It's what's for dinner

Some well-meaning, generous soul gave my husband several pounds of ground deer meat. He is thrilled, of course. As he should be! If we were struggling through a long winter on the prairie in olden times, that gift of meat may have saved us from having to eat each other. I am not, however, a pioneer wife on the frontier, and I am severely lacking in recipes for deer pot pie, deer gravy, or deer flapjacks. Maybe if I put on a bonnet and churn some butter, something will come to me.

The following makes even less sense than Bolognese sauce using meat that has absolutely no fat. I'm all worried about where that deer came from. What kinds of things was it eating? Did it floss after meals? When I purchase protein at the grocery store, I don't give a thought to whether or not the animal ever had unprotected sex. Now that I have portions of deer in my freezer, I keep visualizing a tick-ridden deer lapping water from a polluted stream before being shot with lead bullets, roped to the hood of some yahoo's rusty pick-up truck, and gutted with last season's unwashed hunting knife.

Speaking of meat, I was licking the envelopes of my Christmas gift thank-you notes, and I fear I may have sliced my tongue on the last flap. I can't bring myself to check - the possibility alone makes me shudder - but I can't stop thinking about it.