52°f this morning, clear, dry, a perfect autumn morning.
My last post brought forth so many memories that I woke in the night thinking of them.
There was the time we went hunting for ramps. It was very early in May, I think, and in many places the ramps would have been past the point of harvest. We headed up to the Williams River wilderness and soon found a plenitude of ramps. Our youngestvson Tommy was about 8, I think, so this would have been 1994. Rain began to fall hard, and we were soon soaked to the skin. But we found a little roadside shelter and we set up our camp stove to make tea, and opened a can of Ditty Moore stew. There in the rain, with a long view of wild mountains, we ate stew, drank tea, and never was a meal as welcome as that.
Another time, almost 20 years earlier, my first husband and I were here on this same land where I live today. We had just started building this house. We were here for a week that he had taken off work, and it rained. And rained. And rained. At that time we had a 1972 Chevy van, two-wheel drive. And of course it got stuck, as our mud here is endlessly deep and as slick as oil. Not that it mattered. We were busy!
But then our food stock ran low and the van was still stuck. Now remember that back then it was a mile to the closest neighbor, no phones, no electric, and the road from here to his house was also impassable. We had planted a pitiful garden that year, clueless as babies about gardening in this wild place, but I found a couple onions, a tomato, and a small cabbage in that weed patch. I added water from the creek, salt and pepper, and made the best soup I think I have ever tasted, cooked over a wood fire in front of the rough camping shelter we'd built---where I had wild pennyroyal hung to dry. Ah, to be that young and fearless again!
When I was a child, my family sometimes went to the Bull Run Battlefield Park, just outside of Manassas, VA, where we lived, to have a morning picnic. The park was basically empty in the mornings so our wild horde had the place to ourselves. We would run and play while Mom and Dad cooked us breakfast over the open fire. Eggs and bacon, maybe fried potatoes, bread toasted on a long fork over the coals, hot tea...ahhh, a meal fit for a king.
Those "thrown together" meals from whatever's available can sometimes be the most enjoyable. It sort of reminds me of some of the meals cooked with the children I used to look after; unspecified amounts of the raw ingredients used to get eaten before they got anywhere near the pan, making every recipe an unrepeatable experience. Even more interestingly, sometimes things got added which no one had ever thought of before....like bananas in Scotch broth for example.
ReplyDeleteSome sweet memories...here we usually can find some wild garlic or ramp from late March to late May.
ReplyDeleteYour examples show that good meals are as much about the surroundings and circumstances than the food. I can only imagine how wonderful the food tasted in each of your examples.
ReplyDeleteSweet,sweet memories! Thank you for sharing and giving me a big smile!
ReplyDelete...you have lived a self-sufficient lifestyle more than I have.
ReplyDeleteJust thinking of eating food that had been cooked over a campfire brings such great memories. Of course you get much more hungry while prepping a fire to the degree that it will cook. But fresh air and wood smoke do add to the appetite.
ReplyDeleteWhat great memories, thanks so much for sharing.
ReplyDeleteAnd to think I had granola for breakfast this morning. I'm depressed now. :)
ReplyDeleteIt really is the simplest of times that give us the best memories.
ReplyDeleteFun memories. I don't know what a ramp is though, so am going to have to google that. Had to smile when you mentioned Dinty Moore Stew. Back in our camping days we also attending The Canadian and US Grand Prix and camped at the track. Dinty Moore Stew was always our traditional Sunday night dinner. We added some red wine to the stew and cooked it over our camp stove and thought it was a gourmet meal. As a kid I camped with my parents several times a year, it was the kind of vacation we could afford as a family of 5. One of our other favorite camp meals was fried spam and Shelley Beans. There's just something about how the food tastes when you living in the elements.
ReplyDeleteGreat memories.
ReplyDeleteWe used to camp in a tent when my daughter was little and one of the highlights for her was toast over the fire on a long-handled fork. It actually came from Europe and was called, appropriately enough, a toasting fork. Makes me wonder now what happened to it.
ReplyDelete