If it raids your henhouse for the eggs, it’s a varmint.
Do possums do that? I have hardly ever crossed paths with one.
They sure do. They kill adult chickens too.
Huh. So I’m a varmint.
Possums will eat just about anything, and that’s why they taste bad. If you catch one alive keep it in a cage for a month and feed it fruit. That’ll fatten it up and do wonders for the flavor.
I learn all kinds of stuff on here. Thanks, Colibri.
If we eat that, we might as well eat rats, or mice. No thanks. Though I can vaguely remember seeing mouse recipes from ancient Rome. They would slice them open and gut them, stuff them full of herbs and then carefully sew them back up. Place the prepped mice on a tile and put it in an oven. Bon appetit! But good grief, only if I get truly desperate.
Mice!? How gauche. I won’t eat any rodents smaller than a guinea pig.
Beans. Beans, beans, and more beans. I have a kazillion bean recipes, PM me.
When I make navy bean soup, I started a tradition of making Malt-o-Meal muffins to accompany the soup. Now, I’m not allowed to make navy bean soup until I have checked the pantry to see if there is a box of Malt-o-Meal.
I LOVE mixed bean soup! I call it 99-bean soup.
I don’t care for limas. My sister and I would threaten to move out of the house when Momma would cook up a pot of butterbeans for her and Daddy. The air would be ripe for days.
If ou live near an Asian market, go buy some Kombu dried seaweed. A two-inch piece soaked with, then cooked with a pot of beans makes them more “digestible.” You can find Kombu at health food stores, but it will cost you a LOT more money.
Pinto beans and black beans cn be cooked with a Mexican herb Epazote. Find it at a Mexican market, it may be located with the teas.
Good old beans!
~VOW
Amost as cheap, now, a jar of heated up queso cheese sauce, or a can of Campbells cheddar cheese soup. Or any other kind, I guess.
Cabbage!
You can make an ocean of delicious soup with one medium head. Slice onions, chunk some peeled potatoes, sliver or chop the cabbage, chop a handful of fresh dill, combine in a huge pot and cover with water— or chicken or beef stock, if you are a fancy man. Simmer until everything is soft. Salt and pepper. A scoop of sour cream is nice in the bowl, but not essential.
My sister adds a can of cream of mushroom soup while the vegetables are simmering. Not something I would do; just throwing it out there. It does add cream and body.
Oeufs Gloria, from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service:
If you looking for a source of meat during hard times there is always this book:
Guinea pigs are a swell idea for a cheap meat source.
“To help start a home guinea pig farm, Heifer International typically supplies a family with one male and seven females. In just months, such a collection may have doubled in size. Woods says a guinea pig herd consisting of two males and 20 females can sustain itself while providing meat for a family of six.”
Those would have been dormice (like the one in Alice in Wonderland), not regular mice. From Wiki:
I’ve had roast Guinea Pig several times at fancy restaurants in Cuzco, Peru. It’s my favorite rodent. 
I start off simmering just cabbage, then use a stick blender on the pot. Then I add more cabbage, potatoes, and onions. Mmmmmmmm.
I am reminded of Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat. Supposedly tortillas and beans produces the healthiest kids for very little money.
And I don’t think Steinbeck knew about complementary proteins. (I am assuming the tortillas are corn since that is what God dictated they be made out of. I think it’s somewhere in Deuteronomy.)
Maybe Steinbeck didn’t know about complementary proteins, but people around the world have settled on cheap foods that nonetheless keep folks alive. Some combination of grains plus legumes is a staple pretty much everywhere, whether it be succotash or matrimonia or daal bhat or hummus on pita or peanut-butter sandwiches.
For varmints, any unspecified meat served at Gramma’s house was likely to be groundhog, and that was just fine. But there’s a trick to preparing tree squirrels (I think something to do with cutting out a particular gland), and my family didn’t know the trick. Granpap gave a few to Mom once to cook up for the cats, and lordy, when she was cooking them, you had to evacuate the whole block, the stench was so bad.
My father-in-law grew up poor in Kansas during the Depression and to this day doesn’t like potatoes, no matter how they’re prepared, having eaten so many of them as a boy.
Well I’m trying to emulate the Depression, not Jamestown. Have you heard the stories? Here:
Read the whole article and tell me you don’t agree there have been times even harder than the Depression. At least the Okies started from a point of knowing how to run a farm! The point here is to practice being really, really frugal, as if it is a virtue or something. The Depression is my model for that. People from all walks of life seem to talk of this generation as some kind of American ideal, as if people today should really be more like them if they knew what was good for them- and not some kind of British (literally brain-eating) zombie at Jamestown. Plus, when I read the headlines I get the feeling the fecal matter is hitting the oscillator as I type. Cannibalism might be a good idea for some future COVID-21 menu thread though.
Now, dormice? Roast Guinea Pig? I suppose at the end of the day if one is a good enough chef, they can make you want to eat anything. I like the idea of self-fattening, domestic mice better than feral flea-bitten ones, though rodents remain not my first choice. I am trying to expand my mind here, so I’ll, uh, leave it on the table.
Interestingly, much about the current situation is met with enthusiasm by my cat. Breed rabbits? Cat says: hell yeah! Same for mice in a glirarium. Stay home from work for 3 weeks to be available to play sting games 24/7? Purrfect. I have read plenty of conspiracy theories about the current headline, but the only one that is remotely plausible is that cats are behind it.
Whatever the case, this is not just me whiling away the hours. I’m going frugal in rl. I went shopping for beans the other day and the shelves were depleted. No navy beans, no garbanzos, no black beans IIRC, no kidneys. Still, I picked up 18 pounds between rice, red beans, lentils, the very last 1-pound bag of split peas and a 10 pound bag of pinto beans. I am going to need pinto ideas (VOW are you still reading?)
Juk/congee is a favorite invalide comfort food around here - i do it somewhat traditionally [in a pasta pat, the ones that have the collander insert] i start by simmering a whole chicken chopped up with a chunk of ginger, a large onion, at least a whole bulb of garlic, more westerny a couple carrots and a couple ribs of celery, and when it is finished, I pull everything out and add rice, another onion [chopped this time] a bulb of garlic [also chopped] garlic [chopped] and simmer until everything more or less renders into thickening for the broth. I have by this time pulled the meat off the bones and chopped it and tossed it back in, corrected for salt, added pepper and some 5 spice powder. We normally have at least half a gallon in the freezer in the small chinese take out soup containers. It was one of the ‘lifesaver’ meals during chemo =)
Split pea soup is amazing. Split Pea Anderson [ANderson is a restaurant in California] they have a vegan version that is amazing, and I think they have the recipe online. I know they sell the soup kit at their store.
I remember those books. I have no issue forraging my woods, but I would hesitate too urban areas because of the localized pollution… And it is baby fern season =)
carnivores are usually worse tasting than vegetarian critters - and city that forrage garbage are worse than country critters.
I think it is the anal glands - though when I clean anything, I tend to make sure there are no little glands anywhere [deer have glands at their knee joints as well as anal glands]