Go for the Gold

This past Sunday I was faced with a tough choice: catch the last two periods of the gold-medal hockey game between the U.S. and Canada or go for the golden razor clam. I went for the gold. It's almost always better to be a participant rather than an observer, don't you think? Unless we're talking about alligator rasslin' or something.



So far this season I had been shut out of razor clam openings because of scheduling conflicts. My luck was about to change. It was a perfect afternoon for a dig: partly cloudy with sunbursts, not too windy, low tide at 6:30 pm. Really, it doesn't get much better than that, not on the storm-swept shores of the North Pacific. By 4:30 the beaches started crowding with people, though not excessively so. It was still mild outside and some of the bolder clammers wore nothing but shorts and t-shirts. My friends Chris and Lori, who star in the morel hunting chapter of the book, set off down the beach with faithful hound Buddha.



Meanwhile surf clamming specialists collected first dibs as the rest of us waited for the tide to drop. This is something I want to learn, mainly because it looks so ballsy to be out there in the foam and spray digging beneath a foot or two of water. How do they even locate the shows? I don't know but there must be some secret shared by the confederacy of surf diggers. Unfortunately I forgot to get a picture of any of them. Maybe they don't even show up on film.

The rest of us used our clam guns (shovels and tubes) to score a few early clams while waiting for the drop. Then, all of sudden, the out-going tide exposed the honey holes. Shows appeared all around. Crazed digging and lots of "Over there!" and "Right behind you!" exhortations. Limits filled in minutes. It was a good crop, with many decent-sized razors and easy digging. Virtually everyone had a limit before the turn.

As I walked back to the van a line of cars and trucks sped past on the hardpan beach, people hanging out of open windows yelling and hollering and generally whooping it up. "Waaaahhhhoooooo!" a long-haired freak zinged me as his buddies hauled him away from the beach in an old Dodge wagon gone to rust. They probably had a hundred razors between them. I flashed him the thumbs-up as he rolled off down the flats. It bears repeating that human beings enjoy getting their own food from places other than the supermarket. Another gift from the sea had been gladly accepted and it was time to party.

Tempura Razor Clam Sushi



If you've spent any quality time in Jamaica, then rolling sushi ought to be second nature. If not, just practice. A bamboo roller makes it easier. How you cook the rice is key. Make sure you use sushi-grade short-grain rice and rinse it in a few changes of water before cooking. The rice should spread smoothly on a sheet of nori without becoming too gloppy.

While the rice is cooking, prep and arrange your ingredients. I've used all kinds of fish, fresh vegetables, Asian-style pickled vegetables, and other flavors and textures. The following are examples, but experiment on your own. Tempura is fun because it adds a little crunch to your sushi and a hit of that fatty goodness that only fried foods can give.

4-5 razor clams, cut in half lengthwise
tempura batter (here's a recipe)
2 cups sushi rice
seasoned rice vinegar
1 package nori
Dungeness crabmeat or other fish or shellfish*
1 small jar tobiko
1/2 cucumber
1 avocado
pickled ginger
wasabi
soy sauce

* Note: As you can see from the photos, I used fake crab, known as surimi, but subsequent review of the Sustainable Sushi web site reveals that surimi is no longer considered a viable option for the sushi lover. On the other hand, Seafood Watch's Sustainable Fish Guide application for the iPhone calls it a "good alternative." This is confusing and should be sorted out.

1. Make rice. When cooked, mix in a splash of seasoned rice vinegar to taste.
2. Peel and slice cucumber into matchsticks. Cut avocado into thin slices.
3. Batter razor clams and fry in oil. Remove to paper towels.
4. Spread rice evenly on nori wrapper. Repeatedly wetting fingers in a dipping bowl makes this easier.
5. Arrange ingredients and roll. For an inside-out roll, flip rice-covered wrapper onto wax paper, rice side down.

Itadakimas!



Turns out my Canadian friends got to revel in their medal victory. But I had my own gold. We grabbed a few pints at the Porthole Pub in Ocean Shores and then made tracks back to Seattle, Winterland '73 cranked in Cora's hippie van. After enjoying a wonderful dinner recently at West Seattle's Mashiko, one of only a handful of certified sustainable sushi restaurants in the world, I had ideas for my catch: Pacific Gold, a fine rolling sushi if there ever was one.

Hunters Ed

I've been schlepping up to Bothell on the north shore of Lake Washington all week to attend my first Hunters Education class. The day of the first session I called ahead to make sure the minimum 10 students had signed up and the class was a go. Toni, one of the instructors, gave a little chuckle and said yes, we were a go. Well, fifty other students of different ages, ethnicities, and gender joined me that first evening and the three evenings after that.

As has been widely reported in recent months (see this article from the New York Times) more than a few of the students were like me: would-be hunters of a certain age from the city. In fact, several of us were not legally obligated to take the class at all (the cut-off is January 1, 1972), but coming from urban environments and without family traditions of hunting, we felt it essential to absorb as much hands-on information as possible before marching off into the woods with our weapons.



A few takeaways:

There's a difference between and an accident and an incident; most deaths and injuries while hunting fall into the latter category. In other words, they're preventable.

Carelessness and ignorance account for the vast majority of hunting incidents.

The Golden Trifecta of Hunter Safety:

• Always point your muzzle in a safe direction.
  
• Keep your gun unloaded until ready to use.
  
• Keep your finger off the trigger until you're ready to shoot.

The first night we went over basic safety with a variety of talks and films. The second night we discussed ethics, with some wildlife identification thrown in. Night three was more hands-on. We practiced getting a rifle out of a pickup, carrying it up and down a hill, and placing it back in the truck. (Hint: When picking up a gun, after making sure the muzzle is pointed in a safe direction, always check the action to make sure it's open and not loaded.) Next, partnered up, we practiced getting in and out of a boat and crossing a fence. Good stuff. The third class concluded with a talk on first aid and outdoor survival. The fourth night we shot air rifles in the basement and took the test. I passed.

I still have a sense of vertigo about this hunting thing, like I've pitched off a ledge and am falling headlong into the unknown, but I figure a few trips to the shooting range will help. I still don't feel comfortable around guns. Maybe that's good. Maybe one should never feel too comfortable. And as for the actual hunting—or should I say killing—well, we'll just have to see, won't we?

Nettle Pesto Pops

I found a frozen packet of nettles from last year's harvest in the freezer the other day. With all the fresh nettles we've been eating lately this seemed like an opportune time to see how a year-old hunk of frozen nettles tasted in comparison. I'm happy to report my dinner companions up the street didn't blink. Not for a second did they wonder whether my potluck contribution of Cream of Stinging Nettle Soup wasn't made from nettles picked that day (and I didn't tell—shhhh). The day-glo green color and signature flavor would have fooled me too.

Score another point for free, nutritious food.

Speaking of frozen nettles, I wouldn't have been able to make a soup with fresh nettles anyway because all of my harvest has gone into pesto production. There's a reason for this. She's four going on fourteen, cute as a button when she's not terrorizing her parents or building elaborate homes for ponies and princesses out of the furniture, and she loves her daddy's nettle pesto.

I've already posted a recipe for Stinging Nettle Pesto, but here's more info/photos about putting up your pesto. Use a Ziploc with a corner cut off to fill each cavity of the tray, then put in the freezer for several hours. Once frozen the pesto cubes can be easily removed from the tray and stored in freezer bags, ready for use throughout the year.

Whenever Ruby wants her pesto fix, I simply grab a pesto pop from the freezer, heat it up in the microwave, and toss with a bowl of cooked pasta. A single cube is enough to coat a few servings of pasta.

If you want to make a large batch of nettle pesto just remember to harvest enough nettles. A grocery bag packed with freshly harvested stinging nettles yields about two ice trays of pesto plus a small tub.

Few meals are healthier or easier to make.

Winter Is the New Spring: Nettle Gnocchi

Inhofe and his ilk can bury their heads in the D.C. snow and deny climate change, but here in the Pacific Northwest we just experienced the warmest January on record. Not the warmest in 10 years, not the warmest in a generation—the warmest since scientists first started keeping track, going back to 1891 in the case of Seattle. This is just one of many indicators—from melting glaciers in the Cascades to the changing migration patterns of birds, butterflies, and fish—that a degree or two of rising mercury is remaking the planet in dramatic ways.

The results of our balmy mid-winter beach break have been painfully clear, so to speak. Stinging nettles in the lowlands are already at harvestable size, with some well over a foot tall. I harvested my first batch on February 8. That's two weeks earlier than my previous earliest date. In fact, this year I could have found tender young nettles of six inches or so at the end of January.

To re-phrase an old saw, if the world gives you stinging nettles, make Nettle Gnocchi.

Whenever I make a potato-based gnocchi (as opposed to semolina-based) I'm always skeptical until the little pillows are safely plated and intact. So much can seemingly go wrong (though it usually works out). I improvised on the same recipe as the one for Oxtail & Porcini Gnocchi, which is based on a recipe from 101 Cookbooks. But after making gnocchi a handful of times in the past year I can say that recipes for potato dumplings are more like guidelines. The important thing is to get a feel for the dough. I don't think I've ever used the same amount of flour twice, and this is especially true when adding a wet ingredient such as boiled nettles to the mix.

So think of the amounts below as estimates. The best thing to do is start with less than the full cup of flour and then keep adding. You may end up using well over a cup as I did.

2 large Yukon Gold potatoes, boiled and peeled
1 egg, lightly beaten
1 cup nettles, boiled and chopped
1 cup or more flour
salt to taste

1. Boil nettles for a minute or two to neutralize sting. Remove to cold water. Next wring out excess water. Chop nettles, measure out a cup and then whir in a food processor.

2. Cut potatoes in half and boil in salted nettle water until tender, thirty minutes or more. Remove from water one at a time and peel. Break down potatoes with a fork and allow to cool. Make sure to attack lumps but don't over-mash.

3. Mix nettles into potatoes by hand, a little at a time.

4. Sprinkle a handful of flour over your work space. Pull potato-nettle mixture into a mound on floured surface and make a volcano-like crater. Pour beaten egg into crater and sprinkle 3/4 of the flour over top. Start working the dough with metal spatulas or your hands, adding more flour and folding the dough into itself as you go. I find this step gets messy unless I make sure to use plenty of flour.

5. Split the dough into 5 or 6 balls. The dough is ready when you can easily roll out each ball into a long snake. Again, a work surface dusted generously with flour makes this easier. Now cut into pillows.

6. Add gnocchi to salted boiling water. (You can re-use your nettle-potato water.) When they float to the surface they're done. Remove with a slotted spoon.

I ate my Nettle Gnocchi with two different sauces. A simple red sauce with grated parm works quite nicely, the acidity of the tomatoes marrying well with the high green note of the nettles.

But even better, in my opinion, is—surprise!—a sweet, herbed cream sauce. I know, my love for the cream sauce seems to know no bounds. Just trust me. For this more decadent preparation, try briefly sauteing fresh chopped herbs from the garden (I used sage, thyme, rosemary, oregano, parsley, and chives) in butter, splashing with a little cognac that bubbles off (but not before leaving a pleasant sweetness), and finishing with heavy cream. Pour over the gnocchi and sprinkle with parmesan. As you can see from my picture below I was in a bit of a hurry to eat this meal. I used half-and-half, which separated somewhat from the butter. Still, it was an amazing lunch.

Next Steps

I called the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife the other day. Squirrels, I said to the guy, I want me some squirrels.

Seattle is overrun by thuggish non-native Eastern gray squirrels that strut about as if they own the place—and they're making life tough on the threatened Western gray squirrel. At a party before Christmas I talked to a friend who knew a bit about blowguns of all things. The gears started turning. My boy is crazy for poison dart frogs, which we check out at the zoo whenever we're there. I would get some poison dart frogs (from where I hadn't yet figured out) and...and make an extract from said amphibians! Then tag a few of our oh-so-cocky grays. But after a while that idea somehow lost steam and I was onto the notion of a slingshot. Yeah, knock 'em right off our fence as they prance about.

So I called WDFW. The game warden was understanding. He'd like to see a few of those fat Eastern grays in a nice gumbo too. But city laws trump anything WDFW has to say, and virtually every city of any size in Puget Sound—which is where the Eastern grays gangbang—has ordinances that prohibit projectiles of any sort. "You can't even throw a rock at them according to the law," he said to me sadly.

What's a squirrel gumbo fancier to do?

After that I started looking at Hav-a-Hart traps. But squirrels are notoriously hard to kill and the thought of trying to drown one—the humane option as sanctioned by WDFW—seemed like too much of an ordeal. The upshot is I plan to hunt squirrels the old-fashioned way—with guns—when I visit my brother-in-law in Arkansas.



In the meantime I've hooked up with the bass player of The Tallboys, a local old-timey music outfit, who's a couple years ahead of me on the hunting learning curve. For small game John uses a Savage Model 24, a combo .22 rifle and 20-gauge shotgun that collapses into a packable size. The other day we got an early start (see the sunrise over Lake Washington above) to scout some possible rabbitat near North Bend. The rabbits weren't a-hoppin', though we did flush a couple ruffed grouse and noted those locations for fall when the bird season opens. In a few weeks I take a Hunter Education class, four evenings of instruction capped by a visit to a shooting range.

The odyssey has begun.

The Great FOTL Huckle Buckle CONTEST!

Patience is not one of my virtues. This I know. I also know that I will probably never muster the patience required to be a good baker. Unlike most cooking, baking is all about exact measurements. Good bakers improve on a given recipe based on trial and error and careful observation. They learn precisely how to adapt to local conditions of humidity, temperature, elevation, etc. Keeping a log of each attempt—what went right, what wrong—is the sort of smart attention to detail that any good baker employs. I keep no such log.

And so, unless I change my ways, my occasional stabs at baking will almost always be less than earth-shattering. The numinous alchemy between sugar, butter, and flour will remain obscure to me. This is where you come in, gentle reader.

See the recipe for Huckle Buckle below? It hails from an ancient spiral-bound edition of the Better Homes & Gardens New Cook Book. The "new" cracks me up. Martha must have liberated this copy from her grandmother's collection. The recipe is a standard coffee cake with blueberry topping (huckleberry in this household). It's okay, not great. The baking time seems to vary. Rarely do I get the topping synched up with the fluffy cake part, and sometimes the fluffy cake part ain't so fluffy. But it could be really good, I'm sure of that, with some tweaks and additions. After all, what's not to like? Huckleberries and coffee cake should be a killer combo.

Your mission, should you accept it, is to improve upon this recipe—or come up with another one. If the latter, it should be recognizable as a sort of coffee cake (because I like coffee cake) and use either huckleberries or blueberries. I'll award two prizes, which will be a jar of pickled sea beans or fiddleheads for the lucky winners: one prize randomly selected from all the entrants and one prize for my choice of best recipe. Be warned that overly complicated recipes will have a strike against them from the get-go ('cause I'm no champion baker, remember). It might take me a while to try all the recipes, so be patient (wait, you're bakers—you're already patient!).

One last thing: Please use frozen or canned huckleberries or blueberries. We all love fresh, but most of the year we use berries we've put up.

You can email me your recipe (finspotcook AT gmail dot com) or post in the comments field. Include contact info. Contest ends on February 28, 2010. I'll compile the recipes for a future post.

My So-So Huckle Buckle

Batter:

1/2 cup shortening
3/4 cup sugar
1 egg
2 cups sifted all-purpose flour
2 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup milk

Topping:

2 cups huckleberries or blueberries *
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup sifted all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 cup butter

In large bowl cream shortening and 3/4 cup sugar. Add egg and beat until light. In separate bowl mix together flour, baking powder, and salt; add to creamed mixture along with milk. Spread in greased 11 X 7-inch pan. Top with berries. Mix 1/2 cup sugar, 1/2 cup flour, and cinnamon; cut in butter until crumbly. Sprinkle over berries. Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes or until done. Let cool for several minutes, then slice. Serve warm.

* We use two different techniques when using frozen berries. If the berries are frozen in a clump, we thaw and drain them; if individually frozen we add them to the batter without thawing.

Menu for Hope Results

Congratulations to Marie Schall who has won an afternoon of foraging with yours truly—and BIG thank yous to everyone who participated in the sixth Menu for Hope raffle. Food bloggers raised nearly $80,000 for the UN World Food Program. Click here to see a full list of raffle winners.

Truffling with Jack

As I lay me down here at home, cold-turkey off the meds, there's not much to report in the way of foraging. Luckily I have my wild food stash and a few things to mention that didn't get mentioned in the fall.

A few months ago while in Portland for some book events I made a side-trip an hour southwest to the Willamette Valley in search of a coveted wild edible to bring back home. It's the sort of edible that inspires otherwise circumspect men to spend stupid sums of money and otherwise intelligent women to sleep with stupid men. At least in Europe that's the case, where the truffle has enjoyed a long, colorful history as a pricey luxury item and sought-after aphrodisiac.

Truffles are subterranean fungi, many of which emit pungent scents to attract the animals that will dig them up, eat them, and subsequently spread their reproductive spores. Whether or not these aromas are ever scientifically proven to heighten arousal we can be sure that truffles will continue to fetch top dollar for their culinary uses. The white "Alba" truffles of Italy and black "Perigord" truffles of France have been the choice of royalty for centuries. Here in North America, specifically in the low-elevation Douglas-fir forests of the Pacific Northwest, we have our own edible truffles that don't require a fancy coat-of-arms or family escutcheon to possess. While not as renowned as their European counterparts, American truffles can stir the same primal passions when used correctly.

And there's the rub. The fact is, most American diners—most American chefs, one could argue—don't know what a good truffle tastes like, or worse (in the case of the chefs), they aren't scrupulous enough to know when to not serve the expensive fungus mocking them in the walk-in. In this country unripe truffles are routinely bought and sold and then passed up the food-chain until they reach restaurant patrons who scratch their heads wondering what all the fuss is about. I've been served a very unspectacular Perigord black truffle by one of Seattle's finest restaurants, with the flourish of a waiter brandishing his mandoline at table. The theatric gesture didn't change the fact that the truffle wasn't ripe.

American truffles seem to suffer even more from ill-use, perhaps because they're cheaper and easier to obtain. A small group of local truffle boosters has been trying to change this, but until the public is more educated—from commercial forager to diner—our home-grown truffles will continue to be viewed as vastly inferior to their European cousins. Which is too bad, because good, ripe truffles from both continents can elevate a meal from excellent to sublime.

As I drove southwest from Portland, I thought about my last meal of truffles. It had been just a few days earlier in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood, where a friend took me to his favorite trattoria. We ordered plates of linguini with cream sauce. The waiter appeared with a scale and a large white Alba truffle, which he weighed first, then shaved onto our pasta, then weighed again. Like cocaine, truffles are priced by the gram. Fortunately this truffle that had traveled thousands of miles was in top form and our meal, so simple in appearance, was superb. The smell of the truffles rose up in the steam of the dish. Each bite seemed to offer the possibility of a secret revealed. We took in these ineffable pleasures and washed them down with woodsy Piedmontese Barbera...



Autumn colors in neat geometric patterns across the Dundee Hills snapped me out of my reverie. I wasn't in Italy, nor San Francisco. Here in the Willamette Valley the crush of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay had finished and the leaves were turning pretty shades of yellow and orange. In the town of Dayton I pulled into the historic Joel Palmer House to meet my guide.

Jack Czarnecki, former owner of the Joel Palmer House (his son is now the chef-owner), is about the closest thing this country has to a truffle expert, and he's using his expertise to produce truffle oil. Like the proverbial lightning in a bottle, truffle oil is a way to capture the fleeting flavors of truffles and use them year-round; unlike lightning in a bottle, it can really be done. But it should be noted that Jack's all-natural truffle oils are a far cry from the chemical concoctions devised in scientific labs by most of the other so-called truffle oil manufacturers.


A few words about truffle oil. As wild foods, in particular fungi, continue to land on plates served by high-end restaurants across the land, there's been a commensurate increase in the use of truffle oil. Truffle oil is the sort of fancy ingredient that can spruce up a menu and lend extra gravitas to an establishment looking for culinary plaudits. Which would you pay more for? Wild Mushroom Ravioli or Ravioli of Porcini and Chevre drizzled with Truffle Oil... But what is truffle oil? According to Daniel Patterson in his now-infamous New York Times rant, most truffle oils are a fraud—molecular creations that don't actually have a shred of truffle in their recipes.

You see, the truffle's complex aroma has been sequenced out by chemists so that it's now just a series of numbers and letters, an equation. Even the French and Italian oils are guilty of the deception, and though some will include shavings or pieces of truffle in the bottom of the bottle for an implied authenticity, the actual flavor has been created in a test tube.

Jack hasn't taken the short cut. His truffle oils are the real deal. And for this reason, he needs to forage an enormous quantity of truffles each season. I was only too glad to help. With his friend Tony joining us, we set out for the truffle ballpark—in this case, a managed stand of young Douglas firs on private property where Jack has worked out a barter arrangement that is typical between truffle hunters and landowners. To the untrained eye the forest looked like a rather uninviting monocrop. To the experienced truffler, it looked like the strike zone: young, single-aged conifers grew in rows for easy walking and a thick carpet of duff covered the ground underfoot. Using garden rakes, we gently raked back the layer of duff to expose little white tubers up to the size of golf-balls: Oregon winter white truffles, Tuber oregonense.



It was still a couple weeks early and most of the truffles didn't yet have their typically pungent smell. We collected them just the same. Jack explained that it was possible to ripen the truffles if done with patience and an understanding of the truffle's life-cycle.

I came home with a couple pounds of white truffles. Following Jack's instructions, I washed the dirt off each truffle with a quick blast of tap water and then used a toothbrush to clean the exterior. This took some time. Then I swaddled the truffles in paper towels, layering them in Tupperware and sealing the lid before popping into the fridge. The idea is to keep them cool and dry so they can ripen just as they would in the ground. The truffles sweat so you need to change the damp towels every couple days.

Most of a truffle's flavor and aroma comes in the form of gases emitted by the truffle which can then be absorbed in fats. This is why you never cook truffles at high temperature; the fragile gases get cooked out. The best way to serve truffles is to shave them thinly over hot food on the plate, not in the pan, and allow the flavors to soak in. Scrambled eggs, melted butter, and cream sauces are the perfect vehicles.

Unfortunately most of my individual truffles never ripened as much as they would have in the ground. My ripest specimens got thinly sliced into dishes such as homemade Tagliatelle with Alfredo Sauce to which they added a noticeable hint of truffle, though not as much as I would have preferred. But I had another card up my sleeve: I made a couple pounds of truffled butter, a better choice for my slow-ripening truffles. I sealed sticks of organic sweet cream butter into Tupperware with a few ounces of truffles per stick and left them in the fridge for a few weeks. By the end the truffles were decomposing, but over the course of those weeks they emitted enough of their fabled gases to flavor the butter. (Oh, and by the way, if you ever see truffled butter that's shot through with pieces of ground-up truffle, know that this is either a misconception on the maker's part or a gimmick. It's all about the gases.) The truffled butter is wonderful melted over pasta or simply spread on toast.

This was my first experience digging white truffles. In general I'd say they're stronger than black truffles. Black truffles have a distinctly different flavor (fruitier, less garlicky) and are supposedly harder to find, though I've had some luck foraging them in recent years. Both whites and blacks can make a special accompaniment to a meal when properly ripe, and whether or not our local truffles deserve comparison with European varieties is besides the point. Truffles are a treat wherever they are handled with skill.

Speed Bump

Dear readers, after watching my last post develop a life of its own thanks to your thoughtful feedback and generous contributions, I feel it's only right to explain my absence from that extended conversation and let you in on some personal details that will impact the next chapter in my foraging career.

I took the above photo from my 4th floor hospital room the other night after awaking from a dense, dreamless swim through Dilaudid, Valium, Oxycontin, and Oxycodone. My mood was as somber as the skyline. Frankie calls these the wee hours, that lonely time in the pit of night when we feel our smallest and most insignificant. But I prefer Dylan's counsel on the matter—that it's darkest right before the dawn.

Remember the Amanita cocktail I mixed for my ailing lower back? It didn't do squat. So, after five years of chasing remedies to the degenerating disc at vertebra L5-S1—from acupuncture to Feledenkrais, from chiropractic to Pilates—I finally gave the thumb's up to the scariest and most invasive option of all: a spinal fusion.

I had the surgery last week. My lower spine where the lumbar meets the sacrum is now locked together with a couple titanium bars. A mulch of bone harvested from my iliac crest (pelvis) is housed in a cage where the disc used to be, hopefully fusing the spine as I type this. I'm back home and walking around some, though mostly I'm resting in a narcotic haze. Each day the pain recedes a little more. Yesterday I was able to stroll through my neighborhood for nearly an hour without any sciatica.

My timing was deliberate. January is the quietest month for both foragers and authors. I plan to lay low for most of the month and then gradually ramp up to my usual activities. This March you might catch me harvesting stinging nettles in a brace. If all goes according to plan, by the time the spring porcini start to push their rusty caps through North Cascades duff I'll be out of the brace and hoisting a heavy backpack once again—or maybe chasing a Squirrel Gumbo up a tree.

Fingers crossed.

Hunting?

Now I've gone and done it. So, where to begin?

First will be hunter safety class. Then I suppose a visit to a shooting range to fire an actual gun. (Bow-and-arrow can wait, don't you agree?) Maybe I'll even purchase my own firearm at some point.

But before you get all excited and twitchy about my misadventures in this new land of weapons, killing, and bloodshed—oh, and mouth-watering recipes for wild game—keep in mind that my leap from forager to hunter will not be an overnight transformation. The learning curve is steep enough that this first year, I suspect, will yield mostly preliminaries, plus I've got a bunch more traditional foraging to attend to, and, well, I just don't want to make any predictions, okay? In short, I don't see an elk hunt in my near future.

One of the commenters on my Resolution post mentioned hunting with firepower isn't really the same as foraging. While not one to slice the semantical salami too thin, I'll admit that this feels like a pretty major shift to me, which is why I'll be starting small. I was pleased to see a recipe recently in the New York Times of all places for Squirrel Gumbo. Regular readers know that I'm a fan of Nawlins-style cookery, and though I haven't had the distinct pleasure of tasting our bushy-tailed tree rats yet, I'm pretty sure I can make one palatable in a spicy gumbo.

But this is a ways off. My first shot at a squirrel will probably be in the spring when I visit relatives in Arkansas. My plan is to bone up on all the safety issues first and read some history and lore on the ancient bloodsport. Then, maybe, I'll do my Elmer Fudd routine. I'm both looking forward to and dreading this chapter. Somehow, though, it feels necessary.

(Photo by RunnerJenny)