At our house the goal of knowing where more and more of our food comes from has slowly become more of a priority. Whether it is veggies from the backyard garden, wild game taken from Arizona’s plentiful public lands or a relative’s livestock, it is nice knowing the path your food took from growing to table. Most of our meals are a split of food we know and food from the store, and since we aren’t on a farm I doubt we will be able to fully make that transition for quite some time, but some meals do end up being all local. Recently all of our eggs, up to 90% of our meat is harvested by us or from a relative who raises livestock and we are still working on the greens but catching up more and more.

Small game, rabbits, ducks, squirrels, quail and a few others are some of my favorite foods. The often overlooked meats spice up your standard dinner menu with some seasonal delicacies. Squirrel may be my favorite, either fried or in a stew it’s flavor is incredible and hunting them is another favorite past time (not to mention the awesome flies their fur provides). This day out did not bring home many squirrels (just the one) but did provide some good miles in the woods and a few squirrels that gave us the slip.

Due to the smaller than expected squirrel harvest and having two chickens in the freezer from butchering a few of the old hens earlier this summer, I decided on a mixed bag of local meats. The fall is also when our carrots and onions are reaching maturity and so it seemed a stew was in order!

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Front yard chicken, backyard vegetables and forest squirrels. It is nice to see where everything on the table came from. We can’t pull it off every time but it sure is nice to know I can do it!