cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Recipe Tomorrow I leave for Cincinnati. Or however the fuck you spell it. Woo. I shouldn't have scheduled this trip. I can already tell that I'll be bored senseless the whole time. The worst part is that all of the actual business and workshop type stuff is in a conference center or something a few miles away from my hotel, rather than having everything in one place. So I won't even be able to escape to my hotel room for the odd hour break here and there. Not until the end of the day. Also, my laptop is still not working. So I will be without a computer the whole time. Lovely. I would really have liked to be able to use the evenings to write. Business travel is usually so alienating. I had about 10 minutes of light after I got home yesterday to hunt. I did see a deer that was standing still at 100 yards. I took a shot, off-hand and standing up but I missed. Probably I was a few inches too high. Shooting off-hand in low light at 100 yards isn't all that easy so I don't feel too bad about flubbing it. At least I didn't wound the deer. We made venison steak for dinner last night and it was fucking fabulous. We're well into the meat that I aged like beef right now and it's so, so good. The rest of the world has no idea what they are missing. I wish I could try again for another deer after work today but I have to pack and get ready for my trip tomorrow. I can't afford to put everything else on hold for 4 hours or whatever while I dress and butcher a deer. So I'll get one when I come back. We're getting really low on meat so this needs to be a top priority. I guess I should write my recipe for venison steak down somewhere. Might as well be here. Ingredients: 2 cuts of venison, about 2" thick Mix all of the marinade ingredients well (that's everything on the list except for the meat). Use more or less lemon juice depending on the exact cut of meat. A tougher cut, such as brisket, will need more tenderizing and thus more lemon juice. Pat the steaks dry with a paper towel if they are damp (so that they will soak up the marinade better). Use a fork to poke lots of holes in the meat on both sides. I usually put them in the pan I will be cooking them in (why get another dish dirty?) and pour the marinade over the meat. Cover the pan and put it in the fridge to marinate for at least an hour. Pre-heat the oven for 350 degrees. Pour off the excess marindade from the pan before cooking on the stove top and set it aside. You want to sear the steaks, not boil them. Cook the steaks on 'high' with a bit of olive oil on the pan until the outside of both sides is well seared. The meat is thick enough that the inside will still be essentially raw even though the outside is cooked. Put the steaks onto an oven safe plate or pan or whatever and get that excess marinade that you set aside a few minutes ago. Pour it back over the steaks and then put them in the oven. With 2" cuts of meat, it will probably take at least 5 minutes in the oven until they are cooked to the point of rare in the middle. You basically just have to check them repeatedly after five minutes or use a meat thermometer to get them cooked to whatever level of done-ness that you prefer. Most cuts of venison that I have worked with are best served medium rare at the most. Over-cooking is likely to toughen the meat, unlike what you could get away with when cooking, say, a beef ribeye. There's no fat marbling to help keep the meat tender if you leave it in for too long. Just the marinade, the seared exterior to help lock in moisture and your own good sense of timing. I could also take this recipe back many more steps since I now butcher and age my own meat. But that's a bit much for now. I know that I said last week that I will never butcher my own meat again but I have changed my mind. Yeah, the work is very difficult and time consuming and icky. But the results have been so awesome that I feel it would be stupid not to repeat this. Besides, I do have a proper butcher block and can apparently do a decent (if not terribly efficient) job. The food speaks for it's self. The steaks I've aged and cut by hand are on par with beef steaks that cost over $14 a pound at the grocery store right now. I'd be crazy not to butcher my own deer every time. Now I just need to get myself a meat grinder and I'm in business. Oh, I wish I had the money for some malt extract. It would be terribly satisfying to brew a batch of beer next week so that I can have a steak and a beer for dinner and know that I made all of this by my own labors. 10:36 a.m. - 2007-11-02 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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