I keep hoping that animals will be curious about our Varmintcam. After all, it’s a strange black box that lights up when they go near it. I would think they’d get close, give it a sniff, walk around it – and I’d get some great pictures.

Instead, they seem to walk by, or walk away, and all I get are pictures of their butts. Here are two tails we got a good look at. One is clearly a raccoon, and the other looks like a cat, but it’s definitely not our cat. If you can tell me it’s the rare cat-like New England panther, I’ll be forever in your debt.

And they say you shouldn't wear horizontal stripes

Look in the lower right ... tell me that's not a housecat.

There is only one animal who strolls right up, and gives us a great view.

No mystery here

Ove the last two days in Boston’s North End, I ate pasta and pastry and dim sum and gelato, but not a single solitary thing I procured myself.  Tomorrow, it’s back to austerity.

We went to Boston for the weekend to visit our friends Dianne and Doug, and get our dose of urban.

Stir-fried, for lunch.

Friday evening plans made us move our Every Other Friday to Thursday, and it was my turn. I happened to have some ground lamb in the refrigerator, and it was calling out for Indian. The Every Other Friday rule is that we have to try something we’ve never cooked before, and I decided to attempt samosas. I had thought that any self-respecting samosa had to be deep-fried, but I read several authoritative sources who said that you can bake them.

I’m very fond of deep-fried things, but I’ve never deep-fried at home. There are two reasons I’m reluctant to start now. The first is that I’m intimidated by hot oil. In the olden days it was a weapon, poured over the ramparts onto whoever was trying to storm the castle, and I’m just not sure I want that kind of thing in my kitchen. The second is that I’m trying to rein in what seems like inexorable winter weight gain.

So, when those authoritative sources said I could bake them, I wanted to believe. I mixed my filling. I kneaded my dough. I rolled out my wrappers and formed the little stuffed triangles. I even pan-fried them to give them some crunch on both sides before I baked them.

I had high hopes as I slid the tray into the oven, but they were dashed when I took it out. My samosas were pasty. They were dry. Although the flavor wasn’t bad, they weren’t at all what samosas should be. They were a disappointment.

I now consider myself an authoritative source, and I’m here to tell you that you can’t bake samosas. You just can’t.

They weren’t a smashing success.  But I’ll be eating the leftovers tomorrow anyway.

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.

It was a beautiful day with a mid-afternoon low tide, and we collected a big bag of mussels at the Cape Cod Canal.  This is what I did with them, and I thought they came out better than any mussels I’d ever made.

Mussels with Garlic and Pernod
(serves four as an appetizer, or two as a light main dish)

4-5 dozen mussels, cleaned and de-bearded
1 T. butter
4-5 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 cup white wine
3 T. Pernod or other anise liqueur (I use the cheap stuff)
¼ c. chopped fresh cilantro
¼ cup heavy cream
black pepper to taste

In a pot large enough to hold the mussels, melt the butter over medium heat. Add the garlic and cook, stirring frequently, until it softens and begins to brown, about 5 minutes. Add the wine, turn the heat to high, and bring to a boil.

Using a steamer insert, put the mussels in the pot and cover it. Cook until the mussels open, about 5 minutes. (Discard any mussels that don’t open.)

Remove the mussels to a bowl, and cover it so the mussels stay warm. Add the Pernod to the pot, and cook the liquid down until it reduces by about half. Add the cream and cilantro, and cook another minute or two. Serve the mussels in the liquid. A crusty bread is required.

We had a package of chicken thighs from Blood Farm, and not a lot of oomph, so we fell back on one of our favorite recipes — Beer-Braised Chicken with White Beans and Carrots.   This was a variation with rosemary, because that’s what we had.  It’s a satisfying, dependable recipe.

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.

We broiled them in a cast-iron pan and served them with buttered green beans.

This was a variation on his recipe (the egg was just in the wash — no self-respecting bagel has egg in it). We substituted one cup of King Arthur’s rye flour blend for one cup of the high-gluten flour (King Arthur also — Sir Lancelot). I found it took extra flour to get the dough to be the right consistency, but they turned out beautifully.

Never trust a bagel that's perfectly round

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 a beautiful day, and Kevin and I spent about an hour and a half digging for steamers at low tide.  We had them for dinner, with cole slaw and beer, and pretended it was summer.

The Sasquash was a giant winter squash given to us by our friends Al and Christl.  I defrosted a bag of it — about 2 cups, cubed — and stewed it with onions, green chiles, chipotle, and tomatoes.   I browned a cut-up chicken and braised it in the stew.  It was pretty good, but it needs work.  I’ll get it right next time.

It happens to the best of us, I think.  I had some frozen cooked lamb, and a bunch of beautiful shiitakes (along with two of ours), and some prepared polenta.  I made a kind of ragout with onions and mushrooms, red wine and stock, rosemary and mustard.  The lamb went in, along with some baby peas.  I sliced the polenta and pan-fried it, and piled the lamb concoction on top of it.  Should have been delicious, but it was only so-so.

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.

It was promising.  More on that later.

Kevin did a reprise of the venison sausages braised in sauerkraut.  We often do this — if we really like a new dish, we make it again right away in the hopes that a second go-round will cement it in our repertoire.  This time, we used German-style pork sausages from Trader Joe’s, and a few of the bay leaves I’d collected on our fall hunting excursion.  The TJ’s sausages weren’t as good as the venison, but the dish was the same in its essence.

It’s particularly good with some grated Parmesan.