Grain and gravy
We made this for an early medieval potluck. It was a big hit.
(I think that a similar thing but with "gravy" made more like a modern white sauce, with smoked salmon, would also be delicious)
Step one, meat.
We used TWO kinds of meat in this dish: "quick bacon" (brined pork, see recipe in box on the right), and venison.
"Quick Bacon" Recipe
We used a pork shoulder with a good thick layer of fat. I chopped it up into about 1-2 inch cubes. The cubes were put into a whey vat mix. In this case, that meant 1 liter of whey plus 3 TBS of salt, and since we were in a hurry, some liquid smoke. That marinated for a few days. If you are headed to a camping event, you can do what we did: we put all the ingredients into a ziplock bag, left it in the fridge a while, then froze it. It slowly thawed in the cooler (with lots of ice!) and continued to marinate there.
When we were ready to cook, we put on the fire a grill and also a large iron pot. We put the pork onto the grill first, and transferred it to the pot as it got a little browned. As those got done, we added venison, cut up into slightly smaller chunks than the pork, using the same procedure (brown, then into pot).
Step two, grain.
We actually started the grain cooking before the meat, but that was a mistake, as it only took about 30-40 minutes. We used oat groats. We boiled twice as much water as we had grain, added the grain, kept the fire fairly low, and kept a lid on it. It should have the texture of brown rice. We added butter and Parmesan cheese at the end (and a little salt).
Step three, gravy.
When the meat and grain were all cooked, we made gravy. In a small pot over medium heat, we put butter and flour, stirring for a few minutes. Then we added milk (in our case half and half and water, as we were camping). We stirred this until it thickened. We'd been keeping the meat hot in the fire in the bigger pot, so we just poured the gravy over the meat and stirred the rendered pork fat into the gravy at the end. You could also pour that out and use it as the base for the gravy. We added a bit of salt too.
EAT!
Put the grain in a dish, put the meat chunks and gravy over the top, eat. Ours was quite meat heavy, the pot was more meat than gravy.
We served it with the Viking Age possible "kimchee" (fermented kale and carrots and garlic) to cut the fat a little.
#2 here: Brine Fermentation
The boys declare this to be DELICIOUS, and we agree :)