Mountain Juniper Gets Us Through the Winter

Almost all life retreats on the mountaintop as the frostline descends and the long hard freeze of winter sets in. Almost, but not all.

For the life that remains above ground a square meal becomes scarce but not impossible to find. If you know where to look, there are signs of life everywhere amongst the snow drifts and ice.

Once you see juniper berries, in plump purple clusters bursting from eastern red cedar branches, it is hard to unsee them. They are everywhere.

Crunch a couple between your teeth and taste the familiar herbaceous zing of gin on your tongue.

Junipers help the birds get through the tough winter months. Flocks of robins and blue jays gorge on them in a frenzy when they find a good patch of fruiting trees.

Juniper’s peak season is also perfectly timed to accompany much of the large game hunted up on the mountaintop – especially venison – helping many of us who like to forage and cook what we find in the forests get through the winter too.

Early in deer season I was lucky enough to be given an abundance of venison by my neighbors.

Bill Pushman shot an impressive eight-point buck on the first Saturday of the season that was more than 160-pounds dressed. He spotted him up near his hide on Route 42 and took him down with a 300 Savage.

Around the same time Mike Barcone at the West Kill Brewery released one of his excellent seasonal beers – a Norwegian Farmhouse Ale brewed with juniper branches known in Scandinavia as a kviek.

Aside from lending the beer a delicious mountaintop aroma and flavor, the juniper branches lower its PH substantially, in the same way as hops, helping the yeast to do its job.

Like me, Mike has a lifelong passion for foraging and has come up with many ingenious brews that include ingredients found in the forests of the Catskill Mountains, but this is certainly one of the best.

Tasting it, I instantly thought it would be the perfect accompaniment to the venison given to me by Bill, for which I could also use some of the same juniper berries to flavor a stew.

The junipers could be found in abundance up on Beech Ridge Road in Lexington on the edge of Danny Dymond’s property at Maple Hill Farms, and with Danny’s kind permission we gathered a few branches.

The venison stew was made with more West Kill beer – this time the dark and chocolatey Black Dome Stout – along with the wild junipers, some granny smith apples, parsnips and carrots.

Sharing it the next day with Bill and Mike was satisfying on so many levels.

To share a meal steeped in so much community is rare in much of America today.

Food is so often fast, or so expensive that it is more an elitist hobby to eat rather than a means of nourishment.

Eating well is about sharing and making what little we have go further and feed us better. Without Bill and Mike’s lifelong knowledge of the mountaintop, where to find food  and how to get it to the table we would not have had a meal to share.

This venison and juniper stew had roots as deep as the mountains are high, and it tasted all the better for it.

The mountaintop has something delicious to offer every day, every month and every season.

It’s harder in the winter but as with juniper, there is an abundance of food to keep us alive and well until the spring, if you know where to look.

The Lexington Almanac will spend this year exploring all of those possibilities from Ice fishing in February to Maple tapping in March, trout fishing in April and much more.

Sharing food with friends from mountaintop to table all year round.