The last of the flock block

This was supposed to be a flock block update. And it was supposed to be written yesterday, when the flock block was down to the size of a baseball.

But yesterday got away from me, and today is too late for an update. The flock block, which was the size of a golf ball by the time we put the chickens to bed last night, is now officially gone. They went straight for it this morning, and it had disappeared in a matter of an hour or so.

Which means … drumroll please … the winner is Jen, who guessed March 11. Jen, please send your mailing address so I can send you a jar of genuine, hand-crafted, Cape Cod sea salt. Better than Christmas!

Thanks to everyone who participated. Blogs are so much better when people play along.

Freedom!

The last three days have been sunny and warm, with highs pushing 60. The chickens, who don’t seem inclined to want to leave their run when it’s snowy and cold, start a full-court press for freedom when the sun’s out and the ground begins to warm. They take up their little signs and pace back and forth along the side of the run. “Free range! Free range!” they squawk.

We want to let them out, but the risk-reward calculation is the same as it was a month ago. There’s still not much good foraging, and there’s no protective leaf cover under which they can hide from passing hawks.

What there is, though, is a garden full of the winter rye we planted as a cover crop. If we put them out in that, we can stay close enough to discourage hawks, and they can have a beautiful afternoon’s outing, eating some much-needed greens and taking dust baths on the perimeter. The grass is surrounded by a chicken-wire fence, so they can’t go rogue, and we can put them back in the run when play-time’s over.

I suppose there’s no real way to determine if a chicken is happy. They don’t smile or laugh, and they certainly can’t tell you. But, roaming around the grass field, eating their fill with the sun on their backs, they certainly looked happy. I know I was happy.

Chickens dustbathing from Tamar Haspel on Vimeo.

One day last fall, as we were coming off the clamming grounds at Bay Street in Osterville with a peck of quahogs, we saw two guys loading their pickup with two full baskets of steamers. Steamers, as all you clammers know, are generally harder to come by than quahogs. They bury themselves much deeper than their hard-shelled cousins do and, although they do blow holes in the sand that give their presence away, steamer-clam holes look a lot like sand worm holes. I have also spent more time than I care to contemplate digging under holes that have been made by no sea creature I could find, and could have been made by gas bubbling up from the center of the earth, or by somebody’s ski pole. When it comes right down to it, alll holes look pretty much the same.

And the finding of them isn’t the only difficulty with steamers. Once you encounter a bona fide steamer hole, you still have to get the steamer out without breaking its shell. This isn’t easy. The rakes made for steamer digging are short handled, with tines at a right angle to the handle. You kneel on the beach, dig out the sand in front of the suspect hole, take a layer of sand off right above the suspected clam (being careful not to go too deep), and then use your hands to try and locate the steamer. Once you’ve done that, you still have to pry the thing out of the wet sand, a hospitable home he has no inclination to leave.

Digging up a steamer clam from Tamar Haspel on Vimeo.

I have only a tenuous grasp of the physical laws that account for the sucking vacuum behind a clam you’re trying to pull out of wet sand, but I have vast experience with the sucking vacuum itself. Electrolux should be so lucky.

All this by way of saying we had good reason to marvel at the two-peck haul of the guys at Bay Street.

Naturally, we struck up a conversation, hoping to wheedle their secrets out of them. One of their secrets, though, was lying in plain sight in the bed of their pick-up. It looked a lot like a toilet plunger.

“Hey,” I said, with the grace and subtlety that mark all my encounters with strangers, “What’s with the toilet plunger?”

This was one secret they were perfectly willing to share. They described how, when you get to a fertile steamer ground, you use the plunger to dig a kind of crater in the seabed (you use it under water), and the clams just drift up with with sand you displace. You scoop them up with a net, and Bob’s your uncle.

And just where was their particular fertile steamer ground? That, they weren’t telling. I understood.

Ever since then, I’ve been wanting to try the plunge method of clamming. It turns out that purveyors of shellfishing equipment actually sell something called a “clam plunger,” which looks suspiciously like a toilet plunger except that it has a longer stick and a net attached to the non-plunging end. Overall, it looked like the kind of thing we could improvise.

We have a stick. We have a net. And, of course, we have a toilet plunger.

Anyone who either knows me personally or follows this space understands that I am loath to buy anything I can cobble together out of stuff that’s lying around. The clam plunger was just begging to be cobbled. We had all the parts, and the duct tape to cobble them, but even I draw the line somewhere. Call me doctrinaire, but I think anything that’s used in the toilet should not be used in food procurement.

We bought a brand new toilet plunger, and headed out to our very own fertile steamer ground with it, stick, and net. We also brought our conventional gear, just in case.

We had discovered our steamer ground accidentally. We’d gone out for quahogs, but we kept spearing the soft-shell clams with our wicked, long-tined quahog rakes. Exactly where was that, you may ask? I’m not telling, and I know you’ll understand.

We got to our super-secret steamer spot, and Kevin waded out ankle-deep. We found an area that looked to have some steamer holes, and he started plunging. After two or three plunges, he came up empty. No clams, of course, but also no plunger. It had come off the aluminum pole and lodged itself in the sand. The threading on the end of the pole apparently wasn’t a perfect match with the threading on the inside collar of the plunger.

The same physical laws that create the sucking vacuum behind a clam apply to plungers, and it took a good deal of effort to dislodge it. Once we did, we put it back on the stick it came with, and tried again.

It works as advertised, more or less. The plunging creates a crater, and much of the sand and silt you dislodge floats away on the current. A great deal of it, though, seems to settle back in the hole, which we couldn’t make deep enough to reach the clams, which are usually about six to eight inches below the surface.

Whether the hole depth was the problem, or the clamlessness of the spot, we don’t know. We do know that we didn’t plunge up a single clam. We ditched the plunger and went back to the rakes.

Dinner, and then some

None of last year’s steamering excursions had been entirely satisfactory. The clams had been few and far between, and what there had been tended to be below legal size (two inches long). Although we’d never been completely skunked, the ratio of effort invested to clams harvested always seemed a bit high. This, our new fertile clamming ground, made for a much better experience — once we gave up on plunging. Most of the holes that looked like steamer holes proved to be just that, and Kevin and I both got much better at finding them and dislodging them without breaking their shells. Although we had a few casualties and a few shorts, we went home with five dozen steamers.

We had them for lunch, steamed and dipped in butter, accompanied by cole slaw and beer. 

It wasn’t only the clams, though, that made it such a fine morning. There were signs that winter was finally on the wane — fish were jumping, trees were budding. It was warm enough that I didn’t need a hat. The sun was out. It was a joy to be on the beach, clamming with my husband, looking forward to spring.

It was time.

Last May, we made our very first batch of dandelion wine. Up until then, the only fermenting I’d ever done was accidental, a result of leaving fruit juice, or black beans, or cooked barley sitting in the refrigerator too long. As this was our first attempt at deliberate fermentation, we followed the recipe from Euell “Try Anything” Gibbons pretty much to the letter.

At the time, I was unconvinced that dandelions had anything to do with dandelion wine. Oh sure, you start with a bunch of dandelions, but then you add things like oranges and lemons and sugar and ginger, which are all way more delicious than dandelions. I suspected that the whole dandelion part – which involves hours of backbreaking labor and many, many insects – was just inserted into the recipe to build character.

Now I’m not so sure.

The glass looked clean at the time ...

Last night, we broke out the dandelion wine, which has been aging for almost ten months. There are two gallon jugs of it in the basement, but we reserved one small bottle that we keep in the kitchen so we can taste it without disturbing the jugs. Or shlepping to the basement.

First, we took a good hard look at it. It’s not completely clear, although it’s clearer than it was when we bottled it. It could be my imagination, but there’s a faint residue on the sides of the bottle that looks remarkably like pollen. In color, it’s like the dishwater you washed the orange juice glasses in. Which is not to say it’s unappetizing; it looks like something you can drink.

We each took a sip. It has a faint effervescence and a pronounced (surprise!) citrus flavor, but it also has very decided vegetal overtones that balance the sweetness and fruity flavor. I was forced to conclude that dandelion wine does indeed require dandelions.

Which means, come May, we’re in for another few hours of backbreaking work. It’s not ready for prime time yet, but we’re happy enough with our 2009 vintage to want to try it again for 2010.

Today is the last day of February, and we planted our first seeds of the season.

Our cold frame -- that's our composter in the background

It’s just an experiment. We don’t know if it will work. We planted two kinds of romaine lettuce in our cold frame. One was a standard-issue Burpee, and the other was a fancy-pants organic Thompson and Morgan.

Last year, we used the cold frame for seed-starting, and we failed miserably, The cucumbers suffered a 100% mortality rate, parsley was almost as bad, and the few sunflowers that survived were destroyed by pests almost the instant we transplanted them. If that weren’t enough, we didn’t realize that you have to start root vegetables in situ, so the carrots and beets were naturally a wash-out.

It’s not that we’re giving up on seed-starting (although I can hear you saying that might not be a bad idea). We’re going to try and build a hoop-house for that, so the cold frame is freed up for our lettuce experiment.

We were concerned about viability because the cold frame, a rectangle of treated lumber with a glass door for a roof, was filled with some really crappy compost we got last year from a local supplier who shall remain nameless. (It wasn’t the dump compost, which we’ve been very happy with.) But last weekend we stumbled on an excellent estate-sale find that solved all our problems. It was one of those composting barrels that you spin on a frame.

At retail, one of those barrels could run as much as $200., but we got ours for a song – a mere $25. And, get this – it came with compost inside!

I have no idea whose estate the composter came from but, whoever he was, he really liked peaches. And hazelnuts. Regardless, we figured a stranger’s household compost would be a better bet than the stuff we had, and we wanted to use it, so in it went.

We put a thermometer inside the frame to see how warm it got, and the results were encouraging. Although the nights have been slightly below freezing, the temperature in the frame in the morning was almost 40. During the day, when the sun is out, it gets up to 70 or 80. Even on a sunless day, it’s in the 50s.

Kevin doing the first watering

The seeds went in today. We planted five rows, about a foot apart. We thought we had one of those watering cans with a showering spout, but we couldn’t find it, so Kevin improvised by pouring the water through one of those little plastic planters with a few holes in the bottom. We made sure the soil was wet enough, closed the cold frame, and crossed our fingers.

At night, we’ll cover the lid with one of those reflective screens you put inside your car windshield to keep your car cool. It’s not quite big enough, but we’re hoping not quite big enough is sufficient.

Our seeds are supposed to sprout in 7-10 days. We’ll see if they do. We’re by no means certain, but we’re cautiously optimistic. Experienced gardeners will no doubt have a good sense of whether this whole lettuce-in-the-cold-frame experiment is a good idea or a bad idea. If you think it’s a bad idea, you’ll do me a big favor by not telling me just yet. God knows, I’ll figure it out soon enough but, in the meantime, I’ll have at least a week of hope.

I know, I know – hope springs eternal. If only lettuce did.

It was Kevin’s turn to make our every-other-Friday dinner, and he turned out what may be, in my estimation, his biggest success.

Those of you who follow this space will know that our plumber gave us some venison in return for the use of one of our shotguns, and Kevin decided he’d make something out of the sausage. Now, when you think ‘sausage,’ you naturally think, ‘German,’ so he looked for a recipe from that part of the world.

Epicurious came through. Kevin tweaked the recipe, upping the caraway and including a some of the Cape Cod Beer porter we had in the fridge, and turned out something absolutely irresistible. So irresistible that I ate it all before I had a chance to photograph it.

Up until now, I think I would have said that my favorite recipe on this site was the Lamb and Eggplant Ragout. Now, I might have to go with the Venison Sausage Braised in Sauerkraut. And it’s my husband’s recipe! What does that tell you?

I grew up listening to Tom Lehrer. My father was at MIT in the late fifties, and anyone who poked fun at Harvard was very popular with his crowd. When I was a kid, the regular record-player rotation seemed to be equal parts Weavers, Clancy Brothers, and Tom Lehrer.

Although I’ve always liked “National Brotherhood Week” and “The Elements,” my all-time favorite Tom Lehrer song has to be “Lobachevsky,” about the eponymous Russian mathematician suspected of stealing the concept of hyperbolic geometry from German mathematician Carl Gauss some 200 years ago:

Plagiarize,
Let no one else’s work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don’t shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize -
Only be sure always to call it please ‘research’.

Living out here on Cape Cod, though, I find that “The Hunting Song” is climbing the charts.

I always will remember,
’twas a year ago November,
I went out to hunt some deer
On a mornin’ bright and clear.
I went and shot the maximum the game laws would allow,
Two game wardens, seven hunters, and a cow.

I should have kept that song in mind when we got our Moultrie game camera a couple of months ago.  I had visions of capturing compelling photographs of all our local wildlife and, while I did get some coyotes, I haven’t gotten a single raccoon, opossum, fox, or even skunk.

Lately, I’ve been leaving the camera pointed at the compost pile. Even though Kevin thinks that’s not sporting, I figure it’s my best chance at a decent wildlife picture, and all’s fair in love and photography. It had been out there for the better part of a week when I took the SD card out this morning to see what I’d gotten. Basically, it was two game wardens, seven hunters, and a cow.

A crow, a squirrel, and somebody’s dog.

Two game wardens

Seven hunters

And a pure-bred Guernsey cow

Our introduction to our plumber’s sportsman side came when he installed a tankless water heater for us, about a year and a half ago.

We’d only had the house for a few months when the seventies-era water heater, which we’d been warned about during the home inspection, crapped out. Enter Bob, the plumber recommended by the builder (also Bob) who rents an office to Kevin.

Bob the builder told us that Bob the plumber did excellent work, and knew a lot about tankless water heaters. When Bob the plumber came to take a look, he told us all about tankless water heaters, but he also told us that we lived on a great trout pond. He’s a fisherman, and he comes here all the time.

We knew it was a great trout pond, but we hadn’t yet had any success getting the trout out of it. We talked trout for a while, and let drop that we hadn’t caught one yet.

Bob installed the water heater (a Rinnai that we’ve been happy with once we got over the expectation that hot water would come out of the hot water faucet in the first forty-five seconds after you turn it on). When he dropped by with the bill, he also brought four beautiful rainbow trout, caught right in our backyard.

I’m sure he did this in part to soften the blow of a fairly substantial plumbing bill and in part because he’s just a nice guy. But I suspect there was also just a little bit of a sportsman satisfaction in having so many fish that he can afford to give four of them – count ‘em, four! – to the city slickers who bought the waterfront house but can’t hook a trout.

Bob’s certainly an excellent fisherman, and he seems to be an excellent plumber (judging by the leaklessness of the work he’s done for us). He’s also a hunter.

Bob’s main quarry is rabbits, and he has a stable of beagles he’s trained to hunt with him. When he found out that Kevin is also a hunter, they had a long talk about game and guns. Any discussion of guns naturally has an I’ll-show-you-mine-if-you’ll-show-me-yours component, and Kevin mentioned that we have a Remington 1100 semi-automatic .410 shotgun. It’s about 20 years old, in perfect condition, with a beautiful wooden stock.

Bob really likes that gun. He’d like to buy it, but Kevin also likes that gun, and is unwilling to sell. Lending, though, is another story, and Kevin has repeatedly told Bob that he’s welcome to borrow it any time he likes.

Yesterday, Bob took him up on the offer. He’s taking his son to their camp in Maine, and he asked if he could bring the Remington. But he didn’t just ask – he came bearing gifts.

I’d have been quite content with more trout but, this time, it was venison. I love venison.

Between Bob and his son, they’d shot six deer this past season. Six deer is a lot of venison, and Bob brought us two packs of steaks and a pack of sausage.

We’d have been happy to lend Bob the gun, venison or no venison, but the idea that we can trade its use for several dinners’ worth of wild game makes my day. Last night, we broiled the steaks in a cast-iron pan and served them with a wine sauce and potatoes roasted with Brussels sprouts.

I love barter almost as much as I love venison. Everyone should have a plumber like Bob.

If you’re not reading Cold Antler Farm, you should. It’s the story of Jenna Woginrich’s attempt to set up a small farm in the small village of Sandgate, Vermont. Jenna’s intrepid, and scrappy, and smart, and her blog is a pleasure to read.

Last week, she wrote a post called “Never Looked Worse,” in which she recounted some of the trouble she’d gotten into with her neighbors, and with the village, in the course of acquiring animals and growing food:

I went to a few of the neighbors to talk to them in person, and see if they felt I was in the wrong trying to start a small diversified farm in their village. I asked one woman her opinion and she sighed, looked off into the distance, and said “Well, you know Jenna. The property has never looked worse…”

That response floored her, as she saw beauty in the “sagging fences, the chicken poo on a stepping stone, the bags of feed behind the garage, the hay stacked on the porch.” She makes the point that farms are picturesque in our collective imagination, but much grittier up close.

As I read this, all I could think about was how glad I am that nobody can see our house from the road. Our property is piled with crap. There are the half-completed projects like the base for the wood-fired oven and the lettuce-in-the-cold-frame experiment we’ve got set to go on the next sunny day. There are branches that have come down in storms that have yet to be gathered into a brush pile. There is the brush pile, large even without those branches. There is the trailer chassis (trailer trash!) piled high with lobster traps. There is a very large boat, covered with a canvas tarp. There is ice. There is mud. And there is firewood. Piles and piles of firewood.

I know this is the look of a functional property, but I don’t see in it the bucolic beauty of Cold Antler Farm. I see piles of crap amid ice and mud. I can’t help thinking that the rusting carcass of a 1969 GTO would feel right at home here. Then all we need is a porch, a dog to go under it, and a still made out of an old washtub.

Jenna, tell your neighbors they have a standing invitation to come visit us. They’ll never complain about you again.

Welcome to our house

Since the Egg Pool was such a smashing success, I’m going to run another contest. Like the last one, this one involves chickens, and anyone with a thoroughgoing knowledge of them will probably have a leg up.

It all started at Agway.

In general, I’m not much of a spender. While I certainly appreciate the charms of jewelry, and clothes, and electronics, I don’t often feel the need to own anything beyond the bare minimum. I don’t believe this is an admirable trait, and I don’t take any credit for being this way. I’m simply hard-wired not to care.

Until I go to Agway.

You can send me into Tiffany’s, or Barney’s, or Takashimaya and I’ll look around for a while, admire the beautiful things, and then start thinking about lunch. Agway, though, gets me every time.

Agway, as its name implies, caters to the agricultural crowd. It sells everything from utility trailers to lettuce seeds, and has sections for composting, fence-building, bird-feeding, gardening, and horses (horse owners, that is – I’ve never seen a horse at Agway, but I don’t think they turn them away).

Any chickens on your block?

Naturally, they have a chicken section. By the time we got to it, I’d already passed up the gardening clogs, rain collection barrel, and fatwood bundles, and my resolution was wearing thin. Once the Flock Block caught my eye, I was doomed.

A Flock Block is a 25-pound cube of compressed seeds, grains, and grit. It’s designed to supplement chickens’ diets during the winter, when they can’t range free. It also seems to provide entertainment. It’s so densely packed – it crams twenty-five pounds of feed into a cube about ten inches square – that the chickens have to work at it to get the food.

It was $10.99, about twice the per-pound price of their regular feed.

We’ve been feeling a little sorry for our chickens since they’ve been cooped up for the winter, and we decided they deserved a treat. We bought it.

On the way home, Kevin said, “Make me a market on how long the Flock Block lasts.”

Because Kevin is a commodity trader, trade-speak has become the patois of our marriage. When he asks for a market, he wants to know at what price (i.e. date) I would sell and at what price I would buy.

Say, for example, we’re meeting a friend who’s chronically late. We’re supposed to be at the restaurant at 7:00, but we don’t really expect our friend until some time later. “Make me a market on Joe,” I’ll say. “I’m 7:15 bid at 7:25,” Kevin might answer, meaning that he’d buy 7:15, expecting Joe to be later than that, but sell 7:25, expecting Joe to be there by then.

“Sold!” I might say, if I expected Joe to be earlier than 7:15. I’d buy if I expected him to be later than 7:25. Or, I might decline the trade altogether, if I thought it was a good market.

I did some quick calculations on the Flock Block. It’s half the weight of a bag of feed, and it takes them a month to go through that. That means that two weeks is the dead minimum. But they still have the feed, and they might not even like the Flock Block. But they’re probably bored with the feed, and anything new would be preferable.

“I’m 22 days bid at 27,” I said.

“Sold!” said Kevin.

Now you have all the relevant information about the Flock Block, and you even know that I think it’ll last longer than 22 days, and Kevin thinks it won’t last that long. I can also tell you that, when we gave it to them, they first eyed it suspiciously, then pecked it tentatively, and finally went at it with a will. They seem to enjoy it, but it does look difficult to dislodge the seeds and grains.

To participate in the Flock Block pool, all you have to do is pick the date the chickens will eat the last of it.

Today is February 20th, so if you think it’ll last four weeks, you pick March 20th. If you think the chickens will turn up their beaks at it, you might even pick a day in April, or even later. Leave your guess in the comments, and I will list them in the Flock Block Pool calendar on the left sidebar. Please don’t pick a date someone else has picked.

The prize — there’s a prize! – is a jar of our very own handcrafted Cape Cod sea salt.

And you thought Publishers Clearing House was exciting!

They don't seem to mind guests

It was back in June that we set up our shiitake farm.  We took about a dozen oak logs, drilled fifty or so holes in each, and pounded a wooden dowel impregnated with shiitake spore into each hole.  We had been led to believe that the earliest we could reasonably expect a shiitake crop would be spring.

In November, though, lo and behold!  There was our fall crop – a single mushroom growing out of the side of one of the logs.  I harvested it and used it in a beef burgundy, where it made absolutely no perceptible difference.

Through the rest of the fall, I checked regularly for more mushrooms, but there were none.  Once the ground was covered with snow, I figured we were out of luck at least until April, and stopped looking.  Then Mylene and Brett came to visit.

Mylene is a veteran participant in our lifestyle, having visited last fall with her husband, Russ.  This time, she brought their son, and I was showing the two of them around the place. 

“And here,” I said, gesturing a la Vanna White to the propped up shittake logs, “is our mushroom farm.”

They nodded their approval, and we were about to turn back to the house when Mylene pointed to one of the logs.  “Aren’t you going to take the mushroom?” she asked?

Mushroom?  What mushroom?

There, on the underside of one of the logs, grew not just one but two shiitakes.  They were shrivelled, gnarly little specimens, and they looked like they could have been there since Christmas, but they were undeniably shiitakes.  In the dead of winter, the little triumphs mean a lot.

Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick

Who’s your candidate for greatest American writer of all time? It’s a tough call, and I think there’s a case to be made for Herman Melville or Edith Wharton. Other people think there’s a case to be made for Hemingway, Fitzgerald, or Steinbeck. Still others say Kerouac, but that’s bananas.

For my money it’s Mark Twain. Huckleberry Finn is usually on the short list of candidates for the Great American Novel, but one of my all-time favorite Twain scenes comes from the also-ran, Tom Sawyer. It’s where Tom has to whitewash the fence.

He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden. Sighing, he dipped his brush and passed it along the topmost plank; repeated the operation; did it again; compared the insignificant whitewashed streak with the far-reaching continent of unwhitewashed fence, and sat down on a tree-box discouraged.

Tom first tries to talk Jim into helping him, but Miss Polly intervenes and puts the kibosh on that effort. Next, he checks his pockets to see what he could use to bribe one of his friends to do some of the work. He comes up with “bits of toys, marbles, and trash,” and abandons that strategy. But then, “At this dark and hopeless moment an inspiration burst upon him! Nothing less than a great, magnificent inspiration.”

Tom pretends that the task of whitewashing is so compelling, so absorbing, that he doesn’t even notice his friend Ben sauntering by, eating an apple and impersonating a steamboat. When Ben comes right up alongside Tom to get his attention, Tom manages to convince him that whitewashing a fence is the sine qua non of boyhood entertainment, and refuses to let Ben help. Only when Ben promises his apple as payment does Tom hand over the brush “with reluctance in his face, but alacrity in his heart.”

By the time Ben was fagged out, Tom had traded the next chance to Billy Fisher for a kite, in good repair; and when he played out, Johnny Miller bought in for a dead rat and a string to swing it with – and so on, and so on, hour after hour. And when the middle of the afternoon came, from being a poor poverty-stricken boy in the morning, Tom was literally rolling in wealth. He had besides the things before mentioned, twelve marbles, part of a jews-harp, a piece of blue bottle-glass to look through, a spool cannon, a key that wouldn’t unlock anything, a fragment of chalk, a glass stopper of a decanter, a tin soldier, a couple of tadpoles, six fire-crackers, a kitten with only one eye, a brass door-knob, a dog-collar – but no dog – the handle of a knife, four pieces of orange-peel, and a dilapidated old window sash.

It wouldn’t be accurate to say that I think Mark Twain is the greatest American writer because he wrote one scene that I think about every time I have a tedious, time-consuming job to do, but neither would it be accurate to say that it doesn’t factor in.

Hive frames, unassembled

In this case, the tedious, time-consuming job is beehive assembly.

Our beehives came this week, via UPS, in a shipment of five boxes that arrived over two days and weighed a total of 275 pounds. I knew the hives would come unassembled, and I knew assembling them would be a big job but, as I surveyed the huge piles of parts of frames, deeps, and supers, all gladness left me and a deep melancholy settled down upon my spirit.

Each hive consists of five boxes: three deeps and two supers. The deeps are the large boxes on the bottom, where most of the hive activity happens. The supers are shallower boxes that sit on top of the deeps, and the bees use them to store honey. Each box comes as four sides with dovetailed edges. For the parts to become a hive, the edges have to be glued, the boxes hammered together, and the joints nailed.

That’s the easy part. Between Kevin, me, and the nail gun, we assembled the boxes in about an hour. The hard part is the frames.

Kevin assembling the boxes

A hive is like a file box, with frames hanging from the sides like file folders. Each frame has a sheet of foundation – a sort of starter honeycomb – inserted in it like a picture in a picture frame. Two of the deeps don’t get frames (they’re spares that make working the hives easier), but every other box has ten frames.

That’s 80 frames, total. Each frame has four sides, one sheet of foundation, one bar that holds the foundation to the top, and four pins that hold the foundation to the sides. That’s ten parts per frame, 800 parts in all.

To assemble a frame, you glue the sides to the top, and then glue the bottom to the sides. You nail the joints to make sure the thing doesn’t come apart from apian wear-and-tear. Then you work the foundation into the slot in the bottom, and attach it to the top by nailing a wooden bar over the bent wires that stick out of the foundation at right angles. Then you insert these diabolical little bobby-pin-like pins through holes in the sides of the frame and position them so that the foundation is in between the two prongs of the pin.

Our first frame, with nail-gun damage

So far, we’ve only assembled one It took us about ten minutes, but that included time to bemoan the fact that the puff of air from the nail gun blew a hole in the foundation – twice – as we were putting the last couple of nails in. I think we’ll get better at frame assembly, but it’s still going to be tedious, time-consuming job.

Luckily, the bees don’t come until the beginning of May, so we have time.

I’m thinking we could learn a thing or two from the wood-fired oven workshop we attended last fall. We showed up in a stranger’s backyard, hauled the stones, shoveled the sand, and worked the clay required to build the oven, and paid hard, cold cash for the privilege.. It was straight out of Tom Sawyer, but I didn’t mind because we learned a lot about building a wood-fired oven (and because the stranger was Brewster potter Diane Heart, whose pottery we like and whose company we enjoy).

I’m figuring some of you out there are thinking about keeping bees yourselves, and it would be worth quite a bit to learn how to assemble a hive. Between now and the beginning of May, we’re happy to teach you – for a nominal fee, or even a dead rat on a string.

A tip-up, not tipped up

Ice fishing is an activity in which you risk your life by venturing out on ice which may or may not be strong enough to bear your weight, hack at the ice right under your feet with an ax to make a hole, bait and set a gizmo called a tip-up, and sit outside in the cold watching the flag on the tip-up stubbornly refuse to tip up.

The flag is attached to a spool of fishing line, which is attached to a baited hook.  In theory, the flag will pop up when a fish takes the bait, or when hell freezes over, whichever comes first.  

People argue endlessly about whether, if a tree falls in a forest and nobody’s there to hear it, it really makes a noise, but everyone seems to agree that when you go ice fishing and there are no fish to tip up your tip-up, it’s still called ice fishing.

This activity shouldn’t be called ‘ice fishing.’ It should be called ‘freezing.’

Ice fishing is very strenuous

I’m pretty sure that none of my New York City friends can to do a chicken autopsy. It’s a pretty arcane skill but, if you need to do one, it’s very helpful to have a friend who knows how.

Enter Jen, from Milkweed & Teasel, who, with her husband, Mike, walked me through it.

The chicken (borrowed from freerangeeggs.co.uk)

Any of you who are serious about doing some of the things we’re doing (like raising chickens and gardening) or are trying to do (like keeping livestock and hunting), shouldn’t bother reading Starving off the Land. Just go to Milkweed & Teasel, and actually learn something. Anything I can do, Jen can do better, and Jen and Mike do things I’ll probably never learn to do at all, like raise flocks of sheep and train hunting dogs.

When she read about Baldie’s death, Jen volunteered assistance in doing an autopsy, which I took her up on. By the end of the day, she’d sent me an e-mail with detailed instructions, which I’m going to include here, along with an account of our attempt to follow them.

I should warn that this post is rated F, for explicit farm material. If you’re squeamish about the insides of dead animals, you probably shouldn’t scroll down much farther.

I’m a little squeamish about the insides of dead animals myself. The last time I opened a dead animal in order to examine its constituent parts was in seventh grade, under the tutelage of the estimable Mrs. Weiss. It was a frog, and I didn’t like it one little bit. But squeamishness about animals is something I’m trying to get over, and so I spread the newspaper on the table on the porch and steeled myself to the task.

Of course, somebody needed to take notes and pictures, and it doesn’t make sense for both of us to get our hands covered with potentially contaminating dead chicken guts, so Kevin ended up doing most of the actual handling. I was right there with him, though.

Most of that was pretty straightforward. The ribs were firm, there was no discoloration or swelling. I don’t think smelling the expired breath of a dead chicken isn’t anybody’s favorite task, but Kevin sucked it up and pried open Baldie’s beak. Nothing.

The first cut

STEP 2) “Unzip” the skin from the top of the breastbone to her bottom and peel it back each side. You should be able to see breastmeat. You will also see if there are any eggs blocking or burst in her cavity (egg peritonitis)

So far, so good. No burst eggs.

STEP 3) Pull out the crop and check it – has she been eating? Are there any blockages. Any blockages in her trachea or esophagus?

She should have started this instruction with, “Find the crop.” I’d pulled up a diagram of chicken innards from the Internet, so I had some idea where to look. Somehow, though, the stylized chicken diagram didn’t seem to precisely match the actual chicken carcass. Still, we found the crop and opened it. It was full of recognizable food – pellets and corn. We did inspect her trachea and esophagus, or maybe it was her esophagus and trachea – I’m not quite sure which was which. In any case, she didn’t seem to have choked to death.

STEP 4) Snip the flesh at the bottom of the breastbone. Cut the lower ribs towards the wings. This should allow you to lift up the breast like a lid or trapdoor. Reveals the innards, in layers. You should be able to see the liver, lungs and heart at this point. (n.b. at any point if you find a pool of congealed blood, look for trauma in that area like broken bones. It will have pooled on the side where she was lying.)

 - liver: should be a healthy liver color, no staining (ignore any bile staining that’s on the back). Check for lesions, growth, spots or unusual shape or hardening.

 - lungs – should be healthy “clean” pink, not too much blood.

- heart should be rounded, pinkish, & red at top with a good yellow fat line. Too much blood=heart attack. Grey= secondary infection. Any oedema=infection. No fat line=starvation.

The Blob -- there on the right

Even with the diagram, and culinary experience with chicken organs, it was hard to figure out which was which. There was a big, dark, blobby thing on the right side of her chest cavity. Lungs? Liver? In either case, something was seriously wrong. It wasn’t until Kevin just picked it up out of her chest that we realized it was that “pool of congealed blood” Jen referred to. I never realized blood pooled in a solid mass.

Once we got that out, the organs seemed to fall into place. Only the lungs seemed abnormal, with a large dark spot.

STEP 5) Remove liver. Be careful not to split the gall bladder behind it. Tucked up behind the liver adjacent to the GB is the spleen. Make sure it’s not got any yellow marbling. It should be liver colored.

We removed the liver, and promptly split the gall bladder behind it. I’m not sure we positively identified the spleen. We’ll do better next time.

STEP 6) Start unravelling the intestines gently to look for any blockages or parasites.

That, we managed to do. The intestines looked healthy, unblocked and uninfested.
 

Everything in its place

STEP 7) Remove gizzard. Check the outside of the gizzard is intact, no worms. Split open gizzard, check there is food & grit inside, no foreign objects. 

The gizzard was much larger than I thought it would be, and jam-packed with food, grit, and oyster shell fragments. It’s all muscle, and was so tough that Kevin had trouble getting the knife into it. No worms, no foreign objects.

STEP 8) Check kidneys (stuck inside, either side of the backbone at hip level). Should be pinkish, with a white line through them. Look for discoloration or growths.

We couldn’t find the kidneys, I’m sorry to say. By this time all the innards were in disarray. Nothing was where it was supposed to be, and we could no longer trust the landmarks that should have led us to the kidneys. Besides, Jen told me later that kidneys aren’t kidney-shaped.  Who knew?  Anyway, if there were discoloration or a growth, we missed it.

The only real clue was the congealed blood, and that didn’t tell us much except that her circulatory system had been ruptured. Jen, after seeing the pictures, speculated that she may have been carrying too much fat (we’re going to cut down on chicken treats) and her heart gave out. We’ll never know exactly what it was, but we were able to rule out some of the things, like infection and worms, that would have posed a threat to the rest of the flock.

It also seems unlikely that I killed her by locking her out of the coop. In all probability, she didn’t go in that night because she was either already dead or seriously ill. If she had still been alive, and I had put her in the coop, she simply would have died there instead.

I don’t think it was that, though, that made me feel better about Baldie’s death. Doing the post mortem made me feel like we were responsible chicken owners. We did a job that wasn’t particularly pleasant because we thought it was our obligation to the rest of the birds. There was nothing we could do about Baldie, but there was something we could do about the other seven, and we did it. Or Kevin did it, and I watched.

I also found it much more interesting than I thought it would be, or than Mrs. Weiss’ frog had been. That hour was a more densely packed learning experience than almost any I’d had since beginning this venture. Not only did I get a graphic illustration of chicken anatomy, I got a better understanding of how each part works. I saw the mixture of food and grit in the gizzard, the progress of waste through the intestines, the eggs in development. Next time – and I’m sure there’ll be one, despite our best efforts – I’ll do the cutting and Kevin will do the note-taking.

There’s a danger, though, in my acquiring actual skills. If I acquire too many, I’ll have to re-name the blog. I’m thinking “Milkweed & Teasel” sounds good.

We had a snowstorm last night, and I had to shovel five inches of heavy, icy snow out from in front of the run door before I could go in and let the chickens out of the coop. I heard them squawking as I shoveled.

When the door swung free, I went inside and hung their waterer on its hook. I put a scoop of feed in the feeder, and tried to shake some of the hard snow off it so the birds could get at the feed. The wind had blown so fiercely that the run and everything in it had an icy white coating.

I opened the coop door and put the ladder in place. A few of the chickens stuck their heads out. One took a few steps down the ladder, and then tried to turn back. They don’t like snow, our chickens. At least not until they get used to it.

It was only when I lifted one of them bodily off the ladder and put her down on the run floor that I saw the dead bird. What had been a chicken yesterday was a crumpled heap of feathers against the back wall of the run. It was Baldie, the bird who’d been attacked by the hawk back in the fall.

I went back to the house. Stupidly, I ran. Like it was some kind of emergency. I told Kevin, and we went out together to collect the corpse.

We don’t know what killed her. It wasn’t a predator; there was no sign either of forced entry or of bodily injury. She was just dead.

Last night, I was the one who closed them up in the coop. It’s dusk, or sometimes downright dark, when we put them in for the night, and I had gotten out of the habit of bringing the flashlight and making sure they were all inside. Night after night, they’ve all gone up together. We’ve never had a holdout, so I just assumed all eight were in.

Baldie might have been dead last night when I closed them in. She might have been sick, and that might have prevented her from going in the coop with the rest of the chickens. Or she might have been fine, just tardy, and I might have locked her out.

It didn’t get very cold last night. The temperature hovered around freezing and, although it was very windy, there’s a sheltered area under the coop. I don’t think the conditions themselves could have killed her. But what if she panicked? What if she exhausted herself trying to get into the locked coop?

I’m not such a sissy that I can’t cope with a dead chicken. It’s sad to lose a bird, but if it’s too much to bear then you shouldn’t have chickens in the first place. What’s not so easy is coping with the possibility that I killed her out of carelessness.

I'm sorry, Baldie

Many years ago, I interviewed a nutrition scientist who gave me the most cogent explanation I ever heard – before or since – for our obesity epidemic.

He’d done some work at a zoo, and he had a problem with overweight orangutans. They’d gotten used to eating foods other than the fruits and greens that are their native diet, in part because well-meaning people wanted to donate food to the zoo rather than let it go to waste. Give orangutans papayas and tree bark, and they regulate their own diet. Give them donuts, and they get fat.

Like us, the apes recognize that donuts taste better than what the rainforest has on offer, and the genes that evolved to give them a preference for fruit go into overdrive when presented with a chocolate cruller. Not only that, when you try and get them to go back to tree bark, they throw tantrums and start winging poop around.

Humans evolved to eat a diet not dissimilar from that of our closest cousins, and Krispy Kreme has been our undoing just as surely as it ruined the girlish figures of apes in captivity.

We’re orangutans with donuts, and the ready availability of high-fat, high-salt, high-sugar (read: delicious) food seems to throw all our self-regulatory mechanisms out of whack.

Small children have been shown to regulate their own intake, and can effectively keep their energy intake and output in balance. Once they hit the ripe old age of three, though, all bets are off. From toddlerhood on, food palatability (and its partner in crime, portion size) strongly influences how much we eat.

Animals, by contrast, are pretty good at self-regulation. Fat chickens are a product of science, not gluttony. The birds had to be genetically manipulated to eat a lot and grow quickly. Even so, the only way to grow meat birds economically is to keep them confined and feed them high-protein, high-calorie food. If you let them out, they’ll revert to their calorie-burning, grass-eating selves and self-regulate you right out of economic feasibility.

All cooped up

I’m worried about precisely the reverse. Our chickens free-ranged all summer and fall and, although they always had pellets, I trusted their chicken instincts to eat what they needed. I didn’t have to pay attention to their diet because they did.

Because it’s winter now, we keep our chickens locked in their run almost all the time. The smorgasbord that is our property is barren – no bugs, no greens – so there’s no point in exposing them to do the danger of predators. That means it’s up to us to make sure they have everything they need.

In theory, the layer pellets we feed them provide the full nutritional complement. In practice, I worry. I’m sure they’re getting plenty of protein and calories, but I’m concerned about calcium.

Humans need calcium for (among other things) strong bones. While chickens also need strong bones, they also need strong eggshells. Kevin thought that our chickens’ shells seemed to be getting a little fragile, so we decided to give them a calcium supplement.

Our shell pile

The calcium supplement of choice is crushed oyster shells, and it runs about $8. for a small bag at our local feed store. Uncrushed oyster shells, by contrast, are free for the taking in the giant shell pile that we’re amassing behind the compost.

Kevin dug through the pile to pick some oyster shells out from among the clam shells. Although I don’t know why people don’t use clam shells for calcium supplementation (Lower calcium content? Difficulty in processing?) we went for oyster shells because that’s what everyone uses. There must be a reason.

Kevin, having long anticipated the day we’d want to crush oyster shells for our chickens, had been keeping his eye out for items that would function as a giant mortar and pestle. When the window-treatment store downstairs in his office building closed, he appropriated a steep-sided concrete planter that was left behind.

Here’s where it gets embarrassing. All my life, I’ve been under the impression that the bowl was the pestle and the stick was the mortar. I even told Kevin, and he came up with an easy way to remember it: “The pestle is the vessel.” Turns out, though, that the pestle isn’t the vessel. The mortar is the vessel. The pestle is the stick. Sigh.

Anyway, we had a mortar, but we needed a pestle. Ideally, it would be a foot-long stick with a hard, rounded, heavy end. Kevin couldn’t find one of those, though, so he went the Paleolithic route and used a rock.

A crushing blow

We put a handful of shells in the mortar and took turns pounding them with the pestle. Before long, they were a mix of crumbs, pebbles, and shards. Some of the particles were very small. Others were still quite large.

I was in favor of more pounding. “Some of those pieces look too big for them,” I said.

“They can swallow pretty big stuff,” Kevin answered.

I was still concerned. “I don’t know,” I ventured, “I think some of them could be a choking hazard.”

“A choking hazard?” My husband looked at me incredulously.

“Like with babies,” I said.

“You realize that they free-range all summer,” he said, clearly referring not to babies but to chickens. “And they encounter particles of all sizes, yet manage not to peck at things that will choke them.”

Oh yeah. I’d forgotten about that.

A chicken treat. No donuts.

We mixed the shell with corn and some cooking oil we’d used to fry shrimp fritters, and brought it up to the coop. The chickens wolfed it down, big pieces and small. I subsequently learned that larger shell particles are better for eggshells, apparently because they spend more time in the chickens’ digestive tract, giving the birds more opportunity for calcium absorption.

All in all, I’ve been struck by the chickens’ ability to figure things out for themselves. They know what to eat, and eat the right amount. Once we configured the nestboxes correctly (our bad), our flock laid almost all their eggs in them. They know enough to come into their coop at night and roost up high, where they’d be safe from predation. As long as they’ve got an appropriate habitat – lots of space, the right kind of food, plenty of water – they know what to do.

I, by contrast, am an orangutan with donuts. I’m still trying to ditch the ten extra pounds I’ve acquired over the last year or so, but it’s very hard to do in a world full of things like the chicken liver mousse Kevin made for the Super Bowl party we went to. Any day now, I’ll hit the poop-winging stage.

Have you ever tried to reproduce a flavor? You eat something at someone else’s house, or at a restaurant, or you even decide that something that came from a box or a jar is worth trying to make at home, and you set about figuring out what’s in it and trying to whip up a duplicate.

As a kid, I didn’t eat much that came out of boxes or jars. Cold cereal – Life, Chex, and Cheerios, mainly – was our usual breakfast and, if my parents went out for dinner, we sometimes had frozen pizza or blintzes (the only childhood food I remember disliking), but that was about it. My mother is an excellent cook, and she cooked every day.

Inimitable

There was only one boxed food that ever graced our dinner table: Near East Rice Pilaf. I’m sure you’ve had it. It’s a combination of white rice and orzo, and there’s a little foil packet of spices you mix in. You add a little butter, boil it all up, and you end up with a steaming pile of fluffy pilaf.

They don’t tell you exactly what’s in that little foil packet, but I think it’s crack. Near East Rice Pilaf has a particular hold on me, and I know I’m not the only one. It has a mild, salty, nutty flavor that makes it more like potato chips than rice; you can’t stop eating it.

When I lived in San Francisco, some twenty years ago, I decided that no self-respecting cook should serve a pilaf out of a box, and I set about trying to make my own. I scrutinized the ingredient list (“rice, salt, crack”). I went all over town trying to find orzo (not commonly available at the time). I carefully measured and mixed my spices, checked the rice-to-orzo ratio, and started cooking. The first batch was good. It tasted like mildly spiced rice with orzo. It went well with lamb chops. It tasted nothing like Near East Rice Pilaf.

Neither did the second, or the third. I don’t know how many iterations I went through before I gave it up, but it was probably well into double digits. Since my Near East Rice Pilaf fixation was entirely my mother’s fault, I called her to complain about my defeat.

My jar of herring

She laughed. Laughed! Right out loud, in my face.

Now my mother, while not the most sensitive of people (that’s not a trait that runs in our family), certainly does not take pleasure in my failures, and I was a little taken aback.

“Why is that funny?” I asked, after the guffawing had subsided to a soft chortle.

“Because I did exactly the same thing about ten years ago,” she said.

The nut doesn’t fall far from the tree, as my husband likes to say.

This is the incident that kept pushing itself to the forefront of my thoughts as I pickled my herring the other day. For me, pickled herring has a very particular flavor – the Vita flavor. That’s the brand of pickled herring I eat, and that’s what I think pickled herring should taste like.

It was with great trepidation that, this morning, I took my first forkful of my herring. I took care to get a good balance of onion and fish, with no whole peppercorns or allspice berries. I looked at it closely. Looked right. I smelled it. Smelled right. I tasted it.

Miracle of miracles, it tasted just like it was supposed to. My herring was quite lean, so the texture is a little different, but the balance of vinegar and sugar was right on. Astonishing. If you want to pickle some herring yourself, I’ve posted the recipe here.

And if you’ve figured out how to duplicate Near East Rice Pilaf, both my mother and I would like to hear from you.

Vini, vidi, Vita!

When we lived in New York, Kevin and I had an every-other-Friday restaurant night. We’d trade off picking, and the only rule was that it had to be somewhere we’d never been before. The spirit of it took us to obscure Thai places in Queens, up-and-comers in Dumbo, seedy Indian joints in Long Island City.

When we moved to the Cape, we thought about trying to do it here, but we’d have run out of options pretty quickly. There are good restaurants here (we love The Naked Oyster, Fazio’s, and the Brewster Fish House, to name a few), but not enough to sustain an every-other-week habit.

So we changed the rules. Instead of going out, we cook at home. Every other Friday, we trade off making a special meal. The only rule is that it has to be something we’ve never made before. Whoever isn’t cooking is sommelier, and we splurge on a good bottle of wine.

We did it all last winter, but got out of the habit as a busy summer schedule made it difficult. We’ve just picked it up again, and I’m sorry we ever stopped. Not only does it guarantee an interesting meal at least twice a month, it helps us break out of the rotation rut that almost everyone who cooks daily falls into. In winter, we’ve got the pastas, the stews, the braises, the roast chickens, and then the pastas again.

Last night was my turn. Marcus Samuelsson’s book, New American Table, had caught my eye at the library, and I leafed through it for ideas. It’s a beautiful book with interesting recipes. The only problem is that Samuelsson seems convinced that, in the New America, things like fresh lemongrass and Thai basil are to be had on every street corner. In February.

No matter. A few strategic substitutions, omissions, and variations, and we had shrimp fritters with a mango dipping sauce, accompanied by a salad of hearts of palm with a spicy almond dressing. I want to fine-tune the fritters and adapt the hearts-of-palm salad for seafood, but it was all quite good as it was. Kevin lit candles as I plated the meal, and we sat down to flavors and culinary styles that were markedly different from our usual winter line-up.   And a 2001 August Kesseler Rieslieng Spätlese Trocken.

It’s a good system. It guarantees that, at least once every other week, you break out and remind yourself of the many culinary options you don’t routinely choose. I always look forward to the meal, whether it’s my turn to cook or it’s Kevin’s. And any excuse to buy a decent bottle of wine is OK in my book.

Back in September, I thought I was all that because I filleted fourteen bluefish. By the fourteenth, I was getting pretty good at it, so I was feeling confident as I broke out the fillet knife yesterday to tackle the herring I was planning to pickle.

An onion, a herring. An onion, a herring.

There were about twenty of them (and another twenty in reserve for my second attempt), and they were small – about seven inches, headless. I’m here to tell you that a seven-inch herring cannot be filleted. I don’t care if you’re sixth-generation Swedish, born on a herring trawler, dextrous as a circus performer. Seven-inch herring cannot be filleted.

Oh, sure, you can get the spine out, but there are gazillions of tiny bones that simply will not stay attached to the spine as you remove it, and remain firmly lodged in the flesh. The flesh, meanwhile, will not detach from the spine in one piece. If you’re lucky, you get two strips per side. More likely, you get a couple of chunks and a few tatters.

Two hours after I took the fish out of the refrigerator, I had a bowl of shredded, bony herring and bubonic carpal tunnel.

Given the choice, I naturally prefer my pickled herring boneless. But if I were to throw up my hands and head for the compost because there were some bones in my fish I would betray both my waste-not-want-not ethos and my Norwegian heritage.

I went ahead, using Linda Ziedrich’s Joy of Pickling as a starting point, and adapting that recipe to suit my tastes. If it’s good, I’ll post it so any of you who have a bucket full of salted herring in your basement can follow in my footsteps. I should know tomorrow.

I’ve had a five-gallon compound bucket full of herring in the basement for almost a year now, courtesy of our friends Geri and Emory. They got the fish from our neighbor Bob, who fished them out of the sea last winter with his own two hands. The fish are cleaned, headless, and packed in salt, waiting patiently to be pickled.

Herring coming out of the brine

Geri and Emory are expert herring picklers. They spent many years living in Denmark, where pickling fish is a national pastime, and they brought their herring habit home with them. I, however, am a rank amateur, so I looked around for reputable sources to guide me through the process.

Plenty of pickled herring recipes are out there on the Internet, and my local library came through with Linda Ziedrich’s The Joy of Pickling.

The Joy of Pickling?

I probably get more pleasure out of food than most people do, but I’ve never uttered “joy” and “pickling” in the same breath.

I blame Irma Rombauer for the “Joy of” genre. Her 1931 Joy of Cooking was the first, and there have been hundreds since. Specifically, there have been 477, according to the Library of Congress, and the list of things book buyers are presumed to take joy in is mind-boggling. It runs the culinary and religious gamut, but extends to just about every hobby, discipline, and character trait.

If you don’t take Joy in Cooking, how about Birding, or Demography, or First-year Piano? There are Cats, which are to be expected, but also Frogs and Cockatiels. There is Hockey, there is Rugby, there is Snorkeling. Every kind of sewing project, from Split Ring Tatting to Machine Embroidery, appears on the list.

If you can’t find joy in the mundane – Geraniums or Jell-O Molds, say – perhaps you can find it in Being a Woman, Being a Vegetarian, or Being a Eucharistic Minister.

Maybe Ernie J. Zelinski’s 1998 magnum opus, The Joy of Thinking Big: Becoming a genius in no time flat, is for you. No? Then there must be joy in Negative Thinking, Failure, Funerals, or Being Wrong. Or Lent. Or maybe Liberace.

Why must we find joy in a pursuit in order to deem it worthwhile? I understand why The Drudgery of Cooking didn’t make Rombauer’s short list, but isn’t there something between that and joy? Can’t something be merely satisfying? Amusing? Gratifying?

In a world where joy is sometimes hard to come by, the “Joy of” list isn’t going to be much help. I’ll give you Sex, but Vegan Baking?

Granted, I haven’t done much vegan baking, but I pickled once, and there was no joy to be had. The incident involved a crop of cucumbers harvested from the rooftop garden we had in Manhattan.

We thought we were pretty clever. Our building had a skylight with a grate over it, and we planted the cucumbers in whiskey barrels we put right next to the light. When the vines started coming up, we trained them to grow across the grate. The system worked beautifully, but we had to be vigilant about making sure the cucumbers didn’t lodge in the holes in the grate, which were about an inch square. If they did, they’d grow and wedge themselves in, like someone who gets fat and can’t get his wedding ring off.

We lost a few to the grate, but still had a decent harvest. I set out to make dill pickles, using a recipe someone had given me, and swore by.

I followed the steps to the letter, but then got to an instruction I had somehow missed in my first reading. “Store the pickles in a cool place for three weeks.” An ideal cool place, it went on to specify, would have a temperature within a degree or two of 60.

Pickles-to-be

This was Manhattan in August. There was no cool place. The refrigerator was too cold. The basement, too warm (not to mention public). If I air conditioned the apartment down to 60 for the requisite three weeks, these would be the most expensive pickles in the history of mankind.

It took me a full hour to realize that our wine cooler – the cabinet-size kind that holds about twenty bottles – was pretty close to the right temperature. Out came the Veuve Clicquot, in went the pickles.

For three weeks, I faithfully skimmed the scum off the brine, and did several other things which the recipe required but the memory of which I have clearly repressed. When all was said and done, we had two gallons of some of the soggiest, saltiest pickles I’d ever tasted.

I’m hoping to do better with the herring. They’ve been soaking for almost 24 hours, in a couple changes of water, and I’m going to tackle them today. I’m not expecting joy, but pickled herring is almost as good.