So lets start with the meat first, this dish would work with Lamb, Moose or Elk or a lovely grass-fed beef stew meat..  Ideally, you should thaw your meat in the fridge, then trim off any white skin, fat bits, removing the fat will make a huge difference in reducing the “game” flavour of the meat while leaving you with lots of flavour from the meat.

This is not a fast recipe but each stage is fairly quick in and off itself, so the first thing to do is either make or buy spruce beer, now if you don’t have Spruce beer, instead of switching to a ale or mead type beer, consider making Spruce Syrup, just cut the sugar down to one cup for each four cups of heavily steeped Spruce tea. You can also use honey instead of sugar, I would cut that to 3/4th of a cup and see if that works for you.

So in either the oven or the crock pot, place your pd of prepared stewing meat (You could brown but for this dish, I choose not to) along with two large onions roughly diced, and 2 cups of Spruce Tip Bear or Spruce Syrup over the meat and allow to cook till tender but not folk fall apart tender, in my case about two hours at 350, at which point, I cut up two very large carrots, 4 large potatoes, 1/2 a cup of diced turnip. I seasoned with salt, pepper, turmaic, keens mustard, garlic powder and some grown cinnaomon, an a pinch of allspice

All those are washed, peeled, and cut into bite size peices, and then I used another full cup of the beer to just cover the veggies and the meat and back into the over till the veggies are cooked and the meat is now fork tender, the sauce is rich, full bodied and just lightly spicy..

At this point, make a single batch of Baking Powder Bisquits aka Bannock.. if you are not eating glutten, then could be topped with a layer of whipped mashed with top.. or you could do a nice light layer of puff pastry.. If you are using the Bannock, then roll out or flatten down to about a two inch start and lay over the top, leaving a edge around the outside the baking dish, place the whole stew back into the oven and bake until golden brown and a toothpick comes out clean in the middle

Allow to sit for five min before serving.. heavenly!! I serve this for a get together lunch and everyone gave rave reviews but the fact that the two teenage boys went back for seconds and then finished the dish with 3rds speaks volumes..