Interesting comments about the impacts of acquired skills. My dad never knew his father, consequently I never learned many life skills from him.
When I worked for MSU at their Great Lakes Research lab. south of Ludington, one of my friend/co-workers had a friend who owned a small farm inland, purchased from a shirt-tail relative's widow. Pat raised hogs, chickens and a handful of cattle, as well as growing grain and tending a small orchard. The farm house porch was rimmed by whorls of horseradish. He would hold a work-bee when he slaughtered a pig that generally took most of the day to complete, closed-out by a game dinner, pot-luck style, the only requirement for attendance outside of participation in "events". For a college kid living hand-to-mouth who grew up in a home where nothing was grown or produced by hand, taking part in this event was a real life-changing experience. Pat taught us how to break-down a pig and utilize everything but the oink. Still not a fan of deep fried pork brain, scrapple, or blood sausage...but I tried them. On several of these "occasions" he would also grind horseradish to can, or process cabbage to layer-up to make sauerkraut in heavy giant crocks, with the thick lid weighted with a brick to compress the layers as they fermented. I've benefited from the skills I learned there, applied to butcher all my deer in the years since, as well as a couple of feral hogs. I learned from my co-workers how to smoke meats and fish, identify and pick wild mushrooms, feral asparagus, and can during those years, going from a diet that contained a lot of peanut butter sandwiches to high livin'!
I joined-up with our lab director when he trapped snapping turtles with his brother when Carlos would come up for a couple of weeks during the summer months from New Orleans, where he was a sous-chef in the French Quarter. He graduated from a culinary arts school in the Twin Cities. Carlos taught us a great deal about cooking paneed' whatever, gumbos, etouffee', jambalayas, Cajun bubble and squeak, Spanish eggs, and how to make the magic meats-tasso and Andouille sausage. Prior that experience I never had a clue why the sequence of adding ingredients to a dish had any value in the end-flavors that resulted.
Capt. Rich, if you ever have a chance at some, don't pass-up apple wood smoked lake sturgeon steaks-excellent. We picked-up one that was badly damaged during turbine passage as we were coming in from a Lake Michigan netting stations lift. We chased it down and netted it while it was expiring on the surface. The only fish I would place above it is hot smoked round whitefish, leaner than lake whitefish, but not dry. Smoked or canned longnose sucker is quite good, too, as well as smoked bullhead. These are the deepwater cousins of white suckers, the fish with the steelhead-like stripes down the sides you see in the rivers of the Great Lakes in spring.
