When I started rolling these out I intended for them to come Saturday as a suggestion for a snack to eat while watching football on Sunday. So this one’s late, by those standards. But be honest: Was there really any chance you’d have secured squab by Sunday if I put up the recipe on Saturday?

I doubt it. Squab is surprisingly hard to find given how delicious it is. More on the meat in a bit. Here we go — barbecued squab:

The photo is dark — the squab wasn’t really that badly charred. I chose to focus on eating the bird instead of lighting it appropriately.

You will need:

Squab
Salt
Pepper
Paprika
Olive Oil
Some sort of barbecue grill

Directions:

1. Have your awesome sister get you a whole thing of frozen exotic meats from Fossil Farms for Christmas. Plan to move on Nov. 1, and work toward eating the rest of the food in your fridge and freezer before you do. Find squab in freezer and be like, “hey, honey, you want to try squab tonight?” Thaw the squab.

2. Butterfly the squab and remove any giblets or other unappetizing items from the inside.

3. Brush olive oil over the squab, then lightly season it with salt, pepper and paprika. You could use more seasoning if you’d like, but from this angle it seems silly to overseason a meat you’ve never tried before. Especially, it turns out, this meat. You’re going to want to taste that.

3. Grill the squab over high heat, turning once, until it reaches an internal temperature around 130 degrees. It’s a small bird so it happens pretty quickly — I grilled mine for maybe 8 minutes, and as you can see it got a little charred on the outside.

4. Remove squab from grill using something other than your hands. That’s hot, fellas.

5. Eat it.

I have to be honest, I was not expecting this to be anywhere near as good as it was. Holy crap. It turns out squab, cooked medium-rare — and it’s apparently safe to cook squab medium-rare — tastes more like steak than it does chicken. It’s red meat, maybe a little more tender than most steak, and it comes in an appealing bird shape. My wife compared it to skirt steak, which was a pretty good call.

I know squab is a type of pigeon and I guess that freaks people out. But whatever, if we had chickens roaming our cities as pests I bet we’d be freaked out by eating chicken too. And I guess if you’re not getting it for a Christmas gift squab is pretty expensive. Seriously though, this is a really good meat. Start demanding it at restaurants and maybe we can get it on more menus.