Its A Crock..

..Pot.  Yesterday morn I put a grand ham (which I believe is the glute of the cervid) into my trusty crock pot and surrounded it in a nest of carrots, onions, mushrooms, and garlic, few glugs of red wine, and water enough for cooking.  I put it on "low" at about 8 am.

Pre-party in the crock.

 As crock pots do, it bubbled away all day and when I arrived back at the crib around 5:30 chemistry had done its job the house was filled with the loving aroma of meat.  I prepared some steamed rice and roasted parsnips to go along with the crock contents.  Right before our neighbors arrived for dinner I took the meat out of the pot and shredded it with a fork, not a difficult task at all.  I left most of the liquid with the vegetables but removed some of it to a pan where I reduced it somewhat and added some butter, cream, and flour to make a sauce for the shredded venison.

I have to apologize to you, faithful readers (whoever you might be), for I have failed you.  I intended to have the very finest of grainy, poorly-lit iPhone photos to show off the spread spread, but alas in the heat of laying it out and serving it to our neighbors I totally forgot to capture any.  Here's a pic of the immediate aftermath, as you can see from the absence of the majority of the foodstuffs it was well received:

I'm looking forward to the upcoming muzzleloading season at the end of October, my friend and coworker is going to let me hunt on a small piece of land his in-laws own.  I might try some public land as well, since I have the permits for it.  I have to sight the rifle in first, that should also be fun. 

Between then and now, I'll be up in South Carolina for a few days visiting family and friends.  It will be middle of general gun season there, but I don't plan to be hunting (out of state license and all).  My brother is hugely into dog hunting of the kind where they drive deer out to standers with shotguns, the kind of hunting I grew up with.  His dogs all have radio tracking collars, and for all I know GPS by now (he was talking about it last I saw him). 

My dog Pasco, even though he's been raised as a house dog, is genetically the epitome of the type of hound they often use in that kind of hunting, long-legged and fast, with his nose held high to catch the sent rubbed off the deer's metatarsal glands onto vegetation, not the the hoof print itself.  I've seen blue-ribbon winning hounds in glossy magazine that don't look as good as he did in his heyday.  Blue-ribbon hounds from a kennel right down the road from where I adopted him, that look like they could be his litter mates.  I have an unsubstantiated theory as to how he ended up in that fairly high-end dog shelter where I found him as a three month old puppy, it has to do with a sort of birth defect that gave him a tongue that has a weird fold in it.  Its as though it had been cut and never healed until you inspect it and realized that's not the case, but such a defect would have been a flaw for a judge. 

Alas, he missed his genetic calling, but he's grown used to his life of luxury as an insanely spoiled couch potato interspersed with occasional bouts of frantic dog park activity.

Does he dream of deer?