Wild turkey muffuletta sandwiches, pages 68-69

It's great how pretty the mundane can be sometimes. Just look at the ingredients in the olive relish salad before it is chopped in the food processor.

The relish makes this tasty New Orleans style sandwich special, what sets it apart from any other turkey and swiss sandwich. And, it does the trick very nicely with it's robust ingredients: basil, vinegar, onion, two kinds of olives, capers, pepper, parsley and on and on. What fun it was to make, serve and consume these tasty sandwiches.

To prepare for this recipe, there was Jarlesburg cheese to buy, turkey to cook (I ended up sauteeing the rest of the breast in butter and olive oil) , bread to buy at the bakery, ingredients to purchase for the relish. But, the actual making of the recipe was a pleasant breeze. Basically, it was just whipping up the relish and then assembling the sandwiches.

You can see that Fred and my sandwiches were the same (the works), Henry wanted to try the olive salad spread but not the cheese, and Oliver's sandwich was just plain turkey.

I'm struck yet again by the diversity of recipes in the book and how going through them all (keep our fingers crossed) will expand my cooking. I remember years ago talking to a conservation agent friend of mine. He cooked for his family and  had a weekly dinner routine. I don't remember the specifics, but it went something like this: Monday is taco night, Tuesday is spaghetti night, etc. and then starts all over again on Monday with taco night. I remember thinking that A. the routine of it was kind of  a crack up B. I'm impressed he cooks for his family and is figuring out a system to make that possible and C. the predictability of it could be sweet and comforting, too. Goodness, if you used a book like Cooking Wild in Missouri, it would be sushi Monday, muffelatta Tuesday, crab cake Wednesday, cassoulet Thursday and then you could really let your hair down on the weekends. Gadzooks.

Well, there we have it, folks. We just made the three wild turkey recipes in the book in three days (in other words fried rice Monday, soup Tuesday and sandwich Wednesday!). We finished the last of the turkey breast at the end of the meal. Yum. Yum. Yum. And, right now I'm thinking tomorrow might be fast food Thursday! It's break time!

 

Get the picture? Photos of wild turkey and summer sweet corn soup, pages 66-67

OK. That was yummy. Maybe this post should be a photographic journey of making corn and turkey soup, including the licked bowl at the end.

Wild turkey fried rice, page 64-65 with spicy cucumber salad, page 65

This is the first of the three recipes in the book calling for wild turkey. Fred and Henry gave hunting a good try but had no luck, so a coworker of mine gave us a turkey breast from the turkey he killed this spring. Thanks again, Kevin. I can not believe how generous people have been about sharing their bounty with us. OK, there was the  stealing of our mushroom logs by the numskulls that justified their thievery by leaving half the logs. One cannot pretend that didn't happen. However, that was a ridiculous anomaly. The generosity of people has been much more constant and abundant. Thanks.

I'm counting on being able to use this one turkey breast for all three recipes. Within the next two days I plan on making the next two recipes.

Ironically all three turkey recipes call for already cooked wild turkey. But, how does one get there? I would think just baking a skinned wild turkey would result in a seriously dry bird. And, I'd rather be tarred and feathered than to mess up some one's hard earned, then gifted to us wild turkey. I mean, a person waits all year for spring turkey season, buys their hunting tags, scouts out a good place to hunt, pries their eyes open before the crack of dawn, has practiced the skill of calling and shooting enough to actually be successful and safe in the hunt, cleans and dresses the bird, labels it properly for transport, and ships it to me on ice.

So, what I end up doing is slicing off some small pieces of the meat and sauteed them in the bacon the recipe calls for anyway for the fried rice. I'll deal with how to cook the rest later I guess.

Other than that, the recipe went off without a hitch. I cooked the rice a day in advance and cooled it as Bernadette suggest so that the rice didn't go mushy when fried. We used eggs from our own chickens, which is always pleasant. Both kids loved the dish. Henry had fourths in fact. I particularly liked the spicy cucumber salad that is suggested to serve with the fried rice. I made the salad once before, in fact, but thought the paring sounded so good that I went ahead and made it again.

One turkey recipe down. Two to go. Next up: wild turkey and corn soup.

Bass and crappie spring rolls, page 86 with spring roll dipping sauce, page 87

Ingredients inside the spring rolls

I do believe this is the last of the bass/crappie/bluegill recipes in the book. I've been looking forward to making these spring rolls for some time. In the spring I planted a Thai basil plant and have been watching it grow knowing that I needed 12 leaves for this recipe. Finally this week I felt like the plant was big enough that it could afford to loose 12 leaves without totally doing it in. It's spring roll time!

We also have mint growing in garden, so that just left cilantro as far as herbs go. We bought that at the farmer's market this weekend. The fish is lightly fried, then there's also noodles, avacado, and peanuts in the spring rolls as well (by the way, if you're not familiar with spring rolls I think of them as a cold/fresh ingredient/not fried version of an egg roll). I've never made spring rolls before but have had them at a few Vietnames restuarants and quite like them. Adventures in cooking, here I come!

The action shot

The funniest thing about the spring rolls I made is that they were literally the size of small burritos rather than egg rolls. I started mounding up the pile of ingredients in the rice paper wraps and supper sized them I guess. And, you know what? They were perfectly good that way. We had them for dinner tonight, rather than as an appetizer, so what does it hurt to have burrito sized spring rolls? It's America after all. Hey, would these be good with nacho cheese squirted on top? Hmmm. That's a pretty disgusting thought, actually.

The other thing I learned that I've never done is that I guess I've never in my life filleted a fish. Surely that's not the proper way to spell the past tense of fillet. Not sure. Anyway, I had to fillet the fish for the recipe and couldn't think of a way around it this time. I'm not so keen on cutting the largest hunks of meat off an animal and disposing of the rest. That, and I've never learned how to do it.  I whittled away at three small bass to get enough meat for this recipe, all the while thinking, "There's got to be a better way at doing this". Later in the day, I was glancing at the boys' magazine on conservation and in it is filleting directions (The magazine is free to Missouri citizens, by the way. It's called Xplor and is produced by the Missouri Department of Conservation). So, you start at the head end apparently. Who knew?! How odd that I'd be making something as exotic as bass spring rolls while also learning something as rudimentary as how to fillet a fish.

Fishished product. Like the sumo wrestler platter? My cousin made it.

Anyway, I'm glad I've gotten making spring rolls and attempting filleting under by my belt. It seems like both skills could come in handy in the future.

As to ye recipe evaluation part of the blog, two thumbs up.  The spring rolls were really great as was the dipping sauce. Setting aside the fact that this book helps you cook with many kinds of native Missouri meats and plants, it's also a fantastic reference for how to make all sorts of exotic recipes.  I love Cooking Wild in Missouri!

Grilled trout stuffed with tomato and basil, pages 106-107

 It's summer time! I can feel it.

Today we went to an art festival here in town called Art in the Park. We ate kettle corn, got too much sun, and (Fred's snickering at this one) I bought three photos of man hole covers. Ah, a typical weekend day in the summer!!

After the program we went for a swim, played a bit of tennis, and then came home for a Woods to Food dinner.

Tonight's dinner was trout stuffed with tomato, basil, and firm goat cheese (it called for parmesan, but we have a lot of cheese from our friend's goat farm in right now), rubbed down with olive oil, salt and pepper, wrapped in bacon and grilled. I'm rushing the summer veggies a bit, but the corn on the cob at the store is good already, so we accompanied the trout with most everything Bernadette suggested in the book: corn on the cob, boiled potatoes, cucumbers with peppers and onions in a vinegatte, good bread and we added more goat cheese to the menu!

Boy, did it taste like summer. I think it was mostly the cucumbers in vinegar and ice with mint and dill that smacked me in the face that it was a summertime meal, actually.

The fish was great. After muffins for breakfast and kettle corn for lunch, I was quite ready for a solid, healthy meal and this one surely did not disappoint. Honestly, I wasn't sure why trout had to be wrapped in bacon since it is so good on its own. However, when is it ever a true mistake to add bacon to anything, eh? I like the taste of grilled bacon, and it gave the trout a smokey, complex taste that was certainly nothing to complain about.

The world is always turning

When we were floating on the Current River this weekend, I asked Fred and the boys if they knew what the tall plant with white flowers was. Can you guess? It was elderberry. Elderberry is blooming right now. And you know the first thing we picked to start our year long Woods to Food project? Elderberries. Those white flowers are reminding us that the seasons are cycling back around to when we started, though we still have time left. Those flowers will continue to bloom for a while, then fade, then fruits will form and later ripen. And, that's when we will have been at this project for a year.

What have we left to do? There are summer and fall mushrooms to find and we're shaky on our ability to get those. Plus we'll need some rain, I'd think. There are blackberries and crawfish to harvest. Fred was asking me how we were going to get crawfish and I was hoping he was the one with the answer. There's walleye to catch. And, there are a few more squirrels to get. Wild blackerries and squirrel I'm confident about getting, the rest I'm tempted to buy and lie about. Or, maybe I could buy them and we could all write in made up stories about finding them in the wild.

One idea I did have, though, is that there's a beast feast gumbo recipe in the book we have not made yet and it makes a big batch of the stuff. Perhaps that could be our final recipe and we could celebrate with a Woods to Food finale party. Sounds like a plan to me. But, then again, I have lots of plans and only a dribble come to fruition.

Freshwater seviche, pages 82-83

From Ann: The first time, maybe the only time, I've been around someone who ate seviche was in Costa Rica.  I was taking a college course on biodiversity. One of our instructors was studying bats in Central America. At the end of the course the class went out and she ordered seviche at a restuarant. Two main things I remember about the lady (obviously one of which is not her name). 1. She ate a cup full of raw fish in a foreign county. 2. She told me that in Peru, where she did most of her bat studies,  it was common for families to raise guinea pigs for meat while also sleeping with them in their beds for warmth.

Why is it I have always felt like I know what the world outside of Missouri is like when I'm so blown away by the actuality of it? Raw fish in cup. Snuggling with animals you will later eat. I'm sure I looked like Kramer from Seignfeld as he stumbles backwards in shock. What a sheltered, naive person I have been, am and likely will continue to be.

When my instructor ordered the seviche, IS THAT THE SAFEST CHOICE? was what was screaming in my head, like she'd ordered a cup of cocaine. And that was followed up with another obvious question in my mind. How could a cup of raw fish possibly be worth any sort of risk?

We took the boys camping and floating on the Current River this weekend and I was hoping to make the Cooking Wild's freshwater seviche recipe during our campout. We started by catching a nice sized large mouth bass in Fred's parents pond before we left to go camping. That pond is my new go-to place for getting fish. I woke up the morning we were leaving for our trip not feeling the greatest, however, and just could not bring myself make the seviche. So, we iced down the fish for when we got back.

The boys are now visiting grandparents for a few days so Fred and I have Columbia to ourselves. Perfect time to make seviche, because I was pretty sure it wasn't going to get thumbs up from the boys. Usually when the boys are away, Fred and I barely see the house. We're fully taking advantage of our time together at the movies, on the trail, and at restuarants. But, this week Fred has a miserable cold, so we're trying to make the best of it at home. So, renting a movie and seviche at home it is.

Which finally brings me to the recipe. If you want to know it was GREAT. This seviche recipe actually calls for a quick cooking method for the fish, which I'd never heard of. I thought if I was going to eat seviche it would have to be raw. I guess it's kind of like sushi in that way in that the fish is usually, but now always, raw. I have to say, for my first try at seviche, this did make me feel a lot more comfortable. What a fabulous, fresh, zesty way to serve up a bass,  bluegill or crappie from Missouri.