French

French Consommé

Making your own wild game stock sets you on the path to mastering game cookery, but making wild game consomme puts you on the path to becoming a Jedi Master of wild game. This stuff is mind-blowing!

Mushrooms

Foraging for Blewit Mushrooms

Another foraging trip and another edible mushroom under my belt! Two good stashes of blewits last week gave me a great introduction to this mushroom.

Mushrooms

How to Identify and Cook Honey Mushrooms

I don't eat unknown mushrooms lightly. But when I spotted these honey mushrooms, I knew, somehow, they were edible. Turns out they're a prime pierogi ingredient, too.

Pheasant, Grouse, Quail

Retro-Fabulous Saturday Pheasant

Saturday chicken was one of my favorite dinners growing up. I had no idea how my mum made it, and when I asked, I was appalled... yet strangely excited. I had to make it.

Foraging

Black Walnuts and Holiday Cheer

Of all the things I hunt, fish or forage for, nothing requires as much effort as shelling black walnuts. But it's worth it. Black walnuts are to regular walnuts as a diamond is to cubic zirconium.

Foraging

Hunting Oregon Truffles

Think you can imagine the thrill of unearthing a truffle? Sorry, but you can't. Not unless you've panned for gold. Or dug diamonds. It's the same feeling, complete with the whiff of rapacious greed...

Ducks and Geese

Ruddy Ducks, The Original Butterball

There was a time when the little ruddy duck stood next to the canvasback and the redhead as royalty among waterfowl. Now they are derided as trash ducks. It is an unjust accusation.

How-To (DIY stuff)

Acorn Eating Revisited

It's been another year of learning and experimenting on the acorn front, and the more I learn, the more I love working with "oak nuts."

Essays and Stories

On the Line

Duck Duel Deux is done. More than 24 hours of prep work culminated in a return to the line after nearly 20 years - where I learned just how hard it is to do precision cooking for a crowd.

Mushrooms

Cooking Chanterelle Mushrooms

Chanterelles vie for my favorite mushroom with the great porcini. Chanties are the light to porcini's dark, pheasant not beef, white wine not red. Our season has begun!

Ducks and Geese

Wild Foie Gras is Real

The foie gras debate centers on whether it's natural and humane: Do waterfowl fatten their own livers in the wild? They do. A liver from a duck I shot recently was so fatty it qualifies as wild foie gras.

Italian

Making Mirto, a Sardinian Liqueur

The first time I drank mirto, the dark, herbal-tasting Sardinian liqueur, I fell in love with it. Little did I know then how easy it was to make, and when I found a myrtle bush, it was game on!