Squirrel Stew

Yes, we ate squirrel. It was good.

Squirrel Stew

I don't think we've really talked about Ed's hunting on here yet. He occasionally goes pheasant hunting in the winter. He unexpectedly brought a squirrel home last year (in addition to pheasants, of course) and cleaned it, and it sat in our freezer for quite some time while I tried to figure out how to best prepare it.

We were told by some friends who had tried squirrel before to try slow cooking it, because when they had it fried or grilled, it was very tough. So last week I decided to finally cook it, since I hadn't left the house in days (due to the weather--on Monday morning, at one point the temperature was reading -18 and the wind chill was -44) and was using what we had on hand.

I cut it up and put it in the slow cooker with some baby carrots, onions, red potatoes, two cups of water, and some salt and pepper. I tried something I found in a slow cooker cookbook to thicken it (at the end of the cooking time, mix 1/3 cup of water and 1/4 cup flour, pour in and stir, and cook for 10 minutes more on High), and it worked pretty well, but the gravy was just a bit clumpy (if I try that again, I might use a little less flour). It smelled really good! There obviously isn't very much meat on one squirrel, so we really just had enough to taste it.

The closest thing we could think of to compare the taste to is dark poultry meat. Slow cooking it definitely did the trick, because it wasn't tough--just right.

We agreed that it may have been more work than it was worth. It was time-consuming for Ed to get it to the point where he could clean and freeze it (I won't go into the details), and it was difficult for me to cut it up before cooking it (completely thawed). We did manage to get two meals out of it, though.

In related news, Ed recently brought home four more pheasants, so maybe I'll take some photos when I fix them. We had some last year, but we never took photos.

In blog-related news, I'm working on a couple of posts about our Romania trip right now and hope to have them on here in the next week or so. We're going to try harder to post things sooner than six months after they happen this year. We still have a few things to catch up on from last year, but we're getting there!