We would like to welcome UNP's new marketing manager, Martyn Beeny to his
first blog post. He comes to UNP from the South Dakota State Historical Society Press in Pierre, SD, where he was Marketing Director and Associate Editor since 2005.

The first week on the job is always a whirl, a shimmering
mirage, where you keep thinking you are grasping the nuances of your new job
and the wonderful people you are meeting all around you, only to realize that
you cannot actually reach out and grab it—the mirage is the idea that you have
any idea about what you are doing, of course.

You meet a lot of new people, you try to learn their names
as quickly as possible, you move things around in your new office; all things
you expect. What I didn’t expect was to find myself standing in front of the
stove after work this week trying to cook sautéed penguin. Ok, hold on. Before
someone writes to PETA and sends them my name, I was not actually cooking
penguin; that is illegal! And yet, I did find myself in front of the stove
attempting to replicate a dish from our recent title, Hoosh: Roast Penguin, Scurvy Day, and Other Stories of Antarctic
Cuisine by Jason C. Anthony.

Aside from the wonderful writing that describes so
eloquently the harsh cuisine of the Antarctic, Anthony included in his book a
selection of recipes from various points in Antarctica’s history. As I flicked
through the pages during that first, whirlwind week, one, that for sautéed
penguin, caught my eye. As mentioned above, it is illegal to kill/cook penguin,
but my mind instantly wondered if the recipe might be adapted slightly to use a
legal ingredient so that the modern reader might entertain himself (and
hopefully others) with fare from the south.

I don’t claim to be a chef, but I think I can follow
directions given in a recipe. That assumption led me to the aforementioned
position in front of the stove and to the photo diary below. Today, I shall feed
my fellow workers with sautéed “penguin.” We’ll let you know what they think!

Having traveled to Antarctica to spear my penguin (purchased
Cornish game hen from the frozen section in the local grocery store), I plucked
and cleaned it (defrosted it, opened the packaging, and removed as much meat as
I could!), and melted the butter. The original recipe in Hoosh called for a whopping four ounces of butter. I halved that.
I’m guessing that penguin meat requires a little more cooking than the rather
more fragile game hen I had substituted.

Continue reading “Need a dinner suggestion? Antarctic fare offers nice surprise”