Tag: venison

The deer corn popped out of the truck-mounted feeder looking like small fireworks as the headlamp reflected on the moving corn, creating the illusion of tiny tracer fire piercing the pre-dawn darkness over the empty field. By light, the field would host deer, javelina and maybe a hog.

The truck turned back onto the sendero and mud smacked in the wheel wells. The persistent drizzle caused the endless arrays of prickly pear to glisten. The only creatures moving out of the brush at this moment were little rabbits. That would change.

The truck moved on, shunting from one sendero to another, pausing at a gate, crossing a power line right of way and pressing down another road. Upon arrival, the truck was parked out of sight from the crossing. Up in the blind, the hunter and guide got situated to wait. Go ahead and chamber a round now.

First, three does. A few javelina. The big cream-colored, black polka-dotted wild boar returned from the day before. A 10-point buck showed up. Young bucks followed.

The people waited for a candidate for a guide’s choice. This category is a notch down from a management buck, which is a tier down from a trophy buck. In Texas, landowners, such as ranches, can apply to participate in a state-run wildlife management program. These hunts are handled differently than regular hunts in which hunters use the tags on their hunting licenses to document what they harvest. The management hunts are documented separately under the managed lands deer program.

At this particular South Texas ranch, which has cattle as well as oil and gas, the deer hunts are split into categories and priced accordingly (see guide’s choice, management and trophy above). Ultimately, the objective is to maintain a healthy population of deer with a range of ages and the right proportion among gender. At this ranch, they do not want to harvest bucks under the age of five-and-a-half to give the population a chance to flourish. The first time I hunted this place, the guide’s choice I took turned out to be an eight-and-a-half-year-old buck. The wildlife biologist noted that beyond that, it’s hard to tell because the teeth get too worn down to gauge anymore. He added that it was me, the hunter, or the coyotes that was going to get him and better me than the coyotes.

The day before harvesting this particular buck, we spotted him while scouting a third hunt location. He took off into the brush, but the guide got a good look at him and deemed he qualified as a guide’s choice. This morning, after a couple of hours of hunting, this particular buck came into the field. He took note of a 10-point we’d seen the afternoon before and moved in to attempt to nudge it away. As he walked out, I prepared to shoot.

For a moment, I might have had the shot and got ready, but he leapt into the pen surrounding a feeder, leaving a hog-wire fence between me and himself. (A bullet could hit the wire and miss the deer). He noshed for a good long while and popped back out. I prepared to shoot and then the big white hog disturbed him. Back into the brush he slipped.

We waited with the hope he’d come back out. Eventually, he did, apparently to address the 10-point buck again. He walked out and toward me in the blind, head on. He moved swiftly and certainly. He turned as he progressed after the other buck. He was closing in and I was going to lose my angle. I had to adjust on the fly. Bear in mind, that when we practice at the range, the target is stationary. Hunting is not like that.

The moment came. I had a clean shot in my scope. I took the shot and, mortally injured, he turned for a moment into the road and then into the brush, his antlers visible and after a few seconds, he was down. We waited 20 minutes to go in to get him. I paused with him, said thanks for the chance, the success and the meat.

At check in, he was scored at 126 B&C (Boone and Crockett scale). It was determined, again, by examining how worn down his teeth were, that he was about six-and-a-half years old. The guide removed lymph nodes and packed them in a plastic bag to ship to Texas Parks and Wildlife for them to check for Chronic Wasting Disease. CWD has been detected on a limited basis, fortunately, in other parts of the state, but it’s important to collect data.

These deer live wild on a beautiful ranch with low fences and look very healthy. We are very much looking forward to eating the venison. The ground meat can be used in a variety of recipes – basically anything you’d use ground beef with and can enjoy without all the fat from beef. Venison is lean and delicious. Personally, I love making meatballs with venison (with extra egg whites to bind them).

The backstrap is amazing grilled with a rub of olive oil, salt and pepper. Or, you can cook it in an iron skillet with butter and herbs. There’s nothing quite like toasting your partner with a glass of Pinot Noir and biting into venison you hunted. You know where it came from and, therefore, why it tastes so, so good. If you have the opportunity to hunt, take it.

The Sage Leopard, thesageleopard@gmail.com

When you think of hunting and the great outdoors, do you think of ginger curry with venison meatballs? How do these things spring from my brain?

I have had the benefit of living in Houston, Texas the last 10 years and Houston is home to a lot of Asian cuisine as well as hunters. I’ve always liked Thai curry and the sort of Indian-inspired curry you might find served with chips in an Irish pub.

Curry meatballs served with cilantro

I never really went out of my way to get curry until I had the privilege of spending a month in Singapore. I quickly became obsessed with all the different Indian and Thai curries I could get my hands on. Some nights I would decide to eat light at dinner time, head to the hotel with a yogurt, sit quietly in the room and hear the voice of a green curry down the street calling out my name.

The curry was in a food stall stacked along an alley with a nice smattering of cuisines. The worst was the time I opted to order a Tiger beer from the bar a step from the curry stall only to remember that alcohol is almost prohibitively expensive in Singapore. Once the curry addiction was set, I found myself ordering it all the time at lunch back in Houston.

Then, a British expat friend came to visit and she made an Indian curry. Next, my boyfriend’s father remarked that eating a curry once a week is healthy. I started experimenting. The beauty is you can make it up as you go along and not go wrong. Still, I was truly inspired by a Bon Appetit recipe I bookmarked. The picture is mesmerizing due to the rich, deep orange color of the curry.

Using the immersion blender on the curry sauce

Now, here is the key distinction: I used ground venison to make my meatballs. Venison from deer I harvested last January. I have come to love venison because it tastes good, is satisfying without being filling, Because it is lean, you need to add more egg to bind the meat into balls.

The second departure from the recipe I recommend is using a food processor and most definitely not a blender to puree some of the initial ingredients, such as the scallions. (UPDATE: I just made this a second time and used an immersion blender in the cooking pot. See elaboration below.*) First thing first, review the ingredients and decide what you will use and need. The magazine recipe called for 2 pounds of ground beef. I wasn’t about to commit 2 lbs. of venison to an untested recipe and opted to try it with 1 lb. Thus, I needed to cut this recipe in half.

Meatballs:

• Olive oil
• 3 scallions
• 1 jalapeno
• 3 garlic cloves
• 1 inch ginger root, peeled (I used the full amount)
• 1 tablespoon (just used juice of 1 lemon)
• ½ tablespoon garam masala
• ½ teaspoon ground coriander
• ¼ teaspoon ground cumin
• ¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 1 lb. of ground venison
• 2 eggs (I always use 2 eggs per pound of ground venison)
• 1 ½ tablespoon plain yogurt
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt

Curry sauce:

• 1/8 cup olive oil
• 2 onions (I used one red, one sweet)
• 5 garlic cloves
• another 1 inch chunk of peeled ginger
• 3 dried chiles de arbol (oops, I used 3 instead of 1 ½)
• 2 tsp. curry powder
• 2 tsp. ground cumin
• 2 tsp. ground turmeric
• 1 ½ tablespoons ground coriander
• ½ teaspoon black peppercorns
• 1 14.5-ounce can crushed tomatoes
• 1 bay leaf
• ½ tablespoon Kosher salt

Adding curry spices to onion and garlic

Recognize that if you halve the recipe, that always throws off things. In other words, when you adapt a recipe, you make it your own. I used the full amount of tomatoes instead of half because what am I going to do with half a small can of tomatoes. Also, I had to add water to the first step because the ingredients did not blend. Then, I had to strain that mixture to get out the extra liquid. Toward the end, after I used the outboard motor to blend the sauce (an immersion blender), I found the taste too spicy hot and added a can of lite coconut milk. The result was an outstanding tasting curry with more volume than needed for the meatballs. The excess sauce was stored separately and eaten with toasted French bread for lunch.

*UPDATE: I just made this again, this time the full recipe with 2 lbs. of ground venison and a 28-oz. can of diced tomatoes. To better bind the meat, I used half a sleeve of crushed Ritz crackers. I also swapped out scallions for sweet onion and skipped the dried peppers. I also used Meyer lemon juice (we have a tree).

Try it!

Cheers,

The Sage Leopard

If the idea of cooking with venison makes you want to run for the hills, then you may be thinking of something other than the way I cook with this lean, delicious and versatile meat. Only once did I regret a venison preparation and it was because I used seasoning purchased in an outdoors store.

Pasta with ground venison, tomatoes and sautéed eggplant

It certainly sounded appealing with fennel and orange, but whew, something else in that seasoning mix overpowered my meat. The only way I can describe it is it seemed like a lumberjack time traveled from the 1950s to sneak into my kitchen and give my meal a manly musk. In other words, don’t use someone else’s spice rub. I like to cook venison in Italian food (more on this below), in Asian dishes and by itself with a little olive or sesame oil and salt and pepper. It can also be marinated in buttermilk before cooking. Here is what I love about venison:

• It tastes better than beef
• It’s leaner than beef
• It’s great in recipes that call for beef
• I hunt it and therefore know where the meat came from, where it lived, what it ate and that it does not have any hormones or anything else suspect injected into it
• Vacuum-packed venison keeps well in the freezer for a long time

My boyfriend introduced me to venison as a staple. I had no exposure to hunting before we started dating and now view it as an important perennial activity to stock our freezer. I’ve added venison chili and venison meatballs to my regular cooking repertoire. Plus, having a stash of meat gives me the freedom to experiment. When we take the deer meat into the processor, we order a mix of steaks, ground venison, tenderized meat and a variety of sausages. Well, the Hatch chile sausage was out of this world hot and I wanted to figure out a way to cool it down.

Sausage balls

I thought I could make sausage balls by removing the Hatch chile meat mixture from the casings and folding in sour cream, egg and breadcrumbs. I started cooking the sausage balls and all seemed to be going well. But, even as I gently turned them, the sour cream I used to counter the spicy heat of the chiles made the sausage balls too soft and we ended up with what we called “Happy Accident Hash.”

Happy Accident Hash served with veggies and refried beans

I think I’ll make that again because it turned out to be delicious! Usually, I make meatballs with just plain ground venison mixed with egg, parsley and breadcrumbs, which are then browned before cooking through in homemade tomato sauce. To depart from that regular recipe, I recently opted to brown the ground meat in a pan where I had first sautéed eggplant. While letting the eggplant and meat drain on paper towels, I then cooked canned tomatoes in the pan and brought everything together to serve over spaghetti with freshly grated cheese. Here is a third and very simple example of a venison meal that came together very easily with the following steps:

• Defrost venison steak
• Prepare macaroni and cheese casserole with canned veggies
• Chop and sauté red cabbage

This recipe from Southern Living was jotted down from an old copy at my grandmother’s home back in the ’90s.

My boyfriend seasoned the meat with sesame oil, salt and pepper. I had made a standby cheese casserole from an old Southern Living recipe (it’s called Jack in the Macaroni Bake from 1994, which I have hand-written out but cannot find online) and also sautéed the chopped cabbage in sesame oil.

Venison steaks with red cabbage and mac-n-cheese

I finished off the cabbage with liberal splashes of malt vinegar. Next thing you know, we were enjoying delicious steaks, veggies and comfort food casserole. I cannot think of an easier way to cook meat and the most satisfying thing is knowing where it came from. This is the beauty of field to table cooking.

Cheers, The Sage Leopard

If you told me 10 years ago that I would celebrate my birthday by going deer hunting in Texas, I would have laughed at you. In January 2006, a career change that was in the offing was not yet on my radar as the position I would ultimately transfer to in Houston was not yet posted. By July of that year, I moved to Texas and began to explore a bunch of new things. In 2009, I met my boyfriend and he ultimately introduced me to hunting. I had only tasted venison once before in Washington, D.C., and thought it was terrible. In retrospect, that meat was probably not properly prepared. The first time my boyfriend served me venison, I sliced off the tiniest piece, about 0.5 cm square and delicately took that bite. Surprise: it was good. Venison is a very lean protein and versatile as well. If you are finicky about meat and where you source it, then hunting is the best way to know exactly how it was harvested, cleaned and processed. Some people process their own venison, but we take ours to a trusted processor. As our hunt approached, our freezer reserve of meat was getting low, which provided extra motivation. We were drawn in a state wildlife management hunt, which specified gender and number of deer allowed to be taken. Ultimately, we went home with three does. Even if we had not succeeded in the hunt, we would have deemed it a good outing. We got to sit in the peace and quiet of the woods for hours at a time over three days. We set up camp next to a lake and were thankful for our propane heater as the temperature was in the 40s overnight. We realized our old non-stick skillet was rusting out so it was time to recycle it as the local scrapyard. We sat by a campfire each night, chatting with another hunter, who turned out to have a really interesting job and shared our love for dogs. We exchanged recipe ideas with a hunt volunteer. We counted our blessings and stored all our memories of this trip in our grateful minds before returning to Houston. Knowing we had replenished the venison vault, I took out the last two pounds of ground venison from last February’s hunt in Laredo and browned the meat. It was time to make chili. Lately, I have experimented with my own spice mix before adding tomatoes, but this time I returned to the most reliable and quite delicious Carol Shelby’s chili mix. Lest I start an argument over whether to include beans, I’ll leave that to your personal preference. We enjoyed the chili and sat around our patio firepit to recreate the warmth and happiness we took in at the campsite. In the morning, I walked the Sage Leopard on the bayou so he could pretend he was hunting too.