Crock Pot Season

I decided to get brave this afternoon. When I opened the freezer after going grocery shopping last night to stash a bunch of zero-cooking-required-ready-in-2-minutes-forget-about-any-healthy-nourishment frozen dinners on the shelf, this is what I found (ignore the inevitable presence of ice cream).



That's right. A freezer full of frozen dead animals that did not resemble cow, chicken, or shrimp, and was therefore scratched off my list of potential dinner items. Hubby saw the mass of meat he so proudly killed off last hunting season and was set and determined to make a venison roast for dinner tonight. He pulled out a cookbook and bookmarked a recipe he intended to whip together before he left for work today.



I woke up this morning and realized the book was still sitting there and that there was a thawed piece of purplish meat still sitting in the fridge. The hubby had left without whipping together a deer feast. I was pleased. No deer for dinner. Maybe chicken pot pie or spaghetti instead. Yummm...

I went about my business for the rest of the morning until I began to be haunted by the origin of that darn cookbook. As I walked through the kitchen on my way from doing laundry to my awaiting spot on the couch, I spotted the book again and remembered that my mom had given that to me last Christmas with a jar of venison rub saying I needed to learn how to cook the bacon my hubby brought home. Oh, Mom. Couldn't you have just given me a new sweater or a pair of boots or something?!? I was then plagued by the brutal reality that all of that meat in the freezer had been sitting there for a year since I hadn't put any effort into learning how to cook my hubby's kill. Ugg. So much for watching the end of the Today show. I pulled out the crock pot ('tis the season, after all), opened the book and decided to be brave and take a whack at it. It was the least I could do after all the laundry and grocery shopping the hubby has so selflessly done for me since I haven't seemed to be capable of missing my daily afternoon preggo nap.

So here's documentation of the attempt:

Turns out we were missing all but one of the ingredients called for in the recipe so I pulled together my own (risky, but necessary, given the fact that I had already unwrapped the roast before I realized we had only ONE ingredient)...

1 thawed venison roast
1/2 bag of baby carrots
4(ish) small russet potatoes
1/2 onion
2 c water
1/2 c Worshershire (how on earth do you spell that?!?) sauce
lots of venison rub
a little dash of cumin
1 bay leaf

I threw in the roast, water, sauce, herbs, and rub. Then I chopped up the onion and the carrots and threw them in too. I cut the potatoes into squares and tossed them on top. Put the lid on, set the crock pot to low, and let 'er rip. I'm pretty Laissez-faire when it comes to crock pot cooking, so I'm just going to let it cook all day, maybe crank it up to high in a couple hours and then stir the potatoes into the rest of the roast right before serving.







We'll see how it goes. I'm making some corn bread muffins to soften the blow if the roast isn't good, and I'm also baking a gingerbread cake in the event the entire dinner is a complete failure. I have no intention of even sampling the feast, so I'll let hubby sign in later with an update and overall evaluation of my attempt to be a successfully domesticated hunter's wife. It's chicken pot pie for me tonight!