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AH: Unless you’ve watched the show, Last Man On Earth, there’s no chance of really every one of these wild meats becoming extinct, I think we just need to start appreciating them more. I don’t think the issue is not enough food, I say this repeatedly on the show, it’s not an issue whether or not there’s enough food to feed the seven billion or nine billion that we’re expecting in forty years, but it’s more of let’s not waste and let’s look at other sources that are around us, and in this case rediscover the foods of our ancestors. AH: Awesome, that’s fantastic. Well Kate, thank you for spending time with us and educating us on this fabulous meat called beaver. KG: There’s a big difference. I had actually stopped eating red meat for probably thirty years because only if it was game, the difference in the color it was pale, pale red in comparison to wild game meat which is red, rich red. It was just such a difference and I don’t like taken into anything; like why eat it if it isn’t going to taste good? It got to the point where I’m not sure what different hormones that they inject or are fed, but it just didn’t sit well. So people, you will look at the statistics and I don’t know if you understand that Maine is leading the top as far as young farmers in agriculture in the United States. AH: I was trying to explain to a friend of mine who is Pennsylvania-Dutch and lives in rural Pennsylvania, she said, “Oh, curry; I’ve never had that, what’s it like? I said, think of curry like barbecue; it’s not just one thing; there’s all kinds of barbecue. And the same thing with curry; curry is more of a thing for a stew, it’s not a set combination of ingredients, so approaching it from that perspective really opens up whole worlds for people who don’t like curry.
I don’t know what the balance number is right now, but I still see a lot of people that are involved in hunting and fishing and yet I also see a lot of people who aren’t even interested because of, I really think, technology has moved us in the direction of more convenience. We want everything; immediate gratification, more convenience, let’s have it now. If the people are educated enough, though, I do know a lot of people like that, what’s important is they keep shopping the farmers’ market; they put a little planter outside so they have some herbs to add into their food. That little bit will just be parsley, like you talked about, if they had a little thing of parsley and they start adding it into salads, they’re going to go, “Oh my God, I wonder what else I can do?” So that is a snowball effect and so if people get those ideas we just talked about in their head then they get excited because also when you’re excited somebody else is, “Oh my God, this tastes so good, I can’t make it this good,” and it’s as simple as adding a fresh herb or something at the end. KG: I will say that I’m curious because a friend of mine caught me a farm-raised salmon that must have gotten out of the pen when they were closing down and it was pink so I don’t know if it was at the end and it had been eating shells or been eating dye, but I’m going to do some research on that. Thank you for that. AH: Really, that’s awesome. I could see a lot of people moving to Maine as refuge, just as they move to Hawaii for refuge. KG: I will support you 100% because I cannot tell people enough that what you have just said is that it is so important to start with basic, fresh ingredients. Sometimes just using one fresh herb as opposed to dried makes all the difference in the world.
KG: Well, I think we have pretty much gone through everything that I wanted to talk about that’s important. People are always asking me, and I think it’s very important to understand that you just can’t buy beaver. I would suggest people to ask either a local game warden, or if they know someone that traps, or even a wild game butcher because they know a lot of people who do catch and release with the animals and if they do, then the butcher could be the person to actually take care of the animal for them. It’s important that if you don’t have access to, and you would like to, that there are resources out there.
AH: She also laughed at me for making a pie crust from scratch until she tasted the pie and then had two or three helpings of that as well. AH: Oh, but of course. And folks, you don’t want to miss recipes like Mustard Crusted Beaver or Porcini Rubbed Beaver and the Victorious Beaver Loins. AH: Yeah, it scared me away from ever trying wild game meats, not that I haven’t had kangaroo. I had the opportunity to eat certain things and they were done really well; different kinds of elk and moose and so on. I really enjoyed the stories about her family, and her conversational tone. I think I will get more use out of this cookbook than I was expecting. AH: There’s more than just iron, there’s a lot of deficiencies. When you look historically how people have eaten these foods it’s always with an animal food, there’s always some little piece of pork in there or some fish broth or some animal food, dairy.KG: Right, it’s not wild, they’re not meat. Plus, that’s the first time I had goat was there, and I love it.
KG: This six-year-old, young huge male which was 850 pounds, it had already lost 20% of its weight because it was near the end of rutting season so it would not have survived the winter with its heart like that. I actually felt good because I love when an animal is presented to me that I can take because otherwise it really would have suffered. So that’s another aspect of hunting. AH: Oh gosh, I went hiking in the woods in Canada in the summer once; it was like that scene from King Kong with those giant bugs rustling into the ground, it was horrible. AH: Which is surprising. That, and the fact he doesn’t like nuts, walnuts or something really innocuous like that. KG: I had just quit my husband’s company, I had actually turned it around for him financially, and I’m not in the maintenance mode so I started doing some consulting. I was literallyup on Mount Desert Island at the time and a friend asked me to write a cookbook for her because she knows I’ve been cooking all my life. I’m totally self-taught, so I started putting some numbers and things together and the bottom line is she wanted me to develop a tabletop cookbook for 100% sales and I said that’s not going to work because you’re going to need national distribution for what you want and I don’t have that networking capability up here on the island. AH: Just take your mother away from you. That is incredible. I hope that people listening to this will go and investigate, see what’s available in their area; we don’t have to starve. Now I’m just opening a whole other can of worms because there’s so many of these articles going around, especially places like Spain and San Francisco, that are saying we’re not going to have enough meat, eat this plant that we’re putting into a vial somewhere, and a guy in a lab coat is going to turn it into protein for you.KG: Right, all of our greens and other kinds of proteins; the beans, the legumes, are all very healthy and a great compliment to the diet.
KG: There are certain people I know within the wildlife community. If there is something going through, like when I was working out in the woods one year we had the brain disease for the moose and the deer where they were eating feces and it the worms were getting up to their brain and they were running around going crazy, it was just terrible. KG: So they don’t, that is news to me. I knew they had finished them with shrimp shells because that color turns their meat.
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If you want to learn to cook with whole unprocessed foods this is a very good cookbook. The title tends to make you think it is just a novelty book, something to buy as a joke. But the recipes are simple and (mostly) easy. AH: Yes, totally.So what are some of variabilities from one season to the next, or one year to the next? Why doesn’t it always taste exactly the same? We know that it’s wild, but are there things like a drought year, how is that going to impact?
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