Wild Tidy Joes

[ysabetwordsmith]

Today we made a batch of Wild Tidy Joes using bison meat.  (The original recipe used elk, but it works with a variety of game meats.  We've done it with venison too.)  I got six cartons of sandwich filling.  So that's 6 suppers for the two of us, plus 6-12 lunches for my partner Doug, or 18-24 servings.  We paid about $30 for three pounds of bison meat and probably another $10 for additional ingredients.  That's about $1.66 to $2.22 per serving.  You can put this stuff in a tortilla, a hamburger or hot dog bun, etc.  It also makes a great meaty dip for crackers or chips if you don't like the creamy kind.

Comments

[drwex]

Where do you get your bison meat? I'm very fond of it but find it very hard to come by in the ordinary course of things.

Well ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

We got this batch from a co-op health store. International stores are also a good source of less-common meats because if they're not selling pork -- ours is run by a Muslim guy -- they often try to make up for it with other options.

Around here, there's no guaranteed supply of anything exotic. But bison and venison pop up periodically, and I've even found elk and ostrich on occasion.

[alex_antonin]

Fun (?) fact: There aren't many, if any, full blooded bison left in the world. All/most of the bison alive today are technically beefalo.

Well ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

People often farm beefalo.

However, there are a number of genetically pure bison herds remaining: the one in Yellowstone, which is why people keep fighting over it; several on Indian reservations, which is why people fight over those; and up in Canada where the numbers were never cut down so low as in America.

This comes up every time a white buffalo is born, because it has to be tested pure in order to count, as the most popular beefalo cross with with Charolais, a white breed of cattle.