00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is me eat your podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case underwear listening hunt e podcast. You can't predict anything presented by first light. Go farther, stay longer. You know, as as we get into talking about different food I feel like it's an important thing to clarify here is like, uh, last night, me and Janice eight dinner at Josh's restaurant, but we've also hung out a bit and just socially and had some wild game that Josh and friends you go mostly by Joshua or Josh both. Yeah, that Josh has gotten from friends or harvested themselves. So if when we're talking it sounds like there's confusion ever between what we consumed in the restaurant and what we consumed like for instance, in my hotel room last night. UM, bear in mind that that there's like important distinctions there between commercially produced meat that can be sold in a restaurant and sport harvested meat and fish that you can just get from yourself or be gifted to you from a friend and share with other other friends when there's no financial transaction going on. So just bear it in mind as we talk I'm not gonna go in and clarify all this stuff all the time. And it's an important distinction, and I just want people to be aware of that as we march through some of the foods. We're gonna be talking about Josh Gaines stays On restaurant. Does it annoy you? Does it annoy you? When? When? If you if you look at stays On online, there's two like things that people will point out. Just a joy like a Joe Blow. If you went and typed in staves on San Francisco, he's gonna find that you have three Michelin stars, which is like a tremendous measure of success as a chef and restaurateur. And there's gonna be another descriptor does that descriptor annoy you? Then it comes off you haven't told me what it is yet, because it's the it's the if you take a national perspective, it's the second and most blank. Yeah, you know, unfortunately, that's that's the Do you hate it? Like kind of like a no, I, I you know, I don't. I don't hate it. I mean I think that you know, there's a there's a certain reality until can you tell people what it is the second most one. Well it's it's the second most expensive restaurant in America, apparently because reporters can't do math, but because I feel like it, Um, go ahead speak. Well, you know, we we started um putting. We we we put the price you know, out front in the beginning, right, everything was included. And then if you look at you know, let's say another three star Michelin restaurant, you get a basementu price. Then there's you know, four or five supplements, and you add all those things up and it's like double the price of here. So you know you got it just by coming out and saying here's what it costs for all inclusive? Or how many courses does wind up being? Uh, it just depends anywhere from eight to you know, sixteen, So you're just laying it when you lay it all out. I was trying to put it all out there. I was trying to say, hey, guys, here's math. This is so much. You'll be here for a couple of hours, it's this much, and then it then it positions you in that way where you have all over online. Yeah, people like that expression. Yeah, how many three Michelin star restaurants are in the US. I think I think there's thirteen or fourteen, maybe twelve or thirteen, some twelve and four and some other other ones in San Francisco. Uh yeah, there's one. So we were we were the first, along with another place called Venue. Yeah. I think we should explain if we can just a real general idea of what Michelin stars are, it would be important because yeah, that's who's the chef. Who's the chef that killed himself when he lost the Michelin Star. I mean which one? I think there's a few, but the guy you're talking about, the famous guy his name in France. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know you're talking about. So yeah, explain, like the misslim Star thing. So Michelin, I guess is the you know, it's it's also the tire company. But they started publishing a guide I think it was in the thirties maybe, uh and uh it was meant to uh you know, probably meant to sell tires, but uh, but it gave people, um, you know, a guide to uh you know, destination were the restaurants and so you know it was either one, two or three and three is basically you know the nacle of the cooking world or the restaurant world, and and and it really means that it's worth a detour, you know, a full trip to go to you know, restaurant and then in your place you are you wear a camouflage hat. I noticed last night when I was dying in here, so you had that wasn't because you were here. Actually it's just not so you. But that's the interesting thing is that, um, you're like pretty open, Like you're very open about the fact you like the hunt. Um, even though you live in a town that's perceived by many people who don't live here, like it's perceived by outside as being like a place that would be a hostile environment for hunters. Yeah, but then to be here's like a person who is sort of at the pinnacle of the restaurant world, the pinnacle of the cooking world, in this very space and just being like add out open about it. Have you ever have you ever felt blowback at all for just being like, this is what I this is what I like to do. This informs my cooking, it's my it's a lifestyle I have. I mean, you get you get blowback on you know, Instagram or something, but you don't, you know, in here. You know, it's our purpose is just for quality, right, the quality of the product. So you know, for me, the whole the whole reason for for starting hunting again was uh good meat. It's you know, you you know, as a chef, you start to chase uh quality and uh so you know I was just looking for, you know, a better quality. And so you know, over the years it led me to hunting because you can't really replace that uh you know that that quality level, you know, provided that you handle it in the right way, um as getting in yourself so or at least seeing the whole process through right. Um, so you know, whenever we're at the point just I mean to speak to that like you're you were steaming, like you don't every fish that comes into your restaurant you like to come in alive? Yeah exactly. Yeah, if we if we can get the elk in a live to it, we do that, but it might stress him out a little bit and not tasted good. And you have staff, you have like a staff fisherman. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so we have we have fishermen, and these guys bring us basically everything alive. So the whole purpose is that we get all of our stuff alive because uh, you know, the reality is is like as soon as you you know, you know, pull a trout out of the river, you know, it starts to go downhill. You either click it right there, and you know, you get to experience that kind of perfect uh taste, right, and you know there's a small window. There's usually usually for all things, there's like a window. You get a window in the beginning and uh uh you know that's what maybe thirty minutes after you harvest it, whether it's meat or or or fish or whatever it may be, right, it's maybe an hour let's say an hour, right, and it's perfect. There's one particular taste you know, kind of attached to that that period of time. And then you know, as time goes by, rigor sets in. You know, you can I see your question. I was gonna ask about rigor. So if you actually do, say, you know, eat you're a piece of your elk in that first hour, will you actually be able to eat it and enjoy it before you have any sort of rigor? Exactly? Yeah, So it said you know there's two there's That's what I'm saying. There's basically two particular you know, sets of time before before rigor sets in, before uh, you know, any of those things really happened. There's that that taste everybody's fromil you know, any hunters familiar with that taste. And then there's that I guess what we what we call aging right where we age our meat to a certain point to where you know, the enzymes start to break down the meat and they start to make the meat more delicious or the fish more delicious. And you know, really everything has its its sweet spot where it tastes you know, perfect, right. So so our job is really to find that timing and the products lifespan and then uh, you know, choose the right point to cook it at. So you know, for an elk, for a big big piece of meta, we could hang those primal cuts for you know, a month, three months even and uh and so you know, it's really all about just kind of finding that that that right right moment when it tasts best. I want to get back into I want to spend a bunch of time on aging, because you were telling me some things like aging game that you found just from your own personal stuff, and then you're working your restaurant. That's that's that's kind of up ended some of the things that I thought were possible, some of the extremes that I thought were possible on aging and what you get on it. I also want to talk about your fish killing method. What I call what I heard E K G may But how do you properly say it? I don't speak Japanese. I wouldn't know. I call it a kids. You Yeah, I've just listened to the Japanese. Did say it when I go down to the fish market. You know, you kid? You man? I think, but you, uh, you grew up in Florida, But you did you grow up like in Florida. It's like the fisherman's paradise, right? Did you grow up a round fishing? Oh? Yeah, I grew up fishing, you know, uh, you know kind of Jack's Barracuda's tarpan sharks. You know, you name it alligators? Um? But but I um. I got out of there in high school, and then I moved to Boston and then went to school in New York and then finally came out here. Like your your family's your whole family moved. Are you just left on your own? No? I just left. I grew up around a bunch of people that grew up in New York and and you know, they always talked about the big city, big lights, and so I I, you always had a dream to get out of there and go and moved to New York. You studied what there? Well, I went to so so I went to Boston. I had some family there. Uh what plan? Don't actually going to school in Boston then? Um? Uh didn't? And then wind up going to culinary school New York in a place called French Culinary Institute. Yeah, I gave which is now I think it's called i SEC International Culinary. Yeah, I gave them a beaver tail one time. Right, I was messing around for for a period of time. I was trying to mess around and finding out how the Mountain Men cook beaver you know, like, yeah, you know what you're reading about the Mountain of Arts and they love beaver tail, right, But you get the sense that it's just from oral or you know, oral stuff that was eventually transcribed into writing of people describing the Mountain Men's diet, but no one really got into how they were actually cooking it or what they're doing with it. And so I started messling with it and and put some stuff up online about messing around with beaver tail, and a guy at that at that school, I gave him one and he had his students prep it out and that it's pretty exciting stuff with beaver tail over there. I don't know if exciting comes to mind when you give like a culinary school, you know, some rare ingredient, But but what what is the what's like the makeup of the beaver tail. It's scales. It's scales over so when you look at the beaver tail, you're just seen the scally surface. Uh, that tail will be emaciated in the spring to the point where you'll see you can see the outline of the bone that runs the length of it, just like the end of the you know, the end of the spine right runs into the tail um. But in the fall it gets so fat. I think it gets like heavier and the fall when it builds up fat and when you burn off the scales, you just put it next to you, fire for a long time and eventually start to bubble and burn and you can scrape that skin away and underneath it is what looks and tastes like grizzle and fat on a real fatty ass grilled steak and you slice that thin and you'd eat it and you'd be like, that tastes exactly like grizzle. But you have to consider that the people that were eating that, um, they were living on a diet of very lean wild meat. And I think it was just like it was a fat source. Basically top the bottom just fat, and you slice it thin, put some salt on it, and it's like surprising, because it's surprising that that is what lives inside of a beaver's tail. So what about the meat? Do you eat the beaver meat? We just put that on top like a little it's like a little toiret topping you could make. You could, really you could cook the meat down and then put this stuff on there, like make its own little fat source on there. Alright, I'm gonna give you a recipe for beaver tail after this already got it. I don't want to know what you need. Yeah. Um, So yeah, that was that was my runn into that place. But I had some other point I was gonna make about beaver beaver tails. Yeah, I don't know. Did you know by this point, like when you were going to school, Like at what point growing up, did you know you had a knack for cooking? And then also, at what point did it be that you started to associate hunting and fishing with your interest in cooking. Well, I don't know if I ever I thought I had a knack for cooking in the beginning. I think that You're like, I had to I had to pay some bills, you know, yeah, and uh and so I got a you know, restaurant job. Why Stually, my first restaurant job was in Florida. I was dishwasher the Japanese restaurant. And um, and I just always had restaurant jobs because they were easy to get. You know, back then, you can, you know, any any you know, schmuck can get a restaurant job. So I was just, you know, it was just what I had. And when you were back there scrubbing dishes, you were like, some of a bitch man, this is what I'm I do with my life? What you know? I I So I grew up doing martial arts, and I started once about five or so, and uh and so the organization of actually dishwashing and and getting you know, a pile of ship thrown at you, you know, play a bust you know, bus tubs of uh of plates and cups, you know, and and and having and having to go through the process of like rinsing them, washing them, getting in there, getting out of dishwasher, getting put away, drying them, wax. It was like this movement, you know, smartial arts movement. So I was excited about it. Really, I like my dishwashing job. So there was the fastest dishwasher in town. Man, right, a COVID of dishwasher. You know that it worked for me when I was my short little stit in the kitchen when we had new guys washing dishes and me, and they'd be just crossing in the weeds and be at the end of the night where not only do they have all the cups and dishes and plates and still we're coming at them, but the whole kitchen is just breaking down. So now there's you know, pots was you know, stuff stuck on them, and cheese melted everywhere, and all kinds of pans, and man, if you just jumped in there a couple of nights and gave him like an hour of your time and just busted but with them, and then all of a sudden, it's like your rapport with them was just golden forever. You know, they're just like, all right, man, I like you. I like you forever. This dude can handle burned on cheese. Then yeah, I don't want to I don't want to like labor your bio, but I do want understand kind of how you came to be who you are. Well, I think I think it was really random, you know, it was really just kind of happenstance in my opinion. You know, I I I was interested in certain things, you know, cooking, you know, his physical act. And I think you know, growing up doing martial arts, it was you know, a relationship to crafts, right, I mean, you know it's a craft and so but in fact, I went back and forth on cooking and martial arts for a long period of time when I first started, you know, after I went to corner school. Like you were, like you were doing competitive martial arts. Uh yeah, yeah, when I was younger, I did I did I do Chinese martial arts and and and so. Um, you know I did some compete when I was younger, but um, but I always went back and forth and because you know, really practicing took up so much time. Uh and uh and so cooking at that time was you know, distraction from practicing. And so I went back and forth and and finally around twenty you know, twenty or so, I gave up and and just just you know, needed to pay my bills, and you know, I started cooking full time. And uh and so and where were you then? I was in Boston. I was in Boston. What kind of food were you doing? Uh? Just like be stro food, you know, random bistro I worked out. I worked a couple of restaurants in Boston that are well known. Um, but uh, but it was it was you know, it's like I used to sneak in the bathroom, like read my like martial arts book, you know, a little scrolls and ship in the bathroom. I was like, oh, I gotta breakdown. It's fifteen minute break and we go read my scrolls in the bathroom. So so I was went back and forth, um and uh. And it wasn't really until I came out to San Francisco where I really really like, uh started to Um. It was what thirteen years ago I really started to, uh, you know, focus wholly on cooking. So so working working, working in other places at the time. Still, Yeah, So well, yeah, when I came out here, I worked at a place in the South Bay called H T J. Little little, um, little restaurant that it's been around for maybe like twenty five years, and I had a garden in the back. But but it allowed me to really refocus and really you know, uh, you know, treated as a career and um and uh, you know, it was a learning process. I came out here and there was all these incredible products, you know, coming from the East Coast, where there's there's just not the same you know, you know, convergence of you know, all all these amazing things. There's like a there's a cheese producing region here, there's a wine producing region. You know, you can you can you know, go outside and and hunt. I guess you can do that anywhere. But um, but basically they have everything everything you would want here as a chef to really produce good fit. You felt that, like you felt that the the ingredients available to you and the products available to you was just better here than it was in the East. I mean, go you know, you go to Whole Foods. I mean, I don't know about now, right, it's a little different now. But when I came here, Yeah, for sure. I mean you can go to Whole Foods and you can look at you know, three varieties of radish, whereas you know the you know, uh that I was named that place in the East Coast. I don't know if you got a supermarket out there, and at that time it was just just wasn't the same. Yeah, maybe it's because I was dirt poor when I lived in the East Coast. You know what we were talking about yesterday driving around here is, um, we're kind of in the last couple of days. You've done kind of a tour where San Jose down to Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz up to here. It was like where I you know, where I grew up, where I've lived most of my life. When you are in an agricultural area, you're usually looking at stuff that's fed to stuff that will become food, right like where groups like alfalfa and feed corn. When you're driving around California, like be like, oh, ship, there's a field of cauliflower or there's you know, there's like products you know where you're like, you're you're able to in this climate in this area grow the actual things that you eat. You know, all the artichokes, tree nuts. It just kind of gives you a different relationship to how stuff is after because most people just look at are looking more at commodities when they look at agricultural fields rather than looking at like finished table ready items being grown unless you have a garden. Yeah, yeah, that's true. Out here, you know, it's got everything, but it's still you know, I mean, there's you know, all that stuff out here is still most of the majority of it's still you know, kind of monoculture and and um, you know, you know, cities devoted to just artichokes, right, So it's still it still has its issues out here. Right. So it's really all the small it's it's it's it's all practices, right until you really get into the smaller practices than it. Then you know there's a there's a lot of issues with with you know, agriculture in general. So when you when you got there, I need to start your own. Is this the first restaurant you started? Yeah? Did you at the same time decide to be that You're gonna get a restaurant and get a farm? Well, I mean I yeah, I mean you need a farm to to really have the best things. Like most restaurants don't have a goddamn farm. Well that's true, but you know, if you're gonna make good food, you gotta have farm. If you if you're still good to be like that. That's as simple as that. Like if you have a rest if I'm gonna have a restaurant, a farm, need a fisherman, you know, need to get need to get media, a certain place, you need to find uh you know, uh, you know dry goods. So you know, as a chef, you gotta you gotta go through, uh, you gotta audit your list of of how are you really procure ingredients if you really want to get to to a place where you're actually producing good food in earnest, Right, So explain the farm that goes with stays On. Is it called says On farm? Uh? Yeah, sure, we'll call it that. It's just I saw it written somewhere you got a duck hanging up somewhere, and I saw it, said like, yeah, that's just in our internal language. We don't we just our farm, right, it's called the farm. But yeah, it's just you know, you gotta you have to you know, you got you have a you have choices, right, you can pick up the phone as a chevy you can call you know, your your purveyor, your wholesaler and say, hey, look, you know, uh, take six heads of lettuce today, right, Um. But you know that the whole process of of wholesaling is you know, there's there's a middleman there, there's a you know usually maybe another middleman, someone who actually sources all this stuff out. Then there's the actual producer. So you're separated and by the time it gets a restaurant, you're five layers away from from getting the actual product. So you know, it goes to a whole, it goes to you know, shipping, it goes through holding in the warehouse, and then maybe you get it maybe three or four or five, six, seven days later, right, So at that point, you know, it doesn't taste have any resemblance to really what a great product really is anymore. You know, the aroma was gone. That that that original taste when you picked it has gone. And and most likely the product itself is is you know, some from some seed that was uh, you know, spliced and diced you know, seven different ways to to have no resemblance of the the original taste of that product. So we just wanted to to you know, take it back to a time to where everything had flavor, right, I mean really since what World War one or two or where it was that you know, everything has been you know, um, you kind of bastardize our seeds, our seeds and you know all the produce you know, I mean you really think about, um, you know how many people have eating a ripe tomato, you know, from a great seed off the vine when it's when it's truly like right, it's very few. So that was our purpose. We wanted to just you know, have great products. You know. That's the thing that comes up a lot in conversations about food. I feel like over the last two decades or whatever, is uh, the I sit on both sides of what I'm gonna bring up where people talk about the industrialization of food, Okay, and we generally now sort of talk about it as a negative because we have the luxury in this country, We had the luxury of like eating very fine food. But to contextualize it a little bit, just to show you that, just to demonstrate, like my how I sit on both sizes contextualized a little bit. During World War two, we had estimates very but perhaps some millions of people starved to death in Europe. We had rations in this country on you know, there was like dairy rations, meat rations, major shortages, and coming out of that, it wasn't long after that that we got used to this idea that we might be in the very near future entering into another major world conflict with the Soviet Union. And I think at the time the most pressed thing issue was how can we create a system where we have the capability of throwing a switch and feeding Europe and fielding this military. And so we just like, it wasn't that we got lost our way. It's just that we had a period where our priorities were completely different and we and then some good things came out of it, like that we would bank soil right, You'd have like farms that were put out that when dairy prices dropped, rather than having a dairy farmer go out of business, we would subsidize them so that they could stay ready to jump into action should the need occur. So now we look at it. I feel like now we look at were like we're getting away from that, We're getting away from the industrialization. I feel like we always gonna keep an open eye for the fact that it's just because we have the luxury of doing that. But it wasn't like evil people trying to do evil ship because just people trying to get ready for a catastrophe which we had just witnessed happened. No, it's true. And uh, you know, we we operate within a very narrow little hole, right, so so so our you know, our ore are in our little hole, you know, our little pond we were are. Our focus is purely tastes, right, it's tasting along with taste comes from others saying anyway, saying that you're guilty. Why I just claimed. But I think that there's like there's a way that when when we lose I think we lose sight of some of the motivations of how stuff came to be and treated like it was just bad decision making. Yeah, you like it's all just Monsanto just trying to make next right, Yeah, but it's like a lot of factors at play, right, Yeah, No, it's not just the evil uncle right then that yeah, but but you yeah, but now just to get back to where we are, Yeah, now, we do have at this moment in time the luxury to have like to pursue perfection and absolute ripeness and food rather than just shelf stability. Well, there's also some really cool solutions too that you see coming around, right especially with with the age of technology. There's there's a clue is loop agriculture systems that are happening that produce you know, I think it's you know, twenty x the volume of of product and in a really small space, so you can put you know, one of the most interesting ones is uh. You know, it's completely closed loop. So what that means is really you've got you know, a little pot, a little capsule, and it's an artificial and growing environment, and you can fit a ton of product in there. You can grow a ton of product in a very small space. Um, you produce. You can produce uh. I don't remember what the numbers were, but I think it's roughly x uh the volume of food out of this little small space. You can also control the nutrient drink that goes in. You can control the sun cycle, you know, all of those elements that go into growing food. And since it's closed loop, you're basically recycling you know, all of that taste and all of the nutrient drink. So um, and it's all computerized. Uh, and so you can basically, let's say you had uh, you know, an artichoke that was perfect in uh two thousand one in you know, Salinas, when that was the best arti shark you ever had in your life, you could go you can go look up all of the historical data or all the weather data, and you can plug in those data points to this closed loop system and you can basically replicate that exactly. So there's some cool stuff coming out also, but that's in that would have interesting implications for the wine world. Yeah, well see the issue with that now. But the issue is that you lose a little bit of what's called taroa right you know, because you can still produce a delicious sweet plant. That's that's great, that's the way that you maybe like it. But you can ever replicate really truly the taste of nature, right, It doesn't just it's not possible you can. So so that's the downside of that. Where uh, where in your if we're in if we're checking back in on and on your biography, and at this point we kind of got you where you're here. You got a restaurant, you got a farm, Um, where did like you're sort of a where did your re awareness of hunting come in? Because you were like exposed to it in a way in Florida and we're aware that it was the thing people do. You'd like to run around out the wood, Yeah, you run around, you know, as a kid, you run around and there's Alegan run around with spears. Yeah, you know, at least to try to hunt ut wild boars with spears. Never successful, but you know it was waiting the tree and try to throw a spear down. But it was it was more of a you know, just just being a kid, you know, trying to exactly you get some frogs. You know, we get frogs and we uh, you know, eat some water moccasins and rattlesnakes and stuff. But but you know, it can't it came around because of products. It's it's really taste. Right. At a certain point you look at you start to dissect all of our practices, you know, and all of our food practices, um and at a certain point realize is a chef that that uh, you know, grain fed beef doesn't taste good anymore? Right, You start to notice, you know, it's a process. We start to notice the fact that that beef, you know, or or meat in general, everything tastes like corn, or everything tastes like shitty wheat, you know, or whatever it may taste like. So, so the whole purpose was was taste. Really, that's our whole purposes really taste. Right now, do we really you know, find a product that did is uh, you know, like it once was or or or whatever our reference points are for a particular product, right like, what is what is the most delicious uh meat? What is the most delicious lettuce? You know? And then so your experience is wild game kind of started to shape your impressions of what was possible and what could be done and what things would taste like variations. Well, I've been I've been getting uh, you know, we get we get a lot of we get a lot of hunters here that give us meat, you know, get u s wild ducks or or deer or whatever and just kind of donate it to me. And um, so been eating it for a few years out here. Um surprising. There's a lot of hunters in California, or at least a handful. Um. Some friends would pass long stuff you check out. They just passed along meat I eat here and duck and and um I got you interested. Well it just yeah, it just it. It really re sparked that or reignited that spark, right, And uh, I mean wild ducks are really delicious, right and wild meats you know, really good. We treat it the right way. So so at a certain point, I just want to get it myself, you know, I just I just wanted to. I wanted to, you know, have all wild meat. So there's the thing that happens. Maybe you can explain this to me. When you're looking at when you're reading about chefs and reading about great restaurants, you're always seeing that that anyone can produce I shouldn't say anyone, but yeah, let's just say anyone can produce this great dish once, okay. But the true sign of expertise, so like mastering your craft is that you can do it seventy times in a night or whatever number of times in a night and have it be the same. And then you can do that for weeks, right, and just like executed again and again and again. I don't know if you use that measure of success, but yeah, you're familiar with That's the thing people bring up when talking about being a great cook. But with wild game, you look at me like you've never heard I've never heard of that, to be honest, Yeah, I was reading that. I was reading someone talking about that. No, I was reading there a day someone saying I was reading a profile of chef in the New Yorker. Makes sense, And it was a guy saying like, yeah, um, perfection to me is three eggs, like eggs benedict, without a mistake, without one returned, without one customer return sure, like as as the craft of cooking goes. Yeah, so I hear that now and then. And on the other hand, with wild game, you're opening yourself up to such a tremendous amount of variability because they're not the same. You know, if you if you identified, like if you have a farm and you're identified. Man, this this dude at this farm produces some goodass lamb because he's got some breed of lamb that works well on the land where he raises it. He's got a great irrigated pasture with like the right blend of forbes and grasses, and his alfalfa is beautiful, and he's able to run this thing. And when I get a leg of land from him this year. It's great, I get a leg of land from him next year. It's great. That ship isn't what wild game is like. Well, because you shooting, you're shooting an animal. But you know, I don't know. I look, it looked like a good animal. I shot it, but I got over there and had recently crashed into a porcupine, so its entire belly was full of quills and every one of those injuries was full of post. It was emaciated. Or I shot it and wasn't the first guy that shot it, because it's back leg on the side not facing me had been injured by a it, and so you know, it was packed with dirt and it was a mass. Or I killed some big crazy buck that had been rotting hard for two months and hasn't probably eaten a liquor grass for two months, and tasted like ship. Or I shot a deer and it fell into a big sinkhole and I couldn't get it out till a couple of days later, with a rope and a buddy holding my ankles. So I'm just saying that isn't like this dude that produces these wonderful lambs time and time again, it's like you can't there is like perfection is out there, but perfection isn't always out there. Yeah, I think like we we killed like whatever it was going on that year in Idaho and we killed Yanni. We killed some stomper bucks in Idaho. And I don't know what was going on that year in Idaho, but that was like it was the best mule deer meat ever. And I'm eating a shipload of mule deer right and I don't know. It defied everything you're supposed because supposed to be like big giant bucks on taste. These are big giant bucks pre rut that had two which is of tallow on their back. And we're great. So that's my question, Well, how do you deal with all the lack how do you deal with all the lack of consistency when you're as a chef who's dealing with wild game and not just commercially produced wild game, but on your own, you're dealing with hunted wild game. Yeah, for us, For for us, that's all. I mean, every product is like that, right, I mean the whole for us. You know, it's so specialized that you know, when we get a radish in one day from the farm, it's not necessarily the same as the next day from the farm, right, so you can you can you know, uh, you know, take that theory with with any product that you use. Could be the rain, could be you know, the amount of sun you get in one day, could be uh, you know, their diet. But every product changes a little bit every day. So the way that we operate is we basically get a product in the door, look at it, and then decide what to do from there. Because even if you're getting you know, that lamb, you know, maybe they forgot to feed it one day. Who knows, maybe the lamb is sick, you don't, you don't know, right, So so everything changes just to touch, and even if it's just incrementally, it still changes every day. And so our focus is really on kind of capturing that taste. So you know, if we get uh, if we get a buck in it's very um um bucky, then you know, you've got to decide what to do with it from there. So do you grind it to maybe purge some of that flavor out? You know, maybe you throak in and salt water for salted water for a few days, just to kind of purge it and have have a clean flavor. Maybe it's like that that mule deer you've got and just throw it right and grill. You don't even age it. So it just depends. And so so our whole operating system in the kitchen is based on really kind of assessing what the product is and then deciding, you know, what methods to go through for preservation and so that that you know, select just selecting the right product is is a huge part of it. But um, you know you can either for us, we either especially sparticularly meat and game. You know, you either choose either use it right there or there's some sort of continuation and the preservation process that happens. So whether it's aging or curing or grinding into a sausage or whatever it may be. You know, it's just just like anything else. Can you take this menu and do the many that you served last night and do a sort of speed walkthrough? Uh yeah, I got one over here. Well I want people to get I want people to get a sense of of what of what dishes you like to serve. Well, um, let's see you had a fistfull caviar, start white sturge and caviar. It's white surgeon caviar. It's farmed, right, it's farm caviar. But we we but that is a fish that that is a fish that a Felican fish for Yeah. In the Columbia drainage, they have like uh, you know they have see they have uh open seasons and within those seasons they have kill seasons. Were allowed to like harvest sturgeon. We were making our own sturgeon caviare this year with a very abundant sturgeon called shovel nose sturgeon. But it's material in the Yellowstone River. Yeah, you're about ten a day shovel noses and you get them in the spring. They're about you know, a big one to be two and a half feet long. So, but they have caviar inside. Yeah, but it's it's like painstaking the eggs. Yeah, we're gonna put it through a little sieve. You gotta just mess with it. No, there's nothing to save out. So when you open them up, when you get a female, you open them up and you know some fish have like the skein, right, the sack that holds the eggs like the most the easiest example of over egg to clean would be salmon where you open up that skein and you can just kind of like the eggs just kind of fall away. On sturgeon, the skein and the eggs are just like almost interwoven where each egg needs to be kind of separated from the skein, and it's it's painstaking, like you get it where you have a ton of it, and then we just cleaned it for a long time and they were like, dude, I can't keep cleaning these eggs. And then we salt water the eggs and just ate them. You've seen you've seen the commercial process a cavy are right, I have never seen how they do it. So they just take they take, uh, I mean it's the same, right, Maybe it's more on this like wild surge and shovel nose, but but on you know, like a white sturge and you take the caviar shack out, you throw it into a sieve and the sieve is you know, the right side for the beads. But but they just rub it. They rubb it pretty hard, and they rub it and then it breaks away all the membrane and only the eggs based then they basically drop it in in a salted water bath and then a lot of that stuff will well, a lot of the membrane will float. You just lift it off and then the caviars left over, and they repeat that process till it's clean. The shovel nosed sturgeon, uh there egg is probably about this is this ballpark in it, but their eggs probably about half the diameter of a white sturgeon. There's another you know, there's also another sturgeon or another caviard that comes out of the Yellowstone is um paddlefish caviar which people collect and that's bigger and that's a high grade caviar. And then we used to get caviar out of uh you know, and there's even a commercial market for for white Great lakes. Whitefish have a pretty good caviar and that's the thing that people you know, it's rod and real angers can catch. The reason I bring that up is not just like as you walk through this, I want to just establish what these things even though you're dealing with a commercially caught version or you're dealing with uh, you know, something that's in the commercial chain, right that can be legally purchased and soul in the restaurant that so much of what you're dealing with would also be identified as a type of wild game because, especially in the ocean, pretty much anything you're buying for restaurants things that people can go catch on their own on sport fishing tackle. Right, So sturgeon, Uh though most people don't do it, most fishermen don't do it. Um producing caveat is something that just like anybody could go do from a wide variety of fish. Yeah, they got they did. They got a surgeon fishing out here. Yeah, and there's some kill seasons. Wasn't Scott Peterson when he cut up his wife and dumped her in San Francisco Bay. Part of his defense was that he was sturgeon fishing When they asked him why he was out in the boat that day, did you know that? I have no idea. He did. And me and my fake uncle Donn used to troll stripers in San Francisco Bay and we would go right, it was baiting the sturgeon. So yeah, as he was doing a chum line. Um. Yeah, me, my fake uncle don used to uh do some trolling for stripe bass out here in San Francisco Bay back in two thousand four, and we would just troll right in front of the jail. We're they we're Scott Peterson is housed the prison him. Yeah, what's it called. It's not a San San Quentin. San Quentin. Yeah, yeah, they got they got like watch towers. You we would, I'm not shooting you. We would be trolling by. You'd wave at dudes and watched towers. I feel like there's some sort of environmental issues over there, maybe some waste or something. I was describing to be honest, that we would that I would say that those for for toxic fish, they were delicious. So out of the next one turbot, Yeah, with diamond turbo. So diamond turbots is just a just a local, local species of turbo and a little it's smaller for the most part, um but you can fish it. Yeah, and you brought that fish too. You showed me the fish one of your guys that the fish was alive on a plate, like alive, alive and in it wasn't how how many minutes went by? Five six, and I was presented with so one minute, the fish is there on my plate alive. I grabbed its jaw and it was very flexible, and in a couple minutes later, I had the liver two ways, well different his liver and a different fishes liver two ways. You had made chitlands, right, explain that. So you got so you you basically like you know, on especially a fish like turbo, you've got, I mean, you could use almost the whole thing, right, every everything is good about it as long as you're you know, especially when it's alive a few minutes before. But um, the the guts, uh, the heart, the livers and and and essentially the chiplands are the the intestines, the intestinal track and the stomach are all delicious. You just had to clean it properly. So we boil it in salted water a few times, scrape it out, boil it, scrape it out, boil it. Uh, and then once you chill it down, it's got this little you know, crunchy texture. Um. But it was it was shocking to have that, Like how good it was? The delicious right? Yeah, the little on sauce on there, we've got we've got the sauce called sas on sauce. It's a it's our it's our seasoning elixir. And it's like it's basically a brew uh made of seaweeds, local seaweeds, local little silver fish, all of the excess bones and trim and anything that we get from our fish. And then it's grilled or barbecued or and then it's mixed together and it's basically inoculated with a with a bacteria, and then it's allowed to culture and ferment and it turns into this kind of a lixir that's like the savory almost crossed between white soy and fish sauce. And so we season a lot of things with that. You'll bathe that'll fish, you'll bathe the fish and testines in that stuff. Yeah, but season a little bit in that season yeah. Yeah. And then the livers we the livers are are are basically salted or rinsed in salted water like a brine, right, because you've got to purge the liver um and uh, and then you you salt the liver a little bit. And then and then we um either poaching salted water, we grill it or we we you know, the version you had was basically halted for about a week ranch and then put in uh a seasoning paste which is like stays on seasoning past. It's kind of like a misa it's basically the same thing as a misa um. So you had one version that was poached in one version that was salted and seasoned in our seasoning paste. And then the ribs slab explain what you do with the fish ribs or how the fish rib has become like a little serving tray grilled little rib yeah, yeah, uh so, uh yeah, I guess really the reason for that was because you know, the bones still have meat on it, right, they have they have flavor, they have taste, so and and typically all the little tail pieces anything you might feel might be tough. You know, the connective tissue of the um. You know the skirts, the little a little skirt around the outside of the fin, right basically the ship that nine percent of fishermen throwing the garbage. Yeah, it's and you know that stuff is full of flavor, like a lot a lot of those little little sweet bits or you know that that's the sweetmeat to me because it's full of flavor. It's the stuff that gets a lot of use. Um and that's all gets chopped up and then basically mixed into this chopped seasoned mixture. And then and then put back on the bone and then brushed with a sauce and then grilled, and so it's like a little riblet. Do you know that? In and I see I'm sitting right next to one of the scopier's books. That's how a scopia would handle carp. Ye know, in a lot of other countries, carper like a very popular food fish. And in fact they were introduced into the Great Lakes when when the Great Lakes fisheries were declining at like catastrophic rates. Um a fish cultural has had the idea that they would put common carp into the Great Lakes to make up for the loss of food fish from environmental destruction in the Great Lakes. But it is obviously never caught out with Americans. Like Americans don't like the generally speaking, Americans don't like to eat carp. But scopiers carp recipes would basically be that you poach to fish whatever you're gonna do to it to be able to strip all meat off the bone. Then he would mix that with all kinds of good ship to eat. Right like you said, you're a little you're a little chopped up combination you put on there. But he would mix it with butter cream truffles, and then lay the carp's tail and head down where they belong, and reform the fish's body out of this concoction that he would make, and then putting new scales back on it and serve that as carp. And once you go through all that, that carp becomes pretty damn good. But it doesn't have a whole lot to do with carpet anymore. He just Yeah, it's like it tastes like a truffle. Yeah, exactly, a creamy a creamy truffle kind of moose. Well, back then, you know, there's a lot of a lot of um masking, right because you guys, handling was a little different back then, right, And now we've got we have so much information that we can we can uh, you know, we've learned from other other you know, cultures that like like Japan is a great example of handling, right where everything's just handled so well that the taste winds up being clean and kind of pure, right, like it the records. Yeah, it's like, I guess that's the way of putting it is. The way you're handling stuff that's so fresh, is you're just trying like showcasing what the thing is. You're not using it to make some other thing out of it. Yeah, exactly, you're not doing like a radical transformation. What's good. It's good enough to where you you don't need to write, there's no there's no need to you know, stuff it full of troubles and cream because it already tastes the lessous. You just can't, you know, you can't screw it up. So the rib slabs, then you cook the tail. Yeah, yet you had the head, you had the tail. The rib slabs and the head and the tail are basically just just purged and salted water. Uh. And then we we poached them and then we grill them. So he's poaching for a few minutes at the low temperature I think it's like sixty degrees just to set the head. Yeah. And so it basically cooks the head, you know, evenly all the way through and um and and loosens up all the all the good bits like the little the lips and the connective tissue and the cart lit or whatever whatever is and whatever the makeup of the fishes. But it loosens all that stuff up. Um. And then we grill it. And then you you just pull it all apart, right, so the whole thing falls apart basically, and then all of that good stuff on the inside, which is really one of my favorite pieces or my favorite bits, is you know, easily easy to get at. So on the like on the fish were eating last night, we ate the head, the tail, the trim, the guts. The hell do you guys do with the the flame the meat? Well that's what you ate in the little bull with the flowers. So that's just served raw. Yeah, that's just wrong. And then when you kill a fish. I learned this from my friend Helen Chow because I was out fishing with Helen Chow and her boyfriend John Um. We're at this one time dicking around on a on a fish and charter and the fish they would catch, they would John would kind of sever the spine and then run a hunkle wire down the interior of the spinal cord to relax the fish. And I was explaining to you last night that in South America, I watched amor Indians do that with big turtles that they would catch. Because if he was ever caught a snap turtle and you cut snap turtle's head off the heads very much. We call it it's not alive in any kind of sense of the word of being cognizant, but it's full of activity. The body is clenched up, and the body stays absolutely clenched up, and not like rigor mortis, for just like a nervous system clenched up for hours up to eight hours before I think finally relaxes and you can skin it. And they would do that practice e K G. May. I'm sure that's not the word they used down there, but they would say differently. They would remount the spine and just relax the whole animal, and you get the same effect by when the electoral shock uh cattle doing the slaughter process. Little hit that thing in the head with a captive bolt gun and I can't remember if they then I watched them doing it in a couple different places. They bleed it and then shock it, and that shocking relaxes the animal. But you're getting at something with fish, like can you explain the process. Yeah, we'll say it's not even just fish, it's also game to like. The way that I try to hunt is for pretty specific also, but I'll talk about fish first. So um uh, you know, it's it's it's basically just neural death. You're basically just ruining the nerves so that there's no reaction, continued reaction, right, So you basically, you know, let's say, let's take the turbot for instance. Every fish is a little different in the way you kill it, but but the goal is really the same, and you get brain death and neural death, right or neural destruction, I guess. And uh and so uh you know you you we we friends since you know, insert a knife right at the place where the head and uh, the spine meat and also the brain is and so it's basically just one one stroke, one kill, right, And then we make a little decision on the back of the tail through the spinal cord, you know, that's right, that's where he that's where John runs the wires the tail side. Yeah, and so you grab the tail. It gives you a little handle basically, and grab the tail and you stick the wire on the neural cavity of the neural column. Basically that goes, you know, all the way through the spine of the fish, and you just run that up and down until it basically destroys the nerves and then the fish is limb and then preserves that. Yeah, and it just presert goes completely limp, and that preserves that texture in the fish, and the taste is very it also to me, it also produced. It produces a really a super clean taste, right you don't you don't, um you know there's something about an animal running away or or struggling that produces a different taste, right releases Uh, whatever releases in the system, and that tastes to me is from right. Yeah, And you're gonna touch on hunting, and I wanted, like, I'm gonna preface what you're gonna say with and I'm not gonna like go after you about it or challenge about it. But what what this man is about to say is a controversial notion. But I'll let him. I'll let him speak to you talking about head shooting. Yeah, head shots. Yeah, yeah, your head shot man. Yeah, absolutely so. Cent of the time I count among my head shooting. Uh associates you and my friend Ron, Like, m M, no, I got another head shooter, buddy. Isn't Tony a head shooter? I don't know? But he's like a a marine corps Oh that Tony, Yes, he is. You're right, he is. Yeah, yeah, you like to you like to do neural what do you call it? Neural death. It's the same thing. I mean, it's the same principle, really, but you gotta you gotta let me preface that with like, if you're if you're not gonna put several thousand rounds through you know each each you know shot and in every way you can possibly practice, he probably shouldn't try shoot for a head, right, but because you're robbing yourself of your margin for error right well, into me. Even worse is that you're gonna injure it and it's gonna run away. Yeah, that's what that's the worst part, you know. I don't mean that. Yeah, I'm not worried about if it was like if every shot was either instant death or a myths, there's no shot I would ever pass up. It's the trouble is, you know, the trouble is in those ones that that fall in the gray area between those two extremes, Like when someone shooting at shooting at an elk with a bow and trying to hit it in the heart and they spine it and it drops and they're all excited. You could be like, well, I would temper your excitement with the fact that you were like eighteen inches off, And if you had moved that eighteen inches off in other directions, you would have had a very different outcome. Yeah, but you happen to be eighteen off in exactly the right spot, you know, well, I mean, I guess my opinion is if you can't, if you if you don't feel confident with the shot, don't take it. I mean, that's that's like, if you if you don't feel like you're guaranteeing yourself, you know that you're gonna you're gonna your point of impact is gonna be exactly where you think it's gonna be. Just don't shoot. Yeah, I'm with you. That's what people like, we've we've been asked many times like what's the what's the um what's an ethical shot an unethical shot? And after wringing my hands about that question a long time, I was like, if you're surprised you got its ethical shot, if you want to be like, holy shit, I can't believe I got it that, I was like, you probably shouldn't have touched the trigger, but yeah, so so yeah, so we'll leave We'll leave that one there. But explain, like what you're after, so provided it all the provided all that, then um, you're you're really after the same thing after with the fish, you know, you're you're basically I'm shooting right behind the head where it meets the spine, and um and uh at that point it's going through and the thing drops us dead. You know, at least I think it's dead. Well, if that happened, would be pretty damn dead. Yeah, I mean it doesn't move afterwards, that's for sure. Do you have any thoughts on bleeding because I believe Ron doesn't say when he makes a good headshot he immediately runs up to it. And yeah, because the lung because it bleeds it. Because if you when you hit something through the lungs, you're like self bleeding it right. The blood's all gonna expel. There's no need to run up and then cut its throat because the bloods laying in the chest, cavity or all over the ground. I have a different opinion about blood and game. I think it's just hands. Well there there's so there's an old French method. Let me hold you up for aeman, because finish what you're saying about, like why you would bleed it after you hit in the head. Yeah, right, because like you're saying, if you hit it in the long or this is ron's thinking, if we it's legit thinking. I mean livestock. It's how they slaughter livestock. It's how they slaughter cattle, right, so that you're I guess that your meat is not full of blood the flavor of blood, and cut its throat and beat it. Yeah. So like when when you're slaughtering cattle, they hit it with like I mentioned earlier, somehow this came up electric electric Using electricity, you hit in the head of a captive bolt gun or in the old days of twenty two, and then right away, while it's still kicking on the ground, hoisted up near by the back foot and cut his juggler to expel the blood. I think that has to do. It's also like shelf stability, yeah, and flavor issues. But go ahead, I mean, I'm I'm gonna i'll i'll like mostly defer to your judgment on the taste of it. You know, it's subjective. But there's a there's an old so you know about the there's an old French method where they suffocate like a bird like a pigeon for that. Yeah, and so the taste wines up being um pretty good. You know, it's it's different, but it's it's like, uh, it's bloody, it's spicy, but I like it. It's delicious. And so I mean you really think about it. You know, animals, the meat is full of blood, right, so so you're eating anyway, a little more blood's not gonna kill you, right so you know, I you don't you just take it as a given that blood has to get out, No, not at all, I don't think so. I mean, you know, at least the fish, like the fish you killed that night, you believe, definitely say fish that's a different story because fish has this uh very kind of fish blood has its very irony, kind of metallic taste. They don't want it all. And I think you know, old blood has that to some degree. But a lot of animal blood, like duck blood. You know, there's think about you know, old French sauces like um, you know, duck blood in the sauce or or um in any any birds or uh um. I mean a lot of cultures across the world eat a lot of blood, right, blood. They don't waste the blood here for some reason, you catch the blood and make blood sauceage with it or so I like the blood personally, I think it's good. You just gotta you again, it's practices, right, it's it's handling and practice says. But but has a lot of things too where you use the rabbit blood. Yeah, sauce. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. So, um so anyway, what we're talking about headshots, Yeah, like what you're striving for the kids you may have, you know, wild game of kids you may essentially right now, that's that's what we're striving for. Were striving for that that instant death where it's basically there's zero suffering involved. And but even before that, one of the things that I've noticed is that if you go out there and you scare an animal and it's running away or maybe you injure it, which I have before and I always feel horrible about, but um it's running away and then and then you finally get it, it tastes different, the thing taste. It tastes totally different. So so for me, it's one of the things where you basically sneak up on something you know, you put in the word put it enough work to actually harvest in a way where has no idea. You're there, you know, it's eating some flowers, just like this bear that I just gone. You know it's it's sitting there eating dandelion flowers and the next thing is dead right shot, one kill, instant, It's done right. So to me, that's that's that's the way I like that. Do you feel like it could not only affect the flavor, um, like the difference between an animal that's you know, hurried or rush scared versus you know, completely unaware, and as well as the uh, the texture or sort of like the tenderness without a doubt, Yeah, without a doubt, if you I mean, it's it's the same. It's the same principle, like if you if that thing goes down right away and it's completely limped the second you know that bullet hits that, you know wherever, uh it's limp, right, it's already relaxed. There's no there's zero struggle involved in the process of the thing is left and the meat soft. Another reason I don't like that idea, it's because I have all kinds of animal skulls around my house, and yeah, I would I wouldn't have that anymore. There's your beer right there. You take a look at that school. Well how did you get to put back together again? And never I never shot the skull. I shot right there behind the skull, so it's right in the neck piece, right right where the basically and I basically and putting my eye right on the back of that skull, right behind the year right and that's where I'm looking. Yeah, all right, man, We'll leave it at that. Now, box crab, what the hell? Why is there? Why? Why is uh box crab? Not a thing? Let me let me go back one second. The other thing is is the other the other way that I will shoot too if if I know that I can't, if I if I really want to, you know, get that animal. And I know I can't make a perfect headshot as the eye shoulder right where the spine is, eye shoulder, the bullet splits apart, it shoots into everywhere and the same same thing basically, but it gets familiar with that one and and I've I've gone for that a couple of times. And right one uh right when monolithic bullets started to be very started to become more popular. Um, you know, solid copper bullets people. Yeah, and you should explain this because you follow this ship better than I do. Like the barn. Yeah, Like like monolithic bullets became more popular, you started hearing way more people talk about high shoulder shots. Things punched right through right right, So a lot of people are getting there, like the pencil effect when it would just go through the you know, if they missed the entering rib, you know, they weren't getting that expansion they were used to in a you know, lead core bullet, jacket bullet, and so it was getting that pencil effect, and the deer was running a little bit farther than they were used to, And so I think they were moving their shot placement to that high shoulder. Which I advocate that all the time because I think it's it's a pretty big uh target. Still, you know, you don't have to aim that close to the spine. The spine actually sort of dips down behind the shoulders, so it's not like you're aiming, you know, only three inches below the top of his uh or yeah, below the top of his back there. But there's also up in that areas what's called the void. Yeah, dude, I listen, it's hard to make predictions about the future. I will die. I will live out my life hopefully and get really old, and then I'll die. And on my deathbed, if you said to me, hey man, what's a perfect shot placement, I'm still good, I'll be like, really, that's what you want to talk about right now? And then I'll say but if if in fact, that is what you want to know, as I'm dying double lung, and I'll tell you why. The first time I shot ami with a monolithic bullet, well, I was hunting New Zealand and I shot a stag with a monolithic bullet and it was pretty far out there, but not ridiculously far out there, and I was like, oh, should I missed? Okay, because he's running around, running these high's, chasing them around. And then a while later he kind of got where he looked like he wasn't feeling well, but still was like, you know, I'll keep chasing these highness. You know, I'm not feeling too well. And then all of a sudden got woozy and tipped over and it looked like someone had taken when I butchered it, it it looked like someone took a field tip arrow just an arrow with a practice point on it and jabbed it through the chest cavity. So I've had this with pigs before. While boors it was down and down in southern California. You have to shoot all copper right, you can't shootnything. It's not copper steel. There's no let allout. It's condor zone. And so no, right, not yet. I think it's next year. It's definitely coming. Yeah. Um that's why I washed. Washington's real nice right now. But um, you know, I've I've shot pigs where you know. There was a group of them and I and I shot three at three different pigs, and uh, I thought I completely missed. I was like, well they ran away. I was like, they just gone. I was like, I don't usually miss because I don't usually take those shots. And I put in a lot of practice, and uh in any way, we uh we saw one running away. He ran up the hill, little one and then he dropped dead. And then so I was okay, I did miss. So then we started looking for the other two pigs. Found all three. But in the end it was the same thing, that little puncture that went straight through they were all they were all straight through the lungs right by the heart. They just keep going. It doesn't it doesn't have that terminal, uh, you know, damage right, No, And then I got onto the after that, I got into the whole high shoulder scene. But again I hit like, remember that when we're hunting musk cocks. M hm, dude, he didn't even give it ship to that. It's like, I just feel like it's imperfect. You could speak to it. I don't care. No, But you remember that you said you did pull forward just a little bit because I was worried about you about hitting another animal, and so you like you personally, you know, judge and put it forward. But I feel like with the long shot too, you can be off the lungs in the back and all of a sudden you're you know, into the liver, which animals go a long way when they've got a bullet through their liver, and you go farther back and you've just gone, you know, straight through the paunch and good luck finding that. Well, look, at the end of the day, if you know for sure you're gonna make the shot, it's ethical. Yeah, all right. I want to be confident. I want to keep marching down things. I want to talk about some other stuff box crab. What okay, if you went out and asked Joe blow, Joe blow, dude who eats at Red Lobster or whatever? Uh, just as Red Lobster sttle business. I don't know, but I just read something about get somebody getting food poisoning there the other day when I was a kid, I'm telling you, what if you were going out to that was the pinnacle of a fancy dinner like on prom night, just like dudes would take to take your high school girlfriend down the Red Lobster and you were like tearing, you were set in the stage man and listen, guys out there, if that was that's your plan, or you just did that, took your lady out there like a couple of weeks ago and it was prom night. Uh, we're not We're not dogging. I'm not dogging it at all. I'm just saying I don't know if there's still I don't know how Red Lobs are still kicking as or not. Yeah, no, I think they're still around. Well just just let me let me also help with anybody out there may get food poison from Red Lobster. I got food poison one time. From some sort of bio disease and the and the oysters here in the Bay Area, and I was, I was like, I was really sick, man, I I ate. I don't know how many oysters I ate that day, but but they're contaminated with something and um and uh so I was. I was at the point where I was like sick for hours and I was dry heating. There's no liquids left in my body. Went to the hospital. They gave me this little ivy thing and a pill felt better than like ten minutes. Yeah, listen, Yeah, the fact it obsessed me that you even insinuate that I was dogging on Red Lobster, because if you were the number line out on a one to ten number line out on the quality, like if you took a week and be like, Okay, what quality of foods does this person consumed during a week? If I Red Lobsters, be like on the five mark not do you way? Yeah, I think I'm dog on a Red Lobster. I just haven't been following. I just haven't been following whatever the scene is over at Red Lobster right now. But box what else makes my damn point? People know that there's good crabs right, and they're like snow crab, dungeoness crab, blue crab, king crab. And there's a redundancy here like tanners or snows right. Tanner Tanner is another word check that. I think a tank. I think when you hear Tanner, it's a there's there's a redundancy. I'm not thinking clear right now. There's a redundancy in that list. But your favorite crab is a crab that doesn't fall on the list of super good crabs. That's because nobody knows about it. You think that's fishermen don't even really fish. When I came in and I looked at that tank of crabs, I thought you had a bunch of dungee bodies in there, legless dungee bodies because of the way they suck their legs in. Yeah, they box up, that's what you got the name. Basically, they basically pull in all their extremities and it forms like a perfect shape into the around their shell. They're not so they don't cost nearly what a They gotta be way cheaper than a dungeoness. Oh no, they're they're more expensive because nobody fishes them. I mean, you got it's it's a boutique fishery basically. So I've got a fisher men who have to pay you know, uh, you know, X amount of expenses to just to get you know, the stuff we want, right, so it winds up being a little more expensive. So how did you come to like prefer box crab and not be like helly man. Everybody knows that King Crab is the best crab in the world or Dungeoness is the best crab in the world, like you just don't see box crab around commercially. First of all, we we we try to just use everything just from right here. Okay, you know, we'll take it all. It's it's West Coast because it makes sense for us in terms of taste. So everything you can pull from BC down to south of here, yeah, exactly, down to like Santa Barbara basically, and so that's all that's all relatively the same environment, right more or less. I mean there's obviously some variation, but but um, northerly northerly Pacific waters, yeah exactly. Um, but you know, we we just get we get random stuff from our guys, whether it's our gatherer or our you know, which gathers our forger and um. Whether it's our fishermen or whatever it is, they bring us a bunch of stuff, you know, all the time, random things and um. And so we're constantly kind of exploring, you know, what are these Uh, what can we grow? What can we find? Uh? There's a lot of stuff out there, especially in fisheries that aren't fish, because everybody is so focused on one kind of commodity, you know, a good that that everybody's gonna you know, basically pilfer you know, the entire salmon population, you know, until there's no more left because they get a higher price. But then there's twenty other species out there that are actually really delicious. They're underutilized and completely underutilized. Yeah, like another dish. And this is the thing I've been harpened on for people to live you know, in the Pacific waters is what I what I feel it's gonna be like the most underutilized. Now that being underutilized is a bad thing, but the sea cucumber being a thing that's just like like in my mind underutilized, Well, it's you know, it's it's like I feel like it's a like a challenging thing for people to to get past because it's you know, it's it's slimy. It looks anasty to some people, and and but you know it's it's it's kind of a hidden treasure. In my opinion, it's delicious once you treat it the right. Yeah, it's just did you guys like that, you caucumber last? It's great, Man's delicious. It's not the way we do them. I know, you don't fry anything. You fry anything. We grill fry. So our whole our you know, our whole um kind of ethos is all fire cooking. So if you noticed, you know, every single thing you had was cooked over the fire in some way, some manner, and so all of the methods that we used to use for regular cooking, we've now created a way to cook it over the fire in the same way. So when we fry something, what it's called grill fry. And so let's say you have a flower and we'll coat this flower the like a like a floral flower, right, and uh, we'll code it in a batter, it was a specific batter, and we will let it dry a little bit, and then we have perforated pants. They're just like sautee pants, and so we'll we'll we'll then take the dried the code dried semi dried rather or at least the batter's fried flour, and then we'll we'll brush the pan with the oil and then brush the flower with the oil and then throw it on the grill. So it's basically ceiling that batter around the outside. And so you wind up with what we call grill fry. Do you call that your heart over there? Yeah? Yeah, okay, So we're gonna take a we'll take a picture just to put it up in the show notes so you can go check it out. Um, you got a horror thalnel was like six ft wide, it's eight ft plus um six ft yeah, and different sections. You gotta fire going in there and what and what would you you know, you said you'll burn some almond, almond, uh. Fruit woods of different kinds depending on the season. So if you have, you know, for instance, fake season right now, So we'll take fig wood and we'll grill a thig dish over the fake wood. And so we use that kind of layering method for different fruits. Could be apple, could be quinns, could be pair whatever it is. And when I came in here this morning. You about a rick of wood stacked outside of your front doorway and to come inside. So they got a fire, they got like a rip, like a camp fire burning in your kitchen. And as I was eating, I was looking over there and imagining that I would walk over and be like this giant grill set up with a big gas fire and a grill way over it. But what the guys are doing is there's a camp fire burning, and they're shoveling out little like little shovel piles of amber. Feel like you're miss setting the camp fire, because right, there's more not a camp fer. There's no one camping. Yeah, but it's not, it's not. How is it different than the fire you build if you built a fire anywhere? Tell us so it's the fire, non relatively, I think. So now we're just burning down a bed of ambers, basically that the fire is devoted. Yeah, okay, Yanni's tin camp. Okay, all right, I'll tell my version. You tell your version, all right, you gotta damn fire. Would burning in a fire that was remarkably similar to how one might think of as a camp fire, right, it's not in a It's just burning in the corner. Right, my wrong, m my right right, And you're your cooks who are working this. Take what it looks like the kind of shovel if you had a fireplace and you had like a little shovel to shovel out ash out of your fireplace periodically. They have one of those, and they scoop out a pile of embers, it's not even a court of embers and make a little ember bed bed and have little grates that they have sitting over that ember bed, and that's what they're working on, or any any utensil. So we have perforated pans, we've got grades, we've got uh, skewers, a variety of different tools that we used to cook over the ambers. And the amber bed is not more than two inches deep and probably not that and maybe a square foot, yeah, depending on what you're cook depending on what you're doing. So there's a lot of I mean basically the majority of the cooking is done near the fire and over the ambers. And then you got your racks way the hell above the fire, right where you just got all kinds of ship stacked up there. And give an example of like uh, you know, like uh so we you dehydration, right, dehydrate u um whatever. So for us let's give me for instance, let's use there's a dish that's well known that we do that's called brasicas. And so it's a bunch of Braska leaves. Things in Nebraska family could mustards, you know, cabbages, whatever, broccolia and uh so you take the leaves and we basically lay it out flat and maybe brush a little light amount of oil on there and then lay it out flat on a rack and then we'll put it over almost imperceptible heat, just a really a scattering of ambers where it's probably over for it's probably over or four ft above that. Well, that's that's a different thing. That's that's what we call fire in the sky. So that's a different method. It's like a different different type of dehydration where it's where slowly getting smoked, but it's a similar it's a similar thing, um different outcome. And so this is just you know, above a little bed maybe three inches above. It's on a rack, a bunch of leaves and it just slowly kind of absorbs the flavor of the fire and it gets dehydrated. So that's one example of and it's like a chip and you can just eat it like potato chips after but it's also has that like beautiful sweet smoke from the fire. So that's one example like really low cooking. And then and then you know, for meat, for instance, what we'll do is we'll temper we'll we'll get a chunk of meat out right, and we'll we'll temper it near the fire. So it's already slowly starting to accept the heat, right, and it's and it's, uh, you know, we pulled out of the out of the aging room, let it come to room temperature, put it near the fire, okay, and it's so it's slowly already starting to accept the heat a little bit, right, and it's softening and it's developing more flavor, right. Uh. And then we'll throw it on a bed of ambers, which is, you know, however big the product is, and the height of the bed depends on the heat that we want, and then the distance from the top of the ambers to the bottom of the product is also depending on how long we want to cook it for, how much you know heat be want, or how hard we want to sear it or whatever. Right, Yeah, so okay, talk about those quail. How long do you so you gotta plucked quail? How long do you age a plucked quail for six days? At forty five degrees in a room with a lot of circulation, a lot of air circulations, the keys that you've gotta have. You've gotta have air circulation all the way around these meats, so that you're starting you're starting to dry it, but you want the humidity to also be high enough to where it doesn't dry out too much. Right, So that's about the perfect room. Perfect room. It's forty five or so degrees in six days, and that coil sits there plucked, just gutted and plucked for six days. Yeah, and then you grilled the quail. And I've grilled like a mess of quail. And I was telling you that when I grill a quail, I grilled that quail for not ten minutes. You grill your quail for two hours. Yeah, really really low heat in and out of the heat, right in and out. So you're basically that's you know, it's an in and out method of of roasting meat to where you're basically exposing the meat to uh. Depending on how much fat content is meat, um let's say for this quail, for instance, you know, medium heat for just a very brief period time, and you take it off the heat and you let it rest out its residual. You know, heat really has the opportunity to spread throughout the entire piece of meat. And then once it comes down to basically tep it or room temperature where there's no more cooking happen, than you repeat that process over and over again and you wind up. What I have never said this is, this is the most surprising thing that that you cook. Is it you wind up with? It's like the texture that you can tear the bird apart. Okay, it breaks apart like it breaks apart, like how bird should break apart. It's cooked. But the texture is you achieve a texture that's more like raw coail but not flabby though, no, but it still has a translucent to it. Right, it doesn't turn into like it doesn't turn into your classic like white stringy. Yeah. Yeah, it's still it's translucent down to the bone and definitely not raw, but has like almost like a cired quality to it. Well, here's what we're doing. Basically, you're basically you're you're you're not only allowing it to age. Those those oils start to Uh. First of all, some of the moisture comes out of the bird, right, And then when you're going back and forth on the heat like that, you're getting all that moisture to move around a little bit, but you're not putting on so high of the heat that you're forcing it out, right, So that stuff is just moving around and there gently, and eventually it just rests out and rests over to where it's that it's cooked, but it's not overcooked. Yeah, oh yeah, I forgot. We're gonna come back to you know, you're gonna offer the more accurate version of the damn fire. I'm curious about this. Actually, well, when I saw the fire that when I saw two things that I was gonna ask about. Actually one the campfire that Steve was referring to, I went, I doubled around and said, it's not the camp art's fire if he's referring to that was in the right back corner, right. I just felt like there was an intense management of that fire. That and you're saying campers don't manage their fire, sure, we just how just imagine the fires just like this, like pile of wood that's on fire, and there may or may not be a bunch of members or whatever, but this was like two or three pieces of wood were being very carefully managed to extract those embers. Yeah, here's the difference. But yeah, you're right, and um, yeah, that's something I don't even notice that really, I don't even think about that consciously. But basically, you know, you're camping, you want the flame. You're out there, you want to flame you when you heat from the flame. For us, we want the ambers. So we're we're basically positioning the way to where it's all piled on top of each other so that you can stick a shovel in there and harvest the ambers when you need it. And you're pulling out you're pulling out, are you? Are you guys crushing the embers a little bit, but that's pulling out like centimeter like square centimeter embers. Yeah. So that's why we chose almond wood because it burns down almost perfectly. But a lot of wood does too. If you just if you just manage the fire like you're like you just talking about, so you have you know, we've got that little fire of you know, under the amber pile. Let's say, imagine, is I don't know, four to six pieces of wood all burnt down, and then you've got another maybe two or three on top to just regulate that bed of ambers, so it keeps it glowing hot the whole time. So I've got some flame going on. So you're not you're not like you're not grading out the embers, like how the embers all looks so perfect. That's just the quality of how the fire is being managed. And what kind of would you're burnt? Yeah, I mean you could, I mean pretty much any would you can accomplish the same thing with. But it's really the management of the pile of uh flame, flaming logs on top of the bed of the ambers to keep it hot. And I'm guessing there's also some sort of it looked like there was just like the perfect draw, like the perfect air moving across that fire, right Like it was just like it seemed like you could put your hand three ft above where that fire was and you would burn your hand just because of the way that air is moving across it providing oxygen you know too, So it's burning super hot. Yeah, this is a design of the fireplace, right, So it's got that you know, it's got that suction and basically like the way that this this has a little lip over the like the hood has a lip over the fireplace. That basically UH draws the air in the fireplace up around and then out the flu So it's just good fireplaces time. Yeah. Yeah, it's really surprising to me, like how much you guys are cooking over fire everything, even dessert. Yeah it tastes better. Man. Did you have to dick around a lot to get the uh to get your hearth or fireplace right with circulation? Well no, I mean I had a really talented designer who designed the draw of the fireplace got um abaloni. So those small Because you can die for abalone in California, you can die for abaloni Alaska. There's like regulations on it. I know that, Like for instance, um at our place in Alaska. Because I'm not a resident of Alaska, I'm not able to dive for abaloni. My brother is, he's a resident of Alaska. He's allowed a couple of abaloni the day. There's much smaller than down here. They got a size limit on him. So you serve some small those must be out of an aquaculture facility. Yeah, exactly what got you. And then you had some giant abaloni shells and those are probably like wild wild shells. Those those are the ones I ate. Just use it as a plate. Now do you die for him? You never die for him? No, yeah, no, ever since, ever since, I alred story about my buddy, Well, this guy that I know, and I'm a buddy, but the guy that I know that dives for a blowing around here it's like a sea forger. And uh. He was telling the story about how they went up I think it's around Eureka or Fort Bragg or something like that. A lot of blowing up there, and him and his friend were they got in the water and uh and uh there's there's a bunch of seals in the water, and which is a good sign there's no shark, right basically, or it's a good sign that there might be one soon. Well, so, uh so they're diving and he comes up and I guess the boat is off in the disk the hundred yards maybe, and uh then he realizes there's zero seals in the water, right, All the seals are on the rocks, and so you know, obviously he's freaking out a little bit in his head and swims to the boat. Uh, takes his gear off, takes his flippers off, throws in the boat. You know. Uh, it goes to push up into the boat, sits down, turns around, and there's a great white right below him with his mouth oak him maybe a few feet. It just takes it takes a pass by. That's that's terrifying. I feel that they surfers get a lot of mileage out of their dealings with white sharks. But there's a lot more surfers in there are Abaloni divers, and I think that the Abaloni divers are more in the mix. Have you have you read Canny Roll by John Steinbeck? Um. We talked about it a couple times yesterday because it's you know, takes place in Monterey Bay, and um, they do a lot of even back then. So Steinbeck was writing, you know, in the during the Great Depression, right or writing about that era, and there in that book, those boys are always illegally harvesting avalone's back then. It's been like a tightly regulated industry for a long time. We also talked about Canny Roll because in the book, Um, one of them works at a bar and when he whenever he whenever a client leaves, he just takes whatever was left in their glass and dumps it into a bucket. And that's how him and that's what him and his friends all drink. That's their alcohol source. Wait what I missed that? What was it? What do they drink? So the guy that works in the bar, anytime a client leaves anything left in his drink in his glass, beer, wine, liquor whatever it is, it just goes into a bucket. They just dump it into a bucket and they drink that at the end of the night. And that's what That's what the crew, that's what the crew in Cannary row. That's their alcohol source is just the dregs from everyone's drinks. But they're also avid, avid abalone poachers. Uh monkey faced eel. I've fished for those before. That's not a that's not a popular commercial fish. Nope. But they just I think they just um allowed commercial fistory on it now Yeah yeah, um, well, I mean I think I don't think ellen in general is very popular, right for a lot of people, unless it's like you know, nagi, but it's delicious. It's very similar, right, if you if you were to cook it exactly same way as a nag you come out, you'd wind up with a very simular so it's less fatty, but other than that, it's very similar. Yeah, you know what, the unagi um More and more they're turning to American eels because of how depleted eels are. The eels that the that the Japanese are traditionally using are so depleted that they're turning out to American eels. And there's a lot of controversy right now because guys, what guys are doing is harvesting glass eels, which is uh a little baby a baby eel because you know, like anagramous fish, right, A nagmus fish live in the ocean and run up river to spawn. A catagronous fish lives in a river and goes out to the ocean to spawn. And eels are cattagroniusts. So they're in the in in American rivers and they go out and they just keep going out in the Atlantic and they keep us going to deeper and deeper and deeper water, and that eventually leads into a place called the Sargasso Sea, and they spawn in the Sargasso Sea, and then the larva does free flow on the currents, and eventually the larva develops into what's called a glass eel, which is just a little teeny thing that looks like a looks like a translucent piece of a noodle or just like a little almost like a little piece of seaweed that you can see through. And they start migrating up rivers, and now there's a big market for guys that go out and harvest glass eels, you know, which are worth thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars per pound, to sell glass eels into aquaculture facilities because you obviously can't breed them in captivity. When you you can, you can raise them in captivity, but they can't be bread and captivity. So we're in a situation now where the US Fish and Wildlife Services more aggressively trying to get a get a grip like asses. Demand for glass eels is growing, to try to get a grip on where these things are coming from, where they're going and if we're gonna wind up doing to our own eels what aided their eels and completely deplete them out. So have you had a full, full grown glass siel. Oh yeah, yeah, we smoke them. Yeah, I used to. Like I lived for a while. I had an old girlfriend that was doing a writing fellowship in Rhode Island, and we rented a house. She rented a house that sat on the tideline and Rhode Island, and I would trim deer steaks at night, whatever were and I would just take like whatever I trimmed off silver skin and stuff, and I put it on a hook and I could cast it off my deck. I oughtn't do a little bay, and I would open the bail on my rod and lay it in front of the couch when we're watching movies at night, and I would take a little piece of mask and tape that was white and just pinched that mask and tape on the line at my rod tip and we'd be watching the movie and pretty soon you'd see that mask and tape moving across the living room rug. Then I could just grab my rod, open a slide door and i'd pull eel up over the deck rail. And you can get some freaking giants, man, and I would just gut them. That is a brilliant way to lazy fishing. I would just leave the head on gut them and brine them and smoke them. And what I the way I would produce him is there's a guy, Uh, there's a guy named Ray Turner on the Delaware River who runs the eel weird. And when you're doing eel weirds, they just build rock wall rock wall funnels for commercial harvest and their harvest instead of like they're harvesting the run, right, the eel run, But the eel run is going down river. Everyone thinks of like a fish run going up river, but they harvest them one the eels are migrating to spawn headed down river. And so I was writing about him in my first book, and he kind of turned me on to how he likes to cook his eels. And he runs a place called Delaware Delicacies and sells eel and sells American eels, smoke them. He runs a smoke house, so he smells a variety, he sells a variety of smoke products. But his his his like main offering that he sells in the restaurants and things, is that his main offering is a smoked deal. Well, these guys, these guys are you know what they're they're basically in rock holes right, monkey face. That's how my uncle Don taught me how to catch them, is just dipping bait down into cracks in the rocks. Yeah, yeah, they have out here. They have this little like upside down poll. It's like a stick basically with a little leader on it. I guess, a little hook and bait. He just it's almost like jigging for him. Yeah, you only have you only have like six inches of wire off the end of your rod because you want to be able to cram. You want to be able to cram the stick back into things. Then you're pretty you'll feel and they're big, you know, you'll feel them in. They're bucking around and you drag them out. But it's like a six inch leader in de bait on the end of a you know, like a you know, eight foot long car antenna. That's an interesting way to fish. So there's no line, Well all there's a leader. Yeah, you got a poken pole. The technical the tentnacle term be a poken pole with a leader like a wire on the end with a hook, and you're just trying to deliver that bait by cramming it into cavities under rocks. Any kind of cave thing and you'll hook him. Sometimes what you gotta be careful about. You gotta think ahead, like are you gonna be able to drag a big gass deal out of there? Because he might have come in some other route, Like let's say he's got something you don't even know about where he's coming in some hole and then he winds up in the spot and you cram through some little crack to get him, and then you get him where he's on, but you can't get him out how you came in. So you gotta make sure you're aways fishing or crack. It's gonna be big enough to pull like an average monkey faced fell back out of the hole. And it's a dangerous fishing because you're out and ship that's just getting battered by waves. So it's fun, man, but it's like a high it's like a high risk angling. So all right, we talked about c q can is writing, which is kind of my I'm like way into sea cucumbers right now. But we gotta touch on that again because the sea cucumbers were talking about the eel skin yet no, and that's another crazy thing. Yeah, so well so so for these eels, it's just they're basically grilled, Like the flesh is grilled, but um, there's a sauce that's brust on with made with all of the like all the grilled bits that the bones, the trim, all that stuff from the eel and it's it's put into the sauce and allowed to basically create a glaze more or less, and it's brushed on the eel flesh and it's grilled. Right. But the skin, you know, like they in Japan they do uh what's called uh food goo the blowfish. So they that's the one that has a toxic part. Right, Yeah, so if you don't cut it the right way, it'll kill you. Um. But but anyway, they take the skin and they make like a cold skin kind of like salad or something or you eat it with the flesh. And so it's basically boiled skin like cleaned and then boiled skin and then chilled and then it's just like uh five minutes. It just depends, uh you know in monkey face deal, it's pretty quick. So you scrape all the slime off, clean it, purge it, rubbing a little salt, rinse it in some water, uh, and get all the meat off and then you can basically just boil it on pot if you want. For us, we we put it intide inside a cry back back and it's basically you know, compressed in the cry back back so it's flat, it never curls up. And then we just steam it when it's in the cry back back until it's tender and you can just push through it. You can just put your fingers through the skin. Then once that's tender, you take it out, throw a nice path and it's it's ready, got ready. You can steam it in the cry it's not in the water. It's in the water because it's in a cry evac Well, we just place the skin directly in the bag. You don't have to and just and just seal it and compress it and steel and then put it in your your like su vie water. Yeah, you can do that, or you can just steam it just holding it over, just put it, throw it inside a steamer. Okay, yeah yeah. And then and then you either put it in the water or you can just steam it right. Um and uh, and then what's extend or just chill it? And how long? Uh? Just a couple of minutes. Every fish is different, but in this particular case, it's like three minutes and then you like slice it so it looks like Julian carrots accepted with the texture of like cold noodles, you know, and then you put a sauce on ad or toss it and something. Yeah, there's like a little vinegar made from the monkey face steal bones and some herbs, and then you start it with the flesh. Yeah, that was a very surprising dish the kid. Yeah, because that's the thing. That's kind of thing that impressed me most about what you're doing is you put more attention into the more love and care into the ship that everybody throws away. It's good stuff, man, that's the sweetmeat. That's that's the good. Like a lot of this stuff is like the you know, the chip lands or the skin or you know, and there's so many alternative textures or you know, other textures or flavors that we don't use. We, in my opinion, we have a very wasteful, you know, kind of culture in the way that we are, at least right now, because in our food practices are so like, oh, let's just take the you know, let's just take the tender loin and throw the rest away, or let's just you know, because we don't know what to do with it. So really a lot of it is just you know, you know, uh, it's gonna reassess some of these things. Yeah, that's the thing I think that needs to happen in in game management is a lot of states are aggressive about uh, salvage requirements, okay, um, about curbing want and waste. And I think that it's not even like it's not even like a lefty righty thing, right where you have like some like politically very conservative states Alaska, Montana that are really strict about salvage requirements. So if you think about that, you're like, like, the goal of you know, a goal of conservatism would be that you're alleviating people from regulation. Right, you're not telling your like the goals and not tell people what to do, not mandate to them how to behave or what to do. But here you have like really conservative states who are also saying, no, dude, you're gonna retain the usable portions of your animals, to the point where my brother hunts a moose unit in Alaska where they mandate do you retain the liver? That's the only case I can think of where a state has come out and said you're not gonna waste that moose's livery and that in that particular unit, but some states are still like really lax about it. I remember being down. I remember going down in South Carolina with a friend of mine down to his local butcher. And when they gutt a deer, part of their dear gutting process is two saws all the way the ribs, and saws all the way the shanks, and that all goes into a dumpster. Because even they're a commercial process that they have the salvage require start in place, and then the commercial process there's not even even attempting to deal with it. Ribs and shanks. My own two eyes, every shank and every rib off those deer was into a dumpster. That's crazy to me. You to think about think about it from just like a like a you know, sustainability perspective, like you got if you're if you're a hunter and you're out there and you're thrown away, half of these things it could be turned into Ian think about it. You could make soup for a week, two weeks, three weeks. You can braise the you know, shanks and make stew for your whole family for you know, another week. Uh you know you there's just there's so much that's uh um. I don't know how it got like this crazy though, So there's so much on this. We live in abundance. Many we live in abundance. Yeah, I'd say in most states, you don't have to keep the neck. No, No, I don't know about most No. I would say, yeah, probably most states you don't need to keep the neck. But it's like it's like, over the course of over the course of my hunting life, I always learned more and more stuff. Like I remember we used to always bone out our shanks and just grind them for burger and I was like, oh, Ship, you can make all kinds of good stuff with shanks. And then I remember the first time I ever tried to mess It was my third year of college. We started trying to mess with cooking deer tongues and we couldn't really figure it out, but eventually got it figured out. I'm like, oh, no, Ship, you can cook tongue. And then on down the line, right and anything. You get to a point where you're like, man, I'm getting new point where I'm really utilizing a lot of stuff. But then last night I eat with you and I'm like, yeah, I haven't even scratched the surface. I'm still like, recently we discovered collars on fish. Okay, so the meat surrounding the meat surrounding the um behind the gill cover like the throat of the fish. Okay. Uh still discovered that. I was like, no, ship, I can't believe how many pounds of this stuff we have. How many pounds of this stuff we're thrown away? You know? Another thing like, uh like on the waste thing, man, is black bears? You really like you did? You really were hunting bears the spring and BC. Yeah, um, I've never like, I'm never eating organs on bears, even though obviously they'd be fine. I can't think of ever eating a bear heart because I feel like, uh, you know, man, I mean, for lack of a better word, I feel like there's like a lot of weird uh almost like a spirit like for lack of a better word, like a spirituality thing, man, or like a bear heart. Like it's just like as I can't look at it as an appetizing thing for some reason. But you were saying there's a tradition in Scotland that you cut an X. Yeah, there's an all. Yeah, the tip of the heart. I feel you on that. I understand what you mean by that and obviously not the first person to think it because of what you told me that when we're talking about heart. No, I mean it took me a while to get to the point to be able to even one a hunt of bear. In fact, some of it came from just actually watching your show too. But yeah, there's an old tradition where you basically make an X in the bottom of the heart and they say it's supposed to release the soul, right, so it's basically allows you to you know, consume this thing freely. Yeah. And then so I never a bare heart. I never a bare tongue for another illogical reason because when I used to send bears and to get them tested for trickin nosis, um, they want the tongue because apparently it's a great there's a lot of larva getting the tongue and that's stuck in my head. Um, you know, sorry to that just brings up a question for me. Is Steve and I both carriers of did you have a sore tongue when you had sore back muscles, eggs. My tongue never got sore. You got a sore tongue. No, So you're saying that it never goes away completely, Well, they only know from animals that they've It's hard for them to really map uh when it goes away because you have to you'd have to have an infected animal. No, I mean, I mean you're you know, as a consumer of at least yeah, you stay infected at least ten years. You can't get sick. You have to take medicine because you can't. You can't unless you ate your own arm. You can't get sick. Again, you're a carrier, and when something scavenges your carcass, they'll get sick. But you can't get sick from your own infected meat. It's out of your digestive track and the larva living calcified cysts in your muscle. So the bear that we got sick from head I think it was eight hundred and sixty eight larva per graham. So if you ate a pound of that bear, you ate a half million larva and they die at hundred sixty five degrees. So what do you what do you like? How do you get rid? Of it. What do you You gotta take pills unless you catch it right away, like if you ate I gather, if if you ate infected meat, like let's say you ate some raw meat you found in your buddy's fridge, and then your buddies like that day or the next day, your bodies like, dude, that was bear meat. You're bucked. If you tend took the d worming pills, you'll head some of it off. But once they get along in their life cycle enough and you start getting like the muscle eggs and it's just a month later. You missed your chance because you don't get sick for a for a month. In a month, you get muscle pain. And what that muscle pain is? I mean you might have some gastro intestinal upset that you would just pass off as any number of things. The muscle ache is so peculiar and intense that then you're like, something ain't right. But by then the pills like do any good. But even then, that's nine in ten cases in the in our country are misdiagnosed for a fever. Yeah, be is you know when you get the flu and you get muscle ages. It took me the only reason I would have never put it together if three of the guys I worked with weren't all complaining about the same thing and we hadn't been together for a month. I wonder, if I have trickin nosis, you might you'll be all right from the past. Yeah, if you got you had a similar bounce, A lot of stuff sounds very familiar. You'd be like, dude, Yeah, you might be like dude, I just like been feeling like shit, I got wicked muscle pains, I got some kind of something. Yeah, I mean I felt like I had run a marathon ten days later. Yeah, I kept thinking I had a weightlifting injury across my entire body. So and then you'll hang out and then like ten, eleven, twelve, fourteen days later, you're just back to normal and you got through it, but you're infected. Now. To say, like how long you're infected for it, you'd have to know. This is let me give it. Let me give an ex ample. When I was at the Mountain House factory mountain House freeze dried food, I was like, Hey, what's the shelf stability of Mountain House freeze dried food? And they're like, well, we don't really know. I mean, we know what we'll say like a defendable position. But a peculiarity of it is that we have some from a long time ago that we've kept in a controlled space and it's still good. But we can only tell like that. We don't know the far end of it. We only know like what the oldest sample we have is. And to really map out like how long you stay infected, you'd have to have animal that you knew got infected and when it got infected, and then watch it for twenty years and then butcher it's meat and see if the sisters are still good. And since no one's really done that, they can't say for certain how long something can stay infected for. It would be interesting. I should donate. I might donate my body to science when I die, because I thought they could just take a chunk a flesh and do a biops. Yeah, but I don't want to go through that, so so yeah I could. I could. I should wait a decade. I should wait a decade from infection, which should be I don't know what year was it. Okay, So in I'm gonna go down to the c d C and I'm going to offer a biopsy of my arm. Then they will be able to test if the cysts are still good. I'm throwing us out there right now to the CDC. They'll be able to test if those cysts are still alive. They'll know that you stay infected for ten years, and I will every ten years commit two testing to find out how long you stay, how long the cists are good for. But they're good. I know, it's like at least ten years. But the only thing that can liberate that, The only thing that can liberate the larva from its calcified cyst is stomach acid. So you're making notes, can you can you? Can you eat bear freely? Now? Can you eat infect an animal and not be sick? You bring that up. I'll let the honest feel that one. Yeah. I don't know what got me back onto the U. S d A website. I think I was researching something else, but I saw a something about tricken elysis and I was like, I'll read up a little bit, and uh, it's said that they that they think they believe, through some research that have been done, that that animals do develop an immunity um after they've been infected. Yeah, but it's not not. And also not all bears have trick an elysis. You don't. It's something that each individual needs to acquire through the consumption of infected meat. So uh, yeah, you could kill a young bear and depending on what he's been up to, he might not have ever encountered infected meat. But there is some evidence that over time, as a bear gets older and older and older, it's the likelihood of it having encountered infected me and probably particularly when they get big enough that they're regularly eating other bears, right, the chances of that bear becoming infected go up. But yeah, not all like, by no means are all bears in fact of the trick an olsis. I've I've had them tested and had them test negative, and I had them tested and had them test positive. You know, in Japan they eat a lot of bear that is undercooked or raw or made out raw but undercooked. They might have a lot of tricking nosis. I was starting to someone from the someone from I can't. I think they were from doctors without Borders, and they were saying, when they're working in areas of like Equatorial Africa where there's a lot of bush meat consumption, Um, they roll in and just as a gent, like when they come in and do vaccinations and stuff in villages, they roll in and just do de worming under the assumption they're saying that are our operating assumption is that everyone's a trickolsis everyone's suffering trick noosis. So bush meat you know, like not not already dead, but but hunted bush animals, right yeah, so yeah yeah. And Africa, it's just like they like what we call wild we call wild game, but you're like like bush meat would be that um people hunting wild game and selling wild game. They just say the bush meat trade, you know where where people are actively out hunting in the jungle, um for sale, it's just turn bush meat. It's like yeah, they're they're version of wild game. Um, so yeah, they're operating under the they operated on the assumption that people are eating carnivorous animals or omnivorous animals and just getting infected and getting reinfected and infected and reinfected. They're going to treat people with d worming pills. When I bought a de worming pill for trick and L since it was my insurance paid half of it, uh, I bought it in. The pharmacist said, I'm not gonna tell you what to do with this information, but I can tell you that that pill is seven bucks when you give it to a dog. But she said, I don't know about the doulstages. I'm just like throwing it out there. And I took it. I didn't get better any quicker than anybody else. Ye didn't took it. He wasn't gonna spend his money on something. So you guys got better at the same time, and you didn't too late, but we were we had already been sick for five weeks. Yeah. One of the biggest reason I didn't take it because when I spoke, we were interviewed. Um, everybody was just about interviewed by like their local UH, state and county health department. We all got calls from the Alaska State epidemiologists because it doesn't happen a lot, and the CDC because it's like mandatory reportable disease they have to do they have to do a case on it. And the Atlastic guy, I was like, look, man, that steroid that you'll take to you know, that that you take as a pill is so strong and severe that in my opinion, you might be doing more uh damage to your body by taking that pill than what is going on. Can't you just like chug a bottle of whiskey purge that out? And and this comes up a lot because it's just fun to talk about, right, And like, no one got hurt in any kind of long term way, So it's just fun and funny to talk about. And I talked about it often and with great relish. But um, the point was I gonna make about it. Well we got we got here by talking. We're talking about tongues because we ate tongues. Oh yeah, So that's always like stuck, you know, when you get like little things stuck in your head. Right, I remember getting real sick off Canadian Hunter whiskey and then not being able to drink uh Canadian Hunter because just like the association. So I got stuck in my head about bear tongue. You got the image of like little maggots. Yeah, and so it turned me off. But you uh, from your bear, you got the spring. You know, you're very generous. You only get one tongue out of a bear, and you shared with me some bare tongue. The base of the tongue. You pointed out what you like the fatty party, and that's like cooking tongue. But you also did something that I've always heard about with um illegal wildlife trafficking in Asia, which is bare paw. Talk about how you handled bear paw, which I am guilty of having never that was in my discard pile skin the pause to save the hide, but never using my paws because they were like, I just didn't think about it. I had no idea. Well, if you really think through like the ananoity of a paul, right, if you got you start at the top, You've got you know, the skin, and then the pad, and then all of that connective tissue and tendons and deliciousness underneath that. Then the meat around the knuckles, the cartilage and all that stuff. So there's a lot of layers of flavor in there, right, and uh for those who like maybe chicken feet or you know, something along those lines. But but basically we we just uh we just blanch off the that outer skin and the hair and then you can raise it just like you would anybraise, like a shank. Right, you can throw it in some fats meromatics. You're just throwing a little broth that does raise it and then we grill it afterwards. So but it's got all those layers, got all those layers of flavor. It's used so much that has you know, a ton of flavor already. It's one of my favorite things. I'm just trying to think of something to equate it too, but I can't think of something to equate it too, because it was Yeah, what's the parallel I mean on the I mean you've got that You've got that collagen on the outside. Right, it's like a like chicken feet almost right. That's what I'm trying to describe, is that collagen that you could, um, it would be hard to cut it with a fork, choose up nice, and it's like the it's like the texture and consistency of raw abalone. I don't know, man, like a little crunch to it. Yeah, it's got a little crunch to it, and you can keep cooking and it'll get really soft like if you wanted to. But we've decided to leave a little twosome ryan to get a little texture in there. I'm telling you what, man, if you took a bear paw like that and laid it out in front of those people, and so I'll give you ten guesses what the hell that is? No one is gonna guess. You know, Actually it's not like the freaking claw on there. Yeah. Yeah. The writer Jim Harrison Um, who was an avid hunter and fisherman, he always said that he can't he saw a skinned out bear and could never eat bear because it was like he was looking at a skinned out human. I mean, it's shockingly similar, right, like it's it's definitely I knew that going into it. This is the first bear I ever got. Yeah, it's better not to have if you have that problem, if that problem would trip you up, don't hang it, skin it up. I've never met a person that's been involved with a bear that didn't say that about it. I don't get it like I thought. I don't get it. It just I don't look at and be like, oh my god, it's a dude. Oh no, it's just a bear like I've never had. I don't like yeah, yeah, yeah, I hear you. Because the back legs, we just don't. Don't hang it by the neck and leave the fingers on. That's what he that's what he saw. I gathered he saw one hanging. It was like not going near that. Um, all right, the last thing I want to talk about, uh, last question. You you have hung in your life. You have hung game meat for a year, right over a year? Talk about that ship. We get a million questions about We get a million questions about what's up with the age and dear me, and let me let me tea this off a little bit but kind of like what the questions come, what my personal experiences with it, and kind of just generly how I feel about it, and then I want you to go. But we get a lot of questions like can you age, dear me? And I'm always like, yeah, man, if you have the proper facility, right, the proper kind of space, you can age, dear me. I found it's just like a dude with a house and a kitchen in it, and that I hunt a lot of like pretty remote areas. It often just doesn't come up for me, right, Like, Um, you're dealing in imperfect situations where the way to ensure that animal is gonna be like ready for many future meals is to get the thing caught up and putting your freezer where it's stable because you gotta have climate control. Environment. Another thing I'll say to people, is what I often do for aging on on like a daily basis, is I'll thaw blocks the meat out a thaw roast out, and before cooking them, I'll let them be on a rack in my fridge for a week, ten days, two weeks sometimes and it dries a little bit on the outside, but I'll clean it up and cook that and I feel that that meat is different than what I thought out, like there's some transformation going on there. It's tender izing. Um. I used to take ducks and just gut them and put them in paper grocery bags and put them in my fridge for ten days, and they were better than ducks that you didn't do that with. But my general feeling about it is it's like you gotta have the right space. I've never had the right space. Now you run with it because you've rigged up spaces to do this, Like, how in the world are you able to do that? And I also like we like to hear um, like if you think there is something that they got home without the special space rigged up, you know, well, I mean just to I think about Priscuto, right, okay, all right, it's you know those old methods of proscuto or you know, you rub the socket um and then you rubbed the ball joined the ball yeah yeah, sorry, the ball joined around the you know, like the femur. I guess it is um. And then you throw it on the counter by your fireplace and you just let us sit there for a couple of days and you massage it every day, right if you're not like you're bearing the thing in salt at all. Right, and these things get left out at room temperature. So so it's not really that, it's just it's just a different view point for us, especially in America. Right, But you've got to have I guess you know, at home, you've got to have just the right air circulation. You gotta have the right humidity level, but more importantly just air circulation. So all you're doing is kind of mitigating the um, you know, service moisture and and the air circulation. So if you dry it off and you you put it near a fan, like physically dry it off with towels, yes, so before it goes in there, you know, it's got to be in a good state. Like if you dropped your leg in the dirt or something like that and you know you you had to rinse it off a lot, and and um, you know it's contaminated. I wouldn't recommend it right so, um, but you know, if you have a good you have a good simple you know, dear leg thrown fridge, fridge, skin it out, dry it off, hanging in the fridge. You gotta have circulation all the way around. Um And and the reality is is that the microbes in the air do the rest of the work. For as long as you manage the process from the original surface moisture and continue to dry it off every day and have a lot of air circulation around, it's really super easy to do. There's zero things wrong with with a deer that's been in the fridge for two weeks. Um, you need it, you know, rare, and it's perfectly fine as long as you don't mess it up in between, right, And you don't like is it for for safety's sake? If you're going to try age in something your fridge, you're saying you don't necessarily like not necessarily you don't need to rub that thing down with salt or you hear people about rubbing it down with black pepper, which has some anti microbial quality. You don't have to know, you don't have to, but but you know there's a lot of like ifs, right, like like if if inside you know there's some sort of bullet damage or shrapping or something from that bullet spread apart and maybe hit like a little membrane and then you know how and some animals you'll have like um, all that moisture in the fascia in between like muscle layers. So that's also an issue because that stuff starts to seep out as you age. Got you so as longways just a good condition, then you're you're good. So talk about what it looks like after you've had it. If you've pun something for a year, it has a lot of mold on it, that's like salami. It's got that white pisia on the outside. Um, So that how do you know a safe mold from a shitty mold? Usually shitty mold is that safe mold is that really fine textured, smooth, salami looking mold that's white, uh and and kind of silky. A bad mold is green, black, big hairs, big spores of hair that are growing off the moisture of the wet areas. I definitely don't want to eat that. I don't I don't know what it is, but you definitely don't want to eat that. And what do you when you age? Let's just let's just focus on venison for a minute, or antler, antler and horned game? What are you after by a like? What is what are you trying to achieve by aging it? Well, the whole the whole point of it is that you basically you know, everything has a sweet spot, like we're talking about earlier, you know, and so like the fish being dead for two minutes or two minutes or being dead for one year exactly, it's and so there's there's Lego was saying, there's there's typically two sweet spots. There's right when you get it, and there's further on down the road. So you got to decide for every product which you know further down the road, which which point is best for each product? So, um, you know, as the animal sits in ages, basically the enzymes start to break down this animal, right, um, and they you know, the flavor becomes deeper, right, not game either or what we typically think of as as you know, kind of a nasty flavor, but it just deepens, it also becomes more tender, and so you know, at that point you can you can cut off you know, if you let something age for really like that olt dad leg right, I can cut off a stake of that out dead leg grill it serve it rare and you can bite right through it. We had one time, just perfect conditions where we had a calf elk. The the was hanging in a garage and at night to be down in the upper twenties, you know, in the day time and be up into the forties. But we ate the whole thing without ever freezing any of it. And I remember towards the end you could put you could put a finger into it. You could jab your finger into it. Once you're really delicious, once you cut the rihind away. And my old man used to tell stories of hanging deer until they had an inch of mold on them and cutting the mold away and then cutting that rind away and having just like perfect dear meat under there. But if a dude's doing it, okay, explain this, then what are you not wanting to not happen? Like? What are the things when you look and be like, oh, I need to figure something out because this is going south. It's it's all about moisture control. Moisture control, air circulation is long. It just look if you look at it and it's a it's like a soppy mess. I wouldn't need it. I wouldn't recommend it. What about what about older There should never be a foul order. No, there's never a foul order, right, so you should you should never have any kind of like nothing. You should be uh, you know, after the first few days, it's gonna dry and it's gonna drip Any blood will drain off, any moisture will basically drip off, and you're in you're diligent about and you just wipe it down every day. You keep a fan on it. Basically the easiest way to do it is just to keep a fan directly on the meat or you know, if you have a fridge, just put a little fan inside there, which isn't always the easiest thing to do, but you just cut a little hole and sticking aside um. But uh, that's it. That's really it. As as long as it doesn't smell bad and it doesn't look like it's completely coated and moisture, there's no like excess moisture inside the joints around the bones. You're fine. And another thing you talked about was you were dealing with lamb for your restaurant and you add taking kidney fat and kind of covered the that that ball joint area and with kidney fat so that it dried on there and form like a barrier. What are you doing when you do that? Well, So in that instance, we're basically preventing too much dry rying out too much meat loss. Right, So you know, the the the the outside of the meat ages really well, but where the meats cut ages not as well. So because you've introduced because in the butchering process, you've probably introduced some bacteria onto that. You probably introduced some bacteria onto that cut. Mostly I don't, I have no idea, but most of I mean, like definitely feels different. Like when you skin an animal, it's got that the fell or the fascion on the outside, and where you've cut, it's just different. Yeah, yeah, and I'm not sure of of why, but but um at least scientifically, but but you know, it just doesn't age the same, right, So you gotta you gotta protect it in some way or the other. And easiest thing to do is just to rub a little salt, you know, on there. You rub a little bit of salt and then let it hang. Then you're you're almost guaranteed that you're gonna be good as long as you drive down. So if a guy was gonna rig up let's say, let's say you were like, you're like the fridgerator. I don't have room in my fridge, um whatever, right, you know, you know you don't have room to hang up a whole damn deer's leg in your fridge. If you're going to rig up a space or a room to to do some long term aging, lay out kind of the parameters of what you're after. Well, I would get a fridge and throw it in, or you can you know you can do you can go to I mean let's just say that, um, you know, resources aren't an issue. Then you know you go get a commercial uh like a like like one of these things he's reach in. It's like a like a Stanley steel reach in refrigerator's got a lot of room around or just like I got a little room in the inside so you can get good air circulation around that meat. Then um, you know I would put a fan in there. Those typically already have a fan, you know, but I'm fine doing that. Yeah, you don't need to get it. You don't need to get into like d I Y, like crazy ship that's gonna cost five bucks, like perfect World. Yeah, so yeah, you get you got a refrigerator box with a really high air circulation, and you throw a hook in there, and you put your meat inside and just and at a point you get to where you're not doing any maintenance on it. Right, so after you know that typically like after the first week or so, depending on the size, Like if you've got a whole elk leg in their real elk lay um, then that's gonna take a little longer to try out. Right, you gotta watch it carefully from long. You gotta tend to it. You gotta make sure nothing you know, it's not touching the side of the refrigerator so the moisture doesn't accumulate, or not touching other meat or or uh you know, it's got free air circulation all the way around. But that's really the only thing you need to worry about. And then the temperature you don't want to get you want to keep around probably perfect not much warmer than forty five degrees or so or yeah, I mean I would keep it at thirty six, keep it at thirty six, and then you're you're, you're, you know, all those things just helped to kind of mitigate any issues that you'll have and you wind up with a delicious, you know, age piece of meat. You know. The other thing that it does too, is it also it also uh you know, like I think a lot of people talk about gaminess, but really that's the beauty has no definition. Yeah it but that's the you know, it doesn't it's all subjective, but that's the beauty of wild meat to me. Is that gaminess, right, or rather the taste of wild meat. But you know, aging it for a long period of time actually decreases that aroma of gaminess that it makes it more savoring. Right, It's like a it's like a palatable savor nous that you get once it's once it's aged all the way. And when you're doing that, the end would be the end would be that the dryness on the outside marches in from each side and you'd eventually wind up like in this perfect situation, this perfect aging situation, like when you went too far would be that the part that you needed to trim away to get to the good stuff. Uh, that part grew and aid away what you were trying to say, what you were trying to hang onto in the middle. Do you just have like a piece it was like a solid rind. Yeah, I mean you got you you'll you'll trim off roughly maybe half an inch all the way around, basically skin rind around that. But that mark, but that slowly goes inward, right, I mean over time or does that? Does that? Does that? It does over time the head of time and then you know so that that's uh that barbary sheep, that al dad that have up there. You know you can you know, you have an inch that's wasted around you know, Ryan all the way around it's wasted, but on the inside it's still you know, it's over a year, so it's dried all the way. But you can cut off a slab of that like for shutto and eat it like that. No, ship man, man, that's like I gotta start getting more into that ship. Like I've done some I've done some of that stuff. Only like what because conditions were right? Yeah, well I'll say I'll send you you know what you do is we can. I can send you a spect later on, like the perfect the perfect environmental conditions for all that. Yeah, we'll put that in our shower notes. Man. Yeah, all right, do you got Yanna Yanni like a final thing you want to ask about? Oh? I do, man, But I think we're at a time really well, yeah, we're close. Yeah, my colu, you are throwing away if you hunting fish and handle your own stuff, you're throwing away a lot of good stuff. You don't it's not even that you're a dick, just you just don't know. You could be a dick too. But it's like you don't really good stuff because you just don't know how good it is. Yeah, someone's got to show you. You gotta talk to people who know more than you know. There's there's there's not enough information about it. Really. I think that, you know, we gotta look at our practices and reassess. But you know, you need you know, it's not like it's not that easy to use, you know, eel skin if you've never seen it done before, right, So we've got to have the information. It wouldn't Yeah, yeah, you don't know that you're you don't know that you're not being smart until someone demonstrates it to you. All Right, you got any final things you want to add that That was the one dude. It's like we should do this like every little once in a while and just keep talking about it because yeah, I got it. Well it's never ending, really, right, it's never ending if you really start to look at every animal. Right, there's so many and everyone's a little different. And we haven't even gotten into how to slower grilled pineapple with clarified butter. Well, that's our butter. It's not even clarified butter. It's butter and rum our, butter and rum, butter and rum. Yeah, alright, next time. Next time it's all about pineapples. Alright, Uh, thanks again. I really appreciate it. Yeah, I appreciate you guys coming all right, man, don't forget the Meat Eator Live event, Ellen Theater, Bosa, Montana, August six pm. Still got a couple of tickets. Get him now,