June 2010 Newsletter
Jim Casada
Web site:
www.jimcasadaoutdoors.com
1250 Yorkdale Drive
E-mail: jc@jimcasadaoutdoors.com
Rock Hill, SC 29730-7638
803-329-4354
June’s Many Joys—Then And Now
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These words
are being written on Memorial Day, and here it is about as
gloomy as is possible for this time of year—we’ve had several
thunderstorms, well over two inches of rain, and when it isn’t
raining it’s dark as a campsite without a fire as light gives
way to night. Not exactly the kind of weather to lift one’s
spirits, and thoughts of Memorial Day also leave me in a
contemplative mood. However, it’s only fair to note that
Memorial Day was never a big deal in the Smokies where I grew
up. Instead, we remembered our ancestors, fallen heroes, and all
those who followed the flag on a quaint mountain custom simply
known as Decoration Day.
The words
pretty well say it all, because it was a time set aside to
decorate graves, clean up cemeteries, and look back in longing
to those who had gone on before. The timing varied a bit,
although it was this time of year. That was more because
rambling roses and wildflowers were in bloom than anything else,
I suspect, because one of the customs associated with Decoration
Day was to wear a rose bud—red or white depending on whether
one’s mother was living or dead.
I suspect the customs of
Decoration Day varied appreciably from one geographical locale
to the next, with things such as reunions, graveside services,
grave decoration, all-day singing, picnics, cemetery work, and
more figuring in the mix. A book on the subject, Alan Jabbour’s
Decoration Day in the Mountains, has recently been
published, and I keenly await the arrival of my copy and the
opportunity to read it. Much of the book is set squarely in the
area of the North Carolina high country where I grew up.
Rainy weather
and ruminations on Decoration Day notwithstanding, thinking of
my experiences in June brings a sense of warmth and no small
measure of fond reminiscence. Maybe as good a way as any to
share some of these longing looks back—something which I’m
discovering is an ever more addictive habit with each passing
year—is to offer brief reflections on things which come to mind
when I think of June.
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Catching
night crawlers after a warm spring rain in late afternoon or
an all day rain such as we have just experienced. Night
crawlers brought welcome “cash money,” fetching a dime a
dozen and, just before I finished high school, moving up the
price scale to a penny apiece. A good night’s outing could
find one catching 400 to 500 of these giants of the world of
worms, and in the 1950s that was serious money for a boy.
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Going
barefooted. By the time June rolled around and school let
out, my feet would be toughened up to the point that hot
cement or asphalt posed no challenge, and warding off briars
(although not honey locust thorns) was kid’s stuff. One
regular test for the depth and merit of calloused bare feet
was to use your foot to mash someone’s cigarette butt. If
you could do it painlessly you knew summer had truly
arrived.
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June Specials
With summer at hand, it’s time for cookouts,
picnics, camping trips, family reunions, and other events in which food
looms large. Accordingly, this month I’m offering not one but three
cookbooks at a special price—any of them for only $15 postpaid. Cash or
check only please, I just can’t deal with PayPal fees at this bargain
rate.
The three books are Outdoor Celebrities
Cookbook, Field to Feast: The Remington Cookbook and Wild Fare &
Wise Words. Here’s some information about each of these books.
I only have marginal involvement with
Outdoor Celebrities Cookbook. The compiler, Bill Cooper, was
obviously short of celebrities because he included me. However, you will
find plenty of sho’ nuff celebrities here—folks like Jerry Martin, Bill
Jordan, Mark Drury, Ted Nugent, and Eddie Salter. All of the individuals
covered shared at least one of their favorite game or fish recipes, and
an added bonus is a biographical section with capsule coverage of the
contributors along with photos of them The 264-page book is comb-bound
with hard covers. Limited quantities available.
Field to Feast: The Remington Cookbook,
is written by my wife, Ann, and me. It is a 204-page wrap-around
hardback with internal comb binding, which means it will lie flat when
open and in use. One of its features is extensive illustration featuring
color pictures from the Remington art collection. There are chapters on
venison, waterfowl, wild turkey, upland game, foods from nature, camp
cookery, and a dozen full menus. The work also includes essays
introducing each section which I wrote.
Wild Fare & Wise Words was
edited by Ann and me, and we probably contributed at least half of the
hundreds of recipes to the 160-page hardback. Don’t let the length
mislead you. This book is jam-packed with recipes. They are the favorite
game and fish recipes from outdoor writers in South Carolina, and the
entire project was undertaken by the S.C. Outdoor Press Association in
cooperation with the Harry Hampton Memorial Fund and the Department of
Natural Resources as a fundraiser. I wrote tight little essays (I
consider them some of my best stuff) to introduce each section. These
include seafood and shellfish, freshwater fish, venison, waterfowl, wild
turkey, upland game birds, small game, and wild foods.
If you enjoy nature’s wonderful and varied
bounty, you’ll want one of these books—or more—for your shelves.
Payment should be sent to me c/o 1250 Yorkdale Drive, Rock Hill, SC 29730, and you can call or e-mail to
reserve books if you wish (jc@jimcasadaoutdoors.com
or 803-329-4354). |
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Endless bike
riding. This was in the days before gears, special tires, hand
brakes, and the like. Your bike had one gear, you braked by pushing
backward on the same pedals you pushed forward for movement, and
when hills were too steep to climb (there were plenty of those in
the Smokies) you simply hopped off and pushed your bike to the top.
No boy worth his salt wanted a bike that didn’t have a basket (handy
for things like carrying a baseball glove, one’s fishing bait,
lunch, a slingshot, or the sort of folderol only a boy in the 10-15
year age range can accumulate). Similarly, it was common to use
clothes pins to attach playing cards to the bike’s spokes, thereby
producing a wonderful sound, and sometimes those pins could do
double duty to “peg” a pair of dress pants to keep them away from
the bike’s chain.
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Catfishing. For me
it came in many forms, and June always marked the start of serious
business with Mr. Whiskers. There were trot lines, throw lines,
traps, limb lines, and jug lines, not to mention fishing with a pole
(I don’t say rod and reel because my catfishing gear was
simpler—just a cane pole outfitted with black nylon line).
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Speaking of cane
poles, no start to summer was complete without a session of cane
pole preparation. That included cutting the canes, removing all
foliage from them, hanging them from barn rafters to straighten and
cure, and finally rigging them with a length of line, a sinker made
from the lead covering to roofing nails, and a homemade bobber made
from real cork.
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June wouldn’t be
itself, at least for a son of the Smokies, without two things which
bear the name of the month. June bugs (I’m no entomologist but
suppose a big flying beetle, or a Japanese beetle on steroids, will
do for a description) gave me a lot of fun as a youngster. The fun
came in three steps—catching one, tying sewing thread around one of
its legs, and turning it loose to fly. For a time it would be great
fun, but the beetle soon wore out and your insect helicopter flew no
more.
June bugs stink to high heaven, but that certainly isn’t the case
with June berries (another name for service berries). These reddish
purple taste treats ripen in June and often offer the trout
fisherman a treat as he wades a stream and spots a tree laden with
the fruit.
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Speaking of
berries, June was the month for enjoying not one but three types of
berries which are plentiful (at least in two cases) and incredibly
delicious—black raspberries, dewberries, and blackberries. Old Will
Shakespeare once wished (through the voice of Henry IV) that
“reasons were as plentiful as blackberries.” They aren’t, but
blackberries are common as pig’s tracks and a source of pure delight
for anyone with the gumption to pick them. Like night crawlers, they
were a source of income for me as a lad, bringing what now seems the
incredibly paltry price of two bits a gallon. Yet I picked countless
gallons and gladly sold them at this price.
Black raspberries are also fairly easy to locate, and they typically
ripen in early June while blackberries wait until late in the month.
As much as I love both of them, I still have to give pride of place
to dewberries when it comes to deliciousness. Alas, dewberries
aren’t all that plentiful, or if they are somehow I’m not coming
across many of them. A low running, briar-lade vine, they grow
almost anywhere and often are found in places where seemingly little
else flourishes such as worn-out farmland or sites where topsoil has
been scraped away. They are a booger to pick, but they are worth
every scintilla of effort they require.
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June days also
meant participation in the grand old Smoky sport of tubing. A ride
down one of the nearby streams, the same ones in which I fished for
trout and still do, sitting atop an inner tube outfitted with a
piece of plywood as a “seat,” was an exercise in pure fun. Just this
past summer I was reminded of just how much that is the case as I
scrambled along the side of a stream, camera in hand, while my
daughter and granddaughter, along with a one of the latter’s young
friends, took a wet and wild ride down Deep Creek.
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Of all the
memories filling my mind when it comes to June, however, trout
fishing has to take pride of place. By June the spate of fishermen
who flocked to streams like a fine caddis hatch in late April and
May had abated, and no longer was it necessary, even in readily
accessible spots, to carry your own rock if you wanted a place to
stand. Indeed, week days would usually mean solitude when astream.
Since I found at least an hour or two to fish every day of my
adolescence, that meant lots of wonderful hours of casting without
seeing another angler.
Even today I’m never happier than when I fish all day without seeing
anyone else, because the essence of fly fishing for trout is that it
is a one-man game. In those long ago, balmy days of June, I thought
nothing of hiking four or five miles before I even began to fish.
Today, as Grandpa Joe would have put it, “I ain’t as catty as I once
was,” and certainly the mere thought of a miles-long hike before and
after a trek to trout can be decidedly “off putting.” Still, I
continue, six full decades after I caught my first trout (on a June
day, it might be noted), to relish being astream in June. Evening
hatches are fairly predictable, and if I can shake off the
temptations of slumber, big browns are on the prowl at daylight.
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That’s but a
sampling of my reflections on June, and I’ll conclude by noting
that this year June will be especially busy for me. I’ll be at
Unicoi State Park near Helen, Georgia, on June 4 and 5 joining
old friend Gary Borger as one of the keynote speakers at the
annual Southeast Conclave of the Federation of Fly Fishermen. If
you live in that area, by all means drop by to chat, perhaps
attend one of my seminars (one of them will focus on my
reflections on sixty years of fishing in the Smokies), and see a
bunch of folks who are incredibly talented when it comes to the
fine art of tying trout (and other) flies.
Then I’ll be
in the Bryson City, N.C., home where I grew up for a time,
staying with my 100-year-old father, catching up on work in the
garden there (I’m raising two gardens this year, as I did last
summer—one at his home and one at mine), enjoying the simple
pleasures of small town life, and, probably most every day,
easing off to a nearby creek to catch the evening hatch.
Two days while
I’m there, June 19 and 20, I’ll be offering a class in the
University of Tennessee’s Smoky Mountain Field School. This is
something I’ve done once or twice each summer for a couple of
decades, and it is a pleasant way of retaining my links to the
teaching which was my career for twenty-five years. The School
is a cooperative effort between the University and the Great
Smoky Mountains National Park, and dozens of courses are offered
every year. They are very reasonably priced and the setting for
the fly-fishing offering could not be better—I use a classroom
at Park headquarters in Sugarlands (just outside of Gatlinburg,
Tenn.) for the indoors stuff, there’s a big lawn nearby which is
perfect for work on casting, and only 200 yards away there’s a
trout stream where I can do in-the-water demonstrations. If you
want more information on the
Smoky Mountain Field School, just check their Web site or
e-mail me for more details. |
Upcoming Schedule
June 3-6 –
Federation of Fly
Fisher’s Southeast Conclave in Helen, Ga.
June 19-20 – Smoky Mountain Field School class on
fly fishing in the
Smokies at the Park's Sugarlands Visitor Center just outside of
Gatlinburg. There are still openings in the class. To register,
visit
www.outreach.utk.edu/smoky and full details are provided.
June 26-27 – Speaking and hosting a display at the
Trout Festival in
Bluff City, Tenn.
July 10 – Talk and book signing at
City Lights
Bookstore in Sylva, N.C., 7:00 p.m.
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Finally, the following
weekend I’ll be in Bluff City, Tennessee speaking and hosting a booth at
the South Holston Fly Fishing Fest. There will be some big names in the
sport, such as Lefty Kreh and Joe Humphreys, in attendance, along with a
bunch of folks like me who are reasonably well known on a regional
basis. This event is a benefit for River’s Way, a non-profit operation
which using fishing and other outdoor adventures as a means of working
with youngsters with disabilities or those from disadvantaged
backgrounds. You can get additional details at
www.southholstonflyfishingfest.com, and if you live in the
Tri-cities area of northeast Tennessee, I’d love to see you there.
That brings us to the
end of another newsletter, and as usual, we’ll close with a selection of
recipes. There are three of them, one taken from each of the trio of
cookbooks included in this month’s special offer.
HONEY PECAN MOUNTAIN TROUT
2 pounds of trout
fillets or, with small fish, split down the middle and remove as many
bones as possible.
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
Salt and pepper to taste
1/2 cup finely ground pecans
1 egg or egg white, beaten
Butter, softened
Honey
Preheat a grill,
broiler or grill pan. Combine the flour, salt and pepper. Spread the
pecans on a clean plate or a sheet of waxed paper. Dip the fish in the
flour mixture and shake off excess. Brush with egg, and then press the
fish into the pecans. Dot the fish with butter and drizzle with a little
honey. Grill, skin side down first, until partially cooked, then turn
and cook through. 4 servings. From Wild Fare & Wise Words.
VENISON LOIN STEAKS WITH RASPBERRY
SAUCE
1 pound loin steaks
1/3 cup Dale’s Steak Seasoning
1/3 cup water
1/2 stick butter
1 garlic clove, minced
1/2 cup raspberry jam
Marinate loin in
Dale’s Steak Seasoning and water; drain. Melt the butter and add garlic.
Sauté briefly. Add loin and cook to desired doneness. Remove loin and
de-glaze with jam. Serve as sauce for dipping loin. 4 servings. From
Field to Feast: The Remington Cookbook.
VENISON CALZONE
3/4-1 pound ground
venison
1/2 cup chopped onion
1/2 cup sliced fresh mushrooms
1 clove garlic, minced
1/4 cup venison kielbasa
1/4 teaspoon Italian seasoning
1/4 teaspoon oregano
1 14-ounce jar tomato and basil spaghetti sauce
1 8-ounce package refrigerator crescent rolls
Flour
8-10 ounces grated mozzarella cheese
Sauté venison, onion,
garlic, and mushrooms until vegetables are tender and venison is
browned. Add venison kielbasa and Italian seasoning. Simmer to heat
kielbasa.
Place two triangles of
crescent dough together to form a rectangle and press edges together to
seal. Roll lightly in flour. In center of rectangle place two
tablespoons venison and vegetable mixture. Top with two tablespoons
spaghetti sauce and grated cheese. Fold one edge of dough over and seal
edges together. Repeat procedure. Place in ovenproof dish. Pour
remaining sauce over the calzones. If any venison remains, sprinkle it
on top of sauce. Top with cheese. Bake at 350 degrees for 20 minutes. 4
servings. From Outdoor Celebrities Cookbook.
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