I really don’t recall what turned us onto the topic, but one day here in the editorial office at GRIT, Publisher Bryan Welch, my colleagues and I breeched the topic of selective breeding and the adaptability of livestock. I think we were working on a breed guide at the time, maybe hunting down photos of goat breeds and were overheard. This brought to Bryan’s mind an old Western, The Rare Breed (1966), which I had never seen. A couple of days later our movie, television and books buff, Senior Associate Editor Jean Teller, placed the DVD on my desk. Recently I had the chance to watch it.

I generally do like Westerns, both older – aside from this one, I also recently watched McLintock – and newer – I count Tombstone and Open Range among my favorites. This must be because I grew up watching the likes of Josie Wales, Gus from Lonesome Dove and, from my mom’s favorite television show Gunsmoke, Marshall Matt Dillon when I was a kid. I then would imitate these lifestyles, from cattle herder to sheriff to outlaw, while I roamed the farm on horseback and ran (too much, whatever the amount) fat off the cows on our farm.

Those were some of the best – and worst, from my perspective – chewings my mom ever gave. I say best because they always seemed fierce and well-deserved, although I don’t recall Momma ever giving an undeserving chewin’. With three boys, she never lacked for justification.

Anyway, The Rare Breed features James Stewart as a protagonist, and a mother-daughter duo (Maureen O’Hara and Juliet Mills, respectively) and their Hereford bull, aptly named Vindicator.

Mom and daughter are forced to sell the bull, and what results is relocation to a Texas Longhorn ranch, where Vindicator will hopefully substantiate the claim (Juliet Mills’ claim) that he can survive and procreate. James Stewart leads the bull on the drive, while O’Hara and Mills tag along to ensure Vindicator doesn’t just end up on a dinner table.

SPOILER ALERT!!!

Vindicator, along with several of the Longhorn bulls, perishes in a harsh Texas winter (I expected the heat to be more of a problem), but in the spring several Hereford calves, several baby-white faces, are discovered.

It’s more of the tamed variety of Western movies you’ll find in my opinion – at one point Stewart and the antagonist seemingly play chicken on their horses, the horses collide and one cowboy dies – and there are few to no gunfights, an aspect of the American Western that appeals to me, hence my affinity for Open Range, The Outlaw Josie Wales, Lonesome Dove and others.

What does it for you? What aspect of the American Western movie appeals to you most, and what are the types you like the best? Also, what memories do you have as a child watching Westerns like I do?

Venison Chili Trial One went over well last night. It’s hard to say if it was more the quality of the meat or the mixture of ingredients I used, but the combination of the two made some dang-good chili. I do know this: Even though I didn’t shoot a big, old buck this year, last night’s meal – and today’s lunch, actually – made me very thankful for doe meat in the freezer.

I’d planned on using a Southern Venison Chili recipe, but once I got into the grocery store, the amount of green pepper – it calls for one large green bell pepper, cut in strips – and the inclusion of 2 tablespoons of sugar kind of turned me off to it.

So I kind of combined that recipe with another one to arrive at the one below. The only problem is, I estimate and add a little of this, a little of that when I cook – no matter my intention – taste as I go and make adjustments, so this is only my best guess as to what was in that chili.

The Amateur’s Venison Chili

1 ½ pounds ground venison
½ large white onion, diced
½ large green bell pepper, diced
2 tablespoons cumin seed spice
3 tablespoons chili powder
8 ounces tomato sauce (I went with the Kroger brand, inexpensive, and already peeled and in juice – “Chili Ready”)
8 ounces water
½ cup light-red kidney beans
½ cup ketchup

Now bear with me.

First, you obviously brown the meat.

You can sauté the onion and green pepper while you do this, but mine turned out tender and cooked enough in the end without doing so. The reason I didn’t is because I forgot – kind of a shaky start – and was in too big of a hurry to see how much grease the meat would make. It was very lean ground meat … just what I’d hoped for. After I diced the onion and green pepper – I didn’t have a knife for dicing so I was using my skinning knife that I hadn’t used since the GRIT sharpening experience – I added it to the halfway-browned venison.

Sometimes I feel like I get into some intense situations when I’m cooking.

After the meat had completely browned, I added the cumin spice and chili powder. Then I emptied tomato sauce and water in, added the kidney beans and hoped for the best (i.e., hoped the vegetables would cook to tender). On medium heat, I let the mixture simmer for 1 hour, tasted it, added some ketchup and somehow it turned out really good. Gwendolyn Marie did say she snuck in some more of the spices.

The whole thing was rather fun, despite my methods.

I’ve got plenty more meat, so the next venison-cooking experience for me will either be another chili recipe, or Lori’s homemade Summer Sausage recipe. Her recipe can be found at the bottom of this blog post. I’ll let you know how that one goes.

Anybody else this hectic in the kitchen? I feel like I’m in the weeds most times.

Bottom photo by Gwen Salmon.

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.

Now that late doe season is over, and bow hunting season all together has effectively come to a close, stories pop up and hunters’ imaginations tend to run crazy. During the season, almost two months ago, I was emailed a photo of a man from Baldwin, Kansas, who by his own account was headed to pick up his son for an evening hunt when he happened upon one of the biggest and oldest-looking deer I’ve ever seen.

Since Baldwin is close to Lawrence, where I live – it’s true, I’m an urbanite trying to return to the country – this story was more than any of my friends could believe; even friends who’ve never hunted.

The story finally ran in the Lawrence Journal-World seemingly a good two weeks after word was out.

In two weeks, as is typical with hunting stories, Bambi could reach full maturity and be a Pope & Young buck.

In this case, the picture doesn’t lie and, depending on how the rack shrinks (or shrunk, by now), this deer could make the record books.

To me and my friends, though, it brought up age determination in whitetails.

Part of it is looks. Gray faces and the way a mature buck’s neck connects with the sternum – bucks at less than full maturity will have a noticeable bump where the neck hasn’t fully grown into the sternum; mature bucks will have no such bump – can give you an estimate that, for me, I trust about as good as a hunch. But spike bucks have never been on my radar, and once you’re in a stand the end-all, be-all is the size of the rack.

I have hunted on my cousin’s ground now for a few years, and since he's one of the Buckmen, of Buck Commander (Adam), he often describes deer that are off limits, either because they are still young despite the size of their rack, or because he wants the hunt on which those deer are taken to be recorded, possibly for a Buck Commander DVD.

That’s understandable, and I’m just always extremely thankful for the hunt.

Anyway, age determination in whitetail deer is one thing at which I’d like to improve. Finally, Wildlife Analytical Laboratories has formed www.DeerAge.com to help people determine the age of deer.

The only problem with this is their process offers little in the way of determining age before you put an arrow into the vitals.

Their method uses something called forensic cementum annuli aging, and they claim it is one of the most accurate ways to determine exact age. The process works a lot like determining the age of a tree by counting the rings in the trunk; wildlife teeth can be stained, and different layers of growth form annually, so these folks are able to determine exact age.

What that could do in the way of whitetail age determination is allow hunters to shoot a deer, send them the proper teeth – front two center incisors – have them age it, and learn by a sort of trial and error method. The cost of doing this is $19.95 for the kit you take into the field, and then anywhere from $19.95 to $49.95, depending on the package, for the test results. Also, when getting a deer mounted, I think it would be cool to have an age certificate hanging beside the mount. They’ll send you that for $15. All packages do take over a month to reach you.

Of course, I just need to get that mount first. In what limited time I did have on weekends this hunting season, I managed a doe, which I was thankful for. But I wouldn't classify my season as a success. Like others, I still want that huge, ancient buck that has roamed the forest and managed to survive for 4½ or more years. Or maybe I just want to be tested more than anything else, to have an old, experienced deer right on me, with the chance to screw it up.