Marinated Bambi Shoulder

[ashnistrike]

It's been way too long since I've posted, so you get a recipe for venision.

Background: One of Nameseeker's co-workers enjoys hunting deer. His wife, however, does not enjoy eating deer all that often. We, on the other hand, like venison a lot, but don't hunt. So the co-worker gives Nameseeker spare meat from his freezer in exchange for brownies. About the third time this happened, I realized that venison was no longer a once-a-year-must-get-this-perfect treat and I could afford to experiment. The following is the result. It's a non-recipe recipe, which is to say that I didn't write down how much of anything I used.

Take one venison shoulder (this one was about 3 pounds). Cut away the fat and cut the meat from the bone. You should end up with a bunch of tenders ranging from itty to the size of half a boneless chicken breast--in our case, just enough to feed two. Cover with a marinade of:

olive oil (a lot)
red wine (a lot)
balsamic vinegar (not nearly as much, but enough to taste)
honey (a little more than the vinegar)

The honey should be as dark and as good-quality as you can get. I used wildflower honey from the Madison farmer's market: the color of molasses and almost more savory than sweet. Trying to find more things to do with this honey was the major impetus behind this recipe.

To the marinade, add:

garlic
ginger
clove
cinnamon

I used dried and powdered of all these, to spread the taste around as much as possible. But you could use fresh easily, and doubtless to good effect.

Marinate for an hour and then saute the meat, using a little of the marinade for sauce. Be careful not to overcook the small pieces.

I liked this better than any of the venison recipes I've tried from any of the game cookbooks we own. The sweet and gamy tastes combined nicely, mellowing each other. And I was able to control the doneness of the meat better cut into tenders than when I've tried to roast a whole shoulder in the past.

Comments

[robling-t.livejournal.com]

Because my head is large and stuffed with Useless Facts, I feel compelled to point out that some guy out west died of Mad Cow Deer Disease a while back, but then again he was basically living on venison, so once in a while's probably about as safe as properly-provenanced beef, I suppose... :)

(BTW, still trying to clear schedule enough to settle in with your ms. -- have I completely lost you with c7, or are you as buried in Life Stuff as I've been? :) )

[klingonguy.livejournal.com]

yum. please pack in dry ice and ship to philadelphia. thanks.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I haven't had good luck roasting venison either. Did you just saute it in the marinade and its own fat, or did you add some more olive oil or something at that point? Though I guess if there was a lot to start with.

The one time I tried sauteing venison -- in Swansea, so a long time ago -- I treated it just like lamb, but it turned out that my idea of "medium" and rysmiel's were sufficiently different that I had to return his to the pan, and it went all peculiar in the way proteins sometimes do when heating is discontinuous.