Irreplaceable Brines
July 2022
During the last handful of years we spent living in the woods, I became almost completely consumed with foraging and fermenting. As a result, compiling and cooking with my new assortment of flavorful playthings. It’s always good to have a reliable pastime or two in order to keep the mind occupied and the fingers nimble, but they come in especially handy in an off-the-grid scenario. And particularly when Covid hit. During the initial phases of which, I cataloged as much of the flora on our 5 acres as I could. Researched and determined what was edible, and began curing, pickling, and fermenting with an eye toward culinary usage.
I foraged weeds, herbs, nettles, mushrooms, nuts, and berries - even some truffles with the help of a truffle dog-wielding friend. I fermented an array of hot sauces and vegetables, sauerkraut, kimchi, garlic honey, tempeh, milk kefir, and far more. I brewed numerous forms of yard hooch including ginger beer, nettle beer, a ton of wild fermented hard ciders, and made foraged infusions. We utilized all of it in the making of our own home-bound tasting menus or progressive happy hours.
During a 2-year span, I made or cooked for the first time a number of things including gnocchi, fresh pasta, dressings, sauces, sausage from scratch, cured egg yolks, and cheese. It was rewarding to watch Kara become slowly but surely won over by some of my experiments. She is a woman wholly incapable of keeping dislike or disappointment from washing across her entire countenance in expressive and unmistakable ways. So I was aware when I stuck the landing on something, and I most certainly knew when I didn’t. She even produced and ordered a very Kara-esque label for us to put on ferments that we would give as gifts.
I sincerely hope and expect to forage and ferment again when living conditions and circumstances allow it. Don’t get me wrong, I still participate in little trail communions on just about every hike I take. For now, however, I seem to have swapped them out for wildlife viewing and rockhounding. Living now on the coast, these new pastimes of low tide agate searches paired with birding, quietly and without notice took the place previously occupied by pursuits that came naturally with living in the forest. The hand-cranked pasta machine and hydrometer were replaced by a set of semi-fancy binoculars and a rock identification iPhone app.
It’s an odd thing. When I finally noticed the shift in hobbies, I mourned the loss of my ferments. Not like people or pets kind of mourning, but sadness around the loss of activities that gave me joy and soul satisfaction. And projects that might have been in some way, minor attempts at paying Kara back for the life she provided me, along with the recurring gift of her cabbage rolls. I’m not torn up at all by the loss of my sleeping bags or hiking boots. But thinking about the fact that all of those pastes, chutneys, and hot sauces are gone, caused some profound sadness for a few days. My guess is that some sentimentality over a particularly wonderful chapter in my life may have leached into those suddenly irreplaceable brines.