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.
The pheasants might have been less tough if hung for longer? I confess I’ve never cooked pheasants myself. I do remember my mother buying feathers-on pheasants once when I was a child and hanging them from a line in our dining room after they were plucked. I found the sight of their yellow pimply forms so horrible I refused to eat the game pies she made from them. In retrospect this was silly of me, as I gather they were delicious.
Well done. I had a similar experience recently with braised cabbage and Toulouse sausage – not what I wanted on a hot summer evening but somehow what I ended up cooking because we had cabbage to use up etc etc.
I’m glad you didn’t ‘quail’ at the challenge – heh heh.
Dining room is slightly hardcore, Dot. I can see why you might have found it offputting.
N, quantities proved excessive and half brought out to your parents who greeted it with modified rapture.