How Good it Can be

One less ‘chuck

We can finally see the bottoms of the chest freezers beneath and between the remnants of their former abundance. We’re out of venison and real low on chickens. Even the beef is looking skimpy; we’re deep into the “chuck steak, burger, and short ribs” phase. There’s still a decent collection of porky bits, and thank goodness for that. Blueberries are almost gone. Ditto kimchi (three quarts left!). We ran out of butter months ago, having plowing through nearly 150-pounds in nine months or so. The lacto-fermented green beans are long departed, along with every last one of their frozen cousins. Potatoes are near-to-finished up. Onions, too.

On the plus side, the unheated season-extending greenhouse is churning out enough salad to put love handles on a vegan. So there’s that. And we have lots of liver pates, ranging from beef, to pork, to chicken, and even a little beaver. Dinner last night was salad, chick liver pate, homemade sourdough crackers and one thin-to-the-point-of-being-almost-transluscent slice of cheese each. After not having cheese for something like 184 days and 17 hours (not that anyone’s counting), we splurged on a pound of good cheddar a few days back and we’re trying to stretch it through next month. And eggs. Crikey, the eggs. The boys keep bring home pheasant back mushrooms and wood nettles, too.

I like how our diet shifts with the season, how we have the luxury of  getting sick of things just as we run out of them, and then “rediscover” them when the harvest comes ’round. For the next few months, the table will be heavy with salads and whatever meaty remnants reside in the freezers. We have three cows freshening in about a month and plan to milk two, so there’ll soon be dairy aplenty. The other day we were all sitting ’round the table gnawing on some gristly cut of meat and fantasizing about the abundance to come and Penny said “ice cream” and we started dreaming up all the flavors of ice cream we’ll be eating on a near-daily basis all summer long. Mint, I yelped.  Cinnamon, Penny exclaimed. Maple, the boys clamored. And so on.

In the warmer months, we tend to eat more bread and bread-like products, in part because they’re super convenient and in part because we can eat these foods in summer without having them bog us down, thanks to the endless hours of physical labor that define our days. If we eat much wheat in the winter, both Penny and I notice how the buttons on our jeans press uncomfortably into the soft meat of our lower bellies, so we mostly steer clear. But come summer, it’s no problem, and I make a loaf or two of bread every week or ten days, rather then one per month or so. It’s real good toasted with about a half-pound of butter on top and a couple of fried eggs over a mess of steamed nettles. Breakfast of champions, right there.

I think most people can’t imagine not having access to certain foods whenever they want them. I think most people would hear that we generally go the entire winter without fresh greens and feel sorry for us. The thing is, we sure don’t feel sorry for us, ’cause we know when the greens finally come on, they’re gonna be the best damn thing we’ve eaten since the season’s first blueberries, or the handful of new potatoes we snuck out of the garden because we’d been out of potatoes for four months or the first drips of ice cream that’ve run down our chin in a half-year or more.

I’ve made this point before, but I’m gonna make it again: If you have everything you want whenever you want it, it might be good. But you’ll never know how good it can be.