Grouse Camp: Roses, Thorns and Buds
The good, the bad, and the interesting from a month as a camp chef
I am home from grouse camp, at last. Home in St. Paul, Minnesota, which is going to be odd to say for a while, although I am already getting used to it. Snow fell last night, but I am typing this in my home office with the sun streaming in.
A fitting setting to take stock of this experience, which was not without its ups and downs. There’s a game called “rose, thorn, and bud” where you tell someone, usually someone close to you, about the highs and lows of your day, and about the new ideas that you want to pursue from the day’s experience. I like this game, as it forces you to verbalize something you’re grateful for.
It’s all too easy to harp and, well, grouse, about the downers in our lives. The negative is a powerful, crystalline substance that lodges in our minds with specificity and clarity. The positive tends to be warm and gauzy, an indistinct feeling rather than a pinprick. So doing the mental exercise to manifest the positive helps, at least for me.
The number one positive from my month as a chef at the Pineridge Grouse Camp was working alongside my friend Rachel Rinas. We cooked three meals a day, seven days a week, for a month. We ran that kitchen tight, too, and most of that was Rachel’s doing.
(Side note: No, we are not an “item,” although we’ve become very close. I bring this up because we got asked it on an almost daily basis.)
Rachel has largely done nothing but work in kitchens throughout her adult life. Her knowledge about the minutiae of kitchen life was an endless source of fascination for me, and not a little frustration. Frustration because she instinctively knows how much of anything to get out, prepare or serve for however many people we had to feed, and how to adjust that on the fly, far, far better than I can.
I constantly had to make more sauce, or add another hunk of meat, or more vegetables, to whatever I was cooking to make sure it was enough for hearty hunters, but Rachel just… knew. Being next to that for a month, I’d like to think I absorbed at least a bit of this skill.
Her style of cooking is more instinctual, too. I know dishes, and can tell you how X or Y dish is likely going to be served in whatever cuisine it’s from. Rachel doesn’t and doesn’t care, but her food is great nonetheless. I absorbed some of that spontaneity, too. I emerged from this month a better chef — and I am using that world specifically because in terms of being a cook, creating new dishes and flavors, I don’t think I did progress much. (I wrote about how we need time and space for ceativity here.)
But I gathered knowledge, and that’s the bud in this game.
There’s something you can’t grok about a thing until you see or do that thing a zillion times. I probably cooked 100-plus grouse and woodcock this past month. Every day we’d do something with the birds the hunters brought in. I’ve now seen so many ruffed grouse and woodcock I feel like my already good understanding of these birds just got exponentially better.
I’ll let that bud become a rose in detail over on Hunter Angler Gardener Cook, because, well, that’s where my straight-up food content lives. Suffice to say there’s a lot I learned about cooking with these birds.
Interacting with Jerry and Brenda, the owners of the camp, as well as the rest of the staff, was another rose. Not one person I worked with was a negative, and that’s vanishingly rare. Jerry’s only foible is his difficulty telling us exactly how many people we needed to serve each meal, which can be frustrating — but Rachel and I soon circumvented it by being a) able to expand whatever we were cooking by four or five people, and b) knowing what we would do with leftovers, should we have them. So, all in all, minor thorn.
A nastier thorn was just how grueling it all was. I knew, intellectually, how tiring days that started at 5 a.m. and ending at 9 p.m. would be, but that plus no days off for a month really took a toll on me. (Read all about that here.) It does for everyone on staff, of course, but I found myself withdrawing, getting grouchy. And I don’t like myself when I am like that.
Related, a nice rose was settling into a habit of washing the day away each night. That nightly showering, shaving, skin care and brushing my teeth really let me calm down and prepare to do it all over again. It’s a habit I’ve kept up now that I’m home.
Getting a reminder about how clients tip was both rose and thorn. I, and the rest of the staff, largely work for tips, and tipping was all over the place, as you might imagine. It ranged from people who really knew our situation — a couple from South Dakota who once managed a big hunting ranch themselves — to a rich Georgian who talked some crazy incel stuff tipping us $10.
I think the most lingering and pernicious thorn, however, was the realization that there is a significant minority of hunters who are uninterested in eating their birds, especially woodcock. I was genuinely shocked, then irked at myself for being shocked, that some clients simply wouldn’t eat woodcock, and grudgingly ate grouse.
I want to be clear that it was a minority of clients. Most really enjoyed the food and a few were very interested in how to better prepare and cook their birds. But I heard some variation of “Aw, I don’t eat ‘em, just like to watch the dogs work” more than 20 times during my stay. At least we served their birds to people who wanted them.
Will I do this again? No. I’ll be brutally honest: It was too hard on me, mostly physically, but mentally and even emotionally, too. Several times I found myself being short with readers/fans, and that haunts me. Even if it was just exhaustion speaking, they didn’t know that, and I hate that that happened. I don’t want to be in that situation again.
I’ll be back at Pineridge though, in other capacities. Maybe a culinary hunt there in September, maybe a few special dinners during the heart of the season. There was much to like about the place, the people and even the job.
But I am happy to be home. At last.
I have never understood the act of not eating what you kill. Its likely because I was relatively poor as a kid and my family hunted for food. If it died, we ate it. We raised a lot of our own poultry and red meat was deer that one of us had shot.
Fast forward to my mid 30s and meeting my now partner- an avid hunter. He proclaimed that he "didn't like game" and that he only ate what he killed because he felt he had to. He still, more than a decade later, says "I don't like game" and will get major side eye from me everytime. And then he amends it to whomever he is talking to add that I do great things with game meat. He takes multiple bags of jerky with him to hunting camp now and passes it around "she made this out of bird breasts from last season!". Sacrilege for many but I know that hell will freeze before he eats a medium rare duck breast and jerky is well loved.
Hank - Aaways a pleasure to wake up to this and enjoy how you string a story together. Would love to hear (again), in a way that will finally stick, how to remove the “gizzard thorn” of cleaning them and storing them for future use. No one in my bird group keeps them, so I get them all. I’ve read about it in PQC and watched more than a few YouTube videos, but I somehow still struggle with this…. Congrats on the house, too. Always good to be home…