Wild and foraged – Recipes from Uist

Loin of venison with rosemary and thyme

We were given some very tender loin of venison from a sika deer. Sika deer are a non-native species that have become widespread across the UK, interbreeding with our native species, red deer and roe deer. They pose a threat to the native populations.

This recipe is from Norman Tebbit’s book of game cookery.

INGREDIENTS:

Around 500g venison loin, divided into portions
Vegetable oil (not olive oil)
1 tsp dried thyme leaves
1 tsp dried rosemary
6 juniper berries
a small teaspoon of sea-salt
freshly ground black pepper

METHOD:

Mix the herbs, juniper berries, salt and pepper in a pestle and mortar, and grind together.
Sprinkle the herbs onto the meat and set aside until needed. Heat the oven to 180C.
About ten minutes before you are ready to eat, heat the oil in a large frying pan until it is good and hot. Sear the meat on all sides, and put into a small roasting tin.
Cook in the oven for around 8 minutes, while you sort out the vegetables and mash. When the time is up, remove from the oven and allow the meat to relax.
Slice the venison and serve on warmed plates. We had mashed potato, Cumberland sauce, spinach and tender-stem broccoli.

Wild goose Jamaican style

The flavour of wild goose goes well with peppers. This spicy stew is adapted from a recipe for beef stew from ‘Original Flava’

INGREDIENTS:

2 goose breasts, around 450g meat, cut into 3cm chunks
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp ground black pepper
2 tsp ground allspice
2 tsp dark soy sauce
1 tbsp flour
2 tbsp olive oil
1 onion, finely chopped
1 green pepper, finely chopped
4 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
1/4 tsp scotch bonnet pepper paste
150ml stock
150ml Guinness or other stout
2 tsp dried thyme
2 large carrots, thickly sliced
250g baby potatoes, cleaned. Cut large potatoes into chunks.

METHOD:

Put 1 tbsp olive oil in a plastic container with the diced goose breasts, salt and pepper, the allspice and soy sauce and mix together. Leave in the fridge overnight.
In the morning, stir in 1 tbsp flour, and let that soak up any spare liquid.
Heat olive oil in a casserole pan, and fry the meat until it is browned. Remove from the pot and set aside.
If necessary, add another splash of oil and fry the onion, garlic and peppers until they are really soft.
Add the Guinness and stir, to get anything stuck from the bottom of the pot mixed in.
Add the beef, beef stock, scotch bonnet paste, thyme and simmer for around 1 1/2 hours. I do this in a low oven, around 150C.
Add the potatoes and carrots, and simmer for another 20 minutes, until the potatoes and carrots are cooked.

Serve with white rice. The first time of trying, I added extra potatoes and didn’t add the rice, and it was a full meal in one pot.

Sika venison loin – ‘Wellington’

I am lucky. I know someone who had some extremely high-quality sika venison available, and I got a couple of cuts. One cut was a lovely 450g piece of meat, the loin. Sika deer are smaller than our red deer, but in evolutionary terms, are quite similar. They are originally from Japan and neighbouring countries in the far east, and are an introduced species in Europe.

I made this dish based on a recipe from Gordon Ramsey, adapted to suit. Remember to take your time, as the ingredients need to be chilled and resting in between bouts of cooking.

INGREDIENTS:

450g sika loin
3 tbsp olive oil
around 400g mushrooms
50g butter
1 sprig thyme
1/2 glass dry white wine
Salt, pepper, a grate of nutmeg
2 packs of prosciutto, around 10 to 12 slices
320g jus-rol rolled puff pastry (one pack)
1 egg, beaten, or one egg yolk beaten with a little water

METHOD:

Heat the oven to 220C
While it is heating, put the meat on a roasting tray, brush with olive oil, and season with pepper. Roast for 15 minutes, then remove from the oven and cool, then chill in the fridge for at least 20 minutes
Chop the mushrooms to your preferred texture,
Heat 50g butter with 2 tbsp olive oil, add the thyme and the mushrooms and fry gently for around 10 minutes, until the mushrooms are soft.
Add seasoning, and the white wine, and cook until the wine has been absorbed. Don’t worry if the mixture seems loose, the venison needs a little oil. Once the mushrooms are cooked, remove the thyme and set to cool a little.
On a clean linen cloth or clingfilm, lay out the prosciutto so that it is about double thickness, overlapped and about the length of the venison. Spread the cool fried mushrooms over the prosciutto and then place the venison on top. Use the cloth or cling-film to roll up the venison inside the prosciutto, and to tighten the parcel together. Put this in the fridge to rest.
Take out the pastry, lay it out on the paper it came wrapped in, and use a rolling-pin to neaten it up. Unravel the venison/prosciutto parcel and place it along one side of the pastry, so that there is space to fold the pastry over the top. Think of a giant Cornish pasty. Before you fold over, brush the bare pastry and the top and sides of the venison parcel. Fold the pastry over, press and crimp to seal the edges, and transfer back to the roasting tray. Brush the surface with the egg wash, and use the back of a knife to mark diagonal scores along the pastry. Chill for 30 minutes.
Heat the oven to 200C. Cook the Wellington for 20 to 25 minutes. Allow to stand for around 10 minutes before slicing into thick portions.

We served this with celeriac and potato mash, and garden carrots simmered in a little white wine, butter and thyme.

Hot Lightning with rabbit

This is a recipe introduced to me by one of my daughters, thanks to one of her boyfriends. I believe it is Dutch in origin.

INGREDIENTS:

4 local wild rabbits, skinned and gutted
2 onions, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
60g butter
60ml water
salt and pepper
4 apples (Braeburn or similar)
8 potatoes (general cooking variety)
more butter and/or cream
1 egg
nutmeg

METHOD:

Set the oven to 160C
Mix the rabbit with garlic, onion, salt and pepper. Put it in a roasting tray with butter and water and cover with tin foil. Bake in the oven until tender, about an hour. Take the tin foil off and bake for another ten minutes or so.
When the rabbit is cool enough, strip off the meat, and put it into an oven-safe dish
Meanwhile, peel and chop the potatoes and apples. Put the potatoes in a saucepan and just cover with water, and season with salt. Cover with a layer of apples, cover and simmer for 20 minutes.
Strain off most of the water, and roughly mash the apples and potatoes together, with salt, pepper, nutmeg, and an egg, butter and/or cream to taste.
Put the mashed potatoes over the rabbit meat, heat through in the oven for around 10 minutes before serving.

I think adding bacon is allowed.

Blackberry and apple crumble

Bramble season in the Hebrides, much later than on the mainland. The blackberries we picked last weekend were sharp and flavourful, juicy and small. I’ve frozen some for making bramble jelly later, but I made a crumble for Malcolm, because he loves it.

INGREDIENTS:

1 very large cooking apple
around 200g blackberries
1 tbsp date syrup or dark brown sugar
a pinch of cinnamon, or allspice
90g butter
180g self-raising flour
90g sugar

METHOD:

Preheat the oven to 180C
Make a crumble mix – rub the butter into the flour and then add the sugar. You can add porridge oats, ground nuts, use brown sugar, or add spices if you wish.
Peel and chop the cooking apple, and then combine with the blackberries and the date syrup and allspice (or other sugar, sweet spice).
Put the fruit evenly in the bottom of an oven-proof dish, then cover with the crumble mix.
Bake for around 30 minutes, then serve with custard or cream.

Salad of flowers

This looks so beautiful, adding flowers to salad, and the extra flavour that they bring just lifts the whole thing. I usually make a basic Greek-style salad and layer the flowers on top. The ingredients depend on what is available. I add the ingredients in layers, only mixing together when serving.

INGREDIENTS:

Lettuce
Cucumber
Spring onions
Chopped tomato
Black olives
Crumbled feta cheese
Flowers – borage, nasturtium, chives, violas, dill, rocket, rose, rocket, stocks, pinks, kale, chamomile, marigold, dandelion

Wild goose with bulgar wheat

This is so tasty. The goose needs to be chopped pretty small though.

INGREDIENTS:

100ml olive oil
4 medium potatoes, peeled and sliced finely
1 medium onion, sliced finely
2 medium carrots, sliced finely
700ml stock
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp ground black pepper
1 wild goose breast, sliced thinly and then cut into small squares
250g coarse bulgar wheat (I bought mine online from Turkishop)

METHOD:

Preheat the oven to 200C
Heat the olive oil in a large frying pan, and fry the potato slices. As the potato starts to brown on one side, flip the slices over. Keep stirring and flipping. Once the potato is done, put it into a large casserole dish.
Next, fry the onion slices and carrots together in the remaining oil in the frying pan, for at least 5 minutes over a medium to high heat.
Meanwhile, slice the goose and put it in a layer over the potato.
Once the onion is done, layer that over the goose.
Put the stock into the frying pan and bring to the boil, and season with salt and pepper.
Put the bulgar wheat over the top of the carrot and onion layer in the middle, making a mound.
Pour in the boiling stock, cover and bake in the oven for around 20 minutes.
Let the dish stand for around 5 minutes before serving.

Venison Stew with Membrillo

It is time to make the most of what is in the freezer. I am avoiding going out as much as possible, and eating some of the odd ingredients that are stashed in our freezer. I often take inspiration from recipes from the internet, adapted to what I have. In the freezer, for this recipe, I had some venison diced for stew, and I also had an old pack of membrillo, a quince paste that is generally served with Manchego cheese.

INGREDIENTS:

500g diced venison
1 tsp dried rosemary
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp black pepper, ground
200ml red wine
200ml stock
1 tbsp membrillo paste
salt to taste

METHOD:

Marinade the meat for at least two hours, and preferably overnight, in the wine and olive oil, seasoned with black pepper and dried rosemary.
Strain the marinade and set aside.
In a casserole dish, fry the venison in a little more olive oil,
When the meat is browned, add the strained marinade, stock and membrillo paste.
Cook in a slow oven, around 140 C for around 1 1/2 to 2 hours, when the meat should be tender. Season to taste

I served this with kale tops and mashed potatoes.

Pheasant casserole

A shout-out to all of you who are thinking about seeking out the food in your freezers in an emergency, to all of you who have found a couple of pheasants in there. I love a good basic pheasant casserole, it works very well in a coq-au-vin style stew. This version is from Norman Tebbit’s recipe book ‘The Game Cook’.

INGREDIENTS:

50g butter
1 pheasant (I usually joint the pheasant but you don’t have to.)
120g streaky bacon, lardons or similar
1 large onion
200ml red wine
600ml stock
225g mushrooms, chopped
salt and pepper
Bayleaf
Pinch of dried thyme leaves (or use a bouquet garni)
1 tbsp flour blended to a paste with 25g butter

METHOD:

Preheat the oven to 170C
Melt the butter in a large frying pan and brown the pheasant, transfer to a large casserole dish
Saute the bacon in the frying pan, along with the finely chopped onion, until the onion begins to brown
Add the fried onion to the casserole dish, along with the wine, stock, herbs, salt and pepper.
Cook in the oven for a couple of hours.
When the pheasant is almost cooked, add the mushrooms.
Once the mushrooms are cooked, you can thicken the stew with the butter/flour mixture. Adjust the seasoning, and serve

I like mashed potato and celeriac with this casserole.

There are other options to add flavour to this casserole. A spoonful of rowanberry jelly or red current jelly adds a fruity twist, or you could add a little cooking apple. Another option would be to add a splash of cream at the end. You could swap the onions for shallots or leeks.

Venison Curry

For Christmas, we had pot-roast venison, with a lemon and horseradish gravy. We had a lot of venison for two people, so I also made this curry. It is adapted from a very odd recipe from the BBC website – the quantities were mad, and didn’t match between imperial and metric, so I sort of made up the gaps. It was delicious, although rather hot. I’d like to make it again, so here is what I did.

INGREDIENTS:

1kg venison, diced into 1 inch cubes
3 cloves of garlic
2cm of ginger root, grated
4 tbsp olive oil
2 cans of chopped tomatoes
1 large onion, chopped
2 tbsp kashmir chilli powder, or 1 tbsp ordinary chilli powder
2 tbsp ground coriander
2 tbsp ground turmeric
2 tbsp crushed juniper seeds
2 tsp garam masala
2 tsp molasses sugar or other brown sugar or treacle
2 green chillies, deseeded and finely chopped
1 tbsp chopped coriander leaves
greek-style thick plain yoghurt
500ml stock (I used the lemon gravy)

METHOD:

Heat the oil in a large heavy casserole dish, and fry the chopped onions over a medium heat.
After around 5 minutes, add the crushed garlic, grated ginger and chopped chillies.
When the onions are browning, add the venison, and stir in to cook and brown the meat.
Add the spices and cook for a few more minutes, stirring them in well.
Add the tinned tomatoes and stock, and bring the mixture to a simmer.
Cook over a low heat on the hob or in the oven for 1 1/2 hours, or until the meat is tender. If you are using left-overs, half an hour should be enough.

To serve, stir in two tablespoons of yoghurt, and garnish with the chopped coriander. Serve with nan bread or rice, and with a side-dish of yoghurt.