Sunday morning — after I had already made pancakes for breakfast, I realized that we had run out of maple syrup. I dug around and found a plastic bottle shaped like a toaster waffle in the back of the pantry.
“We can use the evil syrup,” I suggested.
“We can?” John asked.
“Sure,” I shrugged “it’s only once. Why not?” The kids went into tizzy.
“Did you hear that?! Mom says we can have the evil syrup.” Z’s friend who had slept over looked at us like we were crazy.
“We don’t usually get to eat this kind of syrup,” Z explained as we all sat down at the table. The tsunami thrill of being invited to partake in the formerly transgressive high fructose corn syrup in it’s purest form started to wane as I handed them the bottle.
“It’s old,” B warned him. “Really old.”
It was true. The dusty bottle had been in the back of the cabinet for almost ten years. John had brought it into the house back when John’s kids were B and Z’s age; at the time they thought maple syrup was weird. My kids used to call it R and D syrup when they begged to be allowed to try.
B and Z squeezed the viscous, fake amber stuff onto their pancakes and after a few bites, B asked suspiciously, “Did you do something weird to the pancakes?”
“No,” I said. “Although they were made with sour cream which was a bit different.”
He sniffed them.
“It must be the syrup,” he said. “I don’t like it.”
Ok, I’d be lying to say I wasn’t super pleased.
Luckily the pancakes were delicious enough that they didn’t really need syrup. But this is really not a story about syrup. It’s a story about meat. And it starts with the bacon we had along with these pancakes.
Butcher #1 Oscar’s Adirondack Mountain Smoke House
I spotted Oscar’s Adirondack Mountain Smoke House on the way home from skiing at Gore Mountain between Christmas and New Years. I saw the sign as we were headed back to the Thruway and something about the lonely, red house on the hill beckoned me to turn around and make my way up the long driveway to a packed parking lot flanked at it’s entrance with a ceremonial smoke house and a big pink statue of a pig.
The smoke house is a 45-year-old, family owned business beloved of the local community. According to the web, it closed down after a fire on Labor Day of 2009 reopened in February of last year. Despite it’s slick mail order website the store itself feels like a local mom and pop shop. Inside, on one side there’s a wall of refrigerators for self-serve and a few shelves with some barbeque sauces, condiments and maple syrup. On the Southern end there was a regular butcher shop counter with fresh meat, a deli and a place to purchase more smoked products — bacon of course, but also ham and cheese and turkey and beef.
I stood in the middle, between the shiny wall of self-serve refrigerators and the butcher section wondering what I could buy besides the two pig-shaped maple candies I held in my hand.
A man in a butcher’s apron noticed me looking a little confused. “Can I help you?” he asked. “Yes, I hesitated, “Is your meat . . . ”
Maybe I was tired from skiing, but I was not at my most articulate. I wanted to ask if the meat was industrially raised but for some reason I was at a loss for words.
“Organic?” he finished my sentence.
“Yes.” I said. “And grass fed.”
“No.” he said. “We tried some of that last summer and it just sat on the shelf.”
“Really?” I was surprised. We were down the street from a ski resort. For some reason I thought that would generate enough of a clientele that was willing and eager to eat organic and grass-fed meat.
“Yeah,” he said. “It was too expensive and nobody wanted it.”
“What about your pork?” I asked. I was surprised.
“Well that’s different. All our pork is raised on farms in Canada.”
“Not on a factory farm?”
“No,” he said, “The live outside. . . they live a nice life.”
I was too tired to ask if these little piggies were weaned too early so that they bit off each other’s tales, as described in Michael Pollan in Omnivour’s Dilemma. Besides that didn’t seem particularly polite.
Instead, I bought a few pounds of bacon. It’s wasn’t exactly local since the pork came from Canada — but then again, maybe it was, since we were only a hundred miles from the Canadian border. But I took his word for it being farm raised.
Bacon is now a treat in the house. We used to eat it frequently – but since I stopped buying industrially raised bacon, finding and affording it has been more of a challenge.
In terms of taste, I would Oscar’s Smokehouse Bacon was ok. I would say the bacon is better than supermarket bacon, but nothing to write home about. A few months ago we picked up a pound of bacon at Dickinson’s Farm Stand in Chelsea Market that was ridiculously good. That bacon tasted as if all other bacon in the world was a photocopy, and the kind we got at Dickinson’s was the original. But the Oscar’s Smokehouse stuff was also about half the price of Dickinson’s.
Apparently according to reviews, the ham is amazing. Next time, maybe we’ll try it.
Up next: A Tale of Two Butchers Part Two: Fleisher’s Grass-fed and Organic Meats
Jeez. I gotta try that Bacon from the Chelsea Market!
Oh yeah. It’s worth the trip for sure.