Because I Wished To Brine Deliberately

The woods are a remarkable influence on the lives of West Michiganders, especially in the fall and early winter. The trees are dozens of colors. Ducks, deer, and geese draw hunters out and game starts hitting the dinner table in their homes and the homes of their friends. Many of them are much better shots than cooks, and often wild game ends up in chewy teriyaki jerky, or abominable chili and gumbo. If you are lucky enough to know a hunter who is also a good cook, cherish that relationship like gold.

Fisherman too. Sometimes the great freshwater fish around us gets treated with ham fisted brines and cures before they hit the smokehouse. Too much soy or teriyaki again, granulated garlic and onion, too much sugar.  To me these things don't really speak to the place trout come from. Lately I've been testing a brine for smoked rainbow trout that draws on the flavors you might find in the forest. Dried chanterelle and lobster mushrooms, juniper berry, rosemary, and laurel. I haven't really gotten precisely what I 'm looking for,  but I'm closing in on it. This brine worries me in a restaurant setting. Dried mushrooms are expensive and their impact is subtle. This is one of those moments where the "value for money" question might get raised by a diner who doesn't notice the details. More on perception of values in a later post. Believe me, I have lots to say on the subject.

I went for a walk in the fields of my neighbors' farm with my dogs today. It was raining slightly and the  bright trees were starting to lose their leaves. I thought about how much time I've spent in the woods in Michigan and how much I love to cook the foods that live there. The mushrooms, the ramps, the black walnuts and chestnuts, deer, trout. To be truthful, the wild food around us is not always good. Sometimes deer eat garbage and fish swim in polluted waters. I hope I'm not the last generation of Michigander to see hundreds of thousands of crayfish scuttling on the shore of the beach on a moonlit night when the waters were clean enough to support them in massive numbers. I wonder how many people who have lived in Michigan their whole lives even know that crayfish used to be abundant here. Or that our rivers and streams teemed with rainbow and brown trout but now most of the trout we eat, including the ones pictured above, are farmed. These are the very real and immediate consequences of poor stewardship of the earth. It changes what we eat which changes who we are. I hope it is not overly romantic to think we are going in back in the right direction in some important ways.

There is a philosophy amongst heritage breed farmers that says you have to eat it to save it. And it's true. Raising Red Wattles can't be a novelty, an experiment, if we expect them to be around in a hundred years. If we don't use it, we lose it. The same goes for wild food. We will take better care of our waterways, fields, and forests if we appreciate what's in them, both for their beauty and their usefulness in the kitchen. We have to be responsible and moderate about it, of course. But when the opportunity comes, I can't think of a more delicious way to commune with nature and become inspired to take good care of it.

Eat some venison with chanterelle mushrooms and be a part of Michigan before there was agriculture. And don't leave your goddamn beer cans in the woods.