Coconut Chicken Curry, Venison Stew, Bacon Cabbage Melts, Tomato Chowder, Persimmon Jam, Berry Rhubarb Crumble & More!

My parents are still in town, so I’ve been having fun making sure we have enough hearty meals cooked on the weekends to last through all of our busy weeknights!

Coconut Chicken Curry with Sweet Potatoes & Collards

This was absolutely dreamy for our cold and dreary weather last week!

I used two whole chickens from Pearl River Pastures. I find a lot of roast chicken recipes to be a little boring, but then I also often can’t bring myself to pull chicken cuts for us when I know how to break down a whole bird!

So I decided to make a stew with cubed chicken breast and then roast the thighs, drumsticks and wings on a sheet pan to go with them. I froze the carcasses to make broth later, since I already had chicken broth in my freezer to use for this stew.

For the roasted chicken, I sprinkled with corn starch (helps get the skin crispier) and then seasoned with sea salt, curry powder, paprika, garlic salt, coriander and extra turmeric (even though the curry powder has it in it).

I also included the skin from the chicken breasts on the sheet pan and just took them out a little sooner than the rest was done to have as a chicken cracklin’ appetizer of sorts!

For the curry, I started with a lot of sweet onions and sautéed those down, eventually adding a bunch of minced garlic and ginger. Meanwhile I seasoned the cubed chicken breast pieces with the same spice blend as the other chicken parts and browned in two batches in my cast iron skillet.

To the onion-garlic-ginger mixture, I added a little yellow curry paste, plus curry powder and turmeric, then added cubed sweet potatoes and chicken broth, plus splashes of fish sauce, Meyer lemon vinegar and lime juice. I only had one can of coconut milk on hand, so I added that, plus some roasted and pureed kabocha squash from my freezer supply. It added more subtle sweetness and helped thicken it a little.

As the batches of browned chicken finished in the cast iron, I added those, then finally added the collard greens towards the end of the cooking time. We ate it topped with more lime juice, crispy chicken pieces and in my case, plenty of chili crisp!

24-Hour Crockpot Bone Broth

I usually make my bone broth in the Instant Pot, setting it at high pressure for 2 hours and then changing it to slow cook for another 10-24 hours after that.

This time I had a batch of yogurt going in the Instant Pot (which also takes 24 hours) and I didn’t want to wait a day to make it, so I used the crockpot.

I did a few beef bones I had left in the freezer, plus some pig feet/pork trotters. Pig’s feet have a ton of connective tissue and collagen in them, so when cooked for a long time, they break down into gelatin and make for a broth that is like an extremely firm jello when cooled. And of course, gelatin is rich in amino acids like glycine and proline, which is great for gut, joint and skin health in particular.

It’s also delicious and makes the best base for soups, stews, sauces, gravies, etc. I had used up most of my bone broth in the freezer, so I made this for the venison stew below.

First I salted and roasted the bones in the toaster oven to get some caramelizing to enhance flavor. And then I transferred them to the crockpot, filled with water, added bay leaves and a splash of apple cider vinegar and a little more sea salt. I generally don’t add vegetables or aromatics so that the broth is neutral and can be used for anything, plus without onions, I can add to our dog’s food as well.

I cooked for 24 hours, strained, let cool a bit and then transferred to smaller containers to freeze. There was a ton of fat on it, so I like to cool fully in the fridge and remove that before freezing. I struggle with using the fat — it’s not perfectly cleanly rendered so will mold in the fridge after 10 days or so. And if I freeze it, I can’t use a little at a time. So this time I can going to remove, warm it to melt it and then pour into ice cube trays and freeze! That way I can pull one at a time.

Venison Wild Rice Stew with Turnips, Sweet Potatoes & Sun-Dried Tomatoes

My dad brought down some of his venison from his Thanksgiving hunt, so I had to make something really delicious with it.

He brought a hing quarter and three pieces of backstrap (aka the tenderloin). I cubed up the leg into pieces for the stew and trimmed the three pieces of loin and put the ends in the stew, as well.

I tossed those with cornstarch and browned in two batches in a cast iron pan.

Meanwhile I sautéed sweet onions, carrots, frozen pink celery and garlic in the Instant Pot. I deglazed all that with a splash of soy sauce and Bourbon balsamic vinegar. Then I added cubed sweet potatoes, hakurei turnips, sliced sun dried tomatoes and Wisconsin wild rice and seasoned with Smokey Shiitake & Black Garlic seasoning, paprika and garlic salt.

I was still waiting for the broth to fully cool (so I wouldn’t pour too much fat into the stew), so I only used about a pint of the beef-pork broth, as well as a frozen pint of goat bone broth. Both broths were super concentrated, so I also added a little water.

I cooked it at high pressure for an hour and it came out perfectly — the rice was done and didn’t soak up ALL the broth and the venison was super tender.

Venison Filets with Truffle Cauliflower Mash

To go with it, I had to give the main parts of the tenderloin a proper treatment to enjoy them as the tender steaks that they are.

So I sliced them and seasoned with sea salt and Smokey Shiitake & Black Garlic seasoning for a few hours before cooking. And then I just seared them at a high high in the cast iron for a minute or two per side and let them rest.

To go with that and the stew, we steamed a huge Faust cauliflower and then pureed it in the food processor for cauliflower mash. While I love mashed potatoes, we had plenty of starch in the stew with the rice and sweet potatoes and cauliflower is honestly more forgiving than potatoes — they don’t get gluey!

For the creamy factor, I used the last dollops from a container of goat yogurt, butter, a splash of heavy cream and some truffle mayo to add that amazing truffle flavor. Also added some parsley and green onions. It all came together so well on a rainy, gloomy night!

Bacon Cabbage Melts

We did a meat restock from our freezer warehouse on Friday and I found some bacon with some visible blue ink on it and pulled those packages for us.

The USDA puts a stamp on several parts of the carcass as it’s hanging in the butcher’s cooler and sometimes the butcher doesn’t trim off the stamp on the belly — it can mess up the dimensions of the the bellies for ideal bacon slices.

While the ink is food grade and perfectly safe, I often pull any packages with noticeable remainders of the stamp on them for us to eat. And I was’t sad about “having” to take bacon home!

I’ve come to believe that BLTs are the best way to eat bacon. Nothing else comes close for me. So since it’s not tomato season anymore, I decided to come up with a sandwich that hits similar notes. A few months ago I did a creamed mustard green and bacon melt and I decided to do something similar here except with braised cabbage.

I cooked the cabbage and some diced shallots down in butter until soft and almost caramelized. The seasonings were just sea salt and a little nutmeg at the end.

Since it was two pounds of bacon, I did it on a big sheet pan in the oven. For the melts, my dad used his super skills to cut Bellegarde’s honey oat loaf into thin half slices, since we didn’t quite have enough for everyone and we didn’t all need two thick slices of bread anyway! It worked out perfectly, props to him.

For the sandwiches, I did one side with dijon mustard and the other with mayonnaise and then layered on Swiss cheese, the bacon and the braised cabbage. Then I toasted them in a cast iron pan until the cheese was melty. They were absolutely delicious! I added a little homemade bread and butter pickle relish to mine, as well.

Creamy Tomato Squash Chowder

And to go with the sandwiches, we did some creamy tomato soup. It was more of a chowder since there were other veggies in it and I didn’t puree the entire soup, just about three quarters of it.

I started with diced sweet onions and then garlic. Then I added diced carrots and frozen pink celery and eventually the last of the kabocha puree I had defrosted for the curry, plus leftover roasted squash from our sheet pan brat meal last week.

Then I added a small quantity of leftover chicken broth as well as about two pounds of diced canned tomatoes. I cooked it until the carrots were soft and then transferred some of it to the food processor to puree, adding a little whole milk at that point.

I did that in two batches, then added it back to the pot and finished with a little heavy cream. It was bright and rich at the same time and perfect to dunk the bacon melts into!

Persimmon Freezer Jam

I had a bunch of persimmons to use up that weren’t quite sale quality but were still perfectly good.

I sliced and froze some to use for smoothies and fruit desserts, but with the majority, I made a huge batch of “freezer jam,” ie I had no interest in messing with canning it, but I do have plenty of freezer space.

I scaled up this recipe because I was super excited to see it not use any additional sugar and used ground chia seeds to thicken.

It came out SO delicious. And wildly sweet without any extra sugar. I will probably eat most of it with yogurt, but the puree would be great in quick breads or spread on biscuits, also.

Blackberry Strawberry Rhubarb Crumble

I still have plenty of 2024 berries and even Wisconsin rhubarb in my freezer and my mom requested another crisp! But this time I was out of oats, so we went with a crumble.

I have made about a million fruit crisps, crumbles and cobblers, but I still look up a recipe to riff on every time to get the ratios right. This time I used Smitten Kitchen’s strawberry rhubarb crumble. I increased everything to about 1.5 since I used the quantity of rhubarb and strawberries she calls for, plus additional blackberries.

Since the fruit was frozen, I also baked it for a bit before adding the topping to help give it a head start and make sure it got jammy and bubbly before the topping started getting too brown.

The only other change I made was adding tangerine zest in addition to lemon zest to the topping and tangerine juice in addition to lemon juice to the fruit. It was absolutely delicious — even though I’ve made a lot of desserts like this, it was maybe one of the best ones yet!