Camp Food

Camp Food: Deer Dogs With Pea Soup Sauce

Online Editors — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 11:29:11 -0500

Hunting camp is about the only time of the year when I can concentrate only on what I like without being disrupted. When I make a dish at camp, my secret is to keep the recipes simple. I never forget how tired a long day of hunting makes a man. I cook with what I have, while enjoying each moment.
—Martin Picard, Au Pied de Cochon, Montreal

F&S Take:
Pea soup never tasted so good. Trust us. As for the dogs, we used Italian-style venison sausages, which were delicious this way, but any type of sausage should taste great. Try bratwurst if you don’t have any made with fresh deer. If this is the kind of grub Picard prefers after a hunt, then he’s welcome at our hunting camp anytime.

Ingredients

Sauce:
4 cups diced onions
4 cups diced carrots
2 cups diced celery
2 Tbsp. olive oil
4 cups soaked split peas
8 oz. smoked pork lard
3 qt. water
About 11 oz. ham, diced

Sausages:
8 venison sausages
Beer
Ricotta cheese
Mustard
8 hot dog buns, toasted
Tortillons*
*Tortillons are cheese curds that, as far as we can tell, you can only get in Quebec. Feel free to use a local variety. That’s what we did.

Directions

Soak the sausages in beer for 1 hour. Crack a cold one open for yourself while you’re at it.

Make the soup: In a pot, sweat the onion, carrot, and celery in olive oil over high heat until the onion becomes translucent. Add the peas, pork lard, and water. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat. Simmer, covered, for 45 minutes. Remove the lard, dice it, and return to the soup. Add the ham. Reduce the heat to low and continue cooking until the soup thickens. Add a dash of olive oil to the reduced pea soup. Stir well.

Meanwhile, cook the dogs in a frying pan. When they’re done, set them aside and add the ricotta to the residual sausage fat in the pan. Warm the pan over low, if necessary, and stir.

Spread mustard and warmed ricotta on the toasted buns. Add the sausage and a generous spoonful of the reduced pea soup. Dress each hot dog with cheese curds and brown slightly with a torch. Serves 4

Camp Food: Wild Boar Stew With Salsa Verde

Online Editors — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 11:10:02 -0500

I’m not a born-and-raised city boy, so any chance to get out of the city and spend time at camp is a great day. This stew is ideal in hunting camp because it’s a one-pot wonder, and when you open the lid of the final dish that has been slow-cooking for hours, it’s something very special.
—Thomas McNaughton, Central Kitchen, San Francisco

F&S Take:
You’ve got to love the Dutch oven. A staple of any respectable camp kitchen, the cast-iron godsend does its thing, in this case cooking wild pork, pumpkin, and root vegetables to tender perfection, so you can do your thing—hunt, take a nap, or sit down to a game of cards. And when the food is ready, you get to take all the credit.

Ingredients

SALSA VERDE:
1 bunch parsley
1⁄2 bunch spearmint
1 bunch tarragon
1 cup olive oil
1⁄2 clove garlic
4 anchovy fillets
2 tsp. capers
1 Tbsp. Meyer lemon zest
Juice of 1⁄2 Meyer lemon
Salt and pepper to taste

Wild Boar Stew:
2 lb. boar shoulder, cut into 2-inch cubes
1 lb. dried cannellini beans
3 Tbsp. olive oil
1 onion, cut into 2-inch pieces
2 carrots, cut into 2-inch pieces
2 celery ribs, cut into 2-inch pieces
1 clove garlic, roughly chopped
21⁄2 cups chicken stock
1⁄2 lb. pumpkin, diced
2 heads radicchio, chopped

Directions

Make the salsa verde: Pick all the herbs from their stems and cut into long, thin slices. With a mortar and pestle, crush the herbs in batches until a paste forms. Scrape the paste into a plastic bowl and cover with the olive oil. In the last batch, crush the garlic, anchovies, and capers. Combine all ingredients with the lemon zest and juice. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Make the stew: Rinse the beans, and put them in a large pot with 6 quarts of water, give or take. Soak for 6 to 8 hours. Drain and rinse again. Set aside.

Prepare the fire for the Dutch oven. When it’s ready, heat the oven, then add the olive oil. Once the oil is hot, add the onion, carrot, and celery and cook, stirring constantly, until the vegetables are golden brown. Add the garlic.

In a bowl, season the boar with salt and pepper. Add the boar to the oven. Cover everything with stock. Place the lid on the oven and cook for about 2 hours, adding more wood between poker hands every half hour. The stew should simmer (not boil) at all times.

Add the beans and pumpkin. Stir well and cover. Once the stew comes to a good simmer, remove the lid and cook for another 45 minutes. Stir frequently, and add more stock and more wood as needed. The stew will be done after about 3 hours total. Just before serving, fold in the radicchio. Serve in bowls and top with salsa verde. Serves 4

Food Fight: Breakfast Burrito vs. Hash

Sarah Smith — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 10:13:35 -0500

by David Draper

As much as I love the freelance lifestyle, the one negative effect it has is on my waistline, much of which I attribute to the proximity of my desk to the fridge. While it is nice to have all-day access to a kitchen, it’s sometimes too easy to overeat. And much of what I overeat comes in the form of some type of breakfast dish. (Whether or not it’s before noon, doesn’t matter. Another benefit of freelancing.) Here are two simple favorites, one that has ridden a wave of popularity recently, while the other remains a humble standard served at late-night diners across the country.

The Breakfast Burrito

A breakfast burrito of some sort, even if it’s just a scrambled egg, some cheese and a tortilla, is a near-daily staple here at my house. It’s quick. It’s easy. I can eat it with one hand and type with the other – the perfect meal. For this rendition, I marinated some caribou strips in tequila and lime juice, with a bit of cumin and a touch of cinnamon. Fried up with some diced potatoes and soft scrambled eggs, they were another evolution of my pasión for anything wrapped in a tortilla.

Hash

I love leftovers of most any kind and take some pride in extending the edibility of a single dish for a week or more. Here I’ve gotten a third meal out of one roasted duck, which I first featured here at Food Fight Friday a couple weeks ago. After making duck soup with the carcass, I diced up a piece of breast meat that survived the original melee, along with the leftover steamed broccoli and duck-fat-roasted potatoes, and fried it up in duck fat with one egg, over hard. As much as I loved the original meal, I think this quick and easy lunch was even better.

We’ve got one great reader photo that I’m saving for next week’s Food Fight in the hopes someone will step up for a head-to-head battle. If you think you’ve got what it takes, send your best food photo to fswildchef@gmail.com.

Recipe: Hoppin’ John with Venison Sausage

Sarah Smith — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 15:45:18 -0500

by David Draper

When I was very young, all my mom’s family would gather at my grandparent’s house on New Year’s Eve for a big food-related feast. Each year would feature food from a different country, such as Chinese one year or Mexican the next. (Chinese and Mexican were about as foreign as you could get in western Nebraska in the mid-1970s.) I don’t remember much from those meals, other than gorging on fortune cookies, which I still love today.

The extended Richards clan isn’t alone in instituting some type of New Year’s food tradition. Many of the most popular ones are symbolic of peoples’ hopes for economic growth and progress in the coming year. Some folks eat only pork, because pigs root forward, versus poultry, which scratch backwards. Other foods are featured for their resemblance to money, such as greens and cabbage, or beans which are said to represent coins.

One dish popular on New Year’s Day traditionally combines both pork and beans (in the form of black-eyed peas) – Hoppin’ John. Most recipes for this classic Southern dish call for bacon, fatback or ham hocks to give the beans a salty, smoky flavor, but there’s no reason you couldn’t use smoked venison sausage to add a bit of wild game to your New Year’s Day. Or better yet, wild boar sausage if you have it on hand.

Hoppin’ John with Venison Sausage

2 cups dried black-eyed peas, soaked overnight and drained*
1 pound smoked venison or boar sausages, sliced 1/2-inch thick
2 qts. venison or game stock (chicken or vegetable stock will do, if you must)
2 tbs. olive oil
1 onion, diced
1 carrot, diced
2 celery stalks, diced
2 garlic cloves, minced
Salt and ground black pepper
1 tbs. red pepper flakes, or to taste

Heat oil in a large stockpot or Dutch oven over medium heat.

Cook sliced sausages in oil until brown. Remove and place on paper towel lined plate to drain.

Saute onion, carrot and celery until onion becomes translucent -- about 3-5 minutes. Lower heat, add garlic and cook until fragrant -- about a minute.

Return sausage to pan, along with black-eyed peas and enough stock to cover everything by about one inch. (If you don’t have enough stock, you can add water.)

Season with salt, pepper and red pepper flakes.

Bring just to the boiling point, then lower heat to a bare a simmer, over and cook 1-2 hours.

Serve over cooked white rice with cornbread on the side.

*You can use a couple cans of prepared black-eye peas here, though if you do, be sure to drain and rinse them well, especially if your New Year’s resolutions include incorporating a low-sodium diet into your life. Canned beans can have up to 700 mg of sodium, where a cup of cooked dried beans comes in at less than 10 mg.

Food Fight Friday: Holiday Potluck Party

Online Editors — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 11:09:18 -0500

by Colin Kearns

We have a terrific holiday tradition at the Field & Stream and Outdoor Life office: the Potluck Party. Every year, all of the departments from both magazines get together for a few hours in the office lobby, and everyone is encouraged to bring a dish to share. Being that we all love to fish and hunt, the main ingredients of these dishes often feature either the fish or meat that we’ve been lucky enough to gather over the year. It really is a great time. So, for today’s Food Fight, we though it would be fun to showcase the wild dishes that were shared at this year’s party.

As always, enjoy. And happy holidays.

Mike Shea’s ’60s Style Venison Loaf

Sarah Smith Barnum’s Apple Cider Marinated BBQ Bacon-Wrapped Venison Bites

Brian Peterson’s Smoked Salmon Strips

Lynsey White’s Whitetail Cupcakes

Mike Toth’s Blackened Mangrove Snapper

Alex Robinson’s Moose Kabobs

Steve Gianaca’s Red Velvet F&S Cake

Anthony Licata’s Smoked Trout Spread

Nate Matthew’s Dad’s Venison Sausage and Smoked Cheese

Colin Kearns’s Goose Breast Prosciutto

My Favorite Cookbook of the Year

Sarah Smith — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 11:05:42 -0500

by Colin Kearns

The mission of John Besh’s new cookbook, My Family Table, is “a passionate plea for home cooking.” That’s a nice sentiment, home cooking. Home cooking means cooking at home with family. Home cooking means cooking what you have at home—be it a deer you hunted, a walleye you caught, or a winter squash you grew. Home cooking means sharing a meal at home, at your family table. Home cooking is the best kind of cooking, and My Family Table is the best cookbook I’ve seen in a long time.

If you’ve read the December-January issue of Field & Stream, you already have one of the recipes from this book—the duck stewed with apples and turnips, which Besh shared with us because he loves to hunt and read this magazine. I’ve tried that dish, and it’s one of the most delicious meals I enjoyed all year.

There are many other recipes from this book that I can’t wait to try: the slow-cooked brisket, the blueberry cobbler, and especially the fried catfish. But like the best cookbooks, this one is more than a collection of recipes. Besh shares thoughtful stories of making breakfast with his boys, of his grandmother’s fried chicken, and of cooking a Christmas goose. Even the photos tell a story: As you flip through the pages, you feel as though you’re looking at a family album.

My Family Table now has a permanent spot on my cookbook shelf. But if I can help it, the book will spend more time open on my kitchen counter as I cook at home for my family.

Recipe: How to Make Duck Soup

Sarah Smith — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 10:35:57 -0500

by David Draper

Last week’s roast duck is this week’s duck soup, as I used the butchered carcass and some celery trimmings I’d been collecting to make a rich, flavorful stock. The addition of the meat pulled from the simmered carcass, along with some mushrooms and a few vegetables, makes an easy and hearty soup that will serve as several lunches this week.

After simmering the stock for several hours, straining it and letting it cool overnight in order to remove the fat that hardens on the surface, this recipe couldn’t be any easier. Just add the ingredients below to a large saucepan, simmer for eight to ten minutes until the mushrooms and noodles are soft. Serve piping hot, garnished with some chopped cilantro and sliced jalapenos. The only thing I wished I would have done was poached an egg in the broth for a little something extra.

Duck Soup

Ingredients:

- 3 qts. duck stock
- 1 cup duck meat, chopped
- 10-12 baby spinach leaves
- 2 cabbage leaves, chopped
- 1 celery stalk, diced
- 1 cup dried oyster mushrooms, rinsed in hot water and roughly chopped
- 2 tbs. fish sauce
- ¼ package Chinese noodles
- Salt and pepper, to taste

Garnish:
- Chopped cilantro
- 1 jalapeno, diced

Food Fight Friday: Goose vs. Duck

Sarah Smith — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 11:57:17 -0500

by David Draper

Now that there’s a deer in the freezer and the pheasants are starting to flush really wild, I can turn my attention to the abundant waterfowl that’s moved into Nebraska’s Sugar Valley. I’ve managed to get out a couple times within the last week and we’ve had a couple of good shoots, filling the bird strap with Canadas and a duck or two. So keeping with the current theme, let’s pit the two birds against each other in this week’s Food Fight.

Goose Stir-Fry

Lying between a goose’s keel bone and the breast proper, lies a cut of meat that I call the tender. When I get a few of the small strips saved up, I like to soak them in a soy-ginger marinade and cook them quickly for a Chinese-style stir-fry. Here they got mixed in with a sliced onion, green pepper and mushrooms, all served over a bowl of white rice.

Roast Duck

A simple roast duck is becoming my new favorite meal. This is the second one I’ve roasted in the past few weeks, and I’m already dreaming about the next one.

I plucked a fresh, fat mallard, then brined the carcass in saltwater for a couple of days. Slathered with butter, sprinkled with liberal amounts of kosher salt, black pepper, and paprika, it went into a very hot oven for just about half an hour, while the potatoes roasted in duck fat underneath.

So which one wins? The delicious duck or the savory strips of goose? Vote now and don’t forget to send your food photos to fswildchef@gmail.com.

How to Make Spiced Cider

Sarah Smith — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 10:28:03 -0500

by David Draper

From the cool autumn nights of late September on through the holiday season, a hot cup of spiced apple cider can melt away any chill. That sweet, peppery bite warms the stomach and soothes the soul. Splashed with a little bourbon or brandy, it even adds a twinkle to the eye.

Warm a three quart pot over a medium heat. Toss in a pinch of whole cloves, a spoonful of black peppercorn, and two cinnamon sticks.

If you happen to have a few allspice berries (I never do), throw them in the pot, too.

After about a minute or two, your kitchen should start smelling like autumn. Pour in two quarts of apple cider. (Plain apple juice will do, if you must.) Raise the heat and bring the mix just to, but not past, the boiling point. Reduce the heat to low.

Stir in a small handful of brown sugar and zest from half an orange or lemon. Let the cider steep for about 30 minutes—if you can wait that long. Let cool and pour through a cheesecloth-lined strainer.

Food Fight Friday: Cranberry BBQ Venison Burger vs. Country-Fried Antelope

Dave_Maccar — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 12:31:06 -0500

by David Draper

We’ve been getting some great reader submissions for Food Fight Friday, which lets me off the hook as I’ve been a little too busy hunting lately to do much serious cooking. (Yet I’ve still been packing on the holiday pounds. Go figure.) This week is an All-American battle of two great classics: a cranberry-venison burger from Susan Rose, whose corned venison Reuben last week put up a valiant fight, and chicken-fried antelope from Wild Chef reader Andrew Metzger.

Susan's Cranberry BBQ Burger Vs. Andrew's Chicken-Fried Antelope

Susan’s Cranberry BBQ Burger

“The cranberry BBQ burger was an inspiration from watching Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives on Food Network. I can’t remember the name of the diner, but they spotlighted a place that serves elk burgers with a blueberry BBQ sauce and goat cheese. I always like cranberries with venison, so I thought I'd give it a try. I made the cranberry BBQ sauce, then grilled up basic venison burgers and served it on a kaiser roll with aged cheddar cheese and a little red onion. It was very tasty, if I do say so myself!”

Andrew’s Chicken-Fried Antelope

“I normally butcher my own animals, but with living in a trailer and the warm weather, I don't have a place to properly hang and store the meat, so I had it done by a locally well-known processor. Once thawed, I pounded the steaks out with a mallet.

I always coat the meat in seasoned flour (flour, Tony Chachere’s, and black pepper), then take it to the egg wash, then back for another trip in the flour. The coated steaks get bathed in very hot oil and they don't take long to cook. The gravy is a simple roux-style gravy: 1/4 cup of butter, 2 tablespoons flour, salt and black pepper, and 2 cups of milk. Cook butter, salt, pepper, and flour, then add the milk and let thicken.

I tend to keep the sides simple: green beans and mashed taters always go well with country-fried foods. I probably should have left the beer (Fat Tire) in the bottle for the picture, but I prefer to drink ’em out of a glass. You get a better flavor profile from your beer if you can smell it as well.”

Thanks to Susan and Andrew for sending us a couple of great-looking photos. As for the rest of you readers, keep those great Food Fight Friday photo submissions coming. E-mail them to fswildchef@gmail.com, along with a short description of how you prepared the dish.

VOTE HERE!