This is a great time to relish the satisfaction of delicious meals that can result from the success of MSG-free sportsmen pursuits of hunting wild game and fishing.
There is something very special about the culinary delights that connect us to conservation practices, the purity of organic food from wild harvest, and the reality of incredible taste from this healthy food source.
Great tasting healthy food helps to justify the cost of the license and gear, and all the time we spend learning about how to be successful.
A few years ago, my family started looking around for proven recipes that would provide even more range on how we prepare the wild bounty from our lands and lakes around us. We discovered the “Wild Harvest Table” from Cornell Cooperative Extension nutrition educator, Moira M. Tidball, a culinary aficionado who enjoys cooking all kinds of wild game and offers free, proven, advice. The result has been delicious and nutritious!
For this Super Bowl weekend, we are preparing a crowd-pleasing recipes that has become one of our favorites: venison nachos. They are awesome! Let me share with you that there is never any leftovers from either recipe.
For the venison nachos, health consumers today all appreciate that using the venison instead of beef lowers the fat content of typical nacho recipes, that’s all good. This recipe is quite simple.
In a stock pot, add one tablespoon of olive oil and brown the venison over medium-high heat. Add one medium to large chopped white sweet onion and cook 3-5 minutes more until the onion is translucent. Add 2-3 cloves of minced garlic and 2-3 tablespoons of chili powder, cook another minute (don’t let the garlic get brown). At this point, adding one teaspoon of oregano and one teaspoon of cumin is optional, if you like those flavors (I do). Then add one tablespoon of brown sugar and one 28-ounce can of diced tomatoes (or one quart of home canned tomatoes) and gently stir the entire mix in the pan.
Bring the mixture to a gentle boil, once there, lower the heat and simmer the chili about half an hour until it thickens and starts to smell “so good!” Then add one 15-ounce can of red kidney beans or black beans, your choice, but drain and rinse before adding. Then cook 20 minutes or so until heated through and the consistency is thick. Season to taste with salt and pepper.
We then pour the mix into a wide baking dish, sprinkle one cup of shredded cheddar cheese over the top and place it in the oven preheated to 400 degrees. Heat some tortilla chips in the oven at the same time. Remove when the cheese melts (about 6 minutes or so). Spoon some of the mix right into the warmed tortillas, add some sour cream topping and dig in!
Nutritionally, a one cup serving is about 360 calories, offers 25 percent of daily adult needs for Vitamin A and Calcium, 30 percent for Vitamin C and 20 percent for iron, with 24 grams of protein!
This recipe makes six to eight one-cup servings.