More Maple Venison

I love to cook using foods that grew on the farm. Our own beef and pork and vegetables from the garden are a given, but there is special value in the wild crops that grow on their own as well. We love wild game, especially this year when it has been our main source of protein, and the maple syrup from the sugar bush on the Northwest corner of the place is incredible. And there are a lot of ways to use it besides drowning pancakes.

Up until this winter we didn't really know how to use venison. Alan usually gets at least one deer. He is a good hunter and a good shot, so the meat is much better than that from an animal that was wounded, chased over five or six miles, and finally dispatched after an incredible amount of stress. Still, it wasn't beef. Stew and steak were about the best we could do and it turned out edible but not wonderful. I always cooked it like beef, which resulted in something that was okay, but not as good as beef.

This winter, the winter of no beef, necessity has become the mother of invention. Thus we are inventing recipes for deer (and goose, grouse and cottontail) because we were sick of eating leathery stuff that tastes like hooves.

One thing we never succeeded with before this year is roast venison. Every way we tried to roast deer before either turned out dry, stringy, and gamy or rare. I will not eat wild game that isn't completely cooked.

Enter the wonders of maple syrup. The Iroquois who lived here before us paired the two in their cooking and they sure knew what they were doing. Once we took a lesson from them and added maple syrup to most of our recipes, venison has become a delight rather than a chore.

The other night I decided to make some roast venison for sandwiches.

First I sauteed chopped onion, garlic, lovage (for which you can substitute celery) and Italian seasoning in a thick pot. When the onions began to soften I tossed a couple of slabs of venison, cut for roasts, on top and gave them a good browning, turning them occasionally with tongs.

When the outside was brown I added a cup of vinegar to the pot and boiled the whole shooting match for a bit. Then I poured maple syrup over the roasts.
Thickly.
Don't be afraid that wild sugar will make your meat taste sweet. It doesn't, but rather adds a smokey, savory flavor that is incredible, something like mild barbecue, but not at all acidy.

Next I added enough water to keep the meat from drying out, maybe halfway up the side of the roasts, tucked the pot tightly closed with foil, and roasted in a 350 degree oven for as long as it took to milk and do chores, (maybe a couple of hours out in the real world).

Most of the water cooked away and we ended up with venison that was as tender as the finest beef, succulent and juicy and amazingly flavorful. We made sandwiches on nice, fat hard rolls, then used the leftovers in a rice casserole, with zucchini from last summer and some really, really good rice we found over at the Dollar General in Fonda. I wish we had cut a lot more roasts instead of the stew and steak we did make. Next year........

Roast Wild Goose

Alan bagged a couple of Branta Canadensis back during the season (nearly dropping one through the sky light on his best friend's parents' house) and he has been after me to cook them. Never having cooked goose (and only having eaten it once...domestic...long frozen...and just plain nasty) I procrastinated.

Finally yesterday I relented, he thawed the goose that was intact (and the one that was much diminished by excess shot) and we hunted up a recipe.

We found this one.

Around here recipes are more like guidelines, so we threw in some extra stuff and left out some other stuff...dumped a box of prepared stuffing that was given to us on top of the critter. Tucked some venison steaks into the pot for anybody who didn't like goose (which could possibly have been all of us). Added a little vinegar, because we have discovered that, in terms of both tenderness and taste, it does a lot for slow cooking tough meat . Dried cranberries because there was the tag end of a stale bag in the freezer....etc

Then we stuffed it in the oven. Because of milking and chores, which keep me outdoors for quite a while, it got roasted about two hours longer than the recipe called for.

Didn't matter.

Liz tugged off the first piece to see if it was edible. Sure enough it was.

That verdict having been rendered the goose lasted about five minutes before the bones were picked so clean I am wondering if I will be able to find enough bits and pieces to make soup tonight. The guy that wrote the recipe says that it tastes like beef...and it really does, albeit kind of dry beef. Sort of like fine grained-chuck roast that got cooked a tad longer than you planned on. Savory and satisfying. I am amazed to find that I really like wild goose.

I recommend the recipe. All the recipes other we read that were geared for domestic fowl and would certainly have produced a meal fit for soling a pair of shoes, but this one made for a delicious change from deer and chicken. I wonder when the next goose season opens....