We’ll start with the good news. The good news is that our hoophouse has successfully extended our growing season. Granted, it’s gotten an assist from the warmest winter in human memory, but it still felt good to be out there in January, harvesting the parsnips and beets I planted in the early summer.

Or at least it did, until I got the bad news.

Root vegetables allow gardeners to remain in denial up until the very last moment. When you’re growing tomatoes, or eggplant, or lettuce, the fruits of your inadequacy stare you full in the face, from seedling to harvest. You watch as, right before your eyes, they stubbornly refuse to turn into the picture-perfect vegetables of your imagination. You never have the chance to develop unreasonable expectations.

Roots, though, allow you to dream. Surely that forest of beet greens is collecting sunlight to feed big, sweet, deep red beets just beneath the surface.

Surely.

Parsnips, with an egg for scale

Last week, I pulled up the parsnips. Despite having been in the ground for some eight months, most of them were about the size of my pinky. A couple of them reached a diameter of over an inch, but none was more than about three inches long. A more pathetic root harvest I have never seen.

Or hadn’t, until I pulled up the beets. The best of them looked like miniature stunted carrots. There was not a rounded one in the lot. The dozen or so largest – the only ones that merited keeping – came in at about a half-pound. Total. Not for the first time, I was grateful that beets are two vegetables in one, because the greens were lovely.

Beets, with an egg for eating because the beets won't fill you up

I suspect our soil is long on N, and short on P and K. We have a history of growing plants that are long on leaves and short on fruit, and our root harvests have almost always been terrible. Each year, I think I should give it up and only grow things that are supposed to have lots of leaves but beets are one of my favorite vegetables, and I’m of the hope-springs-eternal school of gardening.

So, come spring, Kevin and I will be loading up on organic matter, supplementing P and K, and slipping back into denial.

Consolation greens

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Which raises a very important question: What on earth is the point of an omelet?

Not for omelets, please.

I certainly see the point of mixing eggs with things like cheese and onions, mushrooms and ham. But it makes so much more sense to simply scramble all those things together.

It starts with the pan issue. If you’re making an omelet, you either have to use two pans, or use one pan serially, first to sauté the filling and then to cook the omelet. A scramble uses one pan, once. Cook your onions, add your sausage, finish with spinach, then mix in the eggs and cheese. No getting bowls dirty with fillings, no worrying about little bits in the pan that will interfere with the omelet-making.

But that advantage pales in comparison to the other, more substantive advantages. It’s not easy to make an omelet so the eggs are cooked properly all the way through. Generally, you end up with a tough skin on the outside and an undercooked layer on the inside. But, even if you get it perfect, the eating experience is suboptimal. You get bites of all egg and no filling around the outside, and bites with too much filling and not enough egg on the inside.

And then there’s the texture of the egg. Eggs are best when they’re cooked in soft, creamy curds, not firm, spongy pancakes. The egg in omelets is the equivalent of well-done meat.

As far as I can tell, there is one, and only one, advantage to omelets. An omelet is an opportunity to show off. You get to demonstrate your professional technique and slide the perfect yellow semi-circle out of the pan and on to the plate of a suitably grateful diner. Well, bully for you.

I’ll take the scramble, with eggs just barely set, and cheese distributed evenly throughout. Every bite has a little onion, a little sausage, a little spinach. I’ll take my scramble over your perfect yellow semi-circle any day. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that omelets top my list of over-rated foods, a list that also includes cupcakes, vegetable juice, marshmallows, and the downright disgusting Philly cheese steak.

I wonder if being an unyielding absolutist has anything to do with my not having all that many friends.

Nah.

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And you’re studying Henderson’s Handy-Dandy Chicken Chart to figure out how to pick your breeds.

Henderson’s Handy-Dandy Chicken Chart is indispensable for anyone considering keeping chickens. It’s a comprehensive list of breeds, with their origins, egg-laying potential, heat- and cold-tolerance, and notes on their behavior. I love Henderson’s Handy-Dandy Chicken Chart, and I encourage you to spend time reading about your many choices.

When it gets serious, though, and it’s time to actually buy chicks, I can help you cut through the indecision. There is one chicken breed that’s beak and wattles above all the others.

You will be tempted by the breeds, like Brahmas, with froo-froo feathers, but those feathers decorate chickens that have less in the way of brainpower than your average chicken – and that’s saying a lot.

Pretty is as pretty does

You will be tempted by the ones with the big floppy combs, like Leghorns, because they look like Elvis. But those combs get frostbite instantly.

I'm all shook up

You will be tempted by the ones that are docile and friendly and good with children, like Orpingtons, but you will get very tired of the frequency with which they go broody and have to be kept in a cage for a few days to be convinced that, no, they’re not going to hatch a brood of chicks.

You will be tempted by Araucanas and Ameraucanas, because they lay eggs in pastel shades of blue and green. And they do – every other Thursday. They are freeloaders.

The go-to chicken – drumroll, please – is the Rhode Island Red.

These plain brown hens are barnyard stand-outs. They lay big brown eggs, practically every day. They’re curious and engaged, but not needy or clingy. They don’t bully, and they don’t tolerate being bullied. They never get sick and they never go broody.

It makes sense that it should be that way. If you’re doing the selective breeding, it’s much harder to get feathers and combs and Easter eggs coupled with temperament, egg production, and disease resistance than temperament, egg production, and disease resistance all by themselves. Focus on what’s important, and you get a plain brown hen.

George

The favorite in our flock is George, who’s always the first to come investigate when we’re working in the yard. She’s friendly and calm, and she hangs out near us, scratching for bugs and clucking. If she decides nothing interesting is going on, she rejoins the rest of the flock.

There’s a lot to be said for a mixed flock, with its quotient of stupid ones, flighty ones, and broody ones. We love our motley crew and, if you’re just now venturing into chicken-keeping, I’d encourage you to go that route. It makes watching them and caring for them more interesting, and it sure makes counting them easier. As much as we like them, I don’t think we’ll ever have a flock that’s all Rhode Island Reds. But we’ll never have a flock without them.

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Sasquash is bland, it is watery, and it is very, very large. Together, the five squashes weighed over 100 pounds. The biggest one was 40 all by itself.

A 40-lb. squash. Wine is for scale, and for consolation.

So, after I got over the novelty of having grown a 40-pound squash, I was left with the problem of what to do with 40 pounds of bland, watery squash. As my brothers and I used to say to each other when we were kids, with undisguised schadenfreude glee, “That’s what you get for being greedy!”

I learned a lesson when I dealt with the last giant squash, which rolled in at a mere fifteen pounds: the cost of the propane required to roast it until it browned and shrunk to something with flavor could have bought fifteen pounds of standard-issue butternut squash. So I wanted to try something different.

Although the Sasquash is bland and watery, it does have the virtue of being crisp. It’s more like a cucumber than a squash – not surprising, since they’re both in family Cucurbitaceae – so I figured I’d treat it like a cucumber and pickle it.

I used a recipe from my friend Christl (fitting, since she was also the source of the Sasquash seeds, although she didn’t plant them herself because she wasn’t interested in dealing with 100 pounds of bland, watery squash). It’s a brine flavored with turmeric and dill seed, and I made a trial batch of the refrigerated kind, to see if I liked it enough to break out the canning equipment.

Squash, pickled

I liked it, but not enough. Back to the drawing board.

Since it’s finally gotten cold out, we’re using our wood stove pretty regularly, and that’s what I turned to next. I cubed a couple pounds of squash, spread it out on a baking sheet, and left it on top of the stove. Sure enough, it did the trick! Over the course of a few hours (more or less, depending on how hot the stove is), cubes of Sasquash reduce to about ten percent of their volume (literally). They even brown a little bit.

As an added bonus, they humidify the house. They even smell nice.

Last night, I turned that bland, watery squash into a soup I’d go so far as to call excellent. I started with bacon, and added onion and sage. A little white wine, a lot of good stock (turkey), and a bunch of that roasted, reduced squash, simmered. Then pureed, with cream.

Despite a mishap with the VitaMix that left squash soup on every surface in my kitchen, and my hand burned just enough to remind me to secure the lid next time, we had a lovely dinner.

But I won’t be growing this squash again next year.

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And what’s with the one about life handing you lemons? Lemons are excellent and, last I checked, they were three for a dollar at Stop & Shop. If life hands you enough, you never have to work again.

If life hands you bitter collard greens, however, you’re screwed.

Life, you may already have surmised, has handed me bitter collard greens, and I am hereby going to attempt to make lemonade. Oh, wait – that sounds terrible.

You know what I mean.

Well, they looked good

The row of collard greens I planted earlier this year is the picture of health. As everything else in the garden died off, the collards grew and thrived. The biggest one has a stem as big as my forearm. It was with some pride that I sautéed, simmered, and creamed a pot of them for my Thanksgiving table.

One word: blech.

Now, collards are supposed to be a little bit bitter. They are a cruciferous vegetable, and all cruciferous vegetables have bitter-tasting compounds like glucosinolates and isothiocyanates which, on the upside, are very good for you. The downside is that they are bitter.

All I can say is that my collards must be very, very good for you. I have been eating collard greens all my life – including those which I grew myself – and I have never encountered this level of mouth-puckering phytonutrients.

The net of this is that my collards make a lousy side dish. But they make for an excellent science experiment.

The internet is rife with suggestions for de-bittering collard greens. Cook them with bacon. Boil them in salted water. Add baking soda. Cook for a long time. Cook for a short time. What all these strategies seem to have in common is absolutely no scientific justification, at least not that I can find.

There’s only one thing for it, and that’s to try the various methods and see what works. So, if you’ve got a method, toss it into the ring. If you’ve got the science to go with it, even better. I’ll do the Great Collard Cook-Off next week, and hope to find the definitive de-bitterer (or that there isn’t one).

Yes, folks, it’s Starving off the Land, making history one dorky idea at a time.

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But the bees are defeating us.

How is it that I can’t manage to provide a hospitable home for an insect that, left to its own devices, lives comfortably in a hollow tree?

Our beekeeping began last spring. Over the previous winter, we attended Bee School, the beginner’s course offered by the Barnstable County Beekeepers’ Association, and it prepared us to order our equipment and know what to do with it when it came.

We got two standard-issue Langstroth hives, and packages of bees to put in them. All went well through summer and fall. There was no extra honey to harvest, but that’s often the case in the first year. We went into the fall cautiously optimistic.

In February we still had bees, but by April they were all dead. What happened? Hard to know for sure. Our best guess is that they broke cluster with a spell of warm weather, and then froze to death when it got cold again. I never would have expected that insects could make me sad, but I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that I grieved for my bees.

Kevin and I talked about getting new packages this spring, but we decided against it. We didn’t know what had gone wrong with the others, and it seemed too much like that adage about doing the same thing and expecting a different result. Luckily, I was on the receiving end of some extreme apian generosity, and a local beekeeper who removes hives from houses gave me not one, but two hives that came out of someone’s eaves.

It was late in the season by the time I got them. The first one came in mid-August, and the second not until a month later. I knew that the chances of successful overwintering were slim for colonies that had such a limited time to establish themselves before the cold set in. But the bees were homeless, and I had homes and a score to settle, so I took them and did my best.

The second hive of the season, before it all went to hell

I was lucky in that I wasn’t flying blind. My friend Claire, who is an experienced and accomplished beekeeper, stopped by regularly to help me assess the hives and solve the problems.

And there were problems. The first queen wasn’t laying, so we replaced her with one of the queens Claire reared. There wasn’t enough brood, so she brought over a full frame. The second hive just wasn’t going to get big enough to reach critical mass, so we killed that queen and combined the two hives.

That was about a month ago, and it was with some satisfaction that I added frames of bees and stores from the second hive to the first. I had one deep that was chock-full of bees, brood, and honey. I had a local queen. I laid pieces of fondant over the tops of the frames, and left the hive to its business.

I opened it over the weekend, and it was almost empty. The queen was there, the stores were there, but there was only a handful of workers. I almost wept.

Claire came over this afternoon to take a look, but she can’t tell what happened. Nobody can. There are some dead bees on the bottom board, but not nearly enough to explain the population decrease; the bees seem to have simply left. Best guess is that there was rampant varroa in the second hive, and when we added the frames to the first hives the bees absconded. But that’s just a guess.

When you open a hive and all is not well, there are just so many things to feel bad about. You feel bad for the bees, who must be confused and unhappy (to the extent that an insect can be). You feel bad because you’ve been an inadequate steward – what didn’t you do? You feel bad because honeybees are in trouble, and you’ve let down the side. It is heartbreaking.

I was almost ready to throw in the towel on beekeeping, but Claire has been so encouraging and helpful that she’s made me want to stick with it. I know our hive won’t make it through the winter, but I’ll try again in the spring

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The traditional meal, anchored by a roast turkey, has been woven into the fabric of our American identity. And it’s not just because, as kids, that’s what we ate. As kids, we also made turkeys by tracing our hands and Pilgrim hats out of black construction paper as we learned about how the settlers and Indians managed to set aside hostilities long enough to break bread together.

It’s not just a meal, it’s a mythology.

That’s why the Thanksgiving dinner my family sits down to has looked essentially the same for the fifty years it’s been in existence. Before I was born, my mother made the fateful decision that we’d have bread stuffing and, by god, that’s what we’ve had every year since.

This is what she says in Dreaded Broccoli, the book we wrote together a while back:

There are stuffings other than bread stuffings, but not in my family. … If your family has its own traditional nonbread stuffing, however, I suggest you not switch to mine. You may think your daughter is a wild-eyed radical, but just try changing your turkey stuffing and she’ll turn into Anita Bryant before your eyes.

And so it’s been.  There have been changes to the side dishes, but they’re bit players. As long as there’s a roast turkey with bread stuffing (cooked inside the bird, thank you very much), it’s Thanksgiving.

Kevin and I messed with it this year, at our peril.

We didn’t mess with it a lot. We decided that, instead of roasting the turkey, we’d smoke and deep-fry it. We’d had a lot of success with cooking our ducks that way, and we wanted to see if the process would scale up, which is why Thanksgiving morning found Kevin stoking the smokehouse firebox with oak as I rolled out pie crusts in the kitchen.

Once the fire settled into a steady burn, Kevin put two of our turkeys in – one for us, one for the post-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving that our friends Dianne and Doug host on Sunday night. We kept the temperature within shouting distance of 250 degrees and smoked the birds for four hours.

The rest of the meal, we kept more or less traditional, and tried to use as many first-hand ingredients as we could.

It started with a smoked bluefish pate and a duck liver mousse with marjoram. From there, we had oysters enlivened with a lime granita spiced with habanero and jalapeno peppers. Our appetizer was a winter squash soup with tarragon and our sea salt. With the turkey and the gravy I made from giblet stock, we served that not-to-be-messed-with bread stuffing (with onion, shiitakes, parsley, chives, and sage), although we had to bake it in a casserole dish. Our friends Jon and Susan have a cranberry bog, and it was their cranberries that made our sauce. I creamed our collard greens.

For dessert, there were pecan and pumpkin pies with our eggs and maple syrup from our friend Dave, who taps the trees on his property in Vermont. We finished with dandelion wine.

I counted, and that was twenty ingredients that we managed to grow, gather, or glean from the world around us.

But how was it?

The turkey came out beautifully and, with the exception of the collards, which were bitter (is there anything you can do about that?), the appetizers and side dishes were good. The pies, I will admit, were excellent. (I am a slapdash, careless cook, and the only explanation for my ability to turn out beautiful, precise pies is that, somewhere along the line, I sold my soul to the devil. I have often wished that I’d held out for something better than a gift for pie crust.)

Dinner was good. But it wasn’t great.

Last year, the first time we raised turkeys, we roasted our bird the old-fashioned way and I am prepared to admit that last year’s dinner was better than this year’s. Could it be simply because an oven-roasted turkey yields in-the-bird stuffing and from-the-pan gravy? Or did we disrupt the balance of the meal by cooking the turkey in a non-traditional way and leaving the rest of the meal as-is?

I’m thinking it’s B. If you’re going to shake it up, you have to shake it all up. If you jettison the roasted turkey, the stuffing and gravy just have to go with it. Next year, it’s out with the old. Although we’ll probably stick with turkey because we’ve had good luck with raising our own birds, the rest of it is up for grabs. Maybe we’ll try a barbecue Thanksgiving, with baked beans and cole slaw. Or maybe, just maybe, if hell freezes over and we get our wood-fired oven built, we’ll do a wood-fired Thanksgiving.

The bird won’t look the same. The sides won’t look the same. The table won’t look the same. If the pies look the same, I’m okay with that.

The deficiencies of this year’s meal didn’t, I’m happy to say, meaningfully interfere with the general excellence of the day. My parents and Kevin’s kids were here to share it with us, and it felt very good to be feeding our family with such personal food.

I also count Thanksgiving among the few holidays whose spirit I can get behind. To spend a day, once a year, thinking about that for which I am grateful, does me good.

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Sure, the concept is nice. The results are even good. But the actual brining is a royal pain in the ass.

This year I’m brining two turkeys, about seventeen pounds each. They started the day in our boat cooler, submerged in ice water with three others – the five that remained of our flock of six. I needed a vessel that would A) hold the turkeys and the brine and B) fit in my refrigerator.

Because I’m a genius, I decided to use my super-jumbo twenty-gallon Ziploc bag. I put the bag on the floor and wrestled the two turkeys into the bottom of it – no small feat, given that the legs of one always wanted to go in the cavity of the other. In went some six gallons of brine. It was only after I cleaned off the kitchen table and the sink that I realized there was a leak in the bag. As I watched, Lake Listeria was forming on my kitchen floor.

Genius. A regular fucking Brinestein.

I had to get the thing in the sink. Any idea how much two turkeys and six gallons of brine weigh? Yeah, that would be eighty-two pounds. And, genius that I am, I embarked on this godforsaken venture when my husband wasn’t home to help.

I took the turkeys out, one at a time, and put them in the sink. I plugged up the drain and poured in the brine. The leaky bag, I threw away.

But now what? The only other bags I’ve got big enough to hold a turkey are the kitchen garbage bags, and those have some nasty scent block thing.

No, wait! In the recesses of my memory I see the mental image of a little yellow box with “turkey brine kit” written on it. Is it possible that it’s still up there in my cabinet?

Yes! There it was, behind the summer roll wrappers that I never did master.

I open it up, and find that it’s so old it has the texture of cellophane. I’m afraid it will shatter in my hands. But I don’t have a lot of options, so I put a turkey in it, along with a gallon or two of the brine. I seal it, and put it back in the cooler full of ice water, where it sinks a bit and the brine actually seems to distribute around the turkey and, miracle of miracles, looks to be contained by the bag.

One down, one to go.

There’s a standard-size cooler on the porch, but it doesn’t look big enough. I try to put the turkey in it and, sure enough, it isn’t big enough. Or at least it isn’t big enough if you’re being persnickety about actually having brine in between turkey and cooler wall.

I gave up on persnickety years ago, and I manhandle the thing into the cooler. I put in the rest of the brine, and make another gallon or so to cover. I scoop some ice out of the big cooler to make sure everything would stay cold enough, and there it will stay until morning.

Come morning, I have to take both behemoth birds out of the brine, find bags big enough to hold them, and make enough space for the them in the refrigerator.

Whose idea was it to make birds the size of carry-on luggage standard-issue for this holiday? Quail are native to this country, and would make a perfectly respectable Thanksgiving dinner.

Quail. Any takers?

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But that’s not strictly true. It isn’t death that makes life precious. It’s knowledge of death.

Something our six turkeys, fortunately, didn’t have.

This year's models

This year’s flock was different from last years. Last year, we had three toms and one hen, a ratio that makes for plenty of strutting and posturing, and some out-and-out fighting. There was a clear alpha, Drumstick, two clear subordinates, Beta and Gamma, and a lot of chest-bumping

Edith, the one hen, seemed unaware of the discord she generated. Freed from the biological necessity of fighting for a mate, she spent her days plotting her next escape. (The play-by-play of last year’s flock is here, in all its chronological glory, but you can read the executive summary in a piece I wrote for the Washington Post.)

This year, by chance, we had three males and three females, and there was peace in the pen. I’m no turkey behaviorist, but it seemed that they paired off. There was very little in the way of displaying or gobbling, and we never once witnessed a fight.

When there’s no displaying, and no obvious alpha male, there’s not much to distinguish individuals. Only one hen earned a name – we called her Lefty for a sty on her left eye – and the name faded when the sty shrank and eventually disappeared. Our turkeys were oddly anonymous.

But we liked them. Last year, I thought turkeys were charmless. I didn’t warm up to their eerie one-eyed stare or the way they never learned not to peck at the Levi’s tag on my jeans pocket. (Of course, I never learned to not wear Levi’s in the pen, so maybe I shouldn’t be throwing stones here.) This year’s turkeys weren’t so different, but in between the two flocks we’d had ducks, so we understood just how unpleasant poultry could be. What we found charmless last year looked more like quiet dignity this time around.

I’ll never look forward to a slaughter day (even for a flock of smelly, messy, alarmist ducks), but it makes it easier to have done enough of them that we know what to expect. It keeps the anxiety to manageable levels.

Going into this, we not only had experience, we had help. We cut a deal with our friend Christl whereby she got a turkey in return for her plucking assistance. And our friend Amanda flew in from clear across the country to take part.

The plan was to do it exactly the way we did it last year, minus the plucker Kevin made out of an old washing machine, which met a tragic, fiery end last slaughter day. We kill the turkeys by severing the blood vessels in their necks (without damaging trachea or esophagus) so they bleed out, and we had a cone set up to hold them while we did it. We had a garbage can of water heated to 160 degrees so we could scald them to loosen the feathers. Kevin set up a kind of scaffold with two hooks and a tarp underneath for plucking.

After plucking, we’d remove heads and feet and bring them into the kitchen for eviscerating. I had the table cleared and covered with a plastic cloth with a layer of newspaper on top of it, and we had the big cooler filled with ice for the finished birds.

We sharpened two knives. And then we sharpened them again. The only pain we inflict in this process – if it goes smoothly – is one cut to the neck. We want our knives sharp.

Everything did go smoothly. We killed, plucked and gutted without incident. It wasn’t cutting their throats, or sticking my hand in a their still-warm bodies to pull out their insides that knotted my stomach. It was the cries of distress from the turkey left behind as its mate was taken from the pen, never to return.

There’s a movie scene that sticks in my mind, although I can’t remember what movie it’s from (if you know, please tell me). It’s a scene where someone who I think is on the run from the law comes across a woman who lives alone in the woods. She has goats, and she isn’t afraid of the fugitive. They sit down and talk, and she has a goat standing at her feet with its head in her lap. She strokes the goat gently, and then, without interrupting the conversation, calmly cuts its throat.

That, I have always thought, is how to kill an animal.

What makes killing so significant isn’t the physical pain inflicted. It’s the awareness that there is such a thing as life, and that it is ending. Minus the awareness, it’s only the physical pain that matters. The knife stroke that takes my birds’ life is not nearly as significant as pain or distress we might cause by mistreating them.

Amanda said that taking their feeder away the day before was more difficult than actually killing them because there would be some suffering involved in twenty-four hours of hunger. Leaving a hen in distress because we’ve taken her tom away makes me unhappy, and we tried to take them in the order that minimized their pain. The actual killing, while certainly not pleasant, feels constructive. We raised these animals for meat, and we cared for them and are killing them responsibly.

Amanda was with us last year, too, but only as an observer. This year, she decided she wanted to participate. She found the prospect of killing a turkey, pulling out its feathers, cutting off its head and feet, and sticking her hand in its guts daunting, but she didn’t want to be the kind of person who shied away. And so she made herself do it – all of it.

Some time late in the afternoon, when the birds were on ice, the kitchen cleaned, she sat down for the first time in many hours. “You know,” she said to me, “it was a good day.”

And it was. It was a good day.

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It’s October, and the pain in the ass that is a flock of live ducks is a hazy distant memory. The joy that is a smoked, deep-fried duck is vivid and lasting.

Ducks, before

Back in June, when we slaughtered our flock, our smokehouse wasn’t finished yet. We wanted smoked duck, so we sent all six to freezer camp.

Then, back in August, Kevin finished the smokehouse, and all we needed was the appropriate occasion. That arrived this week when our friends Russ and Mylene came to visit.

Russ and Mylene live in California, but their daughter goes to school in Providence so they end up in our neighborhood pretty regularly. This makes us happy because A) We enjoy their company, B) They are game for absolutely anything, and C) Russ is an excellent cook.

Kevin had been reading about how the Peking Duck House, a place we love in Manhattan, makes their ducks, and he wanted to do a version of it. Essentially, it’s a two-step process. First, you smoke. Then, you deep-fry. (The PDH adds a few other steps, but we stuck to basics for this, our first attempt.)

On Sunday, we thawed two of our six ducks, and Kevin fired up the smokehouse. There was plenty of extra room, so we bought two chickens to keep them company. He used oak, and smoked the birds at about 250 for three hours. The ducks went into the refrigerator.

Russ and Mylene arrived Monday morning, and we started planning dinner just before lunch. We’d wanted to do scallions, cucumber, and plum sauce, all wrapped in those thin little pancakes. Scallions, cucumber, and plum sauce were no problem, but I had no idea how we could make or, preferably, where we could procure, the pancakes.

Russ scoffed at my concern. “Crepes,” he said. “They’re all-purpose.”

Well, okay then.

Russ also spotted an eggplant he liked the look of in our garden, and had big plans for it. (Years ago, Russ and I bought an eggplant that was a dead ringer for Richard Nixon, and we’ve been cooking eggplant together ever since.) To find something to go with the eggplant, and to make sure we didn’t spend the whole day eating and talking about food, we went out for a wild mushroom hunt and came home with some boletes.

Russ and Kevin, cooking

As the sun went down, we opened the wine and started cooking. Mylene made crepes as Russ diced eggplant. I sliced mushrooms, scallions, and cucumbers. Kevin got the outdoor burner and started heating the oil.

Then we opened more wine.

Stories where nothing goes wrong are pretty dull, but I’m afraid that the only mishap was thermometer malfunction. We had to guess when the oil was ready, and if anyone’s got a good technique for doing that, I want to hear about it. (The popcorn kernel, which was supposed to pop at 350, sunk to the bottom of the pot, never to be seen again.)

Duck, after

We guessed, and put the first duck in for six minutes. When we sliced it open, we thought another couple of minutes would be optimal, so we fried the second duck for nine minutes, and it was perfect.

Dinner was ducks we raised, wrapped in crepes made with eggs from our chickens. There were cucumbers from the hoophouse. Russ made a spicy stir-fry with eggplant from the garden and mushrooms we’d foraged. There was more wine.

And this is what I was afraid of. Next spring, in duckling season, it’s this dinner I’ll remember. I won’t think about the havoc ducks wreak. The mess and the smell won’t seem so bad. The charmlessness won’t seem so important. I’ll think of crepe-wrapped smoked duck, and I will want ducks again.

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