The Cooking Thread

[Mark Bolam]

Works really well with chicken.

Thigh fillets, not breast.

Cheaper and more taste.

[AHPP]

Recipe, singular. 
 

Don marigolds and proceed to driveway. Tear bird in half. Crop and neck out, guts out, peel it. Chop the feet and wings off. Don’t wash it. Food hygiene is for cowards. Into a pan (I’ve been using a pressure cooker recently) and loads of water. Boil fck out of it for hours. Add water if necessary. When done, take the meat out and put it somewhere where your dog won’t steal it. Add a tin of coconut milk to the stock. 
 

Fry onions in a wide pan, ideally in lard or dripping. I sometimes salt and sugar them while frying. Add the holy trinity to the fry: garlic, chili, ginger. Once it’s all done, push it to the edge. Add more fat, probably butter, to the clear bit of pan. Fry coarsely ground black pepper, garam masala, cumin and turmeric in that until you’re dribbling like Zed in the tear gas chamber in Police Academy.
 

Flood the onions with the stock + coconut milk. Hope the meat has cooled down enough. Pull it off the bones (a lot will have fallen off if you cook it long enough - like hours plural) and add to the mix. The legs have fcking annoying little bones in. There’s a reason Tesco sells chickens and not pheasants. Put the bones somewhere where your dog won’t eat them. When he does eat them, worry for 48 hours that this is the time his luck runs out. Hysterics will tell you dogs sever their innards and die if they eat cooked bones. Sailor once ate the cooked bones of about fifteen pheasants in one sitting. He’s subsequently eaten cooked bones of all sorts, ten or twelve times. Never been a problem. But Sailor is the sort of dog who, if he was a man, would do his own dentistry and sell ferrets to schoolchildren. Take that for what it’s worth. 
 

Serve from now until the pheasants run out. Squeeze of lemon really lifts the whole thing. Fresh parsley too.  
 

If you want pheasants in the feather, you can get any number from shoots from October until February. Facebook groups (national and regional) called ‘Giving Up the Game.’ Take them or they’ll end up in the bin.
 

Roast pheasant is shit. If it was good, Tesco would sell them. But they don’t. They sell chicken, pork, lamb and beef, which are good. “Oh but game is so healthy and rustic and, like, so part of the rural zeitgeist, yah.” 
Fck off. It’s free and you might have had some sport getting it.

Same for venison. I’d rather have beef but you can’t shoot wild cows here and they’re heavy.

 

The thing pheasant does have going for it is the fabulous yellow fat. You get more of it on the hens than the cocks. Velvety and rich and well camouflaged by the turmeric for any queers who think fat is bad for them. It also mostly stays with the meat. Unlike a duck, where you have to fck on with keeping the skin (plucking etc) if you want the fat. 

Edited 14 hours ago by AHPP

[Steven P]

So what you're saying is... take a pheasant, boil the shit out of it, and in another pan make a decent curry sauce and have that instead? Add chicken if you want meat in it.

[Mark Bolam]

10 hours ago, AHPP said:

 

Don marigolds 

 

Bender.

[openspaceman]

11 hours ago, AHPP said:

Serve from now until the pheasants run out. Squeeze of lemon really lifts the whole thing. Fresh parsley too.  
 

If you want pheasants in the feather, you can get any number from shoots from October until February. Facebook groups (national and regional) called ‘Giving Up the Game.’ Take them or they’ll end up in the bin.

 

I've not been offered any for five years and became wary of stewing them in the slow cooker with an acidy marinade because of the lead. 

 

Do you get any with steel shot? Worry there would be breaking teeth.

[Doug Tait]

1 hour ago, openspaceman said:

Worry there would be breaking teeth.

 

Reckon you'll need to ask Sailor that one.

[sime42]

It doesn't sound like he's a dog to waste time on chewing his food!

[Doug Tait]

You mean he doesn't chew Alex's food!

[sime42]

But does Alex chew Sailor's food?