Venison Meatballs, Redux

I have made venison meatballs a handful of times. This last time, I was able to reduce the gamey taste and paired them with sweet potatoes, which was a great idea.

Here's the recipe I use.

To reduce the gamey taste, I let the meat defrost entirely and drained it before mixing it with the rice and onion. It's not a pleasant activity - draining blood from raw meat - but does reduce the gamey taste considerably.

Love My Slow Cooker: White Bean Soup with Italian Sausage and Kale

I’m a sucker for slow cookers these days. Recipes I can throw in the crockpot in the morning and come home to in the evening are the best.

It’s like I have a personal chef who is preparing dinner for me while I’m on my way home from work. The house smells great and the food is ready to scoop and serve. I don't know why I never did this much before this year!

Sausage, potato and kale soup: Olive Garden-style

Venison-pork Italian sausage

As part of our venison haul from my husband’s successful hunt, we got several pounds of sausage. Venison is a lean meat, and so the game processing company mixed our meat with pork and seasoned it Italian-style.

My first question when I saw all that sausage: What am I going to cook with it? I’m not a big fan of sausage myself, and it was not seasoned to be breakfast sausage. I asked my co-worker, who recommended I make the home version of Zuppa Toscana, the potato, kale and sausage soup from the Olive Garden.

Goodbye Gamey Taste: Venison meatballs

I made meatballs for our annual holiday party to go along with all the pre-packaged items we served. They were a hit and the best meatballs I've ever made. The kicker: No fancy ingredients and a very simple setup.

Goodbye Gamey Taste: Marinated venison steak

This is the first of a series of posts on cooking venison, aka deer meat. In particular the deer that my husband got while hunting a few weeks ago. I'll post one recipe a week and then rank that recipe on how well it got rid of that wild game taste that so often accompanies, well, wild game. I'm not a fan.

That said, venison is a very lean meat and because of that is a great alternative to beef. There's also something to be said for using the meat that comes from a successful hunt. On the other hand, I admit it would have been better had I not seen Bambi before he was taken in for processing.