Turkey stock is boiling down on the stove, which I check every 30 minutes. It is the final contribution of the bird we enjoyed over the holiday. The goal is to reduce it to the point where it will have a gelatinous consistency after refrigeration, meaning enough water will have evaporated to allow the proteins to weave together again when the broth cools.
Those gnarly drumsticks with their connective tissue? And the wings? They are just the things to help produce a rich, jellied stock. The feet are even better; in the pot they would be if they had arrived with the rest. We will freeze the results in small containers or plastic bags to animate our soups, casseroles, vegetables and simmering braises. A few tablespoons added to water will suffice to develop the flavor of our creations all winter long, allowing us to leave the packaged stuff on the store shelf where it belongs.
Of course, Thanksgiving seems like ages ago. It is peak catalog season, and the grocers are after us already to place our orders for holiday roasts. We are roast beef people at Christmas, specifically, bone-in beef for the value, again, of harvesting the savory goodness of the animal’s noble remains simmered with a few aromatic vegetables, peppercorns, a bay leaf or two, parsley and thyme.
We used the past weekend to complete our winterization projects. Tarps went up around the woodshed, which also houses summer lawn equipment, wheelbarrows and a small chipper.
The remainder of the outdoor furniture was moved to storage. The hammock was rolled up. The wicker was covered and stowed against the wall in the basement screened porch. We reclaimed garage space by sending rusted metal filing cabinets that have been offseason campgrounds for mice to the recycling center. With a snow shovel, I scooped away the seedy, pulpy remains of the season’s decorative pumpkins, mauled to bits by our porcupine as they softened in the last couple of weeks. (We say our porcupine because he lives around here. We see each other regularly, at night or in the evening, exchanging passing glances. Three of the chewed-apart melons were on our back porch. He tucked into one of them, with a passing glance, while we enjoyed cocktails and dinner inside.)
On cue, Scott Tucker’s landscaping crew showed up with plow stakes, hammering them through the developing frost in critical places along the driveway. I do not remember the use of plow stakes in suburban Boston to the extent we rely on them in Monadnock and elsewhere in northern New England. We put a few in the ground back then of the hideous hardware store variety – the thin, spiraled aluminum shafts with the reflective red plastic heads – to try and protect the corners of stonewalls and edges of the gardens.
But that was up to us. The plow drivers did not audit the properties ahead and bang brightly tipped wooden stakes into the ground. The truth is that the landscape disappears more under the snow here than there. It may have something to do with how carefully manicured many suburban properties are and how many garden trellises they deploy. And they have shorter driveways. And there are many more lights, streetlights, particularly around suburbia.
Anyway, the leftover turkey is in the pot; we are sifting through the catalogs and are rolled up for winter. Spring and summer are long past. No sense in waiting now for Dec. 21. Autumn is also done. Put a plow stake in it.
Jarvis Coffin and his wife Marcia owned New Hampshire’s oldest inn, The Hancock Inn, during which time he wrote a popular newsletter for the inn’s mailing list. Retired from innkeeping, he now writes full-time, mostly essays on rural life and fiction. You can reach him at huntspond@icloud.com, and keep up with his other musings on the Monadnock Region at postcard-from-monadnock.ghost.io.