Duck, Duck, Goose

A few months before a tick bite made me allergic to meat we had made a bulk purchase of beef. Along with a couple of friends, we split a cow 3 ways and filled our freezer.  Fast forward a few months, and I could no longer eat the beef.  I couldn’t even cook it for my family without provoking an allergic reaction.  So the beef sat in our freezer taking up space that I needed for stocking up on non-mammal foods.

If you’re not familiar with the Alpha-gal Syndrome meat allergy, you can find more information here.

Snow Goose Hunt

In late February of this year, my husband had planned a Snow Goose hunt with his brothers and nephews.   Nebraska is in the migration path of literally millions of birds in the winter including Snow Geese, Canadian geese, Sand Hill Cranes, and more. In some parts of the state there is no limit as to how many Snow Geese you can take. 

How About a Trade?

As the date approached for the Wisconsin and Michigan Tyler Clan to come to Nebraska for the hunt I started talking to my Sister-in-law about the trip.  She wasn’t coming, they have younger children still in school and farm animals to care for.  Among those animals is a growing flock of ducks.  She mentioned having quite a few of them and needing to cull the flock.   I had not been able to find duck in the grocery store since Christmas and I was getting pretty tired of the turkey-chicken-turkey-chicken meal rotation.  So, I offered her a trade!  How about I send home all of this beef in exchange for some of those ducks?  She agreed! 

The day of the hunt arrived along with the hunters!  They brought me 10 ducks and headed out to hunt for snow geese. 

Plucking Ducks is Hard Work

They left for the hunt early Tuesday morning and I went to work on the ducks right away.  I had asked for them to remove the heads and feet, but please don’t skin them.  I wanted the fat to render for cooking!  Trust me, I knew how much work it was going to be! But I felt like it would be worth it.  I laid the ducks out on a table in the garage and got to work.  I worked all day and into the next day plucking ducks. And then dipping them in wax to help remove the down.  

By the end of the day on Wednesday I had 10 beautiful, skinned ducks!  Once again I laid them out on the table to admire my work!

When the guys came back from the first day of the hunt Tuesday evening, they had 63 snow geese to clean!  They removed the breasts and went back out to the field the next morning.

Duck, Duck, Goose!

On Wednesday I finished plucking and waxing the ducks. Then I cleaned and removed the shot from the goose breasts from the hunt the day before.  As I was cleaning the goose breasts I noticed a little tenderloin on some of them. So, I separated those out and cooked them for the guys when they came home that night–with another 87 geese.  Here’s my recipe for Goose Breast tenderloins.

On day three, I cut the ducks up into breasts and leg & thigh pieces for the freezer.  Then, I trimmed the fat and removed the remaining skin from the carcasses.  

On day four, I rendered the fat and boiled the carcasses for stock. 

I ended up with a lot of goose breasts, 20 duck breasts; 20 leg and thigh pieces; a quart plus about ¾ cup of duck fat; and 16 pints of stock. 

It was a monumental amount of work and it took about a week for the arthritis in my hands to settle down from all that work. But it was totally worth it!  And, I didn’t spend any money except for the original cost of the beef, which I couldn’t use anyway. My freezer is now filled with alpha-gal safe, red meat poultry! It’s a well-earned victory in the never-ending Alpha-gal Syndrome quest for safe, satisfying, and affordable meals. 

Do you have a great food find or wild game story?   Please let me know in the comments here, or on my Susan by a Thread facebook page!

Be sure to check back in on my blog recipes regularly or follow my Susan By A Thread Facebook page for the recipes I use to cook both the ducks and the wild geese.  I’ll post them as I go.  Here’s the recipe for our first Snow Goose steaks meal!