Fermenting Lemonade out of Lemons
An injury has thrown me for a loop, but the weirdness marches on.
So, apparently “slamming the type II fun” last month in Alaska had its price. My torn meniscus is bad. So bad I can’t really even walk three miles, let alone chase grouse in the mountains.
This was supposed to be an upland year for me, but I am down for the count. Am I frustrated and disappointed? You bet. A lot. But I’m not going to wallow on the couch watching football all fall, although my New York Giants being 2-0 has lightened my step of late. Nope, I am going to do what I can.
People who know me know that I harness the power of negative energy: I dwell on, and plan for, the worst in any situation, gaming out what might happen and how I could respond. That way, when life sucks a little less than I planned, I can be pleasantly surprised. Some days I am not pleasantly surprised.
But mostly I am, and so I keep on keepin’ on. This mental tic of mine has helped me weather many a storm, and you might find it useful yourself.
Yes, I am pissed off I missed the Chicken Chase with Holly and my friends Jim, Alex, Jeff, et al. And I am likely going to miss a chance to hunt pheasants in North Dakota with my friend Tyler next month. And did I mention that my health insurance still hasn’t given me a surgery date? All they’ve said is something vague, like “a few months.” So yeah, major suckage.
After a day of whining, I got over myself. Well, gimpy, what can you do? Turns out, quite a lot.
Some of you know that I didn’t start hunting at all until I was 32, twenty years ago. Well, I was still me two decades ago, only cooking and fishing and gathering and cooking were what I did. So I am going back to that, and it feels strangely good. Better than I thought it might.
Part of my serenity is our mostly full freezer. Holly and I have had a couple good seasons, I acquired some bison after a film shoot a couple months ago (news on that front soon!), and I still have some nilgai from February. And we have lots of fish. So we are not in what my colleague Steve Rinella calls a “meat crisis.”
As the season unfolds, I have had more time to spend experimenting and cooking, pickling and fermenting and drying and such. A return to Hanksperiments.
In the past few weeks, I’ve:
Started playing with koji, the cool mold that is responsible for sake, miso and soy sauce. I am currently making a Sonoran dried pea and Mexican oregano miso, a morel mushroom and ayocote bean miso, two koji-fermented hot sauces, and a blue corn masa miso.
I am brine pickling cucumbers and hot peppers.
I finally got a chance to make wine from my backyard grapes, something I hadn’t had time to do since 2018. This year is a rose I’m calling the Pink Panther.
I’m drying out lots of seeds from my garden, including a rare variety of Atriplex hortensis that is a “wild” green in the Chihuahuan desert. I may offer these seeds for sale, so stay tuned.
Nearly two gallons of pressure canned chile verde are in my pantry now, along with three types of cucumber pickles.
Three styles of dry cured sausages are hanging in my locker: Spanish fuet, a simple pork and garlic sausage; a venison and wild black sage salami; and a trippy Swedish barley and offal sausage called stangkorv.
For the first time in nearly a decade, I made a batch of German braunschweiger, a smoked liver sausage.
Yesterday I filled up my Traeger with ripe jalapenos to make my own chipotles.
And just this morning I have two unusual (at least to me) styles of Japanese pickles going, one which uses koji.
Every day I think of something to do with what I have, what I can get at the farmer’s market, or what I am growing in the yard. And I’ll be honest, it’s wonderful.
As much as I love hunting and fishing, as much as I love being out there, seeing new things and meeting new people, the thing that has nagged at me for several years is the fact that I have spent more time on the acquisition of good things to eat than actually doing something special with those things.
And now The Fates have intervened, giving me the chance to run through the freezer, to play in the kitchen, to put up those things that are important to me, like the gallons and gallons of fire-roasted tomatoes I have planned for tomorrow.
So yeah, life threw a wrench at me. But I caught it, and kept it. It might prove useful someday.
Man, I felt a sense of relief when I read you have a Traeger. Always feel like I’m cheating/taking the easy way out with mine. Hope to get a fermenter for sausage from Santa to expand my game on that front…been doing mostly whole cuts in my curing chamber.
Thanks for the inspiration, I really enjoy sake…perhaps I will give to a go once I bottle my latest mead.
Sorry to hear about the seriousness of “the wheel,” but do look forward to reading about how it turns…. All the best for a successful surgery and a speedy recovery for 2023 upland…