Smoked pheasant

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LL

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NoDak is pheasant country, and people come from all over each fall to hunt the critters. My neighbor is one of them, and yesterday afternoon he knocked on my door with a vac-sealed bag of frozen smoked pheasant tenderloins (the tenderest half of the breast meat) in hand, and wishes for a Merry Christmas. Just because. Three or four POUNDS of them.

Well... I put some in the fridge to thaw last night before going to bed, and just now ate 'em. First only a nibble to see what they were like, so I could figure out accompaniments and/or a recipe. Ha. It was so tasty straight up that I just kept going, candy bar style, only pausing long enough to whip up a quick side of fries and some coleslaw.

Pheasants are drop-dead-gorgeous iridescent birds the size and shape of streamlined, long-feathered chickens, and I always wondered why anyone would want to shoot them. Now I know. Dem am yummy. :twisted:
 
LL":19yli06h said:
NoDak is pheasant country, and people come from all over each fall to hunt the critters. My neighbor is one of them, and yesterday afternoon he knocked on my door with a vac-sealed bag of frozen smoked pheasant tenderloins (the tenderest half of the breast meat) in hand, and wishes for a Merry Christmas. Just because. Three or four POUNDS of them.

Well... I put some in the fridge to thaw last night before going to bed, and just now ate 'em. First only a nibble to see what they were like, so I could figure out accompaniments and/or a recipe. Ha. It was so tasty straight up that I just kept going, candy bar style, only pausing long enough to whip up a quick side of fries and some coleslaw.

Pheasants are drop-dead-gorgeous iridescent birds the size and shape of streamlined, long-feathered chickens, and I always wondered why anyone would want to shoot them. Now I know. Dem am yummy. :twisted:
I find wild foul much better than domestic. We use to raise pheasants for a man that operated one of those fancy hunting preserves. You are right they is damn good!
 
LL":o04jn73g said:
... First only a nibble to see what they were like, so I could figure out accompaniments and/or a recipe. Ha. It was so tasty straight up that I just kept going, candy bar style, only pausing long enough to whip up a quick side of fries and some coleslaw... Dem am yummy. :twisted:
Yikes... no mentioning of cooking...

:shock: :shock: :shock:
 
Slow Puffs":r94fk81w said:
Yikes... no mentioning of cooking...

:shock: :shock: :shock:
You missed the word "smoked," I think. Here in the United Snakes, it means to cook by smoking, not just "flavored with."
 
Pheasant is the best! We have a healthy amount of them here (haven't bagged any yet this season though due to a bad cold), but they are wonderful eating. You're lucky to have a few pounds of them!
 
LL":3jwk2oou said:
Slow Puffs":3jwk2oou said:
Yikes... no mentioning of cooking...

:shock: :shock: :shock:
You missed the word "smoked," I think. Here in the United Snakes, it means to cook by smoking, not just "flavored with."
Just funning with ya... :lol:
 
Haven't eaten pheasant since 1979 when one flew in front of my Gremlin.
For what a new grille and headlight cost me to replace, I could have had one in a fancy restaurant

From what I remember, it was mighty tasty, once you got all the glass and plastic picked out of it.

Mike B
 
Good stuff. Been a while for me though.


Did I mention that yesterday when we got home from the Hospital ER that I thought my neighbor's house was afire. Turned out he was smoking something. Probably a turkey. Bet it was good.
 
LL":r3vqlyji said:
I always wondered why anyone would want to shoot them.
Aside from being yummy, they're challenging to hunt and there's quite the tradition, the social element and the intricate practice involved in successful pheasant hunting. Usually in cold fall and early winter weather, groups of friends gather early in the morning and work brushy fields and draws over well trained dogs. The birds are quite spooky and stealthy and a dog will use his nose to find a hiding bird and then hold point over the critter while hunters approach. Then in an unbelievable shrieking explosion the bird launches skyward and gentlemen raise their finest field guns and try to take down the racing birds as they flee from the area at a startling clip. If you've never had a pheasant surprise you and jump from your feet it's an experience to behold, it will shatter the silence and send your adrenaline racing. I've seen grown men jump back and holler from the shock of it. The hunts are really quite intriguing as the walks are long and arduous to get a dog to hold point over just a couple of birds, the pheasant explodes from the ground to break the silence with an amazing clamorous commotion, and as big as they are they move extremely fast both in the air and on the ground. You'd think they'd be easy to hit but they definitely are not. A lot of time, thought, effort and expense is put into the long process of taking just a few birds. Pheasant and quail hunting is akin to dry fly fishing for wary trout in difficult water, a lot goes into what seems to be such a simple thing. It's a sport of gentlemen and poets. You could get a trout on a gob of worms with a cane pole and bobber, but what fun is that? You could shoot a pheasant out of a cow pasture from the tailgate of a truck, but how much fun is that?

I'd bet there are some good stories to be heard about those birds he gave you LL 8)
 
Damn! You know what that would cost you in a market?

When I was a kid in SD we used to have pheasant quite often as we could hunt them on our property in the fields. Didn't know how spoiled I was to have food like that then. Geese and ducks were quite plentiful as well.
 
Memory Lane here -- big time :D

(An aside : Your uppa crust English oligarch with his matched set of Purdeys looks down his uppa crust oligarchal nose at the flush-&-shoot method, which he calls (not making this up) "bum plugging." The proper method is having an army of "beaters" putting them up for him and his friends to shoot down as they pass high overhead. This requires the assistence of their servants, some of whom are kept busy re-loading the guns they aren't using at the moment, with the rest collecting the harvest. Which is sent to market).

The challenge, IMHO, is hunting them without a dog. Did it for years, growing up. (Pepper was great for rabbits, but pheasents were a little over her head). M. O. : Pheasents will sit tight if they can, and move to where it seems safer. So walk into your field or patch of good cover on an angle that divides it into a larger and smaller part. Making a lot of noise doing this doesn't hurt. The pheasents will sneak over into the larger part. Keep re-dividing the field like this until they're boxed into the last corner. (They won't, as a rule, sneak back to where you've been). Then, STOP. No noise, no movement for half a minute or so. They're now on the thin edge of blind panic, voiding theiir bowels. Then, one noisy step forward with a shout and the pheasent explosion happens. Lead them about twice as far as you'd think, and catch the closer one's head with the edge of your pattern if you can double.

The later the season gets, the tougher they are. I sat, once, near the top of a hill above a huge harvested cornfield, having a smoke. 300 yards away, a group of hunters pulled up and parked, getting their dogs out. About the time they started into the field, a cock bird came running out of the far edge of it where I was, paused at the edge for a moment to look around, and sprinted past me into the trees at the top of the hill. Didn't have the heart to shoot that one. He knew what hearing a car door slam meant.

By December the cocks are hiding in places you'd never suspect a pheasent could (or would) be.

:face:
 
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