Tasty

So yesterday was the opening day of dove season. For those of you just joining the party, my husband is a rabid hunter and we whatever he shoots: dove, ducks, deer, turkey, hogs are the usual suspects, but he has shot and eaten more exotic stuff, too. Luckily, that was before my time. Shudder.

He and his dad had the most successful hunt they have had in years. T is wildly excited about his bird lease - and I'm wild about it being 10 minutes away. I can put off the hunting-season-widowhood until November and the start of deer season. Yay! Anyhoo, between them they managed to get 17 doves. Enough to make a decent meal for four adults.

So that means we had to eat them. Blech. I have managed to escape eating them for the last four years because the hunting has been so crappy. Except for a tiny little muscle the size of a pencil eraser under the breast, doves taste like organ meat. And in Rae Ann world, organ meat = barf.

The hubs has a secret sauce that he swears by and every time he makes dove, he swears that this time I will like them. Perfectly cooked, dove is a really dry - dessicated even! - tiny little bird as tender as jerky? Tasty? Um, no.

And he burned them.

The sight of 17 tiny charred carcasses on a serving plate was really pitiful. The outer layer of the breast had actually formed an almost impenetrable crust of carbon-y badness. We had to scrape meat off the inside of this shell like we were eating shellfish. Mmmmm. Dove-y.

Luckily, the incinerated outer layer protected the minuscule morsel of white meat. After eating four doves I probably had a total of two ounces of meat. We decided that if we had to live off of doves that we would be really thin. Luckily, we were saved from a low calorie meal by my mom-in-law's pecan pie. At least that part of the meal tasted good!