Hi -

 

Welcome to Wild Bites #5 from Hunter Angler Gardener Cook, a brief biweekly newsletter designed to make you smarter about your wild food. We'll also tell you what we're up to right now - a taste of what's to come on our website, podcast, YouTube, or To The Bone.

 

 ~ Hank (the chef) and Holly (the photographer)

 

Yes, we got into the morels again, quite unexpectedly. More on that below.

1. What's Hot Now

2. Smart Take: Fish Parasites

"The Number One vector for tapeworm in the United States, year after year after year, is raw or under-cooked trout."

-Hank, in the latest episode of the Hunt Gather Talk podcast

 

Well, that explains why Hank gets apoplectic every time he sees chefs serving trout ceviche on cooking competition shows!

 

Yeah, we know, no one wants to think about parasites in wild-caught fish, but proper cooking - or freezing, in the case of fish you eat raw as sushi, ceviche or poke - will ensure your fish is safe to eat.

 

Learn all about those methods and more (including which conservation effort is unintentionally creating an increase in the incidence of seal worms) in the latest episode of the Hunt Gather Talk podcast. It's a news-you-can-use conversation between Hank and fish biologist John Burrows of the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute. 

3. What We're Up To - Part 1

Hank hams it up with a sawzall and a bison carcass

 

Hank just returned from a week of filming in Montana - an exciting project because it will essentially be a companion instructional video course to the incredibly popular cookbook Buck, Buck, Moose. In this photo, he's busily breaking down a bison carcass with an electric saw... and hamming it up, just a little.

 

Hank wrote about the experience this week on To The Bone, though the post is for paid subscribers only.

The mask was to block thick smoke from a (fortunately) distant fire.

It didn't stay on for long - you can't get enough air at that altitude with a mask on.

 

Holly has been searching for new places to hunt mountain quail this fall. We've seen them in our old quail grounds, but their habitat is very patchy there after being ravaged by the Caldor Fire. And truthfully, we're not excited about whacking coveys that may have struggled just to get by this year.

 

She bumped a healthy-sized family where the photos above were taken in (clearly) unburned habitat. It's just like mountain quail to raise their chicks in cover this dense - she's hoping to see them in more open territory when the season opens Sept. 10.

4. What We're Up To - Part 2

 

We know, we know, we thought we were done with the morels, too! We went up to the mountains this week to scout for mountain quail and looked down at one point to see a cluster of fat, fat morels. Which were supposed to be done a month ago.

 

Twenty-seven pounds later ... seriously, 27 pounds! Of course we had bags, because you never know. So, the Excalibur dehydrator is running and running and running, the house smells fragrant and earthy, and Hank is preparing to whip up a few more morel recipes so we can eat some of these beauties while they're fresh.

 

When will you see them on the website? Not necessarily immediately. Like the rest of you, we get our wild food in pulses: lots of fish for a while, nothing but morels for a while, ducks as far as the eye can see for a while. But we spread out the recipes to ensure the content doesn't get monotonous.

 

But, here's what we had for dinner last night: mushroom tacos so damn good they never made it out of the photo studio!

 

5. Storefront: Refurbished!

 

One of our other recent adventures took place not outdoors or in the kitchen, but on our computers: We've upgraded the online store where you can buy signed copies of our three newest cookbooks: Buck, Buck, Moose; Pheasant, Quail, Cottontail; and Hook, Line, and Supper.

 

We now take a much wider variety of payments - not just credit cards, but also PayPal, GPay, Meta Pay, Shop Pay (the latter includes an installment option). And with the new store, you get tracking information when your books ship.

 

Some have asked why our first two books - Hunt, Gather, Cook and Duck, Duck, Goose  - aren't in this store. The answer is those books are printed and distributed by traditional big publishing houses, not us. To stock them, we'd have to pay close to retail, plus shipping, and the mark-up to sell and ship them to you would be absurd. You can still get them on Amazon - they just won't be signed.

 

 

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