Venison Recipes

Smoked Venison Hot Links

This recipe draws a lot of inspiration from a traditional Hungarian Paprika Sausage with the addition of some ingredients and different preparation techniques. The result is a vibrantly bright red/orange sausage with lots of garlicky, salty, snap. The caraway seeds add some balance without turning it into something weird.

Beer & Coffee Venison Stew

For the most part this is a fairly standard stew recipe.   The complexity in flavors comes from using dark beer and coffee as the liquid base and from allowing the stew to rest overnight in the fridge before finishing it on the stove top.  This is a very accessible way to introduce someone to eating or preparing wild game.  Nothing scary, just simple and good.

West African Peanut Elk Stew

Peanut or groundnut stew is a popular dish found in many West African countries with countless regional variations. My version uses venison, in particular the elk I got while hunting in Utah. This is a simple to put together, one pot meal, fitting for a cold day at the end of winter. Perfect for sharing with friends and family as a vehicle to relive stories about and lessons learned from the hunt.

Waterfowl Recipes

Corned Snow Goose & Cabbage Egg Rolls

These are easy to make out of the cheapest ingredients, they’ve got a bit of novelty factor, and they taste ridiculously good. Beyond corning the goose they’re not much more complicated than assembling a few ingredients and rolling them up in an egg roll wrapper. For real though, these are good. Really good.

Duck Bánk Mì

The bánh mì is everything good about a sandwich. Lots of layered flavor components, all working together in a self-contained torpedo of goodness. It’s a Vietnamese mainstay, born out the French culinary influence imparted to Vietnam during the colonization of the region, then known as Indo-China.

Snow Goose BBQ Confit

Snow geese get a bad wrap when it comes to table fair.  This recipe uses the method of confit to accomplish that texture and taste, but adds to it the wonderous alchemizer of smoke. The result is a top shelf BBQ sandwich that tastes fantastic and presents snow goose in a way that’s palatable for just about anyone.

Butt, Beak, Bang

We owe it to ourselves, our prey, and the pursuit to be mindful with the lives we take. To me, the best way of doing that is by using as much of the bird as reasonably possible. I learned to shoot ducks and geese with the adage of “butt, beak, bang” in mind as a way to prompt myself to pull through the shot and lead across flying bird. It’s apropos to apply the same expression when it comes to cooking the bird because with waterfowl you can eat just about everything other than the quack. I’ve made it a mission of mine to show others how to get the most culinary traction from their bird hunts. Here are some of the broad strokes.

Spicy Cranberry Duck Wings

Few activities are as ancient and inexorably linked to our humanity as the sharing of food. It needn’t be overly sophisticated or designed to illicit wonder. In fact, most times the simpler the better. In these times we crave food that is comforting, familiar, even fun. We can laugh and tell stories as we nibble tasty morsels, licking sauce from our fingertips and playing “roshambo” for the last crunchy thing.

Fish Recipes

Whole Fried Bream

I’m a firm believer that the BEST way to prepare bream is also one of the simplest.  Scale them, gut them, dredge them in yellow cornmeal and fry them up. They present beautifully this way, but it also is a method that lets the unassuming fish shine.

Smoked Trout Croquette

Once the croquette is cooked you can serve it any number of ways. Enjoy the croquette on it’s own as an entree, pair with a poached egg and hollandaise for an unbelievable Eggs Benedict or plate them the way I chose to this time, as burger. I think you’ll be blown away by how tasty and versatile this preparation can be.

Simple Smoked Trout

This is an incredibly simple method for preparing trout. It pretty much just involves, salt, smoke and a little bit of time.

Catfish Étouffée

Popularly served with crawfish or shrimp, étouffée can employ any “seafood” as its protein base and catfish especially, seems to take to this preparation. This method results in tender meat and with a little time, transforms the humble catfish into world class table fare.

Forage

Wild Sumac-ade

Wild, edible sumac is a sun loving plant that grows on a rhizome structure.  That means that it grows in big clusters, spreading through an underground network of shallow roots. This makes it easy to collect a good amount, quickly.  The berries have a pleasant, very tart, and slightly fruity flavor.

Balsamic Dewberry Ice Cream

Dewberries are basically a variant of wild blackberry plants that grow as a sort of weed or an edge plant here in Arkansas and throughout the southeast.  They can grow quite prolifically and have a reputation as cantankerous because of their endless supply of mean spirited thorns.