{"id":4677,"date":"2013-03-09T16:44:44","date_gmt":"2013-03-09T22:44:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/?p=4677"},"modified":"2015-10-25T17:52:49","modified_gmt":"2015-10-25T23:52:49","slug":"squirrel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/?p=4677","title":{"rendered":"Squirrel"},"content":{"rendered":"\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"rss\"<\/a>

\"squirrel0\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Yum, right?<\/p>\n

Until recently, the only member of our household who had eaten squirrel was Oliver, our dog.\u00a0 And, despite his best efforts, the only one he ever managed to\u00a0catch had already been dead for a while.\u00a0 But one day, Leslie found one of those “100 things you have to eat before you die” lists online (this<\/a> one, I believe) and filled it out.\u00a0 She had eaten almost all of them, only coming up 5 or 6 things short.\u00a0 One of those things was squirrel.\u00a0 A few days later I was telling a coworker, Dave,\u00a0about this list and he mentioned if we wanted some squirrel, his son Casey would be glad to hunt some for us.\u00a0 And so,\u00a0before\u00a0we knew it, we had squirrels in the freezer.<\/p>\n

I did a little research on recipes for squirrel.\u00a0 The first thing I found was a tasty sounding\u00a0Hmong squirrel stew on the blog Hunter Angler Gardener Cook<\/a>.\u00a0 The recipe was from a cookbook called Cooking from the Heart: The Hmong Kitchen in America<\/a>.\u00a0 (As an aside, it’s a small world: I noticed one of the blurbs on the book was written by a woman named Kalia Kao Yang, who I’ve never met, but\u00a0had been emailing with back and forth asking her questions about Hmong food.)\u00a0 Another recipe that sounded good was the squirrel ravioli on Deadly Food<\/a>.\u00a0 We also got a lot of recommendations from\u00a0friends.\u00a0 It’s not so uncommon to eat squirrel out here and at least one town has an annual\u00a0squirrel dinner.\u00a0 In fact, one of Leslie’s students named squirrel her favorite meat.<\/p>\n

\"squirrel\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Almost all of the squirrel recipes we heard about\u00a0started with\u00a0slow cooking\u00a0the squirrel until the meat came off the bone.\u00a0 We first lightly floured and pan fried the squirrel legs (already cleaned and butchered) until brown, then put\u00a0them in a covered dish with leeks, carrots, onions, celery, garlic and half a bottle of red wine and braised at 325 F for two hours.<\/p>\n

This is the point in the story where we got a bit cocky though.\u00a0 I thought: squirrel must pretty much taste like rabbit.\u00a0 I know what goes with rabbit, I’ll just wing it.\u00a0We decided to make\u00a0a squirrel ragu, served\u00a0over bucatini.\u00a0 The ragu was made with san marzano tomatoes, red wine,\u00a0porcini mushrooms, shallots, parmigiano, and\u00a0lots and lots of garlic.\u00a0 It was a rich,\u00a0full bodied\u00a0sauce meant to go with a dark, complex meat.<\/p>\n

\"squirrel3\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Here’s the problem: squirrel doesn’t taste anything like rabbit.\u00a0 It wasn’t gamey at all; it wasn’t dark (in flavor) either.\u00a0 Much more like chicken (clich\u00e9) with a little bit of pork mixed in.\u00a0 As soon as I tasted the cooked meat I had two thoughts: 1) this is pretty good and 2) this doesn’t go with this sauce at all<\/em>.\u00a0 We made a few adjusts with the seasoning (such as adding parsley) which helped, but in the end it just didn’t work.\u00a0 Cooking 101: taste your ingredients ahead of time.<\/p>\n

So it likely wasn’t the best squirrel dish we’ll ever eat.\u00a0 But that’s okay.\u00a0 It leaves plenty of room for improve on the next go around.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We got a lot of recommendations from friends. It’s not so uncommon to eat squirrel out here and at least one town has an annual squirrel dinner. In fact, one of Leslie’s students named squirrel her favorite meat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4678,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[549],"class_list":["post-4677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-home-cooking","tag-squirrel","has-featured-image"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4677"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4677\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5830,"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4677\/revisions\/5830"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}