I Like Moose Buns and I Cannot Lie

You don't have to braise all the indecipherable cuts of moose from the freezer.  Get your steamers ready, folks.

Steamed moose buns are a great bit of Canadian-Asian fusion to help us through the terrible Newfoundland season of winter-spring (@littleredchicken #StealingYourBonMots).  Great lunch or appetizer.  Even breakfast, why not?

Fefe's Steamed Moose Buns

inspired by The Woks of Life; dough adapted from AmyBites

This is a two day project.  Or an all day project.  Whichever way, it is time consuming. HOWEVER, you will end up making a massive supply of buns for your freezer.  The effort you put in up front will pay itself back in gold when you are wandering around the kitchen complaining that there's no food, only ingredients... but then you remember the moose buns.  In almost no time at all you'll be having the best lunch in town.

for the filling

The cat is generally less concerned about what cut this is.

1-1/2 lbs moose* (to yield a little more than 1-1/4 lbs after cleaning)
1-1/2 tbsp + 1 tbsp lard 
1/4 tsp salt
1 tbsp five spice powder
5-8 carrots (8 ordinary ones; Fefe only used 5 because two were "honking great things"), grated
6 spring onions, finely sliced
2 fresh chilies**, finely diced
1 tbsp soy sauce
4 tbsp mirin

If you live in a place where hot peppers are unpredictably
available, buy them when you can find them and toss any
you can't use right away into the freezer.  From frozen, you
can grate them into hot pepper snow with a microplane (or
just chop like you would fresh and carry on).

2 tbsp fish sauce
1 tbsp sesame oil
1 tbsp hoisin sauce
1 tbsp honey
1 tbsp white vinegar (if you haven't run out of rice vinegar like we did, use that!)

*if you don't have moose, you can substitute venison, goat or beef for a similar flavour, but then you have to call them Mock-Moose Buns...

**or BETTER, use frozen ones and grate them into hot chili snow with a microplane (we learned this trick from Jamie Oliver, it's brilliant)

for the dough

1-1/3 c milk
1/2 c butter
1/2 c sugar
2 tbsp water
3 tsp active dry yeast
2 eggs, beaten
6 c all-purpose flour

To make the filling, cut the moose away from the bone***, and clean it really well, removing all the gristle and as much fat as possible.  Mince by chopping really finely then blasting with a food processor or if you have such a thing as a meat grinder, go ahead and use it.  (If you have pre-ground meat, that's okay too.)

***DO NOT THROW AWAY THE BONES.  Use these to make some beautiful soup stock.

Clean the moose very well, chop finely and then blitz with
your food processor.  Or, if you are so lucky as to have a
meat grinder, use it.

Heat 1-1/2 tbsp lard in a skillet.  Brown the moose with the and five spice powder, then remove to a large heatproof bowl and set aside.  Add another 1 tbsp lard to the pan and saute the carrots, onion, and chilies until soft.  Add the carrot mixture to the moose and stir together with the remaining filling ingredients.

Make the filling a day ahead if you can.  If you have to make
it the same day, let it cool as much as possible before filling.

The colder the filling is, the easier it is to work with.  So if you can make it a day ahead and refrigerate overnight, do that.  Otherwise, cool it as well as possible.

To make the dough, heat the milk and butter together in a saucepan until the butter is melted.  Set aside.  Mix the yeast with water and let sit to soften, about 5 minutes.  When this 5 minutes is up, combine the milk mixture, yeast mixture, sugar and egg.

Sift the flour into a large mixing bowl (or the the bowl of a full sized food processor), reserving about a 1/4 cup in case you don't need it.  Slowly pour in the milk mixture, stirring constantly (or pulsing the food processor) until the dough comes together in a big sticky ball.  It should be sticky, but look like a ball... if it's shaggy, add more flour as needed.

Turn the dough out onto a floured surface and knead for about 5 minutes.  Put the dough in an oiled bowl, cover with a damp tea towel and let rise in a warm place for about an hour.

After the dough is risen, punch down and divide into quarters.  Work with one quarter at a time.  You have a lot of buns to make, this will help it be less overwhelming...

To stuff the moose buns, line 4 baking sheets with parchment (or some combination of baking sheets, serving trays and plates****).   Punch down the dough and divide into quarters.  Working with one quarter at a time (keeping the remaining dough covered), break dough into 12 fairly even pieces about the size of ping pong balls (so, a total of 48 buns by the time you are done with it).  Form each section into a ball, then roll into a circle about 1/4" thick.

****You will want freeze any uncooked buns for another day, so consider freezer safe-ness when choosing these.  Freeze them like you would berries or meatballs, in a single layer until frozen then transfer to a freezer bag or other airtight container. 

The trick is to get the right amount of moose filling.  Too
much and it will squish out the top; too little and you will
feel deprived.

Spoon some moose filling (about a tbsp) into the center of the dough. It's a matter of getting a feel for the ratio of filling to bun.  You want as much delicious moose stuffing as possible without risking not being able to close the dough up.  If you have the time and interest, you can spend a great deal of it looking at the miracle of the internet to find beautiful, intricate and traditional ways of folding up and sealing the bun.  Fefe simply draws up the edges and smooshes***** them together at the top.  Let the filled buns rest for 20-30 minutes before cooking or freezing.

*****That's the technical term, just ask her.

To cook the moose buns, prepare your steamer if necessary.  We make our stainless steel steaming basket non-stick by lining it with vented parchment.  Take a piece of parchment paper big enough to cover the bottom and sides of the steamer and cut it into a snowflake.  Bring a couple of inches of water in the bottom of your steaming pan to a boil, reduce heat to moderate the vigor of the boil but keep it high enough to have a good constant steam.

If you don't have a non-stick steamer, you can make it non-stick by lining it with a parchment paper snowflake.  This is a good job for the kids.

Gently place the buns in your steamer, leaving some space in between to allow for expansion.  Put the steamer over the boiling water, stick a tight-fitting lid on it, and cook for 12 minutes (15 minutes if cooking from frozen). The buns are done when the dough is expanded and soft but firm enough they don't hold a finger indentation.

Serve with sriracha or other garlicky hot sauce for dipping.

~~~

I started writing this blog post before Fefe finished making the moose buns.  She spent several minutes telling me how clever she was mixing half-batches of the dough in our teensy tiny mini-chopper that we pretend is as good as a full sized food processor.  I just heard her swear.  It seems the motor may be blown out.

What Fefe Noir did (left) was break the mini-chopper.  What worked better on the following recipe test (right), was to go old-school and use a bit of elbow grease.

~~~

Food supplies in grocery stores have been a bit unpredictable lately because it's been a hard year for ice... sea ice delays ferries and grocery shelves become empty.  Strangely, not just empty of exotic off-season foods like tomatoes and broccoli but also of ordinary things we can actually raise on this island, like pork and beef.  Meat has to come in from away because the big chain grocery stores won't carry meat that isn't inspected and graded and the only federally licensed slaughterhouse in Newfoundland and Labrador is for chicken.  I will admit to not fully understanding the problem, except to know that it's obvious something is broken.  I am not convinced that federally registered abattoirs is the answer; centralization increases the scale of contamination risk, drives up prices for the producer which can be a disincentive to raise livestock, and it can create a very troublesome gap between husbandry and slaughter.  Clearly, we need better support for agriculture in this province, from policy and from consumers in order to gain a scale of production that could reduce our dependence on that very unreliable chain of transportation.

But I digress.

Forget the beef, pork and Australian lamb marooned in the ice on the Cabot Strait.  The lack of meat on store shelves is only part of what has many of us digging to the bottom of our freezers and thawing out bits of ignored meat.  Like the goat we forgot we had, or that packet of moose that keeps getting put back after staring at it long enough to realize you haven't got the foggiest idea what part of the moose that was.  It's also nearing the end of winter.  We ate the easy stuff already.

This recipe makes a lot of steamed buns, but just freeze the
excess.  They cook from frozen in just 15 minutes when
you need a quick meal.

I know I say this every time we cook moose, but we have a lot of indecipherable cuts in the freezer. It seemed unlikely that the cast-off moose would include t-bone.  On the other hand, I hate to underestimate the generosity our friends and neighbours.  But probably blade roast cut like a steak?  With a slice of round? What do you call the picnic shoulder on a moose?

Here's some good news: you don't have to braise every uncertainty from the freezer. It's a good rule for unknown cuts, but you can also guarantee tenderness by mincing it.  And if you make something really delicious, you won't have to worry about maybe wasting a good steak.

These buns are a good project for April (or whatever time of year represents the dregs of winter where you live).  You won't really have time to make them once you start your outdoor-season projects, and you won't have to find something to fill an entire day or two consecutive afternoons once the weather improves.  Make them on a day when you are feeling stir crazy.  Cook them from frozen on days when it's taken you twice as long as expected to get home from work due to a late-season ice storm. Or when you are feeling listless from depression caused by the never-ending winter.

Serve the steamed moose buns with sriracha sauce, or other lovely garlicky hot sauce.  Mmmmmm.... 

Moose, Pho Shizzle.

One of this year's best discoveries was that pho can be made at home. Now there is no going back. No phoking way.

We took a break from making sugary Christmas treats to make some nourishing moose pho.

Moose Pho

This is a two day recipe.  Make the broth on day one and the next day eat your soup.  The anticipation from the fragrant pho mist swirling through your house will just make it taste better.

Pho is the perfect solution for using that moose your neighbour gave you but you aren't quite sure what cut it is. 

Day 1: Broth

2-1/2 lbs moose (this is a great use for that little red chicken moose, those unrecognizable cuts evidently quite popular with Newfoundland butchers)

Due to a strange dearth of star anise and whole cloves in
Newfoundland, we had to beg a mainlander to send the spices. 

1 onion (cut in half, still in skin)

a piece of ginger root, about 4 inches long (or more, or less to taste)

7 green cardamon pods

3 whole star anise

1 tsp whole coriander

1 cinnamon stick
6 cloves

1 tsp  sugar

2 tbsp fish sauce 

Put your moose in a pan and cover with cold water.  Bring to boil.  Then strain the moose and give it a good wash under the tap. (I know it seems weird, but it helps give you a clean broth). Put your nice clean moose into a CLEAN POT and cover with 4 quarts of water.

Char 'em good!

Char your ginger and onion.  Get our your cast iron pan and heat it up dry. When it's hot put the two halves of the onion and the ginger in the pan and start charring.  You want them to be blackened, but you don't want to set them on fire.  Be vigilant.  Turn occasionally.  It took me about 12 minutes to get a good char.

Put your onion, skin and all, in the pot with the moose.

Peel your charred ginger.  Use a spoon to to scrape off as much as skin as possible, then smash it with a heavy object. Jamie Oliver uses his fist for this kind of business, but I am incapable of doing this, so I use the bottom of pan. Bung your ginger in the pot.

In your dry cast iron pan, lightly toast your cardamon, star anise, coriander seed, cinnamon stick and cloves until just fragrant.  Add to pot.

Add you sugar and fish sauce.  Don't forget the fish sauce.  It makes the whole thing sing.  Bring to a boil, then turn down to simmer for about 4-1/2 hours or until reduced by half.  

Stick in fridge to cool overnight.  

Day 2:  Putting it all together

cold pot of broth with moose from day 1

rice vermicelli noodles

fish sauce
bunch of spring onion

cilantro

limes

hot peppers

sriracha

Get your cold moose and broth out of the fridge.  Strain the moose broth into a clean bowl or saucepan.  DO NOT DISCARD the liquid this time!
  

Pick through the moose reserving the good stuff in separate container.  Get rid on any fat, bones, gristle and all the spices, the ginger and the onion.  You will end up with a beautiful broth in one container and the best meaty bits shredded in another. 

Measuring about a ladle and a half per person, heat your broth back up in a heavy saucepan.

Finely slice your spring onion and hot pepper.  Put these along with cilantro and some lime quarters on a plate to serve with your pho.  This way everyone can choose how much limey, oniony, hot peppery they want.

Prepare your noodles according to package instructions which will probably involve a quick boil and/or soak in boiling water followed by a cold water rinse.  Do not skip the cold water rinse unless you like mushy noodles (you don't, believe me). 

To serve: Put your cooked noodles and some shredded moose in the bottom of a bowl.  Ladle the hot broth over the noodles and moose, and serve with the fresh toppings.  Let everyone add toppings, extra fish sauce and sriracha to taste.

Remaining moose and broth can be stored (separately!) in the refrigerator if you will be eating more soon, or can be frozen for a quick meal another day.

According to caribougrrl, moose pho makes an excellent breakfast the next day.  

~~~

I know it may surprise you to learn that Harbour Grace is not on the cutting edge of contemporary food culture?!   Despite this, and thanks to the food-e-net, caribou and I are exposed to new wonderful dishes and delights everyday.  Having a blog has pushed us to try new and tastier things and has made our lives infinitely more delicious.  

You have to drive to St. John's or Corner Brook to get good pho, you can't just say to yourself, hey, let's get pho from that cute little Vietnamese place down the road in the middle of nowhere.  But we read about it.  We saw the pictures. We drooled.  We got frustrated by the complete absence of key spices in the local shops.  We sweet-talked a friend into mailing us star anise and whole cloves from the mainland.  

Then we made pho.  Lots of pho of all sorts. There is no going back now. No phoking way.

Fefe Noir had to dig through the snow to rescue the last of the cilantro.  Well, she would have had to dig through the snow if it hadn't melted...

UPDATE RE: SPICES: We have it on twitter authority that star anise can be found, at least sometimes, in St. John's at the Magic Wok Chinese Grocery on Duckworth St. and the Blackmarsh Rd. Dominion.  I'm pretty sure I scoured the Dominion stores, but maybe my timing was wrong.  Whole cloves should be able to be found everywhere, but over the last few months we had no luck at all... perhaps with the stores stocking holiday foodstuffs, it's a good time to keep a look out.

The Sherry Thief's Stew

You don't want to waste that last packet of moose from the back of the freezer on a recipe that could go wrong, so don't.  Stick to the basics: moose, booze, berries, root vegetables, and a slow oven.

Sherried Moose Stew

2 tbsp bacon fat

Moose, berries and jelly from the wild.  Root vegetables
are about the only local veg available this time of year,
but still in great shape.

4 cups* moose meat, whatever cut is left in the freezer, thawed, cut into stewing chunks
2 tbsp unbleached all purpose flour
3 shallots, finely chopped
a few sprigs of thyme, dug out from under the snow (or perhaps growing or hanging to dry in your kitchen window because you are smarter than we are)
1 bay leaf
5 black peppercorns
5 parsnips, cut in half lengthwise then sliced

The sweet from the sherry and apple jelly, and the tart of the
cranberries are simple ways to add depth.

3 carrots, prepare 2 of these like the parsnips and divvy the third one up amongst your dogs
4 cloves crushed garlic
1/2 c. sweet sherry, stolen from that nice British lady down the street**
1/4 c. apple jelly (or use red currant or rose hip)
3 c. water
1/2 c. frozen wild cranberries

*Fefe would normally weigh this for you but someone (someone of the feline variety for sure, never ever someone of the caribougrrl variety), broke the scale by dropping it pushing it off the counter
**in this case, Fefe's mother... she also might have known we were taking it, but we haven't yet returned the remainder of the bottle so it still counts as stolen...

Comfort Cove parsnips for comfort food.

Preheat oven to 325F.

In a large cast iron dutch oven over medium heat, melt the bacon fat.  Season moose with salt and pepper and toss with flour.  Brown moose, in batches if necessary, and set aside.

Add a bit more bacon fat if needed to saute shallots, thyme, bay leaf and peppercorns in moose juice for about 5 minutes.  Add parsnips, carrots and garlic, stirring regularly for 10 minutes.  Don't let the garlic burn: adjust your heat and/or fat as necessary.

Deglaze with sherry.  Add jelly, browned moose, water and cranberries to the pot.  Bring to a simmery-boil, stirring occasionally.  Don't worry about hunks of jelly, these will meld into the stew before you eat it.

Put lid on the dutch oven and transfer to oven.  Check every 45 minutes or so to make sure there's sufficient liquid; add more water if you need it.  Cook for 2 hours (or more or less; test the moose with a fork for doneness every once in a while... it's done when the moose is tender and the liquid is thickened).

We served it with roasted turnip (rutabaga, swede).  

~~~

Fefe made this stew during the last major deep freeze.
 

It's difficult to gauge the weather by looking outside... 

So cold, the dishwasher has been clogged with ice nearly every morning.

Our thyme, when we can find it, is holding up rather well despite the winter.

So cold, the cats have taken to sleeping under the covers.

Not only were there cats under the covers, but they refused to get out of bed.

So cold, we are supplying our neighbours with water via garden hose, because they forgot, just one night, to leave a drip and the wait list for water line repairs is weeks long.

So cold, the frost is clawing at the windows to get in.

Okay, maybe the windows hint at the weather outside even if you can't see it.

So cold, the only way to keep the kitchen warm is with the baseboard heaters and the oven.  So cold, we need a low and slow cooked meal. 

Raid your freezer, your root cellar, your pantry, your liquor cabinet... do whatever you have to do to minimize the time you spend out in the bitter cold.  Steal sherry from your mom mum if it means you can avoid a trip to the store.

I got up for this?

(In the interest of full disclosure, as I'm typing, it's raining outside -- such is March, or perhaps such is Newfoundland -- but guaranteed we've got some more too-cold-to-eat-salad weather to get through.  Perhaps the most comforting of comfort foods, a slightly sweet moose stew, can get us through.)

It's About Time: A Recipe for Moose Curry

There's a lot more to moose than stew and sausage.

Let the moose marinate in the rubbed seasoning while you prepare the remaining ingredients for the curry.

Moose Curry, Variation 1:
Fefe Noir's Been-Lied-To* Moose Curry

*see commentary below

for the marinade:



Measuring out your ingredients into cute bowls will make you happy.

2 tbsp cumin seed
1 tbsp whole coriander
1/2 tsp black mustard
2 tbsp sunflower oil
3 fresh hot red chilies 
5 cloves garlic, peeled
1 onion, quartered
1 tsp tumeric
1/2 tsp salt

~ 2 lbs moose blade roast (or other braising part, like the unrecognizable cut of moose from your uncle)


for the curry:

2 tbsp sunflower oil
1 bay leaf
3 whole cloves
small handful of cinnamon bark (or 1 cinnamon stick)
4 green cardamom pods
4 black peppercorns
2 onion, finely diced
4 tomatoes, diced
1-1/2 c. water

Make the marinade: Heat oil over medium-high in a small saucepan; add cumin, coriander and mustard seeds.  Watch them closely until they begin to pop.  Immediately put the lid on the pan, remove from heat so they don't burn, and let them continue to pop.  Leave them aside until the oil is cool enough to handle.

Pour warm (or fully cooled if you were busy with other things and not staring at the pan, waiting impatiently) oil and spices into a blender, chopper, or food processor.  Get a load of this: someone overly generous and now guaranteed to be well-loved, gave us a mini-chopper over the holidays.  That's the most exciting thing to happen to this house since the pasta machine.  Grind up the spices and oil.  Add chilies and garlic, whiz them around until ground.  Add the onions, tumeric and salt and grind again.  

Roughly cut your moose roast, leaving the bone-in.  Don't worry about bite-sized pieces.  First, we'll assume you will serve this to people capable of using a knife and fork and that if not, you'll be cutting it for them anyway.  Second, you want all the good flavour from the bone to be part of your curry.  Embrace the moose juice. 

Combine the moose and marinade in a bowl, massaging the marinade into the moose meat.  Set aside while you prep the remaining ingredients, or for a couple of hours, whichever is most convenient.

Make the curry: Heat about a tbsp of oil in a large, heavy-bottomed saucepan. Brown the moose meat (in batches if necessary); remove and set aside.

Add 1 tbsp of oil to the pan, and quickly sautee the remaining spices in hot oil.  Add minced onion and cook until golden brown (but not burned).  Take your time, there's no hurry.  Add the tomatoes and cook until softened.  Add the moose meat, scraping any remaining marinade into the pan with it.  Add the water, stir it around a bit, bring to a boil.  Reduce to a simmer, cover and cook for about 2-1/2 hours.  While it is simmering, check occasionally to see if it needs more water.  It's done when the sauce is the thickness you want and the meat is pulling from the bone.

During the meal, be sure to remind everyone to watch out for the whole spices and the bones...  unless you went to the trouble of searching them out and removing them before serving.  (This is much easier if you use a regular cinnamon stick rather than the teensy flakes of mexican cinnamon bark.)

Serve your aromatic moose curry with things you like to eat with your curry.  We heated up some naan, broke open a jar of chili pickle, made a quick onion salad and dished out some plain yogurt.  We won't need to eat again for days.  Ha.

~~~

If you are a hunter, be assured that when you share your meat with other people they are really, truly, grateful.  It is not a wasted overture.  You will win loyal friends for life.

Neither of us hunts (yet, says caribougrrl, but she's been saying that for years), so we rely on the kindness of friends and neighbours  - but most especially a particular colleague and friend of caribougrrl's who always comes through with the holiday gift we look forward to most.  This year especially, because once we had some moose in the freezer, we knew we'd be able to answer to our blog name.

Fefe decided the first moose curry recipe should be a simple one.  Something that could be done without too much effort, without any fancy equipment or experience, without multiple dead-end trips to supermarkets and specialty shops to find the right spices.

Which was how Fefe Noir and caribougrrl ended up in a grocery store not buying anything for the blog-edition moose curry.  Everything used in Fefe's fast and easy weeknight moose curry recipe is a staple in the home, including the hot curry paste. 

What?  You don't see curry paste in the ingredient list?

Right, caribougrrl swore up and down that yes, absolutely, just the other day when she was looking for a new jar of apple ketchup, she had seen at least one jar of curry paste in the cupboard.  Her recollection was very particular... just to the left of the partridge berry jam, right behind the priced-to-sell coconut milk that's been there for a couple of years.  And caribougrrl is, afterall, taller than Fefe Noir and thus can see things in the cupboards with more ease.  So against her much better judgement, Fefe Noir did not put a jar of curry paste into the shopping basket.

Well, as it turns out, the first blog-edition moose curry is not a Monday-night-after-work curry (unless you made it Sunday afternoon).  Not only was there no curry paste, but the fresh ginger had started to wither and rot and we were out of a couple other spices.  What does it say about you when your pantry has obscure mexican cinnamon bark but not even one piece of ordinary cinnamon stick?

So make it up and make do.  Make a good moose curry with what's on-hand, just like so much of the cooking we do.