STRANGEST DISH YOU EVER ATE... (Something rarely found on a restaurant menu)

[PufPuf23]

100. Wild Game Feed

I worked for the US Forest Service from 1969 to 1985 and on one of the Ranger Districts an annual event was the Wild Game feed which had a strong element of one up man ship in preparation and actually eating. Plus lots of alcohol drinking.

So there were specialties like (fresh) road kill skunk, Digger (squirrel) and dumplings, roast porcupine, and deep fried and battered rattle snake as well as a traditional game barbeque and roast.

My grand parents had a hunting and fishing lodge for 40 years and as a child I ate things like bear and panther steaks and sturgeon prepared for clients.

When I was a young teen, I shot a number of robins than headed, gutted, and de-feathered and put in tinfoil in freezer. When I had gathered a bunch my Mom used them to make robin spaghetti. My Mom was the instigator in relating her being paid by an Italian neighbor to hunt robins when she was my age then (11-12).

I haven't hunted since age 17 but a supposed delicacy that I partook but never liked was fresh killed deer liver. Yuck.

I have eaten Indian style lamprey eel (not really an eel but a fish) and they nauseate me.

I know maybe 15 types of wild mushrooms (some not the most obvious) to gather but now only gather and eat matusake and morel. I have some old recipes of Mom and grandmother for preserving and pickling less obvious varieties that I have never used.

As a youth, I fly fished for introduced bull frogs (to eat their legs) in our pond and caught crawfish in the local creeks with other young friends. We would cook them on a campfire just like we did trout.

My exe ordered a calamari specialty of the night at a restaurant in Venice and it was a mid-sized whole calamari and the body was stuffed with baby whole calamari and she was distressed. The same trip we were in a nice restaurant in Paris and I ordered the fish selection of the evening and she ordered the (horse) steak not knowing it was horse. I knew some French and wanted to sample and I did not tell her she had eaten horse until after the meal. The French are very good in the kitchen.

I used to be up for about anything sushi.