Foraging
Pickled Ramps
Pickling ramp bulbs -- or the bulbs of any large wild onion -- is a great way to preserve the harvest. These are fantastic served with cured meats and cheeses, or chopped into a relish or just eaten as a snack.
Foraging
Pickling ramp bulbs -- or the bulbs of any large wild onion -- is a great way to preserve the harvest. These are fantastic served with cured meats and cheeses, or chopped into a relish or just eaten as a snack.
Venison
Venison steaks served with a fantastic wild rice pilaf. It's an unusual pilaf, made when I decided to play a game of bouncing flavors, colors and textures off each other. Want to learn how to do this? Read on.
Fish
This is my homage to the North Country, where wild rice and pike, walleye and perch are king. These fish cakes are made with pike from Manitoba, but you could use any white fish. Mixed with mustard, herbs and wild rice, they are easy to make and wonderful to eat.
Ducks and Geese
Football food, people. Or party appetizers, whatever. Honey mustard wings are addictive and will make you save the wings on your ducks and pheasants forever more...
Recipe
Pairing venison with fruit is an age-old thing, and blueberry or huckleberries are a particularly good match. This recipe is an Icelandic version that is not sweet at all. The blueberries are balanced with mushrooms and wine to make a really classy yet easy dish.
Recipe
It's nut season all over the country, and one of my favorites is the butternut, a relative of the black walnut. These cookies are by far my favorite way to eat them -- and yes, they are wonderful with black walnuts, too.
Recipe
A Southern classic, buttermilk fried rabbit. Still my favorite way to cook cottontail rabbits, this recipe will of course work with store-bought bunnies, too.
Recipe
A few years ago I traveled to Louisiana and learned from the McIlhenny family themselves how to make Tabasco Sauce. Now, two years later, I can finally tell you how to make it. It's easy, but like fine wine, it takes time.
Salmon and Trout
When life gives you salmon, LOTS of salmon, make salmon patties. Sure, you can make these with regular cuts, but I prefer to make my salmon patties from "spoon meat," which you scrape from the carcass. Here's how to do it.
Venison
Venison burgers. Pretty much anyone who hunts (or eats) deer makes them. Here's some of the art and science to making as close to a "perfect" burger as you can make, as well as my baseline recipe for great venison burgers.
Salmon and Trout
Smoking a lake trout (a/k/a mackinaw) is a lot like smoking a salmon, but I recently had the chance to smoke a couple fish in Manitoba, Canada with some Cree Indians and learned a lot about the process.
Recipe
Boudin, the ultimate Cajun comfort food. Not quite a sausage, boudin is more like jambalaya in a hog casing. You eat it on crackers or just by hand, right out of the casing. I learned how to make it at Legnon's in Lafayette, and here's my version.