I’ve had bison once in my life and that was a bison burger at a restaurant. Because the burger was extremely dry, I never had to the desire to eat bison again. I figured because it was very lean that it would always be dry. I was so wrong! I now know that whoever cooked that burger, had no idea what they were doing. It had just been introduced to the restaurant and apparently the cook thought that it should be cooked the way you cook hamburger meat. They were wrong! You have to watch it more carefully and cook it a little less time wise because it is so lean.
Many individuals looked at me with a weird confused look on their face and exclaimed “you’re going to eat a buffalo!” I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why they were so surprised unless of course they thought I was going to eat the whole buffalo! Oh my! What some people fail to realize or remember, is that before we started eating cows, buffalo was the animal of choice. Native Americans hunted them long before Europeans took over the joint! Now it’s cheaper and easier to just raise and eat cows. If you want to know more about Bison though, you can check out The Bison Council for some pretty awesome information including why bison is better for you than beef. It’s healthier in so many ways! It has half the calories, fat and a whole lot less cholesterol than beef! It can be cut and cooked just like beef (be careful though because it’s leaner).
For this task, we had to start out by choosing a recipe ahead of time. This was because those wonderful people over at High Plains Bison sent us, free of charge, an overnight shipment of the type of meat we would need for our dish. FREE MEAT! Of course I’m grinning from ear to ear right now. 
Anyway. I chose to do the Mexican BisonBake with Cilantro-Lime Cream. I personally loved it. The only thing I might have done differently was instead of using an entire can of black beans, I may have reduced the recipe to a half can. I also make a mean chili with black beans in it so the rest wouldn’t have gone to waste! Hmm. I might have to try ground bison in that recipe too! Moving along. I’m just not a huge fan of beans period so a half can would have worked just fine. I also think I might have cooked way more noodles than it called for because I kind of just tossed them in the pot. I wasn’t messing up a measuring cup to measure noodles. I tend to do a lot of eye measuring. Oops. Good news is, High Plains Bison sent TWO pounds of ground bison and the recipe only called for one. This means… I can make it again the way I want to versus following a recipe. I personally believe that recipes are a starting off point. Sometimes you can just tweak a few little things and still maintain the integrity of the original recipe but make it your own where you and your family will eat it. Does that make sense? It made sense in my head…Anyway! I really enjoyed working with bison this month and I hope it becomes more locally available so I can try man more recipes!!!
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