Things the Waffles did last weekend: we had my sister to stay; I went out with her on Friday night; Daniel played football on Saturday morning; simultaneously, herself and her father cycled into town so that she could participate with the school choir in the first communion excitement; we took in a cousin for a sleepover and handed over herself in exchange; on Sunday the boys played in a tennis tournament in the afternoon in a difficult to find and inconveniently located tennis club; on Sunday evening we reversed the exchange. In a dreadful moment, we thought we had lost the cousin’s DS but after 24 painful hours, it turned up under the passenger seat of our car.
Archives for 30 May, 2012
Game On
I was trying to buy quails at the butcher’s but he had none and, in a moment of weakness, I was upsold. He pulled a pair of pheasants from the freezer and sold them to me with the novel line that they were only a bit larger than quails.
I retained dim memories from my youth of my mother’s cousin, a farmer, turning up at our front door with birds he had shot but didn’t fancy eating which my mother subsequently hung in the attic. I feel they were nice when we got them. They were not, however, frozen. The non-frozen pheasant may be the better bird. On the plus side, I didn’t have to pluck them myself. [Aside, once my sister’s friend, the vegetarian, called to the house and my mother answered the door in a lab coat covered with feathers while holding a largely plucked pheasant by the neck.]
The pheasants lurked menacingly in the fridge for a bit but tonight I decided to cook them. I feared that the outcome might be reminiscent of the great wild boar disaster of ’07. Certainly, pheasant is not seasonal at the moment. I decided to create pheasant stew. I lashed in the root vegetables, bacon and red wine. I couldn’t easily source chestnuts, what with it being May and everything and substituted mushrooms. It cooked happily all evening filling the summer air with toasty winter smells in a disconcerting and ultimately unsatisfactory manner.
It’s just out of the oven and there is masses of it. The stew is actually quite tasty in an ideal for mid-winter kind of way but the pheasant itself is, alas, deeply unpleasant, stringy and tough. Alas. Still, that’s dinner for tomorrow ready all the same. Hurrah for me.
