My husband is a hunter.
Hunting is not just about shooting animals in the woods. It’s about cooking on a campfire, getting away from a job, male bonding, family bonding, and communing with nature.
I like to go hunting … but I never actually get up early and shoot at things. I just do the other stuff.
I am convinced that killing an animal satisfies some primal instinct in men, because it sure as heck isn’t because going out at the crack of dawn and freezing your buns off is fun.
And it sure isn’t because the meat tastes good either. But we eat all these dead animals that our husbands bring home so we don’t feel guilty about the trouble he went through to get them. We disguise them to taste like something else, so the whole point of hunting wild animals is pretty much lost.
My brother-in-law cooked frog legs once. I had never had frog legs before, and yes, the thought pretty much turned my stomach.
“Try it!” they urged. “It tastes just like chicken!”
They always say it tastes just like something else that our palettes find acceptable. I said, “Then why not just each chicken?” But I tried them and sure enough, they tasted like chicken. They are still frogs no matter how they taste, though, so I think I’ll stick with chicken, thank you very much. I’m sorry if you feel guilty about all the dead frogs.
After a hunter has shot a deer, he will soak the meat for days to get the “wild” taste out. We don’t want a wild animal to taste wild, now, do we? Then they will disguise the meat in some dish like spaghetti and say, “It tastes just like beef!”
You never hear somebody eating beef and saying excitedly, “This tastes just like venison!”
If you really want it to taste like beef, then starting with venison is just not gonna get you there. The sad truth is that if you want something to taste as good as beef, you’re gonna have to start with a dead cow, not a dead deer.
I’ve had venison sausage that was pretty tasty. Then I found out that it was made with half pork and half venison so it would taste like pork, not venison. The honest truth is that pork sausage would be just as good or better, but then we’d have all this deer meat and nobody would eat it.
My husband came home with some goose breasts the other day. Same story, different animal. Unless you buy the domesticated kind of goose that they sell in France, geese have an unmistakable wild taste. So we cover them with sauces and gravies, or turn them into half and half sausage to try to disguise the taste.
Only problem is, wild geese are supposed to taste wild. If you bring home a bunch of wild things in a bag and your first order of business is to make them taste like something else, I think you need to start hunting chickens … or cattle.
Someone could make a fortune if they could come up with chickens and cows that hid during the day and were hard to hunt. People would pay great sums to go hunt them AND the wives would be ecstatic when they brought one home.
But until that day comes, here’s “The hunting wife’s ‘just’ mantra”:
“I’m glad you have fun hunting, just please don’t shoot anything. And if you do accidentally shoot something, just take a picture to show me. Whatever you do, just don’t bring it home.”
“Just do as I say and I’ll have some chicken cooking when you get here.”
