Doing Unhealthy Things With Ducks

October 21, 2012 Shawn West Leave a comment

So in the world of blogs, Instagrams, and tweets, I’ve found a disturbing trend afoot…people are actually exercising in preparation for hunting, and they are actually adjusting their diet accordingly to be lean and trim for hunting season. I hear it called “Hunt Fit” and it is appearing in hashtag after hashtag. Now this is all well and good if you are going to go chasing elk or sheep or Rocky Mountain goats at high altitude, but otherwise, to me it smacks of a little too much preparation. Now the hardcore fitness fanatics may instead refer to it as dedication, or motivation, or some other “-ation” and that is fine….I’m not here to disabuse anyone of their right to do whatever it is that they want to do.

But what I want to do is shoot my own dinner and then make it as decadent and over-the-top enjoyable as I can. Because I #HuntFat.

So in that spirit, here is what I did with some ducks that I had on hand two nights ago. I can’t describe how good it was, so I’ll just tell you how I did it and then if you want to try it, you can. This is how I made what I call pan seared duck with mushroom-tarragon cream sauce with a side of mushroom-cumin risotto. I’m not much for weights and measures, so you may want to read this whole thing first and come up with a plan of attack to make sure it all comes together at the same time.

The Risotto:
Take a standard package of sliced mushrooms and simmer them in a pot with some salt, pepper, and four cups of water. Why standard store-bought mushrooms? Because foraging the ones in my suburban backyard seemed like a bad idea. Don’t boil them, just let them sort of become a hot broth. This is the stock for the risotto. I’ll tell you what to do with it later.

Put an 1/8 of an inch coat of olive oil in a pan over medium-low to medium heat and add one diced onion and three minced cloves of garlic. Do not brown these, just keep them moving until they are soft. Once soft add the arborio rice. It absolutely must be arborio rice…why? Because that is what risotto is made of. If it isn’t arborio, it is just a rice dish. But I digress. Add about a large handful of rice for each person you are cooking for. The above measurements for mushrooms, onion, and garlic are based on about three large handfuls of rice. Stir the rice with the onion and garlic until the rice is coated with oil and everything is getting along nicely. Again, don’t brown any of this stuff. At this point I also added some ground cumin because it is kind of rustic and smokey, and I like that.

Take a splash of white wine and throw it in the pan with the rice, onion, and garlic. Not too much, maybe half a glass. Throw some more wine into yourself if you feel it is necessary.

Once the rice is reduced a bit, turn your attention back to the simmering, hot mushroom broth. Ladle a few splashes of it into the pan with the rice and then just simmer it until the rice absorbs it. Once the amount of liquid in the pan starts to get low, throw some more in. If some of the mushrooms you made the stock with happen to fall in, so be it. They’re going to go in there eventually anyhow.

Keep doing this until you either run out of stock (you could top up with equally hot water, but why would you?) or until the dish is creamy, but not mushy. Risotto is funny that way…just keep in mind that you aren’t trying to make rice porridge.

Put in the mushrooms you used for the stock and then add some kind of dairy. I’ve used cream cheese, heavy cream, and all varieties of cheese. Friday night I shredded half a block of six-year-old sharp white cheddar and stirred it through the dish. Parmesan is the standard though.

Once the cheese is melted, I added a bit of chopped basil and then I was very happy with myself.

The Duck:
First things first. Shoot a duck; a couple of them if you can. Do this in advance of starting the recipe.

Take said ducks and pluck them. Skin on is critical to this (in my opinion) so later season ducks with few to no pin-feathers is ideal. Now butcher the ducks, this recipe is just for the breasts so take the breasts of the ducks and get them as dry as possible. Braise, slow-cook, or otherwise love the legs; but that’s for another post.

Pre-heat your oven to 450 degrees. Score the duck breasts (that is cut a checkerboard or cross-hatch pattern in the skin), then put them, skin side down, in a hot pan over medium-high heat. I put just a little bit of oil in the pan to help the browning along. Sear the skin side until it is a deep gold-brown colour, then flip them over. By now, your oven should be heated. Take the pan (did I mention it should be oven safe? Okay now I have.) and put it in the oven for about fifteen minutes. After fifteen minutes take the meat out of the pan and cover it in foil for five to ten minutes.

Slice against the grain into pieces about a 1/4 inch think. Pour the sauce over it.

Wait, you haven’t made the sauce because I haven’t old you how? Right.

The Sauce:
Take the pan drippings from the duck and add a splash of whatever liquid you like. I used white wine (since I had some open) but you could easily use red wine, whiskey, cognac, or any kind of stock (if you have any mushroom stock left, as I did, you could add that too, which I added as well as the wine.) Just add enough to get the brown bits on the pan to dissolve. That’s duck flavour and you do not want to waste it.

Once I had all the brown bits off the bottom of the pan, I added some heavy cream to thicken it and a bit of chopped tarragon. Basil or parsley or oregano would work here too. Or no herbs. Whatever.

Reduce this until coats the back of a spoon (or really reduce it into a near syrup) and add just a bit of butter to make it rich.

Drizzle this over the duck meat, or do what I did and float the duck meat in it. Don’t judge me.

Vegetables:
There are none. Don’t be ridiculous.

Libations:
I served this with a double dram of Forty Creek Confederation Oak Reserve rye whiskey in a nice glass. You’ll drink what you like with it, just make sure it is alcoholic so you can really feel like a debauched, well-fed epicurean.

So there you have it. It might sound a bit too over the top when compared with the simple pleasures of a roast mallard or a smokey stick of Canada Goose jerky, and while those are good too, sometimes it is just nice to really spoil yourself, eat 1000 calories in a single sitting, and not really give a damn about how many sit-ups you’ll have to do in repentance for enjoying the bounty of the hunt.

Because if you are hunting and not eating it, then you are missing out on the best part, friend.

deer hunting, goose hunting, waterfowl hunting

Perfect Moments of the Not-Too-Distant Past

October 15, 2012 Shawn West Leave a comment

As I write this, I’m sitting at Pearson Airport waiting for a flight to Montreal, but I’m really back at Saturday afternoon on the banks of a drizzly beaver pond, cold water dripping off the brim of my hat, straining my eyes for the slightest movement in the faded gray skies that frame the rust, gold, and brown leaves of the treetops. Our group of six intrepid waterfowlers had kicked a few dozen mallards out of this hole on our way in, and we’d been waiting in vain for the last few hours for them to return as they usually do. A misty drizzle became steady rain, and then became a misty drizzle again. Once or twice it outright poured, and all the while a breeze hung around, becoming just strong enough to make the wings on the flapping decoy spin and to ensure that the parts of you that weren’t waterproof got clammy and cold.

Yep, it was a duck hunter’s kind of afternoon. The ducks just hadn’t read the script.

At some point, almost through spontaneous regeneration, six hunters became eight and with nothing flying we just decided to stand around and trade stories and jokes. Some of the boys had just got back from moose hunting, and there was ample entertainment from them. Someone recited the clips from an offensive sound file they had received in an email, and we all laughed. At one point something very funny was said, because I found myself in fits of hilarity while wiping away tears of laughter. It is probably better that I can’t recall exactly what it was that made me break down that way, as I’ve found that airport boarding areas aren’t the wisest of places to begin giggling like a maniac.

Some ducks came in and a few fell, with Tack’s yellow Lab Levi making quick work of the retrieves. Then we went back to standing around and telling stories and lies. We milled around and carried on quiet personal conversations that were punctuated with group laughs. We talked about hunting, baseball, women, new guns, new calls, and decoys. We threw sticks in the pond and then did personal play-by-play as Levi negotiated the decoy lines and the submerged twigs as he fetched them.

Eventually the wind and rain frustrated us enough that we went and wrangled the dekes; with our guns slung over shoulders we headed for the trucks.

Here on Monday, they just called for priority boarding, but my mind barely acknowledges the announcement. I’m in my memories from Sunday, when we went into a puddled grain field with high stubble and good cover in the ditch. Misty fog wisped around, and once again prospects were good for some gunning. Hunkered down in a line we scratched down a drake mallard that came screaming into one of the de facto ponds that were slowly but surely taking over the field; it almost didn’t matter that we missed the other six ducks that were with him. To be fair we didn’t cover ourselves with glory on that performance, but we compensated on a low flying trio of geese that swung wide in the field before winging towards the gap we had left between the two dozen shell decoys. Some clucks, moans, growls, and shotgun reports later, and none of them made their way out of the field. A few more ducks worked the spread, but all high and wary. Pleading comeback calls and raspy chuckles failed to persuade them and after countless circles they lit down in a deep, fast-moving ditch one field over. Our man Hastings went on safari to jump them up, and as his reward he crumpled a brace of them for his game bag. As flocks of dozens and dozens of ducks traded on an increasingly strong wind, the fog blew off but a rain was fixing to blow in. With Hastings stalking the ditches a field over, and with Tack answering nature’s call well up the ditch, it was up to Rory, Dane, Lucas, and myself to work the calls on six big geese that broke away and once again made our fakes. Just moments before we had failed to lure in a group of forty or fifty geese that showed interest, but just weren’t convinced. This group though, were coming in on a wire. Low finishing work on my Tim Grounds Super Mag combined with good calling from Dane on his GK Giant Killer and from Rory on his Doug Schuyler Voodoo Medicine Man sealed the deal and as the birds put their feet down at fifteen yards, we all began sawing away on our pump guns. As two geese winged away we collected the ones that stayed behind and went back to the cover of the ditch. As the rain began to fall we decided to call it a morning and after a picture or two we packed the decoys, weaponry, and our birds back to the trucks. One large breakfast and one superb nap later, We cleaned up the farmhouse, packed up, and began the trek back home. Hours of hunting, laughing, and being out in the wilderness all seemed to race by as we re-told the tales from the hunts, the details compressed in my mind by the fleeting enjoyment of it all.

And now, less than twenty-four hours later I find myself about to put away the laptop and wing my way east into la belle province. The exigencies of career and parenthood will take precedent for a while longer.

But with any luck, it won’t be long until I’m back on a shore or aside a field, hands braced on my 870 Express, waiting for the birds to drop their flaps and put the landing gear down. Like a golfer’s hole-in-one, those perfect moments of the past keep me chasing the next ones.

hunting, lists upon lists

Personal Failings

September 25, 2012 Shawn West Leave a comment

So.

I’m not going to turn this blog into some sort of confessional, there are plenty of blogs like that out there, and I’m willing to bet that a good many of them do it better than I could.

Still, there have been things in life keeping me out of the fields, forests, and marshes, and I’ve been hearing it through my email, Twitter, and from friends about my recent disappearance from the hunting world. And I can only fight back with stilted, painful attempts at humour.

You see, there are a good many things that I am terrible at when it comes to hunting. Sitting still is one of them, and I am certain that this is why I’m a generally unsuccessful turkey hunter, despite what could be argued are marginally above average abilities as a turkey caller. Being observant is also not my strong suit…I’m often day dreaming or humming a tune in my head or trying to come up with the next clever and witty blog post when I should be watching for game, and I have a suspicion that I’d be a better deer hunter if I paid closer attention to the woods around me. My friends, hunting mentors, and so on don’t seem to have these failings and it is a constant source of shame for me, but also has instituted somewhat of a tradition of ‘ripping on Shawn’ which I find both charming and emotionally crippling.

With that in mind, I’m always seeking to upgrade my skills. Since my recent move to a new town sidelined my annual duck opener excursion last weekend, I thought I’d leverage my time at the mall and in the hardware stores to illustrate the ways that I spent the last four days improving my hunting skills, even though I wasn’t hunting.

Lying

Lying is a critical skill for all hunters, and I got plenty of exposure to lying this past weekend. In the hunting world, some common lies that are popular include fabricating what you were doing when you botched a shot, lying about how big (or small) a given animal was, making up the distance of certain shots, or telling your friends that you missed a shot at a running coyote when in reality you hurriedly blazed two shots nowhere near a standing deer because you were surprised and really shouldn’t have been shooting in the first place. In the world I was residing in this past weekend, some of my go-to lies included feigning enthusiasm over bathroom cabinet styles, pretending to be happy to spend nearly a grand on paint, lighting, and tools, and telling people that I didn’t really mind organizing my unpacking and organizing my basement while my buddies had some laughs and shot a pile of ducks and geese. I lie so well now, that I’m considering a career move into municipal government.

Being Silent

While I may not be observant or stealthy, one thing I am good at being (when necessary) is quiet. Of course I can make a whole lot racket on a goose, duck, or turkey call when the mood strikes me, and it is true that I never shut up when I’m with my buddies in the waterfowl blinds (I like to make jokes…so sue me), when sitting on stand alone, silence is simple. I’m also working on navigating the woods more silently as well, and it is coming along. To that end, I got some great practice this past weekend. For example, I mastered the skill of silently slipping away from my wife while she perused paint colours, and I became an expert at not saying a word when my name was called to assist her with painting the hallway while our son was being a nuisance. Navigating the soul-crushing pandemonium of Bed, Bath, and Beyond will hone any hunter’s ability to move silently and swiftly through narrow, constricted spaces. I feel the effort put in now will serve me well come November.

Decision-Making

Being decisive is so important to hunters that it is second nature to many. Take the shot or don’t? Left-hand trail or right-hand trail? 12ga or 20ga? Go the toilet in the woods or hold it? These are all vital decisions that require timely and committed decision making, and sometimes in the hunt these decisions figure themselves out. In the dog-eat-dog world of moving and home improvement, there are decisions that carry as much (or maybe more) gravity, and none of them are going to sort themselves out. Ivory Palace paint for the living room or Currier Cream? Does the TV look good in the corner or should we hang it over the fireplace? Should we hang the mirror here or there? Gas line BBQ or propane? You see how intense it could be. For those who say that hunting decisions are more important because they can be life-or-death has never tried to tape and paint trim with my wife.

These are but a smattering of the skills developed this past weekend that will no doubt make me a more lethal and efficient predator in the woods. If I could only find a way to apply my skills of procrastinating when it comes to blog updates or of alienating self-proclaimed ‘serious’ hunters, there would be no stopping me. But at least not showing up at the camp gives my buddies more ammo to torch me with the next time we get together, which should be in about two weeks’ time.

Right after a friend’s wedding next weekend and only once I get my pesky guest bedroom in order…

deer hunting, goose hunting, hunting, turkey hunting clothes

Shotgun Memories

August 28, 2012 Shawn West Leave a comment

It is always in the home stretch before a hunting season that I get all nostalgic about hunts gone by, and this year is no exception. Some time ago, my father wrote a piece for the CK Times website (the link is here) about the things he had been privileged to see throughout a lifetime spent in the wilderness. His lifetime is far from over (I hope) and he’s still making memories every year as he heads into his early sixties. I’ve got a significantly longer time to go to even up with the years Dad has been hunting, and given the different paths our lives and careers are tracking on (Dad grew up in a rural village and spent 30 years working for Ducks Unlimited, where his work responsibilities often took him into the wild spaces he loves…I grew up in a mid-sized city and my job often takes me to airports, office high-rises, and business-level suburban hotels) it is unlikely that I’ll ever accumulate the literal decades of time that Dad has been in the woods, fields, and marshes. Since I won’t equal his time afield, I thought I’d at least steal his premise for a post and talk about some of my fondest memories experienced while I was lugging a firearm through the wilderness.

First off, it may just be easier to tell you the fondest memories I have that don’t involve a hunting experience: my wedding, the birth of my two sons, and winning a couple of Regional soccer championships as a teenager. Aside from those, pretty much everything else I hold dear to my mind involves guns, mud, blood, friends, fur, feathers, and the outdoors. But here are some specifics to get you primed for the opening of whatever hunting season is coming up near you.

The very first morning I ever hunted turkeys, the dawn broke exactly how I figured it wouldn’t. My idealistic mind pictured an early morning sunrise, with the glossy feathers of a hefty tom shimmering into view, and the big gobbler stopping in front of me and getting a headful of lead #6s. After all, that’s how every turkey hunting video I had ever seen had run. My experience was significantly different. A low grey sky gave way to misty drizzle, and inside of ten minutes I was soaked in all the places that a hunter hates to be soaked. The seat of my pants was dampened, but my hopes were not. Then I heard it for the first time in the wild, the gobbling of tom turkeys. They were the width of two fields away, and I never got a visual on them but they hammered away in ‘row-row-row your boat’ fashion for fully forty minutes. I was hooked for life after that, and if you haven’t heard a couple of gobblers sound off like that through the fog and the mist, well, you haven’t lived. That morning I even managed to call a tom in, but he obviously hadn’t seen all the hunting videos that I had…he stayed in the woods behind me and never came anywhere near where I could see him, let alone shoot. I had other encounters in the other years since, but that first drizzly, misty, foggy, damp morning sitting on a vest-cushion with wet underpants as I listened to the gobblers do their thing was all I needed to know that I was doing something good with my time.

I had never seen geese side-slipping until my second or third season of hunting them, but the first time I saw it I think I actually shouted some term of wonderment out loud. We were hunting a field in the days before layout blinds, and we were all safely stationed in the fenceline crouched under low shrubs or sitting in tall fringe grasses. A gaggle (to use the term precisely) of geese were winging towards us, but I sensed from instinct that their flight path was taking them beyond us. They were high and they were moving fast. The one-by-one in a pattern that seemed both planned and utterly chaotic the birds began flipping over onto their backs, dropping speed and altitude with every barrel-roll. My young eyes had never seen anything like it and I was in awe of this controlled plummeting. As fast as they dropped in the birds set their wings and the contrast between their rapid descent and the near hovering that they did as they committed to the decoys had me completely bewildered. Someone shouted to take them, and I managed to drop a single goose from the middle of the flock. This was coincidentally one of the last, if not the final, time that lead shot for waterfowl was legal in Ontario so that hunt has some historical significance for me too.

Staying with goose hunting, the first time I had ever heard really, truly proficient calling for any type of game was on a goose hunt. We had set up in a deep ditch in the Ferndale Flats on the Bruce Peninsula (the ditch being the only decent cover) and had put out a dozen or so decoys. After some time, a line of geese on the southern horizon became visible, and they were making for our setup, or at least that is what I thought. At about 200 yards or so, there arose such a sound from the next field east of us that I was sure there was another flock coming. The most true to life clucks, moans, and bawls I’d ever heard drew the attention of the flock from the south and they swung wide of us before setting their wings and dropping to the field on our east side. Six shotgun reports and a few falling birds later it became immediately apparent that a very accomplished goose caller was working the ‘field next door’. So it went for a couple flocks more, and though we managed to score a few birds as they fled the gunfire east of us, it wasn’t the hunt for us that it could have been. But it didn’t matter, at least to me, because my eyes had been opened to a whole new dimension of goose hunting. After the hunt we waited on the side road for the other group, and as it turned out we had been hunting next to a championship-calibre caller: Craig McDonald. He was hunting in the area with his Dad (they had a cottage in the vicinity) and while I was expecting an arrogant ‘professional’ (don’t ask me why) he was exactly the opposite; he was nice and humble and offered a few tips, and he had the nicest truck I’d ever seen to that time. The next week I went out and got my first short-reed goose call, an instructional CD, and started to practice in ways that drove my girlfriend (now my wife) insane. I’ve done a contest or two myself, but I’m still not even close the level of calling that we were treated to that day. Nonetheless, I can pinpoint that hunt as the start of my obsession with game calls. Now my wife knows who she can blame for the soundtrack to her life.

I may have told this story before, but with the early goose season looming, it bears repeating again. On an early goose hunt in 2006 we spent the better part of a very hot September morning rolling hay bales into a makeshift set of blinds on a field that geese had been loafing in during the early afternoons and returning to in the evenings. As with all things in goose hunting, as soon as the bales were setup, we went to get some lunch. Wouldn’t you know it? As soon as we drove off, forty or fifty geese dropped into the field to hang out. We devised a plan of attack and secretly began a broad circle that led to us stalking from hay bale to hay bale until we were within sixty yards of the birds. On a prearranged signal our friend Tack began herding the birds our way. When he was just under a hundred yards from the birds they got up and began to head out. They came our way broadside and a mere twenty feet off the ground. Inside of fifteen yards Rory, my cousin Dane, and I opened up the shotguns; we had to wait that long just for them to provide safe shooting options. I crumpled a bird with my first shot and then missed in the most embarrassing of fashions on my second and third rounds. Dane and Rory both emptied their guns, and Rory managed to re-load and pop two more rounds as the birds put altitude and distance between us and them. Angry at myself such atrocious shooting, I trudged out to pick up my goose. I was dumbfounded to find that I was the only one picking up a bird: my cousin-Dane has a well-deserved reputation for being lethal with a shotgun, and Rory is no slouch either. Yet here we were: eleven rounds spent and one goose to show for it. Dane muttered various curses, exclaiming that he could see the tongues and eyes of the birds, among other things. Rory blamed the soreness in his cheeks from wisdom tooth extractions performed just days before. For once (and probably the only time since) I was able to look smug and bask in some accolades. And the laughs…man did we laugh about that. A while later, just as we were about to call it a night, a big flock came rocking and swinging into our decoys and we all redeemed ourselves, scratching down another eight birds. That day at the hay bales was certainly one for the memories.

One of my fondest deer hunting memories isn’t even of hunting deer. After a long cold day in an early November downpour, we had a sumptuous steak dinner. We ate whipped potatoes, Brussels sprouts slathered in butter, sautéed mushrooms, and perfectly seared T-bones that were big enough to force all the other fixings off your plate. Long after many others had turned in my cousin Luke, my brother Donavon, myself and the camp’s oldest member Frank Sweet turned off the generator, lit up Frank’s old Coleman lantern, and sipped cold beer while we swapped stories. We talked about women, and hunting, and government, and literature, and told entertaining jokes and stories from our lives (although Frank had a significantly larger well of jokes and stories to draw from) while the rain fell on the roof and tinkled against the chimney pipes. I don’t even recall what time we all eventually turned into our bunks that night (and the rain persisted to keep us all in camp the next morning) but I do recall thinking that there was no greater relaxation than just sitting around with the guys telling benign lies to each other, remembering girls we’d loved, and figuring out all of the world’s problems in one go through. I was secretly sorry for those who never had (or never would) experience moments like that, and it was bittersweet to know that it was one of those perfect moments that would pass, and that I would spend the rest of my life trying to re-create it. Frank would be taken away by heart failure the next spring and that just reinforced the fleeting beauty of the times spent in the hunting tradition. The loss of a friend like Frank, while sad, also galvanizes me every year to go out and make as many memories count as I can. And in less than two weeks my friends, my family, and countless others will re-embark on that journey.

Enjoy your journeys as much as I’ll enjoy mine and maybe I’ll see you in the fields.