As requested in comments

[telophase]

What my in-laws fed us yesterday:

They usually eat 2 big meals instead of 3 daily, but in concession to Toby's and my 3-meal schedule, we were served a small lunch of tuna salad sandwiches and chips, along with an offer of cookies, cake, brownies, and all the list from yesterday. Cocktail shrimp and sausage were also offered and declined.

Dinner was:

Grilled chicken breasts
BBQ baked beans
Deviled eggs
Baked potatoes with butter and cheese
Garlic toast

Along with offered wine, beer, Coke, water. Dessert of pound cake, apple cake, brownies, cookies, and Rocky Road ice cream was offered and declined as Toby and I slowly rolled our way to bed.

My mother in law announced that as she was cooking Christmas dinner today and serving it about 5, breakfast and lunch will be light affairs, so we only had this offered for breakfast:

Cornflakes with bananas and half-and-half*, oatmeal, pound cake, Apple cake, coffee, water. (We ate just oatmeal and cake because cake.

Our light lunch is, I believe, leftovers of all of the above plus that cocktail shrimp she wants to get eaten. Christmas dinner's entrees will include turkey breast and a pork tenderloin cooked with an elk sausage in the middle--the family friend who gave her the elk sausage recommended that. (We have already been the recipient of excess frozen elk meat at Thanksgiving and will be taking more home. In other news if you have a recipe for elk backstrap, chili meat, or sausage, now is the time to come clean.) Not sure what else is on the menu at this point. Tomorrow breakfast will be cinnamon rolls before presents are opened, and she's already announced that we'll have a full breakfast afterwards, presumably for second breakfast as I assume by now that she is an extremely well-disguised hobbit.

I don't think we need fear starvation in the next 48 hours.

* This is her daily breakfast and has been ever since Toby has known, which she lets sit for 15 or so minutes to turn into mush before eating. She is a tall, slender lady who can afford to have half-and-half on her cereal, unlike most of the rest of us.

Sent from my Apple ][e

Comments

[movingfinger]

Now more than ever I regret giving away the Elegant Elk, Delicious Deer cookbook penned by a hunter's wife, for hunter's wives.

I seem to recall it had a lot of chili recipes.

[fragilespark]

I am starting to follow this entire food saga with interest :)

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Apparently your in-laws have some ancestors in common with my mom's family. God help us if we tried to leave a house without having eaten something.

[vom-marlowe.livejournal.com]

hahahha, this cracks me up. My mom's friend Kate visited us over the summer, and, since she knows us well, brought a mason jar full of her neighbor's cream. Not the liquid stuff you get in the store, but real cream, the kind you can spread on things, there's so much butter fat.

We blew through that quart-sized jar, in our coffee and on our pies*, in four days, I think. We ended up having to buy more wimpy cream to last the rest of the visit, is my point here.

The last time I cooked Thanksgiving for my mother, I made so many side dishes that there was not only not room on the table for them, there was not room on the counters, either. Finally she stepped between me and the stove and shouted, Stop! Stop!

Cracks me up, looking back.

The menu, for those interested:
Locally raised fancy organic chicken, roasted, to create pan drippings for gravy.
Stuffing
Homemade yukon-gold mashed potatoes, to my paternal grandmother's recipe, which calls for a stick of butter and a cup of heavy cream, except I made less
Roasted beets, carrots, and pears, each mult-colored (so, golden and chiogga beets, orange and purple carrots, two kinds of pears)
Green bean casserole (my mom is from Minnesota, where this originiated, I believe)
Parmesan crusted sweet potatoes
Two cold salads that my mom refused to let me put on the table
Homemade pickles and store-bought olive plate
Roasted green and red bell peppers, with long zuchinni slices
Baked rolls
French apple tart
Pumpkin Pie

I think I'm forgetting a few things. But that was the gist of it.

[tavella.livejournal.com]

I've only cooked elk a few times, my dad being primarily a deer hunter, but I believe the treatment is about the same. To wit, for backstrap, you do not need a recipe. You do not want a recipe. Backstrap is tenderloin, and tenderloin of a very lean animal. And an incredibly tasty cut that is best suited by minimal treatment.

So, remove any excess silverskin, then cover the outside generously with fresh ground pepper and salt, and then sautee' it in a pan with butter (you can use olive oil if you can't or won't do butter, but I like butter best.) Do not go beyond medium rare at the most, and rare is better. It will turn to leather very quickly. Ignore all FDA recommendations and anyone telling you '145 to 160'. Leather I am telling you, leather. You want something closer to 110-120 when you take it off, then let it sit for 10 minutes or so.

During that 10 minutes, you can make a pan sauce with the lovely buttery brown bits left and some wine or water, mixing in any released juices from sitting and butter to finish. But that's all the accompaniment it needs.