I wish I would have taken a picture of the plate of food, but I didn’t….sorry….We had company come in from California for a couple of nights and so we felt it very important we feed them well.  Our first night we served them BBQ t bones with baked spuds and salad…always a good plan.  It was very yummy with lots of left overs.  Yesterday morning, without asking our guests which sounded best to them, I took the liberty to just cook a variety of meats and then serve it with hash browns, scrambled eggs and toast.  That went very well, because the meats included Ham, Bacon and Sweet Breads.  They had not tried Sweet Breads before and so I served that in the middle of the table still in the frying pan and they could taste them at their pleasure….as usual, they loved them and so every last morsel was consumed!  I loved that.  I even sent them home with a batch ready to heat and eat, and two packages of the raw product for them to separate on their own to get the feel for how much work goes into preparing them…OH and also I rubber banded a “Bears Butt dot Com” card to one of the packages and a note to search for “Sweet Breads”….They were happy.  But all of that is not why I’m writing this, it’s because of the meal that was served last night that drew me to writing this:

ELK STEAKS WITH HONEY AND LEMON GLAZED CARROTS

I was at a loss as to how to prepare my meal for them and so I sat back and thought I should marinade the steaks in something different than they may have had in their past.  I came up with a whiskey marinade that consisted of 1/4 cup of whiskey, 1/4 cup of Worcestershire sauce and a large tablespoon of Garlic Powder.  I combined the ingredients in a plastic bag with a zip top, made sure all the garlic powder was mixed well and then dropped in the elk steaks.  Those of you who have processed your wild game know that the pieces do not come uniformly sliced and so this was a mix of some large and some smaller chunks of good old elk steak…just like I like them.  I sealed the bag up trying to get as much air out of the bag as I could.  This I set aside on the counter top to make sure the meat came to room temperature before I cooked it…just my way of doing stuff, and kept turning it whenever I thought about it.  This marinaded for about two hours.

Well, with the meat on it’s way, I had to come up with a side dish and could not find much on the internet.  I had looked in the refrigerator and saw that we had a full bag of baby carrots and thought to myself those would be a great side dish, but not just boiled and served with butter, salt and pepper, but it needed a twist of some kind.  Back to the internet and I found a honey/lemon glaze recipe.  That sounded good to me and so I mixed up the concoction for that.  This is how I put it together, not entirely following the recommended recipe I had found.  I suppose I changed it enough to be able to call it mine, but I won’t.

For the 1/2 bag of baby carrots I planned on cooking for the four of us, I mixed up 1/4 cup of real honey, 1/4 cup of lemon juice, 1/4 cup of chopped yellow onion and two tablespoons of butter (margarine).  I heated it in the microwave to liquify the honey and then mixed it all very well.  Setting it aside until we actually got ready to fix the meal.

Along with this I would boil up a few red potatoes and serve that with drippings gravy.  I knew dang good and well I would not have any drippins in order to make the gravy but I found an “instant mix” beef gravy packet in the cupboard and that would have to do.

When Winemaker got home I conversed with her about my plan and all was well except the sound of the carrots.  Sweet and sour carrots did not strike her as something we should be serving our guests and so she added that just in case they didn’t like the carrots, she would steam some fresh out of the garden broccoli heads…Ok, there you have what was finally served.

When it came time to put it together and get down to eating, I boiled up the carrots and the spuds, made the gravy for the spuds.  Drained the carrots and poured the honey/lemon mix over the carrots and mixed them all together to coat them well.  Out at the BBQ grill the steaks went on a very hot grill and then turned down to low while I kept the steaks turning round and round on side one (ain’t no sense having the grill lines all going the same direction).  When I felt like they had been cooked enough, I flipped them over and did the same round and round turning.  When I thought they were about done I asked Mike (one of the guests) how he felt they were done to that point…He said they needed more time to become Medium Rare…once we concurred they were at that point in we went to eat.  The ladies were ready and so were we.

With it all served up and all of sitting down, I just had to try the carrots first…it was the “Iffy” dish on the plate….With all my senses on the flavor of the carrots I took a bite….To my surprise they were EXCELLENT!  And everyone else thought the same.

So for all you game hounds out there with a freezer full of good old wild game steaks…get after this meal!  You won’t be disappointed!

Enjoy!

Bears Butt

June 29, 2014