Archive for the ‘From The Wild’ Category
When small, the photo on the left looks strikingly like a giant storm of doom shot from space. But it’s just an ice hole. An ice hole that hardly had a line put down it this morning, because, as I was fated to learn, small children have no attention span for ice fishing. Which is cool. I brought other stuff to do – books, sand toys, food, etc. No dice. My 3 year old complained the entire time, starting before arrival. Too cold, wanted mommy, wanted to go home. What I fail to understand is that on the way home, after essentially ruining everybody else’s morning complaining and crying, she declares: ‘I love ice fishing!’. I don’t understand.
The lake we went to is one that’s aerated and stocked with 40,000 trout a year. Figured that might result in some coolness. Nope. Not a bite. Although when you let the toddlers choose their lures, and spend zero time manning a line, you’re not exactly setting yourself up for success. To make things worse, unlike the last time I went ice fishing [Episode 26], we couldn’t see anything much beyond the hole. For whatever reason, the water’s murkier. I’ll choose a lake I can see into, every time. Just a matter of figuring which ones those are exactly. Thankfully the lake was close to the city, it was a beautiful morning, and all my new ice fishing gear worked out a treat. Couldn’t have sucked too bad, as I’m going to a different lake tomorrow. Without the 3-year-old.
Dear whoever will read this, [this letter has been sent to the mayor and a number of city councillors]
I would like to add my voice to all the others asking the city for a non-essential or cosmetic pesticide ban.
I’m a local food writer heavily involved in the urban agriculture and foraging communities. I lead groups of Edmontonians to harvest backyard urban fruit with Operation Fruit Rescue Edmonton. I go on forays with the Alberta Mycological Society to harvest mushrooms that are abundant in our city. I guide a fruit foraging event for Slow Food Edmonton. I write about wild foods for the Alberta Conservation Association, many of these foods being abundant in our city limits. NAIT’s Culinary Arts program has me take students out foraging in the city to inspire them to use the foods around them. In all of these cases, broad use of pesticides is a concern. In fact, one of the most common objections to folks using the foods around our city is that they don’t want to touch them because they don’t know what kind of chemicals they’ve been sprayed with. That’s just sad, and a deterrent to our citizens connecting with the food around them – which seems to counter the spirit of the ‘Food and Urban Agriculture Project’.
I often hear the City of Edmonton talk about the desire to be a world-class city. Perhaps then we should share the same level of protection other municipalities have when it comes to ingesting pesticides. Perhaps we need to be progressive on this front rather than last on the uptake. Sports fields are nice, but so are food and health. If you think pesticides are safe to eat, by all means feel free to eat all you like, but please don’t force the rest of us to in the name of protecting jobs. - Sincerely, Kevin Kossowan
I grew up hunting and gardening, abandoned them both as a young adult, then fell in love with both again later in life. Apparently, same goes for ice fishing. I have semi-fond memories of exhausty ski-doo-trailer rides on to the lake, sitting on a pail getting blasted by the elements, eye lashes freezing together, not catching much of anything, getting cold, and hearing stories about how at one time you caught way more and way bigger fish. When you’re a kid, those kind of stories are far from any form of consolation.
A friend of mine [who I met when shooting another video, coincidentally] invited me out ice fishing with him and a co-worker of his, and I just couldn’t say no. It’s January. In my usually busy food world, action had slowed. Gardening season was over. Hunting season was over. But ice fishing is just getting started. And I had a blast, despite it being a particularly slow day. Ice fishing is immeasurably more enjoyable when you’re protected from the elements in a shack, and more importantly, can see down the hole to watch the fish swim about. Add to that some camaraderie and wild-food action – I now get why folks enjoy it. I’m hooked. I want to go again.
Music courtesy of The AwesomeHots
I got a lot of questions about how the dry-cured elk heart turned out – and I didn’t know until today. Sliced into it exactly one month after the start of the cure, and I’m on the fence if leaving it longer would do it harm or good. You can see in the photo that the exterior’s dry like a jerky, while the interior’s got some texture like a lightly cured fish. Describing fish texture and game meats in the same sentence likely doesn’t conjure pleasant thoughts, but it’s not unpleasant. That’s what’s shocking.
My expectations were strong, rich, heavy, mineral/irony, dense. It in fact is delicate and mild – almost to a fault. It smells lightly like game but not strongly so, with light smoke notes from the cold smoke [I'd go longer next time], and is simply mushroomy & salty. I noticed the mushroom, then looked to see if I’d added any, and sure enough it’s obvious in the photo below that I’d dusted it with crushed wild mushroom and hadn’t noted it. I need to work on my note-taking-discipline. The texture reminded me of a thin slice of lardo in texture [more on that later] – denser than the norm, but in a pleasant way. Overall this is so light, in fact, that when thinking about pairing a wine, I think it would be lost by any red, even the lightest. I wanted a brandy after giving it a go.
So the dry cured heart was surprisingly delicate. Next time around, I’d omit the mushroom [too dominant], and herb and cold smoke it quite a bit harder so that it had some aromatic balance to the game vibe on the nose. Other than that, pretty happy with this one. Yes, I’m a little surprised.
The day we butchered this year’s bull elk, we started curing a couple pieces of eye of round whose fate was to dry in my cellar. Outside the loin and tenderloin – which I’m so not going to dry cure – eye of round is about as uniform a shape as comes out of an animal. That makes it handy for dry curing as it dries evenly and ready all at the same time as opposed to having a dry end of a piece and an end that needs time. It’s also a bit of a boring and not particularly tender cut on a big animal, so adding some interest via dry curing is now my default use rather than having an uninspiring steak or roast from the cut. It cured in the fridge for 17 days simply in salt, instacure #2, and black pepper. I gave the pieces a quick rinse today and dusted them with some dry summer savory and maldon organic black pepper. Tied them up like a roast, wrote up the tag, and hung them.
Below you can see the tags I’m now using. They’re little shipping tags from an office supply store, and they happen to slip perfectly onto my S hook hanging setup. They also happen to be very easy to read hanging on the hook, as opposed to tied to the string – you can stand in the middle of my cellar and easily read all the tags of what’s up there without mucking about. Handy. This is the first time I’m actually tracking start weight, a step I should have taken long ago to track progress – you can measure moisture loss by loss in weight. The waiting begins.
I met Britt a few months ago, when the proprietor of the restaurant she was then working at introduced us. I promised her some plants, she came to get them and came for dinner, and I still haven’t managed to get her those plants. I think she and I get along because we’re both pretty hardcore when it comes to our values around food, and neither of us care much for beating around the bush. We were able to get out mushroom foraging this summer, and it looks like she’ll be jumping in on helping Allan Suddaby and I butcher elk this weekend. So there you have it: disclosure of bias + an explanation of why I was at her event, all wrapped into one.
Anyway, long story short: she’s started up her own gig, was having an ‘after hours’ harvest dinner geared entirely around farmers’ market vendor ingredients [NOT a normal activity around here], and invited me to attend as her guest. If you want to read a lovely blog post, Liane happened to be there. Read hers. I lack her eloquence. What I can tell you is that those chefs leading the way in their industry towards a real local and seasonal approach to food have my support. I’m unusual, with all my DIY/grow-it-kill-it-make-it-yourself stuff – I get it. I also get that many folks that eat out have similar values around local, seasonal, ethical food, and if I can support the chefs blazing the way in industry that serves the masses, I will.
Because I, quite honestly, hate writing about events [or worse, organizing them, don't ask me to do that], do enjoy the video below. It delivers far more than I could via writing and a few pictures. Last thought: get down to the Old Strathcona Farmers’ Market not just to shop, but to eat, as Britt now runs the concession. The menu blew me away, as it actually serves up food sold by the vendors under that very roof. Well done, whoever lined up this long-time-needed change [and I know who you are]. Well done.
Heart is a misunderstood piece of offal. Like the tongue, and unlike the liver or kidneys for example, it’s a muscle rather than an organ. Like pig heads and other butcher-shop wastage that makes me cringe, the heart often ends up left in the gut-pile of a hunted wild animal, or tossed in the bin at the local meat processor. My guess is the big meat processors have figured out how to make some use of it by burying it in a processed meat of some kind. Which brings me to a story.
Last year, as I contemplated cutting the testicles out of a recently harvested bull elk, my dad expressed concern that I’d gone crazy. He dislikes wine too. My joking rebuttal at the time was that he eats hotdogs and drinks brandy, so he essentially eats testicles and drinks wine, in one form or another. In his defence, heart [and tenderloin] traditionally doesn’t leave moose camp, as it’s enjoyed first. My point here is that heart is meat. Not working with it is a waste.
As I cleaned up the fresh heart from my recent bull elk adventure [great video here re: cleaning one], I contemplated what its culinary fate might be. It then occurred to me that there was a nice thick slab, not too different in shape and size to a small pork jowl, that might be suitable to dry curing. A quick google of ‘dry cured heart’ turned up virtually nothing. Will it work out? No idea. But it’s worth a shot. For those interested: 356g bull elk heart, 1g instacure #2, 11g kosher salt, 1.5g black pepper. Into a bag, into the fridge, to cure for a week or so. It’ll then be rinsed, and I’m thinking lightly cold-smoked, maybe with a light dusting of ground dried herbs, then hung in the cellar to dry. I’m pretty curious to see where this goes – most of the dry curing I’ve tried have been variations on well beaten paths. This, not so much.
In 2006, I saw 67 moose in 2 days. This year, 1. That’s more than just a change of luck. That’s a 98.5% decrease. Their populations had already tanked by 2007, and this past winter’s ridiculously deep snow did them in again, according to locals. I’ll have to remember to mention what winter, or perhaps worse, the torture of ticks, does to animals next time somebody gives me a hard time about hunting one. Death by insects or starvation would suck worse than death by bullet, I’d wager.
Other than a short bout of luck with some ruffed grouse, action was slow. I had a draw for a calf moose. No moose in sight, nevermind a calf. So after the first night, my hunting partners suggested picking up a general bull elk tag, just in case we saw one. Not that we’d seen one. But somehow the elk populations are good despite the deer and moose taking a kicking – probably because they’re extremely smart. That evening I picked up a bull elk tag – cows and calves are by draw and I was declined my draw this year. The very next morning, we spotted 3-4 cows, 2 calves, and a legal bull in the same field where I shot my first moose in 2006. Funny how you don’t forget the locations where you shot animals. The elk were 650 yards away – no chance. At least we’d seen SOMETHING.
Then came evening. Spent the evening seeing zero moose, again. Then, about 15 minute before legal shooting time ended, we decided to see if the elk perhaps had made a mistake and come out around the bush where we saw them in the morning. As luck would have it, they made that very mistake. And as luck would have it, they were within shooting range, looking into the sun at us, unable to catch our wind, and kept feeding and walking towards us. Your fate when hunting is tenuous. You can be frustrated, tired, and disappointed one minute, and a minute later be full of adrenaline and have an animal on the ground to field dress. So no calf moose this year – for the first time since 2006, our freezer will be full of elk rather than moose. I’ll take it. The quarters are hanging at 2.2C and 60%RH in my garage, and in a few days we’ll be butchering. I’ve already started a dry curing project, more on that next.
I was lucky this year. I got up to my moose hunt only a day before the snow. Ruffed grouse , although well geared up with cool anatomy to walk on it [see photo below], they seem to go in hiding when it snows. If the trails and roads are bare, they’re often found simply standing about the side of them, especially if it’s sunny. My first outing of the hunt, we happened upon a grouse, and as is often the case, once we found the one, we found more in the grasses and bush around it. An evolutionary foible of the ruffed grouse is they don’t try very hard to get away if threatened. That’s a nice way of saying they’re really dumb and easy to shoot. So I was able to get all 3 of them in this particular group. With the bag limit having been knocked down from 10 to 5 this year, a single group of 3 was happy-making, considering they weren’t our primary objective – calf moose was the goal, more on the big-game portion of the hunt tomorrow.
Ruffed grouse is the lightest, most delicate of the grouse that live around me. Their meat looks like domestic chicken and is mild and delicate, but with a distinctive twang uniquely their own. Spruce grouse is a red meat, and decidedly sprucier. Sharp-tails are somewhere in the middle, I find. I’ll take ruffed grouse 3:1 over any other, any day. This is one seriously under-appreciated local bird, and why that is, I have no idea. It’s not available in a box-store, I guess. I noticed @offalchris is bigging-up local-to-him grouse onto his menu, so props to him for that. @Hank_Shaw, I know, I should have plucked them. Didn’t have time. Had bigger fish to fry, so to speak.
As it’s not a regular meat in my kitchen, I’m going to have to give some thought as to how exactly I’d like to treasure and enjoy it. I bet it’d be good with highbush cranberry jelly – poultry and cranberry done ‘bush-style’. Breaded and deep fried into a chicken-finger with honey-mustard? Fricasseed in a wild-mushroom cream sauce? I’m sure I’ll think of something. And I’m guessing I’ll be wishing we’d found more before the snow came.
