Video: How to pluck a duck

If there's one thing that makes killing ducks look easy, it's plucking them - especially if you like to eat them skin-on, roasted whole. Getting that down off can be a real pain in the butt.

But a few years back, Hank hunted with a friend at a duck club that had a totally sweet operation for processing ducks, and the key feature was the wax pot.

After plucking off maybe two-thirds of the top feathers, hunters at this club would dip their birds in a cauldron of hot melted wax, then put them in a barrel of cool water to set the wax. After that, all they had to do was peel off the wax and voila! The down was all gone, revealing pretty skin, suitable for roasting whole.

We adapted this operation to work in our garage, and at long last, we've made a video that shows how to do it.

I wouldn't say it makes plucking ducks easy - it still takes time. But it does leave you with some really beautiful ducks to eat, and that's the whole point.

Some additional notes about what you see in the video:

The pot: It's a cheap aluminum tamale pot from a Mexican market. Cheap is important, because this thing will get grimy, and you probably won't want to use it for food in the kitchen anymore after you use it for waxing ducks.

The burner: Ours is a totally lame portable electric burner. We keep talking about switching to a turkey deep fryer with a powerful gas burner and thermostat, but we haven't gotten around to it yet. Maybe there will be some on sale, now that the season of eating whole turkeys has passed.

Heating the water: We give the wax pot a head start by filling it out of a faucet right next to the water heater, so the water comes out blazing hot. It really does take a while to heat up, because it's two-thirds full. If I plan to pluck when I get home, I'll call Hank and ask him to get the pot started so it's nice and hot when I arrive 75 minutes later.

The mess: Yeah, it's super messy, which is why we do it in the garage. But it's way easier sweeping up clumps of wax than chasing tufts of down.

Got anymore questions? Comment here or on the video itself and we'll answer the best we can.

© Holly A. Heyser 2012

Video: How to skin a duck

Yes, I know it's a coot, not a duck.

I know - blasphemy, right? I mean, I love duck skin, and my favorite way to eat duck is roasted whole with skin on.

But sometimes you get a bird that you know is going to taste "off." You know your mallards and pintails are going to taste great, but spoonies, gadwalls and wigeon can be a bit funky, depending on where you live and what those birds are eating there. Coots and sea birds? Stinkers, consistently.

The good news that all the foul flavor lives in skin and fat, so you can still make use of much of that stanky bird. All you need to know is how to skin it.

I shot this video on how to skin a duck a couple weekends ago after Hank and I went hunting for diver ducks on San Francisco Bay (San Pablo Bay, to be more exact). Then last weekend I went hunting at my usual Sacramento Valley spot without Hank and he sent me off with a grocery list: He wanted five coots if I got the opportunity to get some. He said something about recipe development.

I got him his coots (you can read that story here), and rather than make him do the dirty work, I decided to give skinning a try myself, based on the instructional video. I'll be damned if it didn't work - and it worked well! Cleaning went really fast. (It helped to have a quality pair of kitchen shears.) I may shoot coots more often.

Two notes on the video: If you choose to save the first section of wing, as shown near the beginning of the video, to get that meat, all you do is keep pulling off the skin, rather than stopping at the breast and clipping it off. You'll see what I mean. And if you don't want the wing, just clip it off at its base.

And if you like liver, go ahead and use the liver from a coot. The diver/sea duck warnings don't apply.

© Holly A. Heyser 2011

Hitting bottom: The Stinky Butt Gadwall

I have finally hit bottom.

Yes, as Hank enters the final weeks of his Hunt, Gather, Cook Culinary Mayhem Tour - also known as The Incredibly Long Period When I’ve Had to Cook for Myself – I have found the bottom of our freezer.

I have roasted the succulent mallards and pintails and teal.

I have turned all the delicate cottontails into stirfry. Quite successfully, I might add, with that velveted rabbit recipe.

And I have failed to kill a deer or a pig, which probably has something to do with having been too busy to hunt them.

So what did that leave me?

This:

The Stinky Butt Gadwall.

I can already hear my duck hunting buddy Charlie guffawing, and fellow hunting blogger Ryan Sabalow saying, “Ha! They’re called ‘gagwall’ for a reason!” And to you two, I say shush!

Hank and I have eaten many a gadwall that tasted not just fine, but downright delicious. We ate one for Christmas a couple years ago when a family get-together was canceled due to snow, and it was one of our most memorable duck dinners ever. Yes, in a good way.

But I freely admit that some gadwalls can smell – and taste – like poop. Literally.

I don’t say this because I’ve eaten poop. I have not, unless you count the crap found in the factory- farmed beef and chicken that I used to eat regularly before I started hunting. But I have done some volunteer work banding gadwalls before, and when I did, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife guys warned me that 1) the birds would crap all over me out of fear, and 2) gadwall crap is the most ferociously disgusting crap in the duck world.

They were right on both counts.

Last season, Hank and I killed not one, but two gadwalls whose flesh reeked of that famous poop.

I remember mine distinctly. I was plucking in the garage, and Hank came out, wrinkled his nose, and said, “Ew, it smells like shit in here.”

I hadn’t noticed. (Yes, Tamar, I can smell a ruffed grouse in the woods, but not a stinky duck in my garage.)

I examined the duck I was plucking to see if it had poop on its feathers. It did not.

But when I went into the house and cut the butt off the bird so I could gut it, a foul stench erupted from its body cavity. I think it’s safe to say I would’ve preferred being tear-gassed (something I have experienced before).

What happened next, though, is where I made my mistake. I continued cleaning the bird normally, and we vacuum sealed it, labeled it and stuck it in the freezer. I was assuming that Hank would work his culinary magic on the stinker. Little did I know he would stick me with it.

Creep.

Last night was when I bottomed out. I needed food to bring to work today, so I rolled up my sleeves and dug in.

Step One: I skinned the duck. And it hurt, because he was a total fattie. Normally a bird that fat, skin on, is something we save for roasting whole. Fatty duck skin is the crack cocaine of wild game cookery.

But fat and skin is where a bird's distinctive flavor resides, and in the case of the Stinky Butt Gadwall, that's no bueno. It felt like sacrilege tossing that skin in the trash, but it had to be done.

Step Two: I cut all the meat off the bones and trimmed all the excess fat I could find. You can't well roast a bird without a skin, and roasting is pretty much all I know how to do with whole ducks.

Step Three: I brought a handful of the meat up to my face and took a deep whiff.

Mmmmmmmm. Shit.

Doh! I would have to take drastic measures: brining overnight.

Brining can be a great way to add moisture and flavor to meat, but it can also help draw out any off flavors. I combined 2 cups of water with 1/8 cup of salt (for the math-impaired, that's a 16:1 ratio), boiled it, let it cool, then poured it over the gadwall meat, which I'd cut into bite-sized pieces.

Hank's instructions for brining off-flavored birds called for a four- to eight-hour soak. It ended up being more like ten by the time I got up this morning, had a cup of coffee and returned to preparing my duck.

Step Four: I melted some lard in a cast-iron pan (I wasn't going to forgo fat entirely), browned the duck bits briefly, tossed some minced garlic on them, then added a couple tablespoons of some mole poblano de guajalote I happened to have on hand. (The recipe for mole is elaborate, so when I make it, I make a lot and freeze it.).

Step Five: At school today, I whipped up some rice in my single-serving rice cooker, threw on about half a cup of the duck in mole, and dug in.

And ya know what? It was actually good.

OK, that's not entirely true. I'd brined the duck for way, way too long, so it was too salty. When I cook the last remaining Stinky Butt Gadwall - remember, we killed two last year, and Hank left both for me - I'll make sure I brine it for no more than four hours.

But there was no hint of this duck's eponymous stench, and that was what mattered. I don't think I even needed something as strong as mole to mask it. It was gone.

Whew!

I feel like I've passed a test, like I've graduated to a new level of culinary self-sufficiency, like I've found a get-out-of-jail-free card that I can use anytime I find myself behind bars with a smelly duck.

I am no longer afraid.

But, as I told my friend Charlie last night, I might start being a little more selective with the ducks I shoot this year.

OK, Charlie and Ryan. You can laugh now.

© Holly A. Heyser 2011

Wild game cooking: The Velveted Rabbit

Yeah, you heard me right. I'm not talking about The Velveteen Rabbit, the children's novel, but velveted rabbit.

Velveting is a Chinese cooking technique used on chicken to ensure it stays moist during the cooking process. I "discovered" it about 14 years ago when I started cooking a lot of Asian food, but I didn't even know it had a name until this summer.

I'd been hunting cottontails, and I'd remembered this recipe for Cantonese Lemon Chicken in The Essential Asian Cookbook. Chicken breast never tasted juicier than it did with this recipe, so I thought it would be great for rabbit, because rabbit also dries out easily. Coincidentally, about a week later when I was reading the August/September issue of Saveur (whose logo, coincidentally, is a rabbit), I discovered the term "velveting."

Velveting is ridiculously simple, and an excellent way to ensure bite-sized pieces of white meat retain their juices - not only for immediate consumption, but after re-heating as well. You can also add any flavor you want - it doesn't have to be Asian.

Here's the essential backbone of "velveting" (there are photos at the end for each stage):

• 1 pound of meat, cut into bite-sized pieces (I like pieces that are 1/4-inch thick, cutting across the grain, and as long as they need to be)
• The white of 1 large egg, lightly beaten
• A little more than 2 tablespoons of liquid (the Asian version calls for 1 tbs. water, 2 tsp. sherry and 2 tsp. soy sauce; in the dish shown here, I used half water and half sauvignon blanc)
• About 1 tablespoon cornstarch
• Salt to taste

Directions: Put the cornstarch in a small bowl, add water/liquids and stir with a fork to a smooth consistency. Add the lightly whipped egg white and stir. Add this mixture to the meat and let it to sit for 10 minutes. Then cook the meat in small batches in a hot frying pan with as much or as little hot oil as you'd like, adding salt to taste. I let it get nice and browned on one side before flipping it, then stir it around to finish cooking the meat.

Put all the meat back in the pan and add any other ingredients you'd like to use. In the dish shown here, I used chopped garlic, toasted pine nuts and sliced scallions. Cook just long enough for the flavors to blend, stirring constantly. Serve over rice. Or whatever.

One note: When I made the Asian version of this recipe, the 2 teaspoons of soy sauce in the marinade didn't make it salty enough for me, so I added more in cooking. I'm a salt fiend, though, so I recommend you taste it for yourself and add salt to your tastes.

How does velveting work? The starch-protein marinade creates an invisible seal around the meat, trapping moisture without adding any noticeably eggy or starchy taste.

The reason I was so excited about this recipe is that I've found it difficult to cook some wild game in a way that reheats easily so I can take it to work, but velveting really does the trick. I ate velveted rabbit every day last week and the rabbit remained juicy to the end.

The funny thing about this recipe is that the original one I followed used the whole egg, including yolk, which is not part of the traditional velveting process. But 14 years ago I aspired to be very thin, so I used egg whites instead to remove that fat from the recipe. Turns out I'd accidentally made it more authentic.

Try this out next time you've got some game that dries out easily, like cottontail or pheasant breast. I think you'll find it's actually much more effective than wrapping dry meats in bacon, and not much more work at all.

Now, for the photos:

Sliced cottontail backstrap (OK, the rest of my rabbit didn't look this pretty). I slice the meat across the grain about 1/4 inch thick.

The marinade: cornstarch, water, sauvignon blanc and lightly beaten egg whites.

The meat soaking in the marinade in a shallow container. Make sure the marinade coats everything.

The meat, browned just how I like it. I swear it doesn't dry out!

Additional ingredients of your own choosing. Shown here: garlic, toasted pine nuts, sliced scallions.

The finished product. Yum!

© Holly A. Heyser 2011

ALONE: My harrowing real-life survival story

One of the reasons I love hunting is the sense it gives me that if everything went to hell - I'm talking a massive collapse of civilization - I might actually be able to survive.

What I didn't realize until recently, though, is that survival situations can come in many forms.

Then, on May 15, Hank headed out for the first leg of his "Hunt, Gather, Cook" book tour, and my real-life survival story began.

What happened, you ask? I'll tell you: This guy's been cooking for me pretty much every day for the better part of the last four years. He has completely domesticated me, and that, my friends, has left me virtually unable to feed myself. (Yes, you read that correctly. It's all his fault.)

I moped for a while after he left. Nature rewarded me with a massive thunderstorm, complete with hail - a fitting soundtrack to my self-pity.

Then the skies cleared, my stomach growled and I asked the question: What next?

Step one: Assess your food supply.

I opened the door of the refrigerator and found it was almost empty, except for beer, a half-drunk bottle of wine and condiments (which, in our case, means stuff like small vats of duck fat and jars of strange green things oddly mislabeled "cranberries").

But wait, what was this cardboard box?

Oh yeah! Hank had taught a sausage-making class in Sausalito the day before he left, and we'd come home with leftovers. Awesome. I love sausage.

I opened the box, and discovered, to my horror, that they were not cooked sausages. Oh no. How the hell do you cook these things?

Momentarily stumped, I decided to go over the photos I'd taken the day before to see if there were any clues.


Cracking dirty jokes about sausage making? No, that won't work.


Expounding? No, no, no - that doesn't generate enough heat.

Then, I saw it:


There it is, in the background: a frying pan.

That sight was enough to jog my memory - I distinctly recalled Hank telling the sausage students, "Slow and low - you can never cook sausage for too long."

So, I broke out a frying pan, turned the heat down really low, then dropped a link in there, and I'll be damned if 45 minutes later I didn't have a totally delicious, perfectly cooked sausage.

That knowledge - and that cache of links - kept me going for a good three days. I even took the extra step of browning rice in the fat that remained in the pan before tossing it in the rice cooker. I was delighted with my ingenuity.

Step two: Forage for foods you know are safe.

I may not know how to cook, but I do know how to drive, so I got my butt to Costco and looked for survival food, and there it was: peanut butter! Organic, creamy, Kirkland-brand peanut butter. In a two-pack, no less!

In the cart it went, and voila! All I had to do with this stuff was stir, then dip a big fat spoon into the jar. Healthy, nutrient-dense - ahhhhhhh. That got me through the next several days' lunchtimes.

Step three: OK, go find some real food.

Peanut butter gets old fast, so I started longing for one of the staples of our kitchen: roasted duck.

I remembered roasting ducks. Yes, I've actually done it! I even have a recipe on this site. It's so easy: Brown it in a cast-iron pan, roast it until the breast meat hits 135 degrees, remove from oven and cover with foil for five minutes, then EAT.


First, I had to find a duck. Given that it was May, I knew I couldn't legally go out to kill one, so where's the next best place?

The freezer!

I trooped out to the garage and dug through a baffling array of frozen meats. Gizzards. Livers. Unidentified sausages. Goose breasts - closer! Then, I saw it: A grocery bag full of frozen ducks.

Bufflehead? Oh, heavens no. I mean, I shot it, but Hank says buffleheads can taste fishy. I'll leave that one for him.

"Gadwall with stinky butt?" Ooooooh, yeah, I remembered that one. Very stinky duck. Also beyond my skill level. Good thing Hank labeled it.

Then I found it: "fat gadwall." This I could do.

I defrosted the duck, browned it, and popped it in the oven. After 10 or 12 minutes, I went to check it with a meat thermometer and

OHMYGODthemeatthermometerwasmissing!

I texted Hank. WTF, did you take the meat thermometer with you?

He texted back. Yes. Deal.

A meat thermometer. On book tour. What, was he cooking the books?

So I guessed and took it out then. After I let the bird rest, I sliced into it and saw it had come out a bit rare. No, a lot rare. Gadwall sushi, anyone? But I just popped it back in the oven for a few more minutes, and it was fine.

The next day I bought a cheap meat thermometer at the supermarket. Then I ate duck every day for the next six days - roasted one day, leftovers the next.

But that wasn't all I ate. I had rice too. Browned in duck fat first, of course.

Step four: Mastering the kitchen.

After eating all those ducks, I now had quite a collection of duck carcasses. I saved them in part because I was raised by parents who grew up in the Great Depression, which made me loathe to throw away food. But there was something else.

A smell.

The smell of the house during duck season. Warm, almost spicy.

That's it! When Hank broke down ducks during duck season, he always roasted the bones and then made broth with them. Mmmmmm. Broth. Delicious by itself, or you could use it to jazz up other cooking.

How does one make broth, though? I had a vague impression: roasted bones, water, onion, celery, carrots. I'd tried it once before, sans recipe, and it hadn't come out well. So I asked myself: What would Hank do?

What would Hank do? Holy cow, he writes a food blog! He's probably blogged about EXACTLY how to make broth.

I ran to my computer and hit a few links on his site, and there it was: Dark Duck Broth. I printed it out. Gasped when a second sheet of paper came out of the printer. Two pages??? Then ran back to the kitchen.

First, I had to forage for ingredients. Onion? Check. Garlic? Check. Fennel? No thanks. Celery? Rubbery, but check. Rosemary? All over the front yard. Red wine vinegar? Check. Red wine? Check. Tomato paste? Check.

I popped all my bones in the roasting pan, then into the oven, and started assembling and prepping the other ingredients. When I got to the can of tomato paste, I dug for the can opener, then tried to attach it to the can properly. Then fumbled. Repeatedly.

Wow. I had actually forgotten how to use our can opener.

I'm choosing to spin that in a good way - we just don't have many canned goods in the house. I usually have to make special purchases to donate to canned food drives during the holidays.

After several tries, I figured it out. Yes, just like I figured out how to cook sausage, buy peanut butter and find ducks in the freezer. I was getting the hang of this survival stuff.

Next, I needed a tablespoon of peppercorns. I opened the spice cupboard, which is so full of bags and jars and tins of whole spices that they all threaten to fall out every time you open the door. But not one of these containers had peppercorns.

Time to text Hank. Are we out of peppercorns?

Hank: They should be in the cupboard.

Me: They're not.

Hank: Adapt and overcome.

Oh I HATE it when he says that.

I picked up the pepper grinder and gave it a crank and it became clear that was empty too.

Do you see why Hank's not in charge of buying toilet paper? Sheesh.

Oh well, screw pepper. I kept going, tending to the burbling broth pot all night, through a phone call with a student, a phone call with my mother and at least one episode of the Real Housewives of New Jersey. When I was ready for bed, I removed the bones and veggies, poured the broth through a strainer lined with cheesecloth, and gave it a taste.

Hot damn, it was good!

I felt accomplished. I'd gone from recoiling at the sight of uncooked sausages to making my own broth from scratch, despite tragic obstacles like the absence of pepper. And now I had a bunch of broth to cook with!

I'm gonna make some damn fine rice with that.

© Holly A. Heyser 2011

Guilty as charged: I love whole ducks, and there's a really good reason for that

I was accused the other day of being a snob because I am a proponent of using as much of the animals we kill as possible. This means, most importantly, that I don't breast out ducks.

Not only does this position risk offending established hunters who grew up breasting out their ducks, I was told, but it risks alienating hunting newbies by holding them up to a standard that, basically, only the stupendous and amazing Hank could meet.

Well, Hank is a freak, and he'd be the first to admit that. He makes wild boar liver creme caramel, goose gizzard carpaccio and duck liver ravioli. And it's all good. I know, because I eat everything he cooks.

But, seriously, duck hunters, I don't expect you to cook like he does (though it would be nice if you ordered his upcoming book, Hunt, Gather, Cook: Finding the Forgotten Feast, which comes out in late May).

And I'm not going to start telling Yo' Mama jokes if your mama raised you to breast out your ducks.

I will, however, strongly encourage you to use more than just the breasts of the ducks you kill, because 1) there's a ton of tasty meat on the rest of the duck, and 2) you don't have to be a great chef to make it taste good.

Let's address Point 2 first. I do very little cooking in our house, because Hank is just way better at it. But I do roast my own whole ducks, because it's super easy.

The short version is that you salt the duck, brown it all over in a cast iron pan, pop it in a 450-degree oven, cook it until the breast meat hits 135 degrees, let it rest under a tent of foil for five minutes, then serve. (Here are the detailed duck roasting instructions.)

Though teal and ruddy ducks are single-serving critters, I can usually get at least two meals out of a medium-sized duck (wigeon, gadwall) and three out of a large duck (mallard, pintail).

This is where we get to Point 1.

The first meal is slicing off the breasts. I did this for lunch just this Thursday with a fat little wigeon I killed in December, and here's how much meat I got from the breasts:


So, that's what you would've gotten off this bird if you'd breasted him out. That scale reads 4 3/8 ounces. And yes, these were like crack cocaine - after I finished eating the breasts, I wanted to go eat the rest of the bird, bones and all.

But I was saving it for this blog post, so I threw the rest of the carcass into the fridge to chill overnight. Then this morning, I picked off all the meat, fat and skin that I could get - this would be a lunch I could take to take to work.

Now, this wigeon was particularly obese, so I got a lot of fat. But apparently Hank really wrecked his wings when he shot him, because this pato gordito came out of the package looking like Venus de Milo - no wing meat for me!

(I know duck wings seem pretty insubstantial and are a total pain in the ass to eat on the bone. But when you're picking the carcass, there's definitely enough meat on the wings to make them worth the effort.)

When it was all picked, I diced up the meat so I could throw it into a quick fried-rice concoction: Duck bits (no added fat needed), chili flakes, garlic, salt, rice.

Here's what I got:


Yep, that's 5 1/4 ounces.

Now, if you're concerned about all that Fatty McFat Wigeon's fat clogging my arteries, don't be - I saved the fat from the frying pan, and it was still liquid at room temperature this morning - a sign it's good-for-you fat. (And if you'd like to read my smug blog post on my latest cholesterol test, click here.)

Now, people like my buddy Charlie would need two of those wigeons to make a satisfying meal (though he'd really prefer if they were two pintails). That's not the point here. The point is that if you think there's not enough meat on a duck to make it worth eating more than the breasts, you might want to reconsider.

What if you hate plucking whole ducks? I sure understand that - plucking is a pain in the butt, and it's the last thing I want to do with my stupid arthritic hands after a day in a wet and windy marsh (I prefer wrapping them around a glass of bourbon).

There is an easier alternative: pluck the breasts and legs and take them out together, each breast attached to a leg. My friend Brent, who hunts up at Lower Klamath, processes his ducks like this, then marinates and grills them. They taste outstanding every time.

The upshot? You worked hard to bring those ducks home. You might as well get all the meat out of them that you can. It sure can't hurt to try, right?

UPDATE: Since writing this blog post, I've produced three videos on how to handle whole ducks:

How to Skin a Duck: For sea ducks or other ducks with off flavors. Removing the skin and fat removes the bad flavors.

How to Pluck a Duck: For all ducks that always taste good (where we live, that's generally pintail, greenwing teal, mallard and wigeon; spoonies and gadwalls can be iffy).

How to Gut a Duck: Part two of the process you begin with plucking.

© Holly A. Heyser 2011

Bling! What to do with a banded dove

Dove season starts Wednesday, and I think most of us hunters would be thrilled just to get a limit of these tasty little birds.

But what if you get a little extra somethin' somethin' in your bag, a little bling on the bird's leg?

That's simple: Report it! Just read the number off the band (you'll need reading glasses if you're over 40 like me), and report it at reportband.gov.

Hundreds - if not thousands - of volunteers all over the country spent their summer trapping and banding mourning doves so that we can learn more about these birds. The data we collected when we trapped them was only the first part of the equation - when and where the birds meet their end is when all the data comes together, but only if the band data gets reported.

If you're really lucky, you may get a reward band, which gives you cash for reporting it. We haven't put reward bands on doves in California for four years, but while most doves live short lives, it's entirely possible that some will live four or more years. (We learned during our banding training that someone once recovered a 32-year-old banded dove - astonishing!)

So, what else should you do with your banded dove? Eat it, of course!

I know a lot of people like to breast out their doves, but I strongly recommend dressing them whole, which takes about 2.3 seconds per bird, so you don't waste a bit of that tasty meat. (Really, the legs are the best part.)

To dress a dove, pluck the body and legs, clip off the head and wings with kitchen shears, clip off the tail to open the body cavity, then insert two fingers to scoop out the innards. Rinse, and you're done.

To cook them ... well, you know me, Boyfriend does all the cooking in our house, so I recommend you click over to his dove recipes.

My favorite - shown in the photo here - is Grilled Dove a la Mancha. The short version is that you salt the bird, stuff the body cavity with bay and sage leaves, paint the skin with bacon fat, grill, paint some more, dust with smoked paprika and serve (click through to the recipe for complete details). It tastes so good you'll never want to breast out this little bird again.

Have a great season!

© Holly A. Heyser 2010

The meat I miss the most

When I first started hunting, I still used to buy all kinds of meat at the store. I needed to - it's not like I was actually hitting many ducks that year.

But at the end of my first duck season, I read The Omnivore's Dilemmaand was so horrified by what it revealed that I resolved to do everything possible to avoid buying industrially-farmed meat.

When we buy meat for home consumption at all (which we rarely need to do because we have so much wild game), we buy pastured animals, usually pork, often just the fatback so Boyfriend will have enough fat to make wild-game sausage.

But that leaves a gaping hole in our inventory: chicken.

I don't care what anyone says: Pheasant - even farmed - is not as good as a nice fat domestic chicken. And no, nothing else out there - not rabbit, not squirrel, not anything - tastes like chicken. Chicken tastes like chicken. And chicken that's been allowed to eat real food - bugs and grass, in addition to "feed" - is the best-tasting chicken of all.

So I was overjoyed when I found that my friend Carina - formerly editor of California Waterfowl magazine - had returned to her family farm to start an organic/free-range farming operation with a friend, and their first product would be chicken.


Carina was on the same airplane to Baja that Boyfriend and I were on two weeks ago, and that gave us the chance to catch up on her operation. The organic feed that supplements bugs and grass was ridiculously expensive, she told us, and the price of her first chickens was going to be steep: $5 a pound.

"I'll buy one," I said without hesitating. Lord, if the only way I could get chicken like that is hunting, I'd pay way more than $5 a pound for the opportunity to hunt one.

I also offered to do photography at her farm from time to time, and it just so happened that this past Wednesday would be my first opportunity: They'd be slaughtering their first batch of chickens. I could shoot photos to my heart's content and come home with a fat, juicy chicken. It was totally worth having to set my alarm for the first time since summer vacation began.

With help from some friends and fellow young farmers in a neighboring town, Carina and her partner CarolAnn had a pretty good little operation: There was a stand with four cones for the killing (more on that in a bit), a pot (turkey deep-fryer, actually) of hot soapy water for dipping, a home-made plucker to speed a tedious process, a table for evisceration and cleaning, and two barrels full of icy water for cooling.

Here's how it went:

Almost all of it was fun to photograph (and no, I did not help - I just spent $1,500 that I didn't have on a new cameraand I'm not going to get fat, soap or guts on it).

Did you notice I said "almost all of it"? The killing was actually really hard to watch.

It's worth noting here that the first animal I ever watched being slaughtered was a backyard chicken my family had when I was a youngun in the tony Southern California town of Thousand Oaks (before we'd gone totally feral and moved to the country). We were raising chickens for eggs, and the rooster - Henry VIII - had become a problem. He attacked me when I went in the chicken pen, and I had big long scrapes down my back to prove it. That and a couple other incidents convinced my folks that it was time for him to go.

Dad took him out of the pen, laid his neck across a chopping block and whacked his head off with an ax. Because the saying about a chicken with its head cut off is true, blood was flying everywhere, and a headless chicken was running around our yard.

I cried. It was pretty upsetting.

But Mom made chicken pot pie that night, and oh my God it tasted amazing! We raised a lot of animals for meat after that - more chickens, rabbits, pigs - and I never cried again. In one brief lesson, I was shown the connection between animals, death and food.

At Carina's farm, they were using a different - and vastly preferable - method of killing. You turn the chicken upside-down in a cone so only its head sticks out. Because it is held close and the blood is rushing to its head, the chicken calms down. Then you find the vein in its neck and cut it (you actually stick the knife through the neck to sever veins on both sides) and all the blood - and life - drains out of it. Generally, the chicken doesn't even squawk because a sharp knife does its job well. And because it's held in a cone, there's no running around spraying blood all over everything in sight.

I'd say the chicken is dead in about a minute, which in my world of hunting is like a quick death from a heart/lung shot. I can only hope to be so lucky as to have my life slip away that quickly when my time comes.

But damn, it is really hard to watch. Unlike in hunting, where the animal is usually some distance away, you get to stand there inches away and watch it die. Because I am a pretty emotional and empathetic person, I always put myself in the shoes of a dying animal, and it was the same with these chickens. And because I feel the obligation to take personal responsibility for the meat I put on my table, I felt it would be wrong to turn away. So I watched.

Ethan - one of the brothers from the nearby farm who helped with the operation - apologized to each chicken before he stuck the knife through its neck, and that comforted me. I and so many hunters I know do the same thing when we must finish off an animal at close range. And when I reviewed my photos from that day, I found that Ethan's expression in most of them was a grimace. It is not a pretty business.

So why do we do it? Because we are omnivores. We are blessed with huge brains that have allowed us to hunt and farm animals. Animal meat nourishes us, just as our human bodies will feed a multitude of plants and animals when we die. It's simply the cycle of life.

(And if you want to read a really great book on this topic, I can recommend The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainabilityeven though I'm only on the second chapter. Hats off to Tovar Cerulli at A Mindful Carnivore for mentioning this book - it's riveting reading that's keeping me up late at night.)

But is that really why we do it, or is that just the 30,000-foot view? Are we all sitting around singing cycle-of-life songs when we slaughter chickens? Hell no. We do it because chickens are good food. I doubt any of us would go to the trouble or grief if chickens didn't taste good.

At the end of my morning on the farm, I asked Carina to pick out a chicken for me and I handed her $24. I was proud to be her first buyer.

"How do you want me to cook it?" Boyfriend asked when he saw what I'd brought home.

"Roasted," I said. Like wild ducks, chickens are so inherently delicious that salt and a hot oven are all that's needed to bring out the best in them.

That bird tasted unspeakably good, way better than the industrially-farmed chickens I'd been buying until my Omnivore's Dilemma conversion.

The funny part was that Boyfriend and I weren't the only ones who thought so.

It used to be that whenever we roasted any kind of bird in our house, Boyfriend's cat Paka would go wild. She loved roasted bird, and she always circled the dinner table like a shark when we'd eat one.

Ever since Paka died in March, that just wasn't happening in our house anymore. My sweet little cat Giblet prefers Fancy Feast, and her tough indoor-outdoor sister Harlequin would rather just go outside and kill her own bird.

But something about this bird made my little Giblet go all crazy and do something she'd never done before:

I loved the intense, mesmerized look on her face so much that I took several photos before reminding her that cats are not allowed on the table.

But I totally understood her reaction. I love chicken too.

© Holly A. Heyser 2010

America's obsession with breast meat

I once had a co-worker who was kind of psychotic about food. Obsessed with being rail thin, the only meat she would eat was chicken, and the only part of the chicken she would eat was the breast. Skinless, of course.
She was a sick puppy, for sure. But in reality, her diet was just an extreme manifestation of America's bizarre obsession with breast meat. And it wasn't until this fall, when Boyfriend went on an upland-bird-cooking spree, that I realized just how bizarre it was.

Here's what got me thinking:

Turkish roast pigeon - click here.

Roasted pheasant with prickly pear glaze - click here.

Roasted grouse - click here.

Grilled dove a la mancha - click here.

Looks good, eh? Yeah, I know, I eat well.

But that's not the point. This is: Every time we dug into those upland birds, no matter what species it was on any given day, we took special note of how incredibly delicious the legs were - that's always where you found the biggest, richest flavors.

None of the breasts was bad, mind you. But the truth about these birds' breast meat is inescapable: It dries out easily, and even if you can keep it moist, it never has as much flavor as the legs. (Be honest with yourselves, hunters - how often do you eat breasts alone without bacon on them? That's what I thought.)

And these upland birds were all just the wild cousins of the domestic birds that are popular in American cooking - chicken and turkey. The domestic versions follow the same principle, only with more fat and less flavor.

So why do Americans gravitate to breast meat? While we do have a long history of favoring white meat, the current obsession has a lot to do with fat. In the 1990s, we saw that we, as a society, were too fat and plagued by way too much heart disease, and we decided animal fat was one of the big reasons.

Yo, drop that chicken thigh, Fatty! Try that boneless skinless chicken breast - it's way lower in fat.

So, in classic style, rather than just eat a little less and exercise a little more - which is almost always the correct answer - we went way overboard. We became obsessed with turkey and chicken breast meat, thinking that putting it on our plates would be our salvation, both in the mirror and in the doctor's office.

Demand for those cuts is so high that we breed our domestic poultry to produce enormous breasts. Chickens sometimes have a hard time walking under the weight of those breasts. Domestic turkeys' breasts are so big they can no longer breed naturally - artificial insemination is the only thing keeping them going as a species.

I mean, check out the turkey on the cover of this cookbook, which was originally published in 1940. Go ahead - click on it to see a larger version. When's the last time you saw breasts like that on a domestic bird?

Because consumer demand is tilted toward breast meat, we actually ship a lot of the other chicken parts overseas because they just don't sell as well here (check out this Meatpaper article on the subject).

And you know what this whole business is? It's dietary self-flagellation. We must deny ourselves flavor in hopes that it will somehow make us more perfect people. And it's bullshit.

I know from experience. I bought into this craze for a while and went on a pretty extreme low-fat diet in which chicken breast was the dominant (but not the sole) meat. Between that diet and a rigorous exercise regimen that included sometimes three tae kwon do classes a day, I was able to get pretty skinny. So skinny that my guy friends frequently told me, "Holly, you're too skinny."

After a few years of that, I finally decided there was more to life than being rail-thin, so I resumed eating food that actually tastes good. Chicken thighs started creeping into my grocery cart. And pork shoulder.

When I started hunting, it got even better. When you shoot a whole animal, you eat the whole animal. Lots of species, lots of different cuts of meat. Suddenly, there was little need to buy any meat at the grocery store.

Yes, I gained weight. But my weight and body mass index are all in the normal range, and despite eating all the meat and animal fat I want, my cholesterol levels are outstanding.

And food is once again a joy, not just one of several bodily functions that must be performed to stay alive.

I still eat breast meat. In fact, when I bite into a roasted upland bird, I often eat the breast meat first because it's easiest to get to. And because I'm saving the best - the leg meat - for last.

Which brings me back to the photo at the top of this post, which I had to buy from iStockphoto because I don't have anything like that in my house. I literally cringe when I look at those two pale, fat-free, flavorless blobs of meat, and I pity the people whose diet revolves around them.

I know not everyone can eat as well as I do, with a diet rich in flavorful wild game and a boyfriend who cooks like mine does. But it makes me sad that with all the choices they do have in the grocery store, so many people go straight for the least satisfying one. If someone told me that was only meat I could eat for the rest of my life, I'd probably go vegetarian and eat tofu. The flavor's just about the same.

© Holly A. Heyser 2009

A blogger, a chef, a wild duck dinner

As many of you know, Boyfriend is one amazing cook, and somehow he found himself in a friendly competition yesterday with Sacramento Chef Michael Tuohy in an Iron Chef-style wild duck cookoff at Tuohy's restaurant, Grange, located in the Citizen Hotel in downtown Sacramento.

They each prepared five dishes from wild duck that Boyfriend and I supplied, and a panel of judges devoured and evaluated them.

The icing on the cake is that the ducks won, hands-down. After the wild-duck cookoff, Chef Tuohy and Boyfriend prepared a prix fixe dinner of domestic ducks (because you can't sell wild ones) modeled after many of the competition dishes. Ten percent of proceeds from that dinner - which was packed - went to California Waterfowl.

My job was just to take pictures, which was about all I was up for because I have a stupid cold. You can check out the slideshow below. I'd love to write more about this, but my Nyquil is calling me. If you want to read a more complete tale - and yes, Boyfriend came away with some good stories, like the horrible thing that happened to a cart full of food - you'll just have to check out his blog.

One last thing, though: This was the kickoff for Grange's new program: Bring your wild ducks to Chef Tuohy 48 hours in advance and he'll make you a gourmet meal out of your own birds for $75 per person. Being a regular customer at Grange, I can tell you you'll get your money's worth. If you're interested, give 'em a call at 916-492-4450.


© Holly A. Heyser 2009

Meat is bad for you? Oh YEAH?

I spend a lot of time reading what anti-hunters say about hunters - particularly those who would like to see the whole world go vegetarian or vegan - and one of the most common arguments they make is that meat is bad for us. You know, all that stuff about heart disease and high cholesterol and clogged arteries.

My response is always that it's not meat in general that causes those maladies, but factory-farmed meat that's high in fat - and low in the kinds of nutrients you get from animals that eat a natural diet of real food, not stuff scientifically formulated to make them grow as quickly as possible.

Well, for a couple years now, I've been eating a diet in which the vast majority of the meat comes from wild game or pastured animals.

Beyond being choosy about where my meat comes from, I exercise very little restraint in my diet. I used to be into low-cal and low-fat, but living with a guy who cooks as well as Boyfriend has killed that. So, I eat what I want. As much as I want. Without counting calories or fat grams or any of that crap.

This has coincided with becoming such a busy person that I can't exercise as much as I used to. Old days: five or six days a week, religiously. Now: one to three days.

I weigh more than I used to, for sure. I used to look, uh, pretty emaciated. Now I look fairly human. Which means I can't be a model. But there's not a big market for 44-year-old models, so who cares.

But what about my health? Whenever I got blood tests in my low-cal, high-exercise days, they always came out great. But what would they look like with a higher-calorie, lower-exercise regimen?

I got the answer today: Freakin' terrific:


Total cholesterol: 182, which the American Heart Association calls "Desirable" - the best rating you can get.

HDL (good) cholesterol level: 76, well above the score of 60 that starts giving you protection against heart disease.

LDL (bad) cholesterol: 97, which the American Heart Association calls "Optimal" - the best rating you can get.

Triglycerides (a form of fat): 45, which as far as I can tell is insanely low. AHA says "normal" is anything less than 150.

I repeat: I do not exercise much restraint in my diet. In the week before I took this test, I had a big fat grilled cheese sandwich with French fries, three slices of pizza, a donut and a Whopper. It was an unusually fast food-laden week due to some extraordinary circumstances (we had a homicide on campus, and I'm the faculty adviser to the campus newspaper - to say we were in crisis mode would be an understatement).

But even in a normal week, I don't shy away from animal products normally considered verboten if you want to pass your cholesterol test. We have a fat collection in our fridge - rendered wild duck fat, pheasant fat and pastured-pork fat. We cook with that stuff all the time. I frequently cook rice with a big dollop of one of the above.

So, to all the militant vegetarians/vegans who tell me I shouldn't hunt because meat is bad for me, this militant hunter has one thing to say to you: You're wrong.

© Holly A. Heyser 2009

Doves: The First Feast of Fall

What's not to love about dove season? It's your first bird hunt of fall. You get to hunt with lots of friends. And if you actually hit any doves, you get to eat one of the yummiest birds around...

Mmmmmmmmmm. Food. Read more...
If you're looking for dove recipes, I should direct you to this article I've got in the Sacramento Bee today - it has three tasty recipes with it. This story was actually part of the Sept. 3 Fall Hunting Preview package I worked on, but it didn't fit in last week's paper so they ran it in today's Food & Wine section. And it turns out that's appropriate, because I really focused on dove as feast.

I've got a couple more links to dove recipes below, but can I just say first that I am thrilled to report that I FINALLY got some doves this weekend? Yeah, it's only my THIRD SEASON of dove hunting. The first season, I couldn't hit anything. The second season there weren't many doves flying by the time I got out, so I didn't find out if I was capable of hitting them yet. My opener last week was the same.

But then I went to Michael's Native Hunt ranch near King City for his annual Labor Day dove hunt and feast. Even though dove season started Sept. 1, Michael didn't let anyone hunt the birds before Labor Day, so it was as good as having a second opener.

Everyone was saying the dove flight wasn't as good as it had been in previous years, which I've been hearing from people all over the state. But it was good enough for me to get lots of opportunity to shoot, which is important with such fast-flying, hard-to-hit birds.

I was a little nervous, being the only chick out in the field. I didn't know if I could hit doves, and I didn't want people to think, "Oh, she shoots like a girl." But it turns out I shot better than, oh, a lot of the boys in the field that day. I brought back six, and Fabio, the Italian gentleman hunter I'd partnered up with, complimented my shooting. A lot. God, I love Italian men.

Unfortunately, I also lost a discouraging three doves because we were set up next to a deer fence, and anything that sailed over it was inaccessible.

Well, almost anything. When we were done for the morning and everyone was sitting around on trucks and ATVs, I looked on the other side of the fence and spotted a dove in the bulldozed firebreak. Dead. Ten feet from us.

We bemoaned our bad luck, and then moved on in the conversation. But we kept coming back to it. It was driving us nuts seeing that bird out of reach.

One guy - Martin - said if he were younger and more agile, he'd hop the fence for it. I told him that such youthfulness had more to do with stupidity than with agility. And within 10 minutes, he was looking for a way to get over that fence. God, I love men.

But he realized that an 8-foot fall would be bad for a 50-year-old man, so he gave up.

We sat there joking about getting some duct tape and taping sticks together to try to drag the bird our way.

Then another guy, Eric, spotted a big, long pine branch that had fallen from a tree. About 10 feet long. He started ripping twigs off of it, then poked it through the fence wire.

Almost... almost. The branch tip stopped about two inches short of the dove.

"Push on the fence!" someone yelled.

So two of us leaned hard on the wire to extend his reach, and I'll be damned if Eric didn't hook that bird. We got it!

I know nothing in nature goes to waste, but I want to retrieve every animal I shoot, because the point of shooting them is eating them, not just watching them lie dead and waiting for the insects to find them. This dove probably wasn't mine - it wasn't close to where I was shooting - but it made me feel better knowing we'd made the effort to retrieve it.

Now, it's all about the eating.

Back at the lodge, Boyfriend was cooking up the doves that hunters brought in, with his incredible - and not difficult - Grilled Dove a la Mancha recipe.

I can't tell you how many times that morning I heard people gushing that this was the best dove they'd ever eaten.

Back at home, Boyfriend got a little more freaky and decided he wanted to work with a theme: doves with their future neighbors (quail eggs). Here's how that came out:

Doves on toast from Hunter Angler Gardener Cook

Yeah, that was insanely good.

Click on the link below the photo for the recipe, or click here to see what he wrote about making that dish. Click here to read about what he whipped up last week - Doves on Feed (dove served over a bed of farro, which is a grain that doves would probably love to eat). Or just click here for all his dove and pigeon recipes.

Dang. Now I'm getting hungry again. God, I love my man!

© Holly A. Heyser 2009

Cooking: How to flatten a duck for the grill

OK, I know it's not duck season, but it is grilling season, and I'm betting all you dedicated duck hunters still have a few tasty morsels in your freezer.

If you're like us and you dress your ducks whole instead of breasting them out, you know that a big round object doesn't always cook evenly on the grill.

But there's an easy method for flattening the duck. How easy? Check out the audio slideshow I produced for Delta Waterfowl Magazine's WebXtras - it's the first in a series of four at that link.

The slideshow shows still photos of Boyfriend demonstrating the technique, while he narrates to explain what he's doing. Enjoy!

© Holly A. Heyser 2009