Vic Williams' Buffalo Balls Recipe
A friend's Facebook post about Salisbury Steak got me to thinking about my old friend, Vic Williams. Vic was several years older than me. He was a very talented musician, arranger, and junior high band director.
Vic was also a lover of the New Mexico and Colorado mountains. We made many backpacking trips together into the Pecos Wilderness near Santa Fe and the Weminuche Wilderness at the very top of the Rio Grande. It was always a treat to travel with Vic. He knew so much of the history of Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado and he was also a consummate storyteller. Vic's tales made the long West Texas highway through the most desolate stretches of the "Staked Plains" come alive with Indians, conquistadores, and old-time Texas Rangers!
The formal photograph of Vic that you see here is not the way that I remember him. When I think of Vic, he has a pack over his shoulder and is walking through a high mountain meadow in the Pecos Wilderness. Those were the days before photography became 'digital' and, though I would love for you to see Vic as I remember him, I have no photos from those days.
What follows is a comment that I posted after asking a question about the difference between Salisbury Steak and Meatloaf. If you read it carefully you will find instructions for creating the most delicious meal that a weary mountain hiker has ever enjoyed!
❝The only "Salisbury Steak" that I have tried was a frozen dinner. I did not care for it very much, but I looked it up on the net and saw several recipes that looked as though they would be tasty.
The recipes reminded me of a meal that one of my friends, Vic Williams, used to fix. It became a traditional meal for when we would get back to the trailhead after a backpacking trip. Vic's recipe, as I recall, was 1 lb. of hamburger meat, 1 potato, 1 onion, 1 cup of "minute" rice, 1 can of mushroom soup, a bit of salt and some pepper, and a six pack of Coors that we had hidden in a nearby mountain stream before hiking into the mountains.
Vic would chop the potato and onion into small bits, mix in the rice and hamburger, then roll the mixture into balls. Put the buffalo balls into an iron skillet, pour the can of mushroom soup over the balls, put the lid on the skillet, then put the skillet on a Coleman stove. The most important step was to fish the Coors out of the cold water and each of us would drink one or two while the buffalo balls cooked in the skillet. By the time a fellow was nearly to the end of his second Coors, the buffalo balls were cooked to perfection.Vic passed on many years ago so my memory may have enhanced the flavor a bit, but I don't recall ever eating anything in my life that would surpass the flavor of Vic's buffalo balls. In fact, I think that tomorrow I will pull out my old skillet and see if I can cook some for myself. I doubt that I can find a cold mountain stream in Texas, and the air around here is a bit thick, so I may not be able to create the same flavor as Vic did up in the mountains. I wish that I could go back and sit around a campfire with Vic and enjoy some of those great buffalo balls again.
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