Our goose ain't cooked

Last Monday, Aaron went goose hunting and shot a Lesser Canada Goose:

 

His hunting partners were kind enough to give him two of their geese, so we now have three geese to cook. I thought I’d share our adventures in goose cooking.

Of course, when you kill the animal yourself, it takes a while to get to the cooking

That attitude of gratitude

I enjoyed John Tierney's article on the importance of gratitude. I've long thought gratitude akin to flossing, but good for my mental, not dental, health. Still, despite my best intentions to focus on the full half of the glass, I often end up wondering if organized religion would help. It isn't that I don't feel gratitude on a frequent, regular, and heart-felt-basis, but rather that I one-eighty out of it so fast there isn't even any danger of whiplash, it's quantum. I'll be awash in warm-fuzzies when, like an “I Dream of Jeannie” special-effect, I'm facing the exact opposite way in the space of one frame, wondering why it was, exactly, that I thought having kids was a good idea, or bemoaning no closets, or pining for a dishwasher.

The fact of the matter is I have oodles to be grateful for this holiday season. Two shining examples are the drainpipe on our washing machine and our propane refrigerator. Prior to the drainpipe installation, each load of laundry meant carrying three carboys full of water from the utility room across the house to the kitchen sink for dumping. I didn't feel sorry for myself, but did spend a fair amount of time thinking, “this is ridiculous.” In October, Aaron hooked up a drainpipe and hot water to the washing machine (which involved running pipe from the utility room, under the house, across the house, to the kitchen sink drain). Now, it is a joy to put in a load and forget about it as I corral, cajole, and care-take the kidlets, hanging the laundry up to dry after they have gone to bed. And switching from an electric to a propane fridge has meant we run our generator about 75% less than we did and can go away for the weekend without getting rid of all of the food in the fridge and freezer. (Talk about an ultra-ridiculous situation.)  Enjoy your refrigeration, it is energy intensive, but think how differently you'd be eating without it.

Anniversary

I just had my one-year anniversary of moving out of Brooklyn. In the weeks before we left, Aaron kept asking me if I thought I was going to be happy living in the country. “I don't know,” was all I could answer, “would I be happy living on the moon?” To me, Maine, the country, not-New York, all felt as alien as a cold ball of rock and metal far, far away. (With much better potential, of course.) But the thing about moving to the moon—apart from the isolation—would be the crazy learning curve of adjusting to life on a space station, with all the maintenance, the repairs, the new weather conditions, the limited laundry, the connectivity issues (although internet access may well be faster up there, than it is here in our cabin), and learning to relax into all the other new-normals that are not yet the least bit normal. To go from the call-the-landlord-maintenance you get when renting an apartment to living on a non-town maintained road, in an ailing off-the-grid cabin has, in retrospect, meant a bit more chewing than we were ready for. The up side: we certainly have learned a lot. The down side: we have oh, so very much more to learn.

I wish I'd had the time and the wherewithal to keep this blog up over the past year, but my time (my life) has been swallowed up by these starlets:

I look forward to having more time for writing, someday...

Full circle

This morning I looked down and saw a tick meandering across the jeans Forest left lying on the bathroom floor.  And so, we are back where we started.  I put the tick in the toilet and the jeans in the hamper.  Then, a few moments later, I felt a tickle on the bottom of my foot.  I pulled off my sock and found exactly what I expected to, nothing.  The creepy-crawlies of tick season feel more real than the actual ticks.

Ahem

No more than a quick throat clearing with this re-entry into blogging.  Certain third world conditions around here currently have the upper hand over me.  Which is to say, our water is not what it should be and, consequently, nor are my guts.

My apologies for the abrupt, unexplained hiatus from blogging.  I blame winter, my children, and inertia.  The long winter started to get me a little down by the absurdly protracted end of it. (Over a foot of snow on April 1!?!)  My children don't let me sleep anywhere near enough for normal brain function.  And inertia can be powerful.  Once I stopped posting, staying stopped was comfy and easy.  I'll do my best to get inertia working in the opposite direction.

Today, I transplanted the beet and rutabaga seedlings Aaron started in our house.  Aaron also put in collards and swiss chard.  We started at the top of our field and have many more trays of seedlings to go.

More soon.

So much to learn. (Vegetarian discretion advised)

We were offered two aggressive roosters by vegetarian friends who keep chickens and don't like being attacked when entering the coop. As earlier mentioned, I feel that, as a meat eater, the responsible thing is to face the death behind at least a few of the meat-based meals I eat. But my feet started getting cold the night before the roosters were due to arrive. I was very glad somebody had to stay with the kids, leaving me no choice but to sit out yet another slaughter. Turns out, proximity to death matters. At one point, I went out to check on Aaron and make sure the attack roosters hadn't gotten the upper hand.  I found him skinning the first bird, bright blood drippings on the dirty snow and milk carton he'd set under the now half naked rooster. Later, when Aaron came in, his cheek was dripping with blood. Happily, he'd been sprayed, not slashed.

After skinning both birds, Aaron finished the processing in our kitchen sink. 

Forest was eager to eat the birds after getting over his initial disappointment that we weren't keeping them as pets.  The blood, guts, and blue-grey feet didn't bother him in the least.  I also watched the proceedings, impressed by Aaron's skill.   Decapitating, skinning, eviscerating without any apparent hesitation or mistakes, Aaron turned two roosters crowing in their cat carriers into supper ingredients.  The advantage of growing up hunting.

As happy as we were to have the meat, it made us both very sad. Aaron said the second bird almost got a last minute reprieve. “They were such beautiful birds. And it always makes me sad to kill.” I was also somber and, truth be told, a bit grossed out by the smell of fresh flesh. Then I started getting tired. Stupefyingly tired. My limbs felt melty, my mind went fuzzy, and I kept tripping. Aaron sent me to bed for a bit, while he bathed the kids. I felt guilty, but I was in such a torpor, I couldn't say no to rest. Was this a reaction to the death of these birds? As the evening wore on, my throat got sore and I had joint aches all over. I became convinced I was getting sick, but then I was perfectly health the next morning. We'll see what happens the next time we kill.

And, it turns out, there is a learning curve with cooking year-old roosters. Aaron wanted to roast one, despite my skepticism, we did. (Really, we steamed it since it was covered with tinfoil.) The result: delicious chicken-shoe, which is to say, excellent taste, awful texture. I wanted to stew one and picked a recipe intended for old roosters, coq au vin. I'm not all that experienced at cooking meat and totally flubbed the dish. (I guess the bacon and the brandy flambe step were more crucial than I thought.) The ingredients didn't come together and transform into a whole greater than the parts, instead the wine sauce tasted like greasy wine and the now purple chicken pieces tasted like greasy wine-flavored chicken. The texture, although better than the chicken-shoe, wasn't all that impressive either. Forest said, “It tastes funky,” and ate bread for dinner. I'm hoping (but not hopeful) that, as promised in the cookbook, the flavors will meld and improve with sitting overnight. Of course it is all the same to those roosters whether we enjoy eating them—in fact, probably nicer for them if we suffer a bit—, but to me it seems they deserved better for the lives we took from them.

I'm cooking as fast as I can

Forest had his first day of preschool today.  He obviously had a marvelous time, and I was planning to blog tonight, figuring I'd coast on that wave of one-kid-only productivity right into the evening.   Then, as I was getting Walker to sleep, I started thinking about the next task on tap: preparing Forest's lunch for school tomorrow.  With the cupboards as bare of prepared food as they are  that meant starting from scratch.  So, this evening I baked bread, hard-boiled eggs, made egg salad, and then, exhaustion be damned, blogged.