Looking forward to cooking for the most important ladies in my life

I wonder how many of you guys have ever cooked a full-on gourmet meal for your wife? How many of you were brave enough to do it before you were ever married?

Yes, I was that crazy.

It’s not like I had a lot of experience cooking way back then, I just wanted to try something different that I was pretty sure she would never fix and had never had. I also wanted to give her a positive experience with wild game since that hadn’t been a regular thing at her house.

I was duck hunting a lot at that time and I wanted to utilize those ducks. This was long before Google and Youtube had ever been dreamed of so recipes were either from a cookbook or magazine. Luckily I had a subscription to Outdoor Life and they featured wild game recipes each month.

I found one for Duck a l’Orange and decided that was where I needed to start this romance.

I shot a really nice mallard drake, plucked him carefully. I went to the grocery store and gathered up everything I would need and somehow I convinced her to let me roast the rascal in the kitchen at her apartment. It wasn’t that I was worried he would stink up my place, it was just that she had a bigger dine-in kitchen. With what I’ve learned about ducks over the years there was a definite risk this thing could have ended with fumigation.

It all worked out because I followed that recipe carefully. My sauce was amazing and my roasted potatoes done to perfection. I knocked it out of the park that night.

Later in the marriage I was to find out that she was actually the one getting the culinary blessing and not me.

Over the years I’ve teased her that if I had owned a microwave as a bachelor I never would have gotten married.

The only other cooking I did for her during our courtship was burgers and steaks on her little hibachi grill.

These days I do all the cooking and really enjoy doing it. Over the years we’ve held a few gatherings for friends and family at our house but not a lot. Seems like when we’ve had a big place to do it family wasn’t close.

This week at Thanksgiving the family will be fractured by first one thing and another so I will have the privilege of cooking for the two most important ladies in my life, my dear wife and my mother. If brother makes it back in time he could come bearing elk backstrap, so I’ll set the table for four and hope.

It should be a fun day and I know I’ll have fun in the kitchen and on the smoker. I’m so thankful for every year around the Thanksgiving table no matter where it happens to be.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

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