My oldest daughter turned 12 this year and bagged her first buck. It was very exciting for all of us. It was right before Thanksgiving and my father-in-law was coming down for the holiday anyways but ended up coming a few days early to help process it. It was so nice of him to help out as Brent had to work and I was clueless. The weather was too warm to let it hang any longer so it needed to be done. I did watch though and tried taking mental notes on how it was quartered and skinned.
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| Taylor's buck |
Some of my first posts on this blog over 2 years ago were about my misadventures with wild game. I have struggled with birds and fish and this was my first time dealing with venison. We didn't really have time over Thanksgiving to deal with the trimming of the venison so we threw it all in the freezer until we had time to grind it up and make sausage. Since Brent had so much time off over the Christmas holiday we decided to tackle it then. On Christmas day, while the kids all toyed with their new goodies, we went at it. We were up until midnight grinding and packaging up pounds and pounds of breakfast sausage. It turned out really good. The kids haven't developed a taste for it yet but hopefully they will. Brent and I really like it though.
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| Deer steak in my Gramma's old cast iron skillet |
Throughout the season Brent has been bagging some various birds. Chukar, quail, Hungarian partridge, ruffed grouse and sometimes a pheasant. We decided to thaw these out and make a meal out of them. The birds are delicious but it takes quite a few to feed this family. Thankfully all of my kids love them. I have not had a lot of success with pheasant in the past. It is really lean and cooks pretty quickly. Today, in order to make the cooking process a little faster I decided to just cut the breasts off all of them and fry them up.
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| Fried quail breasts |
I just used a flour breading on the quail and a Panko breading on the larger birds. I wish I had taken note of the different birds I cooked because they all had their own unique taste. The quail is the biggest hit around these parts though. Too bad it takes so many to get a decent batch. There were 7 quail this time around, enough for each person to have one whole quail.
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| Quail, Panko crusted pheasant and others |
The pheasant was much better this time around than previous times but I still think there is a better way. I was surprised how quickly I got the hang of taking the meat off. There ended up being very little waste once I got the technique down. I had never really messed with anything like that before. I am used to prepackaged chicken breasts and tenders. Other than the Thanksgiving turkey I am pretty inexperienced with bone-in meat.
To round off the day, I made some venison stew. I wish I had more of the stew meat. It was a little potato heavy but tasted good nonetheless. I have been trying to get away from prepackaged seasonings and making my own. It is surprisingly easy. I make my own taco, chili and stew seasoning now and so far there are little complaints. The biggest complaint is that I go heavy on the amount I cook with because it isnt measured out for me. It is still so much better than MSG laden seasonings. In fact when we were making the deer sausage, we looked all over for a prepackaged seasoning and all of them had MSG as the first ingredient, so we resorted to a recipe and it turned out great.
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| Venison stew |
I am just really happy that I am getting the hang of cooking this meat. It would be a shame to waste any of it. It is so tasty and healthy (except when fried in a ton of butter!) and I get excited each time my husband and his bird dog bring home some more birds, and hope someone is able to get a deer (or elk) each season as well.
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