Chris Fischer

Chowder Queen; Mirin Lies the Difference

My Aunt Marie turned 70 this past August. She is still slender, young in most every way and very strong.

mushroom

Mushrooms, Rich and Meaty, Are Popping Up on the Island

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.

tomatoes

Respect for Crop Is Main Ingredient

My dad grows the best tomatoes. He drops them off for me in fruit boxes with padding in the bottom.

rabbit

From Hutch to Table a Short Hop

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.

horse

Meals Seasoned With History Map Out a Culinary Journey

About four years ago I was working on a landscaping project on a horse farm in West Tisbury. Word quickly spread around the farm that a horse had lain down and died in its stall that morning. There was somberness in the air on that hot summer day, with the humidity promising a thunderstorm in our near future. Horses are not small creatures, and a front-end loader was brought in to extract the animal from the barn. The scene became quite loud as chains were rigged this way and that and the engine on the machine was revved for more power.

lobsters

With Lobster, as with Love, Simplicity Is Recipe for Success

Being in love is like eating lobster on the beach as the sun sets over the ocean on a cool evening in July.

On the Farm, Tending Family Mirrors Garden, Lots of Love

I live with my 97-year-old grandmother Rena in the farmhouse she bought with my grandfather in 1963, as a place for them to retire.

fishing

They Are Not Warm and Cuddly, But Go With the Bluefish

The best fishing trip I ever had took place about 10 years ago (my, I am getting old) in a canoe launched off of Lucy Vincent Beach.

chives garden

Precious Package: Green Garlic Brings Out Best of Spring Season

My family has learned how to express love through food. Maybe a little too heavily on the food side, and we are still learning to express ourselves emotionally, which can lead to a miscommunication or two. Just this morning my father greeted me with oysters while he shucked them with a pocketknife. Almost every time he comes by the farm he has something for me in a five-gallon bucket or one of those orange fish baskets he finds on the beach.

hens coop eggs

Good Eggs, Free Range Chickens Lay Top Shelf but Predators Lurk

Legend has it raccoons were brought to the Island as a front for hunters to, as they say, “jack” deer at night. As the story goes, if a warden caught someone hunting at night, the hunter would claim he was after raccoons rather than trying to stock up on some after-hours venison.

In the long run this ploy did not work out so well for the rest of us. Raccoons tear apart our garbage at night and, more devastatingly, they go after our chickens with reckless abandon.

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