Atisnal Cheese in the Back of Beyond and Venison Steaks

I just got off the phone with some good friends of mine. They have cows and have been busting their butts to be able to produce and sell their very high quality milk legally. It is not easy if you're not a huge commercial dairy, and the task has taken them from Washington to Colorado, to Oregon, and now back up to Kettle Falls, Washington (about an hour from Spokane). They're only weeks away from getting their commercial license to sell raw milk. And their milk is wonderful. David bends over backward to make sure that each and every cow, each and every milking's worth of milk is pristine. And it is. His raw milk outlasted the commercial, pasturized stuff in the fridge every time I got it.

Aja, his wife, works for a small natural food store and they're going to expand their cheese section, offering artisnal cheeses. Now this is not a metropolitan area with a lot of middle class buyers looking and paying for upscale products. This is VERY rural. People there, Aja tells me, are willing to pay more for organic, high quality, local, and artisnal stuff. Not everybody, by a long shot, but enough to keep the store going. And hopefully to keep the dairy going.

That fills me with hope. :-) I have loved the artisnal and local foods movement, but I was afraid it was a figment of the moneyed middle class. Let's face it, small scale produced food is simply not cheap. You have to grow very large scale with a minimum of labor hours in order to produce food at the cost you're used to seeing it in the grocery store. I couldn't sell my veggies at grocery store prices and survive. But oh, do you pay a price for cheapness. You pay it in quality of the product -- you've got to use a lot of chemicals in order to eliminate all those expensive hands weeding and removing pests -- you pay for it terms of animal welfare. It is not really possible to raise animals humanely on the scale required to produce cheap meat and eggs.

It's a tough choice to pay more for something you could pay less for. I'm really pleased to hear that people who do not live in the suburbs of Seattle or Portland are willing to do that. I was thinking about this as I cut and wrapped the venison steaks from those mule deer hindquarters David lugged back from eastern Oregon. I caught some flack from someone who wasn't at all happy that I was eating deer. Not a vegetarian. That person just figured it was better to eat that nice, plastic wrapped chuck steak than Bambi. I don't buy commercial beef. That buck didn't suffer much. David is a good shot and a consumate meat hunter. The steer who went from calf operation to feed lot to slaughter house had a tougher time. The lambs I raise don't know what is in store for them and it's over before they figure it out. It's unpleasant, messy, hard work, and of course you have to do the killing, but I'm happier this way. I know they had a good life, both the lambs and the deer. Well, when it's all said and done, a whole lot of tiny critters will get to eat me, so what goes around comes around, eh?

Hunting Season

Well, fall has arrived. Officially. I planted my garlic today and that ends the garden season until I plant peas and fava beans and start my early broccoli and cauliflower next January. Right now, it's the revered Hunting Season. I was passed by two young guys in a big pickup towing a muddy jeep on a trailer. Two deer in bags were seatbelted into the front seats, heads and racks protruding, wearing sunglasses. The back of the Jeep was piled with kids' bikes and trikes. I guess the moms were pulling the trailer with the kids.

My sheep herding and wood cutting buddy, David, 76, I think, this year, (maybe older, I've never been quite certain) was finally persuaded by his son to head out Nyssa (east Oregon, almost Idaho) for a few days. I assured David that Annie and I would look after his sheep and keep all Dangerous People from breaking into his house (it is NOT a house that looks as if treasure lies within). After much coercing from son Bobby and I, he finally went. Two days later I had to assure him over the phone that Everything Was Fine.

That was three weeks ago. :-) A very nice big buck who had been happily fattening himself on farmer's corn and some good bass fishing sort of muted the homing instinct. And he worked on putting a new roof on his son's place. Annie was happy. She got to go hold his sheep off the feeder every day while I put out the feed. And David's sheep are a bunch of sneaky old Suffolk ewes so Annie had her work cut out for her. I think they all enjoyed the dance, since everybody thought they won. (Annie held the sneaky ewes off until I called her to quit and the sheep got the feed in the end).

David finally got home today and of course I got paid well. He arrived with two very nice hindquarters of that big buck, aged two weeks in a walk in cooler, (just starting to grow that green hair that means 'prime' in a restaurant) a big bag full of doves, a slab of the halibut son Bobby brought back from Alaska, and, of course, a lot of fresh bass, caught yesterday evening. (That was dinner and a lot of eating for the rest of the week. I do not freeze fish if I can avoid it!) The Bad Guys did not break into the house, I had all his mail, and the resident coyotes who had been disrespectful in his absense will have to behave themselves. To add to the day, we noticed that the oyster mushrooms were budding on some of his alders (this is a GREAT mushroom year) so strolled into the woods to check and found a downed alder fat with oyster mushrooms and a flush of shaggy parasols. So I added a bulging sack of fresh mushrooms to the plunder. Alas, my favorite mushrooming woods got sold to a developer and bulldozed. Progress marches on.

We still have to cut and wrap the venison quarters (the dogs can't wait!) but my freezer is looking nicely full of protein, and I have this big pan of sauteed mushrooms and all that bass, baked with lime-pepper.

So the wood is all in, I've got the last planting in the ground, and the fall meat harvest has been accomplished with style. Only the coyotes will be disappointed. They'll have to stop taking their dumps in David's front yard now. Life is tough.