Goodness, gracious, great balls o' meat! (Part 2)

I have to admit to being mildly skeptical about this recipe, which is part of the reason that we didn't make it in the same week that we made all of our other meatball-centric meals. I'm a little wishy-washy when it comes to game meats; I like a little gaminess, but I've even had lamb that's been too strong for my tastes, and venison that has been hunted in the wild is much stronger than any farm-raised lamb. I was afraid that this dish, which used up the remainder of a windfall of free deer meat given to us by our old butcher last year, would be exceptionally gamey and unpleasant.

I am pleased to report that I could not have been more wrong.

This was, hands down, the best meal we'd made in weeks, and we are now mourning the fact that don't have access to more venison so that we could make this again.



I'm sorry to say that this was not our original recipe - J did some searching on the internet for meatball recipes using venison and came up with this one, which blended the venison with beef and had them served in a dried cherry and red wine sauce. I thought that sounded pretty good, though in addition to being concerned about the gaminess, I was worried that the sauce would be exceptionally sweet. I needn't have worried about that either - the sauce was a perfect balance of sweet and savory with just a hint of tang, the sort of flavor that just makes you salivate and crave another bite. And when paired with the ultimately mild but distinctive flavor of the venison, these were just about perfect.

J took charge of this recipe, and made a few small changes - his altered version is below. The recipe for my side dish, a warm farro salad with young kale and white beans that turned out to be the perfect earthy counterpoint to the sweet and savory meatballs, follows as well.



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Venison Meatballs in Dried Cherry Sauce
Adapted from this recipe on MyRecipes.com, originally from Christmas with Southern Living, 2000

The original recipe was supposed to make about 4 dozen 1" meatballs. J halved the recipe and made them slightly larger, and we probably got about a dozen or so (which was far too much for dinner but meant we had leftovers that tasted even better the next day). You can make them any size you like - simply adjust your cooking time accordingly.

Meatballs:
1/2 lb ground venison
1/2 lb ground pork
1 tsp salt
1 tsp freshly ground pepper
3/4 tsp ground allspice
1/8 cup minced onion
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp chopped fresh thyme
1 beaten egg
olive oil

Sauce:
1/2 cup chopped onion
1/4 cup chopped celery
2 cloves garlic, chopped
4-5 oz dried cherries (about 3/4 cup)
1 bay leaf
3 whole black peppercorns
1 sprig fresh thyme
1/2 cup Merlot
1 1/2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
1 1/2 cups beef stock

Place ground venison and pork in a large bowl with salt, pepper, allspice, onion, garlic, thyme, and egg. Mix with your hands, being careful not to overwork the meat to ensure a good texture once the meatballs are cooked. Shape mixture into 1.5-2" meatballs.

Heat olive oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat until just shy of smoking, then add the meatballs and sear well on all sides by occasionally shaking the pan to roll them around. Use tongs or a slotted spoon (tongs work better with larger meatballs) to remove the meatballs when they are nice and browned and reasonably firm - you don't need to worry too much about cooking them all the way through here, as they'll finish cooking in the sauce later. Place on a plate or in a bowl and cover with foil to trap them in their own radiant heat, as this will also help them to finish cooking.

Add chopped onion, celery and garlic to the pan and sautee them in the remaining oil and pan drippings until softened and barely colored - keep the veg moving to avoid burning the garlic. Add chopped garlic; cook 30 seconds. Turn the heat down a bit and add the cherries, bay leaf, peppercorns, thyme, wine, and balsamic vinegar, using a wooden spoon to scrape up all the browned bits from the bottom of the pan. Bring mixture to a boil and reduce by half, then add the stock and reduce by half again. Remove from heat and discard bay leaf and thyme.

You want to blend this sauce to a smooth consistency, so use whatever method works best for you. We used our regular blender but if you have a stick blender you could also pour the sauce into a tall container and use that (next time, that's what we'll do - I hate using the regular blender for this stuff). Just a few tips if you use an electric blender: When you put the to on, make sure that one of the openings is fcing the pour spout so that there is a place for steam to escape, and place a towel over the top while you blend. Blending hot liquids can be an explosive ffair if you aren't careful, and once you've had searing hot half-pureed fod go flying around your kitchen once, you never want it to happen again.

Once the sauce is blended, you can push it through a wire mesh strainer if you like, but we didn't bother. Return the sauce to the pan and add the meatballs back in. Roll them around to coat in the sauce and let everything simmer together for a few minutes to ensure even heating and thorough cooking of the meatballs. If serving individual portions, these can be skewered on bamboo skewers or simply placed on a plate with n extra spoonful of sauce. If serving as a group appetizer or a party dish, pour all the meatballs and sauce into a chafing dish or large fondue pot to keep warm and provide toothpicks for self-service. They'll be the best sweet and-sour cocktail meatballs you've ever eaten.



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Warm Farro Salad with White Beans and Young Kale

Young kale is paler green and has smaller leaves than the full-grown kind, and has a milder, slightly less bitter flavor. Use only the curly leaves, discarding the stems. If you can't find young kale, regular will work just fine.

I actually think that this would be equally good at room temperature or even cold, especially if dressed with a simple lemon vinaigrette after chilling, but as I haven't tried that yet myself you'll have to let me know how it turns out.

1/2 cup farro, rinsed and soaked in cold water for 30 minutes
1 1/2 - 2 cups chicken stock (standard ratio for cooking farro is 1 part farro to 3 parts liquid, but I always find I need slightly more, so I start with a cup and a half and add more later if necessary)
1 tbsp red wine vinegar
1 tbsp good extra virgin olive oil
1/4 cup minced white onion
2 minced garlic cloves
2/3 cup canned white beans such as navy or cannelini, drained and rinsed
1 cup roughly chopped young kale, well rinsed
salt & black pepper
freshly grated romano, parmesan, prima donna (our choice, as usual), or other hard, salty cheese, optional

Place 1 1/2 cups of the chicken stock in a medium saucepan and bring to a boil over high heat, then drain the farro and add to the pan. Reduce the heat to medium, cover the pan, and simmer until the farro has absorbed all the water and is tender but still slightly chewy, usually about 20 minutes. You may want to stir it around every so often to keep it from sticking. If you find that the farro absorbs all of the stock but is still a little hard, just add more stock a little bit at a time and continue to simmer uncovered until it is properly cooked. This may take some nitpicking, but you'll get it.

While the farro cooks, heat a bit of olive oil in a small sautee pan over medium heat and add the onions and garlic. Cook together, stirring frequently, until well softened and golden brown - we're going for some slight caramelization here. Add in the kale and white beans along with a tablespoon or so of water, reduce the heat to low, and sautee until the kale has wilted and softened and the beans are exceedingly tender. Set aside.

When the farro is cooked, drain any excess liquid that there may be in the pan (I never have any, but you never know) and gently stir in the kale and beans mixture along with the red wine vinegar, good EVOO, and salt and pepper to taste. Add some grated cheese if you like. We did like, and even added a few extra slices of prima donna to our plates to nibble between bites of meatball and farro - it worked. Really well. Cover the pan and remove from heat to keep warm, but not hot, until ready to serve.

Thumper is tasty!

...ok, if that title didn't send you running for the hills in disgust, you have my thanks. Really, I'm not a totally cold-hearted b*tch. Honestly, I'm not. But there are very few animals that I wouldn't ever consider eating, and rabbits are not one of them. (Cats and dogs, though, are another story.)

The story goes like this - over a year ago, I discovered that our butcher at the time carried rabbit. Frozen, unfortunately, but as this was a relative delicacy that I have yet to see anywhere else, I just couldn't resist the temptation to buy one. As it happened, I bought two. And they've been languishing in our freezer ever since, because we just never thought of a way to try cooking them that really appealed to us. Sure, I found plenty of recipes for rabbit stew and rabbit braised in wine and rabbit pies and other similar things in my online search for ideas and guidance, but we just never got to the point where any of those things seemed like something we felt like eating. A lot of this was because we felt that with a new ingredient, one that neither of us had ever had the opportunity to even try, we wanted to make something that would really feature its flavor, rather than hiding it in a soup or sapping it in a braise.

Also, for awhile we honestly just forgot that we had them.

But a couple of weeks ago we found ourselves dealing with some tight finances until payday, and we wanted to use up some various odds and ends that we'd been saving rather than buying a bunch of new, fresh meat. Thus, one of our little icy bunnies made it onto the menu.

The inspiration? Traditional creole and cajun cuisine; namely, rabbit and sausage gumbo.

I know what you're thinking. "That doesn't look like any gumbo I'VE ever seen." And you'd be right. Because we didn't really make gumbo. We deconstructed it.

Deconstructed dishes tend to be sort of a trendy, high-brow sort of thing, but I think the idea has a lot of merit when thinking about single dish foods like soups, stews, baked goods, or other things that use many disparate ingredients to create a single harmonious whole. While such things can be completely delicious as they are, there is a lot of land to be explored when you consider each individual ingredient as a meal component in and of itself.

When making a normal gumbo, all of the bits and pieces combine and meld to make a bowl of goodness that has a truly tasty overall flavor, but those individual ingredients lose their identity, sacrificing individuality for unity. Deconstructing this dish allows each component to shine.

The rabbits themselves were packaged whole with certain organs still attached, mostly notably the kidneys. Breaking down the rabbit naturally fell to me, as I seem to have developed a bit of a knack for breaking down whole birds like chickens or turkeys. The rabbit, though, was well and truly a whole different animal. I suppose the basic structure was the same, but there were bones in odd places, and the mid-section of the animal was so lean I wasn't even sure if the bits surrounding the rib cage were actually meat or just especially thick skin. In the end I decided upon the latter, and I ended up quartering the rabbit (front and hind quarters on both sides) and removing what I believe were the saddles (a long relatively thick muscle that nestled against the ribcage on each side), discarding the bulk of the body of the rabbit. It would be prudent to note that there is really very little meat on a rabbit, and that the bulk of it exists unsurprisingly in the hind legs. The saddles are a hidden treat, however, and are tender the way a filet of beef is tender, as it seems to be a muscle that is little-used during the rabbit's lifetime. The skin on the quarters was left on, mostly because I found it to be a devil to remove.

Each of these pieces was rubbed down with a mixture of olive oil, salt and pepper - as I said, we wanted to keep it simple so that we could really taste the meat itself. They were then roasted in the oven (I honestly can't remember the temp. or time, its been so long since we made this... my apologies!) until they were golden brown and cooked through so that any juices than ran out when the meat was pierced were clear. Being a fairly uncommon meat and lacking in any sort of guide book for game meat, we didn't bother monitoring internal temperature and just used our instincts to judge when it was done - they didn't fail us, though I'd recommend anyone else who decided to give this a shot do some more thorough research than I did, just to be safe.

Accompaniments for the rabbit were some sliced and sauteed andouille sausage (made by Aidells, the founder of which was one of the writers of one of the most useful cookbooks we own, The Complete Meat Cookbook), some briefly stewed and spiced red chili beans, a heaping spoonful of trinity sofrito (onions, celery, and green bell peppers sauteed together with just a bit of salt and sugar - we added some carrot as well to round out the flavor), and a bowl of cajun-spiced broth.

The rabbit itself was delicious - the texture was almost exactly that of chicken, and the flavor was similar as well, but more earthy. This was a farm-raised rabbit, so I imagine that wild-caught rabbit would have a touch of gaminess to it as well, though I doubt it would ever be terribly strong. I would remove the skin next time, as it ended up a bit rubbery - we didn't achieve the crispiness I associate with good roasted poultry, and was a trifle unpleasant to bite into - but the meat was delicious, especially closer to the bone.

The true appeal of this meal was that with each bite of a single component - a slice of rabbit, or a spoonful of beans or sofrito, or a mouthful of sausage - you could taste the underlying purity of the ingredients, then chase it with a slurp of the broth and the flavors would combine in your mouth to give the distinct impression that you were, in fact, eating a bowl of gumbo. The contrast was fascinating, and great fun to eat and experience.

The truth is, though, that the cajun broth was the star of this show. It was spicy, rich, highly flavorful, and yet somehow light at the same time. I could take a thermos of this broth to work with me every day for a week and it would be a satisfying lunch all on its own, though perhaps a bit of cooked brown rice and sausage on the side would round things out. The flavor was incredible though, and I immediately requested that J make some more a few days later, this time as an accompaniment to some broiled catfish. The second time it was not as good, which leads me to believe that the recipe still needs some tweaking, but the memory of the very first spoonful that flowed over my tongue will stay with me for a long time, I think.

I won't post a recipe yet, not until I think we have it perfected and written down so that it could be repeated accurately, but here are some guidelines:

- The andouille that we ate along side the other parts of this meal actually created the base for the broth - J sauteed them in a saucepan along with maybe 1/4 cup of the trinity sofrito before removing them to eat separately with dinner. The relatively brief cooking period rendered out some of the fat and a lot of flavor, which made a huge difference to the broth in the end.

- We've discovered that the key to really authentic-tasting cajun/creole food seems to be generous amounts of garlic, paprika, chili powder, and thyme - combined with the flavors in the holy trinity, this really seems to lay down the base for a good gumbo or jambalaya.

- When in doubt, over-season. The broth was initially rather too strong when J completed it, but that was easily remedied by adding a bit of water. Making the flavors too weak at the outset, however, can require a lot of tweaking of spices later on, and it gets awfully difficult to maintain the proper balance when you're on your third or fourth addition of the same spice. Don't be afraid of them! This style of cooking demands the kinds of flavors that smack you in the face and leave you speechless as you try to figure out what the hell just happened, and that's really ok. What matters is that the proper blend is achieved, and once you get that, its always easy to just thin out the final product until you reach the level of intensity that you prefer.

I promise to share this recipe once we've gotten it down, because its just way too good to keep to ourselves. We've had tons of other ideas to use it, from cooking rice in it to using it to poach chicken, to thickening it with a roux made from andouille fat and flour and spooning it over steak, and I'd love to know what other people might think of!