Mooseloaf with potatoes and a spinach salad

Guest post by HiLLjO
#Recipes#salads#wild food

Photo by Doug Miller. Remixed under Creative Commons license.

I overheard a coworker talking about his latest bow hunt excursion in Montana that landed him a moose and my ears perked up. I asked him about the story of the hunt and if it was scary hunting a 1000+ pound animal with killer hooves and a 9-foot rack of pointy antlers. He said yes, that it is daunting to shoot at something like that with just a bow, and then he asked me if I wanted some meat.

Moose meat.

I was born in Michigan and grew up on game meat, A&W root beer, and rock and roll. I am more than familiar with deer but haven’t tried moose before. And I wanted to try this moose.

My coworker gave us — since he could not legally sell it to us — POUNDS and POUNDS of moose after it was ready. We have ground moose, moose sausage, moose chops, moose tenderloins and even a few moose bratwursts.

I have an inability to digest foods that come in any packaging, so I started learning to cook out of necessity. I took the need, bedazzled it with fun, and it became something I really enjoy.

We also eat completely for health so a lot of the ingredients I use are medicinal/holistic.

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So when I filled my deep freezer with this luscious, truly all-natural meat my mind began to race with recipe ideas. Although not all moose recipes merely substitute moose for beef, I tried making some Mooseloaf last night and did it ever turn out yumtastic. Hubs ate it up, I cleaned my plate and I thought I’d share my recipe with y’all, in case you also come across a moose. (Sometimes you can find hunters with extra meat on CraigsList — they should only charge processing fees.)

How to make mooseloaf

Ingredients

  • 1 lb. ground moose
  • 1 cup dry oat meal — YES, oatmeal!
  • 1 egg
  • 1/2 medium onion chopped
  • 1 bell pepper chopped
  • 2 clove pieces of garlic chopped
  • 1 tsp sea salt
  • 1 tsp black pepper
  • 1 tsp thyme
  1. Preheat your oven to 360 degrees (180 C).
  2. Chop the garlic and set it aside. This lets the allicin come out of the clove so that it can benefit your body AND be yummy in the food.
  3. Dice the onion and bell pepper.
  4. In a large bowl add moose meat, oatmeal, egg, spices, chopped pepper, onion, and garlic. Mix with your hands until everything is blended together evenly.
  5. Spread into the bottom of a 9x9x2 glass baking dish or pan and cook for 30-40 minutes, rotating the dish in the oven every 15 minutes.

When the loaf is cooked it should be a brown color all the way through (benefits of cooking with glass!) and the juices should bubble around the corners. Allow the loaf to sit for five minutes before serving to let it settle a bit and soak up its own juices.

If you’re the mashed-potato with meatloaf kind like we are, this recipe also pairs well with Greek Yogurt potatoes I made last night. They’re very similar tasting to sour cream-embellished mashies but the yogurt adds a cheesiness and complexity that sour cream just doesn’t have! Plus it’s loaded with protein and none of the fat sour cream has.

Greek yogurt mashed potatoes

  • 2 medium/large Russet Potatoes
  • 1 Tbsp butter
  • 1/2 cup plain Greek yogurt
  • 1 tsp. sea salt
  • 1 tsp. black pepper
  1. Set a pot of water on to boil.
  2. Dice potatoes into 1″ chunks.
  3. Add potatoes to water when it is at a rolling boil. Set heat to medium-high and cook for 10-12 minutes until potatoes drop off fork when stabbed. Drain the potatoes in the sink with a strainer and leave them there for a minute.
  4. Add the butter to the hot pan. Add the potatoes back to the pot and stir them until coated in butter and fall-apart-y.
  5. Add half the Greek yogurt and stir it up really good. Add the spices and the rest of the yogurt and stir the mixture until it’s really creamy and warm again from being on the burner. The cold yogurt can make the ‘tatos cold!

Serve up a spinach salad next to these two and that’s a dinner you can BRAG about tomorrow.

Guest Post By: HiLLjO

HiLLjO is the shortened version of my full name, Hillary Jo, that has followed me around for oh, decades now. I am a new wifey, furbaby momma, blogger, and a heartshaped sunglasses wearer. My partner Shawn and I just moved into our first home in late August in Omaha, NE and we hope to bring some funk to the neighborhood. I am a fledgling designer and I love to crochet, make sock monkeys and cook.

Comments on Mooseloaf with potatoes and a spinach salad

  2. I love the trend of wild game-love that’s happening on OBH… so many hip/alternative websites are vegetarian-centric (not that I mind — I was one for 5 years!).

    • I agree! I have many friends who are vegetarian, so I understand it quite well but I am a meat girl. So lovely to have posts like this for those of us who enjoy our meat 😉

  3. That sounds delicious! I have some ground moose in my freezer (thank you, family of 4 cousins who ALL hunt and are relatively successful!) so will definitely be trying this recipe this winter.

    A couple of weeks ago, I had a holiday party Game Night where we played card games and Wii, and I served game meat. Moose meatballs and brown sugar and bourbon marinated venison kabobs. YUM.

  4. Thanks everyone! Funny thing, we eat 90% veggie so we love to get “wild” with our meat-rotation schedule.
    I love you moose meatball idea! I think I might make some up for our family’s Christmas-Eve party! Or venison meatballs… either way, YUM!

  5. My dad grew up in Thunder Bay Ontario in the 50s and 60s. Every year they would have American hunters from the south (Georgia-esque) to hunt Moose.

    Unfortunately, due to lack of information or drunken hunting, many of those hunters would mistakenly shoot the farmer’s cows (because they were brown…) tie them to the rack of their car and try to proceed back into the states. The border officials would politely tell the hunters that they had not, in fact, shot a moose but instead had murdered Farmer Joe’s cow.

    The farmers, in attempt to prevent future cow hunting, began spraypainting their cows with the word “Cow” or “not a moose” during moose hunting season.

    Nothing really to do with eating moose, but the post reminded me of that story 🙂

  8. Alaskan here! Yes we have oodles of moose up here and EVERYONE eats it. No big whoop! In fact, you can get on the “moose roadkill call chain” and when someone hits a moose with their car you may get called to go get the meat. I’ve have moose jambalaya myself and it was tasty!!! A bit sweeter than ground beef with a softer texture.

    • I’ve been on the other end of that “moose roadkill call chain” – when I lived in Maine, I was in a truck that hit a moose on the highway. The cops offered us the moose, but since our truck was totaled, we had no way to take it. He said that there were others who would be happy to come get it. It was a terribly traumatic experience, but I know that the moose did not go to waste. I would love to actually try moose meat someday!

  9. I just want to say that we have been cooking with yogurt ever since my son was old enough to eat it, just because it’s the creamiest dairy product we have laying around (we never have sour cream), and I LOVE yogurt potatoes. You might also want to try mixing it into your hamburger meat of choice for some extra tasty, and incredibly juicy, burgers. Yogurt is such a good binder, too, because of the high protein content.

  11. I am SO JEALOUS. I love wild game.

    I usually get a freezer full of meat from my dad each year, but he didn’t catch anything this year. 🙁 No mooseloaf for me.

  13. Sounds awesome!!! I work at a vegan restaurant but I needs the meats sometimes! 🙂

    Love the vintage Corningware plate in the picture. Anyone here NOT grow up with those plates? It’d kinda surprise me. 🙂

  15. I’m a single mom of a ten year old boy. me, my son and my dad hunt moose together. it’s a really interesting thing to get in to hunting and i love the outdoor aspect of it. And moose meat is great, really healthy and low cost!

  16. Hubs and I would love to hunt this year. It seems so satisfying looking in the freezer and being like, “NONE of this cost any MONEY at the grocery store!!!” And it’s so clean and yummy!!!

  17. Vegetarian chiming in: while the moose recipe obviously doesn’t appeal to me, I’m really curious about your medicinal/holistic ingredients. Another post please? 🙂

  18. A friend hunted and killed a moose a few weeks ago and gave me some of his ground moose portions for me to roll him egg rolls. He gave me extra as payment/trade for rolling. I just used your moose loaf recipe and it was quite delicious. There was some modification: I used two packets of maple brown sugar oatmeal simply because that’s all we had on hand, added tomato paste and diced a couple a Roma tomato along with the green pepper. Then sprinkled some paprika and fresh parmesan cheese on top towards the end. It fit nicely into our caste iron skillet and was amazing! Thank you for posting your recipe! It was a simple guide an have saved it for future use.

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