Reindeer + Bacon Fat = Belly Love

I know. I've been a bad blogger.
This last while has been absolute mayhem at work thanks to the annual sheepbang that is 'End of Fiscal Year'.
I've also been hit with the joyful craziness of family weddings and the not not so joyful plague.

Prior to all this craziness, I made a batch of Reindeer Carnitas that I've been planning to share with everybody.
Traditionally, carnitas is made with fatty cuts of pork slow cooked for hours until it's bathing in its own lardy goodness. It continues to cook in this pool of splendid fat slowly until it's browned and absurdly yummy.

It is quite simply, genius.

I had purchased a couple of boxes of reindeer meat from a local herder. I got everything from hearts to ground reindeer to a bunch of roasts.
I threw a couple of the frozen roast in the crockpot with a liberal grinding of sea salt. Set it to low and walked away. I let it cook overnight.
Yes, I did NOT add any liquid. I am a reckless crockpotter. It's how we roll up here :P
Reindeer is a pretty lean meat and the roasts did not render out enough fats for browning. Especially since I scooped the marrow out of the bones and ate it straight on its own. I am a greedy pig I know. I did let the puppies lick the grease off my lips.

So I added my fave fat: BACON FAT.

This is my perpetual pot of bacon fat. It kinda looks like ice cream

  I have this super awesome killer crockpot that has a stovetop safe insert. I broke up the meat into smaller chunks and plopped the lard into the crockpot then finished it all over low heat on the stove.  I let it cook until all the liquid was gone and the meat got all brown and crusty on the outside. One pot cooking at it's best!

Served on a bed of shredded lettuce, with a dollop of salsa verde and homemade guacamole.
Yes, it was stupidly good. The meat was crispy and caramelized on the outside and tender on the inside. The flavour of the reindeer was deep and rich without being too gamey and the bacon fat provided a nice boost of unami. 
Probably one of my favorite ways to cook beast.

For dessert, crazy sweet photos of cute puppy-monkeys:

Have a great spring!

Happy Eat Year!

Gung Hay Fat Choy!
Happy Dragon Year!
Like any good Chinese gal, I spent the weekend eating, cooking, eating, cooking and eating some more and ending the weekend with more eating. It was hard work but somebody's got to do it :P

The cooking part was a bit easier, if not more enjoyable now that I have my new double oven stove!

Sexy Beast

I used the money I made from selling handmade yarn at Craft Fair to pay for this baby. The months of working through my weekends to dye up endless batches of yarn and the weeks walking around with purple and green hands was totally worth it now that I have this lean, mean cooking machine in my kitchen.
I LOVE this range. I especially love the double oven feature. I've been on a roasted veggie binge these last few weeks. It took me only an hour or so to cook up what would normally take a good part of the afternoon. Now I have roasted veggies for the week. Wheee!
I've been doing a big cook-up every Sunday so I have a stash of veggies and flesh to feed off of for the week. Usually by the time I get done walking the girls, make dinner, eat and clean up it's usually time for bed. At least this way, I don't have to make, just assemble dinner and there's minimal clean-up.
It's a good thing I have this double bellied beast since Bill the Fruit Guy finally showed up in town this past week with the year's first shipments of fresh produce. I went apeshit buying vegetables. I almost cried when I saw these beauties:

Which got turned into a huge pan of yumminess:

It's been ages since I've had eggplant. Usually by the time it shows up in the grocery shelves  here it looks like an old hag all covered with wrinkles and liver spots.

In celebration of Chinese Dragon New Year, I wanted to whip up some lettuce wraps. I didn't have any dragon meat but I did have a couple of pounds of ground muskox.

Which quickly got turned into this:

What recipe? You don't need no stinking recipe for lettuce wraps. I browned up the musk ox, dumped in some tamari and 5 spice, tossed in some leftover spinach, piled a mess of it onto a lettuce leaf and called it a day. Actually I had three piles of it. It was that good. Especially with my lover, Sriracha. You can keep your puny, weak-knee sappy hoisin sauce, my muskox needs some of the red rooster.

If Sriracha is my lover, this is my crack LOL!:

Cupboard Crack

For the sake of science, I've been experimenting with different applications for almond butter. I think I've found my favorite...on coconut-bacon pancakes 

Almond Butter Delivery System

sopping up the eggy sunshine

GET INTO MY BELLAH!!!!

Enjoy!

Another day in paradise

We're just finishing up a good old fashion blizzard!
The winds have been blowing steady at around 40-50km with gusts near 100km. All night the house shook and groaned and I prayed that the roof wouldn't blow away.
Apparently, somebody should have been doing the same for the Inuvik Airport. It's roof looks like somebody has taken a huge can opener to it.

The whole town, actually the whole Mackenzie Delta and the Inuvialuit Settlement Region, was shut down yesterday. Many towns are still shut down.
We stayed home and had a fabulous blizzard day complete with coconut pancakes and lots of hot cocoa!

Later on in the afternoon, we had a nice family walk around the neighbourhood because that's what you do when the blizzard comes into town:

I walked to work this morning and it was still pretty blustery. If I don't make it home on time I'm probably stuck in a snow drift or something.

Stay warm!

ETA- It's Friday now and it's still blowing 40km with gusts of 60km. Now I know how everybody up here looks so young. They get their wrinkles snowblasted off them every winter .
To everybody down in Vancouver/Van Island area: Quit your freaking whining.

Muskox on a buzz

The sun came back this weekend for like 7 minutes before plopping back below the horizon. It's been snowing and cloudy for the last few days. I'll just take Environment Canada's word that the sun is somewhere behind those clouds.

The town celebrated the Sunrise Festival on Saturday with a pancake breakfast, games and a huge fireworks show. It was -30C that night and so we enjoyed the fireworks from the comfort of our kitchen. The girls were all excited because they thought all the booming was gunfire and they were eager to retrieve the fallen game. So cute.

We celebrated with nice chunk of muskox tenderloin. Yum nom nom nom

It gave me an excuse to use my NEW Crockpot:

Hubba hubba. Hey you sexy thing, where have you been all my life?

It was a Christmas present from myself. It has a metal non-stick insert that allows you to sear and saute on the stove top which means less dishes for me to clean! WooHoo!
I have been pining all year for this but it was just a touch too $$ for me to justify buying since I already had a perfectly good crockpot. Then it went on sale!

Muskox is a pretty mild meat in relation to other game meats but it is a tad gamey.  I figured instead of doing the usual drunken beast treatment, I would experiment with a spice rub.  I opened up the my spice drawer and basically pulled out stuff randomly and dumping whatever felt right into a bowl. I wanted something earthy and just a touch spicy.
I used coffee grounds as a base for the spice rub. I know, it sounds strange but it's sooooo good.

Here's my unrecipe for a Coffee Spice Rub:

Base
2-3 scoops of finely ground coffee
good dose of sea salt
good dose of black pepper

If you want it spicy add:
chili powder (regular or chipolte or ancho)
smidge of cayenne powder
ground ginger

If you want earthy add:
ground cumin
ground corriander
tumeric
ground mustard
paprika

If you want sweet add:
cocoa powder
cinnamon
nutmeg
dried orange peel
ground allspice

Other stuff you can add:
garlic powder
dried herbs
onion powder

Of course, this is not an exhaustive list of what you can dump into your spice rub.  Of course, you could just buy a ready made spice rub but you miss out on the fun of playing mad alchemist dumping random spices into your cauldron of rubbing goodness. 

Mix your spice rub thoroughly and give your chunk a meat a good, dirty massage with it.

After I finished giving the muskox roast a good shiatsu rub down, I melted a dollop of coconut oil in the pan/insert over medium high heat and seared each side for about 3 minutes until I got a nice brown crust. I threw in a chopped onion. I also did the same treatment to a sirloin roast and cooked them both up at the same time since there's so much freaking room in my new crockpot!

I cooked it for 8 hours on low. We had it with oven baked sweet potato fries and spaghetti squash and chimichurri sauce. YUM!

Have a great week!

Feastmas

I'm stuffed. There was barely enough room in my belly for ham and cornbread stuffing omelette this morning.

Barely...heehee. I know, it sounds strange but it was soooo good. Especially with a good zapping of srirachi.  This is now known in our house as my "Birthday Omelette" because TODAY IS MY BIRTHDAY!!!!!
I am 38 freaking years old!!!!
Yippee!!!

I'm recovering from 48 hours of gluttony.  My 38 year old belly is stuffed beyond capacity. There's a lot packed in there....

filled beyond capacity

We started off with a Feastmas Eve feed at our friend Moe's. We had a casual get-together to share the loche/burbot that our friend Juan caught earlier this week.  It's the camo fish below.

loche and coney

Loche is a easy fish to clean and process. The skin peels right off and the meat pulls right off the spine. The skin is smooth with tiny scales. It almost feels like an eel. There aren't any finicky bones to deal with, making it a ease to fillet. You can cook it up whole if you feel like it but most folks around here cut the meat into chunks and boil it up.  I prefer to pan-fry it with a bit of butter and oil and serve with a squeeze of lemon.

There are three rules to a proper pan fry.

Firstly, don't crowd the pan. Or else you'd end up sweating the fish and sweaty fish is about as appetizing as Santa's sweaty jockstrap.

Secondly, don't mess with the fish once you put it in the pan. Give it a good minutes. You'll see the flesh start turning opaque around the edge. You only want to turn the pieces over once.

Thirdly, don't overcook the fish.

I basically spent much of the evening frying up pan after pan of loche for everybody. As soon as I filled up the plate, it was gone.

Thank goodness my dear, dashingly handsome, darling husband took pity on me and fed me as I cooked round after round.



 It's really mild, firm flesh. Many compare it to lobster. It's so good that even my freshwater fish hating darling husband liked it.

The fish also has one of the best livers I have every had. It's sweet and rich and everything good that a liver ought to be. I keep planning to save some to make a pate with local cranberries but it's so much easier to just roast it up.  I threw in the liver with the egg sac (another bit of yummy heaven) into the over for 30 minutes at 350F.

This the egg sacs (top) and loche liver (bottom) in the raw form:

All roasted up (liver on the left, eggs on the right):

Yum nom nom nom. Life is good. I know the idea of eating fish liver and egg sacs is kinda weird to most people. That's ok. That just means more for me!

The following evening we hosted a huge Christmas refugee dinner. Pretty much it was all our friends that stuck around Inuvik for the holidays and didn't have family to share dinner with. I woke up at 8am and started cooking (and nibbling) by 8:20am and kept going all day. I managed to squeeze in a much needed walk with the girls to work through my day-long nibblefest.

I made roast turkey, mashed potatoes, cornbread & apple stuffing, buckets of gravy and cranberry sauce made with local cranberries. Friends brought over bumble berry pie and sugar pie (otherwise known as my Kryptonite), homemade maple syrup fudge, baked sweet potatoes and ham. I also made traditional Danish dishes including rice pudding to start off the evening, braised red cabbage and Kevin even whipped up a dish of candied potatoes. I told if he wanted them, he'd have to make them. Not that I don't like them. I just hate peeling those tiny potatoes. I'm so lazy :P

Just looking at all that food is making my belly ache. And it doesn't even include the all the chocolates and desserts that I ate. Ahhh! Sugar pie is my nemesis! But it's so yummy.

Here are some happy Feastmas puppy photos:

Happy Yummy Holidays everybody!

Snotty Fish and Green Grouse

I'm finally taking some time off. Yippeee!!!!!
The girls and I spent last Sunday with our friends Moe and Bailey on Airport Lake.
As mentioned before, the sun has said good-bye for the year. However a few fingers of sunlight made it above the horizon. This is about as bright as it gets around here this time of year:

Airport Lake

It's was lovely and relatively quiet.  There hasn't been much snow yet, making for easy walking across the lake to pick up another canine friend, Allie.
After a good hike around, we retired to Moe's cozy cabin to put our feet up by the fire and enjoy a nip of scotch (or two).

Cozy fire and drinky-drinks :)

Allie and Moe

Loulou, Bailey, Lyra demonstrate the dog nap techniques

Loulou and Lyra

While we were all enjoying the cozy cabin, our friends Juan, Jake and Bill were out ice fishing for the day.
I had foolishly said that I would cook up the fish if they actually caught any. Jake had his line in for seconds when he caught his first bite!  Well, they caught a good number of inconnu (or coney as folks call it up here) and even a couple of much coveted losh (burbot).

The next night, I made good on my word and cooked up a coney (Stenodus leucichthys) over at Moe's.

Losh and Coney

The fish were still frozen when I got to them because somebody left them outside until that afternoon.  I won't name names but somebody owes me a big one.

I had the unenviable task of thawing cleaning, degutting and prepping this monster.
If you haven't ever had the pleasure of cleaning a coney, it's one slimey beast. No amount of rinsing seems to be able to deslime it. Just roll up your sleeves and plan to take a good, long shower afterwards. I had to give it a warm water bath to thaw it a bit and the sink was soon filled with fish slime water. EWWWWWWWW! It's like a someone wrung out a whole kindergarten class of snot-nose kids into the sink.

Normally, I like to keep the head and tails on my fish but this was so big that I wouldn't have been able to fit it in Moe's oven if I didn't decapitate it.
After degutting and cleaning, I stuffed it with one thinly sliced onion, lemon, a bunch of parsley and liberally seasoned with salt and freshly ground pepper.

Stuffed coney

Proud fisherman

Coney with Chimichurri

I roasted it at 425F for and 60 minutes wrapped in foil. I estimated 10 minutes of cooking for each inch plus another 20 minutes for the fact it was still kinda frozen. I wasn't worried about it drying out. Coney is a fairly oily fish and by roasting it wrapped in foil there's little danger of it drying out.
The flesh is nice and firm for a freshwater fish. It is one of the more mild-flavoured fish around here.

Coney/Inconnu have been a staple of the local aboriginal populations here traditionally.  It's not only a main food source for the people but also their dog teams. Much of this fish is enjoyed dried or smoked, even today.  The oiliness makes it good candidate for these preservation techniques. If you are going to roast it indoors, be prepared to live in a house that smells like neglected aquarium. You've been warned.
We had a bunch of friends over to enjoy the fish. Even with a table full of eaters, we only managed to finish half the coney. That was a big fish!

I served the fish with a homemade chimichurri (unrecipe below). This is my go-to sauce for the week. It's a Argentinian sauce that is used mainly for bbq meats. However, I use it for everything. It's great as a marinade and dressing. A dollop on roasted veggies is yummy. I even like it in scrambled eggs. This has caused my Latino friends to give me funny looks but I heck, I don't give them crap for putting soy sauce on a perfectly good bowl of steamed rice so they can keep their funny looks to themselves!

There are variations all over South America and each region will boast that their is the best. It's culinary chauvanism at it's best. I enjoy it all!

A few days later, I served it with some local grouse. Even wonder whatever happened to these poor buggers from my '6 grouse, 5 shots' entry?

I marinaded some of the grouse breasts in a couple spoonfuls of chimchurri sauce for a few days and then seared them up.

I served them with a healthy dollop of chimichurri sauce. The fresh garlicy sauce complimented the earthy grouse meat very well. I served it with a side of brussel sprouts, sugar snap peas cooked up with bacon. Yum nom nom nom.

Today, I've gotta brine the turkey for X'mas and get some of the baking out of the way. Oh yeah and wrap the gifts and clean the house.

Aren't I supposed to be taking time off??!?!

Chimichurri Sauce Unrecipe

It's basically a herb, oil and acid sauce, much like a pesto (don't tell the Latinos I called it a pesto.)

Choose a couple bunches of fresh herbs (you can use parsley on its own):

Parsley

Cilantro

Mint

Choose your acid:

sherry vinegar

red wine vinegar

white wine vinegar

lime juice

lemon juice

You can use one or combinations of the above to make about 1/2 cup in total.

Rest of the ingredients:

5-8 cloves of garlic (minced)

1 tsp salt

1 tsp freshly ground pepper

3/4 cup of olive oil

Other additions (optional)

dried oregano

ground cumin

hot pepper flakes

paprika

hot sauce

diced onion

tomatoes and peppers (will give you a red version)

Toss everything into container and blend with a hand blender.

You can also do this in a food processor.

You don't want it to be completely pureed. Just blended and chunky.

Taste and adjust seasoning. Some folks like theirs more acidic, other more garlicy. It's your chimichurri sauce, you can add sugar plum fairies for all I care.

I let mine sit for a few days in the fridge for the flavours to meld. Serve with whatever the hell you want.

Happy Eating!

who turned off the lights?

We are well into our season of dark. The sun said 'see ya later, alligator' a week ago.
It's not so bad. We get a couple of hours of dusk in the afternoon when the edges of the sun's light manages to escape above the horizon.

So far no signs of oozing into a puddle of depression or turning into  an epic emotional volcano (well, no more than usual). I am feeling a tad rundown and frayed around the edges but that has to do more with the fact that I've been working the last 5 weeks without a day off than solar abandonment issues.

I think the reason I've be able to keep the hairy SADD monster at bay is because I spend 2 hours every night walking and playing with the pups under the sodium glow of moonlight and surrounded by the stark beauty of an arctic winterland. The fresh air, though cold is crisp and pure. As my friend Moe says, the air is so clean you want to eat it.

Oh yeah, and spiced Frangelico toddies (recipe below) help too :P

Of course, it helps to have a pair of baboons to snoogle with all night.

My dear, dashingly handsome, darling husband has been putting together videoettes of this past year's escapades to keep me smiling. It's awesome! It's like having my own personal video production team.!

Here's a videoette of what I was up to last spring:

Spiced Frangelico Toddy
serves one slightly hypothermic dog walker

1 generous ounce  of Frangelico
1 cup of boiling water
squeeze of lemon
sprinkle of nutmeg, cinnamon or pumpkin pie spice

Directions:
1) Toss ingredients into your favorite mug.
2) Gather your puppies around you.
3) Snuggle under the arm your dear, dashingly handsome, darling husband.
4) Enjoy!