Buried Treasure
I was digging for treasure. I knew where it was. Way down in there. I found it, too. All the way to the bottom.
Pam came out into the garage and looked over my shoulder. “Well?”, she asked.
“Look at this!” I said, holding up my prize for examination. “And more! Two tenderloins and four sirloins. Not a bit of freezer burn anywhere. Like new, even if a year old. Man! I’m charcoaling them tomorrow.”
Maybe yours doesn’t, but our freezer holds treasure from year to year that escapes being eaten, and we eat game and fish out here on The Branch a lot. If you aren’t careful, it escapes to the bottom of the freezer (somehow) uneaten, in perfectly good condition, hidden covertly by new “draftees”.
You must dig for treasure. He who seeks, finds.
I already had a new deer from the recent muzzleloading season, with the prospect of more to come during the high power season. I wasn’t just searching for treasure, but more room as well. You’d think our freezer, a twenty foot “chester” would be big enough. I’m going to have to visit Arlie downtown. We need a good used extra.
We thawed the meat that night. I was pleased to see that Wild Country Meats over to Hominy way had packaged it via vacuum pack, labeled clearly and prominently without a trace of the dreaded gray freezer burn to be seen anywhere through the clear packages. Honestly, as perfect as the day it was butchered, a solid year ago.
Back in the day, when Pam and I butchered our own and wrapped it, back before the development of an old man’s back, the best of freezer paper wrapping with stout, slick paper was no guarantee against the freezer burn. I cut; Pam wrapped and labeled; and both of us held our breath unwrapping anything found a year later. Modern vacuum packaging has pretty much eliminated that.
Our grandson, Lane Webster,13, fired up the charcoal the next evening at sundown. I marinated the meat in a Ziploc holding soy sauce (we couldn’t find the teriyaki) with the air squeezed out for half an hour. Laid out on a cookie sheet, I sprinkled the meat with Montreal Steak Rub (excellent) because I couldn’t find the Daddy Hinkle’s (we like it even better).
Adlibbing all over the place, we were. Good deer meat would erase any errors.
Inside the house at the stove, Pam was boiling squash, yellow and green, in water and butter, a little garlic powder thrown in. In a sauté pan she was fixing charred Brussels sprouts, halved, in butter. I don’t know why anyone would eat them again boiled, once this method comes to their attention. Absolutely delicious, and I won’t eat them usually; only to be nice. Charred? Pass ‘em over here.
Then there were half a dozen small Irish potatoes, the ones Grandma Howell pronounced as “arsh taters”, and kept stored under the crawl space down yonder in Little Dixie, clean straw covering them and protecting them through the winter. These we would halve, then halve again, and then smear while steaming hot from their boil, with yellow, yellow butter, and finally sprinkled with salt and pepper. That’s all.
Outside in the dark, Lane insisted on being allowed to turn the steaks where they sizzled over coals cherry red, hot enough to forge iron.
“Papa! Let me take ‘em up now! I can’t wait!”
“Nope. Three minutes to a side, no more than four. Check it on your cell phone.”
Then we ate. So, so quiet. Knives flashing. Butter dripping. Forks moving up and down. Pepper mill, grinding. Salt, shaking. Tea glasses tilting. So, so quiet.
Some of us were full. Smiling. A story or two, past hunts, eased out onto the table; old people, old times, long gone. Now, back, and momentarily as alive as they ever were.
I opened the foil wrapper where the steaks had been swimming in their juices. There was still a little steam in there.
“Lane”, I said, “there’s two pieces left. You want ‘em?”
He did.
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