Candy from the Hunt

I have been searching for quail recipes and dreaming of another bird hunt lately.  

So I decided to share some more photos about our hunt a couple of weeks ago as I try wind down from a busy week.

If  you ever come across an interesting recipe for these quail, let me know!

These birds are from our first day of hunting in Arkansas.

Memories were made, for sure.

Here we are after our second hunt that weekend.

We were a little more successful on day two......

So after you hunt and kill the birds, you have to clean them.  

I'm not quite there yet.  And we had Gerald.  

He had a wonderful, dry sense of humor and instinct for hunting the quail.

By the end of the weekend, he had learned how to push my buttons.

Here he is cleaning the birds--removing the feathers and saving as much meat as he could.  

Then he would put them into the water to soak before freezing it.

Gerald says quail are "the candy of all the birds".

I asked him why, and he replied, "that's just what they say.  They just are."

"I believe you, Gerald."

And he went about his ways, ignoring me and cleaning the birds.
Doesn't this just look like a chicken breast?

While Gerald went on with his work, I got distracted and looked around the shed.

I stumbled across this old bag of corn.

It always seems to come comes back to corn and soybeans for me, no matter where I am.

Always a farm girl.  

Always fancy and country.

And classic me, I took 5 magazines I needed to catch-up on.  As Gerald finished cleaning the birds and I enjoyed the quiet of the country, I opened one of my favorite magazines Garden & Gun.

And lucky me, I found this fried quail recipe in the magazine which I was really excited about because we now had 20 quail, or pieces of candy, to eat.  

On Super Bowl Sunday instead of buffalo chicken wings, we had fried quail with homemade hot sauce and homemade ranch dressing.  Big step for me to fry and make homemade dressings.  

Next step, clean the birds like Gerald and continue to enjoy the candy from the hunt 

and the memories made along the way.