For the Love of Stew

I admit it: I absolutely love soups (and stews)! When my husband started hunting, it produced many unknown pieces of meat in the kitchen. When you kill an animal and process it yourself, you do not get exclusively New York strips and ground meat. You end up with a lot of “pieces” of meat that become stew meat.

Growing up, we bought our meat from the grocery store and my parents would buy a side of beef from a local farmer. But, we never had wild game and we certainly never had elk stew meat. I have learned that there are many uses for stew meat: stew (obviously), tacos, and Shepard’s pie, to name a few. When we are fortunate enough to kill an elk, we end up with copious amounts of stew meat.
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Throughout the years, I have made canned stews using the pressure canner. I combine all of the raw ingredients, add boiling water, and pressure can the contents. I usually pressure can the stew meat, potatoes, carrots, onions, and spices (garlic, salt, pepper). Having the canned stew makes for an amazing option for a quick dinner after a long day. Typically, I have to add additional broth or water to the stew when I warm it up as it almost becomes a stew concentrate. I have also used the stew concentrate to pour over egg noodles to make a stroganoff. 
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But, my go-to stew is made in the crock pot. In the morning, I combine the raw elk stew meat, carrots, potatoes, onions, poblanos, and any other vegetables that I have on hand, with spices. I sometimes pour a can of my pressure canned tomatoes on top as the acid helps break down the meat. I also add red wine if I have it available. I pour in the water, set the crock pot to low, and leave for the day. When I return after work, the house smells absolutely amazing and dinner is 100% finished. 

Crock pot stew is not fancy and it is extremely easy. But, if we threw away all of the little “pieces” of the elk meat, we would never have elk stew. By saving all of the animal and using as much as we can, we create at least 20 dinners a year out of the pieces of elk meat.
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For us, we only kill animals that we are going to eat. And, we eat as much of every animal as we can. We think that it is the only ethical way to hunt. We have put in for our elk tags for this year, so hopefully there will be a lot more elk stew in our future!