Lets face it, if you point in fact live on the cycle of the farm animals or if you hunt and live on the cycle of filling your freezer with your legally hunted deer, moose, elk or Boo before the next years meat will come in you will have a full year in the freezer, yes you can and should can a certain amount of it for keeping purposes but for many dishes, the freezer is the way to go..

At this point in the year, even with careful packaging and storage, its possable to have a bit of freezer burn or degrading of the meat itself, after all if you read the books. they say only three to six months max for most meats in the freezer.

So lets assume that you do in fact have a lovely cut of meat that has been in the freezer for a while, there are few things that are going to be your friend in allowing you to make it a amazing meal.. Here is my list..

• Aging in the fridge
• Salt
• Sugar
• Acid

So you want to thaw your meat in the fridge (ideally all the time if possable) but in this case for sure, thaw enough that you can unwrap, place in a steel bowl with a plate cover or if you are ok with it, in a double bagged plastic, fill with fresh cold water, pickling or kosher salt (I used about 2 heaping Tbsp), some lovely brown sugar will work but in my case I used raw cane sugar, and I added in half a cup of apple cidar vinager but you can use any kind you want, try rice, red or white wine, or malt, some cracked pepper corns, a bay leaf or two, i also put in a couple dried sage whole leaves. Back into the bottom of the fridge, I put in the back as I want it cold and let sit for at least 12 hours but ideally a day or two.

Once aged and melded, bring out and give it a good rinse under fresh cold water, and then trim as needed, if you any bits that are showing signs of age, trim them off, if you have any white skin on the meat, remove it, take your time and really clean up that cut of meat.

At that point, you can figure out you want for your dish, in this case, I had a nice little roast I was working with, and so after the above, I make lovely little round eye steaks,  I gave them a little pounding, and spiced and seasoned them, and then laid a bed of raw onions, galic on the bottom of foil package, then I laid the seasoned meat, then covered with another layer of onion/garlic and closed up the package and did a slow bake on this..  this allows me for a super tender meat with tons of flavour.. but it can be used in almost any way at this point in time.

Served up with mashed potato’s with some diced in fall greens/butter, and a side of super sweet fall carrots with a touch of maple syrup.. so yum..