awesome guys, I have gotten a couple new ideas here! alot of the stuff is what we already do with it, some have new twists. I hope you guys don't mind, but I'm copy/pasting the ones I really like and keeping them!
I got a really OLD recipe for turtle soup today from a lady who said her grandmother came up with it a hundred years ago. Give me a few to get it typed up and I'll share it here.
as per some of the questions, there is a STICKY regarding wild meat recipes, but it seems to have been abandoned/ignored hence myself posting this. I'd LOVE to hear recipes not only involving venison, but bear, boar, squirrel, rabbit... heck, anything you can cook! We do NOT have a hunters for the hungry around here, mainly because we do not have a licensed deer processing facility in our area. Funny thing, everyone who does come here to hunt ends up saying the same thing "you have more deer than anyone in the county here and you're the only one who doesn't want them around" haha. Our whitetail are generally pretty small here, never weighed one, but when my gal moved here from eastern north carolina, she joked about our deer looking like dogs
We most certainly eat everything we shoot here on the farm, and don't get me wrong, I AM thankful for all the bounty, but it does get old after a bit. Been trying to trade some off for beef, etc... but not had much luck. After over 2 years of deer being pretty much the only red meat we consume, I'm really looking for some new ways to cook the stuff!!! I usually don't shoot them during the hot months just because they're so hard to process and keep flies away, but it's about time to start up again...
OH, btw... here's something you fellas might not have heard of/done with it yet. I can quite a bit of ours in mason jars! works like a dang champ and WAY better than freezing, it'll keep longer and it's easier to prepare when you're ready to eat. I'll take some of the bones, boil them in a big stock pot to make a broth with LIGHT spices to taste (usually with a couple cubes of beef bullion too). You don't want to overspice it because that will make it harder to do different things with it later on... anyhow, after the broth is done, I'll lightly brown chunked meat, I don't cook it, just sear it enought to brown the outside over a high heat. Then I put the meat in the jars, add enough broth to cover it up (leaving enough headspace in the jar) and then pressure can it for the appropriate amount of time. When you go to use it in a stew, make a vegetable stew FIRST (using the broth from the jar). Then when the stew is actually done, dump the meat in. You do this because after canning it is VERY tender and will actually disappear in the stew if you try to put the meat in at the first. Works great, no worries about power outages, super easy to use, no thawing, and a good SHTF skill to have. You can use it in stroghanoff and plenty of other dishes where "stewed" meat would be called for. I find PINT jars are the perfect amount of meat for a decent pot of stew that would easily feed 4 folks for a meal.
