Blog Entry

Warning: Contains Furry little animals

Let me start this post by making something clear. I enjoy eating beans. It has become something of a family tradition for Sarah to prepare a delicious meal of beans and rice with cornbread (or sometimes biscuits) on Monday, and then to make enchiladas with them on Tuesday of every week. I love both of these days because I know that it costs a dollar or two to feed my whole family both days (maybe $3 or $4 if we have fresh guacamole -- mmm!) With so many arrows in the quiver, anything that significantly cuts the price of a meal wins big in my book. The thing that makes these meals so great is the cost... the fact that they're edible and even somewhat tasty is just a bonus.

But lately something -- maybe the cooling weather, maybe some instinctive hard-coded nutritional calculator, or maybe spending too much time browsing Arthur's Hall of Viking Manliness -- has made me crave something more ... meaty. Of course, meat costs money, so adding meat to the beans and rice would change it from a splendidly cheap meal into a delicious but costly one. This presents a tricky problem: How to add meat to the family meal plan without adding dollars to the grocery budget?

My first stop, of course, was Uncle Sam. That is, the United States Federal government -- I mean, if you listen to any Democrat, it's clear that any and every real problem that happens anywhere in the world, the very first go-to person for fixing it is the Fed. (If I ever had the chance to ask a Democrat presidential debate question, it would be something along the lines of, "Can you name one problem that you don't think the Federal government should try to fix?") I was disappointed to learn that my family does not quite qualify for food stamps ... yet. I think 3 or 4 more kids would do it though. :-)

But at the same time I have also been pondering more and more, the possibility of earning my own food the old-fashioned way, by killing it myself. Now I live in unincorporated Knox County, so I think that it might be okay to raise chickens in the back yard. But it's less than a mile from Knoxville on one side and Concord on the other, and pretty obviously suburbs and not farmland, and nobody else does it, so I'm not sure if it's legal. This leaves only one other option: harvesting meat from the wild.

I remember one time, a looooong time ago when I was a boy, when my grandaddy and I raked up cut grass in the yard into grass piles, then upturned the grass piles later to get crickets, then took the crickets as bait and went down to a stream (Turkey Creek?), caught some bream, and took them home to fry them. I don't remember much about the meal, but I do remember seeing the fish frying in the pan and thinking how cool it was.

I also have another single memory, of a family friend taking me out with a shotgun, shooting a squirrel and having it for dinner. Oh whoops, I guess one furry little animal was harmed in this post. It tasted like chicken. For a while now when my kids have been pleased to see a furry little squirrel in the back yard, I have made the offhand comment that they are delicious. Depending on my kids' moods and which ones are around, this is answered by "haha, Daddy wants to eat a squirrel!" or "Yum! chomping sound"

So lately, especially on meatless days, I have found myself digging around the web for hunting and fishing regulations and tips, watching video tutorials of people cleaning fish or gutting squirrels, drooling over delicious-sounding game recipes, and pulling out my combination fishing/hunting license and imagining the possibilities.

And just to cap off this post, I leave you with a related musical diversion courtesy of a fellow Tennesseean.

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