Game Cookery

Yearning for the delicious, fresh flavours of south-east Asian cuisine, Rose Prince makes venison fillet the extravagant star of this tataki dish

- Rose Prince

At the beginning of any other year, I’d be shopping for south-east Asian foods. However, this year, it is not simply because they have a healthy freshness.

Not being able to go out to eat has made me nostalgic for those places where you can enjoy the delicious, sweet-sour piquancy of raw salads and fish, grilled meat and comforting dumplings.

Those last, along with sushi, are not things I make at home — though goodness knows I now have the time. But I have been making broths and adding crab, spices and coconut to make laksa, while stir-frying is happening in my kitchen more than once a week. If you add game into the equation you can do something that restaurants and takeaways seem to shy away from.

Pheasant, partridge and wild duck are ideal meats for stir-fry and venison is a perfect alternative to beef or fresh tuna in this dish, tataki. Fillet is extravagant, but the texture and flavour is so clean that I felt energised for hours after eating this.