Adventures in Eating Locally
Comments (0) Since my husband and I have become more conscious of our food, we have come to certain conclusions about the decision to eat out. After really examining how animals are treated, we have agreed to only eat seafood or vegetable dishes when we go out to eat, which is a rarity indeed.
However, we found out that a local restaurant offers muskrat on Thursdays. For $16 each plate, we recieved two muskrats, a side of fried potatoes, and a side of stewed tomatoes, per plate. Was it frugal? Not necessarily. To mitigate the expense, I fried the leftover potatoes for DH for breakfast the next morning. Then, the following night, we had the muskrat and stewed tomatoes in a gravy with peas, served over biscuits made of fresh ground flour. The night after, we had the gravy served over noodles. Still not as cheap as one of my meals from scratch, that meal was probably stretched much further than anyone would have anticipated.
The meat itself was fantastic, better than squirrel I would venture to say. It was cooked superbly, which is important because, as one of my students said, muskrat can be the best thing you ever ate or the worst thing you ever tasted, depending on who cooked it. There was the added satisfaction of knowing that the muskrat was free and naturally fed until it was killed, that it was trapped in local marsh, that the trapper was a local owner of the gun shop that we frequent, that the restaurant was locally owned, and the waitress was a local lady, working to feed her children. All in all, it was gratifying, both ethically and epicurally.
Themocracy