Venison Medley

Antipasto

I still had frozen venison hunted by my student from western Mass in the freezer. I cooked different parts of venison meat; loin and burger. My friends came over to my place and prepared a full course meal! Here is the Tatekitchen spring version.

Chicken liver for anyone? This super-nutritious organ meat is my favorite, I have never experienced in smelling awful flavor of bloody smell from fresh organic pasture-raised chickens. The chicken liver does contain a large amount of cholesterol, but it also supplies healthy doses of many essential vitamins and minerals. I marinated with aromatic herbs for 24 hours and served with super fresh spring vegetables from local farms.

Broccoli is in season now! This green thick, and flavorful soup soothes the sick and chases away the cold. The soup gets its creaminess from pureeing, which gives it all the creamy texture of a cream soup without using any dairy, but I served it with brie. lol... dipped a piece of homemade sourdough bread in the soup and we ate up the whole bowl of greens.

Primavera means "spring" in Italian, and this dish is full of springtime vegetables. For a pasta dish, I used small dried sakura shrimp from Japan and tossed seasonal spring vegetables. The translucent pink shrimp derives its name from sakura, the Japanese word for the cherry blossom. Pasta primavera can be different from person to person. Some people cook it cheesy, and others add cream for creamy vegetable pasta. Mine was the oil-based sauce and tried to pull a full flavor of sakura shrimp to collaborate with fresh seasonal vegetables. It came out nice.

Pil-pil is a traditional dish from the Basque Country (I have been to Oviedo when minor in Spanish during my undergrad), a region of northern Spain that is credited with bringing codfish back from the Atlantic Ocean for hundreds of years. It is a well-known dish all over Spain and Portugal. It is made with salt cod, garlic, and olive oil, and constant motion allows the olive oil and salt cod to emulsify into the fantastic pil-pil sauce. It is a delicious dish, and although the pil-pil sauce can be tricky to thicken. All you do is using a strainer to emulsify the oil. Usually, pil pil is served with potato, so I changed its shape and cooked with anchovy and herb sauce for the side. Since I served the first dish of pasta small, my little trick worked very well because my friends told me, "I wanna eat more pasta!". I just said "believe in me. You will see". It was a perfect serving size.

The main dish was venison, and its game sauce was a reduction of duck broth. Duck? Do you remember I cooked duck last year, so kept whole bones in my freezer? After de-glazing with the red wine and topping up with duck broth, the sauce simmered for as long as I could manage in the practical. Ideally, this would be for a few hours for the flavors to fully develop, but I don't remember how long. Eventually, I strained the sauce and reduced it to almost a syrup. By the time it was concentrated down to a few spoonfuls, the sweetness from red wine and duck broth brought everything on the plat to the next level. For burger meat, I mixed venison lean meat and homemade guanciale, which has more fat and flavor, and then made meatballs. Since cabbage is in season, I made stuffed venison meatball in cabbage. It was amazing and blew everyone's mind.

We finished with fancy homemade tiramisu with fresh seasonal peace from a local farm. I made almond pulp dough for tiramisu and made both filling and dough less sweet because seasonal peaches are super tasty and sweet.

It was a perfect "farm to table" wine dinner.