Brown: Careful what you reach for

The preservation of food is an important part of living out where town is a place that you don’t get to often, and the grocery store is a place that you visit with a large, empty vehicle. Take just enough help to push that second shopping cart, but the rest can stay home and keep the back seat free for the sacks of stuff you want to keep less dusty.

Audra Brown

Down on the Farm

You might live in the country if the dry pantry has its own navigational protocol and locations are given in terms of compass directions. The beans go on the second shelf, north end, east side. Always have. The potato chips on the middle shelf, south end by the door, west side. The cereal is a couple shelves up from that and the iced-tea bags are one to the right. And yes, the beans take up two shelves.

In another room, or sometimes spread out across several are the freezers. I’m not gonna even pretend there aren’t at least two. You gotta have one just for the beef you pack in every year. Even at dressed weight, that twelve-hundred pound steer you fatted out doesn’t really leave much room for company in the freezer. Then there’s the three or four bushels of roasted green chile that you still have to ration if you don’t want to run out before next season’s come in. That puts us at a freezer and a half, at least, so far. That other half would be for fish sticks and frozen pizzas and the ham you got planned for thanksgiving dinner. Or it would be, if you didn’t need a place to keep the heads.

Have you ever reached down in the freezer, pulled out a plastic-bagged bundle that you hoped was that Thanksgiving ham? Or even the mountain oysters you washed up after the last branding? But that bundle was not what you were looking for. If you were lucky, it was just an antelope head from that hunt a couple years back, or a ziplock full of snakeskins somebody shucked and salted and will maybe tan later. If you’re unlucky, you grabbed the pointy piece of a sharp-clawed former creature and ended up with something worse than a paper cut.

Audra says to keep the ice cream over the badger hides. Contact her at:

[email protected].