Deer Hunting

I have just returned from another visit to my daughter in Iowa. We tend to hurry and get in as many visits as we can before it begins to snow. For a country girl from the south the snows of Iowa are more than a little intimidating.

This trip coincided with the beginning of deer season. Now I grew up with hunting seasons in Kentucky so the rush to the woods at the beginning of deer season wasn't anything really new to me. However, deer hunting in Iowa is a little different. For one thing all the rules favor the deer. Most of the season is strictly for bow hunting. After a week or so of bow hunting there is a week that you can hunt with a shotgun and slugs. Then back to bow hunting. In Kentucky you hunt with rifles that could bring down a buck two counties away but with a shotgun you have to be close enough for "howdy-do's" before you shoot. To make it more challenging you have the sparsity of cover in Iowa. They have lots of open, flat cornfields but relatively few wooded areas. It's hard to hide and sneak up on a deer in a picked corn field. They also limit the number of hunters by making it a lottery to get a permit. In short, the deer are definitely given the edge.

You'd think that this was because they needed to protect a limited population of deer. Far from it! The truth is that there are deer everywhere. Lots of grain and wide open spaces have created a haven for deer. We never left the house that we didn't see deer...in fields, crossing the roads, in the yards in town, behind the school, walking down the road. Driving becomes a defensive art to keep from hitting the deer as they wander back and forth. In fact, we looked up from breakfast one morning to see an eight-point buck leisurely walk by the window on his way to the woods across the road.

It seems the only people not seeing deer were the hunters.

Daddy's Cooking

I come from a long line of people that just like to cook. Even the men in my family could be found pottering around the kitchen whenever they had free time. In fact I have one cousin who carried this on to becoming a chef. Most of us just became ordinary cooks or in today's vernacular, foodies.

My grandmother was a creative cook who loved her sweets. From her I learned early on to appreciate puff pastries wrapped around delectable fillings, rich pies with fluffy meringue, tall cakes with gooey fillings between the layers, and cookies of all shapes and sizes for small hands. My mother, with her artistic leanings, created beautiful food with elegant presentations. She was the one who would think of sugared grapes to accent a salad, chocolate curls atop a delicate cake, or whimsical cut-outs gracing the pie crust top of the apple pie. My aunt was the party planner. She always was thinking of what tastes would compliment each other, which dishes would look attractive together, the balance of hot and cold, sweet and sour, heavy and light, and the total presentation.

However, it was my dad's cooking that was the most fun. He cooked for the shear joy of eating it. It would all start with an idea of what would taste good to him that day or maybe a recipe he just happened to see, or even a dish mentioned in a book he was reading. He would head for the kitchen and mother would head for the couch. If he was cooking it was best to just leave him to it. Daddy never did his cooking in moderation. If he felt like homemade bread, he might make six loaves. If he was making soup, he would make a vat full. So it was best just to get out of his way and let him cook.

One day he decided, since he had an abundance of rabbits that had until recently been raiding his garden, that he wanted to try hasenpfeffer, a German dish made with rabbit. Out come the cookbooks and soon the table is covered with books as he hunts for a recipe that fits his needs (and the supplies on hand). He settled in for an afternoon of culinary adventure. I decided this might take a while so I begged a ride to the local movie theater for the Sunday afternoon show.

After the movie was over my dad showed up to give us a ride home. There were about six of us that usually met at the movie and got a ride home with whichever parent showed up to get us. With a wave of his arm he ordered us all into the car. "Are you hungry?" he questioned. We all grinned and chorused "Yes, sir!!". Hey, we were teens, we were always hungry, especially the boys. With that he drove us home. The six of us fell in on that "stew" with a will. It was delicious, a heavenly blend of flavors I remember to this day. We soon had licked the last from our plates. I'm reasonably sure none had ever eaten hasenpfeffer before and probably not a lot of rabbit. They may not have even figured it out, but they didn't let that stop them from enjoying every morsel.

No wonder I had so many friends!