I'm learning to cook that way. With less clock, minutes, oven temps, and perhaps better results.

Load your canoe. Slowly work the lashes and try out the bowline knot you have been practicing and always wanted to try. Paddle that canoe with one stroke after another across the lake. Now pause to feel that fish bite and land it with the net. Make it a four year old, gold bellied, black backed fish.

Now right there after filleting our pike, I can take a zip lock bag and sprinkle the enclosed fillets lightly with lemon juice and squeeze out all the air. By duct taping this bag to an anchor line and submerging to a depth of thirty feet, I am marinating under pressure those fillets in a pelagic refrigerator.

After a couple hours you can rest these now lemoned pieces of fish on a slab of shingled, fresh felled white birch minus the bark. The slabs on a slab if you will. Next, make a circle of ancient igneous rocks.

By perching this arrangement over some low smoke emitting, but hot coals from dried maple wood, this slab of birch will steam the walleye fillets into something beyond your wildest taste dreams. It’s a long process. It very time consuming. Your reward is this, “good things come to those who wait”.

That birch tree you’re cookin' with might have waited forty years for you to arrive. If the fish took four years to get to a pound and half, I'm not going to hastily char its flesh.

Connecting all this nature with the simplest of pleasures is well worth the time. For people who hunt and fish the labors of harvesting is never correctly accounted for in price per pound. Wild salmon from the store is far too inexpensive when compared to buying the rod, flies, waders, and automobile fuel. The connection to the outdoors that this entire hunter gathering provides is most often expressed in value and never empirical cost.

Gathering wild fruit or catching your own fish, for me, is not saving money in the family food budget. I do not hunt to provide meat for the survival of my family. This hunting connects me to the unhurried nature I enjoy so very much. So did it take four hours in November to get your deer or a couple minutes at the hardware store rehashing the shot you missed six years ago, and two hours walking down that logging road in September, or a day target practicing with your grandson? My deer took most of the year. I would have it no other way. I want the long deer season.

Just pouring thick, slow, rich maple syrup in my, 'before the sunrise coffee', connects and reminds me of camping trips. While chewing the venison sticks while ice fishing or having a bratwurst boil up at lunch on a canoe trip, time and experience just keeps reweaving the digestible fabric into me.

Raw cranberries that tang my mouth or blueberries by the handful and I get the crisp autumn or hot august. Those berries soaked sun, rain, and nutrients out of the ground to get to me.

I have problems with gas grills. A gas grill will cheat me out of my real wood charcoal. The gas grill will get it done. I’m not looking for done. I want well done and every pun intended. Grilling over open fires with seasoned wood, while just about being able to bite into the rich wood meat roasting aroma is like my black pepper grinder. It takes more effort but it’s so much fresher.

Trying to eat fried chicken without using your fingers should be criminal. Buttered ears of corn, or fresh bread swiped through gravy was never meant for utensils. People love to eat hotdogs, pizza, and popcorn because its hand food. Next week make a meal that requires not one piece of silverware. Dip it from the dish, peel it off the rind, or hold it by the fire roasted bone. Take the time.

Taste the time,
Karl "e;Trout Whisperer"e; Seckinger