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It's the perfect time to dish up a venison taco soup Saturday, Nov 10, 2007 By Joe Mosby Soup is good food, especially when the weather cools. It's good also when you can construct it around a supply of meat on hand, like venison. And soup is a good way to work that venison into the main dish for even the finicky folks who claim they don't like wild game. Many times a deer hunter or a person handling the cooking for a deer hunter winds up with some odds and ends of venison, deer meat to many Arkansans, on hand. This may be trimmings or just leftovers from cutting the meat into suitable package amounts. A handful here, a couple of handfuls there, and pretty soon there is enough for a stew, a soup or some chili. Here is one cook's broad and flexible treatment of the leftover venison situation. Starr Lane of Guy said this also works well with ground venison or deer hamburger meat. She calls it venison taco soup. A couple of innovations in the ingredients make it a main dish out of the ordinary. Venison Taco Soup Cut the deer meat, with connective tissues removed, into very small pieces, smaller than stew meat, or use ground meat. Dice an onion and brown both meat and onion in a skillet sprayed with cooking spray. Dice a potato or two and add to a quart of water in a slow cooker. Use another potato and more water if you are preparing for a crowd. Put in the browned meat and onion. Add one package of taco seasoning mix and one package of dry ranch dressing mix. Add a can of Rotel (your choice of mild, medium or hot), a can of diced tomatoes, a corn of whole kernel corn and a can of pinto beans. Stir well. Turn the slow cooker on low and go about your business for a few hours, coming back to give the pot a stir every half hour or so. It can cook three to four hours, and longer cooking won't hurt anything. Serve in bowls with corn bread, biscuits and sides of fruit or a salad. All sorts of options can be used, too. Lane said, "I just use what I have on hand, but the taco mix and the ranch dressing mix are what makes this soup special." Kidney beans or black beans can be used in place of the pintos. If you are fixing it for a crowd, two or three different beans are an option. A diced or sliced carrot or two or three can go into the pot. Dice a bell pepper if you have one on hand. If your preference is for a more tomato-tasting soup, add a can of tomato sauce or paste. Salt and pepper the soup, but go easy on the salt until you taste the soup. The taco and ranch dressing mixes will at least partially offset the amount of salt you think you need. The finished soup can be served over cooked rice, becoming more of a gumbo-type main dish. A cook may choose to add raw rice to the slow cooker at the beginning of the cooking, too. This is a hearty dish that will find favor with even the finicky folks who claim not to like wild game meat. Another cook who sometimes finds small amounts of venison on hand or a supply of ground venison goes the Hamburger Helper route. Yes, that's the boxed commodity that has drawn jokes down through the years. Hamburger Helper comes in several varieties, and the cook doesn't hesitate to substitute venison for ground beef. "If I don't tell them it is deer meat, nobody knows the difference." Like with the venison taco soup, this is another tactic for feeding those finicky, don't-like-wild game folks. -------- Joe Mosby is the retired news editor of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission and Arkansas' best known outdoor writer. His work is distributed by the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. He can be reached by e-mail at jhmosby@cyberback.com. |
