Last week I learned how to make soup. Now, for you to fully grasp how big of an achievement this is, you have to realize that my father and I creatively assembled this soup in a mild panic on our own, without Mama’s help. I never, and I mean NEVER, attempt cooking something for the first time all on my lonesome, but this was an emergency.

What was the emergency, you ask?

Well, my boyfriend the Cowboy was sick. (Yes, I finally wrangled a Cowboy. More on this some other time.)

We had planned this lunch for quite some time because, you see, he works all over the country and is rarely home. I wanted to remind him how spectacular of a woman I am by cooking him a full meal, renting his favorite movie from the library, and giving him the best back-rub in the history of spectacular-woman-kind. I had it all planned out – fried potato slices, asparagus, bacon-wrapped pork chops, three-bean salad, and Mama’s homemade raspberry lemonade (Click here for recipe!), with Man-Bait pecan pie (Click here for recipe!) for dessert. Sounds amazing, right? The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, after all.

I flew home after my morning class at Last Chance Community College, donned my broomstick skirt and an apron (the skirt was necessary for full domestic effect), and was about to start making a holy mess in the kitchen when my phone began hollering “…Operator won’t you put me on through, I gotta send my love down to Baton Rouge…” Cowboy! Cowboy! I flipped (yes, flipped) open the phone to…hacking.

“Honey, I’m sick. *cough cough*”

“Oh. Are you still coming?”

“Of course I am! Just, could you make something like soup? I don’t want you to go through all the trouble of a big meal ‘cause I don’t think I’ll be able to eat it.”

“That’s fine, sweetie, of course I know how to make soup. I’ll see you in a few hours.”

*click*

This is where the panic set in because, well, I don’t actually know how to make soup. I tried calling Mama, but she was at some sort of agricultural convention in Indiana, partying like a hayseed rock star, and couldn’t be bothered with her domestic flop of a daughter. I consulted each and every one of the sixty-two cookbooks in the kitchen, but all of the soup recipes looked confusing as heck. Bone marrow? Who can be bothered with bone marrow at a time like this? Eye of newt? Leg of frog? What??

I decided to pour me a drink and wallow in self-pity. Cowboy is going to discover that I cannot cook soup. He’s going to leave me. I’m never going to find a good man ever again, because I cannot cook soup. I’m going to die a lonely spinster with fourteen cats. I could literally hear my biological clock ticking.

Luckily, Dad arrived home in the middle of my frenzy. He asked what I was drinking (cherry vodka and cream soda) and why I was drinking at 11 a.m. Dad dragged me off my duff and helped me rifle through the fridge and throw everything we could find into a pot. I covered it with water and let it cook for awhile. I even brought myself to cook a pecan pie, with extra bourbon, for myself.

Cowboy loved it, and my biological clock shut up. For now.

So! Here is the recipe for Tick Tock Soup:

Some potatoes cut into chunks

Some sliced up carrots

Some asparagus

Some sprigs of rosemary ripped off of Mama’s plant in the dining room

Some basil leaves ripped off of Mama’s plant in the living room

A couple of pork chops, chopped into hunks

A couple of venison chops, chopped into hunks

Water

Some milk

Pinch of flour

A lot of salt (if you’re cooking for a cowboy)

Throw it all in a pot and set the heat on medium. Stir. When it has simmered long enough for the potatoes to be mushy, it is done.

Serve with beverage of your choice, unless you are serving a cowboy with a cold, then give him chamomile tea with a spoonful of honey. Make him drink it, because he will complain and try to give it to the dog when you are not looking.

If you’re lucky, he’ll even bring you some jeans and shirts to patch, because you lied and told him you knew how to mend…

Since shooting a deer around Thanksgiving, I’ve been eating a lot of venison, and now I can’t wait to try to make my own deer jerky. Be it tenderloin, deer chops or some other cut, the meat has all been incredibly tender and tasty. Being an antler guy, I’d trade it all for a huge rack on the wall, but the quality of the meat from the young buck I took makes me wholeheartedly thankful nonetheless.

When it comes to fish and game, I love to cook it. It’s a great feeling to grill or fry up some game or fish that I’ve harvested myself and share it with the people I love, especially when they like it. I recently asked my fiance to be my wife over masterfully done backstraps, baked potatoes and sweet corn. I only say masterfully done because it worked, so I'll have faith in that meal for some time to come.

From time to time, I hear people talk about how they don’t like venison, or fresh fish, and I can’t help but think, Well, you’ve never had the backstraps from a doe, or, you’ve never had a crappie fillet in the spring. Cooking good fish and game is something I take great pride in – most of all because in my mind it substantiates my belief that I don’t hunt or fish only because I love the actual hunt. I also love the outcome, the practical use and sustenance I get from the animal I’m after. Making it taste good is a big part of the provident feeling.

So when an advertiser brought over some Clem's Seasonings samples, I immediately knew I had some ground venison in my freezer that has Clem’s name on it. I even got a drying rack. The seasoning itself is rather inexpensive; you can season 15 pounds of meat using one seasoning packet that sells for $6. Drying screens are also affordable; around $5 per screen.

Honestly, I’ve been searching for an easy jerky-making process for some years, both for beef jerky and deer jerky, and I hope this is it. I’ll let you know how it turns out. Anybody have a favorite already? Or has anyone tried Clem’s in the past?

It is that same old question we ask ourselves everyday! The real question is probably better put, “What can I make for supper tonight that I haven’t made before?” Sometimes I find myself stuck in a rut of making the same meals over and over again. This has a lot to do with what we have in our freezer. Our main food supplies consist of frozen chicken, hamburger, and venison steaks. The challenge comes with trying to find different ways to prepare these three main foods. I put together a combination the other night that turned out particularly yummy. I thought I would share it.

Steak is always a great choice for supper and very popular at our house, so I pulled some venison steaks from the freezer in the morning to thaw. After they were thawed, I seasoned them with coarse black pepper and steak seasoning. I chopped up some onions and garlic cloves, and opened a can of mushrooms.

The prep time for this only takes about 30 to 45 minutes. At suppertime, I browned my steak on both sides. My steak doesn’t take long to fry up because we usually slice it on the thinner side. Your cook time will depend on how thick your steak is, and how well you like it done. I then added my chopped onion, garlic, mushrooms, and some parsley and stir-fried them in with the steak for a few minutes. While the steak was frying, I took one of our packages of frozen sugar peas from our garden that I had thawed earlier, and stir-fried them with some seasoning. At the same time, I cooked 2 cups of minute rice. When the rice and peas were both done, I combined them.

To serve, I put a bed of the rice and peas on the plate first. Then, I added some steak pieces. On top of the steak I melted some shredded cheese (use whatever kind you like best), and topped with the mushroom, onion, and garlic. Absolutely yummy, and your family will love you for it!

If any of you have any new supper ideas, I would love to hear them!

Here at GRIT, we have a department called Comfort Foods. I’ve always kind of distrusted the label of a comfort food, since to me food is more about sustenance than comfort. But after heading home for the weekend, a fried chicken dinner prepared by my mom reminded me of how comfort foods feel and what they’re all about. And with any luck, someone out there will have a venison chili recipe that will add one more recipe to my arsenal of comfort foods.

But what is a comfort food to me? It has little to do with the actual filling of my stomach. Rather, I think of comfort foods as those dishes we eat that take us back to a time and place, much like my favorite songs that always remind me of the same things.

From a young age, fried chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, homegrown corn, dinner rolls and milk – out of a Mason jar most times – have been a staple to our family’s diet. It brings a vivid picture to mind of sitting at our old dinner table in the old farmhouse, no television or radio on, just a family of five gathered around the largest meal of the day; us boys eager to empty our plates and start wrestling or whatever was the plan for entertainment that particular night, antagonizing something for sure. The smell reminds me of sitting hungrily with the gravy steaming and smell of the chicken drifting, us unable to fill our plates until the prayer was said.

That is comfort; more from the memories and ease that those memories put us at rather than how stuffed we get – although we had that meal on Saturday, and I was still feeling full Monday. To this day, fried chicken, steak (grilled or chicken fried), meatloaf, my mom’s taco recipe and even tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches (we still call them toasted cheese, for some reason) all conjure up images of that little room with five place settings. Those things take me back to my childhood in the same way that spaghetti and Yellow Tail Shiraz take me back to the living room of a house I shared with my brother Josh while in college. It was a coffee table with two settings, rather than a dinner table with five.

What about you? What foods take your memories back to certain places and times?

Also, I’m in search of new deer chili recipes. I have a rather large supply of ground venison that needs cooked up, and I’m bound and determined to find a recipe I can stick with. First of all, I’m going to try Southern Venison Chili, a recipe I got from BuckCommander.com that seems more spicy than other deer chili recipes I've tried. I’ll let you know how it works out, and if anyone has a favorite, I’d love to give it a try.