Chukar and Mushroom Pie
If you don’t have chukar, use pheasant or quail. The mushrooms also don’t have to be morels -- use whatever you have, store bought or foraged.
About the Author : Jenny and Rick Wheatley
Visit authors website | View more articlesJenny and Rick Wheatley both grew up in Southern California and connected over a shared love of the outdoors. They started their wild game cooking blog Food for Hunters in 2011, where they share recipes, photos and thoughts on wild food. Today, Jenny and Rick continue to hunt, fish, forage and cook in the Cornhusker State of Nebraska. Their recipes have appeared in numerous publications, including Petersens Hunting, Game and Fish, Nebraskaland and North American Whitetail magazines.
The Nebraska Center for the Book awarded their book Hunting for Food: Guide to Harvesting, Field Dressing and Cooking Wild Game the Wildlife Honor Award in 2016.
Related Aritlces
Quail, Sage, and Mushroom Pizza
The wife and I do a fair amount of cooking at home, so it's not unusual that I'd get her something for the kitchen as a gift. Last Christmas, I got her a small outdoor pizza oven ... and we've been using the fire out of it. Coincidentally, she was working as a nurse at the time but now works for a local pizza shop. While she likes to cook the traditional Margherita Pizza, which consists of Mozzarella Cheese, Basil, Olive Oil, and Tomatoes, I want to experiment a little. The next few recipes I post will be a few of my experiments. I thought they all turned out pretty good, but this Quail, Sage, and Mushroom Pizza is my favorite. Not just my favorite from this batch of pizzas, but one of my all-time favorites.
Chukar Stock
Ive had a few Chukar recipes on the site where I needed to make a stock as part of the process. I wasn't willing to substitute chicken stock or pheasant stock in my recipes that featured Chukar, but there is no reason I couldn't have. For those recipes, I wanted to amp up the Chukar flavor, and part of my plan was to just do a quick stock while cooking the birds. This was done to save time, kind of killing two birds with one stone. The problem with doing it that way, is that the stock I ended up with was paler in color than what I would have liked, and the flavors weren't as bold ... it was still good and worked for what I wanted, but I knew I could do better. When I came up with the idea for doing another Chukar recipe for the site, a Chukar Lasagna, I knew I wanted to up my Chukar Stock game as well. So, I set out to cook my birds beforehand this time, all I had to decide was how I wanted to do that. A few years ago, for Fathers Day, my wife and kids got me a Smoker. I absolutely love it! I could spend all day just sitting on the back porch watching smoke roll out of it and smelling the food cook. I love smoking Turkeys, Chickens, Ribs, Salmon, Sweet Potatoes, really anything else I can get my hands on. So, it wasn't much of a decision when I decided to smoke these little Chukars before making this stock, but there's no reason I couldn't have roast them or even grill them.
Smoked Chukar White Lasagna
We live on a small acre sized lot, in the middle of town, not a lot of room to have your own garden. It takes me about fifteen minutes to cut the grass. I wanted to plant my own garden, but I lived to far from the family's farm to do it there, so I built a small, raised bed garden in the backyard. It's three beds, roughly eight foot by ten foot each. In the beginning, I justified building it, thinking that I'd easily be able to get enough groceries out of it to justify the cost ... man was I wrong. Somehow, I keep finding new ways to put money into it. I have the lumber cost and all the dirt that I moved in to fill up the beds, plus I installed an irrigation system, so it'd self-water itself. I even installed a solar panel to charge some batteries to power a camera to take still images of the garden while it grows, so I could create a time-lapse video at the end of the growing season. Plus, I installed the world most boring live web cam, so I can remotely check the garden any time I wanted. I'll soon be adding temperature sensor for the air and soil, a humidity probe, and I plan to add a weather station to record rain fall amount and wind speed. To say that I've gotten carried away with my little garden project would be an understatement.
