Blog The Road

If you grow or gather a significant amount of your own food, you'll need plenty of storage space come harvest time. One benefit of living in the snowbelt and having an unheated porch or outbuilding is that you never run out of refrigerator space in winter! Here’s a photo my wife, Dead-Eye, took last week of our walk-in cooler (AKA front porch). From left to right, here’s what’s in it: 1. (in yellow enamel box) deer tallow for the suet feeder (Woodpeckers, chickadees and nuthatches love it.); 2. plastic flowers for all-season floral bouquet; 3. (in ZipVac bag) half-eaten wild turkey carcass for leftover meals and soup; 4. cabbage gleaned from friend’s field (Frozen when we picked them, they keep well all winter. Peel off outer leaves to reveal crunchy inner section.); 5. (in peanut butter jar) chicken broth for soup; 6. (in blue roaster) chicken carcass waiting to be simmered to make broth for next soup; 7. dead cottontail rabbit waiting to be dressed and butchered; 8 & 9. (jars behind roaster) Chinese hull-less pumpkin seeds (l) and shredded coconut (r) for quick road snacks; 10. (under table) bottle of wine; 11. (yellow thing) solar lantern to help me find the door when I come home late at night) OK, so a solar lantern doesn’t need to be refrigerated, but leaving it on the porch helps us remember to put it where I can find it when I come home after dark.
On any given day, our porch might contain all these items and more. The guy from Culligan who delivers salt for our water softener didn’t bat an eye at the rabbit, but here in farm country I’m sure he’s seen stranger things. I often leave game on the porch to age for a few days before dressing or freezing it. Aging tenderizes tough meat, which is exactly what slaughterhouses do with beef, hog and lamb carcasses. Granted, they hang meat under controlled temperatures, but I’ve never had a problem keeping game for as long as a week if the temperature stays between 30º and 40ºF. If its gut is not perforated with shot, you can leave a small animal intact for a couple days at these temps. If it freezes solid, you can let it thaw out overnight and then process it. If you’re not certain of its condition, field-dress it and wipe the inside of the carcass dry with a paper towel. Don’t wash it with water, as moisture encourages bacterial growth. If a critter is gut-shot, you can butcher it, wash and dry it and put it in a sealed container for a few days before cooking or freezing it.

It’s best to process fish right away, but you can keep whole fresh fish for as long as a week in a bucket or cooler of snow. Start with a layer of snow, then a layer of fish, then snow, etc. until you fill the container.

On sunny days, move food to a shady spot on the porch. If porch temps get above 40ºF during the day, stick your food in a snow bank. Just remember to bring it back onto the porch or into an outbuilding overnight, or the local scavengers (coyotes, raccoons, possums) might have a smorgasbord. To help me remember this, I think of Templeton the rat in the movie version of Charlotte's Web singing “The fair is a veritable smorgasbord, orgasbord, after the lights go out…” He'd go nuts at our place.

The porch is where we keep stuff that needs refrigeration. Root vegetables keep just fine at 40ºF in a walk-in root cellar we made in a corner of the basement. After tempering for two weeks at room temperature, winter squash stores well at 50ºF in an unheated back room. That’s where we keep apples, too. All that in addition to two small freezers and a second refrigerator in the basement.

You might not have as much room as we do for food storage, but I’ll bet you’ve got a porch, balcony, patio or snow bank that will do in a pinch if you run into a windfall harvest, as we did with cabbage, squash, apples and several road-killed deer this year.

The deer are another story, one I’ll tell on another occasion.

Later…

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Find out this week on Outdoors Radio, Show 503. Listen online NOW or wait for the broadcast.

John Marksman, of Washburn, Wisconsin, shows off a nice burbot he caught on Lake Superior's Chequamegon Bay.

Photo courtesey of Outdoor Allure.

Captain Craig Putchat, of Outdoor Allure in Washburn, Wisconsin, gives us a fishing report for Chequamegon Bay, shares some tips for catching and cooking burbot (Lota lota) and tells us how an equipment malfunction caused him to miss two gimmee shots at deer during Wisconsin's late bow season.

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Asian carp DNA keeps showing up between the electric barrier on the Illinois River and Lake Michigan, which means the carp themselves have probably already made it past the barrier. Now there's a scary thought!

For another perspective on this whole debacle, check out the River Rat's blog.

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