I’ve been a busy boy lately, so much cool stuff that I’m having a hard time keeping up. But I couldn’t not post about some lovely fish we caught today after a long day on the ice. Not much action, but any day taking home fish is a good day for me, no matter how meagre the success. A perk … Read More
Episode 34: Caviar?
One day, a biologist will explain to me why it is that when ice fishing, the vast majority of your catch are females, or ‘hens’. As an example, the last day I had a bunch of perch in my kitchen sink, 9 out of 9 were female. So what, you ask? Well what this means to me is that I … Read More
Crispy Perch Roe
Some Grant MacEwan University students were at my house the other day doing a photo doc about me, and my dad showed up with a box of 9 perch he’d caught. One of them was a giant 14.5″ long [the fish, not the student], and weighed 830g. The roe sac in the thing was giant, filling my open hand. In … Read More
Ice Fishing Fail
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 … Read More
Mmmm…pesticides.
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 … Read More
Episode 26: Smoke & Ice
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 … Read More
Dry Cured Elk Heart Verdict
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, … Read More
Dry Cured Bull Elk Eye of Round, Part 1
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 … Read More