the details of local eating
daily meals
All of our dinners are delicious except for maybe salmon soup because we eat it so much. Highlights include halibut curry with riced potatoes. Salmon fillets with roasted carrots and beets and mashed potato pancakes. Veni and moose shepherds pie. Potato peel pie with whipped black cod stock. Kathy and Laura figured out how to make fake tomato sauce with roasted beets and carrots blended with cranberry juice and spices. Ari made something resembling ramen once that was delicious.
Breakfast is always some form of potato/carrot/onion scramble with veni, salmon or moose sausage and vegetable (fresh in the fall, now some green thing that was blanched and frozen in ziplocks). Lunch is either leftovers or pretty dang similar to breakfast. Starting in November our bodies realized that fat - either rendered or fried straight from the deer - was our most calorie rich food. We started craving it like sugar and now add it to every meal. Cinnamon (and nutmeg if you’re short and named Kaia) functions as a sweetener. We add copious amounts to our current and cranberry juice and reheated frozen berries.
Snacks we mostly have to do without. Sometimes we’ll munch on carrots or pre-boiled potatoes or dried current seed leather or halibut jerky but there’s nothing in our diet that fills the fast energy niche like a granola bar or handful of trail mix. With this lack we’ve learned, through much trial and error, that if you’re hungry it’s too late. You should have eaten more carrots and potatoes with even more venison fat for breakfast.
things that have changed
Cooking every meal. Frying potatoes takes a long time or boiling them or roasting them or boiling them and then mashing them and then frying them if we’re feeling extra fancy. And we need potatoes with every meal so for breakfast lunch and dinner someone has to cook. And then clean the dishes soaked in fat.
What is and is not food. Almost a month into local eating Atticus and I ran up Excursion ridge on a rare warm and clear fall day. We’d done the same route a handful of times that summer, our running packs loaded with Costco snacks and PB&J tortillas, grabbing handfuls of blueberries and huckle berries. This time we carried dried red current leather, halibut jerky and a few baked potatoes. The ripest and fattest of the berries were still clinging to the branches which had lost most of their leaves. This time we stopped to pick them not for the taste but the same way we stopped to eat a fruit and nut bar climbing the month before. We made it to the top in the same amount of time.
How to get through the afternoon. No more handfuls of chocolate chips and craisins. No more left-over-coffee-from-this morning warmed in the microwave. No more Jumbo marshmallows that Atticus’s mom sent. Instead eat a carrot and some kelp and canned salmon relish. Maybe some frozen strawberries if it’s a tough day. Take a nap. Go run. Sit on the couch and read a book and keep feeling grumpy. Remember to eat more potatoes with lunch tomorrow.
What tastes delicious. I religiously avoided mustard and hot sauce before September 8th. A dollop of either on a chunk of moose liver (a dish I found gag-inducing before) is now a solid afternoon snack. Highbush cranberry juice makes a normal person’s face into a sour pucker, tastes sweet. Cinnamon added to the top makes it practically sugared. The first few weeks we craved any type of acid from pickle brine to apple cider vinegar straight out of the bottle.
keeping track
At the end of August, Ari and Kaia spearheaded our food inventory. (Shocking to none, we’d long since failed at keeping track of things as they went into jars and freezers and now were stuck with taking them all out again and recounting.) The result was a three page spreadsheet taped to our fridge. The image is hard to read but highlights include 967 total jars canned, 169 of which are quarts of salmon stock. Thanks to our berry picking queen Anya, we also ended up with 90 pounds of frozen strawberries alone. Nestled alongside, and creatively labeled by our dear 12-year-old guest Sophie Jacoby, were 81 packages of smoked salmon.
What we did keep track of throughout the summer was the creatures' lives we took. Our gratitude for them and the Xuna Kawuu where they live cannot be represented by these tally marks, but this chart stays on the fridge. A reminder of what went into the food that’s now wrapped up in butcher paper or sealed in glass jars. The deer and moose that we took for our family, neighbors and personal stores we already remember as individuals, so although we stopped adding columns before hunting season started, they’re as big on this chart as any creature.