Fire in the Hole! Or, How *Not* to Cook Your Venison Barbacoa

Nothing makes a new recipe more exciting than setting your kitchen on fire while cooking it.

Thanks to a friend, we have a fair amount of venison in our freezer, and I’m generally on the lookout for new ways to cook it. For years I thought that the only thing you could do with venison was make a substandard and overly-spiced chili with it (yeah, throwing a little shade there) so the last several years’ worth of dinners at our friends’ house have been an absolute revelation. Having been on a bit of a taco kick since receiving Death By Burrito as a gift a few years ago, the venison barbacoa seemed like a shoo-in for my latest favorite taco filling.

The recipe itself is dead easy as long as you think ahead and pull out your slow cooker earlier in the day. As is slow cooker standard, you put everything in and turn it on and magically your dinner is done when you wake up from an extended nap on the couch. That's the beauty of the slow cooker: the part where you really don't have to pay any attention to it or worry about it. (This becomes important later.)

My slow cookers have seen a fair bit of hard labor; from September to April there’s pretty much always one on the kitchen counter, and it's started to make more year-round appearances as I hate heating up our non-air-conditioned house in the summer. Stephanie O’Dea’s excellent slow cooker website has definitely given me a much larger repertoire (though I will never get over the eww factor of her frequent use of the word ‘plop’ in the instructions) as well as explaining that different size slow cookers exist for a reason and that reason has an awful lot to do with not drying out your food while it’s cooking. Hence my justification for owning three different slow cookers of various sizes.

As this was a smallish piece of meat, my smallest, oldest, least complicated cooker was called for. Ingredients in: check. Turn dial from Off to High: check. Fall asleep on couch while food cooks itself with no help from me: check.

Kids! Dinner's ready!

My daughter moved the slow cooker ever-so-slightly and – loud popping noise while the fuses blow: check. Smoke and flame shooting out from underneath: check. Big charred spot on the kitchen counter: check. I slept through all of this even though it took place about 15 feet away. At some point I was lucid enough to tell her to just get another slow cooker and transfer everything, but I don’t remember it. And then when I woke up, dinner was magically ready and there was a nice big char spot on the counter and now I only own two slow cookers.

Tucked into a warm corn tortilla with some pickled onions and crumbled cheese, this was well worth sacrificing one of the slow cookers for, although I’m not going to recommend that as a cooking method. I imagine this would also be outstanding with beef, in which case I’d skip the additional fat.

From Buck, Buck, Moose by Hank Shaw. 

Venison Barbacoa

2-3 lbs venison (shoulder or legs)(or shanks or roast or neck; I used a roast)
2-4 canned chiles in adobo
1 red onion, chopped
5 garlic cloves, chopped
2 bay leaves
1 tsp smoked paprika
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp ground cloves
1 Tbsp kosher salt
½ cup lime juice
½ cup cider vinegar
1 quart venison or beef stock
¼ cup lard or vegetable oil

Put everything except the lard in the slow cooker and cook on High until the meat falls off the bone and/or falls into shreds, somewhere between 2 and 6 hours depending on the age of the venison. If you’re making this in the oven, set the temperature to 300.

Pull all the meat from the bones (if applicable) and shred with forks. Stir in the lard and salt to taste. The fat should coat the meat; venison is super lean and really does need this extra additional fat. Also deer fat is pretty nasty. Pour some of the juices from the pot over the meat.

Serve over rice, with potatoes, or as tacos (with lots of crumbled dry cheese, cilantro, and pickled onions).

 

Hello there, grilling season! Chicken with Sumac

In true Michigan fashion, the weather has been a bit….mercurial, lately. My head – and my grocery list – is still in the comfort food/calorie bomb part of the year, but the temperature was over 50 degrees the other day and the sun was shining and I really, really didn’t want to stand over a stove. (Also it was my turn to wash dishes.) And I got distracted by frolicking outdoors and didn’t set up anything at all in advance, so this was a last-minute, improvised effort.

While I very much enjoy the original version, which is sauteed with sliced onions and loaded into a pita and really isn’t all that much work, I can definitely see this getting tossed into a cooler for a day at the beach or showing up as part of a leisurely dinner on the deck. (Y’all, I am planning SO MANY outdoor dinners this summer. Bring dessert.) I think it benefitted from hanging out in the sort-of marinade for about 15 minutes while the grill finished heating, or you could skip it, or you could keep it in there for a good long while. It’s really hard to mess up chicken thighs, which are super forgiving and won’t dry out like chicken breasts tend to.

NOT THIS ONE!!!

Wondering what the hell sumac is? I was too, when it first showed up in a recipe for fattoush. It’s a spice made from ground sumac berries – not the poisonous variety, obviously – with a tart, lemony flavor and gorgeous dark-red color. It’s often mixed into za’atar and other spice blends, and I like to use it in place of paprika as a finish or in anything involving lamb. I buy mine at a Middle Eastern grocery store nearby, not only because I like to support local businesses but also because Halim will often make me a cup of coffee so we can sit down and visit for a bit while I shop.

This recipe is adapted from The Food and Cooking of the Middle East by Ghillie Basan, which we picked up some years ago from the remainders section at Barnes & Noble and have cooked from regularly ever since. Fun fact: It turns out this is a renamed version of The Food and Cooking of Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, which is what the link will take you to on Amazon. If anyone with experience in the publishing industry has some insight on this, please enlighten me. 

Palestinian Chicken with Sumac – Grilled Edition

1 medium onion, pureed as much as you can in the food processor (unless you feel like doing this by hand, but why?)
1 heaping Ikea spoon of garlic paste (maybe 1 ½ teaspoons? ish?) or 3-4 cloves garlic, mashed (or throw it into the food processor with the onion, if you like)
2-3 lbs boneless skinless chicken thighs (I made that amount up. Cook as much or as little as you want.)
3 tsp ground sumac
2 tsp ground cinnamon
½ tsp ground allspice
3 Tbsp lemon juice
Splash of olive oil
Salt and pepper                    

 Put the chicken in a mixing bowl, add the remaining ingredients, and toss to combine. Ideally this will sit for a little bit while you get the grill going, but it’s very forgiving. Grill over medium coals until the chicken is cooked through (duh) and the edges have those delicious little charred bits.

I like to serve these wrapped up in Syrian bread with hummous, garlic, and some sort of salad or slaw. I’m told some people like to add pickles to these kinds of sandwiches but I don’t think I’m friends with any of those monsters. Yogurt would be nice. So would pilaf. Or slice it and put it on top of fattoush. It’s good cold out of the fridge, reheats nicely in the microwave, and is just as tasty at room temperature. It also scales up infinitely with no extra work so you can feed a crowd.

 

Zero F#@&*s Left To Give: Chicken Divan Pot Pie

On any given day, I’ll freely admit that the pandemic year hasn’t been all that bad for us. Present company excluded, we’re a house full of introverts; having our social lives curtailed has been a bit of relief for some members of this family. My husband is still employed, the kids adapted to online school, and I’m frankly pretty glad to have the company. Most of the time.

Most of the time is not the same as all of the time.

Last night was one of those times.

I had a work commitment scheduled in the evening and David was teaching, so naturally my kids regressed by a solid decade and had a huge screaming/sitting on each other fight. The dishes were piled up, the thing I’d planned to cook hadn’t thawed in time, the dog and cat were both freaking out from all the noise, and yet everyone still expected to be able to eat at some point. Having completely flaked out the previous night and made everyone else cook, it really was my turn. I had little time and even less interest.

Pot pie to the rescue! While we’ve gotten into the habit of making the same two recipes from this particular cookbook, it really is a gem – I’ve been working my way through some of the other recipes and knew that this one was going to make an appearance on the table at some point. Thanks to my Milk Fairy neighbor, I also had some pre-cooked chicken and pre-steamed broccoli hanging out in the freezer, so really all I had to do was the sauce. This was exactly the level of effort I wanted (okay, it was actually quite a bit more but that doesn’t mean it was really much of an effort, the bar was set pretty low) and it was pretty satisfying to look at the baking dish and feel like dinner was 80% done when all I’d done was open a couple of Ziploc bags.

Then, you know, the actual cooking part happened. The whisk I’d grabbed didn’t get the corners of the pan, so I had to get a different one – more dishes piled up – and I couldn’t find any stock so I used bouillon cubes and they wouldn’t dissolve so I was trying to smoosh the cubes with the whisk and stir my sauce at the same time. I discovered that my son had eaten almost an entire loaf of bread during the day so I ended up with less than half the amount of bread crumbs needed, because of course I’d used the last of the bread crumbs in the freezer for last week’s meatloaf. I tried to use my food processor to grate the cheese – something I’ve done a zillion times – but it hated this particular block and kept getting stuck; I gave up when the motor started smelling funny and threw what I had into the bowl with the inadequate number of bread crumbs and called it good enough. The clock was ticking.

I stuck it in the oven, made myself an Old-Fashioned, and dialed in to the work thing. I assume everyone ate dinner at some point. Some nights are just like that, even in Australia.

From Pot Pies: Comfort Food Under Cover by Diane Philips. This is such a gem of a cookbook; it’s a contender in the ongoing First Time I Cooked Every Recipe in a Cookbook competition.

 

Filling

3 Tbsp butter
1 Tbsp oil
8 skinless boneless chicken breasts (or equivalent amount of cooked chicken)
1 tsp salt
½ tsp pepper
3 cups broccoli florets, steamed al dente (or thawed from your freezer, if it’s that kind of day)
3 Tbsp flour
1 ½ tsp curry powder
2 cups chicken broth
½ cup milk

Crust

4 Tbsp butter
3 ½ cups fresh bread crumbs (or whatever your carb-freak child has left in the bread bag)
2 cups grated Cheddar (ish. As long as you keep it proportional to the bread crumbs you’re good)
 

Heat the oven to 375.

In a saute pan, heat 1 tablespoon butter with the oil. Sprinkle the chicken with the salt and pepper and saute until golden brown on both sides but not cooked through, about 3 minutes per side (obviously this step goes much faster if you’re using pre-cooked chicken). Arrange the chicken on the bottom of an ovenproof baking dish and top it with the broccoli. Melt the remaining 2 tablespoons of butter in the same pan and whisk in the flour and curry powder until the mixture begins to bubble, 3-4 minutes. Gradually add the chicken broth and whisk until smooth. Add the milk and bring the sauce to a boil. Pour the sauce over the chicken and broccoli. You can refrigerate it at this point until you’re ready to bake if you’re making this in advance like the organized person you are.

In the same pan, melt the butter. Add the bread crumbs and stir until the crumbs are crisp, 4-5 minutes. Put the crumbs in a mixing bowl, add the cheese, and toss. Spread the crust over the chicken mixture and bake for 20-25 minutes or until the sauce is bubbly.