Game Time

I was just thinking about the first time that I had rabbit in a dish before. It was almost kind of a sadistic thing because it wanted to do that to bother my cousin who is obsessed with bunnies (yes, the one girl). That was many years ago and I happened to love it. Rabbit opened up many doors to me in the world of game meats because people don't generally understand how good they can be. I soon after got into duck, venison (deer), and many others.

Game is a good taste to have acquired when traveling to places such as Europe. Once you get used to the taste, you almost can get obsessed with it, and kind of find a liking for more fancy foods. I have to say, it's a great alternative to ordering steak all of the time, which I do. Now when I see something like Fois Gras on the menu, I jump for that. This brings me into my next story about Paris that doesn't exactly have to do with me.

I remember distinctly I took a trip to France once, and don't get me wrong, it was a great trip and I got to eat in some of the leading restaurants in Paris. It was, though just at the time, I was not so acquainted with some of the types of food that France had to offer. The French have quite a variety of different types of poultry which include: chicken (surprise, surprise), squab (pigeon), pheasant, and quail. There are probably many more that I don't know about there even now, but you've got the idea. It wasn't that I was afraid to eat these, it's just that I was young and didn't have any interest in the food at the time.

I was travelling with my mother and my grandfather and with his vast knowledge of both medicine and history, he managed to tell me this very brief story about Napoleon Bonaparte, when he was a young, and poor child (true story).

"As a boy, Napoleon had grown up quite poor, and his mother was frail and they needed to find a way to get food somehow. There was no way that they could afford to buy any kind of meat, let alone bread, which they could barely afford. Being the quick thinker that Napoleon was, he went out into the park in Paris as a teenager, which had been loaded with pigeons, and brought with him a baby carriage. He lured pigeons near him with bread crumbs and when they came near, he snapped their necks and threw them in the carriage for dinner." That supposedly is how the Parisians came to start eating pigeons as a tradition when Napoleon became emperor.

So go out and get yourself some roasted squab, I'm eating it, it can't be bad (it's actually healthier than chicken).