Reindeer on St. Paul sure make for good eatin'! Terry the Vet and his son Troy shot two of these fine creatures last week and kindly went back out into the field at about midnight, with me and my bud Erin, to collect some tripe, which we naively promised to transform into a delightful appetizer. All went well in the end, but quite a bit of prayer was involved. And a suppression of our gag reflexes.
After some cosultation, we determined that we were looking for two of the four stomachs: the omasum and the rumen. Looking for a set of antlers and a bag of guts in the pitch-black arctic tundra with one flashlight isn't the easiest thing in the world, but we used our noses and eventually came upon what we were looking for. Satisfied, Terry the Pro got to work, we took the requisite photographs, and then we headed back to civilization, where it took us an hour and a half to clean the fucking shit.
Then we boiled it for four hours. It fucking stank like poo dragged through the asshole of Death. Some of the more adventurous Americans chowed down on the plain boiled tripe, but I had to disguise it with some spray cheese on a Triscuit. In the end, we wound up cutting it up into tiny strips and stewing it in a heavily flavoured sauce.
And...I'm happy to report that it was a hit! All the haters and doubters loved it!
We are currently in the process of attempting to make soap from the reindeer fat. The yarrow is drying, the fat is rendered, and the lye has arrived. Wish us luck!
3 comments:
This post both completely amazed and thoroughly nauseated me. Well done!
omg i seriously was gaging while reading this post! And then the photos! I am glad you are having so much fun up there! i wish I could visit but then again you'd feed me tripe stew. You sure are seeing a lot of dead animals this summer.xox as
are you some sort of dead animal collector? alaska looks beautiful except for the piles of dead animals everywhere..
ben
Post a Comment