How to Cook a Moose (40 page)

“A big thing to do on the farm at Happy Hour,” said KJ, “is to hang out by the pigpen and drink beers. A local bakery gives us day-old baguettes. The other day, we stuck them on the pigs' backs and watched them run around with them. When they fell off, the pigs ate them. Big fun.”

I laughed; it did seem like worthy entertainment. I would have sat and watched it myself for an hour or two. But the pigs didn't seem to feel the same way about us humans. Once they had ascertained that nothing exciting was going on with us, foodwise, they ignored us entirely and returned to whatever they'd been doing before we arrived, some in the mud, others in the shade. It was time to move on.

KJ Grow's Pork Breakfast Sausage Patties

A few months after our visit, KJ told me the pigs had been slaughtered, and that she'd bought a share of Mr. Diggler. I asked her what kinds of dishes she was making with the fresh, organic pork, and she gave me the following delicious-sounding recipe, which she credited to
Allrecipes.com
.

2 lbs unseasoned ground pork

Mix the following spices and blend into the pork with your hands, then form into small patties:

2 tsp dried sage

2 tsp salt

1 tsp ground black pepper

1/4 tsp dried marjoram

1 T brown sugar

1/8 tsp crushed red pepper flakes

1 pinch ground cloves

Sauté patties in a skillet, 5 minutes per side, over medium heat. Serve with cheesy scrambled farm-fresh eggs and sautéed potatoes and onions for a hearty breakfast in any season.

Back behind the pigpen, ringed by trees, was a flower-strewn meadow with a large, airy yurt on a wooden platform that served as a gathering place for the apprentices. They cooked on a propane stove and washed their dishes outside with water pumped out of a big blue barrel. Inside were a couch and a table with chairs, a rug and a woodstove. Behind that were the small old RVs where KJ and Shannon slept; Abi lived in an apartment in a nearby town. The inside of KJ's little camper was as shipshape and efficient as a belowdecks galley and berth of a sailboat. It didn't have a toilet; there was an outhouse nearby, and the apprentices showered in the farmhouse.

As we were leaving, KJ led us into the barn and handed us a heavy box.

“I picked some things for you guys,” she said.

I peeked inside and saw a bounty of farm produce, including a bunch of fat orange carrots, kale, garlic, two kinds of tomatoes, basil, zucchini, green beans, spring mix, and peppers.

We drove home with our vegetables and flowers, back along the quiet country roads toward the coast, Black Kettle Farm receding behind us. In my mind's eye I pictured it as one integrated, wholly functional organism: plants, animals, people, dirt, buildings, and weather, all coexisting in a way that felt organic, both literally and in the deepest sense of the word.

Over the course of the next five days, we ate every scrap of vegetables from our box. They were all so delicious and flavorful and fresh, we ate as many of them raw and in salads as we could: a carrot salad, a caprese salad, a green salad with thinly sliced peppers and grated carrot. And one night, I threw together a delectable stew so filled with flavor it almost jumped off the plate into our mouths.

Black Kettle Farm Vegetable Stew

olive oil

1 onion

a heap of chopped CSA box vegetables; for example:

6 cloves garlic

1 bunch kale

1 lb. green beans

2 medium zucchini

1 bunch basil

1 bunch parsley

1/2 to 3/4 cup chicken or vegetable stock

salt, black pepper, and red pepper flakes to taste

1 15-oz. can cannellini beans, drained and rinsed

1/4 cup toasted pine nuts

1 cup grated Pecorino Romano cheese

In a large skillet or saucepan, sauté the chopped onion and garlic in plenty of good olive oil. Add the rest of the chopped vegetables, season to taste, and add the beans. Continue to sauté, stirring often, adding stock as needed, until everything is soft and the flavors have melded, about 20 minutes.

Serve with toasted pine nuts, plenty of grated cheese, and more hot red pepper flakes. Serves 4.

Chapter Twelve

Into the Future

One July weekend in 2014, our friends Ethan and Lindsay invited us up to see their place near Popham Beach. They're a quintessential pair of young, native Mainers if there ever was one: She's a designer who works for L.L. Bean, and he's the sternman on his lifelong friend Lawrence's lobster boat; he also runs fishing and sightseeing charters in the summertime. They're in their late twenties and are both extremely naturally good-looking without being show-offy or self-conscious about it; they could be models straight out of some catalog, advertising the salubrious wholesomeness of Maine life.

Popham is a small lobstering and fishing village right on the water. It's wild and beautiful up there. We drove the hour north from Portland on a cloudless, golden early afternoon, turned off onto Route 1 in Bath, a curvy two-lane country road that took us down a peninsula through marshland, villages, and coastal forests.

After a low-key lunch at a half-decent clam and lobster shack right on the Fort Popham beach, we headed down the road to meet our friends at three o'clock, as arranged.

“We have a situation,” said Ethan after we pulled up to the dock and parked. “My wife has been shanghaied by my father.”

“That pirate!” I said. (It seemed appropriate.)

“We have to go and get her,” he told us.

All of us, including Dingo and their dog Pepper, climbed into the
Guppy
, a large wooden dory with an outboard, the smaller of Ethan's two charter boats. We motored out through the harbor, past rocky, grassy islands.

“That's my mother there in that boat,” he said, as we approached the narrow gut that led out into the open sea. “She and my stepfather live in that house, there.” He pointed over to nearby Georgetown Island, to a shingled place with big windows on the cove.

Trying not to sound too depressing, but wanting the answer, I asked Ethan what the local lobstermen will do when global warming kills off all the lobsters in the Gulf of Maine; what would they catch instead? (Okay, there was no way
not
to make that sound depressing, but he answered with equanimity, and didn't seem offended. Obviously, it's something he thinks about.)

“Seaweed, probably,” he said. “Farmed kelp.”

Kelp, it turns out, has several uses. In addition to being edible in the form of kombu in soups, and as a thickener called alginate, and as a savory snack, garnish, and rice wrapper, its ash can be used in vast quantities for soap and glass production; its high iodine content makes it an effective goiter medication; and, since alginate blocks fat absorption, it can be used as a nontoxic diet aid. It also propagates fast, and its growth in the open ocean produces methane and ethanol, both renewable energy sources.

But no matter how oddly useful kelp is, we agreed, it will never replace the Maine lobster.

Out on Sheepscot Bay, we picked up speed and slapped headlong over the calm water. Ethan slowed when he saw another boat headed
back toward the dock. He hailed them and spun around to meet them as they slowed down.

We pulled up alongside them, and for the next two hours, sat with our feet resting on each other's boats to keep us from drifting apart, and just hung out on the ocean. Ethan's father, Bill, who's also a lobsterman, had just won a lobster-boat race in Pemaquid, for which he'd “shanghaied” Lindsay and her friend, Jamie, a photographer who works with Lindsay at L.L. Bean, to be his “bow fluff,” which is just what it sounds like, along with Ethan's lobstering partner and old friend, Lawrence, as crew.

We pulled out cold beer and wine and talked as the boats bobbed up and down on the waves. The sky was blue, the air warm, and there was no wind. Usually, Ethan told us, there was a breeze, and it was chilly and choppy on the water and partly overcast, but that afternoon was perfect.

Lindsay and I put our heads together and discussed our work.

I told her about this book, since the occasion for this trip was ostensibly research, and she described the magazine/catalog she wants to start, both print and online: well-written stories alongside beautifully photographed and designed pictures of various products made by hand in Maine. It would represent, she told me, the traditional, DIY, down-to-earth year-round reality of Maine, not the elitist, moneyed, summer-people bullshit that predominates in so many publications now. I told her I'd happily write for it anytime.

On our way back to the dock, we stopped off at Seguin Island, which boasts the second-oldest and tallest lighthouse in Maine. Ethan stayed on the boat to make some work phone calls while the rest of us jumped ashore and lifted Dingo and Pepper over the waves.

As we climbed up to the bluff above the rocky little beach to use the outhouse perched there, we ran into the caretaker, who was fixing the tracks for the little tram that hauled supplies up from the cove
and beach for the lighthouse and living quarters. He knew Ethan and Lindsay because Ethan's ferry service took tourists over to Seguin, so even though it was after-hours, he generously offered to give us a tour.

We climbed the sandy path to the grassy plateau at the top of the island, where the main buildings are. The view was extraordinary from up there, over a hundred feet above the water on the last island before the open ocean.

The Seguin Island Lighthouse was commissioned by George Washington and installed in 1797. Its light is a modern-day electric bulb amplified by a many-petaled flower of very old glass, recently hand-polished by the caretaker. It sparkled in the late-afternoon sunlight. We walked around the catwalk outside the cupola; far down was blue water, all around us, in every direction. Close by, we could see Monhegan and other islands. The second inlet, far down the coast, was Casco Bay and Portland. It was a stunning view, intimate and yet full of grandeur.

We went back down to the beach and climbed back on board the
Guppy
and headed for the dock, where we got into our cars and drove to Ethan and Lindsay's place. They lived in an airy but cozy post-and-beam house on the water that Ethan's father built in the 1970s; he now lived with his girlfriend in a newer house just up the cove.