Grilled Grouse at Bide-A-Wee

When I wound up with a grouse and a woodcock thanks to Lily’s miraculous pointing breakthrough and some fortunate shooting on my part, I started imagining a wild-inspired feast. I know some very capable hunters, expert gun and dog handlers, for whom ruffed grouse is basically a chicken substitute during the season. They take a limit of five birds almost every time out, fill the freezer by season’s end. Forget about pork—for folks like this, partridge is the other white meat.

This is not a situation that I can even begin to imagine. I feel fortunate to harvest a few game birds each year, and so each bird in the bag is an opportunity to experience unique flavors. Wanting to make the most of this precious meat places a certain amount of pressure on the ambitious cook. As I started planning how these first birds of the season would be prepared, I thought, nice as it would be to have them at Bide-A-Wee, in the midst of the landscape from which they came, I would be better off cooking them in my Saint Paul kitchen, where there’s an oven, hot and cold running water, lights, and all the other modern conveniences.

And then I thought: the hell with that. Cooking at Bide-A-Wee has its challenges, but Bide-A-Wee is where these birds belong, and that’s where we’ll cook them. There’s a temptation to get all gourmet and elaborate with “special” meat like game birds, but I managed to overcome that, too. I simply grilled both birds. The grouse was flavored with nothing but salt, pepper, a smear of butter, and smoke; the woodcock had nice deposits of fat stored up for its anticipated, interrupted, migration, so I eschewed the butter, but finished it with a glaze of birch syrup. I’ve been thinking of grilled woodcock glazed with birch syrup ever since we made the syrup last spring.

My original idea for a side dish to accompany the grouse was a bubbly, brown gratin of homegrown potatoes, cream, and chanterelles. With no oven

at Bide-A-Wee, we would have to Plan B that idea. It turns out that, while it wouldn’t have the nice brown crust of a gratin, a pot of potatoes simmered in stock and cream until the potatoes are tender and the liquid is nicely reduced is a gorgeous thing in its own right. I’d call it stovetop scalloped potatoes. To start I sautéed some sliced leek in butter, then added the sliced potatoes, maybe a cup of stock and a half cup of cream, sprig of thyme. That simmered very gently for quite a while. About halfway through (whenever that was) I added chanterelles that had been oven-blanched and frozen last summer. Salt and pepper and a bit of butter rounded it out; a slosh more cream toward the end.


For vegetable, sweet buttered cabbage—the recipe’s in the cookbook. It’s a simple preparation, but illustrative: in the past we would often just sauté shredded cabbage in butter or olive oil, perhaps with a bit of onion, leek, or garlic, add water and steam until tender. But while I was writing the cookbook I decided to make more of a “recipe” out of the dish—I blanched the cabbage first; used shallot and garlic to flavor the dish; tossed in a bit of sugar and a splash of white wine. Now that page in the book (page 190, as a matter of fact) is one of the most visited in our copy.

I’m not sure how to describe the taste of ruffed grouse. I will tell you that I just got shivers remembering the flavor of this one (either it was supremely delicious, or the woodstove needs stoking; probably a bit of each). The breast meat is the main event, and there’s a lot of it—we find that one grouse feeds two people easily. The breast meat is as white as chicken, finer grained, juicy when cooked properly, and variable according to what the bird has been eating, though it usually has a slight, appetizing tang to it. “Cooked properly” means as little as possible; you don’t want any of the meat to be flabby and pink, but if you can catch it just past that point, that’s perfect. When I first started cooking grouse I was absolutely paranoid about overcooking it, and so occasionally cut into grouse breast that had to go back to the stove for a refresher course. Don’t go away and forget about grouse cooking on the stove, grill, or in the oven, but don’t fret too much, either. Think about cooking it to medium, how a lot of us prefer our pork chops now that the fear of trichinosis is largely a thing of the past.

And cooking it on the bone is the way to go; unless you want an elegant preparation of slices of grouse breast fanned on the plate and bathed in a sauce made by reducing the superb stock obtained from simmering the carcass with a bit of white wine and lots of aromatic vegetables. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Well, our first game dinner of this autumn was a triumph, if I say so myself. These local flavors combined so beautifully on the plate. The grouse was cooked to a golden turn and flavored with oaky smoke. The potatoes were velvety comfort infused with the aroma of chanterelles. A very nice red burgundy wine was quite, quite suitable.

With ingredients like this, the “Eat Local Challenge” is one we’re happy to meet, any day of the year.

Next time, ode to a timberdoodle.


Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

The Birds of November

It’s been a while since I've written anything about hunting here. Simple reason: there has not been much to report. The last really notable outing afield occurred two years ago, when I shot a pheasant, grouse, and woodcock—the three main “upland game birds” of our region—on the same day, at a public hunting ground near Bide-A-Wee. That was a remarkable hunt for a couple of reasons. One, I’d never accomplished that “triple crown” feat before, and it had been a goal of mine. Also, the grouse was pointed in absolutely classic fashion by our young dog, Lily. Previously she had mainly been known for flying heedlessly through woods and field, launching anything avian in her path into the air well out of shotgun range. We knew she could point; we did not know if she would.

She found the bird at least a hundred yards ahead of me and remained staunch in her point for the two minutes or so that it took me to make my way over to her through gnarly terrain. Just as I came up to her rigid,

quivering form, the bird got up, and I dropped it with the first shot. That was a notable achievement for me, too; grouse are very fast flyers, hard to shoot, and I’m frankly not that great a shot. I already had a pheasant in my vest, a bird that I had walked up, shot, and retrieved with no canine assistance whatsoever. The dogs were running around back in an alder swamp. They heard the shot and came running out to find me standing at the edge of the field with a pheasant in my hand. “Hey, look what I found,” I said. “What have you two been up to?” They wagged their tails and sniffed the bird. I think they looked a little shamefaced. It was a classic moment in the field, one I’ll never forget.

The final bird of the day was a woodcock, which I shot over Annabel’s point, again on the first shot. I don’t think we encountered any other birds that day, though my memory on that point is not completely clear. If it’s accurate, this would have been a hunt on which I killed three birds with three shots, and no misses. That’s something that’s unlikely to happen again.

It was an extremely satisfying day afield, and one I had really hoped to build on in 2010, but you know what they say about plans. October last year was ridiculously warm, dreadful hunting weather. I had to make an unexpected trip to deal with family matters at the end of that month, I blew out my shoulder, then it snowed. In all of 2010 I hunted twice, fired the gun four times at two grouse, missing badly on all shots. The one time I hunted alone with Lily, I’m not sure if she was in the same county with me for much of the outing. And Annabel, then 12 years old and game but a little gimpy, and largely deaf—well, I didn’t know if we would ever again put the bell on her orange collar and send her out with a “Hunt ‘em up. Where’s a bird?”

Based on that dismal year, I couldn’t see things going anywhere but up in 2011, but the season did not have a promising start. Another too-hot October, another unanticipated October trip taking a week out of the brief woodcock season. With no real training in the interim, but lots of self-directed “hunts” on our land—home to both grouse and woodcock, and the occasional pheasant—Lily had become an over-stimulated bundle of bad
habits. I didn’t know if we would be able to bring her back. One short outing with Annabel showed me that she could come along on hunts, but only with a chaperone. I was feeling glum about the season, to say the least. I was feeling even glummer about my future as a bird hunter.

Lily is still a couple months shy of her sixth birthday. She’s in her physical prime, and she’s an incredibly athletic dog. There’s no mistaking the sheer, unabashed joy she displays as she catapults up and down the Bide-A-Wee hills. She is also a very sweet girl, eager to please, devastated when she disappoints (our joke about Annabel is that she, too, is eager to please…herself). I had Lily’s temperament going for me when I decided I had to give her a few more tries before reaching any conclusions.

Some memorable hunting and fishing outings are memorable for reasons quite apart from fish in the creel or a bird in the game pouch. Our hunt at a small hunting ground near Bide-A-Wee, just Lily and me, will stick with me for a long time. After several hunts where she seemed to be simply running around in the woods, no sense of purpose about her at all, she suddenly…started…to hunt. Some lightbulb went off for her. Maybe the “chats” we had had on previous outings impressed her. Maybe she just needed to encounter a few more birds in the proper context. The remarkable thing was how sudden the transformation was. From one hunt with absolutely no pointing, or intimation that she even knew how to do so, suddenly she was a pointing machine. Like someone flipped a switch, or switched dogs on me.

We went in to a stand of small aspen.  Lily was working ahead of me to the left. Even before the point I sensed something different in her manner. She was out of sight when her collar started a steady beeping (it’s an electronic collar that beeps every ten seconds or so when she’s running, then every second when she stops). As I came up behind her I could see from her body language that, yes, there was a bird, but maybe not right there. Close, not in front of her nose. I went in ahead of her, circled to right and left. No bird. I told her to hunt and she zipped past me, slalomed through a patch of dogwood. She drew up short, all four feet planted solidly on the ground, and swiveled her head sharply to the right. Then she did not move.

As I approached a woodcock flushed, mere feet from her quivering nose. It veered skyward, over the tops of the aspens, and I had to turn and get the gun up high, and I missed, and I missed again. I cursed, but I recovered from the disappointment quickly. Lily broke her point with the shots, but came to me when I whistled, and I praised her as few dogs have ever been praised in the history of bird hunting. Then we carried on, and in a few minutes she pointed another woodcock (or perhaps the same one), and again my shooting let us down. But again we were SO HAPPY! Finding and missing woodcock is the best game EVER! We had one more bird encounter that day. On the flank of a distinctive little piece of topography, a sort of rocky knoll covered with scrub oak, dogwood, and stunted jack pine, Lily stopped, her head directed downhill, a solid point. The grouse didn’t hold for long, though. It flushed within range of a shot, but entirely out of sight behind a patch of pines. That was it. Three birds found, pointed, nothing in the bag. A great day.

One thing that has been disconcerting this year has been a general scarcity of birds. Often in woodcock season, as the birds are migrating through, I’ll find eight to twelve birds in the best bits of cover. This season I think the most timberdoodles (woodcock have a lot of nicknames) encountered in a day was four. Lily and I hit a fresh piece of terrain on a cool gray morning, just a couple days from the end of woodcock season—pheasant stays open in Wisconsin through December, and grouse to the end of January, though it’s rare that conditions allow comfortable hunting much past the beginning of December. It was great looking cover—scrappy patches of dogwood and alder along a small creek, extensive stands of young aspen, or “popple” as it’s locally known. We didn’t flush a bird. Well, maybe a chickadee. Lily hunted well. She gave me a “false point” once, came to a dead halt and wouldn’t move even when I told her to hunt after I’d circled entirely around her. She was pretty sure there was something there, but there wasn’t. Could be a bird had flushed ahead of us, leaving a strong scent but no feathered evidence. We made our way back toward the car, and I was thinking it was going to be a lost day, but for a pleasant, if somewhat arduous, walk.

We came up out of a ditch and on to the dirt road that dead-ends farther back in the hunting ground. I could see the car in the parking area just ahead, and I broke open my gun—a side-by-side 20-gauge. I had Lily at a heel as we came up on the road, but when I saw the road deserted I let her go, and she immediately left my side and dropped down in the ditch on the other side of the road. I heard the collar start its steady beeping, and assumed she was stopped for a drink of delicious ditch water. But the beeping went on, and I heard no slurping. I realized she was on point.

I found her on a solid point beside a clump of alder. The cover was thick on the road side, more open farther in, and I was fortunate that the woodcock when it flushed did not veer for the road but rather followed the edge of the alders. The flush came as I was just even with Lily, so I didn’t have too much time to think—this is good—and I dropped the bird with the first shot. It fell in the center of another clump of alders, and was an easy find. I saw it before Lily did, but waited for her to come around and track it down. It had hit the ground dead—when I opened it I found that a pellet had gone right through the heart. Lily came up to the bird and sniffed at it, mouthed it a bit. Our dogs haven’t been trained to retrieve, and don’t seem to take to it naturally. I gave her a chance to bring it to me, but didn’t insist. I picked up the bird and put it in my vest with warm words of praise for my dog. First bird of 2011, first bird in two years.

We had another successful outing a couple of days later, the closing day of woodcock season, although we saw no woodcock. At the small hunting ground near Bide-A-Wee where Lily had had her turn-around day, we finally

started to see some grouse. I walked up one bird that Lily had run past, and missed my shot. Farther back in a mature woods with a boggy section I knew grouse frequented, Lily started to get “birdy”—that is, she broke out of her broad crossing runs and began working a smaller area in more detail, her nose close to the ground, her tail going like an airplane propeller. I turned to the left, she turned to the right—my instincts were better, and the grouse flushed in front of me. I took one errant shot before the bird curved out of view in a stand of pine. Lily came barreling back my way, and I told her “Whoa!” She didn’t seem to hear. I told her again, but it still didn’t sink in. Three times is too many times to have to tell a bird dog to freakin’ WHOA! Once I did get her attention, we had another of those “chats.” She promised she would try to do better, and almost immediately, she did.

Not two minutes later, in this same open area of mature oak, elm, and maple, she went on point again. Woods like this are not supposed to be good grouse habitat, but the grouse in these parts apparently didn’t know that (we have the same sort of joke about trout that don’t seem to know that they shouldn’t exist outside of “designated trout streams”). In dry years, and also in mid-winter, I think they seek out the spring seeps in this area for water and for the little green things growing there. This time Lily went on point along a big deadfall, an oak that had tipped over pulling its roots right out of the boggy ground. I came up near that tall root clump; Lily was on point around mid-tree. The grouse flushed, and flew straight away from me barely over head-high. I had to make a quick sidestep to clear the tree, get the gun up, and I would only have a single shot.

I took it; the bird did not drop, but it seemed to dip. I was pretty sure I had hit it. I stopped and quickly replaced the shell I had spent, then started walking briskly in the direction the grouse had gone. Lily passed me and I asked her if maybe it was possible there was a bird on the ground around here. Her answer was immediate: she went into tracking mode; she had found the scent of the running bird, and was following it avidly.

It didn’t take long to find the wing-shot bird. Lily subdued it, I came and took it from her, I broke its neck—not something I relish doing, but we who eat meat have to accept the fact that animals die for our pleasure; this was just a particularly intimate illustration of that fact.

Overall, in terms of the pointing, the adjustment, the shot, the tracking, that was one of the more remarkable bits of dog-and-hunter work I’ve been involved with in my brief hunting career. We had a quiet celebration over the bird that had given its life to make it possible, and made our way back to the car.

A lot of hunters wouldn’t see two birds in two outings as much to write home about. In spite of hopes and anticipation, my woodcock season ended with a single bird in the bag, an appetizer for two. But for me those

outings marked the beginning of my new hunting life with my “new” dog, Lily. It’s tough to leave Annabel behind—but it’s even tougher to hunt with her. I worry constantly that she’ll wander off in the woods, and with her deafness not hear us to find her way back. I worry that when her enthusiasm overcomes her physical limitations, as it always does, she’ll injure herself without even knowing she has done it. More than that, we’ve had a good run together. She brought me into this world which I find as compelling and challenging as anything I’ve ever done. It’s Lily’s turn now, and the education continues.

Next time, bird cookery at Bide-A-Wee.





Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

Two Birds at Bide-A-Wee (Part Two: Pan-Roasted Grouse in Cider Cream Sauce)

Annabel, our senior griff', is eleven years old now, and though she has slowed down quite a bit, and gets up a little gimpy from her frequent naps--a touch of arthritis, most likely--she can still find and point grouse. She sort of moseys through the woods now, not looking particularly intent on anything, but when her nose detects the scent of a bird, everything changes. Very few pointing dogs actually assume the "classic" pointing pose, front leg lifted and cocked. In fact, when one of my dogs stops on a hunt with her foot in the air like that, I pretty much know it's not a serious point.

Instead, they will stop with all four feet planted, stop as soon as they catch the scent of a bird, and turn their heads toward the scent. Then it's my job to find them, frequently in thick cover (an electronic beeper collar helps here), figure out exactly where the bird is, maneuver to gain the best angle for a shot, walk in to put the bird up, and knock it down with my 20-gauge side-by-side shotgun.



Matters do not often unfold in exactly that fashion for me. I miss my share of birds, or they flush wild or fly low through the brush or disappear behind trees. Then Annabel will break her point and run in crazy circles, barking in excitement, or frustration, it's hard to tell which. This is by no means "classic" bird dog behavior, either. In fact, even if I do manage to hit the bird, she still runs around barking at the sound of the gun, and she is of almost no use in helping me find the down bird. Lily is much better. Every bird I've shot with her in the field, she has been right on it. She doesn't retrieve, but that's fine by me. Having a bird in a dog's mouth for any amount of time does nothing to improve the quality of the meat.


On a rare warm day in October, I went out with just Annabel to hunt a smallish state hunting ground near Bide-A-Wee. We started late morning with the temperature climbing toward 60. We hadn't gone far into a stand of young aspen before my moseying dog stopped at the edge of a clump of dogwood within the aspen, and as I approached her a grouse flushed and escaped low behind thick cover. As I watched it go without firing a shot, a second bird got up and disappeared into a grove of white pine before I could locate it.

That was encouraging, and as we worked our way through that patch of aspen we located a couple more grouse as well as two or three woodcock. I think I missed on one of each, and had no shot at the others.

As we left the aspen stand and started up a little knob of a hill covered in dogwood, small oaks, prickly ash and assorted scrappy cover, Annabel stopped--again at a juncture of aspen and dogwood. I moved around to her right, to try to get the bird between us, and just as I crossed an opening in the trees, the grouse flushed. I hadn't expected the bird to be that close to my pointing dog, but the opening in the trees gave me a perfect shot. I turned to my left as I raised the gun, and brought the bird down with the first shot.

Annabel began running around, barking.

I had shot the bird at quite close range, and thought I had seen where it fell, but these animals are extremely well camouflaged. It took me a couple of minutes to find the bird. Annabel was no help whatsoever, but I certainly would never have shot that bird without her point. When I found the bird I called her over, and we engaged in a sort of dog-and-hunter high fives. "Whatta you know, we got one," I said. "Good girl, good dog." But she was off already to look for more.

It was nearly noon then, and getting hot for hunting, so we called it quits shortly after. In just an hour we had moved at least eight ruffed grouse and four or five woodcock.



I gutted the bird as soon as we got back to the cabin, and plucked it a day or two later back in Saint Paul, let it air dry in the fridge, and took it back out to Bide-A-Wee to cook for dinner the following weekend. I had thought I might grill it, then finish it in a cider and cream sauce, but October had returned to its chill, wet, blustery ways, that sun-washed morning in the woods a distant dream, so we fired up the Haggis and got out the cast iron.

First, I want everyone to appreciate the superb job I did plucking that bird. I know that anyone who has ever tried to pluck a grouse will be impressed by how clean that bird is, how intact is the skin. The skin of a grouse is delicate, and often torn by shot or dog tooth. It's no mean feat to wind up with a bird that nice. It's a tedious process, but it's worth it to me, and then, I'm not usually burdened with dozens of grouse to pluck in a season. A lot of hunters don't bother with plucking. They'll usually skin the bird, a quick and simple process. Others will "breast out" their birds in the woods, leaving behind everything but the boneless breast meat. This is both illegal, for a variety of reasons, and a terrible waste of excellent meat and bones--the carcasses of grouse produce a spectacular stock, and there's a decent amount of meat on the legs, too.

In preparation for cooking, the well-plucked bird is cut in half, seasoned with salt and pepper, smeared with butter. It's a very lean meat which benefits from a little added richness. It also benefits from bacon, but then, what doesn't? I rendered off a couple of tablespoons of lardons from our home-smoked bacon, and in that fat I browned an apple, cored and cut into eighths, not peeled.


Some sliced red cabbage and onions, sautéed, then simmered with a bit of water and cider, cooked on the Coleman stove. A handful of fingerling potatoes I grew at Bide-A-Wee were boiled separately and kept warm on the side of the wood stove.


Then I browned the grouse. Threw in some chopped leeks.

Added a cup of chicken stock, a half cup each of Cedar Summit cream and our own apple cider, a few sprigs of thyme (we can reach out the window and snip it from our potted herb garden on the south side of the cabin!). I finished cooking the grouse in the slowly reducing sauce--it was barely bubbling--for ten or fifteen minutes. Towards the end I put in the precooked potatoes to warm up.



And we served it forth. A well-cooked grouse is among the most exquisite things you can eat. This bird, well, I'd say it produced some of the finest meat I have ever tasted, lean but moist and tender, with a flavor both pronounced and subtle (but I'm not going to say it tasted wild...).

Just a really fine thing to eat, and a celebration of the land and the season. That said, there's no reason you couldn't do the same thing with cornish hens, or chicken.




Thanks, Annabel.

Text and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw