I was feeling all salty and heroic, bestowing little bags of beautiful peppered fillets on a few of our favorite people. Hah! The tables were turned. Here’s a list of what I was given in return for my lousy half-dozen smoked bluefish fillets:

4 ripe tomatoes
1 black-staining polypore
a container of mushrooms that may or may not be chanterelles
1 huge bunch celery
a handful of beans
assorted baby peppers and one cute little eggplant
a bunch of shiso
marjoram, thyme, and two kinds of mint, ready to plant
4 perfect leeks
a bunch of chard
a jar of pickles
3 fat cucumbers
a container of herbs de Provence
6 little Thai peppers
1 cantaloupe
1 long, skinny, Japanese cucumber

And it would have been more, except that I absolutely forbade Al and Christl to give me anything. They’ve been so generous with the things they grow that I wanted to get something in the plus column. Besides, I was already so loaded up from Amanda and Doug and Dianne that I was too embarrassed to take anything more.  But Christl pressed the Japanese cucumber on me, and I couldn’t resist.

It honestly didn’t occur to me that, if I showed up at the homes of gardeners, in the height of vegetable season, with a measly little gift of bluefish that they would load me up with the bounty of their gardens. If it had occurred to me, I probably would have done it sooner.

The bounty

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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?

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1. A plumber’s trade
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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.

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Al and Christl are the best gardeners we know. We’ve had their asparagus, kale, garlic chives, strawberries, blackberries, rhubarb, and tomatoes, and they’ve all been beautiful specimens of their kind, and very good to eat. So, when Al called us yesterday morning telling us he had a very large winter squash going begging, I was delighted.

The sasquash

An hour or so later, he pulled into our driveway, opened his trunk, and staggered back with the biggest squash I’d ever seen. It looked like something out of Sleeper.

“That’s a big squash,” I said.

And it was wasn’t even the whole thing – he’d kept part of it for their dinner. As a bonus, he brought us three blackberry vines, ready to plant. All I could give him in return was a lousy dozen eggs, but I promised that more would be forthcoming as the winter wears on.

I didn’t get to the squash yesterday as we had a dinner party to go to, and it was waiting for me when we got home late last night. There was also a message on our phone. Kevin checked it, and I heard him laughing. When he’d listened to the whole thing, he handed me the phone and told me I had to listen for myself.

“Hi, it’s Al,” the message said. “That squash we gave you was a dud. We cooked it up for dinner, and it was stringy and watery and didn’t have much flavor.” He went into some detail, and ended the message with, “It’ll make good compost.”

Christl is as experienced at cooking vegetables as she is at growing them, and both she and Al hate waste. If Al even hints that it should go in the compost, you can believe that it should go in the compost.

But I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t relegate that much squash to the compost.

Today, I cut off a piece and tasted it. Not much flavor, but what little there was didn’t offend. Kevin tasted it too. “This thing had sex with a watermelon,” he said, knowing the propensity of squash to breed with anything in pollinating distance. It was a distinct possibility. It tasted like a cross between a cucumber, a watermelon, and a glass of water. But not bad. I could work with it.

I’d have to work with it a lot, since it weighed almost twenty pounds, so I got started right away. I made a basic squash soup (the recipe is here) in which cream and really good chicken stock cover a multitude of sins. They did their job, and the soup was delicious. The squash couldn’t stand on its own, but it could add bulk, and color, and texture to all kinds of things. I think, over the course of the winter, I’ll manage to use up twenty pounds of squash. And, if I can, Al and Christl certainly can.

I called them. “Don’t compost the squash!” I said. “You can use it. It’ll work for lots of stuff.”

Christl told me she still had it and, although she had been disappointed with last night’s dinner, she thought it would make a good soup. She went on to describe how she’d make it, and it was exactly how I’d done it, down to the pinch of nutmeg. I knew there was a reason I liked Christl.

The only reason she even considered composting it is that she’s got three more exactly like it.

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It was the day we picked up our chicks. Cape Cod Feed and Supply opens at 8:00 AM, and we were told to get there early, as the chicks sold out quickly. We were the first ones there, at 7:45. By the time the store opened, several other people had joined us.

The young woman who works there made a list with people’s names, but not in any particular order – we were third or fourth. When it came time to divvy out the chicks, though, they went in the order of the list, and the woman just ahead of us wanted six Buff Orpingtons.

It looked to me that there were only eight or nine Buffs left, and we had hoped to get eight ourselves. I hated to do it, but I had to say something.

“I really don’t want to be a jerk,” I said, “but we’d also like to get some Buffs, and,” here I looked at the floor and shuffled my feet in my best aw-shucks manner, “we were here first.”

Everyone was very cooperative, and we took four of the remaining Buffs and let the woman have the rest, but I can’t be happy about any incident in which the words “we were here first” came out of my mouth. This is why the incident sticks in my mind. In my food-related travels here on Cape Cod, this is one of the very few times someone behaved like a jerk. Bummer that it was me.

Maybe the gardening gene and the niceness gene are linked, like blue eyes and blond hair. Among the people we’ve met who raise food – or hunt it, or fish it, or write about it, or just cook it – there’ve been precious few jerks. Zealots, yes. Even a hefty quotient of crackpots. But not many jerks.

And a good thing too. It is the food community’s relative jerklessness that makes the barter system possible. When you’re trading eggs for tomatoes, or clams for strawberries, you don’t break out the scale and the calculator. You simply do your best to offer a fair trade.

Our barter bonanza (not the wine -- that's there for scale)

We’re just scratching the surface of barter’s possibilities, and we’ve done very well indeed. This is primarily because we’ve been trading with Al and Christl – a couple who, between them, could design, build, or grow just about anything. Their need for oak logs and fondness for clams dovetail nicely with our need for plant-related advice and our appetite for the bounty of their garden.

The first time I brought clams over to their house, I had them in the back seat of the car, still in the peck basket. A peck is ten quarts, and it’s a lot of clams. Because Al and Christl are just two people, I was afraid it was more than they could eat in a reasonable period of time, and that too many clams would be something of a burden.

When I took the basket out of the car, Christl’s eyes lit up, and she clapped her hands together. “Oh my,” she said. “Those are beautiful!” And she proceeded to talk about all the things she’d make with them.

Christl appreciates food, and the growing of food. Maybe it’s just her nature, or maybe it’s because she grew up knowing scarcity, but she spends time and energy cultivating a garden that’s the best I’ve ever seen, and nothing goes to waste in her house. It is a joy to bring her clams.

We brought them another half peck a couple of days ago, and they gave us some spectacular rhubarb and asparagus, along with young kale leaves for salad. I suspect my eyes lit up. I know I said it was beautiful. All the way home, I talked about what I would make with it.

It is enthusiasm and good will, and not a careful keeping of accounts, that makes this kind of trading possible. Sure, I want the rhubarb and the asparagus. But I also want the pleasure of the exchange with people of like mind and the comfort of knowing that everyone’s happy with the trade.

So please don’t tell Christl I was a jerk at the feed store.

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We don’t eat that many eggs – maybe two dozen a month, which is a little more than the output of one hen. If you’re going to keep chickens, you need at least four, so we’d end up with many more eggs than we’d need. Besides, it’s a money loser. We buy excellent eggs from a local farm for three dollars a dozen, and our yearly egg budget of about $75. wouldn’t go far in procuring, housing, and feeding a coop’s worth of chickens.

Six-eighths of our brood

But then there’s the barter system. Once you start growing and gathering, a whole new economy opens up. We’ve already traded some oak logs (to grow shiitakes), which we have in abundance, for two blackberry bushes grown by our friends Al and Christl. That worked out so well that, a couple weeks later, we traded them a peck of clams for some tomato and kale seedlings.

Chickens will expand our bartering options. Everybody likes eggs, and we hope to trade not just for edibles but for advice, assistance, and just plain good will. And if there’s anyone out there with a 17′ Whaler …

A Buff Orpington

That’s the idea, anyway, and it was what led to our buying eight baby chicks yesterday morning from the nice people at Cape Cod Feed and Supply. They get them, fifty at a time, from Murray McMurray Hatchery, a business which you’ve never heard of if you don’t raise chickens and which you hear of all the time if you do.

We had planned to get eight Buff Orpingtons, a breed known for its docile good nature and resistance to cold. There weren’t enough to go around, though, so we ended up with four Buffs and four Rhode Island Reds, a hardy breed with an independent streak.

A Rhode Island Red

The difference in the breeds is apparent even in three-day-old chicks. The Reds zoom around the brooder with confidence and aplomb while the Buffs quietly go about their business, which is eating, drinking, and crapping. That will be the sum total of our chicks’ business for the next six months, until they reach maturity and “laying” gets added to the list.

Until that happens, we have to keep them warm, fed, and safe from our cat, who seems excited by the prospect of having very small birds in the house. Kevin likes to let the cat commune with the chicks – through the impermeable wall of the brooder – on the theory that we can teach her that the brood is a part of our family community, and therefore not acceptable prey. I, however, have very little faith in our cat’s community spirit, and prefer to keep a closed door between them.

Can't we all just get along?

We didn’t plan it this way, but in an energy-saving piece of good luck, our timing is such that we have to keep both our baby chicks and our dandelion wine warm for the next week. We’ve sequestered brooder, heat lamp, and fermenting vat in the guest room, jury-rigging the lot so the brooder is at 95 degrees and the wine about twenty degrees cooler.

By all appearances, chicks and wine are thriving.

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