SUSTENANCE: Yule Tidings

Hope you all had a merry holiday, wherever you spent it! And remember, the ancient Yule and Christmas season is just getting started… which is great, if like me, you still haven’t mailed your cards and presents? You’re overwhelmed by the pressure to make Christmas Eve magical, or Christmas day wasn’t what you hoped?

Tell me about it- this year it definitely wasn’t what I’d planned. I was up all night with food poisoning, then we had ramen (and candlelit chocolates for dessert- because sometimes Christmas magic is a couple Ikea tea lights and fancy chocolate from your momma, and that’s enough) and postponed our planned festive meal until the next day. It’s ok- the holiday season isn’t made or broken by a single day…

The festivities continue until Imbolc (Candlemas)! The holiday season is so much less stressful if you don’t cram all your expectations into one day. 

So, here is our second day of Christmas dinner… Venison heart stew (Bidos) and Sami rye flatbread with butter and lingonberry jam and the first bottle of our house-made pinot noir. Very Merry!

The basic recipe for this is just reindeer heart (and sometimes stew meat), broth, onion, potato, salt and white pepper, but a lot of the other recipes I found were a bit more embellished, so we floured and browned the diced heart in a bit of tallow, then simmered in rich stock with diced onion, and added carrot & celery along with the potatoes and a bit of seasoning.

I haven’t had reindeer meat, but from what I have read, it’s strongly flavored (by the forest and lichen they graze on, unlike our acorn and corn-fed Missouri whitetail) so I made a forest salt to season the stew- flavored with juniper berries, some dried sage, rosemary, and a bit of smoky, earthy black cardamom pod carapace (put it all in the blender with some Himalayan pink salt until finely ground and season to taste).

Not pictured, the Frasier Fir highball I was sipping while making the stew- homemade aquavit (“Lie”-nie), Frasier Fir syrup, and soda water on ice. Skål! We didn’t have a tree this year, so I drank one (literally, I made the syrup from a previous year’s tree). Mmm, tastes like Christmas!

 

We only thawed one heart (I wasn’t sure if I would like them as much cooked in broth as I love them grilled or fried), and it was a little light on substance at first, so I added a quart jar of canned cubed venison stew meat right before serving (so it wouldn’t fall apart). So good!