I've been tagging along hunting with my family and friends since I was eight years old. Over twenty years later I still hunt waterfowl, wild turkeys, deer, and small game whenever I get a chance. "Get Out & Go Hunting" combines my two passions, hunting and writing about hunting. Hope you enjoy it, and if you like what you read, please subscribe to have posts delivered to you via e-mail or feed reader.
This short and sweet story first appeared on www.hunttrapoutdoors.com in February, 2018. You can also follow our guest writer Jordan from Hunt Trap Outdoors on Instagram here and on Facebook here.
6:30 a.m. – A loud gobble erupted from a close distance, “Run and Gun” would be my only chance to bag a tom for the day.
I approached the field where the nearby gobble came from and was quickly immobilized by six grazing deer. I feared getting too close may spook them.
While debating my next move, two turkeys appeared on top of the knoll. I quickly doubled back and slipped through the bush. There was some cover midway on the field’s edge, I was hopeful it would put me into position. As I approached the cover – a longstanding lumber pile, I slowly poked my head up over the weathered lumber pile and to my surprise, the boss tom had already made his way to the middle of the field. I quickly sat down and delivered a few box calls.
He continued to make his way to the corner of the field, at first glimpse I could see his fan of tail feathers before his body came into full view over a small rolling hill. My silhouette now glued to the weathered lumber pile, shotgun ready – I let a few mouth calls out. At 45 yards, with his interest fastened on the second turkey, I was confident he wasn’t going to move in any closer. I realized my opportunity to harvest this tom was soon to fade away.
With the bead of my shotgun fixed for a kill shot, I squeezed the trigger and confronted him with a face full of Winchester pellets, before flopping around on the ground, he was down! One of the quickest stalks I have ever made on a turkey – what a rush! Six years had passed since I last entered the turkey woods – a great looking tom, terrific come back and one for the memory bank!
A great Ontario wild turkey for our guest writer. Photo courtesy of HuntTrapOutdoors.com
Sadly, and as discussed previously in this forum, for many hunters Canada Geese have a terrible reputation as waterfowl table fare. Far and away most people laud the specklebelly and they salivate for plump roast canvasback as the pinnacles of goose and duck meat respectively. Sandhill cranes, if only they were legal to hunt in Ontario, are apparently the finest game bird you can consume, but I haven’t yet had the pleasure.
But as for the common Canada Goose, I’ve prepared it stewed and simmered, while other times I’ve slathered them in jalapenos, cream cheese, and bacon, such that the goose is merely a vehicle to carry the other ingredients. We’ve made pulled goose sandwiches regularly in waterfowl camp, and our group recently started grinding goose breasts and bacon together to make sausage patties for breakfast sandwiches a.k.a. “McHonkers”. This says nothing of the countless pounds of pepperettes we churn out and consume annually. All good preparations, but also all aimed at “using up” the birds and mingling them all in with other ingredients.
I ask you “Where is the goose?”
So, I get it, I’m strange. I harvested and fried up goose hearts this fall, while my compatriots looked at me suspiciously. I turned down part of my share of pepperettes this year in favour of taking home a pile of goose breasts and legs, while more than one shooter in our group remarked about me eating the ‘trash birds’. But, at the end of the day I really do like the taste of a Canada Goose. If they are migrators with a layer of corn-infused fat on their breasts, then all the better.
To that end, here is a simple goose recipe I cooked up for myself over the holidays. With some degree of modesty, it was pretty much the best goose I’ve ever eaten, and it will just keep me coming back for more, instead of skinning and portioning all the birds for the grinder.
Be sure to score the breasts, so that some of that tasty goose fat can render off.
Ingredients & Preparation
Pan-Seared Goose Breasts
2 Canada Goose breasts, skin on
Salt & Pepper to taste
Preparation
Preheat an oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit
Ensure the goose breasts are at room temperature and are patted dry with a paper towel
Score the skin in a cross-hatch pattern.
Season the breasts with salt & pepper thoroughly.
Add the goose breasts to a pan, skin side down, and turn the burner on to medium heat.
Sear the breasts until the skin is brown and crisp. I find this takes eight to ten minutes depending on the size of the breast and temperature of the burner. To get an even sear I like to ‘press them’ with a heavy pan, otherwise the ends of the breasts curl up and don’t get as crispy. Watch the breasts closely, because if they burn, they are essentially ruined.
Turn over the breasts and place the pan in the middle rack of the oven for 10 minutes until the meat is medium-rare to medium. If you feel it needs more time to reach your desired level of done-ness, I recommend keeping them on the heat until you are comfortable, but over-cooking will make them chewy. This is also a good time to add any additional salt, pepper, or seasoning that you may want to freestyle onto the skin side (I prefer a bit of cayenne pepper, but that’s just me).
Remove the breasts from the pan and rest them, skin side up, on a cutting board for five to ten minutes.
Be sure to keep the goose medium-rare at the very most.
Raspberry Balsamic Sauce
½ cup raspberry jam
3 tbsp balsamic vinegar
1 tbsp Dijon mustard
Preparation
Mix the mustard, jam, and vinegar in a small mason jar and shake vigorously until mixed well.
If this is too thick, use a small amount of warm water to thin it out to the desired consistency.
Serving
Once rested, slice the goose breast into strips, skin side up. Drizzle a generous amount of the glaze over the goose. The sauce is tangy enough to cut through the very rich goose. I had this with over the holidays with some roasted brussels sprouts and spicy, sunny-side-up egg, but this goose breast goes well with pretty much anything.
I just about go crazy when I read bad press about Canada geese as table fare. We’ve posted a recipe earlier for a simple way to use early-season goose breasts, and we’re back with a great way to take care of those tasty, overlooked goose legs. Butchering the legs off a goose could not be easier: After opening up the bird to take the breasts out, just keep peeling back the skin off the legs all the way down the scaly black skin on the feet. Then push the legs backwards against the ball joints until they pop out. Then using a sharp knife cut around the ball joint and get the thighs and drumsticks to pull out. Lastly, cut the foot off at the knee joint or, alternately use some heavy snips to simply cut through the leg bone and remove the feet.
Once you have the legs they can be roasted, braised, or grilled. Our preferred method though is in a slow cooker, where the meat literally falls off the bone and can then be shredded and used much the same as pulled pork.
Oftentimes the legs get left behind because people fear they’ll be tough and sinewy, or they just get added to a grind pile. Although wild turkey legs can be rugged and almost no amount of cooking will thoroughly break down the thick tendons on those big birds, a long time in the slow cooker for goose legs breaks down almost all off the connective tissue, and you are left with tender, moist meat with almost no connective tissue to pick through.
I had a batch of this meat prepared recently and was really craving it one weekend morning. The kids wanted crepes, so once they had their breakfast out of the way, I added some cayenne pepper and garlic to the leftover batter and made a “grown-up” crepe that I then added some pan-crisped goose leg meat to. It’s now my go-to wild game breakfast (with sincere apologies to the goose camp staple McHonker breakfast sandwich, which I also still love).
Slow Cooker Goose Legs
Ingredients
1tbsp olive oil
4 goose legs
Salt & pepper to taste
6 cloves garlic, crushed
1 whole lemon, cut into thin wedges
1 litre of reduced salt chicken broth
1/4 cup rye whiskey
4 bay leaves
Sear the goose legs in a hot pan with the olive oil until brown on all sides. Add the oil and goose legs to your slow cooker and cover with all of the other ingredients.
Ensure the legs are completely immersed in the broth. If the litre of chicken broth does not cover the legs completely add more broth or top it up with hot water.
Put your slow cooker on it’s “longest” setting (mine is 10 hours) and let the whole batch simmer away. Check occasionally and top up the broth if needed to ensure the legs stay immersed in liquid.
Once the time is up, remove the legs to a board and pull all the meat from the bones. I like to use two forks to pull and shred the meat, just as I would a smoked pork shoulder.
This will keep for up to two weeks in the fridge or can be frozen and defrosted for future meals.
Spicy Garlic Crepes
Ingredients
1 cup all purpose flour
2 large eggs
1 cup skim milk
¼ tsp kosher salt
½ tsp cayenne pepper
½ tsp garlic powder
Chopped parsley to garnish
Mix the flour, milk, eggs, salt, cayenne, and garlic powder in a bowl and whisk together until smooth.
Turn the burner to medium heat under a non-stick pan. If there are concerns about the batter sticking, a thin coating of cooking spray will help.
Pour ¼ to ½ cup of the batter to the pan once it is heated and spin the pan to make a thin, round crepe. Cook until golden brown.
Once the crepe sets, flip it over with a spatula and brown the other side.
Set aside in a warm oven and repeat until all the batter is used (makes 4-6 crepes)
Assembling the dish is easy. I take a big scoop of the shredded goose legs and add it to the non-stick pan that I made the crepes in and I cook the leg meat over medium heat until it browns and gets crisp. I added a small amount of olive oil to speed this along. Then I simply put it on top of a crepe, sprinkled the plate with some parsley and then added the condiment of my choice. I experimented with standard BBQ sauce, as well as some home made Alabama white sauce. Both played nicely.
This whole process is admittedly a bit of effort to put together (even though the slow cooker does most of the work), but it is completely worth it. It makes a great dinner on its own, but also stands in as a superb hangover breakfast (just trust me okay?) and when served with a Bloody Caesar, it will cure pretty much anything that ails you.
We shot a lot of geese the other weekend, or as they say in the current vernacular we “made a pile”. In fact, that’s precisely what we did. In the tradition of almost every successful waterfowler since time immemorial we made a pile of dead geese, and we took a photo of it. It is without a doubt a common practice to take such a picture, in fact there are pictures of hunters and dead waterfowl going back for as long as there are photographs. I’ve heard people make a connection between ancient cave paintings of hunting and the act of taking photos, arguing that they share a common ancestry; I’ve always considered that to be a bit of a “reach”.
Regardless, in my advancing age, I’ve developed an increasingly tactful approach with my ‘pile pictures’ in the age of social media. In a pre-social media age, pictures of hunters grinning behind some stacked up mallards or a row of belly-up geese lived in print photo albums, pulled out for the occasional trip down memory lane, and then tucked safely and inoffensively away until the next time. But with the culture of sharing (and some might argue, over-sharing) prevalent, I’ve opted not to subject my non-hunting friends, coworkers, and acquaintances with big body counts on their Facebook, Twitter, and other news feeds. If they want to see that sort of thing, they’ll follow the website pages, and not my personal page. Which leads me to the handful of social media hunting forums I frequent, where I felt I was among brethren. It was there I posted an evening photo showing a tailgate-bending pile of sixty-two geese for their perusal. Just eight birds shy of our 14-man limit, we’d had a truly unforgettable hunt and I was generally, if not a little naively, certain that if there was feedback it would be positive, after all I really enjoy seeing other waterfowlers having success and I’m not shy with my Facebook ‘likes’.
I was more or less right, but one hunter took exception. He likened the photo to ‘market-hunting days’, labelled it disrespectful and twice called the character of myself and my friends (total strangers to him mind you) into passive-aggressive question. He said (I’m paraphrasing) that only through those kinds of interactions could waterfowlers “get better”. Now, it was certainly not metaphorically a mountain nor was it a molehill of chastising on his part, and since I really try not to argue with anyone on the internet I just kindly thanked him for his feedback and apologized in true Canuck fashion for my misreading of his sensibilities. Other hunters had the expected feedback, defending the photo, the hunt, and my responses, which was an unexpectedly pleasant outcome. In the end though, even that it all ended in a surprisingly respectful fashion, it did give me extensive pause for thought.
Because although I won’t stop shooting piles of geese, nor will I likely stop taking pictures of those piles of geese, objective self-assessment is healthy so here’s what I came up with.
The offending photo.
First off, waterfowlers ceasing their ‘pile pictures’ or ‘grip and grins’ or ‘hero shots’ or whatever you want to call them would only be constitute the situation getting “better” if you take as fact this anonymous commentator’s opinion that we are currently in a state that needs some manner of improvement…and I’m not so sure we are in that situation. After all it would certainly not be a faulty argument to state that ‘pile pictures’ give a nod to conservation. There was a time not too long ago when seeing 100 geese in a whole season would have been unthinkable, never mind shooting almost 100 in a weekend. To be certain there are several contributing factors to the current plentiful state of goose populations, and the efforts of hunters and other conservationists are surely part of that equation, so why not reap the bounty? All our geese get processed and eaten, and several recipes have graced this website previously (and more are coming) which would put us on the vanguard of field-to-table culture, and we have introduced many young kids to the tradition, future conservationists and hunters with awe in their eyes while hundreds of geese trade the skies and whirlwind into the decoys. So, excuse my ‘pile photo’ if it offends you, but sorry I’m not really that sorry.
That said, I’m not so pedantic to think that we as hunters should not temper our pride or prowess with an understanding that a whole lot of people don’t like to look at heaps of dead animals. I just hadn’t experienced it with and from other hunters. But such is the world we live in now. After all, just what are we exactly celebrating in this photo? We almost shot a limit, so do pile photos illustrate restraint, proof that we stayed under the legal maximum? Were there hints of vanity or an air of dominance of man over flying beast? Objectively, there probably is a sense of “Look at us and what we did!”, and in the submission to my peers I’d be lying if I said there was not validation sought and gained.
Of course, with every piece of technology now a camera, is it time we re-assess what hunting photos even are anymore. The old saying “photos or it never happened” seems haggard and overused, and more than once I’ve rued the requirement to accumulate images and engagements and that oh-so elusive “content”. There are so many of them, I don’t think I’m out of line to ask if all hunting photos are even celebrations anymore or are they just becoming the perfunctory and ubiquitous by-product of our time?
If I put myself in the mind of this commenter, I have even further questions. For example, in that individual’s eyes what would be the acceptable number of geese or ducks to show in a photo? Would it be zero? If it were to be zero, would that in some way sanitize the hunt or show some elevated level of respect for the birds? As much as I respect the non-hunter viewpoint when expressed rationally and respectfully, at the root of things to hunt is to kill. If we take the kill out of the medium and narrative, why take photos of anything? Why tell any stories? Nay, why hunt? Why anything at all?
Okay, so it got absurdly nihilist there for a moment but I’m back.
This all boils down to the theory I’ve had for years, and written about here clumsily, around what I call the Hypocrisy Line; that nebulous and elusive stage where the things you could reasonably participate in cross the line into the things you find offensive when others do them, but are still okay for you to do for no other reason than that you yourself are doing them and can use rational gymnastics to justify the act. It is the hunting embodiment of “Do as I say, not as I (might) do.”
There absolutely are hunting photos I find distasteful. I once saw a harvested wild turkey in close-up with half of its face blown clean off. That wasn’t for me. I found a photo of a legally-hunted rhino draped in an American flag. I had reservations and a few questions. There has always been something a little off to my eye about shooting and then posing with a lion or a giraffe or a leopard, but that’s a bias of my upbringing more than any deep-seated objection to the act. But in all those scenarios, and the sporadic others I see now and then, I’ve never been so incensed that I took it public with another hunter and their posting.
Because sometimes that’s hunting, warts and all. Also, I refer you to my earlier remark about not arguing with people on the internet.
Anyhow, I debated a bit about the ‘offending photo’ and whether I’d leave it up in the social media group. In the end I did, and I’ve put it in this post too, because if you’re reading this far you’re either very generous with your time for my rambling, or you’re in consensus with me. And if you’re not, that’s fine too; shout at me on the internet if you want.
