While going through life behaving well isn’t so hard – most moral choices are straightforward – it’s very difficult to reduce “behaving well” to first principles. In general, I’d say I’m a greatest-good-for-the-greatest-number kind of girl, but I fully acknowledge the difficulty of such a far-reaching and enigmatic calculation.

Immanuel Kant, borrowed from britannica.com

Immanuel Kant thought he had the first principle nailed. “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law” was so compelling to him that he called it the Categorical Imperative. (Not just an ordinary, run-of-the-mill imperative, mind you.) While it’s hard to find fault with something that boils down, essentially, to “do unto others … ,” I’m not sure it helps with the really tricky moral dilemmas. Those usually involve overcrowded lifeboats, tragic accidents, or concentration camps. Thinking of your actions as a universal law doesn’t help you decide whether you should have drowned the child Adolph Hitler, if you’d had the chance.

I have gone through nearly fifty years of life on this planet without ever having encountered what I’d consider a tricky moral dilemma, so the lack of a compelling philosophy has had very little practical significance. Most of what we all consider moral behavior is uncomplicated. You don’t need a coherent first principle to figure out that, when the cashier gives you too much change, you give it back.

Life is governed, instead, by a series of smaller, less important rules. One of my favorites, borrowed from my friend Rafe, is “Never refuse a mint.” Miss Piggy contributes “Never eat anything you can’t lift.” The only billionaire of my acquaintance adds “Always do a billionaire a favor.”

Here’s my contribution to the pantheon: “Always make friends with the local brewer.”

Bluefish, drying

I will confess that I did not think of this rule in a flash of foresight. It was only after Kevin and I had met our local brewer, Todd Marcus, and decided he and his wife Beth were interesting, funny, and smart that we began to see the real advantages of that friendship. Like, when we invited them over for pizza and they brought a cooler full of their products. Or when our out-of-town friends come to visit and we get to take them backstage at the Cape Cod Beer brewery.

Being friends with a brewer is particularly important during bluefish season which, for us, began this past Saturday.

The weather was good, and it was my stepson Eamon’s last weekend with us. We rigged the rods with wire leaders and metal lures, filled the boat with gas and the cooler with ice, and headed out to Horseshoe Shoal, about six miles due south of Osterville.

There was some chop in Nantucket Sound, and it took us a while to get out. Once we got there, it was better. The Shoal is a big shallow area in the middle of the Sound and, when the wind is from the south, the north end stays relatively calm. We went to our favorite spot, dropped the lines in, and I had the first fish in the boat inside ten minutes.

Bluefish, smoking

We spent the whole morning, and came home with thirteen fish. I fileted them all and we grilled three that night, Nantucket-style. The rest went into a brine, overnight.

On Sunday, Kevin fired up the brand-new smokehouse for his first attempt at fish smoking. Last year, he perfected a kettle-grill method, but the smokehouse lets him do a much bigger batch. There are still a few kinks to be worked out (at which point I’ll tell you in more detail about the smokehouse), but we ended up with twenty filets of smoked bluefish. A little softer and moister than is ideal, but with a balanced, smoky flavor.

When I posted our haul on Facebook, Beth posted back: “You wanna trade for beer?”

Always make friends with the local brewer.

Kevin, checking

Oh, and the local gardeners. Bluefish season corresponds, coincidentally, with garden bounty season, and Dianne and Doug gave me a very nice bunch of raspberries and blackberries. Past bluefish hauls have earned us produce of all stripes, from Doug and Dianne, from Al and Christl, from Amanda. From our friends who don’t garden or brew, there is goodwill and gratitude.

We value goodwill and gratitude a lot, if not quite as much as beer.

The problem with my rule is that it does not pass the Categorical Imperative test. If “make friends with the brewer” were a universal law, and everyone did it, there would be no beer left for us.

Such are the limits of moral philosophy.

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Okay, it’s Kevin who made it, but I think our being the proverbial one flesh entitles me to take credit for his discoveries.

It all started when Al and Christl went out of town.

Al and Christl's asparagus

Starving regulars will know that Al and Christl are gardeners. Excellent gardeners. I’ve been on the receiving end of their produce, their advice, and their tomato seedlings, which Christl grows for me every year in return for clams, oysters, and smoked bluefish.

In addition to tomatoes, squash, strawberries, beans, lettuce, rhubarb, leeks, and herbs, Al and Christl grow asparagus. They have a huge patch of the purple passion variety, which yields pounds and pounds of the stuff from mid-May to mid-June.

So there’s no accounting for Al and Christl’s decision to go to England, to visit their son, from mid-May to mid-June.

While they’re gone, I’m babysitting their tomato seedlings (which, I’m happy to report, are thriving in our hoophouse). In return, I have permission to raid the asparagus patch, which I’ve done every few days.

The asparagus is amazingly good. The spears are thick – some almost as big around as my wrist – but tender all the way to the base. The flesh is tender enough that you can eat it raw, and it gets melty and luscious when you cook it.

But that’s not the discovery. This is the discovery:

Drumroll, please …

Purple asparagus doesn’t make your pee smell!

Surprisingly, the mechanism by which regular green asparagus does make your pee smell isn’t well understood. There are a number of suspected chemical culprits, but the research (yes, there is research) has been inconclusive. The issue is complicated by the fact that some people pee very smelly pee, and some people pee not-so-smelly pee. Just to make it harder, there seems to be some 6% of the population that can’t smell the asparagus pee smell at all.

I’ve never minded the asparagus pee phenomenon, which may explain why I didn’t notice that the purple asparagus didn’t produce it. But Kevin did.

There you have it. You heard it here first (or, if you heard it somewhere else, you’ll have the good grace not to mention it). Purple asparagus doesn’t make your pee smell.

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I served for ten years, several of them as president, and there was some meeting of neighbors and improving of community. Mostly, though, there was tsuris.

In all that time, nobody ever took me aside and told me how great it was that the building was running so smoothly. I never heard satisfaction that the common areas were so clean, the elevators so reliable, the storage units so commodious. What people noticed – what people everywhere always notice – were the problems.

I heard about it when the washing machines were broken, when the doorman wasn’t helpful, when (yes) the exit signs of our newly installed emergency lighting system were unattractive. What really opened the floodgates, though, was the new contract with the cable TV provider, which specified that users of broadband (most of the residents) got lower rates, but bare-bones customers paid about $10 more per month. We were so besieged by aggrieved television watchers that I starting taking the stairs to avoid elevator confrontations. It was grim.

Kevin and I are having a different experience out here in the sticks. We’ve joined several local organizations, including the Barnstable Association for Recreational Shellfishing, the Cape Cod Organic Gardeners, the Barnstable County Beekeeping Association, and the Indian Ponds Association. Not only does no one call us to complain about the quahog harvest or colony collapse disorder, we’ve discovered, in our community-mindedness, that there’s something in it for us!

Through the Organic Gardeners, we met Al and Christl, who have been the other half of some of the best trades we’ve made. In return for clams, smoked bluefish, oysters, and eggs, they’ve given us asparagus, strawberries, raspberry brandy, winter squash, rhubarb, various plants, and tomato seedlings that became the source of the best BLTs ever.

Through the Beekeepers, we met Claire and Paul, who have paid housecalls on our beehives to help us figure out what’s going on inside them. They also encourage – encourage! – us to ask questions via e-mail, which they always answer promptly and thoroughly. We bring them the occasional dozen eggs, but that’s just a token.

And then there’s Bob, who serves with me on the board of the Indian Ponds Association. Bob, besides being a really nice guy dedicated to maintaining the health of the three lakes that constitute the Indian Ponds, is a commercial fisherman. I can summarize the advantage of knowing a commercial fisherman in one word: bycatch!

Bycatch: John Dory (top) and tilefish

At this time of year, Bob fishes for squid, and he comes home with the sea creatures who had the bad luck to get in the way. A few weeks ago, he gave me a John Dory and a tilefish, neither of which I had cooked before, and both of which were lovely and fresh. All he got in return was gratitude and an e-mail telling him how I cooked them and how good they were.

Then, yesterday, I got an e-mail from Bob. This was it, in its entirety:

Fluke? Weakfish? Tilefish?

Now don’t you wish someone sent e-mails like that to you? “Yes please,” was what I said, and I just picked up a bag with three kinds of fish, filleted and iced down. In return, all I’ve offered up is the promise of oak logs on which to grow mushrooms, from trees we’ll be cutting down in the spring.

So there you have it. I’ve become a big fan of community engagement because I come out ahead. Civic booty!

Sounds all wrong, but I don’t think that, at bottom, it’s selflessness that builds community. In a sense, we’re all in it to make the place we live the kind of place we want to live in. Individual interaction – a produce trade, a beehive housecall, a drive-by fish pick-up – is the unit of community. Enough of them, and pretty soon nobody’s bowling alone.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate bowling alone – if you bowl the way I do, you see its advantages. But I think life is fuller and more interesting if you’re connected to your neighbors by what you have in common. Just as long as it’s not the cable bill.

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But this one tops all of those, because all I had to do was give up something I wasn’t going to use anyway.

Last week, I posted a turkey update in which I mentioned that the birds had only one month left to live, and I got a comment from Jocelyn asking me whether I had any plans for the feathers and offering up the possibility of a trade: turkey feathers for home-cured olives.

Olives!

I sent her an e-mail, quick, before she changed her mind, and we made the deal.  And today, in the mail, I got a box with three — count ‘em, three! — jars of beautiful olives.  There was also a lovely letter explaining what kinds they were, and wishing me well with my new acorn-feeding program.  (“Bigger turkeys = bigger feathers?” she wondered.)

On the Sunday before Thanksgiving, I will be packaging up all my turkey feathers and sending them to Jocelyn, who is a jewelry designer.  (Her company is called Nous Savons — you can read about it in this Daily Candy item.)  The feathers will certainly find themselves in much more elegant surroundings than they have enjoyed thus far.

I like the idea that the feathers are going to be used, that Jocelyn is going to turn them into something beautiful that will make someone happy.  But I like olives even more.

Thanks, Jocelyn.

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I was feeling all salty and heroic, bestowing little bags of beautiful peppered fillets on a few of our favorite people. Hah! The tables were turned. Here’s a list of what I was given in return for my lousy half-dozen smoked bluefish fillets:

4 ripe tomatoes
1 black-staining polypore
a container of mushrooms that may or may not be chanterelles
1 huge bunch celery
a handful of beans
assorted baby peppers and one cute little eggplant
a bunch of shiso
marjoram, thyme, and two kinds of mint, ready to plant
4 perfect leeks
a bunch of chard
a jar of pickles
3 fat cucumbers
a container of herbs de Provence
6 little Thai peppers
1 cantaloupe
1 long, skinny, Japanese cucumber

And it would have been more, except that I absolutely forbade Al and Christl to give me anything. They’ve been so generous with the things they grow that I wanted to get something in the plus column. Besides, I was already so loaded up from Amanda and Doug and Dianne that I was too embarrassed to take anything more.  But Christl pressed the Japanese cucumber on me, and I couldn’t resist.

It honestly didn’t occur to me that, if I showed up at the homes of gardeners, in the height of vegetable season, with a measly little gift of bluefish that they would load me up with the bounty of their gardens. If it had occurred to me, I probably would have done it sooner.

The bounty

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Those of you who follow this space will know that our plumber gave us some venison in return for the use of one of our shotguns, and Kevin decided he’d make something out of the sausage. Now, when you think ‘sausage,’ you naturally think, ‘German,’ so he looked for a recipe from that part of the world.

Epicurious came through. Kevin tweaked the recipe, upping the caraway and including a some of the Cape Cod Beer porter we had in the fridge, and turned out something absolutely irresistible. So irresistible that I ate it all before I had a chance to photograph it.

Up until now, I think I would have said that my favorite recipe on this site was the Lamb and Eggplant Ragout. Now, I might have to go with the Venison Sausage Braised in Sauerkraut. And it’s my husband’s recipe! What does that tell you?

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We’d only had the house for a few months when the seventies-era water heater, which we’d been warned about during the home inspection, crapped out. Enter Bob, the plumber recommended by the builder (also Bob) who rents an office to Kevin.

Bob the builder told us that Bob the plumber did excellent work, and knew a lot about tankless water heaters. When Bob the plumber came to take a look, he told us all about tankless water heaters, but he also told us that we lived on a great trout pond. He’s a fisherman, and he comes here all the time.

We knew it was a great trout pond, but we hadn’t yet had any success getting the trout out of it. We talked trout for a while, and let drop that we hadn’t caught one yet.

Bob installed the water heater (a Rinnai that we’ve been happy with once we got over the expectation that hot water would come out of the hot water faucet in the first forty-five seconds after you turn it on). When he dropped by with the bill, he also brought four beautiful rainbow trout, caught right in our backyard.

I’m sure he did this in part to soften the blow of a fairly substantial plumbing bill and in part because he’s just a nice guy. But I suspect there was also just a little bit of a sportsman satisfaction in having so many fish that he can afford to give four of them – count ‘em, four! – to the city slickers who bought the waterfront house but can’t hook a trout.

Bob’s certainly an excellent fisherman, and he seems to be an excellent plumber (judging by the leaklessness of the work he’s done for us). He’s also a hunter.

Bob’s main quarry is rabbits, and he has a stable of beagles he’s trained to hunt with him. When he found out that Kevin is also a hunter, they had a long talk about game and guns. Any discussion of guns naturally has an I’ll-show-you-mine-if-you’ll-show-me-yours component, and Kevin mentioned that we have a Remington 1100 semi-automatic .410 shotgun. It’s about 20 years old, in perfect condition, with a beautiful wooden stock.

Bob really likes that gun. He’d like to buy it, but Kevin also likes that gun, and is unwilling to sell. Lending, though, is another story, and Kevin has repeatedly told Bob that he’s welcome to borrow it any time he likes.

Yesterday, Bob took him up on the offer. He’s taking his son to their camp in Maine, and he asked if he could bring the Remington. But he didn’t just ask – he came bearing gifts.

I’d have been quite content with more trout but, this time, it was venison. I love venison.

Between Bob and his son, they’d shot six deer this past season. Six deer is a lot of venison, and Bob brought us two packs of steaks and a pack of sausage.

We’d have been happy to lend Bob the gun, venison or no venison, but the idea that we can trade its use for several dinners’ worth of wild game makes my day. Last night, we broiled the steaks in a cast-iron pan and served them with a wine sauce and potatoes roasted with Brussels sprouts.

I love barter almost as much as I love venison. Everyone should have a plumber like Bob.

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Al and Christl are the best gardeners we know. We’ve had their asparagus, kale, garlic chives, strawberries, blackberries, rhubarb, and tomatoes, and they’ve all been beautiful specimens of their kind, and very good to eat. So, when Al called us yesterday morning telling us he had a very large winter squash going begging, I was delighted.

The sasquash

An hour or so later, he pulled into our driveway, opened his trunk, and staggered back with the biggest squash I’d ever seen. It looked like something out of Sleeper.

“That’s a big squash,” I said.

And it was wasn’t even the whole thing – he’d kept part of it for their dinner. As a bonus, he brought us three blackberry vines, ready to plant. All I could give him in return was a lousy dozen eggs, but I promised that more would be forthcoming as the winter wears on.

I didn’t get to the squash yesterday as we had a dinner party to go to, and it was waiting for me when we got home late last night. There was also a message on our phone. Kevin checked it, and I heard him laughing. When he’d listened to the whole thing, he handed me the phone and told me I had to listen for myself.

“Hi, it’s Al,” the message said. “That squash we gave you was a dud. We cooked it up for dinner, and it was stringy and watery and didn’t have much flavor.” He went into some detail, and ended the message with, “It’ll make good compost.”

Christl is as experienced at cooking vegetables as she is at growing them, and both she and Al hate waste. If Al even hints that it should go in the compost, you can believe that it should go in the compost.

But I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t relegate that much squash to the compost.

Today, I cut off a piece and tasted it. Not much flavor, but what little there was didn’t offend. Kevin tasted it too. “This thing had sex with a watermelon,” he said, knowing the propensity of squash to breed with anything in pollinating distance. It was a distinct possibility. It tasted like a cross between a cucumber, a watermelon, and a glass of water. But not bad. I could work with it.

I’d have to work with it a lot, since it weighed almost twenty pounds, so I got started right away. I made a basic squash soup (the recipe is here) in which cream and really good chicken stock cover a multitude of sins. They did their job, and the soup was delicious. The squash couldn’t stand on its own, but it could add bulk, and color, and texture to all kinds of things. I think, over the course of the winter, I’ll manage to use up twenty pounds of squash. And, if I can, Al and Christl certainly can.

I called them. “Don’t compost the squash!” I said. “You can use it. It’ll work for lots of stuff.”

Christl told me she still had it and, although she had been disappointed with last night’s dinner, she thought it would make a good soup. She went on to describe how she’d make it, and it was exactly how I’d done it, down to the pinch of nutmeg. I knew there was a reason I liked Christl.

The only reason she even considered composting it is that she’s got three more exactly like it.

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It was the day we picked up our chicks. Cape Cod Feed and Supply opens at 8:00 AM, and we were told to get there early, as the chicks sold out quickly. We were the first ones there, at 7:45. By the time the store opened, several other people had joined us.

The young woman who works there made a list with people’s names, but not in any particular order – we were third or fourth. When it came time to divvy out the chicks, though, they went in the order of the list, and the woman just ahead of us wanted six Buff Orpingtons.

It looked to me that there were only eight or nine Buffs left, and we had hoped to get eight ourselves. I hated to do it, but I had to say something.

“I really don’t want to be a jerk,” I said, “but we’d also like to get some Buffs, and,” here I looked at the floor and shuffled my feet in my best aw-shucks manner, “we were here first.”

Everyone was very cooperative, and we took four of the remaining Buffs and let the woman have the rest, but I can’t be happy about any incident in which the words “we were here first” came out of my mouth. This is why the incident sticks in my mind. In my food-related travels here on Cape Cod, this is one of the very few times someone behaved like a jerk. Bummer that it was me.

Maybe the gardening gene and the niceness gene are linked, like blue eyes and blond hair. Among the people we’ve met who raise food – or hunt it, or fish it, or write about it, or just cook it – there’ve been precious few jerks. Zealots, yes. Even a hefty quotient of crackpots. But not many jerks.

And a good thing too. It is the food community’s relative jerklessness that makes the barter system possible. When you’re trading eggs for tomatoes, or clams for strawberries, you don’t break out the scale and the calculator. You simply do your best to offer a fair trade.

Our barter bonanza (not the wine -- that's there for scale)

We’re just scratching the surface of barter’s possibilities, and we’ve done very well indeed. This is primarily because we’ve been trading with Al and Christl – a couple who, between them, could design, build, or grow just about anything. Their need for oak logs and fondness for clams dovetail nicely with our need for plant-related advice and our appetite for the bounty of their garden.

The first time I brought clams over to their house, I had them in the back seat of the car, still in the peck basket. A peck is ten quarts, and it’s a lot of clams. Because Al and Christl are just two people, I was afraid it was more than they could eat in a reasonable period of time, and that too many clams would be something of a burden.

When I took the basket out of the car, Christl’s eyes lit up, and she clapped her hands together. “Oh my,” she said. “Those are beautiful!” And she proceeded to talk about all the things she’d make with them.

Christl appreciates food, and the growing of food. Maybe it’s just her nature, or maybe it’s because she grew up knowing scarcity, but she spends time and energy cultivating a garden that’s the best I’ve ever seen, and nothing goes to waste in her house. It is a joy to bring her clams.

We brought them another half peck a couple of days ago, and they gave us some spectacular rhubarb and asparagus, along with young kale leaves for salad. I suspect my eyes lit up. I know I said it was beautiful. All the way home, I talked about what I would make with it.

It is enthusiasm and good will, and not a careful keeping of accounts, that makes this kind of trading possible. Sure, I want the rhubarb and the asparagus. But I also want the pleasure of the exchange with people of like mind and the comfort of knowing that everyone’s happy with the trade.

So please don’t tell Christl I was a jerk at the feed store.

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We don’t eat that many eggs – maybe two dozen a month, which is a little more than the output of one hen. If you’re going to keep chickens, you need at least four, so we’d end up with many more eggs than we’d need. Besides, it’s a money loser. We buy excellent eggs from a local farm for three dollars a dozen, and our yearly egg budget of about $75. wouldn’t go far in procuring, housing, and feeding a coop’s worth of chickens.

Six-eighths of our brood

But then there’s the barter system. Once you start growing and gathering, a whole new economy opens up. We’ve already traded some oak logs (to grow shiitakes), which we have in abundance, for two blackberry bushes grown by our friends Al and Christl. That worked out so well that, a couple weeks later, we traded them a peck of clams for some tomato and kale seedlings.

Chickens will expand our bartering options. Everybody likes eggs, and we hope to trade not just for edibles but for advice, assistance, and just plain good will. And if there’s anyone out there with a 17′ Whaler …

A Buff Orpington

That’s the idea, anyway, and it was what led to our buying eight baby chicks yesterday morning from the nice people at Cape Cod Feed and Supply. They get them, fifty at a time, from Murray McMurray Hatchery, a business which you’ve never heard of if you don’t raise chickens and which you hear of all the time if you do.

We had planned to get eight Buff Orpingtons, a breed known for its docile good nature and resistance to cold. There weren’t enough to go around, though, so we ended up with four Buffs and four Rhode Island Reds, a hardy breed with an independent streak.

A Rhode Island Red

The difference in the breeds is apparent even in three-day-old chicks. The Reds zoom around the brooder with confidence and aplomb while the Buffs quietly go about their business, which is eating, drinking, and crapping. That will be the sum total of our chicks’ business for the next six months, until they reach maturity and “laying” gets added to the list.

Until that happens, we have to keep them warm, fed, and safe from our cat, who seems excited by the prospect of having very small birds in the house. Kevin likes to let the cat commune with the chicks – through the impermeable wall of the brooder – on the theory that we can teach her that the brood is a part of our family community, and therefore not acceptable prey. I, however, have very little faith in our cat’s community spirit, and prefer to keep a closed door between them.

Can't we all just get along?

We didn’t plan it this way, but in an energy-saving piece of good luck, our timing is such that we have to keep both our baby chicks and our dandelion wine warm for the next week. We’ve sequestered brooder, heat lamp, and fermenting vat in the guest room, jury-rigging the lot so the brooder is at 95 degrees and the wine about twenty degrees cooler.

By all appearances, chicks and wine are thriving.

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