EP 523. Canadian Duck Camp Cooking

 

A Goose Recipe to Remember

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Mojo’s Ducks Season Somewhere podcast, where today I’m in Saskatchewan at an amazing place I love to come to in the fall. It’s a great place to be in the fall unless you’re a duck or a goose. I’m at Prairie Lands Outfitters, and it is great. You know, I’ve been here a couple of nights. We’ve had some great hunts. But, you know, when you come to these places, come to a guided hunt anywhere, you expect the ducks and the geese are a given. But not all food is created equal, and that’s a fact. I have heard so much in the last couple of days about how good the food is here. And that’s all thanks to Chef DJ Douglas James, is his real name. Chef, how are you today?

DJ Douglas: I’m well.

Ramsey Russell: Man, I was glad you were a familiar sight. You were a welcome sight when I walked through the door the other day, and I still saw you here. That was great to hear.

DJ Douglas: Yeah, my first fall being the full-time cook. I’ve done two springs now. Then COVID, spring was sort of a slower pace. 2020 spring was my first season here.

Ramsey Russell: That was, that was. And they weren’t gonna let you go, were they? I mean, once you showed up, they loved your food. They weren’t gonna let you go at all. I’m gonna pull that mic up just a tad for you. There you go.

Ramsey Russell: All right.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah. Now, you know, speaking of that spring, I’ll just kick off by asking you about this recipe before I get too much into the questioning. I was here, and in that spring, the first spring you were here with snow geese, you presented a recipe that has become a camp staple. And I don’t know if it’s a fall staple or a spring staple or a camp staple, but you made a spin on some kind of Asian snow goose. What do you call it?

DJ Douglas: Yeah, so I was calling it my ginger goose. Sort of like a ginger beef, ginger goose. Yeah. It’s marinated with soy sauce, sriracha, ginger, and lime juice, and then I bread those pieces, fry them, and make a kind of teriyaki sauce but with a pile of ginger and a little bit of orange concentrate and a few things like that in there. I got inspired by that. When I was young, I worked at the Chinese place in Marsden.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

DJ Douglas: Yeah. When I was 13, I started in the restaurant there. So I was basically everything but cooking, but I got to watch them cook, and they would cook every fall for the bird hunters. There was one group that was freelance and a few other guys that a cousin of mine would guide. So, basically every fall, when I was working there for four years, I saw her make a great big spread for the hunters, and she would do something similar to that ginger goose, as well as chow mein, chop suey, and egg rolls, all kinds of stuff. So I kind of took one of those recipes and made it my own a little bit, and it’s been extremely popular.

Ramsey Russell: Somebody described it that year as kind of like a PF Chang spin on something, only better.

DJ Douglas: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And it was. It was so freaking good, man. You bring up a question. Here you are, born and raised in small-town Saskatchewan. Throughout the landscape, I drive all from north, south, east, and west, all up and down this province. And I’m always amazed that there really is a lot of Chinese or—I’ve had Philippine, I’ve had Thai. There’s a lot of that influence here in Saskatchewan.

DJ Douglas: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Why? I mean, I’m just wondering, has it ever crossed your mind to go to China and open a restaurant?

DJ Douglas: No, but a lot of the reason we’ve got Chinese, as many as we do all across the prairies, is because, well, back when we were a new country, and you guys in the States were a little more established, we wanted to beat you to that west coast. We didn’t want the whole west coast to be taken up by the Americans, right? So we brought in some Chinese labor to build that railroad. And quite a few of them hung out after it was built.

Ramsey Russell: Really? So that’s the history of it all.

DJ Douglas: That’s kind of the history of why we have so many Chinese. The Filipino, and a lot of those, are newer additions. But, yeah, the Chinese have been here for quite some time.

Ramsey Russell: You know, I’ve had one of the amazing foods up here. In fact, my wife came up a few years ago. I’ll take a few days off, she’ll come up, we’ll hang out. And she’d done a little background research before we flew into Saskatoon, before she flew into Saskatoon to join me. And she said, you know, everybody keeps talking about this poutine. Have you ever had it? I go, yeah, you know, I’ve had it. And boy, you want to talk about some better than others, that’s poutine. And she wanted to try some. And we asked around and found a little pub in Saskatoon, which is a college town. I got to tell you, it was on the good side, on the real good side, had real cheese curds, real, real good gravy, hand-cut fries. It was good. But I had something for the first time, talking about this Philippine influence. I had some buffalo chicken poutine. I’m like, oh, that’s just ruining a good thing. Until I dug into it. You ever had something like that?

DJ Douglas: I have, yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Is that a thing now? All these different flavors of poutine?

DJ Douglas: A lot of different flavors of poutine. There was actually a place in Wainwright, a few years back that was just a poutine shop. And I think all they had was poutine. There were about 30 different types on the menu. Everything from a Southwest poutine with pulled pork and corn to what you were saying, buffalo chicken. I think they had some sort of Asian flavor as well. So it’s, again, one of those classic dishes that’s basically fries, cheese, and gravy, and people put their spin on it however they want.

Ramsey Russell: Was that something you grew up eating? I mean, that is like a distinctively Canadian food. French fries with gravy and cheese curds. That’s kind of how I would describe it.

DJ Douglas: And for some reason out here in the prairies, the curds kind of went away. In a lot of places, you’ll see them make it with just shredded cheese.

Ramsey Russell: Shredded cheese.

DJ Douglas: There’s a lot of people that like how the cheese melts into the fries. Well, really, it should kind of stand out a little bit. Your cheese curd should have a little bit of a squeak to them and not be totally melted away.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right. They should have a little squeak 1038

DJ Douglas: Stand out a little bit.

Ramsey Russell: I was doing a little deep dive on it the other day, for some reason, reading up on poutine. What else did I have to do? And I think it kind of comes from Quebec.

DJ Douglas: It does, yeah.

Ramsey Russell: I think poutine, whatever it means, is a French word. What do you think that word stands for?

DJ Douglas: Don’t know. Don’t know much French.

Ramsey Russell: Don’t know. Don’t matter.

DJ Douglas: Yeah.

On the Food Path as a Canadian Youth

Yeah, yeah. Liking the spice is definitely an outlier thing in Canada.

Ramsey Russell: So where did you grow up, DJ?

DJ Douglas: Right here, actually. I did high school in Neilburg. Marsden has an elementary school, so I went to grade six up to grade six there and then they ship you over to Neilburg for the junior high school, we call it.

Ramsey Russell: The big city

DJ Douglas: Yeah, the big city. Go from the town of 300 to the town of 450.

Ramsey Russell: What was it like growing up in a town of 350–400 people? I mean, man, talk about Little House on the Prairie. What was it like growing up out here as a youngster? What does a 10-year-old kid do for fun out here?

DJ Douglas: Yeah, you get a pellet gun or BB gun. I was probably more like 12 when I got my first little dirt bike or whatever to run around on. Skidoo, that sort of thing in the winter. Toboggan. I mean, being on a farm, it’s sort of hard to visit with friends and stuff like that, depending on the time of year, right? Summertime, not a big deal. Wintertime, you know, get into a little bit of video games and stuff like that because you’re not going to go play around when it’s minus 40.

Ramsey Russell: This part of the world, your neighbors a lot of times aren’t just right next door. They might be a mile or two away.

DJ Douglas: Yeah, we had one house in the yard that we’d rented out. So we had some neighbors that had some kids when I was younger. Like, the two kids were pretty much my age, which was nice. Other than that, yeah, the next neighbor was pretty much in town. I had a few, like nobody my age right close to me. So we had neighbors that are a mile away. But it was about four miles to town where most of the friends were.

Ramsey Russell: All the traveling I’ve done, I’ve never been anywhere in the world that has poutine. But I’ve never been anywhere that has as much good soup. And I’ve always just said to myself, you know, wondering aloud, I think the reason that all these people up here cook such good soup is because of those minus-40 days. They don’t want to get out. They sit there, they work with what they’ve got in the cabinet. And it’s almost like a soup culture, man. I mean, just all these different flavors of soups, and all of them absolutely delicious. Is that pretty accurate?

DJ Douglas: I would say so. A lot of your supper specials or dinner specials at restaurants will come with a soup or salad. And most people are taking the soup till it runs out. I mean, it’s, again, hearty, quick, easy—something you can make and keeps you going in the winter for sure. I really haven’t done enough traveling, I guess, outside of my little area to know enough about food elsewhere. So it’s interesting to hear that our area in Saskatchewan here is kind of known for it because I know you travel everywhere.

Ramsey Russell: That’s kind of my opinion. I mean, yeah, you go to a lot of meals, a lot of three-course dinners in lodges and stuff. There’s always a soup. But I’ve never seen as much soup or as good a soup selection as when I’m in Canada. Because really and truly, here we are in October, and it’s 30 degrees finally in the mornings, which is late. It could be snow this time of year, and you all start getting, I don’t know, good summer weather again in May or June. That’s a long, cool winter where a good hearty meal and good hearty food supplements would be important. And I’m leading up to this question, though. DJ, I just wondered, you know, a little boy that grew up in small-town Canada with a pellet rifle and a dirt bike, playing some video games in the winter. I just wonder if that soup idea I’ve got, this soup concept I’ve got, is kind of what led you into your present-day vocation, which is a cook.

DJ Douglas: Well, I’ve always liked food. I mean, it was always something I was interested in even when I was young, like visiting my grandma and stuff back when I was really little. One of my mom’s favorite stories is when I was, I guess, about four or so, I wanted to taste everything in the fridge. So I went through and I was tasting all the condiments, this, that, the other thing. One of my favorites at that age even was Tabasco sauce. So I’ve always had an interest in food .

Ramsey Russell: That makes you an outlier in Canada.

DJ Douglas: Yeah, yeah. Liking the spice is definitely an outlier thing in Canada.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve met Canadians where ketchup’s a little too spicy.

DJ Douglas: I’ve mentioned that a few times. It took a little bit of getting used to cooking for Americans coming up because I’d make something that I thought was good for me, but I thought, well, you know, the average person might find that spicy. And anytime I think something’s a little bit spicy, I’m getting more compliments than, you know, just about anything else. If I were to serve some of those chilies or something like that up here, you’d be getting guys asking for a cup of sour cream to put on top of it.

Ramsey Russell: I wonder why that is. It’s funny. It’s funny how different cultures are like that. You know, some cultures are real hot, and some are not. And so there’s a lot of cooks like yourself I’ve talked to in passing or on the podcast. And when I ask how they got interested or what inspired them into cooking, it’s amazing how many times they mention their grandmother. What was your grandmother like? What’d she do? And what were some of her specialties cooking.

DJ Douglas: So my grandmother on my mom’s side was a Mennonite lady. She cooked all kinds of stuff  homemade. Homemade egg noodles with cream sauce. She’d make something called roll cucumber, which I think is actually going to be part of breakfast tomorrow, which is like a fried fritter. It’s like cream and sour cream, egg, flour, and baking powder. You roll it out thin and then fry it. And that lard I was rendering out yesterday is my plan.

Ramsey Russell: My gosh. Let me tell you. We get in last night, and you’ve got a beautiful pork roast sliced up. And always a fresh salad. Always a nice salad. And I can’t remember. I think, I can’t remember what the side was last night. I went for the salad and the pork, but there was this bowl of something that looked like little round croutons or something, a big bowl. I said, what is that? And you go, that’s cracklings. And you’d been doing something, and I tasted one. And I don’t know what you intended them to be, but I put lots of them on my salad and lots of them on my veggies and lots of them on my meat. I could have just made a bowl of ice cream with them. That dials in my flavor profile perfectly. What was that, and why did you have that on hand?

DJ Douglas: Well, we’d actually got a pig butchered from a local guy here. So to go with, you know, all the chops and roasts and hams, we had a big bag of fat. So I rendered that down into lard. And one of the byproducts is basically your little bits of fat. Once they’re fully rendered, you can fry at a little bit of a higher heat, crisp them up, throw some salt and pepper on them, and you’ve got, again, kind of like—you can use it like a crouton. If they were bigger pieces, you can kind of eat them like a chip. But those ones were fairly small, like smaller than popcorn. But they’re still real tasty. It’s kind of a—if you like it, you like it, and put it wherever you want to.

Ramsey Russell: It might have been good on some ice cream. What are you going to do with the lard itself?

DJ Douglas: Well, for frying.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

DJ Douglas: Yeah. Gonna kind of try doing some deep frying with that instead of just the canola oil or soybean oil.

Ramsey Russell: That’s the only thing to cook with. I don’t know why, but I grew up like everybody else, back in the old days eating with Crisco or lard and then this whole vegetable oil. I guess since the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, you know, everybody peanut oil and canola oil. And man, I’ve gotten so far away from that. You know, I want to cook in lard, lard or beef tallow. And that’s it. To me, I don’t know what it does or why it does, but that’s the only thing I’ll cook in anymore.

DJ Douglas: Yeah, I think that that was a large amount of marketing that. At one point in time, the sugar industry told us that fat was bad. So everything went to low fat, and they added some extra sugar to it to make it taste good.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve heard that. You really think that’s true? I think it is.

DJ Douglas: It’s part of it. It’s part of it. Originally, some of the seed oils were being basically processed for.

Ramsey Russell:  Machinery.

DJ Douglas: Exactly. Engine lubricant. And once they figured out how to do it cheap enough, and, you know, we had an abundance of these crops everywhere, well, might as well put it in the food.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, let’s feed it to everybody. Yeah, no, I’m a big lard and tallow.

The Joys of Duck Fat

DJ Douglas: Tallow and duck fat.

Ramsey Russell: Tallow and duck Butter, duck fat. Man, I fry my popcorn with bacon grease. Yeah, don’t knock it till you try it. It gives it a great flavor. And I love, I’ve gotten on this kick, I think, since going to Argentina, where a lot of their beef is grass-fed, it’s leaner. I just fell back in love down there this year with sirloins. That’s what I grew up eating, a sirloin cut, kind of lean, kind of like this moose you cooked the other day. And at home, I will sear it on cast iron, and when I flip it over, I just put a dollop of bacon grease. It starts to melt down and sizzle up under that meat that’s cooking. It adds a little bit of fat because the meat needs it, but it adds just a subtle flavor of bacon, which makes it perfect. I mean, that’s like my last meal type meal right there—a sirloin steak with bacon grease. Am I weird for that?

DJ Douglas: No, that gives a heck of a good flavor. I did, well, a couple of weeks ago, we had an eye of round steak, and eye of round is not really known for being a good cut. I smoked them for a bit so they were about rare. Then I pan-seared them and slow-cooked them in foil to tenderize. That little bit of bacon fat I pan-fried them in sure put a heck of a nice flavor through it. Like it’s, it’s, again, I don’t know. At one point in time, somehow we all got convinced that tallow and lard were bad for you. But I’m like you, I’d use that before pretty much anything. Well, butter, butter’s up there too.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, butter goes on everything. Now, when you were a little boy, tasting everything in the refrigerator, from there to now, at what point did you say, ka-ching, I want to be a cook?

DJ Douglas: Well, I was doing some cooking around home. I’d make, you know, this and that for myself and once in a while for my parents as well. I kind of decided, I think I was about 13 or 14 when school started telling you to think about picking a career. What do you like to do because you want to do something you like. And I thought, well, I like cooking. So I started looking into that some more. Back in those days, Food Network was sort of a different animal. There was a lot more educational stuff on the Food Network. Now it’s, you know, everything’s just a game show, it seems like. You don’t really learn as much. I learned a few interesting techniques just from watching some of the good old cooking shows.

Ramsey Russell: Who would have been some of your influences off of that television show?

DJ Douglas: Well, back in those days, there was a Canadian guy, Michael Smith, from Chef at Home. He had a fairly nice little show. Oh, I’m trying to think of the guy’s name now. He had a TV show called In Search of Perfection. Heston Blumenthal is his name. He’s a Michelin-starred guy out of Europe. That show, In Search of Perfection, was basically breaking down dishes and how to make the perfect version of them. One I remember was his roasted chicken and chips. The prep work he did to the chicken to get the best result—brine it for a 24-hour period, pat it dry, air dry it in the fridge so the skin could get a good crisp to it. And then the French fries, he did a triple-cooked French fry. I’ve always done a double-cooked French fry.

Ramsey Russell: Which is drop it, let it cool off, then drop it again?

DJ Douglas: So with the triple-cooked, you boil it in salted water first. Most of the time, when you cook a potato, you want your water to start cold. For this, you have a rolling boil and heavily salted water. That salt plus the rolling boil overcooks the outside of the fry before the inside is done and breaks it down just a little. Then you take it out and cool it off. Next, you do a deep fry at a low temperature to drive off moisture, which begins to set up the outside. Then you cool them off again and fry at a high temperature when you’re ready to serve. You can do those first two steps ahead of time. The salt desiccates the outside of the potato, breaks it down, gets it a little fluffy, and that turns into an extra crisp outside layer on your French fry. That episode took a half-hour to show chicken and fried potatoes. Nowadays, every time I look at Food Network, it’s kind of a gimmicky show. They’re trying to show how to cook with gummy bears and tenderloin or whatever. Here’s your mystery box. To me, it’s lost a lot of what it once had.

Ramsey Russell: It needs to be more educational, doesn’t it?

DJ Douglas: Yeah. I don’t follow it enough, so there could be some good shows hiding in there.

Ramsey Russell: When I moved out of the house, I didn’t know how to cook anything. I mean, you know, a big night for me was the expensive TV dinner.

DJ Douglas: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Instead of the cheap one. Gosh, I must have lived on French fries and chicken pot pies, you know, that you bought. Just heat them in the oven. Now I do like to cook. I’m not near the level you are, but I do like to cook. I like my kind of cooking—what I do. You know, I’ve got enough that I can survive. My wife and I, we can both cook. We were kids when we got married, and now we’ve been married 30 years. We know how to cook. We had gotten kind of out of the habit when COVID hit. You know, kids were just getting out of high school, going into college. We were kind of semi-empty nesters on weekends. We’d just work around the house if we were both home and say, “Oh, let’s go get a bite to eat.” So we’d go out to dinner. Then COVID hit, and we weren’t going out for obvious reasons. Now, we hardly ever go out to eat dinner because we realized we’re way better cooks than what we can buy in Brandon, Mississippi.

DJ Douglas: Yep.

Ramsey Russell: And it kind of brought us back home. We found our own groove again in cooking. Kind of became food snobs in our own way.

DJ Douglas: Well, once you start cooking stuff you like or find a place that’s making really good food, it’s hard to go back. I don’t like to order a steak because I know I can cook it better. You’re basically just paying twice what you should for the experience of sitting out at a place.

Ramsey Russell: It’s funny you mentioned steak. That’s just what I was thinking. The only steak I would really buy at a restaurant is a cheap steak.

DJ Douglas: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Like a cheap steak and egg breakfast. I’m not gonna buy a nice steak out because I ate enough of them in enough camps spread around, and I cook enough of them at home my way with the bacon grease. I ain’t paying you all for years. It’s ridiculous.

DJ Douglas: Exactly.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, that’s the one thing I run into. Now, there’s a lot of things I can buy at restaurants that they cook way better than I do, but steak ain’t one of them.

DJ Douglas: Exactly.

Perfecting the Craft

 And we’d kind of have our freedom with it. You know, it wasn’t having to be a set recipe. 

Ramsey Russell: Everybody likes their steak their way. So did you go to culinary art school, or where did you go from watching the Cooking Channel to, you know, what next? What next for DJ?

DJ Douglas: Yeah, that was probably 13 or 14 when I started thinking about it. And then I was 17, I believe, in Grade 11. In Canada, we’ve got a skills competition for pretty much all the trades, and there’s a high school, secondary, and post-secondary level. So, in Grade 11, we got me registered to go into Saskatchewan, no it was Regina, yeah. So I went for cooking. One of my buddies was down there for welding, and another guy was down there for carpentry. Three guys from school, and one of the teachers drove because it was kind of like a school-sponsored trip or whatever. We did stuffed pork loin—no, sorry, stuffed chicken breast. It was a Duxelles stuffed chicken breast with a mushroom stuffing and potato rösti. So it’s like a grated potato pancake sort of thing. It was the set recipe we had to do, and then they judged on it. I pulled in third place doing that my first attempt. So after that, I was kind of even more interested in it. I found a dinner theater, which is outside of Calgary, in a tiny little town called Rosebud. It’s an acting school and a dinner theater. I was doing my apprenticeship there. You work for, I think, 700-some hours that you have to accumulate before you go to school your first time. So then, yeah, I went to school two months at a time. My first term was in Edmonton; my next two terms were both in Calgary. I worked at Rosebud Dinner Theater for three and a half years.

Ramsey Russell: Like, when you went to work somewhere like that as a young guy finding his way in cooking, if I were you and I started in that little acting theater or went to a restaurant, do they say, “Here’s how we cook this,” and you’re kind of following a recipe verbatim?

DJ Douglas: Well, the nice thing about the Rosebud Dinner Theater is they change their menu with the shows. So we’d be doing the same sort of set menu on the buffet for about two to three months, depending on the season for the show. And we’d kind of have our freedom with it. You know, it wasn’t having to be a set recipe. Some of the salads were sort of set recipes, but, you know, we had some freedom for how you want to season the vegetables or the meat. That sort of stuff was all up to you as long as it tasted good and was cooked properly. They gave us some freedom that way. So we would do up to seven shows a week and have up to 230 people per show, but we still had a fairly small staff. I think in the kitchen, there were only about 14 of us, with about 7 doing the morning shows and 7 in the evening shows. Within the first year and a half, it was kind of me being the first-year apprentice and then the guy that was the third-year going on to finish his schooling. We were kind of in charge of the evening fairly quickly. The first two days there, they kind of knew that I was better than most of the staff they had coming around. One day, they asked me to, the first day or whatever, chop like 8 liters of onions and dice another 8 liters of onions, celery, and carrots or whatever. So it was just like mass-producing the chopping, right? I said, “Okay, what do you want me to do now?” like an hour or two later. They said, “Well, you gotta chop all that stuff.” I said, “Well, yeah, I’m done.” After that, they kind of looked and went, “Oh, we got somebody that actually knows what they’re doing without too much training here.”

Ramsey Russell: He likes to do it.

DJ Douglas: Yeah.

Best Duck Camp Chef in Canada

So I ended up coming over, getting introduced, and I guess the rest is history. I’ve been here since 2020.

Ramsey Russell: What were you doing when you met Brian up here at Prairie Limits? What were you doing in the area as a cook, the spring of COVID, that led you here to Prairie Limits? What was your vocation? What were you doing, were you still working for that acting theater?

DJ Douglas: No, I had been done with that acting theater for a while. I’d come up here. So right before I got with Brian, I was actually taking kind of a hiatus from cooking. I had been working at the Maidstone Hotel, about 40 minutes north of here, for a year and a half or something like that. And it was just too much driving. The problem with these small towns is you don’t know if you’re going to be cooking for seven or eight people at suppertime or if you’re going to have 40 people walk in. It’s just really hard to keep a menu full of options fresh and have choices for people when you don’t know what kind of supply and demand you’re going to have. So I was taking a bit of a break. I was actually working at a little retail store selling hydroponic equipment in the city.

Ramsey Russell: Hydroponic equipment? There’s a big demand for that around here?

DJ Douglas: There is. After things got legalized, there was a fairly big demand. And I mean, it was something different. I like gardening, and it was able to get myself some nice discounts on a few things to garden kind of all year, which is nice as well. It was a different change of pace. It was all right, but not something I’d want to do long term in retail. That was, yeah, I think it was just before snow fell. It would have been probably around this time, October in the fall, that I started there. Wayne, another guy that works here, is a local as well.

Ramsey Russell: I know everybody knows Wayne. Are you kidding?

DJ Douglas: Yeah. So Wayne, he had basically mentioned that he knows a chef, and they were kind of looking for somebody to do spring. So I ended up coming over, getting introduced, and I guess the rest is history. I’ve been here since 2020.

Ramsey Russell: DJ you know what I wonder sometimes? What holds these little communities together in the modern era? I mean, there are a lot of communities like this with two or three hundred people. There’s a main street with maybe a grocery store, maybe a library, or maybe you have to go eight miles away or maybe not. It just the small tiny little community. There are so many communities that used to be this small that no longer exist. There’s a lot of communities throughout America that no longer exist. They’re just a wide spot in the road with bushes growing up around the houses. Everybody’s moved to the city. What’s holding these little communities together still? How it is that a little community like this of 200 or 300 is still clean, thriving, and neighborly? Are they all related to farming? Why does this little community continue to persist at such a small level, where I’m having to have a middle school or a high school comprised of several different communities?

DJ Douglas: Well, unfortunately, the population is shrinking. We’ve got a fair few houses for sale and that sort of thing in town. So, as much as it is holding together, it is not quite as strong as it used to be. A lot of it is distant family, people that are cousins at some point in time or married into other families. So everybody just kind of knows everybody. That’s a big draw to it. But when oil kind of took a bit of a dive, we lost a lot of business around here. That was one of the big industries. Between farming, cattle, and oil, that’s what basically employs the majority of our community and our area. Now that’s sort of slowed down, the whole community is, I mean, it’s still doing all right. They just did our hall, which is nice. They’re supposed to be renovating our water plant. We’re supposed to be getting RO into the whole town. So there are some things that are improving, but in general, we are slowly shrinking, it seems like.

Ramsey Russell: Do most of the young people leave for jobs, for employment opportunities? Is that what’s happening? I still see some young people, but not a lot of them. The number of young people I see walking up and down the streets would be like in my own little neighborhood in Mississippi. It’s a very small community, but it’s very tight-knit community. But it’s a very small community and so is it continuing to, as young people grow up and need gainful employment, do they just go to bigger cities?

DJ Douglas: I think that’s a part of it, opportunity and, you know, they want to do a career that’s not available here. Because, like I said, unless you’re looking at oil fields, farming, or ranching, there’s not a lot of options.

Ramsey Russell: To your point, you know, we were talking about this next community over here. You’d go and cook there at the hotel, and there might be seven people, there might be 17 people. But either way, that’s hardly enough to keep the lights on.

DJ Douglas: Exactly. I mean, it was doable there because they were attached to the bar. So we had the restaurant side and the hotel bar side. The bar would still make some money, and the hotel rooms still made some money. But it was very inconsistent. You just never know. Then the way these small communities work is you see somebody you haven’t seen in a while’s truck parked in front of the place, and then you pull in so you can eat and visit, and then the next guy does the same thing. It is kind of neat that people still get together for coffee and meals sporadically when they see, somebody they haven’t seen for a while. It’s nice that we still have a couple of coffee shops around here, but they’re hurting as well. Business everywhere seems to be down. Everybody, I think, is doing a little bit more of what we were saying earlier, cooking at home, just because, well, you can go out, but if you can save the money right now, everybody’s pocketbook is a little tight, I think up here.

Ramsey Russell: The way economies work is everybody in the community is swapping money. The baker gives it to the candle maker, who gives it to the butcher, who gives it to the gas guy, who gives it to the restaurant. And it just keeps trading hands like that. The smaller the community gets, the harder it is to prosper unless you’ve got some major input, like you say the oil companies coming in.

DJ Douglas: Yeah. And when we had two fairly large oil businesses that kind of went by the wayside here, I think the one probably would have employed about 30 people. That’s a large percentage for a community of this size, 450 people, where you’re looking at 7% of the people just at that one business, If there’s 30 guys working there.

Ramsey Russell: What does it mean for a company, especially a company like Prairie Limits, to come in? They bought a vacant building in downtown, renovated it, opened it up to the public, and employed a lot of the local citizenry. That’s got to be a good thing for the community.

The Difference of Eating Locally Sourced & Hunted Meat

Are all you all’s meats sourced locally like that?

DJ Douglas: It is a good thing for the community, for sure. I think there’s maybe a few people that are a little jealous that they didn’t come up with that idea themselves. Other than that, it’s good for the economy. As far as  we do a fair bit of shopping. We buy our beef local. We bought a pig here local. We’re buying a fair bit of stuff from Texas.

Ramsey Russell: Talk about that. Because last year, last time I was here, not last year, I had to go home for an emergency, but it was the year before I was here. I met a father and his daughters, and they had raised beef, I guess 4H-type show beef. Brian buys it every year and feeds it to his clients. So it’s good for the community, but it’s an amazing boom-up sale for the clients because we’re getting good beef, really good beef. I guess the same thing with pork. Are all you all’s meats sourced locally like that?

DJ Douglas: Not all of it, but we’re trying to increase what we can do locally.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I think it makes a huge difference to eat a steer that was bought local. I was talking to a rancher down in Oklahoma, and he and his brother raised beef like this. Okay. And you want to talk about, you know, everybody’s seen that Yellowstone TV. This family’s the real, real hard-working American Dutton-type family, keeping the family ranch with hunting and fishing and beef production and lots of other cool things. And you know, one thing he said that just gave me a pause was like, if you buy, call them up online and buy their steaks, he can tell you what sale it was fed in. They know that cow. And it made me wonder when I go buy beef at Kroger or wherever I’m buying beef, I don’t know where in the f-bomb that cow came from or what it was fed or how it lived. I don’t know anything about it. It’s just meat because I’m being told, it’s meat.

DJ Douglas: Exactly.

Ramsey Russell: I don’t know anything about that. But whereas everybody listening, we go out, we hunt ducks, we hunt deer, and we hunt rabbits, we hunt all these critters, and we know exactly where that meal came from. It just, I think there’s a need for that kind of stuff.

DJ Douglas: There definitely is. There’s a lot of the population that’s completely detached from where their food comes from. You know, you can ask people, “Where does meat come from?” and they’re going to say Superstore or the butcher shop. And it’s sad but true how that’s kind of happened. Being again from the prairies, from out here, we’ve always had, Well, actually, when I was young, we raised elk. So I grew up eating a lot more elk than I did beef. When I was younger, that was another thing. That chronic wasting disease hit, and all of a sudden the markets for that kind of collapsed. So we slowly worked our way out of it.

Ramsey Russell: How is cooking wild game? Like you cooked that moose the other day, and it makes perfect sense that your family raised venison because you handled that moose perfectly. A couple of hunters had been through. They’d been moose hunting. They donated some moose roast to the, and man, that was so good. I couldn’t believe how good that was. It was tender. It was so amazing.

DJ Douglas: Yeah, for being round roasts, those were very nice pieces of.

Ramsey Russell: How did you cook those to get them like that?

DJ Douglas: Low and slow. For the first few hours.

Ramsey Russell: On the smoker.

DJ Douglas: Yeah, on the smoker. 180° for about three hours. Then I turned them up to about 250°. And once I saw that they were about 130° Fahrenheit inside, I pulled them out and just let them rest. They actually, they came up a lot more than I expected them to. They were a bit more well done but still tender and still lots of.

Ramsey Russell: I would not call mine well done. I would call mine medium rare with a beautiful smoke ring inside.

DJ Douglas: There was one of the four roasts that was more medium rare, but there were about three of them that were kind of more medium, medium well, I thought. But they were still pretty tasty. That’s for sure.

Ramsey Russell: That all jowl that kind of came out of it, you put it on top of it. It was just amazing.

DJ Douglas: That’s all very smoky. Very, very smoky drippings that come off that when you’re on the Rec Teq there.

Ramsey Russell: What do you do these days? You cook here for the season now. What will you do during the off-season?

DJ Douglas: Summertime, I’ve been grass cutting for the last few years. My dad’s got a little oil field business. We cut leases and basically cut the cattle guards and the signs and the culverts. Everything the tractor can’t get to is what I’ve been kind of doing. Gets me outside for the summer. And then come wintertime, I’m not 100% sure what I’m going to be doing this year. I’ve got a milk cow which kind of keeps me tied to the farm a little bit.

Ramsey Russell: A single milk cow?

DJ Douglas: Well, we’ve got one that I’m milking at the moment, but we’ve got three. We had a barn fire a few years ago, and I think that she was pregnant when that fire happened. I think she lost the calf, and she hasn’t got pregnant since. So we’ve got two cows and one that’s probably gonna be more burger here. If she doesn’t. If she isn’t looking pretty fat by spring, she’s gonna be.

Ramsey Russell: Are those Holstein cows?

DJ Douglas: No, they’re actually Jersey.

Ramsey Russell: Jersey cows. Holstein is a dairy cow too, isn’t it?

DJ Douglas: Holstein is a dairy cow. Jersey’s kind of known for their heavier cream production. Holstein, that’d be more milk but about the same amount.

Ramsey Russell: What are you doing with this milking cow or two? I mean, is it a pet project? Are you making cheeses creams, milks for consumption or what?

DJ Douglas: Yeah, well, right now it’s mostly personal consumption. I have been making cheese though, as something. I like cheese.

Ramsey Russell: I knew it.

DJ Douglas: Yeah, something that eats up some time. So I’ve done some cheddar, I’ve done some Manchego, it’s called Mozzarella, Gloucester, I’ve done. Yeah, I’ve been just messing around with a few different recipes on the cheese. But it’s one of those things you need a little time for. It’s good in the wintertime when you’ve got, you know, nice, it’s a tedious job.

Ramsey Russell: Something to keep you busy.

DJ Douglas: Yeah, it’s a, you know, warm the milk up, add the rennet wait for half an hour to an hour, depending on how fast it sets up, and then cut your curd, stir it for an hour, let it rest for 20 minutes, and then you might be, you know, having to adjust the pressing.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve never known a single person but you to make cheese. And I eat the heck out of cheese. But I did have a buddy back home. This was 20 years ago. He told the story, he decided he was gonna make some beer. And however you make it, he put it into each bottle and cap it to ferment to let it ferment do its thing. One night he woke up, he thought somebody was breaking in, and he walked out in his kitchen, and the whole place was covered in beer and pops blown up, and it was a mess.

DJ Douglas: I did the same thing with some rhubarb cider I was making a few years ago. So, yeah, you get your first fermentation happens, makes your alcohol content. Then you add a teaspoon or so of sugar to each bottle, and that’s what carbonates or ferments again, and you catch that carbonation. You get a little too much sugar in there, and you end up making yourself a beer grenade or a cider grenade. Basically, at some point in time, it’s going to ferment to the point where that bottle can’t take it anymore.

Ramsey Russell: I guess beef is beef, because I know you got, like, cows that are known for their dairy production, cows that are known, like Black Angus, for beef production or whatever like that. And I had a really, really good steak about two or three hours south of here with a friend of mine. He had bought it from a local Hutterite community. I went, and they had some amazing bacon. I made real, real thick bacon. I went down to buy a pack of bacon and left with a couple of T-bone steaks. It wasn’t till I paid for them and bought them, I’m telling you, I wouldn’t have bought these steaks had I known, even though I’d eaten one. It was good, and it was a Holstein cow. I’m guessing it was just an old dairy cow that wasn’t producing anymore, trying to make steaks. It was amazing. It was a good steak. A lot of fat content. It was a really good steak.

DJ Douglas: I actually haven’t tried eating any of my Jersey cows, but when we got that Jersey, it was bred, and it was bred with an Angus. So she had a steer, a half-Black Angus, half-Jersey steer, and that was some of the better beef that I think I’ve ever eaten off that smaller-bodied cow. Nice thing about a small-bodied cow is you can cut your steaks thicker, like a ribeye off of a great big 1,500-pound or 1,800-pound cow is going to take up your whole plate. You’re going to have to cut it fairly thin, and it’s still going to be like a 16-ounce steak. Whereas if you get a small, like 800-pound cow, you can have a nice ribeye that’s quite a bit smaller, but you can have a nice thicker cut. And they also were not grain-fed, just grass-fed with minimal, like some hay and a little bit of barley, just because I’d give the, well, its mom some barley just to bait it out for milking.

Ramsey Russell: Sure.

DJ Douglas: So it wasn’t really grain-fed. It might get a handful a day, sort of thing. But that was very well-marbled beef, and I think a lot of that might have to do with our winters up here.

Ramsey Russell: I can see that. Yeah, they need the fat.

DJ Douglas: Need the fat. I’ve also heard, when I was first looking into the Jersey cows, because I know about them for dairy production, but one thing I read is apparently they’re very popular in France. The retired Jersey, like a four- to five-year-old Jersey cow, apparently they’re known for fairly good quality meat.

Cooking for American Duck Hunters

We want to, you know, have nice homemade stuff for guys. 

Ramsey Russell: Mm. I want to ask you questions about cooking here at Prairie Limits. How does it differ cooking here for a bunch of American duck hunters versus cooking for local restaurants or theaters or something of that nature?

DJ Douglas: Well, you’re always doing buffet style, so you know what you’re cooking that night. You know how many people are coming in. You might not know the exact time based on how the hunts go, but you’ve got a pretty good idea of what’s going to be happening that night. Whereas if you’re in a restaurant, and if I were to try to have a menu for you guys where you get to choose this, that, the other thing, well, I’d need a full commercial kitchen to be able to do it right. So it’s nice because, like I say, we buy a whole cow, so you get kind of a limited number of steaks, roasts. you’re working your way through all of the different cuts. Whereas if you’re in a restaurant, you’re going to have a sirloin or a strip loin, whatever type of steak is on the menu, and it’s always going to just open a box and have the exact same steak every time. I get to play, right? Because as we’re using up these different cuts, I get to kind of put my own spin on stuff. I like it. I like knowing that I’m gonna be busy, that I have X amount of people, and that you’re not just kind of tucked away.

I do sort of, some days, like to have my space. If you’re busy and you’ve got a whole lot of questions coming in, it can get to be, you can get yourself distracted. So there is something I kind of miss out there.

Ramsey Russell: That’s one thing about it that I love about Prairie Limits, it’s an open floor plan.

DJ Douglas: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And so I can walk in and see what you’re cooking and ask you a question or two. But everybody does that. Before you know it, you’re trying to remember where you were with cooking.

DJ Douglas: Yeah. It’s not so bad most of the time. Yeah, it depends on the day. Sometimes guys have lots of questions. Sometimes you’ve just got guys, but one group limits out, so then they’re in there chatting, and you can get yourself distracted in a hurry if you’re not careful. All of a sudden, you’ve been talking for 45 minutes, and you’ve got something burning away in the oven.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

DJ Douglas: But other than that, there are a few things I miss about having a commercial kitchen, like a bigger fridge. That’s about my biggest grievance at the moment, there’s just never quite enough fridge space for this many people.

Ramsey Russell: They might need to tuck another fridge somewhere in there.

DJ Douglas: I’m trying to talk them into getting a sliding double-door cooler so a guy can put some leftovers on plates and stuff in there, and it’d be a lot easier for guys to see.

Ramsey Russell: That’s a great idea.

DJ Douglas: Yeah. We do a lot of, I mean, we don’t want to be running out of food, but you also can’t have too many leftovers. So we were talking about my soups earlier. I mean, a lot of my soups are, you know, whatever’s left over. I made a ham vegetable last week out of the leftover breakfast with some extra veggies added in, right? There’s a lot of freedom to do that sort of thing, too, because you’re not, again, you’re not making a potato bacon soup because the menu says you have a potato bacon soup. You’re making whatever soup you’ve got supplies for that day.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

DJ Douglas: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: I was going to ask you that, if you all had, like, a set schedule. Day one, two, three, day one, two, three or a little more fluid than that.

DJ Douglas: It’s a fair bit more fluid, really. I mean, we try to switch it up so it’s not beef two nights in a row or pork two nights in a row. We did do, like, my ginger goose that we were talking about earlier. I’ve made that a few times this fall. And just to save myself some work, we had two groups switching over, so I did a double batch of my marinade, double batch of sauce, chopped everything up, and we did it two nights in a row.

Ramsey Russell: Work smarter, not harder.

DJ Douglas: Yeah, exactly. I mean, that’s where having a bigger fridge would come in. There’d be certain things that I would, you know, instead of chopping onions every day, I’d start on Wednesday. I’d chop myself, you know, a gallon bucket of onion. Then, when I need onion, I just go grab out of the bucket, sort of thing. But we’re a little tight on space for certain things like that.

Ramsey Russell: There’s a real abundance of sugar and fat and cream. What I kind of just throw all together in the comfort food realm, your menus. And when you walk in this kitchen over here, or the kitchen space, that whole bar is 20 feet by 100 square feet of pastries and cookies and pies and desserts and brownies and cinnamon rolls. I watched somebody yesterday make, she must have made four dozen from-scratch homemade cinnamon rolls and wrap them up so people could put them in their pocket and take them with them or walk to the TV or go to the field. And it’s just endless. It’s all in the world you could possibly want. How important is that? Is that how you would describe, let me ask you, is that how you would describe comfort food? Is that what you’re going for at this place?

DJ Douglas: Yeah, basically. Brian said, like, how mom used to make a big meal, that sort of situation. So I guess it is very much. We want to, you know, have nice homemade stuff for guys. You could just be opening bags of cookies or, you know, have granola bars on the counter. But it’s just not the same. This year and last, this last spring, I’ve had Baker or Carla there that’s been coming in. She did all those cinnamon buns yesterday, and she made 10 dozen chocolate chip cookies that got eaten before they got put in bags yesterday with breakfast.

Ramsey Russell: I was hunting with those Tennessee boys yesterday, and they had a gallon Ziploc of chocolate chip cookies. And I just assumed they packed the bag for the rest of the trip. You know, it was gone.

DJ Douglas: Yep.

Ramsey Russell: By the time we were counting geese, I kept hearing plastic rattling. They were passing it all up and down the chute line. It was gone.

DJ Douglas: Yeah. Well, again, when they’re fresh and hot out of the oven, you’re good to go.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right. One of the most impressive things I’ve noticed here is portion size. Twenty-five people, there’s never a lot of leftovers, but you’re never going to run out. How do you allot? I mean, do you do some kind of math in your head and say, well, I’ve got 20 people tonight, plus the guide staff, boom, I need this many pounds of meat, this many pounds of potatoes? Or you just got this gut feeling for it?

DJ Douglas: I mean, I look at trying to have about 8 to 10 ounces of protein per person, depending on what the meat is.

Ramsey Russell: There you go.

DJ Douglas: So, yeah, like last night, I figured we had about 34, I believe, with all the stuff.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

DJ Douglas: So I look to have about 8 to 10 ounces per person. That night I had 20 pounds of meat out. And it turned out I thought we were going to be a little lower on pork, but no, we still had a pound and a half, two pounds left, which is plenty for another four people to eat. But yeah, it depends on the crowd a little bit. I told Brian if we get too many guys from the South, just, you gotta let me know. Tell me that there’s going to be 30 if there’s only going to be 25. We had one group here a couple of weeks ago that were big, not real big breakfast eaters, not really as hard on the cookies as some groups but, oh my, when it came to supper time, oh yeah, they kept me busy, that’s for sure.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, you know, everybody’s got their own little thing. And I’m going to get around to asking you a question about breakfast because, to me, breakfast is done right here. But, you know, I’m that guy. I’m kind of heavy toward the proteins, you know what I’m saying? And there’s a lot of guys that are heavy on the potatoes and gravy. And a lot of folks like, you know, we want it all. And there seems to be, just to me, that would make it daunting, hard to please. It’s like if you got three kids sitting around the table every night and they all are three different types of picky.

DJ Douglas: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: You know, so you gotta cook more food, more different kinds of food. And it’s hard, you know, rather than just everybody eating the same thing. It makes it tough.

Eating 20 Pounds of Goose?!

Ginger goose can be a funny one. You don’t know exactly how hungry people are going to be on the goose end of it.

DJ Douglas: Yeah. Well, I mean, between, again, about that 8 ounces or so on your starch, and same with the vegetable, same with the potato, you end up having about a pound and a half of food for everybody, which seems like it should be plenty. And 90% of the time, it is once in a while, things get a little bit tight, but then there’s always a little bit of leftover from the night before, that sort of thing. If the guides need to eat something different, some of it’s by count. You know, like the chicken thighs, I try to have two per person, plus an extra dozen for a group this size. Not a lot of guys eat more than two big chicken thighs. Yeah. Ginger goose can be a funny one. You don’t know exactly how hungry people are going to be on the goose end of it. I’ve had a couple of nights with that that have been nearly, nearly ate me right out of 20 pounds of goose.

Ramsey Russell: Well, that’s because it’s so good, D.J. It’s like the time I ate your ginger goose. I came back for at least two more helpings, and I hadn’t been hungry. I was just eating it because the flavor, it was so satisfying, you know?

DJ Douglas: Yeah, I guess that can be a problem sometimes, too. You make it too good, and it just gets eaten up on you.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Breakfast done right. I’m an egg guy. I just love eggs. And you thought I was kidding yesterday when I came in and pointed to six or eight of them and said, I’ll take those. And that was my breakfast. But, you know, you’ve always got a spin with yesterday egg off the griddle. Eggs your way off the griddle. Today was more of a scrambled egg. And, man, you started with the tortillas and you roll them up there, and you got just pounds and pounds and pounds. And you got hash browns and all kinds of toppings and goodies. But then you’ve always got the pancakes or the cinnamon rolls or the French toast or something, some kind of spin in that area, too. I posted up yesterday the crowd favorite was that pecan praline topping. T   hat just sounds Southern. Now, I’m gonna tell you that’s gotta be Southern inspired. And I posted up a picture, and my old buddy Greg Muda, they said, get me the recipe. I mean, just from seeing it, you know, so you always got a spin on something like that. I guess it’s just kind of how you keep everybody happy and everybody going.

DJ Douglas: Well, and try to make something homemade, too. I’ve done a bananas foster-style sauce as well for French toast, which I think I’ve done banana foster sauce twice, and that pecan bourbon caramel sauce twice. And the pecan bourbon caramel is just more popular, so that’ll probably get done.

Ramsey Russell: That would be good on anything, though. Anything. What inspires you for these recipes? Where do you come up with these ideas? Are you talking to clients, and you hear somebody from the South, you hear somebody from New England or California, whatever, you go, I’m going to put a spin on that? Or does that just all kind of come out of yourself?

DJ Douglas: Actually, I worked at a place that had a bread pudding with a pecan bourbon caramel sauce. I’m not really using their recipe, but I just know the flavors go together. It does go to the stuff you –

First Impressions of Canadian Food

But there are some good cooks out here, that’s for sure.

Ramsey Russell: You use a smoker very, very well. You use it every time I’m up here. I just got to tell you the story. It’s been a long time, but, you know, my first impressions of Canadian food 20 years ago were completely unimpressive. I’m coming up there to goose hunt, and I’d eat. Was the way I looked at it. The way I told clients, just remember, you’re going there to hunt, not eat. And I got a job banding waterfowl over near Quill Lakes one summer, and we drove all the way up on government time, and we were banding, and we went to dinner one night, the first night, and my buddy Don ordered ribs. This buddy. Oh, he ordered ribs. And he said, and I ordered something different. He goes, you didn’t order the ribs? He said, I thought you loved ribs. That’s all you talked about up here. That’s all you ate on the way up here. I said, yeah, but I don’t smell smoke. I just want to see what they’re bringing out. What they’re calling dry ribs is what they were calling dry ribs back home, is a dry rub, no wet sauce. I just want to see what they bring you. And if they look good, I might start ordering them. And when they brought it to him, it was in a little, like, French fry basket with a paper lining. And he said, no, I didn’t order the fried shrimp.

DJ Douglas: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And they go, well, that’s your dry ribs. And what it was, was it was like the little meat slivers out between the ribs, the little meat line in between rib bones that they had cut into little nuggets and breaded and fried.

DJ Douglas: Yeah. Lots of times they do those. And it’s not even ribs. They call it a dry rib, but it might be like a shoulder roast or something that’s cubed up as well. And it’s not.

Ramsey Russell: I didn’t eat ribs all summer.

DJ Douglas: Yeah, it’s not a rib, but it’s something like a chicken wing. You think about it more like that.

Ramsey Russell: More like a chicken nugget than a rib. You’re cooking real stuff out here on these smokers.

DJ Douglas: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: So it’s almost like in the last 20 years, Canada, maybe because of the Cooking Channel or something, has really come full force.

DJ Douglas: I still have a hard time going up to the city and finding stuff that’s good quality consistently. But there are some good cooks out here, that’s for sure.

Ramsey Russell: What are the real, if you were going to print recipes on note cards to hand out to clients, because, you know, for example, I was at a hunting camp in Louisiana and they had a bacon, candied bacon, and I asked for the recipe and she smiled and opened up a drawer and she had a million of them printed out. She said, everybody asks for the recipe. What is it you cook here at Prairie Limits that you would readily make those recipes to hand out? What are the real crowd pleasers here?

DJ Douglas: For the most part, that ginger goose is the one that everybody wants the recipe for. And I’ve tried to write myself a recipe out for it about three times now. And what happens is I write the recipe out, and the next time I go to cook it, I just try to follow my recipe and I always have to tweak stuff, especially if you’re using the fresh ginger. It can be a big change between batches. Same with soy sauce. There are a lot of different brands. And dark soy sauce, light soy sauce. If you’re not using the same product, you’re going to have different results, like sriracha sauce as well. There was kind of a shortage of the popular sriracha sauce, and so you’re switching up brands and you can get stuff that’s completely different. So a lot of it for me is I go by taste, and I’ve got my ingredient list, but it’s very much a taste and try to find a balance. You need enough salty and sweet and acidic, and that all comes together. You get it balanced right, and you’ve got something that, you know, like you were saying, you just want to keep coming back because it’s so satisfying if you get your flavors mixed right. So, yeah, basically, the ginger goose and the marinade I do for it are both very popular. And another. I’ve done some smoked duck and goose breast as well. Really marinade, which is pretty simple. It’s Frank’s hot sauce, Worcestershire sauce, lime juice, some Slap Ya Mama, and honey. And I’ll marinate in that for a few hours and put it onto the smoker at 180 and try to pull them off at about 125, 130, so that they’re rare, medium rare. And it’s one of those ones that I don’t know if it’s the Worcestershire and lime that really helps cut the game out of it, but guys will eat that even cold. And most of the time, I’m not a big fan of cold duck and goose, but that stuff, it does turn out fairly good.

Ramsey Russell: Smoked duck is one of the best ways to eat smoked duck and goose. It’s just something about it. And I guess you leave the skin on when you do that.

DJ Douglas: I didn’t know.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

DJ Douglas: I mean, if a guy, you could, I guess, take the time to do that, and it would probably be pretty good. I’ve been told by a few people I need to try making a goose pastrami. And I think if I were to do a goose pastrami, I’d want skin on it.

Ramsey Russell: Absolutely. I think I’m going to reiterate that your skills on the smoker out here, that would be, oh, man. Just for appetizers or something. I’ve got a buddy down in, I’ve got several friends down in Lake Ohio that make that kind of stuff. And, man, it’s amazing. What a great way to eat goose.

DJ Douglas: Yeah.

The Kitchen: The Heart of a Hunting Camp 

Everybody’s excited to talk to you. To me, you gotta be able to go in the kitchen. 

Ramsey Russell: You know, DJ, I appreciate you. I know you’ve been busy. You fed us all this morning. You got to feed us all again this evening. But I just wanted to bring you on board because, you know, to me, to me, like I said, starting off, the ducks and the geese were a given. When you show up on a hunt, this morning was foggy, so it wasn’t a hunt to end all hunts. But it’s like I told Dylan as we were packing up, I said, man, I have been on a lot worse hunts in a lot better conditions than this right here this morning. It was an amazing hunt, as far as I’m concerned. But that’s the given part. It’s the everything else part, you know what I’m saying? The hospitality, which you’re very, very good at. I don’t know how you keep so much going in the oven and on the eyes and on the bar and everything just flying off the shelves and going and keeping everybody, boom, straight on time, keeping everybody so well-fed and so happy. And people want to come up and talk to you because it is. You know, it’s funny how, it’d be totally different if that kitchen were in a separate room. Out of sight, out of mind. But, you know, the kitchen kind of is the heart of a hunting camp.

DJ Douglas: Yeah. Everybody’s excited to see what they’re gonna get.

Ramsey Russell: Everybody’s excited to see it. Everybody’s excited to talk to you. To me, you gotta be able to go in the kitchen. So, anyway, I appreciate the time. Appreciate you coming on. Tell us your story. Are you ever gonna do a cookbook? I keep encouraging you to do it. I think you should.
DJ Douglas: Yeah. At some point in time, I’m gonna have to try and get myself something together for a cookbook. I don’t use a lot of recipes, so everything that I do, I’ve got to basically start, I think, filming myself. And guess what I’ve thrown in.
Ramsey Russell: We talked about that the other night. You know, that. That to me, like you say, a lot of the television shows don’t have any educational value. And, man, I just really think a YouTube channel like yours that you could totally do on your own would be. Would be amazing either in social media or YouTube. Just going through the steps and rigmarole. You know, I do read recipes. If I’m going to make, I don’t know what. I know what. Here’s a prime example. Red beans and rice. I follow a recipe. I look at it. Here’s what goes in it. But I don’t look at the measurements. To me, this much or this much is more or less, and I just adjust it to flavor. I put a lot more sage in it. I put stuff in it that they don’t call for, but it is a good thing to look at to get me started.
DJ Douglas: Yeah, I should know the guy’s name. He’s one of the kind of founders of the classic French cooking. I think it’s Escoffier. One of those guys had a cookbook that is kind of an old, like, would be late 1800s, early 1900s. Famous cookbook that, again, it’s all ingredients, no amounts. There’s a little bit of technique, and there’s the different list of ingredients, but there’s no amounts to those ingredients. And that’s sort of how my cooking goes most of the time. I know what I put into it, but the amounts are up to. What do you like? Do you like it a little spicier? Do you like it a little sweeter? You can tweak things cookbook 01:12:06
Ramsey Russell: I think you ought to write a cookbook like that. Don’t you think it would be of great benefit to guys like myself or anybody listening to have a cookbook? I think most real cooks add a little bit more, take a little bit less. We just need to know the basic gist of what goes in there in some form of proportion.
DJ Douglas: Yeah. Yeah. It’s something I might have to start working on this winter when I got some more time.
Ramsey Russell: I wish you would. I really do wish you would. I think everybody, everybody. There’s 30 people in this camp house, and I’ve heard every single one of them talk about how good the food is. That’s why it’s important for me to have you come on and just meet with you a little bit, introduce you to the world. And because it really is the heartbeat of Prairie Limits, beyond the trigger pull, is Chef DJ. Thank you, Chef.

DJ Douglas: Thank you.

Ramsey Russell: Folks thank you all for listening this episode of Duck season Somewhere podcast from Prairie Limits Outfitters in Saskatchewan. You’ve been listening to my buddy DJ. That stands for Douglas James, but we call him Chef DJ. See you next time.