How About Cooked?
Posted: December 27, 2014 Filed under: Wild Food | Tags: Cooking Elk, Cooking Razor Clams, smoked salmon Leave a comment
After all that raw product I put up last week, here’s some pix of the pre-Christmas meal we cooked up with my Dad. He loves all kinds of wild food, so I packed the raw ingredients in a little cooler for our flight, then we put together a kind of Northwest surf-n-turf dinner. Appetizer above is a chunk of alder-smoked Willapa Bay coho from September.
Perhaps the best part of cooking and eating wild food is the stories and people that come to mind with each ingredient. That coho makes me think of the day Sweeney and I caught it, and how we limited by early afternoon and didn’t know what to do with ourselves for the rest of the day. The razor clams, here fried in a crisp, panko breading, bring back all the fun the kids and I had on the beach with the Sweeneys a few weeks ago.
The elk backstrap pictured here, marinated in olive oil, garlic and rosemary, then pan seared, reminds me of our good friend Kate Taylor (she’s the source) and all that went into her Montana elk hunt.
Finally, put it all together and it’s more than a great meal; it’s a plate full of stories and thoughts of friends, places and times. Delicious.
