By Gabby Zaldumbide
Let's be honest: 2020 sucked. In fact, some of the best things to come out of the last 12 months was spending time in the outdoors, taking a mental break from the stress of the news cycle, and filling our freezers full of deer, elk, black bear, perch, and so much more. With ample time at home to get creative in the kitchen, the Hunt to Eat community wrote some amazing wild game recipes. Here are our favorite wild game recipes of 2020:
Ambassador Michael Cravens loves to use his bones from his harvests to fill Mason jars full of rich, healthy bone stock. This stock is a perfect base for soups, marinates, crockpot recipes, and it’s even delicious all by itself.
This is a woodchuck, bean, carrot, and onion soup that ambassador Jonah Curtis put together with some simple fall ingredients. He likes using his family’s garden to fill in the soup with the critter that is always trying to steal them. Hunting and homesteading go hand in hand, and result in a warm and delicious soup! Plus, learn how Jonah butchers woodchucks here.
Never leave your venison ribs in the field again! Hunt to Eat ambassador Alyssa LeBlanc shares her go-to rib recipe in this video. Venison ribs can be tricky to make, but Alyssa makes fall-off-the-bone rib meat happen.
7. Hawaiian Black Bear Sliders
When you think of eating bear meat, you probably don’t think of comfort food, but you should get yourself out of that box. This is the ultimate comfort food. Hawaiian Bear Ham Sliders might just be the best party, tailgate, or movie night food there is.
If you love venison recipes with a kick, you need to try Hunt to Eat ambassador Alyssa LeBlanc’s recipe for spicy venison bulgogi. This versatile dish serves up great as a Korean-style burrito, on top of stir fry, or on a bed of rice.
Ambassador Michael Cravens has held onto a deep love of southern-style meals and takes advantage of frying up a mess of catfish every time his family is lucky enough to bring a stringer of them home.
Avid small game hunters know that squirrel quarters are the wild equivalent of chicken wings. Barbecued, fried, or braised, you really can't go wrong when it comes to squirrel meat. Next time you harvest a limit of squirrels, give H2E ambassador Michael Cravens' recipe for Hot Honey Squirrel legs a try.
3. Phez Nug
It took ambassador Josh Mills decades to discover that wild pheasant breasts, cubed, breaded, and fried, is one of the most delicious things nature has to offer. Personally, he feels cheated. Nevertheless, he’s thankful to have stumbled across this kid and adult-approved meal. Here’s his own bare-bones basic recipe for breaded and fried pheasant nuggets.
2. Fried Largemouth Bass
There is no reason in the whole wide world that you shouldn’t eat largemouth bass. Director of Education Cindy Stites loves crappie, bluegill, and walleye, but so often people give her a funny look when she tells them she eats largemouth. Her family’s favorite way to cook up bass is deep fried with some crinkle french fries.
1. Cast-Iron Seared Venison Backstraps
Unsurprisingly, our most popular recipe of 2020 was the classic seared venison backstrap. Brown the perfect medium-rare venison backstrap with ambassador Alyssa LeBlanc in her video recipe.