Fun and Traditions

I’m not sure that I ever mentioned it, but we have a tradition in our household that when someone has a birthday, the birthday boy or birthday girl gets to choose what is made for dinner. Monday was my wife’s birthday, so she was given that option.

This is sort of a big deal because her birthday falls so close to Thanksgiving when we have a feast. In years when her birthday actually falls on Thanksgiving or just after, she doesn’t have much of an opportunity to choose a birthday dinner. It would be too much of a hassle to cook a feast and a special birthday meal and it would tend to be wasteful. So this year, with her birthday several days prior to Thanksgiving, I wanted to make sure she was able to choose.

Somewhat frustratingly, when I asked her what she wanted, she said, “Surprise me.” 

I set out to do exactly that. I’ve mentioned all the meat my nephew, Tanner, brought us. One of the items was ground moose and I knew that Ella had never tasted moose before. It is likely that most people reading this have never tasted it, either, and I simply invented a new recipe for the ground moose. I’ll be sharing the recipe later since it should also work with ground beef.

Moose is substantially leaner than beef and the meal turned out great. Ella loved it. Surprisingly, beef has a stronger flavor than moose, but not as surprisingly, the flavor is quite similar to venison. After all, a moose is the largest member of the deer family. Again, I’m thankful that Tanner brought it to me and made the birthday tradition fun and different.

Note: What we call a moose is called an elk in some places in the world and what we call an elk is called a wapiti in those same places. The picture is of what I’m referring to here as a moose. The one in the picture isn’t an especially large bull. They get huge; literally as big as a horse.