Have a Wild Feast this Holiday Season

I am lucky that Pop Pop and I started hunting elk together in my youth.  There are lots and lots of reasons why this makes me lucky, but one of those reasons is that it helped our Christmas traditions take on a much wilder flavor as we found success in the breaks country of Idaho.  The Christmas Feast was always a highlight of the season, as we are a family of foodies, but once we started packing our holiday roasts out of the mountains on our backs, the meal satisfied in more ways that it had previously.  At first unsure, extended family soon warmed to the idea of consuming game at the holiday meal, once they realized we could cook.

Elk has been the most common wild beast served at our holiday gatherings, but whitetail deer, mule deer, turkey, and antelope have made appearances.  Perhaps my favorite is when we have set aside an entire hind quarter of a doe antelope, from the knee to the hip, with the bone in.  This cut is known as a Steamship Round (a real butcher out there can feel free to correct me if I am wrong).  This is a pretty impressive hank of meat to set down in front of your loved ones and start carving like you are the head chef at the Waldorf.

This is about how your "Steamship Round" should look before you prep it for a holiday table.  Trim it up and serve the whole kit and caboodle.

Here is how we like to prepare it:  Rub the whole thing down with olive oil or butter, salt, and pepper.  It is always a good move to cram a bunch of cloves of garlic into little slits cut in the meat too.  Usually, I will have the oven turned up as high as it will go while I am prepping the meat, then I will turn it down to 375-425 as soon as the meat goes in (on a rack in a roasting pan).  Occasionally while it is cooking, take the meat out of the oven and baste it with more olive oil or melted butter mixed with salt and pepper.  I think this really helps build up a savory crust on the outside of the meat that otherwise wouldn't occur with game meat, because it doesn't have enough of its own fat.  It also helps keep the meat inside the crust deliciously moist.  We usually take the meat out of the oven when it has reached an internal temperature of 125 and let it rest.  We like rare meat, and frankly, I think game meat is amazingly delicious when rare and dog food when overcooked.  USDA recommends 145 degrees for rare beef, but I have never had a problem with our game meat.  I suppose it is one of those "at your own risk" things, but ruining your dinner is a much bigger risk, in my book, than getting a nasty bug from rare game meat...  Don't worry, if Uncle Whimpy doesn't like his meat rare, there will be some medium and well done pieces on the edges of the roast.

The second best thing about serving elk, deer, or antelope for Christmas dinner is serving Yorkshire Pudding with it!  If you have never had Yorkshire Pudding, you have never truly enjoyed the ultimate starch and meat pairing.  Hopefully you have saved all of the drippings from your game roast.  Joy of Cooking tells us we should have all of the following ingredients at room temperature before we begin...

Pre-heat oven to 400

3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons all purpose flower
1/2 teaspoon salt
(sift these into a bowl and make a well in the center)
Into the well pour 1/2 cup milk and stir it in
Beat 2 eggs into the mix
add 1/2 cup of water

Beat the batter until you get nice, big bubbles, then pour the mixture into the hot roasting pan with the meat drippings.

Bake for 20 minutes, then reduce heat to 350 and bake for an additional 10-15 minutes.

It is done when it is puffy, golden brown, crispy on the outside, chewy in the center.

So good with rare game meat, good gravy, and a robust red wine.

Grammy shows off a fine specimen of a Yorkshire pudding... good as it gets, she is a master. 

This particular Christmas dinner didn't include a steamship round, but elk roast is awfully darn nice too.

Have a Merry and Wild Christmas!!!

Emily's Mule Deer Chili Verde

Recently, my bride pulled together one of the more delicious preparations of stewing cuts of venison, chili verde.  About a month ago, we pulled the rest of the tomatillos off the plants in our gardens.  We would have had more of the green "husk tomatoes," but the variety we grew was popular with the toddlers in our social circle.  They would grab the fruit, which looked like little hot air balloons, rip off the husk, take one sweet juicy bite, then throw the rest in the bean patch.

If you are going to stew chunks of venison, I think neck and shank make the best cuts to use.  The connective tissues, which are prevalent in those parts of a deer or elk, are tough until they are cooked low and slow.  Two hundred seventy five degrees, two or three hours, and some kind of cooking liquid is the recipe to turn tough tissue in to tender, gelatinized, flavorful morsels.

Emily's approach for the chili verde was as follows (This is simple and wicked good):

• Brown about 1lb of stew meat seasoned with salt, pepper, and garlic powder, put it in crock pot with about enough tomatillos to equal roughly the same volume of the meat
• Brown 1 large onion and 6 small poblano, coarsely chopped
• When onions are translucent add them to the crock pot.
• Deglaze the skillet with half a can of beer and pour all the goodies and the rest of the beer into the crock pot.  If you don't want to use beer, use game stock, beef stock, vegetable stock, etc.
• Turn on the crock pot and try to forget about it for a few hours.  Soon enough, the dish will smell so good, you won't be able to forget about it anymore.  This is a good time to start sampling the broth.
• Serve with warmed tortillas.

MB2013 (AKA the 24th Annual Talk Like a Mountain Man Week)

I sloshed into camp, still wearing my waders.  The aromas of coffee mixed with ash and smoke from a campfire without enough wood weren't the same cure for a hangover as the fresh air and mist on a river musty with life.  A dozen men all (but one) a generation older than me sat around, laughing, and throwing hilarious and ridiculous insults at each other.  I stopped by the propane camp stove and lifted the lid on the stock pot.  Fat from bacon grease formed a thin cap on a leftover fish chowder.  I fired up the propane under the pot and gave the chowder a stir.  A hot cup of this stuff would ease that hangover better than anything.  We had done better than most years at filling our fish chowder pot with rainbow trout meat.  On the South Fork of the Snake, it is darn near unethical to release a rainbow back where it might hybridize with the local population of Native Cutthroat trout.  Our group is ruthless, both to the rainbows and to each other.  Of course we love to catch the rainbows, and we love each other's company too.  As I sat down, with ice on my waders and a cup of hot chowder in my hand, I heard a phrase that has been uttered annually on the last morning on the river, as if part of a rite, "Hey!  Where are the fucking biscuits!"

Many men like to fish.  Many men also like the company of other men while they are fishing.  I happen to enjoy an annual trip of many men enjoying the company of many other men while fishing.  Twenty-four years ago, Pop Pop, along with his brother, Uncle Chrissy, and Uncle Chrissy's friend, Jimbo, embarked on a week long fly fishing sojourn of southeastern Idaho and Yellowstone National Park.  They were trout bumming, but there was something in the chemistry of unpredictable October weather, golden cottonwood leaves, the hope of heavy trout, and the company of family and friends that made this particular annual adventure so special that Pop Pop hasn't missed a single trip in all of those years.  Uncle Chrissy and Jimbo haven't missed many more.

The trip has grown, no bloated, to the point where five boats and 14 attendees isn't out of the ordinary.  Several other regulars now make the adventure without fail.  Uncle Predator, Uncle Don, Uncle Crotts, Virg, Elle Belly, Uncle Bill the Pill, Sam Sam the Whitefish Man, and a smattering of cameos and newcomers.  You'll notice a common thread.  Most of these people, whether or not they are full siblings of my father, are 'uncles' to me.  One other claims me as his godson, and the rest I would claim as very close friends... family friends.  I think we all have a great deal of affection for each other, which is why we all spend a week floating rivers and berating each other with cruel barbs and insults (Pop Pop warned me on my first trip, that no quarter was given... ever).

Why is Male Bonding (as this annual week-long holiday is now known) so important to its attendees?  What keeps this tradition strong and getting stronger?  There are two primary and intertwined reasons: Peter Pan and unscripted therapy.  This trip is a week in Neverneverland for a group of motivated and successful professionals and entrepreneurs.  Grown men get to act like teenage boys and fish and, for one week, shed the stress of day to day life, letting the pursuit of that next big fish or hatch of blue winged olives be the most serious endeavor of the day.  This trip also serves valuable therapeutic purposes.  It has helped men heal from divorces, make life changing decisions... hell, I studied for my comprehensive exams on this trip.  It also helps us develop a deeper appreciation for the women in our lives.  Absence, and the opportunity to say whatever is on your mind, without fear of reprisal, does indeed make the heart grow stronger.

I left the trip a few days early this year in order to have a long weekend with my young family on another river.  As I jetted out with my godfather, we raced past all the gravel bars, runs, and riffles that have produced such memorable moments in Male Bondings past.  A flickering reel of thrilling fish and snapshots of male antics ran through my mind like the sun shimmering on the river rocks only a few inches below the aluminum hull.

Fish on a Stick

I recently found myself deep in the Selway Bitterroot Wilderness.  As many trips to the wilderness are, it was like a dream and it always seems like you wake up before the end.  Spending a few days devoid of screens and in midst of an existence of water, rock, sweat, dust, sun, and stars is my favorite way to strengthen the body and revitalize the soul.

As usual, I was chasing fish.  This time it was for work; to collect scientific data and tissue samples from Chinook Salmon.  It is never easy to catch up to a Selway River Chinook.  They move fast and hard on a long journey up the Clearwater, and they don't stop until they are far beyond the reach of legal anglers.  In August and September, they start to reach that finality that all salmon reach.  Reproduction and replenishment of stream nutrients.  We were there to catch up to them when they can't swim up any more.  We counted their redds and measured their carcasses.  We snorkeled with the offspring of their predecessors.  We worked our asses off, but it is the kind of job you daydream about when flipping your pencil around in your fingers when the professor fails to communicate the relevance of cellular processes to fisheries biology.

We worked up fish in a hole that woke up the inner cave men in us.  Hundreds of mountain whitefish loosely schooled in the green depths.  I had packed a rod to opportunistically sample fish and kill free time in the evening, but it didn't get much use once we realized the lock on the reel seat had come unglued from the rod butt.  Fortunately, the colleague I was working with wasn't afraid to fish outside the graphite box.  We needed lunch and a break from a march up and down a hot wilderness trail.  I carved a pole from the hawthorn that provided the only shade on the pool.  Emanuel fastened a 9 foot piece of monofilament, a split shot, and a stonefly nymph to the flexible end of the stick.  Before long, I was filleting whitefish that had just moments before been writhing on an invisible tether to a green hawthorn branch.

I have made dozens of excellent meals in the back country, but this was certainly one of my favorites.  Fresh whitefish fried in hot oil until the skin was crispy.  Turns out crispy whitefish skin is quite tasty, especially when you crave every calorie you can get your teeth around.  This all got me to thinking about the point of wilderness is to have the opportunity to get a little more primative.  Next time I head into the back country, I think I will leave the graphite sticks at home.  A whitefish in your belly doesn't care how much you paid for your fly rod.

Faith

Dry fly fisherman often think of themselves as the most refined of all anglers.  Truly, convincing a selective trout to sip your mayfly imitation from the midst of dozens of real mayflies is a bona fide fishing accomplishment. Of course you know the fish is there. You know the fish is eating. Sure you might spook a fish with a sloppy cast, but half the battle is already won.  Fishing with nymphs and other wet flies, you have to read the water, understand the currents, know the fish's habits, and have a little faith that the fish are there.

Catching fish under the surface actually requires three things to occur simultaneously.  First, the fish needs to be there.  Just because you are fishing good habitat, doesn't necessarily mean there is a fish in it.  Second, you have to get the fly into the fish's wheel house.  Those currents are complex and, sometimes, the river is deep.  Getting the fly where it is supposed to be is sometimes a tricky business.  Make a cast to the right spot, sometimes way upstream of your target, make a mend to get the fly on the proper course.  Make another mend, get the tension off of the line, let the fly sink, and drift it into the wheelhouse as naturally as is possible.  Third, the fish must strike.  Just because the fly is in the wheelhouse, doesn't mean she will eat.  You have to do your very best with a bunch of wire, feathers, yarn, plastic thread, and graphite to make the connection between this world and theirs.

Lately, I have been making a new foray into the ways of knowing fish.  Our home is only hundreds yards from one of the finest (well, most popular) steelhead runs on the Clearwater River, one of the more storied steelhead rivers in the Pacific Northwest.  Don't get imagery of a rustic lodge on the banks of a pristine wilderness river.  Our's is a blue collar run.  There is a four lane highway, a series of pump houses, and most imposingly, a gigantic paper mill whose airborne effluent occasionally wafts across the waters to greet the angler with a powerful scent.  It is called the Stink Hole for a reason.  The Stink Hole, along with the rest of the Clearwater (which is more scenic), the Snake, the Salmon, and the Grande Ronde, are all outr my back door, and all of them fill up with steelhead each fall, destined for the wild streams and hatcheries of Idaho, Washington, and Oregon.  Anglers descend by the thousands on each of these rivers with all varieties of tackle to pursue steelhead.  Since moving to Lewiston, I have watched anglers use each of these approaches, studying in an attempt to understand how to commune with this most fickle of fish.  I myself have dabbled in several of these methodologies, but one has intrigued me above all others: swinging flies with a two handed fly rod.

I am a fisheries biologist.  I study how many fish there are and how people interact with them for a living.  I know that swinging flies is, relatively speaking, an ineffective way to fish for steelhead.  If you are in it for numbers, probably better be back-trolling plugs or side drifting eggs from a boat.  Truly, I want numbers too, and once the harvest season opens, I want to abruptly end the return migration of a few hatchery fish in my freezer.  So why take up the study of a fishing technique doomed to relative failure? The answer can only be in the aesthetics of a well executed spey cast, and the prospect of those rarer successes being so sweet.

I am human.  Sometimes I let the downer parts of life try to get the better of me.  Lately, I have fought back against that negativity by devoting myself to the pursuit of that graceful cast and the connection with that mysterious fish.  The purpose of spey casting is to re-direct a very long reach of flyline, casting it from a drift that has ceased to be useful into one that may better yield the object of one's ambition.  There are many ways to know God, to struggle to understand the higher meaning, to replenish your soul.  I have nothing against it, but church pews and pastors haven't ever worked too well for me.  There is a song that I love on a favorite album... "Church of the Wandering Stream."  Somehow whenever I find myself revitalized, it is near running water.  Often, I have a rod in my hand and faith that amid the complex currents of both life and rivers, my fly will end up in the right place to trigger a strike.

What's Your Frickin' Problem with my Crocs?

Sometimes a HHMM needs a comfy pair of shoes; a pair of shoes that cushion those tired dogs at the end of a long day in the pursuit of the HHMM arts.  What features would the ultimate pair of end of day shoes have?  The would have to be lightweight... if you have been lifting a pair of mud caked boots or sopping wet wading shoes all day, you want to free those tired lower appendages from unnecessary burden.  Those shoes would also be well ventilated... if you have been hiking or wading all day, chances are your feet are the color and texture of a good old fashioned English crumpet, and they need to be air dried.  Finally, they need to have good cushion and be slip on... nobody wants to bend over to tie shoes onto sore, swollen feet, and those feet need a firm, but tender bed in which to rest.  Thanks to the marvel of modern molded foam resins, such a shoe exists, and thank goodness for Crocs.

Good to see these old friends at the end of a cold, wet morning.

I have become acutely aware in recent weeks that there are many people in this world that hate Crocs.  At least four people have teased me about my love and use of that most comfortable shoe. The ultimate insult came, however, when I was watching the latest Sacha Baron Cohen film The Dictator.  In the film, the main character General Aladeen, wonders why he has just been derided by a subordinate for wearing Crocs.  The subordinate replies, "because they are the universal symbol of a man who has given up hope."  A piece of satire on The Daily Rash claims the same, and that Croc wearers are using the shoe to let the world know they are low-self esteem losers.

WTF?  Sorry my slippers don't come from J. Crew.

Turns out, Crocs are actually pretty bad ass in a number of outdoor settings as well.  Crocs are light enough to be strapped on a backpack and barely be noticed, yet they meet all of the comfort requirements described above.  They may be the ultimate relaxation shoe for a weight conscious backpacker.  Something about the tread design also makes them fairly sticky on wet rocks, which also make them nice for a stream crossing... keep your boots dry.  Sticky on wet rocks? Wear them fishing too!  Perfect for a warm day in the drift boat. If you want to get out and cast an Adams to fish rising in a riffle, no problem!

I suppose they are a little silly.  They are a bit like little girls' jelly shoes for adults, and they do come in a whole rainbow of colors.  You can even purchase little plastic charms to put in the holes, effectively adding pieces of 'flair' to your plastic shoes.  That does hint of throwaway consumer garbage crap.  Are they an anti-fashion statement? Perhaps that is the problem.  Does it bother people that I couldn't care less if my feet look cute. They certainly don't fit the search image of what some hipster girl wants when looking for a dude wearing women's pants and a pair of Italian leather elf shoes.

Don't take this as a Croc advertisement.  Go buy yourself a pair of Marlins or some other knock off.  They might not last as long, but they sure feel good when you are mixing the brine and sharpening the fillet knife at the end of a day of whacking and stacking whitefish and trout.  Trust me, you want your girl to care a whole lot more that you put an elk in the freezer than you remembered to buy your Sperry Topsiders before Greek Week.  Chicks dig a provider.

The Mini-HHMM demonstrating proper fashion for the production of backyard foodstuffs.  He is living proof Crocs don't affect fitness (in the evolutionary sense, Frat Boy).

Christmas in July.

Fall hunting season begins well before the first arrow is nocked in an antelope blind, or the first smoking shells are ejected from a family heirloom in the grouse woods.  Hunting season begins in the spring and it begins with a cup of coffee and a fresh copy of the new big game regulations.  Any self-respecting HHMM (or HHMW) spends many hours pouring over the newspaper print pages trying to piece together the most epic fall possible.  Google Earth tabs stay open on the computer for weeks on end.

Of course there is always dreams of drawing that once in a lifetime trophy hunt, but really it always comes down to how to put the most meat possible in the freezer.  You know the phrase "make hay while the sun shines?"  That applies to hunting big game.  You should always get as many cow tags, extra deer tags, and antelope tags as you can.  Why?  Because you never know when you will have a few tough seasons, or when life gets in the way of shopping for gourmet cuts in the prairies, canyons, and wooded ridges.  For example, the Mini-HHMM was born right around the start of the whitetail deer rut.  Getting out to hunt deer isn't all that easy with a newborn keeping you on your toes at 2:30 in the AM, but lean red meat is important to a healing, breastfeeding, new mom.  Good thing I had gone on safari in eastern Montana the previous fall.

So we waited with bated breath for that fateful moment in July, when that all important mailing comes from the state.  Like a letter from your number one college, you want to see the word congratulations in the first sentence.  Damn, didn't draw that antelope tag again.  Somehow I never do, even when the odds aren't that bad.  Pop pop and I didn't get our tags for fat cow elk either.  At least the letter from my safely school is more positive.  Emily and I will be doing our best to fill the freezer with a couple of mule deer tags this fall.  It isn't exactly the Christmas in July we were asking for, but it sure will be epic!

100% (Chicks!!! Part IV)

It is all paying off!!! Right?

$36 for chicks
$50 for feed
$30 for brood box and equipment
$150 for coop and run supplies
$40 for various chicken how-to guides
$40 for something I am sure I forgot we bought
------
$346 (somebody check my math)

We have now collected 7 eggs from our flock (~$50/egg).  Quite the deal, right?

We have eaten five of those oeufs, and they really were spectacular (in taste, certainly not size).  In fact, Emily and I celebrated our first four eggs by showcasing them in a special meal.  Emily had the brilliant idea that we should eat a meal where 98% of the ingredients were produced on our little third of an acre.  The remaining two percent (not including the minimal spices) was gathered HHMM style.  Here is the recipe:

Enough romaine lettuce and arugula for two
7 new potatoes
3 beets
1 red onion
10 camas bulbs, sliced in half
4 fresh eggs
2 tablespoons olive oil

Quarter and roast the vegetables (not the greens!) in the oven until the onion is caramelized at something like 425 degrees.  Season with a little kosher salt and pepper.  Place roasted roots over a bed of greens, then fry eggs over easy (HHMM) or over medium (Emily).  Place fried eggs over the roasted roots.  Puncture the yolk and let it drain into the roots and greens and enjoy a heavenly and rich dressing.  Eat a meal that is 100% DIY.

Actually, this meal, as Emily pointed out, was rather poetic.  The one major ingredient that came from outside our short little property line was the camas, which I dug near the headwaters of the South Fork Clearwater River in a wet meadow that not too long ago was flooded with spring snow melt.  That meadow has since drained and those waters percolated, gurgled, bubbled, raged, and surged down Red River, down the South Fork Clearwater, down the Clearwater River, where a tiny portion of that water was sucked out of the river by the pump owned collectively by those of us who live in our little neighborhood.  Finally, that water was sprayed out over our garden, where beets and onions and potatoes have been growing.  So really, the same water that helped sprout that lavender colored camas, also made our potatoes sprout little lavender flowers.  How many meals give you a sense of place like that?

Yes, I know the olive oil was probably imported from Spain or some such... but hey... not too shabby!

So has it been worth it?  You be the judge...

 

A Contrast in Styles

Encyclopedia authors have a thing or two to say about a couple of the rivers of Idaho.  The St. Joe is the highest navigable river in the world.  The Snake River's dammed slack waters make Lewiston the most inland seaport on America's west coast.  In addition to their extremes of navigability, these rivers also boast world class fisheries.  Nevertheless, those fisheries, and the reaches of the river where they occur, couldn't be a greater contrast in styles.  I fished them last week over consecutive days.

Sturgeon are big fish and require big gear.  Rods designed for giant saltwater fish, reels with hundreds of yards of 60 pound test monofilament and 80 pound leaders, railroad spikes for sinkers, slabs of bait the size of your palm..  You can use rafts or fish from the shore when chasing these beasts, but a jet boat works better... you might have to chase a eight foot long fish down to the next pool and back up again.

Catching a sturgeon in the Hells Canyon Reach of the Snake River is one of the truly exhilarating sportfishing experiences of the Pacific Northwest.  Hells Canyon is a stunning example of Idaho's country.  It is steep, deep, hot, nasty, rocky and hot.  Yep, I mentioned hot twice.  During our journey up the river Monday, the high temperature in Lewiston surmounted the 100 mark.  Constant evaporative cooling from regular dips in the river was the only way to feel good.  Water temperatures were perfect, though.  Sturgeon like to eat when the water is 65 degrees.  Our group landed 11 sturgeon, 6 over 6 feet long, and one taped in at 8'9".  What amazing animals.

That's Emily's first Sturgeon... a 7.5 footer

Fishing for Sturg in Hells Canyon

In contrast, westslope cutthroat trout are considered big when they hit about 13 inches.  Delicate flyrods designed for casting hand-tied weightless flies on the end of invisible tippet, bait is illegal (at least on the Joe) and would be eschewed.  We used a raft to float a long and catch many fish, but we also strolled along side channels and good runs and casted our flies to fish rising on the other side... you could reach 'em, as long as you had a big enough mend.

Flycasting to cutthroat trout on the St. Joe River is one of the truly poetic sportfishing experiences in the Pacific Northwest.  The St. Joe River is lined with cottonwoods in its lower reaches, but cedars dominate the upper reaches I most like to fish.  The day was warm, but the emerald and gold waters were cold and full of fine, fat trout.  The river bottom is paved with colorful cobblestones and mortared with garnet sand.  Sips of cold microbrew and the jovial banter of three anglers made the day feel good.  Our group landed dozens of fat westslopes, some as big as 14 inches.  Couldn't have been a better, more relaxing way to spend the day.

Pop Pop with a fine westslope on the Joe

My Home River

These fishes are my current favorites to chase.  They represent the ends of the Idaho native sportfish spectrum.  What I like most about my two days of fishing last week is that the diversity of these animals mirrors the diversity of Idaho's riverscapes, and the diversity of ways to experience them...

Happy Father's Day, Pop Pop

Pop Pop didn't become Pop Pop until the Mini-HHMM came along.  Before that he was Dad, or Pa, but mostly Dad.  My insatiable thirst for rivers, my unrelenting hunger for mountains and prairies, and the critters hidden within them... that came from Dad.  By the time I had attained memorable consciousness, my dad was an idealistic biologist, whose love for wide open spaces, productive rivers filled with fat trout, and a world of unstudied resources, endowed him with a whimsical curiosity and a contagious sense of purpose.  In his mind's eye, he could see the high deserts of the Snake River Plain still dotted with herds of bison, with a grizzled trapper covered in animal skins moving between them on his way to a rendezvous in Jackson Hole.  His imagination was powered by the magical country in which he ran, and by the history of those who ran the country before him.  That kinda thing rubs off on a kid.

When Dad went fishing, I wanted to go.  When Dad went bird hunting, I wanted to go.  I wanted to see the country that impassioned my father.  When I was small, I couldn't always tag along... you can't fish as hard or walk as many miles of railroad tracks chasing birds with a six year old slowing you down.  I certainly understand that now, and maybe I understood it pretty well back then too, but when I got to go fishing with Dad, that was a big deal.  I don't know if he did it on purpose or not, but he sure made me crave the opportunity to be outside, to float on the river and catch fish, to sit in a blind and hope to fool a duck.  Sometimes I feel like I can't remember the vast majority of what I learned in ten years of higher education.  I certainly can't remember how to prove a theorem in geometry.  The experiences I have shared with Dad in the magical landscapes of Idaho... those are etched, seared, tattooed, engraved in my most cherished memories.

So for Father's Day, I thought I would put together a timeline of the greatest hits of some of these memories.  The dates may be off by a little, but the experience is right at the heart.

~1985~ Dad puts me on my first fish, a mature, gravid, female Yellowstone cutthroat in the stream where he did his master's studies.  I broke his heart when I made him kill the fish so I could eat it, then didn't like how it tasted.

~1988~ Dad takes me on a camp-out under the cottonwood canopy of the South Fork Snake River.  We did a little fishing, but most importantly we shared a campfire together and he helped me make warrior sticks (my descriptor), which are nothing more than dead tree branches with a sharpened end.

~1990~ Dad takes me on a father-son camping trip to the Jarbidge River.  This is a remote corner of Idaho... really, it gives me my first taste of wilderness.  I find marmot skulls and catch rainbow trout at will, thus making this the coolest place I had ever been, bar none.

~1990~ Dad takes me, my cousin Robb, and my Uncle Bill on a float down the South Fork Boise River.  I enjoy my first true Idaho whitewater experience, Robb and I catch monster rainbows on Rooster Tails.  Dad is a demi-god for rowing Raspberry Rapid.

~1991~ Dad takes my Uncle Chris and me fishing on the St. Joe River.  Uncle Chris moons me.  I get skunked all day long until I throw my Panther Martin into "The Wonder Pool," the most picturesque fishing hole I have ever seen on a trout stream.  I catch what may have been my very first westslope cutthroat trout.  The St. Joe becomes "The Family River."

~1993~ One day before my 13th Birthday, on my first duck hunt, I harvest my first animal that doesn't have gills, a fat hen mallard.  Dad gives me the shotgun I killed the bird with as an early birthday present.

~1993~ As punishment for some wrong I committed against my mother, I am allowed to go duck hunting, but I am not allowed to take my shotgun with me.  This may have been the last time I was grounded.

~1994~ With no wetsuits or drysuits, Dad, Uncle Chris, and I run the Moyie River during spring runoff.  Dad nearly flips the raft at Eileen Dam, I witness the true power of river hydraulics for the first time, and Uncle Chris nearly floats out of the raft and down the river.  Dad saves the day with one final desperate stroke to keep the boat from flipping.

~1995~ Dad teaches me a lesson about hormones getting in the way of good judgement after he kills a sex-crazed tom turkey on a spring hunt.

~1996~ Dad hands me the keys to our Isuzu Trooper, Gus, for the first time.  In this vehicle I get my first taste of being an independent mountain man, though not so hairy yet.

~1997~ Dad and I share one of the most exciting moments of each of our lives when, after an hour or more of tracking, we recover my first elk after I made a poor, albeit ultimately fatal shot.  One day later, Dad kills his first elk and we learn together what it is like to make multiple five mile hikes with a load of meat on our backs.  I drink my first whisky in elk camp.

~1999~ I graduate high school.  Dad builds me a fly rod for my graduation gift.

~2001~ Dad, our hunting partner, and I each kill cow elk within 40 yards of each other, within half an hour of each other, on the last day of our elk hunt.  We learn what it is like to carry 2/3 of an elk in one trip.  Good thing my elk was a calf.

~2003~ Dad and my beautiful mother give me a canoe for my college graduation gift.  I have paddled that canoe with Chinook salmon in Idaho and with roosterfish in Mexico.

~2003~ For the first time, Dad takes me on his annual Male Bonding fishing trip in October.  This is a legendary trip full of larger than life participants.  This was a true right of passage into manhood.

~2004~ One day after I harvest a deer, I put my dad on the same spot and he harvests a fat whitetail doe.  This is the only time either of us has had whitetail deer hunting dialed in 19 years of hunting the damnable creatures.

~2005~ I move to Montana for graduate school, but Dad and I still kill elk together in Idaho.

~2006~ I meet the woman of my dreams and take her mule deer hunting.  We hike to the spot where Dad and I killed our first elk.

~2007~ Dad puts me on the last elk I killed (I know, it has been too long!) on the first morning of our hunting trip.  Emily (the woman of my dreams) and I harvest our first Montana mule deer on the first day of our hunting trip.  The first person I call is Dad.

~2008~ I marry the woman of my dreams on the banks of the river where I am doing my doctoral research... studying westslope cutthroat trout... Dad stands next to me as my best man.

~2010~ I determine that my skills as an angler surpass those of my father :)

~2010~ Dad kills his first Antelope with Emily and me in Montana.

~2011~ I move back to Idaho and Dad and I rediscover our love of waterfowl hunting together.  Dad becomes Pop Pop.

~2012~ I net Dad's first Steelhead on a fly rod.

~2013~ ...Hey Dad, we can't spend Father's Day together, but will you go fishing with me next weekend?  Are you pumped about hunting season yet?

Happy Father's Day, Pop Pop

Green Peas and Garlic Scapes

Early treats from the garden are some of the most exciting.  Nothing drives away the doldrums of winter and the dreary rains of spring like the first greens and peas harvested from the garden.  Over the last weekend, we harvested garlic scapes.  These are the flower-like tips of hardneck garlic varieties.  Cutting the scapes encourages greater growth of the garlic bulb, but it also provides nice kitchen fodder for the evening meal.  Think crunchy vegetable, like fresh asparagus... and yes, they are garlicky.  We made two meals over the past weekend that included garlic scapes.  For the second of these meals, we did nothing more than saute sections of the scapes in butter and sprinkle them with some kosher salt.  Then we served them with some rare grilled whitetail deer backstrap, an arugala salad, and homemade marinated mushrooms.  We ate it on our back patio while the mini-HHMM played under a giant green sycamore tree with sunlight filtering through the leaves and a warm early summer breeze keeping the smoke from the Weber away from the table.  Does life get any better than that?

According to the World-Wide-Web, this is a good time to harvest scapes... when they make their first full curl.

One of my favorite ways to put fresh off the vine vegetables to use is in a stir-fry.  Cooking in a carbon steel wok over high heat and for a short period of time is one of the best ways I have found to cook vegetables and still showcase their freshness.  We employed the wok to render us an epic snow pea, garlic scape, and venison stir fry.  Here is the recipe (remember, I don't measure so you probably shouldn't either, use the volumes and quantities described as a rough guideline only.  Just keep adding the stuff listed below until it tastes good):

1 small pile of snow peas picked from the garden
1 slightly smaller pile of fresh garlic scapes, cut in to 1"-2" lengths
1/2 pound venison strip steaks cut from backstraps or hind quarters, shaved in to even, bite-sized chunks
1/4 cup canola or peanut oil
1 tablespoon chili paste, Sriracha, or other Asian chili sauce (adjust to taste)
1 tablespoon fish sauce
1/2 cup soy sauce
1 teaspoon garlic powder, or 3-4 crushed cloves
1 teaspoon ginger powder, or 1 tablespoon grated fresh ginger
1 teaspoon ground mustard

For the marinade: combine the chili paste, fish sauce, soy sauce, garlic, ginger, and mustard in a bowl and whisk.  Add the meat and allow to marinade for an hour or more.

Add the oil to the wok and turn the heat to high.  Remove the meat from the marinade (save the liquid) and put the meat in the wok once it starts to smoke.  Stir fry the meat until it is brown on the outside (won't take long) then remove the meat and set aside.  Add the peas and garlic scapes and stir fry for a minute or so.  Add a portion of the left over marinade as a cooking liquid and stir fry for another minute or so.  The vegetables should still be bright green when you remove them from the heat.  Add the meat back into the wok and stir.

Assuming you remembered to start cooking your rice on time, dinner is served.

Urgin' For Sturgeon

I don't like to pay for "seafood."  Fish and the like are expensive, and, as often as not, they are harvested in an unsustainable manner.  I have a problem... I like to eat fish.  The clear solution is to harvest fish in sport fisheries within the bounds of the rules, limits, and regulations.  Over the last few years, I have become increasingly focused on harvest when I fish.  Fish taste good, they are good for you, and they are especially satisfying to body and mind when collected on one's own.  I like to harvest perch, mountain whitefish, rainbow trout (including steelhead), smallmouth bass, bluegills, catfish, burbot, and just about any other teleost with tasty muscles.

There are two kinds of sportfish I like to fish for that I do not like to harvest: 1. cutthroat trout (preference only applies to their native waters), and 2. white sturgeon.  Let's not delve into my preoccupation with catch and release cutthroat fishing, let's save it for another day.  Where I fish for white sturgeon, no harvest is allowed, and with good reason.  Sturgeon species, as a group, are generally long lived (up to and over 100 years), slow growing, and they mature late in life (20 years old before they spawn), which makes them the opposite of a good candidate for a sustainable harvest fishery.  There are rivers and reaches where sport harvest of sturgeon is allowed, and sturgeon are delicious, but I am just not sure I could do it... take a club to a fish that might be as old as me.  They may grow slow, but they grow long.  White sturgeon have the distinction of being North America's largest freshwater fish, and rank among the largest freshwater fish in the world.

In the Hell's Canyon reach of the Snake River Idaho/Oregon/Washington, it is rumored that there are still white sturgeon pushing 12 feet in length.  I have personally seen fish approaching nine feet, and they are as amazing as you would expect for a fish weighing well over 300 pounds.

I always described catching my first sturgeon, which was about five feet long, as a religious experience.  Why  religious?  Because the first time you feel a good one, you are in awe of the power of the fish.  I have hooked, landed, and lost many big rainbow trout.  Yes, they are fun.  Yes, they are fast and they jump and they run and they thrash about, but sturgeon pull really, really hard.  When a big sturgeon wants to run, you might have to follow him, in a boat.  My pop once had a big sturgeon tow our raft upstream in a river, with three adults in the boat.  Sturgeon are also beautiful.  Their sides are lined with scutes like plates of armor and their their backs have bony spikes.  Their tail has the same shape as a shark, and their big fins are perfectly proportioned to their elongated and muscular bodies.  They look (and are) simply prehistoric.  The best part, however is the feeling of the fish from their smooth snout covered in beautifully intricate sensory organs to their leathery fins.

In short sturgeon are just really cool animals, and you have to catch one to experience just how cool they are.  It is really fun to release a big one, knowing that your grandfather could have caught that fish when he was a young man.  It is fun to catch a little one, knowing your granddaughter might catch that fish some day as a grown woman.

Enjoy this video of my pop landing a five footer on a recent outing.  Sorry about the wayward finger halfway through... videography is only a hobby.

Meeting a Mountain Lion (on His Terms)

I should be turkey hunting right now, or at least on my way up the mountain.  It is 0446 and my alarm went off a little over three quarters of an hour ago so that I could get up, pull on my camouflage, check my pack for all my gear, drive to a turkey spot, hike through pine forests, call for strutting toms, and, hopefully, come home with the largest upland game bird in North America.  That is what I should be doing, but instead I am sitting here, processing what happened on my last turkey hunt two days ago.

I have never been afraid to hunt, fish, or hike alone.  Solitude and self reliance are important to me.  Don't get me wrong, I am a social animal.  I enjoy recreating in places I love with people I love.  Many times, there just isn't a hunting partner available to go with me.  Folks have busy lives and other commitments, even to other hunting partners.  Often, I hunt alone out of necessity, but I don't shy from the opportunity - I relish it.  My mind wanders both broadly and with depth when I hunt alone, but I also find moments when I am completely focused.  Whether I wander or focus, the result is cathartic.  I get to purge my busy brain, decompress from sudden and unexpected adulthood, and hope to get to that state my Pop and I have always referred to as "predator mode."

Predator mode is that subliminal moment when a hunter is 100% completely focused on his or her quarry.  In most successful, do it yourself, hunts, there is a time when everything converges; where hunter and hunted are in the same place in the space-time continuum, the hunted is unaware or off guard, and the hunter is completely focused on the hard conclusion.  Senses heighten and heart rate increases, but if you are in predator mode, the adrenaline doesn't lead to jitters, or buck fever, or panic.  For a moment, it makes you primal and deadly.

I didn't expect I would ever experience prey mode, on the receiving end of predator mode.  I didn't think I would be the sole fixation of what is likely North America's most fixated predator.  Puma, Panther, Catamount, Cougar, Mountain Lion.  No matter how you say his name, he is a frightening creature, at least when he has you on his terms.  Mountain lions are reclusive, silent, powerful, athletic, and absolutely majestic.  Now I know how it feels to be in his sights, caught unaware, or at least off guard.

I was hunting turkeys in fresh snow.  It had already been an eventful morning, but not on the turkey front.  I had hiked a couple of miles for a couple hours with no responses to my calls, but the morning was crisp and bright, and it felt good to be hunting while most of the Pacific Time Zone was barely filling their coffee pots.  Earlier, I had a close encounter with a great grey owl.  He watched me with suspicion, rotating his head further than seeems natural as I walked around and under the snag on which he was perched.  Naturally, I already considered the outing a success.  It isn't every day you get to see a great grey owl.   With only fifteen more minutes hiking to do, I heard a gobble in response to a yelping call.  That was why I was out there, for the hunt, and I thought "responsive toms are worth a few hours of vacation time."

I could hear three distinctive gobbles across a meadow.  My goal was to get within a 100 yards or less of the birds, and entice them into shotgun range with the calls of a willing mate.  Call, locate, hike, set up for a shot.  I repeated this several times, but the birds kept moving away from me, apparently not convinced my calls were truly those of a willing partner.  Finally, the gobbles drifted out of earshot.  I knew the birds had crossed above me, moving left to right, and I knew with fresh snow, I could follow them with more purpose and greater direction.  I trailed them for several hundred yards, through thickets and snow banks, around a curving ridge to the edge of a ravine.  That is when I got them calling again.  I thought they might still be in the bottom of the little drainage.  They sounded close.  I could hear clucking and putting and other turkey noises in addition to the volleys of excited gobbles.  This is when turkey hunting gets really fun..

Still, I couldn't get a bird to show himself.  I carefully crept to the edge of the ravine, which was littered with dead fall and noisy branches.  I could still hear the birds, but I then knew they weren't in the ravine after all,  rather they were calling from the bench on the other side.  I crouched and crept to a tree ten yards below the edge of the bench.  I knew this would be a tough spot to bring the birds in, with such a severe blind spot, but I couldn't go further without risking exposure.  Now the birds were hot, instantly responding to each of my calls, but still, they were hung up.  The blind spot made them wary.  With my head low, I moved across the face of the ravine to another tree twenty yards away hoping to change the game just a little.  I settled in with my back to a tree and started to call again.

That is when I heard a noise of soft movement behind me and over my right shoulder, from a small thicket of dog hair timber.  My first thought was "excellent there is another tom coming in."  I raised my right hand to cup my mouth to slightly muffle the sound of my diaphragm call.  I let out a burst of yelps, the toms let out a burst of gobbles, and I heard a burst of movement from behind my right shoulder.  I actually froze at that moment.  In the split second, I thought I was going to see a sex-crazed tom turkey run right past me.  The only question was whether I would be able to swing my shotgun on him without him noticing.  The gun was laying on my lap, muzzle pointed to my left, where I expected the other toms to come into the open.  I was one convergence away from predator mode.  I turned nothing to the right but my gaze, and as I did, a primal fear welled out of my core when I saw the lion make the sharp turn around my tree with vicious speed.  My hand was still at my mouth from calling, so my arm was already in a defensive position.  The lion's right paw swatted me hard in the chest, and I pushed away from his chest with my raised arm and I screamed.  I didn't notice until I felt a bruise later on, but the cat must have hit me hard on the right shoulder as well.  I fell on my side and he reared back.  He must have been startled by my scream.  Turkeys don't make that kind of noise.  Turkeys don't weigh 235 pounds and they probably don't fight back all that well.  I guess he must have been startled by that too.  For a second the cat stood there just a few feet from me.  His tail was long and it was crooked at a couple of places.  His fur was thick and healthy, but it looked wet or at least oiled, not like the clean tanned pelts successful hunters hang on their walls.  I yelled again, "holy sh#t!," and the cat hesitated then retreated back to the thicket, looking confused.  I jumped up to face him, this time with my shotgun ready.  He stood in the thicket, only ten or fifteen yards below me.  He wasn't a huge cat, but he was an adult.  His length was remarkable, with that iconic long tail flicking the same way our house cat's tail does when he is agitated.  Lions can look confused and disdainful especially when an easy meal of nesting hen turkey turns out to be much more than he bargained for.

The cat slinked away, but my rush didn't go with him.  Those three silly toms gobbled again above me, apparently not dissuaded too much by the commotion below them.  I marched over the hill, thinking maybe there was still some luck in my bank.  Thirty plus yards away, a tom turkey popped his head up.  I aimed and fired, but my aim wasn't true.  Everything that day had converged in the space time continuum, except the turkey's head and the lead from my shotgun.  I suppose not being lion food was enough luck for the day.

In hindsight, the speed of the attack was what was truly frightening.  It wasn't the silence... I knew something was there.  It was the speed.  I was armed, but once I knew it was a threat, not quarry, there was zero chance of defending myself.  Even a sidearm would have been useless, other than for a potshot through the trees as the cat slinked away.  In the high of the adrenaline rush, I didn't feel scared, but truly exhilarated.  I had just counted coup on one of the most formidable predators in North America.  I checked for bites and scratches, but couldn't find much.  My chest was a little sore, and I had an almost indiscernible laceration on my right nipple.  I was lucky that biting wasn't the first thing that lion did to dispatch his poultry dinner.

Now, for the first time in my life, I woke up and thought twice about hunting alone.  After processing for a couple of days, I know now that was my most frightening moment, and I might need the buddy system when I go back to the woods.  I will hunt alone again and I will do it soon.  It is too important for me to have that solitude to let a scary kitty cat get under my skin.  I think I will probably look over my shoulder a little more now.  I know what it feels like to touch the wildest of wild, and walk away unscathed.  I would rather foul up a turkey hunt than meet another mountain lion on his terms.

The Mountain Man Recipe Projects

HHMM needs a project.  The way I figure it, since this blog is about hunting, fishing, gardening, and food, I might as well make the project about all of those things at once.  Really, it will be a series of projects, with each one aimed at gathering, growing, or concocting one of the important ingredients, then writing a story about it.  How awesome will it be to sometime in the near future enjoy a meal flavored not only by the delicious meats, seasonings, and vegetables, but also by the tales of a day or days spent afield gathering those ingredients?

There are several cuisines that lend themselves well to a project such as this one.  The cuisines have to lend themselves well to wild versus domestic meats, or they have to regularly showcase such meats.  Cajun cuisine is perhaps the genre that first comes to mind.  I can't tell you how many times that I heard "well, you can cook it up in a gumbo" when the misfits of the game meat world - coot, squirrel, jackrabbit - were discussed.  If those misfits are accepted, even welcomed, in Cajun cuisine, then any game will be at home.

Gumbo is perhaps the most iconic of all Cajun dishes, and gumbo will be the my gastronomical muse for this adventure.  Sometime in the coming months, I will make an epic gumbo that will be rich, savory, spicy, and hearty (at least that is the plan).  In this gumbo, I will have crayfish, which I will harvest from my local waters.  The dish will also have andouille sausage, which I will mix, stuff, and smoke.  Perhaps if I am lucky, the sausage will be made from the meat of the bear I hope to harvest during this spring season.  The gumbo will have tomatoes, bell peppers, garlic, and onions, hopefully all of which will come from our garden this year.  Here is the recipe I plan to use (modified from the Creole Crab Gumbo in this book):

1/2 cup sliced onion*
4 tablespoons butter
4 tablespoons flour
1/2 pound wild game fish fillets*
1 pound cooked crayfish tails*
1 pound smoked andouille sausage*
1 pound okra, cut up*
5 cups canned tomatoes*
1 cup diced green pepper*
2 garlic cloves, crushed*
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
2 teaspoons salt
Black pepper to taste
2 cups brown game stock*

The starred ingredients above are ones I ought to be able to acquire or grow on my own.  The way I figure it, even if I fail to produce one of these ingredients on my own, and I have to resort to acquisition of foodstuffs from alternative sources, at least I will have a story.  I will publish each one of those stories as a blog post.  It should be fun...

The Best Cider

Brewed. Blended. Bottled....

I finally put this cider to bed this weekend... it was a long road for this batch, very unlike the process I describe in http://hairyhippymountainman.blogspot.com/2013/01/easy-cider.html.  Oddly enough, a portion of the cider started as a batch of "Easy Cider" from a local orchard that must not have had the proper balance of juices.  It started as my first failure in the cider making business.  The batch in question was almost undrinkable - much too tart and without any balance.  Emily and I aged the cider for months in a glass carboy, without any marked improvement in the flavor.  We gave up and bottled the stuff in every growler we had sitting around the house, figuring we would use this bulk beverage for something down the road.  

As time went on, we tried a nip of the stuff here and there, and after a year or so since it was brewed, the cider started to mellow, get drinkable, and almost good, but it was still a little too much on the tart side to be called good.  Around the same time, we took a trip to a you-press cider operation (http://www.bishop-orchard.com/).  The must from this adventure went into primary fermentation with the best fragrance of any cider I had brewed.  Unfortunately, that is all that came out of the fermenter... fragrance .. the juice was relatively flavorless.  So now I had two poor ciders on my hands, and both were poor because they were too strong in one component of tasty cider.  So I mixed 'em.  Two gallons of the tart stuff and four gallons of the fragrant stuff.

I had read about the virtues of blended ciders, but this has been my only firsthand experience making one, and I couldn't be more stoked about the result.  The clear lesson is this: if you ever have a cider that doesn't come out quite right... save it.  For one, flavors will mellow with time.  Second, you never know when a strongly flavored cider in the cellar will balance well with a future boo-boo.

Salmon River Steelhead

I must be getting older, because never before had my hand been numb from just a couple of days of hard fishing.  The skin on my right thumb and forefinger was chapped and cracked, and the cracks had filled with the oil and grime that is an inevitability of days afield in the mountains in early spring.  The same grime filled the crevices and spaces of the cork handle on my favorite flyrod, though those deposits are the result of many trips and days and hours of chucking line laden with lead and weighted flies.  Many people go fishing to relax, but I had only just reached my zen, after two and a half days with no steelhead.  I had hooked a couple whitefish, validating that I hadn't forgotten how to drift a nymph and detect a strike, validating I wasn't a worthless fisherman.  The steelheading had been so slow, I was ready to try anything.  Normally we drift big black stonefly nymphs trailed by an egg pattern for these late season fish, but I decided to try a mix of swinging and drifting a gaudy purple articulated fly one of my technicians had tied up for me.  Swing, dead drift, swing, dead drift, swing... nothing, but the day was bright and clear, the air smelled like spring, and I was standing in the Salmon River with my Pop, so I was content.  Maybe that is what the river gods needed... my contentment... because that is when my indicator stopped and slipped beneath the surface in the way that only happens when a fish strikes the fly.

I set the hook hard: not the way you do when you are frustrated and anxious about the fishing, but rather the way you do when you know it is "fish on."  The way the fish came with the fly as I set the hook, I was convinced I had hooked another whitefish, and I declared such to Pop, who was re-rigging his gear on the bank behind me.  Almost immediately, the fish pulled harder, and I saw its bright red stripe.  "No! It's a steelhead!," I declared.  The fight was on, but the battle was short lived.  Spring steelhead like that one have already had a long journey - some 850 miles from the ocean, and the fish hadn't fed in several months.  The energy stores it had been surviving on had almost been depleted, and there wasn't much left in the tank for epic battles with flyfisherman.  The hen, on the small size for a steelhead at 23 inches, had an adipose clip, which meant she was born in a hatchery and was destined for a grill or smoker.  I dispatched the fish and cut her gills. The thick red blood flowed down a rock at stream's edge and diffused and disappeared into the flow of the river.  I imagine that blood was a microcosm of the diffusion of the waters of this river as it moves toward the ocean, first mixing with the major forks of the Salmon River, then the Snake, then almost washed away in the Columbia.

One of the other members of our fishing party, Jim, had come downstream to watch the battle, and he offered me a congratulatory cigar.  Jim and I sat on the bank in the Salmon Country sun watching the swirls of pungent smoke drift downstream, while Pop gave it one last try.  This wasn't my first steelhead, or the biggest.  It was certainly the hardest-earned fish of my life, but that sense of relaxation I had after a great trip with great friends in beautiful country made me feel like I hadn't worked all that hard for it in the end.

A hard-won steelie and a contented angler.

Enjoying the finer points of a boys' fishing trip with Paul.

Pop soaking up some spring sunshine in some of the finest country in the world.