Welcome the More Outdoors on News Talk five sixty k LVI. This is Chester Moore and Man, the fall is here. The white tail in southeast Texas are starting to get a little bit of a running action going on. We got a little waterfowl migrating in and a lot of great stuff happening. Fall is the ultimate time, especially in our great state of Texas, to be in the great outdoors. Now, if you've listened to my program more than a few months,
you've probably heard my good friend Jeff Stewart. He is an author, a cookbook author, he does TV spots, he does all kind of crazy stuff, and he is a outdoors expert, and we have him on the show tonight.
Welcome the More Outdoors, Jeff.
Chester. It's always my honor and pleasure to be on. Man, it's just great to enjoy the outdoors with good people and good friends and to talk about it.
Well, you know, you and I were just talking on the phone as friends last night, and you said, hey, Man, you know I was hungry tonight, so I opened the freezer and got some red fish fullet and I said, well, we just date deer chili a little bit. Some of the last packet is a deer from what I killed last year. And you know, I think that that is
an underrated part of the experience. I mean, I think true outdoors lovers savor the wild game and the fish and everything that we that we harvest in the great outdoors. But I think to the public, they don't understand how important that eating element is of what we do.
They don't because mine stems from growing up very poor in a very rural area, and times were hard back in the early seventies, you know, I mean it was rough man and I remember, you know, we often had very meager meals until Dad and I killed a deer or caught a bunch of cat fish.
Yep.
And at that point in time, we got to eat our fill. You know, my sisters and I'm mom would make a big thing of a chicken fried backstraped with gravy and potatoes and the whole spread, and you got to eat as much as you wanted, or we fried up that catfish or those craffee or brim our buffalo or anything that we taught, and you just basically got
to eat your fill. And all of a sudden, it's like, wait a minute, we can hunt more, we can fish more, we can fill this freezer full, plant our garden, do those things, and things started to get better as far as our family went. Because at first my dad wasn't a great big hunter. He hunted early in life and stuff like that. But you know, East Texas seven in the seventies, there weren't a lot of deer.
No, not at all.
As the seventies progressed, of seventy eight seventy nine, eighty deer already coming back pretty sick. Texta, parks and wildlife were doing some great things. Deer started coming back, and all of a sudden you could start putting more deer on the table. So it really became an integral part of my life that hunting meant phosphorous times. Hunting meant good times with the family. It meant being around the
table laughing and eating and telling stories. It meant being down at our deer camp with friends and family, laughing and eating and telling stories. So it became a such an integral part that this game hunting was so much fun because not only did you get to go enjoy all of the aspects of hunting, from mowing and bush hogging and planting green patches and doing those things, setting up stands, which was fun time with my dad, to
the cooking with my mom. I learned to cook with her, and it was just it just meant family fun time. And then then with my own children and my own family, it has always meant family time, quality time. It's meant time in the outdoors. It has meant good goss.
For yeah, you know, and for me it's very similar. We're very close in age and everything. You lived in sort of central East Texas and I live in the southeast corner. And that oil industry bust in the late seventies early eighties was early impactful, and I remember us going to fish on the side of the road, throwing a cast that to catch bait, and whatever we caught
was what we were probably gonna eat that week. And we were hoping that bt big old alligator garfish, because a big old alligator gar you can get five or six good meals off that sucker, or a bunch of drum or some catfish and.
The freshwater bayou systems around here.
But it wasn't like I was upset because we had to settle on a fi or wild game. I loved eating it and always do. And the first time I got to kill a deer was in nineteen eighty six, right after Christmas, like December twenty seventh that year, because we went on the dailies out of the Texas hill country and the deer was so low in southeast Texas
at that point. I had never seen a white tail until we turned off a highway seventy ten to seventy one US like forty in a oat field by Columbus and thought I'd entered the promised land and kill the dough And I got to get eat deer chili out of my dough I shot, and of course the bax trap chicken fried, and that was just a real celebration moment,
you know. And I think that the public, if the hunting and fishing community, could better communicate that some of the most important part of a hunt is what you do with the meat or the catch. If you don't catch your release, what you do with that is the most important part, and honestly, in a private level at home is the most celebrated.
Part, right And you know, here's a good thing that people don't think about catching release. Catching relief is a good thing for certain species, but not all species fish absolutely. Now, I do regulated catching relief.
I if I catch catfish, I keep catfish that are generally between that eight to ten inch mark and the five pounds mark.
Once they get over about five pounds or so, I let them go. They're not as good eating fish, even though they're still delicious, they're not as good as the smaller one. And they put those are your egg producers, man, those are the ones that have a million eggs in their belly, you know. I see people holding up these fifty sixty pound blue cat one hundred pound blue cats even, and they're they're, oh, we taught this blue cat. I'm like, what are you gonna do with it? Oh, we're gonna
eat it. And I'm like, why.
Exactly?
Because that you should have turned that, you know, catch those smaller fish and eat them. But I turned those bigger ones back. Yeah.
And with redfish, you know, like, yeah, I haven't kept and over the slot red fish in twenty years.
Until about two weeks ago.
I was out trying to catch big gar and I have because a gar will mess with your line for like twenty minutes sometimes before he decided to take it. I thought it was a guar just pecking on end up being a redfish that had swallowed it, and it had bled out pretty much by the time I got it in and was just kind of still. So I went ahead and tagged in oversized red legally, but I always just keep the slot reds, never use my trophy tag.
And same thing with catfish. I don't do as much catfish as I used to, but those like you know, three to six pound catfish or primo man and let those big ones bring it.
That's my big thing. My biggest blue cat that I caught was around the seventy four pound seventy five pound mark. And my largest largest uh what we call them op, which is a flathead, but we call them ops. The largest ops that I caught weighed up close to eighty
five eighty six pounds somewhere in that area. And I was a young man whenever I caughtee fish, you know, I'm talking back in the mid eighties when I caught them, and I kept them, and we cleaned them and trimmed all your double file at them, trimmed all the fat we put off of them, and then tried to eat them. And they weren't very tasty. They're not not as compared to what I was used to eating, and those those
you know, foundries and stuff. And from that point on, my dad and I said, you know, even though the ops are better eating as a bigger fish.
There, but they're definitely better eating as a bigger fish in a blue.
So we decided we're going to turn those back. You know, we're for fixing to turn those a loop back into the river, but we're going Now. Texas has changed its regulation and we're those size limits on those fish, and you can keep the smaller fish, more of the smaller fish and less of the bigger fish. And I really
support that change. I'm not big on being too strict on sportsmen with their stuff, but I think that was a good move because I think those bigger catfish need to breathe, they need to be our brood stock, and that's gonna work out better for all of us. Yeah.
I agree with that totally, Jeff. And it's a great conservation move. And allowing the smaller side allows that family fishing from the bank on some pier or in some gully somewhere to have a chance to bring some fish home and enjoy the harvest and things like that. And we come back on More out There're gonna talk more about celebrating the harvest with Jeff Stewart. Welcome back to More Outdoors on News Talk five sixty KLV, where we think you're weird if you don't like the outdoors, and
I really mean that. I mean you don't have to like dig, fishing and hunting. But if you don't like watching a beautiful sunrise over the mountains, or you know, going to a beach and seeing the beauty of the Gulf of Mexico, you might want to get checked out. Something very well could be wrong. And if you want to celebrate the outdoors more, you can also check out More Outdoors podcast KALVI dot com. Go the podcasting the top of the page, go back and listen to the archives.
Also check it out via the iHeartRadio app and follow my blog at Higher Calling dot net, my instagram at the Chester More and Higher Calling Wildlife on Facebook. Jeff and I are talking about celebrating the harvest, kind of rounded up, talking about catfish regulations, catch and release for the bigger breeder size fish and things like that. And you mentioned the interesting fish a lot of people don't know is very edible, and that's the buffalo. Tell us about your experience eating buffalo.
Buffalo happens to be one of my favorite fish to eat in the entire fresh or salt water. And people say, man, you're crazy with coffee and brim and everything else floating around. I'm like, look, I grew up on try eating trash fish because you could go down while I lived right across the border from Louisiana, and the netting was legal in the Louisiana and all you had to do was buy your Louisiana license and we could set out hook
net in the river. Will you know buffalo? We would catch buffalo and bring them in and we would cut those ribs out of those buffalo and that's what you eat on a buffalo.
Ribs, ribs, Yeah, and eating it would.
We oh my gosh. Then we would fry those buffalo ribs up and eat them. And it became quickly one of my favorite fish. And people don't notice. But at one time I had the number three black buffalo in the state of text Cool. I shot at bowfish and weigh sixty eight Paul.
That's people, get monster. I've been on a raven bass fishing before. And seen buffalo moving in the shallows and I was like, is that a carp Nope, that's a monster buffalo. And my memory is a buffalo. Where as a kid, there was a fish market here in Orange and you know, I love you know, my version of that is the garfish. I mean, we grew up garfish because garfish is freeing excellent and not just as a garball. Just fried garfish is great, and grill garfish is great.
But if you like redfish yep, or an our good saltwater fish like black drum red fish, something like that, the garfish of our fresh water fish has the closest texture and taste of meat to a good quality salt water fish.
Yep, you're right about that, man, I love it. And I saw this sign it said gar do and buffalo for sale. Well, my like seven year old self knew what a gar was and goo was spelled goo on the.
Side, and I was a little fish to that, you know, I was like, what are they selling?
And then buffalo and in my mind I thought it was at first, you know, bison me. Then I went hunt on second, it's a fish market. Oh there's a buffalo fish. And then I made my mom pull over and I went in there and like interrogated him as a seven year old, like what do you got here?
You know?
And it was buffalo. And I looked at the fish. They had some fish there that they brought in. And then the gas. It was gasper goof freshwater drum, which is also good to eat, by the way. So I think it's interesting to open people's minds to these different kinds of different kinds of stuff to eat, you know,
because the harvest is very very important to look. Man, Look if anybody sees the world we're living in now and thinks we're going to go back to the glory days of the fifties and leave it to beaver, you're out of your mind. There is hard times coming, and hard times are here for a lot of people.
I know.
We don't like to say that, you know, but it's true. And being able to harvest and understand that there's some good quality meats out there and fish are very abundant in many many locations. I think it's an important thing. Plus it you know, who just wants to eat beef, pork and chicken, You know there's other stuff out there, you know.
So and we're gonna he and you.
Don't only go ahead, I was just gonna say, you don't have and you don't have to be rich to fish. No, you literally can go down to your local department store and buy a rod and real combination that comes with a little tackle box with some brim, hooks and different things in there. You can literally buy one of those for ten twelve bucks, yep. And you can buy a box of worms for four dollars or dig them out
of your own yard or whatever. And you can go to almost any city park that has a pond, city lake, bigger lakes, if you live near creeks. Even I grew up fishing creeks, I could go down to a creek with a just a roll of string in my pocket, some hooks, and a couple of bobbers and could catch twenty five or thirty brim Most of them were, you know,
probably two or three fingers long. But I would scale them, build a fire, put them on a stick, and roast them right there and eat them right there as a kid. And there's you know, there's nothing better than doing something like that. But you don't have to buy a you know, twenty thousand dollars boat you don't have to have a fancy full wheel drive truck. You don't have to have
a seven or eight hundred dollars rifle. You don't have to have a thousand acres of property that's private, or you don't have to do all of these things in order to fish.
Yep, that's I call fishing the equalizer in sport, in the sporting realm, because you know, you may be a star football player in high school. Maybe you get to college and a few get to the pros, but you're done by thirty five, unless you're Tom Brady or whatever. You know, but you know, and you can fish to your one hundred your whole life, you know, And that's that's a wonderful, beautiful thing and celebrating that harvest. Now you mentioned you like buffalo. What is the favorite fish?
Let's say, I know you have your local favorites, but maybe you've eaten something more exotic or something special. What's your very favorite fish you've ever eaten?
Oh my gosh, man, my very favorite fish that I ever ate is halibate caliban.
Okay, cool, cold.
Cold water. Gentleman that I worked with in the coal mines many years ago. Every year he and his son would go fishing for halibate up in like a last or somewhere, I'm not sure where they went, and every year he would bring me back vacuum sealed packages of this fish. And the first time I ever cooked it, I would afford to you that I put a chicken breast on the grill because the texture of the meat was more like like meat. It was more like chicken or pork or beef or something. It had that real
meaty texture. It wasn't fishy. And we ended up after I cooked the first batch of it, fried it like fish, you know, corn meal and stuff, and I didn't really like it as much that way. Then the next batch I cut up, marinated it like I would chicken breast in a little bit of lime, juice and different things,
different seasons. And then I battered it just like chicken, egg buttermilk, then flour, and then back in the egg and buttermilk, and then flour again, put a big thick coating, put it in the oil, brought it to that golden brown, and then I was like, oh my goodness, I have found my favorite tea. Man.
I love it.
I've eaten halibut at a restaurant and really really liked it a lot, but I know it wasn't as good as like that vacuum sealed personally caught stuff, you know, And and one of my dreams is to go. I have a buddy of mine, Lee Leshper. He's was an out there writer here in Texas. Moved to Alaska one a few menu. I'm jealous of on the planet because his fishing photos blow my mind. He was fly fishing for halibate. They were chumming up, and I'm like, that's
not even fair. But the favorite fish I've ever eaten, like you know, that I've caught. It was kind of a special thing or whatever is peacock bass, believe it or not. When I was in Venezuela back in ninety nine on Lake Goury fishing for peacock bass, we were releasing most of the fish. But every night they would tell we had like six boats out fishing. Everybody keep one or two peacocks between like three and five pounds,
So everybody keep one. They cook them different ways, and I didn't find a way that the peacock bass was it epic, my favorite. They grilled it and put some like lime juice and stuff kind of like you described on it best fish I ever ate. And I was talking to my buddy, Gerald Swindle, a bass Master Elite Series pro, two time Angler of the Year. Loved that guy one day and we're talking about favorite fish. He said mine was peacock bass. He goes, man, I forgot
how good that was. I ate peacock bass too. So just now in terms of locally, like something you're gonna catch in Texas Louisiana, what's your favorite fresh water and favorite saltwater that I'll give you mine.
I'm gonna blow somebody's mind here with this one, because there's gonna be people out there that say, with all the things you can choose, why would you choose that.
I'll tell you what, Jeff Grinnel, We're gonna stop right there, and when we come back on More Outdoors, we're gonna talk why in the green heck Jeff Stewart chose a grinnel over a crappie and a bunch of other stuff. You're all gonna hear this stuff here on More Outdoors. We'll talk more Jeff when we come back. Welcome back to More Outdoors on News Talk five sixty KLV. I got my good friend Jeff Stewart. We're talking about celebrating
the harvest. We've been kind of camping on fish. We're gonna talk fish a little bit more and shift over to some game. I ask you your favorite fish and fresh and salt water.
You gave me a grinnel.
Give me a quick explanation of why, because most people don't think of a grinnel. Also caught a shoe pick, a dog fish, a mud. I've heard them called a mud marlin. Why they're such a good eating fish?
Growing up, we never ate them because if you try to fry them, they turned a mush at first, and then as the meat cools, it turns to cotton. Yep, that texture. They just never were good until I learned how to fix them. And the way I was caught. You take that fish and you filey it, and then you take a spoon because their meat is very very soft, yeah, and you scrape all the meat off of the bone, off of everything, and you put it into a bowl. You season that up. You mix green onion, you mix
a little bell pepper in there with it. You mix a little bit of your favorite seasoning in there, whether it be just salt pepper or a Cajun type seasoning or something I like, something a little spicy in mind. And then you take and you mix a few breadcrumbs with that, you make a ball out of it. You take that ball and you flower it on the outside. You drop it down in your oil and you brown it just a little bit. You pull that out, then you take it make a root. You add your onion, bell,
pepper and celery, your trinity to it. Then you make take that root and you add chicken broth to that root, and you make a nice thick root with that. Put all of those balls that you made of the grinnel back in that. Then you put them on a simmer, put it on low. You let it cook for about thirty minutes, and then you serve that over a better rice. And it is some of the most delicious fish you ever ate in your life.
Dude, I love That's why I have Jeff on the air, only me and him come up with a peacock bass is my favorite, or a grinnel. I mean, I love this, this, This is expanding people's information now in freshwater. My favorite is a very cliche one, but you can't hardly.
Beat a crappy.
Crappies, you can't.
Crappy is my favorite, and saltwater people are going to get offended. It's not flounder because I'm the flounder guy, but I honestly I love flounder.
It's way up there.
But my number one in salt water that we catch regionally is going to be a red snapper. It is almost impossible to take and beat a red snapper grilled or broiled, covered in butter and garlic, salt and all that.
It's just unbelievable.
You take a red snapper. A red snapper is the saltwater crappie.
Yeah, that's it. That's it.
That is salt I just wish crappy got If krappie got twenty pounds, I would only fish for crappie.
My whole life be dedicated to crappie. You know what I mean?
Seems like me. I say that grennel is my favorite, not because it is the most delectable piece of meat, but it's the most surprising. It's my favorite because I can I can serve this dish, I can make this dish. When I got a bunch of friends coming over them, we're gonna do something. We go out and fish. I love to put out the noodles or jug line. You catch a lot of grennel on those. You come back and I cook it up and I'm like, man, this
is the best. What about eating? And you tell them grennel and they're like, no, yeah, yeah, you know you're eating. And they're like, I can't believe that we're eating this, because you know, everybody gets mad when they catch an old grennel. You know you.
I like catching them for the fighting personally.
You know, well, you think you got a twenty pound catfish on there, you pull it in and you got about a six pound grintel. Yeah. They six pound grintel fight like a dang twenty pound cat.
Yeah. They're awesome.
So oh and they'll hit anything from a worm to like a like a night crawler all the way up to an artificial worm or crawlfish or a lizard or spinner bait fish anything.
Me and my cousin Frank Moore, like twenty seven years ago, were out fishing the Burnout Bridge Old ninety across some Orange Texas here bass fishing from the bank, and they were hitting every worm and crawlworm combo.
We could throw.
And I like catching. We're trying to catch bass. I said, you know what, I've never caught one on the top water. I threw a top water out and made one jerk and caught a ten pound grinel.
But uh, a lot of fun, cool stuff.
I want to switch because only got like a segment and a half left to a game. You know, wild games. There's a lot to cover in the wild game realm. And I'm just going to say that straight up. Out of all the more exotic other words, not white tail cottontail squirrel meat that I that I've eaten, my favorite wild gamemate is nil Guy. Antelope and nil Guy are free ranging along the southern Texas coast, mainly on the King and Kennedy ranches. I've had a privileged eating in
a few times. It is unbelievable light. It like fried backstrap, and it was just the best meat I'd ever eaten like that. Also, bison is really good. What in your game experience is kind of your favorite more exotic type game meat.
I like access. Yeah, I really like the texture and the taste of the axis. Yep, I've had access now. I killed a black buck back in the early nineties out around seven all Texas, and it was. It was decent eating. It really was, just wasn't a whole lot of it, because you know, this thing full grown from sixty pounds on the hoop. But I would have to say those are really good. But the most I guess exotic animal I've ever killed and eaten was a water buffalo.
Oh wow.
And yeah, there was a ranch here close to my house. They had exotic animals all over it and they had a huge bull water buffalo that was hooking and hurting all the other animals. And the guy that was running it was a good friend of mine, and he came and asked to borrow a gun because he wanted to go shoot this water buffalo. And I said, well wait a minute, let me shoot it. Yeah, and he said okay, he said, what are you doing. I'm going to have to get my bow. And he said, you can't kill
this thing with a bow. I'm going to yep. So I grabbed my bow and I grabbed my forty five seventy and I give him the forty five seventy and I said, look, please go south shoot it. Yeah, but I'm taking to shoot this thing with my bow. And we went out to the ranch, and I mean these things are not were not tame. I mean they weren't just the wildness of animals, but they weren't tame either. I mean you couldn't you couldn't just walk up and
put this thing. And so we stopped within a water hole that he was at, within about forty five yards, and I was shooting at the time. I was shooting about eighty pounds on my compound bow. And that's back whenever, you know, shooting those big heavy aluminum shafts of twenty two nineteens, you know. So I had a good heavy shaft and one hundred and twenty five grain those old good three bladed nap broadheads that we used to all shoot the thunderheads. Yep. I don't even think they'd make
them anymore. And man, I sunk one right right behind the shoulder, kind of low in the chest, and just watch those sletches disappear, and this thing kind of jumped and ran about forty or fifty yards. You just there, you can just see that it was it was bleeding out and it never acted like it was it was even new. It was it, yep, And it stood there and then just slowly walked off about another twenty feet, laid down, never stood up again. It took less than
a minute yep for this. I don't know how much this thing weighed fifteen hundred, two thousand pounds, but man, yeah, I had the.
Sad experience with a bison one time I shot at the bison. I shot, which was unbelievable to buy meat for a year. At the house call, my good friend Ted Nuda said, where do I shoot a bison with a bow?
Uh?
He said, Neverthelengs, So go forever, shoot it right behind the when it walks, get an angling shot right in the crease of the of the you know, right in the crease right there. It went about thirty yards and it took about a minute and it was bye bye.
And the meat was incredible.
So how was the was the was the was the meat tough? Was it an older one? Did you make it ground meat? Did it kind of like beef or what?
Well? The guys that owned the place he decided, he said, you go, hey, we're gonna we're gonna process this thing. We're gonna we're gonna have it process. And he said, when we get it done, you know, I'm gonna bring
you you know, a bunch of meat. I'm great. So several weeks later, I'm home and uh see this truck coming up the driveway and it's my buddy, and he just pulls back a tarf on the back of the truck and the whole back of the truck just full of white packages for a freezer, paper from the bricker and he's like, where you want this? And I'm like, I don't know anywhere to put this this much. So we we filled everything we had. Okay, I'm gonna cook it.
I decided to cook a steak like a stake, and you couldn't hardly eat it because I mean, this bull was probably as old as a bull.
Yeah, well, hold that, hold that thought. We're gonna come back on Laura out the words we're gonna talk about. We've got great cliffhangers tonight, cooking a water buffalo, take in and East Texas I dare you to find on other programs. We'll talk more with Jeff Stewart and wrap up our conversation about celebrating the harvest here on More Outdoors. Welcome back to More Outdoors on News Talk five sixty klv.
I Follow my blog at Higher Calling dot net. Find me on Facebook, at Higher Calling Wildlife and at the Chester, more on Instagram, and of course the program every week here at six to seven pm CST. Say that for our listeners all around the nation, and also streaming at KLVI dot com and via the iHeartRadio app. I'm almost omnipresent in the great outdoors media. Continuing our conversation with good buddy Jeff Stewart. Now we had a cle another cliffhanger.
You were cooking water buffalo meat and the steak was a little bit too tough. So tell me how you tackled the water buffalo.
Put the Dutch oven, the biggest one I had put it, built a fire in the yard. But just like you're gonna homestead cook something, put my Dutch oven over it. Added you know, some some oil to the bill. Round off one of these ROAs, real good, flowered it, rounded off, left it in there at my onions, my potatoes, carrot,
a little bit of celery to it. Put some beef stock over in there that I had saved in the freezer, and put the lid on the top of it and just let it cook on top of that for probably four hours five hours, just every once in all, stoaking the fire head and a little more wood, whatever I could do, making sure the liquid didn't boil out of it. And when we ate that thing, it was the best thing you would have thought it was. You wouldn't have known that it wasn't a premium chuck roast from the store.
Gotta love it, man, that's I love that. When I shot that bison, we got most of it made into you know, like hamburger meat, because you can cook that. We made bison meat balls and bison lasagna and bison tacos. The steaks were great. Another surprise, awesome. I killed a scimitar horned rix. It's kind of antelope out to my friend Thompson Tipples Place back in the late nineties, and to this date, it was the best faheta meat I've
ever had in my entire life. We were like we were taking that state meat cut in strips, made the heat to meat out of it.
Incredible stuff.
It just shows, Jeff, there's a lot more than beef, pork and chicken out there.
Right, yep, lots lots more stuff. You know. We're even the worst animal I ever killed and cooked. I enjoyed, which was a Corsican.
Ram like I do good on those.
Oh man. It was. It was an old billy and it was probably as gamey as every bike. Tasted like a barnyard. Like if you went out in the barnyard and got in, like right in the middle of the manure pile and started eating ham sandwich. You're breathing in that manure smell as you take a bite. That's kind of what it reminded. But at the same time, everybody, I remembered the hunt. I remember taking the longest shot I've ever taken on an animal. I took a sixty
yard shot with a bow. That was the longest bow shot I've ever taken on anything. I don't like to take over forty yard shot, and I took this Corsican on a ranch and it was a perfect shot. Forty fifty steps. Maybe after I shot it, it went and just piled up on some rocks and was gone. I mean maybe five seconds, six seconds, you know, this thing
was out dead, gone, and it was wonderful. I've still got a rug made from its hide that we had made, and I look at it and I remember it, and I loved the story, and I just remember eating the meat and going it's not the best, but wow, what a hunt.
I've killed a lot of those exotic sheep over the year, and you know, the old, the old trophy size ones are tough, so we always get them ground up and we mix them about thirty percent beef and make ramburgers. They're great, love them. We got got a lot of it. They're really good that way. And uh a trick, Yeah, well.
I thought, yeah, yeah, it was a mistake on my part.
Bob material, but it's definitely good when you ground it up a little bit of beef in it, it gives it a little kick.
Like it that way. But that's the fun. It's laughing.
We're having good time talking about the celebration of the harvest out there. And uh, you have a cookbook out, tell me a little bit about your cookbok before we got to go.
Texas Jack's Wild Game and Venison Cookbook. I'm Texas Jack. Actually, Uh, Texas Jack is just a name that a lot of different people have written under. And a good friend of mine hit me up and said, man, I need a Wild Game in Venison cookbook and would you team up with Texas Jack and give us some of your tried and through recipes, and I'm like, yeah, and we sat
down and wrote this book. And the first half of the book is a dedication to my dad who had who had passed away right before I wrote the book. And so the first half is about my dad, and it tells kind of a story because my dad was a legend around here. He was an outdoor legend. If it came to fishing. Uh, everybody my dad nickname was Skeeter. So if it came to fishing, everybody said, go ask Skier. If there was a hole that you can catch a
big old catfish in, they asked Skier. So I made a first half of the book about my dad.
Cool.
And the rest are our recipes, everything from my dear Chili all the way to my dear Fahidas And uh, there's a lot of fish recipes, different things in there. It's just a great little cookbook.
Dig it man. And that's Uh. You know, where can people get ahold of the book?
The easiest place for them to get a hold of the book is on Amazon. That's the easiest place to look it up and get it. But if they would like a signed copy of the book, they can reach out to me through social media. Uh, anything on my Instagram page, Uh, Jeff, Jeff, grip the hold Stewart my Facebook page. You know, just stript the hold Stewart. They
can just type that in and find me. Other than that, catch me at one of the events that I attend around the country and I usually post that on Facebook and different social media. Is where I'm going to be at and they can get a signed copy.
Very very cool man, and uh, it's just it's just fun talking about this stuff, and you know how to how to enjoy every minute, even post harvest, post expedition out into the wild, and you know, the whole idea of going out into the wild. I just had an incredible opportunity to go to Colorado and grant a higher calling Wildlife Expedition Wild Wishes encounter.
For a young man, sixteen year old boy named.
Elijah who had lost his father and took him into Rocky Mountain National Park and other areas around Esta's Park, Colorado to photograph wildlife and teach him to use cameras to capture wildlife images. And me and my buddy Amos. Now the cool part is Amos came through our program six years ago. He graduated high school and once to get involved in ministry using the outdoors.
So we got him to go be my assistant.
We went and scouted the day before, found a bunch of mule's, found some elk. Thought okay, we can do mule's and elk, but the ultimate we want to find as a big horn, and found no big horn in that area that day. Fifteen minutes into the expedition. The next day, the kid Olajias photographing a may your huge ram and you can go see that a higher calling
wildlife on Facebook. Seeing a smile of a kid who had lived in Colorado, had never been in the mountains and photographing a big horn ram shows that anyone can be impacted by that glorious encounter in God's creation in the great outdoors and seeing amos come along and being part of that. It reminds me of our conversations we're having the night about just that joy. And look, man, the world sucks right now. There's a lot of crazy stuff going on, but it almost never sucks in the
great outdoors. And whether you're get Texas Jack's cookbook and learn some good dear chili recipes, or you go fly fishing or whatever you do, going into the great outdoors is one of the best things you can do.
I know you agree with that, Jeff.
Old artedly, because I tell people all the time in the outdoor there's no there's no ulterior motive. If you go out to the outdoors and sit under a tree and just soak it in, nobody's nobody's out to get you, nobody's telling you what to do, one to do, how to do. You just sit there and if it's ten minutes, two hours, whatever it is, for that length of time, and it's you and nature, it's you and God. You know, it's like the best time I ever had in nature.
Is a young man that wanted to spend a day hunting with me, who had leukemia, and I took him hunting and we watched the sun come up over the trees and we had the best conversation. We didn't even see a deer that day. The next day he could not go hunting with me again. We were going to go the next day, and the next day he died. And the greatest honor I had was spending that young man's last days on this earth in the woods with him,
and that's all he wanted. To do was spend that those last hours that he had alive with me in the woods.
Can't beat that. Nothing better, No, can't beat nothing, no, not even a cond I'll.
Never forget that. I'll never forget that. Never forget that, young man. Never forget the feeling of that sun coming up over those pine trees. There was frost on the ground when that sun hit it, the steam coming off the frost, the steam coming off the pine needles, and that smell that you get whenever that sun breaks over the horizon. And it's just something you'll never forget. If you ever experience it, you'll never forget it.
Yeah, you don't want to forget it. I'll tell you what been a great show.
Thanks for coming on the program tonight, Jeff, and thanks for sharing. That's awesome man. That's right where my heart is with the young people in the great outdoors. And God bless you all for listening to more outdoors tonight. Don't forget you can connect it Higher Calling not net at Dee Chester Moore on Instagram, Higher Calling while on Facebook. Have a great and glorious outdoors weekend.