February 2012 NewsletterJim Casada
Web site:
www.jimcasadaoutdoors.com
Thanks to his tutelage I know how to make a slingshot and select the right type of wood for the task (a good fork from a dogwood is hard to beat, although other tight-grained woods such as persimmon and bois d’arc also work well); have a solid understanding of down-to-earth subjects ranging from pulling weeds for pigs to dealing with free-range chickens, can find fishing worms and know how to store pumpkins, turnips, cabbage, apples, and other foodstuffs so they will keep for months; hold an advanced education in the finer points of fishing for knottyheads; have solid grounding in many of the elements of storytelling; realize that formal education is by no means the only measure of a man’s intellect or his worth as a human being; and most of all have a deep, abiding appreciation of the meaning of closeness to the good earth. To my way of thinking, in leaving me those qualities as well as many more, Grandpa Joe left me a mighty fine legacy. Robert Ruark, in reminiscing about his own “Old Man” (who was actually a composite of both his grandfathers and other individuals), wrote that when his maternal grandfather died, impoverished by medical bills and the toll taken by the Great Depression, “all he left me was the world.” In truth, and poverty notwithstanding, his grandfather left more for him in terms of tangible things than Grandpa Joe did me. I have the rocking chair where he held court situated four feet from where these words are being written, a single photograph of him by himself, a few family photos, and nothing else you can hold in your hands or look upon with your eyes. That doesn’t matter, because I have a storehouse of memories filled with riches far beyond the measure of material things. One of the great regrets of my life, and like anyone who has lived as many years as I have there are plenty of regrets along with even more fond recollections, was that I was unable to attend Grandpa Joe’s funeral. He died back in 1967, just short of his ninetieth year. I was twenty-five at the time and under different circumstances would have joined other grandsons as a pallbearer at the service. Buried on the day I had scheduled to take the Graduate Record Examination with an eye to graduate school (and it was the last opportunity to do so if I was to start in the summer), his passing left me with an impossible choice—miss the funeral or mess up my future. Fortunately I had already said my goodbyes, not once but several times as we talked in Grandpa’s final years, so the decision was easier than it might otherwise have been. That was the first time I truly realized the truth inherent in the old adage which suggests funerals are for the living. His death came in February, which seems to me somehow fitting, because in our countless sessions of rocking chair relaxation in the heart of winter, as he eased close to the fire and muttered about what he simply styled “the miseries,” Grandpa often philosophized about the month. “It’s fittin’ February is so short,” he would say, “because twenty-eight days of it is about as much as a body can stand.” He would then opine that the best of winter’s hunting was over, “and besides, these grey days of rain and snow are a time for a spry young colt like you, not an old man, to be out and about.” I wanted to remind him that he had been “out and about” on just such a day when he slipped in snow while squirrel hunting and shattered his hip, but I knew better. I would have gotten a good, biting dose of verbal tea concluding with something to the effect that I didn’t know what I was talking about but “you’ll learn.” Yet for all that he mistrusted mankind and clung to his independence with a ferocious tenacity, it simply wasn’t in Grandpa’s character to stay pessimistic for long. He’d shake off his bouts of arthritis, “rheumatiz,” or whatever might be plaguing him by saying “I reckon an old man’s got a right to ache a bit, but it don’t do to dwell on it.” Having thereby put his ailments aside, he would take a sip of “Rooshian” tea (a tea and citrus juice concoction) so hot it would burn the lips of most mortals, then turn to sharing his own brand of homespun wisdom with me. His thinking ranged widely and might involve anything from reliving his boyhood to practical matters such as how he planned to lay out the garden come spring or what the signs foretold when it came to weather for the next few days. Grandpa Joe was a mighty believer in signs of all sorts, from planting by them to reading what the skies, smoke, animal behavior, and a host of other things had to say about the weather. Most of all though, he was a dreamer. In some senses I think he spent his whole life dreaming, although Grandpa’s visions and wanderings in the realm of wishful thinking lay outside the normal human approaches. If money meant much to him I never saw any real indication of it, although whenever the subject came up he always referred to “cash money.” Throughout his life he had so little of it the redundancy was richly deserved, and to his lasting credit he never seemed overly worried about it. He could outwork men half his age and never shied from doing so, although he was constitutionally incapable of following orders if they involved supervision. You could tell him a field needed hoeing or an orchard needed pruning; just leave him to have at it and all would be fine. But look over his shoulder or start making suggestions on how to perform the job, and you might as well look for someone else. He was so much his own man no one could tell him anything. Grandpa’s dreams, rather than involving money, focused on things such as the return of the American chestnut, the significance of planting walnut trees (he called them “grandchildren’s trees,” knowing it would take that long for the slow-growing species to reach maturity as harvestable timber), the old days when he often heard the scream of a “painter” (a cougar—and he killed one in the N. C. mountains when he was a young man), hunting pheasants (his name for ruffed grouse) in large numbers, and indeed sport of almost any kind. He also ventured into romantic realms on the piscatorial side of the sporting equation, with my favorite recollection being when he told of speckled trout so plentiful you could easily catch a hundred in an afternoon of fishing, and every time he recounted an epic battle with a “jackfish” (his term for a muskie) I listened in enchantment. Never mind that I had heard the tale times without number before. It never grew old and that’s one hallmark of a masterful weaver of words. Sooner or later though, at this time of year he turned to a subject which provided me endless delight. Grandpa would abruptly switch directions from musing about matters dating back to the late nineteenth century to those associated with the future. “February,” he would declare, “is for figurin’, and it’s high time the two of us got busy on that front.” Or maybe he would take a bit of a different tack and suggest the month was one for “dreamin’ and schemin’.” Whatever his choice of verbiage, the point of it all was quite clear. It was time to quit reflecting on the past or worrying about the present. Instead, in Grandpa Joe’s mind a good dose of planning about events which lay in the near future was the perfect antidote for cabin fever. At that point he would launch into a detailed plan of what we needed to do to get ready for spring fishing, or maybe he would decide it wasn’t too late to make one more rabbit gum and set it in a likely spot. Or we might peruse that year’s Sears & Roebuck catalog to compare prices of essential items such as snelled fish hooks or the new-fangled monofilament line with what they cost at the local hardware store. Often Grandpa talked of trying a new fishing spot on the river, and at some point most every February we would get several cane poles ready for coming spring and our fishing forays in greening-up time. In other words, we looked to the future in joyous fashion, and year after wonderful year Grandpa showed me that dreaming is by no means the exclusive preserve of the young. You just had to be young at heart. That was one of his most enduring and endearing qualities. Grandpa Joe never saw the ocean, but he fished in pristine mountain streams and drank from springs where the water was so icy it set your teeth on edge. He never drove a car but he drove teams of horses and understood the meaningful application of the words gee, haw, and whoa. I’m pretty sure he never left the state of North Carolina, but he lived a full life in the Smokies, mountains so lovely they make the soul soar. To my knowledge he never once ate in a restaurant, but he dined on sumptuous fare the likes of which no high profile chef ever fixed. He never drank a soda pop, but he sipped and savored pepper tea like a connoisseur of the finest wines. He never tasted seafood, but he dined on speckled trout battered with stone-ground corn meal. He never ate exotic fruits such as papaya or pomegranates, but he grew cannonball watermelons so sweet they’d leave you sticky all over and muskmelons so juicy you drooled despite yourself. He never had crepes suzette, but he had buckwheat pancakes made from flour milled from grain he had grown, adorned with butter his wife churned, and covered with molasses he made from cane he raised. He never ate eggs Benedict, but he dined daily on eggs from free-range chickens with yolks yellow as the summer sun. He was marginally literate, but he read the Bible faithfully every day. He seldom went to church, at least in the years I knew him, but he was an intensely religious man. In short, Grandpa Joe was not, in the grander scheme of things, an individual who garnered fame or fortune, accolades or grand achievements. His life was one of limitations in many ways—geographically, technologically, economically, in breadth of vision, and at least in the eyes of some, accomplishments. To my way of thinking though, he epitomized love; the magic of mentoring; liberal dispensation of that most precious of gifts, time; and sharing of down-to-earth wisdom of the sort which makes one realize the truth inherent in singer/song writer John Prine’s suggestion that “it don’t make much sense that common sense don’t make no sense no more.” He was, in my small world, one less circumscribed than his but nonetheless small indeed, the most unforgettable character I’ve ever known or will likely ever know. I didn’t quite think, to echo a refrain from a poignant Randy Travis song about his grandfather, that Grandpa Joe walked on water. But seldom has there been a day since his death, now encompassing the passage of four and a half decades, that I haven’t thought about him in one way or another. Almost always it’s with mixed feelings that bring a wry smile to my face even as they produce a hitch in my throat. He blessed me with treasure beyond all measure, not the least of which was providing me an endless fund of anecdotes and tidbits of information to use in my writing. For that I owe him a debt of gratitude which can never be paid, and in concluding I only hope that at least a few folks reading these words were similarly blessed. Even more to the point, I hope a lot of you who read them will endeavor to dispense similar blessings to what Grandpa Joe would have called “your grand young-uns.” Thoughts On February Fixin’s (Foodstuffs)Although he was lean of body, without so much as a sign of fat, Grandpa was a mighty trencherman. Hard physical labor was his lot throughout life, and he ate foodstuffs which would bring raising of eyebrows and rolling of eyes among today’s health professionals—cracklin’ cornbread, vegetables cooked with generous additions of streaked meat (fatback), biscuits made with liberal amounts of lard, lots of fried foods cooked in lard, real butter, buttermilk, and sweets of every sort. Grandpa liked his coffee hot, strong, and almost syrupy with sugar. No meal was complete without a heapin’ helpin’ of some kind of dessert, and that would likely come after he had enjoyed a couple of biscuits soaked in honey or dripping with blackstrap molasses. Yet he was tough as a well-seasoned hickory walking stick and thought nothing whatsoever of working endless hours in the hot summer sun or bitter chill of winter. In the latter season he was a firm believer in feeding the inner man, and Grandma Minnie was certainly up to the task. Corn figured prominently in February foodstuffs at the Casada household. While biscuits were the bread of choice at breakfast, dinner and supper (and Grandpa ate dinner in the middle of the day—lunch wasn’t in his vocabulary), cornbread held pride of place for the other two meals. It might be a freshly baked pone of cracklin’ cornbread, with crunchy bits of cracklin’ browned to sheer beauty wherever they touch Grandma’s big old cast iron pan. Incidentally, that pan never made connection with water—it was cleaned with a kitchen rag, rubbed with a bit of lard, and then when it was to be used again rubbed with a piece of streaked meat. Or there could be corn dodgers, corn cakes (cornbread batter cooked just as you would prepare pancakes), or a mush made from cornmeal. Vegetables which stored well—turnips, cabbage, carrots, and pumpkins—figured prominently in meal planning. So did taters of three kinds—Irish, yellow sweet taters, and white sweet taters. The latter two, baked with their skins intact, also figured prominently as snacks between meals. There would usually be at least one canned green vegetable, with green peas taking pride of place although Grandma Minnie also canned turnip and mustard greens along with lima beans. Invariably there was some type of dried bean which had soaked in water overnight and then cooked in a pot, with a hambone or maybe a few bits of meat and fat from one of the hams Grandpa had cured. Pinto beans, October beans, Navy beans, and black-eyed peas all made regular appearances on the table. Dinner was the main meal of the day and often supper would be nothing more than a big chunk of leftover cornbread and a steaming bowl of soup or soup beans. Finished off with a fried pie slathered in butter or maybe a heaping dish of cobbler made from blackberries Grandpa and I had picked and Grandma had canned, it was food which, then and now, offered appeal far exceeding what you’ll get in fancy restaurants. Hearty soups loomed mighty large in the February scheme of culinary matters, and in my mind’s eye I can see Grandpa Joe now, getting down to the bottom of a big bowl of vegetable soup made from leftovers or maybe one featuring beans or cabbage. Whatever the case, and the same held true for pot liquor as a fixin’ of greens or beans was about gone, he would take a chunk of cornbread, crumble it up in the liquid, stir it a bit with his spoon, and eat it with great relish. “The best is at the bottom,” Grandpa would say, and I reckon he was right. Let’s finish with some soup recipes. A couple feature venison, a meat we never had thanks to a great scarcity of whitetails, but rest assured Grandpa Joe would have loved every one of these offerings. AFTER THE FEAST SOUP
1 wild turkey carcass (or baked hen carcass with some saved chicken
scraps) Remove skin from the carcass. Place in a stock pot and surround with onion, celery, carrot, garlic and bay leaf. Cover with water and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer, covered, for two hours. Refrigerate stock and remove fat which accumulates on the top. Remove all meat from bones and save.
8 cups stock (add canned chicken broth if needed) Cook stock, milk, potatoes, carrots and celery for a half hour. Add lima beans, pasta, spinach, peas, turkey meat, parsley, basil and pepper to the soup and cook an additional 20 minutes. Remove from heat, season with salt if necessary, and stir in evaporated milk. Return to low heat, stirring often. Do not let soup boil. Thicken with flour/water paste if desired. 12 hearty servings. VENISON NOODLE SOUP
4 cups beef broth Heat broth to boiling and add noodles. In a separate pan, brown venison. Sauté celery and onion in butter. When noodles are done, add cooked venison, celery and onion to soup pot. Add garlic salt, salt and pepper to taste. Simmer for 10-15 minutes. Garnish with fresh chives and Parmesan cheese. TIP: If you have leftover venison burgers, they can be chopped up and used in the soup. TACO SOUP
1 pound ground venison Brown venison, garlic and onion. Add taco mix to venison and follow package instructions. In soup kettle, combine tomatoes, kidney beans, corn, broth and water. Add venison mixture and let simmer for a half hour. To serve divide crumble tortilla chips amount 6-8 soup bowls and add soup. Top with grated cheese and a dollop of sour cream. Thank you for subscribing to the
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