The Birds of November

It’s been a while since I've written anything about hunting here. Simple reason: there has not been much to report. The last really notable outing afield occurred two years ago, when I shot a pheasant, grouse, and woodcock—the three main “upland game birds” of our region—on the same day, at a public hunting ground near Bide-A-Wee. That was a remarkable hunt for a couple of reasons. One, I’d never accomplished that “triple crown” feat before, and it had been a goal of mine. Also, the grouse was pointed in absolutely classic fashion by our young dog, Lily. Previously she had mainly been known for flying heedlessly through woods and field, launching anything avian in her path into the air well out of shotgun range. We knew she could point; we did not know if she would.

She found the bird at least a hundred yards ahead of me and remained staunch in her point for the two minutes or so that it took me to make my way over to her through gnarly terrain. Just as I came up to her rigid,

quivering form, the bird got up, and I dropped it with the first shot. That was a notable achievement for me, too; grouse are very fast flyers, hard to shoot, and I’m frankly not that great a shot. I already had a pheasant in my vest, a bird that I had walked up, shot, and retrieved with no canine assistance whatsoever. The dogs were running around back in an alder swamp. They heard the shot and came running out to find me standing at the edge of the field with a pheasant in my hand. “Hey, look what I found,” I said. “What have you two been up to?” They wagged their tails and sniffed the bird. I think they looked a little shamefaced. It was a classic moment in the field, one I’ll never forget.

The final bird of the day was a woodcock, which I shot over Annabel’s point, again on the first shot. I don’t think we encountered any other birds that day, though my memory on that point is not completely clear. If it’s accurate, this would have been a hunt on which I killed three birds with three shots, and no misses. That’s something that’s unlikely to happen again.

It was an extremely satisfying day afield, and one I had really hoped to build on in 2010, but you know what they say about plans. October last year was ridiculously warm, dreadful hunting weather. I had to make an unexpected trip to deal with family matters at the end of that month, I blew out my shoulder, then it snowed. In all of 2010 I hunted twice, fired the gun four times at two grouse, missing badly on all shots. The one time I hunted alone with Lily, I’m not sure if she was in the same county with me for much of the outing. And Annabel, then 12 years old and game but a little gimpy, and largely deaf—well, I didn’t know if we would ever again put the bell on her orange collar and send her out with a “Hunt ‘em up. Where’s a bird?”

Based on that dismal year, I couldn’t see things going anywhere but up in 2011, but the season did not have a promising start. Another too-hot October, another unanticipated October trip taking a week out of the brief woodcock season. With no real training in the interim, but lots of self-directed “hunts” on our land—home to both grouse and woodcock, and the occasional pheasant—Lily had become an over-stimulated bundle of bad
habits. I didn’t know if we would be able to bring her back. One short outing with Annabel showed me that she could come along on hunts, but only with a chaperone. I was feeling glum about the season, to say the least. I was feeling even glummer about my future as a bird hunter.

Lily is still a couple months shy of her sixth birthday. She’s in her physical prime, and she’s an incredibly athletic dog. There’s no mistaking the sheer, unabashed joy she displays as she catapults up and down the Bide-A-Wee hills. She is also a very sweet girl, eager to please, devastated when she disappoints (our joke about Annabel is that she, too, is eager to please…herself). I had Lily’s temperament going for me when I decided I had to give her a few more tries before reaching any conclusions.

Some memorable hunting and fishing outings are memorable for reasons quite apart from fish in the creel or a bird in the game pouch. Our hunt at a small hunting ground near Bide-A-Wee, just Lily and me, will stick with me for a long time. After several hunts where she seemed to be simply running around in the woods, no sense of purpose about her at all, she suddenly…started…to hunt. Some lightbulb went off for her. Maybe the “chats” we had had on previous outings impressed her. Maybe she just needed to encounter a few more birds in the proper context. The remarkable thing was how sudden the transformation was. From one hunt with absolutely no pointing, or intimation that she even knew how to do so, suddenly she was a pointing machine. Like someone flipped a switch, or switched dogs on me.

We went in to a stand of small aspen.  Lily was working ahead of me to the left. Even before the point I sensed something different in her manner. She was out of sight when her collar started a steady beeping (it’s an electronic collar that beeps every ten seconds or so when she’s running, then every second when she stops). As I came up behind her I could see from her body language that, yes, there was a bird, but maybe not right there. Close, not in front of her nose. I went in ahead of her, circled to right and left. No bird. I told her to hunt and she zipped past me, slalomed through a patch of dogwood. She drew up short, all four feet planted solidly on the ground, and swiveled her head sharply to the right. Then she did not move.

As I approached a woodcock flushed, mere feet from her quivering nose. It veered skyward, over the tops of the aspens, and I had to turn and get the gun up high, and I missed, and I missed again. I cursed, but I recovered from the disappointment quickly. Lily broke her point with the shots, but came to me when I whistled, and I praised her as few dogs have ever been praised in the history of bird hunting. Then we carried on, and in a few minutes she pointed another woodcock (or perhaps the same one), and again my shooting let us down. But again we were SO HAPPY! Finding and missing woodcock is the best game EVER! We had one more bird encounter that day. On the flank of a distinctive little piece of topography, a sort of rocky knoll covered with scrub oak, dogwood, and stunted jack pine, Lily stopped, her head directed downhill, a solid point. The grouse didn’t hold for long, though. It flushed within range of a shot, but entirely out of sight behind a patch of pines. That was it. Three birds found, pointed, nothing in the bag. A great day.

One thing that has been disconcerting this year has been a general scarcity of birds. Often in woodcock season, as the birds are migrating through, I’ll find eight to twelve birds in the best bits of cover. This season I think the most timberdoodles (woodcock have a lot of nicknames) encountered in a day was four. Lily and I hit a fresh piece of terrain on a cool gray morning, just a couple days from the end of woodcock season—pheasant stays open in Wisconsin through December, and grouse to the end of January, though it’s rare that conditions allow comfortable hunting much past the beginning of December. It was great looking cover—scrappy patches of dogwood and alder along a small creek, extensive stands of young aspen, or “popple” as it’s locally known. We didn’t flush a bird. Well, maybe a chickadee. Lily hunted well. She gave me a “false point” once, came to a dead halt and wouldn’t move even when I told her to hunt after I’d circled entirely around her. She was pretty sure there was something there, but there wasn’t. Could be a bird had flushed ahead of us, leaving a strong scent but no feathered evidence. We made our way back toward the car, and I was thinking it was going to be a lost day, but for a pleasant, if somewhat arduous, walk.

We came up out of a ditch and on to the dirt road that dead-ends farther back in the hunting ground. I could see the car in the parking area just ahead, and I broke open my gun—a side-by-side 20-gauge. I had Lily at a heel as we came up on the road, but when I saw the road deserted I let her go, and she immediately left my side and dropped down in the ditch on the other side of the road. I heard the collar start its steady beeping, and assumed she was stopped for a drink of delicious ditch water. But the beeping went on, and I heard no slurping. I realized she was on point.

I found her on a solid point beside a clump of alder. The cover was thick on the road side, more open farther in, and I was fortunate that the woodcock when it flushed did not veer for the road but rather followed the edge of the alders. The flush came as I was just even with Lily, so I didn’t have too much time to think—this is good—and I dropped the bird with the first shot. It fell in the center of another clump of alders, and was an easy find. I saw it before Lily did, but waited for her to come around and track it down. It had hit the ground dead—when I opened it I found that a pellet had gone right through the heart. Lily came up to the bird and sniffed at it, mouthed it a bit. Our dogs haven’t been trained to retrieve, and don’t seem to take to it naturally. I gave her a chance to bring it to me, but didn’t insist. I picked up the bird and put it in my vest with warm words of praise for my dog. First bird of 2011, first bird in two years.

We had another successful outing a couple of days later, the closing day of woodcock season, although we saw no woodcock. At the small hunting ground near Bide-A-Wee where Lily had had her turn-around day, we finally

started to see some grouse. I walked up one bird that Lily had run past, and missed my shot. Farther back in a mature woods with a boggy section I knew grouse frequented, Lily started to get “birdy”—that is, she broke out of her broad crossing runs and began working a smaller area in more detail, her nose close to the ground, her tail going like an airplane propeller. I turned to the left, she turned to the right—my instincts were better, and the grouse flushed in front of me. I took one errant shot before the bird curved out of view in a stand of pine. Lily came barreling back my way, and I told her “Whoa!” She didn’t seem to hear. I told her again, but it still didn’t sink in. Three times is too many times to have to tell a bird dog to freakin’ WHOA! Once I did get her attention, we had another of those “chats.” She promised she would try to do better, and almost immediately, she did.

Not two minutes later, in this same open area of mature oak, elm, and maple, she went on point again. Woods like this are not supposed to be good grouse habitat, but the grouse in these parts apparently didn’t know that (we have the same sort of joke about trout that don’t seem to know that they shouldn’t exist outside of “designated trout streams”). In dry years, and also in mid-winter, I think they seek out the spring seeps in this area for water and for the little green things growing there. This time Lily went on point along a big deadfall, an oak that had tipped over pulling its roots right out of the boggy ground. I came up near that tall root clump; Lily was on point around mid-tree. The grouse flushed, and flew straight away from me barely over head-high. I had to make a quick sidestep to clear the tree, get the gun up, and I would only have a single shot.

I took it; the bird did not drop, but it seemed to dip. I was pretty sure I had hit it. I stopped and quickly replaced the shell I had spent, then started walking briskly in the direction the grouse had gone. Lily passed me and I asked her if maybe it was possible there was a bird on the ground around here. Her answer was immediate: she went into tracking mode; she had found the scent of the running bird, and was following it avidly.

It didn’t take long to find the wing-shot bird. Lily subdued it, I came and took it from her, I broke its neck—not something I relish doing, but we who eat meat have to accept the fact that animals die for our pleasure; this was just a particularly intimate illustration of that fact.

Overall, in terms of the pointing, the adjustment, the shot, the tracking, that was one of the more remarkable bits of dog-and-hunter work I’ve been involved with in my brief hunting career. We had a quiet celebration over the bird that had given its life to make it possible, and made our way back to the car.

A lot of hunters wouldn’t see two birds in two outings as much to write home about. In spite of hopes and anticipation, my woodcock season ended with a single bird in the bag, an appetizer for two. But for me those

outings marked the beginning of my new hunting life with my “new” dog, Lily. It’s tough to leave Annabel behind—but it’s even tougher to hunt with her. I worry constantly that she’ll wander off in the woods, and with her deafness not hear us to find her way back. I worry that when her enthusiasm overcomes her physical limitations, as it always does, she’ll injure herself without even knowing she has done it. More than that, we’ve had a good run together. She brought me into this world which I find as compelling and challenging as anything I’ve ever done. It’s Lily’s turn now, and the education continues.

Next time, bird cookery at Bide-A-Wee.





Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

Scouting Spring

I'm under no illusions that winter is anything like over, or even that we've "turned the corner," with Groundhog Day behind us and the Pennsylvania rodent predicting an early spring. We can still see a lot of winter from mid-February to the end of March (indeed, it's minus 10 here in Saint Paul this morning, after a teasingly mild weekend).

Still, the sunlight has warmth now, it's even hot if you're in a sheltered spot on a sunny day. The male goldfinches are starting to color up out at Bide-A-Wee, and we see that our fox is digging out her hillside den again. We never see the actual fox--traveling with dogs isn't conducive to viewing wildlife--but our neighbors down the valley do. We see the snow around the den colored with the yellow soil the fox kicks out. These are signs, sure, but signs of progress only, not of any arrival. Best to keep a realistic view, hold on to our "mind of winter" as Wallace Stevens put it (without, I hope, becoming snowmen and -women ourselves...).



We found ourselves out and about in the Wisconsin countryside quite a bit this past weekend, looking for more signs, maybe. Started the day with a breakfast that some might just see as bread and jam and cheese, but we know it as la belle tartine--French bread and jam and cheese. Oh, and good butter, of course. I don't know why cutting the baguette in that French manner, separating top and bottom, is so evocative--maybe because I've only ever seen it in France, and at our house....



Home-baked baguette, our own runny blackberry jam from Bide-A-Wee fruit, aged cheddar and wonderful Marieke gouda, smoked fenugreek, if you please. A bowl of café crème would be the thing to accompany, but both Mary and I switched from morning coffee to tea recently, quite spontaneously. We drink plain old Tetley's or Red Rose generously whitened with raw milk that we get from our friend Renée at Bolen-Vale Cheese.

One day we packed a picnic lunch (optimists, yes, cock-eyed, for sure) and drove up along the Chippewa River north, through Chippewa, Rusk, and Sawyer counties, and meandered some side roads, just seeing the countryside. We stopped to scout a few putative trout streams, but the fact that most were ice-covered was not encouraging--the spring-fed streams that trout prefer remain open even in the coldest weather. But we saw moving water in the Chippewa River below the dam in the town of Radisson. The river flowed dark and ice-flecked, but the sight of it was encouraging, just the same. It made me think of stringing up the fly rod, stepping into my waders--though that pleasant moment is some weeks off, too.



In Radisson we also found this welcoming park with picnic shelter. You can practically smell the burgers and brats searing on the grill, can't you? We snowshoed across the park to the shelter. There were picnic tables under the roof, and one corner was relatively free of pigeon poop.



We had rillettes sandwiches with cornichon slices, butter and mustard, and a bottle of our own cider. I'd whipped up a quick soup just before setting out, an assemblage of vegetables, mainly--celery root, carrot, kale, potato, onion--made delicious by some of our home-smoked bacon. Just water to make the broth, and a little milk at the end.



A couple of cars passed on the park road as we ate, and we could see the drivers do a double-, maybe triple-take. We were very happy with our picnic spot. It was a very pleasant day, all 'round. We didn't see anything really remarkable, just the charismatic north country quiet under snow, under marbled gray skies mostly (Mary calls them India ink skies), the sort of light, the sort of scenes that can give you little shudders of delight for no reason you can fathom. And looking at the houses, cabins and trailers, we might have shuddered in another way, wondering what the long white season was like in that trailer in the shade of tall white pines, that once-gracious farmhouse now paintless and tilting, with the yard full of flotsam and jetsam that someone apparently thought worth keeping around, or just not worth removing. It was a little trip back into winter, in a sense, even if we were looking for spring (but we turned back before reaching the town of Winter, a few more miles up Wisconsin 70).


The dogs are excellent travelers, Lily on the left, Annabel right. The kitty litter is just for traction.


Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

Concentrate

We're still drying apples from last year's store. Well, to give credit where credit is due, the apples are doing a pretty good job of drying themselves. Some of the apples reside in our spare fridge in the basement, some in an old cooler in a chilly part of the basement. Almost all have softened, and many are basically rotten, but it actually smells really good down there, sweetly fragrant, orchardy; makes you think of hayrides, mulled cider. Apples may be unique in this quality of smelling good even when frankly spoiled.

The ones that are not spoiled are still not all that appetizing in appearance--shriveled, shrunken, they'd be garbage at worst, compost at best, to the too-fastidious eye. No one would put them into the kid's lunchbox, except as a cruel prank. But I don't look at them as halfway gone fresh apples; rather, I see them as being halfway to greatness as dried apples.

We dry them in this gizmo here, our mighty Nesco American Harvester. I started to research food dehydrators last fall, and quickly became bewildered in a maze of sizes, shapes, prices, energy efficiency. I gave up. Then one day at Menard's we came across the Nesco, on sale for around $30, I think. I remembered that Emily and Dan, our young heroes, use one of these babies. We snapped it up. Haven't looked back.

We also bought a corer-peeler device, which works a treat on fresh apples; with these soft, well-aged beauties I left the skin on, just cored and sliced. They only took a couple of hours to finish drying up to tart-sweet, chewy, aromatic morsels.

We use them as: Doggies treats--Annabel and Lily love them. People treats--Mary and I scarf them eagerly, too. In granola, in salads, and as a local (and free) alternative to many dried fruits in recipes. Today I'm going to make a recipe for lamb meatballs with beets that's been calling to me since I saw it in a recent Saveur. I've got the last of our garden beets from 2009, and Anne (Sheepy Hollow) Leck's awesome lamb. The recipe calls for currants; chopped dried apples will take their place.

You'll still find last year's apples at whatever farmers markets are open through the year, and there likely will be some at markets getting set to open in May. I know Denny Havlicek brought some holdovers to our market (Midtown Farmers' Market ) last spring (we hit the Lake Street parking lot May 1 this year, three weeks from Saturday, yikes!).

Remember: It's never too late to dehydrate.



Text and photos copyright 2010 by Brett Laidlaw

Sweetness, Toil, and Smoke

The sugaring season, days of sweetness, toil, and smoke. It's great when it starts, maybe better when it's over. Coming to the end of our second season now, I realize it's a bit of a compulsion. Partway through I wind up asking myself, is this really worth it? The hauling, by hand, of heavy jugs of sap from the north end of our property, where the maples are, to the south end, where sits Bide-A-Wee; the cutting, hauling, splitting of wood; the expense of all that wood, and the tending of the fire, and the smoke in your face, day after day, and what do you get in the end, a gallon or two of syrup?

But if you're someone who's just a little fanatical about getting his food as close to the source as possible, and more than that, making the most of local treasures, well, how could you pass this up?

Concentration, distillation, that's what's at the heart of it. The thing that is fascinating and compelling about it is exactly what is also, at the end, somewhat disheartening--you start off with this vast amount of clear liquid, cook it for hours, and hours, and hours, watch it gradually take on color, sweeten, go from barely sweet water to a viscous, fragrant, indescribably sweet, and, to me, incomparably delicious nectar. How great and amazing is that? And at the same time, you go through...all that, as above, to wind up with...a little sticky sweet stuff, that now fits into a few pint jars? How depressing is that?

But it's deceptive. A little maple syrup, of course, goes a long way. And has magical properties. A couple of teaspoons in a vinaigrette makes a dressing that has people going back again and again to the salad bowl, though they couldn't say why. A glaze on a pork belly, or a duck breast, then exposed to applewood smoke and gentle heat for a few hours makes the best cured meat in the world.



And it's not bad on pancakes, or french toast. Or in a cocktail. So, you know, I guess it's worth it.

We haven't come up with the perfect evaporation system, but I'm pretty pleased with this sort of Snuffy Smith-looking moonshiner's contraption, bunged together of cinder blocks and pieces of metal "repurposed" from some dismantled piece of farm equipment we found in the North Woods near the maples. I'm going to keep it, refine it, for a summer cookstove, add a grilling station adjacent.

And now, speaking of concentration, here's what you start with. These three containers of five, six, and seven gallons.

And then two more, given scale here by 60-pound, four-year-old griffon Lily. (Isn't she cute? She's turned out to be just a beautiful dog, and sweet as can be, a maniac out on the land, rarely stopping unless we make her lie down, all day long; the only problem is she's unconscionably moist, and cannot control The Terrible Tongue. But I digress.)

That's, let's see, close to 30 gallons of sap. Imagine your refrigerator filled with 30 one-gallon jugs of milk. Imagine then reducing that over heat until you have less than one gallon, about three quarts. Or, as we see here, five gallons sap, one pint syrup.

Dinner one night at the cabin was slices of that just-smoked pork and duck, some plain steamed jasmine rice, and sweet-and-sour chard made with our syrup and apple cider vinegar. The chard dish was a keeper. Recipe to follow.

A Bit of Winter Green

It's become something of an annual tradition that on a sunny day in February, when the cabin fever is running high, I put the dogs in the car and head to a woods I know, a little ways south of the cities. A sweet little trout stream runs through this woods, and the stream is fed by a pretty spring, and in that spring lives the only green thing in the white winter woods (except for some tenacious moss): watercress.


Because cress grows in springs that bubble up from the earth at a fairly constant temperature year ‘round, the plants are protected in a sort of microclimate created by the 40-degree water. The plants dangle their fine white roots over the sandy bottom, but they take most of their

nourishment from the water itself—it’s Great Nature’s hydroponic salad garden. I carefully snip off a sackful of leaves, trying to leave the plants undisturbed—preserving the resource must be a key tenet of any successful forager. While a spring bursting with cress, or a forest floor covered in ramps, might look to be inexhaustible, I remind myself that it got that way because it has been left alone.

The spring is not bursting with cress at this time of year; the plants are holding steady, waiting for sympathetic signs from the season. I harvest sparingly, taking a few leaves here, a few there. When I'm finished I want the spring to look exactly as it did before I started picking.

Of course, I sample some leaves of cress while I’m picking, and that pungent, almost hot flavor, along with the brilliant green of it, acts as an absolute tonic to my winter-dulled senses. Then with a few servings of cress tucked away, the dogs and I take a wandering walk along the stream. They dash back and forth from bank to bank, kicking up a splashy ruckus. I’ll try to find a quiet pool to peer into, try to spot some trout. Opening day of Minnesota’s trout season is still weeks away, but a guy can dream….



This stream usually runs thin over sand and graveled riffles, only deepening in corner pools where the current digs into the bank, but this year I found I couldn't cross in the expected places, wearing only calf-high boots--beavers had built two dams a couple hundred yards apart. That extra depth could make for good fishing, for a while, though the dams might not survive the spring floods that often scour a narrow valley stream like this.


It was a great day to be out. I wandered from the path and had a pulse-raising trudge through knee-deep snow--should have brought the snowshoes--soaked up a good dose of vitamin D in sunshine that is strong and hot on a calm clear afternoon now.

The cress we use judiciously, as these winter leaves are especially pungent. Last night we tucked a few leaves into extraordinary fish tacos, local as hell, and more details on which to follow.

A fine weekend to all.

Brett




Text and photos copyright 2010 by Brett Laidlaw

Two Birds at Bide-A-Wee (Part Two: Pan-Roasted Grouse in Cider Cream Sauce)

Annabel, our senior griff', is eleven years old now, and though she has slowed down quite a bit, and gets up a little gimpy from her frequent naps--a touch of arthritis, most likely--she can still find and point grouse. She sort of moseys through the woods now, not looking particularly intent on anything, but when her nose detects the scent of a bird, everything changes. Very few pointing dogs actually assume the "classic" pointing pose, front leg lifted and cocked. In fact, when one of my dogs stops on a hunt with her foot in the air like that, I pretty much know it's not a serious point.

Instead, they will stop with all four feet planted, stop as soon as they catch the scent of a bird, and turn their heads toward the scent. Then it's my job to find them, frequently in thick cover (an electronic beeper collar helps here), figure out exactly where the bird is, maneuver to gain the best angle for a shot, walk in to put the bird up, and knock it down with my 20-gauge side-by-side shotgun.



Matters do not often unfold in exactly that fashion for me. I miss my share of birds, or they flush wild or fly low through the brush or disappear behind trees. Then Annabel will break her point and run in crazy circles, barking in excitement, or frustration, it's hard to tell which. This is by no means "classic" bird dog behavior, either. In fact, even if I do manage to hit the bird, she still runs around barking at the sound of the gun, and she is of almost no use in helping me find the down bird. Lily is much better. Every bird I've shot with her in the field, she has been right on it. She doesn't retrieve, but that's fine by me. Having a bird in a dog's mouth for any amount of time does nothing to improve the quality of the meat.


On a rare warm day in October, I went out with just Annabel to hunt a smallish state hunting ground near Bide-A-Wee. We started late morning with the temperature climbing toward 60. We hadn't gone far into a stand of young aspen before my moseying dog stopped at the edge of a clump of dogwood within the aspen, and as I approached her a grouse flushed and escaped low behind thick cover. As I watched it go without firing a shot, a second bird got up and disappeared into a grove of white pine before I could locate it.

That was encouraging, and as we worked our way through that patch of aspen we located a couple more grouse as well as two or three woodcock. I think I missed on one of each, and had no shot at the others.

As we left the aspen stand and started up a little knob of a hill covered in dogwood, small oaks, prickly ash and assorted scrappy cover, Annabel stopped--again at a juncture of aspen and dogwood. I moved around to her right, to try to get the bird between us, and just as I crossed an opening in the trees, the grouse flushed. I hadn't expected the bird to be that close to my pointing dog, but the opening in the trees gave me a perfect shot. I turned to my left as I raised the gun, and brought the bird down with the first shot.

Annabel began running around, barking.

I had shot the bird at quite close range, and thought I had seen where it fell, but these animals are extremely well camouflaged. It took me a couple of minutes to find the bird. Annabel was no help whatsoever, but I certainly would never have shot that bird without her point. When I found the bird I called her over, and we engaged in a sort of dog-and-hunter high fives. "Whatta you know, we got one," I said. "Good girl, good dog." But she was off already to look for more.

It was nearly noon then, and getting hot for hunting, so we called it quits shortly after. In just an hour we had moved at least eight ruffed grouse and four or five woodcock.



I gutted the bird as soon as we got back to the cabin, and plucked it a day or two later back in Saint Paul, let it air dry in the fridge, and took it back out to Bide-A-Wee to cook for dinner the following weekend. I had thought I might grill it, then finish it in a cider and cream sauce, but October had returned to its chill, wet, blustery ways, that sun-washed morning in the woods a distant dream, so we fired up the Haggis and got out the cast iron.

First, I want everyone to appreciate the superb job I did plucking that bird. I know that anyone who has ever tried to pluck a grouse will be impressed by how clean that bird is, how intact is the skin. The skin of a grouse is delicate, and often torn by shot or dog tooth. It's no mean feat to wind up with a bird that nice. It's a tedious process, but it's worth it to me, and then, I'm not usually burdened with dozens of grouse to pluck in a season. A lot of hunters don't bother with plucking. They'll usually skin the bird, a quick and simple process. Others will "breast out" their birds in the woods, leaving behind everything but the boneless breast meat. This is both illegal, for a variety of reasons, and a terrible waste of excellent meat and bones--the carcasses of grouse produce a spectacular stock, and there's a decent amount of meat on the legs, too.

In preparation for cooking, the well-plucked bird is cut in half, seasoned with salt and pepper, smeared with butter. It's a very lean meat which benefits from a little added richness. It also benefits from bacon, but then, what doesn't? I rendered off a couple of tablespoons of lardons from our home-smoked bacon, and in that fat I browned an apple, cored and cut into eighths, not peeled.


Some sliced red cabbage and onions, sautéed, then simmered with a bit of water and cider, cooked on the Coleman stove. A handful of fingerling potatoes I grew at Bide-A-Wee were boiled separately and kept warm on the side of the wood stove.


Then I browned the grouse. Threw in some chopped leeks.

Added a cup of chicken stock, a half cup each of Cedar Summit cream and our own apple cider, a few sprigs of thyme (we can reach out the window and snip it from our potted herb garden on the south side of the cabin!). I finished cooking the grouse in the slowly reducing sauce--it was barely bubbling--for ten or fifteen minutes. Towards the end I put in the precooked potatoes to warm up.



And we served it forth. A well-cooked grouse is among the most exquisite things you can eat. This bird, well, I'd say it produced some of the finest meat I have ever tasted, lean but moist and tender, with a flavor both pronounced and subtle (but I'm not going to say it tasted wild...).

Just a really fine thing to eat, and a celebration of the land and the season. That said, there's no reason you couldn't do the same thing with cornish hens, or chicken.




Thanks, Annabel.

Text and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw

Two Birds at Bide-A-Wee (Part One: Duck Breast, Haw Sauce, Celery Root Fries)

As much as I love cooking over an open fire--grilling over hardwood coals, smoking or smoke-roasting with apple and oak--it is also extremely pleasant to move indoors as the weather cools, fire the woodstove, heat the cast iron skillet, and listen to dinner softly sizzle or simmer while we sip an apertif by candlelight (which is both wonderfully romantic and entirely necessary, as we have no electricity at Bide-A-Wee). With all the gadgetry in the modern kitchen, and the widespread misconception that more expensive equipment will make you a better cook (and your life, therefore, complete), it's a particular pleasure to be able to turn out wonderful seasonal meals from a hunk of black iron sitting on a hot metal box. This time out, it's duck breast with haw sauce served on fried polenta with celery root fries and fillet beans. Next time, pan-roasted grouse with cider cream sauce, fingerling pototoes, red cabbage.

I've mentioned my fascination with the hawthorn tree, and with its fruit, the haw or hawberry. Hawthorn grow wild and profusely on our land in Wisconsin. Here above you see the haw, and the thorn. Wicked thorns. You want to be careful if you find yourself in the midst of a hawthorn thicket. The shrike, the only carnivorous songbird, sometimes impales its prey, small rodents and other birds, on the thorns of hawthorn. A perching bird, it doesn't have the raptor's claws to hold and tear apart its meal, so uses the thorn like a fork, its beak the steak knife. It has earned the nickname "Butcher Bird." (We saw a northern shrike take a vole from under our bird feeder last winter; a remarkable thing to see.)

There are lots of types of hawthorns. Some seem to make little or no fruit, and some bear pomes no bigger than a blueberry, and the best for eating that we have found carry bright red fruit that closely resemble rosehips, and indeed roses and hawthorns both belong to the botanical family rosaceae--apples are in there, too. Hawthorn trees are disctintive in the landscape, small and gnarled, the trunks and branches often colored with lichen. Those thorns set them apart from small, wild, seedling apple trees or wild plums. In late fall and into winter, they often hold their bright red fruit, and the contrast between those cheery berries and the tortured shapes of the trees is striking--a tormented artist who paints serene and beautiful canvasses.

That's our 3 3/4-year-old griffon Lily giving scale to a hawthorn tree with nice fruit. You have to taste around to find nice hawthorn fruit, and you have to use your imagination. Even the nice, plump haws that we have found are mostly skin and seeds, and what flesh there is is rather pulpy and dry. These are not for eating out of hand, though you could probably survive on them if you had to.


But when you cook them in water for a rather long time they soften, and then you can push the mash through a seive, and you wind up with a good amount of fragrant mush, slightly sweet, with an aroma that's somewhere in the midst of vegetable, fruit, and roses. You can sweeten that to make a simple jam. In Britain hawthorn jelly is well known.

Those are nannyberries with haws, above. I sometimes fall into the lazy shorthand of describing the flavor of a wild food as "wild," and while that characterization is no doubt literally true, it also strikes me as close to meaningless. A mushroom, a berry, a game bird, a trout, all are wild, and may be said to taste "wild," but what does that mean, for each type of food, and do they share anything in common, all being wild? And then, on further consideration, I think that there is something valid there, as long as it is further qualified. In fact, all those things do taste wild, in that they have a flavor very different from their domestic counterparts. If you've ever picked wild blueberries from the top of a lichen-covered rock in northern Minnesota, Canada, or wherever those wild wonders grow, and compare their sun-warmed flavor with the bloated, bland, watery farmed type, I think you'll see what I mean.

When a wild food is domesticated, it is bred to emphasize certain characteristics, to eliminate others. Sometimes the favored characteristics are good ones--like sweetness or juiciness in fruit--and sometimes they are merely convenient--pickability, shipability, shelf life. And sometimes the characteristics that are selected out--well, rightfully so, one might say. There's often a slight or even a pronounced astringency to wild fruit that we rarely find in farmed fruit today. There is also, I would say, a much broader range of flavors than we are accustomed too, and it may take a bit of tasting to become so. Some will find it not worth it, but if you're a regular reader of these pages, I imagine you would want to try.

Start tasting haws in mid-September, and when you find they've acquired some flavor--some sweetness, some perfume--pick a good cup or so. They seem to improve with a frost, and the fruits stay on the trees long after the leaves have fallen.

Rinse the haws and remove any stems. Add three cups water, bring to a boil, slowly simmer, covered, for about 45 minutes. The haws may still look quite intact at this point, but if you press them they should yield, skin splitting, pulp emerging. Keep some of the water, which has quite a bit of flavor, and will help as you sieve the pulp. Just dump the berries and some water into a wire mesh sieve, and press with the back of a spoon. The juicy stuff with come right out, and with a little more pushing, the pulpy stuff will follow. Soon you'll have nothing but dry seeds and skin in the sieve. Be sure to scrape the last of the pulp from the outside of the sieve.

Now I realize this has been more about the berries than the bird, but everyone knows what a duck breast is, and how many have tried haws? But, on with the bird: You've got a nice fat magret de canard. That's the breast of a fattened duck raised for foie gras--ours from Au Bon Canard and Clancey's. These things usually weigh 12 ounces or better, so for us, one feeds two. You may have to look around, or use both breasts from a regular-size duck.

I have heated my cast iron skillet on the Haggis (our pet name for our woodstove; I know...), and I've cross-hatched the skin of the duck with a sharp knife or razor--just cut a titch down into the fat, not reaching the meat--to let the fat flow forth as it cooks. I cook it slowly, skin side down most of the time. As the fat flows forth I add to the pan about a half a celery root trimmed and cut into french fry shape, and also a handful of fillet beans, last of the season from the market, and absolutely wonderful. Now everything sizzles away in duck fat. Meanwhile:

On the propane camp stove my sauce is making. It's a generous half-cup each of chicken stock and dry red wine, which I reduce by half, to which I then add about three tablespoons of haw purée and a tablespoon of maple syrup, a grind or two of pepper, couple pinches salt, taste for seasoning. Simmer very quietly as the duck rests.

I have pan-fried some slices of set-up polenta. I finish my sauce with a knob of butter (I would call that a tablespoon and a half...). We find the magret properly rosé. We find in the celery root and beans a splendid counterplay of late-fall flavors. We find that haw sauce is something unique and delicious, and an excellent partner to the rich, savory duck in all ways--in its mild sweetness, its fragrance, and even in that lingering astringency. We find that we are happy campers, delighted to have made the acquantance of the haw.

Text and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw