Smoked Pork Hock Soup

Soueee!

by burnishings on Flickr.

We discovered a wonderful source for local smoked pork products at the Duncan Farmers' Market in the Square a couple of weeks ago: Ravenstone Farm. We'd been making a delicious pork & beans recipe in the slow cooker, but I wanted something different. I cobbled together a couple of recipes from Art of the Slow Cooker by Andrew Schloss, my "go to" manual for slow cooking and pretty much 80% of our dinners lately! I used a roasted vegetable soup with what I'd been doing for the pork & beans recipe, and got something like this:

Smoked Pork Hock Soup

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 carrots, peeled & chopped into 1" rounds

1 sweet potato (the orange fleshed one!), peeled & chopped into 1" pieces

1 small squash (I've used butternut and Marina di Chioggia), peeled & chopped into 1" pieces

3-4 celery ribs, chopped into 1" pieces

1 large onion, chopped into 1" pieces

4 whole garlic cloves

4 cups total liquid - I used about 2 cups red tomato salsa and 2 cups chicken broth, both home-made

1 medium (about 2 to 3 pounds, depending on the size of your slow cooker - ours is a Crock Pot VersaWare, I think 6 quart) smoked ham hock

1 to 2 cups cooked (or canned) chick peas, drained

1/2 tsp cracked white or green peppercorns

1 cinnamon stick

1 bay leaf

Preheat oven to 425F. Toss the vegetables and garlic in the olive oil and spread over a rimmed baking pan. Roast in the oven for 30 minutes or until softened and slightly browned at edges. Place ham hock in the slow cooker. Scrape vegetables into slow cooker. You can use some of the broth to wash off the pan into the slow cooker if there are bits stuck, but I've not found that necessary. Pour the chick peas into the slow cooker. Add the salsa and broth and stir the ingredients together a little to distribute. Add the peppercorns, cinnamon stick and bay leaf and cover the slow cooker and cook on low for about 10 hours, or high for at least 5 hours, or until the ham is falling off the bone and the vegetables are tender.

This is a very versatile recipe: use whatever root vegetables you've got on hand that you feel like including. It's wonderful with parnsip, turnip (rutabaga), etc. Just enjoy! And like most soups & stews, it's even better the next night. And if you happen to do the baked beans recipe (which I'll have to post at some point) as well, it's fabulous mixed in with this.

Venison Bourguignon with Roasted Root Vegetables

You'll be happy to know that this doe did not make it into the stew pot.


But another one did!

Dave brought home a beautiful mule deer doe from the Peace River country up near Chetwynd this fall, and she's been very tasty. I know, many people will be deeply offended by that statement. Too bad. Unless they are die-hard vegans who live what they preach, then I'm afraid I don't have a lot of sympathy for anyone who eats store-purchased meat in this day and age that thinks that hunting is cruel. Anyway, I digress. This is our second deer and this one got hung for a few days before being butchered into meat packages, and what an incredible difference! This doe is so darned tender, it's mouth-wateringly good.

So dinner for last night & tonight was prepared as follows:

approximately 1 lb of cubed venison stew, silver skin removed
2 tbsp bacon fat (well, you could use oil, but bacon fat is just so much tastier!)
1 can dark beer (in our case, Canterbury)
4 large brown (crimini) mushrooms, coarsely sliced
scant 1/4 cup flour (possibly less, depending on how much liquid there is left after cooking)

Melt bacon fat, then brown meat all around at medium high heat to seal, but not cook. Pour in beer and add mushrooms, turn down heat to minimum or low, and let whole thing simmer for a minimum of 1/2 hour, but can be longer. When getting ready to serve, turn up heat a bit and add in flour to thicken.

For roasted veggies:

1 large sweet potato (orange root vegetable, not yellow fleshed yam)
1-2 medium rutabaga (from our garden)
4-6 medium potatoes (we used Russian blue and French fingerling from our garden)
a generous sprinkling of salt (Brittany grey)
1 tbsp crumbled dry oregano

Chop the veggies up into coarse chips (fries) shape, spray pan & veggies liberally with grape seed oil (if you don't have oil atomizer, you can mix salt & herbs with a couple of tbsp of oil then dribble over veggies). Roast at around 350°F for at least an hour, turning regularly, until fairly crisp and baked on the outside.

Serve with the stew & gravy ladled out over the veggies, and maybe with a pint on the side. Mmmm!