The Deerslayer's Wife
Embracing the Hunting Lifestyle
A Day in the Life…..
As I begin this strange journey into blogging, I pondered long and hard on a starting point. It needed to be a good one, a beginning, an introduction. Since I hope to share information about cooking wild game (almost exclusively wild game) and since I couldn’t decide on a brilliant beginning to introduce everyone to my world of “all things gamey”, I now choose to start with “a day in the life of a deerslayer’s wife”. The rhyming was an accident and I promise that it won’t happen very often.
Usually, my Sunday starts with a strong cup of coffee and notebook for carefully planning out my menus, grocery list, and lists of things to do for the week. I prepare three meals a day for my husband, who comes home for lunch, one of my daughters, whom I homeschool, and my other daughter who is starting graduate school.
Yesterday, we prepared toast from the beautiful, round loaf of rustic bread that my 12 yr.old (almost 13!) baked the day before. One of the great things about homeschooling is that the domestic arts are equally as valuable as the more academic subjects. For lunch, I boiled some pheasant from the freezer to put in a pasta dish that the girls and I have chosen to refer to as “Pheasant Phantasmagoria”. Alliteration is important in the naming of these recipes! This one is similar to a dish that we had at a local Italian restaurant. For dinner, I prepared my husband’s favorite meal of all time, baked white-wing doves in gravy. This is ALWAYS served with white rice and LeSueur peas. This was his father’s favorite dish, as well. It holds a place of honor, usually reserved for special days like Fathers’ day, birthdays, etc. However, as dove season nears, and our freezer is still overflowing with white-wing from last year, special days now consist of days that end with “y” . Such is a day in the life of the deerslayer’s wife.
As I prepared the doves, I decided that readers might benefit from photos of the process. Mistake. While the photos might be beneficial, they are ugly and silly looking. Tiny plucked carcasses, I decided, just aren’t very photogenic. Nor are they appetizing.
See? Should I have told him to smile? If, after being exposed to the “dove of doom,” you’d still be interested in a recipe, I’ll be happy to provide one.
The Deerslayer's Wife 
You’re right; that is a bit disturbing. More than a bit, actually. It looks a bit like a crime scene photo.
Fortunately, it’s one of those tastes-better-than-it-looks things.