Around KJ's Table July 25th- July 31st

 The kiddos are all home now! Yay, this mamma is happy to have all her cubs back in the den. But the menus will look slightly different for the next few week as the girls will take over cooking since they are home for the summer and have the time.  You will see some gaps with family vacations.

Here is the menu this week: Weekly Meal Plan 07.25-07.31

This week is not overly complicated as the girls are doing most of the cooking and pretty self explanatory. A few notes for you:

Potato Salad: This is one I will make dairy "ed" and then a smaller bowl of d/f for the eldest.  Here is my favorite recipe: Loaded Baked Potato Salad and then for my d/f kiddo I just boil some cubed potatoes and after cooled I just added vegan mayonnaise, dijon mustard and salt and pepper.  

Fried Venison Steaks: if you are not a familiar with cooking wild game, it is all about the prep.  If you do not want your meat to taste gamey you need to remove all the silver from the meat. We harvest and butcher all our own "catches" both wild game (deer, rabbit, turkey mostly) and fish (walleye, perch, sheep head, bass, etc) so we can guarantee the best quality of end product.  But if you do not do this, try to remove as much of the "silver" you can out of your meat prior to cooking, it reduces the gamey taste of the meat. 

Venison is a very lean red meat, one of the leanest you can find, so you will need to add oil to the pan, or fat the meat if you are making ground meat. If you have harvest deer you will know that you generally do not get large "steaks" as you would from a cow but smaller, thiner pan steaks. You simply fry them in butter (or oil) and your spices of choice (garlic, onion, paprika, etc).  Fry the steaks in a skillet for 2-3 minutes per side depending on size and thickness. (they can easily become leather so don't overcook). This meal is what I grew up on and to this day is still one of my top 5 meals.  

This week when we did the fajitas we used chicken; but I have ever cut the venison steaks into strips and made fajitas or what we affectionally call "slaughter cheesesteaks", but that is for another meal/menu. 😃😉.

Most everything else on the menu this week was from the frozen section or the canned/boxed section.