A good book for meat lovers

I enjoy bagging (or buying), preparing and eating meat. I offer no apologizes for this. I enjoy preparing meals and have a decent library of culinary books. Recently I was looking for a classic partridge recipe, including guidelines for hanging birds prior to cooking. A book I bought about two years ago - The River Cottage Meat Book, by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (published by Ten Speed Press) has a lot of informed and practical information on cooking all types of meat, and has an excellent treatment of all types of game - game common to the British Isles, anyway. The photography by Simon Wheeler is excellent and mouth-watering.

Fearnley-Whittingstall is a hunter and dog owner (this is the connection that justifies its inclusion on this blog...), a chef, and owner of River Cottage farm. In his introductory pages he bows to the typical British sensitivity regarding animal welfare and expresses regret that some game animals are not dispatched cleanly.  A concern that most hunters also share. 

"... As I pull the trigger and the bird falls, or the beast tumbles, I feel the gap between me and the quarry, which a moment ago seemed unreachable, closed in an instant."

And he does not shy away from straight talk about other possibly sensitive culinary subjects. Here is what he has to say about fat in food...

"Fat gets bad press. Because few of us want to ge 'fat', and because the consumption of 'fat' (the noun) has been identified as one possible cause of people becoming 'fat' (the adjective), fat the substance has been effectively demonized. Yet fat has a critical role in brokering the flavor of meat-not just meat, in fact, but in many of our favorite foods. That's why we put butter on our bread, beef fat in our Christmas pudding, and crated cheese on our pasta.

The critical thing is that many flavor-bearing molecules are soluble in fat but not in water. In addition, the flavorful substances into otherwise dry foods are far more effectively absorbed by the taste buds when combined with or accompanied by fat..." 

On hanging game...

"The other thing to say about gaminess, besides, perhaps, that not everyone likes it, is that its level, or intensity, is not a given. It can be encouraged or discouraged, according to the length of time for which the creature has hung." And there follows an in-depth discussion of hanging (or aging) all types of game.

Bottom line, I find tis book even more useful (and inspiring!) than either The Complete Meat Cookbook by Bruce Aidells and Denis Kelly or Roasting by Barbara Kaufka, both good books in their own right.

John Yates Setters for sale

If you follow this blog, you have seen contributions by John Yates. You also saw a post regarding his untimely passing on September 15th of this year. John bred and trained setters. His dogs are strong in TMS and Crockett. I have seen a number of them in person, and they show their wild bird training.

His widow, Donna, is offering most of the dogs from their kennel for sale and some for adoption. Please support Donna in finding a good hunting home for these excellent setters. 

Eaglerock Kennels

Old dogs rule

I have two setters in my life: Rosie (7 years) and Silk (13 years). Rosie is a wide-ranging, stylish girl, and I love to watch her cover open ground. Silk works much closer - a good match for quail in our California chaparral. Though she is intense on point, she does not have Rosie's style or grace.

It seems strange that I kill about as many birds over each of them. One might expect that Rosie's wider range would give her an advantage but it just doesn't work out that way. I hunted chukar over the weekend and Silk had more points, including a single bird on a hillside that she relocated three times before pinning. Rosie inadvertently bumped one covey - there was almost no breeze and I think she just ran over them. But cautious, slower Silk never had that problem.

Rosie hunts the hillsides way over there and I appreciate that she saves me the steps, particularly on steep chukar slopes. Sometimes she'll find birds that I would have missed. Silk hunts nearer to me, and since I walk through the most likely cover, she spends more of her time in amongst the birds.

So, I love them both for what they are and don't worry about what they aren't.

Wolves eat dogs...

"Wolves hate dogs. Wolves hunt down dogs because they regard them as traitors. If you think about it, dogs are dogs only because of humans; otherwise they would be wolves, right? And where will we be when all the dogs are gone? It will be the end of civilization."

   - from Wolves Eat Dogs, by Martin Cruz Smith

The ground in front and that behind

I have been thinking that an upland hunter has a lot of ground to cover in North America. To take it all in - the birds, the country, the people and dogs - is a lifetime of hope, travel, and ultimately assimilation and learning.

There is still a lot of ground to cover. I hope to get to southern Arizona for Mearn's quail - I have never hunted there or even seen a Mearn's. Then there are willow ptarmigan and Alaska uplands.  And lesser prairie chickens. Some things call for a repeat after many years - hunting band-tail pigeons on the Coast Range comes to mind. 

I am not checking off items on a list, but this all leads to thinking about next season, even before this one has run out. Getting a bit older seems to sharpen the appetite for those things not yet tasted. 

Mixed bag in Southern California

Well, Mike's most recent post describes snow and freezing rain in Montana. There is no danger of such weather in the Imperial Valley. A friend and I headed out there this morning for the dove second-season opener and brought my setters in the hope of also finding a few quail. Temperature was 50F pre-dawn and warked to 71F by noon. Nice, though a bit warm for the dogs.

I also brought a new toy - a Mojo Dove, mounted on a 10' piece of painted conduit, augmented with a couple of stationary decoys. Yeah, it is a bit non-traditional but that thing really worked. We had doves landing in the adjacent trees, apparently mesmerized by the rotating wings. If you get one of these set yourself up close to the decoy - you'll get some birds on top of you. Model 42 range.

The dove were not plentiful but were pretty thick for a few minutes around 8.00. We both bagged a few, then packed up the decoys to look for quail. Within just a few minutes Rosie hit a point but before I could get close a very nervous rooster bumped out of range. Clair Kofoed had suggested #6 for late season dove and I was wishing I had taken his advice, though not because of the dove!

We got into a few quail and I bagged a beautiful Gambel's cock. I usually see only the Valley quail so the Gambel's colors are a treat. I guess I've always been a sucker for redheads. Rosie had another very nice point - intense with a raised front leg - but the bird flushed unshot from the wrong side of the brush.

As we dropped over a berm by a drainage creek, planning to walk back to the car on the adjacent dirt road, another cock pheasant broke out of the brush. That was sufficiently promising that I walked 50 yards downstream and flushed 2 more cocks, one of which I dumped cleanly on the other side of the creek. Wading in that stagnant farm runoff was not attractive so we walked a mile or so around and eventually picked up the bird.

Who says you can't kill wild pheasant with 1 oz of #8 in a 16 ga? And this was a very nice old bird - he'd been around for at least a couple of years.

Hope others are enjoying themselves as much as we did.

Will in Montana

Will Pennington with his pointers, Riley and Lizzie. 

My friend, Cmdr. Will Pennington, Spent a week with me in Montana. We found the bird populations down a bit from previous years, but we had plenty of dogwork, including a classic find by Will's young pointer, Lizzie, on a covey of Huns. Will collected a double on a perfectly handled find. Impressive.  

Unfortunately we had some very troubled weather the week Will was there - the Airstream froze while I was in Michigan and we had some work to do before it was fully habitable, and we had some very cold nights and rain/sleet that kept bird hunting more about hunting than birds.  Still, we did find enough birds to enjoy each day. I think Will had a good time - I enjoyed his visit and hope that we can repeat again in the future.