Be still my yummy heart...

I'm at the final leg of wrestling with this silly plague. Last night, I was in need of something to boost my system and get healthy once and for all. You can keep your echinacea, your tinny flavoured zinc tablets, your chalky Vitamin C lozenges and your wimpy herbal teas.
I ATE A HEART!

Well, not the whole heart. But a good chunk of it :)

I am currently having a love affair with reindeer meat.

I have a couple of reindeer hearts hoared in my frozen meat stash. At $5 a heart, they are the cheapest cut of meat up here. And it's from a local free range herd. Win-Win!

Technically, the heart is not an organ meat. It's a muscle, a beautiful, finely grained, lean muscle.

I trimmed all the excess fat and gristly parts and gave it to the pups'.

gristly top of the heart

The rest I sliced into 1/2 - 1/3 inch slices.

I was tempted to marinade or do a spice crust or make a wine reduction but I opted for a simple dusting of salt and pepper and seared the pieces.

I wanted taste the flavour of the heart without adulteration. 

The slabs of heart were seared (in bacon fat, of course) for about 2 minutes on each side over medium high heat. I wanted it medium rare. For such a lean cut of meat, you don't want cooked anymore or else risk a dinner of shoe soles. You want to still see the muscle fibres slightly quivering with echoes of their former lub dub lub dub

Here's Lyra about to chow down on some raw reindeer heart and kibble (yep, spoiled stinking rotten):

Here's my plate of reindeer heart with roasted cauliflower and shichimi yams:

Yeah, that's all for me. I'm a growing girl :P
The reindeer heart was done just right with mild gamey flavour. The finely-grained meat was tender enough to cut easily with a butter knife. I did add a dollop of horseradish and whole grain mustard as condiments to my plate. Nice and simple.

That said, I could see this meat doing really well in a garlic and fresh herb marinade and grilled on the bbq. Another future experiment would be reindeer heart satay. The walls of the hearts could easily be seperated with sliced into thin strips for that.

I'm also wondering if I could utlitize the chambers of the heart for stuffing other yumminess into it and baking or braising it. Oh, the possibilities!

For dessert, sickly sweet photos of dear, dashingly handsome, darling husband snuggling with Loulou:

Have a yummy week!

Carcass Soup

(Warning: This post contains harvesting images that may be disturbing to some. If you are squeamish and don’t like seeing fluffy animals  all covered in blood as a result of a well placed headshot, you’d better move onto this entry where there are some photos of some very cute puppies.  But heck if you’re going to eat meat, you might as well face it sooner or later that a living creature had to die because you wanted to have a hamburger. At least the creatures in these photos had a life frolicking about the land, free from factory farms and didn’t have a clue what corn-based food pellets tastes like. Anyways, 'salad' is just a nice way of saying ‘vegetable massacre’.)

There are still plenty of  critters are still out there, however the odd storm event mades it tricky to catch anything but frostbite.  Kevin caught some really swell photos along with dinner.

wolf paws compared to husband`s gorilla paw

There were a number of wolves and other big fluffies other there this week. Kevin even saw woodland caribou and a moose cow with two newbies.

I don’t know who’s going to break it to the children of Inuvik but next year’s Easter Egg Hunt may have to be cancelled due to the lack of Easter Egg delivery bunnies thanks to dear, dashingly handsome, darling husband. Apparently he has a vendetta against the bunny tribe.

Most of these went to his grandmother who is actively encouraging this vendetta. 

It was a crazy whirlwind long weekend for me (as if there is such a thing as a calm, quiet long weekend around here :P )

I made ‘Carcass Soup’ to sustain us through this chilly weekend. (Recipe below.) Carcass Soup is my response to folks that tell me that the only parts worth eating on a upland bird is the breast meat and that there`s not enough meat on the rest of the bird to be worth the effort.
Seven Hells! If you`re gonna snuff out a creature`s light with you`re own two hands, you do it the courtesy of using as much of the creature as possible. I have an army of elders to back me up on this one.
I will admit, it`s a pain to be dealing with the tiny slivers of tendons that are found in the drumstick but there are ways around it .Carcass Soup is one easy way of seperating the meat from the bones for small birds.  The basic premise is to simmer it until the meat falls off the bones.  The tendons just slip right out.
Check out this video showing a slick trick for removing tendons from game birds.

A good chunk of this weekend was spent getting ready for the Great Northern Arts Festival Christmas Craft Fair (November 25-27th at MSRC). Yes, it`s that time already. I`ve rented a table to sell my handspun and hand-dyed yarns. My house looks like a muppet slaughterhouse with a gzillion skeins of newly dyed yarn hanging all over the place to dry.

The rest of my weekend was spent playing outside. Whee! My friends and I, with a pack of dogs in tow, went for a ski along the East Channel just outside of town.  There was just enough snow on the river to make for good skiing. There weren`t many skidoo trails and so there was a quite a bit of trailbreaking involved. The fun ended when I broke a ski in an attempt to  gain higher ground which sucks musk ox balls.  I hobbled back with my transverse fractured ski and a long face. However, it`s next to impossible to be too sad for long when you have these two running around you:

Afterwards, my friends and I had a big doggie biscuit baking afternoon. We had volunteered to bake dog cookies for the SPCA`s craft fair table. We made liver biscotti, peanut butter cookies, oatmeal and molasses treats and cheesy biscuits. Conservatively, I think we made over 1000 cookies.

The doggie biscuit baking crew

This week started off with a sharp cold slap to the face.  It was around -30C this morning when I trudged off to work. I walked home for lunch and arrived looking like this from my 15 minute walk from the office:

armed with beaver mitts

Frost tipped eyelashes! No winter outfit is complete without this icy bling.

Have a great week!

Carcass Soup

3-4 ptarmigan or grouse skinned carcasses (basically everything but the breasts)

water, stock, wine

couple bunchs of spinach, kale or chard (shredded) or 1 box of frozen spinach (thawed)

1 can of white kidney beans or whatever bean you feel like

• Dump the birds into a crockpot. Top with water or stock or wine or any combination of the three.
• Cook on low for 7-8 hours or until the meat begins to fall off the bone.
• Remove the bird from the broth and set aside to cool.
• Dump in the other ingredients.
• Shred the meat off the bones. Careful to slip all the tendons out of the drumstick meat. You should get about 2 cups or more of meat.
• Return meat to the soup. Let simmer for another 20 minutes.
• Serve.

This is a basic broth. You can add all the culinary bells and whistles. I added some red chili flakes and a couple shots of soy sauce. I wanted to taste the bird and the greens.  The beans provided some earthiness to the soup. Simple and tasty!

Drunken Pickled Bunnies

It’s definitely hunker-down-and-grab-a-bowl-of-soup weather out there. The temperatures have been puttering around -10C with an absurd humidity of up to 90% which doesn’t make for much fun. It’s dumping another pile of snow outside. My skis are ready to go.

We spent last weekend helping my dear, dashingly handsome, darling husband celebrate his big 4-0. Most of the weekend was spent hunting (surprise!) Along with getting some small game, we saw this handsome fella:

Hawk Owl

We have a friend who is Kevin’s b-day twin and so we had a duo-b-day potluck dinner. Here’s some pics of the spread:

Roasted Grouse with crispy skin

Seared Grouse Breasts

Pumpkin Birthday Pie

Drunken Pickled Bunny Soup

That's a picture of Loulou and Lyra giving me their best sad puppy dog eyes because I segregated them from the kitchen and they had to watch us eat from the other side of the doggy gate.  There was grouse and rabbit and pumpkin pies all over the place and I was being realistic about the obedience levels of my pups in the face of such temptation.

Don’t feel so sad for them. They got some grouse for their dinner.
We also found out that Lyra really like pumpkin pie :P

Here’s the recipe for the German Rabbit stew (Hasenpfeffer), now known in this house as Drunken, Pickled Bunnies.

Basic Drunken Pickled Bunnies

1-2 rabbits disjointed into 4-6 pieces each

1 cup of dry red wine

1 cup of cider or red wine vinegar (yes a whole cup)

1 tablespoon of pickling spices

1 Bay Leaf

½ onion chopped fine

1) Brine the rabbit overnight.

 

2) Mix the rabbit in big ziplock bag with the rest of the ingredients. Seal bag, mush the ingredients all around so they are well mixed. Place bag in a glass or ceramic bowl.

3) Throw the bowl into the back of the fridge for a few days (I had in for 4 days). Occasionally, turn the bag over, mush about the ingredients to ensure the rabbit is evening marinated.

 4) Throw it all into a crockpot and let it cook on low for 8 hours.

 

5) Meat should be falling off the bone. Remove meat from liquid and let cool for a bit.  Then shred the meat off the bone and return to the cooking liquid.

That’s the basics of Drunken Pickled Bunny stew.

Yes, you can dredge the rabbit in flour and brown it and get jiggy with some caramelization before throwing it into the crockpot. I was too lazy. I don’t think it lacked too much without the browning.

There’s a bunch of different Hasenpfeffer recipes online that call for a bunch of other ingredients like brandy, bacon, currant jelly and fresh herbs. You can go as fancy as you want. I don’t know if I could even find currant jelly around here. I could probably find kumquat jelly but probably not currant jelly. It's one of those strange  food supplies issues about Inuvik. I found salted duck eggs but I couldn't find turnips last week.  

 

I did add some shredded cabbage and caramelized onions (leftover from a previous meal) into the cooking liquid while I was waiting for the meat to get cool enough to pull off the bone. I finished it with a large handful of finely chopped parsley.

It has a different flavour than your usual rabbit stew. When I was brining the rabbits, one was definitely goaty. It smelled like it had just finished off a marathon when it ran straight into Kevin's .177. 

The marinade certainly performed it's culinary alchemy on the gamey meat. It wasn’t as acidic as I thought it would be with all that vinegar. The meat was very rich and had that thick, succulent mouth-feel of a confit. (yum...drool..confit).The cabbage helped lighten and stretch the meat. The parsley was a great bright, fresh addition. Never underestimate the power of parsley!

There’re so many possibilities with this dish. I ended up using up the last bowlful of it in a spicy noodle soup for dinner last night. I could also see the meat doing well in pulled meat sandwich or in a fajita or topping a nice mushroom risotto.  If I wasn’t goddamn lazy I’d even consider making rabbit ravioli. 

Happy eating!