I make sure to dehydrate plenty of ramp leaves when I can during the spring so I can use them in whatever I want during the year–if you have access to them, there just isn’t a reason not to. They’re mild, less aggressive than something like garlic powder, but still have enough kick to flavor…
Charcuterie
Charcuterie is the art and craft of curing meats, and it's a passion of mine. I've cured thousands of pounds of meat for all kinds of projects over the course of my career, and my skill working with various odds and ends is something I pride myself on.
Here you'll find recipes for things to make out of trim and scrap, as well as intensive, show-stopping projects like headcheese, homemade sausages, fancy French terrines, and simpler things like venison bacon.
Middle Eastern Confit (Qawarma)
As I’ve worked with the lamb and goat farm for the past few years, I’ve loved researching every and all traditional recipes using lamb and goat around the world. Qawarma, or small pieces of lamb cooked in it’s own fat, is one of the most interesting I’ve found–essentially French confits attractive Arabic cousin. It all…
Smoked Venison Shanks
Do you grind up your venison shanks? Feed them to the dog? Wonder what could ever make them taste good? No more. Smoked venison shanks (and lots of other smoked deer parts) are a great thing to keep around. Cure, Smoke, and Freeze for later The basic idea is this: right after I butcher an…
Smoked Rocky Mountain Oysters
Fries, rocky mountain oysters, eggs, cowboy oysters, balls, or gonads, whatever you call them, the technical name is testicles, and if you’re here, you’re probably looking for a way to eat them. Congratulations, because this is hands-down the best recipe for rocky mountain oysters I’ve ever had–and I’ve eaten plenty. The first ones I had…
Venison Pancetta
Say the words venison bacon or venison pancetta to a hunter and they’re likely to tell you how much they like it. Unfortunately, the venison bacon so many people like is a mocked-up, sort of salty meatloaf injected with liquid smoke and pork fat to make it palatable. Like I talked about in my basic…
Wild Rice Blood Sausage
Black pudding, mutura, kaszanka, boudin rouge, zungenwurst, blutvurst, biroldo, morcilla, sanguinaccio. Across cultures, historical preparations for blood sausage will be found just about anywhere animals are harvested. And those are just sausage, don’t even get me started on the legion of other sanguine-devoted cultural specialties. Like most meat eaters, I love homemade sausage, and, once…
Fried Blood Sausage and Potatoes
I’m proud of the fact that I make my own blood sausage from lambs on the farm I harvest myself. It’s a process that’s pretty intimate, and not available to everyone, and from there, people that harvest their own animals probably don’t harvest the blood, so it’s a special sort of circumstances that have to…
Beef Neck Terrine
I’ve created more versions of pates and terrines than I can count, and some of them blur together, but one sticks out above the rest: the beef neck terrine. It was a crowd favorite, but also burned in my mind as one server repeatedly asked me to show her where the fruit was. She was…
Venison Jerky with Serviceberries
I loved eating beef jerky as a kid, and I always liked the Pemmican brand, it was simple, and good. But, when I found out years later that pemmican was actually a sort of mashed up paste of dried meat and lard, I was a little confused as to why people would have eaten it….
Spring Sochan and Watercress with Venison Ham
When spring arrives, greens are on my mind, and there are tons for cooking: nettles, waterleaf, violets, wood nettles, but sometimes I want some raw. Two of the best wild greens for eating raw are sochan and watercress. Watercress is widely known as an edible, but sochan, or Rudbeckia laciniata, the Cherokee rite of spring,…
How to Make Venison Bacon
Venison bacon is a thing, a smoky, delicious thing. But I don’t see many people making it. Do a google search for how to make venison or deer bacon and what you’ll find is definitely not bacon, they’re basically recipes for a sort of spiced meat loaf made with pork. Calling something like that bacon,…
Chicken Blood Sausage
I love cooking with blood. It’s hard to come by though, so that usually means it’s a once-a-year thing when I might help someone butcher a few lamb. I typically get enough for about 15 pounds of sausage out of that, which is plenty for me, and leaves enough so that I can donate some…
Meat Garum
Meat garum (just think soy sauce made from meat) was the first thing I planned to make after flipping through copy of the Noma Guide to Fermentation, by Rene Redzepi, a book I know plenty of my friends have been experimenting with. It is some seriously mind bending, technical restaurant ideas and experiments, and not for…