I'm sure that nobody would mistake me for a five-star chef, but I’m not helpless in the kitchen either.
One of the things that anyone who reads this blog (which, of course, are darned few people) will already know is that I'm pretty feral, for lack of a better way to put it. An Agrarian and a Distributist at heart, I'd prefer a more agrarian world in every way, including getting as much as your table fare from the fields and streams where you live. I'm a lifelong hunter, but not a head hunter. That's the way hunting where I live when I was a kid. You hunted to put food on the table. I'm not saying that you can't and shouldn't put a trophy on the wall, or go for a big example of what you are after, but hunting is primarily for that.
Not only that, but it's the most honest and ethical way to put mean on the table. I'll truck no arguments from vegetarians and vegans, and others who would maintain a deeply anti nature view of the world. Hunters and Fish Hunters (fishermen) are the population that's most connected to nature, and part of the body of people who try to keep the plant livable for us all. Meat hunters and fishermen most of all.
Wild game, moreover, is the meat source that's closest to what we're evolved to eat.
If I could have my way, the vegetables we'd eat here would come from our own garden, and the meat from the fields. That is in fact partially true now, although I haven't put in a garden for several years as my well is down and, like a lot of things in my old age, I haven't gotten around to having it fixed.
Well, having spouted off. I'll be putting in some recipes here, an endeavor that was inspired by something recent that I'll keep off-line.
I'll note here in addition that there are some links below. I think these links are useful, which doesn't mean I've tried everything listed there. I'm not, as noted, a trained chef. The links are to sites by people who have a lot more food knowledge than I do.
My bonafides
Okay, so what, if anything, qualifies me to say anything about the topic of cooking wild game?
Well, quite a bit, really.
For one thing, I grew up eating wild fish and fowl, as well as wild leporids (i.e, rabbits).
My father was an avid outdoorsman. Unlike me, he inclined more towards fishing than hunting, but when fall came he switched from fishing to bird hunting. He started fishing in the spring as soon as you could, and then fished all summer, and into the fall He continued fishing basically until the snow flew, even after he started bird hunting. He didn't ice fish much, however, so he took the cold winter months off from fishing.
He started hunting birds when sage chicken season opened in the fall and soon started hunting ducks and geese after that, with an occasional mix of other birds as well. When I was old enough to hunt and fish, which in the case of hunting was five years of age, I started that. When I was just about that age, I started hunting rabbits as well.
My father had hunted big game when he was single, but some time after he married, he stopped for a while due to the pressures of work and having a small family. Also, in those days, hunting big game was more of an expedition than it is now, in spite of what people might think. When I was about 10 or 12 or so, however, he started again, probably as he had more time and I wanted to. At that time, you couldn't hunt big game until you were 14, so I had a couple of years of observational experience before I started hunting big game too.
When my father started hunting big game again, it was antelope. I don't recall him getting a big game license during my lifetime for anything else. But I did. I started hunting deer the same year I started hunting antelope, and added elk hunting as soon as I had the automotive freedom to do that. By the time I was a late teen, I was fishing in the spring, but switched to hunting as soon as the season was on, and hunted until the last of the seasons. I wasn't an ice fisherman at that point either.
Now, we were a family of three. And what this should tell you is that we were eating a lot of wild game. When I was born Catholics still had meatless Fridays every week of the year, and therefore we normally had trout for Friday dinner. We continued on with this even after it was no longer required, as we had lots of fish. My father froze fish so we continued to have them long after it grew too cold to continue fishing. And as this should also indicate, we ate a lot of waterfowl during the season as well as some other game birds. Once my father started big game hunting, and then I did, we had antelope and deer as well. As both my father and I took antelope, and I usually got additional tags, we had quite a bit of antelope.
So I grew up in a household were wild game was a staple.
That doesn't mean, of course, well-prepared wild game. My mother was an awful cook and that applied universally to everything. But my father was a really good cook and when she could no longer cook, my father took over. By observation, I started to learn how to cook wild game then.
To add to this, from 1983, when I graduated from community college, until 1995, when I got married, I lived pretty much exclusively on wild game. That's a period of 12 years, of course, which is a significant period. I didn't normally buy meat at the grocery store when I was a college student unless I flat out ran out of wild game, which would occur. And when I was first practicing law and living at home, I was bringing home a lot of wild game. When my father died, and it was my mother and me for a time, I did the cooking normally, and wild game it was.
Cook a lot of wild game, and you'll learn how to cook it.
An additional bonafide
My grandfather owned a packing house and my father had worked in it. He knew how to butcher meat. Watching him do it, I learned how to do it, although I was never anywhere as good at it as he was.
I don't like taking my game meat to a meat processor and for years I absolutely wouldn't. I butchered things myself. The pressures of work and life, and the fact that my wife didn't like me spending an entire day butchering, meant that I eventually relented, and I do now, and have for a number of years. I'd still rather not, but I have made that compromise.
I've butchered or helped butcher everything from rabbits up to cattle.
A note on wild meat and how not to ruin it.
Eat wild mean and sooner or later you'll hear somebody say they don't like it, as "it's gamey".
Taste is an individual thing. I heard one Marine Corps veteran of Afghanistan go long on praise on Afghan goat, for instance, which not everyone would, I'm sure. Some of that observation, "it's gamey", really means that the person who is speaking has only eaten grain fed American beef or pork. Grass fed beef, which is the kind we normally have here, tastes considerably different from the beef you buy at the grocery store or get at a steakhouse. Indeed, this is so much the case that if you get used to grass fed beef and then have the latter, it's a shock and not necessarily a pleasant one.
In fact Plains Indians complained, soon after they were bound to reservations, that allotment beef they were give was "sweet" and they didn't like it. Used to leaner bison, it tasted odd. And I can vouch for something similar. After over a decade of normally only eating wild game, getting used to store bought beef again was a bit difficult. I like beef, but to go from lean antelope and deer to fed beef was strange and I found I had a preference for the wild game.
People, I note, make similar complaints about lamb, once an American staple, and all sorts of people claim to dislike mutton, even though they mostly have never eaten either. I love lamb and I like mutton as well.
Which gets me next to this. Some people think they don't like wild game as the meat has been ruined by how it was treated.
You can ruin any meant, and the easiest way to do that is to not remove the heat from it.
The other day I was at the meat processor to drop off an antelope. I was stunned when I got there as the antelope I was dropping off was the only one that had been skinned. I can think of no surer way to make antelope gamey than to not skin it in the field. I can't imagine why people do not do this.
Learning to skin an animal is not hard, and its vital to do it.
When I shoot a big game animal, the very first thing I do is to bleed it by cutting its throat. This involves, I'd note, an element of safety as a person should never ever draw a knife towards himself. If you don't know how to do this, have somebody show you, least you slice yourself open accidentally. People die in the field cutting themselves with hunting knives. If its sharp enough to cut game, it's sharp enough to kill you. Anyhow, you shouldn't be running a knife towards yourself. I'm not going to explain how to do this as, if you don't know, you should have somebody show you so you don't slice yourself open. Bleeding doesn't take long, however, and it removes a lot of heat, right away.
After that, you need dto field dress it. I'm not going to explain how to do that either, but don't ever draw a knife towards yourself or put yourself in a position where you can get cut. Then you need to skin the animal.
The only reason not to skin an animal immediately is that you need to drag it to where you are loading it. Okay, that's a reason. But skin it as soon as you can.
On this, years ago I shot a moose in weather that was right at about 0F. We field dressed it and skinned it and loaded it in my 1/2 ton pickup truck. In spite of that, I still lost a little of it to spoilage.
I'm convinced that at least half of the claims that meat is gamey is due to the meat being absued. The rest has to do with odd occurances, unfamilairity, and bad cooking.
What I'm noting, by the way, applies to smaller game as well. When you shoot rabbits or birds, you really need to field dress them in the field. Rabbits should have their fur removed in the field, both to cool them down, and because they always have fleas. Birds are a little tougher call simply because sometimes you need the plumage to show game wardens what you have. Indeed, that can be true for big game animals in terms of their heads and other evidence of sex. Fish, of course, are easy as you simply remove their guts before you leave the stream.
Big Game
Okay, with all of that, we'll start on big game.
I'm going to really deal with two types of big game here, one being antelope and the other being Cervidae. Cervidae are deer, and that includes all types of conventional deer in the United States, as well as elk, caribou and moose.
This isn't to suggest, I'd note, that every Cervidae tastse the same. Far from it. But they tend to be more similiar than different for the most part. I.e., elk doesn't taste like mule deer, and neither taste like moose, but none of them are close to tasing the same as antelope.
What I'm not dealing with, therefore, are things like buffalo or bear. I'm not, as I have no experience with cooking either. I'm only dealing here with things I know.
Which brings up this. Save for moose, which is a very dark rich meat, every recipe I'll give here works for everything, but you need to keep in mind they are different by degrees. These meets have different characteristics, and a recipe that works really well with one meat, will be so so with another.
Antelope
Antelope hunter north of Laramie Wyoming, 1888.
North American Pronghorn are a unique North American animal in every way. Particularly associated with Wyoming, they are hunting throughout the West. They are a fleet foot animal with almost no fat whatsoever.
Fat, it's often observed, is what gives meat its flavor. It's also what gives meat moisture to some degree. And both of these reasons are why people will claim they don't like antelope.
Antelope cannot be cooked like beef.
It's easy to overcook antelope no matter how you are cooking it. Given the same length of time in the frying pan or on the grill as you do a steak, even a lean steak, and you've ruined it. That's the first thing to keep in mind about antelope.
The second thing to keep in mind is that its lack of fat means that it picks up the taste of any spice of any kind It's cooked with. And it can do so in spades. The fat isn't there fighting it.
This means that antelope is ideal for spicy cooking. It takes less spice than other meats. It also means that its a good meat to cut sausage with. A fatty sausage used for Italian food, for example, will go further with antelope and result in a less greasy meal that taste almost identical.
When butchering an antelope there's no reason, in my view, to save roasts or anything of the type. The entire animal can be cut for steaks and burger. That's about it. Having said that, the Hunter Angler blog has a recipe for corned antelope. I've tried to make this on a recipe for bear, well before I saw this recipe, years ago, and had it turn out to be a complete failure. Note the warning about picking up spices in spades. I suspect, I'd note, that if a person knew how to make sausage, which I wish I did, but which I do not, you could make good sausage with antelope.
A staple with antelope is fried antelope with green peppers and onions mixed in the same cast iron pan. I use olive oil for the fat. My father used to use bacon, which he'd fry first. It's excellent, but I haven't done it that way since I was in my early 20s. I don't want to buy the bacon to do it, and it's probably not the best thing for you.
This is an easy recipe. Two things to keep in mind. Antelope steak cut thing will fry up like shoe leather and taste the same, and don't over fry it.
I like my beef rare and I like my antelope the same way. That's me. I know there's dangers to eating anything rare, but that's me. Well done, however, which is how my mother fried everything, is not an option on antelope.
Friend this way, seasoned with seasoning salt and cooked all together, it's excellent. If you have a dutch oven to use as a pan, thrown in sliced potatoes for some variety.
It's excellent.
- Antelope Cheese steak Sandwiches
My wife developed this recipe. We like it so much that in the past couple of years when we haven't had an antelope, we adopted it for lean beef.
Fry the antelope cut appropriately think as shown below. Toast the buns on a frying pan with butter as the fat. Place the antelope, peppers, and onions on a grilling pan with cheese (Swiss or provolone) on top, and then place in the oven on the broilng setting very briefly.
A note, you absolutely have to watch the pan when its in the oven. Don't put it in there and walk off, check your phone, or whatever. You'll have a tremendous fire and burn your house down. This takes hardly any time at all in the oven, and if you ignore it, you'll have a disaster.
DON'T IGNORE IT.
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A person reading this so far might wonder if I have any cast iron frying pans. Well, I do indeed, and here you'll see most of them in use. Two small ones, frying onions and hot peppers, and two large ones, frying antelope steaks and bell peppers. These were the basic constituents for Philly Cheese Steak, Wyoming style.
The first time, I think, I've had all four of my cast iron pans in use simultaneously.
I must have originally also had photos of how to complete this, which involved toasting hoagie buns and then finishing things off in the oven. No cast iron there, however.
The Wyoming Cheese Steak
Everyone has heard of the legendary Philly Cheese Steaks, that sandwich made with steak, onions, peppers and melted cheese. People even debate which ones are the best, in those places where they're offered for sale. Well, a sandwich of that type can also be made from deer or antelope, so here we debut the Wyoming Cheese Steak.
Hoagie rolls are, of course, an essential ingredient. We butter them lightly, and then put them in oven on broil to toast them. Watch that carefully, and don't place the bread on the highest rack in the oven, or you'll have charcoal brickets instead.
Frying pan on the left contains sliced onions and green peppers, being fried in olive oil. On the right, here we see sliced deer steak (venison to those who prefer to use that name), but antelope, I think, works even better.
Put on the steak, onions, peppers and cheese (provolone works best, but Swiss will do also) and but back in the grill to melt. Taste great!
Antelope makes for really good fajitas, which is no surprise, as the original Mexican dish was made with flank steak donated to vacqueros after a beef was butchered, i.e., the toughest leanest part of the cow. They made a virtue out of necessity.
This is made the same way as any other fajita recipe is. Appropriately season the antelope with fajita seasoning. Fry but don't over fry. Fry the onions and peppers separately. Use chilies or Anaheim peppers if you wish. You can fry them all together if you wish, or if your diners prefer to build things very much separately, fry separately.
Or grill the meat.
This probably comes as a surprise, but I think the original Mexican dish involved grilled meat, probably grilled over an open fire. At any rate, we normally grill ours. If you do that, place the meat in a shallow pan and cover lightly with olive oil, and then season.
As you'll note about other meats below, this recipe works with deer and elk. It actually works better with them than it does with antelope.
This is chili con carne, obviously.
Antelope makes excellent chili con carne.
There are a million recipes for chili, and which ever you prefer, antelope works perfectly for them. Simply remember, it's going to pick up the taste of any spice more than beef, and when you fry it, it's very lean and needs some sort of oil to be used.
When I was young, at home, the practice of my father was simply to fry the meat, warm the chili beans, and mix that two. Frankly, this works as well as anything. It's excellent Chili. I always chopped some onions to place on top of it.
My wife makes a much more elaborate chili, which takes hours to make, and over the years I've adopted her recipe somewhat to my chili. This involves frying the meat, mixing in onions, mixing in stewed tomatoes in my variant, and letting it simmer for a long time. She always prefers to have Frito's top it along with sour cream, and I've come to prefer that as well.
For a variant of this, you can cut the antelope with Chorizo, which gives it a much different taste. I would never use 100% Chorizo for chili, and I wouldn't go more than 50/50 with antelope. As a practical matter, antelope chili in which Chorizo is used is Chorizo chili.
Another recipe that works great with antelope is stuffed peppers.
When I make stuffed peppers, I always use a Dutch Oven, so my cooking is adjusted to the longer times that cooking with a closed lid Dutch Oven requires. This should be kept in mind.
To prepare the peppers what I do is to chop up onions to taste, mix in with the ground antelope, and stuff it in the cleaned out peppers. I use bell peppers like most everyone else with this recipe for the most part, but occasionally I stuff large Anaheim peppers, which makes for a spicier dish. My dutch oven has a cast iron meat rack that I use when I bake something that drains. You don't need one, but I recommend one.
Remember to puncture the base of the peppers to allow for drainage. They will drain, and this is important.
I then put in the oven, with the Dutch Oven lid closed, at around 325F and bake for about two hours. You can check on things to see how they are going.
My wife prefers for cheese to be added on top of the peppers, and so usually we finish them off by putting Colby jack cheese on top of them briefly, and finishing off with the lid off. At that point in the recipe, you are basically done, so the cheese is only a finishing touch.
Bolognese? What's that?
That's the Italian meat sauce that's made with any meat and which tops any Italian pasta dish. If you've had spaghetti and meat sauce, you've had spaghetti with Bolognese.
Bolognese is easy to make and there are a million varieties of it. I have two basic ones, and they are basic, that I'll make.
One is simply to fry the meat, and in the case of antelope keep in mind its lean, and then mix in a purchased red sauce. Then let it cook for awhile. When I do this, I throw in onions either while I'm cooking the meat, or when the red sauce is put in. Just depends on your preference for fried over cooked onions. You don't need onions at all for that matter.
I do season the antelope when frying. If I have Italian Seasonin in the cubbard, I use that. I'll also tend to use some black pepper. If I don't have Italian seasoning, I'll use seasoning salt and black pepper.
Now, you can use an appropriate sausage for Bolognese, and usually that would be "Italian Sausage". Some meat processors offer "Breakfast Sausage" for wild game, and it works well in this role. I don't want somebody else's antelope or deer, so when I have sausage made I have it made by a packer who will use my animal for the sausage. They don't all do that.
Antelope makes good Breakfast Sausage for the reasons set out above.
Sometimes I'll use store bought Italian Sausgae and cut the antelope with it. Again, this is simply to have a more sausage like taste.
When I fry any ground antelope I use olive oil, which is otherwise perfect for this role anyhow. But if you use store bought sausage, it may be so fatty that you need no fat at all. When I fry things that I'm pretty sure won't require extra oil, I don't add it. When I do that, however, I always start off with a really low temperature sot hat some of the fat liquifies before I really get cooking.
Now, all this is with the store bought sauce. I don't make my own sauce, although I''m pretty sure it's not too hard. I have, however, subsituted canned sauce for the bottled saunce, and when I was growing up my parents used tomatoe soup for the sauce, which works fine. You simply open the can and mix it into the cooking meat.
Antelope Kabobs are something that my son brougth to the table and I wouldn't have thought of. We have a recipe for it in a cookbook around here.
The key here is to season the meat appropriately, which he did. I'll have to dig up the cookbook but the seasoning really adds a demennsion to it. Other than that, you simply prepare them the way you would any other kabob. You use a wooden skewer and add green peppers, onoins, and pinapple. I think the pinapple is critical for it.
Most of the dishes listed here involving tortillas are down in the venison section, this one is an exception as I feel that it works better with antelope. Some claim that this dish goes back to the Aztecs, although the description used to support that claim seems to me to more properly describe tacos or burritos. Anyway you look at it, the really early version of this probably were game recipes.
Enchilada differ from tacos and burritos, which we discuss below, as they're a baked dish, and they involve a bit more preparation. One thing you need is enchilada sauce, and I just buy mine. I prefer the canned sauce over the dry mix sauce, which you have to then mix to instructions, but either works.
With this dish, you fry the meat in olive oil while seasoning it to taste. I tend to use chili powder or paprika combined with seasoning salt, and perhaps its worth noting here that enchilada means "to season with chili" in Spanish. I like to fry my antelope for this dish with onions and green peppers.
While you do that, you warm the sauce.
You need to be really careful at this point as you don't want the sauce so darned warmed you burn your fingers making the dish, which is easy to do. I suppose that if you use the canned sauce, which is what I prefer, you might not need to warm it at all, which only occurred to me while printing this out.
You need a baking dish, like a casserole, at this point. You put a little bit of the sauce on the bottom of the pan. You then roll corn tortillas through the sauce and then put the meat in the tortilla. These are, we'd note, raw corn tortillas, not baked ones. Before rolling up, you put sauce on the meat. You then roll and put in the casserole. Once the casserole is filled, you pour sauce on top of the rolled enchiladas. You then garnish with cheese to top and then bake. I can't recall the temperature, but it's guaranteed to be on the can or mix for the sauce. They do not take long to bake.
Now, my wife makes a totally different enchilada recipe that's not even remotely like this. I don't know the recipe for it, but it involves one of the cream soups and diced canned jalapeƱos. It's very good but is a very heavy-duty meal. This isn't a light one, however.
Venison
Venison comes from the Latin world "hunt" and came over to English, via the Normans, in that form. Originally, when it was used, it meant a hunt, and any meat of any kind that you gained from hunting. Sometimes to our surprise it's the case that in older times food terms were very general, and this is an example of that. Another one is the world "apple", which in the Indo-European ancestral language meant any fruit.
Anyhow, venison, the word, fairly quickly came to mean meat from deer, as that was the big thing that the Normans were hunting in England. And that tends to be how we use the word today.
In this work in progress page on this blog, we're going to use it that way. The recipes listed here will work for deer and elk, and also for moose. They'll also work for antelope. Given that, where they're more appropriate for deer and elk, they're covered in this section, whereas if they're better with antelope, they're covered above. If they're about equal, they were probably covered above, but that will be noted here.
Any recipe we gave above for antelope will work for venison., so we're not going to relist those. That means there won't be much here on this list.
This was something that we picked up from a restaurant in Laramie when I lived there decades ago. The restaurant was The Overland, which existed down by the Union Pacific Railyard. It's now long gone, apparently, even though it was a popular eatery when I lived there.
The Overland had this dish on the menu, and they used farm raised venison. They'd have had to, for one thing, as it's not legal to sell game in a restaurant in Wyoming, and for that matter, most of the US. Fortunately, they're easy to make.
Shape ground venison into a burger patty (a little trickier to do if you've never done, but still not that hard). If your venison has been frozen, which it probably has been, and its into nearly burger sized squares, just slice through the square while still partially frozen, but be careful not to cut yourself. Keep in mind that your burger patty ought to be thicker than a regular hamburger patty, as venison is very lean, and it will shrink while being cooked more than beef will.
Place both sides on a plate or pan with olive oil very briefly and then season with seasoning salt.
You then fry or grill the burger. I like my meat rare anyway, but be careful not to overcook which is easy to do if you are used to fattier beef.
When close to done, put Canadian bacon on the patty. You should have fried or warmed this separately, but of course Canadian bacon is already cooked, and you really don't need to do much to get it ready. The next step is to put the cheese of your choice (I prefer Swiss) on and let it melt over the Canadian bacon. It's then ready to serve.
I like to toast the hamburger buns for this recipe, which I do just by lightly buttering them and toasting them on a pan, or by putting them on the top rack of the grill. Sometimes I'll put sliced onions on top of the Canadian bacon before I put the cheese on.
This is another recipe picked up from a restaurant, in this case an excellent bar and grill in Casper Wyoming.
Everything about the burgers starts off the same way as per the Mountie Burger. I.e., slicing, grilling, or frying, etc. While you are doing that, however, warm up some green chili. I don't know how to make green chili myself, so I always buy it. So what I'm doing here is pouring it into a pan and warming it up.
While also doing that, I fry eggs for the burgers. And you also must prepare onion rings.
I do know how to make homemade onion rings, but I haven't done it for years. They're not hard to make and they're much better than the store bought ones. Having said that, due to laziness or whatever, I tend to go with the store bought ones and I tend to bake them.
When you have everything ready to go, you place the buns on the plate opened faced. Like with the Mountie Burgers, I toast the buns. You put burger on the buns, pour the green chili on them, and hte top with fried egg.
It's delicious.
Burritos and tacos are a little better, in my opinion, with venison than with antelope. I've made and eaten plenty of both, but I prefer venison for this dish.
Tacos and burritos, rather obviously, are not the same dish, but I interestingly find some people do not make a distinction between the two. My wife, for one, doesn't, if she's cooking them, and if she cooks them with wild game, it's with venison According to one website that claims to be able to define the difference, the difference is thus:
WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A BURRITO AND A TACO?
The main difference between a burrito and a taco is the shell size. Tacos are generally a lighter snack or meal, while a larger burrito is a hearty, full meal. For a taco, it can either be a soft or hard corn shell, while a burrito is generally a larger flour tortilla, as corn tortillas tend to fall apart more easily. Tacos also tend to have one type of meat and lighter toppings, while the burrito can hold a large number of vegetables, cheese, beans, etc.
I'd regard that as a pretty good definition.
Both of these dishes, I'd note, are originally wild game recipes, so they're well suited for this. Pre Columbian Mexicans grew corn, as is well known. I don't know how they seasoned them, or garnished them, and I don't really even know what would have been available, outside of tomatoes. I'll have to research that. Even the name "taco" may show its Pre Columbian origins, as one theory is that it is from the Nahuatl word 'tlahco' meaning “half or in the middle”, referring to the way it is formed. Burrito, on the other hand, means "little burro", which supposedly refers to a burro's ability to pack a lot of stuff.
What may be surprising to people who have never made them is that not everyone makes these two dishes, which are prepared in a nearly identical fashion, exactly the same way. My mother, who was an awful cook, made horrible tacos, which isn't surprising. She simply fried meat with no seasoning, used super thick pre made hard taco shells, and garnished them with Velveeta cheese.
Pretty bad.
The way I make them is pretty close to the way my wife does. I fry the ground venison in olive oil. I season the venison with store bought taco seasoning as a rule, although I'm less zealous about that than my wife is, who always does that. I'll sometimes use chili powder or paprika instead and if I was doing all the grocery shopping, I'd probably always to do that as I'd be unlikely to buy the taco seasoning. I don't, I'd note, have anything against taco seasoning.
When I make them, I like to chop onions and green peppers and fry them with the meat. Most people do not do that as a rule, however. Once its sufficiently fried, you simply assemble the taco or burrito to taste.
To taste, I'd note, varies a lot. I like lettuce, onions, peppers and black olives on my tacos. My wife isn't as keen on onions and hates black olives. Nobody uses refried beans in tacos, but some do on burritos. I have, but only rarely. I'll sometimes add Spanish Rice to both burritos and tacos. Like most, but not all, people who like Mexican food, I'll add sour cream as a topping as well.
As noted, if you'd wandered into a native village in what is now Mexico prior to Herman de Cortez showing up, you'd likely be offered a taco with deer or antelope, so this is actually as wild game dish in its original form.
Whether or not a person ought to give a separate recipe for nachos and taco salad, or even operate this out from tacos, depends on how you view these dishes. Not everyone really means the same thing when they discuss these.
In my view, there's no difference between nachos and taco salad, although my wife feels there is. Quite a few people would feel that what I call nachos is in fact taco salad, however. That may be because I don't really like the original form of nachos, which is simply corn chips with gooey cheese, or if you are doing them as they were very much originally done, corn chips, gooey cheese and sliced jalapeƱo peppers.
The original dish is a bar food and like a lot of bar foods, it's pretty basic in its original form. Bar foods are a snack, not a meal, and that's fine. What's surprised me about nachos, however, is how the original form has spread even though it's a really messy snack.
What I'm referring to here, however, is something that's prepared essentially identically to tacos with the toppings then put on corn chips, rather than on a tortilla or in/on a shell. My wife makes a distinction in that she'll sometimes make the same dish but omit the lettuce. If she adds the lettuce, and she'll also add black beans, she calls that taco salad.
Either way, it's pretty good.
- Some linked in Venison articles:
Fowl
It may seem odd to have "fried upland bird" as a general recipe, but I fry all upland birds, whether they be pheasants, grouse of any kind, or whatever, just like I do chicken, but with some preparation differences.
Here's my recipe.
I like to fry a game bird the day I get it. I know that Europeans once hung game birds, but that freaks me out, and I think it's dangerous. So I like 'em fresh. I will freeze them if I have a surplus, but I rarely do, so they usually, the entry below notes, go right from the field to the plate.
I tend to breast the meat. Most upland birds have thin little legs rather than the thunder thighs that chickens have through eons of domestic breading. About all the meat on an upland bird is on its breasts, but they usually have a lot of it there. So I breast the bird, wash the meat, and then soak it in milk.
I don't soak it that long. Maybe an hour or two before I fry it. If I'm keeping the meat in the refrigerator overnight, I let it soak in water. I don't brine anything and don't know how, so that's what I do.
This is one frying recipe where I don't use olive oil, which a reader here will note I otherwise favor. Rather, I use some sort of corn oil or Crisco. I'm not going to get into a debate if that's good for you or not, that's what I use.
I warm the oil and while doing, so I roll the meat in flour. Prior to doing that, I've seasoned the flour lightly with seasoning salt and pepper. I think place it in meat in the oil, which is warmed to frying temperature, and fry.
On the oil, this is one of the few recipes here, although there are some others, where I use something like Crisco or corn oil. I prefer olive oil for most things, but it doesn't work well for this.
Probably not too surprisingly, as game birds fly, they're not as fatty as chickens, which don't. Given that, you have to be really careful while frying the bird. You want the bird completely fried, just as with chicken. Not raw, in other words, but you also don't want it over done. Timing is really the key here.
Also worth noting, not all upland birds, or game birds, taste the same. Pheasants, blue grouse and dusky grouse, are extremely mild. Pheasant is so mild that a person could pass it off as chicken, and blue and dusky grouse nearly so. Sage chickens have a much stronger taste. Some people claim not to like sage chicken, but having prepared my own for years, and having eaten my mother's when I was a kid, I can vouch for much of the "gamey" complaint being due to bad cooking.
When serving an of these birds, I serve them with cranberry sauce. I don't know if anyone else does, but if they don't, I'd be clueless why not. People serve fried and roasted chicken with cranberry sauce, so why wouldn't you serve sage chicken with it? Indeed, cranberry sauce really works with sage chicken and takes the "gamey" taste pretty much away from it.
An example of fried chicken is provided below, start to finish.
This is wild duck, a mallard, stuffed with oranges, and wrapped with a local farm pic,
Frankly, the dutch oven needed to be reseasoned, and this recipe achieved that.
The roasting directions are basically from Patrick McManus' Watchagot Stew, even if the recipe is not. Times are lengthened, but I'll note that a person needs to be super careful, as the bacon wrapping entails a risk of fire.
Things I haven't tried, but I ought to:
Duck Nachos
I often seen these interesting looking waterfowl recipies, but have yet to try one. This looks pretty good.
Useful Sites:
Hunter Angler Gardner Cook: This site, I'd note, is the most useful, in my opinion. The Author also is sometimes featured in Wyoming Wildlife. He additionally has a podcast, although I haven't listed to much of it.
Wild Harvest Table. This site is sponsored by New York's Cornell University extension and has very good practical recipes. It was originally associated with a (then) young university professor who blogged a lot about hunting in New England, but whose cooperative blog on that topic seems to have gone into the ether, like so many blogs have over the years, but who was clearly, along with his wife who was the main driver of this blog, a fellow killetarian.
Food For Hunters. This blog, like the first one mentioned, has some really good recipes, and it also brings some different prospective to recipes.
A 12 Gauge Girl. Another blog with interesting recipes, from a killetarian prospective, although its very infrequently updated.
Chef In The Wild. Interesting blog, but not updated since December 2020 at the time I'm putting this up.
Cowgirl's Country Life. Not a hunting specific site, but with some hunting recipes. Also, infrequently updated.
The Prairie Homestead. This site has a very active blog and a podcast that has a cult following. I'll be frank that I don't know that this link really belongs here, and I'll also admit that I have some problems with the modern "homestead" movement, while also finding it interesting and sympathizing with it.
Okay, the item above is cheating, but it's another page here on our site.
Last updated on October 10, 2021.
Last updated on February 18, 2023.
Last updated September 14, 2023.
7 comments:
Hey there! Wyoming wild game food blogger here. I'd love for you to check out my website for delicious wild game websites as well!
Cheers!
Annie
Peak to Plate
https://peaktoplate.com/
I looked for a blog feed on your site, but couldn't find one. If you have one, I'll add it to the list of wild game cooking blogs here so people can see when it updates.
Hello! I do have a feed at https://peaktoplate.com/feed
Let me know if you're not able to access it. Thank you for your consideration!
Thanks, you've been added in the Food links!
Thank you so much! I really appreciate it!!
No problem, and the elk sliders look great!
Thank you so much!!
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