Venison stew with dumplings
We've been eating a lot of venison lately, and this is one of my favorite recipes. For the stew:
- 1 pound of venison stew meat, cut into chunks
- a little bit of vegetable oil
- 2 large onions
- 1 quart of homemade chicken stock
- 1 quart of water
- 2 bay leaves
- a few sprigs of fresh thyme
- 3 large carrots
- 1 pint of frozen green beans
- salt and pepper to taste
Saute the chunks of stew
meat in oil until the outsides are brown. In the meantime, cut up
the onions and add them to the meat, cooking until tender. Then
add the chicken stock and water, bay leaves, and thyme (with the last in
a tea ball so it's easy to fish the stems out later) and simmer for at
least two hours, until the meat is very soft. Next, cut the
carrots into bite-size pieces and add them to the stew, simmering for
about half an hour longer until they're soft but not mushy. Add
the green beans then salt and pepper to taste.
As
a special treat, you can add dumplings, which I adore but don't make
often since we're mostly off grains. I do this by eye, but amounts
are roughly:
- 1 egg
- about the same amount of yogurt as egg
- about half as much honey as yogurt
- a sprinkling of salt
- about half a teaspoon of baking powder
- enough flour to make a biscuit-dough consistency
Mix it all together, then plop four spoonfuls onto the top of your stew at the green-bean stage. Your soup must
be at a gentle simmer for this to work. Put on the lid and let
cook for about ten minutes, then flip the dumplings (which will have
expanded drastically) over, replace the cover, and cook for another ten
minutes. You can also add herbs to the dumplings, but they seem to
soak up enough of the broth to be quite flavorful as-is.
With the dumplings, this
serves four hungry people. Without the dumplings, it would serve
four less-hungry people, or three hungry people. Enjoy!
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Do you make Bone Broth from the Deer bones? It would make fantastically healthy broth for your stews and soups....much like Beef Bones.
The fat is no good though...bitter. But...the bones..........Ummmm Um
Edith