We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
I have a friend who was a dog handler in Vietnam. He would take the dogs into the jungle, find the caves, then go into the caves. Scary as hell, even with the dogs. Last I recall, he and his wife have two little Shih Tzus.
Because I love the environs where trout are found, which are invariably beautiful, and hate the environs where crowds of people are found, which are invariably ugly;
Because of all the television commercials, cocktail parties, and assorted social posturing I thus escape;
Because in a world where most men seem to spend their lives doing things they hate, my fishing is at once an endless source of delight and an act of small rebellion;
Because trout do not lie or cheat and cannot be bought or bribed or impressed by power, but respond only to quietude and humility and endless patience;
Because I suspect that men are going along this way for the last time, and I for one don't want to waste the trip;
Because mercifully there are no telephones on trout waters;
Because only in the woods can I find solitude without loneliness;
Because bourbon out of an old tin cup always tastes better out there;
Because maybe one day I will catch a mermaid;
And finally, not because I regard fishing as being so terribly important, but because I suspect that so many of the other concerns of men are equally unimportant - and not nearly so much fun.
Robert Traver
A mermaid, or a cougar in a tree? Cougar safely below the fold -
I pulled a few nice trout out of this beat in Connecticut on Saturday:
Here's my recipe:
4 to 6 trout (approximately 1/2 lb. each), 3 Tablespoons lemon juice, 1 teaspoon coarse (kosher) salt (or to your taste), 2 cloves minced garlic (or to your taste), 2 bottles of fine Sauvignon Blanc, 2 Tablespoons Italian parsley, 2 Tablespoons chopped green onion, 2 Tablespoons dry seasoned bread crumbs, 4 Tablespoons melted butter.
Wash and dry trout. Rub the outside of trout with lemon juice and sprinkle with salt. Reserve half the wine (1 cup) into an appropriate stemmed glass.Retain the base wine for step 3.Sample the reserved wine.
Arrange the minced garlic in the bottom of a buttered baking dish that is large enough to hold the trout in a single layer.Check the reserved wine for flavor.
Place trout in the dish and pour the base wine over the top. Double-check the reserved wine.
Sprinkle with parsley, green onion, and bread crumbs. Spoon the melted butter evenly over the top. Test the reserved wine for spoilage.
Ceremonially empty the reserve wine container and bake trout at 400 degrees for 20 minutes.
Makes 4 to 6 servings. Open the second chilled bottle to serve with the fish.
The USA is unusual because wild game meat can not be sold in stores. All "game" meat sold in the US is farm-raised, whether venison, quail, pheasant, duck, or whatever.
That is the correct and righteous legacy of the devastating, 12 month/year market hunting of the past which devastated the seemingly endlessly abundant American wildlife populations.
There is no bird as special for the table as Woodcock, but you have to get out and shoot them yourself. One way to do justice to this diminutive bird (smaller than the European Woodcock) is a ravioli dish I learned from my Cordon Bleu chef friend.
Take a few Woodcock, and cut all of the meat off them - breast, thighs, etc. Chop the meat into roughly 1/2" pieces. Throw in a bowl and mix with a bit of sauteed very finely-chopped shallots and carrots, salt, pepper, a bit of fresh thyme and parsley and a little bit of truffle oil.
Take some wonton squares and brush some whisked egg on the edges as glue. Put a teaspoon or two of the mixture inside, then seal the squares tightly to eliminate any air inside, and place carefully into gently boiling water until done. It only takes a few minutes.
Serve two or three raviolis drizzled with somewhat reduced gibier sauce, with a few shavings of black truffle on top.
Here's the menu for the sort of 1890's-style dinner our Ducks Unlimited commitee serves annually. Our Chef for this special annual Game Dinner was making Rillete de Lapin since he was a kid in France. Yes, it is generally Black Tie out of respect for the chef and/or the host.
What's the deal? Our Ducks Unlimited Committee sells this dinner for twelve for significant bucks (usually $10-20,000 - and worth every penny) in our charity auction, provides the game, helps the Chef, and serves. When lucky, we're invited to join the dinner table. Otherwise, Chef and his sous chef feed us well in the kitchen, and we help consume the wines.
All the host has to do is to light the fire, and buy the wine and ceegars. With all of the loins and breasts, this is one sexy menu, and mighty filling:
Cocktail hour hors d'oevres:
Game terrine, grainy home-made mustard, gherkin slices, and toast
Rillette de lapin, capers, toast
Pate of Wild Duck Liver with cognac, toast
Dinner:
Roast Country Pigeon with green and white asparagus, mache salad, truffle vinaigrette
Woodcock ravioli with celeriac flan and wild mushroom sauce, with Black Truffle garni
Pheasant breast, braised red cabbage, lardons, with cognac jus
Satueed breast of Redhead or Canvasback with wild rice and roast figs, jus de gibier
There are two edible parts of a duck, whether wild or farm raised: the breast, and the leg and thigh.
Some people like to roast the whole bird, but I prefer just to remove the breast and the leg, and then use the carcass for gibier or duck stock.
Duck breasts, generally, are cooked by scoring then searing the skin side in a hot skillet for a few minutes, sizzling the meat side briefly, then roasting at 400 for 5-10 minutes. It should be rare-medium rare. (I once ate a whole raw, warmed Bluebill. Sushi. Wasn't too bad, but a bit fishy. I wanted to take "rare" to the limit.)
Then comes the sauce. Here are a few of my favorite ideas:
4. Emeril does a simple pan roast. Trouble with that for me is the danger of overcooking.
5. I also like a sauce made with a gibier base, with some halved cherry tomatoes and chopped Italian olives and a little vinegar.
Duck legs are another matter, because they are tough and stringy like pheasant legs. Both do very well for confit, if you want to take the trouble. An alternative is to braise the legs. Some ideas:
A reader sent me this pic. Trust me: these dogs are trained. Which reminds me - we need a series on dog training, hunting and regular obedience. It's an important topic, and only the rich farm it out to experts. I have trained my own. For regular obedience, they have been quite good but for hunting they have been a little "difficult." They like the birds too much and behave like children when there is too much game around. My fault.
If you feed a dog, he'll love you. Any dog will snuggle. The training is the deeper connection in which you learn to think like him, and hopefully mostly vice-versa. His work is to anticipate your wishes just as our work is to anticipate our bosses' wishes (but at Maggie's, we try to avoid having bosses other than God).
Any dog can be trained to the whistle and to hand signals. Any human can learn God's hand signals.
It's more shooting than hunting, but it looks like great fun. Friends who have done such shoots come home with sore shoulders but otherwise very happy and well-fed - with no time zone change.
More cool if slightly pricey hunts at GSS. (No, this is not a paid advt. We do no paid ads here but we do plenty of freebies just for fun.)
Interesting bird, the Snow Goose. For one thing, it comes in a blue and white form, and all sorts of intermediate forms, so was long thought to be two species. For another, its population has boomed in recent years such that it is destroying its tundra nesting areas, and so the wildlife managers are essentially begging people to shoot them. They were scarce in the 1970s.
There is almost no real limit on these birds, and it is now legal to use electronic calls to try to bring them into your field decoy spread during the spring Snow Goose season in the midwest. However, as it turns out, hunting makes no dent in their numbers.
When a flock of 100 or 1000 of them descend over your blind into your field decoys on a frigid dawn, it's one hell of an adrenaline rush and one hell of a shooting experience. A literal "blast," and you cannot reload your auto fast enough to keep up with the action of these determined birds who can, at times, seem quite undeterred by the sound of shotgun fire. They go down very easily, compared to Canadas which can sometimes coast or flap for a quarter mile with a fatal wound, which gives a retriever - or a fellow - a good work out.
We say "They go down like a prom dress."
Our Brit cousins would love this shooting - they have, alas, nothing comparable for fun. Neither prom dresses nor Snow Geese. Our good pal Mr. Free Market would have the time of his life.
When 5000 of them decide to chose the seemingly identical barley field adjacent to the one you happen to be in for brainless goose reasons, it is a deeply frustrating experience and there is not a damn thing you can do about it.
A northern Canadian nester, this medium-sized honker is highly migratory across the US, especially in the Central Flyway. It is not unusual, these days, to see them flying over Vermont ski slopes in winter, or on Long Island potato fields.
The causes of the potentially self-destructive population boom are unclear, but may have to do with changes in the agricultural lands on which they winter. I wish I had a decent digital image of the size of the flocks of these birds, capable of truly blocking out the sun, but my best shots are from my pre-digital era, a few years ago. Beautiful, and awe-inspiring but, according to the biologists, a big problem too. They could be wrong; it might just be a natural boom and bust cycle like the housing market.
Being game birds, a word is always in order on cooking, since you must eat what you kill. These geese do not hold a candle to the delectable Canada Goose. The tough breast is best stewed, or crock-potted, and can be quite fine in a cassoulet. But anything is good in a cassoulet on a cold snowy, blowy winter evening, with crunchy garlic toast and a few bottles of Cote Roti and a mountain of powerful stinky French cheeses on the side.
More about Snow Goose at CLO, whence the photo, here.
Our old post on Cassoulet is lost for the moment. Good hearty peasant food, best made with game sausage and game meat of any sort. We once made one with venison sausage, wild boar, and Snow Goose breast.
Every year in midsummer, Bird Dog invites all the Maggie's Farm contributors to gather under the shade of the old hanging tree for the company picnic. It's a veritable kaleidoscope of camaraderie, and Mrs. Bird Dog always has a big supply of road kill jerky and ouzo for everybody. Please note the prevalence of what we like to call Maggie's Farm Gun Safety. The Wikipedia entry for Maggie's Farm gun safety rhapsodizes:
Bird Dog always opens the ceremonies with a rousing "Let me hear your balalaikas (and your AKs) ringing out, come and use your guns free form!" This year, I'm bringing a bazooka, or a bouzouki, or both.
Looking forward to the solstice, Bird Dog. Until then, I'll keep the home sterno burning.
I forget where this fine recipe came from (maybe Mr. Free Market. No, it was The Englishman), but I'd think it would work fine for any game bird except duck, and certainly for chicken:
A Country Squire’s Own Recipe for Roast Red Grouse
Peel the potatoes first thing in the morning as the second cup of tea and Aspirin take effect. Put in a pan with lots of cold water and handful of salt, bring to the boil on the Aga as your bacon and eggs cook. Finish breakfast, ablute and then pour the boiling water out of the pan over your breakfast plate in the sink to clean the eggy stains off. Leave pan lid off for the potatoes to steam dry as you walk the dogs.
On your return, sniff the grouse hanging in the woodshed and pick a couple, or more, of the ripe ones. Do the dirty deeds and return indoors with your fresh plucked grouse.
Rummage in the larder and pull out all the root vegetables you can find. Cut off the grotty bits, put in the hen food bucket (it's legal as long as you don't take them into the kitchen first).
Open up the Sunday paper on the kitchen table and put the vegetables on it; read, cut, slice and swear all at the same time. When finished screw up the soiled paper and use in the bottom of the fire grate.
Open a bottle of red.
Heat a large knob of dripping [fat from roasted meat] in your largest roasting pan until it is smoking, drop in the potatoes, swirl about and sprinkle with lots of salt. A sprig of rosemary can be added on top. Bung in the oven. Pour a glass of wine.
Second roasting tray, butter and oil and put to heat. When you have finished the wine, take out of oven and put the veg in, shake and return.
Your frying pan that you cooked your bacon in this morning should be returned to the hot plate and all that lovely bacony grease heated up. Pour another glass of wine.
Take birds and roll around in hot pan until they are brown and your fingers hurt.
As Agas only fit two roasting trays you will probably now need to add them to the potato tray.
Drink the glass and check how laying the table in the dining room is going.
Your guests should now arrive, have a sherry with them; make your excuse as soon as he mentions his work at the bank, retreat to the kitchen, open another bottle of really meaty red, get all the stuff out of the oven, birds on the carving plate on the table to breathe, veggies in the bowls that were warming in the bottom oven. Splash some wine in a glass to check it and then into the meat roasting pan, pinch of this, spoon of that and your gravy is made.
Take through and carve and let the guests help themselves to vegetables.
My pup is uncomfortable with all of this global warming snow and cold. He lifts his leg, for instance, but cannot get it above the snow - much less get his peeing organ above the snow. He's not a small dog, medium-sized, big enough to grab cheese off the kitchen counter. Our snow is powdery, not crusty, and around 2' deep these days and 5' in the drifts.
As for poops, he seems uncomfortable because he feels he is just pooping against himself, without the satisfying drop of proper elimination.
We wonder what small dogs do, especially little ankle-biters when the snow is over their heads.
Do they tunnel like the famous Snow Mole of the Arctic? Or do they sneak into the basement like I just discovered, to my dismay, that our pup has been doing since all of the big snows?
That's a Savage Model 99 chambered for .308. There is always a good selection of Savage 99s at reasonable prices at Gun Broker.com.It's good to be able to purchase firearms through them: it's an online gun show.
A 100 year-old lever action hammerless design, still going strong although the manufacturing of this rifle ended in the 1990s. Jon Wolfe says:
For hunting North American game, the Savage 99 is still one of the finest hunting rifles of all time. In fact, it was a solid performer well into the later part of the last century, nearly one hundred years after its creation. It was manufactured for nearly a century with over a million rifles produced before the Savage 99 was discontinued due to decrepit machinery and increased cost.
Had a fine New England hunt today with Gwynnie, another pal, and the new pup. We did manage to bag a few birds. This enthusiastic young Lab (only his third real hunt) puts on a good point. I think it would be a shame to train the point out of him, but some folks like a Lab to flush the bird right away.
I meant to re-post this in December. Is it too late?
Red-neck Yankees wear lined overshirts (like the one in the photo, from Moose Creek) much of the year. Few things are more comfortable, and you don't care what happens to them. They keep you cozy at 50 degrees and at 20 degrees - and lower if you are working hard and moving around.
These things are made for outdoor work. You often need to buy them one size up for layering underneath, depending on your personal size range. They look better and feel softer with some dirt and grease on them, and a small tear or two.
If you want to go a bit upscale from that sort of thing, these are always acceptable (even though they are from LL Bean). They are also made with quilted linings like this for colder weather.
Disclosure: Four dump trucks of wool and cotton overshirts were dumped in our Maggie's Farm driveway, blocking all tractor traffic and causing all sorts of problems with the hogs, in exchange for the above post. Please, everybody - Stop giving us free stuff and money! We don't want it! We have enough money and stuff, and it costs money, time, and effort to get rid of excess stuff. Ever try to take a Filson wool cape shirt off a dirty ole 800 lb. hawg who wants to put on airs? Dang.
Here. The Judge is a handy weapon, but the .410 in it might not kill anybody for keeps.
You do not want the bad guys alive to testify at your trial, because they will lie.
Re gun safes, I just don't want my firearms stolen, but I have no idea what good a home protection firearm is when locked in a gun safe. All across this great land, people keep a loaded shotgun handy and hope they never need it for anything other than a rattlesnake.
Best home protection is a cheap pump action 12 ga. Only a semi-pro or pro could kill an intruder with a handgun in the dark, while feeling freaked-out and confused. A 12 ga might damage your possessions but at close range with the right cartouche (Buckshot) it can definitely mess up a bad guy so he will die in the hallway before the cops arrive.
These are not very Christmassy mental images, are they?
Readers know that we are fans of SureFire military and tactical flashlights. They are useful for blinding and illuminating a bad guy, or for illuminating a distant detail - or for finding a fox, beaver or owl at night.
The problem with them has been that the battery drain has been so fast that they were not useful for any regular flashlight use (for which they were not designed anyway - they were first designed to incapacitate and illuminate a human target).
They have now come out with a line of LED flashlights, some of which may not meet the same tactical specs but which have a longer battery life, and still should not be used in anybody's face unless you wish to disable them. A MagLite on steroids.
Also, Insty informs us that Amazon has deals on knives. Practical knives, not the fancy ones. Except when boarding a plane, a guy needs a knife in the pocket.
You can address a curious bear with some confidence when you are a deer hunter and have a firearm on your lap. I'd guess the bear smelled the hunter's breakfast burrito.
Got any Woodock left in the freezer?
Cocktail hour hors d'oevres:
There are two edible parts of a duck, whether wild or farm raised: the breast, and the leg and thigh. 
one thing, it comes in a blue
A Country Squire’s Own Recipe for Roast Red Grouse
Via Insty, 
Red-neck Yankees wear lined overshirts (like the one in the photo, from 
Readers know that we are fans of