Christmas nutcracker

Our Woods to Food Christmas Gift Poem

by Ann Koenig

I didn't get a llama for Christmas

To munch on our lawn like I dreamed

Not sure quite what I was thinking

Apparently not logic, it seemed.

But, under the tree what could there be

But a spring loaded device of new

With a lever and cams it's cooler than lambs

This nutcracker will surely do.

So, all you walnuts beware

And, hickories you'd better hide, also

'Cause I don't think there's a nut in the world

This baby can't crack with gusto.

And to all the family and friends

who from us recieved a copy

of our new favorite gift to give 

A signed Cooking Wild in Missouri

Let me extend the offer

If you're ever driving past

To bring your whole nuts to our house

Our nutcracker's built to last.

Papassinos (Sardinian raisin and nut shortbread cookies), page 131

It is so the Christmas season. We've made a gingerbread house and actual cookies not from the frigerator section at the grocery store! That tells you right there that something special must be in the air. One of the Christmas cookies we made was papassinos from Cooking Wild in Missouri.

Really, as I think about it though, this story is about mammas, and specifically my mom.

Sara Hill with KOMU asked to film a story about the 'woods to food' project our family is doing. She wanted to film Fred and the boys hunting and then me cooking from the book. We set up Thursday to do this since the boys would be home from school. Anyway, because 1) I rarely seem to get done everything I picture getting done and 2) we're trying not to stress this season, Thursday morning came and I hadn't got the house straightened up too much.

My mom and dad were up to watch the kids for the day. And, while I went to work in the morning for a bit, Mom saw to it that things got tiddied up. Then, because the Sara Hill was coming at noon and the cookies I wanted to make needed to chill for four hours, Mom made the dough for me in the morning. Then, she trotted to the basement to help us catch up on laundary, helped my older son on his piano playing, and worked with the boys to clean their rooms - all before 11:00 a.m.

Then, when the film crew got here, she stepped outside with her dog, stepping away from the attention of the TV folks.

And, as it turns out, Sara and company filmed us making another recipe, but didn't stay long enough to film us baking the cookies anyway. They left to film Fred and the boys rabbit hunting and had enough footage by then that they didn't need to come back to see the finished product of what we were making.

Thanks, Mom, for supporting us on our project and our family! And, thanks to all the mommas this holiday season who are helping their adult daughters make "ends meet" with all the big and little things you do to keep our worlds turning in the right direction. Life is so much with better with you.

Cookies were good, by the way.

Merry Christmas, Mom, and to all a good night.

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.

Jim Low's Mallard Satay with Thai peanut dipping sauce, page 61

We've now had wild duck cassoulet (which one could call bits of duck hidden in a bean and sausage casserole) and duck rumaki (which one could call soaked duck wrapped in much bacon).

What we haven't had was straight up duck. You know, an actual piece of meat, naked, staring up at you, with no bacon, sausage or whatever to hide behind. And, I was beginning to think there was a reason for that. A reason like "plain old wild duck is too nasty to eat alone", for instance.

I had one more package of duck in the freezer from Fred's hunting expedition and a couple more recipes to choose from. I bought ingredients for mallard stew but got out of the mood for another tomato based wet dinner, so I shifted gear to the duck satay recipe.

BUT, satay is basically meat of a stick, like fair food only with a bit more spice. And, that stick wasn't going to do much hiding for the duck meat. How was straight up duck going to be?

I used the last four ducks for this recipe since that's what it calls for, feeling guilty that I might waste quite a bit. The meat is marinaded in wine, soy sauce, ginger, garlic and lime, then skewered and grilled. OK, in the recipe book the cool people grill over charcoal with soaked sassafras wood on top. Whatever. I didn't get to that.

Then, there's a Thai peanut dipping sauce to make. I loves me some good Thai food and was excited about the hopes of making a good peanut sauce.

Anyhow, we kept checking the duck satay with a flashlight on the grill. I didn't want to overcook and ruin the meat (hey, let's at least give the recipe a chance) but the duck wasn't browning much it didn't seem like. I guess that's because it's so lean. We made a guess that they were done and brought them in.

Fast forward to the end of the meal. Bamboo skewers are littering the table. Four are by my plate. About half a dozen are strewn around each of the boys and Fred's plates. The platter is bare.

So, this recipe proves it. Duck on a stick with no bacon or anything else to cover with . . . can be yummy.  

George Seek's Duck Rumaki, page 60

This is the ultimate guy food. It involves hunting, fire, wooden sticks . . . even bacon, for goodness sakes. First, hunt the duck. Then soak daylights out of the stips of meat in soy sauce and teriaki. Then, wrap the duck around a water chestnut, a strip of bacon around that, and spear a couple times with a toothpick. Add fire, and via la, you've got a tasty snack. And, let me tall you, fellas, compliments to the chef on these tasty babies. You know how to cook a game bird. This is an often used recipe to cook duck and a fine way to get the job done. When I told our friend we'd be having duck at dinner, she said it had been years since she'd had duck and was looking forward to juicy, rich meat.  Whoa, we are not talking about the same duck here. Finnie was thinking of domestic duck, the duck I think of hanging in Chinese meat markets. As I said in an earlier post, wild duck is vastly different with a dark, livery taste. Soy sauce and bacon are a great way to help the meat along. So, thanks, boys, for the excellent recipe.

Craig's Picante Pecans, page 141



Spice mix for the pecans

I made an appetizery dinner this week for some folks and used a couple recipes out of the book. It was quite fun because a couple of the people we had over are from Australia. I love the idea of serving wild foods to them. If I were in Australia I would be thrilled with having some home cooked dishes from wild foods-talk about getting to know a place!

One of the dishes I made was spicy pecans. The nuts are from the orchard here in Columbia. A duck hunter told Fred that he knows of several wild pecan trees growing at Overton Bottoms Conservation Area which is west of Columbia just on the other side of the Missouri River. It would be interesting to pick our own next year.

I was leary of usig lavender buds, which is one of the herbs in the recipe. I think of lavender as incense and therefore it is not appetizing. But, by this time I'd have to be dense to not trust the cookbook and at least give it a try. 

I've made candied pecans once before by winging it and they turned out a mess. At the time I was guessing the crunchy foamy coating on candied pecans must come from whipped egg whites, so I foamed up some, dipped the pecans in them, and baked them with some other ingredients. They turned out soggy and much like chicken food.

The spicy pecan recipe from the book, however, used butter, maple syrup and spices and turned out  rich and meaty and flavorful. I'd recommend them for sure. I served the left over nuts at brunch on the weekend and that was nice, too.

Venison Shephard's Pie, pages 32-33

Here's the spice list in the shephard's pie recipe:

coriander

cumin

fenugreek

cardamom

mustard seeds

fennel

cloves
cayenne
tumeric
cinnamon

garlic

Um, that doesn't sound like my mother's shephard's pie. Actually, I don't remember my mom ever making shephard's pie. But, you get the point. The top is sweet potatoes mostly, with a small portion white and a little bit of maple syrup added.

The meat portion is venison, onions, cream, egg, peas, corn and the spices.

I actually thought this was going to be a bust dinner. I've made mashed sweet potatoes before too wet, and thought this dish was going to be bland (before I  looked at the spice list) and wet. To my pleasant surprise, we all loved it. We stopped the boys at thirds because we had just shy of half left and if stretched, that could do for another meal. There's a good mom for you: "No worries, kids, we'll just fill up on brownies at dessert." "Oh, come on, Mom. Can we at least have toast? We're still hungry."

Toast was made. They ate it while wrestling around on the kitchen floor. Boys. And, there you have it. A mom sliding on her parenting care and growing, silly boys . . . and shephard's pie.

Moroccan spiced braised venison, page 44

Prunes and lemons and cardamom, oh, my. This Moroccan stew was going to have some zip to it, it looked like. Venison round steak is used in the recipe, so we used the first venison from Fred's opening day deer. Actually, I'd previously made sloppy Joes with some of the burger, but that wasn't out of this cookbook. Nope, I'm wrong. We used Fred's deer in the venison in a pumpkin dish, too.
The recipe suggested cooking the round steak 2-3 hours. After that amount of cooking, the round steak could still have used some more softening up, but was reasonable enough in texture to be still tasty. We just had to help Oliver cut up his meat! I often do that with beef, too, by cooking stew meat about 2/3'sof the amount of time it would take to actually make it tender. Usually, I start late enough in the day we have to go ahead and eat it that way.
Anyhow, we served the stew with couscous, green chutney and sauted green beans, 'cause you know what? I really have no idea what veggies are eaten in Morocco and the green beans had served their time in the fridge long enough.

The next day I had left overs as a sandwich at lunch and you know what it reminded me of? A meat loaf sandwich. Funny, eh? But, the tomato in the sauce plus onions plus sweetness from the prunes made for a nice sauce surrounding the steaks that was meatloafesque. Venison's red meat is very satisfying yet the leanness of it helps one not feel greasy the way beef can. Let me tell you, it was a good, warm lunch on a cold, cloudy day.

How exotic and delightful  is Morocco, any way? Apparently, their food is tasty. The name is fun to say. And, this past weekend Fred and I went on a Christmas home tour in Columbia . One of the families whose home we toured collected mammoth sized (not literally speaking here) geodes and fossils from Morocco. One of the geodes was about six inches shorter than me and filled with purple crystals. And, they had this slab of a fossil with ocean plants looking like they froze in time as they waved in the . . . well, waves.  The slab was about the size of our car hood. I'm now picturing Morocco as a place where life-size geodes and fossils litter the ground and wafts of spicy food fill the air. Sounds fun to me.

Pancakes with maple syrup, apples and pecans, pages 138-139

How good are you at making pancakes? Do you have a recipe or a mix that works well for you? I've tried lots of mixes and recipes and have found a few that are good, but it seems like the ones I get at restuarants for breakfast are consistantly better.

When I make my own I prefer to use some oats, or whole wheat, or something to give the pancakes something besides fluff. This pancake ingredient list is pretty extensive: buttermilk, yogurt, white and whole wheat flours, cormeal, turbinado suger, etc. And, to top the pancakes, you make a sauce of sauted apples with butter and maple syrup. And, toasted pecans sprinkled on top are the wild ingredient. My maple syrup comes from Canada, I think, but if you are cool enough to have Missouri maple syrup that would be a second wild ingredient.   Hungry, yet? We served the pancakes with our own bacon and Fred's excellent coffee.

I thought the recipe excellent. The batter is thick and I should have cooked them with a lower heat because I was tending to get the outside too brown before I could flip them. But, that's my fault, not the recipes, eh! A double batch made one big breakfast for the four of us plus enough batter for a more regular school day breakfast. The pancakes are indeed soft in the middle as the book indicates, while also being hearty enough to not make you feel gross after you have from a simple starch spike many pancake recipes cause.

I like weekend breakfasts. I like not having a time schedule biting at the tail end of your meal, keeping you tense. I like public radio in the morning, and Fred's good coffee. I like making a wowser breakfast for the boys, and slipping through lunch time without anyone wanting to eat more than a piece of fruit at about 2 pm to tide them over until dinner. I like muffins and waffles and omelets and fresh squeezed juice and going out to eat, and lattes and newspapers and conversation. I heart weekend breakfasts.

Lacy Spice Wafers, page 133

This is one of a couple recipes in the book that don't have anything wild in them, but are in the book anyway because they go with a wild dish. The lacy spice wafers are to accompany the black walnut gelato, only I didn't get them made on the same night.

Oh my stars, this is DEFINITELY A RECIPE TO TRY! Do you hear me?! I mean every capital letter in that statement. Get out your book, (if you don't have a copy yet, it's worth it for this recipe alone, I'm not exaggerating) open it to page 133, make these quick wafers, and thank Bernadette, Cooking Wild in Missouri's author, for bringing you a little bit of heaven.

I've never made a wafer before but had a sneaky suspicion they were going to be tasty. The batter is made in a saucepan, poored into puddles on a cbokie sheet, and baked until bubbly. Then, they are scooped off the tray and can be formed into shapes as they cool and crisp up (in the photo above I'm drapping them over a rolling pin to form a rounded shape). They go oh so nicely with ice cream and I imagine custard or perhaps pudding, also.

We served them to some friends for dessert and both kids and adults went for them, for sure. 

Venison in a Pumpkin, page 42 - 43

Ann has been doing a fantastic job of knocking out these Cooking Wild in Missouri recipes, much to my eating pleasure. But it was about time I took a turn in the kitchen. And I had just the recipe in mind that I wanted to do.
This story really starts with the Columbia Farmers’ Market, and one of my favorite things: a deal. We were shopping for pumpkins two days before Halloween, not bad for us. There were plenty of big, beautiful pumpkins at the farmers’ market, priced at $4, or three for $10. Each of my two boys wanted his own, so then for only $2 more I could buy a fantastic, locally grown pumpkin. I couldn’t pass that up. I let Oliver do the picking, and he always goes for big, and with some help we got the pumpkins to the car.
Later that day I helped the boys carve them up, with the fairly traditional scariest faces they could muster. Each boy did one, and although they encouraged me to do my own, I didn’t take time to do so. Which left us with one pumpkin post-Halloween.
I had spotted the recipe in the book for venison stew in a pumpkin, but I was a little worried. We didn’t have any venison left from last season, and this deer season wasn’t here yet. How long would the pumpkin keep? Then I read in the book that the author had kept her’s from the fall until she used in February. That encouraged me - surely I’d have a deer before then.
Opening day of firearms deer season was successful for me, and the day after Thanksgiving I picked up the venison from my Dad, who had picked up his and mine from the processer at Linn. Now I was ready to go.
So even though we had a big crowd at our house for Thanksgiving, and for dinner the day after Thanksgiving, I didn’t really want to keep my venison pumpkin to myself. My friend and neighbor Robert has been following the blog, so I invited him and his family, who boys are friends with my boys, over for dinner Sunday night.
It’s a pretty hardy recipe, that starts with two pounds of venison stew meat, but with Robert’s family plus mine I would be feeding 10, so hearty is good. I started off browning the stew meat on the stove top, then added the rest of the ingredients, except the tomato. I then transferred the pot to the woodstove. I had a raging fire going and it was boiling harder than I wanted it to on the woodstove, so I set a metal trivet between the pot and the stove, then it simmered just right.
This gave me a couple hours to go back to a painting project in our bathroom, and then it was back to the kitchen. I cut the top of the pumpkin and pulled out the innards like we were going to be carving another jack o lantern, and then I transferred the stew from the pot to the pumpkin.
I’ve made soup in a pumpkin before, but it was mushroom soup in a smaller pumpkin, and I didn’t bake it as long. This would be different.
The book says to put the top back on the pumpkin, but my pumpkin was too big so this wasn’t possible. The book also says to put the pumkin in a baking dish, but again, my pumpkin was too big, The best I could do was put a cookie sheet under it. It baked for two hours, and toward the end of that time I put the top in the oven beside it, so the color change would be similar.
When it came time to remove the pumpkin, I couldn’t pick it up by the cookie sheet, because it was too flimsy and the pumpkin was too heavy. So I got out our big cutting board that we had just used for serving turkey and put it on the floor next to the oven. Then I kneeled down and prepared to lift the pumpkin from the oven. I advised Oliver to stand back.
Disaster! A rupture occurred in the bottom of the pumpkin! Stew was spewing on my oven door! I quickly placed the pumpkin on the cutting board.
Then nothing. Apparently it had just been a small fissure that occurred when I lifted the pumpkin. When I sit it down on the board the leaking stopped. Fortunately there is a little trough that goes around the cutting board, so it caught some of the spill. Quite a bit got on the oven door, and made it to the floor, but half a roll of paper towels later, Oliver and I had most of it cleaned up, and oven was ready for Ann to make dessert. The spilled stew made a mess, but in terms of real quantity we didn’t lose much, and still had a lot of leftovers.
We served the stew out of the pumpkin with no more leaks, but post dinner I noticed the pumpkin was starting to slump quite a bit. Two hours may be too much in a convection oven.
I like stews, and have made a lot of them, both by recipes and by winging it. This stew is superior to any that I’ve made before. Oddball ingredients like dried apricots really add to its complexity of flavors, and I think the key ingredient was the coconut. The stew wasn’t a favorite among the kids, but I think I’ll make it again, with or without a pumpkin.