Bacon Belt for Sam Squirrel

Howdy ya'll.

New Years Day is my last full day at home before I return to beautiful Columbus. I was looking through my freezer and found the very last bit of weird food that I had to prepare from my three week winter break: two locally "grown" squirrels.* My cousin presumably shot (or trapped) these suckers and was kind enough to gift them to me when he heard about my little experiments. And it just so happens that I've been craving bacon lately. So today, I bring to

you, bacon wrapped squirrel.

When I unwrapped the freezer paper,I was immediately reminded of rabbit: long and lean (read as: little meat.) Fortunately, most of my family and friends are risk (and fun) averse and choose not to eat with me, so there was enough to make a proper meal.

I didn't have a lot of time to mess around the kitchen, so I figured a quick coating of spices and a few hours in the oven would be best. The smaller of the two wasn't fortunate enough to get a pork suit; instead, I bathed him in EVOO and dropped a light coat of chili spice mix that I had left over from the two previous batches of guisado de lengua and venison pot roast. I threw in a little extra garlic salt, and he was set.

The fatter of the two was dressed up real nice in a porcine tuxedo; I stuffed is chest with one piece of bacon, and wrapped three pieces around his torso, with a toothpick to close his hindquarters. I coated a pan with a light mix of EVOO and apple cider vinegar, set the oven for 300 F, and let em sit for a few hours.

The result was nothing short of delicious. My bacon craving was satiated, and the spices

performed well. The larger chunks of meat from the extremities reminded me of rabbit, which in turn reminds me of a stringier chicken. I let the dish dry out a bit too long in the oven, so the torso lost most of its flavor, but I couldn't help feeling like a frontiersman gnawing on a roasted rodent skin. It was a lot of work to get the meat separated, and I spent more time than I would have liked picking bones out of my teeth. But all in all, it was a nice little meal. The bacon fat made up for the dryness of the centerpiece, and a spoonful of warm peas finished the plate nicely.

* Every dish I prepare presents at least one new perspective or idea that I hadn't considered before, beyond the experience of preparing, and eating. Here in Ohio, squirrel and deer are about as close as one can get to really living off the land. I'm really not trying to force any hippy or Grok lifestyle here, because heaven knows I can't walk that walk, but hear me out. The state of food production today is dismal. The way we raise meat animals, by feeding them shit that makes them sick, pumping them with medicine and hormones, slaughtering them in these giant facilities that make the spread of disease that much easier, is unarguably unnatural. The practice is so far removed from the cattle culture of even 50 years ago, that one could be forgiven for forgetting that cows, sheep, and pigs were once wild creatures.

Squirrels, however, are different. They are wild. To my knowledge, there aren't squirrel farms. Sure, they aren't roaming the wild outdoors like I'm sure they used to; today, squirrels are restricted to whatever wooded areas we haven't paved over yet. Compared to image of hunter-gatherer drawn on the cave walls of woolly mammoths being felled by stone spear points, shooting a squirrel with a 22 rifle may seem like cheating. But in 2011, er, 2012, I think its just about as close as we can get to "local" meat here in suburbia.

I had already been pondering this aspect of localism when I came across this article. A woman in Seattle catches squirrels in her front yard and drowns them. Now that's primal.