News and event information for Williams Lake, BC - as it happens.

By LeRae Haynes 

When my children were born I was determined to learn to cook with meat. A lifelong vegetarian, I had never tasted it myself, but wanted them to be able to choose when they grew up. I still think that. It should be a choice---a carefully thought-out choice that takes nutrition, lifestyle and health issues into consideration. 

For me, it wasn’t a choice: not really. I never ate it growing up, never watched anyone cook it and simply was never interested. To try to force myself to eat meat it as an adult just seemed silly and unnecessary. 

But when I had kids that all changed. I got my friends to share their favourite carnivore recipes, hauled out my Good Housekeeping book that included little drawings of hands cutting up and preparing meat dishes and got ready to cook dead animals. 

All my friends said that it was far, far easier to cook with meat than to cook vegetarian: you do a meat and a couple of sides and you’re done. I’m not squeamish and I love to cook, and thought, ‘How hard can it be?’ 

The very first meat I ever cooked was fish. My first child was one year old and I was vastly pregnant with the second. A pickup truck pulled up in front of the cabin where we lived and a local fisherman lifted a giant dead fish out of the back of his truck and laid it carefully on the porch. 

It was easily five feet long and two feet wide in the middle. I had never seen a dead fish close-up before and was horrified, but I could tell by the look on the fisherman’s face that this was a gift of some import, so I arranged my features into something resembling awe and gratitude and said thank you so much. 

I stood there looking down at that dead fish after he drove away, and decided that I would make salmon steaks with garlic, dill and lemon. I took a deep breath and said to myself, ‘I bet you don’t eat the head.’ 

I marched determinedly into the house and grabbed a steak knife and started sawing away on the head. The blade bent and sent little shreds of fish skin flying, but didn’t make a dent. I went back for a bigger knife, then a bigger one, and eventually gave up and got the machete. 

The steaks were an enormous success and I was inordinately pleased with myself. 

It was also really important to me that my kids understand where meat comes from: not from little Styrofoam packages from the grocery store. I took them fishing and taught them to gut and cook trout over a campfire.  We helped butcher a deer with a local hunter, made beer stew for Thanksgiving dinner one year, and I took them with me one summer to butcher chickens at a friend’s farm. 

I will never forget the two-day chicken butchering experience, which involved several families. All the children were put to work gathering and soothing the chickens before they were respectfully ‘harvested’ by a soft-spoken German man with silver hair, blood-flecks on his glasses and a Pepsi in one hand and a hatchet in the other. 

It was a stunning experience for me: I had never handled a dead farm creature before. I was put to work on the gas-powered plucker, next to the 40-gallon barrel over a fire that ‘blanched’ the headless birds before plucking. My job was to haul the dripping carcasses out of the hot water by their feet and wobble them on the plucker until all their sopping feathers came off. 

There were a couple of notable incidents. I reached in to grab a wet dead chicken out of the barrel, approximately the size of a vulture, and its giant claws closed around my wrist, nearly sending me catapulting into the evergreens. 

Another time I grasped a nearly naked chicken under its wings, to ‘sit’ it on the plucker to remove the stubborn tail feathers. Something in the way I gripped it around the middle sent air up through its flaccid neck, resulting in a loud cluck that almost made me die from shock. 

I learned a lot, learning to cook with meat. My best friend from Argentina taught me how to make a perfect roast with crushed rosemary and garlic, I canned 4,000 jars of salmon and was famous for my dilled halibut casserole. I learned that you don’t cook the hamburger before you try to shape it into patties for burgers. If you accidently do, though, you can make sloppy joes instead. 

One of the most memorable things I learned was about chicken breasts. Once, with company coming for dinner, I decided to make Chicken Cordon Bleu. I’d never made it, and got out my handy cookbook with illustrations that made the process look effortless. 

The recipe said chicken breasts, basil, Swiss cheese and ham. What it didn’t say was that there are boned chicken breasts and there are boneless chicken breasts. 

I heaved and yanked and cussed and sweated, trying to roll the stubborn chicken pieces, full of unyielding bones, into little scrolls around the other ingredients. Enormously frustrated and desperate, I managed to hold them in a vaguely cylindrical shape, and stabbed the edges together with several dozen toothpicks. 

In the oven, they started to brown and smelled great, despite their decidedly odd appearance, until all the toothpicks flew out and started on fire in the bottom of the oven. 

I’m a firm believer that looming humiliation is the mother of invention, and at lightning speed, managed to sliver the chicken off the bones, toss it with the rest of the ingredients, add some fresh mushrooms, cream sauce and shell pasta, top it with fresh toasted bread crumbs and made a casserole. 

I did have a little trouble explaining the smell of the charred toothpicks.

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