Appetizers and Snacks
If you want to know what I am munching as I hit the road for a very long book tour, it's these cookies. Acorn flour makes a damn good shortbread because shortbread doesn't really need gluten to be good. These are nutty and sweet, with a hint of vanilla and maple.
Preservation Recipes
This is my favorite way to eat zucchini: It's an old Sicilian method where you dry the zukes and then saute them with oil, chile and mint. I grow zucchini almost solely for this recipe.
Salmon and Trout
Salmon candy is a special kind of smoked salmon that's been cut into strips, dry cured with sugar and salt, painted with birch or maple syrup, then heavily smoked almost to the point of jerky. It's one of the more addictive trail foods ever made by humankind.
Charcuterie
Lots of people made duck or goose "prosciutto" with the breast. But the real magic is in this Northern Italian ham made with the goose's leg and thigh. Unlike the breast, this can hang for the better part of a year. Let it age that long and it tastes like eating silk.
Pheasant, Grouse, Quail
Quail barbecued slow and low with Arizona sauce. What is Arizona sauce, you say? All that is good about the wild foods of the Southwest: mesquite honey, tequila, and wild chiltepin chiles.
Recipe
Beef or venison tartare is the "trust fall" of the culinary world: Raw meat and a raw egg yolk. If your ingredients are not impeccable, things can go very, very wrong. But done right, this is at once a primal and exciting little appetizer.
Salmon and Trout
One of the cool things about salmon is that it is rich enough to make rillettes with, especially when you use belly meat and the trim from around the bones. This is a pretty classic version, with both smoked and fresh salmon or steelhead trout.
Recipe
If you like fried chicken, you'll love fried quail. This is a Southern style recipe, where you marinate the quail in buttermilk, then fry it in a cast-iron pan. Pure Southern comfort food...
Greek
It's not often I remake a five-year-old recipe and change nothing. This Greek meatball recipe -- venison (or lamb), bulgur wheat, oregano and a Greek tomato sauce -- is one such dish. Nice to know some dishes hold up well over time.
Asian
Happy Lunar New Year! I can't think of a better way to celebrate it than with potstickers, the Chinese dumpling Americans love most. My potstickers are filled with venison and yes, those are handmade wrappers. We don't mess around here on HAGC.
Recipe
I could eat these all day long. Tangy, smoky and addicting, kabanosy, a Polish smoked meat stick, is what a Slim Jim dreams about when it sleeps at night. You want to make these. Now.
Recipe
I'd always been leery of the Slavic style of salt-pickled mushrooms. But I finally took the plunge and fermented my mushrooms Polish style, and damn but they're good -- especially with some rye bread and lots of vodka...
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