Pheasant Coq Au Vin
Often times, I'll look at my list of food ideas and realize that I already have the ingredients to make something that's on it ... and that's kind of what happened here. It was time to harvest some of the Onions, Carrots, Garlic and Thyme I'd been growing in my tiny backyard garden, so I was trying to figure out what I could do with all this stuff I grew. That's when I realized, it was time to stop planning to do this Coq Au Vin and just do it. To me, this Coq Au Vin was the perfect harvest recipe for my little garden produce. Since most of the vegetables I used in it can be either winter or summer crops, late spring or fall seems like the perfect time to make this meal, as you gather fresh produce from your own garden. I even used a homemade Cabernet Sauvignon, that me and wife made in the garage. Of course, you don't have to make your own wine to make this recipe, any store bought dry red wine will work. I also used some Wild Hog bacon in this recipe, that you can substitute that with regular Bacon, Guanciale or Pancetta.
I originally just planned on using pheasant leg quarters to do this recipe, I know the legs can have a lot of sinew in them but braised in this liquid for a long time would have made for a pretty tasty meal. I decided to just try to use the whole pheasant, after all it fit perfectly in my Dutch oven. My major concern was overcooking the breast meat waiting on the legs and thighs to cook, but that really didn't turn out to be a problem. I think having the lid left off my Dutch oven and not having the bird fully submerged in liquid, help even out the cooking process and let some of the liquid reduce down. The whole thing turned out prefect, although my presentation wasn't exactly what I was looking for, it was delicious! The meat literally just fell off the bones, even some the bones, simply broke in half while cooking. Serve this with some good old crusty white bread to sop up that sauce and you'll think you died and went to food heaven!
About the Author : Jeff Davis
Visit authors website | View more articlesYou may think cooking and recipes don’t have much to do with a website dedicated to hunting dogs ... but really, why do we hunt? Sure, we enjoy watching our dogs work in the field and being outdoors, but ultimately, hunting is about survival and feeding our families. We might as well try to do it well. I'm not a chef and definitely no food authority ... but I do like to eat and enjoy cooking. After searching for people willing to share their recipes on Gundog Central, without much success, I decided to try to do a few on my own, with my wife Tami's help. The recipes I share here are things I like to eat and have made here at home. I've tried to include step-by-step instructions with each meal describing exactly how I did it, but my method may not be best, if you decide to try a recipe posted here, please use whatever technique you think works best, I'm simply sharing how I did it. You'll see a lot of recipes where I've tried to make things from starch, when I could have just used store bought ingredients, simply because I wanted to learn how something was done. My goal is to continually update these recipes as I learn new things and techniques. These are my attempts at creating good, home cooked food, that I would like to eat! If I'm sharing it here, my family and I enjoyed it and I believe you will too.
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Twenty-twenty definitely wasn't the year for a normal summer, with Coronavirus restricting travel, leisure time and family gatherings ... we basically spent the summer in quarantine. Going to work, then coming home with nowhere to go and nothing to do. We had to find ways to entertain ourselves. Tami and I spent a lot of time cooking and tending to our small garden, but with summer winding down, some of our cooking will have to move from outside to inside. One of the more popular meals we cooked this summer, that the kids absolutely loved, where these Turkey and Chorizo sliders on Brioche buns. I wanted to do this meal as a homage to how we spent our summer, a kind of farewell to summer meal, so another sliders seemed like the perfect choice.
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I'm not Cajun, nor was I born and bred on the bayou ... I did spend a fair amount of my adult life living on it though. My dad was in the Air Force, so we traveled around quite a bit. The last place we were stationed, was Barksdale Air Force in Louisiana, it's in the northern part of the state, close to Shreveport and Bossier City. I remember the day he came home and told the family we were moving to Louisiana, we were Stationed in Missouri at Whiteman Air Force base at the time and I was half way through my sophomore year at Knob Noster High School. Even being in High School and having studied all 50 states since middle school, I couldn't for the life of me picture where Louisiana was even at, I had to look it up on a map. I didn't want to go, I dreaded the thought of moving and I hated it before we even got there. I didn't like it any better when we finally got there either, to me it was just plain, old, Lousy-ana. I end up graduating at Haughton High School in Louisiana and then attended Bossier Parrish Community College and LSU, ever so briefly ( my grades were dreadful ). Dad ended up retiring down there and it felt like the family was going to be trapped there for the rest of our lives.
