Venison meat sauce

Venison meat sauce with home canned tomatoes is possibly the best meal ever.

So, I canned my first vegetables back in July and it took me until February to eat any of them. This is not because I haven’t been cooking. It’s because of my life-long, engrained fear of botulism. I’m not kidding. I had these jars of gorgeous tomatoes in my pantry for months, and I just couldn’t eat them. Finally I decided I had to take the risk. So I read up on botulism and discovered it isn’t necessarily fatal (as long as you get medical care pretty quickly). That made me feel better and gave me the confidence to open some tomatoes.

On Monday I made Chipotle Chili with them. Best chili ever! The only difference from what I normally do is the tomatoes. Yes, I will be canning again. And since Rick and I didn’t die, or even get sick, I decided to make some venison meat sauce for this weekend. Rick, of course, hunted the venison. The green peppers, tomatoes, and basil came from our garden.

I store the herbs and peppers in the freezer. I just pop my peppers in freezer bags and pull them out as needed. I find chopping them frozen is actually pretty easy, and they thaw quickly. This basil I just chopped and froze. People have different methods of freezing herbs, and I was just experimenting by doing nothing but freezer.

Enough of the food talk. The only other thing to note about this recipe is that I used fennel instead of onions. This was, in part, because I had fennel and I didn’t have onion. Actually, that was the entire reason. But I really like the flavor. Fennel has a very light licorice flavor which goes beautifully with the Italian herbs. But you could use onion instead of fennel, beef instead of venison, and canned tomatoes instead of home canned tomatoes.

Putting venison meat sauce over arrowroot noodles makes this dinner super healthy.