Frye: Bring on the wildest game

I found myself at dinner with my wife, wishing I was more of an adult, or at least capable of eating like one.

Mandy looked over her menu and asked what I was ordering.

That was the dilemma. Several of the entrees initially looked good, but all were made with, smothered in or otherwise polluted by cooties.

“You mean vegetables?” she asked.

Bingo.

Rejecting her suggestion that my juvenile palate order star-shaped chicken nuggets and chocolate milk in a sippy cup, I got some relatively plain grilled chicken. Then the waitress asked if I wanted the usual sides: a potato and the vegetable medley.

“Vegetable medley? What's that?” I asked.

She said it was cauliflower, broccoli and carrots. I hear razor blades, thumbtacks and shards of glass.

Actually, that would have been preferable.

I'm not sure why that is. With meat, and especially wild game, I'm more adventurous.

While visiting relatives over the holidays, my son, Derek, and I had alligator fried in cajun breading. Aside from a few fatty pieces, it was white and flaky and wonderful.

This past week, he and I made venison jerky and sausage. The spice mixes we used — pepper, bourbon BBQ and mountain man blends — are store bought. They're probably not concoctions of sawdust, bearded lady whiskers and bath salts, but beyond that I have no idea what's in them.

But whatever. Put them on thin-cut, dehydrated strips of deer steak or melded ground venison and pork fried in a cast iron skillet, and I'm all in.

Earlier in the fall, I took my nephew squirrel hunting a few times. We came home with a bunch of the free range, organic, hormone-free, tree-climbing superfoods.

We ate them in stir fry, slow-roasted with a fiery rub and baked with gravy. They were great each way.

Mandy's aunt wasn't impressed, judging by the incredulous note she sent on Facebook.

“Tell me you don't eat those!” she said.

Mandy doesn't. She draws the line at squirrel.

I don't push, given my own pickiness.

She's a foods teacher and sometimes brings home leftovers. Some are good, even very good. Others look appealing but for the chunks of green and yellow and orange stuff — things prey species eat — mixed in.

“My kids made it,” Mandy will say. “It came out pretty good. You should try some.”

“What's in it?” I'll ask.

If her lips start twitching from trying not to smile, that meal gets classified as a survival ration.

Were I to wake up in a post-apocalyptic world, where the entirety of the earth's surface had been scorched by nuclear fire and the seas were dead, and I was breathing stale air in an underground bunker in the light of a single dim bulb, with no knowledge of other human survivors, no tools with which to carve out a living and, really, no cause for hope, I might eat it.

But not right away. Things would have to get desperate first.

Until then, pass the meat, the wilder the better.

Bob Frye is a staff writer for Trib Total Media. Reach him at bfrye@tribweb.com or via Twitter @bobfryeoutdoors.

Article by Bob Frye,
Everybody Adventures, http://www.everybodyadventures.com

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