Cooking in Technicolor

Hunting changed Jeff Benda’s perspective.

Like a lot of kids who grow up in North Dakota, he dreamed of leaving. And he did for a time, moving first to Minnesota and then to Florida to work in restaurants.

But Benda returned home for school. While wrapping up an education degree and making plans to move to Tampa, Fla., for his first teaching job, a couple of classmates invited him on a duck hunt. Soon after they took him pheasant hunting and then on his first deer hunt.

He said it was like the beginning of “The Wizard of Oz” where the world is black and white until Dorothy and Toto are swept away by a tornado and dropped in Oz.

“That is how I saw North Dakota growing up. It was just this bland black and white,” he said. “As soon as I went on my first hunt, North Dakota became color for me, just like when Dorothy stepped out into Oz and everything turned to color. I saw North Dakota differently and just fell in love with it.”

Benda hunted every chance he could. For work, he took what he calls a regular job and used his restaurant experience to open a catering side hustle. One day his wife challenged him to put a finer touch on the wild game dishes he prepared for her and their daughter.

“Make it like something you would serve at a catered event,” she said.

He accepted and moved away from chucking pheasants in a crockpot with a can of cream of mushroom soup and turning much of his deer into sausage. Soon he was researching recipes and creating his own. He followed wild game chef Hank Shaw on Facebook and posted recipes to Shaw’s Facebook group.

Justin Townsend of Harvesting Nature published one of his creations on his website. Benda started submitting recipes to Game and Fish Magazine and appeared as a guest on Townsend’s podcast.

While driving from Bismarck to Fargo, Benda’s wife suggested it would be neat if he could figure out a way to do the wild game cooking thing full time.

“I heard my wife say, ‘You should quit your job and go hunting and fishing all the time and cook wild game,’ so I did,” he said.

Now Benda runs wildgameandfish.com and has carved out his own unique space in the hook-and-bullet culinary world. In addition to the website, he teaches online wild game cooking classes that were fantastically popular during the pandemic. He is a frequent guest speaker and guest chef at a wide range of events, including the national Backcountry Hunters and Anglers annual Rendezvous. He runs the Wild Game Wednesday blog for Outdoor Edge Knives. And he hires out as cook, butcher and photographer for hunting parties.

Barker may be contacted at ebarker@lmtribune.com or at (208) 848-2273. Follow him on Twitter @ezebarker.