Mess with Thanksgiving at your peril. 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 [...]
God I hate brining. 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 [...]
I was very small when my mother explained death to me. Everything alive eventually dies, she told me. Pets, plants, grandmothers. You and me. And it is death, she has always said, that makes life precious. But that’s not strictly true. It isn’t death that makes life precious. It’s knowledge of death. Something our six [...]
It’s been nigh-on two weeks of near-death experiences around here. First we had our sick chicken, Flopsy, who couldn’t seem to stand on her own two feet. Then we had my father, hospitalized with an EKG that looked like one of those seismic meters during an earthquake. Then the cat, who’s become decidedly indoorsy in [...]
It’s a banner year for chipmunks. And no wonder. The boneheads who own the property they live on seem finally to have figured out how to create a chipmunk-friendly environment. They scatter cracked corn on the ground for their chickens. They’ve actually managed to grow a few nice tomatoes, just at ground level. And they [...]
Our turkey pen is made exclusively of materials designed to contain other kinds of animals. The main structure is made of cattle panels, which are 16-foot sections of galvanized, heavy-gauge fencing. Since cows don’t fit through turkey-sized holes, we had to line the bottom couple of feet with chicken wire. If it can keep in [...]
One of our turkey poults died and, for the first time, I was upset by a livestock death. The poults were big enough that we put them in the all-purpose poultry pen, which had been vacated by the ducks a week earlier. We’d cleaned out the house and the sheltered area under it, but the [...]
I can never understand other people’s happiness unless it’s derived exactly the way mine is. If it makes you happy to fish, to talk to people smarter than you, and to watch episodes of The Good Life back to back, I get it. But if opera, kayaking, and adventure travel float your boat, your psyche [...]
I believe in editors. I’ve had the good fortune to be edited by some of the best in the business. My books were read, amended, and read again by Tracy Bernstein at Penguin and, before that, by Maria Guarnaschelli (then) at Scribner. My magazine and newspaper work has almost always been made better by the smart, [...]
Oblivion is a double-edged sword. Not the kind of oblivion one’s work is consigned to when nobody pays it any mind. That kind of oblivion is a single-edged sword, and a very sharp, very threatening sword it is too. I’m talking about the state of oblivion. Being oblivious. Not noticing. I have almost fifty years’ [...]
Tamar Haspel has been writing about food and health for over a decade. She recently moved from Manhattan to Cape Cod. She’s adjusting well. [Read More …]
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