Let's Eat!

 

“How do I love deer meat? Let me count the ways,” the poet might’ve said, but he didn’t. I said that. He would have said it, had he ever eaten any. 

Here, post deer gun season, I’m trying to think of a way I wouldn’t eat it. I can’t. Maybe if you threw a raw piece of it into the middle of your driveway, and ran over it with your truck four or five times, maybe I wouldn’t eat it that way. More likely, I would pick it up, hose it off, and give it a shot anyway. 

Actually, I did that to a degree when, years ago, Dave Hladik and his wife, Linda, invited Pam and me to share a deer dinner at their house out on Highway 48 north of Mannford. Linda, an excellent cook, made a deer Swiss steak meal smothered in tomato sauce, sliced onions and mushrooms so good I nearly cried at it’s near perfection. 

Wow. Here I am, still talking about it some thirty years later. God rest that girl’s soul. 

At the end of the meal, girls at the sink doing dishes, Dave and I laid back in our chairs, bellies out, I asked him where he had gotten the deer. 

“Out on Highway 64, ‘bout five miles south of Cleveland,” he said, picking his teeth. 

“Where?” I asked, not sure I had heard him right. 

“Almost right on top the center line.” 

The deer meat meal was excellent. Its procurement, not what you expect. 

Then there was Bob McClintick, camp cook out of Cody, Wyoming, who cheffed the elk camp, the one I hunted out of back in ‘06, up in the Bridgers east of Yellowstone’s eastern boundary, the one no one ever sees ‘cepting a thirty-mile horseback ride. I got my elk early that year, and spent the last five days of a seven day hunt helping Bob in the kitchen, payment being every scrap of story he dropped on the ground. 

Bob was an old school camp cook, who, so far as I could see, never referred to a single written recipe. He carried them around in his head like he did the shells in his pocket for the ten-gauge pump shotgun standing in the corner close to the cook stove where it could be picked up and brought to bear (so to speak) in an instant. 

“Few years back,” he said when I asked him did he expect to shoot some geese at that altitude should they fly over the cook tent, “had a grizzly stick his head in the tent flap yonder while I was fixin’ dinner. It’s kinda’ put me on my toes ever since. I sleep in here you know.” 

Should you pin me down on the subject (it will not be easy. You might as well ask me for a way I do not like to eat crappie while you’re at it), I will tell you that if offered as a last meal, ever, Bob’s Elk Tips Over Rice, as applied to deer tips, would probably be it. It follows. I wrote it down while glancing up, now and then, at said tent flap. 

Ingredients, for two people: 

1/2 onion, chopped or sliced. 

One lb. of deer steak tips, i.e. deer round, sliced thin across the grain. 

Two bell peppers, sliced or chopped. 

1/2 tsp. minced garlic. 

1-2 small cans mushrooms. 

1 pkg. beef gravy mix. 

Marinate meat in Worcestershire sauce to taste. 

Tech stuff: Sauté onions. Remove from pan. Add garlic two minutes before removing onions from pan. Brown marinated deer tips in same pan as onions. Add gravy mix after mixing according to package directions. Add mushrooms and peppers. Cook until peppers are done to taste. Serve over rice or noodles. Call Conrad and invite to dinner.

 © 2016 Conrad M. Vollertsen