Away Days

I'm going to Melbourne very shortly FOR FUN - well, that's the idea. I'm going to take my camera - I plan to eat a lot of good food and take pictures of it and write it up when I get back. The friend I am going with is both the finest private cook and the most judicious food-finder I know, so we should have a great time.
        Meanwhile, just to be going on with, here's what I did with the wild venison last week. I browned the beautiful tender slices briefly in olive oil - not TOO hot, so they wouldn't toughen up. Then I took them out, poured in some red wine and reduced it over high heat. I turned it down to low medium, and put the meat back in for a few minutes; took it out again and let it rest while I added Ali's quince jelly to the pan; and when that had dissolved with constant stirring, some cream. Last came some grainy French mustard, stirred in well.
       This whole sauce-making process takes a very short time. The trick is not to let the sauce reduce so much that it burns or gets too thick. There was one large spoonful of sauce for each person's venison.
I served this with parsnip and potato mash and red cabbage softened gently in a little oil with red onion, a spoon of sugar and a bit of balsamic vinegar. (Apples are good too.)
        Didn't get any decent venison photos, so you'll just have to imagine it, but here's the mash and cabbage.

Cutting up rough

I'm very partial to venison, so I was pleased to see it appearing in the supermarket. It's a wonderful meat, fat-free, tender (providing it's gently cooked) and combining beautifully with a wide range of other great flavours, from bacon to fruit.
          So far I've tried two different cuts of Silver Fern venison, the diced and the stir-fry. In both cases, the meat has been excellent, but the cuts have been, well, rough, to say the least. The pieces of diced venison were wildly uneven in size and thickness, and had to be carefully recut to produce anything like even chunks. We had the stir-fry this week and that was the same - really uneven pieces of meat, as the picture shows. (It's just occurred to me that if I'd arranged them differently they'd look very like New Zealand...) This matters more for stir-fry because the whole point is to cook it quickly. Considering how expensive these neat-looking little packets of meat are, I don't think this is quite good enough.