Thats some good cookin!

You might remember last year I posted a little on some meals we've cooked, I figured today I'd show off a little more, and especially to focus on game meat.

This is wild goose breast with apple/cherry chutney. Angie gets an attagirl for this one. We've got a bunch of goose breasts from last fall that I was a little nervous to cook. A lot of people talk smack about wild goose breasts and I was a little nervous about these but they came out fantastic. The came recipe from the Meat Eater Wild Game Cookbook. The trick, as with most game meat, is to not overcook it. Angie sears the goose breast in a cast iron pan and then finishes it in the oven. She just chucks the whole pan in the oven.

Notice how red the meat is. Wild goose isn't poultry, not like chicken anyway. If you cook it like chicken it'll get that "gamey" flavor that people don't like. Treat it like venison and it'll come out great.

This is Christmas dinner, pheasants from last fall. There were actually two, I'd shot a hen and a cock on the same day

The hen is hard to see in this picture, she was hard to see in the field too.
 

We wrapped one in bacon with no other seasoning, the other got a dose of Vintner's spice which we had gotten as a gift. The Vintner's spice goes really well with game meat, the stronger flavors of the pheasant are complimented. 

The big deal in this meal was that Angie's parents came over. They'd never had pheasant before and really had only ever had a couple meals of game meat. They seemed to really enjoy the different flavors, but really, would anybody say no to something cooked in bacon?

This isn't really a meal but the prep for a meal. I made these meatloafs (meatloaves?) for a lantern gathering last fall. These are half venison sausage, half ground beef. We eat meatloaf pretty much every week and I always do it the same way, it works out great.

Finally, one from last summer:

You might remember these from a video back in 2012, zucchini sausage boats.

Again I used venison sausage, just a quick fry-up that you can see in the pan. I'd scooped out the inside of the zucchinis and fried that with the sausage and some red peppers diced up fine. While that going I pre-cooked the zucchini. It's amazing how much water comes out of a zucchini.

Then put the meat mix into the zucchini, cover it with cheese and grill it for a few minutes, they're delicious and a great way to use up zucchini.

It's a northern tradition!

 You might remember back in 2020 when we picked a bunch of fiddleheads, well we've done it again.

I've written about fiddleheads a few times but as a reminder these are ostrich ferns that have not yet unfurled themselves. We pick them in the Aroostook valley in northern Maine. For best results we kayak down river to spots that are difficult to get to on foot. This prevents us stealing somebody's spot and causing hurt feelings. Back in 2020 we picked and froze 52 quarts which was a record. This year we did 58 quarts, a record I think will hold for a long time.

After picking the fiddleheads need cleaning, some of them have a paper "chaff" on them that will come off in a light breeze, they also tend to have a little grit on them from where they came out of the ground. Both are easily fixed with this cleaning roller. My "Uncle Bunny" (actually he was my grandfather's cousin) made it at some point in the past, nobody alive knows exactly when. He died in the early '90s, so certainly well before that, probably in the 1960s. There is a fan that goes with the unit and blows across the drum but there was enough breeze that we didn't bother with it, sometimes the fan is more work than it's worth.

We decided to process up north and haul home frozen fiddleheads, this is my 413C on water heating duty. In 2020 I said I needed to get my Handy Gas plant up and running and I wasn't wrong. The 413 is up to the job but only just. The red cooler is full of cold water. The fiddleheads go in boiling water for 3 minutes and then into the cold water to stop the cooking process. Then out onto the towel to get the bulk of the water off before going into bags and into the freezer. We really like the zipper style vacuum bags although Angie's folks got us a vacuum food sealer that we might try next year.

We did this all at my aunt and uncle's house in town, it's really handy to have running water.

The freezer at Cushman house was a real convenience. This is half of our take. We initially froze them at the house in town but that freezer already had some food in it so there wasn't enough space for all of the fiddleheads.

With any luck it won't be all that many years before we can process fiddleheads at Cushman house. I powered up the water system while we were there and it made pressure, the same as it did last year. I'm amazed considering the age of the pump.

So anyway, even accounting for giving some away 58 quarts should hold us for a good long time, we've still got 1 or 2 bags of the 2020 fiddleheads and even one more bag of 2017 that I found while digging around in the freezer. The nice thing is that fiddleheads don't really suffer from freezer burn and are still fine to eat even when the freezer dries them out.

Long overdue tractor maintenance

 You might remember my 1952 Farmall Super M:

Pictured here with the '98 Ford 1920

Over the last couple years the transmission in the old Super M has been getting progressively louder, this isn't unusual in a machine with straight cut gears. At this point I've owned the machine going on 20 years and I've never serviced the transmission. Dad thinks it's not been serviced since the 1960s when my great uncles quit farming.

The transaxle holds 13 gallons of gear oil so first I acquired the replacement oil which brings up a fun northern Maine story. It's been a little hard finding 80w90 gear oil in the kind of volume I need so I called up MPG (Maine Potato Growers) who had plenty in stock at the best price I've seen. Dad and I headed over but it turned out the computers were down. Well that's no problem, the guy took dad's phone number and said "I'll call you tomorrow." and that was it, we left with $130+ in oil with the promise that tomorrow we could pay for it...

Anyhow it was with some trepidation that I removed the drain plug:

I was greeted by 11 gallons of tar...

Yeah, 11 gallons out of what should be 13. I hadn't run the machine since November, in retrospect I should have started it up and run it around to warm things up.

With the worst drained out I put in 4 gallons of diesel fuel for a rinse cycle. I drove the machine around the yard a little and drained it again:

That stuff was clear only 20 minutes before

This time 6 gallons came out so I suppose I got 12 gallons of the original crud.

I left it sitting open to hopefully get some more crud to drain. I should probably do another rinse cycle but really with new oil we should be ready for another 50 years.

As an aside the factory recommended drain interval is yearly...

Bismuth, getting ready for duck season

 All of a sudden it occurs to me that I don't appear to have written hardly anything about my recent forays into the world of non-toxic shot.

For those of you not in the know waterfowl (ducks, geese, etc) need to be hunted with non-toxic shot. For most folks that means steel. However steel shot is hard and will damage the barrel of a classic gun. Last year I decided I might like to hunt ducks with my grandfather's 16ga Remington model 31. The old 31 (mine is from 1924) is often regarded as the smoothest pump action gun ever made. They only made them for a few years and mine is the only one I've ever seen.

A 2020 pheasant with the old model 31

16ga is a fun, uncommon, gauge. The advertising used to say "Hits like a 12, recoils like a 20". These days its mostly out of favor but has it's adherents, including me.

So to shoot ducks with the 16 I needed a non-toxic shot softer than steel which brings us to bismuth. The other advantage is that bismuth is more dense than steel which gives it more oomph and better ballistics. The disadvantage is that it's much more expensive...

So last year I ordered a case of #5 loads from Boss Shotshells. This is not a paid endorsement of them, in fact AFAIK they don't do that. While I did get one stud wood duck last year with the 16ga mostly it shot partridge.

I guess tailgate pictures are kind of a thing for me...

Edit: I almost forgot the green wing teal from last fall that I took with the Model 31. That gun logged a great season, 1 teal, 1 wood duck, 13 partridge, one pheasant and a porcupine. Not bad for a gun that's pushing 100 years old.

When I picked up the 16ga ammo I also got 2 boxes of 12ga #4 shot. These are their 2 3/4" "shortie" loads which did pretty well on geese. I didn't have a whole lot of luck with these on ducks. Later I realized that I'd screwed up with the choke. Steel shot doesn't compress much as it goes through the choke owing to the hardness of the steel. Bismuth and lead are much softer so you need a tighter choke to get the same pattern out of the gun.

During duck season last year I noticed a lot of people complaining about finding ammunition, this isn't uncommon during the season, people wait to buy. Last year was worse because of the widespread ammunition shortage. This year I decided that I'd again stock up early.

That's a case of Boss 12ga 3", #5 shot. Should be real good for ducks. Since bismuth is heavier than steel you can use a smaller shot size which gives you more pellets per shot. I went with #5 as a compromise, it should be heavy enough for early season geese but with more pellets should be better for ducks. That case was eye wateringly expensive but as they say "I didn't come this far to miss". These shells should result in a better kill percentage and fewer cripples. I hate the idea of leaving a bird to die later.

The #5s probably won't be good enough on late season geese but we really don't have that much late goose action since the water usually freezes. If I do get a chance for late goose hunting I still have a few #4s from last year and a couple of boxes of steel BB so I'm plenty well supplied.

Finally, for some real entertainment I picked up 10# of bismuth #6 shot. I've got a couple ideas for that, one is to get my first muzzleloader duck. Back in 2017 I tried for a muzzleloader duck and failed. My 2020 and 2021 muzzleloader pheasants (and a 2021 muzzleloader rabbit) were a bit of redemption but I still want a duck. Back in 2017 I was carrying #4s because I didn't realize I could get away with lighter shot, I've learned a lot in 5 years, hopefully this will be the year.

The other thought is to load some black powder cartridges and shoot a fine damascus double. Dad has a bunch of them, these are antique guns that won't hold up to the pressure of smokeless power but will still shoot fine with a proper blackpowder load. A big advantage in a black powder cartridge gun is the ease of cleanup.

So at least from an ammunition standpoint I'm ready for duck season 2022. All that's left is to wait 4 more months...