Pheasant Helper with Roasted Sun Sugar Tomato Sauce
The next few recipes I'll post will all involve produce collected from my garden this year. I planted a much bigger garden this year than I normally would. Lots of sweet corn, tomatoes, peppers, kale, cabbage, radishes, squash, green beans, pumpkins, and watermelon. I was doing a pretty good job of keep the grass out of the garden until I hurt my back one morning using the hoe. Barely able to walk, the grass eventually took over. I was able to harvest a bunch of tomatoes, peppers, kale, squash, and corn ... but the rest of it didn't fare so well.
I was looking for way to use some of my garden produce I had harvested. I had planted a bunch of Brandywine and San Marzano Tomatoes this year, but I had one of each of those plants die early on. My dad purchased several Sun Sugar Orange Cherry Tomatoes from the Amish down the road and ended up giving me a couple of those plants. Those two little plants have really shown out, I've gotten buckets of little orange tomatoes off them. I could walk out there today and easily harvest another bucket load of them. I've had so many of them and hated for any of them to go to waste, that I've literally been inventing different things to do with them. What I decided to do for this recipe was to use a bunch of these little tomatoes to make a sauce. They are so tiny that it really takes a bunch of them to get any amount of sauce. I took a couple sheet pans full of these tiny tomatoes, hit them with some Olive Oil, Salt and Pepper, then roasted them in the oven. Once they were blistered, I pureed them in the blender, with some garlic and basil to make a bright orange tomato sauce. The color might have been off putting, but it sure was tasty. You can just use regular tomato sauce, if you don't want to mess with making your own.
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.
Related Aritlces
Pheasant Cacciatore with Creamy Polenta
Im not a chef, nor have I ever claimed to be one, but I do enjoy cooking and so does my wife. When we were dating, one of the first dishes I cooked for her was a Chicken Cacciatore with some homemade French Bread. She married me, so it probably wasnt all that bad, right?! Over the years, weve cooked a lot of meals together, you can find plenty of photos of the food we prepared on our social media feeds. In fact, we have a small food blog, #wecooktogether, were well post some recipes we liked or prepared. Weve created a lot of themed meals based on shows like Game of Thrones, Lord of Rings, Shark Week and the NFL Playoffs. Id been wanting to recreate that Cacciatore recipe for a while now, kind of a nod to that first pre marriage meal. When I got a hold of these Wild Ramps, I immediately knew I wanted to used them to re-create that meal. I had been wanted to do a foraging / hunter style dishes and Cacciatore was the first thing that came to mind. Cacciatore literally translates to Hunter in Italian and usually consist of poultry braised in onions, garlic, tomatoes and wine, with some additional seasonings. As Wild Ramps are in the same family of vegetables as Onions and Garlic, I thought I could use some of the Ramps bulbs as a replacement to some of those other ingredients. Mushrooms are another popular forage item and while they might not be in a traditional Cacciatore dish, Im adding them here cause I want to.
Parmesan Pasta with Pheasant Meatballs
My wife loves pasta!! If it was up to her, we'd eat it every night of the week. Needless to say, we have it for dinner more nights than not. If she got her way, we'd eat the same three pasta dishes every week ... Pasta Carbonara, Cacio e Pepe, Bucatini All'amatriciana. All three are classic Italian dishes ... She's got good taste. Of course, we'll have some of our other favorites, like Spaghetti, Penne Pasta with Pesto and Farfalle with Vodka Sauce. Now, I'm not complaining about the pasta, I get feed really well, but I've been thinking about doing something different for a while. I've actually changed my mind on this recipe several times, including on the day I finally decided to make it. We've been growing our own Tomatoes and Basil all summer, I had been wanting to do my own Spaghetti recipe using the things we grew in the backyard, but somehow that project morphed into this Parmesan Pasta dish with Pheasant Meatballs.
Pheasant Shawarma with Roasted Pepper Hummus
Being an Air Force brat, we lived a lot of different places where we got to experience a lot of different things. Of all the places we were stationed, the one place that stands out as the most unique was Turkey. This was way back in the 70's when Pan AM was still a major airline, and the cockpit doors were left open during the flight. I remember getting to meet the pilots, who gave me my very own pair of golden wings, albeit plastic ones, to pin to my shirt, it really made me feel like part of the crew. There wasn't any base housing available at the time, so we lived in some apartment buildings off base. The apartments were a single set of buildings out in a middle of a cotton field with nothing else around them. It felt barren and isolated. Off in the distance you could see a single mountain, who's peak was covered in snow all year round. Coming and going from the apartments, we'd see gypsies picking cotton from the surrounding fields. On a few occasions, a guy would come by the building, pulling a cart, he'd play music while a bear danced around in the parking lot and a monkey collected money with his hat. You would hear prayers being blasted over the air from a nearby Mosque during certain times of the day. We'd took a lot of road trips to go sight-seeing, I remember seeing temples carved into cliffsides in these deep ravines right off the side of the roads and swimming in the Mediterranean Sea.
