Venison Ragu

This is one of my favorite meals to make with venison roast/shanks. In this case, I used frozen doe fawn shanks.

What's ragu, you ask? The internet says ragú is an Italian sauce made from tomatoes and ground/chopped meat and cooked for a long time. I say ragu is a much fancier spaghetti sauce, easy and delicious too.

You can make it in the instant pot (from frozen!) or in a slow cooker (from thawed!) or probably other ways too, but I can only speak to those. :)

Sauté chopped carrots, onions and celery in butter. Technically this is called mirepoix and apparently you can buy it at the store in the frozen section, but I think it's really expensive. Plus, making your own releases the most wonderful smell. Who doesn't like cooking onions in butter?! Read more about mirepoix here. The original recipe calls for one cup of mirepoix...I prefer to use as much as possible. In this case, I used two onions, 6ish stalks of celery, and 6ish carrots.
In an instpant pot, combine: the mirepoix, 6 minced garlic cloves (don't skimp on the garlic!), a 28oz can of crushed tomatoes, a tsp of dried thyme, two tsp salt, two bay leaves, and the frozen venison shanks.
Pressure cook for 60minutes, natural pressure release for 20minutes. I've made the mistake in the past of under cooking the venison (ie only 40min or so) and it ended up much too tough. As Hubby says "cook the sh*t out of it" to ensure it's nice and tender. [If you go the slow cooker route, it's about 6hrs on high.]
Remove the venison, shred it, and return it to the sauce.
Serve over pasta! (Or polenta or baked potatoes or rice or cauliflower rice or zucchini or whatever suits your fancy!)