Bonsoir, tout le monde...The Watchful Wino has returned to furnish the world with some relatively new and well ruminated-over musings. It's been a couple of weeks, so first of all, let me offer my apologies to the addicted readership that reads my blog. I got stuck on travel for a while and only recently returned to the swamps of Northern Virginia. But what welcoming swamps they are...

As usual, I digress. So, what would everyone like to hear about this evening? I've only got a couple of amazing travel stories, excluding my taxpayer funded year in Mesopotamia, to regal everyone with, so I thought that I would turn to a more practical topic tonight. What might that be, you ask?

Intimidation. My advice to budding foodies: ignore it. Give it the proverbial finger. Don't let it get you down.

So There I Was. In Chicago, that is, just a couple of days back this time, staring at a rack of elk that my dad had dropped quite a dime on. I was to prepare it according to the recipe in Jacques Pepin's recently released chef-d'oeuvre, which involved creating, from scratch, both the marinade and the sauce, and I could not overcook the elk. And not overdoing the elk was quite a task. It's really easy to overdo venison, as the meat is extremely lean (the same goes for other lean meats, like bison and kangaroo - really - I've also done kangaroo).

I was looking at a serious amount of cooking if I was to avoid abject failure; about 8-10 hours, by my calculation. And here comes that intimidation word. Just a year back I wouldn't have bothered. But this time, I tackled it head on. Why not? There was quite a bit of slicing and dicing of vegetables to create the marinade, the pain and anguish of pouring half a bottle of great vino (used a cotes-de-ventoux) into it, the addition of some red-wine vinegar, an assortment of spices, and finally the act of heating it all up. Done. In went the Elk (RR - was that courtesy of you :-)? I planned to marinate it for about 8 hours.

Time to kick it and quaff some high-quality grape-derived liquid, right? Wrong. I had to make the sauce from scratch. I actually had to buy some beef bones to make this. Brown them. Slice and dice a host of veggies once again. In it all went to heat up, along with some liquid. But still not time to kick it; there was still at least one side to consider.

If you ever serve venison, I suggest serving a celeriac and potato puree along with it. It is an excellent accompaniment, and it did not disappoint in this case. So I set about doing just that, which actually was relatively simple.

The result was pure heaven. The venison was perfect, flavored by the marinade and cooked to a crawling-off-your-plate temperature. A stellar Vacqueryas helped washed it down, and that celeriac-potato puree was just heavenly alongside. You can view a shot of the end result above.

So if you ever need advice on a venison recipe, post a comment here and I'll be sure to get back to you. Stay tuned for more travel related culinary fun in a week or two. Until then.

Loose!