February 2008 NewsletterJim Casada
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www.jimcasadaoutdoors.com February Figurin’; or Random Thoughts on a Worrisome MonthMy Grandpa Joe, who was a pretty crafty old curmudgeon, not to mention being as full of tricks as a pet ‘coon, didn’t hold the month of February in particularly high esteem. “I reckon,” he would opine in one of the rocking chair sessions we enjoyed tucked up close to the old wood-burning stove in his house, “that it’s the shortest month because it’s so mean and miserable. There’s no worse time of the year for the miseries, all the huntin’ worth thinking about has come and gone, trout season is still a distant dream, and the weather is as ornery as your Grandma Minnie when she’s on a tear.” Warming to his subject, Grandpa would then turn to a fuller definition of the term, “miseries,” he used to describe his collective ailments. His arthritis bothered him, in the final decade of his life any spell of damp weather set his hip to aching like a bad tooth (he fell and shattered it while squirrel hunting in the snow when he was closing in on his 80th year), and it was a bad time of year for colds or a bout of the flu. In truth though, what bothered him most was precisely the same malady which affects us all this time of year—cabin fever. I’ve had a chronic case of it the last fortnight or so, and therein lies at least part of my excuse for being shamefully late with this month’s column. However, since it doesn’t cost any of you a red cent, I reckon I can weather any complaints about my tardiness. Anyway, an ongoing bout with sinus infection, a state of abject disgust with the deer which have pruned my pansies down as if a lawn mower set super low had passed over them, and general malaise have afflicted me and left me as grumpy and grouchy as Grandpa used to be in February. This past week though, my sinuses (and those of my wife, who was even more miserable than me) notwithstanding, we spent a few days down in Alabama with some writer friends who happen to be talented musicians as well. We all get together once a year for a couple of days of pickin’ and grinnin’, although let me make it clear here and now that my sole contribution comes on the grinning side. While I remember the lyrics to a passel of country and gospel songs, attaching a tune to them absolutely escapes me. For a fleeting moment a couple of years ago I thought maybe there had been a breakthrough, for my cherished friend Rob Simbeck, who knows a great deal about country music and is quite talented in his own right, said to me: “Why Jim, you sing like a bird.” Then came the crusher. “That bird just happens to be a vulture.” Still, I suspect more for reasons of encouraging me to keep my pie hole shut when the rest of the group is singing than anything else, the pickers and singers take a break once in a while for a session of storytelling and turn to me. This time I talked about simple things I knew well as a kid, mostly connected with how food on the farm came to rest on the family table. Specifically, I went on at some length about the joys of free-range chickens and some of the problems and perspectives connected with them. Maybe some of those memories are worth sharing here. One of my favorite recollections involved Grandpa’s approach to getting a hen for Sunday dinner. Chicken (roasted most of the time except when a bunch of biddies bought at the local farmer’s store or in some cases raised by the hens had grown to the fryer stage) was our standard “eat well” or “company’s coming” fare. However, catching a free-range chicken is anything but an easy task. You don’t want to lift a hen from the roost at night, because the resulting ruckus invariably will result in a decrease in egg production from the rest of the flock for a week or two. Similarly, trying to catch one by hand in the day time may be wonderful exercise, but a chicken that doesn’t want to be caught is highly unlikely to come to hand. Typically though, Grandpa Joe had an answer. It took the form of an inordinately long cane pole with a bit of black nylon line at the end. With a hook, baited with a single kernel of corn attached, all he had to do was scatter some scratch feed and then, at a distance, dangle his lure in front of the hen of his culinary desires. Once the hen “bit,” you let her swallow the hook then pulled her in hand over hand. I think I’ve described that process before, but on one memorable occasion it went awry (through no fault of Grandpa’s). Daddy had procured a hen for our Sunday feast and brought it home early, leaving it to me and Mom to finish up the business of chopping its head off, removing the entrails doing the plucking, and the other necessary elements of preparing a hen for the oven. I thought it would be grand fun to take over the executioner’s chore, and in a moment of misplaced confidence Mom agreed. To this day I don’t know whether I hit a mis-lick with the hatchet or if Mom released the hen a tad too early. The end result however, I do remember with remarkable clarity. We had an outraged, ever so lightly wounded, and highly elusive hen on the loose. We chased it to no avail, and when Dad came home from work late in the day he was fit to be tied. He eventually managed to capture the hen, but that was the last time, until I was in my early teens, I had anything to do with the final dispatching of chickens. Even then, Dad insisted it be done properly; namely by wringing the neck rather than chopping it off. That never failed, and the separation always came at the proper place, saving the entire neck for use in making giblet gravy. I don’t think that approach would find a great deal of favor with the PETA folks, but then what the members of that organization collectively know about life on a farm would probably not be enough to give a retarded gnat an intellectual challenge. One thing I loved about having hen for Sunday dinner (and if you’ve never heard the old Bobby Bare song, “Chicken Every Sunday,” try to listen to it) was that every third Sunday I got to enjoy the choicest part of all, at least to my way of thinking. That was the little line of yolks, stair-stepping in size along the inside of the hen, which was found when the carcass was broken open as Dad carved it up. The only thing to touch it, in my view, was the rare mess of fried chicken livers fixed the way Mom prepared them—crusty on the outside but soft and moist inside. Catching chickens was but one part of a much bigger equation. In the summer you soon learned that letting a flock loose in the tomato patch, no matter how many surplus tomatoes you had, was not a good deal. Free-range chickens will choose a ripe tomato over most anything, and a steady diet of them will leave a chicken in a condition Grandpa described as “passin’ poor.” Chickens need grain, whether in the form of store-bought scratch feed or the shelled corn we more frequently fed them, insects, and a balanced diet to fare well when it comes to laying eggs and waxing fat. Another common problem was snakes developing a taste for chicken eggs. It was usually black snakes or chicken snakes, and Grandpa had mixed feelings about them. They did yeoman duty in keeping rats and mice out of the corn crib, but once one discovered eggs it could be devastating. The answer though, was as simple as it was draconian. You just took one of those store-bought glass eggs which were used to encourage the hens to get about the business for providing breakfast fare and made it available to the marauding snake. It would eat the egg then be unable to crush it. The only problem was that sometimes the offending reptile crawled off somewhere to die where it couldn’t be found, and Grandpa, who was the epitome of parsimony, flat-out hated the thought of losing a glass egg that cost five cents. Another periodic offender on the egg destruction front came in the form of egg-sucking dogs. Once a canine develops a taste for raw eggs, and I don’t care if it is a mongrel or a pointer which is pure poison on quail, it will find a way to dine on the delicacy until drastic measures are taken. Grandpa’s approach was a simple one. He would take a fresh egg, “blow” about half the liquid inside out, and use a syringe with a thin needle to inject a solid dose of what he called “hot pepper tea” into the egg. One species of pepper he raised each summer was so hot it would literally burn your hands just by touching it, and a potion made by crushing dried pods and mixing them in hot water was what he put into the egg. One bite of that fiery liquid will send the guilty dog howling from the scene, never again to want any part of an egg. Weasels, wanton killers which could wipe out every chicken on the roost, were another problem, as were foxes, ‘coons, skunks, and ‘possums. Most of those called for some canny dealings with a trap or two, something Grandpa knew how to go about with a knack I never learned (even though I did a bit of trapping for muskrats and mink as a boy). Such things were an integral part of life lived close to the good earth, and with chickens as with all things Grandpa always had an answer. Storytelling was one way he whiled away the hours in February, and he was also a fine hand with a pocket knife. He whittled out slingshots, whammy-diddles, flutter-mills, little wooden animals and the like while he told stories, and he recognized a good pocket knife for what it was—arguably the single finest tool known to man. Beyond that, we always did a bit of dreaming and scheming. That involved thinking about adventures past or planning those yet to come. At some point in February we would take a half day to cut a bunch of fishing poles. That involved nothing more than going to a nearby cane brake, selecting a dozen or so prime stalks, and cutting them down. We would trim away all the sparse greenery they held, saw carefully through a base joint, then tie a good-sized rock to each pole. Hung rock end from the eaves of the barn, they cured and the weight guaranteed you a perfectly straight pole. In six weeks or so we would take them down, attach the requisite line (black nylon “casting” line with a section of monofilament tied on at the hook end), make a sinker out of the lead covering for roofing nails, attach a snelled Eagle Claw hook and a home-made bobber, and we were ready for business. Sometimes, though not always, we gave the poles a bit more life by adding a coat of varnish to the cane. Soon enough February would give way to March, and by the end of the changeable month service trees would be blooming in the mountains, you might find the first signs of ramps or poke salad peeping through the ground, and Grandma would see to it that one and all had a good dose of spring tonic in the form of sassafras tea infused with a bit of sulfur and a spoonful of honey. One thing for sure, that folk remedy, particularly when used in the same time period as a big bait of the first poke salad of the season, would clean out the inner man (or boy). February was also a great time for food, since there wasn’t much else happening, and Grandpa Joe, never mind his wiry frame and rope-like muscles, was a trencherman of the first water. February usually meant simple fare like crackling cornbread, big pots of pintos cooked with ham hock, leather britches, turnips, and canned truck like sausage (it was canned by shaping and cooking the cakes then covering them with lard), apples, green beans, and mustard greens. We would also have game dishes, mostly in the form of squirrel, rabbit, and the occasional partridge (what Grandpa called grouse), and somehow the taste of this wild fare never paled and my appetite for it never waned. Throw in some kraut, breakfasts of grits, country ham, eggs for the aforementioned chickens, and of course Grandma’s cathead biscuits, and February fodder was pretty good. Best of all though, from the perspective of my ever keen sweet tooth, were the fried pies both Mom and Grandma prepared regularly. We had some of these, home-made ones at that, during the recent Alabama trip. They were made the right way, except the inner fixings weren’t a sauce prepared from dried apples or peaches. If you don’t think the taste is different, about all I can say is that the dried fruit, stewed back to its original fullness and spiced just right, is as fine a dessert fare as a body could want. That’s enough rambling for now. As usual I’ll finish with a few recipes, and if I can shake my current miseries I promise to do a sprightlier job of getting the March newsletter out on time. Meanwhile, memories of what I now realize was a magical boyhood sustain me. I can only hope that you have some similar recollections to warm the cockles of your heart in the depths of winter. SQUIRREL WITH HASH BROWNS2 cups chopped, cooked
squirrel Remove squirrel from bones and chop into small pieces. Peel and coarsely grate potatoes. Put drippings in skillet and heat. Slide potatoes into heated drippings. Sprinkle onion, squirrel, and seasonings over potatoes. Cover and cook moderately fast until potatoes are browned on underside. Stir to blend, turn over, cover and brown on other side. Total cooking time is approximately 10 minutes. Serve immediately. CREAMED SQUIRREL¼ cup chopped onion Sauté onion, green pepper and celery in butter until tender. Add broth, mushroom soup, squirrel, chopped boiled eggs (reserve some for garnish if desired) and pimiento. Heath thoroughly and adjust thickness by adding more broth to thin or flour/water paste to thicken. Serve in puff pastry shells or over home-made biscuits. BACON RABBITStrained bacon
drippings Cook bacon and strain drippings. Pat squirrel dry with a paper towel. Roll squirrel in flour mixed with garlic salt, pepper and paprika. Dip in back drippings and completely moisten. Dredge in bread crumbs seasons with basil. Place squirrel in baking dish and bake at 375 degrees for 30-45 minutes on one side, turn and bake other side for an additional 30-45 minutes or until well browned and tender. SMOTHERED RABBIT1 rabbit, quartered| Sauté flour-coated rabbit in butter until it is browned. Cover rabbit with onion slices and sprinkle with salt and paprika. Pour sour cream over rabbit. Cover and simmer for an hour or until the rabbit is tender. Serve with rice. All the above recipes come from cookbooks Ann and I have written. We have literally hundreds upon hundreds of scrumptious dishes in our cookbooks, and details on how to acquire them can be found in the Web site. Hope you’ll be interested in adding one or two to your shelves. Thank you for subscribing to the
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