Coffee-Cocoa Crusted Venison On A Bed Of Spinach

We are absolutely loving finding recipes from the Game and Garden lady, and trying them out in our kitchen! For Valentine's Day, they enjoyed this recipe which we made last night! When you put all of this together and finally sit down to eat, the smell in the house alone is a give-away to the delightful dish you're getting ready to enjoy! The entire house smells like chocolate coffee, with a fabulous sweet berry topping! Not to mention there are no onions or garlic to chop, so the delicious smell lasts on your hands as well (it's like having a chocolate lotion-YUM)!  Now, we did ours a tiny bit different than her's because we had slightly different ingredients in our pantry. So let's get started!

Ingredients

1/3 c coffee grounds

(I didn't realize until it was too late that I make vanilla coffee...didn't matter! Still tasted wonderful)

1/4 c cocoa

(We used dark chocolate cocoa powder)

1 TB brown sugar

1 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp. cayenne pepper

1/2 loin

(I didn't have a venison loin. I did however have butterflied back straps. Which worked great!)

If you don't have venison, don't fret...I would use a pork loin!

Olive oil for browning

Mix together all the ingredients to make your dry rub. I sprinkled the rub over the meat, and pushed down to make sure it was thoroughly coated! Make sure all sides of the meat are covered in the dry rub mix. 

Once you have each piece (or loin) covered in the dry rub, get a skillet out and add some olive oil to the pan for browning the meat. You are going to want to get your pan "smoking hot"! Once our skillet was smoking, we placed the meat in one piece at a time to brown on both sides! (I think since we used dark chocolate and coffee-It looked completely seared or charred! It wasn't. Just make sure you keep an eye on it!) Once you have your meat browned, you're going to want to put it in a 350 degree oven for 5 minutes! 

Meanwhile let's talk about the berry sauce! Here are the ingredients...

Ingredients

1 1/2 c blackberries

1/2 c blueberries

1/2 c red wine

1/4 c sugar

1 lemon-juiced

salt to taste

Place all your ingredients in a small sauce pot on the stove, and bring to a boil! Reduce the heat and reduce the sauce by half! 

At some point during the sauce making, your venison will be done in the oven. Carefully remove the pan, and let it cool for a couple of minutes. I sliced mine into small strips, if you have a loin like the recipe link above (or right here) you can cut it into small rounds. Make a bed of spinach (or arugula) to add everything to on a plate! 

Once your sauce is finished and removed from the heat, here are my step-by-step instructions as to how I put this all together:

1) Add bed of spinach to my plate

2) Take the strips of meat and dip each one in a Raspberry Chipotle sauce.

3) Add meat to top of spinach

4) Spoon berry sauce over the top like a delicious salad dressing

5) ENJOY!

I think this is one of my new favorite dishes! If you've been unsure about trying venison, I would recommend starting with something like this! There was no "game" flavor whatsoever, and the meat was so tender it practically falls apart in the first bite! The chocolate and coffee flavors are wonderful together! Then when you pair it with the tiny bit of a spicy kick you get from the dipping sauce, and then pair that with the sweet berry sauce, it's a completely unbelievable, melt-in your mouth kind of taste! This is why we love cooking from the Game and Garden site, because she has so many recipes to choose from, and they are ALL so tasty! 

Until Next Time...

Sausage Biscuit Sandwich for Breakfast

One of my favorite sites to look through is GameandGarden.com. Stacy does a wonderful job explaining through photos and videos how to cook fresh meals for your family. If you have a hunter in the family, or you have your own garden where you grow fresh produce, she's your gal!! She has cookbooks and we first discovered her doing a segment on the outdoor channel! We tried her venison breakfast sausage (ours was already made, she explains how to make your own), and homemade biscuits! You can of course use regular pork sausage if you don't have venison ready in your freezer! Venison is a much healthier less greasy alternative to pork sausage! You actually have to add a little oil in the pan because you hardly get any grease off the meat! We love venison in our house, but if you don't have a hunter then of course you can substitute in the meat you do have. We made her biscuits quite a bit smaller than a regular biscuit because D loves to make sandwiches with just about anything! So to make it easier on us to eat, we made them thinner so we could easily eat them as a sausage biscuit sandwich!  You can find her recipe here, on her brand new updated site (it's really beautiful and easy to navigate)! So let's get started!

Ingredients
3 c of flour +some for dusting
1 TB Baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp salt
1 stick (1/2 c) butter
3 TB shortening (cold)
1 c buttermilk

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

Mix all your dry ingredients together in a large bowl.

Cut the butter into small, pea sized pieces and add them to the dry mixture. Work it all together until it resembles oatmeal texture. Be careful to not overwork the butter into the dry mix because it can alter the outcome of your biscuits!

After the butter has been integrated into the dry mix, add the buttermilk into the mixture and mix well. Place the dough onto a lightly floured surface and roll out until it is about 1 1/2 inches thick. Cut into rounds (I couldn't find a circle cut, however I did find a nice flower shaped cookie cutter that worked just fine), and place onto a greased cookie sheet!

Make sure the biscuits are touching when you add them to the sheet.

If you are making "thicker" biscuits, make a thumb print in the middle of each

biscuit to ensure they rise properly. 

Place them in the preheated oven for 10 minutes then brush the tops with melted butter, and bake for another 10 minutes (20 minutes total). While the biscuits were cooking DJ made sausage patties on the stove top! Once everything was finished we put them together to make our breakfast sandwiches and thoroughly enjoyed our homemade biscuits and sausage!! Her recipe is easy, and delicious, and puts making "Bisquick" biscuits to shame! 

Incredibly delicious!! You can even freeze them and pop them in the microwave to re-heat for an easy on the go breakfast!! 

I hope ya'll go check out Stacy's site! She has a flavor boosting herb butter that we can't wait to try on some of our dishes!! She'll give you tips on gardening, hunting (along with some videos from her and her husband), cooking, beekeeping (would LOVE some fresh honey with these biscuits), and sustainable living tips!! We will be all over her fish recipes this spring/summer when we get back out to the lakes and ponds with our fishing poles!! She also has a Facebook page you can follow, which you can find here. Go give her page a like and follow her work, I promise you won't be disappointed!!

Until next time...

~Happy Eating~

Venison (or beef) Stuffed Peppers

Sadly, I have come to the end of ground venison from last hunting season. This is one of the last recipes I was able to pull off with what we had in the freezer! Good thing hunting season is just around the corner! So I pulled this off a friend's Pinterest site and went to work! You know it's good when your man takes one bite and looks up to say, "You can feel free to make this anytime you want". I totally agree!! The thing about cooking with venison vs. cooking with beef is no matter how "lean" you buy the beef, you still always get grease! When I popped these in the crock-pot, there was almost no grease at all which made the peppers very yummy and not soggy. If you make it with beef, let me know how it turns out! We wondered where all the grease would go. Here is how to fix up these delicious peppers...


First you are going to start with 4 bell peppers. (Any color will do...I used red, green and orange). Cut off the tops of the peppers and remove the stem and seeds. Save the tops because you're going to want to dice them up to throw back in! Dice half of a yellow onion, then pour one cup of enchilada sauce over the onion in a bowl and microwave for about 5 minutes. Pour 1/3 cup of water into the bottom of your crock-pot, then nestle the bell peppers in. In a large bowl you are going to combine one pound of meat, the sauce and onion mixture, the chopped up bell pepper tops, one cup of shredded cheese, 3/4 cup of cooked rice, one and half teaspoons of salt and a half of a teaspoon of pepper. Now spoon mixture into the the peppers and top it off with more shredded cheese. Cook these yummy peppers on low for 6 hours (I actually didn't have six hours so I cooked mine on high for about 4 hours). Remove them from the crock-pot and eat up! I served it up with some homemade guacamole and chips and they were a hit!

Happy Green Pepper on a Plate

You can find the original recipe on a cute little blog titled no. 2 pencil 

Here is the run down:

4 bell peppers
1 pound of 85 percent lean ground beef
1/2 of a yellow onion, diced
1 cup of canned enchilada sauce
1 1/4 cup of shredded jack cheese
3/4 cup of cooked Mexican rice
salt and pepper
sour cream and diced green onion for toppings

Finely dice the onion place in a bowl and cover it with enchilada sauce. Heat in the microwave for 5 minutes.

Cut off the tops of the peppers and remove the stem and seeds. Finely dice the tops of the peppers and place in large bowl.

Pour 1/3 cup of water into the bottom of your crock-pot and nestle the bell peppers in (It might be a tight fit...it's okay)!

In the bowl with your chopped pepper tops add, meat, sauce and onions, 1 cup of shredded cheese, 3/4 cup of Mxican rice (cooked), 1 1/2 teaspoon of salt, and 1/2 teaspoon of pepper.

Fill peppers and cook on low for 6 hour. Top them with sour cream and green onions and enjoy!

~Happy Eating~ 

Also, if you have a hunter in the family as well and haven't discovered Game and Garden you really need to head on over to Stacy's blog and check it out! We saw her the other day on the outdoor channel and I immediately went out and looked up all the recipes I could find by her, and put her cookbooks (she is releasing a new one) on my WANT list :) She has some great ideas!! I can't wait to try more of her venison recipes once hunting season starts back up and we get more venison! We are getting ready to try one of her fish recipes...check back soon to find out how it turned out!