Venison ragu, page 24

I’ve been looking forward to making this recipe since before I got my deer. Ann’s been doing nearly all of the cooking, and I wanted to take a turn. This looked like a good one, and one that I could handle.

Ann was in the kitchen with me when I started. As she read down the ingredient list, she said, “Oh, that’s just gross.” She was referring to the six tablespoons of butter we were supposed use to sauté the onions.

I tried to sway her with math. “It’s a big recipe,” I said. “If you divide the butter out by the number of servings, it amounts to less butter than you’d normally use to eat a slice or two of bread.”

“Yes,” she replied, “ but this butter is being used to fry pork sausage.”

She had a point. Although I normally precisely follow all recipes, figuring the author of the recipe knows far more than I, I relented and cut back to three table spoons of butter. I put in the 1/3 cup of oil before we had a chance to discuss it.

The excess continued throughout the recipe. Once I had about three pounds of meat (venison and sausage) simmering, I added 3 ½ cups of milk to it, and then let it boil away. That was followed by adding three cups of dry white wine. I was all out of the cheap stuff, so I had to pop the cork on a bottle of Yellowtail that I had paid $5.85 for. This recipe was getting to be an investment. And in case you haven’t done the math, three cups of wine pretty much equals one bottle. There’s hardly enough left for a glass. I did substitute a big pile of tomatoes that we had left over from the garden for one of the 28-ounce can of tomatoes. These were tomatoes that we had harvested green right before a freeze, and I had finally got them ripe, so I didn’t want to let them go bad.

 We asked over company since it was such a big recipe. Our guests included three adult friends, and two kids that are Henry’s age.

All of the kids were polite enough to not say anything negative about the dish, but none of them asked for seconds. This surprised me, because they all like deer burger, and love pork sausage.

The adults liked the dish – okay. I don’t think anyone was crazy about it. Ragu Bolognese is a very different dish than spaghetti sauce, be it homemade or from a jar. It’s not just that it’s drier; I found myself longing for some oregano or basil, and not really needing the nutmeg. In order to appreciate the dish, I think you just need to get spaghetti sauce out of your head and treat this as something different altogether.

 A couple days later, Ann warmed up some of the leftover meat for lunch, and had it with some kale and good bread, and just loved it. This might be a dish that has some staying power after all.