Hump Day Curry

It's was another crazy week up here.

I've been running meetings all week with spillover onto Sunday and Monday.Blah!  By Wednesday I was already losing steam. A week stuck in meetings means a week of work and emails piling up only desk. Double Blah!

On top of that I'm supposed to make a dessert buffet for 60 for our office X'mas party this Saturday. No, of course I hadn't started baking anything. Heck, by the time I get home, walk the pups, make dinner and clean up, it's 9pm by the time I get a chance to put my tired feet up and I don't feel like pulling a Martha Stewart outta my butt!

I'd figured I'd at least cut out having to cook for the rest of the week and make big pot of curry. Not just any curry, Ptarmigan Curry.

A recipe? As far as I'm concerned, the best curry is basically a stir-fry with curry powder instead of soy sauce. And no, I don't have a recipe for stir-fry. The best stir-fry, like the best curry, is a quick, ruthless discussion between you and your fridge.

  "Psst, what you got on your shelves, Mr. Fridge."
"A bunch of spinach handful of baby carrots, half an onion, half decapitated crown of broccoli and 2 sad mushrooms."
"I'll take everything but the mushrooms."
"That'll make them even sadder."
"Too bad. No room for sad veggies."

I'll admit that the of the veggies used in tonight's curry came off the veggie tray from my meeting today. A handful of carrots, tomatoes, broccoli, cauliflower and celery. What do you want from me? I hate watching food, especially perfectly fine veggies go to waste.
When broccoli is $6 a bunch and potato is going for $20 a bag of potatoes, I'm shameless.
And anyways, it also already cut up and ready to go.

I also had a bunch of kale and cilantro in the fridge. I added a can of chickpeas foraged from the backwoods of my pantry.

  I seasoned the ptarmigan breasts with salt, pepper and curry powder and seared them for 2 minutes on each side over med-high heat. I cut them into bite-sized pieces and added them to the curry. You want the breasts on the bloody side of rare because it'll cook a bit more when you add it to the curry.
Here's the end result:

Throughout the week, I'll just keep tweaking it to make variations. One night I'll 'souped' it up with some coconut milk. Another night, I'll added a more tomatoes. It's great with a range of starches from quinoa to rice noodles to being stuffed into a wrap for lunch.

Hurray for Hump Day Ptarmigan Curry!

Carcass Soup

(Warning: This post contains harvesting images that may be disturbing to some. If you are squeamish and don’t like seeing fluffy animals  all covered in blood as a result of a well placed headshot, you’d better move onto this entry where there are some photos of some very cute puppies.  But heck if you’re going to eat meat, you might as well face it sooner or later that a living creature had to die because you wanted to have a hamburger. At least the creatures in these photos had a life frolicking about the land, free from factory farms and didn’t have a clue what corn-based food pellets tastes like. Anyways, 'salad' is just a nice way of saying ‘vegetable massacre’.)

There are still plenty of  critters are still out there, however the odd storm event mades it tricky to catch anything but frostbite.  Kevin caught some really swell photos along with dinner.

wolf paws compared to husband`s gorilla paw

There were a number of wolves and other big fluffies other there this week. Kevin even saw woodland caribou and a moose cow with two newbies.

I don’t know who’s going to break it to the children of Inuvik but next year’s Easter Egg Hunt may have to be cancelled due to the lack of Easter Egg delivery bunnies thanks to dear, dashingly handsome, darling husband. Apparently he has a vendetta against the bunny tribe.

Most of these went to his grandmother who is actively encouraging this vendetta. 

It was a crazy whirlwind long weekend for me (as if there is such a thing as a calm, quiet long weekend around here :P )

I made ‘Carcass Soup’ to sustain us through this chilly weekend. (Recipe below.) Carcass Soup is my response to folks that tell me that the only parts worth eating on a upland bird is the breast meat and that there`s not enough meat on the rest of the bird to be worth the effort.
Seven Hells! If you`re gonna snuff out a creature`s light with you`re own two hands, you do it the courtesy of using as much of the creature as possible. I have an army of elders to back me up on this one.
I will admit, it`s a pain to be dealing with the tiny slivers of tendons that are found in the drumstick but there are ways around it .Carcass Soup is one easy way of seperating the meat from the bones for small birds.  The basic premise is to simmer it until the meat falls off the bones.  The tendons just slip right out.
Check out this video showing a slick trick for removing tendons from game birds.

A good chunk of this weekend was spent getting ready for the Great Northern Arts Festival Christmas Craft Fair (November 25-27th at MSRC). Yes, it`s that time already. I`ve rented a table to sell my handspun and hand-dyed yarns. My house looks like a muppet slaughterhouse with a gzillion skeins of newly dyed yarn hanging all over the place to dry.

The rest of my weekend was spent playing outside. Whee! My friends and I, with a pack of dogs in tow, went for a ski along the East Channel just outside of town.  There was just enough snow on the river to make for good skiing. There weren`t many skidoo trails and so there was a quite a bit of trailbreaking involved. The fun ended when I broke a ski in an attempt to  gain higher ground which sucks musk ox balls.  I hobbled back with my transverse fractured ski and a long face. However, it`s next to impossible to be too sad for long when you have these two running around you:

Afterwards, my friends and I had a big doggie biscuit baking afternoon. We had volunteered to bake dog cookies for the SPCA`s craft fair table. We made liver biscotti, peanut butter cookies, oatmeal and molasses treats and cheesy biscuits. Conservatively, I think we made over 1000 cookies.

The doggie biscuit baking crew

This week started off with a sharp cold slap to the face.  It was around -30C this morning when I trudged off to work. I walked home for lunch and arrived looking like this from my 15 minute walk from the office:

armed with beaver mitts

Frost tipped eyelashes! No winter outfit is complete without this icy bling.

Have a great week!

Carcass Soup

3-4 ptarmigan or grouse skinned carcasses (basically everything but the breasts)

water, stock, wine

couple bunchs of spinach, kale or chard (shredded) or 1 box of frozen spinach (thawed)

1 can of white kidney beans or whatever bean you feel like

• Dump the birds into a crockpot. Top with water or stock or wine or any combination of the three.
• Cook on low for 7-8 hours or until the meat begins to fall off the bone.
• Remove the bird from the broth and set aside to cool.
• Dump in the other ingredients.
• Shred the meat off the bones. Careful to slip all the tendons out of the drumstick meat. You should get about 2 cups or more of meat.
• Return meat to the soup. Let simmer for another 20 minutes.
• Serve.

This is a basic broth. You can add all the culinary bells and whistles. I added some red chili flakes and a couple shots of soy sauce. I wanted to taste the bird and the greens.  The beans provided some earthiness to the soup. Simple and tasty!

Family birdbrains

We spend much of this past Thanksgiving weekend roaming the land and hunting.  We didn’t have any luck with caribou or moose.  They figured it was a long weekend so they slept in.
There was a smattering of little critters out there. We managed to get something for the stew pot.

This one brought the whole family together.

My darling , dashingly handsome, dear husband shot at the ptarmigan.

The shot only clipped its wing and  when he went to retreive it, the bird hopped into the thick bushes and poof disappeared into a cloud of magical snow. 

My husband and I beat the bushes and traced and re-traced the blood trail to no avail. 

So we called out the experts:

Lyra and Loulou in their natural state

Who shamed us completely and found the downed bird in no time flat. Which is nice but really not that impressive because , well, they are the most houndy- hounds ever. What was really impressive was when Lyra, who had recovered the still flapping bird, was asked to 'drop it’, the little bugger actually dropped the freaking bird at my feet and sat back, waiting for further instructions.  Now THAT is impressive considering that she is known to de-squeak and de-gut her toys in a whirlwind of puppy-manic delight. (All those 'tuff' dog toys...yeah, not so much in the hands & jaws of Lyra-girl, the Shredder.)
Here are the girls ‘inspecting’ the booty:

We got it home quick enough that it was easy to dry pluck.

I brined the bird overnight and threw it into a lemon-garlic marinade but didn’t get around to cooking it for a few days. Actually 5 days. It was a crazy week of board meetings, volunteering and all-round non-stop insanity. By the time I got home, it would be nearly 9 pm and I barely had enough energy tin me to nuke a dinner of leftovers let alone deal with preparing and cooking a bird, much less with having to clean up the mess afterwards. Anyways, we had a crap load of leftover turkey to get through.

Finally came a night when I didn’t have plans after work beyond training and and walking the girls. I got into the kitchen at the civilized time of 7:30pm. I had ptarmigan plans brewing in my head for days. 

 Since it was plucked so nicely, the skin was begging to be roasted up nice and crispy. However, if you overcook the breast meat, it not only is dry but livery and not in a good pâté  sort of way.  So I’ve developed a bifurcated cooking method that incorporates roasting and a quick sear and broil to finish off the bird.

I served the ptarmigan in a red wine cranberry sauce made with local cranberries.  Here’s the recipe:

Roasted-Broiled Ptarmigan

1-2 ptarmigan (brined at overnight, then marinated in lemon and garlic overnight or for a few days if you have a crazy stupid schedule like mine)

1 cup red wine (on top of the one you're already drinking while you prepare this dish)

Handful of minced red onion

Cupful of cranberries

Olive oil

 Sherry or balsamic vinegar

Salt and pepper to taste

     1)      Prep: Preheat the oven to 425F. I have realized that my oven is a bit cranky when  it gets about 350F. So  I have it at 375F to 450F depending on the alignment of the stars.

2)      Separate the breast from the rest of the bird. Then cut the meat off the bone. Throw the bones into your handy dandy freezer cache of soup bones. Sprinkle salt and pepper onto the breasts.  Set them aside for now.

 

3)      Roast: Flatten the rest of the ptarmigan (back, legs and wings) so it looks like roadkill. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Place it on a pan skin side up. Throw into the oven for 15 minutes.

4)      Sear: Heat a couple glugs of olive oil over medium high heat in a pan. Sear the breasts (skin side up) for 5 minutes. There should be a nice brown crust. Remove the meat from pan and set aside on a plate.

 

5)      Red wine-cranberry sauce:  In the same pan, add another glug of oil and toss in minced red onion. Sauté the onion until you get it nice and caramelized.

6)      Deglazed the pan with red wine.  Reduce heat to a low simmer.

7)      Simmer away the red wine until it is reduced by half. The wine should be thick enough to coat the back of your spoon.

8)      Toss in cranberries.

9)      Add a splash of either sherry or balsamic vinegar.

10)   Season to taste and set aside for plating.

     11)   Broil: When the bird is done roasting, turn on the broiler.

12)   Place breasts (skin side up) in the pan with the rest of the bird.

13)   Place pan a few inches from broiler and broil for 5 minutes.  

14)   Let meat rest for 10 minutes before cutting.

15)   Serve: Slice breast meat into slices.  The breast meat should be medium rare (Still pink on the inside) Chop the bird lengthwise along the spine.

Plate however you want.  I lay down the sauce first instead of spooning the sauce onto the bird because I like my skin to remain crispy.

drool all over the keyboard goodness

Darling, dashingly handsome, dear husband gave this meal two enthusiastic thumbs up. The skin was nice and crispy. The breast meat was juicy and reminiscent of a medium rare steak with enough gaminess to remind you that this chunk of protein is not a product of the corn industrial complex.   The sauce provided just enough tartness to compliment the wild meat. It would go well with other upland birds. 

You could do the sauce with store bought cranberries but those are basically crimson coloured packing material compared to wild lowbush cranberries.  The sauce would be good with blueberries or blackberries. Kevin suggested that a kick of orange zest would be nice but I didn’t want to have to deal with cleaning another kitchen utensil. 

Don’t think the girls were left out. They got ptarmigan guts in their puppy stew.

In all this kitchen tomfoolery, the handle for the oven door broke off. The darn thing is on its last legs. The oven came with the house when we bought it. It might be time for a new one. Where did I put that Sears catalogue??

Dawn of the Ptarmigan

Out of the pre-dawn mist, rises a Ranger of the North.

The young world is held captive in mist and wind,

frost and ice.

Yet, our hero braves the arctic break of light in search of the (not so elusive) feather footed creatures of the tundra...

There! Off in the (near) distance, a wing of premature winter.  Your mistimed camouflage did you in, snow wing.

The Ranger of the North, stealthily (or as stealthily as one can while wearing Gore-Tex), takes aim.

Our Ranger of the North, returns to camp with his brace of feather footed prey of the silent 'p'.
( A little etymological trivia: The word 'ptarmigan' originates from Scottish Gaelic 'tarmachan' .  The pt- spelling is a mistaken Greek construction from 1680's, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. I know, I'm such a geek.)

He heralds two of the tundra’s most feared tailed mercenaries to flush out the rest of the (not so elusive) feather footed creatures of the tundra. 

Lyra squeals,  “I smell them! Over here! Hurry, hurry!”

“For dog’s sake,“ mutters Loulou,  “calm down before you pee on yourself.”

Onto the rolling tundra they traverse, in search of the rest of the feather footed creatures of the tundra.

In the end, our Ranger of the North returns to camp with the morning’s bounty.

My darling, dashingly handsome, dear husband (yes that his official blog designation) ran off for a few days with the girls and a hunting buddy in search of caribou and moose.  This was the closest they got to a caribou:

LOL!

As you can see,  he did find plenty of small game to fill the Rubbermaid bounty bins.  

Apparently, he was keen on taking down the equivalence of a caribou’s worth of ptarmigan. Not that I’m complaining...

Stay tuned to find out what madcap culinary adventures are in store for these feather footed yummies.