By the time I arrived at Serenbe, I had been through most of the stages of COVID Homesteader Syndrome. I had baked sourdough, thrown myself into gardening, canned my semi-abundant rooftop harvest, and then began lacto-fermenting everything in sight, from hot peppers to cucumbers to cabbage. I foisted small jars and vials of my culinary industry onto everyone with an opposable thumb.
And, then, after months of barely leaving my Chicago neighborhood, I found myself back home in Georgia, thanks to a generous opportunity to work on my writing for a couple of weeks through the AIR Serenbe artist in residency program. When I wasn’t sitting at the desk in my cabin, untangling tortured sentences and doomscrolling Twitter, I began going on longer and longer trail walks through this planned community in South Fulton.
Credit: Nicolas Bour
Credit: Nicolas Bour
That is when a new stage of homesteader syndrome took hold of me. I began foraging. At first, it started simply, with wild garlic chives to flavor a bottle of vinegar. The farther I went into the forest, the more I encountered black walnut trees dropping their fruit with ominous thumps. I scooped up so many of the just-thumped nuts — Crayola green and unblemished — that I had to use my T-shirt as a sack to bring them back.
I convinced Nic Bour, the chef at the Farmhouse at Serenbe, to make the Italian nut liqueur called nocino. We spent a nice afternoon cracking the walnuts and setting them in jars with aromatics (coriander seed, star anise), maple syrup and vodka. According to most recipes, the nocino will need a year to become barely palatable.
Credit: John Kessler
Credit: John Kessler
My foraging days might have ended there, had I not discovered an abundance of springy little yellow golf ball-size fruit dropping from a small grove of thorny trees growing by a creek bed. The air was perfumed with a heavy smell of lilac, orange, pine and cinnamon — basically, what you’d get if you dumped Tide, Pine-Sol, Mr. Clean and the contents of your spice rack into a bucket. The fruit were fuzzy, so, when I cracked one open, I was surprised to find citrus. I squeezed a little juice into my mouth, and found it alarmingly bitter, but not wholly unpleasant.
I sent a picture to Nic, who had no idea what it was. The next day, we set out to find the trees. We walked in circles until the sun began to set and rain began to fall, and returned home empty-handed. The following day, I stuffed a string bag into my back pocket, set out into the woods, and, within a half-hour, found myself back by the stream and the citrus grove. I retrieved a good bushel of fruit, and noticed that they gave my fingers that weird dusty feeling of latex.
With the bag slung over my shoulder, I returned to the cabin, and it took only 15 minutes of internet sleuthing to find out I had trifoliate oranges, sometimes called hardy oranges, for their ability to withstand low temperatures.
There were some reports of them being both a skin irritant and mildly toxic when eaten raw, but also a lot of chatter about marmalade. I prepared a batch, cutting and de-seeding the oranges, softening them in simmering water for a good hour, then boiling the milky concoction down with sugar, until it clarified and thickened into a pectin-rich gel. That gel was bittersweet and floral, but the pieces of rind were still hard, and as bitter as biting into aspirin. After one unpleasant piece of trifoliate marmalade-slicked toast, I decided to strain out the gel, unequivocally tasty on its own.
Credit: John Kessler
Credit: John Kessler
The rest of the oranges sat in a bowl in the cabin. Their odor was intoxicating at first, then overwhelming — like I was quarantining with Axe Body Spray Guy. I had to move the bowl to the porch when the noxious odor woke me up in the middle of the night.
A few days later, I had a particularly productive day of writing, and rewarded myself with a late afternoon walk through the woods. As folks at Serenbe say, these woods are “a place where you can get lost without ever getting lost.”
I got lost.
Where, before, I couldn’t go 10 minutes without finding a signpost, this time I walked an hour, then two. I thought I saw two dogs, which would mean a human. But, there was no human, and the scampering “dogs” had silvery tails that stuck straight up.
As the sun started to fall, I figured the best plan was to keep going straight until I saw a sign. When it was pitch black, and the only light to guide me came from my cellphone, I decided to turn on the phone’s compass, and try to direct myself north, as best the trails allowed.
Another hour passed — it was after 8 p.m. — and the walnut thumps weren’t helping my nerves. The wind picked up, suggesting rain. I may have screamed the F-word several times to the unimpressed heavens, when I realized I had to call for help. As I scrolled through email, looking for the phone number for AIR Serenbe’s director, the wind came, bearing a sweet, familiar smell. I followed my nose, like a cartoon character sniffing out a pie on a windowsill, and found the trifoliate oranges growing by the creek bed. From there, I knew my way home.
The next day, I went to the Piggly Wiggly for a 4-pound bag of sugar, to turn the rest of the oranges into a big pot of jam. Before I left, gifts went out to all the good folks at Serenbe who had befriended me (from a safe social distance) throughout my stay. I’m not sure these oranges actually saved my life, but they made my trip to Georgia a whole lot more memorable. For once, I wasn’t thinking about the strange horror of this year.
Read more stories like this by liking Atlanta Restaurant Scene on Facebook, following @ATLDiningNews on Twitter and @ajcdining on Instagram.
About the Author
