The Pickleville Philosopher

Wild Feast

Jim Stone, The Pickleville Philosopher

Well I’m so used to getting up early to get the store opened up; I forgot I was closed up for the year.  I have a giant list of things I was gonna do but I don’t know what happened.

I got a call but it wasn’t on the phone.  It was the call of the wild.  Sometimes I don’t answer my phone because it’s a salesman or someone I can’t understand, but I answer the call of the wild 100 percent of the time.

Anyways our waterfowl season doesn’t open for a month, but the blue grouse season is open.

For you guys that might not know, grouse is kinda like a big chicken, but you gotta do a bit of work to find them.  Grouse or all birds love wild berries.  It’s fun to find berries because normally you find some big nice grouse too.  Today I got some grouse for my dinner but I was mostly after the wild berries to make sauces for all the wild game to come.

Raspberries

Today me and the dogs and my great friend went on a gathering trip we found Oregon grapes, and apples that are too green.   Still, we got elderberries, chokecherries, serviceberries and one cool one we found looks like a razzleberry but it’s about five times the boldness and flavor.  It’s called a thimbleberry.  It has great big huge plants and leaves with what looks like a miniature raspberry.  We found late season huckleberries and rose hips.

Two of my favorite berries to find are mountain ash,  they look like a pod of orange grapes;  we call them grouse berries because the blue grouse love to dine on them.   The late summer brings a lot of delicate flowers.  I wish I could identify them, I don’t know much about that.  I will freeze and process all the wild things we gathered today to make wild sweet sauces for all the wild meat from, I hope, a good year hunting and fishing.

Gooseberries

Wild berries go so hand in hand with wild game.  It makes me think of how well the pioneers ate when it was all wild food.  They had to work hard compared to a drive up window for burgers and fries!  Well I got grouse steaks, wild greens and berries, a cucumber from the garden and a cob of corn that my friend dropped off.   I hope you all have a great night big smiles from me to all of you.