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 Cliquot, 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.

Back in 2000, psychologists Sheena Iyengar of Columbia University and Mark R. Lepper of Stanford published the results of an interesting study that shed light on how people make choices.

In their experiment, the choosers were customers of a grocery store in Menlo Park, California called Draeger’s. (They bill it as “upscale,” and I’ll vouch for that. When I lived in northern California, I’d drop by every now and then to see how the other half ate.) What was being chosen was jam.

Specifically, the researchers set up a tasting table offering samples of “exotic” varieties of jam from Wilkin & Sons (Purveyors to Her Majesty the Queen, no less). One day, they offered six varieties. Another day, they offered twenty-four. They tracked how many people stopped by, who those people were (by observation), and, ultimately, whether they bought jam.

Of the people who had six to choose from, thirty percent bought jam. Of the people with twenty-four choices, only three percent bought. Variety of choice, in some circumstances at least, inhibits purchase.

It’s a bloody miracle that anyone, ever, buys seeds.

Have you ever looked at a seed catalog? Take a gander at Fedco’s. There are forty-five – count ‘em, forty-five – varieties of tomato. Twenty-one of cucumber. Even the vegetables you thought were pretty straightforward, like eggplant, can flummox you. Do you want the Black King, the Swallow, or the Pingtung Long?

If you think reading the descriptions can help, think again. Catalog writers are supposed to make you want to buy whatever it is (trust me on this one – I’ve done some catalog writing), so each variety sounds tastier, more insect-resistant, and easier to grow than the next.

The bottom line: it’s a crap shoot. You just pick one and hope for the best. If it works out, get it again next year. If it doesn’t, try something else.

Unfortunately, that strategy doesn’t work so well with trees. The selection problem is the same, but it’ll be a good ten years before you find out whether you chose wisely.

And choosing is particularly hard for apples. There are 2500 varieties of apple grown in the United States, and estimates put the worldwide tally at 7500. That’s just a wild-ass guess, though. Because apples are heterozygous, the real number is probably closer to a zillion.

Heterozygous means that they have dominant and recessive alleles for the same trait. An apple tree that produces large, red, sweet fruit may have offspring the produce small, green, sour fruit, depending on which alleles make it into the particular seed from which the offspring grew. It’s just like in humans – you start with my parents and you might get me but, if you’re really lucky, you get my brother.

This means that apples, left to their own devices, are almost as variable as humans. Which is why growers don’t leave them to their own devices. Instead, they take a cutting from the tree they wish to propagate and graft it on to a rootstock. When you’re choosing an apple variety from a catalog, that’s what you’re looking at. Which means that the number of choices is significantly lower than a zillion.

In my case, it’s sixty-one. We’re going to get our trees from Fedco, a garden-supplies place in Waterville, Maine. We chose Fedco because gardeners we know swear by them, and their location indicates that they know a thing or two about growing fruit in our climate. They sell apple varieties running the gamut from the familiar, like the Macoun, to the obscure, like the Esopus Spitzenburg (an apple of “unkown parentage,” made famous by Herman Melville in Bartleby the Scrivener, when Turkey and Nippers, the two coworkers, “were fain to moisten their mouths very often with Spitzenbergs”).

Picking from sixty-one wouldn’t be quite so daunting if we were only picking one. But we want four, each a different variety. That means we’re faced with over 12 million possible combinations. I wonder how that would go over at Draeger’s.

To help us narrow it down, we’ve asked every recreational apple grower we know for advice. Turns out, everyone’s got a favorite, and everyone’s favorite is different. In the end, we made our choices using a combination of research, nostalgia, and voodoo.

We’re getting a Baldwin, because it’s supposed to be both disease- and insect-resistant, although it has the disadvantage of being biennial (which means it tends to overproduce one year and underproduce the next). We’re getting a Cortland because Kevin likes them. We’re getting a Chestnut Crabapple because we really liked the description. (Yeah, I know I warned you about copywriters, but we couldn’t resist). Our fourth is going to be a green variety (we’ve been told that insects tend to pass them over), and we’re deciding between the GoldRush and the Grimes Golden.

If you want to know how we did, check back in ten years. But I’ll let you know about the eggplant in September.

When the cold weather set in a couple months back, we knew what to expect. Our chickens would need more calories to be able to keep themselves warm, so we gave them corn and seeds mixed with fat. They’d need water that wasn’t frozen, so we brought their two waterers indoors in shifts. They’d need air flow in the coop, so we cleared the snow away from the vent. Although we knew they’d be prone to frostbite on their combs, we didn’t cover them with Vaseline because we’d read that this strategy, while widely deployed, didn’t help at all.

An egg-laying machine, and dignified to boot

And we knew we’d get fewer eggs. There might even be stretches when we’d get none at all. Chickens cut back on their production in the winter, in part because there’s less light, which plays a key role in governing their laying cycle, and in part because they often molt in the colder months, and that’s a drain on the resources otherwise devoted to egg manufacture.

Some chicken owners put lights in the coop to prevent the downturn in the cycle, but we figured we’d let nature take its course, and let chickens do what comes naturally in winter. I don’t know for sure that keeping lights on all year stresses the birds, but I know I certainly wouldn’t like it. Besides, there’s no electricity.

It has been one of the surprises of this enterprise that our chickens haven’t slacked off the pace at all. We have gotten at least five eggs from our eight chickens every single day, and six or seven is the norm. I’m sure we can attribute this, at least in part, to the fact that they’re nine months old and at the beginning of their peak laying age. But still.

“Why do you suppose our chickens are still laying all those eggs?” I asked my husband. “Is it because it hasn’t been that cold? Is there something in the food?”

“Nope,” he said, with perfect confidence, almost swaggering. “It’s all about the husbandry.”

Sheesh. He takes credit for everything.

It was shortly after Kevin and I first started dating that it became apparent he’d be a regular visitor to my apartment – the kind of visitor who needed a toothbrush, a razor, maybe a change of clothes. One sunny Saturday afternoon, we wandered up Broadway to find what he needed.

There was a large drugstore, one of a now-defunct chain, just a few blocks up, and that’s where we headed. We got the toothbrush, the razor, and a few other necessities.

One of those necessities was, of all things, a hair styling gel. To see my rough-hewn husband now, you’d never believe that Kevin ever used anything beyond the bare minimum in hair-care products. Back in the day, though, when he had to show up on the exchange floor every day, split ends were an issue.

He used something called Sebastian Potion 9, and it wasn’t cheap. It came in two sizes: a tube that held about three ounces, and a tub that held at least sixteen. Now, Potion 9 is the kind of stuff you use sparingly, a dab at a time. A sixteen-ounce tub would certainly last six months, maybe longer. We’d barely been dating that many days. I remember thinking the tube would be the way to go.

Kevin, though, held up the tub, which had a price tag in the vicinity of twenty-five dollars. “I think we should get the commitment size,” he said.

I didn’t know it at the time, but that’s what he’s like. He simply decides what he wants, and forges ahead. In that case, in my most incredible stroke of good fortune ever, what he wanted was me. Now, he wants apple trees.

Our fig tree in its snowsuit

We’ve talked about fruit trees many times, and we even planted a brown turkey fig last year. I have to confess, though, that I don’t think of fruit trees the same way I think about vegetables or mushrooms, chickens or bees. Vegetables, mushrooms, chickens, and bees are relatively short-term projects. The payoff is, at most, about a year away. Everything you do can be undone.

A tree, though, is forever. Maybe not end-of-time forever, but forever in the sense that it will last longer than we will, which is all the forever I’m willing to contemplate. I’m perfectly comfortable planting tomatoes because I’m pretty sure I’m going to be living here, doing this, in six months. Apple trees, though, are commitment-size.

“Do you balk at all at the thought of embarking on something as long-term as planting fruit trees?” I asked Kevin today.

I should have known what he’d say. You probably know what he said, and you’re not even married to him.

“No,” was what he said.

Each of us still has one foot in New York. Because this is by necessity – we both have business there – I’m spared the trouble of asking whether I’m also still tied to Manhattan by inclination. As happy as our lifestyle makes me, I can’t say with certainty that it’ll make me happy until hell freezes over, or our apple trees mature, whichever comes first.

Right now, though, I absolutely want to be living here, doing this. And if I start hedging because I’m afraid that, some time in the hazy distant future, I may want to live somewhere else and do something else, who knows what I’m going to miss out on?

So I’m happy to say that we’re going ahead with the apple trees. After all, the Potion 9 worked out pretty well.

Self-sufficiency, even the tepid, amateur type Kevin and I practice, has lots of disadvantages. You have to get up early, do heavy work, subject yourself to the vicissitudes of nature, and get used to having insects absolutely everywhere. You eat a diet heavy on kale and light on mangoes. You’re a slave to your heavy equipment.

But it should have one unequivocal advantage: you stay thin. Pioneers and peasants are lean, mean, self-sustaining machines. If, come January, you can’t zip your jeans, you know you are neither.

Sad to say, I am neither.

While it is one of the lessons of this lifestyle that to everything there is a season, no one ever mentions that winter is the season for indolence and baking.

If we were true pioneers, we’d undoubtedly have a slate of winter chores like carding wool and repairing fences which would keep us off the couch, but we’re dilettantes, so we don’t. Instead, we have a house that we keep cold enough that a nice pot of slow-cooking stew or a crusty loaf of long-baking bread sounds not just tasty, but practical. Warmth! We have eggs that are calling out to be turned into muffins and puddings. And we have a half-year’s supply, at least, of meat.

Weight gain waiting to happen

This is not in the pioneer spirit. Not only did we not raise this meat ourselves (we bought it, in one fell swoop, from Blood Farm, an off-Cape slaughterhouse that handles the animals from the small farms in a wide vicinity), but neither did we smoke, cure, can, or process it ourselves. We simply stuck it in our non-pioneering 13-cubic-foot Energy Star Kenmore upright freezer.

And this is why I weigh ten pounds more than I ought to. Instead of being outside doing food-related jobs, I’m inside reading food-related blogs – most of which encourage indolence and baking. (Particularly diabolical is John at Food Wishes and his Boston cream pie post – “where New Year’s resolutions go to die,” he says, unapologetic.)

Playing in to the winter weight-gain dynamic is the Wholesomeness Paradox (explained in exhaustive detail here), the seductive idea that a locally grown, lovingly raised, whole food must be good for you, even if it’s pig jowls. Our home-grown tomatoes are fine and healthful, and we eat them raw all summer. In winter, though, the ones we put down in September just beg to be stew or chili. And stew or chili, even if it’s made with grass-fed beef from grass-fed cows who were, until very recently, grazing the verdant fields of northeast Massachusetts, isn’t the stuff that weight loss is made of.

To make matters worse, there’s some evidence that cold weather makes us conserve calories, which would have been a neat survival strategy back in olden times when food was scarce in winter. But, when the survival strategy for scarcity meets our overflowing 13-cubic-foot Energy Star Kenmore upright freezer, you get jeans you can’t zip.

I am taking steps. Now that there’s no snow on the ground, I’m running more. We just got two cords of wood delivered, so I’m trying to be less parsimonious with the heat. We’re attempting to go alcohol-free a couple nights a week. I’m reading Denise and Lenny at Chez Us, who have gone public with their commitment to lose ten pounds in as many weeks.

I’ll really get serious as soon as that Boston cream pie is gone.

Two weeks ago, we went to our first night of Bee School. What we learned about bee habits and feeding had us wondering whether, with our wooded property, we were a good candidate for a bee hive. After a site visit from Andy (one of the instructors) and a canvas of our holly tree population (bees love holly), we determined that we shouldn’t get a hive – we should get two.

Two hives means twice the chance for a successful colony. It means being able to compare hive behavior and habits. It’s means twice as much honey. The only downside is the money.

I have provided insect housing before, but this is the first time it has cost me. I’ve certainly paid to get rid of them, but never to put them up in the first place. They’ve come, of their own accord, to live in my pipes, or my collard greens, or my corn flakes.

Bees, though, aren’t content with stale cereal or household crevices. They need a hive, and hives are expensive. With the boxes, the frames, and the accoutrements, you’re looking at $250. per hive, easy. And that’s without the bees! You wouldn’t think it would cost so much to house something, which, left to its own devices, lives in a hollow tree.

A bee brush

Since we were looking at a bill approaching $500., I started scrutinizing the list of equipment, looking for anything we might be able to do without. There wasn’t much. The list was put together by the Barnstable County Beekeepers Association, and they tried to keep it to the bare minimum necessary for a new beekeeper to get started. Still …

“Do you think we need the bee brush?” I asked Kevin. A bee brush is a soft-bristled brush that you use to remove bees from a honey-filled frame so you can put it, bee-less, into the extractor.

“Of course we need a bee brush,” he said. “What are you going to brush them off with, your bare hands?”

An ice scraper brush

“We could use the brush from the ice scraper we keep in the car.” I asked. “It looks just like it.”

Kevin rolled his eyes. “The scraper brush is a hard brush.” He picked up the sample bee brush to show me. “A bee brush is a soft brush.” He brushed it on my hand to demonstrate.

“We could use it gently,” I suggested.

“It’s $3.95!” he exclaimed, with more than a little exasperation.

I gave in on the bee brush, but I’m sticking to my guns on the bee suit.

A bee suit

A bee suit is a full-body, white zip-up number that, with hat and gloves, is supposed to keep bees out. The full suit wasn’t on the BCBA list, but several people suggested that we get at least one, and preferably two. A quick Internet search revealed prices in the $100 – $200 range.

“It looks like a Tyvek suit,” I told Kevin, who was marginally more receptive to this suggestion.

“Tyvek suits cost six dollars,” I went on.

“They’ll be really hot in the summer, and I’m not sure I want to tend bees while I’m sweating in a Tyvek suit.” He was still skeptical. “Maybe bees can smell discomfort the way wolves smell fear.”

“I don’t think the heat will be that bad,” I said. “I’m at least willing to try it.”

A Tyvek suit

“You are SO getting stung,” Kevin told me.

“I’m getting stung?” I exclaimed. “Why should I get stung? You’re the one who’s going to get stung.”

“You’re going to get stung because you insist on cutting corners on the equipment,” Kevin said, irritated. “Why do you think I’m going to get stung?”

“You’re going to get stung because you’re careless?”

“Careless!?”

“Honey, you’re covered with cuts and bruises you get from doing ordinary household chores. A few months back, you put a nail through your finger with a nail gun. Your nickname is Crash.”

He had to concede that there was something in that. My husband isn’t known for following, or even reading, instructions.

“Bees are different,” he said.

“And why are bees different?”

“Bees can sting,” he explains. And that, presumably, makes them scarier than nail guns, or chop saws, or boats. Oddly, I think we’ve found the one thing that scares Kevin more than it scares me.

We haven’t gotten the bee suit, yet. We won’t need it until April, when our bees come. And then we’ll see who gets stung first, the cheapskate or the daredevil. My money’s on the daredevil.

It was an accident that we ended up with two different breeds of chicken. We’d planned on eight buff Orpingtons because we’d read that they were friendly, docile, and cold-hardy. When we showed up to pick up our chicks at Cape Cod Feed and Supply, though, there was a run on Orpingtons. This had the two-fold consequence of making me act like a jerk and forcing us to integrate our flock, which is four buff Orpingtons and four Rhode Island reds.

Everyone should have an integrated flock. Having more than one kind of chicken has a couple of advantages that we, as first time chicken owners, hadn’t foreseen. For starters, they’re easier to count. You can also compare breed personalities. The Rhodies are more outgoing and, we think, smarter than their Orpington cousins, but the Orps seem a little less greedy and demanding.

We had read that the Orps were easy-going to the point of being a target for bullies, and we were afraid that the Rhodies would pick on them, but we’ve never seen it. At feeding time, on the roosts, at the waterer, there has never seemed to be any tribal animosity between the buff chickens and the red chickens.

It is, of course, ridiculous that we take pleasure in the fact that our chickens seem blissfully unaware of their feather color. When we watch them pecking at a pile of corn – red next to buff next to red – we have a sense that all’s right with our peaceful, colorblind barnyard community.

On Martin Luther King Day, though, when Kevin went up to close the chickens in for the night, for the first time he found a segregated coop. Buffs to the right, reds to the left. We figure, though, that as long as we stick to one drinking fountain, they’ll get over it.

Calling Rosa Parks!

Lots of things come in indoor/outdoor varieties. Furniture, activities, cats. Herbs, though, don’t seem to.

Sad-sack sage

When we decommissioned our garden back in October, we had the bright idea to put some of the herbs in pots and bring them inside. Parsley all winter!

The parsley had other ideas. It immediately started to yellow. The chives started to wilt. The sage started to brown. I thought they were all having separation anxiety from the outdoors, and they’d recover as soon as they got over the shock to their system. But now, three months later, they’re still struggling.

The parsley, particularly, has begun to act strangely. It is sprouting new growth, but the new leaves are different from the old leaves. Instead of being parsley-shaped, they’re longer and pointier, and they don’t taste nearly as good.

All you gardeners out there, can you help me figure out why my herb garden is such a bust? Is there anything I can do to resuscitate it?

What's wrong with this parsley? Old leaf on the left, new leaf on the right.

Sporting or not, putting the compost and the clam shells out lured not one, not two, but three (3!) coyotes.  We caught them in the act.

The night visitors

It was almost twenty years ago now that I was diagnosed with a heart problem called arrhythmogenic right ventricular dysplasia. It’s a tricky disease to diagnose because it often manifests itself in intermittent bouts of ventricular tachycardia (essentially a dangerously fast heartbeat), but leaves no trace on an EKG when the affected heart is beating normally. To make the diagnosis, you have to first catch the heart in the act. To do that, you use a Holter monitor.

A Holter monitor

A Holter monitor is a 24-hour EKG. The leads are attached to your chest, the machine is clipped on your belt, and you go about your business. When your heart acts up, there’s a record of it.

The sure cure for any heart ailment is a Holter monitor. I don’t know how many 24-hour periods I wore one, but in none of them did I get even a single off-beat. The same principle dictates that your car never makes that funny noise when you bring it to the mechanic. And that the intruder never invades your chicken run when the motion-detecting camera is there to bear witness.

Our Moultrie GameSpy i40

We bought the camera over the weekend. It’s a Moultrie GameSpy i40, and it does lots of cool stuff. It can take up to three pictures, or a 15-second video, when it detects motion. At night, it uses an infrared flash that’s not supposed to spook the animals. It’s rain- snow- and cold-proof. Each photo is tagged with the time, temperature, and even the phase of the moon. It’s good to know that, when the weasel ate your chickens, Jupiter was in the seventh house.

The morning after its first night guarding the run, I was out there at dawn retrieving the SD card that stored the photos. I plugged it into my computer, and opened the folder.

The only thing on it was a three-photo series of Kevin testing the camera by jumping out from behind the coop.

The next night, it was the same again. Pictures of us, making motion in the motion-detection field. At least we know the camera works.

That blur on the left is a coyote, we think

The third night, I figured it was useless to point it at the coop, and I turned it to look out into the open space by our upper garden, where I’d seen tracks of various kinds of animals. When I checked the photos the next morning, I finally had something!

I use the term loosely. What I had was the blurred rear end of what appears to be a coyote, disappearing behind our stacked lobster pots, which we’re storing next to the garden.

I now understand why there aren’t any clear pictures of the Loch Ness monster, or the Yeti. There are challenges inherent in trying to photograph something that might show up, but probably won’t. Before motion detection and digital imaging, it was almost impossible. You could sit out there by Loch Ness, clutching your camera, for months at a stretch, and Nessie was guaranteed to show up when you were eating your lunch, or blowing your nose. So, yeah, you only got the tail. I understand.

Cameras like my GameSpy (the name and appearance of which make me feel like I should watch for black helicopters coming up over the horizon) make endeavors like this easier, but by no means foolproof. When Kevin and I went outside to check for coyote tracks behind the lobster pots (we found them), we also found wild turkey tracks – two feet outside the camera’s range. It’s like they knew.

Tonight, my plan is to put fresh scraps on the compost pile and fresh clam shells on the clamshell pile, and aim the camera in that direction. I think that would guarantee us some foraging wildlife, but Kevin thinks it’s unsporting to put bait out there and photograph the animals who come to eat it.

I don’t think it’s any less sporting than putting chickens out there, and photgraphing the animals who come to eat them. But I speak hypothetically, because everyone knows that never works.

Can you spot the Kevinicus husbandicum?

It was just a couple weeks ago that I made a big hairy deal about the fact that the only part of self-sufficiency that interests me is the food. No knitting, no soap-making, no finish carpentry.

Today, I’m using home-made toothpaste.

There is a food connection, though, in the form of wintergreen. I’ve had some leaves steeping since last winter, and we’ve tried to use it in food but, as a flavoring, it has a serious drawback: it makes everything taste like toothpaste. So, for almost a year now, we’ve been wondering what to do with these two little jars of toothpaste flavoring. Kevin was the first to see it.

He started browsing the Internet for toothpaste recipes

Anyone who’s ever browsed the Internet for a recipe has to wonder why anyone’s worried about those explosive-making sites. Internet recipes, particularly from crackpot sources, are notoriously unreliable, and the proto-terrorist who reads online that he can make a bomb out of anchovies and deodorant is unlikely to get very far.

If you’re looking for a recipe for something straightforward – zucchini bread, say – you’ll probably do pretty well. But once you leave the well-trodden path and start looking for things like mortar, or dishwashing detergent, or deep-tissue massage oil, it gets a lot dicier.

Toothpaste recipes run the gamut, but most are some permutation of the same six ingredients: baking soda, hydrogen peroxide, glycerin, salt, non-sugar sweetener, and flavoring. The only one of those we didn’t have in the house was glycerin, so we picked up a bottle at the local drugstore and Kevin went to work.

How do you get it in the tube?

A little of this, a little of that, a taste, and a little more of the other thing. Mix it up with an absurdly tiny whisk that was intended to be decorative, and it was ready for its inaugural brush.

Kevin took the bowl into the bathroom and dipped his toothbrush in. He scooped up a daring grape-sized globule and started to brush. I watched carefully for his reaction. Nothing.

To understand what “nothing” means in this context, you have to understand my husband. He’s as tough as they come. He’s capable of withstanding pain and hardship – physical or emotional – that would have me running for the hills. The day he put a nail through his index finger with a nail gun while putting together a raised bed for our friend Linda he barely flinched. Then he pretended it was only a scratch, partly because he didn’t want Linda to feel bad and partly because he felt stupid for exercising insufficient care with a dangerous tool.

He's going in ...

As he tested his toothpaste, he certainly would have nodded and smiled, or given the thumbs up, if he had liked the taste. But, if he hadn’t, nothing on god’s green earth would have induced him to make a face and spit it out, or even grimace in displeasure.

“How was it?” I asked, after he’d rinsed.

“It was OK,” he said. “A little too salty, but OK. You should try it.” He proffered the bowl to me.

I dipped my toothbrush in, and took a less daring, pea-sized globule. I started to brush.

Without a doubt, this was far and away the worst toothpaste I’d ever tried. The worst I’d ever heard of! It was nasty and salty and gritty and absolutely not something you wanted in your mouth. I brushed long enough to be able to say I did it, and then spat and rinsed. And rinsed some more.

Kevin’s going to tweak the recipe. Meanwhile, I’m sticking with Tom’s of Maine (fennel flavor).

This experience has reinforced my determination that, when it comes to self-sufficiency, I’m sticking to the edible. And I don’t think it’s just me and my priorities; it has to do with the nature of food itself. Food is fragile and perishable, and handling it, transporting it, and processing it in a factory somewhere is unlikely to do it any good.

The same can’t be said of soap, or furniture, or clothing. People with industrial-strength tools, and vast experience, and economies of scale, are invariably going to turn out better versions of those items than I can make myself. There are lots of things that factories do better than people. Sure, a proficient knitter can turn out beautiful things, but there are a lot of misbegotten socks between here and proficiency, and even the best knitter can’t knit me a new pair of Wellingtons.

Tom’s of Maine makes better toothpaste than I ever will, but I make better chili than Hormel ever can.

We won’t discuss my root beer.

Blame it on Danny, from Cottage Smallholder. He had the bright idea of nominating me for a 2010 Bloggie Award, and now I can’t just let a sleeping dog lie. I have to wake it up, and ask it to vote for me.

I’m running in the “Most Humorous” category. It’s a stretch, I know, but at least it gets me around the problem of competing with some of the excellent food blogs listed on the right side of your screen over there. If I’ve ever managed to make you laugh, and you’ve got a few minutes to cast a vote, you can do it at the 2010 Weblog Awards site.

While you’re there, you might consider some of those excellent blogs listed on the right side of your screen for Best Food Blog. (You have to include three nominations for your vote to count.)

Voting closes on Tuesday, at which point I should have pictures from the brand new trail camera (the outdoor kind, with motion detector and infrared flash) we bought yesterday. We’re going to hang it outside the chicken run to see what’s breaking in while we sleep. If you vote for me, I’ll post the pictures. I know the suspense is killing you.

The break-in site

I need your help. Something got into our “predator-proof” chicken run, and I need to know what it was.

Yesterday morning, when Kevin went out to let the chickens out of the coop, he found a hole in the floor in the run. He followed it to its natural conclusion, and found the tunnel’s end on the backside of the run wall. Something dug a two-foot tunnel under the 6×6 lumber that forms our run’s foundation, and came up through the wire fencing that lines the floor of the run.

He was en route to his office when he discovered it, and he called me when he got there.

“Something got into the run last night,” he said.

I pictured a grizzly bear, and carnage.

“It dug under the wall,” he went on. “You should go take a look.”

Whew. He wouldn’t be telling me to go out there if there were a man-eater on the loose. I put on my boots and headed out to the run.

Tracks of my fears

Now you would have thought I’d read enough mysteries and watched enough cop shows to know that you can’t be blundering about in a crime scene, but that’s exactly what I did. I stomped around in the snow, looking for the tunnel entrance, covering all the animal tracks in the process.

Nevertheless, I have three clues:

1.  The tunnel was narrow – my hand couldn’t fit through – and whatever it was fit through the 2×3 inch hole in the fencing.

2.  There was a well-worn path from the tunnel to the woodpile, indicating many trips, presumably with chicken food.

More tracks

3.  The same animal came back the next day, but didn’t bother to dig, either because he was sore from the night before or because Kevin hung the feeder out of reach.

There was a dusting of snow yesterday, but the culprit didn’t have the decency to leave any sharp prints. I can see, though, that its feet are about the size of a quarter, and they look to have four slightly oblong toes

I’m thinking rat. I’m hoping rat. If it’s after the chicken food, it’s a nuisance, but if it’s after the actual chickens, it’s a real threat.

Any ideas?

Rats?

… and I’ll make stock.

A year into Starving, the waste-not mentality has taken root, and it makes me look at everything differently. If I see a downed branch, I think firewood. Bacon fat gets turned into chicken feed. Fish guts? Lobster bait!

It’s gotten to the point where not only do I want to save every stray piece of metal, plastic, and cardboard that comes our way, I want to get other people’s cast-offs from the scrap heap at the dump. “Just what are we going to do with those vertical blind slats?” Kevin asks, quite reasonably, as I emerge triumphant from the construction pile with an armload of them. “I’m thinking maybe edging?” I say, a bit tentatively. “For the garden? Or maybe the stone patio?”

Inexpertly butchered rabbit braising in beer and stock

I had thought that this tendency was new, born of the seat-of-the-pants, food-procuring lifestyle we’ve embraced since we moved here – a lifestyle that has us doing things that actually seem to require stray pieces of metal, plastic, and cardboard. And vertical blind slats. Last night, though, as Kevin and I were finishing the beer-braised rabbit I’d made for dinner, I realized I’d always been like this.

Kevin finished a leg and held up the bone. “Do you have a receptacle?” he asked. I opened the freezer and rummaged through my collection of Ziploc bags. I found a partly-filled one marked “chicken scraps.” Close enough. In went the rabbit bone.

We never throw away a bone. The remains of any animal that graces our table – bones, scraps, and innards – get put in a bag in the freezer until I have enough to make a pot of stock. I’ve been known to take bones home from restaurants, and I’ve even taken them from dinner parties at other people’s houses.

“You’re not going to throw that away?” I ask, as I see the hostess prepare to dump a carcass in the trash. “Well … yes,” she says. “You should make stock out of it,” I say, on the pretext of being helpful. I know that anyone who’s throwing away a carcass won’t be making stock any time soon, and she will gladly give said carcass to me. Which she does. (She doesn’t catch me eyeing her vertical blinds.)

I’ve always been a re-user. I just never had so many uses.

Because I’ve settled into winter cooking routine, which focuses on stock-rich stews, soups, and braises, and because it’s the middle of January and not much else is going on, I’m going to depart from my usual navel-gazing and use this post to be an advocate. I’m advocating home-made stock. And not just because stock-making is an excellent waste-not habit, but also because stock you make at home is in a different league from stock you buy (a few exceptional butcher shops excepted). And stock is critical to food.

Don’t take my word for it. Ask Auguste Escoffier, who’s generally regarded as the father of classical French cooking. His Guide Culinaire, first published in 1903, is still thought of as definitive. This (in translation) is how the book opens:

Before undertaking the description of the different kinds of dishes whose recipes I intend giving in this work, it will be necessary to reveal the groundwork whereon these recipes are built. And, although this has already been done again and again, and is wearisome in the extreme, a textbook on cooking that did not include it would be not only incomplete, but in many cases incomprehensible … .Indeed, stock is everything in cooking.

Escoffier’s way fussier about his stock than I am, but with good reason. Like any professional chef, he has to make stock exactly the same way every time because he has to make dishes that taste exactly the same way, every time. Home cooks can play fast and loose.

If you’ve been scared away from making stock by recipes that call for bouquets garni and constant skimming, forget all that. All you need to make stock is bones and water, heat and time. That’s it. You don’t need vegetables or herbs, wine or salt. The meals you make with your stock will have all those things, and then some. Your stock provides backbone, mouth feel, richness, and none of that comes from carrots. It’s all about the meat. (Vegetable and fish stock are also useful, but in a different way.)

Which is not to say you shouldn’t throw in a carrot – or an onion, or a celery stalk – if you’ve got one. A few vegetables won’t hurt. But you don’t need them, and I generally don’t bother.

Here’s the simplest way to make stock: put bones and meat scraps in a pot, cover with water, simmer for three hours, and drain. You can even mix species. If I have enough lamb scraps to make a batch of lamb stock, that’s what I do. But if I just have a few rib bones, and I’m making chicken stock, in they go.

When your stock is done, it should taste like the makings of soup. If it doesn’t, either it hasn’t been cooking long enough, or you started with too much water. Either way, concentrate it by cooking it down until it seems like stock. Then refrigerate it and let the fat solidify on the surface. Skim the fat, and you should find gelled stock underneath. If it hasn’t gelled, you can still use it, but adjust your water-to-scraps ratio for your next attempt.

If you’re more in Escoffier’s camp than mine, you care a lot more about the niceties. Some dishes call for white stock, others brown. Some need veal, some need chicken. To accommodate those needs, you’re going to have to be more persnickety about your stock. But if you’re a throw-it-together type cook, just about any stock will do.

Stock-making isn’t so much a chore as a habit. The chicken bones go in the freezer in the same way the apple cores go in the compost; it becomes automatic. Boil ‘em up when you have enough. Making stock isn’t any harder than making compost, and there’s no heavy lifting.

If you’re not convinced, come over to our house for some beer-braised rabbit. The stew of beans and carrots, which melt into the beer and stock, will convince you. You’ll be sneaking the rabbit bones into your handbag. But keep your hands off my blinds.

Many years ago, when I lived in California, my friend Greg came to visit. I knew, at the time, that Greg played a mean game of ping pong, but I didn’t know he was interested in competitive table tennis. I didn’t know there was competitive table tennis. But we headed over to Berkeley for a tournament and the scales fell from my eyes.

A semi-final doubles match at the 2009 World Table Tennis Championships (photo borrowed from Kiyoshi Ota/Getty Images). Note shoes, shorts, and focus.

The tournament was in a huge, open room, set up with ping-pong tables as far as the eye could see. They were spaced father apart than I would have thought necessary, but that was because the players, as I later learned, stood a good six feet back from the table.

That wasn’t the only way in which this kind of game did not resemble the rec-room ping pong I’d occasionally dabbled in. For starters, there was the concentration. The players were every bit as focused as Serena Williams or Rafael Nadal.

“Didn’t anyone tell them this isn’t real tennis?” I whispered to Greg. He kicked me and told me to be quiet.

They had super-duper paddles that, judging by their cost, must have been made from titanium. They had special shorts that allowed them freedom of movement. They had ping-pong shoes that gave them the right kind of grip. Many of them looked like serious athletes.

I found it fascinating. And it wasn’t just the game, although I found myself drawn in. It was the idea that there was an entire table-tennis subculture that I knew nothing about. I’d probably passed some of these players on the street, having no idea that they had secret lives as competitive ping-pong players.

A glimpse into someone else’s subculture, previously unknown, is a reminder of all the things you might be doing with your leisure time if you didn’t squander it all on Facebook.

Since we’ve been here, I’ve discovered that there are groups – some loosely organized, some formal enough to be incorporated – that have coalesced around every activity we’ve undertaken. There are not only gardeners, there are shellfishers and bird-watchers and mushroom foragers.

And beekeepers. Monday was our first night of Bee School, a class intended to help rank novices learn how – or whether – to keep bees. It’s put on by the Barnstable County Beekeepers Association, which has a fifty-year history and a robust membership. Beekeeping is very popular on Cape Cod, and more of our fellow citizens than I would have suspected have hives in their backyards. Who knew?

We’d been planning to get a hive in the spring, but our first class gave us pause. In order to thrive, the instructor pointed out, bees need an abundant supply of nectar. At some level, of course, I knew that, but I’d never stopped to consider the implications for our situation. We live in the woods, and are nectar-challenged. I looked at Kevin in alarm. “We’re nectar- challenged,” I said.

He scoffed. “We have 120 rhododendrons.”

It’s true, we have 120 rhododendrons. I’d forgotten about them because they flowered months ago. Out of sight, out of mind. But they’re only in bloom for six weeks. What are the bees going to live on the rest of the year?

After class, we explained our situation to Andy, one of the professional apiarists teaching the class. “ Will the rhododendrons be sufficient?” we asked.

“Rhododendrons are no good for bees,” he told us. “They don’t have nectar.” He saw my look of disappointment. “What else you got?” he asked.

We have exactly what he’d already said was, from the bees’ perspective, a barren wasteland – oak and scrub pine. And nasty prickery vines.

One of our holly trees, probably 50 feet tall

“No linden trees? Or black locusts?” he asked.

I couldn’t say for sure, but I didn’t think so.

“How about holly?”

Bingo! Andy told us that holly was almost as good as linden, with nectar-rich flowers. And holly, we’ve got in abundance. Not only that, it turns out we live about two miles from a decommissioned holly farm, which still has many acres of mature trees. Since two miles is well within a bee’s foraging radius, things were looking up.

“Do you think we should do it?” I asked Kevin. The initial investment is in the neighborhood of $400. so, although we’re both very interested in bees, I didn’t want to try it if we were doomed to fail.

Kevin shrugged. “Sure.” He’s more sanguine about these things than I am.

“It might be worth it just for the endless stream of bad puns,” I suggested.

“Might bee,” said Kevin.

Ugh.

Next week, at our second class, we’ll be picking our equipment and signing up to get a colony delivered in the spring. Success isn’t guaranteed. But, as Andy pointed out, very little in life is. If you want a guarantee, buy a toaster.

Part of what characterizes a subculture, whether it’s table tennis or beekeeping, is enthusiasm. You just gotta beelieve.

Character outs early. I was a stubborn, obnoxious baby, bent on having my own way. My mother, a sensible woman, made the decision early on that, in the interest of peace, she should give me as much autonomy as it was possible to give to a child who couldn’t walk yet. And so it was, one morning when I was eight or nine months old, when I said my first word. (I was a precocious talker, but made up for it by being behind the curve in every other area of development.)

My mother was trying to dress me, and I was having none of it. I squirmed and fought and carried on. My mother, accustomed to this, soldiered on. Finally, my patience was at an end. “Self!” I proclaimed, and snatched the clothes away from her. I got my pants on my head, but, goddammit, I was going to dress myself.

I was bent on being in control of my life, from the ripe old age of zero.

Given my track record, you’d think I’d get wholeheartedly behind the concept of self-sufficiency – hey, it’s got ‘self’ right in the name! – but I find myself surprisingly ambivalent about it.

I like the pioneer spirit it implies, the do-it-yourself willingness to work hard at something wholesome and constructive. But self-sufficiency also implies keeping your fellow man at arm’s length. In a way, it’s a vote of non-participation. At its most extreme, it has an off-the-grid, move-to-Idaho kind of militancy.

I don’t aspire to self-sufficiency. On a logistical level, it requires more work than I’m willing to do, but I’m not on board with it ideologically, either. Interdependence is, I think, part of what makes us civilized. Today, you’re growing your own turnips. Tomorrow, you’re the Unabomber.

I’ve had “self-sufficiency” in my subtitle since this blog’s inception a year ago, but only because I haven’t come up with a better way to describe what I’m doing. And other people are doing it, too – I’ve read books and blogs by people who hunt and fish, gather and grow, and very few of them do it with the aim of walling themselves off from the world’s food supply. Instead, “self-sufficiency” has become shorthand for trying to use the resources at our disposal – personal, financial, ecological, and agricultural resources – to feed ourselves and our families wholesome, interesting, good-tasting food. It is an effort to supplement, rather than to suffice.

Somehow, though, “Bumbling toward supplementation” sounds like a half-assed attempt to fulfill very low expectations. (Yeah, I hear you saying, “If the shoe fits …”)

I know some of the people who read Starving are undertaking some of the same projects I am. Do any of you balk at “self-sufficiency?” Have you found a better way to describe what it is we’re doing?

I’ve started thinking of it as “first-hand food.” First-hand food is simply that which you procure yourself, whether by raising it at home or harvesting it from the world around you. It can be as simple as a window-box herb garden or as complex as a full-blown farm. It can require minimal time and effort or it can be a full-time job. First-hand food is fresh, whole food whose provenance you know.

But it’s not just about eating. It’s about being outdoors, getting exercise, showing children where food comes from, learning about plants and animals. For me, that last one’s big. At 46, I’m past my physical and cognitive peak, and it feels very good to be getting better at a few things.

And I did get better at a few things in 2009. Fishing and shellfishing, gardening and foraging. Kevin and I ventured into lobstering, mushroom growing, and chicken raising. I delved into fermentation and preservation. I learned about motors and tools, trucks and trailers. It was a rich, interesting year, and I’ll be continuing the food-a-day challenge into 2010.

I hope that you, my readers, will stick with me. I’m grateful for the time you’ve spent, the attention you’ve paid, and, particularly, the comments you’ve left. Starving is way more interesting when we’re doing it together. I feel as though I know some of you, and I’d like to get to know more of you in the coming year.

Meantime, I’m trying to come up with a first-hand food subtitle that conveys the appropriate mix of enthusiasm and ineptitude. I’d ask for suggestions, but there’s only so far I can go with this whole interdependence thing. Self!

There’s oystering, and then there’s oystering. For me, oystering involves wandering around in the shallows at low tide with a rake and a bucket, looking for specimens over three inches long. For my friend Florence, oystering is an entirely different proposition.

Florence suiting up for oystering

Florence has an oyster grant, a two-acre parcel in the flats of Barnstable Harbor earmarked as her oyster farm. It’s dry at low tide, underwater at high tide, and marked out by buoys. She grows oysters in part because she owns The Naked Oyster, arguably the best restaurant on this end of the Cape, and in part because she’ll do anything.

Florence is French, but not in an effete, Chanel-wearing kind of way. Florence is tough and intrepid, both of which qualities come in handy for oyster farming, especially this past week.

This was the week the oysters had to come out of the harbor. Because the water generally freezes over the course of the winter, and the ice floes can crush both the oysters and cages used to contain them, the whole shebang has to come out before winter hits in earnest.

For Florence’s operation, which only uses a small portion of her two-acre allotment, that’s about three days of cold, heavy work. Two of them had been done when she called Monday morning to see how Kevin was.

She was concerned about him because, in the course of helping her son Julien with the oysters the day before, he’d fallen in the water and come to the brink of hypothermia. I’d put him in a hot shower as soon as he’d come home, and put clothes in the dryer so they’d be warm when he got out. In an hour or so, he’d been fine, which is what I told her.

“Don’t you still have work to do out there?” I asked her.

She told me they did. And that, given the weather forecast, this was probably the last day to do it.

“Do you need help?”

She told me, essentially, that our household had already made the maximum allowable contribution to the oystering effort. I told her that was nonsense, and I’d be there, suited up, when she was ready to go out.

We set off at about 1:30 in the afternoon. It was me, Florence, and two young, strong, boat-savvy guys, Jeff and Drew, recruited for the purpose. We took her boat, a small Carolina Skiff, as well as a slightly larger one she’d borrowed from a friend, and went out on the meandering path to the grant.

Barnstable Harbor is shallow, and its many sandbars make it difficult to navigate at low tide, even in the flat-bottom skiffs used for oystering. We took a serpentine route around the shallowest spots, and we probably only drafted a little over a foot, but we still had to tilt the motor up several times to get through. We did get through, though, and arrived at the grant some time around 2:00.

Then we had to make a decision about where to put the boats. The central conundrum of this kind of oystering is that low tide is the best time for the work, but high tide is the best time for the boats. The oysters are on dry land at low tide, and you can walk around the grant, doing what you have to do. You want the oysters on dry land. Not so the boats.

When we got there, the oysters were high and dry, and we could get the boats within about thirty yards of them. But the tide was still going out, and the spot where we had them would be dry soon.

“We should keep the boats floating,” Florence warned.

I’d checked the tide, and dead low was at about 2:30. I thought that, if we left the boats where they were, we’d be significantly into the flood by the time we finished the work (which I thought would take about an hour and a half), and the boats would be afloat again, even with their heavy loads.

If we wanted to keep the boats afloat, we would have to put them about twice as far from the oysters, which had unpleasant implications for how far we’d have to carry each load. We left them where they were, and started loading.

Oysters at low tide

There are several different techniques for farming oysters. Florence begins with the seed oysters in bags. When they’re big enough, she transfers them to flat wire trays, each about two feet by three feet and holding several hundred oysters. The bigger the oysters are, the more the trays weigh. Most of the oysters we needed to move were approaching legal (three-inch) size, and the trays probably weighed between twenty and forty pounds each.

The work didn’t take as long as I thought, though, mostly because I didn’t factor in just how much lifting and carrying two young, strong guys can do. Florence and I aren’t sissies, but we are middle-aged women There’s just no substitute for being male and twenty-three.

By 2:45 we had the oysters and cages stacked in the boats, ready to go. But something was wrong. The tide was still going out. How could that be? Tides have been well understood for centuries. Tide charts aren’t wrong.

“How could the tide still be going out?” I asked Florence, with some indignation. “The chart said low tide was 2:30.”

“It depends on exactly where you are, and the wind,” she told me, with a shrug. “It’s unpredictable out here.”

“We should have kept the boats floating,” I said ruefully.

There was nothing to do but wait.

If it hadn’t been getting darker and windier by the moment, waiting wouldn’t have been a problem.

Fully loaded, high and dry

We watched the water, we watched the sky. Finally, at some time well after three, the tide turned. Ten minutes later, water was lapping at our stranded boats. The level slowly crept up until we were able to get the smaller boat to float. But the big one sat stubbornly in the sand.

We pushed it, we rocked it, we redistributed the cargo. It moved, but it was stuck on some kind of lump of sand that just wouldn’t give up its hold. The sun was setting, the wind was blowing. My fingers were beginning to get cold. We pushed some more.

Finally, it came loose. “Let’s get going,” Florence said, and she yanked on the pull-start of the motor. Nothing.

A litany of everything that could go wrong was going through my mind, and it started with a failed motor. From there, it went on to swamping, stranding, hypothermia, and even drowning. We’ve got overloaded boats in an increasing chop. It’s too dark to see the sandbars. The temperature’s dropping fast. We’re all wearing waders – which are the last thing you want to wear if you fall in because they fill with water and drag you down.

I knew at the time that most of my fear was unreasonable. We had two boats, and there were several others out there, so help would be at hand in case of a mishap. The harbor wasn’t more than about six feet deep at the deepest spot we’d be going over. The wind was behind us. Although it was getting cold, we were properly dressed and dry. The likelihood that something could go catastrophically wrong was very, very slim. But fear and reason are strangers to each other.

Florence pulled the starter again, and again nothing.

“Do you want me to have a go?” I asked.

She didn’t want me to have a go. She wanted to start the bloody thing herself. She hated the idea that she was having trouble pulling it hard enough, accustomed as she was to being able to do everything that needed doing. But this was the third day she’d been doing this work, and she was depleted.

“Give it a try,” she said.

I pulled, hard, and the motor turned over. She and I got in, and Jeff and Drew followed us in the bigger boat. It was slow going. The boats were heavy, and the prop on the other boat was so worn down that its top speed was about three knots. The water came within inches of the gunwales, and Florence was navigating from memory, since the water was too dark to see the shallow spots.

Not only was Florence in complete control of the situation, and confident in a successful outcome, she even had the bandwidth to reassure me that all was well. It’s not like I told her I was scared. I wanted desperately to be brave and intrepid, and I was doing my best to be cheerful and positive. It was probably the white knuckles that gave me away.

The oysters' winter home

I could see car headlights shining from the ramp at Scudder Lane, and it crossed my mind that Kevin might be there to meet us. I’d told him I was going out, and he would have known there’d be unloading to do.

He was there, and I was mighty glad to see him.

We pulled the boats in, loaded the oysters and gear into the three pick-up trucks we had, and brought them to the restaurant. There, Florence’s staff helped us get them into the refrigerated truck where they’d be dormant over the winter.

When the work was done, Florence made us drinks of whiskey, lemon, and hot water. “I’m sorry you had to go out on one of the hardest days,” she said.

“Hey, it was fine,” I told her. “We got all the oysters in, nobody was hurt, and I’m sitting here with a hot drink in my hands.” And then, after a pause. “Were you scared at all?”

She shook her head. “I don’t really get scared,” she said. “If I’m scared, we’re probably going down.”

Kevin’s that way, too. Are you born that way, or do you get that way? I want to be that way.

I can’t decide whether I want to stick with oystering along the beach with my bucket and rake, or get my own oyster grant in the hope that it will make me that way.

“Next time, we’ll go out in the summer,” Florence said. “We’ll bring a cooler full of ice, and some really good white wine, and we’ll sit out there on a warm, sunny day and drink wine and eat oysters.”

All in all, I don’t think I want an oyster grant. I just want a friend with an oyster grant.