Welcome to this Country Life. I'm your host, Brent Reeves from coon hunting to trot lining and just general country living. I want you to stay a while as I share my experiences in life lessons. This Country Life is presented by Case Knives on Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcast the airwaves have to offer. All right, friends, grab a chair or drop that tailgate. I've got some
stories to share, spam onions, grits and butter. I find it very gratifying to see folks make it at home what they used to buy at the store. I've always said that life is cyclical, and eventually we go back to where we started. Radio was first, then movies, TV, and now podcasts are like video all over again. Watching a podcast is like when radio turned into television. But media isn't our focus today. It's homemade groceries, one of my favorite subjects.
And I'm going to.
Tell you all about some things my brother Tim does. But first I'm going to tell you a story. This story comes from our friend Avery Settler Check, an aspiring actor living in New York City. Avery is a native of Jacksonville, Florida, and was blessed with a grandfather to make some fond memories with this story. Speaks of food, and food is kind of our theme today, sowing Avery's words and my voice.
Here we go.
As a young boy, I spent much of my time with my papa. My mom, a recent widow, nurse and mother of three, could certainly used the help, and her dad was one of the many people to answer that call. He was an iron worker, a barber, a gospel singer, a TV cameraman, and even an aerial photographer. He had more jobs than a job fair and was retired by the time I popped up, so he had plenty of
time and stories to share with me. Papa taught me all of the cool things in life, like flea markets and action movies and painting your own initials on all you tools. Well of all the things he and I did together, hunting was by far my favor. Each fall, we'd pack up his camper, haul it up to the club and set up shop. Then throughout the season he would pick me up on Friday and take me to the club where we would run dogs on Saturday before I tailored it back for church on Sunday morning. I
loved every second of it. Riding on the toolbox, talking on the c B, and holding my four ten in anticipation of that big buck I just knew was coming my way. But most of all, I love spending time with him in the woods. However much I loved everything else about these trips. Our crowd jewel was always food, specifically our snacks while we.
Were out in the woods.
Papa loved food, especially anything fried and salted, and as a growing boy, so did I. We would stop at the only gas station for miles, and while we filled up on ice for the weekend, we'd get an order of three potato wedges. Now we only got three because he swore they'd swell up in your stomach. I still wonder if that's true. When we were hunting, though, we were just about always eating, And I'm not sure if that's the way the other guys did it, but that's
how we did. Before the dogs were even barking, we'd break into the viany sausages and peanut butter and crackers and free doos, not to mention the coveted you Hoo cans that would be faulted with a bologna sandwich for lunch and a cookout for dinner, and that's how it went for us. As much as we loved hunting and took it seriously, the opportunity to eat a snack and
talk was the main event. One day, Papa and I had the rare occurrence of hunting and a stand together running dogs was the perfect high energy version of hunting I needed as a kid, lots of commotion and movement, no major need for being total quiet. Hunting up in a stand meant that I, as a hyperactive eight year old, had to be completely still and quiet for multiple hours. It's this exact reason that on this day my grandfather and I sat in what we called the condo stand.
The condo stand was a completely boxed instructure, high off the ground with the drawstringed wooden flat windows and bolted and swivel chairs, perfect for a kid and this disabled grandfather. As always, Papa brought a knapsack of snacks and with the first hour or so we tried to be good, but the wind was whipping and we were cold and bored. To better enjoy the moment, my Papa declared chow time.
On this day, I, ever, his provisions were running a little low and from the bag he procured a sleeve of saltine crackers, a can of spam, an onion, and a bottle of hot sauce. Now I had never had spam. I was a fan of veiny sausages, and I looked at him with a look that said.
Papa, what is this about?
He looked back at me, equally dumbfounded with the options we had, and shrugged his shoulders with a mischievous wealth, we might as well and smile with a fancy flourish. He opened that can of spam and began to prepare our olders with his pocket knife. He peeled back the onion and began cutting small pieces to lay on what he'd.
Created before us.
He topped that cracker off with spam, onion, and tabasco, and with a slightly worried look he had to be wanting to try. He got one and we toasted the two together and then set them down the hatch. Then the strangest thing happened, to our surprise and delight, it was good. It was like a Michelin star restaurant in our very own hunting stand. We started laughing out loud together, not caring a liqu about the hunt, and eventually ate the whole can of spam.
One cracker at a time.
We laughed the whole way home, and for weeks laughed recounting that story to others. Over the years, we laughed about that day, saying, man, we must have been starving or something. As I grew up, Papa's health got worse, and although we still spend lots of time together, we weren't able to hunt anymore. Now I'm an adult, living worlds away in New York City, pursuing my dreams, and I think back on those days. Often I were spent with my grandfather in the woods, eating food, swapping stories,
and sometimes hunting a deer. There, my grandfather taught me about life. I asked him things I was too afraid to ask my mom, and I learned how a man should view the world. But most importantly, I had someone to listen to me, someone who told me he was proud of me and let me know how much he enjoyed spending time with me and how much he loved me. My grandfather has to mention now, and it can be difficult to have conversations because he will always ask me
things like where do you live? Repeatedly? But one thing he always remembers with ease is our hunting trips. If I bring up the spam to him, a big smile lights across his face and he says, boy.
We sure were hungryuldn't we?
And according to Avery Settler check of New York City, that's just how that happened.
Avery.
I appreciate you sending in that story. I liked it from the first time I read it, and I've been saving it for just the right time. That's a story that fills my heart thinking about y'all filling your bellies with a spam and onion cracker. Thanks buddy. We were having breakfast at Joe's Diner and sheared in Arkansas, just
me and my brother Tim. It's a spot that's about halfway between where each of us live and the spot closest to that point where a man can get a platter of eggs, sausage, biscuits, gravy, and a bowl of grits that'll fill your crawl well enough so that your next meal will be called supper. The waitress calls us honey, laughs at our dumb jokes, and keeps the coffee smoking hot while we entertain ourselves with whatever the meeting has been called for normally just an excuse to share a
mail together and laugh. We were having an in depth discussion on timeless topics that are important to us and should be important to everyone that cares about the quality of their lives and the pursuit of happiness in America, and that topic was grits. Historians agree that folks have been grinding corn as long as eighty seven hundred years
before the reason we have Christmas. The evidence comes from Central America and Native American tribes in the southeastern portion of this nation that were grinding corn down to a coarse powder that we now call cornmeal. Contrary to the beliefs of a few folks from New Jersey who were blatantly lied to by an Arkansas duck guide over thirty years ago, there's no such thing as grit fields or grit bushes.
If that reference is to.
O'bsecure for you slipped back to episode one seventy three of This Country Life entitled Grits, Rhinos, Monkeys and Ducks.
That shit is clear, that right up.
But grits have been a staple in our diets forever. I don't remember a time when they weren't available at home or just about every place. We just worthy of sitting down to have a meal that served breakfast. The waitress brought out our food a company by two bowls of grits that were still bubbling hot from the stove, and we looked at one another and Simon tanously said, they'll thick it up in a minute.
To eat their own.
But it's customary and our family to eat grits with a fork and running grits they just won't fill the bill. So while we waited on the grits to thicken, we dove into our breakfast. In our conversation, I need to bring you some of the grits I've been making. Hold on there, Timmy, you've been making your own grits. Oh yeah, butter too. And for the next hour we talked about all this stuff he was doing at home that was
better than going to the store. And it opened up a whole new list of questions I had for how he was doing it now obviously to everyone now, even the duck hunters. New Jersey grits are made from ground corn, but not just any corn. There are six major types of corn grown in the US. Dent corn is primarily used for livestock, feed, fuel, and corn starch. Podcorn is a wild variety and the corn that modern day corn
was derived from. Sweet corn is what we mostly eat when it's prepared on the cob, and flour corn for making corn flour, pop corns for popping, and flint corn, which is what works best for making grits, homney, and corn meal. But before the corn police issue warrant from my wrist, what I just stated is that the exact law of the land, there are just the major types of corn, and there are varieties within those types that
cross over for each type of use. Tim's favorite corn to us to make his corn meal and grits is a variety called butcher red, which is a dent corn that has a beautiful, deep red color. Some even refer to it as bloody butcher red, regardless of what you call it. He showed me a picture after picture of the process he uses and the gristville.
He does it with.
It's an electric stone grinder he bought off the anterwebs, and when he first told me he bought it online, I thought that kind of took some of the nostalgia out of it. But I quickly realized that the Google search of today is no different really than posting up in the country store and asking the propriety for something they didn't have, but they could order it for you. Tim's raising his own corn too, from seed to cob. It keeps him busy, and what could be more rewarding
than growing your own corn bread? I dare say nothing, but as good as those grits were that had finally cooled to the point of a few degrees south of molten lava, Tim said, the grits he made it home were ten times better, and it turns out they're better for you. Consuming fresh stone ground corn in any form preserves the vitamins and minerals and the nutrients that are lost over time to degradation. Here's the process that Tim uses now. Once he picks the corn, he drives it
out for about a month. There are several ways to do that, from just hanging the corn in the shuck out in the sun, to removing the shucks and drying the cobs in a controlled environment, which is what he does. He said he can keep the bugs out of it and allow for proper drying without the chance of it getting mulled. By using his designated corn drying room. Corn
drying room. You built a corn drying room, now, dummy, I keep it in the guests bedroom with the ceiling fans set on Hurricane I put all the cobs in the laundry basket and stir them around every few days so I know that they're all getting there.
Ah okay, I got you.
Now, after about four weeks of pamper in the guest's bedroom, he'll take the corn that's sufficiently dried and run it through a corn sheller. Now his is an old, antiquated handpired apparatus that he has mounted on a wooden box to catch the colonels once the sheller removed it. It's pretty sporty to watch for anyone that's ever wondered how that process works, and you can see it demonstrated about a million times on the University of YouTube just by
searching it up. The cob is fed down through the top and a gear that was exposed teeth knocks the kernels off and fall into the bottom of the box, while the cob is eventually turned and run out the back to fall on the outside. Mister Lester E. Denison, the Connecticut got the first patent on a corn sheller in August of eighteen thirty nine. The one Tim has is a David Bradley brand. It's made out of cast iron and was manufactured from around nineteen hundred to nineteen
forty nine. Series and Roebuck bought the company in nineteen ten and eventually started churning out garden tractors instead of corn shellers. You can find them on the internet, yard cells and flea markets in perfect working order. Should you decide to grow, dry and grind your own corn, now, if garden is your limiting factor, you can buy corn that's ready to grind that someone else has already drived
and removed from the cob by the sack full. Now, if you're wondering what the yield is, Tim said that he averaged about four cobs to the pound of shelled corn. His gristmeal is electric and has two options for making the cornmeal. The wheels that grind the corn are called burrs,
and he has stone burrs and steel birds. Stone birds are said to be slower because they aren't uniformly smooth like poly steel is, and most commercially ground corn is done with steel birds because it's faster, more efficient, and can produce a finer grind. Traditionally, stone ground corn retains the nutrients of flavor, and the steel burs may literally squeeze it plumb out of it. And after adjusting the space between the birds and multiple trips between them, Tim
finally got his setting that he prefers. But the ground corn is still not one hundred percent uniform, and what he did next was pretty cool. Took an old tea strainer and poured the ground corn in it and shook it back and forth, sifting the smaller grind into another container while keeping the larger ones in the strainer. The small ones he uses for his corn meal and the
larger one he uses for grits. Tim said that when he makes corn bread from that corn meal and takes it out of the oven, it has a blue or a purplish tint. I looked that up when I got home. It's not that I don't trust my brother, It's just that, like President Reagan said, good policy to have is to trust but verify. It turns out he wasn't kidding. Turning purpleness from the presidence of what's called anthos, which changed color with heat. Now what's an antho cyan? And I'm
glad you asked. It's just the pigment that causes colors to be colors, and in this case it's what makes butcher red corn. Red grits are just bowled corn until you add salt, black, pepper, and butter. I could do without pepper if I had to, I wouldn't like it, and the more peppers are better for me. But the other two, man, they are mandatory. Not letting Tim's comment of my making my own butter, slip asked him what critter he was milking to churn since he didn't have
a cow. He ignored that question and showed me a picture. It was a nineteen fifties Jim Dandy electric churn that he bought at an online auction. I don't know what I'd ever seen one. I've seen regular churns, and I even participated in the churning with my maternal great grandmother, Lizzie Watanita Beard Play, so we called Mama Player. She was born in eighteen ninety three and might have stretched to five feet tall, but it would have been a
pretty good stretch to get her there. I can remember thinking I was grown standing beside her, and she died when I was seven. She never broke one hundred pounds her whole life. I don't remember her ever wearing anything except cotton dresses and apron and those little faded blue cats shoes, unless, of course, it was Sunday and it was a fancier dress and leather shoes.
But she had a porcelain.
Stone ware churn that set on the back porch. The handle and dasher was worn thinner around the middle by the countless trips up and down, by years and years of churning. It was an arduous process, the one that was both necessary and part of farm life. By the time I hit the ground in nineteen sixty six, my mama player had an electric churn, but she kept the old one around and let me take a turn at it.
When I was just a pup.
We would feed the chickens from the feed. She towed it in her apron, holding the bottom edge up to the form of pocket.
Then we gathered eggs and headed back to the house.
She'd already milked the cow by the time I made mustard, and it had been set long enough for the cream to rise to the top. That's where that sin comes from, if you didn't already know. The cream is then skimmed off the top and poured in a churn, and then a dash or handle is brought up and down into that cream, agitating the cream until a portion of it solidifies and turns into butter. And the liquid that's left, well,
that's butter milk. I catch a lot of greef from my Yankee friends at me Eater when I referred the whole milk as sweet milk. But if you've ever tasted buttermilk, you'll know where that comes from. I didn't make it up. It's a label for whole milk that I've heard all my life. My daddy hated it, but he would buttermilk right out of the ice box.
Pretty sure.
I told you all about that in episode one twenty nine Hauling. Hey, it's a good one you should listen to if you haven't. But I've seen him come in from the barn that we just filled with square bells and the blistering heat and chug buttermilk straight from the jug while I was gulping water from the kitchen sink as fast as it would run out of the spigot. Look it gives me the ev GeV is just thinking
about it. But if you didn't know how all of that went down and where buttermilk and butter comes from, consider yourself educated. Tim said he wasn't using the churn he was using a big upright kitchen aid mixer. But he's also minus of cow, so he buys whole heavy whipping cream from the store raw if he can find it. Starting out with two cups of cream, and you'll wind up with about three sticks of butter and a cup
of fresh buttermilk. The process is fairly simple by letting the large wists do all the churning for you, allowing you to concentrate on other things. But don't stray too far. You can literally have all that done in less time than it took.
Me to tell you about it.
I watched the lady on YouTube knock it out in about fifteen minutes. Just search for making homemade butter and you'll get all kinds of recipes and instructional videos. Now, to me, the neat thing about making your own grits and making your own butter isn't limited to just the production of healthier foods and the satisfaction of providing something
better for your family. It's the education that I got from doing just a minimal amount of research into something that's now obscure, that was once commonplace in almost every home. These things are simple, but they're important to pass on to the folks who are going to be picking out our nursing homes one day. Now you add a child or a grandchild into the mix when you're doing these projects, and who knows, y'all just might find your own spam
and onion salmon. As always, thank you for listening to us here on the Beggars Channel, and I have an update about this country life merchandise from our gal on the Prowl Reeve Hansen. Folks, we're not months away. As I reported in Era last week. We're supposed to have the first ones this very month. I'll be sure and keep you posting and who to blame if it don't happen. But until next week. This is Brent Reeves signing off. Y'all be careful