The Sportsman Dispatch

It all started with some Robert Rodriguez research for my fantasy film-making career.  Rodriguez’s recipe (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vrw5FkLutWk) was/is excellent, if  replicated exactly.

Just like Depp’s character’s pursuit in “Once Upon a Time in Mexico”, I’ve been hunting a perfected Pibil of my own.  I’ve made 2 good ones, and 3 horrible ones (seems to be a theme on this site).   This is incredible food, and I have to say it, a perfect hunting camp recipe (one pot, one meat).

Things NOT to do:  Don’t use pork tenderloin ever for slow-roasting. Don’t skip/forget the vinegar.  Don’t get carried away adding spices like Cumin, Cinnamon, or Tarragon(?).

Things to Try:  Le Creuset pot instead (in the oven or over a campfire), vegetables, or wild game.

Recipe is as follows (basically):

1 Whole Pork Butt, 2″ cubes (no exceptions, no other cut of meat works quite as well), throw into crockpot

1 Onion sliced,  throw into crockpot

Season all lightly with SeasonAll

Marinade:

1 Cup Orange Juice

1 Cup Vinegar (type doesn’t seem to make a difference, why not, ehhh, half cider and half white?)

1 Cup 100% Agave Tequila

1 Can Chipotle Peppers in Adobo Sauce

Pour marinade over meat the night before, leave in fridge, set for 12 hours slow cook the next morning.

I ended up making enchiladas out of these, too (basically shred the meat, roll up in pan-fried tortillas with monterey jack cheese.  Sauce

The dog waits for the Pibil.

is 1/2 El Paso Mild Enchilada Sauce, 1/2 juice from the Pibil, cooked on low with some flour to thicken, cover whole thing with cheese).

Soundtrack for this recipe: Turnpike Troubadours “Down on Washington”,  followed by the entire “Mambo Sinuendo” album by Ry Cooder and Manuel Galban

Throw it all in... (Special thanks to Mike W. for his contribution of this recipe and support of The Sportsman Dispatch)

Anyone who hunts has found themselves with a hodgepodge of freezer bags of last year’s harvest.  Whether it is that lone pheasant, that package with three quail in it, or those last two links of deer sausage,  nobody wants to throw out game.  A few years ago my wife came across this recipe while playing Bunco one night.

I have found it to work well with just about any kind of meat you can think of.  Deer, shrimp, sausage, chicken, pheasant, rabbit, beef, quail, dove, squirrel.  I usually have at least three different meats in the pot.  On the smaller things like dove I cook them in a pressure cooker first and peel the meat off the bone.  This meal can be eaten like a stew or it can be eaten like a gumbo served over rice.

I call it a gumbo even though it does not have okra or a roux like traditional gumbo.  A large pot of this concoction is just the right thing for a house full of people on a cold winter day watching football.  I hope you enjoy it!

Gumbo

Use a big pot (really big)

2 sticks of butter

1 can cream of celery soup

2 large onions

1 can cream of mushroom soup

1 complete stalk of celery sliced (the whole bunch)

1 can french onion soup

3 small cans of mushrooms

2 8-ounce tomato sauce

5 cups of water  (probably more)

1/3 cup Konriko Creole seasoning

Meat

Potatoes (cubed into 1/2″ to 3/4″ cubes)

Carrots

Simmer butter, onions, celery, and all spices until soft.  Add remaining ingredients.  Bring to a rolling boil.  Add Meat*.  Cook on low heat until meat is tender, 30 minutes – 2 hours depending on meat.  Add carrots, potatoes, jalapenos (if you want).  Be careful with the jalapenos.  This is already pretty spicy.   Serve over rice or as a stew.

*Use any meat you want.  If you use dove or quail, you can boil them in a pressure cooker for about 3-5 minutes and the meat falls off the bone.  Use chicken, sausage, shrimp, dove, quail, venison, beef, pheasant, pork, squirrel, etc….. Chicken, sausage, shrimp, pheasant, quail do not take long at all to cook.  Beef, pork, venison take longer.  Pressure cooked meat will be very done.  If you cook it too long in the pot it will start to disintegrate into pieces.  Add it at the last.

Seasons other than Konriko work but none give it as good a flavor.

From the Hello Kitchen Design Blog

My buddy has been looking to build an outdoor kitchen in the backyard of his new house in Houston, and being a BBQ/cooking nut, I started to help him plan it.

There’s a few ways you can go with planning any project/product, you can do it simple/basic, or highly idealistic/almost-unattainable.. we chose the latter.  This is why it makes it to The Sportsman Dispatch, anyway.

So, if you’re going to build an outdoor kitchen, what do you incorporate? From a high-level perspective, I started thinking about my my favorite cooking methods, even idealistic ones I want to try, ALL built into one:

This series, fully titled “Buying Random Meats, and Putting them into Pots”, was inspired by the realization that great meals can be cooked by simply browning any meat in a pot, adding some vegetables and juice, and waiting several hours.  This has excellent applicability in expedition, camping, hunting and fishing cooking, where simplicity is ideal.

In this image: Zwilling/J.A.Henckels Professional "S" series knives, Boos Block cutting board.

As a follow-up and continuation of the promised aforementioned series in last month’s article “Last Minute Cast Iron Supper”, I decided to buy some more meat for the cast iron pot.  This time, it was inspired by an episode of “Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations”, which, I’ll admit, will be a large influence on many of the cooking articles on this site for awhile.  In this episode, Bourdain claims that every American should know how to make a stew, and showed a simple 5-ingredient Beef Bourguignon.

Burgundy, I presume..

So I went to the store and bought the best non-leaky-package pot roast I could find, an onion, carrots, and a handle of $7 Burgundy (a necessity in this dish according to Bourdain) Wine.  That’s cheap wine, but it was the only Burgundy I could find.  The recipe?  As usual, season and brown the meat, set it aside, season and saute the vegetables, add liquid (wine), add back the meat, and wait. (more…)