Phil finished gutting the deer after midnight last night. Today he skinned the deer, removed the head and lower legs, and hosed it down, then wrapped it in cheesecloth. It looks like a mummy hanging in a tree. We aren’t sure what to do with the venison, but will probably turn it into jerky and sausage (courtesy of the Bessette’s meat grinder). For now, though, it can hang in the tree and age.
I spent more time than usual lately making dinner. I picked turnip greens from our garden. The garden has been an interesting experiment. I think the planting chart in the seed catalog was not terribly accurate, or, perhaps, more useful for the Deep South. We are rapidly heading into mid-November, when the earth hibernates at this latitude (I think when there is less than 10 hours of daylight, the growing season ends. In D.C., there is less than 10 hours of daylight from November 17 to January 24). Many of my plants from October will be fortunate to have an inch of growth. Perhaps we will cover them, and hope for early growth in the spring (after January 24th!).
My garden has surprised me in more ways. I planted two types of turnips in a bed. The leafy greens turnips did absolutely nothing, while the purple root turnips have provided us with greens for several dinners a week over the last month. And the bed gets more full all the time, as the leaves grow to support the roots.
The cherry belle radishes are almost gone, but in one bed they produced heavily. In the bed immediately adjacent, they did not do nearly so well. In my bed of beets, the standard beets are mediocre; the red and white striped Chioggia are stellar. In my bed of random greens, the daikon radish took over the center in dinner-plate whirls, while everything else stays a careful three inches tall.
But my biggest surprise came today, as I once again admired my kale bed. I love kale. Besides being the most nutritious of all vegetables, it tastes great! (I cut off just the bottoms of the leaves, chop the whole thing, stems and all, fry in butter with some fresh garlic pressed on top—yum!) It doesn’t cook down as much as spinach, and retains enough crunch so as not to be insipid.
To ensure a constant winter supply of this tasty (and pricey) vegetable, I planted two types, green and red. Surprisingly, they all came up red. I have been thinking for weeks now that the two types would differentiate themselves—at some point, the green would be more green. The red stems were all lovely, but so uniform.
As I looked today, I noticed some green kale. Way off on the edge, about one-fifth the size of the red kale. For some reason, it never took off. So strange!
But I digress from my story about dinner. I picked the turnip greens. I cooked a Bessette chicken in my cast iron Dutch oven. When the breast was done, I put some brown rice on. With a single burner, it can get tricky to juggle the various parts of a meal, but that’s okay. The last two times I have made rice, we haven’t eaten it all. In Boulder, I had a pot of rice cooked at all times, though now I don’t recall what I did with it. I had hopes that this night, we would eat the rice, and in time, the rice was done, and we sat down to eat.
The meat was still raw. Not all of it, but enough. Apparently, when a chicken is frozen, the breast is not the part to check; the part of the leg next to the body would be more indicative. In the future, Phil reminded me that we can use our toaster oven to roast. That would alleviate the single-burner stress.
While we waited for the chicken, we snacked on bread with butter and jam. As the chicken continued to cook, and the children ate three thick slices of bread apiece, my hopes for rice consumption rapidly faded.
When at last the meal was done, the chicken picked clean of meat, ready for the stock pot tomorrow, I surveyed the table. I considered bringing the chicken and the rice pots outside, but it was cold out there, and the children needed their bedtime books, and Phil would probably go out before me, anyway. He could bring the pots out.
I should have asked him to.
He went to the office while I was reading Bible stories to the A’s. Apparently, the stories were enthralling, for Isaiah and even Jadon soon joined us. Neither adult realized that Joe was alone in the room with the pots, until I said goodnight and stood up to find rice … everywhere. Joe had gleefully removed the lid of the pot, and spread great fistfuls around the room. The newly-vacuumed carpet had heaping tablespoons of rice mashed into it. Joe’s pant legs themselves were sticky with rice up to his knees. Rice on my sheets; rice on the floor; rice on the chairs and the table and the Ergo baby carrier.
And not much rice left in the pot. Yet another meal where the rice goes uneaten. What was salvageable will go to the pigs. “Cheer up,” said Phil. “At least rice is cheap. Isn’t it?”
Jadon, to make the encouragement complete, continued: “And the bacon is free!”
Several hours removed, I can see that this was not the end of the world. We summoned Chloe the dog, and faithful Dyson the vacuum. We changed clothing and used baby wipes and hands to get those sticky grains from every place we could. Jonadab somehow missed getting rice on the basket of clean clothes waiting to be folded—amazing in such a small space. But at the moment of discovery—oh, ick. Hundreds (thousands?) of sticky, mashable grains all over my living space.
And that, faithful reader, was the Great Rice Debacle of Ought Nine.
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