apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Urgh.

Locavorism anyone?

My neighbors used to eat squirrel alot.

Raccoons eat a lot of garbage I don't know if they'd taste very good.

I should research ground squirrel recipes though because they have invaded my parents yard with hundreds of tunnels.

The beaver recipe calls for removing the "kernels". That must be the oyster meat.

I've eaten a version of wild guinea pig called "cui" from Ecuador. I would not want to make that a regular staple of my diet.

I haven't read the article but I think this type of subject matter is worth reading about and it doesn't have to be facetious. Brunswick stew is still a popular dish in some parts of America and it originally called for squirrel. It's history really. What were the famous words? Remember history or be doomed to repeat it. Something like that.

From what I've heard, squirrel meat can be good eating and is a little like rabbit meat. The best squirrel is apparently found where there are lots of oak trees, as the acorns seem to make the meat tastier. I would also suspect that raccoons wouldn't be too tasty.

Judith Jones, famous editor at Knopf of Julia Child, Claudia Roden and many, many more, talks about a recipe for beaver that she tested for one of her cookbooks, the L.L. Bean cookbook she wrote with her husband if memory serves correct. I bet it would taste a lot like duck.

Oh, and that would be in her recent memoir, The Tenth Muse, drrrr.... must have more coffee

Seems like there was a New Yorker article in the recent past year or so about eating squirrells and a disease you can get from them. I'd do some googling about risks of eating wild things if I were inclined to eat them in the first place.

My husband's grandmother lived in Alto Adige (in the Italian Alps) until she moved here in the 50s. She told me her recipe for squirrel a few years ago--I guess in the mountains they ate a lot of squirrel, which I bet wasn't too bad since the squirrels were living on acorns and things!

Anyway, her recipe involved soaking the prepared squirrel in wine overnight and then stewing it all day.

ok, maybe I'm going to share a little too much here,

I grew up in south Louisiana and we eat plenty of 'varmint,' if you will. Squirrel stew complete with - I don't know how to put this any more delicately - skulls and brains was a pretty common dish. However now you must be careful because squirrels are carriers of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy which leads to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans.

all this talk is making me hungry... time for a squirrel burger