I fish 300 days a year so I can afford to hunt the other 65. Lately I’ve been hunting the Midwest the first three weeks of November and always try to make it home by Nov. 23, which is my daughter Brooke’s birthday right before Thanksgiving. In the Midwest I hunt for deer. I mostly hunt for big trophy bucks, but along the way I’ll take a doe to have venison to bring home for Thanksgiving dinner.
Before Thanksgiving dinner, my son Captain Jojo and I are normally on fishing charters while the girls are at home cooking, but when we get home we sit around and watch football before dinner. While watching football we’re eating Ritz crackers and slices of farm-fresh Midwest cheese and venison summer sausage prepared by our Amish friends. We’ll also lay newspaper across the table and crack some stone crab claws.
Being a fat Southern guy, I like most of my food fried. For years in the Florida Keys we have prepared a special surf-and-turf meal for our Thanksgiving family dinner. We like to have fried venison tenderloins and back straps with fried snapper and lobster and all the fixings.
The fresh venison, fish and lobster are prepared the same way. All three are all cut into finger-size chunks. The venison is fried in one pan while the fish and lobster are fried in another pan. All three meats are dipped in milk and scrambled eggs, then dipped in an Everglades seasoned flour mix and cooked in a pan using butter. The fish and lobster is fried with garlic and Key limes. The venison is fried with red onions and cilantro.
Our family members are “dippers” – we like to dip our meat and sauces. For our fish, I like to dip it in homemade cocktail sauce made with ketchup, mayonnaise, Key lime and horseradish. The kids and my wife like tartar sauce that my wife Ana makes special. For the venison my son likes a North Carolina-style mustard BBQ sauce. I dip my venison in ketchup and my daughter and wife like to dip in Sweet Baby Ray’s barbecue sauce. Everyone likes to dip the fried lobster in melted butter with garlic salt and Key lime juice mixed together hot.
Our fixings are normally corn on the cob, green beans, Venezuelan-style black beans and rice, homemade mashed potatoes and brown gravy. For dessert we like to eat my wife’s homemade Venezuelan flan and/or Georgia pecan pie and Blue Bell vanilla ice cream.
Most of this Thanksgiving meal has been a tradition of our Florida Keys family over five generations.
This year I spent 22 days hunting for a monster buck in the great state of Indiana. I came home on Nov. 22 empty-handed in the buck department, but did bring back a cooler of meat from a big nanny doe I took. I also harvested a couple trophy bucks in October in Sparta, Georgia this season, so our freezer was overflowing with venison for this Thanksgiving holiday. We’ve shared a lot of our venison with many of our Keys friends for this holiday season, and I hope they enjoy it as much as we do each year.
To book a charter with Ana Banana, call or text Capt. Joel at 813-267-4401 or Capt. Jojo at 305-879-0564, or visit anabananafishing.com.
