By Dennis Kellogg
Director of Communications
A wild game feed that has been a tradition for more than two decades attracted 450 people to the Curtis Community Center Feb. 18.
This is the 23rd year for the event, started and hosted by Father Bernard Kimminau, currently pastor of St. Patrick Church in McCook.
The meal serves as a fundraiser and a social gathering for his current parish and his former parish, St. James in Curtis. The dinner, though, brought in people from across the state, including North Platte, Broken Bow, Indianola, Cambridge, Lincoln, Omaha, Wahoo and Lawrence, to name a few. Bishop James Conley of the Diocese of Lincoln and several priests from the diocese also attended this year’s feed.
The draw is the quality and variety of the wild game served.
“We prepped 630 pounds of meat,” Father Kimminau said.
The 28 different entrees offered included antelope barbeque meatballs, venison Wellington mini bites, squirrel eggrolls, duck fingers, elk chimichangas, goose lasagna, moose tater-tot casserole and porcupine meatballs.
Father Kimminau said he gets the wild game from different hunters and various connections he’s made through the years.
The feed that now attracts hundreds started in a very small parish as a way to bring everyone together.
“It started in Morse Bluff years ago as a social gathering,” he explained, “because I had all this stuff in my freezer and I said, ‘I want to get rid of some of this, but I also want to get people together just to have fun.’
“And it went over so well we were like, ‘let’s keep doing this and let’s just put a basket out there for donations and see how many people want to come and experience it.’”
Then as Father Kimminau was reassigned to different parishes, the wild game feed traveled with him. From Morse Bluff, he took it to Dawson and then to David City. From there, he hosted the event in Curtis and this year put it on with the parishioners of Curtis and McCook.
“You get a chance to come together to have a fun night, raise a little money, and support the efforts of the Church, not only in the money that we raise but also in the efforts of people getting together and enjoying each other’s community and enjoying each other’s camaraderie. That’s the beautiful thing about it,” Father Kimminau said.
One of the traditions associated with the feed dating back to David City is the serving of a different “mystery meat” each year. People can sample the meat and then try to guess what it is. Father Kimminau said very few ever get it right and if they have, “usually they’ve cheated. Someone in the know lets them know.”
The unidentified meats have included musk ox, skate (a ray fish from the ocean), woodchuck, kangaroo, beaver, porcupine and fox.
This year’s mystery meat? Spam.
The evening also included a live and silent auction and a number of games. The theme of the event the past two years has been Mardi Gras.
That makes Dr. Robert Dugas feel right at home. The Louisiana native who is now a Lincoln doctor with Nebraska Orthopaedic Center helped cook for the feed for the third year. He first met Father Kimminau several decades ago when he repaired the knee he injured when he fell from a deer stand. A mutual friend mentioned the wild game feed to Dugas and he told Father Kimminau he’d come out and cook for him.
“I said, ‘So has anybody ever fixed alligator?’ He said, ‘No. Nobody ever has.’ So I went out and made an alligator sauce piquant. Sauce piquant means hot sauce and it’s kind of like smothered-down alligator. And that particular year, that was the only dish that they ran out of,” Dugas said. “So he started asking me to keep coming back. Because number one, he liked it a lot, and he said, ‘you’ve got to keep cooking that.’”
This year, Dugas made the alligator sauce piquant again, as well as a crawfish pasta dish. Dugas, a member of St. Joseph Parish in Lincoln, said he enjoys the opportunity to cook for the feed.
“I love to do it,” Dugas said. “My mom and grandmother were just fantastic cooks. We never went to restaurants when I was growing up because nothing was as good as we could get at home. I just kind of fell onto the wake of the boat and have done it ever since.”
Father Kimminau finds the planning and prepping for the feed enjoyable as well. Which is good, because it never stops.
“I will start prepping for next year’s game feed in about two weeks, in the sense of starting to gather stuff,” Father Kimminau said. “Like snow geese. You get them when they’re here. I know guys who hunt snow geese in the spring so I’ll try to get 20 pounds of snow geese from them somewhere along the line, and then this spring I’ll go out and catch a bunch of crappie and bluegill.
“Some of the guys run lines for catfish,” he continued. “Then next fall when hunting season starts, start gathering squirrels and pheasants and things like that. So collections for this thing probably happen 11-and-a-half months out of the year.”
Father Kimminau said some people at this year’s feed were already asking about the date of next year’s event, but he said that hasn’t been determined yet. Father Kimminau added the wild game feed has continued to grow and expand from its modest beginnings, but there will have to be some major adjustments if that keeps happening.
“If it get much bigger, we may have to tweak some things because right now we’re close to the capacity of the facilities we’re using,” he said.
The wild game feed has earned an impressive reputation and great reviews from those who have attended through the years. Father Kimminau said he doesn’t mind being known as the “game feed priest.”
“There’s St. Francis, the friend of animals,” he said, “and Father Kimminau, the fryer of animals.”
Courtesy photos
