EVENT: Wild Game Cook-off
WHERE: Greenspace near 50 East. Downtown White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia
WHEN: Saturday, November 2, 2013. 1-5pm.

Inaugural events are always exciting, interesting, and not surprisingly, often full of surprises. On Saturday, November 2, 1-5pm, WSS Main Street will host their first ever Wild Game Cookoff in downtown White Sulphur Springs. Whether you’re an active participant preparing your favorite wild dish for the masses, or sampling many of the day’s offerings, the event promises to be another great edition to the local community, and a palatable pleasure.

The Half Bad Bluegrass Band (pictured above) will provide the afternoon’s entertainment!

Live entertainment, by the likes of the talented and popular Half Bad Bluegrass Band, will surely lively up the crowd and energize the good vibe feeling of the event. Visitors to the event can pay a small fee of $15 enabling guests to the Wild Game Cook-off to sample each of the food vendor’s dishes. A small price to pay, especially considering the high cost and rising popularity of small portions of wild game in top notch restaurants worldwide.

First place wins a new hunting rifle, so sign up soon!

Certainly, one of the greatest advantages of eating wild game is the health benefits. Generally wild game is leaner than beef and pork and has about 1/3 the calories that other meats do, not to mention they have less saturated fat and cholesterol. Wild game meat is better for you than processed meats, and meats that have been raised on farms which have often been given hormones and steroids in order to make them bigger and meatier. Rest assured, the wild game that is harvested is additionally free of artificial preservatives, which is found heavily in our store-bought processed deli meats.

As if you needed an added reason to attend the cook-off and consider incorporating wild game into a normal part of your diet, wild game, which is readily available in our mostly rural countryside, is both economically and ecologically sound. With a small investment in a hunting license, taking advantage of crop damage and nuisance animal permits issued to local landowners and farmers, or gifted food from a friendly neighbor or outdoorsman, the financial cost in obtaining wild game is minimal. Wild game’s environmental footprint is also much smaller than maintaining, processing, and distributing domesticated livestock, and is one way to ensure your obtaining free range, organically fed food items.

The event’s tasty wild game offerings could range from fin, feathered, or furred animals. You may very well encounter the likes of alligator, venison, goose, dove, boar, wild turkey, bison, caribou, bear, trout, froglegs, …the list goes on and on. Be sure to sample all of the vendor’s selected dishes during the inaugural White Sulphur Springs Wild Game Cookoff, you may very well be pleasantly surprised what you fall in love with.

WSS Main Street is now accepting vendor applications, so if you are interested in setting up a booth at the event, please contact them soon! Email anne.bowling1@gmail or call 304.661.3778 for details. If you’re not cooking the game, come out to sample the recipes and enjoy some GREAT live music. $15 at the door gets you samples of all of the delicious recipes, a couple of drink tickets, and some great live bluegrass.

Click here to join this event on facebook.

– Craig Miller, LBSPY #44 (Oct 21-Nov 4, 2013)