Venison meatballs

Hey, you dad gum varmits, quit look'n at mah dad gum meatballs!

Salad with garden tomatoes given to me by friends.

Dressing = raspberry vinegar whipped with vegetable oil and raspberry preserves and Dijon style mustard, salt/pepper.

Sauce on the meatballs is a commercial Tuscan vodka sauce. It's not that great. I'm only using it to get rid of it and because I don't have any pesto. Almost anything else would have been better.

Meatballs, below.

Frame 1. I was given two packages of ground game and told what they were, but now I forgot. This package of meat is either venison or elk. Possibly moose or reindeer. Maybe caribou or polar bear. Oh, I don't know it might be narwhal or penguin. OK, now I'm sure, it's venison. The guy who gave me the venison shot the deer with his own two hands. And a gun. But mostly with a gun. Then dragged it out of the woods with a pack of snarling howling threatening wolves circling around him, dashing in and out trying to get him to drop the deer, but he wouldn't give in. Then when he finally got to civilization he gutted it and cleaned it. Then butchered the meat grinding portions of it and packaged it himself. Then made moccasins and belts out of the leather, sold them, and donated the profits to native special needs children living on reservations. OK, I made up that whole last part after the shooting it.

Frame 2. The green stuff is chopped spinach. The orange stuff is bell pepper. Crumbly stuff is sourdough breadcrumbs I made from bread that wasn't quite stale but too far gone to eat otherwise. That stuff doesn't last long because it doesn't have any preservatives. I'm lazy and I'd prefer to load the meatballs up with vegetables, that way I don't have to cook them separately. Tricky, eh? Actually, I just wanted to moisten and lighten the meatballs. Venison is exceedingly lean, and meatballs can be tight, so all this stuff loosens them up. A lot. They're very tender. I like my meatballs round and not flattened out. I'm a bit neurotic about that. So I boiled them first, to stiffen them up a little. You can eat them just like that. They're delicious. But boiled meat? Bleh. Lacks the interesting chemical complexity roasted meat undergoes.

Frame 3. Basil and parsley, grown at home.

Frame 4. Boiling meatballs.

After getting this far, with the first batch, six at a time, I realized I forgot salt and pepper. Duh! So I added it to the remainder of the mixture, along with a little habanero flakes, to kick it up.

OK, now that picture of a meatball sitting in a bowl of olive oil up there is pure art, and I don't care who ya are.

Drained, rolled in olive oil, then baked. Drenched in olive oil like this gives the oven something to toast and a medium to carry flavor. Added vegetable oil to substitute for animal fat that venison lacks. Fat is flavor. Alcohol also carries flavor, so adding beer would do the same thing. The vegetables were finished with wine before mixing with the ground meat. So there's that. This idea works for lean beef hamburger too. Better to ingest olive oil than animal fat. You know, cholesterol, and all that. They were drizzled with even more olive oil right before baking, so those pans were really sizzling.

I made an outstanding mess of the kitchen. That one pound of venison produced 27 meatballs, and I intend to eat every one. Unless somebody comes over and I generously toss them one.