Guide To Find (Or Hunting) And Preparing Your Own Roadkill

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Please Note: This is a tongue in cheek article. I do not recommend, under any circumstances that you should do anything in this article. The television show, Top Gear, poked fun of US Southerners by staging a roadkill experiment. They "found" a dead cow [actually, it had been dead for several days and died of natural causes]. Clarkson shows up in the camping spot with this poor beast tied to the roof of his car with juices dripping inside.

As an homage to the Top Gear gang [Richard Hammond, Jeremy Clarkson and James May] who have given such a funny view of all Americans, I have decided to include a report on how to deal with an amusing topic of what to do with your roadkill - how to find it and how to prepare it and what to do if no suitable roadkill is around.

Honestly, the thought of eating roadkill would be highly repulsive to the vast majority of Americans, even the ones who want cheese on everything. But suppose you were hungry and far away from the nearest store or restaurant or there was some crisis that prevented you from getting in your gas guzzling Hummer and your poor legs could not carry you farther than 3 blocks to the nearest fast food place, then what would you do?

If you lived out in the vast, wide open country which make up 90% of the US, then you have plenty of opportunity to pick the finest animals around to hunt down manually, but not always the best roads to get them until you head for the Interstate. All the rest of the city slickers have to rely on construction crews driving out populations of indigenous creatures into their new home - the streets, although the variety is poor. From what I have seen in the UK, it is closing in fast to beat the US in that last method, so it would be better to stretch your search of better variety of kill in France or Spain whilst on holiday.

Finding roadkill is easy. Go in your car or take a hike along a busy street near where animals live. You don't want to get just any poor animal who met its unfortunate fate with the front end of a car. You want something that still is in a fresh pool of its own blood, minus the flies and maggots. Look out for others after your spotted item, if they would eat roadkill, they may eat you, too.

Of course the search may take a bit of time and if you are an impatient person, you will want to speed up the process. Go to your local nature preserve area and have a friend scare out the fauna into the road where you can run them down yourself. Good creatures to mow down would be the deer, cows, elk and other huge beasts. Birds and other small creatures don't have that much meat to share with a large party of drunken rebels on the pickup truck.

When you go after the big beasts to mow down with your truck, choose the dumbest member of your group to hit your target and reduce the population of the members we do not want to reproduce offspring.

As soon as you find the animal which will eventually become dinner, take a huge knife and cut it from the throat and down the middle in order to bleed it. If it is a huge beast, you will need to ask several friends to help you raise it over your shoulders so you can all participate in the blood bath.

With your fresh, or nearly fresh kill, scoop it up and place in the bed or the pick up truck or on the roof of your car, just make sure you line underneath with plastic garbage bags to contain the oozing goo.

When you get to your pit area to feast on the poor beast, you will have a bit of work to do. If by campfire, chop down all the trees and use about 1% of the wood you cut down to make your fire. Dig a big hole and place in the wood then douse it very liberally with gasoline, toss in a match and run! If preparing by kitchen, open all the windows to air out the smell of death whilst getting all the tools needed to prepare your meal.

With birds of all sorts, you will have to pluck all the feathers off. Using a pair of pliers will speed up this process. Shaving the thing will only leave you with bits of stubble in your food. Of course, you could always take a knife and separate the skin from the bird and take all the feathers with it, but everyone knows the skin is the best part and you would only end up mangling the meat in this manner.

Other animals have the fur issue and you will have to get them out of their skins. Take a huge, sharp knife and cut down the side of the beast from head to hoof and from the center incision, peel the knife underneath the skin and go around to the backbone from both sides. Use the skin to make clothing so nothing is wasted and you will have a cool object for vegans wanting target practice.

Now you are stuck with a naked piece of meat stripped of fur and feathers and blood drained. What to do next? Pull out the parts that only drunken people will eat on a dare (you know who you are) - the brains, heart, kidneys, liver, tongue, intestines.... If you happen to be quite plastered, put all of those parts into a stomach with some onions, oats and whiskey and boil it for hours.

Cut up the meat to pick your favourite parts and season according to taste whilst you put them on your campfire spite or in a nice baking rake of your cooker. Cook them only as long as it will take to get to your preferred degree of rareness...about 3 minutes. Then enjoy the fine, blood streaked juices of the meat as it slides down your throat. Watch out for pieces of bumper that might still be imbedded. And don't forget to add some cheese with that!

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