How to Cook a Moose (41 page)

After we parked by the house and got out, Ethan went into the basement storage space. Dingo followed him and flushed a stray chicken out from her hiding place. “There she is,” Ethan said. “I knew she was in there.” He tossed her into the coop to join the rest of them, just settling in for the night.

In the buggy, darkening evening, we picked vegetables from their greenhouse and garden. They apologized for the weeds, which they told us they don't have time to pick, but we were too impressed by the bounty to notice.

While the men stayed outside and boiled the red potatoes Ethan had just dug from their garden on an old propane double-burner cookstove, in the same pot with the lobsters he had just pulled out of one of his traps, Lindsay and I stayed in the kitchen and cooked, like good women. She fried the rest of a striper Ethan had caught the day before. I made a salad with the vegetables we'd just picked: cucumbers, tomatoes, red onions, garlic, basil, green beans, and green pepper. Lindsay sautéed the zucchini and garlic we'd just pulled out of their greenhouse. We used olive oil from Ethan's brother's wife's family's place in Greece, which added a whole other level of homegrown to the mix.

“What should I do with the vegetable scraps?” I asked Lindsay. “Do you have a compost bucket?”

“Just throw them out the window for the chickens,” she said. “They'll see it and get excited for tomorrow's breakfast.”

On the counter were several large jars of beets that Lindsay had pickled that morning.

“They'll be good in the wintertime,” she said. “We had so many all of a sudden from the garden.”

The beets looked like big round jewels suspended in ruby red liquid. I was very tempted to open a jar and eat a few, but I admired them instead, contenting myself with a handful of raw green beans while I made the salad.

As we were setting the table, Bill, Jamie, and Lawrence arrived with the story of another adventure they'd just had; Jamie's knee was bandaged, but all was well. We all gathered around the table, heaped our plates, and feasted.

While we ate, I realized that this was a true foraged, fished, and garden-to-table meal. Everything in front of us was food that Lindsay and Ethan had grown or caught, gathered and served without fuss or
fanfare. The meal was simple and perfectly delicious; the lobsters didn't need butter, and the vegetables were still alive.

Afterwards, we all sat out on their deck, looking out at the gleaming estuary while the full moon rose and the tide came in. It was one of the most magical days I'd ever spent, and I'll never forget it.

“You're writing a book about food in Maine?” My friend Millicent Souris, a chef and baker and cookbook author who lives in New York, was unequivocal: “You have to meet Ladleah Dunn.”

When I asked who that person with the interesting name was, Millicent promptly described her as “a cook, baker, grower of food, sailor, and native Maine person.”

That would have been enough to catch my interest, right there, but she went on:

“The last time I was in Maine, two Augusts ago, I was staying with Ladleah in Lincolnville, where there's a sweet, somewhat public area to swim. According to Ladleah, it's also the only legal place to fish or clam, and sometimes there are razor clams, and the beach is full of lamb's quarter. Her husband was so bored by the ladies chatting with a cooler full of beer that he just dipped down and pulled up what we thought were quahogs for dinner. They were big. Very, very big. We did stuffed clams, and honestly, they were the best stuffed clams ever, because they were so big and could handle all the flavors. Ladleah had some pork belly squirreled away, and she makes bread, for fuck's sake, so we were set. She put them on the grill, then got guilted when a few of them tried to escape with that one foot of theirs.

“But clams be damned, we chopped everything up and ate them. And while we were eating them, she looked up how old they were. Eighty years old. Eighty-year-old clams! And we ate them! Which
leads to a new mixture of ‘Oh, man, we ate those truly majestic wise old clams' with ‘Shit! They were old!,' and ‘Man, that was good.' (Later, after some research, we found out that hen clams, are likely twelve years old at the most, but there was a pervasive sadness when we thought we were eating such ancient shellfish).”

When I wrote to Ladleah and explained the project I was doing, and the book's title, she wrote back, “My husband Shane is a moose hunter. He and his father have a tradition of going up to Newfoundland and meeting up with guides and native Newfoundlanders they've known for a long time and hunting for moose and caribou (if they are lucky to get a permit for the caribou). At home we hunt for deer, grouse, rabbit, and squirrel also.”

Instantly intrigued, I asked her for some of her moose recipes. She described sausages and jerky and moose tacos, then added, “There really is no limit to what one can do with moose, as long as it's of good quality (like anything, I suppose), and is treated like grass-fed beef. That is to say, it is cooked rare, or all day. We
love
moose stroganoff made with a nice strong stock from our wild foraged dried mushroom stores—old-school, and so good. No nutmeg required, as our moose has a great spicy wildness to it, and with the chanterelles and black trumpets, it really is a hearty winter meal.

“Bolognese is always a winner. Fire-roast some tomatoes, kick it up with a little cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, cardamom, an obscene amount of garlic, whatever root veg is hanging around, throw in some kale at the finish. Tourtière [meat pie], meatballs, burgers, curries, stews, tacos . . . treat it like a flank steak with a great chimichurri . . .”

Clearly, this woman knew how to cook a moose. And that turned out to be only the beginning of all the things she knows how to do.

Later that winter, on a frosty February morning, Ladleah wrote, “Come on up and hang in our greenhouse . . . it's about 70 in there right now . . . I have eight or so different varieties of kale, collards,
escarole, celery, parsley, parsley root, carrots, raab, beets, chard, a bit of cilantro, leeks. The leeks have all been pulled, though, and I have baby lettuces, radish, spinach, and arugula coming up where they were.”

She attached a photo of her bare feet resting on the earth, a mug of tea, a jungle of green things growing in the background, the walls of the greenhouse steamy with warmth.

I wanted to go up there that minute—or at least, that week—but things kept getting in the way: pressing tasks to attend to, work, a book tour, houseguests, deadlines, social obligations, daily life.

In March, she wrote to me, “We are going to smoke some moose jerky and make some moose chorizo. Care to come up and help?”

I cared very much to go up and help. But now, we were ensconced in the New Hampshire farmhouse with Dingo, and I was struggling to start a new novel, hoping to get it under way by summer so I could concentrate on this book then. The novel had taken over my life, as novels will. I wasn't ready to learn about moose yet.

So I put her off again, even more reluctantly this time.

Finally, in mid-September, it hit me that I absolutely needed to meet Ladleah and Shane and see their place. In fact, I couldn't finish this book until I did. They sounded like the living example of what this book is all about: the continuation of a centuries-long tradition of making a living off the land and sea, prime exemplars of this new generation of badass young DIY Mainers I've been getting to know since I moved here.

I wanted to make it up for the weekend of Ladleah's “Hurricane dinner,” a fund-raising meal on Hurricane Island she was cooking, and to which she had invited Brendan and me, but once again, we had visitors arriving and things to do.

A few days later, after Brendan had gone to Los Angeles for a couple of weeks, I tried to find a dog sitter for Dingo so I could go up.
But no one could do it, and none of my cat-free, dog-friendly friends could take Dingo, either.

And then, a few days later, the stars finally aligned. Dingo went off for the night with our friend and Dingo's major crush, Angela Crabtree, a dog caretaker, artist, and longtime native Mainer. Before she took Dingo, she told me that her father had worked as a game warden in the Allagash for thirty-five years before he retired and moved back to Hope, his hometown, to become a private investigator.

“He has a million stories,” she said. “He was held hostage at gunpoint by a couple of Canadian deer poachers he caught who tied him to a post in an empty camp and left him for dead. It took him days to escape.”

“Holy shit,” I said. “He should write a memoir.”

After Dingo trotted happily off with Angela, I packed a small backpack with pajamas and toothbrush and change of clothes, went to our bougie local store for a bag of good cheese, red wine, flaxseed crackers, and chocolate to take to Ladleah and Shane, and gassed up the car.

And then, finally ready to go, I headed onto the interstate, up the coast toward Lincolnville, two hours north.

This was my first long solo trip since getting my first-ever driver's license the month before, and it felt appropriate that I was making my maiden solo voyage in order to meet two of the most resourceful people in existence. It was a scintillatingly clear, dazzling, early-fall day. The seawater in the coves was a deep, shifting, rippling blue; the trees lining the freeway were rich green underlain with delicate rust. As I drove past marshlands, I could see leaves on low shrubs turning their silvery undersides to the breeze. I listened to Top 40 radio and sang happily along with every song like a teenybopper as I bombed north at a racy seventy-five miles an hour.

Stopped in traffic at a red light in the scenic, touristy village of Camden, I called Brendan.

“I love driving!” I burbled. “Maine is so beautiful!”

“Be careful, baby,” he said.

“Don't worry; I hear your bossy voice in my ear every minute: Check your blind spot! Be defensive! Never tailgate!”

“Ha!” he said. “I taught you well.”

The directions from Ladleah were straightforward and clear: “There will most likely be a large boat out in front of our barn by the time you get here. Turn in after the boat.”

I turned in at a driveway with, as promised, a sailboat propped on jack-stands, its hull resting on large wooden blocking, in front of an enormous, elegant boat barn marked
KALLISTÉ YACHT SERVICES
.

And there was Ladleah Dunn, at long last, sturdy and beautiful and smiling. Two elegant dogs surged around my car; I learned a few minutes later that they were wirehaired pointing griffons named Buckminster and Zubinelgenubi, Bucky and Zubi for short.

I parked next to Ladleah's car in front of the house and got out. After all this time, I felt we were already old friends who just hadn't met yet. I gave her a big hug.

“What do you want to do?” she asked. “Do you want something to drink? A bathroom?”

“I just really want to walk around,” I said, happy as a kid to be there. “Show me everything! But first, how do you pronounce your name?”

“
LAID-lee
,” she said. “It's Irish. My parents were a couple of romantics . . .”

While Ladleah showed me the boat barn, which she and Shane had built themselves from their own design, she told me about their business. They repaired sailboats; that was the way they made most of their income. The boat outside belonged to Shane's father. Ladleah's
and Shane's sailboat, the one they'd lived on for three years between Florida and the Bahamas before buying this land and settling down, was stored in the barn. In the barn's smaller addition were two more boats they'd been paid to store for the winter. The boat barn was warm in the wintertime, Ladleah explained, because there was radiant heat in the smooth concrete floor and a wood-burning furnace that was so demanding, it was like having an infant to tend, with propane as backup heat.

Beyond the boat barn was a small flock of sheep with sweet, inquisitive faces, grazing in a small pine woods. They weren't at all woolly; their pelts were more like goats'.

“They're Katahdins,” Ladleah explained. “We don't raise them for wool, just meat. I'm always really sad when the time comes to schedule the slaughter dates.”

“I remember when they were lambing last spring,” I said. “You posted pregnancy and birth updates on Facebook. It was like following a serial drama.”

While we talked, a pickup truck drove in and a bare-chested young guy got out and conferred briefly with Ladleah, and then he drove away again.

“Avery's going to stack our wood,” she said. “This is the first year we've hired someone to do it for us. He's the son of a friend of ours. He's gone to run an errand, and then he's coming back to work till dark.”

Shortly after Avery drove off, Shane drove in. He introduced himself and shook my hand with a direct gaze and a firm grip. I liked him instantly, as I had Ladleah, both of whom radiated energy and purpose and trustworthiness and intelligence. We all climbed a wood ladder (“First one he ever built,” said Ladleah, “but don't worry, it's sturdy”) into Shane's father's boat and went belowdecks, where I admired the woodwork and the 1970s upholstery as I asked them about living on their sailboat for three years.