EN's Hunk o' Critter

[Elizabeth N.]

1. Select critter. Slaughter and butcher to specifications....Oh, wait, sorry, wrong instructions.

1. Select hunk-o-critter of choice from your handy supermarket shelf. Quantity of critter should be, meh, something like half to maybe 2/3 the volume of your crockpot or thereabouts.

2. Place critter in crock. Unwrapped, of course.

3. Fill crock to bursting with peeled, sliced sweet onions. Pack those suckers in there TIGHTLY cuz they shrink a lot.

4. Add seasonings of choice pertinent to type of critter. This can be as simple as salt and pepper or as complex as you wish. The minimum at my house is salt, pepper, oregano and vast quantities of garlic. I buy my garlic in the big jar at Costco (the stuff you have to refrigerate after opening) and scoop it with a soup spoon. My 8 quart crockpot gets at LEAST one such heaping spoon of garlic per critter batch. Do NOT be shy with the seasonings. Be nice and liberal with everything except maybe the habanero peppers. I'm told they get hotter with long cooking

. You might want to go a little light on the salt too and add more later.

5. Plop a nice big blob of butter on top of all this stuff. How much depends on taste preference and poop needs, well and on how lean your critter is. A whole chicken, skin on, needs less help than, say, an antelope shank that has about five grams of body fat per pound. Bison is that way, too, very VERY lean, so I'd add more butter to that. Typical for my big crockpot is half a stick of butter for a chicken and a whole one for a lean pork or beef roast.

6. VITAL: DO NOT ADD ANYTHING ELSE. NO LIQUIDS OF ANY KIND WHATSOEVER. Well, except maybe for a drizzle of Liquid Smoke. No tomatoes. No shrooms. No juicy veggies. No wine. No beer, No NOTHIN'. The juice in the onions and meat, and the butter are PLENTY. I promise. You will have magnificent juiciness just fine.

7. Crock all day. Or overnight.

8. Pull out the critter and chunk it if it hasn't already shredded itself to bits as soon as you touch it. I'm in favor of pulling out bird skin at this point, but to each his own.

9. Pig out. It's a LOT better the next day and absolutely divine by day three. (And this coming from someone who doesn't usually eat leftovers.)

 

[Munchkin]

Wanting an antelope shank to make hunk o critter with.

 

[Elizabeth N.]

Wanting an antelope shank to make hunk o critter with.

Well, don't you live in the land of antelope?

 

[Cello]

This is a BIG YUMMY {burp} THANK YOU to EN. Just enjoyed hunk-o-critter... totally or(al))gasmic! Browned about a pound of Trader Joe's stew meat (beef) and plopped it in the crock pot with several yellow onions, chunked, and a ginormous pat of butter. The onions weren't sweet going in. Added some torani sf syrup after a couple hours (not flavored, just a sugar substitute). Crocked all day.

OMG this is fantastic. Served with a big glob of sour cream. ) This is un-freakin-believable. Onions taste like sweet Mauis. Stew meat totally fell apart into strands and I, who still cannot reliably eat meat, just ate several ounces very slowly. Beef is shredded enough I think it's gonna go all the way down juuuust fine. And I am licking the plate while typing. Not kidding. O.M.G.

If you haven't already, tttttrrrrryyyyyy ttttthhhhhiiiiisssss!!!!!

 

[Elizabeth N.]

Oh happy anticipation.....I took a "picnic ham" aka bony pork shoulder to my smoker-wielding friend this afternoon. She's all happy because she can put fatty shoulder hunk above the turkey she's smoking for Easter dinner. Sunday evening I shall pick up hunk-o-smoky-shoulder and plant that sucker in the trusty crockpot overnight. DROOOOOOOOOLLLLLL....... The big ass bone will flavor a batch of bitty African red beans, potato greens and hot peppers the next day. YUM YUM YUM....

 

[Elizabeth N.]

This is the BEST hunk o critter EVER. I have reached new heights of food joy . The bones and skin are now crocking overnight to make broth for bean soup.

 

[Sheanie]

@Elizabeth N. , can you eat bean soup without going into agony? I cannot. I even tried BeanO and still get doubling over pain, followed by about 2 hours of gas. And I make the BEST bean soup in the universe. Now I've taken to making it with more ham than beans, but I still have to time it so I'm home alone or I might kill someone with the fumes. It's just not worth it.

 

[Elizabeth N.]

Happily, bean soup doesn't do me worse than a normie any more. It took a few years.

 

[Terri]

@Sheanie do you soak your beans overnight? That seems to help us but still normie so idk what will happen afterwards.

 

[Elizabeth N.]

Hmmm. I neglected to consider what 24 or so hours of cooking would do to those lovely little ancho chile seeds. WOWZERS spicy meatball!!! So I divvied up the soup base in half, and tomorrow we'll be on to TWO crockpots of soup love. I think I'll do one with black beans and one with pinto beans.

Meanwhile, I had an attack of spring foraging when I saw the dandelions had popped out overnight. Off I went snuffling around my yard and those of the neighbors on both sides and scavenged myself a batch of strong greens-dandelions and sorrel, and a handful of wild onions to boot. Those are all headed into the soup as well. That broth is hot and smoky enough to withstand them.

Mr. EN is a bit fretful that I might poison him. I pointed out that I learned my greens picking at my mother's knee and promised to not feed him any nettles *evil grin*. (He doesn't know that nettles are edible if prepared correctly. They're actually kind of tasty. Lamb's quarters aka pigweed and milkweed are the only other wild green things I know how to identify, and I don't like them.)

I wish I trusted myself to correctly identify a few East Coast shrooms. The little buggers are popping out all over.

 

[Sheanie]

@Terri , yes ma'am, I soak them overnight, AND change the water 3 times. AND use BeanO, and still get the double-over gas pains. One good thing about the DS, though, the gas passes through FAST, so the pain is short lived.

We had a crop of false morels pop up in our yard, @Elizabeth N. , right next to some genuine morels. No WAY was I eating any of them. I will get my mushrooms from the store, thank you very much.

 

[Elizabeth N.]

@Terri , yes ma'am, I soak them overnight, AND change the water 3 times. AND use BeanO, and still get the double-over gas pains. One good thing about the DS, though, the gas passes through FAST, so the pain is short lived.

We had a crop of false morels pop up in our yard, @Elizabeth N. , right next to some genuine morels. No WAY was I eating any of them. I will get my mushrooms from the store, thank you very much.

Yeah, I'm really, really careful about shrooms. There are exactly three that I can identify with 100% accuracy, and I've never seen them here. Morels are in the "I'm pretty sure that's them, but have to take them to Mom to confirm" category. That doesn't work cuz Mom's been dead since 1978 .

There was a lovely lady at my first place in Germany who took me out foraging for delicious stuff. The only things I got confident enough to identify on my own there were wild onions, asparagus and fiddlehead ferns. The various shrooms that sprouted from dead logs all looked the same to me, so I never tried them on my own. I found plain old button shrooms, though.

 

[Sheanie]

@Elizabeth N. , with the Internet now, you can just google your little shroom that looks like a morel and quickly identify it correctly. My problem is I have been SO SICK before in my life that I'm scared to be sick again. And I do not throw up, no matter what. Haven't since I was 12 and aspirated and nearly died.

Off to get a hunk of meat to critter-ize for supper tomorrow.

 

[Elizabeth N.]

FINALLY got around to finishing the Bean Soup That Grew. Crockpot #1 got pintos, rice and a bag of whacked up bok choy left over from last summer's freezing project. That, along with the additional water for cooking, got the heat level down to just right.

Crockpot #2 got little red beans and a couple cans of black beans. I pureed them after they cooked and the result was too thin, so I added rice and some finely chopped carrots, celery and onions, a boatload of minced garlic and a little Maggi, as it seemed rather bland. Maybe red beans absorb more pepper heat than pintos? *shrug*

I nommed on leftover critter every night for a whole week. It was marvelous. And Mr. EN has a month's worth of frozen lunch entrees .