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dragonlady7I grew up on a 50-acre plot of what was essentially the wasteland, the unusable land around several large and fertile fields farmed by a local farming family for 50 years. My parents are the reason those fields haven't been sold for housing developments: we own all the access. We own the ravines and the streams and the roads, and those beautiful fields are left intact and the local family still farms them.
About 50 years ago the property was logged, and so the few truly massive trees left are the ones whose roots the loggers knew were holding up the sides of the ravines.
There are three streams on our property. The first one is swampy and broad, and has little water in it during hotter portions of the year.
The second one is steep and shale-bottomed, and always flowing. We found a tiny fish in it once. It's very shallow. The sides of the ravine are mostly clothed in pine trees, and it looks like the Adirondacks (a huge park to the north; when looking at a map of NY State, it's the huge big block in the north sticky-uppy part. I'm from the extreme east-- Rensselaer Co.-- lived a while in the southerly bit -- Westchester Co. (never go there: it's not worth it, just go to Manhattan) -- and now live in the extreme west-- Erie Co.-- and the Adirondacks were a lengthy day trip for me as a child (Essex, Hamilton, Warren counties and others). My grandparents met through a club that led hikes there. It's beautiful there).
The third stream is steep and muddy, and we seldom go there, but the woods there are mixed conifers and deciduous trees.
The fields are usually planted with field corn-- not the kind humans eat, but the kind they leave standing until it dries on the stalk, and then harvest and feed to cattle. It is hard and the grains rattle against each other in your hand. But sometimes the fields are planted with soybeans, or pumpkins, or winter wheat. The farmer's name is Della Rocco, and he practices good soil conservation, so our streams aren't choked with erosion runoff (and he still has fields to farm, up on the ridges).
The point of this story is to mention that my family's property supports a fairly large population of white-tailed deer, native to the area and once a dietary staple of the inhabitants. The State of NY allows two hunting season on deer-- a longer bow season, and a shorter firearms season.
Those of you who think hunting is cruel, i will say that once when I was a child I came across the carcass of a deer that had starved in one of the fields. It had been a hard winter, and you could see the signs everywhere-- bark stripped from trees, holes dug in the snow to go after spilled corn in the field, shrubs eaten wholesale. The deer were desperate, and many were killed on the roads. (A child in my town was killed when a deer came through the windshield of his mother's minivan [they jump in front of cars, dazed by the headlights and noise, and sometimes miss the hood altogether in their seeming eagerness to get killed] and kicked the child to death in the backseat.) The one I found had died out in the open field, probably chased down by wild dogs (we get coy-dogs, hybrids of the original wild coyotes and domestic or feral dogs; they howl at the moon and it's the scariest unearthliest noise ever) and too weak to seek shelter in the ravines. Even in rich, fertile areas like ours, the deer sometimes have more fawns than the land can support. And in areas where there is no hunting-- crowded Westchester County, in the south, where I used to live-- the deer (which I would meet on my morning commute) were undersized, scrawny, tick-infested (I know, they gave me a Lyme-disease infested tick, thanks) and pathetic little things, most of whom get road-killed. I know a reasonable-sized deer when I see it. These, that I saw in Westchester, were full-grown (fawns are marked by dapples in their coats, and so are easily told apart from adults), but ridiculously small.
And so every year, dutifully, Dad gets his landowner's permit and goes out hunting.
My father, however, is not a very good hunter. First off, he forgets why he's out there. In his mind, he goes back to Vietnam. He prowls silently through the forest, watching the sunrise slanting through the trees, watching the pathways, and he finds himself looking for the NVA, hunted as much as hunting, watching for signs of ambushes and looking for opportunities to set up his own ambushes. Needless to say, he sometimes forgets to look for the deer.
Sometimes he sees the deer, and lines up a shot, and then doesn't take it because he doesn't feel confident enough of the backdrop-- if you miss, a bullet keeps going more than a mile, and that would just get the bullet as far as the next inhabited street, and you never know who else is in the woods in the meantime even with the no trespassing signs.
Sometimes he sees the deer, and lines up a shot, and then he remembers that, even gutted, a dead deer weighs over a hundred pounds, and also, even shot fatally, can keep running for several hundred yards. Getting that back up over the two ridges to the first place wide enough to get a 4wd vehicle out would be backbreaking work. And he invariably thinks, "I'm not that hungry."
But not so with Dad's cousin Arthur. Arthur is a great hunter. He travels all over the place hunting things. He loves hunting. He stuffs trophies and puts them on his wall. He fishes, too.
He knows how animals think. He tracks them with silent, expert skill. He never shoots unless he's sure he can kill. But he doesn't hesitate, if he knows he can.
He is very respectful of the animals he kills, and is an expert butcher, and what he doesn't eat himself he gives away generously. In real life he is a university professor, teaching I think sports psychology at a big university in Massachusetts.
Anyhow. He came last year, the day after Thanksgiving, with his friend Gary, his two sons, and Gary's son. They and Dad went out hunting on our property. And by the time it was nightfall, they had bagged not one but two deer, both bucks, both well over 150 pounds.
The first deer, Arthur butchered right there for us, and we put it into the freezer. I took a number of the steak cuts of it, fried them in bacon grease (venison is very lean) and onions, and put them into the oven to keep warm. I fed those to the hungry hunters when they finally came back, exhausted, from the hunt for the second deer, which had run after it had been shot and had taken them 3 hours to find. (Arthur won't leave an injured deer, and he knew he'd hit it.)
I still have a bit of this first deer left, and it's getting sorry and freezerburned, so rather than throw it out, I've put it in to marinate and am going to prepare it according to this recipe. I've had the recipe before, and it's quite good, so we'll see how it is this time.
DEER, from Tom Brundage.
1 bottle beer
1/2 cup sugar
2 bouillion cubes (beef)
1/4 tsp celery seed
1/4 tsp garlic powder
1 Tbsp vinegar
1/2 tsp oregano
1/8 tsp basil
1 onion, cut up
1 splash Gravy Master
1 pepperoncini (little hot yellow pickled Greek pepper), cut up
Marinate overnight.
Cook 8 hours in crockpot, on low.
About 50 years ago the property was logged, and so the few truly massive trees left are the ones whose roots the loggers knew were holding up the sides of the ravines.
There are three streams on our property. The first one is swampy and broad, and has little water in it during hotter portions of the year.
The second one is steep and shale-bottomed, and always flowing. We found a tiny fish in it once. It's very shallow. The sides of the ravine are mostly clothed in pine trees, and it looks like the Adirondacks (a huge park to the north; when looking at a map of NY State, it's the huge big block in the north sticky-uppy part. I'm from the extreme east-- Rensselaer Co.-- lived a while in the southerly bit -- Westchester Co. (never go there: it's not worth it, just go to Manhattan) -- and now live in the extreme west-- Erie Co.-- and the Adirondacks were a lengthy day trip for me as a child (Essex, Hamilton, Warren counties and others). My grandparents met through a club that led hikes there. It's beautiful there).
The third stream is steep and muddy, and we seldom go there, but the woods there are mixed conifers and deciduous trees.
The fields are usually planted with field corn-- not the kind humans eat, but the kind they leave standing until it dries on the stalk, and then harvest and feed to cattle. It is hard and the grains rattle against each other in your hand. But sometimes the fields are planted with soybeans, or pumpkins, or winter wheat. The farmer's name is Della Rocco, and he practices good soil conservation, so our streams aren't choked with erosion runoff (and he still has fields to farm, up on the ridges).
The point of this story is to mention that my family's property supports a fairly large population of white-tailed deer, native to the area and once a dietary staple of the inhabitants. The State of NY allows two hunting season on deer-- a longer bow season, and a shorter firearms season.
Those of you who think hunting is cruel, i will say that once when I was a child I came across the carcass of a deer that had starved in one of the fields. It had been a hard winter, and you could see the signs everywhere-- bark stripped from trees, holes dug in the snow to go after spilled corn in the field, shrubs eaten wholesale. The deer were desperate, and many were killed on the roads. (A child in my town was killed when a deer came through the windshield of his mother's minivan [they jump in front of cars, dazed by the headlights and noise, and sometimes miss the hood altogether in their seeming eagerness to get killed] and kicked the child to death in the backseat.) The one I found had died out in the open field, probably chased down by wild dogs (we get coy-dogs, hybrids of the original wild coyotes and domestic or feral dogs; they howl at the moon and it's the scariest unearthliest noise ever) and too weak to seek shelter in the ravines. Even in rich, fertile areas like ours, the deer sometimes have more fawns than the land can support. And in areas where there is no hunting-- crowded Westchester County, in the south, where I used to live-- the deer (which I would meet on my morning commute) were undersized, scrawny, tick-infested (I know, they gave me a Lyme-disease infested tick, thanks) and pathetic little things, most of whom get road-killed. I know a reasonable-sized deer when I see it. These, that I saw in Westchester, were full-grown (fawns are marked by dapples in their coats, and so are easily told apart from adults), but ridiculously small.
And so every year, dutifully, Dad gets his landowner's permit and goes out hunting.
My father, however, is not a very good hunter. First off, he forgets why he's out there. In his mind, he goes back to Vietnam. He prowls silently through the forest, watching the sunrise slanting through the trees, watching the pathways, and he finds himself looking for the NVA, hunted as much as hunting, watching for signs of ambushes and looking for opportunities to set up his own ambushes. Needless to say, he sometimes forgets to look for the deer.
Sometimes he sees the deer, and lines up a shot, and then doesn't take it because he doesn't feel confident enough of the backdrop-- if you miss, a bullet keeps going more than a mile, and that would just get the bullet as far as the next inhabited street, and you never know who else is in the woods in the meantime even with the no trespassing signs.
Sometimes he sees the deer, and lines up a shot, and then he remembers that, even gutted, a dead deer weighs over a hundred pounds, and also, even shot fatally, can keep running for several hundred yards. Getting that back up over the two ridges to the first place wide enough to get a 4wd vehicle out would be backbreaking work. And he invariably thinks, "I'm not that hungry."
But not so with Dad's cousin Arthur. Arthur is a great hunter. He travels all over the place hunting things. He loves hunting. He stuffs trophies and puts them on his wall. He fishes, too.
He knows how animals think. He tracks them with silent, expert skill. He never shoots unless he's sure he can kill. But he doesn't hesitate, if he knows he can.
He is very respectful of the animals he kills, and is an expert butcher, and what he doesn't eat himself he gives away generously. In real life he is a university professor, teaching I think sports psychology at a big university in Massachusetts.
Anyhow. He came last year, the day after Thanksgiving, with his friend Gary, his two sons, and Gary's son. They and Dad went out hunting on our property. And by the time it was nightfall, they had bagged not one but two deer, both bucks, both well over 150 pounds.
The first deer, Arthur butchered right there for us, and we put it into the freezer. I took a number of the steak cuts of it, fried them in bacon grease (venison is very lean) and onions, and put them into the oven to keep warm. I fed those to the hungry hunters when they finally came back, exhausted, from the hunt for the second deer, which had run after it had been shot and had taken them 3 hours to find. (Arthur won't leave an injured deer, and he knew he'd hit it.)
I still have a bit of this first deer left, and it's getting sorry and freezerburned, so rather than throw it out, I've put it in to marinate and am going to prepare it according to this recipe. I've had the recipe before, and it's quite good, so we'll see how it is this time.
DEER, from Tom Brundage.
1 bottle beer
1/2 cup sugar
2 bouillion cubes (beef)
1/4 tsp celery seed
1/4 tsp garlic powder
1 Tbsp vinegar
1/2 tsp oregano
1/8 tsp basil
1 onion, cut up
1 splash Gravy Master
1 pepperoncini (little hot yellow pickled Greek pepper), cut up
Marinate overnight.
Cook 8 hours in crockpot, on low.
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no subject
Date: 2004-11-15 04:15 pm (UTC)Nevertheless, interesting as always.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-15 04:31 pm (UTC)I'm always like this.