Groundhog day is one of the dumbest days of the year.
It’s the day of the year that we, for some unholy reason, look to a groundhog (ground squirrel, woodchuck or whatever we want to call them) and let it tell us whether we’re going to have six more weeks of winter or an early spring. Now, I’m not here to talk about the history—or even the illuminati conspiracies surrounding the holiday—no, I’m here to talk about how we eat those small, tasty, suckers that fuck up farms and drag out winter EVERY GODDAMN YEAR.
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It’s payback time, baby, and that payback is going to include a side of gravy.
Now, full disclosure, while I have eaten/cooked my fair share of weird food in the past I have never cooked or eaten ground squirrel. That said, I am not opposed to it and if you have some groundhogs for some eatin’, holla at yo boi.
OK, so you’ve gone out with your .22 (any larger caliber will just explode the poor thing) or your traps and you’ve gotten yourself some groundhogs. Nice work. Now you have to clean them—for you city folk, cleaning an animal is when you gut and skin it. According to a YouTube video, hosted by a man with a VERY DEEP voice, you should start by stringing it up upside down by its feet. You start at its legs and work your way down peeling the skin and the fat off the meat slowly and meticulously.
Now that you got the skin off, what do you do? Well, according to a step-by-step guide by Practical Self Reliance, you slice open the belly and carefully remove the organs—the amount will surprise you. Now, comes the most important part, you have to make damn well sure that you remove the stink glands.
“Groundhogs have scent glands that can impart an off flavor to the meat if not removed promptly,” they write. “The scent glands are small kernels a bit smaller than a pea just beneath their skin, located around the back, armpits and tail.”
OK, so you’ve cleaned your groundhogs and gotten about 2.5 lbs of meat per woodchuck—nice work, fam—the hard part is over! Now it’s time to cook them, whhhhhhhooooooooooooo!!!!
So a quick cursory Google search will do you well for recipes. One of the easiest I found involves is by Wildlife Recipes and it’s simply just fried groundhog. For this you will need flour, salt, fat, and the groundhog of course, so, simply you cut your groundhog up into bite sized pieces, boil them for an hour (if you haven’t removed the scent glands, this is where you’ll know) roll them in the flour and salt and fry em up—bonus points if you use the groundhog fat for the frying.
Another one, this time by the fine folk at Mother Earth News, is for the more adventurous of the groundhog eaters out there. It’s woodchuck pie and you’re going to need the groundhog meat, some carrots, potatoes, onions, and a pie crust. Boil your woodchuck meat for an hour and a half, and at the end of that add the veggies and let it go for another half hour. Now, drain that but keep two cups of it and chop up your meat. Take the onions, some butter and flour and start making yourself a stew, when it starts to thicken add in the broth, the other veggies and meat. Mix that together, throw it in the pie crust and bake ‘er up—BOOM, ground squirrel pie.
Now, you eat your fill of the groundhog.
There you have it, you’ve consumed some groundhogs—and you know what, if they called for six more weeks of winter, they deserved it. I hope you enjoyed our journey, my dear readers.
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