More Pre-eating - Cookies, this time

Cookies for the hunt.

Use the "vanishing oatmeal raisin cookie" recipe under the lid on the Quakers" Old Fashioned Oatmeal"lid, but add a cup of walnuts and a cup of dark chocolate chips. Use half whole wheat flour and replace sugar w/ honey and tablespoon or so of molasses to taste( it is ok to taste the cookie dough) if you want them really healthy and good tasting.

These cookies are like a meal in the woods/stand, as well as a real sweet treat. Stash enough for yourself so the other hunters don't short you. Of the many things I have learned while cooking on fishing and hunting trips is that your chums will not think of you while piling their plates full. Ya gotta keep enough for yourself. Some of those partners are bottomless when it comes to food and appetite.

The cookies will qualify as pre-eating too, because you will want to practise on a batch and then you will eat them. Start soon.

Pre- Eating for Deer Season

You know how "pre-fishing" before a fishing tournament makes sense and that scouting the woods and fields and fixing your deer stand before season and sighting in your rifle and stuff(pre-hunting) also makes sense, well then wouldn't it also make sense to pre-eat some deer season food before season?

Like scrambled eggs with chili and cheese on top and toast. Just had it and thought what a great breakfast or brunch on deer openers. Many of us plan on chili at camp anyways. This makes it a two-fer - another great chili meal that ain't just chili.

Pre-eat the last of your venison from last season too, and you'll be tuned up for this one.

Pre-fishing. Pre-hunting. Pre-eating. They all make sense.

On The Sunny Side of The Street

Wild Alaskan Kings have intruded in a good way like an unexpected yesterday( sunny, 60 degrees). Slow roasted in a cast iron pan, seasoned w/ dill and parsley and sage and butter and cooked to medium, this salmon ( a gift from School Principal Dennis of Onamia, caught by his own hand) was clean tasting, deep red, luscious with therapeutic oils that have apparently healed a recently aching hip joint, redolent of swift water, fresh, and the salty sea.

Overnight, no less. Will I walk as the King swims? Perhaps. What I do know is that I will eat more. Dennis?

If you are lucky enough to have leftover salmon, stir some maple syrup into mustard, douse your salmon, and eat it on rye krisp for breakfast, along w/ cottage cheese and a glass of apple juice. There is a little curry flavor in yellow mustard due to the turmeric, which is what gives it the yellow color. I used Plochman's mustard. $ 1.09 at the store.

I will be doing some deer tenderloin recipes for Outdoor News, which is traditionally the first eaten meat of the deer at deer camp. Onions, mushrooms, and the valuable medallions simply sauteed w/ salt, pepper and garlic and finished off w/ a splash of brandy. Done medium rare and served on toast. Or a stroganoff( medium rare, also) served over noodles. Others, too, I'll let you know.

And remember. You gotta get a deer to eat a deer.

Stir Fly

I taught an Asian Cooking class last night at Onamia High School on the behest of Onamia Community Education.

For starters I did a "mother sauce" for stir fry with chicken broth and plenty of garlic and ginger - thickened w/ cornstarch and water. It works for chow mein, too. It is called a mother sauce because it is adaptable to many different dishes - add crushed red pepper( and catsup!), and or Thai chili sauce to get a spicy Thai stir fry, more garlic to do garlic chicken and broccoli, fish or oyster sauce for others and so on.

We did a curry, too, w/ heavy cream and carmelized onions and chicken( and curry powder, of course), lime juice and cilantro that was excellent. A guest at the class said she made a similar curry utilizing grouse and coconut milk and it was great. Good idea. Pheasant would be exceptional.

In the past as an appetizer I have sautee'd bite sized pheasant portions and glazed/finished them off w/ a sweet hot Thai chili sauce. It is like eating candy it is so good.

Missed Again!

You can't eat a deer if you don't get him.

Thirty years ago or more I was sneaking and peeking for deer in a soft late season snow; heavy, wet flakes the size of miniature poodles adhered to every branch of the alders, dogwoods, and conifers. Visibility was about 10 feet.

It was a fairytail land of silence. I was approaching a stand of balsam and as I stepped into a bouquet of small ones a tree exploded with white. It was a doe busting loose just 10 feet from me, maybe 8. It was too close to shoulder my rifle( 30-30 lever action Winchester), so I negotiated a quick hip shot and in the blink of an eye the deer was past me and gone, though not before I fenced forward with the rifle barrel and stabbed her in the ribs w/ the muzzle.

I had been unable to lever out my spent shell because the rifle was down at hip level so I could not shoot my 2nd shot. All that remained was a few deer hairs stuck to the end of the barrel.

A short time later, after I had crossed the 40 acre field to the farmhouse, Clifford looked at me sideways as I told him the story.

It wasn't the only time over the years that I have missed a deer. When you miss one, you don't have one to eat. The photo is of a roast of another deer in another year.

Late Season Shore Lunch

I am going to keep writing about venison but today will be an interlude because yesterday while on the patio I saw sunnies and bass( largemouth) in the shallows.

There is only one reason that fish would be in the shallows this time of the year. They were feeding. Fishing it was, then, and we caught 4 northerns and 4 bass in 1 hr and had a great late season shore lunch for supper. Traditional in the sense of fried potatoes and baked beans, but we also had corn fritters with chives and jalapenos.

I floured and panfried the fish and finished it off with white wine, tarragon, parsley and butter.Exceptional.

Back to venison tomorrow.

Waxing and Waning

I did a venison roast recipe for Outdoor News which should be in this wk's issue. It involved a marinade w/ nearly equal amts of soy sauce and red wine and even more oil, plus the usual suspects of garlic and bay leaf and pepper and w/ the surprising addition( to me) of lemon juice. A 24 hr marinade.

I think the wine and lemon juice function as tenderizers. I found the recipe in the old farmhouse cupboard of my Great Aunt Sophia. She was a great cook. I got it shortly before dementia encouraged the removal of Clifford, her son and a mentor of mine, from his birthplace and lifelong home in Gowan near Floodwood.

A lifetime of fishing and hunting memories remain. Food too. Clifford had an easygoing facility in the kitchen and the smokehouse. He made the best venison I ever ate. His traditional first meals of the fresh shot deer were a neck roast and the ribs, which many of us discard as inedible because of the many inseparable layers of meat and tallow. He would chase the waxy ribs w/ real hot coffee to dissolve the wax and make it palatable. It works.