Hobbit Stew

I have several friends that are really good cooks, at least their pictures of food look AMAZING!  And sometimes I'm lucky enough to get a recipe! Today is one of those days!  My friend Derek has made this stew before and I'm pretty sure I drooled on my phone and begged for the recipe....yesterday he wrote it out and tagged me in the post!  So tonight we are eating Hobbit Stew!

We love sausage!

On Friday my husband got his first deer of the season.  Super exciting!  I did a post last year about dressing out our his deer.  This year we did it just the two of us, which was interesting because I'm 5 months pregnant, and his deer this year was a gut shot.  If you have ever dealt with a gut shot deer then you know how stinky it can be....and being pregnant with a super sniffer....I posted and laughed about it on Facebook.  Also new this year, instead of making burger out of the entire deer we I wanted some actual cuts, so I found a YouTube video on processing a deer which I am including because I really like the way this guy explains everything.

We kept the loin, tenderloins, ball roast and rump roast, the rest went into bags in a cooler to be put on ice till the next day.  It was almost 10pm when we finished with the carcass...fast forward to Saturday morning....after breakfast we cleared off the counters and got two stations set up for removing silver-skin and connective tissues.  My husband set his station up with a stool...I did tease him about making his pregnant wife stand, so he gave me the spot with the seat.  Such a sweetie.  It took us all day (it felt like all day) several hours to trim everything up, and about an hour more to grind it up.  Two pounds of ground went into a vac seal bag destined for chili, 2 lbs is in a bag in the fridge for the Bulk Venison Breakfast Sausage and 3 lbs is in another bag in the fridge for the Venison Summer Sausage

Because the summer sausage takes over 24 hours to make I am starting with that.  Well I was going to start with that!  Our deep freezer is nice and full of meat right now.  We went in with our neighbors and got 1/4 side of beef.  So I am using a pound of the hamburger for this recipe.  Course the packages we reiceved have two pounds per in the hamburger, so I will make something else with the extra pound, after it has thawed.  I got it out last night and left it in the fridge overnight, and it's still frozen solid....gonna leave it on the counter while I move on to the Breakfast Sausage....

My first step today was to put on my new apron...it's super cute, and lots of pockets!  Thank you Sharon over at MS Purses for whipping it up for me!  She makes purses mostly, but she is a very talented seamstress!!!!

Gotta protect that bump!

None of the components for the breakfast sausage are frozen so I can just dive right in!  I got the smallest package of pork that I could, but there was still more than I needed, I'm sure I will find something else to do with it....so gather your ingredients and lets get started!  I want to note that we opted to make a partial batch of the sausage until we know if we like it or not.  There is nothing worse than making something in bulk only to find out it's not that great!

Then measure out your ingredients....

And remove any jewelry then dig in with both hands, it's cold, but it's the best method.  I didn't get any pictures because my hands were covered in stuff....after you have it mixed you can use a scale or just eyeball it out into 1 lb packages.

 We didn't do a full recipe so we ended up with 2-2/3 lbs of breakfast sausage.  Two pounds got sealed up with my handy vacuum sealer!  I LOVE this thing!!!!!

The vacuum packages are headed to the freezer, and the leftover chunk is going to be made into biscuits and gravy soon!

The hamburger is FINALLY thawed out so I can now make the summer sausage.  We are doing a full recipe of this because it never lasts around our families.  So as always, gather everything you need.

Combine everything in a big bowl, I couldn't find my onion powder, so I used chopped onions and increased it to 2 teaspoons

dig in with your hands and get it all mixed up!

Once it is all combined you can start the sausage making process!

Divide it out, I chose to do 1 pound sausages

Form a log packing it as tightly as you can, then wrap with foil, shiny side in.  I like to give my ends a little twist to help pack the sausage even tighter,  don't twist too tight or you risk ripping the foil.  Then it goes in the fridge for 24 hours....

Once the 24 hours has passed you preheat the oven, and pierce the underside of the sausage and put them in a broiler rack, or in my case a large sheet pan with a wire rack on top, and they cook for an hour and a half...now is when I wish I could let y'all smell the wonderfulness!

We went to Cabela's today and saw the summer sausage casings, which is a bit too late for this batch, but maybe next time I can put it in a casing instead of foil.  Enjoy!

One of the many things to do with Venison

Venison has been processed and the ground portions are sitting in my fridge in my turkey pan....being that Thanksgiving is a week away, I needed to do something to get it OUT of my turkey pan.  I looked up recipes for making venison summer sausage and settled on one.

So I went to the local grocery store to get the stuff I needed to make summer sausage, and to get some beef fat to add to the ground venison.  One site suggests a 10% ratio of fat to meat, so for 20 lbs of ground meat I needed 2 lbs of beef fat.  The butcher was more than happy to give me as much beef fat as I wanted, for FREE!  Which makes the overall cost of our venison uber cheap!!!  As in pennies a pound. We used the same grinder to grind up the beef fat.  And while DH was slicing up the fat chunks, and grinding away I started mixing up the sausage.

For this recipe I used three pounds of venison, and two pounds of ground beef.

One of the ingredients is fresh ground pepper, and I wasn't about to take the time using my hand grinder, so I dumped the peppercorns in my spare coffee grinder and went to town.

The spices and water get mixed together in a bowl and then added to the meat.  I did increase the garlic to 2 tsp instead of the 1 tsp they called for.  I LOVE garlic.

The next step is to mix for two minutes, so I removed my rings, and washed up real good....then dug in with both hands

Once two minutes is up, time to cover with plastic wrap and allow to sit in the fridge at least overnight, but no more than three days, mixing once a day.

Set the oven to 350,

and start forming the logs, about 2" in diameter.

You will also need either a broiler pan, or a pan with a rack over it.  If you don't have access to either of those things, you can put a drip pan under the middle rack and place the sausages directly on the oven rack.  Just remember you will have to clean the rack afterwords.

After the sausage has baked for an hour and a half, remove from the oven and take them out of the foil and put them on paper towels to absorb the rest of the fat.

Then once cooled (or while hot if you just can't wait) slice and serve!

Happy Snacking!

It's deer season, and yes this post has pictures!

Image from buckmanager.com

I got my hunter safety permit years ago, but unfortunately my first season out, didn't get a deer.  In fact I haven't been out since that first season.  I don't have a proper deer rifle!!  My husband has one, and I used it that first year.  Maybe soon I can get one, then I too can go hunting!  I love venison, it's hormone free, free range, and very lean!  Not to mention very versatile. I cannot wait to start making yummy things with this beautiful deer.

With the temperatures bottoming out this past weekend I was not sure if my husband would be successful getting a deer.  He went out Sunday late morning to his hunting spot, and didn't see anything.  Then got up super early Monday morning (like 3am) to head back out so he could be in place when the sun came up.  By noon he hadn't seen anything except a bobcat...and he was coooooold!  Fortunately just a while later (like three hours later) a gunshot on another property spooked a doe out of her hidey hole and into his range.

After taking the requisite picture to send to me, he did the field dressing, don't worry, no pictures of that, and loaded her up for the hour and a half trip back home.  Now I have to say, we have the BEST neighbors ever, we borrowed a cherry picker (engine hoist) from one neighbor, and another came down to help us process it!  I'm not gonna post a ton of pictures, cause honestly my hands were icky because I was helping process...  But after skinning we started removing the meat.

And then all of the meat went into a cooler overnight.

The next day we started removing all of the fat and silverskin...

...and chunking it...

...to so we could grind it into burger...

...which is now sitting in the fridge, we still need to add some beef fat, not a lot, and then I will be making jerky, summer sausage, and a bunch of yummy things!  Hopefully he will get another deer either next weekend, if the weather cooperates, or during the antler-less portion that is the first week of December. 

Until then...Happy Eating!