Everyone should have a good recipe for wild boar….

Shouldn’t they?

It’s hunting season in the mountains (and everywhere else).

Our friend doesn’t hunt but the locals in the village regularly bring him a leg of boar or haunch of venison.

I bring him the celeriac whenever we visit…. For some reason, he can’t get celeriac in Spain.

Wild Boar Stew

32oz (2000gr) wild boar
1 liter red wine
2 cl gin
10 allspice berries
10 peppercorns
10 juniper berries
2 crushed garlic cloves
3 bay leaves
1 tbs olive oil
4 tbs flour

Cut the boar into chunks (done during butchering).  Crush allspice berries and peppercorns.  Put all of the ingredients into a large bowl and marinate 4 – 24 hours.
Drain the boar, reserving marinade.  Heat olive oil in a large dutch oven.  Add boar and brown well on all sides.  Add flour and stir. Add reserved marinade and spices to boar, stirring well.

Add:
500ml wild boar stock
4 carrots
4 parsnips
1 celeriac

Cut vegetables into large chunks and add to boar.  Cover and bake in a medium oven 2 – 3 hours.

Our friend lives in the mountains above Sort, Spain. Sort is nestled in a valley in the foothills, population around 2,000.

It’s a pretty little village with a park running through the center.

Everyone lives in apartments, as is typical of Spain (and Europe).

Sort is the Catalan word for luck.

In addition to being a center for white water rafting and hiking, Sort is also know for selling more tickets for the lottery than any other place in Spain – could be more than all other places in Spain combined.

This lottery office, according to our friend, sells half a million euros worth of lottery tickets every week in the lead-up to the drawing.

The lottery is the Spanish national lottery that has been taking place every year since 1812. The big drawing, El Gordo, or The Fat One, takes place just after Christmas.

There have been a large number of winning lottery tickets sold in Sort – maybe because there is such a huge number of tickets sold there????

The result is that busloads of tourists come into Sort every day for the sole purpose of buying lottery tickets.

And more winning tickets are sold.

Oh, speaking of busloads of tourists…. When we got to our friend’s village there was a tourist bus blocking the road – as in there was a bus on the road.  The road is not wide enough to get around a bus. Fortunately it was stopped by a barn so we could drive on the tractor path and get around it.

Neither we nor our friend could figure out how it got there or why it was there.  Even if there was no other traffic on the road we couldn’t figure out how it could negotiate the corners.

And there is nothing to do in that little village – not even a bar!

It was gone when we left 3 days later.

It had to be magic.