Venison

Well, for some reason I can't seem to get my pictures to upload. I'll have to have Mark look at it later. So he came back from his hunting trip with his deer! It was really exciting, even more so to see him with his deer. We went up to my parents house so they could teach us what they knew about cutting up and packaging.

It was actually kinda fun. To see what would be filling my new full size freezer and thinking about how I would cook these cuts, excited me. My mom taught me how to grind the meat to make ground deer. You go to your local butcher, get pounds of beef fat and add it to the grinder and it helps with the whole process. It will also help create a little bit of fat for cooking, deer are so lean, it would just completly dry out if you didn't add the extra fat.

Well, we came home after another long exhausting, but good day and I was just too tired to cook, so I went to Burger King. Yes I did! The next night I thawed out a tenderloin. OMG! This was by far the best piece of any meat I've prepared. I followed some advice, and did the following:

1.) thaw, and place meat on paper towel on plate to soak up all the extra blood. let sit at room temperature.
2.) Cook a piece or 2 of bacon and reserve the grease. ( I already had this from breakfast, so I saved it from the morning)
3.) Heat grease on high, add salt and pepper to meat and toss in the pan. Cuts like this will do better on really high heat, therefor it will cook fast AND never cook it past rare. It will dry out within seconds of passing that temperature.

Once I got it to rare, I pulled it out of the pan to rest for just a bit. I cut off the pieces for the girls and cooked those just a tiny, tiny, tiny bit more and saved the big pieces for Mark and I. Wow, hands down best cooking tip/advice I think I've ever recieved. This cut was amazing. Now I know why people pay so much money for venison in restaurants, if I can do this at home and within minutes, who knows what a real Chef could do.

It was so succulant, it had the slightest hint of bacon flavor, there was no game flavor or after taste, it practically melted in your mouth. The thought of having a freezer full of the stuff made me a happy girl.