Venison stew tips

 1) Back there on the hind leg of the deer, below the knee, I guess you might call that the 'calf' of the leg and say it's not worth the trouble of keeping, right? I'll take those if you dont want them, thank you very much. They're just a bunch of long thin muscles covered with blue/silverskin that nobody wants to deal with anyway. Later, when the rest of the deer is in the freezer, I'll bone out those calves and then just separate some of those muscles and cut them crosswise into stew chunks.

 2) Last night the TV weatherman said it was gonna be a raw damp day so I took a pack of stew cubes out to defrost. At about 10am I'm going to brown them in some bacon fat and then put them in the slow cooker along with some potatoes, carrots, onions, and a couple of beef boulliion cubes.

 3) A lot of folks use water in their stew but for this one I'm going with tomato juice. The long cooking time teamed up with the acid in the tomato juice is gonna tenderize that venison as though it were veal.

 4) It's 5pm and everything in the slow cooker is fork tender. The sauce is still a bit thin. At this point some folks add a couple of tablespoons of flour, but never having developed a taste for thick pasty lumps I'll pass on the flour and just stir in a couple of tablespoons of "Minute' brand instant tapioca. The tapioca is odorless and tasteless, but will pick up the flavor of the stew while soaking up excess liquid, and only adds another five minutes to the cooking time. Use that five minutes constructively by buttering a couple of thick slices of bread and getting your beverage of choice out of the fridge.

 5) Enjoy!

 

PS. I've purposely avoided mentioning spices. This is a very basic recipe which you may customize to your own taste.