Wild Game Dinner!!
Yay, I am excited to welcome my first official guest blogger. Chad Pelton went to a wild game dinner a couple weeks back. What with bacon madness it took me a bit to get it posted but here is his recap with a photo! Thanks so much Chad:
The Wildlife and Fisheries Society at UT hosts the annual Wild Game Dinner on the Ag Campus in the Ellington Plant Sciences Auditorium. It is a potluck, and Wildlife/Fisheries students and faculty tend to do lots of hunting/ fishing, so there is always tons to eat.
This year was no exception. Dishes ranged from simple BBQ pork to Squirrel Dumplins and grilled shark…there were probably 10 cast iron Dutch ovens set up cooking, and a host of grills. Elk was probably the most abundant dish, and it was mostly variations on tenderloin, as were the venison dishes. A highlight was antelope tenderloin wrapped in bacon, and the elk burgers were delicious, and perfectly medium rare.
There was salmon, shark, trout, catfish, and even an alligator dish (but I was too far back in line for that one).
The black bear summer sausage was good (bear seems hard to fix unless it’s in some stew or sausage form).
The squirrel dumplins were out of this world and made me feel like a kid at Grandma’s house, and the Cajun Goose Gumbo was the best thing I’ve tasted in quite a while.
Presentation of the food is how you’d expect…paper plates and platicware. Non-pretentious. You can feel the sense of passion for the outdoors…as there are also items up for raffle, ranging from knives, handmade bird houses, camo shirts, to a 12 gauge shotgun. The event raises money for the Wildlife & Fisheries Society, and also serves as a forum for likeminded folks and alumni to swap memories and stories.
The Ag Campus is a special place indeed, and I will always have a special place in my belly for the time I spent in the Wildlife program. Good people.
