Wild Bites #33: a 3-minute read that makes you smarter about wild food and tells you what's to come on the website, podcast, YouTube, or To The Bone.

 ~ Hank

1. What's Hot Now

A Three Sisters stew of corn, beans and squash, with grouse. 

2. Make Some Meals of Teal

Grilled teal, slathered with homemade BBQ sauce. 

Teal seasons are a thing in much of the United States: A chance to hunt these little, aerobatic ducks before they migrate south to warmer climes. I'm actually going to be in Oklahoma this weekend for a teal and dove hunt, and you can bet I'll be making some of these teal-friendly recipes. 

Teal are one of the few ducks that are great cooked whole. They are almost always tender, and are single-serving... ish. (I can eat two on occasion.) Here are some options for when you bring home some of these tasty birds. 

• Start with grilled teal. You spatchcock the birds, or split them, then grill over high heat with the sauce of your choice. 
• Teal in a jar is a recipe/technique I learned from my friend Jesse Griffiths in Texas, and it's a fun way to make a meal-in-a-jar. You can vary the flavors to suit your own tastes, but the technique is the same. 
• If you just have teal breasts, try a classic French au poivre recipe: Peppered teal breasts. Also works great with doves.
• Want something a little fancier? Go really old school and make a salmis of duck, which is often done with teal. It's a recipe that's more than 150 years old. 
• Finally, save those giblets! A great way to try them is to make Cajun dirty rice, a classic that uses finely minced duck livers, chopped hearts and gizzards. It's amazing, and not scary at all.  

And here's a video on how to pluck ducks that might be useful, too. 

3. Fall Mushroom ID Guides

I've been picking mushrooms on my off days here in Alaska, mostly yellowfoot chanterelles. But there are all sorts of shrooms popping all over the country right now. 

One common mushroom in the north is the birch bolete. I recently wrote a guide on how to ID birch boletes that you'll find useful -- if you live in a place with birch trees. A more widespread mushroom is the honey mushroom, which lives all over the continent. Here's my guide to identifying honey mushrooms. 

I have a couple other good guides for fall mushrooms, including blewits, which are very common in the US; meadow mushrooms, which might be even more common; and matsutake mushrooms, which are less common but very much worth seeking out. 

4. Deck Life

My Alaska sojurn is over. As you read this, I am heading to Oklahoma for the next gig, a dove and teal hunt with my friends at Coastal Wings Outfitters. But I am leaving Alaska stronger, a bit more dinged up, and much richer in experience.  

My latest article on To the Bone is a day in the life of a deckhand (me), and it shows you what it takes to get high-quality salmon to your table. I put you right on deck with me: Rain, wind, blood, stinging jellyfish, all of it.

I also wrote about why I would want to fish commercially at all, why I heeded the siren song of salmon. My reasons are at once similar and different from others in this fishery, and I hope it helps explain a little about why I do what I do. 

If you like what you read, it would mean the world to me if you would consider subscribing to To the Bone. You can start subscribing for free, and upgrade to paid if you want to support my work. Thanks in advance for considering it. 

5. Two More Trips...

Me with a willow ptarmigan in Alaska, last year. 

Fish done, at least for now, so now I turn to hunting. Grouse will rule my fall, as I join my friend Rachel Rinas at the Pineridge Grouse Camp in northern Minnesota for the five-week season. We'll be the cooks there, and we're hoping to put some seriously good food on the table. Will I hunt? Maybe. But food comes first. 

But before that, I have one of my culinary hunts in Oklahoma with Coastal Wings Outfitters. This one is for teal ducks and doves, and it should be a fun dust-off of the ole' shotgun. I confess I haven't shot it since January. We're doing another culinary hunt, for ducks and geese, in January. That one is sold out, but we can put you on a wait list if you are interested; message me if you are. 

Finally, we're just about ready to release that discount coupon at Yakobi Fisheries. They have more than the salmon I just caught, but it's all great, ultra high quality fish and seafood. Stay tuned. I do know that the boxes are 20 pounds or more -- anything smaller will defrost before it gets to you. So if that's too much for you, get your friends in on an order!  

Gotta get on the road to Oklahoma, and it's a 14-hour drive. So bye for now,

~ Hank

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