The adventures of a red-necked cook

I did not grow up learning to cook from my Momma. No, the mention of cooking sent me fleeing outside to help my Daddy tune up the tractor, pull the sucker rod out of the windmill, or just about anything else. Despite my Momma’s best efforts, I left home with a 3 ring binder of recipes she prepared, some pots and pans too worn out for her to use, and no idea at all what I had to do to feed myself.

This was in the dark ages before microwaves became very common. Frozen dinners were still referred to as “TV dinners” and tasted like boiled cardboard. To make matters worse, there were not grocery stores on every corner or mail order ingredients on the internet. You made do with what local stores you had and ate what they carried or made things from scratch. I tended to make do.

Every once in a while, though, I had a burst of creativity. I lived with several dogs and started hanging out with the people who trained hunting dogs. Eventually, I came into the possession of two quail that had met a bad end. Quail are small, and one is about a meal for an adult. Knowing that such birds were considered delicacies, I purchased some marinade. I actually had the sense to read the ingredients I had to provide and realized it called for wine. I do not, and did not, drink, so had to purchase a bottle of wine just for the occasion. I got one that had a screw top cap for easy opening since I had no corkscrew, either.

General pointing quail

The marinade I purchased was actually for chicken, there not being much call for quail marinade in those days. I got all the ingredients out and started to make the mix. It was the kind you cooked the poultry in so it did not have to be made ahead of time. That would be why I found myself unscrewing the wine bottle in the middle of mixing the marinade and finding out there was a cork under that cap. Now what?

I very carefully put the partly thawed quail up on top of the refrigerator. I then went to the bedroom closet and started tossing it for anything resembling a corkscrew. I was in a hurry, too, because I knew that one of the dogs would figure out how to scale that fridge given much time. I found a Swiss Army knife I didn’t carry because it had so much stuff on it the belt couldn’t hold my pants up with it in my pocket.

Hurrying back to the kitchen, I verified the quail were still present and accounted for. I worked for quite a bit to get the cork out, finally settling for drilling a hole through it that wine could come out of. After mixing the marinade, I discovered one casualty of my absence from the kitchen. The directions for the marinade had been consumed by one of the pointers who had snagged it when counter surfing. I was forced to call my parents for the temperature at which to set the oven and the amount of time it took to cook a “baby chicken.” They didn’t hold with hunting so I didn’t mention quail. If I had known more, I would have declared a Cornish hen, but if I had more sense, I wouldn’t have had the problem in the first place.

The quail was good. I found out later that my Daddy knew exactly what I was cooking and found the whole situation humorous. It is amazing how much smarter my parents have gotten as I have gotten older.