by David Draper

When I was very young, all my mom’s family would gather at my grandparent’s house on New Year’s Eve for a big food-related feast. Each year would feature food from a different country, such as Chinese one year or Mexican the next. (Chinese and Mexican were about as foreign as you could get in western Nebraska in the mid-1970s.) I don’t remember much from those meals, other than gorging on fortune cookies, which I still love today.

The extended Richards clan isn’t alone in instituting some type of New Year’s food tradition. Many of the most popular ones are symbolic of peoples’ hopes for economic growth and progress in the coming year. Some folks eat only pork, because pigs root forward, versus poultry, which scratch backwards. Other foods are featured for their resemblance to money, such as greens and cabbage, or beans which are said to represent coins.
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by Colin Kearns

The mission of John Besh’s new cookbook, My Family Table, is “a passionate plea for home cooking.” That’s a nice sentiment, home cooking. Home cooking means cooking at home with family. Home cooking means cooking what you have at home—be it a deer you hunted, a walleye you caught, or a winter squash you grew. Home cooking means sharing a meal at home, at your family table. Home cooking is the best kind of cooking, and My Family Table is the best cookbook I’ve seen in a long time.

If you’ve read the December-January issue of Field & Stream, you already have one of the recipes from this book—the duck stewed with apples and turnips, which Besh shared with us because he loves to hunt and read this magazine. I’ve tried that dish, and it’s one of the most delicious meals I enjoyed all year.
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by David Draper

Now that there’s a deer in the freezer and the pheasants are starting to flush really wild, I can turn my attention to the abundant waterfowl that’s moved into Nebraska’s Sugar Valley. I’ve managed to get out a couple times within the last week and we’ve had a couple of good shoots, filling the bird strap with Canadas and a duck or two. So keeping with the current theme, let’s pit the two birds against each other in this week’s Food Fight.
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by David Draper

We’ve been getting some great reader submissions for Food Fight Friday, which lets me off the hook as I’ve been a little too busy hunting lately to do much serious cooking. (Yet I’ve still been packing on the holiday pounds. Go figure.) This week is an All-American battle of two great classics: a cranberry-venison burger from Susan Rose, whose corned venison Reuben last week put up a valiant fight, and chicken-fried antelope from Wild Chef reader Andrew Metzger.

Susan's Cranberry BBQ Burger Vs. Andrew's Chicken-Fried Antelope

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by David Draper

In the town near where I goose hunt, there’s a little taquería that serves the best burritos for just $3. You can get them filled with just about any traditional Mexican meat you can imagine—from abodaba to tripe—with my favorite being la lengua, or tongue. Favorite, that is, until last week when I saw a new ingredient listed—buche, which was explained to me in broken English as being part of the pig’s stomach. Well, come to find out, it’s actually esophagus, but I was intrigued enough to try it, and let me tell you, it was delicious. So much so that I’m more excited for my next buche burrito than I am for the actual goose hunting.

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by David Draper

I hope most of you were smart enough to avoid the insanity that has become Black Friday, and instead did something productive the day after Thanksgiving, like go hunting or watch college football. I did a little of both, managing to get a couple of pheasants and rooting for my beloved Big Red in their end-of-season win over Iowa.

Truth is, I wouldn’t have gone shopping even if I’d had the store to myself—that’s how much I dread that part of the holiday season. Still, Christmas will be here before you know it, and there are gifts that need to be bought. So, to make things a bit easier on all of us, I’ve put together a quick list of great gift ideas any Wild Chef would be happy to see under the tree.
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