Ramp Mashed Potatoes

Topped with fresh ramps

When cooking with ramps the ideas and uses are limitless, yet sometimes you have to get back to the basics. This re-creation of a classic recipe is something I ate growing up and I'm sure many of you have too. Yet I've made a few tasty alterations to include ramps into the recipe, I’m sure it will not disappoint. This is my twist on ramp mash potatoes; they are a great side dish to help introduce people to ramps. This recipe leaves the potatoes with a mild flavoring of ramps throughout the dish without being over powering.

Ingredients

8 to 10 – Red Potatoes

4 to 6 – Small/Medium Whole Ramps (bulbs, stalks, and leaves)

4 to 8 Tablespoons – Butter

½ Cup – Milk 

In a large pot put water on to boil while cutting / quartering up potatoes. Once the potatoes are cut, place them in the boiling water with a pinch or two of salt. Allow for potatoes to boil for 20 to 30 minutes or until they are soft.

While the potatoes are boiling separate the ramp bulbs and stems from the leaves. Once the ramps leaves are separated from the steams, finely mince the steams and bulbs and rough chop the remaining leaves of the ramps. Add one to two tablespoons of butter to a small skillet on medium heat. After the majority of the butter has melted, add the ramps (minced bulbs/stems and rough chopped leaves) and sauté.

By this time the potatoes should be soft enough to begin mashing them. To start this process the potatoes need to be removed from the heat and then drained. Put the drained potatoes back into the/a pot and run a potatoes masher through the potatoes until they are broken into small chucks. At this point add two to four tablespoons of butter and the ½ cup of milk to the mashed potatoes and stir/mix the potatoes. Continue stirring until they reach your preferred consistency. Now add the sautéed ramps and butter used to sauté them to the bowl of mashed potatoes; stir the ramps in until they are mixed thoroughly throughout the potatoes. If you like your mashed potatoes a little on the creamier side you can add a few more splashes of milk and then more butter to flavor. 

#DEERTOUR 2012 Teaser

If you remember awhile back #DEERTOUR made a trip to Foggy Mountain this past season. With hunting, nothing went as plan and it did no turn out as I wanted but it was still a great experience! Now for a preview of the entire #DEERTOUR 2012

Pulled Venison BBQ

Pulled Venison Sandwich with Pickled Ramps

For anyone that knows me or knows anything about the blog,  you know that I love to cook and I love to eat that much more.

For me and my buddies, food plays an important role when talking about deer camp or those all day fishing trips.

When cooking for these activities, there should be a blend between quick and easy and filling and tasty.  This is recipe fits that bill nicely. It can range from as simple as two ingredients for easy cooking in the field to a tasty dinner for the family. This is something that is a staple for us when hunting and fishing because  it is simple as can be. When in the field you need to do is open a quart jar of canned venison and warm it in a skillet and then add a bottle of your favorite BBQ sauce. At this point, apply it to a bun and you are ready to eat. This is warm, great tasting, and quick outdoor meal.

This is not where this recipe ends, I have a recipe for everyone to try if you have more than a single burner Coleman Stove or in your kitchen. First it is important to remember that there is more than one way to achieve the pulled venison, there are recipes where it can be cooked in a crock-pot or slow-cooker  but I prefer to use canned venison that is pre-cooked. This method allows for this meal to be cooked in under 10 minutes.

Ingredients:

• 4 Cups (1 Quart) of Pre-Cooked Shredded Venison
• 1.5 Cup - BBQ Sauce
• 2 Tbsp - Molasses 
• 1/4 Cup - Brown Sugar
• 2 tsp - Mince Garlic
• Salt and Pepper to taste

Directions:

Step One: Add mince garlic to a lightly oiled pan and sauté until brown.

Step Two: Once the garlic is browned, add the BBQ Sauce and Molasses to the deep walled skillet and bring to a simmer.

Step Three: After the sauce is brought to a simmer, slowly add in the brown sugar until it is dissolved.

Step Four: Mix in the shredded venison and allow for the mix to warm and salt and pepper to taste.

After the venison and sauce and combined thoroughly and warm apply to a bun or roll. If you have any Pickled Ramps, they make a great topper for this sandwich.

The Return to Foggy Mountain

It has been blatantly obvious over the last year or so I have been absent. For those of you have have been following along know I have been in school, getting married, and starting a new job and working. With this whirlwind of life bearing down on me, I blogged when I could, but that was very seldom. I did manage to throw in one of the many book reviews I have to do and the story of my buck in bow season, but other than that I didn't get on here much recently. At this point, I started to think if I just needed to call it quits on the blog. Now don't get me wrong, this isn't intended to be a pity, woe as me post, this is more of a back story to lead into the true aspect of this post. Between finally graduating Graduate School and falling into a rhythm with work and life and some serious encouragement from my wife, I decided to keep blogging. The last part of this was trying to move past writers block.

Moving past writer's block has been an ongoing struggle, I've been trying to write this post since the second week of December.  All the while I was still reading all my favorite blogs to try and spark some form of a post I'd want to write. The spark wasn't there and the old stand-by post just weren't what I wanted to put out there. Many of the post I was reading involved hunting season recaps, year end reviews, and previews of what's to come in 2013. When looking at that, as I said before I didn't have much to recap from hunting season nor did I have much for a year end review. I guess I could go the route of giving my goals for 2013 and what I have planned. That is what I'm doing that in a form but not completely.

What I started to think about was why do I blog anymore or at this rate why do I want to keep blogging? I had started this blog blind and the only guidance I had was trying and mirror other more popular blogs in hopes of attracting more of an audience. This lead to me writing post that where more about producing a certain quantity of post not the quality of what I truly wanted to post. This is something that also played into my writing block and not writing for a while. After thinking about it more, I realize I started this blog because I couldn't find another blog about hunting, fishing, or foraging in West Virginia and because I enjoy writing and sharing my adventures as well as giving and getting advice. Now with that being said, I may write on these topics, but by no stretch of the imagination am I an expert in any of these fields. That's what makes it fun in writing, as it is labeled in the header, these are my misadventures and will help me and hopefully anyone else that is reading, grow as an outdoorsman.

To bring this full circle, what I am saying with all this rambling is that I am not here to try and make this blog my gateway into the outdoor industry. I am here because I love the outdoors and everything it has to offer. All I want to do is be able to share my adventures and advice with everyone that wants to hear it and show a positive outlook on West Virginia. I feel like I got away from that and want to get that back. I am not going to list my goals that I have for this year to come, at least not now.

A thing at inspired me to start this blog was my love for blogs like Hank Shaw's Hunter-Angler-Gardener-Cook, Georgia Pellegrini, and author Steven Rinella. I am no where near as skilled as any of these great chefs/hunters, but I do love to cook, can, and preserve wild game, mushrooms, ramps, and other things found in the wild or garden. I'd like to and plan on having more posts concentrating on this topic. This is  the main area that I want to integrate into the blog more. There will still be content on what I am doing as far as hunting, fishing and everything that goes with that, but not as much of the filler stories just to produce a post. Trail Cam Tuesday will still exist  yet it will be on a much more limited basis, which I believe will actually make it better. This is not going to be a major change to the blog or the content, this is more of an update on the mission statement of this blog and to explain to everyone where I've been. Although I might not have the same regularity of post as before I hope the quality of the post will make up for that. Thank you all for following along and I hope everyone has a great new year to come!

MEAT EATER: Book Review and Interview

With hunting season in full swing, it is time to start putting long hours in the stand. For those long sits, I normally like to take a book to break up the mid-day down time. In mid August I was lucky enough to get an early copy of Steven Rinella's latest book, "MEAT EATER," as named after his hit TV show. I highly, I repeat, highly recommend this book to be with you at camp, in your stand, or even in you lazy boy for that lazy rainy Sunday while watching football, it is that good. I have have now read it twice and am still carrying it in my truck to read whenever I get some down time. This book does not just cover Steven Rinella's adventures in hunting, yet it dives in deeper to why we hunt and the experience we get when hunting. This book is a great read for anyone from the casual to obsessive hunter, as it will turn anyone into a true MEAT EATER. Below is a short interview I was able to conduct with Steven.

Foggy Mountain Meanderings: To begin, I'd like to thank you, Steven, for standing up and believing in the idea that hunting for sustenance is still acceptable in today's world! With that being said, you have an amazing passion for hunting and the outdoors, but that passion also comes through while you are preparing the food, where and when did this passion begin? And how do you continue to let this grow, do you pick up techniques from others or learn by trial and error?

Steven Rinella: My family ate a lot of wild game when I was a kid but it wasn't exactly adventurous cooking. My dad had a commercial sized deep fryer that he kept in the garage and he ran everything from salmon to squirrels to snapping turtle to deer through that thing. My mother did more creative cooking, like the occasional minced meat pie and roast wood ducks and sautéed venison liver. My own personal passion for eating wild game started to develop when I moved away from

college and began eating wild game for all of my at-home meals. Being stuck with my own cooking really inspired me to figure things out. Later, when I was about 26, I moved to Montana. There my potential pool of ingredients seemed to quadruple. Suddenly I was coming into elk, mountain lion, blue grouse, you name it, and I really started experimenting heavily. At that time I also started reading books by some of the great chefs like Escoffier, Julia Child, Jacques Pepin. Also the food writing of the novelist and poet Jim Harrison, an avid hunter and eater from my home state. Everything started to coalesce, and my love of hunting expanded into a love of cooking as well.

FMM: A common question in these interviews is what was your favorite hunt or what hunt are you looking forward to, sorry but that seems to be a little too easy. My question is what was one of you most difficult hunts (conditions, gear failure, injury/illness, etc) and what advice would to give to anyone else attempting this hunt to help overcome this?

Steven: I’ve had so many tough hunts it’s hard to pick one. Everything from gear failure to bad weather to illness to just plain miserable luck. But the difficult hunt that most readily pops into my mind was a mule deer hunt last fall in Montana. That trip was at the tail end of a three-pack hunting venture that went from Arizona (coues deer) to California (hogs) to Montana. In Arizona I managed to pick up some waterborne virus. In California I got coated in poison oak after butchering a hog that must have been rolling in the stuff. By the time I was in Montana, where it was -5 degrees, I was harboring a colon infection and open sores. When I got home from that trip I was passing blood and I landed in an emergency room. Spent four days in the hospital. That’s a hell of a hunting trip!

FMM: As someone I highly regard and look up to as an outdoorsman, what would be your message to hunters and non-hunters alike as to why hunting for sustenance is such an enjoyable goal?

Steven: For me, and for many other hunters, hunting for food taps into something that feels primal and instinctive. The history of anatomically and behaviorally modern humans goes back some 50,000 to 100,000 years, and for the vast bulk of that time we lived off hunting. There are cave paintings in Europe dating to 36,000 ago years that demonstrate a very complex relationship between human hunters and their prey. The residents of this continent were hunting since their
arrival about 14,000 years ago, and mostly kept at it until just a couple hundred years ago. So I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I suggest that we humans are built for hunting. Or rather, built from hunting. It makes us feel real and alive. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t be here today.

For more information or to order your copy of MEAT EATER, check out www.themeateater.com.