At the most basic, meatball recipes combine ground or chopped meats, functional ingredients and flavoring components. Bread crumbs, crackers, or a cooked grain are for body and prevent the toughness that happens when muscle fibers shrink as they cook. Eggs, sometimes bread soaked in milk, water or a broth bind all of the ingredients for simplifying the forming and cooking process. Those are all functional ingredient options that build the basic structure that can be simple or complex, depending on which regional result you want to create.  Adding specific flavoring components from seasonings, spices or aromatics is what really defines your dish and makes it embrace the style you have intended for it.  Onions, garlic, lemon grass, citrus and fresh herbs can transform any combination of your functional ingredients and send it to the far reaches of the earth. 

Carpaccio is one of my favorite dishes of all time. It’s an Italian dish of beef tenderloin sliced paper thin with a deli slicer and served raw. I’ve never seen a recipe of carpaccio done with mule deer and seeing as how it’s my favorite meat, there is no way it could be bad. My adaptation to this recipe can be done in any home. If you can’t get it deli slicer thin with a knife don’t worry, you can pound it after and it comes out great.