Don’t Just Watch Fall Happen

The weather changed almost overnight. After months of heat and humidity, we’ve had these incredible crisp mornings that make me want to get outside before the day even begins.

I’ve always loved fall. As a kid, it meant the fresh start of a new school year. It meant hunting season, time in the woods, and watching the world around me change in ways I could see, smell, hear, feel, and taste.

And maybe that’s what I love most about this time of year: fall asks us to participate.

One of the best ways to do that is through food. Not simply by eating what’s in season, but by becoming part of the process that brings that food to the table. Eating is an incredibly sensory experience, but so is everything that comes before it: the bite of cool morning air, the sound of a flock of geese overhead, the weight of a ripe fruit in your hand, the smell of squash roasting in the oven, and finally the pleasure of sitting around a table and sharing the meal.

This time of year gives us so many opportunities to step into that entire experience.

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Hunting: Knowing the Animal Behind the Meal

Here in Maryland, fall means hunting season. Archery season for deer is already open and gets us back into the woods. Duck season has just opened and brings us back to the water, and goose season will soon get hunters back into the fields.

For me, hunting has always been one of the most direct ways to connect with food. You have to understand an animal and the landscape it inhabits. You pay attention to weather, wind, sound, tracks, movement, and behavior. You move carefully. You make decisions. And if you are successful, you assume responsibility for everything that comes afterward.

That last part matters.

Most of us have become incredibly insulated from the animals that provide the meat in our diets. Meat appears cleanly portioned, wrapped, and completely disconnected from the living animal it once was. Hunting makes that relationship impossible to ignore.

It also connects us with questions humans have wrestled with for an extraordinarily long time: How do we obtain food? What responsibilities come with taking a life? And how do we make the absolute most of what that animal has provided?

For me, the answer cannot end with a package of steaks or a pair of duck breasts.

Honoring an animal means using as much of it as we possibly can. That matters ethically because we shouldn’t waste a life. It matters from a sustainability standpoint because every part we use is food we don’t need to obtain somewhere else. And it matters nutritionally because organs, connective tissues, bones, skin, and fat provide flavors, textures, and nutrients we miss when we limit ourselves to familiar cuts. Liver, for example, is extraordinarily nutrient dense and particularly rich in nutrients including vitamin A and B12.

That philosophy is at the heart of our Making the Most of Your Hunt classes at the Modern Stone Age Food Lab. We show that the harvest is only the beginning. We move from the animal into processing, butchery, preservation, cooking, and learning to use parts that many people have simply forgotten how to eat and turn them into delicious and nourishing food.

Whether you hunt yourself or someone shares wild game with you, learning those skills can fundamentally change the way you look at the meat on your plate.

Billy, Michael (Christina’s brother), Bill (Bill’s Dad), Steve (Christina’s Dad) and Bill goose hunting on the Eastern Shore

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Foraging: Learning to Read the Landscape

Fall is also an incredible time to forage.

Foraging in Ireland

Walk beneath an oak and you may find the ground covered in acorns. Pay attention along the edge of the woods and you might discover American persimmons beginning to ripen. Once you learn to recognize even a handful of edible wild foods, something changes: the landscape stops being simply scenery and starts becoming something with which to form a relationship.

You begin noticing what is ready now, what needs another week, what the animals are eating, and what will disappear if you wait too long.

But foraging also teaches one of the lessons we return to constantly at Modern Stone Age Kitchen: finding food is only the beginning.

We also need to know what to do with it.

American persimmons are a perfect example. Bite into one before it is fully ripe and the tannins create an astringency so intense that your mouth can feel impossibly dry. This is a natural defense mechanism persimmons use to ensure they are not eaten until its seeds are mature. But wait until that same fruit becomes incredibly soft and fully ripe, and the experience is completely different: sweet, rich, and delicious.

Acorns demand even more from us. They contain tannins that make them bitter and unpleasant to eat directly from the tree. But humans learned how to transform them. Crack them, grind or crush them, leach the water-soluble tannins with water, dry the resulting meal, and suddenly something most people walk over without a second thought becomes food.

That transformation requires knowledge, time, and work and that is precisely the point.

The landscape offers possibilities. Traditional knowledge and skills turn those possibilities into food.

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The Farm Harvest: Experiencing Abundance

You don’t have to hunt or forage to participate in fall this way. One of the easiest places to experience the season is at a local farm.

Fall is a time of incredible abundance. Walk through a farmers market or farm stand right now and really look at what is there. Winter squash in shapes, colors, sizes, and varieties you may have never cooked before. Apples that taste completely different from one another. The last tomatoes of the season. Peppers, grapes, sweet potatoes, pumpkins, and all sorts of foods that connect this particular moment of the year to the land around us.

Buy something directly from the person who grew it. Ask what variety it is. Ask how they like to prepare it. Choose something you’ve never cooked before and take it home.

Squash is a great place to start. There is an incredible world beyond the familiar pumpkin or butternut. Delicata can be sliced into rings and roasted until its edges caramelize. Acorn squash becomes its own edible bowl for a savory filling. Kabocha has dense, rich flesh that is incredible roasted or blended into soup. Cut one open, scoop out the seeds and roast those too. Brown some butter. Add fermented cream. Drizzle it with a little maple syrup. Put two different varieties next to each other and taste the difference.

But there is another part of the fall harvest that I think is especially important: abundance has always asked humans to think about tomorrow.

For most of human history, when food arrived in abundance, we couldn't simply let it disappear. We had to know how to preserve it.

So bring home a box of tomatoes. Peel and seed them, cook them down, and make sauce for later. Pick apples and taste several varieties side by side, then turn some into applesauce, cider, or something fermented. Ferment peppers. Dry herbs. Make something that will still be feeding you when the landscape outside looks completely different.

Preservation is more than extending shelf life. It is another way of participating in the season. When we ferment, dry, cure, or otherwise preserve food, we capture a particular place and moment in time and carry some of it forward with us.

That jar you open in January began with something that was ripe and abundant in September or October.

And there is something incredibly powerful about that.

Instead of merely watching fall happen around us, we become part of it.

Apple picking with Brianna when she was 5 days old!

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From the Landscape to the Table

Hunting a deer, gathering acorns, picking apples, and choosing a squash from a farm stand may seem like very different activities. But they all move us toward the same thing: a deeper relationship with our food and the place where we live.

Each asks us to pay attention. Each engages our senses. Each gives us an opportunity to learn a skill.

And that connection doesn’t have to stop once the food enters the kitchen.

Hunt it, gather it, or choose it. Learn how to process it. Preserve it when appropriate. Cook it with care. Serve it to people you love. Sit down together and tell the story of where it came from.

Because when we participate in the entire journey, the meal nourishes us in ways that go far beyond calories and nutrients.

This is my favorite season.

So as these first crisp mornings arrive, get outside. Pay attention. Hunt if you hunt. Forage. Visit a farm. Talk to the farmer. Pick an apple. Buy a strange-looking squash you’ve never cooked before. Ferment something and preserve something for later.

Don’t just watch fall happen. Participate in it.

And bring some of it home to your table.

Billy from field to fork with his 1st deer!

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Fall Is Happening at the Food Lab, Too

Bill's challenge this week is simple: don't just watch fall happen. Participate in it.

And if you want to build some of the skills to do exactly that, this is one of our favorite times of year at the Modern Stone Age Food Lab.

Our Making the Most of Your Hunt classes take the harvest beyond the familiar cuts and into processing, butchery, preservation, cooking, and using more of the animal—from nose to tail.

Because the harvest is only the beginning.

Waterfowl class!