Jim Casada Outdoors

April 2008 Newsletter

Jim Casada Web site: www.jimcasadaoutdoors.com
1250 Yorkdale Drive E-mail: jc@jimcasadaoutdoors.com
Rock Hill, SC 29730-7638
803-329-4354

There Just Ain’t Enough of April

My Grandpa Joe was a great one for offering opinions, and he had one on about any subject you might care to mention. Never mind that he was marginally literate, probably had never seen the ocean, certainly had never been abroad or even out of the state of North Carolina, and spent his entire life eking out a subsistence living in the heart of the Great Smokies. Those seeming limitations did nothing to short-circuit his philosophizing, and in truth he regularly offered far more practical wisdom than politicians, titans of industry, or diplomats. His approach to life was simple, down-to-earth, and far fuller of joy than is the wont of most.

I was fortunate enough to spend what he would have described as a “passel of time” with him when I was a boy, and at least some of what he had to say stuck. Grandpa Joe could find some reason to like every season, and he had a wealth of weather folklore stored away in his mind. He planted (and harvested) by the signs, could do a better job of predicting the weather by looking at the clouds than most of today’s prognosticators, and he paid close heed to what plants and animals told those who cared to observe them about coming weather patterns.

Grandpa absolutely loved April, and on more than one occasion I heard him mutter (and that’s the way he invariably talked, so softly you had to be close and pay close attention to catch what he said): “The only problem with April is that there just ain’t enough of it.” He held strong opinions about other months as well, such as suggesting that even at 28 days February was too long. In the case of April though, with the arrival of earth’s greening-up time and promise of May’s balmy days, Grandpa Joe was full of energy and maybe even fuller of himself and the business of life lived close to the good earth.

For starters there was all sort of garden truck to plant. There were taters to be cut up, ideally with two eyes showing, and pushed carefully into the rich soil, raw cut portions down. It was also time to put out onions. This meant separating the little clusters of the multiplying onions saved from the previous fall and putting those in the ground, and we’d also set out sweet onion slips bought at the local Farmer’s Exchange. Cabbage plants went in the ground, and early seeds to be sown included those of black-seeded Simpson leaf lettuce, sweet peas, beets (for pickling and sweet beets), carrots, mustard greens, and turnips. Grandpa would get his sweet potato slips started from a fine specimen which he had kept through the winter, and to keep Grandma Minnie happy he’d fool around with flowers a bit as well.

There were “biddies” (recently hatched chicks which would be raised to fryer size) to get started, all sorts of repair work around the place to undertake, and the opportunities to enjoy earth’s wild bounty certainly couldn’t be overlooked. Along about mid-month, depending on the weather, the first sprouts of poke would begin to peek through the ground, and that meant some mighty fine eating. Then there were creasy greens, lambs quarters, dandelion greens, water cress, and that pungent mountain delicacy, ramps, to enjoy as well.

Mention of ramps invariably leads to thoughts of fishing, another of April’s abiding joys which Grandpa cherished. Before I get into that it just needs to be noted for the uninitiated and victims of culinary deprivation that a bait of fresh ramps and fried trout, cooked in a skillet over a campfire using bacon grease, is food fit for the gods. Grandpa loved to fish, and it didn’t matter if the quarry was trout, catfish, knotty heads, or some other species. He worked hard yet somehow amidst April’s abundant chores there was always time for a bit of fishing.

In fact, I’m pretty sure it was in April (although it could have been May) when the two of us got into big trouble with Grandma Minnie. I may have shared this tale at some point in the past, but I cherish it so much you’ll just have to hear it again. After all, it’s my Web site, and the amount you are paying to read it means I can do as I please when it comes to content.

Grandpa and I had fed the chickens and then, while in the chicken lot, availed ourselves of the opportunity to dig a batch of the red worms which flourished in that rich soil. There were always rigged cane poles handy, and once we had bait we headed off down the river which ran in front of his house to a favorite hole of ours. It was known locally as Devil’s Dip, thanks to the fact that there was a pretty good rapid there which produced a strong backwater somewhat reminiscent of a whirlpool. A rough, rocky shoal led out to the big water, and there probably wasn’t a finer place in the river to catch knotty heads. By the way, if you don’t know what a knotty head is, the species is a type of sucker, seldom reaching 10 inches in length, which takes its name from the little bumps which adorn its head.

They were biting with a will on that warm afternoon, but each time we repositioned things would slow down after three or four fish had been added to the stringer. When that happened Grandpa Joe would lead the way as we eased a bit closer to the surging whitewater and the strong backwater alongside it. At some point, sensing danger, I said to Grandpa: “We better be careful or one of us might fall in.” He agreed but answered with irrefutable logic: “Son, you’re right, but they bite better every time we move.”

Sure enough, the inevitable happened. I don’t know whether I slipped and grabbed Grandpa or he slipped and grabbed me, but the end result was the same. Both of us ended up in Devil’s Dip. I lost my cane pole (not a significant loss), and Grandpa lost the fine straw hat he had purchased the last time he was in town. In my mind’s eye I can still see it as it made one circuit of Devil’s Dip, caught the main current, and headed downriver like a moving beacon of distress.

Fortunately that was all the damage. We both scrambled out on the rocks, soaked to the bone and looking like a pair of drowned muskrats. Grandpa assessed the situation, suggested we head back to the house to get dry, but then hesitated with an ominous comment: “They ain’t going to like this.” The word “they” was how he described Grandma when he knew she would get her dander up. It didn’t take a lot to light the fuse of Grandma Minnie’s ire, and in a body that couldn’t have weighed a hundred pounds she harbored a 250-pound temper. I guess Grandpa somehow thought that depersonalizing Grandma by referring to her as “they” somehow eased the situation.

Whatever the case, he was right. “They” didn’t like it. When we walked into the kitchen, soaked, still dripping, and shivering from the chill, she took a long look at us and then shook her head in abject disgust. Getting right in my face, she prodded me with a bony index finger and then pronounced judgment. “The only thing worse than a young fool,” she stated, turning to poke Grandpa as she did so, “is an old fool. Here before me stands a matched pair.”

With that we slunk out of the room, ever so much like a pair of wet hounds with our tails between our legs. Yet you couldn’t subdue Grandpa or dampen his spirit for long. As we rounded the corner, headed for the fire in the living room to warm up, he winked at me then whispered: “I reckon ‘they’ won’t be cooking any fish tonight.” He was right. We dined on cold cornbread, fried streaked meat, and milk, although even that simple fare was (and is) might fine fixin’s.

As I look back on those halcyon boyhood days in April, any number of thoughts course through my mind. Like Grandpa, I loved the month, with the first wildflowers in bloom, trout season open, tastes of the wild again available, and the occasional warm afternoon just to wander, full of wonder, through the reawakening woods. There’s no denying the fact that Grandpa Joe was squarely on target in his conviction that “there just ain’t enough of April,” and today it’s even worse.

That’s because turkey hunting enters into the picture in a big way. Right now I’ve got broccoli, onions, Swiss chard, cauliflower, and Brussels sprouts in the ground. The herb bed, with oregano putting out new growth, the lemon chives and regular chives nice and green, and the flat-leaf parsley already providing cuttings, is in pretty good shape. I’ve taken a chance and put out a few early tomatoes (frost will likely get them but it’s worth the risk), and we’ve already had the first messes of asparagus.

But gardening is about to be neglected in a big way, and were Grandpa Joe around I know he would understand. Wild turkeys have laid hold of my soul. I’ve already gotten a fine gobbler down in Florida (far further from home than Grandpa ever traveled in his entire life), and the season opens here Tuesday. In one sense there won’t be near enough of the time of gobbling birds, early morning risings, and the inexpressible joy of being in the woods as dawn arrives.

On the other hand though, there will be more than enough of the month. Maybe the finest day of the year, one I anticipate like a kid awaiting Christmas, is opening day of turkey season. However, I await the final day of turkey hunting, bedraggled, sleep deprived, behind in garden work and other work, a stranger to my spouse and to my house, almost as much. Take it any way you please though—Grandpa had the month of April pegged.

One final thought—Grandpa Joe was a trencherman of the first water. Lean and tough, he could eat prodigious quantities of food and did so with great gusto. Yet he never carried an ounce of fat, thanks no doubt to a life filled with hard work and, as he put it, “being out and about.” As I think about him, here are some of the dishes he loved.

PAN-FRIED TROUT

Properly cooked, fresh from the stream and with all of nature as your dining room, trout are some of the finest fixin’s a man could want. You can get them in restaurants with the bones removed, all sorts of stuffing, dill sauces, as trout almandine, and much more, but just give me four or five little fellows about six or seven inches long. Prepare them with cornmeal dinner jackets (use stone-ground corn meal), and cook in bacon grease which is piping hot when the trout hit the pan. Fry until golden brown. For the little fellows, you can eat bones, tail, and all.

KILT GREENS AND BACON

Save the bacon grease used to fry the trout as well as the bacon. Pour it over spring greens. You can take them from the wild in the form of tender dandelions, branch lettuce (saxifrage), or water cress; alternatively, use store bought lettuce. Either way, the hot grease will wilt the lettuce along with serving as dressing, and bacon bits enhance the flavor. Should you be so fortunate as to add ramps to the salad, so much the better. Just one word of warning for the uninitiated. Raw ramps are mild to the taste, but they have an after-effect which redefines halitosis. It was standard, when I was a boy, for someone who had consumed a bait of ramps to be sent home for three days. The odor lingered that long. On the other hand, if everyone in camp dines on ramps, no one notices.

FRIED STREAKED MEAT

Streaked meat has a variety of synonyms. Among them are salt pork, side meat, and fat back. In every case you are talking about salted pieces of pork, predominately fat but with a bit of lean as well. Mountain folks used it to season most everything—dried beans, green beans, greens, all sorts of fried vegetables, and more. When cooked to the point where it is crisp and most of the grease has been fried away, streaked meat is absolutely delicious. It’s salty as the shores of the Dead Sea, and so laced with cholesterol as to give a cardiologist nightmares. But slip a properly fried slice into a slit piece of cornbread and you’ll soon understand why folks where I grew up have always been partial to this simple but supremely satisfying fare.

POKE "SALLET"

Pick a mess of poke, wash clean, and introduce to a pan of boiling water. Cook until the sprouts are tender, pour off the water, and re-cook in more water (start with the water cold). Repeat the process, drain off the water, and top the poke "sallet" with thinly sliced boiled eggs. Poke’s delicious to the taste and it also does a fine job of cleaning out the inner man as a spring tonic.

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