It’s the rationing that will be my undoing.
All summer and fall there has been an abundance of harvest coming through the house. And when working outside, a simple stroll through the garden yielded tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots and the odd berry, which could satisfy those peckish moments enough to get a person through till the next meal.
Now, things are tightening up. The other day, I was preparing a nice broiler of moose meat, lavishly garnished in onions and garlic, a decadent gesture in celebration of the successful hunt. Suzanne strolled by, peeked over my shoulder, and did not deliver the expected awe in regards to my culinary efforts. Instead, she took this as an opportunity for a discussion in realism and restraint.
She reminded me that we had limited stock for the winter, equivalent to “one medium-sized onion and one clove of garlic, a day.” What we have is what we have. Till summer.
I quickly realized that there is no room in that calculation for decadent delights. And that’s when the fear started to crawl into my persona. You see, my calculations suggest that we often have potato pancakes and scrambled eggs for breakfast, both accented with onions and/or garlic. Naturally. Then, a nice on-the-fly winter lunch could be canned moose meat fried up with a little…onion. And/or garlic. Something that could sustain a guy through the woodpile at 20 below. And then there is the supper for a family with almost three teenagers. That medium-sized onion is going to require some serious divine help.
And then there was last night. As you know, Suzanne has been making birch syrup ice-cream fairly steadily recently, preparing for freeze-up which is the time when the cow becomes inaccessible. So, last night she pulls out the ice-cream as a treat. We all had some, and as a respectful gesture of appreciation for fine taste, I motioned for another round. No luck. That would deplete the stock. What we have is what we have. You can have today if you don’t mind being without tomorrow.
The problem I’m having is that I really care so much more about today than I do tomorrow. We are talking ice-cream addiction here. What has tomorrow got to do with anything? Eat now.
You see, this is the kind of thing that comes naturally to Suzanne. She enjoys calculated restraint. Not everyone does. She doesn’t know that. It reminds me of a ten-day hike that she took me on years ago, before kids, when we walked the old Yukon Ditch from Dawson to Tombstone. She took care of the logistics and food. I had the simple job of lugging everything.
Every day, in fact every moment of every day, I was hungry. Suzanne had “done the calculations,” but the tiny meal allocations and the meager desert allotments of “either one square of chocolate or this sliver of fruit cake,” were not making any impression on my constant state of starvation. It was not till we returned to the land of food and sustenance, and after realizing that we had each lost one to two pounds per day (!!), that a re-punching of the numbers revealed that the calculation was quite incorrect. No kidding.
So, this whole experience is starting to feel that it could be a déjà-vu opportunity, a chance to test our mettle, and perhaps a chance even for Suzanne to brush up on her math…