Wild Bites #37: a 3-minute read that makes you smarter about wild food and tells you what's to come on the website, podcast, YouTube, or To The Bone.

 ~ Hank

1. What's Hot Now

All sorts of ingredients ready to be made into venison marinades.

2. All Hail King Backstrap

Venison tenderloin au jus on a platter.  

With many deer seasons open, some just ending, some about to begin, this is as good a time as any to highlight what many call the kings of venison cuts: the backstrap and the tenderloin. 

Venison tenderloin is often eaten at deer camp simply, and that's a wonderful tradition. But if some makes it back home, you'll ewant to start with my simple seared venison tenderloin, pictured above. 

Generally speaking, you want to cook backstrap and tenderloin less than you think because unlike a beef steak, there's no internal fat to slow the cooking process. When in doubt, undercook: You can always cook something more. You cannot uncook something. 

Here are some of my all-time favorite recipes for both loin and tenderloin, for deer, elk, antelope, moose and caribou: 

• Steak Diane, a zippy sauce of mustard, Worcestershire sauce, demi-glace, cream and shallots. The date night classic.
• Cumberland sauce, which uses red currants and red wine or Port. Also a legendary pan sauce.
• French au poivre sauce. I love this creamy green peppercorn sauce.
• A Scandinavian beer sauce I often do with duck.
• A barely sweet blueberry sauce that works very, very well with venison tenderloin.

Side note: All red meat animals work interchangeably, so if you have bison or nilgai, sheep or oryx, it'll all work well.

3. Pheasant Time!

Pheasant season is in full gear, and almost everyone I know has come back with birds. (I've not yet gone out this year -- too busy setting up my house here in St Paul). I really want to stress the point that there is more to life than skinless pheasant breasts. Really, there is. 

But how, you ask? Fair question. First, even if you don't pluck, you can skin your birds and use the legs, carcass and giblets. Mostly it's the same as you'd do with a chicken, except for the drumsticks, which have sinews that won't break down. Slow cook them and shred the meat. 

Giblets go great in a Cajun dirty rice, giblet pasta sauce or in a giblet gravy. Carcasses, once washed, make a phenomenal pheasant stock. 

But plucking is the way to go, IMHO. Here's how to hang pheasants, and how to pluck a pheasant -- or any other upland bird, for that matter.

Here is my gallery of pheasant recipes, but you might want to start with classic roast pheasant, or the smoked pheasant pictured above. 

Just have breasts? Well, you can't go wrong with a simple fried pheasant. 

4. Lodge Life, the Conclusion

Welp, my time at the Pineridge Grouse Camp is over, and I learned a lot. It had its ups and downs, it's roses and thorns, as well as a few buds -- areas that have sparked my creativity to delve more deeply. I am grateful for all of it. My latest essay over at To the Bone is all about how to assess your experiences for those roses, thorns and buds. I hope you enjoy it. 

If you like what you read, it would mean the world to me if you would consider subscribing to To the Bone. You can start subscribing for free, and upgrade to paid if you want to support my work. Thanks in advance for considering it. 

5. Unpacking and Nesting 

Unpacking. Unboxing. Puttering. Wandering my neighborhood, looking around,. Discovering. 

This is what is occupying my mind these days, which is a welcome change from exhaustion and stress, uncertainty and fear. I can feel myself settling, healing. 

It's not all roses though. I had a thing happen to me during grouse camp, a thing that has happened a lot over my career: I completely blanked on a few people who had quite vivid memories of our meetings. I hate this failing of mine, and I needed to clear the air about it, and explain myself -- and to see if I'm all alone on this one. It's my latest essay over at To the Bone. 

Not going to end on a low note tho. The big plus in my life right now is that I've started reading for recipe development again, and since I am in the North now, I am leaning into all things Scandinavian, Scottish, German, Polish and Baltic. So expect to see more recipes from this region as my first Minnesota winter in 20 years gets going. 

Until then, may your soup have deer, and not tags in it!  

~ Hank

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