Wild Bites #16: a 3-minute read that makes you smarter about wild food and tells you what's to come on our website, podcast, YouTube, or To The Bone.

 -Hank and Holly (Team Hunter Angler Gardener Cook)

1. What's Hot Now

Tunisian venison stew

2. Smart Take: You Gots To Chill

When making sausages of any kind, temperature is critical. So long as the meat, fat and any liquid you are using are all just above freezing, you can get away with any number of other errors in technique.

The warmer your meat and fat are, the less margin for error you have both mechanically and in terms of food safety. So keep everything cold - cold enough to chill your hands when you're mixing ingredients together.

Pick up more tips for better sausage making here.

And yes, that headline was an old school hip hop reference. It was the party song when Hank ran track & field at SUNY-Stony Brook. Under no circumstances should you click on that link if you are not in the mood to get funky.

3. Duck Fat Rules

We love eating the fat ducks we're blessed with here in Northern California, and we especially love getting every last bit of fat we can find on them and rendering it down for use throughout the year.

Hank's got a great tutorial on rendering duck fat, which includes a video of the cooking process - it takes a while, but it's easy, and it makes the house smell heavenly.

And Holly has a video (below) showing her method for breaking down ducks, which will reveal all the places you can find fat for rendering.

Don't toss those duck cracklins, either! They are amazaballz stewed briefly as chicharrones en salsa verde, a Mexican classic. 

4. HAGC Hoodies & Shirts Are In!

The second wave of new merch - clothing! - didn't make it online in time for Christmas, but it has finally arrived! We've got hoodies in blaze and gray, men's and women's T-shirts, a long-sleeved T and a hooded fishing shirt, made out of sky-blue technical fabric.

Yeah, we know, one of these people is not a professional model. But the other four probably can't cook a wild duck breast to perfection, either. Not that we Gen X'ers are underestimating these adorable Zoomers.

These shirts are all printed in, and shipped from, Sturgis, South Dakota. 

Once again, thanks to everyone who took the time to fill out the merch survey earlier this year - your votes drove the selection!

And in case you're wondering what the first wave of merch was: stickers (which are going like hotcakes, especially "I eat, therefore I hunt").

5. What We're Up To

Hank has been recording great conversations with experts on preservation, and he's busily preparing to launch Season 4 of the Hunt Gather Talk Podcast on Thursday, Jan. 5.

Many of Hank's guests are friends, making the conversations livelier and more fun. Up first will be episodes on dry aging, salting fish, freeze frying and old school Italian preservation methods.  

Why, yes, that is a copy of Duck, Duck, Goose elevating Hank's keyboard - nothing but the finest in ergonomics here at HAGC HQ!

Holly has been making the best of the forced down-time that came with Hank's gift of Covid (womp womp). That means lots of sleep, lots of sci-fi bingeing, and - once her brain began functioning again - working on some exciting plans for 2023.

She also managed, during the haze of Covid, to write a piece for To The Bone about the dumb things some guys say to women hunters - the opening one is a doozy! But she wrote with a perspective we all need a lot more of these days: Outrage is fun, but it'd probably be better if we all cut each other a little more slack. "Sometimes stupid things have a way of flying out of my mouth" too, she wrote, "leaving an aftertaste of regret."

That's Holly on the left at the outset of a hunt with girlfriends in 2009.

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