Roasted chicken is a comfort food I enjoy any time of the year. It is a simple pleasure that is accessible and easy for nearly all home cooks and provides a cost-effective meal for the whole family or for the individual with leftovers to be eaten for days and a carcass to be coaxed into a stock with endless potential. Even when purchasing a local bird for the average price of $5 a pound and up, the price per serving, with leftovers and soup included, is still in most shoppers’ price range.
In 2005 my sister Molly, then 12 years old, caught an enormous striped bass. It was so big when she finally hauled it onto the boat she backed away from it in fear and almost fell head over heels off the side of the boat into the churning ocean. I remember her telling me she thought she had caught an alligator. It is a story that has been told over and over again since then: a 12-year-old girl catching a giant bass and winning the Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby.
My Aunt Marie turned 70 this past August. She is still slender, young in most every way and very strong.
Mushrooms are the richest and meatiest food I know of outside the animal kingdom. In the past few weeks, following a number of torrential rainstorms, mushrooms have begun popping up everywhere on the Island. On a visit to a friend’s house off of Middle Road two weeks ago, friends and I stumbled upon a yard filled with chanterelle mushrooms and the black trumpet variety. We harvested the chanterelles first that day from underneath a maple tree, leaving the black trumpets to grow larger.
My dad grows the best tomatoes. He drops them off for me in fruit boxes with padding in the bottom.
Our rabbits live in little cages made out of different odds and ends left around the farm. We have four cages with chicken wire covering the bottom to keep them from burrowing their way to freedom. They are placed in our fields over our spent crops with the idea that the bunnies will clean up our old greens and weeds, digest them and then fertilize our soil with their manure. One cage was built by my father for my sister Molly when she brought home three wild bunnies she had found that were abandoned by their mother.
