Published: January 16, 2009 09:55 pm      

Mmm mmm! Enjoy

This is the time of the year that wild game dinners start popping up all around the circulation area of the Cumberland Times-News.

It’s a great tradition.

A church here, a volunteer fire department there. These organizations and a lot of others take advantage of the fact that many of their members and friends hunt and fish and know how to prepare for dinner what they shoot and catch.

Usually there are a bunch of good cooks among the ladies in these groups and they provide enough desserts to supply your annual amount of sweet calories.

I’ve attended a number of these events during the three decades I’ve been writing this column. It was at dinners such as these that I first ate barbecued raccoon or groundhog meatballs.

Most of these groups put on the wild game dinners for the fun of it, for the fellowship and for a venue at which they can tell a few hunter or fishermen fibs. “You should have seen the one that got away.”

At the most, there may be a small fee to cover dish detergent and the like.

At some coot and carp dinners, guest speakers are brought in and offer some pretty good insights into hunting fishing as everybody sits around and burps.

Occasionally, somebody will bring an exotic wild game dish such as barbecued ribs from an African antelope or the wild version of Rocky Mountain oysters. Catfish fritters might even show up on the table.

It’s best just to chew and swallow at these gatherings rather than ask a lot of questions.

Speaking of hunting and eating, it used to be that come the firearms season for deer I would be deluged with calls from this organization or that which was putting on a hunters’ breakfast and wanted some publicity on the Outdoors page.

I can’t remember the last time I announced a hunters’ breakfast. It may have been the one the Boy Scouts put on at Camp Potomac a few years back.

There used to be plenty of them. I remember that there was always such an early morning repast at Rocky Gap State Park.

These early a.m. frycooks would offer hotcakes, eggs, sausage, coffee and other typical breakfast fare at dark-thirty o’clock so that hunters headed for the woods could stop by, chow down and be leaning against their favorite oak tree when the sun came up.

Jimmy “Rabbit” VanMeter, my late co-worker and occasional hunting companion ,called the morning meal a “breaffus.”

There may be such hunter breaffuses still out there, but I don’t hear about them.

Contact Outdoor Editor Mike Sawyers at Contact Michael A. Sawyers at msawyers@times-news.com. .