Using it All

The quiet thrill of wasting nothing

A rich game bird stock, simmering slowly.

The smell of steaming pheasant broth made from bones and scraps fills my house, crowding out the sweet scent of fat rendered from a pair of mallards I’d shot in North Dakota. As I busily vacuum-sealed the wings, tenders, drumsticks, and thighs of the pheasants and ducks, I glanced over at my dehydrator, where a pound or two of dried green beans lay. They had been overripe beans, the kind most throw away, dried in the pod. I’ll simmer them — probably in that pheasant broth — until they become velvety soft some icy evening.

This is my life. This is me at my most Hank: Turning what most overlook or throw away into something wondrous.

I am, as I’ll tell anyone who asks, a Thrifty Scotsman — if only by ancestry. I come by it honestly. My Yankee mother drilled into me the New England maxim: Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without. I didn’t know it at the time, but that phrase has guided my whole life.

I’ve written about saving seeds and composting and opting for used books over new (although you can make an exception with my books😉). Nowhere does my thrifty instinct feel more natural, or more joyful, than with food. That’s where thrift turns into comfort, into order, into something that feels like home.

When my garden beds are empty, I’ll fish not just for dinner but for the carcasses that fertilize next season’s vegetables. And when the beds are full, those carcasses become stock. I’ve used the skins of fish to make crispy fish chips, which are fantastic, have eaten plenty of fish livers, which, oddly, tend to be fattier and less, well, livery, than the livers of birds or mammals.

Anyone who has tried it knows that the best fish soup is made from the carcasses. The meat around the head, the pectoral fins, belly and what’s left on the skeleton is vastly superior for soup than the fillet. The closer to the bone, the sweeter the meat.

It applies to birds and mammals, too. Anyone who has made the Mexican stew pozole the traditional way, with a pig’s head, knows this. Sure, it’s fine with “normal” meat, but it’s really only transcendent with the picked and chopped meat off the head.

This is my third autumn in Minnesota, and only now do I feel fully me. It takes time to set up systems. Curing space, freezer space, a place for pickles and dried herbs. It all grows slowly, like trust. And this was my first real season with a garden of my own — the first full conversation I’ve had with the land since 2022.

I tinker and putter. My ex, Holly, used to call them “Hanksperiments,” but really they’re how I build a life: small, thrifty acts that add up to winter comfort. I daydream about a lot of things, but mostly about things to eat. Because at my core, that’s what I do: I make good food, mostly from scraps and bits.

Let me walk you through my weekend. After I returned from North Dakota, laden with birds, I set to plucking them all. Yes, all of them, even though I knew a few of the pheasants were a bit shot up. Why? Because if you start from a plucked bird, all things are possible.

If you are lucky enough to have pristine birds, you can decide if you want to smoke them, roast them whole, or, if you’d like, break them down for a variety of meals. This works with most birds, from pheasants and grouse to turkeys, and especially waterfowl. I like to call it “eating everything but the quack.”

Liquid gold, rendered duck fat, and the fond left over from roasting bones. Use it to make a superior stock.

So yeah, it took me several hours to clean six pheasants and a pair of mallards. Pheasants are tricky, but I have a tutorial here that will help you. If I ever get into a groove where I am killing more than a few pheasants, I may invest in a plucking machine, which apparently works really well.

In the case of the busted wings, I salvaged clean flats or drumettes on several of the birds (the shot up bits went into the stockpot), so I can make pheasant Buffalo wings. Yep, you can do that: You just need to poach the wings until they are mostly tender, then fry them. Pheasants work for a living, unlike chickens.

The giblets — hearts, livers, and gizzards — I am planning to do a riff off Cajun dirty rice, only with barley, or rye or wheat berries. I’ll switch up the seasonings, too, to make this more of a Midwestern dish. Or maybe I’ll use wild rice?

Tenders are, well, tenders. They’re the “boneless wings” you see in restaurants, which annoys me to no end. No, they’re not boneless wings, they’re tenders. We have a word for that, ladies and gentlemen. Sigh.

Many fine meals on this tray…

You may notice in this picture that the pheasant breasts are skinless. So why did you spend all that time plucking, Hank? I was hoping you’d ask. First, the shape of a pheasant’s breastbone is all wrong for skin-on breasts; grouse, strangely, don’t have this issue. So I strip the breast (and back) skin off for what I call the ultimate pheasant taco. If you’ve never made them, grab your gun, get outside right this minute, and whack yourself a disco chicken! Too Jersey for you? Not sorry.

The real reason I pluck pheasants is for those thighs. I love pheasant thighs more than any other part of any other game bird. Anytime you put me between a pair of thighs, I’m a happy man. (Yes, I did that on purpose.)

Seriously, though. Pheasant thighs are fantabulous. Crispy skin, meltingly tender dark meat, and they’re large enough to be worth it.

And I haven’t even shot a deer yet this year. If you’ve read my book Buck Buck Moose, you know I love both the front of the animal (shoulders and neck) and the wobbly bits way more than I love backstrap or the hind legs. Backstrap bores me. There, I said it.

If I seem a little swoony it’s because I am. I am finally doing all the things that make me happy: a home that smells of broth, a pantry full of promise, a freezer full of birds, and a long winter coming that I’m ready to meet. Waste nothing. Respect everything.

Every jar, every bag, every packet of homemade sausage or smoked fish reminds me how good a quiet, thrifty life can be. It makes me excited to cook again. At last.