Week 6 - It's a Caribou kinda place

So Monday was Thanksgiving.  It was kinda nice having a three day weekend, although I didn't manage to get as much work done as I would have liked!  This year, since I was only cooking for me, I made Turkey legs (since dark meat is far superior to white meat, and also I can eat the turkey legs like Fred Flinstone), smashed potatoes, yorkshire puddings and corn. It's great making my own dinners since I can always have corn for my vegetable!

So the pie is not whole since I decided to try a piece for breakfast :) What can I say, my Dad has instilled a strong belief in Quality Control.

Later on during the week I was excited to get, what Gillian would refer to as, a blob of Caribou.  It was interesting to do a small amount of butchery on it.  It is a very red lean meat.  No visible fat and only a slight amount of marbling but the meat itself was quite tender. Even cutting across the grain didn't take very much effort.

After this fine example of butchery I used my Mom's kitchen aid attachment to grind the meat down.  The ultimate goal was to create some Caribou Burgers.

As you can see, this attachment works very well.  I even made sure to refrigerate the blade and attachments so that it would minimize the heat created through friction.  Last time I ground meat I had to stop and re-cool my attachments since they were getting too hot.  The burgers actually turned out very well; Caribou has a great taste.

On Saturday I went for a ride on Mark's boat.  He definitely puts the pal back in principal...haha.  It was a good time and the day was just beautiful.  It was completely sunny here and around 10-15C.  We went on a little bit of a seal hunt.  We managed to spot a few but couldn't keep up with them.  It was interesting to learn the methodology.  Apparently when you see them you don't want to shoot to kill, you just want them to go under.  When they resurface you try and make them go under again without getting a deep breath.  They can actually swim very far on a single breath.  The goal is to get closer and closer to them so that you aren't too far away by the time you actually shoot them.  It is very hard though since you never know when they're going to pop or where.  If you manage to shoot em, you then have a spear that you use to harpoon them and drag them back to the boat.  Seems interesting, hopefully I'll get another chance to try it out!

For dinner on Saturday we had another fire.  On the way to the camp spot we actually attracted our canine companions again.  A little bit up the road there is a stream by some of the houses that someone was using to clean off a Caribou skull they got.

Sammy seemed to be quite interested in the horn, but I think he knew better than to try dragging it out of the water.  This fire was actually a bigger event than last time.  There were around 20 people there and we made some food, had some drinks and had a lot of laughs.  The best time was from Gillians attempts to prove that she can be Sciencey.  It was fun, although I'm still waiting for her to show me how the rock is going to sublimate and turn into a gas. lol