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When Joe
Rossi let his daughter Stephanie choose any dinner she
wanted for her 11th birthday, pizza and pop were the
last things on her mind. Instead, she requested
bacon-wrapped, seasoned duck with sesame teriyaki wasabi
sauce. Granting that preternaturally grown-up birthday
wish was no problem for Joe, whose freezer is packed
with the meat of birds, fish, and wild game, all
personally obtained on hunting and fishing expeditions
across North America and beyond.
A
businessman by day, Rossi, 50, of Peters Township, is
also host of “Joe’s Wildside Adventures,” a
self-produced hunting and cooking program that’s been
running on Fox Sports Pittsburgh and which will air this
summer on the national cable network, The
Sportsman Channel. Each
episode follows Rossi as he experiences a hunting or
fishing trip for the first time. While there’s no
shortage of such shows on cable these days, Rossi’s is
unique for two reasons.
First,
though he’s been hunting since he was a teenager
growing up in Beaver County, Rossi knows that he’s no
expert when it comes to hunting antelope in Montana or
caribou in the Northwest Territories. This gives the
show an everyman appeal, as Rossi’s reactions to what
he’s experiencing probably aren’t that far removed
from the way the viewer would respond in the same
situation.
Second, the
end of every show includes a segment on one of the more
overlooked aspects of hunting – how to properly cook
wild game. “My mom and dad were both outstanding
cooks,” Rossi says. “But when I would bring home
rabbits or pheasant or deer, my mom had no idea what to
do with it. She would cook it like a steak. But if you
cook a rabbit for 15 minutes on each side, you might
prefer to eat your own shoe.”
He began
experimenting with cooking techniques, and over the
years has become so good that now he conducts seminars
in game-cooking at Pittsburgh Sweetwater Cooking School
and has recently created his own line of wild-game
seasonings.
Stalking
Game in the Frozen North
Sitting in front of a large iMac screen in his home
office, Rossi reviews footage of a recent trip to Canada’s
Northwest Territories, just 150 miles from the Arctic
Circle and not far from where the History Channel films
“Ice Road Truckers.”
On screen,
Rossi stands in front of a lake telling the camera that
they’re waiting for a bush plane to fly them to camp,
accessible only by air or boat. Just as the words leave
his lips, the plane appears on the horizon and swoops
down toward the lake with movie-like timing.
Rossi pauses
the footage, swivels in his office chair and says with a
laugh, “That wasn’t staged or anything. My cameraman’s
eyes got real big when that happened.”
He’s
learned a lot in the two years since he first embarked
on the TV project. His day-job selling computer control
parts to power plants frequently took him around the
country. When work took him someplace suitable for
hunting or fishing, he’d often bring a shotgun or fly
rod. One such trip to Arizona led to contact with The
Sportsman Channel, which
expressed interest in Rossi’s concept. Soon after,
Rossi began taping programs with the help of a
professional filming guide, but learned to handle the
most of the technical duties himself.
The hunting
and fishing portions of the show have him fishing in the
tropical heat of Belize and stalking pheasant on the
cold plains of South Dakota. Each trip usually results
in multiple episodes. The Belize trip, for example,
spawned programs about bonefish, followed by tarpin and
snook.
The cooking
segments are filmed in the kitchen of Rossi’s McMurray
Road home, complete with special guests for each
episode. Often, this affords Rossi the chance to show
non-hunters that wild game can be pretty tasty if made
right. “You have to modify the way you cook the meat,”
he says. “Wild game doesn’t have any fat, so if you
cook it two minutes too long, you ruin it.”
In the
summer of 2006, Fox Sports Pittsburgh expressed interest
in the program and has periodically been re-airing the
13 episodes that Rossi has completed. A lineup of local
sponsors, from car dealers to sportsman’s supply
shops, has backed the show during its FSN run. The
Sportsman Channel will
begin airing “Joe’s Wildside Adventures” this
summer, with 26 original episodes and 26 reruns.
Love for the
Sport
On the walls of Rossi’s gameroom are the mounted heads
of various animals he’s hunted over the years. Among
the sundry species is one trophy that Rossi holds in
particularly high regard – the head of a 12-point,
750-pound bull elk from the mountains of New Mexico.
Shot from only 35 yards away, it took four hunters to
carry the divided carcass nearly a mile down to the
nearest truck. A woman attending the same hunting trip
shot a similar-sized elk a good three and a half miles
from the nearest road, requiring tremendous effort to
get the animal to the truck. “That’s the thing about
hunting,” he says. “The real work doesn’t begin
until after you shoot the animal.” It can be a lot of
work, but Rossi has a genuine love for the sport, and he
hopes that affection – and eagerness to find new
experiences shines through on his program.
His
long-term goal is to get the program on one of the major
cable networks like A&E
or Discovery.
“There are
so many hunting and fishing shows on now, but mine is
unique. A lot of guys want to be on TV as experts. I'm
just an average guy out there having fun and exposing
people to different parts of the country and the idea
that you don’t have to be afraid to eat that venison.”
The cooking
aspect of the show could be Rossi’s break into the big
time. In this age of celebrity-chefs, it’s not hard to
imagine a cable show and corresponding line of books
devoted to inventively preparing wild game. Already,
some industry insiders have told Rossi they like the
idea of flipping his program into a short hunting
segment followed by 20 minutes of cooking instruction.
People often complain that wild meat tastes, well…gamey.
But Rossi emphasizes that it doesn’t have to. A
well-prepared meal of venison or wild duck can be so
good that even an 11-year-old will love it.
“Joe’s
Wildside Adventures” airs on Fox Sports Pittsburgh on
Sundays at 12:30 p.m. until January. It starts on The
Sportsman Channel this summer. For
information, visit www.joeswildsideadventures.com.
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