Tennesseeification

So, the process is now complete.  I am officially a Tennessean.

This post may be disturbing to those of you who never figured out that the hamburger in your mouth used to be a cow.  If you think killing animals is wrong, you should stop reading now and continue eating your soy hot dogs and tofu chicken wings.

For those of you still here, I successfully completed my first hunting trip!  One of my new Tennessee buddy's (Darren) has some land about an hour outside of Nashville.  Last Saturday I was invited to head out there for the opening of Dove season.  Please mind you, these are Mourning Doves, not the white doves that are released when I walk into the room.

Darren's family was awesome.  Really nice folks, and his dad made the single best grilled bologna sandwich I had ever had (sorry, Mema!).  Don't think Oscar Meyer bologna because this was a different "meat" entirely, although I had my fair share of good ole' Oscar as well growing up as a poor child in Mississippi.  I did not grow up in Mississippi.

So anyway, dove hunting is quite possibly what I was made to do.  Here is the idea.  Get a whole bunch of people who like each other, go find a field in the middle of nowhere, sit in lawn chairs around said field, and proceed to eat, drink and socialize.  Eventually, a dove is going to fly over the field, at which point you pause your sentence, stand up, shoot that dove, and then sit down and continue discussing the tragic divergence that Keynesian Economics has taken from intelligent and/or rational thought.  You would think there was more to it, but there really isn't.  Some folks wore camo, others wore jeans, one crack shot 10 year old girl was in a pink t-shirt.

My first time out.. let's say I was less than a crack shot.  These birds are the size of your hand and flying pretty dang fast.  After you've taken into account the rotation of the earth and the relative humidity, it becomes a relatively difficult shot.  I went through a few more than 50 shells and had 3 confirmed hits.  I also participated in quite a few artillery rounds, where 8 people shot at once, so I will claim credit for all of those as well.

Thanks to the generosity of some old men who were watching me from across the field, I came home with 16 dove!  Not a bad haul for a first timer..

Here is where the story gets good.  There really is no reason to shoot an animal unless you intend to eat it or unless it is really, really ugly.  Since doves aren't THAT ugly, we decided to eat them.  My friend Matt, Lia and myself proceeded to clean the doves and marinate them in vinaigrette dressing.

Yesterday, we went ahead and stuffed them with jalapenos, wrapped them in bacon, and cooked them on the grill.  They were surprisingly amazing, considering neither Lia or myself had any experience with preparing and cooking dove.  Below is a picture of the two different batches of dove wraps.  I am always nervous that I am going to under cook meat and kill everyone I love, so I intentionally burn the first few so I can start to see what they are supposed to look like.  Staggering the batches works wonders toward this aim.

When all was said in done, we got to share our dove wraps with a bunch of people and the opinion was resoundingly positive.  Maybe I can get used to this local organic food after all!