Not these.

These.

I always wonder which type of egg carton is more environmentally friendly, so I decided to do a little research:

1. I can compost or recycle the paper ones.  The polystyrene foam ones are not recyclable here in Podunk Junction – they have to be thrown in the trash.
   • One vote for paper.
2. According to Eggland’s Best, it takes one-third less material to make plastic egg cartons than the paper/pulp ones, and the recycling process from paper to pulp uses a lot of energy, water and chemicals.
   • I think plastic wins this round.
3. According to a study done in 1998 by the Department of Food Science at Clemson University, eggs packed in paper cartons (what they call MPP or molded paper pulp) had less breakage compared to foam cartons when transported in plastic crates. If they were shipped in cardboard boxes, there was no significant difference. When I check the cartons in the store, my perception is I find more broken eggs in the paper cartons than in the foam cartons.
   • I call that one a tie.

After all that, I still can’t decide which is “better”.  Do you choose one type of packaging over the other?

While standing in front of the dairy case pondering the “green” aspects of egg cartons, I automatically scanned all the prices and picked up jumbo eggs.  Why?  ‘Cause Mom always said that if the sizes are 20¢ or less different in price, buy the biggest ones.

Not having a calculator with me, I wrote down the prices of all four sizes and checked when I got home.  You know what?  Mom was right.

The jumbo eggs were cheaper per pound than the other sizes.

However, buying jumbo eggs sometimes presents a problem – occasionally my recipes don’t turn out quite right.  I discovered that recipes are written using large eggs as a standard.  I’ve been using too many eggs in certain recipes, according to this handy conversion chart from large eggs to other sizes:

As an added benefit, the three eggs called for in my casserole recipe would cost $.6225 using 3 large eggs ($2.49 ÷ 12 = $.2075 each), but only $.465 ($2.79 ÷ 12 = $.2325 each) now that I know I can/should use only 2 jumbo eggs.  It doesn’t sound like much, but I’ll bet those “pennies saved” will start to add up.

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Our favorite way to cook our venison tenderloin filets is to crust them with pepper, sear and serve with a tart, fruity sauce.

First, mellow out the pepper.  Put some olive oil in a small heavy saute pan and add coarsely ground black peppercorns (or smashed with a hammer if you don’t have a grinder – you need it kinda chunky, so don’t use the ground pepper you buy in tins in the grocery store).

Simmer the pepper in the oil for about 10 minutes.  You just want to heat it until the pepper becomes very fragrant – be careful not to burn it.

Coat the filets with the pepper and oil.

If necessary, spoon the pepper out of the pan if they’re not coated enough.

Cover the meat with plastic wrap and refrigerate until you’re ready to cook them (at least an hour is good).

Get a heavy saute pan nice and hot.  We like to use safflower oil, which doesn’t burn over high heat.

Yeah, it does get smoky.  Sear the filets on one side for about a minute or two – or until the meat releases from the pan.  It should be nice and brown.  Flip and sear the other side.  Sear the sides as well.

These look just about done.  Tender cuts like this should be rare to medium rare.  If you like your meat well done, you probably won’t enjoy this cut.

These can go into a 350°F oven until the internal temperature is about 130-135° (for rare, which is how we like them).

Make a quick sauce by combining a tablespoon or two of elderberry jam and a dash of port wine and beef stock.  Heat and season to taste (you won’t need pepper).

You probably don’t have elderberry jam, but you could use red currant or sour cherry.  Red wine works instead of port or, if you don’t want to use wine, cranberry juice is a good substitute.  Or make a traditional bordelaise sauce.

Serve with a roasted potato and fresh brussel sprouts (we finally picked them from the garden) and you’ve got a gourmet meal at home.  This dinner cost us about 50¢ per plate (the strip of bacon was the most expensive item)!

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‘Tis the season…for venison.

For those who think venison is icky or gamy, it’s probably because:

A. It’s meat from an old buck in the middle of the rut (you know, the ones with the big trophy-sized rack on their head), or
B.  It wasn’t field dressed properly, or
C.  It wasn’t cooked properly.

In our opinion, venison is some of the finest meat available.  Not only does it taste good – it’s good for you.  More protein and lower in calories than beef or chicken, and contains iron and vitamins.  What’s not to love?

If you’ve never tried venison, a good cut to begin with is the tenderloins or backstrap.  Here’s how we put up venison tenderloins.

This is a whole, trimmed tenderloin.  These are found on either side of the spine (there are two of these per deer).  As this muscle doesn’t get used very much, it’s very tender.  They do have a tissue layer called silverskin over them, which must be trimmed off just like a beef tenderloin.

You can leave the tenderloins whole or in “roast size” pieces, but we prefer to cut them into “mignons”.

Cut into slices about 1-1/4″ thick or the height of a strip of bacon.

Wrap each mignon with a strip of bacon.  Venison is very lean meat, and the bacon provides some fat and also holds the mignons in shape when cooking.

Do use a good quality bacon.  It doesn’t necessarily have to be thick cut, but some of the cheaper brands tend to shred as you wrap them.  We happen to like Boar’s Head brand.  You’ll probably need one 1 pound package of bacon per tenderloin.

Secure the bacon with a toothpick – I use sandwich picks.  Push the pick all the way through and nip off the pointy end.  If you have some small irregular pieces (usually from the tapered end of the tenderloin), just roll them up with a smaller piece of mignon.  The bacon wrapping and the pick will hold them together.

You’ll have two flat ends just barely sticking out of the roll.  This prevents any sharp points from poking through the wrapping in the freezer.

Wrap each mignon in plastic wrap.  For the two of us, we put three mignons into one bag and vacuum seal.

Like so.  We got 37 mignons from our deer.

In the next post, we’ll describe how we cook these delicious morsels.

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It’s much nicer to heat up the kitchen in December than it is in August.  Winter has become my jam-making time.  I need to make some room in the freezer, so I’m ready to make elderberry jam.

As an added benefit, I’ve found I get a lot more juice from frozen/thawed berries than fresh ones.  As an experiment, in September I processed three pounds of berries that had only been frozen a week or so and got 3-1/2 cups of juice (a little less than 1-1/4 cups per pound).  In December, I processed four pounds of berries and got 7 cups of juice (1-3/4 cups per pound).

So let’s proceed.  Put the cleaned elderberries into a pot and gently heat them to encourage them to start releasing their juice.  If they are frozen, that’s OK.  I don’t bother to defrost them. Mash gently with a potato masher and stir them around a bit.

After asking BarBBQ Bill what he wanted – jam or jelly (he voted for jam), flavored or not (his won’t be flavored, but mine will), I decided to put this batch through the food mill so I’d get a bit of pulp in the juice.  This is technically “jam”.  If I’d wanted jelly, I would have dumped the heated, mashed berries into a jelly bag (or if you don’t have one of those, an old clean pillowcase or a couple of layers of damp cheesecloth in a sieve or colander works fine, too), let it drip through the bag for a while and gotten nice clear juice.  Steps would be the same – the finished product would just be slightly different.

Put a portion of the warmed berries into the food mill and start cranking!

After a few minutes, all the juice and pulp (not much pulp) will be in the bowl, and you’ll be left with seeds and sticks.

My four pounds of elderberries yielded 7 cups of juice.  I’m going to use 4 cups of it for a No Sugar Needed Fruit Pectin (which I bought by mistake and was due to expire) and that will satisfy BarBBQ Bill’s plain old not-too-sweet-no fancy-carp-in-my-jam requirement.

Well, I have 3 cups left to experiment with.  I’m going to use Pomona Pectin in this recipe.  I like working with Pomona – I can use alternative sweeteners like honey, agave nectar or maple syrup and it’s very easy to experiment with small batches of jam.

I decided to try Elderberry with Honey and Port Wine for this batch.

Put three cups of elderberry juice in a large heavy-bottomed pot (this one is 8 quarts and you’ll see later how close it came to boiling over), preferably stainless steel but anything non-reactive will do.  Add 2 tablespoons lemon juice. I like the “sparkle” that lemon juice gives to elderberry flavor.

Here’s the contents of a package of Pomona Pectin.  One pouch (the larger one) contains the brownish pectin.  The smaller packet is white calcium powder (monocalcium phosphate).  Mix 1/2 teaspoon of the calcium powder with 1/2 cup of water and store in a jar.  This keeps a long time in the refrigerator. Make sure you label the jar – otherwise, it will get thrown out (ask me how I know that).

Have your boiling water bath heating and jars, lids and rings ready to go.

Add 3 teaspoons of calcium water to the juice and begin bringing it to a boil.

Measure out 1 cup of room-temperature honey and add 3 teaspoons of pectin.  Mix well.  Elderberries are low in natural pectin, so I’m adding 1 teaspoon of pectin per each cup of juice.

When the juice boils, add the honey/pectin mixture and stir.  I use a whisk to help dissolve everything.  Bring it back to a vigorous boil (you won’t be able to stir it down) and stir constantly.  If your jam threatens to boil over (like this one), simply take it off the heat for a few seconds to let it calm down a bit.  Boil for one minute, then take it off the heat.

Stir in the port wine.  I used 9 tablespoons for this batch.  Keep tasting until the flavor is where you want it.  Any time I add wine or liqueur to a jam or jelly recipe, I stir it in at the end to maintain more of the flavor.

Fill the jars leaving 1/4″ of headspace at the top.  A canning funnel and a small ladle make this a lot easier.

Skim off any foam, stray seeds or bubbles with a teaspoon.  Take a damp towel and thoroughly wipe off the rim.  It must be clean to make sure the lid seals properly.  Add a heated lid and screw on a ring.

Put the filled jars into the boiling water bath.  Since I have boiled/sterilized my jars, I’m going to process these for 5 minutes.  If you use just heated jars (warmed up but not boiled), process for 10 minutes. Either way is fine.

When the processing time is up, remove the canner lid and turn off the heat.  Leave the jars in the water for another 5 minutes.

Remove the jars from the canner and let them cool on a towel.  After 24 hours, check the seals, remove the rings, wash the jars and store in a cool, dark place.

We have 8 jars of lovely elderberry jam.  One note – low sugar jams or those made with honey or maple syrup don’t keep as long as regular jellies and jams (all that sugar in jelly is a preservative), so, once opened, keep them in the fridge and use them up within a month or so.  That’s another reason I like to use these 4 oz. canning jars.

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We used to buy our kolbász from a local butcher shop, but they seem to have changed their recipe.  We don’t care for it as much, so we decided to try making our own.  I refuse to buy mass-produced pre-packaged kielbasa – I really don’t like eating food that contains ingredients I can’t pronounce or identify as edible (what, for instance, is isolated soy product? And why does everything in the universe need to contain corn syrup?  But I digress.)

The local grocery store had a good sale on pork last week, so I picked up a 9-1/2 lb. pork butt.  It was pretty lean, but we happened to have about 1 lb. of pork jowl in the freezer (doesn’t everybody have pork jowls in the freezer for just such an occasion?)

Our recipe is a combination of different ingredients from many different recipe sources.  Here are two of the books we own and refer to often and one particular Web site we like:

• Great Sausage Recipes and Meat Curing by Rytek Kutas (an encyclopedia of all types of sausage making – some parts are geared more to a commercial sausage-making establishment – but I can usually find an answer to a specific question in this book.)
• Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn (a bit highfalutin’ – I doubt I’ll be preparing Shrimp, Lobster and Leek Sausage any time soon but, then again, who knows? – overall a good book with a lot of the basics illustrated and very clear instructions.)
• Len Poli’s Sonoma Mountain Sausages Web site (if you can’t find a recipe you like here, it doesn’t exist!)

Our Smoked Hungarian Kolbász recipe:

10 lbs. pork, trimmed of gristle and bone and cubed

For each pound of meat, these are the spices we use initially (we get to taste it later):

• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon pepper
• 1 teaspoon paprika (sweet Hungarian)
• 1/2 teaspoon dried marjoram
• 1/4 teaspoon dried savory
• 2/3 teaspoon good garlic powder (not garlic salt)
• 1/2 teaspoon yellow mustard seeds

For a 10 lb. batch, we use a total of these ingredients:

• 2 cups powdered milk
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 1 teaspoon powdered mustard
• 2 cups liquid (we used 1-1/3 cups of water and 2/3 cups chardonnay wine)

Equipment We Use:

• A meat grinder (or you can have the store/butcher coarse grind it for you)
• A meat mixer (totally optional, but your hands will get very, very, very cold – trust me)
• A sausage stuffer (we prefer a manual stuffer)
• A smoker or grill for smoking the kolbász

So let’s get started.

Put your cubed meat into the freezer until partially frozen.  This allows the grinder to cut the meat cleanly. Shallow trays or cookie sheets work great.  Keep everything very cold from start to finish.  We even put the grinder parts in the freezer.  Luckily, the weather cooperated and it was cold enough outside to chill our mixer, too.  That definitely doesn’t fit in the freezer.

We mix the seasonings, powdered milk and the liquid together, blend well and let sit in the fridge for a while to meld the flavors.

Make sure the casings are well rinsed.  Ours were packed in salt to preserve them, so we rinse them out with water (just find an end, put it over the faucet end and run water through the casings to flush out any excess salt).  Let soak until you’re ready to stuff the sausage.  These are 42mm casings we got from the butcher shop.  By the way, casings packed in salt last practically forever.

Please excuse the mess. One small kitchen + one large temporary game processing table because it’s deer season = a total disaster.  In spite of the clutter, we’re ready to start processing.  Our meat is “crunchy” and the grinder is assembled.  Time to grind the meat.

Here’s our pork coming out of the grinder.  Looks good so far.  Keep the ground meat in the refrigerator (or the freezer if it’s not for too long – you don’t want it frozen solid) until you’re ready to begin mixing.  Just keep everything very cold.

Put the ground meat into a mixer or a very large pot or bucket if you’re going to mix it by hand.Thoroughly mix the seasoning liquid into the meat, while retaining the texture and not “mushing” the meat.  This is hard to do when you’re mixing by hand – your hands will be numb from the cold and your arms will hurt from trying to stir with a spoon.  We did it that way for years, so I literally feel your pain.  If using a mechanical mixer, don’t overmix the meat.  We did ours for only about a minute.

Here’s where you get to taste it.  Take a small ball and make a patty.  Fry in a pan until cooked through and check the seasonings.  Don’t try to cook it in a microwave – you won’t get the same flavor as frying it on the stove.

We needed a bit more salt (about another tablespoon), a bit more sugar (about a tablespoon), and a bit more liquid.  We mixed the salt and sugar into another 1/4 cup of chardonnay and mixed the meat for just a few more seconds.  We’ve learned it’s better to slightly under-season the sausage if you’re not sure.

Here’s what our meat looks like after mixing.  Still a lot of texture but the orange from the paprika is pretty evenly disbursed throughout.

Chill the meat until you’re ready to begin stuffing.  You can leave it in the fridge overnight if you like (especially if you’ve mixed by hand – you’ll need a break).

Lightly pack the meat into your stuffer.  This is a hand-cranked one that holds about five pounds of meat.

Thread the rinsed casing onto the nozzle of the stuffer.  Push a tiny bit of meat out to get any air bubbles out of the nozzle and the casing.  Tie off the end with a piece of cotton string.  (I know the picture looks vaguely “suggestive”, but that’s really what it looks like.)

Casings are pretty sturdy and they will stretch quite a bit.  Stuffing is one of those things that you just have to practice.

Stuffing is easier with two people – one to crank and the other to form the sausage.  BarBBQ Bill cranks and I make sure the casing is evenly filled (don’t overstuff or the casing can split) and keep as much air out of the sausage as possible.  If I get any huge air bubbles in the sausage, I just prick it with a needle or pin.

We’re making “horseshoes” about 20″ long.  It also helps to put some water on the table so the sausage glides around and doesn’t stick to the countertop.  When they’re long enough, stop cranking the stuffer and tie off the end tightly with another piece of string.  Leave the string ends about 4-6″ long, so you can hang these after smoking.  Tie another piece of string about an inch or so away from the sausage end (this will be the beginning of the next horseshoe) then cut between the two pieces.

We’re done stuffing.  This batch (which was actually 10 lbs. 13 ozs. of meat) yielded six “horseshoes” and a short link about 6″ long.  Put them into the refrigerator overnight, uncovered, to blend the flavors and dry the casings slightly.

The next day, we’re ready to smoke them.  We have a smoker box in our gas grill – if you don’t have one of those, just make a pouch of heavy-duty aluminum foil, fill with soaked wood chips, poke a few holes in the top, and put it right on the grill.  BarBBQ Bill is using a bit of mulberry wood, some pecan chips and some apple chips.

Here’s our kolbász after about an hour.  The one on top closest to the smoker box (the warmest spot) is already starting to turn color.  The fire bricks act kind of like a pizza stone to absorb the heat and they also protect the sausage if the wood in the smoker box happens to catch on fire (that’s pretty normal).

Another hour and the color is deepening (and the porch smells really, really good).  Smoke the kolbász until the internal temperature is 150°F.  It took ours a little over three hours to reach that temperature (and it was about 38° outside for reference).

These are done smoking.

Drop the kolbász into an ice bath and bring the temperature down to about 90°.

Then hang at room temperature overnight to cure.  For long-term storage, we’ll vacuum seal and freeze them.

These have an incredible aroma of sweet, fruity, nutty woodsmoke and garlic and I just wish you could smell them right now!

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