Friends -

Hope each of you had a great Christmas with your families. Our tradition has evolved to having an early Christmas Eve mass followed by an adaptation of the feast of the seven fishes. Christmas Day features a big hunk of meat, followed by muc a much smaller meal later in the day. This year, I tried to make it an all wild foods/locally sourced series of meals.

To kick off the festivities, we had a new gumbo adaptation: greenhead ducks killed a week ago, wild turkey legs from this spring, and some pronghorn I killed in the fall.







This turned out really well. Used Hank Shaw's method here: https://honest-food.net/wild-game/ve...ld-game-gumbo/

We chased the gumbo with some Gulf Coast oysters, shrimp and flathead catfish.





Not gonna lie, pretty much set for a coma that night and still had a few hours of assembling and wrapping presents. Evan Williams Single Barrel 2011 helped get through that task.

The main event for Christmas Day was a cured, whole smoked venison ham. This turned out way better than any of us expected:







Ill post the recipe in a post below. Only thing I would have added here is a good sour cream horseradish sauce. That would have taken it to a 10/10.

I ground some pronghorn sausage early in the morning and used that in the stuffing, and then made little Vietnamese fried sausages with what was left later using Jenny Ly's method: https://www.chasingfood.club/article...apped-sausages

Note that instead of using caul fat I used very thin sliced bacon....worked just fine and fits very well with a mustard based BBQ sauce.

Finishing off the night sampling some of my collector bourbons: Weller 12, Elijah Craig 18 & 23, Redbreast 21.

Here is to continued good times, and successful pursuits all around!

Hail State!