Christmas Season Sausage Rollups
 | Author:
Eileen Clarke - Rifles and Recipes
Author: Rifles and Recipes |
Christmas Season Sausage Rollups
Eileen Clarke
Rifles and Recipes
Just a Little Special Something for the Holidays
My friends know I’ll be making Hoppin’ John New Year’s Day for good luck in 2025 but, for me, New Year’s Eve implies something a bit more elegant. Sometimes it’s Stroganoff, sometimes Bourguignon. This year I’m looking for something simple. So, I’m going to pick up some Mexican-style sausage and maybe some sweet potatoes for a side dish. The rest is easy! (FYI: if you’d rather mix up your own sausage, read on.)
If you were lucky enough to get an elk this year, you can use a flank steak for this dish. Flank comes off the outside of the rib cage and is the thinner end of the brisket. But you can also use a piece of moderately or not-so-tender steak, sliced 1/4 to 3/8-inch thick. If you cut them thin while butchering, you can avoid a step. If not, you can always pound them thin. The marinade will do the rest.
Christmas Season Sausage Rollups
Serves 4
Ingredients
1 pound venison steaks
1/4 cup rice wine vinegar
1/2 cup oil
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 cup minced fresh cilantro
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1 pound sausage*
Preparation
1. Dry the steaks, and slice into 2 to 2 1/2-inch wide strips, about 6-inches long.
2. Measure the vinegar, oil, garlic, cilantro, salt, and pepper into a resealable plastic bag. Add the strips, seal the bag and give it a good shake to coat the steaks.
Marinate in the refrigerator 48 hours.
Cooking
1. Preheat the oven to 350˚F. Remove the steaks from the marinade, but save the marinade.
2. In a lightly oiled baking dish, assemble the rollups. Lay out each strip of flank steak, spread the sausage over each, then fold and clasp together with toothpicks. Stand the rollup upright in the pan.
3. Roast 40-50 minutes, until a meat thermometer inserted into the sausage registers 160˚F. As the steaks near finishing, take 2 tablespoons of the pan drippings, pour them into a small saucepan, and add the marinade. Bring the sauce to a low boil over high heat, lower the heat to a simmer, and simmer 4 minutes. (Don’t skimp on the 4 minutes. The marinade needs it to be safe to eat after spending a couple days with the raw steaks.) Serve the rollups hot with the sauce poured over the top.
*You can mix 8 ounces ground venison with 8 ounces pork fat for this recipe, but 1 pound of ground pork shoulder will also work. As for the rest of the ingredients, toss them all into a food processor, give it a few pulses to chop small, then mix into the meat/fat.
¼ yellow onion
1 tablespoon bottled roasted red pepper
4 cloves garlic
1 teaspoon canned mild jalapenos
1 tablespoon smoked chipotle Tabasco sauce
1/3 cup minced fresh cilantro
3 tablespoons cold water
1 ½ teaspoons ground cumin
½ teaspoon salt
Eileen’s cookbooks are on sale now at https://www.riflesandrecipes.com/406-521-0273. The rollups are in Slice of the Wild, which includes a fresh chorizo recipe but this particular sausage, above, is from Sausage Season. Slice has 100 venison recipes plus side dishes; The sausage book has 75 sausage flavor variations for all our game meat.
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Image 1 Caption: Christmas Season Sausage Rollups
Eileen Clarke Photo
