Deer Stew

I exchanged a pot of dulce de leche with deer meat from a girl at work. Actually, she gave me deer meat sausages and a mason-jarred deer meat stew. I’m finding canning more and more intriguing these days. I mean, you can grow anything and can it. You can hunt for your own meat and can it. You can basically be self-sufficient with the art of canning. Unfortunately I know nothing about canning and I’m kind of scarred of killing someone with botulism or something.

We like our stew to be hearty. Taking the mason jarred meat as our base (basically cubed deer meat with loads of onions in water and a bit of spices...supposedly keeps forever...hmm) we then build with what I consider to be traditional stew ingredients. Rutabaga cubes, potatoes, carrots, cabbage, onion, and finished off with sweet peas. Now I know I shouldn’t admit to this but we used a pre-made stew St-Hubert spice mix to flavour the stew. In my defence, I’m not the one who was cooking that night.

Anyways, the stew turned out to be delicious. It’s more or less these kind of things that push me towards building my own pantry and relying less on the always disappointing supermarket products. Have you ever tried canned stew from the grocery store? It’s gross. Like those canned potatoes. Pure yuck.