year. I conveniently forgot that we also had an oil burner that would send dusty hot air into the house at night. As of yesterday, we have burned three and three-quarters cords of wood. I think the two and three-quarters cords we have left should last for the rest of the season, and we may even have some leftovers for next year. No matter, we are rapidly stockpiling wood cut to four foot lengths for next season, and I have a more than a few invasives picked out for removal to create better light for the bees and gardens. I'm an experienced chain sharpener now, and we keep two Husqvarnas and a Homelite ready for the job.

           Next year I will stack the oak separate from the maple, and the maple apart from the locust, which dominates our stack. When the forecast calls for very low temps with nasty winds, I want to be able to grab plenty of oak without having to deconstruct my tight stacks. The heat from an oak log is an incredible, exciting thing on a cold night. Heavy window covers are a must, if funds allow, and nasty drafts must be eliminated. I discovered why the side door is so awfully drafty, and it is an unfortunate oversight. Weather-stripping is essential. Harvesting and cutting and splitting and stacking and seasoning and lugging all our own heating fuel makes us appreciate it much more than we would if we simply wrote a check for it. But, oh, what a feeling it is to know that the heat we enjoy in the depths of winter was gathered by hand from the land we inhabit.

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Happy 2010 Burn Season

Friday marked the first day of brush burning season for Cape Cod, and it was almost unimaginably a "burn day" in Orleans, meaning permitted residents could touch off their piles of brush - that is, if the tinder wasn't still covered with snow. In past years, snowy days were usually not burn days. As the firemen explained it, wet brush resulted in an inevitable increase in the use of accelerants to get the fire roaring. Many locals can recall days when it was customary to throw diesel fuel on a stack of brush to help set it off, but hopefully most of us now know better and have more respect for the fragile ecosystem we inhabit.

         I pile brush all summer, after the first-of-May end of the burning season. If I have extra tarps, I will cover the piles and wait for the first burn day. Lately, with cord after cord of wood stacked in the yard for our winter's home-heating, I have been short of tarps and hope the pile will dry out in time for burning. Recent history has proven good for drying time and bad for early burning, what with snow storms, rains and those frustrating low-ceiling days that seem to persist through much of the early part of burn season.

         It has always troubled my barbarian brain to think that fire has been stolen from humans. There is a Native American fable about how man got his hands on fire, and it involved the use of our friend coyote, the trickster, who managed to trick the Gods into relinquishing their hold on that precious essence of barbeque. After all that, and after use of fire secured its role in countless examples of forward motion for the human species, we now find ourselves often denied that simple and essential tool.

          While I wish we could burn with impunity throughout the Cape Cod s'mores season, which is summer for those of you who haven't been to camp, I am more acutely aware of the dangers of burning than I once was. My uncle, Dave Hubbard, worked for the National Forest Service on the Six Rivers National Forest, which abuts and surrounds Redwood National Park in Northern California. Residents of the state of California are about as keyed in as you can get to the dangers of wildfire - they think about fire the same way Cape Codders think about hurricanes, remembering deadly conditions, heavy damage, and close calls.

          A hurricane is usually tracked by Cape Codders as it is generated off the coast of Africa and strengthens as it moves over the warm waters of the Caribbean and turns northward and ravages the southern coast and heads toward our peninsula. A fire, on the other hand, can start in your neighbor's back yard. Uncle Dave warned me that the Cape is primed for wildfire, pointing to the dry tinder everywhere in unmanaged woodlots and big backyards. Coupled with a lackadaisical attitude toward fire and general unpreparedness, the situation could be bad. I double-checked my hose and shovel arrangement after that conversation. I also paid more attention to the wind, as burn days can be cancelled by increasing winds. It is the permitted burner's responsibility to extinguish their fires if the wind increases during the day. I believe the cut-off is 20 mph, but you'll have to double-check that with your own fire department. Let's just say if the sparks and burning bits start blowing into the woods, turn on the hose and call it a day.

          When it comes to lack of fire, I really can't complain. I have a gas grill, a charcoal grill, a woodstove, propane tank and burner, electric and gas ranges, matches, lighters, and all kinds of other ignitions. But there's nothing like a raw, open brush fire to kindle the primitive spirit and mesmerize children and the inner-children of their parents and tall friends. Which brings me to another barbarian gripe; brush fires must be extinguished by 4 p.m. No ghost stories or oral traditions expressed over the crackle and glow of the fire allowed. The blaze has to be squelched just when it's really getting good. The only way around these regulations is to have a "cooking fire", which is identified by some piece of food being cooked on the coals or scorched by the flames. In these parts, that usually means a fire ring, and, although I won't soon be parting with several hundred dollars to make my primitive soul happy, I have been collecting big stones for the past couple of years and will probably put some mortar to them soon.

          Having food on the fire is something we can handle. I can't resist using all those BTUs to make some food, even if it's something as utterly simple as throwing potatoes on the coals. Those will be some of the best potatoes we cook, our palates biased by the poetry of smoke and labor. But it's the baba ghanoush that I most deeply appreciate. You haven't had baba until you've roasted it on the coals of a well-earned brush fire.

          The smoky flavor and little charred bits of eggplant skin in a fresh batch of baba ghanoush add depth and flavor to the dish, and the best way to get it is to burn that eggplant down until it looks like something you would never eat. A pair of tongs or deftly handled stick is needed to grasp the deflated mess out of the coals, and then the smoking lump of eggplant must cool before tahini and lemon and cumin and garlic go to work to make the most fabulous baba, and every year it is more wonderful than the last. What a scrumptious way to celebrate the first fire of the season and warm the appetite for the many more that will follow.

Baba Ghanoush
1 large or 2 small eggplants

1/4 cup of tahini, or to taste

3 cloves of garlic, minced

1/4 cup of lemon juice, or to taste

2 or 3 big pinches of cumin

salt to taste

2 Tbs extra virgin olive oil

2 Tbs fresh flat leaf parsley, chopped

Pita bread

Prick the eggplant all over with a skewer, knife or fork and deposit in hot coals. Roast until the skin blackens and puckers and looks charred. Let cool, then open the eggplant by slicing down its length with a knife. Scrape out the flesh and discard the skin or give it to your chickens. Place the flesh in a bowl.

Using a fork, mash the eggplant flesh into a paste. Add the tahini, garlic, lemon juice, and cumin and mix well. Season with salt, then adjust the tahini and lemon juice to taste.

Transfer to a serving bowl, if necessary, and smooth out the surface with a fork. Drizzle the olive oil on top and sprinkle with parsley. Serve with torn pita bread.

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