I’m cooking for one, again. Yep. I’m single again—at least for three weeks while my wife is away in Alaska. (I guess that opening qualifies as click-bait!)

After one day of ‘bach-ing it,” I was ready to start eating well and I turned to the freezers and larder for sustenance and, to be honest, the pleasure of cooking. As I noted recently, we have now primarily consumed wild game meat, not domesticated meat, for more than twenty years. We have been intentional in our consumption. In 2000, my friend and colleague Dennis Staffelbach took me hunting with some of our students and I killed a nice Indiana doe. Since then, we haven’t bought red meat for ourselves in two decades and we have dramatically reduced our consumption of chicken, only buying a few breasts every six months or so. The sight of nearly-featherless chickens being transported in sub-freezing or oppressive heat in little cages to be anonymously slaughtered and dismembered became increasingly incongruous with the lifeway that we had embraced—and even labored to pursue. When I eat duck jerky—I know that bird was free until one-fateful day.

We have been blessed. We have enjoyed an amazing diet that has been the product of hunting the land of others across several states, and now even hunting our small parcel which we have worked into viable wildlife habitat rich enough to allow us opportunities to hunt waterfowl and the occasional wild pig. In Texas our hunting and fishing licenses must be renewed on September 1, and my wife and I have made an event of buying our next year’s licenses together. It is a moment of hope for the season to come, a celebration of a shared pursuit, and a ceremony of thanksgiving for the riches of nature that we have shared in the previous years.

When I turned to the pantries and freezers tonight, I was reminded that it was, despite some disappointments last year, a good hunting season. In our storage, I found ducks, geese, doves, squirrels, rabbits, wild turkeys, wild pigs, red deer, axis deer and whitetail deer as well as fish from our ponds, a bounty of fruit from our orchard, and bags of vegetables from our garden. Besides all the meat, my wife makes fantastic jellies and jams from the fruit grown here at the “Flying H,” and I found a few jars that she saved and did not sell at the farmers market this fall. We have been blessed and we have worked hard. With the help of my friend Joshua Foster and pictures in books, we first butchered and first processed our deer in our little galley kitchen in 2003 and we have continued that time-consuming, bloody, but rewarding labor ever since. Each bite is a reminder of our labor as the hunter or the husbandman, the butcher or the baker. But we cannot make the plant produce; we cannot make so many animal lives.

This weekend, I will smoke venison roasts and a wild pig over the post oak and pecan that I have harvested from our own land. I look forward to the hours of splitting dried wood and feeding the fire box. The tactile process of smoking brings an amazing satisfaction and thinly slicing a whitetail, red deer, elk, or axis roast is almost as satisfying as tasting it. I admit, I find amazing satisfaction in eating the strips of meat with my fingers.

Plans are good, but tonight I turned to a couple of basic recipes for wild game that have served me well, viz., venison meatballs and a pot of venison chili. The meatballs are super-simple and can be eaten in numerous and diverse dishes. Tonight, I cooked 19 meatballs and then took four meatballs (and I make them BIG) and placed them in a bowl of hot rice, topped with sliced jalapeños and onions and drizzled with Szechuan sauce. It was the perfect guy-on-his-own hearty meal.

My grandmother, Dorothy Hill, died recently. Tonight, I pulled her old cast-iron Dutch oven out for the first time since her death and cooked a pot of venison chili. It is now cooling on the stove top. I will whittle away at that pot of chili over the next couple of days and I expect that I’ll cook a cast-iron pan or two of jalapeño-laced cornbread, with a bottom lightly fried from hot oil, to be consumed with copious amounts of butter and cold beer. Blessed.

I probably could feed the handful of folks who read this essay—but since you aren’t with me now, I offer a couple of recipes that have served us well over the last couple of decades. Maybe I’ll post a few more in the days to come.

Bracy’s Simple, Easy, BIG Deer/Venison BIG Meat Balls

Bake Time: 30 minutes at 350 degrees

Preheat Oven to 350 degrees

1 pound ground venison

2 eggs

¾ cup Panko/bread crumbs

¼ cup of Parmesan Cheese

1 tsp garlic powder (or 1-2 finely chopped cloves of garlic)

Pinch of fresh ground Black Pepper

(optional: If you want to serve with a red sauce, add 2 tablespoons of Italian seasoning. Be careful. If the bread crumbs already have Italian seasoning, I recommend not using additional seasoning!)

(optional: Add red pepper flakes—because why not?)

Combine all ingredients in a large bowl, mix well. Roll ground venison into 1” – 1.25”. One pound of meat will yield approximately 9-10 balls. I like big balls! Spray cast iron skillet with cooking spray/oil. Place balls on skillet, spritz balls with oil or cooking spray to assist browning, and place in oven. Cook for 30 minutes.

Use your imagination on how to eat!

Freeze the leftovers in freezer bags and defrost for a quick meal with red sauce and noodles, rice and vegetables, in a bowl of ramen noodles, or covered in barbeque sauce and consumed with a side of chips and cheesy dip.

Bracy’s Deer/Venison Chili

2 lb ground Venison

3 cans red kidney beans (don’t drain)

2 cans stewed tomatoes/chopped tomatoes (avoid tomatoes canned with additional spices)

1 (6 oz) can tomato paste

1 ½ - 2 diced onions

3 tbsp chili powder

6 tsp cumin

3-4 cloves garlic

3-5 jalapeno peppers (chopped or sliced) Make it as hot as your audience can take!

1 tsp salt

(grated cheese—add on top when served)

Brown meat. If using domesticated red meat or high-fence venison, you need to drain the fat. (It is very unlikely that you will have lots of fat if cooking wild venison.) You can brown the meat in your Dutch oven; just spoon the meat out for the next step. Brown ¼ cup of onions in a drizzle of olive oil (and any residual fats) in a Dutch oven at moderate heat. When onions are lightly caramelized, add garlic and chopped peppers and cook for 30 seconds. (Cooking garlic longer will result in an unpleasant bitterness.) Mix all remaining ingredients including the rest of the onions, (except the cheese), together in the Dutch oven, cover and simmer for at least an hour on the stovetop. Stir occasionally. If the chili becomes too thick for your taste, add a bit of water to the mixture.

Taste. See if you need more chili powder, cumin, or salt to satisfy your palette.

I prefer a thick chili so I usually have it simmer for two hours. Serve with cheese and sour cream and jalapeno corn bread with tons of butter—or use Mexican tortilla chips as tasty but messy spoons.

Leftovers can be frozen in plastic containers. Simply defrost and warm up in a pot at a later time.