[Announcer] This week on Bob Redfern’s Outdoor Magazine, Bob takes us on an awesome opening day turkey hunt in South Carolina. Plus, we take a look at South Carolina’s freshwater coast. And on this week’s Sportsman’s Table, we feature a South Carolina certified shrimp and grits recipe. All this and a whole lot more, and it begins all right now.
[Music – show open]
Bob Redfern: Well, folks, on this week’s show, it’s the opening day of turkey season here in South Carolina. And you know, 12 months have gone by. You end up the season dejected if you don’t get a bird. Bird hunting has gotten a little bit more tricky. And, you know, for most of you hunters out there, you know what I’m talking about. You’ve got predators, coyotes, all kinds of things. And then we go through the heat of the summer. We see some turkeys out there. Then you get into the fall season. It’s deer season. And what do you see most of? Turkeys, okay?
Bob Redfern: And from that, then after deer season’s over in January, here, then we start putting the cameras up. Or, some of y’all keep cameras up all year long. And you see the birds migrate in and out of the fields late in the afternoon. Well, as always here in South Carolina, we’ve got ’em on camera. I’ve been tracking these birds since January. And as seasons come and seasons go, weather changes, all kinds of wives’ tale stories about, “Well, have they already laid their eggs in January? Now they’re in the second mating season.” I don’t know. All I want to know is, I’ve got gobblers and they’re talking to me. At least I can track ’em when I get up early in the morning. And, well, we had that on the first day here.
Bob Redfern: And I tell you what. Well, I guess all of that amping up, all of that excitement, and I’ve got a new shotgun, I’ve got everything out, I got all the decoys dusted off and I’m ready to go. I’ve got my trusted cameraman with me. And you know, I’ll tell you what. A lot of folks say, “Well, Bob, how many turkeys do you kill?” Well, to me, it’s not about taking a bird. It’s about filming a bird. Yeah. And I try to make it so it’s entertaining for you all. But, again, I get a lot of opportunities to hunt. But when you get one and you can down a bird on film, that’s really the key.
Bob Redfern: And so, with this season that started, I, well, okay … I tell you what. As things come and go, we got out there early. First light, gobbles everywhere. And as you can hear, the whole area is lit up. Now, I’ve been tracking about 12 to 14 gobblers over the past six to eight months. And they’re out there and they’re talking to me. We got a perfect setup over the field. I got the decoys out there. And in comes a bird. Well, I just gotta tell you. Let me show you what happens.
Bob Redfern: Well, as you can see, I don’t get ’em all. Anxiety … I wanted the birds to separate a little bit. I didn’t want to take two birds with one shot. So, again, excuses? Nah. It’s about filming a bird and not downing a bird, okay? I really thought the hunt was over. I thought, “Okay. Yeah. You’re a little dejected. You missed the bird.” But on my defense, these birds are evasive, okay? And he got spooked a little bit. Little separation, again, as you can see.
Bob Redfern: But anyway, we took a break, started to reflect on what was and, again, what might be. With that, we come back, get back set up in the afternoon. I hear a few birds off in the distance. I thought, “Hmm. Maybe this afternoon’s going to be a little promising.” And again, had not had an opportunity to scout much in the afternoon. But we’re going to try it anyway. Again, it’s opening day. You’re out there. You’re all ready. And so you gotta start somewhere. And so we did. We sit down, give a little call. Got some answers. Waited a few more minutes, and about 45 minutes later, in comes a bird. Well, let’s take a look and let’s see what happened later that afternoon.
Bob Redfern: Got it. Oh, man. Well, folks, listen. I’ll tell you what. Turkey hunting opening day, it’s been an adventure. Birds talked a lot early this morning, been gobbling. This year, I’m on my own place, something I’ve developed here over the past year. Birds have been in this area quite a bit. I’ve been watching them, tracking them on game cameras. Again, opening day in South Carolina, it’s always exciting. Not much talking this afternoon. But with that bird right there, he just popped though the woods and I wasn’t going to let him go. Looked like he had probably, maybe a six, eight-inch beard. From what I could tell from here, just a little bit of a beard that’s been, looked like, pulled away.
Bob Redfern: Hey, listen. I have to give the folks at Browning a new push here. This is the new Browning Synergy Turkey over and under shotgun. What an awesome gun. It is just one of those shotguns that I’m very familiar with. Shooting an over and under, you’ve seen me do it with quail, sporting clays. But now, for turkey, all camo’d up, extended turkey choke tubes, three and a half inch. Again, the Browning Synergy, it is one of those guns that truly is the best there is.
Bob Redfern: All right. Let’s go take a look at this bird. I think he’s done flopping for a while. Oh. And I forgot to tell you about the new Browning turkey loads. Browning, the best there is in ammunition, three and a half inch, right there, number fours. And there be the wad. Okay. All right. Let’s lay this thing down here. Let’s see what we got here. Good spurs. Probably a good, oh, I’d say, at least inch and three quarters. Those might even go a little bit more than that. Nice, full beard here. But as you can see, what I thought initially he might have been a jake, but he wasn’t. He’s lost some of his beard here. And that’s a good probably six inches, maybe longer. But some of it’s broke off already.
Bob Redfern: Well, I know it was exciting for you guys. You’re probably going to ask the question, “Well, okay, Redfern. You shot twice.” Well, thank goodness that I had two shots. That bird, as you saw, came in, popped in, silent. Tried to think silent but deadly. He moved over to that decoy. He got spooked because, again, I was waiting long enough. Because, again, I wanted to see him strut a little bit more. Something spooked him. He turned and, as you always well know, when a bird turns his back to you, it’s going to be hard unless his head’s up. And that one, at about 72 yards, and I stepped it off, he turned his back. I popped the cap. It just bounced off. Lucky for me, I had that second shot in that new Browning Synergy over and under turkey.
Bob Redfern: And, again, we’ve talked about that. You’ve seen it on the show. It’s one of those things, that if I hadn’t had that second shot in that over and under, I would never, I don’t think, been able to have got that with either a pump or an automatic shotgun. I’ve tried that before. You all have known that you’ve missed a bird and you’ve tried to get that automatic up. I don’t care if you’ve got five rounds in there. But there was just something about having that over and under and that second. It was just more responsive. He turned to the left, up his head, and boom. And down he went.
Bob Redfern: With that, I tell you what, it was exciting opening day for me, one, well, I’ll cherish for the rest of my life. And trying to get a bird, well, it’s never easy. And even not even easy for us who do TV.
Speaker 1: When Bob Redfern’s Outdoor Magazine returns, we take a look at Bob’s top 16 locations of the Old 96 District in South Carolina, which is home to amazing outdoor adventures, a haven for history buffs, and the location of the most remarkable attractions and places of interest in the state of South Carolina.
Speaker 1: Bob Redfern’s Outdoor Magazine, brought to you today by the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources. Life’s just better outdoors. By Berkley … Catch more fish with Berkley fishing products. By Ranger boats, still building legends one at a time. By Browning Ammunition … Browning, the best there is. And by Southern Woods Plantation, a place where the grandeur of times past can still be experienced today.
Speaker 1: Chevrolet presents Bob’s Top 16 Outdoor Destination of the Week, a look at the best hunting and fishing destinations in the United States. Each week, Chevrolet will feature a new hunting or fishing destination in conjunction with Bob Redfern’s Outdoor Magazine and Bob’s Top 16.
Speaker 1: South Carolina’s freshwater coast was made for outdoor lovers. With over 100,000 acres of water, 2,000 miles of shoreline, six state parks all situated on water, and more than 150 hiking and biking trails, South Carolina’s Old 96 District, which includes Abbeville, Edgefield, Greenwood, Laurens, and McCormick counties, are perfect places to experience your next outdoor adventure in authentic southern hospitality. Fishing offers the angler many different bodies of water and various species of fish, from stripers, crappie, catfish, to largemouth bass. And for the shooting enthusiast, make sure you check out the Palmetto Shooting Complex at the National Wild Turkey Federation in Edgefield, South Carolina, where young and old can enjoy shooting sports at the 300-acre facility. And while in Edgefield, be sure to come by the National Wild Turkey Federation’s museum and headquarters.
Speaker 1: And if history is your passion, then the Old 96 District can satisfy that as well as many Revolutionary War hiking trails, historic homes, and vintage railroad cars. For information and travel info for the Old 96 District in South Carolina, go online at SCTravelOld96.com. For more destinations, be sure to visit BobRedfern.com and click on Bob’s Top 16. And to get to your next destination, go online at Chevy.com.
Speaker 1: When Bob Redfern’s Outdoor Magazine Returns, we take a look at Bob’s Top 16 locations of the Old 96 District in South Carolina, which is home to amazing outdoor adventures, a haven for history buffs, and the location of the most remarkable attractions and places of interest in the state of South Carolina. When we come back, we head to the Sportsman’s Table for another South Carolina certified shrimp and grits recipe.
Speaker 6: The Sportsman’s Table, brought to you by the South Carolina Department of Agriculture. Remember, buy South Carolina. It’s a matter of taste.
Bob Redfern: Welcome in to this week’s Sportsman’s Table recipe. We’re here at Frank’s Restaurant in Pawley’s Island, South Carolina. And my guest is chef/owner of Southern Comforts Restaurant, Greg [Metcalf 00:14:29]. And I have to tell you, Greg, thank you so much. I am just so amazed at what comes out of Pawley’s Island. And, again, you’ve got another great restaurant to come visit.
Greg: Well, I’ll tell you, Bob, I am impressed myself. Our family’s been vacationing down here for about 20 years. And my wife and I just moved down about a year ago and opened up Southern Comforts Restaurant and Bakery right down the street. We’d had a restaurant up in the mountains of North Carolina for several years, pretty much the same concept, but just wholesome food, freshly grown, as local as possibly can be. But I’ll tell you what. We’re the new kids on the block. And there are so many great restaurants in Pawley’s Island. That’s what drew us to open up a restaurant here.
Bob Redfern: Oh, wow.
Greg: To keep us on the cutting edge of what’s going on. And they certainly do it around here.
Bob Redfern: Well, what have we got today?
Greg: Today we’re going to do one of our specialties. It’s the shrimp and grits with our pimento cheese grits. We use an Ash County cheese out of North Carolina, and then our fresh, local shrimp that we just went down to the docks, Georgetown Independent Seafoods, I go to, or I go to the East Street Docks right down there to get our shrimp. It’s usually about twice a week or so.
Bob Redfern: Oh, great.
Greg: We’ve got some assorted peppers over here, some Andouille sausage, which, believe it or not, is a Lowe’s product here. But they make all their own sausages in-house.
Bob Redfern: I got you.
Greg: So we gave them a recipe and they make ours for us.
Bob Redfern: That’s wonderful.
Greg: It works out pretty good.
Bob Redfern: Yeah.
Greg: But we’re going to start off with this. And we don’t want to overcook our shrimp a little bit. So we’re really going to start off with our vegetables. We’re going to heat it up a little bit. We’ve got some butter in here, unsalted butter. We’re going to start off with the peppers a little bit, give it some color.
Bob Redfern: Well, you know, shrimp and grits, when people of shrimp and grits, they think of South Carolina.
Greg: Well, interesting enough, years ago, probably twenty-something odd years ago, I worked in Charleston. And it was my first experience of really southern cooking. And I had a lady out there that had been cooking all her life. And she was an older lady. And she taught me the shrimp and grits.
Bob Redfern: Oh, wow.
Greg: And, of course, people do it differently. In New Orleans, they’ve got the tomato broth. This is going to be more of a Cajun cream broth as far as that.
Bob Redfern: [crosstalk 00:16:10] I got you. How long you gonna cook the vegetables?
Greg: We’re gonna cook ’em. We’re gonna keep ’em al dente and keep ’em real colorful. But we want to get ’em going here a little bit for us. It’s probably going to take us just a minute or two to get those going. And then we’ll toss in our Andouille sausage. And we’ll do the shrimp last, actually, ’cause we don’t want them to be overcooked. A lot of folks will overcook the shrimp. And then it’s dried out and it just doesn’t give you that good flavor and texture that you need.
Bob Redfern: It’s like eating rubber. I know.
Greg: [crosstalk 00:16:29] Absolutely. Absolutely. We’ve seen that all over. That’s one of the nice things. You don’t want to ruin a good fresh product like that, either, as well.
Bob Redfern: That’s true. Exactly. If folks want to log on, tell ’em your website while you’re flipping, there.
Greg: I certainly can. W-W dot Southern Comforts Restaurant and Bakery dot com.
Bob Redfern: Oh, wow. There you go.
Greg: Like I said, we also run a bakery on part of the restaurant. My wife is the baker. She’s won awards for her carrot cake and her chocolate bourbon pecan pie.
Bob Redfern: Oh, my weaknesses.
Greg: Which is one of the biggest sellers. Absolutely.
Bob Redfern: Oh, my goodness.
Greg: Now we’re going to throw a couple big ones in there for some garnish.
Bob Redfern: You know, just the mixture of the sausage, just the vegetables, it has a great aroma.
Greg: Well, you know, interestingly enough, one of the first times I ever had shrimp and grits, coming from the Midwest, as you probably well know, grits only come with cheese.
Bob Redfern: Yes.
Greg: Or come with butter or ham. Nobody puts shrimp in their grits. When I was in Charleston 25 years ago, I said, “Shrimp and grits? What are you talking about?” We tried some and absolutely fell in love with it, to be honest with you.
Bob Redfern: But this is a different twist. It’s got a lot of color to it.
Greg: It is.
Bob Redfern: Yeah.
Greg: It’s got a lot of culture to it. And of course, you know, they’re using local products they have. And nice vegetables, and sausage and that all worked out well. And the grits, of course. You gotta have your yellow stone-ground grits, which we get out of Duluth Mills in Columbia, South Carolina.
Bob Redfern: There you go.
Greg: But I think, you know … And then we put our homemade pimento cheese in there, as well. So it has a little bit of a twist as far as the flavor is concerned. Now, we like lots of vegetables and lots of shrimp and lots of sausage in there, because it is a meal. That’s the one thing about shrimp and grits is that if you don’t put a lot of stuff in there, some people walk away a little hungry, more grits than they do the body of what’s going on.
Bob Redfern: Well, they’re not going to walk away hungry with this, boy.
Greg: Absolutely. Well, now we’re going to put a little bit of our chef’s salt in. We use a lot of the chef’s salt in the restaurant to season our steaks, burgers, seafood, the whole nine yards. It’s got ingredients of five different items, and we don’t tell anybody what it is. We’d have to kill you if we did. Just kidding.
Bob Redfern: I got you.
Greg: So it is secret. And then of course, our Cajun spice here a little bit. We also make that in-house, too. Everything we do is made in the restaurant. We don’t have a freezer. So we can’t buy anything in and just store it. Basically, what we buy in, we buy in by the day or a couple of days, and keep it as fresh as we possibly can. And then we make all our collard greens, the macaroni and cheese, the meatloaf and all those types of things every single day.
Bob Redfern: And that’s truly, uniquely, South Carolina.
Greg: It truly is. It truly is. There’s a lot of places that … Especially this day and age, it’s easy to get hooked on the pre-boxed stuff and so on. But the one nice thing about a lot of the restaurants here in Pawley’s Island that I’ve visited is that you can tell they do everything fresh.
Bob Redfern: I get you.
Greg: And especially with the qualified chefs that they have down here-
Bob Redfern: I’ll tell you what, I’ll help.
Greg: We’re going to take a second here and just heat up these grits real quick.
Bob Redfern: Okay.
Greg: Okay.
Bob Redfern: All right, Greg.
Greg: Well, we’re going to finish off with a little heavy cream.
Bob Redfern: Oh, wow.
Greg: That’s going to make it. Then reduce that down a little bit. Make it a little thicker for us, give us the good flavor.
Bob Redfern: [crosstalk 00:19:11] You know, it’s just amazing the compilation of all of those ingredients.
Greg: [crosstalk 00:19:17] Well, it’s a wonderful, colorful dish, too.
Bob Redfern: [crosstalk 00:19:17] that it comes down to that. Yeah, it is.
Greg: [crosstalk 00:19:19] is what I like about it. And it’s got everything you need in it. You got your meats and your vegetables and, of course, your fresh, local shrimp.
Bob Redfern: And, of course, our Adluh grits.
Greg: Absolutely.
Bob Redfern: This is truly a certified SC-
Greg: Yeah, I’ve really.
Bob Redfern: Grown and bred-
Greg: Grits are a phenomenal product to work with. We do grit cakes and jalapeno grit cakes and all kinds of good stuff.
Bob Redfern: [crosstalk 00:19:40] Oh, that’s awesome.
Greg: We’re going to go ahead and just come on off here.
Bob Redfern: Folks, if you want a copy of Greg’s recipe, just log on to BobRedfern.com. Click on The Sportsman’s Table and right there it’ll be.
Greg: All righty. And there we have it. As we call this nice little cream sauce in the south, we’re going to put some gravy on there.
Bob Redfern: A little touch.
Greg: That’s right.
Bob Redfern: That’s great.
Greg: Make it the way that we’d like it. I’m gonna wipe the plate just a little bit.
Bob Redfern: Presentation, yeah.
Greg: Yeah. We’re going to take these big ones here and put ’em right on top so people know.
Bob Redfern: That there’s actually shrimp in them there grits.
Greg: [crosstalk 00:20:16] Got some great shrimp.
Bob Redfern: There you go.
Greg: Yeah. I think they’ll find out as soon as they bite into it.
Bob Redfern: Yeah.
Greg: Of course, a little fresh parsley always never hurts. There we go. And there you have it, our local, low country southern shrimp and grits from Southern Comforts Restaurant and Bakery.
Bob Redfern: [crosstalk 00:20:26] Great. Thank you so much. I love it, man. Thank you for being a guest.
Greg: [crosstalk 00:20:32] Thank you, Bob. I appreciate it. It’s been a pleasure.
Bob Redfern: I appreciate it. And folks, listen. If you’d like more great recipes, just like you saw today, log on to certifiedscgrown.com and it’s a matter of taste. We’ll be right back here again next week on another great recipe on The Sportsman’s Table.
Speaker 1: If you would like more information on South Carolina grown products, visit them online at certifiedscgrown.com. Remember, buy South Carolina. It’s a matter of taste.
Speaker 1: Bob Redfern’s Outdoor Magazine is brought to you today by Chevrolet, the official vehicle of Bob Redfern’s Outdoor Magazine, by the South Carolina Department of Agriculture. Buy South Carolina. It’s a matter of taste. By Pennington Seed, the leader in outdoor forage products … By Browning … Browning, the best there is … By South Carolina Embroidery and Screen printing … And by Back Woods Quail Club, offering southern style hunting and an array of exciting and challenging clay target shooting sports …
Bob Redfern: Well, folks, I hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s show. Opening day turkey, it’s always an adventure. And it’s always an adventure for me. Again, we’re going to be out hunting the whole season. We’re going to have some more great shows coming up. Stay tuned, won’t you? ‘Cause Bob Redfern’s Outdoor Magazine’s going to show up at a destination … Well, it might even be near you. As I always like to say each and every week, the outdoors my passion. I want it to be yours, too. We’ll see you next week with another episode.
Speaker 1: If you’re looking for a new fishing or hunting location with a guide service that you can trust, make sure you visit Bob’s Top 16 at BobRedfern.com. Have an opportunity to fish or hunt with the same outfitters we do on the show each week. The outdoors is our passion. We want it to be yours, too. Visit BobRedfern.com and Bob’s Top 16. And make some outdoor dreams for yourself.